Part Two: The Alter-Globalization Movement: From the Zapatistas to the Battle of Seattle

Margaret tells you about the rise of neoliberalism and the rise of its opposition and about better ideas about how to globalize society. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who
Did Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that whenever there's
bad stuff happening, there are people doing good things too.
And usually I'm like, and some of those people are
morally compromised, and it's okay, or it's not necessarily okay,
but it's okay that all kinds of people try and
do things. I call the show Cool People Did Cool Stuff,
but really, we're all cool people, and we're all doing

(00:24):
cool stuff, and even if some of us are also
doing uncool stuff, because actually we're all complicated people who
do complicated stuff. I am your host, Margaret Kiljoy, the
only person who can determine what is and isn't cool.
And this week we're starting a series about the alter
globalization movement that destroyed the neoliberal consensus and opened a

(00:46):
crack in the facade of the neo colonial empire. It
mean a lot of neo in this episode. People really
liked using the word neo in the nineties, and then
I think the Matrix just like killed all of that
because they were like, yeah, we get it, you made it. Literally.
Now there's like a literal guy named Neo and he's
like the space Jesus. No, not space Jesus, computer Jesus.

(01:07):
He's like, I don't know whatever, and a trans allegory,
and like all good movies, it'll get turned into something
terrible by writ wing people eventually. That's besides the point.
As you might have noticed or remembered from part one,
I am without a guest for this particular series because
I wanted to keep real odd hours while researching and recording,

(01:29):
and just to kind of mix things up a bit.
I want to think my producer, Sophie Lickterman, my audio engineer,
hi Eva. Eva's name isn't hi Eva, it's Eva, but
everyone's to say hi to Eva hi Eva. And of
course our theme music was written for us by unwoman
in part one of this series a couple days ago
or very more recently than that. If from my perspective

(01:51):
and certainly my dog's perspective, who's going to go out
as soon as I finished recording this. But I don't
want to say exactly what he's going to go out
to do because he's currently curled up by my feet
and if I said the word, then he would think
it's happening right now. Anyway, A couple days ago when
you heard this, I talked about the rise of neoliberalism
in the colonial core the UK and the USA, and

(02:13):
how after the collapse of the USSR, neoliberalism rapidly began
to spread around the globe. The end of the Cold
War was heralded as the end of history. Society had
found its final form, some people claimed, and that form
was liberal aka capitalists. In this context democracy, Well, some
people didn't want history to end. The end of the

(02:38):
Cold War knocked out two of the three big polls
of socialism. Democratic socialists took a real hit when there
was no longer a USSR for them to look good against,
and authoritarian socialist took a real hit when you know
the USSR collapsed. But socialism might be best understood as
a triangle. I have a bias towards thinking about things

(02:58):
in triangle shape. The three points of the socialist triangle
historically are anarchist or anarchistic socialism, authoritarian socialism, and democratic socialism.
All three argue for public ownership of capital of the
famed means of production. Anarchist socialism and authoritarian socialism are

(03:22):
both revolutionary socialism in that they generally argue for directly
seizing the means of production. Authoritarian socialism and democratic socialism
are both Marxist and that their ideological lineage can be
traced to Marx and before that, authoritarian socialism can be
traced a Blanchy. But that is me nerding out and
you do not have to remember that democratic socialists generally

(03:44):
argue for working within the frameworks of democratic republics in
order to move the government towards more socialist ends. This
is why they aren't revolutionary. And with the fall of
the USSR they thought they do really well. But instead
it turns out capitalism was only playing nice with democratic
socialism because democratic socialism was on its side of the

(04:06):
Cold War against the USSR. As soon as the USSR fell,
capitalism turned on its ally and destroyed it. It's not
completely destroyed. I don't want to call that fight over.
Democratic socialism still has an important role to play. But
did the democratic socialist places took a real hit? And
I am risky and oversimplifying things again. With authoritarian socialism

