Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 32

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey everybody, this is It Could Happen Here. I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart and sometimes had to put them back together. Today, this is another episode about the war in Ukraine. It's going to be eventually an interview with a Ukrainian anarchist militant who is fighting on behalf of Ukrainian people.

In that conflict, but here's a little introduction first. So anarchists are all about the elimination of hierarchy. And since the state tends to be the hierarchiest thing around, most anarchist activists tend to either seek the destruction of the state or at least snatches of a life lived beyond its bounds. The most joyful moments in anarchist organized protests tend to be those brief liberatory windows where anything seems possible and even say middle-class suburban moms might feel briefly like they could tear down the walls of a federal courthouse. So the idea of anarchists joining and fighting in a national military, commanding and being commanded in the hierarchy of a state's defense forces, feels like a pretty big contradiction.

Yet when the Russian Federation launched a massively expanded invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many Ukrainian anarchists announced their intention to fight on the side of their government. Organizations like Revdia formed militias which have been integrated into Ukrainian territorial defense forces. In one statement I found on the website, enough is enough, a militant representing Revdia explained their feelings this way. Ukrainian anarchists are at war with Russian expansionism, fascists and the government. They have created their own arm and call on us to join them. Every anarchist collective and organization that understands the revolutionary task and the internationalist struggle must transform its general anti-war position into a position of engagement by participating in or strengthening the anarchist Ukrainian guerrilla struggle

without suspensions and by attacking the Russian economic and political power. Victory in arms for the anarchists in Ukraine who stand against Russian imperialism, fascist paramilitary groups and the democratic government in Kiev. Solidarity with the Russian and Belarusian anarchists who are crawling in the democratic dungeons trying to stop the war. Let us give space to the people and not to the imperialist dreams that divide the planet into plots. We are forever with the invisible people of the world who are fighting for an inclusive, self-organized and anti-hierarchical world. So, anarchists with Revdia and other Ukrainian organizations are very much acting in line with more than a century of anarchist tradition in Ukraine. During the Russian Revolution, famed Ukrainian anarchist warlord Nestor Makno was forced to make a tough decision. Ukrainian nationalists threatened the central government that had arisen after the fall of the Tsar,

and Makno and his comrades decided to defend the democratic socialist government against the nationalists. From the book Anarchy's Cossack, quote, That decision faced the local anarchists with a problem, for it had them support governmental forces here, which, even if they were of the left, were nonetheless potential enemies of the masses' autonomy. Makno reckoned at the time that, as anarchists we must, paradox or no paradox, make up our minds to form a united front with the governmental forces. Keeping faith with anarchist principles, we will find a way to rise above these contradictions, and, once the dark forces of reaction have been smashed, we will broaden and deepen the course of the revolution for the greater good of an enslaved humanity. Roughly one month into the expanded Russian invasion, I had the chance to sit down and interview an anarchist in Ukraine who was participating in the resistance to Putin's regime. We conducted our interview over the course of several days, as his fighting schedule allowed, and we did so over voice messages and signal.

His audio quality was thankfully quite good. I have condensed some bits of the interview, particularly my questions, to make things easier to understand, and I moved some stuff around a little bit. I hope this is still pretty clear. Now, here's our source introducing himself. What I would start you to tell about my story is, let's call me Ilya. I am an anarchist from some neighboring country, but living in Ukraine for several years. I had to leave my homeland because of the political repressions against anarchists there. And for me, participation in this conflict, it has several dimensions. Once, the first and simplest thing is that Ukraine, even though it's a highly imperfect state, like with clear neoliberal stuff and some nationalist and far-right influences in the politikum, but still is more like gray zone and more like, how to say, pluralistic and free space. The state here has much less control than in Russia and Belarus, for example.

I wanted to start by asking them about the elephant in any room where people are discussing left-wing resistance in Ukraine, the neo-Nazi-Azov battalion. I think it's important for people to talk about Azov and whatnot and not whitewash what's going on there. But it strikes me that they have a really effective social media campaign and they're sneaking a lot of videos and a lot of combat footage and whatnot out into kind of western mainstream media without people realizing it's Nazis. Well, to be honest, of course, far-right movement is much more massive in Ukraine than any libertarian leftist movements at the moment. This, I think, is obvious for you. But at the same time, sometimes conscious or unconscious pro-Russian propagandists try to portray the situation as if it is a Nazi state or something like all the resistance is far-right or something. But actually, a general part of the state and also, which is more important, of the grassroots popular resistance is just a political in the sense that most of the army are not in the politics, even though, of course, we are aware that army is a political institution itself. And especially all those people in the villages who are now taking up arms to guard their lands against the occupiers, they are also not politically affiliated somehow.

Ilya and many of his comrades see anarchist participation in the struggle against Russia as necessary for two reasons. The most basic is that Putin's regime is a threat to their life and freedom, too. The secondary reason is that if they don't fight, they will have no ability to influence what happens in their country after the war. Today this invasion really constructs the threat for the whole existence of this society, more society than to the state itself. Because this is a kind of attempt to export this totalitarian hell which were constructed in Russia more or less. And to confront this, just not let it happen is already a task, I think. But of course, to come to defend some land against some occupation for me is too simplistic for the anarchist and revolutionary approach. So there come more detailed reasons, I would say.

First of all, I really believe that if Putin will be confronted intensively and successfully here, then it's very possible that it will break the spine of this regime in Russia, which may lead to revolutionary changes both in Russia and Belarus, because Belarusian dictatorship exists, like relies very much on Putin's support and so on. And another dimension is that any force which wants to be like really politically meaningful in Ukrainian society should take sides in this conflict. All people who say some dogmatic things like we are against all states, against all wars, this is not enough now, this is not a position now. And now this is really popular resistance, like if you do not join it for whatever reasons, then you exclude yourself from actual political process, because the main questions will be like where are you and where were you in these events. And of course, the right side is to confront this imperialist occupation. This can really give an opportunity for future, and not for future actually, already today for organizing and mobilization of revolutionary libertarian forces

and constructing ourselves as some considerable significant movement. Like for example, now there is this unit of territorial self-defense, which anarchists participate in actively. This is now already around 50 people, well, it was like unimaginable at the recent years and months to have some gathering of 50 anarchists, antifascists and so on as some joint unit. But now this is the reality and this mobilization is made because of this invasion actually. So this is something that makes sense, in my opinion. And another interesting thing, I think in context of comparing, for example, far left and far right participating in Ukrainian political life and in current events, that of course for us any collaboration with the state is much more problematic than for the Nazis, because even their like ideology and mindset, as far as I can evaluate it, pretty allows them both any relations with the state structures and also any dirty schemes both with the state, with the business and with criminal sphere.

Like our approaches are much more puristic, which is partly good, of course, but also have some consequences for us to be much less adoptable as the movement to the real social, political, economical realities. And for example, now currently, this is still a question for anarchists, should we join, for example, these territorial defense forces, which is even though somehow militia like localized institution, but still, of course, like state affiliated force orchestrated and arranged by the state and subordinated to state army hierarchical system. But we still believe that in current events, this participation like it less compromise us, but more give us the tools to organize, to get experience and to get subjectivity, if we can say so in English, like to become really an actor. And still it is within this frame is still possible to maintain political independence and even some sort of structural independence. So this is not just people are going and joining the army. And that's it. They are now just units, at least up to the moment. This is not our story. And this is something, at least me personally, reflecting on a lot. First, I would like you mentioned you came to Ukraine from a neighboring country where repression of anarchists was more severe. I am interested prior to, you know, this stage of the invasion. Obviously, the first invasion happened in 2014, but prior to this escalation.

How would you describe state repression against anarchists in Ukraine, the degree to which anarchist organizing was opposed by the state by the police in Ukraine. And then the follow up question to that would be, as you guys saw this war building. Could you elaborate on some of the discussions that happened about what to do about whether or not to form militias, whether or not or to what extent to fight alongside the government. So about state repressions against anarchists in Ukraine in recent years, I would say that they were, of course, much less hard than, for example, in Belarus and Russia. Also, because, like, for different reasons. Because of, in general, of course, more pluralist political culture and political situation in Ukraine, but also partly because anarchist movement in after Maidan period was not that organized and not that combative to really drive attention of the state to itself. And also, what I need to say that in maybe 2019 and 20, this attention grew dramatically after several direct actions were taken by anarchists. For example, some sabotage against cell phone towers of some Turkish affiliated company when Turkey invaded Rojava in the late autumn of 2019 and also several actions against some police stations. Some of the statements were placed in anarchist fighter website and telegram channel. And so police and secret services got, how to say, very energetic in their attempts to find the people who did this, even though they didn't succeed actually.

So, several house raids taking place. They also tried to depart one anarchist from Belarus Alexei Boryankov, who stayed in Ukraine for several years while decided to move out from Lukashenko regime. And so, but they didn't depart actually and also their house raids were not successful, so they didn't succeed in their repressions. So in last couple of years, this picture, I would say vegetarian picture of zero attention of the state to anarchist movement had changed. So it started to be like different way. Before it actually also was some direct actions believed to be related with revolutionary action anarchist group. It was, if I'm not mistaken, around 2017 and so on. And this also were somehow prosecuted by Ukrainian secret services. Also about organized participation of different anarchist faction in the current resistance against the Putinist imperialist aggression. Like about the most organized initiative you all in most numbered, you already know, but there are several others smaller groups, like more like affinity groups or several friends participating in different units.

We even cannot count it because we even don't know about everyone who participate. At this point, he started talking about an anarchist militant named Igor Wallachow, who had been killed by a rocket in Kharkiv a few days earlier. Before the war, Wallachow had expressed a desire to organize a network of co-ops across Ukraine. He'd also been active in providing support for anarchists jailed in Russia. Ilya referred to him as having been martyred. He was participating, I don't know, either individually or with some of his friends from Kharkiv, but for example, I knew nothing about their group and their participation. There is also Black Flag anarchist group from Lviv, which now, as far as I know, participating in territorial self-defense of Kiev. At least they released several photos and some short statement. This is something organized, which I know about, and apart from that, I know just, as I already told you, several affinity groups, groups of friends.

The overall picture he painted of anarchist resistance in Ukraine was extremely atomized, due in part to pre-war concerns about avoiding state repression and the myriad doctrinal differences between different kinds of anarchists. The war seems to have had a catalyzing effect, which has made larger militant anarchists organizing possible for the first time in recent memory. Ilya was cautiously optimistic about this, but he and his comrades also recognized a danger here. We are trying to avoid attention from the state services, from secret services, even though we still have to collaborate somehow with the military hierarchy and so on in this situation. But of course we understand that if we will attract undesirable attention, then probably some forces would try to destroy us or somehow assimilate, subjugate us. None of these scenarios are good for us, and we are aware of it. So we try to have some publicity and at the same time to act ourselves in the way which will not drive repressive attention to us like immediately.

So up to now within this frame of territorial defense and some civil volunteer activities and some other quite conventional activities of participating in this conflict against the Putinist side, we believe that we can take the ground for the new conceptions and programs of libertarian cause and also some organizational developments like some organized structure, which of course not necessarily should be illegal from the very first steps, but to establish some organizational basis and maybe hopefully ideological basis which will help us to act more actively both during the war and after war. Could you go into a little more detail about the ways in which you all do, your units do, kind of interface with the state? I went on to ask how they organized their combat units and whether or not this reflected their broader beliefs about horizontal organizing. His basic answer was that the militias have to operate within a military command structure and thus have to be broadly organized in the same way conventional military units are. However, being a regular, their life outside of battle is much less regimented than what regular soldiers experience. So about military hierarchy in general, of course, territorial defense forces are set by the state and they are included into the general structure of military hierarchy of regular army.

In this sense, we are, of course, generally not autonomous and what is what's been issued by superior command, we should implement in life and should fulfill this orders. However, now territorial defense forces, I would not speak about all of them because I limited since the very start of war within my own experience with this unit. These forces have like a lot of time for constructing itself like our internal life, not that much regulated by the higher command. And also, there is a sort of space of communication with some commanders which are a little bit higher than us. So we have like good people who our comrades who set this opportunity for us to get organized within this frame of territorial defense. This was just our old friends who decided to join some territorial defense structure as officers already before this situation started to happen. So I think these people do really good job and they provide for us options to fill ourselves like comparatively free. Of course, not in operational sense because like operational frame is being set by the higher command and like as one picture, one scheme.

And in this aspect, we of course, just the one of the elements of the general plan of the fighting, they put in regime invasion here. So I mean, yes, as a unit, we are governed by the military command, but this is really rarely that we see anyone apart, anyone of some officers or generals or somebody else from above the military hierarchy. We here now occupy it with training with organizational constructing and with like improving our internal life, not being like really 100% orchestrated by any military hierarchy people. So what about the internal structure, it is still supposed to be organized on the traditional army scheme. So every section has a commander unit in general has a commander and this is not an elected people. This is not like really controlled from from below people. Maybe unfortunately, or maybe this is necessary in the current situation, this is really hard to estimate to evaluate at the moment. In this manner, our internal structure in sense of like military structure is more or less traditional for the territorial defense.

At the same time, of course, we have more democratic internal culture. In general, territorial defense is people mostly organized on local basis and also out of volunteers. So people who came here on their goodwill and not on some conscription or some contract which gives you certain money or privileges. Also because of this, you already supposed to be somehow more free and more up to express your opinions and so on. And of course, we as somehow leftist affiliated anarchist unit. Of course, we encourage the internal discussion, everyone including all the commanders inside our regiment are subjects to critic and discussion, even though maybe final words in the operational questions are up to these people. And also is important that we maintain total political autonomy in sense that all the groups and individuals who construct the unit, we are part of.

They like absolutely free to express their analysis, political analysis and conceptual conceptualization of both these events and our participation in them, according to their like analysis, their attitude and so on. I also asked what it was like to fight ostensibly on the same side as neo-nazi elements like Azov, while Ilya and his unit are not anywhere close to the Azov battalion. I wanted to know how he and his comrades dealt with the weird reality of being in the same broadside as people they might have battled in the street at one point. I would say that before war, of course, there was a lot of tensions between fascists and us, not directly with Azov, because Azov is like military unit, like this is not the guys you meet and fight in the streets. But of course, there is like, they tried to set like their own, how to say, mafia, political empire, I would call it, or mafia, like they had some businesses, some criminal stuff, some patronage from the interior ministry, and also very different, how to say, far-right groups, which the leaders of so-called Azov movement, which is much broader than Azov battalion itself, they tried to utilize and instrumentalized to reach their own goals. And with some of these groups, of course, we had like just street fights, for example, the elements closed to the Azov movement. They tried to influence a lot the Belarusian diaspora, like a positional diaspora in Kiev.

For example, in the one-year anniversary of the protests of 2020 in Belarus, there was fight in Kiev between anarchists who came to participate in demonstrations, in this demonstration, and the Nazis who attacked them, in like aiming to somehow push them out from the Belarusian movement to influence it in their own way. Like also just a usual street confrontation also took place all this time, there is quite visible and active Antifa movement in Kiev, which confronted Nazis on the streets and blocked sometimes several of their initiatives and so on. And also, of course, informational and propaganda struggle was held by us during all this time since Maidan and of course before as well. About the current military situation, like of course, we are now actually a part of one army with the right sector, Azov and so on people, we are under the same military command and if we will be tasked to fight in the same place, the same enemy, we will be actually at the same part of the barricade. But this situation we need to deal with, like there are different opinions amongst our comrades in here about Azov and all the far-rightists. They differ from that they are actually our enemies, like both now and also in any future Ukraine, in any future scenario, because these people promote like quite obviously, absolutely opposite political and social goals than we. Other people say that now there is how to say general deadly threat we are facing and we should fight regardless of left and right and something like this to fight the imperialist invasion.

But I personally, I do not support this second assumption and position, I see this quite not really politically smart, at my opinion. But what we here can agree on is that if we want to confront Nazis and far-right parts of the Ukrainian political and also military spectrum, then we need to develop our own strong structure, our own strong actor. And also this somehow connected with the question about PR, you mentioned that like we need our own PR, our own publicity and media work and also our, first of all, our own conceptions and ideological blueprints which we can suggest to Ukrainian society and present both inside Ukraine and abroad. And this is the work, this is the challenge and duty which we need to fulfill and hopefully, like not hopefully but actually we are working on this already now. So if you want to combat Azov, now is not the time maybe to accuse them in some public statements, but this is time to develop alternative structure which will be able to really confront these reactionary currents. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that you have heard me introduce like probably like 70 or 80 times by now. But yeah, you have heard me introduce this podcast enough times that you probably know what it's about. If you don't, it's about things falling apart and then putting it back together again. And today we are doing a historical things, trying to go back together and then fell apart again episodes. And with me, I'm your host Christopher Wong.

And with me is Nicholas Scott, who is a PhD candidate in Latin American history at UVA. Nicholas, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to have you. And today we're going to be talking about something that we've mentioned before on a few other episodes that we've done about Chile and about the Allende period. But I think like, well, we definitely have not given enough attention and I think gets less attention in the sort of mainstream like left analysis of what happened to Allende and what was going on in that period, which is the Cordonis. And Nick has written about this a lot and is also writing more about this and is doing research. Do you mind if I mentioned that you're in Chile doing research right now? No, totally. You know, that's where I am. I'm here two years after the pandemic took me away. I've finally been able to come back and resume my research. Yeah. And so Nicholas, I think in your work, the thing that I think is different about it than a lot of the stuff that you'll read about Allende and about the Cordonis is the sort of historicization of it. And so I was wondering if we can start back, I guess in the 60s and talk a bit about the sort of political situation that gets you to this sort of revolutionary moment.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think that it's important that we start at an earlier moment to really understand how the Cordonis emerge as a specific culture, a specific urban space across the city of Santiago. You know, the English translation of the Cordonis industrialist would essentially just be industrial belts. So you can think of these as sort of sectors of the city where the majority of sort of heavy industry had been based. And these sectors themselves were sort of remnants of the 19th century, specifically the railroad lines that would sort of the main thoroughfares into the city of Santiago from the countryside. Over the course of the early 20th century, as you have the development of industry in Chile and in Santiago specifically, these are the same areas then where these factories are being developed because you have preexisting sort of transportation networks that they're able to take advantage of. The problem is that, you know, industrialization happens sort of in fits and starts in the history of Chile. And the other sort of problem is the problem of transportation itself. So for example, in the 1930s, there's an urban plan that gets developed for Santiago or the central part of Santiago, and they bring in an Austrian urban planner Carl Brunner to help with this. And while Carl Brunner essentially tries to do for Santiago, what Hausmann did for France, right, widened boulevards, make the city more accessible to new forms of transportation, right, ideally the car, buses, things of that nature. The problem is, is that he limited his work and his studies, as I said, just to the center of Santiago itself. The other problem is, is that once Brunner leaves Santiago, the plan that's actually put into effect isn't necessarily all of his plan, it was sort of a patchwork that legislators sort of pick and choose from when they put this plan into effect.

And so in between the 30s and the 1960s, you know, a lot is happening. Primarily, you have these sort of twin processes of industrialization, sort of rapid industrialization that's taking place, which also have this other process, which is rural migration, sort of internal migration, and this isn't a process that's limited to just Chile, right, this is a region wide process that's happening all across Latin America. And you're having sort of two factors at play in this migration, right, you're having the push factor from the countryside, right, the lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, lack of secure employment from the countryside. And then you're also having the poll factor, which is, you know, these industries that are springing up in the city, as well as the sort of infrastructure that a city would afford relative to the countryside. And these two processes sort of come to a head in the 1950s in Chile and by the end of the 1950s, it's clear to a growing set of people, including Juan Pariocchia, who is an architect, that something needs to be done and there needs to be a new urban plan for the city of Santiago. And this urban plan, what they try to do is it's the first time that there's a sort of inter communal, which communal in the sense would be a rough translation to the municipality in English, so it's really the first sort of inter municipal urban plan that tries to link networks together. And this is actually the first time that this word cordon industrial appears in like an official government document, right, that's the first time that urban planners themselves are thinking about zones of the city that are going to be specifically for the city industry. And so the idea is that they want to move a lot of the industry that has sprung up in those intervening years from the early 20th century, that was located more in the center of the city, they want to move it out of the center of the city, you know, largely for

pollution, safety, all the things that go along with heavy industry, they want it further on the periphery. And so that's part of this urban plan that essentially tries to zone, basically zone these, these sectors. And so that's really where my dissertation starts, that's where my research really sort of starts the stories and the late 1950s, early 1960s, when these urban plans are taking effect. And so what I'm interested in then is, you know, how did the creation of these specific sectors of the city as industrial zones, how did they then give rise to an urban culture that will then manifest itself in a very revolutionary moment once I in day comes to power. Yeah, and I think that that's an interesting way to look at it because I think, you know, because the process of sort of industry moving from the center of the urban core outwards is something that's happens really across the world. So mostly after that period, and that that's one of the one of the things that struck me about it that's interesting, I want to ask you about which is, so to what extent is this is this a different process than the kind of like, you know, the kind of suburbanization that you see of industry in the US, for example, in like the 1980s, or is it closer to, well, you know, I've talked about this, I guess on the show in the Chinese context to where you have mostly pollution stuff has seen like some industries sort of like, I mean, just literally getting pushed into rural areas, is it like, is it like those same kind of impulses or is there a different kind of like relation, I mean, like how far out of the city like is the stuff like getting pushed to. That's a great question. It's a wonderful question. And, you know, it is actually important. This is important to remember that at this time, the city of Santiago, you know, just outside the city of Santiago is still largely rural.

Right, where the first cordon will emerge on the southwestern side of the city is still a largely rural part of the city itself. And so it is very similar to the dynamics that you're describing in that it is pushing, you know, away from where people are living, right, to more rural places where there is more land, both to build right so there is the availability of space. But there's also less people living in that space. So from the planner's perspective, it's considered better because the sort of, you know, chemical and heavy metal runoffs from a lot of the metalworking factories, all of these things and the pollution from smokestacks, etc. You know, are less harmful. The problem then becomes, however, as I mentioned, the rural migration and people that are migrating to the city. You know, there's not space in the center of the city for these people to live, right, so they're moving into the same areas. So in some senses, the sort of historical dynamics of the region are undercutting the sort of success of the planners when it comes to making these zones away from the city itself. And I guess I guess that that will be something also that that's interesting about this, which is that I think because like, you know, the sort of like decentralization of industry and the push into rural areas, I think largely did not produce a kind of like radical working class culture. But but it seems like you have this kind of handling factor here, which is that you have a bunch of people who are like, who are coming into industrial work for the first time out of the countryside, which tends to be a very radical factor.

