ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Organising for Revolution with Rodrigo Nunes
Episode Date: December 1, 2021What should political organisation in the 21st century look like? Wiggly? Lumpy? Diagonal? Something rather like that, suggests political theorist and author Rodrigo Nunes, who joins Keir Milburn and ...Jeremy Gilbert on this additional revolutionary Microdose. Focusing on the last few decades of radical left politics, the trio reflect on on their own experiences in […]
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Hi everyone, welcome to this ACFM microdose, which will probably be more than a microdose,
in which I, Jeremy Gilbert, and my friend and comrade Kier Milbin,
we'll be interviewing our friend Rodrigo Nunes.
Hello.
And we're doing this as a microdose, a supplemental episode of ACFM,
supplementing our big episodes really already on the topic of revolution.
And so we're interviewing Rodrigo.
because he published this year a book called Neither Vertical nor Horizontal,
a theory of political organization published by Verso,
which touches on a huge number of issues which are really central to our themes and concerns
and has a whole chapter, indeed, on the question of revolution.
So we're going to chat about a number of the themes and issues raised in the book.
And first off, we were going to talk about this core concept of revolution, this question of what it means to think about radical politics in an era when, as we said in the main episode, we appear to require nothing short of revolutionary transformation. And yet the political conditions for revolution just don't seem to obtain in almost any country in the world.
I say, Rodrigo, maybe you could talk to us a bit about,
A, why is there a whole chapter of the book called Revolutioning Crisis?
And what is your ultimate feeling, your conclusion about the concept of revolution
and revolutionary transformation?
There were two major reasons.
Well, both of them were connected to the broader project of the book,
which was to function as an intervention in debates in which I felt that a certain theoretical clarity
or consistency was lacking in a very specific way.
Like people, and that's probably, that's certainly partially to do with what I call the crisis
of the idea of revolution in the book.
We've been lacking a general theory of what we're doing for a long time.
We as in the left, and as a consequence, we sort of pick and mix stuff from different traditions
and different contexts, and we apply those things in a way that's not very consistent.
And one of the things that I wanted to do with this chapter was to point out the ways in which
the understanding of revolution seemed to have changed, not only because of the failed
revolutionary experiences of the 20th century, but also as a consequence of much broader
transformations and, you know, there's stuff that I bring into the discussion that's
like the appearance of statistical mechanics and thermodynamics as having a bearing on these debates.
And so the three main transformations that I was charting was speaking in very broad, diffused terms,
what seems to be plausible for us in the idea, or seems to have become implausible for us in the idea of revolution.
nowadays the three transformations that I was trying to chart were the passage from historical
determinism to a much more open-ended contingent idea of history so we we can't try as we
might it's very hard for us to believe in historical determinism nowadays for a number
of reasons connected to that this is actually a term that I take
from Badu, the passage from what I call following a transitive understanding of the revolutionary
subject, by which I mean the idea that there's a transitive relation between social structure
and the agent of transformation of that social structure, namely that there is a privileged
structural position that's privileged both in the sense that it necessarily develops
a revolutionary consciousness, but also that it occupies the one position in the social
structure that is capable of producing a revolutionary transformation, both of which
were ideas that were part of the understanding of the proletariat in the
the Marxist tradition, and how we abandon that transitive understanding of the revolutionary
subject in favor of a compositional understanding of the revolutionary subject, that the idea
that any revolutionary subject that we might have will actually have to be composed out
of different elements, different interests, different class.
positions or different class fractions, that they will have different motives, different reasons
to act, et cetera. And so the challenge is to construct those connections and create that
composition that any revolutionary subject will always be a Frankenstein monster in
the sense that it will be made of parts of different things rather than emerging naturally
and spontaneously from a predetermined position in the given structure.
And then the third transformation that I try to chart is the transformation from what
I call, and here I'm following Simondon, a hyalomorphic understanding of revolution,
basically an understanding of the role of the revolutionary subject as being that of giving a form to a matter of the world that doesn't have its own inner tendencies that could be shaped in any form by the revolutionary subject and instead of that we seem to have moved to an understanding of political action
and consequently revolutionary action as well,
as always acting on a complex world.
So we replaced this hyalomorphism,
this idea of a sovereign agent that can just freely give form to matter.
We move to the idea of one agent acting among many other agents,
all of which have their own inner tendencies, their own limits.
And political action is a matter of being one agent among others that's acting within that complex world.
So that was one of the things that I was doing.
The other thing was pointing out the way in which from the moment the very idea of a revolution
goes into crisis, as I suggest in the chapter prior to this chapter on revolution,
this crisis actually happens twice.
It's a crisis in relation to the 1917 model of revolution
and a crisis in relation to what we could describe as the 1968 model of revolution.
both of those fail in their own terms and in their own way
and the crisis of the idea of revolution is the crisis of you know
what do we do now that the two models that we thought we had have failed
and one of the things that happens in the period when this crisis becomes definitive
say from the late 70s, early 80s until now,
is that you sort of have a, let's say the extensive idea of revolution
is replaced by an intensive idea of revolution.
So you can't basically you can't think at the same time
a revolution that would go, that would be,
truly transformative and would happen at the appropriate scale.
And then the tendency is to choose, well, let's have the most radical transformation
that we can have in whatever space in which we can have that transformation.
I think the clearest example of that would be the idea of the temporary autonomous
zone. It's like let's live this revolutionary situation that's only going to last for a little
bit and we'll have the intensive experience of the revolution. But we won't have the revolution
in the sense that the word was actually meant, which is a permanent transformation of a system,
which ultimately is a world system.
So you abandon the hope,
even though it's not everyone who makes it clear
that this is what they're doing.
Many people, many thinkers and movements
tend to be more equivocal in relation to what they're doing.
But ultimately, what you're doing is you're abandoning,
the hope for a system level transformation in exchange for, well, what is the most radical
thing that we can experience within whatever confines. And eventually this intensive
idea of revolution comes to be understood as being more radical than the system-wide
transformation because obviously the idea of system wide transformation always comes with you know
anything at that scale is always going to come with lots of compromises of all kinds and you're going to
have to build institutions of some kind you're going to have to build structures of some
kind. You're going to be threatened by the danger of the concentration of power,
etc. in a way that you wouldn't be if you were working at a much smaller scale,
both in spatial and temporal terms. So the fact that you can avoid all those risks and all
those problems in the intensive experience of revolution makes it so that the intensive
idea of revolution comes to be seen as being more radical.
So having a very compressed, having, let's say, having an experience that's revolutionary
in a deep sense, but doesn't go wide, is preferable to having, to having,
a system-wide transformation that would, no doubt, come with all sorts of different problems.
And what I'm trying to do, the other thing that I'm trying to do in this chapter is to point out,
and this is what connects it to climate change.
You know, in the face of climate change, you don't have the option to choose the intensive.
anymore because you could have a million intensive experiences that if they failed at the
system-wide level of, you know, dismantling the fossil fuel industry, shortening the long logistical
chains that connect different parts of the world today, etc., etc., you would still not be
addressing the problem. So climate change actually gives us the opportunity to go back to the
original idea of revolution as a system-wide transformation of a system that ultimately
coincides with the earth, you know, the system that is a world system. So yeah, I guess those
are the two things that I was trying to do that. And I'm glad I managed to remember that those
Well, it's almost like there's a conjunctual argument of the book which says the conjuncture has come along and given us a chance to get rid of all of these melancholic attachments that the left has built up.
