December 20, 2024 • 39 mins
Mia chats with Shuli Branson, carla joy bergman, and Vicky Osterweil of the Collective of Anarchist Writers (CAW) about their new project, media between upheavals, and writing as a collective practice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Als Media. Welcome to It could happen here a podcast
that I introduced the same way almost every time. I
don't know, you listen to the show, right, you're listening
at like some point in the future, you probably know
the things falling apart putting back together again Intro. I
don't have to do it. We are doing something that
we have done before and I guess we'll continue to do,
(00:22):
which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their
work and how things are going, and yeah, the general why,
how what of it all? And today we're talking with
the Collective Anarchist Writers, and very specifically we're talking to
Shirley Branson, who is a writer, translator, and teacher currently
living in so called New York. Carla joy Bergman who
(00:45):
lives across the border in Canada and is a mom, writer,
artist and loves crows. Very important. We'll be coming that
back to that in a second. And Vicky osteriwhil who
is a worker, writer and agitator based in Philadelphia, And
all three of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks so much for having us,
for having us, love your project. I also just wanted
to give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny
or listen, who's not here today because she's working paid work,
who just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to
say her name.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, and partly I'm
excited to talk about it because so the acronym for
this is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on,
and we love a crow here in Portland. It is
maybe our big thing.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, I'm in Vancouver.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well I was in Vancouver, just stopped from there, but
Pacific Northwest and so it's pro highway, you know, thousands
and thousands of crows.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Oh yeah, I got it.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the
project for us, honestly, Yeah, hell.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
Yeah it was. It really came together around around the
Corvid theme, I think.
Speaker 6 (01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
Yeah, in the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence,
and never ending spite. I think you're all sort of
motivating factors for all.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Of us, and that they are collective and have meetings
often throughout the day.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
A collective called the Murder, which is also pretty badass.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we
have the Mega Murder. So every every like morning, all
the crows sort of fly off into their different like
little murders, and they go they you know, they go
out and hang out in the city. And then at
a round sunset every day, all of the crows fly
back into the city. They have their like giant mega
murdering meeting. There's thousands and thousands of them. You know,
(02:32):
you look up and you just see them like the herds,
like that, the murders. The crow is flying past. And
if you there's bificent spots in Portland where you can
just go see all of the all all all the
crows hanging out and you know, doing doing doing whatever
the things crows do. When literally in entire cities where
the crows gathered together every night.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Oh no, it's a spokes council.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I don't it's not a spokes assel because all of
them are there. I feel like that's an assembly.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah yeah. On Vancouver called it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah,
hell yeah, because it's so massive and goes forever and
ever and ever.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
To their roost.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Brief story on crows and resistance A really incredible story
in Vancouver when a park was a colonial person created
a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a
lot of Indigenous people in their homes and designed this
park that was filled with crows as well. They also
brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty,
(03:33):
and the crows made it really hard for these animals.
And so the City of Vancouver for fifty years from
nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty gave free range to the
Vancouver Gun people to go into the park and shoot
crows every day.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And when I see like the amount of crows that
are still alive, it's just some metaphor for Indigenous resilience,
you know, Like it's just so powerful. So it's another
reason why I'm like interested in and in terms of
where I was like.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Living, as I been gathering images for our project that
I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking
people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know,
the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is
the crow's revenge.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
One of the things that you know you kind of
have to do here in Portland is you have to
kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to
like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort
of you know, when your friends come, you let you
introduce them to the crows, or the crows know that
you're okay. It's very sweet shiny things. Yeah, we love
a crow based society. And speaking of a crow based society, yeah,
(04:49):
do you want to, I guess, give a brief sort
of overview of what Cause is before we get sort
of more into it.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that as VICKI.
By the way, Yeah, so cause of like I mean,
it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is
a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a Corvid appreciation
working group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it.
And what we are doing is we are bringing all
for at first, just all four of our efforts together.
(05:16):
So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We
have pedagological tasks, We have many activist projects that center
around culture. You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has
a Patreon, Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also
has like an email list. There's just all these different
projects and we realize that like for all of our
talk about mutual aid and working collectively when it comes
(05:37):
to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured
and so alienated and sort of turned into like everyone
has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another,
you know, even though they don't want to be like
they want to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's
happening is that there's limited sort of customers. And there's
also this other trend going on right now of this
really exciting kind of worker owned journals, a lot of
(06:00):
them local journalisms. There's some in New York and Chicago,
and there's one in Ashville and all over the country
as well as like on special topics like aftermath, which
like does I think the other video games, and there's
four or four media it is tech. There's just like
all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing,
and I think in some ways all of us are
sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort
of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know.
Speaker 6 (06:21):
In a big way.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
So there's sort of two goals that we have, and
I think Carla Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this,
but one of which is to make writing radical culture
work beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work,
to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else
who wants to share in this project, who we can
sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier
(06:44):
for people who are reading to have access to these things,
like in one place, instead of having to, you know,
decide who they care for and who they like in
order to sort of, you know, do that mac of
like who can I afford to subscribe to? Like I personally,
I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but
personally I usually have about two or three people I
can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch
it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know,
or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused.
(07:08):
But what we're really excited to do mostly is support
each other's work, because I think we all really love
and admire each other's work and have for a long time,
and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of
my writing just being for me, it's for Julie and
Carla and Danino, and that just makes it feel more
inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah, I mean connected to the financial aspect. But I
think when we are initially discussing this, the experience of
being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah,
and if you're trying to get paid for that, you
have to sell it to people, right, And so it's
very hard to get paid at all for writing, and
it's very hard to place your writing in venues to
(07:48):
publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle,
because people do not really want to publish things that
come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do
all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you
to think about like what an action is like.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
So like, you know, you could write for some of
the lefty.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
So called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't. Yeah,
they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as
if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
They erase the whole history of it.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
The only serious kind of political forces some kind of
democratic socialism. So to us, we wanted to create a
place where we can do the writing we want to
do without having to make compromises in what we want
to say. Just to get published because that, yeah, just
that game of like of shopping your stuff around is
it's demeaning, It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from
(08:44):
actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band
together instead of each of us going off wasting our
time trying to write.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with
this too also like the pay is just so bad,
like even though almost especially the leftiscroops like page is
so rancid, and all of the combinations of those things
make it really really hard to just sort of be
an independent writer. And also, okay, jumping back a second,
so they're raising anarchism exists. This is why. The one
(09:15):
that makes me always lose my mind is like I'm
specifically gonna name Jocobin here because I don't like them.
But like, one of the things that jack Wum will
do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized
by the IWW. It is an IWW union, that they
will have pictures of the strike where there are a
bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never
mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.
So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy
(09:39):
of silence, I guess about our politics and the stuff
that we do in the world.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
It's so claring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And
then the podcast associated with the dig, like they will
specifically will be talking about history where anarchists have been
very involved, and then they just will not mention them.
I'm like, and they sometimes there's really good history and
now that podcast, but like this is an omission that
they clearly are choosing.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, And I think, you know, self organization is effectively
the only way out of this because why you just
sort of I don't know, have to deal with all
of the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting there in
front of you with a stick going no anarchism of balk.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Yeah, and even the projects that have sustained, that have survived,
which are all really awesome, you know, like and exciting,
Like very few of them have offered real sustainability, like
on a professional level, and like I've been publishing like
quote unquote professionally for fifteen years and like I'm the
like newest writer on the scene, like from our crew basically,
like we're incredibly experienced, and all of us have books out,
(10:43):
all of us have edited volumes all of us have
like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really
respect whose names I think are big and important in
the world of theory and activism and like in the
anglophone world especially, And none of us can sustain ourselves
as writers as such because of the way that just
you know, both politically but also just like the way
the market has come down. Yeah, and it just feels
(11:04):
like something we could apply our politics to solving as
a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like
a you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all
your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also
function to make more work available to produce and to
platform and to yeah, to to sort of work as
an example simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Unfortunately, speaking of speaking of sustaining work as a platform,
unfortunately the way we are sustained here is with these ads.