And like, is that one of the things that gives you this sort of radical culture instead of the kind of like total disintegration of the class that you see in the sort of later versions of this? This is such a beautiful question. And this question really lays at the heart of my research. So if we scope out just for a bit and think about this historiographically, in Chile, there is a vein of historiography that is very concerned with these rural migrants, which once they arrive in the city are referred to as pobladores, which we can roughly translate as sort of urban poor. And they're considered a sort of capital S social subject that is distinct from a worker or from a working class, from a sociological point of view. And the reason this is is because a lot of them, while they are workers, you know, they are part of the working class functionally. They're sort of social concern and the social movement that is bound up or known as the sort of poblador movement is a movement for housing. Because they are arriving at these sort of vacant parts of the city, they bring with them the sort of, as you mentioned, their own histories of struggle from the countryside, of which the sort of main tactic is the toma or seizure. Right. And so what they will do when they arrive in these places of land is that they will seize these lots and they will erect a structure on it.

In doing so, then they would use that to stake a claim to prop as a claim of property rights right as a claim for their own proper home and everything that would go with it within within a city infrastructure right utilities sewage etc. That's what they would leverage then as a claim for that. And so my project is essentially trying to break down this analytic barrier that has separated the poblador from the worker in the historiography specifically in the historiography of things like the hordones and the popular unity years during I&A because as I mentioned, many of these people once they're moving to the cities and, you know, moving into what would be referred to as either campamentos or poblaciones, you know, they're looking for work and they're finding work at a lot of these factories that are nearby where they're moving. And so, however, they're coming into contact they're sort of mixing with the older generation of migrants that migrated from the north of Chile, right from the mining sector in the north of Chile, following the Great Depression, which is the sort of historical birth of the labor movement in Chile the nitrate sector in the far north of Chile which, you know, following the development of sort of synthetic forms of explosives. And the dates are not salt peter specifically is not as high in demand anymore. So you have a lot of people migrating to the city to begin working in industries there. Right, so those sort of older working class who also have their own sort of history of struggle history of tactics, etc. And this newer form of worker the poblador right are mixing and they're sort of mixing in these areas in specific and that to me is why it's

really important to think about the coordinates is more than just an organization that emerges in the early 1970s, and really think about them as a space as a geographic space that developed their own unique forms of local culture, informed by these larger more macro historical processes. And that that seems like a much more. I don't know if I don't know if productive is the right word, although it is but I think. Yeah, I think that is a better way of thinking about it than what you usually see because yeah that that kind of the fact that you have multiple different essentially like you have multiple different like sociological classes mixing you have your tactics sort of fusing and that developing its own culture that's distinct I think from a lot of the, you know, because this this is a period of time like the late 1960s early 1970s is like the golden age of the factory occupation. And I think, you know, I think you can draw similarities between that and between the Cardone's but I think. I don't know I mean it at least the version of this that I know the best and that one I guess sort of also has a similar dynamic of you get you get a bunch of you have this mixing of sort of the old urban working class but then you have a bunch of you have this huge labor migration from from the south from the rural areas that mixes in there and I'm wondering I guess like when you talk about sort of the culture of this how how much of that is something that you think is like a distinct product of

like this exact configuration of of social classes hitting each other and to what extent it's kind of like a process that we've that you find in other places where you have you have these sort of market worker like first generation market worker bases hitting these sort of older industrial working classes. Yeah, no I think that you're spot on right I think that this is a larger global history, right this is a moment in which you are having a lot of migration from countryside into the city worldwide. Right you have a lot of French intellectuals at this moment thinking about sort of what does it mean that the city is perhaps becoming the new focus the sort of new locus of social movements and social actions you know what does it mean that the city is dominant over the countryside and things like that, but I think it's different or not necessarily different but perhaps unique in the Chilean case is that this is a, you know you have a culture in Chile. That is known the world over for its political culture right everyone at this moment was thinking and talking politically and talking about big, you know grand ideas of politics not just you know, sort of everyday politics but how did everyday politics inform these larger sort of social struggles right this is still a moment when socialism is on the table. And so you have no not that this is different than other places in the world clearly as you mentioned in Italy socialism is very much still on the table communism is very much still on the table there as well.

But in Chile what is different is that there is this idea that one could perhaps legislate socialism right or that one could use the means of democracy to achieve socialism right that's what's going to make the idea in day government so unique in this moment. But what also makes the court bonus unique is this sort of relationship between social space and physical space in the city. So for example, the very first quarter that emerges in 1972 city as my poop, as I mentioned earlier on the southwest of the city. As I mentioned, because it had such close contact with the rural sector on that edge had a lot more solidarity between rural laborers and factory laborers, such that by 1973, you have factory laborers going out of their factory and helping the laborers sees their properties and hold their properties away from the landowners essentially right and claiming sort of a redistributive, you know, land for those who work at type of strategy. This is say different from the cordon that my dissertation is focused on Vecuna McKenna, which, as I mentioned a much larger segment of pobladores living nearby it right. There's much larger solidarity between the pobladores and between factory workers. And what makes that even more unique in this case is the role of the Catholic Church. And this is really one of the sort of new things that my dissertation is trying to do is what is the role of the Catholic church here. So, for example, the Catholic Church, historically within this, and within the historiography as well, has always been associated with the political movement, right because of this sort of connection to the countryside, because of the you know, missionary kind of work and going out into the population, you know, poorer populations, especially following Vatican to that in which they begin to sort of have more outreach into the poor sectors.

So it's never really seen or rather very few scholars have thought about or looked at what does this mean then for those individuals who may have lived in a poblacion, but who worked in a factory. In other words, what was the relationship between the sort of spiritual pastoral message of the church, and the sort of socialism of a factory worker. And in the case of Hakuna Makena, there's actually very strong links here so specifically the San Cayetano parish, which is located just to the west of the Cordeaux improper, was fundamental in helping some of the workers establish unions in the Cordeaux and so for example the Sumar textile factory, which was functionally a city unto itself. This textile company had a series of different factories within its property so it had a cotton plant, it had a nylon plant, a silk plant, they had a polyester plant, and each of these different plants then each had their own unions. And in Chile in the labor code in Chile from the 1930s, there were two different types of unions per factory or per plant, you had the industrial union which we could think of as the blue collar worker union. And then you had in Pleados Union, which we can think of as a more white collar union these would be the sort of professionals in the factory the sort of technicians, the engineers, right not so much the manual laborers but everyone else in the factory. And in the case of Sumar specifically the cotton plant itself. In the late 1960s when they're trying to found their union for the first time, they don't have anywhere to go to find it to found it right because they can't do it in the factory itself because the management the bosses will crack down on it. They don't have their own local yet because they haven't founded a union. And so what they ultimately do is they reach out to the parish priest in San Caetano, who is, you know, who offers them help.

And in doing so offers them a space to hold their first union vote. That's how the union of Sumar gets founded. And Sumar will go on to play a major role both in the core bonus and then after the core bonus during the dictatorship it's a very, very important factory in this history. But it's often overlooked that, you know, the church played a very fundamental role in the sort of larger history of the working class formation of the Sumar workers. And one of the things about this period that's, I guess, becoming to be better understood, but I think if you're a person who has not spent time looking at this might look kind of weird, which is that yeah, the Catholic Church in this period in a lot of Latin America like takes, I mean, especially in Vatican too, but like it takes this like very hard left turn that, yeah, it has all of these causes that like, you know, like you get like the Italian version of it is like you get a bunch of priests who are just like like like clergyman who are literally doing kidnappings of like random government officials. And I think, yeah, I guess in this context. What's interesting to me, I guess is, yeah, like how much, okay, so like, what is the, you're talking, you're talking about the sort of like the sort of pastoralism of this sort of like social gospel message. Is there like a divide between the way the church is working in the city and the way it's working in the countryside or is it just sort of like, it's all shifting left, but they're more the influence of the church is larger in among sort of rural and natural people.

That's actually a really good question and this is actually where I'm in the midst of sort of figured this out specifically. For the past three weeks, I've actually been working in the church archives here in Santiago. And so that's actually the documents that I'm sort of sifting through as as we speak. And so one thing I can say for certain, as of now, what I've been able to sort of uncover is that, you know, the church was not homogenous and it certainly wasn't monolithic, not in Latin America, and definitely not in Santiago. You know, in the region itself, following Vatican to you have the Episcopal Conference of Latin America's second conference that takes place in the 1960s in Medellin, and that's where the sort of the idea of liberation theology is born. Right. Falling Medellin, then in Chile, the Episcopal Conference of Chile, then is basically tasked with determining a way to fit its own pastoralism, its own sort of pastoral plan within these new structures that they, you know, are a party to because they are part of this larger conference in Latin America itself. And so, you know, one thing that I have uncovered in the documents is that this is very much you begin to see a divide amongst the the bishops amongst the church hierarchy here that are very, you know, interested in following this new plan of action. But they're also wary of some of the discourse that is surrounding this. One example that comes to mind here is the idea of liberation itself, right? We often talk about liberation theology, and we often talk about it as though it was just sort of accepted wholesale by the church in Latin America.

Well, a lot of the documents that I'm encountering here are there's great debate over the use of liberation specifically because the idea of liberation is so tied up with Marxism. Right. And that is, you know, at this time, the Catholic Church as a global institution and Marxism as a global ideology are seen as antithetical. And here the idea that in a church's view, at least from these documents, the idea of Marxism that it's talking about when it's using Marxism is very much the Soviet Union. Yeah, right. It's very much the sort of atheistic approach to the church to religion that comes out of the early form of Marxism, mononism from early 20th century. And so there's a great debate on whether or not to use liberation and ultimately, you know, the those supporting this discourse went out and it is decided that liberation will be the words and the sort of discourse that the parish priests will use. But the other big thing that comes out of this, in addition to this sort of discourse of liberation, is this new idea of Catholic based communities, right, is this whole new framework for sort of understanding a Christian community. So prior to this innovation of the base community, you know, a Christian community was defined by the hierarchy of the church right you have the sort of congregation you have your parishes, you have the different sort of structural and bureaucratic designations that sort of link from a parish upward to the sort of church hierarchy itself. But the base community essentially is saying that, you know, wherever a few people gather and are studying the word of God or reading scripture or having theological debates that that should be considered,

part of the church should be considered that part of the church. And so in that sense, we can look at say some kind of parish and the work that it's doing with workers and the sumar factory. And so this has me thinking about, you know, what does it mean, you know, what are these base communities look like in practice, is it possible for us to conceive of workers who are reaching out to their local priest for assistance, as perhaps their own Christian base or furthermore, you know, at this time in Chile, in addition to the leftist political parties, the socialists and the communists, which is, you know, a majority of workers, the Christian Democrats are also a large force, right in 1964, President Eduardo Frey is elected as a Christian Democrat, and he's the sort of what will initiate a process that will culminate with a yende's election in 1970. And by that, I mean, he initiates what he refers as to a revolution in liberty, which is sort of a communitarian reformism that is essentially seen as perhaps forestalling Marxist revolution, socialist revolution from taking place. But it's incredibly popular amongst working class and workers. And the Christian Democrat Party itself was a very wide ranging party that encompassed right wing elements, but also left wing elements. Can we can we talk a bit a bit more about like what the Christian Christian Democrats are, because this is the thing that like doesn't really exist anymore, but was I think like a very important player.

Like, I mean, there's there's there's there's very powerful which democratic parties in Europe is very powerful Christian democratic parties, like across Latin America. Yeah, can we can we talk a bit about like what that is and how that's different from like, you know, how was different from just like your your generic, your generic sort of socialist party and how it's different, even from your sort of like, I don't know, you're like Labor Party, Social Democrats. Yeah, no, I mean, this is a this is a great question and you're right, this isn't something that is sort of exists in the present moment so it does seem very foreign to us. But really, with the sort of wager that the Christian Democrats make is that, you know, in theory, they agree for the need for structural change. Right, in theory, the alleviation of poverty, a more, a more just distribution of wealth, right, but their ideas of justice and think and this is where the Christianity part of the Christian Democrat comes in, right, is that it is justice as understood in a Christian sense of justice, right, not in a sort of more radical egalitarian sense of justice that say a socialist or a communist would believe in. You know, so for a socialist or a communist, the sort of motor of history is class struggle, right, for a Christian Democrat, the motor of history is God, and his son Jesus Christ.

Right, and that is the sort of would be, I guess you could think of as the main difference, and then how that plays out in practical terms would be in a for a communist or a socialist, right, you want a sort of radical communism, the relationship of the proletariat, these types of forms, a very stagest movement through history for a Christian Democrat, however, it's much more of a communitarian ethic, right, it's much more of a harmonization between say the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, rather than an overthrowing and eradication of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, as it would be for say a socialist or a communist. Yeah, and I guess that's something I want to, like, I want to move a bit talking about Allende briefly, because I think that's an interesting, one of the things you're talking about earlier is Allende talking about, okay, well, we can have a democratic path to socialism. And what's very interesting to me about both Allende and what's happening in the Cordonese is that like, okay, so like, that is a, that idea has been around for a very long time, and like there are a lot of people who take power, who are like, okay, we're taking a democratic path to socialism. We're taking a democratic path to socialism, and then, you know, like, a lot of Weimar, like, Germany, right, is ruled by the German Social Democratic Party, and it's like, well, you look at what they do, and they're not really like socialist thing. They're most, I mean, you know, they're doing things like, they're doing things like welfare reform, but that's a very different thing. And you can see like the Labour Party in the UK, for example, like, okay, well, they'll nationalize industries, right, but you don't see the kind of movement against like the, you don't see the kind of movement against property and the movement against sort of like,

you don't see an actual attempt to like eliminate, which was he is a class in the same way that you do about Chile. And so I was wondering like, what, what makes like, what was it about this moment that someone who claimed that actually comes into power and starts doing it and starts doing it in a way that's not just the sort of like, you know, when most, like 90% of the time when someone nationalizes something, right, it's okay. So instead of having a boss that is, instead of having a boss whose job it is to like, make money for the stock market, you have a boss who works for the state and there's very little sort of like structural change in how the bureaucracy is run, there's no change and like, your individual relation to your boss does not change, he's still your boss. And that isn't what happens in Chile in the same way that, yeah, I'm interested why this looks different here, I guess. No, I think this is a great question, you know, and, and so to get to my end, it is imperative that we start with fray in 1964. And in some senses, we can start even in 1957, which is I and base first attempt at running for president. At this time, I am day is running as essentially the last gasp you could say of the popular front, which emerged in the 1930s and into the 1940s, and had successfully united a large swath of the political parties in Chile. And this is what led to that earlier moment of industrialization, largely through the sort of policy known as import substitution industrialization, when which you know, the national industries would be built, they would be protected via tariffs price controls and others that would stimulate local growth to produce products that would have otherwise been imported.

So, by the late 1950s, things have begun to bottleneck, right, largely in the Chilean case because a lot of the countryside is still under control of the Latino grand estate, right, and which means that productivity isn't necessarily where it should be. It seems that the labor force that's sort of stuck on the land as well isn't available then for the development of capital goods in industry right and the capital goods are what you need to really jump start industry wholesale. What Chile does really well is that sort of intermediary phase of making goods for individual consumption, right, things of things of that nature. And so, what I indy does in 1957 is essentially trying to first run on a platform of industrialization and to fix inflation right and he narrowly loses, he just barely loses the election 1957. He'll, who wins is Alexandria wins, and he will essentially adopt a very classical liberal approach free market reforms, repression of labor, in some senses, freezing of any sort of gains of the labor movement etc. This ultimately does not work. Right. And so in 1964, you know, shocker, you have calls then for a more revolutionary approach. Well, also what's happening in 1964, right, is we're now in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, which has taken place, which has put the Americas as a hemispheric designation on notice that now it is possible to have sort of a revolution via insurrection via

failure, be successful, right, and only be successful but be successful in defeating the hegemon of the hemisphere, United States. And so what the United States will then do is launch the Alliance for progress, which is essentially a way of funneling money into reformist minded governments as a way to appease these calls for revolution, but prevent a sort of Marxist Revolution from taking place. So in the case of Chile, the Alliance for progress will funnel many, many amounts of dollars into the Frey administration. And Frey wins the 1964 election handily. Now there's a great debate to be had on whether or not the, or rather the involvement of the CIA and a sort of scare tactic and fear mongering campaign went on in the 1964 campaign. We just don't have the documents yet. For this period like we do for the 1970s and lead up to the coup in the 1970s. You know, hopefully one day we'll have a better sense of really what went on that explains such a lopsided defeat of I in day 1964. Frey will come to power in 1964 and actually the agrarian reform in Chile will begin under the Christian Democrats under phrase administration, financed in large part by the Alliance for progress. Also the nationalization of copper, which will be fully nationalized under I in day in the 1970s, but it actually exists in a state of so called negotiated nationalization under Frey, or what Frey would refer to as the Chileanization of copper, in which Chile would take a very

very small right 51% controlling in the copper companies, but would still have large the American copper companies anaconda and kina caught specifically would still be the ones responsible for running the operations themselves. That's an interesting, I guess, weird historical thing, because I know, okay, so like there have been a lot of times where the CIA has supported land reform, which is very weird, like they do it in Japan, for example. And, you know, it's seen as seen as one of these things is like, okay, well, we have to do land reform in order to like stop and stop an actual revolution from happening. It's interesting to me that Chile does it because I feel like that that's not something that happens in most of the other Latin American states with the CIA gets involved. Yeah, well, it's also, I mean, the Alliance for progress is official government policy, you know, it will be the one that starts the alliance, and then it will continue into the lbj administration following Kennedy assassination. And so that is, and you're right that regionally the Alliance for progress is largely a failure. There are, however, a few successes and Chile was at the time held up as one of the successes and has somewhat been born out as one of the successes in so far as it is what initiates the Korean reform in Chile. So, so I guess. So, okay, so what you're saying is that there are there's there's a specific group of parties at the US backs at this period who are trying to do this sort of who are trying to do some kind of reform. Like, who are trying to do the sort of like the the class collaboration reform to stay off revolution thing. And then, I guess the like later policy becomes just do the kind of do kind of uncertainty on behalf of the landowners.

Yeah, I mean, the way the fray, you know, as the fray administration continues, it becomes clear that his sort of reformist approaches as simply not working. One is just not working on a macro economic level right inflation is still happening which has sort of been the, you know, enemy number one of the Chilean economy for most the 20th century right most of the 20th century in Chile is presidential administrations and economic economists economic advisors are all struggling to understand how to control inflation. You know, fray thinks that they can figure it out via these sort of reforms via the Korean reform, via the sort of Chileanization of the great mining wealth of the country. In terms of factory or industry level, they essentially propose this idea of sort of workers enterprises that is somewhat modeled off the Yugoslavian model, which is a much more communitarian approach right as you were saying earlier, you know, the boss is still there. Workers do have a stake in control of the enterprise, but private property still exists. So I guess like still the boss, like with that, like how to what extent is like, like, if you have this on a scale of like, on the one hand, unlike the the extreme end you have, there's like nothing or maybe workers can own a share of a company and on the other end is like, I don't know, like a 1930s, like a 1937 like anarchist commune in Spain, like how how much control do they actually like, I don't know, like is this closer to something like the sort of like German code determination system?

Like how close to like Yugoslavia is this? Sorry, I'm trying to get a sense of like, yeah. This is a lot of this. No, this is fascinating. In fact, one of my sort of dream projects or sort of dream archives to get into would ultimately be the Yugoslavian archives or former Yugoslavian archives, because there is a lot of collaboration taking place between the Yugoslavian left and Chileans at this time. The problem is, is that a lot of this never really gets off the ground in practice. It is a lot of sort of things that exist on paper reforms that are proposed, but reforms that never really get implemented, which then has the effect of heightening expectations, but not delivering on the goods, which pushes people further to the left, right, and pushes them to demand a more radical solution, which they find in the 1970 campaign of Salvador Allende. Right. And this is what really gets us to the to Allende's victory, which is the sort of failures of the Frey administration to achieve the sort of revolution in liberty that he promises. Also, the near the end of the Frey administration, there's a massacre that takes place in the south of Chile in part the month that really solidifies, or if you will, sort of the final push or loss of legitimacy for the Frey administration, as well as pushing the sort of more popular classes to be opposed to the Frey administration, be opposed to sort of the Christian democratic message of reformanism, and decides to sort of give revolution a chance.

And it's into that moment that Salvador Allende reforms the coalition that you know the original coalition that he runs on was referred to as the FRAP. He forms a sort of new coalition in the lead up to 1970 election, which would be the popular unity coalition. And it's a coalition of leftist parties, primarily the socialists of which Allende is a member and the communists. And here it's important to remember in the Chilean case that the socialists are actually to the left of the Frey. The communists are a much more reserved approach to revolution, and by which I mean they're very much going to sort of have the, you know, they're holding the party line right there behold into the common term, right. But they are also very much in line with the Allende's with Allende's view of legislating socialism. That's, I guess, another interesting aspect of this is like, that's something I think also doesn't get discussed very much, which is this period where, like, a lot of the, like, that was the party discipline being imposed from Moscow for, like, a lot of this period, like, is explicitly telling them not, like, explicitly saying don't do revolution, like, hold and stabilize the situation. Um, is that the case with, like, so I, okay, this is again going back to me knowing Italy, but I know, um, Chile, is that something, like, how long has that been policy from?