(04:29):
knocked back and democratic socialism knocked back too, anarchists and
anarchistic socialism stepped back into the ring. Bottom up socialism.
This branch or pole or corner or whatever. Of socialism
had been much more prominent in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, substantially more prominent than authoritarian socialism throughout much

(04:51):
of the world. But after the Russian Civil War, by
like nineteen twenty one, the Bolsheviks had staged their coup
and put down the rest of the socialists. The authoritarian
socialists came out on top of the socialist club, and
you can see our long series about the Russian Civil
War for war about that. Now, I want to be
clear that the socialism that kicked in hard after the
fall of the USSR was not anarchists with quotes in

(05:16):
all ways, it was anarchist dick. There were and are
plenty of self identified anarchists in this camp. But the
thing that happened after the Cold War was that horizontally structured,
direct action focus socialism came back to the center stage,
and this time it called itself lots of different things,
especially thanks to the strong grassroots and indigenous components. The

(05:40):
actual group that really broke the end of history, the
group that brought about the end of the end of history,
came about in the kind of cool way that a
bunch of horizontal militant democratic leftist groups have come into
being a bunch of Marxist Leninist gorillas were like, you know,
this Marxist Leninism thing isn't really working with us. We
like ways of doing things better and created something syncretic

(06:04):
and beautiful. It'll happen later with the Kurdish gorillas, but
for now we're talking about how it happened in Mexico.
We're talking about the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas take their name
from Emiliano Zapata, a revolutionary leader from the Mexican Revolution.
I am not going to side quest on him particularly hard,

(06:24):
because I've been planning a Zapata and Pancho Villa episode
since basically forever, or at least since I did the
episode about the Maganistas, the indigenous anarchist movement that kicked
off the Mexican Revolution. Suffice it to say that Emiliano
Zapata was real interesting and specifically was into land reform,
that thing where you take land away from the big
rich landowners and redistribute it back out to individuals and communities.

(06:48):
It was also probably queer, but I haven't done my
deep dive on the guy yet, so I'll give you
my verdict on that some other time. Zapatistas take their
name from Zapata, but they're entirely their own thing. Their
full and formal name is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
The easy ln what the Zapatistas did and are still

(07:10):
doing well. To quote SubCom Modante Marcos, the most famous
spokesperson of the Zapatistas, who's also a brilliant writer, I
just want to like point that out. He's actually one
of the best selling authors in Mexico, and it's written
a ton of stuff. And I've written like a novel
that he co wrote. It's called The Uncomfortable Dead, I think,

(07:30):
and it was with Paco Agnacio Dabio Dos. Anyway, he's
a very poetic writer. Quote. It doesn't appear in any
written texts, but rather the ones that haven't yet been
written and yet have been read for generations. But that's
where the Zapatistas have learned that if you stop scratching
at the crack, it closes back up the wall heals itself.

(07:54):
That's why you must keep at it, not only to
deepen the crack, but above all, so that it does
not clothes. But if there's no crack, well we'll make
it by scratching, biting, kicking, hitting with our hands, head
an entire body in order to make in history what
we are a wound. Then someone will walk by and

(08:16):
see us seize the Zapatistas hitting ourselves hard against that wall.
Sometimes that passer by is someone who thinks that they
know everything. They pause and shake their head and disapproval,
passing judgment and declaring, you will never bring down the
wall that way. But sometimes, ever so often, someone else,

(08:38):
an other will walk by. They pause, look understand, stare
down at their feet, at their hands, their fists, their shoulders,
and their body, and then decide this spot is as
good as any. We'll be able to hear them as
they make a mark on the unmovable wall, if only

(09:00):
their silence was audible, and they go at it end quote.
And so the Zapatistas, by their own estimation, they've created
an opening, a crack in the wall of the machinery
of domination. And I just I really like that metaphor.
You know, we can get really hard on ourselves about

(09:22):
like not winning, right. We haven't created a you know,
socialist utopia of whatever flavor. But our job sometimes is
just to hold open a space and show that this
is possible and that fighting against this is possible. Unfortunately,