So hold on and we are back, And this, I
guess brings us to the kind of work that's happening here.
(11:47):
And I was very excited because one of the things
you all have done is an interview with Raouls of Becky,
who is the author of like one of my favorite
quotes of all time. I think I've said on this
show like multiple times. I really ran into in a
sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Patchacuti,
which is about the sort of the water and gas
wars in Bolivia. I talked about this book on the
(12:09):
show like all the time. This quote goes roughly like
struggle illuminates the divisions of a society like lightning illuminates
the sky. And I love it. It's like it's like
it's the best explanation of what happened during twenty twenty
that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's
happening like right now too. Is like you have these
sort of flashpoint moments where where you know, suddenly like
(12:29):
all of how society works very briefly becomes visible and
you have this sort of moment when you're illuminated by
it to act. And so I'm I don't know, I'm
really excited that y'all are talking to him, And yeah,
because you talked at a bit more about what's been
going on and what's to come.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
I'm sure. Thanks.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That was a highlight definitely this year was talking to
Raoul obviously, you know a podcastco We talked for quite
a bit longer than what was on the show, and I.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Think like reading his newest book that was.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Translated and then doing that show with him, it was
completely connected to me, like reaching out to Suley about
doing Call, because there is a way that we that
he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that
those Bapatistas are working on, like this idea of really
truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or
(13:23):
automy that we don't actually enact in our day to
day lives. And so I really started to reflect on
my own life that way, and not so much Vicky
at this point yet, but like Suley and Danny, both
of them, like we just were blurbing each other's books
and like supporting each other, connecting to publishers or trying
to connect each other to publishers, and just like trying
(13:46):
to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath even when
we're all really committed to not being competitive, but there's
it is, like there's a you know. So all is
to say that for me, like collaboration is at the
heart of we're doing here in a deep, deep way,
and for me, collaboration just means that when something is
(14:07):
created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So
I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes
up individually, but also like with each other and even
like through collaborations like the show with Raoul and like
how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah, So like for myself,
I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way.
(14:28):
I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for
the for call. I think it will always be in
conversation with others and just trying to double down on
on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, and that's something I think this is useful for
everyone listening to this, is that, like it's a lot
easier to develop better ideas, and you know, it makes
your writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know,
just the way you act in the world a lot
more clear when you're working with other people and it's
you know, it's it's it's the process by which the
best stuff gets created.
Speaker 5 (15:03):
Yeah, I mean I think that's really like true. And
I think like I have for a long time now
sort of accepted that writing is never going to support
or sustain me and all I needed was a push
from a few other people to be like, wait, what
if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to
be like, oh yeah, like I could actually try that,
Like I don't have to just accept that, like I'll
always have like a full time job plus whatever writing,
(15:25):
like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and like,
you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes
and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out
enough to like sustain myself. Like that whole process. I
think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle,
you know, of having gigs and work and lots of
other important things to do and and you know, sort
of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like,
(15:47):
what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla and and
as Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm
the last one on the on the crew, and I
was sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But
I think, like, I don't know what that means genuinely,
but but I was broughtup. And I think just having
them propose it already just as a project that we've
been thinking of, has like changed the way I've been
thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing.
(16:10):
And then so I think, like just to underline that
point and go on and on, collaborations really really like
important and supporting one another is so is so powerful.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, when carl and I initially had like the seed
conversation of this, like Carla said something about collectivizing as writers,
like we talk about it with all these other other
workplaces and industries and whatever, and it was like like
when when she said that, I was like, oh, yeah,
like that makes so much sense that we're off here
doing our own thing. And as Vicky said, you do
(16:42):
it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable.
You steal your time to do it.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
Right, Even the.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write
actually make you do all this other work. So like
the time for writing is always like endlessly deferred. And
you know, we have that image also, like of the
patron or something, or like Virginia Woolf says, you need
money enough to have a room of one's own. But
if we put ourselves together in this way, then we
(17:11):
are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time
for ourselves to write. And then like going back to
something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there
was a time in anarchism where like I think we
talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block
had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right. It wasn't like, yeah,
you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think.
(17:32):
It was like it was hyper local in a way,
and there was so many voices. And so I think
that's another thing that we want to do, is like
help for that proliferation, because in the sort of spirit
of collaboration, like the reason to write as an anarchist
for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility
for people to like receive it and then contact me
into and I get into conversations with people and learn
(17:54):
things from them.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, I think it's an angle there too, where like
I think we're kind of okay, So I was a
tiny baby when all this was happening, So I'm I'm
gonna have to rely on y'all for this. But like
you know, one of the things I get sort of
reading the record about like the older anarchist movement, I
mean When I say older, I mean like like anti
anti globalization era stuff was like there seems like there
(18:16):
was a lot more of a kind of like anarchist
media sphere.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Are you talking about like the late nineties.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, like like like to the two thousands, to.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Some extent like a Battle Seattle.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah yeah, I mean that was like the you know,
the birth of anarchy again, right, yeah, I was definitely around.
I'm in my late fifties, but the same struggle was there,
like that that we're swimming in liberalism and like that
socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as
(18:47):
powerful then, and it was you saw it at all
the rallies and stuff, and you know, immediately anarchism was
marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for
the revolution. And this is why it's clinch off and
all these kind of sectarian movements in the That's my
take anyway.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I think that no, it makes sense. It makes sense.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I mean I've hashed this out with so many older
anarchists that I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies,
Like we talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott
Crow and you can just see the direct line of
where it went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth.
Sorry I went off on a different thing instead of
like journals and media.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
But yeah, no, no, well this is good too, because
like I think that's the other thing I've been realizing
is like people don't I mean in my generation too,
but like people younger than me don't really know the
history of this stuff. Like all the time I have
conversations with people where I start talking about like the
Wojaca uprising, and they have no idea what I'm talking about,
And I'm like, oh, no, we need to, like we
need to like resuscitate the history of like the two
(19:46):
thousands because stuff happened there.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I
was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at
the moment. And some of that was actually because a
lot of what was going on in the globalization movement
in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously,
like touring punk bands would also bring zene libraries with them,
so they would have someone destroying zines and playing the show.
(20:11):
And like, I mean I got radicalized through punk. I
know a lot of people who did that. Was you
know when I finally did, it was after that movement
had largely crusted, But I think there was a lot
of focus on culture, and also a critique of culture
was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving,
And I think the explosion of social media and like
posting and like the sort of quote unquote democratization and
(20:35):
leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more
real in the early twenty tens than it is certainly
than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made
up narrative, but there was also it was also over
relied on. I think people sort of reached for a
kind of like, well, anyone who can use these tools
to communicate, like, that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media
(20:56):
in general, or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort
of beside the point because we can around it. We
can sort of go we can you know, go on
Twitter and subvert it, and we can like do all
these you know, go sideways around it. So I was,
you know, a participant in to Occupy Wall Street in
two's eleven, which people also don't know anything about because
that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started
by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the
(21:18):
WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around, and
that by twenty eleven. When they did that, we thought
it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these
culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they
started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right, Like that's silly,
and like this is not to defend Adbusters, I think, whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
We yeah, there's some issues with them, but yeah, yeah,
they also did I don't know.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Yeah, But also I think that reaction of like culture
jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like
talking about who wants to talk about culture? At this point,
I think that that made sense in the context in
which we were moving and organizing, but like, now, once
again it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere
in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous
amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important
(22:00):
to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't
just news, but that are like really talking about art
and beauty and excitement and joy and fiction and all
these things that we find really important. Because you know,
I think a lot of people sort of think, well,
it's a crisis moment. You know, the world's ending. Why
would you do that? But like the world has been
ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the world worth defending
(22:21):
has been ending since then, and it hasn't ended yet.