Is that, like, an old, is that old popular front? Like, stuff from them? Or is this, is, has it, like, because I know, like, because you asked policy, so it's just, like, the Moscow line flips back and forth somewhat randomly depending on, like, what is going on. You're totally right. It flips a lot, especially in that 1930 period. And, and, you know, once they establish the idea of the popular front, that sort of does become the line. The big change is, takes place in 1957. There is a meeting of the common turn in 1957. And that's when the idea of individual national roads to socialism becomes the official party line of the common turn. And that is what then authorizes communist parties across the world to seek their own routes to socialism, right? So it no longer has to be a limitless insurrectional model. It no longer has to be a Cuban revolutionary model. It can be its own so that when Ayende proposes this pluralist way of reaching socialism, that's what the communists will link to. And really, that's what they'll hitch their wagon to and will tow that line throughout the three years throughout the 1000 days of the Ayende government, which will then ultimately put them into conflict with the left wing of the socialist party, which is pushing for a much more radical, radical shift. And that's really the sort of context that the cordon is emerge out of in 1972 is this sort of growing factionalism, growing sectarianism within the ruling coalition of the popular unity. And I guess this is already going a lot of or some of the way to explaining why this looks different than a lot of the other sort of like a lot of the other sort of socialist coalition governments you see around the world.

Yeah, I mean, partially, yeah, the influence of Yugoslavia is fascinating to me, because I mean, because that explains that explains so much, right? That explains why there's this sort of democratic component to it, even in the sort of reformist periods. And it explains why the expectation is that and not the sort of like even not even like like Soviet style nationalization absolutely does not look like that. Yeah, so you're right that you know that these these multi faceted multi layer influences globally as well as locally within Chile as well as regionally produce something that is the first time that. For example, a in days victory 1970 is the first time that an openly Marxist candidate will be elected president of a nation elected democratically in a free and fair election that is not contested or anything like that. Now that said, he wins by plurality, he only wins by about in the 30% range. Now historically in Chile, a plurality victory is not a problem because you demand it to the Congress and the Congress typically will just rubber stamp the victory. I in day however, you know, there's a lot of apprehension about what he means for the country, what he means for the sort of landed deletes what he means for the sort of oligarchs that control the grand monopolies in Chile. And so there is a lot of tension. Well, this is also then where the actions the CIA backfire. So the work of the National Security Archive has done great work for uncovering the sort of two track plan that Nixon and Kissinger have for subverting the election of a buy in day and then ultimately preventing him from assuming power.

And part of those tracks was to sort of foment some sort of crisis. And so the crisis that they attempt to foment involves General Renee Schneider. And it is the attempt is that they're going to kidnap him and hold him hostage and use that as a way to prevent I&A from coming to power. Well, the problem is that goes horribly wrong. The people that are carrying out the kidnapping are clearly unprepared for what happens. Things go haywire and Schneider is assassinated. He's shot accidentally and later dies. And the problem then becomes, you know, the nation is horrified. The Chilean nation is horrified if this took place. And as a result, then ranks are closed around I&A and it is decided that they will approve his candidacy, his election, and that he will be affirmed as the president. And, you know, also what's happening in the background during the election and during the lead up to that vote is that the Popular Unity Coalition has its program, you know, what we would think of as a campaign sort of platform. But part of the platform in the Popular Unity's case was what they referred to as the sort of basic agreement between the coalition and both the people of Chile, but also the political system, which in this basic agreement is sort of what we've been discussing this whole time,

which is that I&A would not change fundamentally the political system, right? Any sort of nationalizations, any sort of economic restructuring that they would achieve or that they would try to achieve in Chile would be taken, would take place, would be used or won through the halls of Congress, right? Everything would be legislated. Everything would still be remain the sort of Chilean government as normal, right? This is where you get I&A's famous phrase that the revolution is going to be with empanadas and vino tinto, right, with meat pies and red wine, which means, you know, it's essentially not going to be a revolution of deprivation, right? It's not going to be a revolution that fundamentally changes the structures of everyday life in Chile. This has been Nick Hadappan here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview, where we walk through the Chilean Revolution, the Cordonnes and their lasting impact on Chilean society. If you want to find more of Nicholas's work, he has an article coming out the next week or so in the Made by History section of the Washington Post connecting the revolutionary period and the broader struggle for a dignified life to the modern inclusion of social rights in the proposed new post uprising Chilean constitution. You can find more of us at HappenHerePod on Twitter, Instagram, and we have two new podcasts coming out. The first is Ghost Church, hosted by the inimitable Jamie Loftus. It's a deep look at the historical contemporary practice of spiritualism and mediums who talk to ghosts. It is wonderful. Jamie is one of the best podcasters to ever do it, and the first episode is out right now. You can find Ghost Church, wherever fine podcasts are distributed. Second, on May Day, which is this Sunday, May 1st, the first episode of the Great Margaret Kiljoy's new podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, is dropping. It's about, well, what the title says.

It's the coolest revolutionaries, desperados, and ordinary people in the right place and right time doing extremely cool stuff. And it's happening every Monday and Wednesday from here on out, so go give it a listen when it drops on May Day. It is going to be great. And yeah, it is a great time to be podcasting. There are many podcasts, so go listen to them now after you're done with this one. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show that is once again today about the Chilean Revolution. Here's part two of my interview with Nicholas Scott. Yeah, I guess the next thing we should look at is how the game goes in this opening phase. Yeah, exactly. Essentially, by the end of Allende's first year, things are looking very promising. So a few victories, more than a few victories, but a few key victories take place in his first year in office in 1971. He submits his plan for the nationalization of the nation's mineral wealth, which is voted unanimously in Congress, which speaks to the level of broad support for Chile having its own national sovereignty over its own resources. And this also then connects with sort of the theme that we've been developing this whole time, which is the sort of trends and regional and global similarities between Chile and elsewhere. A lot of the Third World movement, a lot of countries in the so-called Third World at that time are looking to nationalization as the way to extricate themselves from what they viewed as being in a relationship of dependency to circuits of global capitalism.

You have this whole idea of dependency theory that comes out of Latin America in specific, and the solution then is seen to be able to control one's own natural resources and use that wealth to develop its own national industry. This would overcome the sort of bottlenecks in the import substitution model, as well as allowing for a more redistributive structure of wealth and or land within the individual countries themselves. So he gets his mineral wealth nationalization passed. The Popular Unity Coalition also wins a series of off-year or by-elections at the local level and wins them so successfully that they will eschew an alliance with the Christian Democrats who are not part of the coalition, the Popular Unity Coalition, but they are also at this time not part of the opposition, which is largely controlled by the Nationalist Party. They're sort of somewhere in the middle, but they're also in the point in the middle in which they control a large share of the Congress as well as the courts themselves. So the Popular Unity Coalition is sort of buoyed by what it sees as the success of the ballot box, and it sees its success as getting its plans passed, and so they will eschew an alliance with the Christian Democrats. And then the sort of other main thing that takes place in 1971 is that Aayinde is able to affect using macroeconomic policies that were functionally Keynesianism, right, and his economic minister Pedro Vuskovich will essentially allow for a redistribution of wealth in which

workers receive sort of what we can consider bonuses, right, but sort of automatic increases that were affected from the top down in wages across. And the historian Peter Wynn, who published the sort of landmark study that really dominated the field of the history and the historiography of the Popular Unity years, he published a book called The Leavers of Revolution, that looks at the John Rourke Textile Mill, which was the first mill that Aayinde nationalizes in 1971. And what Wynn found during his research is that, you know, Aayinde's policies in 1971 allowed a majority of Chileans to purchase bedsheets for the first time in many of their lives. And the bedsheets were not something that the majority of Chileans used, despite the fact that a majority of Chileans worked in the textile industry, right, the textile industry was one of the most developed industries in Chile at this moment. And so all of these things sort of come together. And by the end of 1971 signs are looking good. By the time sort of 1972 dawns, and as we're getting into 1972 cracks are beginning to appear. There's another series of by elections in which the Popular Unity Coalition does not win the Christian Democrats win the election for the rector of the University of Chile is a shock defeat for the Popular Unity Coalition the Christian Democrat wins that as well as in 1972 there is for the first time in the nation's history the Central Workers Federation of Labor the coup has for the first time its own open elections for its leadership was the first time the presidential election file could elect the leadership of the National Labor Confederation, and the Communists win the largest majority, and the socialists come in second, but just below the socialist and at the percentage level it was functionally the same, where the Christian

Democrats, so much so that basically court that the Popular Unity Coalition sees that a quarter of the working class of Chile identifies as a Christian Democrat. So basically, things are beginning to stall out. Inflation is beginning to creep back up production is not necessarily at the levels that the government would want it to be at right so the idea of winning the battle of production begins becomes the sort of rallying cry in 1972. And if the successes of 1971 had somewhat paper to over the sectarian differences that we were discussing earlier between say the Communists and socialists. In 1972, those sectarian differences are really spilling out in the public view. So in mid 1972, you have the Communist Party member for the Communist Party is also a member of the I&A government or Orlando Mias, which is an editorial in which he essentially calls for the party for the coalition to sort of close ranks to consolidate its gains to reach out to the Christian Democrats to make an alliance and use that sort of consolidated as the way to move forward on in the revolutionary path. The socialists, however, specifically the left wing of the Socialist Party, which was sort of identified with Carlos Ultimerano at the time, takes the opposite approach, and says that no the solution isn't to consolidate to advance. The solution is to advance and consolidate by advancing. In other words, we shouldn't try to make an alliance with the Christian Democrats because in their view the Christian Democrats were just bourgeois, right, that we should essentially align ourselves with the popular classes, with the rural laborers that are needing charge of the agrarian reform that's picking up speed rapidly in the countryside at this time, right. Land seizures are taking place much more rapidly now.

We should also place our alliances with the popular working classes, which at that moment at the moment that this polemic is playing out in the press of Chile is the very same moment that you have the first cordon industrial emerge in Sidious Maipu. And it's into that sort of fractured moment that you have workers from a couple of plants that just happened to meet serendipitously on the steps of the labor ministry. One day in about May of 1972. They had both been on strike, and had both been demanding their incorporation into what was referred to as the social property area, which this was a in days vision for creating a socialist economy. And this was a plan that he had submitted to the Congress to structure the Chilean economy into three parts. They would have a social property area that would be owned and operated by the state. You'd have a mixed property area that would be a sort of mixture 5050 between the state and private mystery. And you'd have a private property area, which would just be businesses usual private enterprise. That plan had been stalled out because of opposition from the Christian Democrats that vetoed it and submitted their own alternative strategy, which then I end a vetoed the game of constitutional crisis that got remanded to the constitutional tribunal in Chile, which ultimately it languished there through the end of the end of government through 1973. During the coup is never really resolved. Nevertheless, workers saw the ability to be in put into the social property area as the solution to what they perceived as a socialist revolutionary socialism right to be in a socialized economy. And I mentioned earlier Peter Wynne's work on the order text on mill. That's exactly what the workers at yard or did they decided to do.

Now that is in opposition to I in day in the popular unity's plan which was to put these sort of grand monopolies in the social property area, not necessarily smaller industries such as such as the yard or text on bill in particular. There are other perhaps textile companies that have been slated for incorporation. But the problem is is that the workers successfully petitioned and pressured I in day and one their incorporation, and that unleashed what Wynne would refer to as a revolution from below. That allowed the workers who seized the labor ministry that day in 1972 to demand their incorporation into the social property area because there was a law on the books in Chile that stated that if there was an unresolved labor conflict of the factory that the state could intervene and essentially make state control of that factory which would be the first step to them being incorporated into the social property area. So it's out of that happenstance meeting on the doors to the labor ministry when they seize it and take it over shut it down. That then the workers of this industrial sector on the west of Santiago, begin meeting and they begin collaborating, and they begin organizing themselves territorially. It was a good moment to apologize to our listeners that never really gave a good definition as to what a cordon industrial was in practice. Essentially, the sort of wager of this organization was that you could organize yourself territorially, rather than by trade or industry, right, which would be the traditional way that a union would be structured.

It's organized with metal workers, class workers organized with class workers, textile, etc, etc, and never the twain shall meet in practice, right, it's all through bureaucratic structures, labor leaders, etc. As I mentioned, it wasn't until 1972 that the, you know, rank and file is ever able to vote themselves for their own national leadership. And so the idea of these workers is that they're going to create their sort of new form of organization. And after, you know, deciding to do it, they seize the territory of Sirius Maipu. They shut down traffic. And this road that they seize is one of the main roads into the city of Santiago from the west, which means that the government had to respond immediately. As one worker, not worker, one government official put it at the time, the workers were in the streets, we had to respond. Right, you're a government that it claims to represent the working class, your government that it claims to be putting yourself on the road to socialism. And the workers have now cut off transportation to the city, and are demanding sort of you to fulfill your promise. And so they had to respond. Ultimately, some of the workers that were striking at the time specifically from the Perlac company, which was canning company, they did win the incorporation into the social property area.

And however, other workers from other factories in the area did not win their incorporation, which then produced a march into the city of Santiago in late June. And it also produced a platform of struggle by what was referred to as the workers command of Sirius Maipu. And that's really the first document we have that shows that there is this new structure that is demanding that the government fulfill its promise, live up to its basic program. Now, following that moment, however, there's sort of a period of demobilization that takes place in sort of mid 1972. And it's really not until October 1972 that you have the flourishing of this new form of organization of the Cordon industrial across the city of Santiago. And the reason that it takes place in October of 1972 is because that's the moment that the opposition launches its first concerted effort to try and topple the Allende government. It's what's referred to as the boss's strike. And essentially what happens is there's a localized strike of truckers in the far south of Chile, and the sort of business elites of the country are successful in transforming what is a very localized strike in the far south into a global knockout on the part of business owners, right? So they'll shutter factories, they'll shutter distribution centers of foodstuffs, they'll completely shut down transportation networks in the city of Santiago and other cities across the country. So you can understand why they would call it the boss's strike.

This is the moment then that you have workers in these industrial zones that we began our conversation with, using this model that emerged in the southwest of Santiago as this new model to seize their factories that they've been locked out of, to reorganize the production of their factories and to ensure distribution takes place of basic goods and services for local residents in their community. It's really what allows the Allende government to weather the storm of the October strike and the October crisis as it will also be known. Ultimately, you know, that will reach a truce in November, that includes a cabinet shakeup also includes integrating the military into the cabinet, as well as Allende was able to deploy the military to sort of keep the peace in some senses. So there is a historiographical debate to be had between, you know, how much of it was the workers in the Cordonis saving the country and saving the government and how much of it was military remaining loyal to the government that allows them to sort of reach was referred to as the truce of November. So I guess I want to back up for a second and talk about what is the internal organization of the Cordonis actually look like like are we talking about councils is this Bass assemblies. How does this actually work on a sort of like day to day basis. The great question and this is actually the question that has sort of dominated a lot of the scholarship on the Cordonis. Frank Gaudichaud, who is sort of the leading scholar of the Cordonis essentially used Marx's distinction of a class in itself and a class for itself to sort of unravel this and so for Gaudichaud, the Cordonis itself is the sort of territory right that we begin our conversation with, and then the Cordonis for itself is essentially the workers council that is the governing body of the Cordonis itself, which was composed of already unionized workers right so it already is a tier of working class above say just your general worker that worked on the factory floor so it's already a unionized worker and some of the occupies a power or a position of authority within the union i.e. already

a or on the directorate or president vice president treasurer or secretary. So that main council is are elected within the sort of general assembly of the Cordonis itself. Below you have then different commissions right you have a sort of propaganda press commission, you have a cultural commission, you have a sports commission, you have a security commission, right because at this time you had far right shock troops that would spark street battles, and it would harass workers that would also attack factories that had been seized. So that they had security commission frontline defense commission, you also had distribution commissions, and then you had other commissions that would essentially seek to coordinate all of this that exists so you had a sort of coordinating board just below the sort of general council, and then that's what was the mediation point between that sort of governing council, and your different commissions, how are the people who are like who are on these commissions selected are they like are they elected or is it just like whoever wants to be on this thing. So it's a mix of both right so you you're sort of main council itself is elected via general assembly. In terms of the commissions the smaller commissions we sadly don't have great documentary evidence that you know lays out the process for that. The best guess or our best understanding would be a mix of sort of volunteerism, as well as some sort of within the commission itself, some form of election. Excuse me that would take place to sort of a point ahead of that commission that would then coordinate with the general council itself. So what this, you know, what this sort of cuts the heart of is that the history of the coordinates is a very evervescent history. It's really easy to see the coordinates in action, right when they're doing things like seizing control of their territory and erecting

them. But on that day to day level. It's a relatively opaque sort of structure it's really hard for us as historians to get a view into that you know one reason the good issue is able to, and to, you know, unpack as much as he has and he has is because he conducted a series of oral history interviews with many of the surviving workers. And that's really one of the foundational source bases we have. He published this in a book in which he published the full transcript of his interviews so we don't it's an interpretive essay it's the full transcript. And so that's that in combination with some of these coordinates had local presses that we have existing documentary evidence from that sort of would give you know your standard diagram of council commission lines connecting them, and things like that. But one of the other few documents that we have surviving documents we have is what's referred to as the manifesto of cordon vacuna macana. And this is the document that my research really is at the heart of my research, because, while the machine is recognized as sort of one of the most dynamic and strongest of the coordinates behind the original insidious my pool. We really don't have a lot. We don't know a lot about what was going on in there in fact, my research was born out of a conversation. The first time I was in Chile conducting research for my master's at Tufts with go to shoot himself who told me that like we really don't know a lot about what's going on, day to day in the clinic can be really great. If we could somehow find a way to do that. And you know that kind of stuck with me that really wasn't my concern at the time I concerned at the time was trying to understand how the coordinates that shifted from their emergence to the crew itself to seeing a lot of the literature was that people were using sources from late 1973, once the coordinates are established and really showing up in press, right, they're showing up in the archive a lot more by 1973.

And they're using documents from 1973 to describe their sort of founding in 1972. And the historian in me was kind of like, hmm, you know, yeah, things change, right. And things change both over time and space. And so my original concern was, you know, what made the sort of changes from the western side of the city to the eastern side of the city. But then when I got to UVA and began my doctoral work, I really wanted to zero in on Fakuna Makena and really I was, you know, that that conversation with Frank was really ringing in my head. And so, you know, I kind of at UVA had to do another master's essay as part of the program there, despite having, you know, already done a master's thesis when I was at Tufts. Oh, no. Exactly. Exactly, the thesis curse. But you know, what it did, what it allowed me to do was to, you know, kind of play with the sources in ways that I may not have had the ability to do otherwise, right. So I really sat with this manifesto for a long period of time and really did a close reading of this document, which, you know, a lot of times this document has shown up in previous studies.

It's shown up as a, this is a document that emerges during the October crisis. It's the document we know we have from this one core zone. Here it is. But what I uncovered was that the document itself, the document that is headed as the manifesto is actually a reworked version of a document that had circulated previously during the October crisis that was produced by the revolutionary left movement, the mirror, the far left party. Yeah, aren't they aren't they like guvarrists? They are. They very much are. This is the very far left party that is calling for a more insurrectionary model. It's also calling for worker peasant alliance, right. So it is this very much more traditional socialist revolutionary in that sense compared to the sort of eye and dayist vision of socialism that is being handed down from above. Right. And so during the October crisis, there's this document that circulates by the opposition that's running the crisis. That is essentially the petition, the pliego in Spanish would be the word, but essentially the petition of Chile.

And the mirror takes issue with the fact that the bosses issued a petition in the name of Chile. And so they issue a counter document that is the people's petition, the pliego del pueblo. And it's a very long document. It's a very, it reads as a essentially a manifesto for a new revolution to take place, right, like how to transform the present crisis into a revolutionary breakthrough. And as you're saying, a guvarrist model. The tail end of the October crisis as cordon volcano McKayna is consolidating itself right itself forms after a factory seizure at Alec metal, which then unites the sort of two nodes that existed in the territory that north end and the south end into one sort of communication and solidarity network that will then become known as the cordon that has its first general assembly in which it takes this document from the mirror and begins to rework it. And that's then what becomes the manifesto of cordon volcano McKayna. And so in my research and in my master's essay at the University of Virginia. What I did was like, you know, I really compared these two documents and looked for where the differences, you know what's showing up here. That's not showing up in mirrors document.

In other words, what glimpses can we get of the local culture of the corner McKayna itself. And one of the key differences that I find is there's an entire section that begins the manifesto that was the crime of the bosses the crimes of the bosses. And that exists in the mirrors document as well. But the crimes that are articulated are very slight differences. But the in the manifesto itself the final crime that is articulated is that the manifesto reads that it's a crime that the basic few elite Chile continue to use the country's wealth to support their privileges without giving a dignified life to a majority of Chileans. And this doesn't appear anywhere in the mirrors document. And it was something about this phrase of a dignified life that really just like cued my analytical senses that sort of raised the flags for me. And this is what then led me down the road that I'm on now, which is the road of looking at things like the church and the Pope led or movement, because the idea of dignity and the idea of a dignified life is a key discourse that's circulating in the church's pastoralism, right, coming out as we were speaking about earlier, the discourse of dignity is really present in the church's outreach efforts, but it's also present in this public or movement for housing. The idea of a dignified house as the end goal of their struggle is something that is, you know, rings out in the documents that we have access to and in the oral histories that we have.

And so that really, you know, made me think like, what is it then about Fukuna Makena, that is allowing this to appear here. And, you know, what can we then learn using this as our, you know, starting point and going out where and so that's when I decided to sort of take the story back all the way to 1957 and look at things like the church look at things like the Pope led or movement, but then also extend the story past the 1973 period, which is when the coup takes place which is, you know, in the historiography and is this, you know, hard line, this break in Chilean history that there's a before September 11 1973, and there's an after September 11 1973, and very few studies cross that line, especially studies with regards to the labor movement. The specifically the dignity thing is really, really interesting to me too, because I so I did an interview, like, oh God, like a month ago, sort of have lost track of time, but I did an interview with with an with an Amazon organizer. And one of the things that that was one of the things that was like one of the things that he brought up is that one of the things that like, we are fighting for his dignity and yeah, that doesn't think specifically I've been thinking about more because I think we talked about this a bit in the interview itself, but like, like, dignity as a demand is a thing that you that you see all of the time in, like, in, in, you know, if you are talking to a bunch of people, like, on the street in the middle of a movement, you will hear people talk about dignity. I mean, I think if I'm remembering this correctly, this is what this was one of the this is one of the big thing. This is one of the big demands like the modern Chilean protest movements, like that was one of their huge sort of focus. But it's also something like I have never like any I don't think I've ever seen like a Communist Party, say the word dignity, like, like, I think it happens. I don't know, every once in a while, like, maybe you see it if you get a document that's that's not produced by the sort of

ideological engines but is produced by, like, just a bunch of workers in a factory. But yeah, yeah, that's fascinating to me because like, yeah, because that it, I don't know, it seems like the structural for dignity. Both. Yeah, it has this thing as like a very specific discourse from the church, but it's also something that shows up in a lot of movements where you're not dealing with the kind of like ideological rigidity that you get from, I mean, you know, like the mirror, not the mirror is like that, you know, like that that's that's a very like, like this is a party, it has a line, it has a very sort of like, yeah, yeah. And it's fascinating to me that that yeah that you can see these differences where even when they have influence, the thing that gets is dignity. Yeah, I mean, there is, you know, I think that perhaps what has pushed studies of leftism, socialism and labor movement away from the idea of dignity as an analytic object is there is tension here, right. And dignity is a highly individualized concept. Yeah, but the solution for a dignified life for all Chileans, as per this document, were collective structural changes. And so there's this tension between a collective solution and an individual right. And so I think that that both explains why this hasn't necessarily been a focus of a lot of studies before, but it also you know it gets to the historiography itself, which was, you know, a large product of the history here. And so things like the Christian Democrats and things like the church were seen as the enemy of the popular unity coalition given the way that the, you know, the coup takes place. And things like that. And so anything that maybe had a whiff of Christian democracy or Christianity or things like that was seen as as antithetical or incompatible with the study of the left.