(09:45):
there's cracks in the other direction too, where even when
you have a wall of anti capitalist podcasting, there's a
wound in it, kind of a little way that the
dark gets in, you know. We call those ad breaks.
There's one. So where did the Zapatistas come from. Well,

(10:08):
people have been fighting colonization since colonization first reached the
shores of Turtle Island. But the most immediate organizational precursor
to the Zapatistas is the Fueraes de libreasi on Nassanal
the National Liberation Forces the FLN, a much more traditional
Marxist Leninist gorilla group. I've read one source that says

(10:29):
that this group started in Monterey in northeastern Mexico, and
another that claims it started in Chiapas. I'd believe the former.
I believe it started in Monterey. They started in August
nineteen sixty nine, after the nineteen sixty eight Flatal Local massacre,
when the Mexican Armed Forces gonned down three hundred and
fifty to five hundred students in Mexico City. Basically people

(10:51):
looked at that shit and were like, Yeah, why are
we just protesting when they're shooting us, we should be
shooting two and become hard to find, and so they
formed the FLN. After a few years, some folks from
the FLEN made their way down to Chiapas and set
up in the jungle. Chiapas is a Mexican state down

(11:12):
in the southeastern corner of the country, right up against Guatemala.
About five and a half million people live there, so
roughly the population of Finland, more than the total population
of Ireland, and about two thirds the population of New
York City. There's a rainforest in Chiapas, the Lacandan Jungle,
that crosses the imaginary line between Mexico and Guatemala. There

(11:34):
are a ton of Mayan ruins in the area, and
an awful lot of different indigenous groups still live there.
After several years of not really getting anywhere in the FLEN,
now in Chiapas six folks were like, Okay, we're still
part of the FLN, but this branch is called the EAZLN.
So the EASYLN was founded on November seventeenth, nineteen eighty three,

(11:57):
for two years, this small group of people lived in
near total isolation in the mountains, just learning how to
live there basically, and they didn't really make enough connections
with the other people who lived there. In nineteen eighty four,
a few more folks showed up, including a man who
would one day become maybe the only famous Zappatista Subcovedante Marcos,
the author that I was talking about before, who would

(12:19):
go on to become its spokesperson. Now, the Flen didn't
show up to find a blank slate in Chiapas, and
I think that this part is really important. The book
The Zapatista Experience by Jerome Beshett picks the start of
the Zapatista story as October nineteen seventy four and an
indigenous congress that brought together more than a thousand delegates

(12:41):
from all sorts of indigenous communities in Chiapas. All sorts
of different organizing bodies came from this meeting working together
to try to turn shit around for people. And like, yeah,
you can say that the easy Eleen came from the Flen,
and that is like technically organizationally true, but you're talking
about like six people came from the atheln you're talking

(13:02):
about the overwhelming majority of Zapatistas. This is more Their
actual background is indigenous organizing, the Indigenous Congress, and I
think it's important at this Congress they came together from
a variety of positions. One important part of their organizing
was future friend of the pod liberation theology. I think

(13:23):
we talked a little bit about liberation theology here and there.
We talked about Brazil a while back. Anyway, Liberation theology
is a branch of Catholic theology the fights to liberate
oppressed people basically that have been growing in Latin America
for a couple decades at that point, and had of
course syncretized with indigenous theological structures. Then also at this congress,

(13:45):
there are the Maoists, the northerners who came down from
central and northern Mexico to help. They were part of
an organization called Proletarian Line. But at least according to
some of what I've read, the Proletarian Line folks, the
Maoists they were like kind of into government, right like,
because they want to create a government, and so they
started working alongside the existing governmental power structures in the area,

(14:09):
which caused a lot of tension and infighting. Throughout the seventies,
all these indigenous groups started getting a ton of shit done,
getting land redistributed, which has always been a major rural
and leftist and decolonial goal. Land redistribution basically get land
out of the hands of single rich people, the big
plantations and shit. It's been the goal almost everywhere forever,