So it's almost as though, you know, revolution was unthinkable and then the problem of transition, how to transition out of this society, at least this society on this, based on this energy base, is the problem of everybody.
the problem of our time, basically.
And so in the book, you sort of reverse the poll and say,
well, you know, we used to think of revolution as this big process in which
the revolutionary transition was what was one bit of it.
And that, you know, there's a big theory around revolution transition.
And now the problem is transition.
Will we have something that looks like an insurrectionary revolution?
Well, maybe, but that would just be one part of it.
It's within that part.
So there's like a conjunctual, the conjuncture has come along to save us sort of argument in there.
But like if we want to position your, because I think it would be good to go back, like, talk a little bit about how we all know each other and then position this book amongst other historical doublings.
So I think, well, in the book, I think there's a doubling of, there's a crisis of the 1970s and in particular crisis of the sorts of thoughts that people were, or the theories and attempts to address the problem.
of Revolution post-1968, there's a whole set of theories, and those are really important
resources that you go to, Rodrigo, just that they're pretty important resources for me and
Jeremy as well. Let's not hide this thing. But then there's also the crisis of the mid-2010,
so there's a crisis of the 2010. So you wrote this book, or one of the prompts for you writing
this book was the failure of the 2011 wave, but then it's done.
doubling in Brazil in the 2013 protest wave.
Yeah, and it's a little bit like, you know,
we want to get rid of these two left melancholys,
the meth-monicolle from 1978 and the left melancholy from 1968.
But in fact, we're mainly going to 1968,
the post-1968 sort of theoretical wave
in order to address the 2010's theoretical wave.
I mean, in your defence, you're probably,
when you go back to the 1970s, you're trying to go back
and let's say, let's put the Lenin back.
into the 1970s, basically, to some degree.
So, you know, you want to go to Foucault and Delaus and Guartari when they're at their
most Leninist.
I'm sure they wouldn't like it put that way.
But, yeah, it is them at their most Leninist point because it's the problem of, like,
the failure of 1968 is a revolutionary project that people are trying to address.
And then that gets, you know, in fact, in the book, you sort of say, you know, the problem
with that is there was this huge theoretical wave, really rich thinking.
But by the time you get to the 1980s, there's no agent to do that thinking anymore.
There's no collective agent left.
And it's only after, perhaps post-2008, but certainly post the 2010s, that the problem comes back and can be addressed again, minus perhaps the over-determination by neoliberalism.
Yeah, I mean, the one decade that's missing from that summary is the 90s.
And I think is if this book connects to a nair of the times or to a zeitgeist of swords,
which is something I can see, I think I can see, for example, in Paolo Jabaldo's new book
that I know you're discussing with him next, you're discussing with him next week, is the fact that,
We're leaving the 90s behind at last.
So this return, I think this return to the 70s that you just described
involves precisely abandoning a certain way in which those books and those thinkers
were read in the 90s that was precisely in a context when revolution had become
unthinkable
and had clearly
become not just
unthinkable but undesirable
no one really wanted
it anymore because everyone
thought well that's just going to
end up in the gulag
that's what always happens
and so there is
there are a number
of things in those books
and in those thinkers
that got
pushed aside
ignored or, you know, downplayed in favor of other aspects.
And one of those things is precisely the fact I used to, in the process of writing the book,
I never, I still don't know how to give an elevator pitch for the book.
I still haven't developed a proper one.
But I used to come up with these epithets that promise.
all these different things that the book was going to do.
And one of those was, this book will give post-structuralism
the theory of organization that it lacked.
And actually, I think there is the beginning of a theory of organization
in the late 60s and the early 70s
and the work of people like, I would say Guatari more,
than Deleuze, if anything, against the usual narrative that Pitts, Deleuze as the
proper philosopher who was led astray by the activist Wattari.
I think in this point, the problem was that the proper philosopher led the activist astray.
But I think you find elements of that in Foucault as well.
And then those things get read later on in, well, obviously, they go through that, as you said, they go through that experience of disillusionment, of, you know, the movement that they counted on disappearing.
The long winter, as Katari puts it.
Exactly.
And then you have, you know, one of the best documents of that is the...
The last thing that Foucault writes about Iran after he gets lambasted for his initial enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution,
where he does, he's citing Hawkeheimer in that passage, but he does directly put the question, you know, maybe we should be asking ourselves as Hawkeimer has.
if the revolution is so desirable after all.
And he writes this defense of the idea of the revolt over the idea of revolution,
which we could understand as a defense of the intensive idea of revolution
over the extensive idea of revolution.
So that transformation is happening in that turn from the 70s to the 80s.
And then all of that gets read in a distorted way, I think we could say,
under neoliberal hegemony in the 90s.
And this is something that I know you two have been discussing a lot as well.
One of the things that we're seeing is the end of the long 90s at last,
also in the way that, you know, the theory that is dear to us was,
distorted by the 90s.
Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a very good point.
I mean, I want to just clarify this for listeners who aren't going to be as familiar with some
of the details as we are, that we're all roughly the same age and we were like graduate
students in the 90s, the early 2000s.
And, you know, we all had the experience of reading and being heavily influenced by a group
of thinkers and philosophers who are at the peak of their activity in the, really in the early
half of the 70s, and they were very much associated with the wave of radical movements
for which 68 is sometimes a sort of metonym. But they were being read in the universities,
in the English-speaking world in particular, to some extent in France as well, it has to be said.
They were being read under these conditions whereby really, you know, under the conditions of
the great defeat of Soviet communism, the kind of the turn against the whole idea of revolution.
And really, I mean, my argument is to a large extent they were being read by liberals and they were being read as they were being read as anti-Marxist by liberals who wanted a kind of sexy anti-Marxism that they could deploy in, which was always a misreading.
I mean, it's just a basic rule of thumb.
If French political culture is just significantly to the left of Anglophone political culture.
And, you know, if you don't understand, if you try to translate the terms of debate,
in French political culture or Italian political culture into English, into terms that map it
onto English-speaking political culture, you pretty much invariably misunderstand
like how left-wing people think of themselves as being. So like when Foucault is polemiciting
against the Communist Party in France, he's doing so from a perspective, which I would say is clearly
that some sort of a libertarian socialism. But then it's very easy for just liberal-centrist,
sort of anti-socialists in the English-speaking world
to pick up Fouca and say, oh, look, here are some tools we can use
to critique all forms of Marxism and socialism.
And there were really, I mean, there were really egregious examples
of this in the 90s, particularly around the reading of Deleu.
I mean, Deleu's got read.
Deleuze and Guittari got read in Britain as sort of philosophers
of right-wing libertarianism.
So, yeah, so for all of us, one of the things that's going on
this sort of recovery of these thinkers.
I mean, I think this is significant
because, like, the younger generation,
I mean, our sort of millennial comrades
didn't go through this experience.
And for the most part, their experience
has been like recovering Marxism
and just sort of seeing that post-structuralist moment
of the 70s and 80s is a thing they're reacting against.
Basically, people have gone back to Marx and Gramshee
and largely just sort of reject, you know,
most of this sort of theory,
which they now were.
associate completely understandably with a sort of liberal backlash. In terms of an elevator
pitch, you know, shall I attempt an elevator pitch for the four listeners? Let me write it down.