It also gets to the tension that you were doing a really great job of sort of unpacking which is this tension between the national leadership of these parties and the national union leadership, and then everyday workers on the ground. Right. And, you know, that's I think really where the strength and this was really the argument that I advanced in my master's thesis at UVA is that one of the central contradictions of the Iyende period is there were competing ideas of socialism. Yeah. So from the top down and from Iyende's view socialism was the traditional Soviet Unionesque approach. And so far as it was national economic planning, party hierarchies, things of that nature, right, discipline at the base and upward and upward planning from the top down. But what I think the manifesto and the history of the Queen McKenna helps us understand is that for everyday individuals, that their idea of socialism didn't have anything to do with state economic planning. It didn't have anything to do with expertise and technocrats and things of that nature. It had to do with the idea that like, I need sheets for my bed. I need food for my child. I need the ability to, you know, have enough sleep to be able to get up and go to the factory the next day right I need to be able to live a dignified life to be able to then, you know, carry out my work my obligation as a worker in the historical movement of socialism. So I think that this is really what this tension is then what allows for the sort of destabilization to take place as the opposition consolidates and ultimately destabilizes the Iyende government in 1973. I think this is a tension that like, I mean, I think there's there's different versions of it to that you see sort of across history, like one of the ways that it manifests is this battle between people who think socialism is about like is national like state national

destabilization and people who think socialism is about like direct control at the point of production by the people who are doing the work. But but I think also, yeah, the question of dignity is it's like, it's this it's like dignity is this expression like maximally bad for like if you're like, you know, if you're like a you're a material you're like a you're a historical materialist theoretician right it's the worst possible slogan because on the one hand it's like it's not materialist right like what is dignity there's no dignity has no class relation like what is that you know and it's it's it's simultaneously like it's not materials enough it's too reformist because like, Oh well you can give people dignity by just buying them off or like increasing wages or you can have a class compromise and that can give you dignity. But then simultaneously it's this thing that's too radical because the problem with dignity also is it like, yeah, I don't know like there's there's no guarantee that you're going to get dignity if like your factories controlled by the state. Like exactly. Yeah, and this is why like you see almost like the state is a boss, just by different name. Yeah, and and yeah, it's like it's why you see like the uprisings that happen. I mean really starting in 1957 in Hungary. But yeah, you see this is why like they're uprising in Czechoslovakia looks almost identical to like the uprising that happens in France is because they're both like there's you know you're like you the factory worker in a factory in Czechoslovakia and you the factory worker in the factory in France are dealing with essentially the same thing and so it's this kind of like, I don't know, it seems like it's this perfect sort of like cipher for all of these kind of political differences that that that manifests this this really old tension in what the workers movement is going to be that's been being fought out since 1830s.

And yeah, but I think that like if we as scholars and if we as intellectuals are really serious about when we say that we're going to study things from below, then I think that we have to take the workers at their word. Right. And so like, for example, I presented a version of my of my master's thesis at a, I studied, was it a program in Bologna for a summer. And so I was presenting this and to the sort of, you know, and the Italian leftists in the room really came, you know, came down on this question of, it sounds like what they're describing isn't socialism because they're much more interested in distribution and not interested in the point of production, which isn't socialist. And all I could say and all I could respond to this is like, that's what my subjects are using in the archive. And for me, it's far more productive to look for those slippages and look for those spaces in the archive, when they are saying something that may be different than what we understand it to be. And that's a lot more productive avenue for analysis. And that to me is really how we fulfill this obligation to study things from below is we have to actually take them at their word and understand and try to understand what that actually meant for them. Right. And what that meant on an everyday basis. And I think that there's a sort of like practical, like, organizational, like, like, you know, if you today want to do something like this, like, I think there's an imperative there too, which is that like, you actually do have to take seriously what people think and how that's different from the way that like you, the organizer are thinking about this, because those are things that don't overlap. And a lot of times that like, you know, and it is not enough to just be like, Well, these people want day to day what they actually want is socialism or like what

they actually want is the abolition of the classes. It was like, you have to like, believe them when they say that they want something. And, you know, and when you don't do that, and when you get these sort of disjuncts between like when you get these disjuncts between the sort of the sort of party bureaucracy on the top and what like people in the streets who are seizing factories want like, yeah, I think like things start to sort of come apart. Exactly. And I, you know, I think that that if we don't, you know, depart from the perspective of staying true to what the archive gives us, then there's only a risk that we're, you know, every historian, every scholar is going to inject their own interpretation onto a document, right? But the best way to sort of safeguard that is to, you know, stay true to what it's saying. And that, you know, the same goes for an activist and organizer, as foreign intellectual, right? Like if you're don't depart from the perspective of what your constituents or what your group is saying, you know, what they're really saying, the words that they're using to describe what they're demanding, then you're only ever going to just be trying to sort of fit the, you know, the square peg and the round hole. Yeah. And that can go really, really, really spectacularly broad. Exactly. And you know, and that is, you know, what then leads to, you know, in the case of the cordonous that will then lead to tensions that will really break out into the open in 1973 and early 1973, when the ideas to the same person that starts that polemic in 1972, by this point becomes finance minister in the administration and presents a plan to sort of devolve some of the factories that have been seized during the October crisis, right, back to their original

owners. And then this creates a huge problem, huge tension between the base between workers in these factories that had sort of sacrificed everything and put their lives literally put their lives on the line to seize the factories in the first place. And so then you have another sort of moment of mobilization of the cordonous across the city of Santiago in early 1973. That's very much an opposition to the government now. Can I ask a brief sort of framing question about this, which is that like, okay, so we talked about this in the interview we did with some modern Chilean activists. But like, what is the population of Santiago relative to like the population of the entirety of Chile at this point? Like how. Yeah, that is a great question that I don't actually have statistics like that I can rattle off my head. But you know, I mean, there's there is. It is a great, you know, Santiago is the most populous region, for sure, or rather the most populous city, and then sort of metropolitan region itself is very densely popular. And is it still like a like a pretty significant like population of the entire country, or is it less? It is a significant population of the whole country, for sure. But there is tension in this and this is kind of the reason why I always try to steer somewhat away from these types of questions because I'm sure this came up in your

conversation with Chilean activists is that, you know, there is the phrase that Santiago is not Chile. And so there is a tendency to rely on statistics of Santiago's population and the metropolitan region's population to say like, Oh, this is where the majority of people live. So if it happened in Santiago, then that must be true for all of Chile. And that just isn't the case, right? Chile is a huge country. It may be very narrow. This is very long north to south. And, you know, it is very distinct across the many regions of Chile. And so I very much am on the side of those that argue that Santiago is not Chile. Unfortunately, in the case of the Cordonis, the majority of them do exist in Santiago. That said, in Concepción, you know, another Chile further to the south of Santiago, there is one of the other cities that we know for sure, actually did have Cordonis that were moderately successful as well. In fact, there is, and now I'm completely forgetting her name. But there is a historian that has published a book about the Cordonis in Concepción. That's one of the few studies that sort of tries to look at Cordonis beyond Santiago itself. And a very well taken point on my part here that like, you know, a lot of our discussion today has been about Santiago, and so it's very much limited to...

This is a problem that you get a lot with, like, large urban movements. Like, I run this with Tiananmen all the time, where it's like, you know, okay, so Tiananmen, there's the big thing in Tiananmen. But this happens in like cities all over China, and there's just nothing. There's like almost nothing that has ever sort of like been written or has gotten out of what happened everywhere else in the country. And so you get this very myopic view of like what was happening that I think loses a lot of the sort of like... I mean, a lot of the diversity and a lot of the sort of... You get a reality that is shaped by the specific experience of one place, which is not the specific experience of every other place. Right, exactly. So like in the case of like Santiago and Cordonis, right, like the labor working class that's making up this is factory labor, as we were saying, at the sort of level of consumer products. Right, but say if you had a Cordon and say Valparaiso, the sort of coastal city, the port city, where you have a much different labor force, right, with dock workers, things like that, you're going to have a much different formation that's going to take place. And so as much as like my initial sort of attempt to understand the differences within the geography of Santiago, you know, I think was important. I always have to remind myself that like it's still just this one city, which is very different from the experience of a vast majority of Chileans.

I mean, it's definitely a moment in which, you know, there is still a very large rural population, for sure. And I guess like that, that brings me to this. So like, yeah, in terms of sort of... Okay, I guess that there's two directions here. One, I guess, is about what is the like, what is the rural population doing? Like, while this is going on, and the second one, well, I guess I guess we can start there. Yeah, I mean, as we sort of mentioned earlier, there isn't a graring reform that is happening, right, and you are having a labor movement that is picking up rapid steam in the countryside, right, and you are having land seizures that are taking place and picking up steam. And so that's a lot of what's going on in the countryside is both an increase in land seizures, an increasingly militant land seizures as that. But you're also having an increased unionization, right. So the labor code in Chile had a different set of regulations for rural labor than it did for urban or factory labor, right. And so one of the things that on the I&A period that we see is a sort of flourishing of organized labor in the countryside. So you are having a lot of party militants going out into the countryside, as well as labor leaders locally in the countryside that are organizing rural laborers.

So you are having mass union drives. Unfortunately, and I will be the first to admit that I am largely, you know, and this is again a consequence of like being an urban historian. I am largely ignorant of the inner dynamics, what is happening on in the countryside. Scholars like Florencia Mallon or Heidi Tinsman have both produced outstanding works on this question in terms of the relationship between land seizures and gender and indigeneity that is taking place in the countryside. So I guess, yeah, so, you know, okay, so yeah, we can't get into too much detail on this, but I would it be broadly like accurate to say that it's not true that you're dealing with a situation where there's a huge sort of divide in the level of mobilization organization between the city and rural regions. Like this, this isn't like a sort of like, like you're not dealing with like a like a Von Day peasant situation where you have this enormous sort of reactionary base in the countryside. Oh, right. Yeah, no, you definitely don't. Yeah, it's definitely not that. And, you know, there are attempts over the course of the end of years, you know, the mirror is one of the sort of fronts that this is playing out in. But even the cordones themselves right so like one of the initial rallies and sort of mobilizations of the Soviet Smaipu cordon is for the jailing and imprisonment of a series of rural militants and rural labors that in the area of Malipia.

There are some activists and workers that are jailed. And those the cordon actually marches into the city of Santiago into the downtown part of Santiago to demand their release. And this is like a disparate geography here that we're talking about. And so it is, you know, this is an instance in which you're trying to see these sort of links be both be made and strengthened between factory labor in cities and rural labor in the countryside. And I guess that brings me to the second point, which is like, OK, so there is a right in Chile, and it is not happy. Very much. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess one of the things I guess I wanted to talk about is so my impression about a lot of what is happening in 1973 has to do with the fact that she lays like truckers movement is really right wing. And that that has, well, OK, so part of that part of that is the CIA part of that is just this like a like part of it is the CIA's ability to keep striking truckers afloat. Yeah. And they're not working in on struck. Yeah. Part of it also is a consequence from this moment in October, right, in which the national business elite and national economic elite in Chile transform that trucker strike into the boss's strike.

Right. So you do have this alliance being formed and strengthened at that moment as well, which will, as you're referring to, in 1973, there is another trucker strike that takes place that is even more crippling in some senses than the initial one. Yeah. And then also, also, as I will mention literally every time, even though I don't know if I can say that on air, but the part that I can say on air is of, yeah, to their eternal ignominious nonglory. The AFL CIO is also heavily involved in that, which is fun and good. And yeah, AFL CIO, please stop overthrowing governments and helping neoliberalism. It's a very, it's a very interesting AFL CIO history in relation to is actually very fascinating because during the dictatorship, they will actually be on the other side and actually helping labor get back on its feet and as a key point of resistance. So they're in the late 1970s organizing a boycott of Chilean products, which actually is a key point of pressure on the dictatorship to begin allowing for a sort of new labor movement to begin emerging. Yeah, which that I get at some point, like, I don't think it can happen here, but I just did the podcast name. Hey, but yeah, I don't think I don't think it can be this time. But like, yeah, at some point, I do want to take a deeper dive into sort of like what the AFL CIO is doing through this period because they are like, they're all over like, yeah, there's a fascinating history. Yeah, like, I mean, like, you know, like what my last AFL CIO, what are you doing thing for this episode is I so the AFL CIO has a policy where like, they don't like, they don't associate with like, like state union federations.

And they make one exception for it. And it's the state union federation of the military dictatorship in South Korea, which is like, it's like, good job, guys, like, doing great here. This is going great. Yeah, but, but yeah, I guess can we can we get into sort of the, the, the, the crises that like are the crises that like precipitate the end of a day. Totally. Yeah, so by this point, you know, as I mentioned, by 1971, the opposition is largely disarticulated. You have the National Party, you have the sort of far right organization that would be translated. That would be translated as fatherland and freedom. That I translated as fatherland and freedom because I think it has a better, it conjures it better. Others will translate it as fatherland and liberty. But I'm a sucker for alliterative forms. And so that's the translation that I use. I also think it conjures more of the sort of fascistic elements, which is very much was a fascist organization. But you need a little bit too. Yes, no, I mean, a lot of, you know, Los Chicago boys will have ties to pot three or liver dad. And so they're having a rightist shock troops that are fomenting conflicts in the streets that are also setting off bombs that are crippling the power grid, especially much later in 1973.

But following that moment in 1971, when the popular unity government issues the alliance with the Christian Democrats, the Christian that pushes the Christian Democrats to begin forming an alliance with the National Party. And what happens then is that the left wing of the Christian Democrats splits from that party to form its own party of left Christians. But then the consequence of that is that that means that the more rightist elements of the Christian Democrat Party can consolidate their power and strengthen their ties with the national power. So that by, you know, late 1972, and very much by the March 1973 elections, which were sort of the key electoral moment that everyone was looking to at this moment, you have a solid alliance of the right. Now the coalition will win the March 1973 elections. And that is really the moment that scholars agree that the switches would have flipped for the opposition, and they realized that they can no longer defeat the popular unity coalition at the ballot box, and that they now need to use extra institutional means, right, and so they begin developing sort of deploying the full force of those means. And here is a point where the role of gender is very important, because a lot of what the right will do will be to mobilize the power of the power and symbol of women protesting.

As a way to delegitimate the end a government and to delegitimate key figures in the administration. So earlier, there is a key protest that happens, which is the March of angry pots. And this is a very traditional form of protest in Latin America, which the Casa Lazo right the sort of banging of pots and pans and protest. But the right organizes it to be largely carried out by women as a way to protest what is seen as a, you know, a lack of supply of basic food necessities for families in Chile, which, you know, we now know is a result of black market speculation and hoarding on a lot of the part of the sort of distribution centers controlled by the right. Nevertheless, they essentially use this symbol of women heads of households, marching in the streets in opposition to a and so that's one thing that happens. Later in 1973, they will sort of reuse this tactic and deploy women to protest in front of the houses of key military figures that are in the cabinet of I&A at this point. This will then forced the resignation of some of these figures from the I&A cabinet. And then one of the key figures that has been replaced in the cabinet is none other than Augusto Kineche. It will be welcomed into the cabinet and specifically will be welcome into the cabinet because he is seen as a strict constitutionalist in the Chilean military and is not seen as any sort of threat to what is going on.

Meanwhile, in late June of 1973, there is an attempted coup that takes place. And once you have a rogue regiment of the Chilean army deploying tanks in front of La Palomaida, the presidential palace in Santiago, that is put down. It's also one of the last moments that the Cordonis themselves will mobilize and all the Cordonis in Santiago will seize their territories. A wrecked barricade, it's cut off transportation to prevent any sort of large scale coup from taking place, essentially to try and isolate that regiment just within front of La Palomaida to allow for the wings of the armed forces that are still loyal to the president at this point to put that down. So that is put down. And then in between late June 1973 and September 11 1973 is what scholars specifically Peter Wynn referred to as a creeping coup begins to take place. And the creeping coup has a multifaceted strategy. As I mentioned earlier, there's the bombing of electrical grids. So you have, you know, increasing blackouts, instability, things of that nature, right, fear mongering in very real palpable senses. You also have a shake up amongst different members of different branches of the armed forces, which those that are loyal to the Constitution that are the constitutionalists are pushed out.

And as a result, then you have the coup plotters that are, you know, ready to essentially overthrow the government, achieve positions of authority in which that they can give orders. And this is a key factor. This may seem like a small factor, but the Chilean military had historically been trained in the Prussian model of military training, right. This was a very strict regimented hierarchical structure in which historically had been very loyal within that hierarchy. So it was important that the coup plotters would achieve positions of higher authority to be able to actually effectuate a coup, especially after the attempted coup fails in June. So on the morning of September 11 1973, you have hawker hunter jets that began bombing the presidential palace. And you have a deployment of military forces throughout the city to put down any sort of armed forces or any sort of resistance, right. And leading up to this moment, you had deployments of both the Chilean militarized police, the carabineros, which are actually functionally militarized. They're part of the armed forces in Chile. It's not just militarized in the sense of tactics and weaponry to raid factories in the search of arms, right, things of that nature.

They had this sort of daily occurrence taking place. And a consequence of that, right, is that then these forces know the weak spots in these factories, they know the capabilities of these factories and things like that. Cordero and Vakuna McKayna will actually be the place that will witness some of the fiercest fighting of what was referred to as the Battle of Santiago. You know, often when we talk about the Chilean coup, we talk about strictly as September 11 1973. The Battle of Santiago actually rages for a few days after September 11. It's not just a quick, you know, in and out mission. There is there is there are forms of resistance that take place. Vakuna McKayna is one of the places that this takes place. There are two Chilean historians, Mario Garcets and Sebastian Leyva that published a masterful, wonderful book that is all about this called the coup in La Leyva. And La Leyva was a historic population that was just to the west of the Vakuna McKayna factory. The workers of factories in Vakuna McKayna, specifically the Sumar textile mill that we mentioned earlier, will essentially lead a march, gathering other workers, saving those that they can, and essentially holding their ground for as long as they can in the population of La Leyva. In fact, I have some testimonies of workers and documents that I've uncovered. Particularly described the battle that raged there is as being like hell on earth.

They had helicopters firing from the sky. They had tanks surrounding them. So they were under fire from both the land and the air. And so, ultimately, then the government is overthrown, right. I end it's unclear to this day if I end a committed suicide if he was killed. We just we don't know we do know that he refused to leave the presidential palace we do know that he delivers one final address very famous address to over the radio of Chile. And then after that we we know that that his corpse appears in a lot of the materials that the military will put out military takes control of communication networks. Many of the communication networks and press networks were already controlled by the right. So it was very easy for them to gain access to these methods to sort of spread their message. And this is where things, you know, historically speaking, get very interesting in the difference between our sort of conventional wisdom and what actually took place or takes place.

Right, the original structure of the military who takes command was designed as a tripartite structure that would rotate amongst different branches of the armed forces to prevent precisely what happens with the figure of Augusto Pinochet taking power himself to prevent such a thing from happening. Right. Ultimately, though, over the course of the 1970s, you have Pinochet consolidating power. In fact, if you've ever seen the image of him that's sitting cross armed with the sunglasses on. That's like one of the most recognizable photos of him from this time. That photo is actually the actual original version of the photo. You have the full junta behind him taking a picture.

Yeah, yeah. And it's not so much even he did it, but it's that that photo just over time became so associated with him because it's such a jarring image of him sitting there. That it sort of functionally recreated the sort of purging that he takes, that he'll carry out essentially. You know, also what they will do immediately is that they will close the Congress, they will dissolve the coup, the National Labor Federation that we discussed earlier, and they will essentially dissolve the conciliation councils that oversaw any sort of collective bargaining, they will freeze any sort of petitions play goes from factory laborers. And they will begin to purge labor leaders across both the national spectrum of labor leadership as well as, you know, through the course of 1974 and well into 1975 will be again purging factory level leaderships. They will institutionalize torture. They will institutionalized forced disappearance.

And all of these things constitute how they are essentially able to hold on to power. In those early days there's a state of siege that is declared, which means that all civil liberties have essentially been suspended. And all of this is in the name of national security. And that's really the key thing. And so everything from the labor movement is shut down. And then it will begin to reemerge and that's really like where I think my research and my dissertation, another key intervention that I'm trying to make is that, you know, 1973 wasn't the end of the story. Yes, it was the end of the court on is induced to God us with a capital C and a capital I. But the idea of a territorial labor organization will reemerge in the late 1970s and in the 1980s when protests against the dictatorship began to flourish. And this is something that I mean, I guess this is projecting into the future.

But this is something that I was, I don't know, I've been thinking about and I don't quite know how to think about which is the connection between. Like, can we draw a line between the cronies, the sort of the protobocracy movement that eventually like through Pinochet's incompetence and their skill, like brings on the dictatorship and the sort of the really vibrant, like, I mean, really for the last like 20 years, like incredibly vibrant sort of like. I didn't protest, but I mean, just to sort of like, like, left to straight movements in Chile, because I mean, like, I don't know, like, I guess the impression that I got when I was talking to. Like the Chilean organizers was that, like, organized labor wasn't playing much of a role in this. And so, yeah, I guess I was wondering, like, how do we think about sort of this trajectory? And I know this is like 50 years, but. No, I mean, I mean, my dissertation is trying to sort of branch this full trajectory and it's a beautiful, wonderful question. And you're right, you know, the activists that you spoke to, that is a very common, commonly held view.