(14:33):
and the American left needs to take a lesson from
the rest of the Americas about that. The Indigenous goal
was to break down the finca system the big est
states and replace it with the traditional hido system, the
communal lands. They tried and were repressed, and they tried
and then were repressed, and occasionally they made gains, and

(14:55):
so it went, and honestly, so it goes. While the
maoist faction of the organizing was kind of losing steam.
People were enamored with the idea of the state, and
so they're negotiating heavily with a state, and people kept
arguing about who got to be leaders, and eventually the
infighting split that whole part of things apart. In nineteen
eighty three, probably not coincidentally, the same year the easyln

(15:17):
the Zapatista's got their start, although on the other hand,
I've read that the Zapatista's at the beginning of the
ZLN was like so disconnected from what was going on
that maybe it was completely a coincidence. I'm not sure,
or maybe this thing that I read was kind of
exaggerating how isolated the Zapatistas were because to make the
point about how when they started really working with people

(15:40):
in the region, Because in nineteen eighty five, the EASYLN
started recruiting or finally started succeeding in recruiting, and basically
some folks would leave their villages to come live in
the gorilla camps, while others would stay put and build
the infrastructural base for the resistance movement in the communities
they were already from. This is the clandestine period of

(16:03):
the EAZLN, which was definitely necessary. It's called the Mexican
dirty War because there's a lot of different dirty wars,
where basically it's when the government fights dirty and just
like kills a ton of people, usually with the US's help.
The CIA is heavily involved in all this shit. The
Mexican government was just assassinating hundreds of dissidents during that
time and locking people up. As the government kept showing

(16:24):
itself to be more and more fucked up, people got
more and more sick of trying to play the liberal
democracy game, and more and more people joined the Zapatistas.
Soon there were thousands of them. There was one catch, though,
that top down thing, the vanguard party that shows up
to the jungle to teach everyone how to fight, that

(16:47):
wasn't going to work for people. Marcos describes this as
the quote first defeat of the EAZLN, which he is
quite glad happened. He's quite glad the EAZLN was defeated.
He wrote, quote, we were not teaching anyone to resist. Instead,
we became students in a school of resistance, taught by
those who had been doing it for five centuries. Still,

(17:11):
though at this time they were ostensibly under the direction
of the FLN, they were just starting to really build
their own autonomy and democratic structures. Where they were and
what they probably didn't have, but you, dear listener, do
have a chance to have. Maybe they had it too. Honestly,
advertising's kind of everywhere. This is an ad break, that's
what's happening. I'm pivoting to ads. Here they are and

(17:37):
we're back. Shit was heating up in Mexico at this point.
In nineteen eighty eight, a man named Carlos Salinas Dicotari,
usually just called Salinas, won the presidential election by a
pretty transparent voter fraud. The New York Times refers to
it as an open secret that this was fraud, and
this was more or less fully confirmed in two thousand

(17:58):
and four when some memoirs from the time were released.
Everyone knew that the election was stolen from a leftist candidate.
But Selinus held onto power and began to institute that
neoliberalization shit fast and furious. His new government was like, yeah,
we're just going to privatize all the communal lands. Fuck you.

(18:22):
People marched against these policies. Tens of thousands of people
marched against these policies, and there was a march of
ten thousand indigenous folks that was heavily Easyln marching undercover
in these big marches because at the time, of course,
they couldn't be open about doing all these things because
they were an armed gorilla group living in the hills Glendestinely,

(18:42):
the Easyln held a referendum among their people and the
overwhelming majority were like, yeah, no more hiding and waiting,
armed uprising police, Which makes sense. Your government has just
been completely stolen. You know it had been stolen before
that too, him pretty sure. But anyway, the fact that
this is a reference is actually pretty important because Marxist