You can correct. Yeah. I mean, I think the book starts, it comes out of the experience of radical
politics in the 90s and the first decade or so of the 21st century, wherein various groups,
and organisations, we're trying to agitate for forms of politics, which neither took the form
of kind of very conventional, like historically conventional communism, or just kind of, you know,
post-war social democracy or neoliberalism with some amelioration that was offered by the third
way. From things like the Rhodes protest in Britain to the anti-globalization movement
through to the experiences of 2011 and Occupy, etc.
There's a series of political experiments
in which people are trying to find radically democratic ways of organising
and they're trying to contest neoliberal hegemony
in ways which aren't conditioned by that history,
they're not just following the dogmatic pattern
of, say, the Trotsky movement.
And yet, time and again,
they come up against a set of limitations
and the most obvious of those limitations
is that within those circles and those movements,
partly under the influence of some very crude forms of anarchism,
partly under the influence of very crude readings
of some of the philosophy we've been talking about,
partly just under the influence of an unproblematized libertarian individualism,
there's just a very strong resistance
to pretty much to any notion of strategy
and any notion of substantial organisation.
I mean, I can remember, I mean, this would have been around the time we would have first met each other, Rodrigo, in the early, really in the early 2000s.
Like, we were moving in circles around things like the social forum movement in Britain and the anti-globalization movement, where there were large numbers of people who literally, they would literally say, if you said, look, I think a movement needs a political strategy, they would say, well, you're a Stalinist.
You know, you're, you know, there is just, there is no, the very concept of strategy is in some sense, like oppressive and offensive, you know, that you can't, you can't have a strategy without somebody telling someone else what to do and somebody telling else what to do is the ethical crime par excellence, which can never be, you know, countenanced. And this was extremely frustrating. And it was extremely frustrating for those of us who kind of always thought, where you ought to read Marx and Gramsci and Denin, and you ought to read Marx and you ought to.
read Deleuze and Vitari and you ought to figure out how these things all work together and you
ought to both take seriously the libertarian critiques of the democratic centralist vanguardist tradition
and also but also not abandon you couldn't just abandon any notion of strategy because
I mean really the argument I was making sort of 12 years ago and I think it does sort of recur in
this book in a really sort of perfected form I think is well one of the places you got to
quite quickly, and it's always a danger for those kind of arguments is a point where there were
just no criteria according to which political success or failure could ever be established.
So, you know, lots of people, I mean, lots of people we all worked with politically just got
themselves into a place where you could never say, look, we tried something and it failed.
Like, you somehow you always had to claim that the action had been a success.
Like, you know, you've done some shitty bit of street theatre, you know, that had just alienated
the local community.
But it had made you and your mates feel good for a couple of hours.
And you still had to say it was brilliant.
And frankly, that's still going on with XR.
Extinction Reveni are still doing that now.
They're still completely refusing to impose any kind of criteria on their activities,
which might acknowledge the fact that, you know, their second big action, for example,
completely failed to deliver any of the stuff it had promised it was going to do and what
that might mean.
So in the process and in the process of addressing that set of questions and that set of
issues, the book goes through. First, it establishes the importance just of the very idea
of organisation and the fact that if analysed or thought about and an appropriate level of
abstraction, any thinking about organisation has to start from the premise that, look, everything
is organised, just experience as such is organised. Otherwise, it's just chaotic. You're just in a
seamless flow of information. You're just, you might just be living in the Dow, but you're not,
you know, you're not actually doing anything or thinking about anything without some form of organisation.
And so from that, from that, from that and that all, really all claims about, you know, different forms of organisation to some extent,
or about the value or of or the value or weakness of certain forms of organisation are, to some extent are being made, you know,
are really sort of claims about,
this is one of the things I take from the book,
are really sort of claims about questions of scale
and their claims about questions of scope
and they're questions about the appropriateness
of certain functions being carried out by certain bodies,
often rather than really being sort of disagreements
about whether certain things tasks have to be carried out
or not for political success to be achieved.
And so, I mean, in terms of the historical narrative as well,
the bit I've sort of missed out was that really,
I mean, the other thing the book, I think,
is responding to really importantly is, it seems to me, is that the end is the fact that
after the kind of obvious failure of this wave, a kind of libertarian, non-strategic, you know,
politics in the, from the second half of the 90s, really through to about the 20, early 2010s.
Then, indeed, amongst especially that sort of millennial cohort and some kind of, you know,
theorists, like people like Gijek, there's a sort of counterreaction which just ends up
with a sort of polemical embrace of Leninism and the idea of communism and people saying,
we need to get back to this kind of classical idea of revolution, which is, again, clearly
has no sort of purchase. So it seems to me that a lot of the work of the book is to really
demonstrate very persuasively that, indeed, as I just said, many disagreements about forms of
organization, which end up polemically taking the form of people saying, for example, all
organization must pass through the party form or the party form is always oppressive or all
organizations should be done by networks or no networks are bad, they're just a capitalist form
whatsoever. None of it is really disagreements about the kind of things that a movement or
organisation, a collective body of people need to get done if they're going to have some kind of
political success. And it's often just a very confused set of debate about the question of what
scale task should be carried out, or what temporality various tasks would be carried out. And so
one of the most powerful arguments in the book, I think, it seems to me, is that if you're going
to approach the question of organisation, you have to ask yourself, okay, what are the things that
have to be done for a political project to be successful? What are the various things that have
to be done? Resources have to be marshalled. Decisions have to be made about how resources are
marshals. People who don't already agree with the project have to be persuaded to agree with the
project, up to a certain point. And that one of the most useful ways to get through the
impasses between a lot of these different debates over question of organisation is to sort of,
is firstly, to abstract them. And this is why abstraction is often useful as a conceptual move,
is to say, look, let's think about the functions that have to be carried out in certain,
in order for any sort of political project to be successful. And let's abstract those
our understanding of those functions from our kind of attachment or to or revolving from any
particular institutional or organisational forms. And let's then think about what would it
mean to have a conception of political organisation which accepts that those functions have
to be carried out, but he's always agnostic and open-minded about who might carry them out,
where, when, and by what means. And the logical consequence of that is to have what the book
posits as an ecological model of organisation, according to which you recognise that. You recognise
that will any movement or organisation or set of organisations that is going to have any kind of
political success, you know, indeed has to involve a set of different particular political task
being carried out. But it's going to vary from one context to another, whether they're all
being carried out by a mass party organisation like Gramsci envisaged or whether they're
carried out by a party and a bunch of NGOs and a bunch of community groups or whether they're
carried out by just a bunch of people on Facebook or whatever.
And that really, to some extent, the sort of plea of the book is for people to be sort of
rigorous yet open-minded in approaching the question of political organisation, by focusing
at the appropriate level of abstraction on the question of, what are the tasks that have
to be carried out in particular contexts, and accepting that the answer to that question might
be relatively uniform. But the question of who, where and when they should be carried out is going
to vary from context to context. Thanks, Jim. Can I just point out that only works as an elevator
pitch if you're in that tower in Dubai and come to the top floor. Well, yeah, fine.
You're holding the other people hostage in the elevator. That was less than 10 minutes for a very
complex book. Thank you. It was a very good summary. It's not an elevator pitch.
Well, I mean, it was a context and then an elevator.
I mean, the elevator pitch would just be.
Political organisation requires certain tasks to be carried out.
Who carries them out?
Where and when they are carried out is going to vary from context to context.
And it's people's confusion over the question of whether certain tasks have to be carried out
or whether the political issues who has to carry them out or whether they have to be carried out at all,
which often leads to political ampasses.