And it's a commonly held view for a couple of reasons. One is that one of the what is seen as one of the main protagonists in the pro democracy movements that take place in the 1980s are precisely those figures we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation, the pobladores, the pobladores are seen as the protagonists that protest the dictatorship, largely because they are right this is I'm not trying to say that they were not by any means they clearly were. And we have great studies of this Kathy Schneider's book shantytown protest and Pinochet's Chile is just a wonderful study of this. They were protagonists and the geographic space the site of the population is is where a lot of the protests are going down. But labor did play a part. And labor did play a key part. And this is part of my argument is that not only does labor play a part. Labor plays a key part in initiating the protests that begin in the early 1980s. In the late 1980s, the, they're people are certainly right that labor is no longer anything close to the power it was pre 1973, or even earlier in that decade, by any means. But in the late 1970s in the early 1980s, specifically in the space of a corner McKenna, and workers that are coming out of that tradition play incredibly instrumental in key roles. For example, there's a gentleman Manuel Bustos is a member of the Christian Democratic Party. He's a worker at the sumar textile mill in the cotton plant specifically.

He will at the time become president of Sumars cotton union. He will then go on to along with other labor leaders found the National Union coordinator or the CNS. He will become president of that. And he will become one of the key figures, along with other labor leaders that will initiate and lead to the pro democracy protests that begin in the early 1980s. So much so that he is at one point relegated, which this is a way one of the tactics the military used would be to relegate perceived agitators or provocateurs to different parts of the country, right out of say Santiago in the case of Bustos. So at one point he is relegated to the far north of the country. He's also exiled at a certain point. He's also jailed at a certain point. So even if we, you know, even if we don't look at the archival record in terms of what Bustos is saying what Bustos is doing, if we just look at what the military is doing to Bustos and to his colleagues in the CNS. Then we that should tell us that they perceive them as a legitimate threat, and that they perceive labor as a legitimate threat. And this really, you know, explains why you have a shift in the dictatorship's policies with regard to labor between the early 1970s, the late 1970s and 80s. So here I'm drawing a lot on the work of Rodrigo Araya, who is a scholar here in Chile, who has done great deal in showing that early in the dictatorship, you had a series of labor leaders who were opposed to I&A who were still labor right still pro labor, but anti leftist and anti I&A who take control of some of the key labor federations, namely the copper federation.

And begin to sort of designate themselves as the key figures of labor. And there's an attempt then by the dictatorship to essentially make a corporatist model of labor and integrate them and control them from the top down. Ultimately that backfires, because in doing so they, the military refuses to recognize some of these individuals and instill their own sort of puppets, if you will, their own labor leaders, which then causes resentment, which then pushes that group to an oppositional stance, which then allows for more connectives, tissue more connections to be made between that group, which would be loosely referred to as the group of 10, and individuals such as Bustos and others that are forming this national union coordinator. Those two groups will ultimately in the early 1980s, form a new group, which is the National Workers Command. And this action group is formed at a point in which Bustos himself is been exiled out of the country. So, you know, there's a debate to be had whether or not the formation of the command was an attempt to consolidate control away from the union coordinator and Bustos which was much more open to working with members of the left and the communists at the time, compared to say the group of 10, who, you know, were much more opposed to working with leftists. So that's really, you know, one of the big differences between labor in a pre 1973 period and a post 1973 period is there's still a struggle for labor rights protection of workers in unionism, right to strike right to collectively bargain. But what's missing in that post 1973 period, or rather, what has been murdered disappeared tortured executed by the dictatorship is a theory of power for unions

right, the sort of leftist influence, you know, you could call it Marxism, Linism, you can call it sort of a social democracy, but some theory of power that animated unionism and animated the labor movement in the pre 1973 period. That is, is essentially being purged over that course of the 1970s into the 1980s. There's these sort of national level developments which, you know, for me, Bustos is the straight line that connects the territory of Aquina McKenna to this national level. Within volcano McKenna itself, you have two groups that begin to emerge in the late 1970s 1980s. The first would be the solidarity group. And then the second would be Union Unity, and both of these new organizations emerge in the volcano McKenna and emerge specifically as territorial organizations of labor. So they are in opposition to what Bustos and others are trying to do, which is reform the sort of national labor hierarchy hierarchy bureaucratic or, you know, the bureaucratic, excuse me, approach to labor. They're specifically opposed to that and are arguing that labor should be organized territorially, because it allows a greater flexibility for the workers to respond to the new realities of a dictatorship, and specifically to the new realities of the new constitution that the dictatorship puts in place in 1980, as well as the new labor plan that they put in place through a series of laws in the late 1970s and early 1980s that severely curtail labor's ability to both organize.

So for example, the closed shop is essentially done away with. They also will limit the ability to strike. You could you can strike. However, after 30 days. The management can begin hiring scab labors, essentially, to break the strike. And if a strike lasted past 60 days, that the management was allowed to fire all striking workers because after 60 days they were considered to have walked off the job, and we're no employees. Also, one of the key, you know, innovations that the sort of technocratic advisors to the dictatorship as implements in the new labor code is the individual labor contract, right, which means that workers now are contracted which also then prevents any sort of national level union from bargaining on behalf of a sector wide or an industry wide contract. That is no longer allowed. And so it's for all of those reasons that you have these two groups begin to emerge and saying, No, we need to focus our efforts on the base. We need to focus them territorially. And for me, that is a straight line between the legacy of the cordonous and what we're seeing in the 1980s. And then the other sort of discursive straight line like if that's the material connection, the discursive straight line is that these organizations are using the discourse of dignity and dignified life in the extant source material that we have. And that makes sense. And I think that also but that also I guess partly explains why, like, why organized labor like ceases after that point, because I guess it is just sort of like the it's the sort of the the political shifts in what's happening in terms of the actual law. And then actually, I don't know, I guess I should ask about this. Like, is there also a sort of like, like, do you also get a sort of like, like another sort of

geographic shift in in how factories are distributed? Like through the use? Totally, you have essentially a deindustrialization, a policy of deindustrialization, and you have a total reversion to what we can think of as a 19th century economic export economy for Chile, right? So you have much more focus and investment into commodity exports, be it the fishing sector, the agricultural sector, things like that, right? So like, for example, if you go into your grocery store, and look at some of the fruits, specifically, say grapes, more often than not, they're going to come from Chile, especially in off seasons, right? The benefit of Chile being in the southern hemisphere for, say, consumers in the United States, is that then you have access to things that you wouldn't have access to otherwise. And so the dictatorship will prioritize this over the idea of industry. So you have a total reversion to importing goods and services that would have been produced nationally or locally. And so what this means then for a lot of the labor that happens in these zones, right, is you have mass layoffs. That's another innovation that the dictatorship and the Chicago boys will introduce as the ability for management to fire at a mass level and have that be legal. And so you have skyrocketing unemployment amongst factory level labor, such that like, yes, by the 1980s, have a refounding of a national labor confederation. Also, the acronym being the coup. The difference, however, is that it's under such a much different labor framework. It's also in a situation in which industrial labor is just not the main sector of labor. And in its founding statutes, if the coup pre 1973 was identified as the only national labor confederation, the statutes post 1973 and in the late 80s when it's reformed allows for there to be other national confederations.

And actually, this is one of the great debates that takes place between those organizations at the base in Brooklyn, McKenna, and these national level organizations is whether or not there should be one labor confederation or whether there should be many different labor confederations organized along ideological lines, which is essentially a code word for anti communism. Right. The idea of the ideological labor central was a way to exclude the left from gaining control and organized labor like in the pre 1973. And so by the dawn of 1990s, when democracy, or rather when democratic elections returned to Chile, you have labor in a much different position. And that's why you have this very weakening series, or period under the Concertacion government, the ruling coalition, the governing coalition that takes power in 1990 with Patricio a woman winning the presidency. It's just much different. And it's straight jacketed legally because the 1980 Constitution is still in place, right, it's still in place to this day. And that's actually then it's the period the concert has shown that is the period where you really have the most weakening of labor. It's also the period we have the most privatizations that are taking place. And I guess that's sort of like that. That's the thing that I guess gets you to one of the last sort of 20 years of like a student led protests and sort of ecological protest. I guess like the Puche have always been like fighting, but the way that Oh, from from Spanish.

Yeah, I mean, the only indigenous group that was never conquered by the Spanish. Yeah, but I guess like the the the axis on which the left is sort of like built on like through that period just shifts and that's I guess where you get the modern like the sort of modern like configuration of the left that's been in the streets and last sort of like You do and this is this is the reason why I sort of draw a hard line ending my study in 2010 for two reasons. One is that it's the 2010 is the first is the election of Pinaeira to the presidency Sebastian Pinaeira as his first term in 2010. And so it's the first moment that someone from the concert has shown is not elected as the president, they had governed sent from 1992 2010. So, that's really the what Peter when and other scholars have referred to as the Pina chip period, which extends all the way from 1973 to that moment is inclusive of the concert has shown government because of their adherence to the neoliberal economic model. That's when that period ends in 2010. Also a year later in 2011 is when the student protests. Yeah. And that's when you have a new cycle in Chile and social movements led by the students right prior, you know, post the return of democracy.

Again, the return of democratic elections in 1990 I think this is a very important distinction between a return to democracy and a return of democratic elections, which seems to be a confusion between not a confusion but a slippage between the form of democracy free and fair elections and the content of democracy. And so a lot of people were referred to 1990 as the return to of democracy, but I think that the past 30 years of governance in Chile shows us, especially the past two years of uprising and resistance against that model, show us that democracy has yet to fully return. And in that period, you know, in the 1990s on street protests were not seen as an affected effective measure as as as the way to protest, right, they obviously were effective in the period of dictatorship. But after that there are no there there's a not not necessarily discrediting of sorts right, but there's not the emphasis on them that there was during the dictatorship and certainly not that there was in the pre 1973 period. It's not until the students take to the streets in 2011 that you have this revival of the street protest as a as a viable form of resistance and protest in Chile. And you know, and it's no surprise then that in October 2019, when the the estate though the uprising takes place that it's students that were once again the vanguard of this. And, you know, when they're jumping turnstiles in the subways to in protest of proposed transportation hike. I was I was actually lucky enough to be living here in early 2020 pre pandemic. And a lot of people that I spoke to at protests and things like that were very quick to tell me that it was not 30 pesos, it's 30 years that they were protesting. And you know, and I guess that also like the left wing forces that took over the state, like it's it's it's the reason why a lot of that winds up sort of being about the Constitution.

Because yeah, you know, you still have this, you still have Pinochet's like. Yeah, I think constitution remains intact. Yeah, yeah. And God, I used to know the name of this is saying one of the other episodes I think I think like the guy who wrote it like was like an enormous Hayek fanboy and call it like the Constitution of Liberty or something. Yeah, it was it was a hands it was a hand selected team of very few individuals that was handpicked by the dictatorship to write the Constitution. You know, there was the there was a veneer of Democratic support in so far as the dictatorship in 1980 holds a referendum on whether or not to vote up down yes for no for the new Constitution. Right. The yes vote one. However, there is many sources at the time, as well as scholars that have claimed that that victory was not a valid victory by any means. But you know, right now, in the post 2019 period, a sort of effect of the uprising that took place as there is a constitutional convention that's taking place as we speak here in Santiago, that's headquartered in the former National Congress. During the dictatorship, the Congress has moved to the port city of our prezzo away from Santiago. But in the old National Congress building is where the new constitution provisions take place and actually two nights ago, there was a marathon voting session, in which a series of social rights were adopted into the constant into the text of the new Constitution. And these social rights included among other things, the right to unionization, the right to strike, the right to collectively bargain, the right for workers via unions to have a say in the

direction and business of an enterprise of a business itself to participate in management, essentially, but it also included things such as a right to health care, a publicly funded health care system, the right to social security, publicly funded, and it included a right to housing, which specifically included the phrase of a right to a dignified adequate home, as well as a right to the city that included the phrase that the right to the city is for the development of a dignified life. And that is kind of the epilogue to the story that we've been talking about this whole time. Now, you know, we don't know if the Constitution itself will be adopted. There's going to be an exit vote on September 4 of this year, in which Chileans under a regulatory vote will vote up or down on whether or not to adopt the new Constitution. So we can't say for certain if these rights will actually become rights of citizenship in Chile. But as of now, those rights are included in the text that will be voted on in September. And I think, I think that's a pretty good place to end it unless you have anything else that you want to know. I think that that's a really, you know, there's a really nice symmetry there. And, you know, I stayed up far too late the other night watching that vote. I think it went to like two in the morning. But it was a, you know, it was an exciting thing to see. And, you know, it is an exciting moment to be here in Chile, especially after having to be away for two years during during the pandemic. Yeah. Um, yeah, well, thank thank you so much for thank you so much for talking with us. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a it's been a real pleasure. You know, and I hope that my ramblings are sensible to your listeners, and that they're able to take something from it because I do think there's an

important importance in this history, especially, you know, this year is the 50 year anniversary of the cordonous emergence. And so it's a great time to sort of spread knowledge of this this moment in Chilean history. Yeah, and I guess, do you have anything like that you want to plug? I don't know how many things specifically. Yeah, no, still cranking away in the archives and working on my dissertation. So sadly, I don't have a book to plug or anything like that. But you know, give me a couple years and I'll have you back on when it comes out. Yeah. Um, yeah, well, in the meantime, you too can form a large section of industrial democracy in your workplace that involves taking it over. Yeah, go go do that. This this has been it could happen here. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram it happened here pod. Actually, by the time this is dropping, we will be a few days away from Margaret Killjoy's new series cool people who did cool stuff, which is rad. You can hear a lot of cool people doing cool things and dropping on May day on May 1. And after that, we have we have another show dropping which is which is which is Ghost Church about ghost church eat things. It's going to be good. It's Jamie Loftus.

Jamie Loftus doing Jamie Loftus things about a bunch of a bunch of the sort of like American ghost churches and people who talk to ghosts. So yeah, go listen to that. Have fun. Bye, everyone. Hello, it could welcome to it could happen here, the podcast that is my podcast now. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. And with me is the webby award winning Sophie Lichterman as our producer, as well as the actual host of the show. Who go without mentioning because I don't see any reason to include them. Can that just be the intro to every episode from now on? This is better than all of our regular intros. Oh, I loved that. Yeah, so what are we talking about today also on podcast Garrison Davis and Christopher Wong.

Hello. Yes. So today we are we are talking about the sort of long and incredibly tragic history of Japanese anarchism. Well, okay. Japanese anarchism before World War Two, because after World War Two was an entirely different story. And as much as I love people in construction helmets, just like beating the shit out of cops with large sticks. That story is extremely complicated. If you want to hear me talk more about that story a little bit, the third part of my Nobisuki Kishi episode has a lot of people in construction helmets with sticks. But, you know, this is, you know, the history of anarchism generally is the history of tragedy, but even by anarchist standards, the history of Japanese anarchism is just an absolute welter of heartbreak and loss. Out of all of the people that we're going to talk about today, exactly one of the non-Russian anarchists is going to live to see the end of World War Two, and he's Korean. Every single other person is either going to be executed by the state, assassinated, killed themselves, or drink themselves to death. So this is an extremely bleak story in a lot of ways.

Good to have one of those optimistic episodes every once in a while. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think as long as no one gets thrown down a well. Well, okay, it's unclear whether anyone got thrown down a well. I'm sorry, I'm skipping ahead, and I don't actually know. We will get to the wells. Yeah, I also, okay, so there's a lot of Japanese anarchists, and we don't have that much time, so if you're like in a Sawa Sakataro stand, I'm sorry, we can't cover all of them. The other thing about the history of anarchism in Japan that is weird is that the beginning of the story predates there actually being anarchists in Japan, or specifically there being Japanese anarchists. There's this huge degree of sort of like cultural exchange and influence running between Japan and Russia by virtue of the fact that they are, you know, next to each other.

And especially in the 1870s and 1880s, this is one of the sort of, this is important again because Russia in this period is like, this is like the hotbed of anarchism, right? Like they're killing the Tsar, they're doing all the things, they're going to the countryside, the Russian anarchists are sort of on the move. And a lot of things Russian anarchists wind up like in Japan. Bakuden is there for like, he has some extremely complicated arrangement, he like sneaks on a boat and he like gets out and he beats one of the sort of like samurai, like Meiji restoration revolutionaries and they chat for a bit and then he leaves. So he, you know, Bakunin's not. This is when he was escaping Siberia? Yeah, I think, yeah, he's escaping Siberia and then he somehow convinces like the American embassy or something to like let him on a boat to Japan. It's a very weird story.

It's like all things Bakunin are, but the most prominent anarchist to spend time in Japan is Lev Mechnikov. Mechnikov is like, he's like a pretty big deal in Russian revolutionary circles. Like he's considered like, okay, so the big sort of like anarchists left when moving to Japan is the populist, right? It's called the Robendix. And there's two big figures in it. There's Nikolay Chernachevsky and this guy, Lev Mechnikov. You know, he's Mechnikov, like he knows everyone. He's friends with just like every single person and we will get to more of his friends later.

But like he's a counterpart of Bakunin. He has a very similar career to Bakunin in a lot of ways where he just sort of like runs around, especially like Eastern Europe. He's like runs around the world being in revolutions, which is good work if you can get it. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty exciting and he doesn't die, which is sort of incredible. Love that for him. So he's still around? Yeah, this is very sad. You know, look, this is the goal of Russian Cosmism.

No, is it actually Cosmism? I have no idea. Yeah, I think it's Cosmism. The cosmonaut people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they would bring back all the dead people. Oh, no, I don't know about this. I only know a weird thing where there was like anarchist cosmonauts in like 1920s Russia.

Yeah, yeah. So their whole thing was like... Okay, so they thought that the anarchists had like been defeated in the revolution because they were insufficiently committed to bringing the dead back to life. And that, you know, their whole thing was like they're some of the people who were involved in like the Soviet like rocket programs. And they're doing this because they want to colonize the moon and Mars so they can fit all of the dead proletariat they're going to bring back to life. Wait, are you telling the truth to me? Yeah, this is all true. This is all true.

This is amazing. I've been... Incredible. I've been trying to fight for the anarchist necromancer league for so long, which our slogan is raise the dead to fight like hell for the living. That's incredible. But yeah, no, like the Russian Cosmism, it's a weird one, Cosmism. It's like a weird mix of like natural philosophy quote unquote, which is just like different forms of like folk magic or whatever and like religion and spiritual stuff. But also it's like a predecessor to like the modern transhumanism.

It's an interesting little collection of ideas that was popular at like the very beginning of the 20th century. It's part of my thesis that no one normal has ever been involved in the production of a rocket. Like Jack Parsons, Cosmists are like on the Soviet and then there's just like the Nazis and it's like, oh, zero normal people. I have no counter argument. Because there was the guy who did all the multi-stage rocketry, the nihilist who killed the czar, who built the bomb that killed the czar. He like, when I talk about this in my podcast, you probably already listened to this. You have a podcast. Whoa.

Yeah, I really just, I'm here. I'm going to plug this every like five minutes on this episode. You can learn about the bomb maker who killed the czar and his, what he brought to the world in terms of rocketry and manned rocket travel. Anyway, please continue. On what show, Margaret? Well, okay. Is this podcast that I'm recording on right now? When does it come out?

When are you listening to it, dear readers? Okay, well, then next Monday, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff, which is my podcast. Yeah, I'm so good at my job. Anyway, my job is to interrupt you with, please tell me more about the Cosmis and how they relate to Japan. The Cosmis actually has nothing to do with this, unfortunately. Yeah, but Lev Mechnikov, he also fights with Garibaldi to reunify Italy. He's just all over the place. He's an interesting guy because, okay, so there's a lot of foreigners who go to Japan, but he makes Japanese friends and learns Japanese before he goes there,

makes him utterly different than 99% of the people who are Westerners who are writing about Japan this period, who don't speak very good Japanese and never leave their houses. So nothing has changed? Yeah, except weirdly, this one guy's doing better. Oh, no, I mean, nothing has changed from now. Oh, yeah. Where no Westerners actually, they just pretend to care about Japan. Yeah, it's time.

That's one of the running themes of these two episodes is like, there's a lot of stuff about this, about anarchism and about Japan, just like, don't change. But, you know, one of the things that Mechnikov winds up doing is he winds up spending two years teaching at this thing called the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. And this has a bunch of major impacts, one of which is on Mechnikov himself, who, he becomes heavily influenced by the major restoration, which he thinks of as like this, like, he looks at this as like a revolution, like this is an anti-Fedal revolution, this is the most successful social revolution of the 19th century, he thinks that it's like destroyed the sort of stratified class system and creates this like possibility of like mass social mobility for commoners. And, okay, so this is like not the best interpretation of what's going on with the major restoration,

where, I mean, so the major restoration sort of ends the field system in Japan. It does a lot of other bad things. What is it? Like, I don't know that much about this. Yeah, yeah. So maybe the audience doesn't either. Okay, so the major restoration is a thing that happens where, so Japan has been ruled by a shogun for like a long time. And the shogun runs a field system, it's very elaborate, everyone has only sort of made it hierarchical cast.

But eventually, there's this kind of, like, there's this sort of, it's complicated, it's this kind of nationalist movements by a bunch of, like a bunch of the samurai clans, who, this is happening in the 1860s, and they mobilized to overthrow like the shogunate and basically like restore the emperor to power. The emperor has been like a puppet head, like figurehead guy for like 200 years. And they bring him back to power, because I'm a hack of a fraud and a fraud, I'm forgetting their exact slogan. It's something like, it's revere the emperor, and I can't remember what the other part of the slogan is. It's very similar to the box rebellion slogan. It's this sort of, I mean, there's a lot of things going on here, it's kind of a reaction to, so in the 1860s,

like Japan is sort of forcibly opened to the world by, like, Kabadar Perry showing up with a bunch of like the largest gunboats anyone has ever seen. And this like, this forces Japan to sort of like abandon its isolationist positions. And yeah, and you know, and you get this sort of class of intellectuals who are looking at this and they're going like, okay, if we don't do something like we're going to get colonized. And so they do, and the thing that they do is that they do this revolution and they overthrow, they overthrow the Shogunate. There's all this like, there's like a trillion anime set in this period because there's like, there's like, there are squads of samurai swordsmen like running around like stabbing each other in Tokyo with like Kyoto and like, it's wild. It is a time.