(19:03):
Leninists generally practice something called democratic centralism. The basic idea
of democratic centralism is after something has been voted on,
everyone has to go along with it, and this is
to keep parties from splitting. It obviously doesn't work Leftist parties,
Marxist parties in particular, famously split all the time. But theoretically,
democratic centralism could be a form of direct democracy in

(19:25):
which people vote on the actual issues and then everyone
agrees to go along with the majority vote. In practice,
democratic centralism means that the party leaders are elected and
they decide what is to be done, and everyone has
to obey their orders. So it's worse than the American
system in terms of democratic process, which is saying something

(19:46):
because we're not a particularly democratic nation as far as
things go here in that we elect lawmakers and don't
vote on issues, and money votes every day, and you know,
there's so much money in lobbying and all that stuff whatever.
But in this case there's no checks and balances. You
elect the leader, the leader decides what to do. That's
what Trumpists are practicing right now is democratic centralism. This Zapatistas,

(20:10):
though they didn't let their elected dictators dictate, They held
a referendum. They worked to find out what people actually wanted,
even though they were ostensibly under the command of the FLN.
So in January nineteen ninety three, the easy ELN told
the FLN they were going to do an armed uprising,
and the FLN was like, well, what do we say. No,

(20:33):
the easy LN was like, now We're doing it. At
this point, they formed a new governing group amongst themselves,
the Indigenous Clandestine Revolutionary Committee, and started to break the
chains of Marxist Leninist leadership. The new committee was led
by indigenous leaders referred to as commandantes. They built a

(20:54):
democratic structure, laws were not imposed from the top down.
By the end of nineteen ninety three, for example, they
had passed the Women's Revolutionary Law, which had taken four
months of campaigning around various villages and communities to build
up a consensus for this law to be passed. For
adopting women's rights and centering them as the revolution within

(21:15):
the revolution. And this is a ten point program. The
first one reads, quote, women have their right to participate
in the revolutionary struggle in the place and at the
level that their capacity and will dictate without any discrimination
based on race, creed, color, or political affiliation. Other things

(21:36):
in the ten points include things like women get paid
fairly and can work, and women have the right to
decide how many children they will have and take care of.
There's no forced marriages, guest to education, no beating women, etc.
Women are fucking equal. Basically, they did all of this
while they were in the middle of planning one of

(21:56):
the most important military attacks in history. Feminism didn't take
a back seat, Democracy didn't take a back seat. Equal
rights and horizontalism were the revolution, alongside gorilla training in
the hills, of course. Meanwhile, NAFTA, the North American Free
Trade Agreement, was set to go into effect on January first,

(22:20):
nineteen ninety four. On that day, Mexico was finally going
to get to be fully modernized part of the big
Boys club at the expense of their poor. So those
Zapatistas were like, yeah, best one, we'll do it. Six
five hundred indigenous people were armed and ready to go,

(22:41):
and they took off at dawn. They wore balaclavas over
their faces and red bandanas around their necks. They captured
four cities in Chiappas, although I've also read five, including
the place that was the cultural capital and previously used
to be the governmental capital until eighteen ninety two. San Cristobaldeles,
the military commander of the San Cristobal force, was a

(23:03):
woman who I believe was a cook, although I haven't
yet figured out her name. The implication what I read
was that her name was being left out of history
on purpose, not as a racer, but for her sake.
But I don't know. It might be written out somewhere.
There are so many books on the Zapatistas, and I'm trying,
and I've been reading and learning about them the entire time.
I've been a radical, because these are the people who
set up the conditions that radicalized me. As they marched

(23:27):
on the cities, their rallying cry was yabasta. It's usually
translated as enough or enough is enough, and I like,
enough is enough. Subcommadante Marcos took to the balcony of
a government building and read the first Declaration of the
Lacandan Jungle, which declared war on the federal army and

(23:49):
demanded the removal of President Salinas the usurper. They called
on Mexicans to struggle for quote work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy,
justice and peace. In that declaration, they were very clear
about where the movement came from. It says we are