And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by
indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures and stories and
narratives and works of art has been an important mode
of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle.
And yeah, I think we can move some struggle into
that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot
(22:43):
of craving for it now because I think also for
a while things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years,
the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No, everything feels like
streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess. There's no
access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing.
They know it's exploiting the artists. They know, you know,
Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know, Hbo
(23:04):
and all those you know, all the all the streaming
services you know support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right,
And I think there's there's a real opening and a
real desire for something else at this moment, at the
same time that things are indeed quite on fire literally ecocidally,
but also also sort of politically.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, speaking of everything being on fire, we need to
take an ad break and then we will come back.
And I think the deliberate political intervention here.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
We are.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
We are back from capital healthscape to mild do less
capital healthscape. Yu, you were gonna say.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing,
because when you know, when after October seventh, people are
getting together to try to figure out how in the
United States to do some kind of work and action
and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement,
Like people were sort of like, what the hell can
we even do? And one of the things that I
would say to people is like just putting up stickers
(24:05):
and writing about Gaza on the walls, like in graffiti
has a huge impact in it. It's overlooked often, I think,
as like something that's effective. But we can see that
there has been a giant cultural shift after October seventh
in terms of people's awareness of the Israeli ginocide against
the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think
(24:26):
that it has to do really, you know, post October seventh,
with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere,
and so it's easy to kind of think that that
isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something
like that is more effective than the kind of marching
in circles that we can do that we call protest.
And you know, like going back to punk, I think
(24:48):
also Punk has gets a bad rap sometimes because you know,
in that line of like the kind of bookschin lifestylism.
But I don't think we should downplay like punk created
its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make
it happen. It's where I got radicalized too, and they
were like it was anarchist, right, It was like explicitly anarchist,
(25:11):
and you were living in an anarchist way and like
creating things in an anarchist way, and it was this
whole other world. So like, if we put our anarchist
energy into culture, it's part of making a world that
we want to live in, you know, over and against
this world, this hell world that we're also trying to
destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't
(25:32):
kind of just like dismiss this as as less important
than the other kinds of actions that we can take.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
You're here, Yeah, And that brings me to something I
wanted to sort of ask about, like more deliberately, which is, like,
what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying
to make into this moment with this project? And both sorts,
I guess a bit more generally, too big question.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
I mean, I my work has always been about intervening
around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just
now bad, or that people don't know what anything, or
pedagogically they're lacking. Like I've always tried to intervene around
this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are,
and there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways
(26:21):
of being and knowing and doing, and so it's like
a deepening of that. And I think probably on a
systemic thinking, systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism
or empire, whatever you want, of colonialism to really like
live it in the everyday.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
So that's partly that.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
And then on just a super practical level, like you know,
all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth,
are working all the time to try to meet and
meant and some of us are have housing insecurity and
other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff and
so like actually showing up for each of us is
(27:02):
at the core of it. For me, Like I it
feels so good in my body to know that I'm
not just showing up to think about what to do
for cow. For me, it's like in the act of
collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to
what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have
(27:23):
an agenda except for to disrupt and intervene belief systems
that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came
of age in the early eighties in the punk scene
and had a venue space, and to me, punk is
and I would say hip hop is well underground hip
hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being
(27:45):
captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that
punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low
to the ground.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just like to build on that, Carl,
because I think that was really beautiful. Second, everything that
you said is it like many of us have a perspective.
You know that huge structural change is going to need
to come, and that often that will come through these
big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know,
these lightning strikes, right, but you can't force those, you
can't make those happen. Yeah, and in the meantime you can.
(28:17):
I think I've spent a lot of my in the
meantimes in trying to sort of organize stuff that sort
of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just
feels often feels like wheal spinning, you know, like I'm
build I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,
like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like
one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven
are youdly two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven to
(28:39):
twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was never
more than probably eighteen months before there was like something
else going off in the streets. And so although those
could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult,
you still had a lot of periods where you know,
you could just sort of be waiting and it would
just sort of happened.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Again.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
That was certainly what I was doing in that decade
and in a way that I don't think I appreciated
until it was over. Yea, because the last four years
has been very different. The rhythm has been very different
since the pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini
on this podcast, Okay, everyone does it right, Yeah, since
since the dynamics started, you know, those rhythms have been disrupted,
(29:17):
and I think the Biden counter revolution against Way twenty
which has also really disrupted those things. And in that
space it has felt very clear to me personally, and
I'm older, you know whatever. I'm like, you know, a
movement elder at this point, just because our movements are
so you focused now, because I'm actually old. Like the
decade before twenty eleven, from like two thousand and one,
(29:38):
you know, from nine to eleven until sort of occupies
sort of how I periodize it a bit, There wasn't
a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq War
stuff that was really really big, and there were important
exceptions to that in the US. I'm doing a potted
history here. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely
had all this time and the stuff that was sustained
and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And
so like I think like now as we're moving into
(29:59):
this era here in North America on Turtle Island of
extreme repressive danger, right, like we shouldn't like joke about
it or downplay it. Like we're facing a lot of
extreme repression and fascists back in the streets in a
big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of
the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where
people did a lot of marching in circles, but there
(30:20):
were targets for the pressure, you know, like they don't
feel as relevant now. But now I'm really off, way off.
But no, I think so I think like I think
like we're in this moment where the fascists both are
quite empowered and very unfocused. They're they're confused. They don't
really have us in their sights, like they think Liz
Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assada Shakur
(30:41):
or whatever, right, And like that leaves us some space
to move and to build things that can maintain the
spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance
that can also organize. And another thing that has really
been important for me recently with KA is that I've
been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about
the details of, but that the skills have largely come
(31:02):
from punk music that I did in the twenties twenty
is being in a touring punk band, and those skills
have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a
huge thing for me because I'm working with other people
who are younger who don't have that experiential like, oh,
how do you do this? I'm like, oh no, no, it's
so easy. You just like do this. You know, here's
these skills I learned just from doing music, And like,
I don't think that's just like accidental, as Shirley was saying,
(31:25):
like the DIY nature of some of that work, the
culture work. You know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The
bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever,
but they gave me all of these powerful skills and
ideas and concepts for doing really important work. And I
think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture
in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
I think like, if I can build off this too,
and I'm going to try to do some tying together
of things. But like one of the ways that I
think about my contribution is to think about like let's
not like.
Speaker 6 (31:57):
Don't look there, let's look over here.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
And that can mean of multiple things, which is often
when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments
or big actions or like top down solutions, which means
that we take our attention away from these other places
where we're doing all this stuff, like carlois saying, like
we're already doing a lot of important kind of like
life making work. And then also there's movements in our
(32:22):
movements where we have to be like you all look
over here while we do stuff over right, Like you
don't want to be seen all the time, So we
have to be able to direct our attention to the
things that we do and then also keep some of
that stuff under wraps. And that means it's hard sometimes
to see and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really
functions through decentralization, like we're not always aware of how
(32:44):
much power we actually have and what's going on at
any one moment. And going back to the kind of moments,
even tracing back to the Battle of Seattle, and I
think it's like ever more present today in all of
the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being
done that a lot of the groundwork for any of
these moments is done by anarchists, and then it's not
(33:06):
either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like
we make everything sort of run, and anarchism makes everything run,
and then it just gets ignored because it's not about
taking credit, it's not about kind of imposing itself. And
so I think like that kind of in between of
saying what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then
(33:28):
keeping under wrap so that we can keep chugging along,
and then just also being aware of when our work
is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes
against what we want.