Excellent.
Let me write that down.
If that's a reasonable summary,
I mean, I think it is really important.
It's important to sort of talk this through
because I think we should talk about what this means,
what the implications of this are
for some concrete situations.
So, well, the obvious thing for us to talk about
is the UK situation.
And obviously, I would just, I mean, I would say this.
but I mean to me the book just gives a very clear sort of theoretical framework within which to
justify what I think is just is the correct attitude that people should have towards you know
issues like I'm hoping this is how everyone who buys the book will feel so buy this book
and feel like this yes I think because I mean almost anyone listening to
this, we'll probably have heard me say in some context already, and I'm writing a thing for
the momentum sort of email newsletter this week, saying it again. And that is that, look,
a great deal of strategic confusion amongst people on the Corbynite and post-Corbonite left
over the past few years has derived from people's confusion about the appropriate attitude
to have to an institution like the Labour Party. And I would say it basically comes from people
wanting the Labour Party to be either the thing they love or the thing they hate,
either the thing which they are identified with and are attached to
and are going to support as such on its own terms and are going to enthusiastically be
members of or a thing that they basically are opposed to, they want to formulate some kind
of left opposition to, they want to see as the problem. And that neither of these things
are really appropriate, because what we should see the Labour Party is, is a set of, you know,
often quite contradictory institutions, which form part of a much wider ecology of the left
and indeed the Liberal Centre, and which, you know, you just have to adopt a much more complex
nuanced and instrumental attitude if you're going to negotiate sort of centrally. I mean,
that would be, that's one example of how I think this is obviously relevant, but I think rather
than me kind of banging on this, you know, that line, which, you know, for ages now. And I think,
I think we should sort of come back in more detail to the question of the sort of post-Colbinite
left, because Kears obviously, you know, got really important things to say about that as well.
And we all have. But maybe you should talk in a bit more detail for the listeners about, well,
what the sort of the specific political contexts and debates that this was emerging from, I guess
especially the sort of its relationship of the book to that sort of um 2011 moment so what was going
on i mean what in more detail like what was going on like in 2011 for example that the book is
trying to sort of respond to well the way i always tell this story is i i wanted to write this
book to free people to make their own mistakes rather than making other people's mistakes
without realizing that that's what they were doing.
Because one of the things that was,
I think we all had, all of us who went through the experience
of the anti-globalization movement,
and even, like, in the case of you two,
even earlier stuff, like the anti-road movement,
the most remarkable thing about 2011, perhaps,
was the fact that I had, okay, I have this anecdote of I was living in Portaulagre at the time.
I had just come back from doing my PhD in the UK.
And you could already sense that something was coming in Brazil,
that something like the 2013 protests were coming.
Because one of the interesting signs in Portaerlegrie at the time
was that critical mass had become a big thing,
which was very ironic because it wasn't a big thing anywhere else in the world at that point.
And also, it hadn't been a big thing in Brazil or in Portolegre back then.
Just explain what it was for people you won't know.
Right, yeah.
So critical mass was a kind of action that emerged in the 90s, I think, in San Francisco.
Which was basically, I mean, this would be a function as an example of what I was calling the intensive idea of revolution.
It was the idea was that it was a kind of reclaim the city action where people would just, mass of people would go around the city on bikes together.
and they were together for security reasons because, you know,
the numbers protected them from the traffic,
but there was also like this symbolic dimension of we are taking the city,
we are reclaiming the city from the cars.
And so this was happening in Port Allegory in 2011, 2012.
And at the time, I was in.
involved in, I was involved in community organizing with communities that were being affected by
the works that had been planned for the World Cup, which was going to happen in 2014.
So people who were being, who were under threats of being expelled from their homes, etc.
And there was this new energy coming from, you know, this critical mass people who were
were getting bigger and bigger every week.
So we tried to draw them in.
And we had these incredible,
and all the people who were involved in this,
or most of the people who were involved in this community organizing project,
were people who had been active in the anti-globalization movement
and the World Social Forum.
And we had this incredibly frustrating experience
talking to the critical mass people who are,
all like 10 years younger than us. Because we were trying to draw them in and they would be like,
well, you have to understand that we are a horizontal leaderless movement, blah, blah. And it was
incredibly frustrating because we were like, well, first, A, you don't have to talk to us like we're
old people who don't understand your young politics. This was our politics.
10 years ago. Also, this was our politics 10 years ago. And one of the reasons why this is not
our politics anymore is precisely because of this kind of thing. Like they, it's just, however much
we tried with the people we talked to, we were like, okay, but can you call a meeting? And we'll
take it from there with whoever comes to the meeting. We'll talk to them. But like, people
felt that because it was supposed to be a horizontal leaderless movement, that form
of politics was incompatible with them individually taking the initiative of proposing
to the group that they were organizing with, you know, there are these people who would like
to talk to us and get us involved in this other thing that's going on in the city and
That's going to be huge in a few years' time because of the World Cup.
And that allowed me to see, like, all the things that we were talking about in relation to the politics,
let's say the spontaneous politics of everyone who came of age in the 90s and the early 2000s,
and how much of liberalism and anti-evalism.
communism or like a huge you know I'm sure part of the the problem there was that they were
very suspicious of us because we were doing community organizing and surely if you're doing
community organizing then you must belong to a political party and we don't want anything to do
with political parties etc so my main motivation back in 2011 was
a to like I realized okay there was a collective learning that my generation that has gone through
that hasn't been communicated at all among other things because we didn't create the media
that could pass that on to a new generation of activists and it was only in places like
Spain, where there was really a transfer of knowledge from one generation, from the generation
of the turn of the century to like the generation that became active in 2011.
And at the same time, the other thing that was really interesting about 2011 was precisely
the fact of the fact that people very quickly ran against the limits of that experience.
Like, you know, we couldn't prevent them from making the same mistakes.
But maybe they learned from those mistakes much more quickly.
No thanks to us.
Yeah.
So as I say in the book, maybe we should see 2011 as the 1989 of 1968,
in the same way that 1989, the fall of the Berlin War,
was the moment where, okay, the fantasy of a socialist revolution in the old mold has become
completely unthinkable.
No, you can't really go back to it.
Or you can only go back to it as some kind of quasi-pathological attachment at this point.
In the same way, what I was describing as the spontaneous politics that came with
2011 and prior to that with the anti-globalization movement and that many people would trace
back to 1968, even though that's sort of also a retrospective construction.
1968 is from the 80s onwards made to mean that whereas it was, like if you look at it
from the organizational point of view,
it was a lot more complex and not as clear-cut
as a horizontalist movement.
As I say in the book,
I felt like people are ready for this conversation now.
And the way to do it is to try and start from scratch.
Let's start by defining the terms we're dealing with.
Let's start by defining what organization is,
what leadership is, what spontaneity is.
Let's try and redefine all the terms in the debate so that we can,
so that we can have this discussion for realese this time
and not in a way where people are just trying to score points
for their particular political beliefs,
but there are actually trying to solve practical,
problems.
Just to, as a, as a, I don't know if it's a provocation or not, actually.
But anyway, instead of it being 68, instead of 2011 being the 89 of 68, perhaps the 2011
was the 89 of 99, the Seattle anti-globalization sort of upsurge.