(24:13):
the product of five hundred years of struggle. Their original
plan was to take Chiapas and keep marching towards Mexico City,
planning to do something very similar to what the anarchist
Maganestas had done nearly one hundred years earlier in the
lead up to the Mexican Revolution, liberate territories and bring
the revolution with them as they went. Their plan was

(24:34):
to take control of the means of production away from
the capitalists and give it to the regional governments, organize
free elections, redistribute land, and institute the Women's Revolutionary Law.
The Zapatistas had an advantage on their initial attack. The
Mexican army was either drunk or hungover from New Year
celebrations overall, and was slow to respond. This still wasn't

(24:56):
an easy Fight. The Easy Alend chief of staff Subcome
Dante Pedro, died while taking the city of Las Margaritas.
He was one of the founders of the Easy Elen,
a thin and blonde, hunchbacked man who was thirty one
when he died. The Zapotitisa has also captured a general
at his ranch, put him on trial, and released him
with the punishment that he would have to quote live

(25:18):
until the end of his days, with the pain and
shame of having received the forgiveness and kindness of those
people who have long been humiliated, kidnapped, robbed, and killed.
But Mexico deployed twelve thousand soldiers and the Zapatistas were
wildly outnumbered. Worse, the government was willing to just kill

(25:39):
the shit out of their own civilians as a solution
to the problem. After four days of fighting, the Zapatistas
largely retreated from population centers to avoid putting more civilians
in danger, and while the people of Mexico didn't rise
up to overthrow their unelected leader, they did start a
massive campaign demanding that the government cease fire, and by

(26:00):
January twelfth, Selinus ordered a ceasefire and the Zapatista has
announced that they were suspending their offensive. They stopped because
it seemed to be what the people of Mexico wanted
after ten years of preparing for war. The war lasted
twelve days. The era of fire was over. Now was

(26:21):
the era of the word. For several months, the Zapatistas
were in peace talks with the government, but by early
March they were like, all right, you've said a lot
of stuff, mostly really negative, but we've got to go
talk to our people and see how they feel about
what you've said, because they see themselves as literal representatives

(26:41):
of the people, not the embodiment of the people's will
in some like czarist or authoritarian way, but literally like, well, no,
I've been delegated to go talk to you all, but
I don't make decisions. The people make decisions. I merely
communicate with you about those decisions, which is what actual
democracy looks like, and you don't get to know it
because we live in where we live. Meanwhile, Mexico itself

(27:05):
was in crisis. This one party pri had been ruling
Mexico for decades and each president would serve one term
and then pick their successor. But Selinas a successor was
supposed to be this guy, Luis Donaldo Consolio Murrieta, but
he started drifting from the party line. He started talking
about the corruption of the government, he started talking about

(27:26):
indigenous rights, and then on March twenty third, nineteen ninety four,
he was assassinated. It is generally understood that the pri
had him killed. The Zapatistas put out their second Declaration
from the Lacandan Jungle, which is a call for a
national Democratic Convention, where six thousand delegates from various organizations

(27:48):
showed up to discuss building a bottom up democratic movement
in the country. I love that the Zapatistas have always
been in every tool in the toolbox kind of group.
We'll talk about it more in future episodes. Though occasionally
like support candidates in traditional politics, right, and they're also
totally fine with occasionally you got to invade some cities,

(28:09):
and they also are like, but we're also going to
be working the whole time to build a bottom up
democratic movement, and you know that rules and is where
most of their successes come from. Although again not knocking
the fact that they try every tool in the toolbox.