Speaker 6 (33:38):
I think these are.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
All ways for us to prepare for those moments of
like explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then
we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah. I think the way I've always thought about it
was just kind of like, is this like flame tending
process where in these sort of low cycles, your job
is to keep the flame alive, and eventually you know
that you're going to see it, like you know, you're
you're you're going to see the explosion again, right, You're
going to see the flame for uh, But like that
that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and
(34:13):
unless people have been tending it and people have been
trying to make it grow. And you can't necessarily just
like add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's
gonna it's gonna grow now, right it. You know, you
don't you don't really have control of how it sort
of moves and grows it expands, but you have control
over your ability to like make sure that it keeps going.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Absolutely all about Bambers.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, And I think also, like I thinking about the
punk metaphor a lot. Like one of the ways that
I've been thinking a lot about like what we're doing
here and it could happen here is we kind of
took the like we took the ridge against the machine gambit,
which is to say we were like we're like, Okay,
we're going to go to try to go somewhat mainstream
in order to I mean bridge but obviously like went
way bigger than we did, but like we're gonna go
(34:55):
try to We're going to go like somewhat mainstream so
we can like spread this thing to a larger group
of people. That's also very very dangerous in the sense that,
like it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself
in the kind of mire of like the field you've
walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about
it is that we're not the only people doing this, right,
and there's all of you out there who are doing this,
(35:18):
Like everyone on this call is doing this, like is
doing the like like the DIY work that is going
to be the core of what this whole thing becomes.
And the more the more of these media products we
get and the more that people are able to sustain
themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able
to break like I don't know, just like the modelmaniacal
substack control of like taking your money and giving it
(35:40):
the transphobes kind of thing. The better shape we're going
to be in in the years to come exactly.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad
at doing is accepting that we do wire money and
asking for it. So I'm going to do that for
the squad. Yeah, we are currently fundraising because it's actually
really hard to make something sustainable for people. Yeah, so
we have a fundraiser going on. If you like what
we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo
literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're
(36:10):
going to have a pay what you want subscription model,
so everything will be subscribed. But we really want to
have three months worth of living wage for all of
us to do two days a week on it, right,
so we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries,
and that's forty five thousand dollars because four people for
three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money
because we're including solidarity funds in that and like paying
any writers who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah,
(36:32):
if you have a few bucks and you know, maybe
you're thinking about, you know, getting off of one of
those substacks or something, and you want to throw our away,
we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept
anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money,
which is I know true for a lot of us,
which is why we feel bad asking for the money
because there are so many people who need it right now,
you can subscribe online. You can find us on social
(36:53):
media and keep in touch until we do launch, and
then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also
a really great way to support us. But if you
have a few bucks you want to throw, if you
want to give someone a present of a year's membership,
you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays,
you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work,
we'd really really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
And yeah, thanks Vicky.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, and I don't know, I'm excited for this. There's
already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on
the site. We will have links to everything in the description. Yeah,
thank you, Thank you three for coming on the show.
And I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Well, thanks for having us.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it. And like
I always say, like if anyone is interested and wants
to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And yeah, yeah, same and reach out to us too.
A few ideas on what cost stands for. We love
hearing from people. My favorite is kin the anarchist right,
that's what it stands for. I don't know who came
up with that.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I think that might have been scherlier Vicky.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
But it's a good one TVD TBD, So yeah, send
in what you think. And we also are going to
have an advice column that's going to be lunched soon. Yeah,
so send us questions or individually or whatever, but you know,
disrupt individualism, reach out to us.
Speaker 5 (38:06):
Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a long time listener,
first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here.
So thank you Mia so much.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
That's not true old time.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
Second a right, sorry I was on. I just go
on so many podcasts like.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
Sorry.
Speaker 5 (38:24):
Yeah, well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and
talking to everyone, and we hope to meet y'all in
the future and we'll have a well, we will have
a discord community, we'll be having like writing class, We're
gonna have a lot of like really exciting stuff. So
even if you can't throw in money right now, please
sign up to our website, cosh anythings dot com stay
in touch and find out all the really cool stuff
we're doing.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're
already doing is now going to have a home and call.
So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's review reviews and essays,
and Carla's many projects which include pot podcasts and writing
and these interviews, Danny's writing and classes.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
Yeah, this is all moving there.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Plus new things doing it together.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Yeah in that spirit YouTube, dear listener, can can do
things together and go to rup this world. So go
do that now instead of listening to whatever else it's
happening on the show. This ending exactly only well, but
go go go tosruugh things.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
I get it, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out from the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
now find sources for It could Happen Here listened directly
in episode descriptions.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Thanks for listening.
Als Media. Welcome to It could happen here a podcast
that I introduced the same way almost every time. I
don't know, you listen to the show, right, you're listening
at like some point in the future, you probably know
the things falling apart putting back together again Intro. I
don't have to do it. We are doing something that
we have done before and I guess we'll continue to do,
(00:22):
which is talking to other anarchist media projects about their
work and how things are going, and yeah, the general why,
how what of it all? And today we're talking with
the Collective Anarchist Writers, and very specifically we're talking to
Shirley Branson, who is a writer, translator, and teacher currently
living in so called New York. Carla joy Bergman who
(00:45):
lives across the border in Canada and is a mom, writer,
artist and loves crows. Very important. We'll be coming that
back to that in a second. And Vicky osteriwhil who
is a worker, writer and agitator based in Philadelphia, And
all three of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Hi, thanks for having us, Thanks so much for having us,
for having us, love your project. I also just wanted
to give a shout out to our fourth member, Danny
or listen, who's not here today because she's working paid work,
who just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to
say her name.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, and partly I'm
excited to talk about it because so the acronym for
this is caw and there's a whole crow theme going on,
and we love a crow here in Portland. It is
maybe our big thing.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
Yeah, I'm in Vancouver.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Well I was in Vancouver, just stopped from there, but
Pacific Northwest and so it's pro highway, you know, thousands
and thousands of crows.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Oh yeah, I got it.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the
project for us, honestly, Yeah, hell.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
Yeah it was. It really came together around around the
Corvid theme, I think.
Speaker 6 (01:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (01:51):
Yeah, in the combination of enjoying shiny things, extreme intelligence,
and never ending spite. I think you're all sort of
motivating factors for all.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Of us, and that they are collective and have meetings
often throughout the day.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
A collective called the Murder, which is also pretty badass.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Yeah, there's a huge thing in Portland here where we
have the Mega Murder. So every every like morning, all
the crows sort of fly off into their different like
little murders, and they go they you know, they go
out and hang out in the city. And then at
a round sunset every day, all of the crows fly
back into the city. They have their like giant mega
murdering meeting. There's thousands and thousands of them. You know,
(02:32):
you look up and you just see them like the herds,
like that, the murders. The crow is flying past. And
if you there's bificent spots in Portland where you can
just go see all of the all all all the
crows hanging out and you know, doing doing doing whatever
the things crows do. When literally in entire cities where
the crows gathered together every night.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
Oh no, it's a spokes council.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
I don't it's not a spokes assel because all of
them are there. I feel like that's an assembly.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah yeah. On Vancouver called it's called the Crow Highway. Yeah,
hell yeah, because it's so massive and goes forever and
ever and ever.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
To their roost.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Brief story on crows and resistance A really incredible story
in Vancouver when a park was a colonial person created
a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a
lot of Indigenous people in their homes and designed this
park that was filled with crows as well. They also
brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty,
(03:33):
and the crows made it really hard for these animals.