And like the difference between, if so, if 2011 was an attempt at a repetition of
1999, it went much, much bigger.
basically, you know, so 2011 was the 1989 of 68 or 99, whatever you want to put it,
it was that because that idea of politics was tried out on a really massive scale,
on a scale of which has never been tried out before, that form of politics,
and it basically reached its own limits really, really quickly.
And then there was a crisis period, and people regrouped and went on to something else.
And it's interesting, it's interesting in relation to what Jeremy was saying earlier about
you know, there being no criteria,
they're not even being any criteria by which you could measure
failure or success.
It was very interesting to see some people who were involved,
like the really hardcore horizontivists in the group
who initiated Occupy Wall Street
in some of the anniversary pieces
that came out a couple of months ago
on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Occupy.
I remember reading one of these people saying,
oh yeah, it was occupied.
People who say, I don't understand what people mean
when they say that Occupied failed.
It was a massive success
because we showed to people
that it was possible to do things differently.
And never mind the fact that that doesn't seem to be
the conclusion that most people reached?
Oh, well, they, no, okay, to be fair, people did get a taste of different ways of doing
things.
They also realized, okay, we didn't find a way of, we couldn't make these different ways
of doing things sustainable over time.
But there is precisely this idea, which is a very 90s idea.
in the way that the most you can aspire to is to have an experience of living differently
and plant the idea in people's heads that things could be different.
And it's like, well, this is the largest mass mobilization that you'd had in the U.S. in a very
long time to make planting the idea that things could be different in people.
people's heads as the utmost goal that the largest mass mobilization in the history of the
US in a really long time could have? That's like how many more do you think you're going to get
of these? And like how many more times will you plant the idea in people's heads until you actually
make a move to right, this is it. Now that all of you got the idea, let's do it. I think that's a really
That's a really interesting way putting it to talk about things like this not happening every day.
Although, but I would also, I mean, I sort of agree with that conceptualisation,
but I would add a sort of complementary, sort of a counter-contextualisation that my experience of
moments like Occupy is that, to be honest, the mistake that people make more often, too often
is to think that they're more exceptional than they are and to think that they're so exceptional
that the fact that it's happening at all
it means that you don't have to do anything else now.
You don't have to go and try and build those institutions.
I mean, this was always my, you know, that you just,
I don't know how many times I've, some person in their early 20s
has told me that the fact that there's been a big demo in town today
is proof that we're now at the end of, you know, capitalism
or at the end of neoliberalism or, you know,
and, you know, I remember, I mean, you know,
I've often said this about the student protest in 20,
You know, they were not as big as the wave of massive wave of university occupations in 1990.
It's just been completely forgotten about.
They weren't really that exceptional, except insofar as, you know, they ended up contributing to the emergence of an ecology of institutions,
which ended up having some bigger effect on wider sort of ecologies.
And I think it's true.
I think both of those things are true, actually.
I think it's important to recognise those moments as opportunities.
But it's also important not to fetishize them
because there was also a lot of millionaireism around Occupy.
There were people who thought that the fact that you'd occupied Warsbury meant
that there could be, it was just proof that revolution was imminent.
That question of success or failure around things like Occupy,
I think is interesting.
I mean, I've been interested in this idea of a sort of ecological perspective for a long time.
And I think it does, and one of the things that the notion of working in a political ecology problematize it, actually, is the idea that you can always have a clear understanding even of the relationship between sort of intentionality, outcomes, success and failure.
Because I think, you know, I mean, I do, I think Occupy did have an effect. I think Occupy A, I do think it sort of was enough of a counterweight to the Tea Party move.
that Obama wasn't, didn't implement, I mean, everybody hates Obama now for all the right
reasons, but he didn't implement as savage and austerity policy as the EU did and the European
countries did. And he probably would have done, I think, if it wasn't for the fact that
Occupy demonstrated there was a degree of popular resistance to a sort of, you know, a right
wing completely pro-bank political agenda. And then also be, it obviously did just based on the
sort of biographies of some people who were involved in it. It obviously did end up
contributing, like the student protest in Britain, to the kind of left wave, the left
organizational wave that has ended up producing things like the Bernie movement, the institutions
that have come out of that, the commercial success of Jacobin, things like this. So,
and all of those things were not really things that anybody intended or were planning for,
but they were, I think, I mean, I think they were an outcome.
of the fact that Occupy
had some successes
and in the terms
we're talking about
I think it had some part
its main success actually
was that it was able to break
with that sort of politics
of 1999
to the extent that it at least
started to,
it did at least start
to try to conceptualise
the idea of
the dream of a mass politics.
Like I always say that
you know it wasn't a mass politics
but the fact
that it was even aspiring to be a mass politics, with the slogan,
We Are the 99%, that was a significant advance on the politics, which was really
characteristic of that moment, sort of 1999 to 2003, when, I mean, lots of people involved
in those protest movements just made a positive virtue of the idea that they were never
going to be a mass politics, they were never going to have mass popularity, they didn't want
it, they didn't see themselves as wanting it. And that's partly, that's comes, I wanted to come to
the title of the book, a little bit, you know, the question, neither vertical nor
horizontal. I mean, one of the ironies, one of the paradoxes to tease out in thinking about
those concepts is that on the one hand, the notion of horizontal organization, horizontal
organization is supposed to be in completely non-hierarchical, participatory, deliberative,
democratic, and vertical is supposed to imply, I mean, exactly what vertical implies is
sort of complex, because the simplest way of understanding it is, well, it's top-down,
power. But even the most ardent supporter of Leninist democratic centralism, which would be
the extreme form of left verticalism, doesn't actually think you should just have a party
leadership telling the masses and all the party what to do. They're supposed to be accountable
to a set of internal democratic processes in the party. It's just that once decisions have been
taken, the collective is supposed to be absolutely bound by them. And also under kind of critical
emergency circumstances when there isn't necessarily time for prolonged mass deliberation,
you're supposed to defer to the elected leadership. Now, that's what verticality means in that context.
I sound like I'm defending it. I'm not. I mean, historically, I'm a great critic of verticality
in every possible form. But of course, but ironically, the problem is one of the things that really
characterize those horizontalist movements is they didn't, they never really did seem to have like
a horizontalizing aspiration in a gram-shy.
sense of like spreading out and widening the coalition. The classic aim of, you know,
the revolutionary party in the Leninist sense and then in the sort of in Gramsci and Gramsci sort of
revision of it is that the whole point is you're supposed to be building mass support. You're
supposed to be extending your coalition outwards from the core, the organizing core, the political
core of the proletariat or the revolutionary party or whatever. But one of the things that it tended to
characterize these so-called horizontalist movements over the past 30 years. It's been a
complete disinterest, a great lack of interest, I should say, in doing that. And indeed,
I mean, this was the argument I was constantly having with people in those movements like
when we first met each other. The argument, I would say, look, you've got to persuade people
who don't already agree with us, to agree with us. And that, just that in itself ran counter
to their sort of tastes and aspirations to some extent, partly because there was this kind of weird
sort of anarchist idea that even just trying to persuade someone to change their mind about
something, even if that person was a Tory, it was like somehow was like oppressing them
in a way you shouldn't do. The idea was just you should act to some sort of magnetic force
or some something that people might want to imitate, but you shouldn't make any active
attempt to like get them to change what they would do it. But partly because it was really
a lot of the time that kind of horizontalism was associated with, you know, he ended up being
associated with a sort of subcultural politics where really what people were interested in doing
was creating ideal sets of social relations within a really a highly determined group. You know,
you create your group and you make your group function very democratically, but you don't really
have any interest in trying to change the way other groups work or, you know, the wider society works.