(28:30):
By December, the Zapatistas took control of thirty territories in
Chiapas and declared them territories and rebellion. This was the
foundation of what's become the autonomous municipalities, which will forever
be the real legacy of the Zapatistas. Taking over the
big cities was cool and necessary by my estimation. But
setting up an actual alternative society and defending it, that's

(28:53):
the reason everyone knows who these people are. I don't
know exactly when these signs went up, but when you
drive into the autonomous territories, the signs along the road
read quote, you are in Zapatista territory, where the people
command and the government obeys. And everything I've learned leads
me to believe that they mean it when they say

(29:15):
that these autonomous regions. Of course terrified the government, which
you know, wants to be the governing body. They don't
want autonomous regions, they want to be the government. The
state was like, all right, fuck you, we're just going
to kill you. But they scoured the jungle and couldn't
find the leaders, despite arresting a lot of suspected Zapatista
sympathizers around the country. This is the advantage of having

(29:38):
spent ten years building a gorilla base of operations, they
did this crackdown where they were arresting sympathizers and shit
in classic government way where they were like, oh, we're
just looking to talk, but instead they would just arrest
everyone and try and destroy the movement. They failed, and
this is a really common thing too, when you try
to exert power against power, they'll be like, fuck, you

(29:59):
would kill and then when they can't kill you, they're like,
just kidding, but we're like friends, Let's just talk it
out as friends. So by March nineteen ninety five, the
government was back to the negotiating table. It helped that
the Zapatistas had support all over the country. When the
government docks the now famous mask spokesperson Marcos and put

(30:23):
out a warrant for his arrest with like his legal
name or whatever, ten thousand people, tens of thousands of
people marched in Mexico City saying we are all Marcos
and so. All the while, while all these various failed
and halfway successful negotiations are happening with the Mexican State,
the Zapatistas started doing organizing and negotiating. It was probably

(30:44):
even more important they started organizing and negotiating with the
international community. They met with leftists and anarchists and grassroots
activists of all sorts. There were a series of international consultas,
and the worldwide alter globalization was born. How they did
all of that and what it meant for everyone, including

(31:06):
eventually me, we'll keep talking about next week. Anyway, that's
part two of the series. I actually don't know how
long this series will be. I'm guessing four parts, but
we'll see. It depends on how many side quests I
go down, because there's so many cool parts of the
ultra globalization movement, Like, of course I want to tell
you about the history of the Black Bloc, but I

(31:26):
also want to tell you about all the like you know,
radical clowns and people who put on giant inflatable tubes
and use that to attack the police, and all of
the different like farmers movements. And we've talked about some
parts of the altglobalization movement already, you know, listen to
our episode about the Argentinian cooperative movement and how as
the Argentinian government fell into collapse as a result of

(31:47):
all the austerity measures, how people just started taking over
factories and running them on their own, because it turns
out you actually don't need owners to get things done.
You can get things done with the people who know
how to do things, which are the work. And there's
just so many cool parts to this story and it
makes me really happy to get to tell you, well,
this is another one of those episodes I've been thinking

(32:09):
about ever since the very beginning of the show, and
so I'm I'm glad to finally kind of take the
time to do this deep dive. And thanks for coming
along with me on this deep dive. As far as
things to plug, I guess I'll keep plugging Strangers in
a Tangled Wilderness, which is an anarchist worker cooperative publisher
that I work with. We put out podcasts, we put

(32:32):
out books, we put out other things, audiobooks, zines. One
of the big things that we do is we put
out zines of a lot of different types. We have,
for example, our Skills Zine series and our Skills Zine series.
We make all these zines as available as cheap as
possible to buy in bulk from us or you can
download and print them yourself. And we have like a

(32:52):
first aid one and we have one about I think
it's called doing it yourself or something. I don't have
it in front of me. You think I would have
this in front, but I don't. We have a zine
about self managed abortion that hopefully won't well whatever. Actually,
I hope it's useful to people like it's great and
that's Strangers in a Tangled Olderness And you can find

(33:13):
it at Tangled Olderness dot org or you can support
on Patreon. If you give us ten dollars a month,
we will mail you a zine anywhere in the world
every month. And it's cool. And also all those zines
are free if I'm want to read them well on
the internet. All right, I'll see y'all next week. Bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of

(33:35):
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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