And so the City of Vancouver for fifty years from
nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty gave free range to the
Vancouver Gun people to go into the park and shoot
crows every day.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
And when I see like the amount of crows that
are still alive, it's just some metaphor for Indigenous resilience,
you know, Like it's just so powerful. So it's another
reason why I'm like interested in and in terms of
where I was like.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Living, as I been gathering images for our project that
I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking
people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know,
the follow up to what you were saying, Carla, is
the crow's revenge.
Speaker 5 (04:25):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
One of the things that you know you kind of
have to do here in Portland is you have to
kind of like negotiate with the crows. You have to
like you leave them like peace offerings and you sort
of you know, when your friends come, you let you
introduce them to the crows, or the crows know that
you're okay. It's very sweet shiny things. Yeah, we love
a crow based society. And speaking of a crow based society, yeah,
(04:49):
do you want to, I guess, give a brief sort
of overview of what Cause is before we get sort
of more into it.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
Yeah, I'm happy to take a spin at that as VICKI.
By the way, Yeah, so cause of like I mean,
it's an anarchist journal of arts and culture that is
a collective of anarchist writers. It's also a Corvid appreciation
working group. There's a lot of different acronyms for it.
And what we are doing is we are bringing all
for at first, just all four of our efforts together.
(05:16):
So a lot of us work on separate podcasts. We
have pedagological tasks, We have many activist projects that center
around culture. You know, I have a newsletter, Surely has
a Patreon, Kyla has a newsletter, Danny has has also
has like an email list. There's just all these different
projects and we realize that like for all of our
talk about mutual aid and working collectively when it comes
(05:37):
to writing and creativity, the market has been so fractured
and so alienated and sort of turned into like everyone
has an individual newsletter that they're competing with one another,
you know, even though they don't want to be like
they want to be. But that's sort of ultimately what's
happening is that there's limited sort of customers. And there's
also this other trend going on right now of this
really exciting kind of worker owned journals, a lot of
(06:00):
them local journalisms. There's some in New York and Chicago,
and there's one in Ashville and all over the country
as well as like on special topics like aftermath, which
like does I think the other video games, and there's
four or four media it is tech. There's just like
all these different sort of sites doing this sort of thing,
and I think in some ways all of us are
sort of collectively reinventing the newspapers that have been sort
of stolen and destroyed by capital, you know.
Speaker 6 (06:21):
In a big way.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
So there's sort of two goals that we have, and
I think Carla Carla speaks really eloquently to some of this,
but one of which is to make writing radical culture
work beautiful, joyful, fun and also critical like movement work,
to make it sustainable for us and for anyone else
who wants to share in this project, who we can
sort of expand towards, but also to make it easier
(06:44):
for people who are reading to have access to these things,
like in one place, instead of having to, you know,
decide who they care for and who they like in
order to sort of, you know, do that mac of
like who can I afford to subscribe to? Like I personally,
I don't know if it's true for everyone else, but
personally I usually have about two or three people I
can afford to subscribe to a month, and I switch
it out just like on a very arbitrary basis, you know,
or something like that. That was very technical and financially focused.
(07:08):
But what we're really excited to do mostly is support
each other's work, because I think we all really love
and admire each other's work and have for a long time,
and this is just this really exciting opportunity. Instead of
my writing just being for me, it's for Julie and
Carla and Danino, and that just makes it feel more
inspiring and exciting as well as a collective process.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
Yeah, I mean connected to the financial aspect. But I
think when we are initially discussing this, the experience of
being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. Yeah,
and if you're trying to get paid for that, you
have to sell it to people, right, And so it's
very hard to get paid at all for writing, and
it's very hard to place your writing in venues to
(07:48):
publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle,
because people do not really want to publish things that
come to anarchist conclusions, Like they want you to do
all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you
to think about like what an action is like.
Speaker 6 (08:03):
So like, you know, you could write for some of
the lefty.
Speaker 4 (08:07):
So called lefty socialist whatever rags, but they don't. Yeah,
they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as
if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed.
Speaker 6 (08:19):
They erase the whole history of it.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
The only serious kind of political forces some kind of
democratic socialism. So to us, we wanted to create a
place where we can do the writing we want to
do without having to make compromises in what we want
to say. Just to get published because that, yeah, just
that game of like of shopping your stuff around is
it's demeaning, It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from
(08:44):
actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band
together instead of each of us going off wasting our
time trying to write.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, and I think one of the other issues with
this too also like the pay is just so bad,
like even though almost especially the leftiscroops like page is
so rancid, and all of the combinations of those things
make it really really hard to just sort of be
an independent writer. And also, okay, jumping back a second,
so they're raising anarchism exists. This is why. The one
(09:15):
that makes me always lose my mind is like I'm
specifically gonna name Jocobin here because I don't like them.
But like, one of the things that jack Wum will
do is they'll be covering a strike that is organized
by the IWW. It is an IWW union, that they
will have pictures of the strike where there are a
bunch of people holding IWW banners, and they will never
mention that it was the IWW who organized the strike.
So like, yeah, there is this real sort of conspiracy
(09:39):
of silence, I guess about our politics and the stuff
that we do in the world.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
It's so claring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And
then the podcast associated with the dig, like they will
specifically will be talking about history where anarchists have been
very involved, and then they just will not mention them.
I'm like, and they sometimes there's really good history and
now that podcast, but like this is an omission that
they clearly are choosing.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Yeah, And I think, you know, self organization is effectively
the only way out of this because why you just
sort of I don't know, have to deal with all
of the sort of media gatekeepers like sitting there in
front of you with a stick going no anarchism of balk.
Speaker 5 (10:19):
Yeah, and even the projects that have sustained, that have survived,
which are all really awesome, you know, like and exciting,
Like very few of them have offered real sustainability, like
on a professional level, and like I've been publishing like
quote unquote professionally for fifteen years and like I'm the
like newest writer on the scene, like from our crew basically,
like we're incredibly experienced, and all of us have books out,
(10:43):
all of us have edited volumes all of us have
like podcasts, and like are people who I like, really
respect whose names I think are big and important in
the world of theory and activism and like in the
anglophone world especially, And none of us can sustain ourselves
as writers as such because of the way that just
you know, both politically but also just like the way
the market has come down. Yeah, and it just feels
(11:04):
like something we could apply our politics to solving as
a workplace issue rather than just sort of as like
a you know, are you committed enough to sacrifice all
your time issue? And so hopefully like that will also
function to make more work available to produce and to
platform and to yeah, to to sort of work as
an example simultaneously.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Unfortunately, speaking of speaking of sustaining work as a platform,
unfortunately the way we are sustained here is with these ads.
So hold on and we are back, And this, I
guess brings us to the kind of work that's happening here.
