Anarchism Past and Future

The crew is joined by JMC of the new magazine Strange Matters to talk about the rise and decline of modern anarchism and how we can bring it back again.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
It could happen here. Uh, it being a number of things. Uh,
this is the podcast about things falling apart and also
maybe putting them back together. And assuming there's not a
nuclear war in the immediate future, you will probably be
hearing this episode sometime in early March. I am Robert Evans,
my co hosts as always well as often Chris and Garrison,

(00:29):
and that's that's my job for the day. Done. I'm
gonna I'm gonna sit back and chill. You guys want
to take it from here, Yeah, I'll take it from here.
We are doing one of our perennial things fall apart
but also we sort of put it back together again episodes.
And joining us today is j m C from Strange
Matter as a new libertarian, socialist cooperative magazine. J MC

(00:49):
great to have you here. Yeah, this is really great.
So I guess we should probably explain with the magazine
is not just in of itself, but also because it's
a good lead in into um um into what we're
gonna be talking about. So we basically, uh, there's five
of us as co editors and we're all equal worker
owners in it. It's a magazine called Strange Matters. And

(01:13):
the point of it is to explore radical new ideas,
not just in terms of politics and economics, which is
going to be kind of half the focus is trying
to figure out like you know, libertarian socialists talk a
lot about dual power, which I know y'all talk about
on the show a lot talk about building independent institutions
under the direct democratic control of the working class to
control real resources and are not the state or capitalist firms.

(01:35):
But like, we talk a big game, but do we
actually know how to do that stuff, and do we
know how to do stuff like run like you know,
a big company as a as a self managed democracy,
or do we know how to like run a city
as a as a radical democracy like rooted in neighborhood
councils or anything like that. The answer kind of is
not really. And there's a lot of like um open
questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and

(01:58):
that very few people are working on those answers. So
Strange Matters is um partly about discovering, uh, those answers,
not because we the editors have the answers, but because
we need like some kind of space within which we
can bring lots of different people different life experiences together uh,
in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out.
And then the other mission of it is to be
a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the

(02:21):
kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and
stuff like that that uh that UH perhaps gets shut
out of capitalist society because it's not commercial or because
it's too weird, because it's like, I don't know, historiographical
essay about it's been called doon or something like that,
you know. And and we think that there should be
a place for that, um, just because it brings delight

(02:43):
and meaning into people's lives, and it's what we're fighting
for more democratic society in order to do so. That's
basically our vibe UM. And the answering question is a
collective editorial that we that we collectively drafted and edited uh,
talking about our political views in particular and the recent
history of libertarian socialism UM. And then asked for me,

(03:04):
I'm I'm a writer who's written for a couple of
other places like The Point in the Brooklyn Rail UH,
and I also was involved in the d S as
Libertarian Socialist Caucus and also the the Yeah yeah, right, yeah,
but a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some

(03:27):
some uh yeah, but any who, uh and also the
Symbiosis Federation UM, which is a federation across Mexico, the US,
and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a
it's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to
do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah. So I guess, well, okay,
so the pandemic isn't I guess the perfect jumping in

(03:49):
point for this. But I wanna go back and I
guess getting into the meat of this piece because I
think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk
about the origins of like what's called sort of new
anarchism and how it's sort of begin to decay after
after the collapse of occupying After well, I guess that

(04:10):
the sort of kind of revolutionary arc ofens so basically
before you do the decline, at least is the way
that we wrote it, and I kind of think that
it's the way that I would tell it. Um, you
have to kind of do the rise first, right, because
like there was this moment from roughly the fall of

(04:31):
the Soviets in two roughly like two thousand and even
kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards where it kind
of looked like anarchism was going to take over the world.
And that's a bit of a joke. But it's also
not a joke because in the context of like the
radical left, which is of course obviously a kind of

(04:52):
like you know, dissidents seen in any country where it
happens to exist. Um, you know, everything ing receded in
terms of the traditional parties because the fall of the
Soviet style uh Leninist states uh, either through their collapse
as in the case of the USSR, or in the
case of their transition to much more like clearly and

(05:15):
obviously like state capitalist uh semi liberalized model like in China,
like the you you basically had like this total recession,
not just in Leninism interestingly, which obviously enough right, like
you know, it's basically a global collapse of Leinist style
of governments, but also in like social democracy, um, because

(05:37):
it's a lot of the I mean, it's actually kind
of interesting why it's it's unclear why it is. Uh.
People have different theories, but they're you know, people often
describe it in in um you know, Fisher's term the
the writer Mark Fisher capitalist realism. The attitude in the
nineties was that, uh, you know, there's there's only one

(05:58):
world that's possible, and it's the best of all possible worlds,
and that's the capitalist world, where everybody's gonna have McDonald's
in every country, and two countries that have the same
McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we
kind of found out the hard way this week that
that's not really the case. Well, and if people had
paid attention more to other parts of the world, they
would know that, like, well, there were civil wars in