And this sort of, this is what sort of consolidates the modern Japanese nation state. You know, I've talked about this in my Kishi episodes, like it sets off this wave of colonialism. They like, they conquer Hokkaido, they conquer the Ryoku Islands. They do all this horrible colonialism stuff, but there's, there's, it's really unclear what the revolution is actually going to mean because like there has been a revolution, right? Like the sort of like feudal like class system has been swept away. There's all of this sort of, there's all this, this energy in the masses. There's like one of the things that Meshokov finds is like, so he gets to Japan in like, in like the 18th, 1870s.

And he's seeing like the first signs of discontentment with the sort of the major restoration, which is the restoration of the emperor. Because there's a lot of people who look at this and were like, oh, hey, we're going to, we finally like defeated the sort of oligarch class that like rules all of us. And then there's a new oligarch class and they're like, wait, hold on. And so there's like, there's a series of like ex samurai rebellions. There's this whole sort of like, like he, like Meshokov literally like gets there in the middle of an uprising. And he's just like industries. He has no idea what's going on because the guy he's been talking to winds up being in the uprising. And, you know, so he gets there. And what he sees also is he sees upheaval, but he sees this enormous network of like cooperative movements.

He sees a bunch of mutual aid groups. He sees like villages who are like pooling all of the resources like and send kids to like school in the cities. He sees like, he sees the government failing to provide services to people because there's an uprising going on and also the government. And so people are sort of people taking care of each other. And this has an enormous influence on him. And he starts to, you know, like the way he thinks about anarchism changes. He sees like, he starts to think about sort of like anarchism as cooperation, like mutual cooperation between people. Like mutual aid enters this sort of lexicon and. Okay, so.

There's a there's a modern historian named. Shoko no she who writes this book called anarchist modern anarchist modernity cooperatism. Wait, hold on. Yeah, anarchist modernity cooperatism and Japanese Russian intellectual relations in modern Japan. And he makes the argument basically like catchy title. Yeah, there's there's two. It's a better title than I'm reading it because there's there's two. There's like a heading and like a subheading straight because I'm a clown. But he's making the argument that this this is like this is actually like something that's very important in the development of narco communism.

Because this guy, he knows everyone like the anarchist geographer like at least Rick loose. I can't pronounce his name. I think it's reclue reclue. Yeah, I think so, but I can't not with a gun to my head. I'm not sure. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, like they're roommates. Like they're like they live together for like a while and like he writes the Japan entry and like the encyclopedia. He's friends with Kropotkin.

And after after his his sort of like thought starts to change about mutual aid, you start to see a lot of the same stuff. Like, you know, like this is like he's there before Kropotkin writes mutual aid. And then you see you see all the sort of mutual aid stuff popping up Kropotkin. And I don't know how seriously to take the argument that like you're sort of seeing like that that a lot of this theory is sort of a rebound of reflection of what they were seeing in Japanese society. But it's interesting. And I think I should mention it because I don't know, like there's there's this whole sort of intellectual sphere of people who were like associated with anarchism. The everything that happens in this period is that like, um, so there's a bunch of like. Meshchikov like has a bunch of friends in Russia who all got arrested because they were in like terrorist groups.

And he he's able to get like a whole bunch of these people to like he's able to get them like exiled and their exile is they go to Japan, they teach with him. And so suddenly there's like there's like a bunch of people who are now like these people, these populists are like writing stories about like the stuff they were doing and like all the people who are still fighting in Russia. So there's suddenly there's all these people who are like reading about the Russian populists in Japan. And you know, and this is there's there's this kind of like anarchist cultural sphere that exists in Japan, like before there's anarchists. Like the other Japanese anarchists. Yeah, yeah. For Japanese anarchists, they'll be like one like, yeah, there's like a couple of Russian anarchists and like, yeah, but like Meshchikov leaves one. But the other big thing with this is Tolstoy, who is like Tolstoy in like the 1880s, 1890s, like early 1900s.

He's like he's the like he I think he's like the most translated author like on earth in Japan. And it's they're not just reading his like literary work. They're reading his like theology is political work, which is important because Tolstoy is like a Christian anarcho pacifist, right? Yeah. And this influences this there's this kind of like there's there's a lot of sort of like left wing anti imperial strains of Christianity that pop up in Japan. And this is one of the reasons for it because everyone's reading Tolstoy. And so you get the seeds of this anarchist movements that eventually sprout into a man named Oh God, this guy's name is actually hard. Kotoku Shusui, I'm butchering the last part of it, I'm sorry, my Japanese does not extend to this many years and eyes in a row.

But Kotoku, Kotoku, he's an interesting guy because so he hasn't. So he has like a whole career before he becomes an anarchist. He's like he's a very print my journalist intellectual like he writes a newspaper is very famous everyone reads it. And he's the heir apparent to this other like very famous sort of liberal journalist who again because Lev Meshnikov knows literally everyone was like a friend of Lev Meshnikov. I don't know. He just knows every single person on earth. It's incredible. I know that rules goals, you know.

Yeah. Unless he ever turned if you ever snitched to be terrible. Apparently never did. So yeah, I mean still around. So I mean, he still could snitch. He's still around. He still has the chance. Oh, I guess everyone who was snitched on is dead.

So makes it harder. The ethics get blurry area. Yeah. So Kotoku is like he's kind of like a standard livable, but he gets involved with the anti war movements. Specifically, this is the the anti. Well, it does anti a lot of wars because Japan is fighting an enormous series of wars in like the early 1900s. Yeah, they kicked Russia's ass at that point. Yeah.

Yeah. They fight Japan. Fight Japan. Sorry. They fight China. Yeah. Do you know who else is fighting China? I don't know.

I'm afraid to know. The products and services that support the show. Are we supported by American nationalism? Apparently. Yes. Question mark. And we're back with the first rush, the first actual Japanese anarchist. So in 1900, Kotoku writes this book called Imperialism Monster of the 20th century, which is like.

That is a better title. Good title. Yeah. Yeah. Great title. He rules. And this is significant for a number of reasons. One of which is that like this is one of the first major like books about imperialism.

There are some other Western writers who stuff like predates this, but like this is 1900. This is before Lenin has written about imperialism. This is before like Hobson. This is before Luxembourg. And I'm just going to read a little bit from it because it rules. So from the first section, it's called Imperialism, a wildfire in an open field. Imperialism spreads like a wildfire in an open field. All nations bow down to worship this new God, sing hymns to praise it, and have created a cult to pay it adoration.

Look at the world that surrounds us. In England, both governments and citizens have become fervent acolytes of imperialism. In Germany, the war-loving emperor never loses a chance to extol his virtues. As for Russia, the regime has long practiced a policy of imperialism. France, Austria, and Italy are all delighted to join the fray. Even a young country like the United States has recently shown its eagerness to master this new skill. And finally, this trend has reached Japan. Ever since our great victory in the Sino-Japanese War, Japanese of all classes burn with fervor to join the race for an empire like a wild horse freed from its harness.

So, you know, the one thing that he got incorrect as I understand by spending a lot of time on Twitter is that actually only the United States is imperialist and any actions. Especially by Russia, I was very confused that he included Russia as the... I can't finish this sentence on this straight face. What? Russia would be... Also, how could it be imperialism if Lenin hadn't yet defined the term for it? Oh, this is okay. This is the whole thing. Okay, so Kotoko gets like a lot of shit from this book. For like, from later on, for Japanese leftists, because they're like, he's insufficiently materialist. He's like, yeah, he is mostly just taught.

Like, the book's mostly about like how patriotism and nationalism, like, create this stuff. It doesn't look at economics much, but like... Oh, no. Okay, there's a whole problem here, which is that if you try to apply Lenin's definition of imperialism to Japan, it doesn't work. Because like, when Japan is invading China, they have like, I think it's like 50 total factories. Yeah. Everything is completely backwards. Yeah.

Like, it's like... Yeah, and like, you know, like Lenin's imperialism is supposed to be like the highest stage of capitalism. But then you go to Japan, Japan's like, barely started the decision to capitalism. Like, Lenin's imperialism is supposed to be about like, debt exports, right? But Japan is just conquering countries while they're just literally like, borrowing. Yeah. Massively from other states to fund their industrial relations. Everything does, nothing, none of it works.

And Kotoko gets like, again, he gets like a lot of shit for this, but it's like, no, he's right. Like, Lenin is wrong. Lenin's analysis, if you try to apply it to Japan, does not work. And Kotoko does. So, you know. Imagine that. Yeah. And, you know, Kotoko, I think, like, he's keyed into things that the Marxists aren't like, specifically about like, about the power of nationalism.

Because, you know, I mean, like, obviously, if you go a bit later, it's like, well, all of these people who are like, oh, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. And then all of their parties vote to go to war with each other in World War I. Like, you know, okay. Kotoko, I think, like, gets this because his relationship to socialism and anti-imperialism are, like, backwards from the Marxists, right? Where the Marxists arrive at anti-imperialism, like, from their Marxism. But Kotoko, like, becomes a socialist because he sees it as a way to stop wars. Like, that's like his big thing, is he's in the anti-war movement even once his wars have stopped. That's the right direction to do shit.

You should do shit because, like, you don't pick the label because what's cool. You pick, you figure out what you believe and then you pick the label that fits what you believe and sort of the other way around, you know? Yeah. And, you know, it means that he's less sort of, like, he's less dogmatic than, like, his successors. Because, you know, I mean, because he's working off of his actual principles versus sort of, like, this, like, dictation stuff. Like, he's, in 1903, he publishes the Essence of Socialism, which is, like, this is, like, the first, like, socialist, like, book written by a Japanese person. It's, like, one of the, I think there's maybe, like, one or two other ones that are before him. This is, like, the first big one. Okay.

And he, so he's also, like, he's involved in founding the Japanese Socialist Party. And then he gets, like, arrested and sent to the U.S. And something happens when he's in the U- I don't know. There's, I've seen, like, cis conflicting accounts. Like, I've seen accounts that say he joins, he joins the IWW. I don't know. I've seen other people say he lived in a commune.

Like, he definitely read Karpakken. He, like, becomes an anarchist. Let's decide he did all of these things. Yeah. He lived in a commune and tried to organize the commune with the IWW. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, he, this guy is enormously influential in the history of Japanese left. Like, he is the guy, when he comes back in 1906, he's the guy who introduces the concept of the general strike to Japan.

Yeah. Like, he's the first guy to write about it. He's very cool. He also, like, yeah, you know, he starts pushing this and start this. He starts pushing anarchism and sort of direct action. This is, like, instead of, like, doing parliamentary stuff. And he translates, like, Karpakken's work in Japanese. He translates, like, the Communist Manifesto.

He does labor organizing. He's sort of, like, all over the place. And, you know, like, labor and the anti-war movement are, like, two of the, like, big currents that are producing anarchists. But the other, like, big current that's making anarchists is periodist feminism. Because, okay, so I... Stop me if this isn't any way surprising, but the late 1800s and early 1900s are not a time to be a woman in Japan. What? Really?

Yeah. It's not a good time, like, anywhere. But Japan... Not even now, it's not the best. Yeah, I mean, it could be improved. I will say, it's better than this. This is, like... Sure.

Like, the major regime is sort of, like, consolidating itself. As it's consolidating itself, it gets, like, progressively more, like, patriarchal, misogynist. I'm going to read from the book, Reflections on the Way to the Gallows, which is a great book. That's also a good title. It's a collection of... Yeah, well, so that's a... God, I forget... One of the Japanese anarchists who's about to die, like, that's the title of, like, a piece that she wrote.

And they... This book is like a collection of Japanese feminist writings, mostly from people who get killed by the state, because that's what happens when you're a feminist in Japan in this period. Yeah, it's bad. Okay, so I'm going to read the quote from this. In 1892, the government forbade women to make political speeches. And in 1890, made it illegal for women to participate in political activities whatsoever. Women were forbidden to even listen to political speeches. The police security regulations of 1900 reinforced these strictures.

Article 5 of the regulations prohibited women from forming any political organization whatsoever. Jesus. Yeah, it's like, that's like a level of restriction that, like... I'm not sure I've ever seen, like, that explicit level of, no, you can't do this? Yeah, I feel like it's usually implicit in a lot of Western countries. Yeah. And then also, like, one of the things that really sticks out to me about that is that I'm so used to thinking about... I think people tend to think about, like, this, like, linear progress model where, like, you go back really far,

like, all women in all other oppressed categories had it terrible and then just slowly gets better or whatever. But if they're passing these laws in 1900, there's an implicit, it was a little better before 1900. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it very specifically gets worse. Yeah. So one of the things with the 1898 legal code is that it literally just legally enshrines, like, patriarchal control of the households. And this is a massive reactionary shift in sort of Japanese, like, domestic and political culture. Like, that kind of patriarchal control of the household was, like, a thing in some samurai families, but, like, it wasn't a thing for...

There's a huge number of popular classes that didn't exist. And they just legislated into existence. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the things that they're applying here, like, women need consent of their father to marry, is for this another quote from the book. One of the provisions held that, quote, cripples and disabled persons and wives cannot undertake any legal action. Fucking hell, uh-huh. Yeah, so this is an incredibly reactionary state. And there's also, like, there's a lot of sex trafficking going on, like, actual, like, there's a lot of people just being grabbed off the street.

Uh-huh. It is a disaster, and it is into this patriarchal mess that, like, several generations of Japanese and American feminists step into. The most famous of the first round is Kano Asugako, who's... She's a socialist author who converts to... Well, she's originally socialist and she converts to anarchism, which is, like, a thing that happens a lot in this period. And she's working as a journalist. And, you know, she's, like, she's a very sort of controversial figure. The government, like, hates her.

So she meets Kotaku and they have an affair. And this is, like, one of the other things that keeps happening here is there's a lot of, like, free love stuff going around the Japanese anarchist circle at this time. And this has two consequences. One is a lot of men use it to be really shitty. And two means there is, like, there is a... Again, this is the big, like, nothing has ever changed in the anarchist movement. There are so many relationship drama things. Nothing has changed.

Time was the flat circle. Like, there are two different times when the most famous Japanese anarchist man and the most famous Japanese anarchist woman wind up in a relationship. It ends with them splitting the movement and them both dying in prison. Like, this happens twice. That exact sequence happens twice. It's nuts. It's... Like, they're just doing polycule shit.

Like, it's... They just need better mediators. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is a thing with, like, the Japanese... The Japanese anarchist movement, like, has a huge feminist wing. But, like, the men still suck. Like, they just keep being bad. And so, you know, the other thing about this is that...

Kanosugako is, like, enormously more militant than, like, almost any other anarchist that's alive in Japan at this point. And so, in 1910, she gets involved with the plan to assassinate the emperor. And this becomes known as the High Trees and Incidents. And the state, like, gets wind of this. They arrest her. They arrest Kotaku. And they arrest, like, 22 other... 22...

Yeah, 22 other anarchists. Now, like... Five of these people are, like, even tangentially involved in this plot. Um... But they... This is... Okay, so I... I can't say that the Japanese government only does this to anarchists because they do this to fascists, like, once. But, like, they do this thing where...

Okay, so they have a bunch of people that they want to execute, right? So they find one person who's, like, an ideological figure, and they're, like, okay, you're now in the middle of this, and you're the link between, like, this group and this other group who want to kill and this other group who want to kill and this other group who want to kill. And so, they convict, uh... Like, Chuseo, um... And, uh, Kanosaga-ku, like, they all get convicted and they all get executed. Yeah, and so this case is also interesting because there's a bunch of people who the state, like, wanted to kill, but they couldn't because they'd already arrested...

Like, this is, like, two years after, like, a mass arrest of, like, half of the Japanese anarchist movement. And so they have all these people who are in prison, and it's, like... Even by, like, the standards of the Japanese state, it's, like, okay, how are we going to convict all of these people who have been in prison for two years of trying to... of, like, being a part of this plot to kill the emperor that was, like, organized outside of the jail? Uh-huh. And so this is the thing that saves, like, a huge portion of the Japanese anarchist movements that saves it from literally... So, like, this...

The hydrogen incident kills, like, most of the famous anarchists in Japan, but it leaves, like, a couple alive, and that's why they're alive because they were all in prison. Oh, god. Wait, how are they going to kill the emperor? Uh, the plot didn't get very far. I think they were trying to use a bomb, but the police got wind of it, like, very, very early. Not classic. So they never really got much, like, past the planning stage.

Okay. This is a shame. Yeah, yeah. And do you know what else never gets very far past the planning stage when they're trying to assassinate the emperor of Japan? Uh, is it the ads? Because they don't know how to do direct action because they're too enmeshed in capitalism? That is actually exactly what we were talking about, Margaret.

Thank you so much. And we're back. I was genuinely trying to see if I could, like, think of a company that had, like, tried to kill the Japanese emperor, and I couldn't think of one. And I was like, hmm, this says something about society. This does. This is a real solid critique we have here. I really hope that, uh, ten years from now, this all seems very dated.

Like, of course, someone major company has tried to. Never mind. Please continue. One can dream. So Kanosugaku is dead. Kotaku is also dead. And this means that it's time for, sort of, like, another generation of anarchists to try to fill in the gaps.

Wait, so they're executed? Yeah, yeah, they're dead. Like, they just die. They kill like 22 of the anarchists or something. And, I mean, this is a huge purge. They wind up executing just like, there's just like a sympathetic Buddhist priest that's executed. When is this?

This is 1911. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, this is 1911. And actually, there's another interesting thing about this. Kanosugaku becomes the first woman ever executed by the Japanese state. She will not be the last. Like, oh boy.

Feminist icon. Yeah, I mean, equal rights, equal fights. There's another, like, very influential narcofeminist who's emerged just slightly after, like, in like, 1914, 1915, is Ito Noe. She's an egoist anarchist who eventually, like- Yes! Finally! Finally, we bring it up!

That's all I have to say, but that's like almost all I have to say. She takes over the editorial position of this magazine called Blue Stocking Magazine, which is like Japan's- I think this is like the most important feminist magazine in Japan, and she takes over the editorial staff about it. And her work is really interesting in a lot of ways, because it just straight up is contemporary feminism in a way that a lot of the stuff in this period isn't. If you go and read the arguments she's having, she's arguing that sex work should be legal and everyone should be able to get abortions because women should have autonomy over their

bodies. Yeah! It's like- You always keep winning. Well, sometimes. Well, this is not going to end well for her. Well, yeah. But you know what?

That is also a trend. It doesn't end well for any of us on a long enough timeline. You know, like, all that matters is the time- That's true, but this is particularly bad. Okay, fine. Yeah. So, yeah, she's able to do this for like a year, and the Japanese state looks at this and is like, absolutely not, and shuts the magazine down.

And so she gets forced to move on to other things. And the other thing she moves on to is being extremely heavily involved in the free love movement. Of course, yeah. Yeah. But also, and this is the thing that's interesting about this sort of period of Japanese anarchism is that the egoists are all also syndicalists. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so she's like heavily involved in labor organizing. And this is how she comes into contact with her partner who she's like, cheating on her imprisoned husband who will later form the Japanese Communist Party. Oh, wow. That is, that's a lot of stuff happening. There's so much beef.

This is so soggy. It's incredible. There's, there's, this, like, we haven't even gotten to the wild part of this relationship yet. Okay. Which is so, so, okay. So she comes into contact with her partner or person who will become her partner, Osaki Sakai, who is like dating another very famous Japanese narcofeminist who she stabs him in the neck over the fact that he's in multiple relationships at once.

So this wasn't really a free love situation from her point of view. Yeah. This is the thing that keeps happening with free love of this period. It's like, you got to like, you got to lay down, you got to make sure everyone's okay with everything. They sure seem to say the right things in theory, but then in practice they sure do fall apart. Huh? Isn't that funny?

Yeah. And this too divides the Japanese anarchist movement. But did she win? Did she succeed? Did she kill him? Or did he survive the next time? No, he survived. Okay.

Yeah. I'm just, I have, there's a special place in my heart for slit, slit throats of patriarchal men. Yeah. Anyway. Osugi Sakai is also very heavily involved in labor organizing and he, he, he's one of the guys who like turns anarchist labor into like a serious political force, which is.

Maybe it's good that they survived. Yeah. Like it's probably not good, but all of the guys in this story like suck except, do I haven't except here? What about the Korean guy who, um, oh yeah, we got to him. Yeah. He's, he's. I kind of liked him.

I think he's actually fine. Yeah. I think maybe the end of his story gets weird. Yeah. We'll, we'll get to that in a second. But yeah. So Osugi Sakai has like, he has this like fusion of like egoism and syndicalism where like the individual ego will be liberated through like collective action, but the goal

of the workers movement is not to just like end poverty. It's to like liberate the individual and give themselves development. And he's also this like incredibly fierce, like, like one of his big thing is that like he does not want intellectuals anywhere in the workers movement, like does not go into this. No, absolutely not. Yeah. And this is because like, again, he's been around for ages.

Like he becomes an anarchist around the time when, um, Kotaku doesn't like that. You know, six. So he's been like around and he's one of the guys who survives the high trees and incident because he was already in prison. Um, okay. All right. And so he, like, he, like, he's one of the people who like keeps the sort of flame of anarchism alive after like their pressure in 1911.

But unfortunately for him, um, and for Ito Noe, they get caught up in the, the Kanto earthquake of 1923, which is this like, this earthquake between Yokohama and Tokyo alone kills 200,000 people. It is like, it is like, it is one of the worst, like national disasters. It's really bad. And it immediately gets worse. The state wouldn't use a natural disaster to try and further its aims through extra legal means.

Yeah. Uh, so. Okay. I'm going to start with one of the ways that the genocide of Korean people in Japan at this time starts is, so there's a bunch of, uh, Korean workers at a long-tree union that's been organized by this built and like left his union guy named Yamaguchi Sakai. And okay. So like they're in this long-tree union, there's this disaster.