So I would say the book does a really good job. I mean, it says neither vertical nor horizontal. I've argued
that in different ways. This group compass I'm involved with sometimes has this notion of
45 degrees politics. I think deconstructing, deconstructing that kind of a way of framing
things, understanding that, you know, it's a really important task of contemporary politics.
And I think the book does a really important job in doing that.
And part of the point is, or the main point is precisely that you're not, you know, the joke I've had to deal with the most since the book came out was people saying, so you mean diagonal.
And now I have to, it took me a while to find them, but now I have good answers to that, which are no wiggly.
and there's another one that came up yesterday, which is lumpy.
Because that's the description of ecologies that I provide in.
That's a good way of describing the description of ecologies that I provide in the book,
is that ecologies are lumpy.
The first use of diagonalism, or the use of diagonalism as a direction in between vertical and horizontal,
the first time I'm aware of that was around 2010 with the climate.
Justice Movement, and particularly when it went to Copenhagen.
In the 2000s, me and Rodrigo were involved in a magazine called Turbulance,
and we were both in Copenhagen giving out these huge numbers of these magazines.
It was nicknamed Turgidance, actually,
so we should be careful how far into the theory we get.
But in a way, that is the classic, that is a classic example of your argument, isn't it?
That was the point at which the Horizontist Movement,
So the climate justice movement in the UK was basically a continuation of the anti-globalization movement,
took loads of those assumptions with it.
Then you get to a problem like climate change, and there is no theory of change apart from raising awareness or set in exemplary moments, as Jim just said.
That's when you suddenly get presented with this problem of, well, you know, everything we've inherited just basically is completely inadequate, basically.
diagonalism would be you know some almost like a form of Eurocommunism we need to be inside
and outside or whatever I'm this I was just up at Glasgow at the COP 26 and it was the same old
same old um dance because it's not a really there's not a good answer to that problem we need
to come outside that sort of direction is there a step missing in that in your argument rod
about um you know in order to be able to think ecologically and do the sort of strategic at the analytical and
strategic work, you're already presupposing like there's a collective agent who've got those
analytical and strategic competencies. How do we get to that stage? Is this, so like if we just
take our own biographies as a start, is this, is this, is this, not a how-to manual, but a
some sort of guidance to the remnants of past movements? How do we get to the, how do we get to
the stage where there's a big enough collective agent with the wide enough spread of those
competencies that this can then have an effect. Do you see what I'm saying? We want to create
collective agents and not just rely on aggregative sort of forms of change by small things
happening through aggregation. But there seems to be a step missing. Well, I find it hard to imagine
any other way to arrive at a critical mass of people doing different things and coming at the
same problem from different angles with different forms of action or whatever without going
back to you have you have a few movement big bang moments where you'd
suddenly have a massive influx of people.
And obviously, big bangs can be bigger or smaller.
You know, they happen in different scales.
But that is usually, my impression is that those things come in leaps.
It's usually like when you have a moment like this,
that you will have...
a huge influx of people and then it will be possible to have then that will give you an ecology
for a while and then if people can keep it up then there will be organizations of all different
shapes and forms like media initiatives like navara to you know campaigns uh to whatever
publications, legal teams, et cetera.
But the critical mass usually depends on a moment like that.
But then there's the other element,
which is upping everyone's
and every individual organization's game.
You know, the, and this is something that I say
at the start of the book when I talk about
like how the first, the idea first occurred to me, the output at the level of the ecology
depends on the input at the level of the different parts of the ecology.
So if you don't have, and this, this is what I realized, that that was one of the moments,
you know, in my trajectory around that time when I first realized this, which would have been
2005 or 2006, I started doing, I joined the Justice for Cleaners campaign in what was at the time.
What was the name of the union at the time? It's now Unite. It was called the TNG at the time.
So I was one of the people who started that campaign. And I was doing a form of politics that was very different from
anything that I had done up until that point.
Previously, I'd been a horizontalist who still posed a problem of, you know,
okay, how do we bring more people into the movement or how do we win people over to our side?
And one of the ways with, so just to qualify a little bit what Jeremy was saying earlier,
It wasn't that no one posed this problem,
but I think that the way people kind of solve the problem in their heads
was always with this magical card of,
well, we need to invent new forms of organization.
And these new forms that were always to come,
we were always going to invent them one day,
they were going to solve this problem for us.
And then when I started working for the TNG in the Justice of Cleaners campaign,
I realized actually the way you solve this problem is you go and you talk to people.
And obviously, you need resources to do that.
You know, the union was paying me a wage for me to do that.
And there was an office and there was, you know, there was a whole infrastructure behind us that made that possible.
but it was this very old-fashioned
form of politics
that could actually deliver
precisely what we were missing
at that point in the networks
of the then
Moribund anti-globalization movement
which was something to draw
more people in or to expand
our zone of influence
or to actually
make the
input of the
all the different local nodes of the of the anti-globalization movement add up to something
more than just, you know, at the end, I remember in the 2005 World Social Forum at some
point, I realized, okay, literally everyone in this room now is just a PhD student who is
studying the World Social Forum? There's nothing else going on. This is just people doing
their PhD researchers with one another. Have I ever told you about the time I got,
I got studied by a couple of Italian sociologists as a member of the British anti-capitalist
movement? What do you think they learned? They didn't, well, they didn't learn much.
from, they got, this was around, this was in the aftermath of the time you're talking about,
and Chantal Mouf had told them, I talked to this guy, Jeremy Gill, where he's like, he's like
an actual activist. And I had to go to this room at Soas with like three other people who they'd
identified as like activists. And they were really pissed off with me. Because first I said,
there is no movement. There's like 300 people who all know each other. That isn't a movement.
And they kept saying, we don't want your analysis. We want to know how you feel. And I said,
said them, I feel frustrated by our complete inability to constitute an effective counter-hegemonic
force under these circumstances.
But they were really, really pissed off with me.
But we're evoking a lot of that moment, and it's very sort of powerful, but I think I wanted
to ask about sort of a couple of things in relation to that.
So, I mean, one thing I felt when reading the book was that it was all, you were saying very
correctly, or the things
in some ways
we've been trying to, several of us
had been trying to save, sort of years
since that moment.
But I was also thinking, well,
do the best of the younger generation
of activists I know now,
do they even need all this? Because to some
extent, you know, the best people are sort of
doing this. So I would look to
a sort of project like
forward momentum,
which was the
faction, it was basically the radical left
as I would call it, as opposed to the orthodox left faction,
contesting for the leadership of momentum last year,
that Keir was heavily involved with,
in the sense of actually doing stuff,
and I was involved with in the sense of benignly offering
in courage, evuncular encouragement.
But that project was really successful.
It really did kind of deploy radical democratic,
deliberative strategies of like holding primaries and getting people using kind of
quite very sort of horizontalist in a way or organizational forms and it's and it was also successful
whether that group have now been able to do anything much with momentum having got control of it
under present circumstances is another question but I do think but I certainly most of those
people most of whom are sort of you know 10 15 years younger than us
they would have an idea, a conception of the relationship between party, movement, democracy,
you know, centralisation, etc., which is just sort of precisely the one you're setting out in the book
or kind of advocating for. They already have sort of absolutely a sort of ecological conception
of politics. And so one might say, well, they don't really sort of need the book,
which I think is probably true on some level. On the other hand, it's also clear that they're not,
really, I mean, unfortunately, even within the sort of post-Colbinite left, people with that level
of strategic sophistication are not in the majority, and which is why the arguments of the book
are still really needed. But one of the, a central question that comes up in the debates
between that group of people and other people on the sort of, as we keep calling it, the post-Colbinite
left, which also mirrors debates going on within DSM.
in the States, is the question, the perennial question of the party form.