(06:18):
a bunch of countries that had McDonald's. It didn't stop
people from shooting each other, as as the United States
should tell you, people will kill each other whether or
not they have access to chicken McNuggets. Yeah, you know,
I mean I think like that, that's that's a period
that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has
ever been, Like you got Franchis Fukiyama, like the most
wrong person ever You've got. Yeah, You've you've got a

(06:42):
lot of sertif idealogues you like, have sort of deluded
themselves into thinking this stuff is over. And yeah, I
think you're right. That that that sort of plays into this,
you know, into sort of the collapse of of of
I guess, the party state left, and then the way
in which that at, you know, the alternative to that,

(07:02):
I guess becomes new anarchism, and anarchists practice, even if
it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups, kind of
seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene. Yeah.
So basically the story that we tell is that there's
some you know, the sepathist of rebellion in triggers these Uh.

(07:23):
It's not just that the stufferthiasts are able to create
their autonomous territory and chap us, but they it triggers
this wave uh that UM. We use a term that
sometimes it's used in academia called neo anarchism for this. UM.
You know, there's an anarchist revival in the nineties UM
around the world, and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists.

(07:44):
It's all these movements that were inspired by the libertarian
socialist broadly speaking UM sabathistas UM adopting kind of similar
methods in their local contexts in different countries, fighting against
I mean a lot of things. Initially it's against like
you know, neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up
being against like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot

(08:06):
of outsourcing is is. You know, if if they have
unions in this country from the social democratic period, they
shut down the factory fire, everybody moved it to someplace
where some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries
to do a union. Uh. And then that you know
that lowers Uh. Logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this
point that you know, it ends up being cheaper for
the company even though they have to transport goods all

(08:27):
across the world and do just in time delivering that
kind of thing. So um. The a lot of the
the the anti globalization movement that sprouted up around the
two thousands was like, um, against all these things and
usually using the kinds of direct actions, which is when
you act kind of independent of the state and not

(08:48):
trying to like, you know, convince politician to do something,
but taking direct action to get your results, your desired result. Um.
You know, and all this kind of stuff uh that
we're at using direct democratic consensus methods uh in the
way that they organized stuff. Uh. That that was that
was all basically an artistic and so there was this

(09:08):
way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchists like attitudes
towards what activism even is, started filtering into all these
other movements. And this has been happening a little bit
in the eighties too. So there was like the anti
nuclear movement had a lot of this, the feminist movement
had a lot of this. Um there was a whole
um stream of single other ecological movements were actually like

(09:30):
pioneered in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties,
um so, as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Bolivia, etcetera.
So the this is the kind of like rise of
this neo anarchist movie that we're talking about, which is
not just about anarchists, it's about people who act and
think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. Yeah, I

(09:53):
mean that's the kind of thing that I hope we
can kind of more encourage as well in the next
few decades as those types of ideas can be I
want I want to make sure that we can take
these ideas and make them very approachable for people, even
if they don't use the terms that we might use.
You can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts,

(10:15):
and this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints. HM.
As much as we're about to get to how this
sort of goes wrong fails in substence, Like, I think
that was the strength of this movement was that it

(10:35):
was its tactics were really easy to spread, and that
led to a lot of people adopting me. It led
to it sort of becoming this I guess activist consensus
that you know, like you use in consensus process. You
you know, you have hozontal organizations, you have you do
direct actions, you mobilize people. You don't have these sort

(10:57):
of like article parties. But that yeah, And I think
I think the next part of the story that you
want to tell us about, I guess how that fell
apart and the consequences of that. Basically what ends up
happening is that like there was this moment of our ascent,

(11:18):
because I would identify myself as being definitely like part
of these uh, the this general of you. I mean,
I came I hopped aboard a lot later with like
Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of the kind of
explosion of movements that happened around the world in again
not always right. It started with the Arab Spring, which
started with somebody seeing themselves on fire in Tunisia and
like you know, and then that spreads to um other

(11:41):
countries in the Middle East and um, you know, protest
against dictatorships and so on. But it starts getting kind
of like transported beyond its initial Middle Eastern context. And
what a lot of people don't know is that the uh,
the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America and like
other movements that you know, some of them were called
occupy some of them, I'm one of them was my

(12:03):
Don in Ukraine as a matter of fact, um, and
other like you know, the the Hong Kong, the the
the umbrella movements, yeah, the and all these kind of
movements that that proceeded from after twenty eleven. A lot
of them were basically in a single kind of wave,
a protracted wave of copycat movements. Uh that we're trying

(12:24):
to adopt the same kind of tactics of like occupying
public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous and doing like
direct democracy in those squares, modeling the kind of society
that they that people wanted to create, um, you know,
in this moment where it seemed like you could have
these direct democratic, uh sorts of movements the the end.