(11:47):
And I was very excited because one of the things
you all have done is an interview with Raouls of Becky,
who is the author of like one of my favorite
quotes of all time. I think I've said on this
show like multiple times. I really ran into in a
sort of completely unrelated book called Rhythms of the Patchacuti,
which is about the sort of the water and gas
wars in Bolivia. I talked about this book on the
(12:09):
show like all the time. This quote goes roughly like
struggle illuminates the divisions of a society like lightning illuminates
the sky. And I love it. It's like it's like
it's the best explanation of what happened during twenty twenty
that I've ever seen. And this is sort of what's
happening like right now too. Is like you have these
sort of flashpoint moments where where you know, suddenly like
(12:29):
all of how society works very briefly becomes visible and
you have this sort of moment when you're illuminated by
it to act. And so I'm I don't know, I'm
really excited that y'all are talking to him, And yeah,
because you talked at a bit more about what's been
going on and what's to come.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
I'm sure. Thanks.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That was a highlight definitely this year was talking to
Raoul obviously, you know a podcastco We talked for quite
a bit longer than what was on the show, and I.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Think like reading his newest book that was.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Translated and then doing that show with him, it was
completely connected to me, like reaching out to Suley about
doing Call, because there is a way that we that
he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that
those Bapatistas are working on, like this idea of really
truly looking at all the fault lines within horizontality or
(13:23):
automy that we don't actually enact in our day to
day lives. And so I really started to reflect on
my own life that way, and not so much Vicky
at this point yet, but like Suley and Danny, both
of them, like we just were blurbing each other's books
and like supporting each other, connecting to publishers or trying
to connect each other to publishers, and just like trying
(13:46):
to disrupt a competitive nature that's running underneath even when
we're all really committed to not being competitive, but there's
it is, like there's a you know. So all is
to say that for me, like collaboration is at the
heart of we're doing here in a deep, deep way,
and for me, collaboration just means that when something is
(14:07):
created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration. So
I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes
up individually, but also like with each other and even
like through collaborations like the show with Raoul and like
how that spreads seeds and ideas. Yeah, So like for myself,
I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way.
(14:28):
I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for
the for call. I think it will always be in
conversation with others and just trying to double down on
on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Yeah, and that's something I think this is useful for
everyone listening to this, is that, like it's a lot
easier to develop better ideas, and you know, it makes
your writing more clear. It makes the way that you, you know,
just the way you act in the world a lot
more clear when you're working with other people and it's
you know, it's it's it's the process by which the
best stuff gets created.
Speaker 5 (15:03):
Yeah, I mean I think that's really like true. And
I think like I have for a long time now
sort of accepted that writing is never going to support
or sustain me and all I needed was a push
from a few other people to be like, wait, what
if we like actually tried to do it collectively, to
be like, oh yeah, like I could actually try that,
Like I don't have to just accept that, like I'll
always have like a full time job plus whatever writing,
(15:25):
like in whatever hours I can steal, you know, and like,
you know, with great difficulty put out some writing sometimes
and then always feel guilty when I'm not putting out
enough to like sustain myself. Like that whole process. I
think a lot of creatives right now know that struggle,
you know, of having gigs and work and lots of
other important things to do and and you know, sort
of accepting that that's the conditions. And I think, like,
(15:47):
what's so inspiring about, you know, because Carla and and
as Carlo was just mentioning, they sort of brought I'm
the last one on the on the crew, and I
was sort of the closer, you know or whatever. But
I think, like, I don't know what that means genuinely,
but but I was broughtup. And I think just having
them propose it already just as a project that we've
been thinking of, has like changed the way I've been
thinking about what is possible with the writing I'm already doing.
(16:10):
And then so I think, like just to underline that
point and go on and on, collaborations really really like
important and supporting one another is so is so powerful.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, when carl and I initially had like the seed
conversation of this, like Carla said something about collectivizing as writers,
like we talk about it with all these other other
workplaces and industries and whatever, and it was like like
when when she said that, I was like, oh, yeah,
like that makes so much sense that we're off here
doing our own thing. And as Vicky said, you do
(16:42):
it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable.
You steal your time to do it.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
Right, Even the.
Speaker 4 (16:48):
Supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write
actually make you do all this other work. So like
the time for writing is always like endlessly deferred. And
you know, we have that image also, like of the
patron or something, or like Virginia Woolf says, you need
money enough to have a room of one's own. But
if we put ourselves together in this way, then we
(17:11):
are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time
for ourselves to write. And then like going back to
something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there
was a time in anarchism where like I think we
talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block
had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right. It wasn't like, yeah,
you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think.
(17:32):
It was like it was hyper local in a way,
and there was so many voices. And so I think
that's another thing that we want to do, is like
help for that proliferation, because in the sort of spirit
of collaboration, like the reason to write as an anarchist
for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility
for people to like receive it and then contact me
into and I get into conversations with people and learn
(17:54):
things from them.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Yeah, I think it's an angle there too, where like
I think we're kind of okay, So I was a
tiny baby when all this was happening, So I'm I'm
gonna have to rely on y'all for this. But like
you know, one of the things I get sort of
reading the record about like the older anarchist movement, I
mean When I say older, I mean like like anti
anti globalization era stuff was like there seems like there
(18:16):
was a lot more of a kind of like anarchist
media sphere.
Speaker 3 (18:19):
Are you talking about like the late nineties.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Yeah, like like like to the two thousands, to.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Some extent like a Battle Seattle.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Yeah yeah, I mean that was like the you know,
the birth of anarchy again, right, yeah, I was definitely around.
I'm in my late fifties, but the same struggle was there,
like that that we're swimming in liberalism and like that
socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as
(18:47):
powerful then, and it was you saw it at all
the rallies and stuff, and you know, immediately anarchism was
marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for
the revolution. And this is why it's clinch off and
all these kind of sectarian movements in the That's my
take anyway.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
I think that no, it makes sense. It makes sense.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
I mean I've hashed this out with so many older
anarchists that I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies,
Like we talked about this a lot phenomena with Scott
Crow and you can just see the direct line of
where it went into sectarianism from this sort of rebirth.
Sorry I went off on a different thing instead of
like journals and media.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
But yeah, no, no, well this is good too, because
like I think that's the other thing I've been realizing
is like people don't I mean in my generation too,
but like people younger than me don't really know the
history of this stuff. Like all the time I have
conversations with people where I start talking about like the
Wojaca uprising, and they have no idea what I'm talking about,
And I'm like, oh, no, we need to, like we
need to like resuscitate the history of like the two
(19:46):
thousands because stuff happened there.
Speaker 5 (19:49):
So I wasn't actually active at that point, but I
was like very adjacent to some of that stuff at
the moment. And some of that was actually because a
lot of what was going on in the globalization movement
in that period was happening through culture. I think most famously,
like touring punk bands would also bring zene libraries with them,
so they would have someone destroying zines and playing the show.
(20:11):
And like, I mean I got radicalized through punk. I
know a lot of people who did that. Was you
know when I finally did, it was after that movement
had largely crusted, But I think there was a lot
of focus on culture, and also a critique of culture
was also pretty central to how people were thinking and moving,
And I think the explosion of social media and like
posting and like the sort of quote unquote democratization and
(20:35):
leveling of communication capabilities, which in some ways was more
real in the early twenty tens than it is certainly
than it is now. It wasn't totally like a made
up narrative, but there was also it was also over
relied on. I think people sort of reached for a
kind of like, well, anyone who can use these tools
to communicate, like, that's valuable. So critiquing sort of media
(20:56):
in general, or critiquing sort of capitalist media is sort
of beside the point because we can around it. We
can sort of go we can you know, go on
Twitter and subvert it, and we can like do all
these you know, go sideways around it. So I was,
you know, a participant in to Occupy Wall Street in
two's eleven, which people also don't know anything about because
that's just being older. But Occupy Wall Street was started
by a magazine called Adbusters, which came out of the
(21:18):
WTO movement and sort of managed to stick around, and
that by twenty eleven. When they did that, we thought
it was like a joke. It was like, oh, these
culture jammers who like make fun of advertisements, like they
started the movement. Like that's ridiculous, right, Like that's silly,
and like this is not to defend Adbusters, I think, whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
We yeah, there's some issues with them, but yeah, yeah,
they also did I don't know.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
Yeah, But also I think that reaction of like culture
jamming is sort of stupid or like, you know, like
talking about who wants to talk about culture? At this point,
I think that that made sense in the context in
which we were moving and organizing, but like, now, once
again it is clear that by abandoning the cultural sphere
in many ways, we have in fact lost a tremendous
amount of ground. So I think it's actually really important
(22:00):
to have cultural organizations that aren't just theory, that aren't
just news, but that are like really talking about art
and beauty and excitement and joy and fiction and all
these things that we find really important. Because you know,
I think a lot of people sort of think, well,
it's a crisis moment. You know, the world's ending. Why
would you do that? But like the world has been
ending since fourteen ninety two, Like the world worth defending
(22:21):
has been ending since then, and it hasn't ended yet.