They start doing mutual aid. They start going out. They start taking care of survivors or giving people food, but you know, they're like waving red flags and stuff. And the Japanese police lose their minds and are like, oh my God, they're the Koreans are doing socialism and they just start killing them. And they, there's this whole thing about like, there's these rumors start that like Koreans are raping Japanese women and it turns into this thing about like looting and then like

Korean male contents are supposed to be like overrunning police stations and the Lynch mobs, the Lynch mobs are mostly targeting Koreans, but they're also like if you're Chinese, if you're from Ryokyu Islands, like they're killing you too. They kill 2000 Koreans in Tokyo and another 2000 in Yokohama. And like 2000 Koreans in Yokohama, that is half the Korean population of the city. And these people die like horribly like, and it's not just like, so the police are actively hunting them down, like the entirety of Japanese society like remembers that they really like killing people and they really like fighting.

And like, I mean, you have people like taking their like ceremonial swords from like their ancestors who were in the major revolution, like they're taking their katanas and going into the street and murdering people with them, like people just like have fish hooks and they're just murdering people in the street. And this goes on for like, this goes on for days. And one of the things that happens in this is, well, okay. So the other thing that happens in this period is that the Japanese government just starts like arresting Red and Black just executing them.

And that's what was supposed to happen to Ito Noe and Osago Sakai, but they get arrested by squadron military police led by Mashahiko Amakasu, who just, she just murders them. There's like conflicting stories of how this happened. There's one version of it where like, he kills them and like their six-year-old nephew and throws their bodies on a well. There's another version of it where they get strangled and he strangles them in prison. And this is like a huge outrage, but it's not a huge outrage because he murdered them. It's a huge outrage because he was supposed to wait for the trial.

I mean, and yeah, and this is one of the things that like, this is, this is part of how like fascism comes to Japan is that like, he becomes a hero for the fascist, right? Like he goes to prison for 10 years supposedly, but he only serves three and then he gets out, he becomes a hero and then he becomes basically the head of like the, the, the, the sort of fascist secret police in the like Manchurian puppet state. But on the upside, he, when Japan loses the war, he kills himself. So. When I, yay.

With the, the story I had heard was the, the thrown in the well story. And I remember it, it stuck with me so much because the first time I met anarchists from Japan, they, they gave me a zine and it was like Japanese anarchist martyrs, you know, like the martyrs of our movement or whatever. And I was like looking through it and we're all of these children. And it just like really emotionally affected me that I was like, oh, y'all's martyrs include all of these like little, not like, like literal, like like six year olds and stuff because yeah, you know, they, they came and, and killed not just the grown up anarchists, but the

baby anarchists or whatever as well. I know that this has happened lots of places, but it just, it really stuck with me. So whether it was true or not, the, the story I heard was the story about the well and it, it stuck with me. Yeah. I mean, like the level of repression in Japan, like it's, it's unlike anything I've ever seen that's not in a country that's literally in the middle of a civil war. Like they just, they just like murder people like constantly.

Yeah. And then this is one of the other things, like one of the things that starts the right wing, like turn in Japanese society is when, is when the earthquake happens and the government is like, like they're like, the police are being like, it's the Koreans need to go fight the Koreans. So they do. And like, I mean, like, wait, they like blame the earthquake on the Koreans. Yeah.

Well, so everything is, there's this fire. The fire kills like 60,000 people. Uh huh. And it consumes their, like they're the urban core of, uh, what's the name of that city? The urban core of Yokohama just goes up in flames and like 60,000 people burned to death. And that's the government needs some explanation for, yeah, I mean, it's horrible, but it's like the government needs some explanation for it. They're like, oh, we'll blame the Koreans.

And then suddenly all of these people are just like, like the whole of Japanese society just goes into this total mobilization, like kill mode thing and they just murder enormous numbers of people. And this, and like this has this enormous sort of like, like cultural fact shifting people back to the right and shifting people back towards militarism because now they've like, you know, like they've tasted blood, they've like, they've gotten the sort of sense of it. Yeah, it is brutal.

And before we go, we're going to kill off one more anarchist. Wait, we're killing off the wrong team. Can we kill off the other team instead? Unfortunately, no, none of them die in this story. It's the worst. All of the assassination attempts fail. It's so sad. What?

Yeah, I'm sorry. That's all right. I forgot how depressing this, because I was, I was remembering part two of this, which is just like absolutely hilarious, kind of pointless, like ideological battle over like things that are kind of dumb. And then I forgot about the first part of the story, which is everyone gets executed. Yeah. So the last person who we're talking about, he gets executed is, is Fumiko Kanako, who

is Fumiko Kanako. So she, she, she's a nihilist anarchist, but she's different from like everyone else we've talked about today so far, because when she's a kid, she gets sent to live in Japanese occupied Korea. And so she goes there and she gets like horribly abused by her family, which leads to become like leads to her becoming a nihilist, but it means that like, okay, so like, like a lot of the anarchists, like in Japan talk a big game about anti like imperialism, right? And like they will do things like, yeah, like they will, they will go fight police to try

to stop a war from happening, but they don't really talk to people in Korea very much. And Fumiko Kanako was like the exception to that because, you know, she, she lived there for a long time. And she, she winds up marrying Pacquiao, who is a very influential Korean anarchist and they, they do a bunch of organizing, specifically like their thing is they're trying to like get, they're trying to like end the Japanese occupation. And you know, they're doing great work. And then unfortunately, after the earthquake, she and Pacquiao are, and stop me if you've

heard this one before, they are sentenced to death for a supposed plot to kill the emperor. Wait, no, yeah, we already did this part. You're just repeating. Yeah, yeah. They do it again. This is the second time they just keep doing this and this way it's unclear if there was actually a plot and if there was a plot, it's unclear to what extent Fumiko Kanako was like involved with it.

But while she's getting interrogated, she's like, oh yeah, no, like I hate the emperor. I was absolutely involved in a plot to kill him. Like I was making a bomb to kill him. Also I'm an anarchist and she was like an incredibly detailed sketch of like all of the oppression in Japanese society that I'm just going to tell you, like the person who's like the court examiner who's like, and you know, there's an interesting thing that happens where she and Pacquiao are like, they're handed pardons as like the sort of like mercy of the emperor thing.

And Pacquiao like takes it, but Fumiko Kanako, like they hand her the paper and she tears it to shreds in front of them and it's so embarrassing that like the record of what happened is like sealed until after World War II because it was like a big media scandal, all of the stuff with them being arrested, right? And I'm, I'm basically, I don't actually know more, but I watched a movie once. There's a great movie about this called Anarchist from Colony, this part of it. Yeah. Yeah.

And she, yeah. And like, yeah, it's just like whole thing. And like the government also kind of doesn't want to assassinate them because it looks really bad that, I mean, they've, they've, they've picked, they've, they've arrested two random people who like have done nothing and they're just going to kill them. But Fumiko Kanako's like, no, like I believe in the things that I believe in and I will literally like tear up this pardon and die for it. And so she tears up the pardon and so she goes to prison and she lives long enough to

write like the greatest entry in the, in the genre of a narcofeminist, a Japanese narcofeminist prison memoirs, which is an entire genre. There's like multiple books because this, it keeps happening and these people get arrested and set to prison. It's called the prison memoirs of a Japanese woman. It's great. Everyone should go read it. It's, it's also extremely depressing because her life sucks. But yeah, it's, it's, it's good.

Yeah. And so now having killed off the leading intellectuals of anarchism, again, for the second time in a generation, you would think that this would, this would kill the movement. Like I think, I think like 99% of movements, like if, if you kill their leading intellectuals, like all of them, like twice in like 12 years, like the movement collapses. Yeah. That, but at the very beginning, there was the guy who said, keep the intellectuals away from the labor organizing.

Maybe he was right. Yeah. Well, but this is, this is, yeah, the incredible thing about this is, no, it doesn't, it doesn't kill them. They, they, they keep going like, and they, they have, they have one last glorious, glorious and absolutely baffling hurrah. Okay. So, of like infighting, extremely weird and funny infighting.

Okay. So yeah, that, that's what we're going to be talking about next episode. All right. Yeah. Is it time for the plug of the plug? Yes. Oh, oh, Margaret, you, you have a new podcast. I do.

You want to tell us about that? It's on this very network, CoolZone Media. On this very network, I have my own podcast. Is it called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? And does it? Yes. So. Does it come out on May 2nd?

And is it produced by the Webby Award-winning Sophie Lichterman? Uh, perhaps and do episodes drop every Monday and Wednesday? I think they do. Uh, that is super, super exciting, and you can find that wherever you get your podcasts. If I remember correctly. Anywhere you get them, like if there's a peddler on the corner who sells you podcasts, your pain, get your podcast, yeah, get your podcast, half off today, two for one, yeah. Exactly.

And where, and where can people follow you on the interwebs? Uh, well, for now, you can follow me on Twitter before the mass exodus, uh, at magpiekilljoy, and you can follow me on Instagram, which we've all known for a very long time is owned by evil people, and that is magpie kill, no, Margaret Killjoy, because I wasn't clever enough to get my own name in both places. I don't know why I'm explaining this to you, but you can follow me on social media. And that's where I am. And I post pictures of my dog that keeps barking in the background while I'm trying to record

this episode. But, but if you, if you follow Margaret, you'll see her dog and you'll understand that it is worth it because he is handsome. Very nice. And agrees. Well, I'm very excited to start listening to CPW DCS, just the best. Oh, is that the episode? Yeah.

I guess I'm starting this one. Uh, hi. Welcome to It Can Happen Here. It's a show. If you're listening to this episode, you probably listened to the last one. I hope so. You know what it's about. Yeah, please do.

I mean, I guess you could start with this one because this one is sort of wildly different from the last one, but yeah, we're rewriting it so they all survive. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't, no one gets executed this episode. Yes. That is, that is a win. That's a win. And the cosmos come, the Russian cosmos come and they resurrect at least Kenneko Fumiko.

The rest give or take whatever, maybe the children could be resurrected. That's how I would prioritize it in that order. That makes sense. Yeah. And that voice you're hearing is Margaret Kiljoy, host of cool stuff, a cool stuff media podcast that is launching its first episode on May 2nd and episodes are every Monday and Wednesday. I did it.

Okay. Woo. That's true. All of the things are true except the cosmos part. No, the cosmos, I don't know, maybe they'll still pull it off as if yet. So we're going to go back a little bit. We went to the last episode in 1923, 1924 with everyone sort of dead, but the reason that also didn't wipe out the anarchist movement was that there's another sort of wing of it.

And the other wing of it is in 1917, 1918, labor movement in Japan reemerges and it reemerges because there's the war like Japan fights over one and there's just like mass inflation and deprivation. And so even though striking is like unbelievably illegal, people do it anyways because the alternative is just starving to death. And so there's this reformist trade union that eventually becomes Japanese confederation of labor that swells in numbers to about 30,000 people. And I should mention like 30,000 people is like, it doesn't sound like that big for

a union. But I think this is the biggest any union is going to get in this period. I think this union might get slightly bigger than that. But like, yeah, most of the unions don't crack 20K because the size of the Japanese industrial working class isn't that big. And also the amount of repression is unbelievable. But you know, having 30,000 people in your union means that your union is now the site of Japanese intra-left conflict, which is wonderful.

I mean, it only took like three people for the power to kill a cow and to fuck people up. Yeah, it's great. There's like, you know, there's a period where everyone kind of gets along like all of, like everyone in Japanese left knows each other, like they're all dating each other. Like this is true. Like, you know, we've been talking about all the anarchists dating each other, the anarchists and the communists are all dating each other, like the reformists are also dating each other.

Like they're all sort of like everyone knows each other and for like a bit, they're sort of able to get along. But with the Japanese Confederation of Labor, this lasts for like one year. And by 1921, the anarchists and the Bolsheviks have split over the question of the USSR after the anarchists published like Emma Goldman writing about how it's bad actually. And suddenly these two factions are like fighting tooth and nail for control of like the entire left because like these groups are like the anarchists and the communists are in every social movement.

Like they're in labor, they're in the feminist movement, they're in this movement that like we haven't really talked about, but it's going on in the background of all of this, which is the Burukumen Liberation Movement. The Burukumen are this like hereditary class. I'm pronouncing that extremely badly and I apologize. But the hereditary class and like the old fuel system, which is like technically abolish in the late 1800s, but like discrimination against them continues. It's very similar to like the untouchable, like the untouchables in India.

And so they have this sort of movement and the anarchists back it. And the communists like waffle on it because they're Bolsheviks. It takes them like a while before they're like, no, no, no, 1925, we're fully backing this now. And so yeah, that gets wrapped up in this, this giant battle for the control of the left. And the battle for the control of the left leads to like one of history's most common alliances, which is Bolsheviks allying with reformists who like also favor like centralized control to fight the anarchists who don't want centralized control.

Yeah. They're there are new things in labor movement. This plays out in this battle over like where power is supposed to be in a union confederation. So you know, the question basically is, is it supposed to be in the federation bureaucracy, like the people are like the sort of high level of bureaucracy itself, or is it supposed to be in the unions who are like the part of this federation? And this has real consequences. You know, like in a lot of sort of centralized union federations, like the central union

bureaucracy are the people who decide if you can strike or not. And you know, this is extremely useful to both reformist bureaucrats who want to make sure nobody goes on strike because they have their deal with the capitalists and they don't want a revolution to happen. And it's also very useful for the Bolsheviks who want to make sure they can purge anyone who they don't like and also want to make sure the union movement is just like an extension of their politics. And so there's this huge battle and it ends with basically like both the Bolsheviks and

the reformists pull out of the union. Whoa. So the anarchists win. Sort of. Well, it's a Pyrrhic victory. There's like nothing left. Yeah. Well, it's not there's nothing left.

So like 20,000 members go with the reformists, like 12,000 go with the Bolsheviks and about 8,000 go with the anarchists. Oh. Okay. So it's not the best, but they rebuild. And into this phrase steps, arguably, Japan's greatest anarchist theorists of this period, Hadeshuzo. And this guy is a character.

He's he's he's barely known in Japan. I mean, there was a sort of like renaissance in Hadeshuzo scholarship when this one guy named John Krupp wrote this book called Hadeshuzo in Pure Anarchism and Interwar Japan, which is a mouthful of a title, but I'm just going to keep plugging this because like this is the book that made me an anarchist. Like this is like I checked this book out from a library and I read it and I was like, oh my God, I'm an anarchist now. So yeah.

Yeah. He has he has like a she has a wild story. He's born in he's born in Japan in December 8th, 1886. And he sort of like bounces around like different manual labor jobs in Tokyo. And like at one point, he wants to be like a he tries to be like, I don't know if it's a long trip. He wants to be like a sailor. So he gets on a boat and he's going to be a sailor.

And then he after like one sail ride to Taiwan, he immediately decides he doesn't want to be a sailor anymore. So he just gets off the boat and leaves and doesn't come back. I feel like that's what I would do if I decided oh yeah, that job, especially like the 1920s that job seems awful. Yeah. You're like, oh, I want adventure. And then you're like, oh, adventure means bad things happen.

Yeah. It's like, I mean, I guess I understand why all these people are anarchists because like that is a terrible job. But yeah. So Shizoh winds up sort of just like wandering around Taiwan. And one of the things that happens when he's wandering around Taiwan, by the way, is a Japanese colony at this point. And while he's wandering around Taiwan, he becomes a Christian and he like goes to school

as like a theologian, but he drops out. But then he somehow still becomes a pastor because I don't know, this guy's career is wild. No, Shizoh is not like a noble pastor. He rapidly starts pissing off like everyone around him because he's like, all of his sermons are just him antagonizing rich people and preaching this like very, very left wing of the hospital. He's like read the Bible.

Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. There's this great quote from Hada Shizoh and Pierre Anarchism in Japan about his time as a pastor from like someone who was there. It was pastor Hada's sermons were superb. So much so that I thought it was a shame that what people were not there to hear them. It was like the Bible talking in the spirit of pure socialism and one of my friends admired

pastor Hada so much that he asked him to celebrate his marriage. Yeah. And you know, this like this does not make me priestess going around. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because he starts like as a Christian, right? But like he just like progressively keeps getting more and more left wing and keeps realizing that like, okay, so there's the kingdom of God in heaven, right?

Like what if we did that here and like as he's getting like as he's pissing off more of the church and as like they're in fighting gets bigger, he's becoming just more and more of an anarchist. And by the end, he just like gets pre get the booted out by his church and he's just like, okay, I'm an anarchist propagandist now. And so in 1924, he just like leaves and he's like, well, I'm an anarchist now. And Shizoh becomes what's known as a pure anarchist and this is something that is like entirely unique to Japan.

Like there's nothing, this doesn't exist anywhere else. And this is different than like basically every other anarchist theorist and movement in Japan until this point has been like something you can find parallels with and other anarchist movements around the globe. Like there are nihilists in lots of countries, there's egoists everywhere. Like there's syndicalists literally in every country that's ever existed. And they mostly sort of believe the same things, you know, and you get some like, like, Osegi Sakai's like combination of egoism and syndicalism is like, it's cool.

Which is, I like that idea. But yeah. Yeah, it's a good idea. But it's also not like, it's like, he's not the first person to ever do this, right? And like the Japanese syndicalist movement is built in the mold of like the French syndicalists in the CGT, which is this big union, actually, they're still around today. So in like the very early 1900s, they were sort of a narcosyndicalist union in like 1906, they have this famous charter that's like anarchist, but then they go reformist and

they like, they vote for World War One. And now they're famous for, there's been like 12 things that probably could have been a revolution in France if the CGT had ever a single time went to the barricades and they never do. Which is never, ever. That's like their whole thing. Like like they sat out May 68. Like that's impressive.

Yeah. This is a tried it, man. Yeah. Yeah. And they sat out May 68. It's like, it's incredible. But you know, in like 1906, right, the Japanese that are looking at this, like, oh my God, this union has like millions of people in it.

Like it's enormous. It's a syndicalist union. Yeah. Which is cool at the time. Yeah. Yeah. And like, you know, they, the Japanese anarchists do sort of their standard syndicalist things. Like they're building up democratic unions.

They're like working towards a general strike, the season, music production, they're like fighting for a society where production is run by workers themselves, blah, blah, blah. I shouldn't blah, blah, blah, blah, that's actually, it's cool. It's fine. But pure anarchism is not that. I'm dying to know what pure anarchism is. New anarchism just dropped. I'm excited.

100 years ago. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's a version of anarcho-communism, but like, what if you like really, really rigorously applied anarcho-communism? And this is a thing that doesn't exist anywhere else because everywhere, like in the West and in Latin America, like, syndicalism and anarcho-communism just like fuse to the point where like, they're not really, they're like, but there's not really, they're not really separate tendency. Like, nobody's written an anarcho-communist theory in like 100 years.

Like, they basically cease to be separate tendencies. But in Japan, the syndicalists in the Ancombs like, fight it out to the death. And this produces pure anarchism and it rules. We're gonna talk about what it is because it's both wonderful and incredibly silly at the same time. So okay, so to understand what they're arguing about, because this causes like a huge fracture in the anarcho-communist, I think we need to sort of like go into like the vulgar Marxist conception of class structure that's kind of shared by the syndicalists.

So okay, okay, so you're, okay, the important thing about this is that like, this doesn't work in Japan. Like the vulgar theory of like Marxist class structure, right, is that like, okay, so you're supposed to have the great industrial proletariat. Like if that's supposed to become a majority of the population, it's supposed to be unified and organized by like the discipline of the factory system. And the entire world is supposed to reduce to two classes. Like the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, like one class of people who have nothing to

sell but their labor, one class of people who exist purely to like extract wealth from people because they entirely support the sort of by owning things. And you know, eventually these are supposed to like, if you read your communist manifesto, eventually these two classes are supposed to like meet themselves in like a final conflict or the proletariat defeats. It's called Ragnarok. Yeah, yeah. Ragnarok.

Yeah. And you know, the proletariat defeats them and then they abolish the conditions of their own existence as a class and you get stateless, classless, muddiness society. It's like a free association of workers and this is what communism is. And famously this never happened. What? Yeah. And there's not a reason for this.

What about the immortal science? Yeah. The immortal science, yeah, this is the problem with the immortal science is that one, instead of unifying the industrial proletariat, capitalism like divides it and just sort of like literally spatially like kicks them into suburbs and you can get this sort of like the system where instead of like unifying everyone into one class, everyone is now this like completely alienated like boomer living in a suburb, even if it's a work in a factory. And the other problem is that there's never just two classes and this is the problem that

like all the other ones are our enemies. Yeah. That's why you're doing it. You know, but this is a real problem, right? Because like the Marxists run into this in Russia where it's like, okay, so we did our thing. We did our urban proletariat revolution, but like there's all these peasants and they don't like us because we keep taking their granite gunpoint.

And but you know, you have, you have this one problem, but it goes great, right? Nothing bad ever happens. They don't famously have to kill the normal numbers of these people. But then like, you know, there's something weird happens, which is in China, Stalin managed to get like the entire, like the entire urban Chinese working class, like built and working class killed. And so Mao has to like make a revolution with peasants. And so, you know, peasants become the sort of like, you know, this, this sort of like

this, this is what the actual revolutionary subject of communism wants of being like from like China to Colombia is these peasants. But like, you know, okay, so your theory of the industrial proletariat is already down the toilet, and this is what Shuzo is reacting to. Like he looks at Japanese society and there's like five people who you wage labor, but mostly there's this enormous like 14 million people who are tenant farmers, who are like trying to support their families on these like tiny plots of rented land. But you know, and like Senator Marx's theory is like, well, okay, these people will inevitably

be absorbed into capitalism, right, by they'll be driven by competition or whatever it is to the market. But like they're not, it's not happening. They're just they're sitting there. They're just really poor and paying their landlords and yeah, well, you just got to wait for all of Japan to be like annihilated. To be saved by the second kind of, yeah, uh-huh. Yeah.