(12:45):
In the US, there's like a direct line of succession
from like Occupy Wall Street through to like Black Lives
Matter through to like the anti pipeline Indigenous protests. There's
a lot of like shared movement experience, a lot of
the same people showing up to it or teaching the
next generation UM in those movements. And I think this
is something I mean, uh, it's difficult to find like

(13:05):
sources on this, but I mean, y'all are involved in
social movements. I think that that's like a rough that's
roughly a description of of what's happened, right unless unless
we're crazy. Yeah, I think, you know, I think I
guess what you call the last wave that is occupied
ice In Yeah, yeah, you know, like I remember, like

(13:27):
that was the sort of mix of I guess two crowds.
One is you know, I mean, like I remember it
was a bunch of you know, people who'd been an
occupy and then also it was a lot of people
who radicalized essentially about Trump. Yeah, there was there was
a pretty big new wave of people, yeah, around around
just sixteen and that, you know, and I guess I
guess the other thing that that that's going on through

(13:49):
this period is the the the ascension of consession of
the right and the return also not just of you know,
not just a sort of the fascist right, but of
Leninism and social democracy as well. Yeah. Um lapped around
like when Bernie Sanders was getting more popular. Yeah, yeah,

(14:10):
And I think I think I think there's there's you know,
there's a couple of there's like two threats there. There
there's the sort of Bernie Sanders thread, and then there's
you know, the the rise of the rise of the tankies,
which has to do with Syria and has to do
with sort of this backlash against the justin eleven revolutions
that you know, like some some of that backlash turns
into like just you know, like aired ones like hard

(14:34):
right bobbing. It's never like not a right wing but
like air to wance turn into just like fire bombing
cities and um and literally barrel bombing, you know, the
peaceful protests stuff. Um can overthrow governments if the government
is not willing to bomb and shoot people who gather

(14:56):
on mass in the central Square because they're afraid of
what the world response would be if they did start
doing that. But you know when Bashar Alasad did that
in Syria against the Democratic opposition movements, Um, you know,
that basically sent the signal nothing, I mean nothing happened
to us side, right, So that basically sent the signal
that like oh he had a stress of years. But yeah, yeah,

(15:18):
right right, yeah, like like you can you can just
shoot people and bomb them and like it. And that
basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot
of these movements were trying to do, which is to
have like large numbers of people do nonviolent civil disobedience
and then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture
of like direct democracy in the hopes that, um, you know,

(15:41):
the assemblies that are created in that space could in
some way become the germ of the organs that could
run society, or at least that's like when it's taken
to its logical conclusion. Because usually people who are involved
in this, they get involved in it, they think the
assembly stuff is really cool, they start learning more about it,
they get radicalized by being in the assembly because like
when you're in a direct democratic something you're actually making
the decisions like together, and then you come to an

(16:03):
agreement and you execute the decision. You start asking yourself
like why can't we do everything like this? Um? And
then um, you know all that that's what directs a
lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah,
one of the reasons why these movements starts to decline
is because they get smashed um the But I think

(16:23):
that there's always this other thing going on, which and
I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it,
like you know, there's there was this kind of both
like an external critique at first from people like you know,
Boskar Sencrove, Jacobin and things like that, but then also

(16:44):
like this increasingly over the years in the last half
of the internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves.
Are people in this general kind of you libertarian socialism
talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the
most pressing crises in the twenty century. Like if you like,

(17:07):
if you guys had to say, I know it's like
kind of pretentious, but like, what is the most pressing
crisis of the century, What are like the top three
just off the top of your heads without thinking, what
would you list if you have to list three, two
or three separate things? Climate change, creeping authoritarianism, and rampant
disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet? Okay, so let's

(17:27):
tackle each one of those, right, Like, what's what's an
anarchist got to say about climate change? Well? Okay, disrupt
the pipelines, like you know, do uh, Like, you can't
have infinite growth on a finite planet, so you have
to have like, you know, we we have all the slogans, right,
I mean we've all heard them like a million times. Yeah,
you have the diagnoses of the problem. But yeah, yeah,

(17:50):
But then like, okay, so how are we going to
like you know, I guess we're gonna build some co
ops and then the co ops are gonna democratized per
auction and then we can do d growth somehow, but
like also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing
step here, right, because like, you know, the reason why
we have all this production in certain ways, because the

(18:11):
entire economy depends on it's been set up that way. Uh.
So you implied in the idea that we're going to
do de growth somehows that we need some way of
constructing a different economy, and how do you construct a
different economy right through some kind of planning? So really
the question is like how do you do economic planning? Uh?
Second one, um, I got a skip creeping authoritarianism for now,

(18:32):
because that's actually like feeding into the more the ending
of the essay. But the but the other one, right, disinformation?
Another great question, right, like what do you do with
social media? Like? Okay, again, anarchists talked in general a
lot about like, okay, we're gonna democratize all the companies
because we're democratizing everything. We're democratizing neighborhoods or democratizing cities.