And one of the ways it hasn't ended is by
indigenous and black and other marginalized cultures and stories and
narratives and works of art has been an important mode
of history and resistance just as much as organizing and struggle.
And yeah, I think we can move some struggle into
that terrain right now. And I think there's a lot
(22:43):
of craving for it now because I think also for
a while things felt really oversaturated. But the last five years,
the internet doesn't feel helpful anymore. No, everything feels like
streaming is a mess. Like everything's a mess. There's no
access to culture that feels good. Everyone hates what they're doing.
They know it's exploiting the artists. They know, you know,
Spotify is giving people pennies, and that you know, Hbo
(23:04):
and all those you know, all the all the streaming
services you know support Amazon, and they're they're just miserable, right,
And I think there's there's a real opening and a
real desire for something else at this moment, at the
same time that things are indeed quite on fire literally ecocidally,
but also also sort of politically.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, speaking of everything being on fire, we need to
take an ad break and then we will come back.
And I think the deliberate political intervention here.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
We are.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
We are back from capital healthscape to mild do less
capital healthscape. Yu, you were gonna say.
Speaker 4 (23:43):
Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing,
because when you know, when after October seventh, people are
getting together to try to figure out how in the
United States to do some kind of work and action
and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement,
Like people were sort of like, what the hell can
we even do? And one of the things that I
would say to people is like just putting up stickers
(24:05):
and writing about Gaza on the walls, like in graffiti
has a huge impact in it. It's overlooked often, I think,
as like something that's effective. But we can see that
there has been a giant cultural shift after October seventh
in terms of people's awareness of the Israeli ginocide against
the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think
(24:26):
that it has to do really, you know, post October seventh,
with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere,
and so it's easy to kind of think that that
isn't action. But to me, in a way, doing something
like that is more effective than the kind of marching
in circles that we can do that we call protest.
And you know, like going back to punk, I think
(24:48):
also Punk has gets a bad rap sometimes because you know,
in that line of like the kind of bookschin lifestylism.
But I don't think we should downplay like punk created
its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make
it happen. It's where I got radicalized too, and they
were like it was anarchist, right, It was like explicitly anarchist,
(25:11):
and you were living in an anarchist way and like
creating things in an anarchist way, and it was this
whole other world. So like, if we put our anarchist
energy into culture, it's part of making a world that
we want to live in, you know, over and against
this world, this hell world that we're also trying to
destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't
(25:32):
kind of just like dismiss this as as less important
than the other kinds of actions that we can take.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
You're here, Yeah, And that brings me to something I
wanted to sort of ask about, like more deliberately, which is, like,
what's the kind of specific political intervention that you're trying
to make into this moment with this project? And both sorts,
I guess a bit more generally, too big question.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
I mean, I my work has always been about intervening
around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just
now bad, or that people don't know what anything, or
pedagogically they're lacking. Like I've always tried to intervene around
this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are,
and there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways
(26:21):
of being and knowing and doing, and so it's like
a deepening of that. And I think probably on a
systemic thinking, systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism
or empire, whatever you want, of colonialism to really like
live it in the everyday.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
So that's partly that.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
And then on just a super practical level, like you know,
all of us don't have wealth, don't have generational wealth,
are working all the time to try to meet and
meant and some of us are have housing insecurity and
other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff and
so like actually showing up for each of us is
(27:02):
at the core of it. For me, Like I it
feels so good in my body to know that I'm
not just showing up to think about what to do
for cow. For me, it's like in the act of
collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to
what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have
(27:23):
an agenda except for to disrupt and intervene belief systems
that are ideologically driven by empire. And I also came
of age in the early eighties in the punk scene
and had a venue space, and to me, punk is
and I would say hip hop is well underground hip
hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being
(27:45):
captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that
punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low
to the ground.
Speaker 5 (27:53):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I just like to build on that, Carl,
because I think that was really beautiful. Second, everything that
you said is it like many of us have a perspective.
You know that huge structural change is going to need
to come, and that often that will come through these
big social movements, that these explosions of energy that you know,
these lightning strikes, right, but you can't force those, you
can't make those happen. Yeah, and in the meantime you can.
(28:17):
I think I've spent a lot of my in the
meantimes in trying to sort of organize stuff that sort
of oriented towards mass movement, you know, and it just
feels often feels like wheal spinning, you know, like I'm
build I'm trying to build mass movement organizing like you know,
like whatever that means. And in the twenty tens, like
one of the things that happens from like twenty eleven
are youdly two thousand nine, but definitely twenty eleven to
(28:39):
twenty twenty was that wherever you were, it was never
more than probably eighteen months before there was like something
else going off in the streets. And so although those
could be very hard, those waves could be very difficult,
you still had a lot of periods where you know,
you could just sort of be waiting and it would
just sort of happened.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Again.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
That was certainly what I was doing in that decade
and in a way that I don't think I appreciated
until it was over. Yea, because the last four years
has been very different. The rhythm has been very different
since the pandemic started. And I can't just say Panini
on this podcast, Okay, everyone does it right, Yeah, since
since the dynamics started, you know, those rhythms have been disrupted,
(29:17):
and I think the Biden counter revolution against Way twenty
which has also really disrupted those things. And in that
space it has felt very clear to me personally, and
I'm older, you know whatever. I'm like, you know, a
movement elder at this point, just because our movements are
so you focused now, because I'm actually old. Like the
decade before twenty eleven, from like two thousand and one,
(29:38):
you know, from nine to eleven until sort of occupies
sort of how I periodize it a bit, There wasn't
a ton of street movement. You had the Iraq War
stuff that was really really big, and there were important
exceptions to that in the US. I'm doing a potted
history here. Obviously there's exceptions to this, but you definitely
had all this time and the stuff that was sustained
and remembered were largely like sort of cultural projects. And
so like I think like now as we're moving into
(29:59):
this era here in North America on Turtle Island of
extreme repressive danger, right, like we shouldn't like joke about
it or downplay it. Like we're facing a lot of
extreme repression and fascists back in the streets in a
big way. It doesn't feel like big political organizing of
the kind that happened during the first Trump administration where
people did a lot of marching in circles, but there
(30:20):
were targets for the pressure, you know, like they don't
feel as relevant now. But now I'm really off, way off.