Like, what is the role, and the party as an institution?
Like, what are political parties?
What functions, for the carrying out of what functions, are they actually necessary?
And what can we do with the existing ones that we've inherited from the histories which
we haven't chosen?
So, for example, I thought, I really liked the way you sort of engaged with the arguments made
by people like Jody Dean, who sort of in, as part of that sort of neo-Leninist moment of about,
you know, five, ten, twelve years ago makes a very sort of strong argument that basically
you cannot do without the party form. And you make an argument very well, you know,
I think I've made it, I've made in the past more casually, which is that look, just because
you've identified a set of things that have to be done, that have historically been done by, like,
Leninist parties, doesn't mean the Leninist party is the only.
anything they can do them, which I think is really useful, incredibly useful. I think it'd be
interesting, though, for us to talk about all of us, you know, the sort of concrete situation now,
and the way in which these debates around how you relate to the existing parties, whether
you need new parties, etc. How do they play out? I mean, specifically in this kind of Anglo-American
context, which is fairly distinctive from the European context, for example, and probably
different from like most Latin American countries, in that apart from anything else, we have
sort of electoral systems which basically just foreclose the option of just creating a new party.
I mean, in a country like France, there's a well-worn path to deciding you need a new project,
creating a new party, splitting the old party that you've come from, but still getting enough
votes to get into parliament, then negotiating with the party you have split from in order to
arrive at a position and that's how you do politics.
Things in Britain in the States, we just cannot do that.
The entire, we have a constitutional set-ups which just mitigate against that being a, being
an option.
The only thing you can do with a new, you can harass the major parties with a new party.
You can do like UKIP and you can put sort of tactical pressure on them.
But you cannot just set up a new party, which is expressive of your ideology and expect
to do the work that a party is historically supposed to do.
So I wonder at what your thoughts are, but also Kears as well, you know,
both of us are on, well, what is, you know, on the basis of the insights in the book,
what are the useful things we can do in that situation where we are just,
we are apparently just stuck with a sort of, you know, a situation in which there is one,
you know, centre-left party with which is capable of content.
electoral politics, and which historically, until very recent, for the past 30, until 20, really, from
1985 to 2050, anything you can reasonably refer to as the left, was just completely out with,
completely outside of. I think one of the, one of the problems that the left has had over the last
couple of years, and that includes, you know, the new leadership of momentum as well, is that
We haven't been very good at fighting a rearguard action from a defeat, basically.
And part of that is if we use the Rodrigo's ideas and basically instructions to think ecologically.
And so that means, you know, they're all different organizations.
And you have to think about how one organization influences the ever,
even if that's not conscious or even where you're not even aware of the interaction.
You can still influence the way groups operate, et cetera.
And so the way Rodrigo writes about it is that, like,
what that should, what awareness of thinking ecology should do
is to sort of highlight complementarity
or to bring complementarity,
how to make the different parts of a movement complementary to each other to some degree,
either consciously or basically just by playing the parts that aren't there,
as Rodrigo said in a different interview recently in a Miles Davis.
quote or paraphrase.
But the problem we've discovered,
the reason that the left has not been good at
doing a rearguard action since the defeated Corbyn
is we sort of didn't think
ecologically in terms of our
enemies, either, right?
Or even
people who could be friend or enemy,
but since Corbinism are now just
absolute fanatical enemies.
And so basically what part of the thing that Corbynism did,
it had an incredibly radicalizing effect
on centurism, both centuris,
right and centre left in the UK. And so liberals, liberals who we actually do need to have
some sort of complementary relationship to, to a certain degree, have been like fanatically,
you know, anti-communist, but basically anti-democratic as well. I'm like absolutely fine with,
you know, all democratic structures in the late part of being ripped apart, all sort of democratic
norms around journalism, being thrown out, like, you know, absolutely no compunction at all
about just at least ripping up norms and any sense of fairness to a much larger degree than
before Corby. There seems to be a problem there of we can think ecologically with people on the
left and work out complementarity, but just by trying to introduce the most mildest forms of
social democracy, you know, straight away we got into this incredibly hard conflict,
which has radicalised people who we could have been in complementarity with.
And the degree to which that was happening, basically,
that which that was happening before 2019,
but the way it's just carried on and accelerated since 2019,
I think is completely wrong-footed,
the left, or a large part of the left,
who were trying to fight a rear-guard action,
but didn't realize that the basic fanaticism of the enemy
that they produced just by existing.
And I think the situation that you find yourselves in now is very,
like one of the difficulties of trying to give any suggestions from outside
is that also you seem to be in that position.
That anecdote that Jizek likes to tell about the advice
that Gandhi would have given to Jews in Germany,
let the Nazis come at you because this is.
going to demoralize them.
But that obviously supposes that the Nazis weren't serious about exterminating the Jews
and that they could be shamed by being publicly seen exterminating the Jews.
The equivalent in the situation in the UK now is that it's not clear to me
that, you know, you would have one sort of leverage.
dealing with the people who are in control of the party now if it looked like they
wanted to win but it's not even clear that they do and this gives you a lot less
leverage because they would need you to uh despite all the distortions that are created by the first
past the post system they would need you in order to win but it's not even clear that they
don't just want to be the loyal opposition forever.
I think it's clear that it's clear that that is what they would.
I mean, but I think that's part of the process that Keir is talking about.
It's a very good analysis, I think, Keir,
we've radicalised them to the point where that having faced the choice
between actually getting a left government and just remaining the royal opposition,
they clearly chose the latter.
And that is a symptom of that radicalisation in a way, I think,
that they're not even willing to go along with a left government
that would have been popular and that would have been, you know,
done all the stuff most of them had been telling themselves they wanted to do
but couldn't for years.
Yeah, and then you're doubly limited by the fact that on the one hand,
the political system makes it almost impossible to,
create a new party that would be able to contest elections. And then on the other hand,
you can't negotiate anything if you can't, like the most important currency that the movement
would have would be votes. But if they're not that interested in votes, then it's hard to.
To me, the situation, it does sort of exemplify something that allows us to deepen a bit,
our understanding of what does an ecological approach to politics mean?
Because to me, it's a good way of describing, you know,
something I've been sort of trying to advocate for, I think,
since I was a teenager, which is just taking completely seriously
the idea of by any means necessary.
You know, take seriously that Malcolm X slogan.
Look, you just use whatever means are available to advance the cause.
You know, whether that means working in the Labour Party,
whether that means, you know, fighting on the streets.
and you can do both in the same week.
I mean, I remember, it used to drive me mad in the 90s,
that assumption that you somehow,
there was a contradiction between, you know,
even advocating for a Labour government,
even if it was a Blair government,
and like doing reclaim the streets.
Because to me, it was just, well, they're different domains,
like in the domain of electoral politics,
the best we're going to get at this moment is a Blair government.
It's better than a Tory government.
You know, that doesn't stop us, like, squatting a street
if that opportunity also presents itself.