(18:53):
So it's kind of the same thing, turning everything into
like a radical direct democracy. Okay, but if we're going
to have social media, first of all, should we like
was it a mistake to invent a centralized system instead
of the more decentralized internet that created that existed before
social media? Right? That's kind of an interesting question. But
then assuming that we do, how do we restructure it?

(19:15):
Not just in terms of how it's managed, but like, okay,
we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever, and let's
say that we're the workers at Facebook, what do we do, Like,
how do we structure it so that it's not a
giant misinformation engine? Right? Like once once you actually have
like the responsibility and the power of being in the saddle,
which is what we spend so much of our time
kind of just trying to do. You have to actually

(19:37):
make decisions about what to do. And honestly, there aren't
that many. I mean, what do you what do you
do with with the within with the utility like that? Like,
for example, who ought to be in control of the
utility like that? Is it really just the workers of Facebook?
Aren't all the people who are users of it? Don't
they have a right to be making decisions about it too?
And is it just an American institution just because it's

(19:59):
an American LLC? Or is it like a global institution
because everybody on the planets on it? Um is there?
You know, are are there ways that it could be reconfigured,
like fundamentally in terms of how users use it that
would change the experience in some way to actually make it, uh,
make you less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand,
if you try to manipulate people in order to UM

(20:22):
you know, not see something that's going to be misinformation,
isn't that well, you know, like censorship or or or
some other thing that we generally would oppose, right, like
the tool of centralized social control. So they like, these
are really deep questions, and again this is generally a
kind of silence, and of course, you know in that case,

(20:45):
there's silence from the social democrats too, and there's silence
from the Leninist I mean, well, the Lennis just kind
of fantasize about turning Facebook into the tool of the
central party state uses in order to crush dissent forever
or whatever. But you know, social democrats are like less
nationalized Facebook, and it's like, you know, yeah, sure we could,
we could do that. And then you know the n

(21:05):
S s A owns on Facebook. I'm sure that that's
a that's a better scenario. Yeah. I mean, I tend
to think somewhat differently about what it means to have
an anarchist solution to those problems. Like, for example, I
don't I don't see anarchists or social democrats or Leninists
having any kind of stopping climate change solution um, because

(21:26):
I don't I don't realistically see the organizing potential um
capable of actually stopping what's going on in any kind
of reasonable time frame. And I certainly don't think that
the existing you know, neoliberal structures or the authoritarian structures
that exist in you know, other countries or in this
country are going to stop it either. So when I

(21:48):
think about solutions to climate change from an anarchist perspective,
I think about how can anarchist organizing help people deal
with the consequences of climate change, And I see to
see the potential for actually like mitigating climate change coming
more from there's as the consequences of this become more

(22:10):
dire to people, if anarchists are better, are good at
providing relief and helping people and organizing through that, and
eventually there's some potential to actually get people organized to
stop the causes of the problem. But um, I just don't.
I'm not an optimist of about our ability to stop
the worst of it at this point, um especially not

(22:31):
after the most recent I p c C report. And
I guess I'm kind of in the same boat when
it comes to disinformation, um I. And this is not
just like anarchists, I feel like lack as you've stated,
at a like a good idea about like what do
we do with Facebook, what we do with you do,
what do we do with the way all of these
things are set up in the harms that they do
at scale. Um, Nobody and I include the people currently

(22:56):
in charge, has any real good ideas for that, because
they they haven't. Like I've been working in this space
for a very long time, I've I've spent a lot
of time talking with and debating with a lot of
the folks who are leading minds kind of in the
fight against disinformation, and I just don't feel like there's
any sort of solution that is an immediate term solution

(23:18):
because so many the problem is so advanced as it is,
so as I guess that's kind of like where I
land on a lot of this stuff is we certainly
need to be thinking about solutions, but I kind of like,
I think it's less likely that there's going to be
like you were you were saying, the kind of debate
is between is there some way of like reforming or

(23:39):
fixing making Facebook more democratic, or is it just we
need to decide that maybe we don't have some of
this stuff. And I tend to land towards that that like, well,
I think the solution is going to be maybe maybe
Facebook's a bad idea, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't
have There's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously, and
I think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that

(24:00):
are useful, But um, I I think the they're also
fundamentally tied to the algorithms that drive them, which is
also what drives so much of the toxic aspects that
I think if you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm,
you're talking about something that is very different and longer

(24:20):
than media. It's longer than media. It's it's so radically
different that it's just it's it's not even useful to
compare them. It's like it's like it's like comparing Discord
to Facebook. It's like they're not they don't operate the
same way. That's the Yeah, that's exactly kind of where
I where I tend to be on on that. And
I know that's not like I I to the extent