But no, I think so I think like I think
like we're in this moment where the fascists both are
quite empowered and very unfocused. They're they're confused. They don't
really have us in their sights, like they think Liz
Cheney is just as much a revolutionary as Assada Shakur
(30:41):
or whatever, right, And like that leaves us some space
to move and to build things that can maintain the
spirit of resistance, that can reproduce a culture of resistance
that can also organize. And another thing that has really
been important for me recently with KA is that I've
been doing an organizing project that I won't talk about
the details of, but that the skills have largely come
(31:02):
from punk music that I did in the twenties twenty
is being in a touring punk band, and those skills
have made this organizing really easy. And that's been a
huge thing for me because I'm working with other people
who are younger who don't have that experiential like, oh,
how do you do this? I'm like, oh no, no, it's
so easy. You just like do this. You know, here's
these skills I learned just from doing music, And like,
I don't think that's just like accidental, as Shirley was saying,
(31:25):
like the DIY nature of some of that work, the
culture work. You know, maybe the band wasn't revolutionary. The
bands I was in certainly weren't like the revolution or whatever,
but they gave me all of these powerful skills and
ideas and concepts for doing really important work. And I
think that that's also a reason to pursue DIY culture
in a way that's genuinely sustainable and world building.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
I think like, if I can build off this too,
and I'm going to try to do some tying together
of things. But like one of the ways that I
think about my contribution is to think about like let's
not like.
Speaker 6 (31:57):
Don't look there, let's look over here.
Speaker 4 (32:00):
And that can mean of multiple things, which is often
when people think politically, they're looking at these big moments
or big actions or like top down solutions, which means
that we take our attention away from these other places
where we're doing all this stuff, like carlois saying, like
we're already doing a lot of important kind of like
life making work. And then also there's movements in our
(32:22):
movements where we have to be like you all look
over here while we do stuff over right, Like you
don't want to be seen all the time, So we
have to be able to direct our attention to the
things that we do and then also keep some of
that stuff under wraps. And that means it's hard sometimes
to see and because it's so decentralized, and anarchism really
functions through decentralization, like we're not always aware of how
(32:44):
much power we actually have and what's going on at
any one moment. And going back to the kind of moments,
even tracing back to the Battle of Seattle, and I
think it's like ever more present today in all of
the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being
done that a lot of the groundwork for any of
these moments is done by anarchists, and then it's not
(33:06):
either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like
we make everything sort of run, and anarchism makes everything run,
and then it just gets ignored because it's not about
taking credit, it's not about kind of imposing itself. And
so I think like that kind of in between of
saying what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then
(33:28):
keeping under wrap so that we can keep chugging along,
and then just also being aware of when our work
is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes
against what we want.
Speaker 6 (33:38):
I think these are.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
All ways for us to prepare for those moments of
like explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then
we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Yeah. I think the way I've always thought about it
was just kind of like, is this like flame tending
process where in these sort of low cycles, your job
is to keep the flame alive, and eventually you know
that you're going to see it, like you know, you're
you're you're going to see the explosion again, right, You're
going to see the flame for uh, But like that
that doesn't happen unless the flame is still there and
(34:13):
unless people have been tending it and people have been
trying to make it grow. And you can't necessarily just
like add fuel to it and be like, ah, it's
gonna it's gonna grow now, right it. You know, you
don't you don't really have control of how it sort
of moves and grows it expands, but you have control
over your ability to like make sure that it keeps going.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Absolutely all about Bambers.
Speaker 1 (34:35):
Yeah, And I think also, like I thinking about the
punk metaphor a lot. Like one of the ways that
I've been thinking a lot about like what we're doing
here and it could happen here is we kind of
took the like we took the ridge against the machine gambit,
which is to say we were like we're like, Okay,
we're going to go to try to go somewhat mainstream
in order to I mean bridge but obviously like went
way bigger than we did, but like we're gonna go
(34:55):
try to We're going to go like somewhat mainstream so
we can like spread this thing to a larger group
of people. That's also very very dangerous in the sense that,
like it's very easy to sort of just lose yourself
in the kind of mire of like the field you've
walked into. But on the other hand, the upside about
it is that we're not the only people doing this, right,
and there's all of you out there who are doing this,
(35:18):
Like everyone on this call is doing this, like is
doing the like like the DIY work that is going
to be the core of what this whole thing becomes.
And the more the more of these media products we
get and the more that people are able to sustain
themselves doing this, the more that we're sort of able
to break like I don't know, just like the modelmaniacal
substack control of like taking your money and giving it
(35:40):
the transphobes kind of thing. The better shape we're going
to be in in the years to come exactly.
Speaker 5 (35:47):
And speaking of which, one thing anarchists are famously bad
at doing is accepting that we do wire money and
asking for it. So I'm going to do that for
the squad. Yeah, we are currently fundraising because it's actually
really hard to make something sustainable for people. Yeah, so
we have a fundraiser going on. If you like what
we're talking about here, you can donate to our Indiegogo
literally anything helps. Once we fully launch in February, we're
(36:10):
going to have a pay what you want subscription model,
so everything will be subscribed. But we really want to
have three months worth of living wage for all of
us to do two days a week on it, right,
so we're not even you know, we're not talking full salaries,
and that's forty five thousand dollars because four people for
three months, it's not even a tremendous amount of money
because we're including solidarity funds in that and like paying
any writers who contribute, like lots of other stuff. So yeah,
(36:32):
if you have a few bucks and you know, maybe
you're thinking about, you know, getting off of one of
those substacks or something, and you want to throw our away,
we would be absolutely honored. I'm very excited to accept
anything in this launch. And if you don't have that money,
which is I know true for a lot of us,
which is why we feel bad asking for the money
because there are so many people who need it right now,
you can subscribe online. You can find us on social
(36:53):
media and keep in touch until we do launch, and
then you can join and subscribe that way. That's also
a really great way to support us. But if you
have a few bucks you want to throw, if you
want to give someone a present of a year's membership,
you can get that for one hundred dollars for the holidays,
you know, radicalize your uncle, you know, just with our work,
we'd really really appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (37:12):
And yeah, thanks Vicky.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Yeah, and I don't know, I'm excited for this. There's
already been a bunch of great stuff that's up on
the site. We will have links to everything in the description. Yeah,
thank you, Thank you three for coming on the show.
And I'm really excited about this.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
Well, thanks for having us.
Speaker 4 (37:28):
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share it. And like
I always say, like if anyone is interested and wants
to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
And yeah, yeah, same and reach out to us too.
A few ideas on what cost stands for. We love
hearing from people. My favorite is kin the anarchist right,
that's what it stands for. I don't know who came
up with that.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
I think that might have been scherlier Vicky.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
But it's a good one TVD TBD, So yeah, send
in what you think. And we also are going to
have an advice column that's going to be lunched soon. Yeah,
so send us questions or individually or whatever, but you know,
disrupt individualism, reach out to us.
Speaker 5 (38:06):
Yeah, thanks so much. And yeah, as a long time listener,
first time caller, it's really exciting to be on here.
So thank you Mia so much.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
That's not true old time.
Speaker 5 (38:14):
Second a right, sorry I was on. I just go
on so many podcasts like.
Speaker 6 (38:23):
Sorry.
Speaker 5 (38:24):
Yeah, well, anyway, it's really exciting to be here and
talking to everyone, and we hope to meet y'all in
the future and we'll have a well, we will have
a discord community, we'll be having like writing class, We're
gonna have a lot of like really exciting stuff. So
even if you can't throw in money right now, please
sign up to our website, cosh anythings dot com stay
in touch and find out all the really cool stuff
we're doing.
Speaker 4 (38:44):
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're
already doing is now going to have a home and call.
So like my essays and podcasts, Vicki's review reviews and essays,
and Carla's many projects which include pot podcasts and writing
and these interviews, Danny's writing and classes.
Speaker 6 (39:05):
Yeah, this is all moving there.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
Plus new things doing it together.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
Yeah in that spirit YouTube, dear listener, can can do
things together and go to rup this world. So go
do that now instead of listening to whatever else it's
happening on the show. This ending exactly only well, but
go go go tosruugh things.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
I get it, Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Foolzonemedia dot com or check us out from the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can
now find sources for It could Happen Here listened directly
in episode descriptions.
Speaker 3 (39:48):
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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