Yeah. It's going great. But there's also like, there's all these other like classes to like, there's these classes of like, there's just like petty traders, for example, or like, like low level, like really low level government officials, like, like, you know, you're like like a clerk, for example, who just don't fit into this sort of class schema at all, like if Marx some things about like, like small, like, I don't know, people who like cut wood and then go into a town and sell it, like they're like, well, these people are Pratipojwa, like

they're reactionaries, blah, blah, blah, and there's this whole history of like anarchist organizing people like this, who Marx is just sort of like steer at like, Bolivia has this where like anarchist organized these like, these indigenous like, they're not really like, these indigenous artisans, who's things like they go to market, they sell their craft, and the Marxists were just like, why do we care about these people? Like, why they're not workers. And it always seems like the better, I don't know, whenever I was like presented with the basic analysis of like, okay, we've got the proletariat who have terrible lives and factories,

and then you have the lump and proletariat who refuse that kind of work and are like beggars and thieves and people doing work outside of the traditional system or whatever. And then you have the petty bourgeoisie who are like, you know, own stores or artisans or whatever. And then you have the bourgeoisie over it. And it's just always funny to me because I look at, I'm like, well, clearly the only ones that would be worth being would be lump and proletariat or petty bourgeoisie. Yeah.

Like they're the only ones who get to have any fun. Yeah. You know, and I think like, like this is the problem that, that Chuzo sees, and I'm gonna read part of Krupp's book about his solution to this, because I think it's really interesting. Even the failure of the available methods of class analysis to capture the subtleties of Japan's social structure, Hada developed the notion of the propertyless masses as an alternative concept to the proletariat, that the propertyless masses was a wide-ranging term which encompassed tenant farmers, small traders, petty officials, artisans, and even

wage laborers when they are prepared to forsake their preoccupation with narrowly defending advantages that accompany their urban lifestyle and were ready to throw in their lot with the other oppressed strata. Yeah. That makes sense. That's just the 99%. You know, it's the like, versus the haves and have nots, like, okay. Well, it's kind of, but there's a crucial difference here, which is that like, okay,

so the other, like the really big thing about the Puranicus is that they don't believe in class struggle. And the reason why they don't believe in class struggle is that they think that, okay, so they look at the history of the union movement, right, and it's like, okay, so has the union movement ended capitalism? It's like, no. So like, okay, what does it actually do? And the answer is it gets people slightly more money under capitalism.

Which is nice, too. Yeah. Which is nice. But it's also like, Shuzo, like Adoptus Tube, there's another Japanese anarchist who has this metaphor. It's like, he compares it to like people fighting inside of like a bandit gang where it's like, okay, so if you have, you have like fight, like the bosses of the bandit gang are obviously exploiting like the lower level people in the bandit gang.

But you know, even if the low level people in this bandit gang like take over, they're not actually going to stop being a bandit gang, right? It's just the distribution of where the bandit gang wealth is going changes. And this is a big thing for the Puranicists because the Puranicists are, you know, they're looking at the industrial working class and like, this is tiny and they're all exploiting the countryside. And so because of that, like they look at this, they look at the union movement and they look at it at like class struggle, like classical TM, like class struggle.

And they're like, well, this doesn't cause a revolution. All this does is just like sort of reorients, like who's in power inside of... That's what the Bolsheviks did, right? Yeah, but it's not just what the Bolsheviks, they apply this to the Bolsheviks, but like it's also like there's analysis of what a union is, is that you're like class struggle is just defending your position under capitalism. But you're also fighting very specifically narrowly for your class, right? So if you're like a factory worker, right?

You're fighting for you and the other factory workers. You're not fighting for like, I don't know, like a tenant farm, but you're not even fighting from like, for like the guy down the tree who makes bread. It's like you're, you know, these things that are like instruments of class struggles, like your workers council, your unions, your Soviets, like they don't actually get rid of class. It's just now another class has power. And it doesn't matter if it's sort of like, and this is what they're arguing, it doesn't matter if it's like democratic, it doesn't matter if it's like, you know, like there's

no difference in how the actual eventually the class dynamics will play out. It doesn't matter if it's like, you know, like Lenin making like Stalin making himself dictator, or you have a bunch of democratic like Soviets, because they're both still instruments of class power, they're both sort of just going to reproduce this whole system. And yeah, and so they have this thing that they counterposed, which is like class struggle is just about what stuff is happening inside the system, but that's different from revolution, which is like destroying this system entirely, and this is where you get into his stuff about the division of labor, which I think is really interesting because it I think this this sphere

of pure anarchism got to a bunch of critiques of stuff that people have gotten to now, but they got to it in like 1920, where okay, so it shows like one of his big things is that like the division of labor is inherently exploitative, because it like it destroys sort of rural communal living and it replaces it with the centralization of expertise and centralization of power. And he also thinks that like science is like a capitalist engine that's used to like create the division of labor, and then it's used to create like mechanization, and it's used to create like labor exploitation.

Yeah, that sounds like modern, a lot of like stuff that I read more modern, yeah. Yeah, yeah, except again, this is like they're doing this in like 1927, yeah, you know what else is a capitalist engine of exploitation? Products and services. The podcast industrial complex. It's true. And we're back with more things that are exploitative. And the...

Well, no, revolution, theoretically, theoretically not exploitative. Well, yes, yes. But we have to get through the last exploitative thing, which is the thing I talked a bit about this earlier, but like the Puranicists argue that like cities inherently are this concentration of wealth and resources and power. And so like farmers and workers need to work together to destroy all forms of power, including cities. And this sounds a lot like primitivism.

Yeah, it does, although, you know, they wouldn't necessarily be like repping the farmers. I think primitivism might be the wrong term, but it's definitely a lot of like the anti-tech stuff. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Okay, so they have like, they thread this needle, so like there are people in this period who want to just go back to pure rural agrarianism and don't want their technology. And the Puranicists are like, no, we still want technology, but we don't want the division

of labor. So they're like, we like our reaping machines, so we don't have to work as much when we're farming. We just don't want everyone to live in apartments. Yeah, I mean, even the reaping machine, I don't know, like it's kind of unclear to me how this is exactly supposed to work, because like, we'll get into this, I guess we can just get into this now, which is like, okay, so they really don't like the division of labor because they think the division of labor, like, well, okay, they have like, there's

like three critiques of it. One is that like, when you have the division of labor, labor becomes like mechanized and industrialized. And when that happens, labor, like it gets reduced to just like a cog you put in a machine. And they see this as like, this is like an inherent like thing that happens with labor specialization is you just end up like being a person who makes one repetitive move in a factory over and over again, like you're not free because of this. And they also argue that like, specialization means that people only care about like labor

that they do. And so this gives you like an identity that divides workers from one sector, like say if you're, you know, you're like a coal miner, right? Your daily experience is so utterly different than a baker. And it's not just like your experience, it's like, it's like, your knowledge is different. The other person's not going to like the baker is not going to understand what you're doing. And you know, wanting to argue against this political position that I know, I know, I keep trying to be like, no, no, no, no, that misunderstands the nature of specialization

and all, you know, but then I'm like, all right, I can't convince these people. And I think like, I think, okay, this is, I'm going to, I'm going to put on my, my, my Marx, my like weird left-com Marx noise and go, oh, it's a critique, not a platform. Okay. Which is not, they actually wanted as a platform, but like, I think it would have been a great critique and not a very good platform. Yeah. The platform.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's, there's interesting elements of it, like they have this argument that like, okay, so if, if you have your like, your, your syndicalists, like society, right, where, okay, so you have a bunch of like, you have a bunch of like coal miners, you have a bunch of people who like make pots and pans, but you need to coordinate your labor. Because you, because you, you, you have like specialization, you have branches of labor. And their argument is that, okay, so well, the syndical is where you do this, you have coordinated committees, right, you, you like elect a person, you like send them to a coordinating

council and the coordinating council, like coordinate stuff. Okay. And she was just like, well, that's just gonna, she's just like, things like that's just gonna turn into a state. Like you're just gonna create a permanent class, even if you rotate people, you're, you're, you're creating an administrative body that's gonna like rebuild the state again. And yeah, like, okay, like, I don't, I don't, I'm making this like shrugging gesture that the audience gets.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, I, I don't, okay, so like, I don't, like, I don't think he's right about, like, most of this, like, I think he's sort of wrong about a like almost all of it. The thing, the thing that stuck with me, though, when I read this is like his specific critique of syndicalism, which is that it maintains like the structure of the old world. Because if you're a syndicalist and your, your society is based on unions running their workplaces, then you've maintained the division of labor, but you've also maintained like the basic like geographic, physical, technological, and organizational structure of capitalism.

Sure. Like all, all of the, like, all of that stuff is still in the same place and you're still sort of like going there to do your job. And I think there, there is an interesting sort of like, like, I think there was a genuine interesting critique there of, yeah, like how, how do you make sure that you aren't just sort of reproducing that stuff? And like, I mean, I don't know, like, the critique of why would you want to build a society like structured along the lines of production?

Like why, why do you want to structure your society around work? Like that's awful. I like that about the pure anarchists where they were kind of like, let's, let's throw away the Marxist ship for a minute and like just actually like figure out what we want and like, I like that about it. But I, I, I dislike the idea of like, well, it's, it would be my problem of syndicalism and most of the syndicalists I met believe in syndicalism as a method and not a end result.

Right. It's a way of building workers power, not a way to create a society. But, but if syndicalists were like, everyone must wake up and go to their work job and then make eight widgets, but it's collectively determined which widgets that you make. Right. Like, fuck that. But also if it was like, everyone goes and wakes up and goes to their collective farm and maybe we use reaping machines and maybe we don't.

And it's just like, I get so unexcited by, it's like one of the reasons like a lot of the like nitpicky branches of anarchism don't, they interest me, but I don't like subscribe to any of them is because I'm like, well, what if some people like this shit and some people like this shit, like, you know, maybe they're going to be fucking different. Imagine that we could have a plurality of economic models systems, but you know, whatever. I'm now arguing with that people who I probably would have like, no, this is interesting. Like, well, I don't know because these guys like they have like the Maoist thing going on where like they will like attack other leftist groups who like don't like follow

their line. And so this is where this whole thing is wild because one of the other things is like the the the pure anarchists are like completely convinced that syndicalism is like a sort of like, well, they think it's just like it's not an anarchist thing. It's just like a tendency to labor movements. And they also think that like it's basically like a bastardized form of Marxism because they're not like entirely wrong about either of those things, but it's different at different places and times.

Yeah. But it's like the thing that they have about it, like, because they're completely convinced that syndicalism will inevitably just like turn into like Soviet communism is like it's incredibly silly. But like this, you know, like on the one hand, like they are kind of inventing a lot of the sort of like like they're inventing a lot of the sort of like some OK, some bad arguments about like specialization and stuff like some anti-work stuff too that like is going to be around later.

They're also inventing a lot of stuff that's like, and, you know, initially this kind of like new theory doesn't have this doesn't have an enormous effect. In 1926, the Federation of Black Youth or Kokodran has its first public meeting and they they have a bunch of cool slogans, the slogans roll, they have the emancipation of workers must be carried out by the workers themselves. We insist on libertarian federation, destroy the political movement, get rid of a reject the proletarian party, get rid of professional activists with all oppressive laws and ordinances. That is an entirely based platform.

Yeah. All right. It's sweet. It's good. Yeah. And you know, the other thing is, despite the fact that it's called the Federation of Black Youth, this is like not a youth. I mean, I mean, there's like youth in it, but like it's it's this thing's backs by like

remember those those printers unions that I was talking about last episode that aside from Sakai had like set up. So they're all heavily involved in this. And they do a bunch of cool labor stuff. Like they they get involved in like there's a bunch of tram worker strikes to get involved in. They're in this the Japanese musical instrument company strike, which is like there's like over a thousand people on strike for like over a hundred days.

And there's there's this great split where like so the leadership of the union is Bolshevik, but like a bunch of the like a bunch of the ordinary people in the union are anarchists. And so you have that there's there's like this is this fun tension going around there. They're doing the stuff. And then the anarchist form Zengoku Jirai, which is the all Japanese Libertarian Federation of Labor unions, which is a it's a Federation of 25 unions. Wait, these are the pure anarchists that you're talking about that are doing all this. Oh, so sorry.

At this point, they haven't split yet. Oh, OK. This sounds like all the stuff that they said that they don't want to do. Yeah. Well, this is the other the other wild thing about this is that like, OK, so the entirety of like of like pure anarchist theory right is about how like unions don't do revolutions and that class struggle, but like they still do strikes like they still do all the normal stuff.

It's kind of wild. OK. I kind of like that. Yeah. And you know, and like and this that that's sort of how they're able to get along in this early period. And these unions like OK, so there's like a lot of printers unions in this because the printers unions are just really anarchist, but there's there's like there's a tenant

farmer's union. There's a bunch of like rubber unions. And it grows to like 15,000 workers almost immediately. And yeah, they're doing a lot of cool stuff like they they have they have these huge demonstrations in support of Sakuen Vanzetti who the U.S. is killing for being anarchists and also Italians. Just like, yeah, the one time anti Italian racism was real and 100 years ago, shit was real different than it is now. And it doesn't.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for for one year, this like this works great, you know, like the the yeah, the unions up to like I think they get up to like 20,000 30,000 members like it gets pretty big. But then 1927 intense conflict between the syndicalists and the anarchist breakout. This gets so bad so fast that like the International Working Man's Association, which is the like the giant international like Federation of Syndicalist movements, like sends them a letter

that are like, hey, syndicalists and anarcho communists get along literally everywhere else on earth. They're chill. You guys like chill and the anarcho communists in Kokodran. Their response is we are fighting, quote, the betrayers opportunists and union imperialists in Zengoku Jiren's ranks. Oh, no. It's amazing.

Uh-huh. This is why we can't have nice things. Yo, it's great. It gets better. It gets better. It's better than they always lose. Yeah. Because of this shit.

Okay. Look, in the 1928 conference, Zengoku Jiren, which is the Union Federation, like they have this conference, they have the Union Conference in 1928, and there's just like giant battle over like what the organization's platform is going to be, a thing that doesn't matter at all, except it's a proxy ideological fight, and both sides just start screaming at each other. And I'm going to read this description from Harashiso and Piranakus and Minto War Japan. Uh-huh.

Kokodran members barricaded the anarchist syndicalists, Jiren and Kat calling them. And the proceedings degenerated to the level where it was almost impossible to hear the speeches. Eventually, the anarcho-syndicalists decided they had had enough, unfleurling their black flags. They walked out of the hall to a chorus of taunts such as believers, blind believers and central authority, Bolsheviks and betrayers. Oh my God, get over yourself.

Oh my... It's incredible. No. Okay. To be fair to the Piranakist, oh, one of... So, okay, a bunch of the syndicalists Union start leaving, and one of them does actually join the Bolsheviks, but like all the other ones don't because they're not. And you get this pure...

There's like... There's a syndicalist and the Piranakist have dueling magazines, there's one called Black Flag, there's one called Black Battle. And like... So, Kokodran, which is like the youth movement thing, like the syndicalists and the anarchists are still in it together. And they like... They start just like fighting each other in the street when they run into each other.

Because they... This is more depressing than everyone getting murdered after the earthquake. Not the genocide part, but the anarchist killing part. It's incredible. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's... Oh my God.

It's like... It's incredible. And like... Yeah, they... What's interesting about this, though, is that like the anarcho-communists, like when the Union splits, like almost all of the people stay with the anarcho-communists, even though the anarcho-communists are like explicitly saying, we're not fighting for like wage increases, we're just fighting for revolution.

Which is fine. I'm all right with that. Well, there's interesting stuff too, where it's like they're also... So because they have this thing that's like, okay, so the urban workers are like exploiting the... Oh, okay. The line about it's complicated because it's like they think the urban workers are exploiting the countryside, but they also don't think that the solution to it is to just like turn

it the other way around. They think that like the workers and the tenant farmers just work together to like make the oppression go away. That seems fair. Which is like a reasonable stance on it. Yeah. But it means that, you know, they're interested in like... They're interested in the rural movement in a way that like the other Japanese-left

movements aren't. But unfortunately, you know, okay, there's a big debate as to whether this split like actually like... How big a role this split had in the collapse of anarchism? Because like by like 1931, like the fascists have just straight up taken over Manchuria, like things have gotten so fascist that it's like it's unclear whether the split mattered at all. Yeah.

Yeah. But, you know, they run into this problem where like, like, the state really hates them and they all... A bunch of them get arrested and they, you know, they respond to being arrested by like getting more militant. But then that just, you know, that fuels the cycle of them getting arrested for and people just leave because they're like, well, okay, if I'm in this organization, like we're all just gonna like get shot.

I mean, that's the clandestinity spiral. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's just a problem in like how does Shizu himself becomes just like incredibly depressed by the depression of the movement. But 1932, he just leaves. Like he's just out. He like renounces anarchism.

He abuses his wife because this is the story of a bunch of guys who sucked. And then... He drinks himself to death. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess okay. He did it to himself. Yeah.

He drinks himself to death. He got it done on his own. Yeah. And, you know, so he dies and he like kills himself. Well, I don't think he was doing it on purpose, but he just dies from drinking too much in 1934. And that year, actually, the anarcho-communists and anarcho-sindicalists like get back together, but it doesn't matter because by this point, the fascists are just sort of in power.

And yeah, the anarchists, they do one last whirl up rising and they fight a lot of cops and then all of them get arrested and anarchism just sort of dies until the end of World War II. Okay. Yeah. It's, you know, okay, anarchism does reemerge after the war, but that's like, that's a whole another story entirely. What I will say about it is if you see those construction hats from the 1968 protests and

you see one that's just all black, it doesn't have like a name written on it, like those are the anarchists. Cool. They're still around. Cool. And, you know, anarchism in Japan like survives to this day. There's a book called The Manual for a Worldwide Manukae Revolt that like one day I swear to God, I'm actually going to read, but he is really big in China.

Well, okay. I said really big in China. It's very influential in a very small subcultural anarchist scene in China, but I'm talking about them because it heavily influenced like the people who wrote The Lying Flat Manifesto were like, were very heavily influenced by this stuff. What's The Lying Flat Manifesto? Oh, okay. Okay.

So we did the episode about this a while back, but Lying Flat was this thing in China. Like, it's still going on, but like people were just like, it's kind of, it was kind of the version of anti-work. Or most people like discovered diogenes and were like, what if I just didn't work? Like, what if I just like lived on like, I worked like one day a month and then lived on like nothing. So I didn't have to work. Or what if I just quit?

What if I just like stop doing all of this capitalist stuff and what if I like stop having to deal with this patriarchy? What if I just like, you know, it takes, it's kind of like, yeah, they're great. They had lots of fun, diogenes, quotes, lots of like, the, the Manifesto they released is like very, it's like very anarchist. And yeah, like that whole thing, that was like, this is a big enough social movement that like, like Xi Jinping, like mentioned it in a speech. And so yeah, like Japanese anarchism still has influence to this day.

It was like a big deal. It was like a big problem for them. Yeah. They were like kind of concerned about it. Yeah. They were like, this is the same way a whole bunch of like, oligarchs got concerned about the anti-work stuff. You saw like anti-work hit pieces in the past like six months.

It was like, yeah, it's like similar things being like, well, this better not catch on more because that could really suck for us. That's as optimistic of a note as you could possibly get out of the story, which is that they're still around and they still influence things that matter. So and hopefully they don't fight each other more than the state. Yeah. Don't, don't do that. Like I, like, yes, I guess I will make my controversial sometimes it's okay to stab

an abuser under the throat stance, but also don't purge all your syndicalists because on the accusation of bullshibism, hot take, don't purge all your syndicalists. Yeah. Yeah. Don't systematize violence like that. You know, you're like this individual guy just did this thing and I'm real upset that he just did it to me and there's like a throat. I'm not actually making an actual advocacy.

I'm talking about how sometimes when that has happened in history, that seemed kind of cool, but yeah, not the, not the systemic kick out all the people who have this minor, I mean, it's really funny to me because I'm like, I'm like huge anti-infighting that people are like, don't you spend all your time fighting tankies on the internet? And I'm like, they want to make a state that's different. Yeah. They believe that they, everyone should be thrown in jail. That is a different thing.

Also, I don't like, you got to manage the polycule drama like you got to manage, it's got to be kept under control. You cannot allow your retirement scene to be factionalized over rival polyjules. And anarchists control your polycule drama, quotations and a parenthesis impossible. See, that's why you just need more, no, maybe such as like, you need more multi-generational anarchists because I think people in their forties give less of a shit about a lot of the drama. But then I'm like, maybe that's not true.

Maybe people in their forties would give just as much of a shit about all the drama. Anarchism. Wonderful idea. Yep. Yeah. It's good. And speaking of wonderful ideas, it is time for us to do the plugs. First, I just want to plug Jamie Loftus's New Coulson Media podcast, Ghost Church by

Jamie Loftus. By the time this drops, episode one will be out and episode two will be dropping on... The next Monday, I believe. Yes, exactly. And we also have another podcast on Coulson Media with one Margaret Kiljoy called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Margaret, you wanted to tell us about that? Oh, should I start working on that?

I'll get it done by Monday. Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. I have a new podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, which is about cool people who did cool stuff. And you might like it if you like stories about people who, I can't say cool stuff again, I'll have to use, come up with more synonyms.

Really it's just all a competition to see how many synonyms for cool I can come up with without using the word based because I feel like I'm too old to use the word based without... Really this is what you are here for. So I'm much more eloquent on my podcast, which you can catch every Monday and Wednesday, wherever you get your podcasts. Probably wherever you got this podcast is where you can find it. And the trailer is out now, so you can go and you can listen to the trailer where I talk about some anarchist bank robbers who broke out of prison because why would you

be in prison when you could be outside of prison, which is generally the preferable position to be in. With the exception of every now and then, people break out of jail by someone goes to jail on purpose, but they have hacksaw blades in their shoes and shit. That would be cool too. So more breaking your friends out of jail and less chasing them out of the room jeering at them is my general rule. I hate to make rules, but if I were to make one, it would be that.

And you can hear me talk about those kinds of stories on the podcast. Well, thank you so much for joining us today for Chris to talk about the wonderful history of Japanese and the many deaths that are associated in those poor people and yeah, like the basic way like a like a mini Korean genocide. Yeah, yeah. Intense. Well, that's it for us today. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram and have been your part in cool son media.

See you next week. And go listen to podcasts. We have many of them. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media. Visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the I heart radio app

Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources, thanks for listening.