(24:43):
that like, uh, that's pessimistic. I guess I am kind
of pessimistic about anarchisms ability to stop the worst of
things that's happening. Where I kind of look at myself
as an optimistic anarchist is in the I believe anarchism
offers solutions when these things go as badly as they're
going to do in a way that you know, the

(25:03):
present systems or you know, more authoritarian systems that people
propose can't solve the worst consequences of these problems as
as well. That's that's kind of where I feel like
it is can feel a lot simpler to default to
like the dual power framework of a lot of these things,
because otherwise the problems are so complex that you cannot

(25:24):
approach them from from from every angle, because you really
do need to simplify and condense them and collapse them
into something that is more simplified, which often results in
like a dual power kind of framework for what you
actually start doing. Yeah, and I think you have to.
I think if you're an insurrectionist, if you're a revolutionary,
whether it you're an anarchist or or you know, a

(25:46):
Leninist or whatever, you have to be looking at what's
actually happening in Ukraine right now and recognize that, all right, Well,
to what extent do you think you're going to be
able to organize people in such a way that allows
them to deal with thermobaric weapons. You know, in what
way are you going to organize people that allows them
to effectively resist cluster musician munitions? Um And I think

(26:10):
that when you kind of look at it that way,
which is what it would take to overthrow any of
the large hegemonic powers in the world right now, a
much more realistic set of solutions is, all right, well,
let's work on building power by building organizations and communities
that are capable of taking care of themselves in the

(26:30):
holes that these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing
because because they too are crumbling. And that's much smarter
than being like, all right, well, I'm gonna try to
get a bunch of my friends with rifles and and
arm up a couple of drones and and go up
against you know, people who have access to m l
r s, you know, weapons systems and whatnot. Yeah. No,

(26:52):
I think that that's a really great point. Um I.
The way that I would think about it is the
starting with the big picture problems is a bit misleading, because,
as you said, like nobody, it's quite like that nobody
has solutions to these problems. Certainly the social Democrats. Yeah,
you know, and I say this is somebody who's like

(27:15):
half a social Democrat by temperament. Um. It would be
really nice if we like did it a little social
democratic government and they swooped in and you know, did
like new deal stuff. I like new deal stuff. I
like w p A stuff as much as the next. Uh.
You know, um person who likes arts programs and infrastructure development. Well,
you know, some infrastructure development, not others. Right, the war,

(27:37):
the war complex we can do a little without. But
you know, the thing about it is those big problems.
You're right, it looks like there's not going to be
like a big solution, uh, and that we're going to
kind of have to cope with the consequences of of it,
at least at first. Even coping this is this is

(27:57):
kind of where I think the real kind of substance
of of of the problem that libertarian socialist are facing
right now. Even coping would require a greater level of
organization than we have proven able to muster up to now.
Not because the methods that we choose don't work. Because
in fact, as you point out, and as I actually
really want to forcefully argue, and because because we do

(28:20):
in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't
work and can't work for a lot of the specific
problems that we face, uh, and history shows that very definitively.
But um, there is also a serious way in which
even kind of developing these like you know, local highly

(28:40):
like you know, rooted in a community, uh like direct
democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to
the point where it actually could start replacing some of
the gaps left behind by uh you know, U states
and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused
on their own goals to to to to meet those

(29:01):
needs that would actually require us to be able, for example,
to know how to build up a cooperative sector in
a city, or how to kind of like network the
tennis unions that already exist, you know, across different uh
you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and
then construct like the way in which they self manage

(29:24):
each other or or not each other self managed together
the you know, the the larger group or it would
require and you know, there's a lot of people working
on these problems, but sometimes there is a kind of
like you know, you'll you'll see this like obstacle in
the road, because, for example, like what do you do
when the it might not even be the state properly speaking, right,

(29:45):
it might be like a posse that's funded by some
rich billionaire asshole who's got like his uh, you know,
his notion that some people are just better than others
and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech
bros um, you know, and then that billionaire funding a
bunch of people who have got now like you know,
some industrial access to industrial infrastructure, and they don't like

(30:06):
the fact that you're doing your d I Y like
you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf.
So how do you fight back against that? I mean,
some of it you can fight back against that kind
of our current level of capacity, but some of it
does kind of require us to start thinking like, well,
how do you how do you build up financial independence?
What like, how do you build up the kind of
independence where it's like, if we get kicked off of

(30:28):
the capitalist uh social media, for example, which is a
great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind
of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives, um,
that are not like the ones that the Nazis created
when there was a purge of some of them that
gab like highly dysfunctional, Like you know, it didn't even
work for them. Uh not that I mean I'm happy

(30:48):
about that, but like you know, my point is, like
the same thing could happen to us, So what would
we do? Um the like they're there are all these
kinds of things that are more little picture questions in
a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at
least like medium sized questions where we need this kind
of like um these these because because part of what