But of course, in order to do that, I mean, this is the sort of conclusion I came to
and other people also came to by the end of the 90s is, well, one of the issues there is you
really have to sort of not make a lot of your political work a site of sort of psychic investment
and identification. Because the whole point, the whole problem for those people in the 90s
was, well, if you identify as a, like a roads processing anarchist, you can't also identify
as a member of the Labour Party. And my position was always, but you probably shouldn't
identify as either of those things.
You should, or you probably, if you're going to identify as something, it's got to be something
which is very sort of, you know, which is defined partly by a commitment to ecological
practice and thinking and strategy.
I mean, I keep saying to people in debates around whether or not people should leave
the Labour Party, which I keep saying people shouldn't.
I mean, I say, you know, you can identify with something, identify with momentum.
It's an ideological organisation, but don't identify or disidentify with the Labour Party.
is stupid as a site of investment.
And one of the things that's really came out,
when this issue,
I talked about the issue at the world transformed,
you know,
the big kind of sort of Corbynite,
post-Corponite left festival of ideas
that Keir and I both participate in every year.
I talked about this in September.
And one of the things that really sort of became clear
in people discussing this issue was that,
I mean,
one of the things that is quite difficult,
really difficult for people to manage and handle,
and it's really understandable that it's difficult.
is that if you're going to approach the situation that we've been describing, so with the Labour Party today,
where you have got to be prepared to be very fucking nasty towards some of these people.
You know, some of these, you've got to be prepared to be a root, to be ruthless, cold, indifferent and antagonistic towards our enemies
and the sort of bureaucratic right of the party, to the point where you are actually willing to, for example, contemplate deselecting a local MP,
to whom you're sort of vaguely emotionally attached just because they're not the Tory candidate.
And the problem is that an awful lot of people on the left, especially as a Corbynite left,
they're not nasty people.
They're used to being habitually to be nice, creative, collaborative, collegial,
caring and sensitive in most of their lives, you know.
And it just is very, very difficult for them to be nasty.
And they think of people who do nasty things as nasty people who they don't want to be like.
And to me, this sort of, you know, it requires, to do ecological politics, I think, it requires
having a sort of conception of yourself, which is somewhat complex, multiple, you know, which is
capable, which recognises that at times you will have to do things. You might have to do things
that feel nasty. Of course, this is the classic Leninist, you know, claim. This is the, and of course,
one of the things that people are kind of understandably repulsed by is that, that
the kind of the classical Leninist figure of the ruthless revolutionary who is so dedicated
themselves to revolutionary cause and outcomes that they no longer have any emotional mind.
You know, it's Lenin versus Martop, you know, when, you know, Lenin won't condone the comrade
who is obvious, who is just abused a woman, you know, who has had an abusive relationship
with a, with a female comrade and won't, you know, won't apologize for it. And, you know,
this is one of the things that provoked the splits between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
And so this is an old problem.
And Guattari famously writes against the figure of the militant, you know, the activist, the militant, the revolutionary, the dedicated revolutionary, who's just a total wanker.
You know, Guatari sort of writes against that person.
So, but that presents us with a situation where one of the real challenges is that we do have to be prepared sometimes to be nasty to our enemies,
while cultivating loving, caring relationships of solidarity,
like amongst our comrades.
And it's something that people find incredibly difficult
under present circumstances, I think.
I should just set some context, Rodrigo.
Over the last couple of years,
we've witnessed the emergence of this character
called Tanky Gilbert every now.
Tanky Gilbert.
Yeah, Tanky Gilbert is demanding stern revolutionary discipline.
Apologising for Stalinism.
I mean, reflecting on this history we've been talking about,
it really does bring home in a concrete way
is something I do keep saying to people.
And I know it's something that quite a few other people of our age
or a little bit younger agree with me about.
And people a lot younger find that hard to get their heads around.
That this is, you know, this is not like the worst moment of my life
politically by any means.
Like I found that.
that period we've been talking about 15, 20 years ago, much more frustrating. You had sort
unchallenged neoliberal hegemony and just, you know, there was no, nothing, there just
wasn't really an organised left. And, you know, these movements we were all part of didn't really,
a lot of them people involved were resistant to conceptualising themselves as being part of
the history of the left at all, you know, and the left just seemed to be dead. And the fact that
now, the fact that we're now in a situation where not only we have a left, even if it's a
left that has suffered recent, you know, setbacks, but we have one, like for the first time
in my adult life, and I'm 50, we have one, and we have one in which the best bits of the
best, of the actual organised left, not only academics and theorists, are people who have the
level of sophistication, which this book is trying to sort of codify in their thinking around
organization is huge. It's a huge advance on where we were. It's a huge advance on where we were
at the moment of Occupy. And to me, it is very encouraging. I think it is really encouraging
that we're in a place where I can actually even ask myself, like, well, you know, it's looking
at people who are sort of, you know, very active in organised politics, in the party, in community
politics, I can ask myself, like, do they even need to read this book? Rather than asking myself the
question, I would have been asking myself 10 years ago, like what could possibly happen to create a
situation in which people would read this book and begin to understand it and take it on board?
So we shouldn't just be, I think, sort of despondent because I think the fact that this, I think
the book has come out at a moment when, you know, it can find a readership outside kind of academic
political theory seminars and in which, you know, it's not just me and Rodrigo, like, you know,
groaning to each other about the other delusians or being dickheads or, you know, no one else. No one
else, no one else understanding that it's important, you know, to try to have a complex idea of
strategy. So I don't think, I don't think we should just be despondent. I mean, part of the
ecological perspective is, is not having a kind of totalizing psychic relationship to experiences
of victory and defeat, you know, it's not, it's not deluding yourself that just because
Jeremy Corbyn has just been elected leader of the Labour Party, you're on the verge of socialist
revolution. And it's not, it's conversely, not telling yourself, oh, Jeremy Corby's not
leadership of Labour Party anymore. And, you know, the right have been on a rampage for a
total of like 11 months. That, you know, that means, oh, actually, like, there's no possibility
of progressive politics, you know, for the next 20 years. Like, it's neither a, it's, you know,
Take it on, it's, you know, it's accepting that all outcomes are complex and imperfect, you know, and there are no total victories or defeats.
Oh, thank God we've got Buddhist Gilbert back.
But it is, there's a good point, you know, if you're operating in the politics of contingency without, you know, a sort of teleological conception of history as though, you know, we are moving in a certain direction and therefore,
ultimate victory is assured.
You know, ultimate victory is not assured.
Neither is ultimate defeat.
Do you know what I mean?
Exactly.
And you realize you go, these, you know, movements and the movement overall goes through waves.
And you try some it out, it gets exhausted.
And then the movement, you know, reassembles over a period and then tries another thing out.
We know, the difference now is we have to hope that this is in an accelerated mode because the time scale is short, etc.
But ignore what Jeremy just said.
You should buy this book and read this book,
even if you think you know it all already.
Even though it is the tardiest owl of Minerva ever,
it was too late to be the owl of Minerva of the anti-globalization movement.
It ended up being too late to be the Al of Minerva of 2011.
But it provides a very useful set of concepts and languages
to formulate these arguments.
which we're going to have to keep happening with our comrades over the next few years.
It's the tardy the owl, the greater the knowledge delivery.
And that, folks, is Hegel.
On that owl bombshell, let's...
Thanks very much, would be.
Yeah, thanks, Rod.
That's perfect. Thanks.
Deep far out.
Deep far out.