(31:10):
it is is also that like it's not that these
questions are impossible, it's that they're kind of neglected. And
there's um there, there's these uh the thinkers like Christian Williams,
who is an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote
a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism. And there was
another pamphlet, uh an essay and CounterPunch by a person

(31:34):
named Gabrielle Coon who's an autonomous Marxist basically like a
libertarian Marxist Marxist anarchist type um called what Happened to
the Anarchist Century? And both of those essays which I
highly recommend that people read. They may they make points
basically like this, you know, like where where the focus
on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty

(31:54):
of how to do that has kind of receded from
anarchism um as it's actually proud actist uh init Like
so there's like a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not
always the attention to the nitty gritty of how you
actually can like build resilient institutions that actually like carry
that through which you know, a hundred years ago people

(32:15):
talking about like the one big union and the general strike,
but that's kind of like, um, well a it didn't
work in exactly the way that they were thinking it.
What even in the most successful revolutions like in Spain
and b it was also like the there's there's there's
a certain way in which our tensions are focused on
other things. And it's not that those things are bad,

(32:35):
it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect
of the question of large scale organization and how you
do coordination, like you know, in order to tackle problems
that are kind of like at the scale that that
I was talking about before. UM and so Basically the
argument of the essay is that in the absence of that,
like for the socialist movement that emerged after turned away

(32:59):
from NEO because I'm thinking basically that it had no solutions,
which I don't think it's true either, but it's like,
you know, like rather it was true in the moment,
but it doesn't have to be true, but it was true,
but enough people thought that it was that they turned
to like the social democratic route. But with the failure
of Corbin and Bernie that kind of burned a lot
of people out too, and a lot of what is

(33:20):
seems like it's coming up now, and I'm wondering, I
wonder what you guys think of this, Like a lot
of the people that we see showing up in movement spaces,
who we see kind of like getting politically activated for
the first time or whatever, a lot of those people
are really interested in Leninism and on specifically, because I
don't know, I don't know how true that is. That's
at least that's that's that that that part is not

(33:42):
true at least at least at least here in Portland. Portland.
Yet no other, no other part of the country is
like Portland other than maybe Eugene, Like, Okay, that's that's fairy.
Like Portland. Portland is a big enough anarchist city that
there are entire decade long like like into anarchist wars

(34:03):
that no one else in the US has ever heard
of that are like the most important thing that's ever
happened in Portland's Oh boy, welcome to the Green Red.
Let me tell you, Chris, you have just piste off
sixty people who could not explain to you if you
gave them a year, could not explain to you why
they're angry. And I mean, I mean to to be

(34:25):
to be fair, like I I am an anarchist in Chicago.
When the first time I introduced too of my Twitter
mutual together, they almost got a fist fight. So like
that make yeah, that's that completely scans Even with like

(34:46):
d s A stuff, I feel like there's there was
at least was a trend a little bit to stay
away from some of the more Russia Communist kind of
like types of aesthetics and ideas because it is a
turn off for so many people and it does encourage
us and it has like encouraging forefront a form of
authoritarianism that maybe is not great. Yeah, I don't know,

(35:11):
Like I've seen sort of both friends of walking. So
I think the last like a year has been very
different than I think the previous five. I've seen it
on Twitter, but I don't know how much it expands
into as I think. I think it's like I saw
lot ex happens in the d s A is that
the Leninists essentially took over the International Committee and they

(35:34):
had this kind of delicious division label inside the d
s A where like you have like you have a
part of the d s A that's essentially a social
democratic machine, and then you have the International Committee, which
is which is the foreign policy wing essentially run by
by essentially run by by the Leninists. And I think
I don't know, I think I saw it there. And
the other thing I think I saw a lot of
that I've seen even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinist,

(35:54):
is what you know, part of what was talking about
this is the sort of like climate Stalinism or like
climate house Off like that that is a huge problem
that you know. I mean, I think I think part
of it also just has to do with the fact
that people don't like Okay, so like we we have
actually existing, uh, climate leninism, like we have it. It's

(36:16):
it's it's it's it's China, like the CCP changed, it's
literally changed. State ideology in in in the mid two
thousand tends, as you know, as an attempt to deal
to deal with with within with pollution climate change. It
did nothing. Like they pressed every pricey it doesn't it
didn't like it didn't work. Yeah, yeah, I mean they
did carbon markets, they did. They literally just banned coal

(36:36):
and entire provinces and it didn't work. They they change
your contravaluations. I I problem people. Yeah, Like La Late
lays this out specifically with China to an excruciating degree,
like like in detail. If you're really interested in this
type of like climate left authoritarianism. They call it climate
Mound the book, but you can call it climate climate Leninism,

(36:58):
you can call it whatever. But they they lay out
how it could work and how use cases of it
have not worked, um to a pretty pretty intense degree.
If you're interested in that, I would recommend reading the book.
Climate Leviathan definitely influenced a large portion of the writing
for this show. Yeah, And I mean to your point,
I don't think that this is the only trend I do.

(37:20):
I agree with you that out of like the conjuncture,
there was this um I I think that a lot
of the more like establishment reformist aspects of the movement
were discredited and that pushed people in different radical directions,
like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism.
I am seeing a lot more faces that are interested
in in in those questions for sure. Uh. And that's

(37:43):
kind of counter to the trend that I was describing
from the last like five years of like you know,
people becoming more disinterested because of the real or perceived
lack of solutions. However, I do think that it's important,
and this is kind of following on Chris's climate Leninism
point to understand that there's at least a counter trend
where a lot of people are have not only moved
away from libertarian socialism, have not only moved, but they've

(38:05):
also moved away from democratic socialism. And if you follow
that pattern, which is a pattern that I at least
have seen within the d s A, within various trade unions,
in a lot of among a lot of like intelligencia
type people like journalists, professors, blah blah. You see a
very common set of arguments. And I think it's very
clear that as the century proceeds and the crises get

(38:27):
worse and start killing like even larger numbers of people
than they already are, we're going to see this argument
a lot more. Um and and the argument is something
like this. I mean, there's a quote from a tweet.
Uh and And you know, one could argue that the
tweet doesn't matter, but you are naive if you think
this is the tweet climate You are naive if you

(38:50):
think climate change can ever be solved without an authoritarian
government at this point. That's and that's that's the whole thing.
So it's a it's a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous, right,
it has this like shocking and scandalous effects. You know,
we need authoritarianism to to to solve climate change, the
scandalous you know, bougeois or whatever. But then it's like, okay, wait,

(39:11):
but what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just
being hysterical reacity. It's the same as saying you're naive
if you think that, um, climate change can be solved
without nuclear power, or climate change can be solved without
really big hammers, Like, we have authoritarian governments, we have
nuclear power, we have really big hammers, and climate change

(39:33):
does not be solved been solved. Is it possible that
any of those things might be a part of a
theoretical solution that may happen someday. Yes, but it hasn't.
And there's like, if you're trying to say that authoritarian
governments are better at dealing with climate change than the
governments that currently dominate number one, hell of a lot
of authoritarian governments are responsible for our current situation, are

(39:55):
climate change. Number two, the Soviet Union, which I suspect
most of these people's see as a guiding light. Horrible
for the environment, turned the largest body of water in
Eurasia into a poison lake. Yes, not not good at
the environment, you know. And here's here's what's interesting about
the thing to me. The other thing that it's doing

(40:17):
is kind of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to
oppose this idea without specifying what the idea is like
and like, in other words, authoritarianism, like but like, I mean,
let's let's be blunt, right. What they're implying as a
Leninist is the one party state, the secret police, press
censorship in the command economy. So does that help you

(40:39):
fight climate cheese? That's actually an interesting and a kind
of like you know, distant five thousand foot view, you know,
from the god's eye view or whatever, like, uh, the
that's an interesting technical question. Do these institutions actually help
or hinder a response? But we're not even having that
conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to
get you to think that. So again, does a tweet matter? Well,

(41:00):
I think a tweet matters if it comes from a
member of the National Political Committee of the d s A,
because at least ostensibly if d s A is, which
is who the person who did that tweet? Because at
least ostensibly if d s A is a mass movement
as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists
in the US, and you know, and and the National
Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the d s

(41:22):
which I personally don't believe, but that's certainly how they
think of themselves. Um, then this indicates that the largest
most important socialist mass movement in the US, at least
self branded UH has people in its leadership who believe
that the secret police might help in addressing climate change.
That's an interesting thing and it's also very disturbing. And

(41:45):
the thing is this, this person is not actually like important,
He's a symptom because this is something that's happening across
the board. And a more intellectually serious version of this
argument was put forward by the Arxist intellectual and historian
um a professor of human ecology called Andreas mom And

(42:06):
people who are really into like Marx Nerds stuff will
probably have heard, Yeah, what a very good book called
Fossil Capital. Everything he's written after Fossil Capital is a disaster.
I like some of the sabotage. It's it's I mean,
it's a little romantic and impractical. He wrote an ethical
discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of

(42:28):
eco sabotage, which is the actual important part of the
degree to which it can matter because eco sabotage. There's
this idea on the left that like, what we need
to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again
it's like what it's it's like what that ds A
dude said, like, yeah, that could theoretically be a part

(42:49):
of but as if it's like nine dudes who do
it and then they go to prison or get shot. Well,
that doesn't really fix climate change. I think the book,
the book A Ministry for the Future really lays out
all of the all kind of like the best case
scenario for all these types of things and how they
can work together to overall trend in this direction. Because yeah,

(43:11):
that type of like eco sabotage in conjunction with other
like political effects can be impactful on what things happen.
But it's can won't necessarily be you know, it's not
it's not as simple as we would like it to be,
because yeah, it's it turns out a complex world has
complex consequences and complex and and I think I think
this is you know the trend that Mom was on,

(43:32):
the trend on that you know, there's there's a big
environmental authoritarian like thing among among liberals. This is a
huge thing. In political science was a big thing, and
in ecological studies that was essentially making a similar argument
to to I'm almost making this like, well, okay, you
need some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to deal
to climate change, and you know, it's it's it's it's

(43:56):
basically this this attempt. There's like these people have seen
climate change, but they have no actual solution to it,
so they wave their hands and pretend that like this,
like you know, the state is going to descend from
this guy and save them, and it's not. And I
think that's you know, I think I think we're we're
sort of I don't know, I think as we just

(44:18):
I guess kind of wrap this up because we unfortunately
they're running out of time. But you know, this like
this exact moment like like these like few weeks are
this moment of incredible like rupture on the left right,
because we we have we've had we've had in some
way social democrats be discredited by the fact that like
Corbin and Sanders both lost right their political project has
been discredited. Um, we've had a serious sort of anexist failures.

(44:40):
But then you know, and in the last couple of weeks, right,
it was all of the sort of big state like
authoritarian people like tied themselves to a bunch of imperialists
and you know, May staked their whole entire politics off
of them being the anti imperialist class. And then you know,
the state, who's like a bunch of their press, people
like literally work for right and who who they've been
arguing like is is the contramperist powers does imperialism? And

(45:02):
so like, Yeah, I think we have this moment where
everything is in chaos in which we have to be
the ones that that that have solutions or have or
have the tools to build them. And I think that's
why that's why this project is important, because that's that's
something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah, I

(45:25):
think there's a tremendous value in being humble about seeking
out solutions to these questions and not doing what so
many do on the left and pretend that their tendency
has an absolute answer, because all we have is theories.
And the reason I know that to a point of
certainty is that no one has solved any of these
problems yet absolutely, And and so there is a tremendous

(45:46):
degree of humility that people need to have in terms
of like, all right, well, we are attempting to arrive
at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world,
as opposed to we are trying to force through this
thing we know will work. Um, because you don't, you know,
if you're a Marxist leninist, and you think that we
need climate MAU, you don't know that that will work

(46:07):
because it hasn't yet. And if you're an anarchist who
thinks the solution is bombing as many oil refineries as
you possibly can, well, you don't know that you're ever
going to get enough people on board for that to
mean anything. Um. And I think that there's the conversations
that we need to be having. I think it's it's
important to see them as conversations as opposed to polemics

(46:29):
aimed at just getting people in line behind this shining
vision of a of a clear set of steps. Um.
It's important to envision the end goal. I say that
a lot. You know, we need to be looking and
and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's
important not to be dogmatic about the road to get
there because nobody, nobody really has a clear idea of
what that looks like. Yeah, So the piece ends up,

(46:54):
and if you want to see the ending of it,
it'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the
next couple of weeks. But the basic gist of where
it goes is precisely to the practical question, right, Instead
of like making these like polemical arguments that are rooted
more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided
to identify with within the broad family of socialism than

(47:16):
in like actually trying to like solve problems for the
people around you, right, or help contribute to the solutions.
Like it's actually what we want to ask is like,
if we have like the giant ecological crisis, Uh, how
do you how do you actually do it? Is it
by trying to force people from the top down to
do it as Um under his momb kind of draws

(47:38):
on the failed uh policies of war communism as and
inspiration for that. Or is it potentially by having like
democrats democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks,
Like Naomi Klein basically uncovered a want of her journalism
and this changes everything. So this is kind of like
the debate that we have to start having in order
to be able to together formulate the kinds of solutions. Yeah, alright,

(48:03):
well I think that's gonna do it for for us today. Um,
what do we what do we we do? You got
you guys gotta gotta gotta plug You want to throw up,
throw up before we roll out. Yeah, if if you
want to follow us at at Strange Underscore Matters UM
on Twitter. UM. We also have a Facebook and you

(48:27):
can read our articles at Strange Matters dot co op,
which is our website. Uh and if anything that you
read there that you've heard here inspires you at all,
please consider donating. We're going to be in the next
month raising money uh for for the magazine and we
want to pare writers above market rate because we think
market rates too low. So but in order to actually

(48:48):
do that, and none of the money is going to
the editors from the fundraisers, so if if, if we're
going to be able to do that, we've got to
meet our fundraising target. All right, Well support them and um,
you know, figure out how to save the world. It's
it's up to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one
person right now and no one else, but I'm not

(49:09):
going to be more specific. It could happen here as
a production of cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts from
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(49:29):
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