It Could Happen Here - Anarchism Past and Future

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

The crew is joined by JMC of the new magazine Strange Matters to talk about the rise and decline of modern anarchism and how we can bring it back again. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. It being a number of things.

This is the podcast about things falling apart and also maybe putting them back together and assuming there is not a nuclear war in the immediate future. You will probably be hearing this episode sometime in early March. I am Robert Evans, my co-hosts as always, well, as often, Chris and Garrison. And that's my job for the day, Don. I'm going to sit back and chill. You guys want to take it from here? Yeah, I'll take it from here. We are doing one of our perennial things fall apart, but also we sort of put them back together again episodes. And joining us today is JMC

from Strange Matters, a new libertarian socialist cooperative magazine. JMC, great to have you here. Yeah, this is really great. So i guess we should probably explain what the magazine is yeah not just in and of itself but also because it's a good lead-in into um um into what we're going to be talking about so we basically uh there's five of us as co-editors and we're all equal worker owners in it it's a magazine called strange matterss. And the point of it is to explore radical new ideas, not just in terms of politics and economics, which is going to be kind of half the focus, is trying to figure out, like, you know, libertarian socialists talk a lot about dual power, which I know y'all talk about on the show a lot, talk about building independent institutions

under the direct democratic control of the working class to control real resources that are not the state or capitalist firms. But like, we talk a big game, but do we actually know how to do that stuff? And do we know how to do stuff like run like, you know, a big company as a, as a self-managed democracy, or do we know how to like run a city as a, as a radical democracy, like rooted in neighborhood councils or anything like that? The answer kind of is not really. And there's a lot of like open questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and that very few people are working on those answers. So Strange Matters is partly about discovering those answers, not because we, the editors,

have the answers, but because we need like some kind of space within which we can bring lots of different people with different life experiences together in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out. And then the other mission of it is to be a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and stuff like that, that perhaps gets shut out of capitalist society because it's not commercial or because it's too weird or because it's like, I don't know, a historiographical essay about Ibn Khaldun or something like that, you know, and we think that there should be a place for that just because it brings delight and meaning into people's lives. And it's what we're fighting for a more democratic society in order to do. So that's basically our vibe. And the essay in question is a collective editorial that we

collectively drafted and edited talking about our political views in particular and the recent history of libertarian socialism. And then as for me, I'm a writer who's written for a couple other places like The Point and the Brooklyn Rail. And I also was involved in the DSA is libertarian socials caucus. And also the, the, yeah, yeah. Right.

Not so much in the LLC, but yeah. A lot of history there. Trauma, you know, some, some yeah, but any who,

and also the symbiosis federation, which is a federation across Mexico, the U S and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah, so I guess, well, okay, so the pandemic isn't, I guess, the perfect jumping in point for this. But I want to go back and I guess just getting into the meat of this piece, because I think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk about the origins of what's called sort of neo-anarchism and how it sort of began to decay after the collapse of Occupy and after, well, I guess the sort of kind of revolutionary arc of the 2010s. So basically before you do the decline, at least it's the way that we wrote it. And I kind of think that it's the way that I would tell it.

You have to kind of do the rise first, right? Because like there was this moment from roughly the fall of the Soviets in 91 to roughly like 2000 and even kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards where it kind of looked like anarchism was going to take over the world. And that's a bit of a joke, but it's also not a joke because in the context of like the radical left, which is, of course, obviously a kind of kind of like you know dissident scene in any country where it happens to exist um you know everything receded in terms of the traditional parties because the fall of these soviet style uh leninist states uh either through their collapse as in the case of the ussr uh or in the case of their transition to a much more like clearly and obviously like state capitalist, semi neoliberalized model, like in China, like the, the, you, you basically had like this total recession, not just in Leninism, interestingly,

which obvious enough, right? Like, you know, it's basically a global collapse of Leninist style governments, but also in like social democracy. Because it a lot of the I mean, it's actually kind of interesting why it's unclear why it is. People have different theories, but they're, you know, people often describe it in, you know, Fisher's term, the writer, Mark Fisher, capitalist realism, the attitude in the 90ss was that, you know, there's only one world that's possible and it's the best of all possible worlds. And that's the capitalist world

where everybody's going to have McDonald's in every country and two countries that have the same McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we kind of found out the hard way this week that that's not really the case. Well, and if people had paid attention more to other parts of the world they would know that like well there were civil wars in a bunch of countries that had mcdonald's it didn't stop people from shooting each other yeah no that's absolutely right yeah

as as the united states should tell you people will kill each other whether or not they have access to chicken mcnuggets yeah you know i mean i think like that that's a period that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has ever been like you got your friend fukuyama like the most wrong person ever you've got yeah you've got a lot of sort of ideologues who like have sort of deluded themselves into thinking this stuff is over and yeah i think you're right that that sort of plays into this you know into sort of the collapse of of i guess guess the party state left and then the way in which that – the alternative to that I guess becomes neo-anarchism and anarchist practice even if it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups kind of seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene. seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene yeah so basically the story that we tell is that there's um you know the zapatista rebellion in 1994 triggers these uh it's not just that the zapatistas are able to create their autonomous territory in chapas but it triggers this wave

uh that um we use a term that sometimes is used in academia called neo-anarchism for this. There's an anarchist revival in the 90s around the world. And it's not just people calling themselves anarchists. It's all these movements that were inspired by the libertarian, socialist, broadly speaking, Zapatistas, adopting kind of similar methods in their local context in different countries fighting against, I mean, a lot of things. Initially, it's against like, you know, neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up being against like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot of outsourcing is, you know, if they have unions in this country from the social

democratic period, they shut down the factory fire, everybody move it to someplace where some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries to do a union uh and then that you know that that lowers uh logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this point that you know it ends up being cheaper for the company even though they have to transport goods all across the world and do just-in-time delivery and that kind of thing so um, a lot of the, the, the anti-globalization movement that sprouted up around, uh, the 2000s was like, um, against all these things and usually using the kinds of direct actions, uh, which is when you act kind of independent of the state and not trying to like, you know, convince a politician to do something, but taking direct action to get your result, your desired result, um, you know, and all this kind of stuff, uh, that were based at using like direct democratic consensus methods, uh, in the way that they organized stuff, uh, that, that was, that was all basically anarchistic. And so there was this way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics,

anarchist like attitudes towards what activism even is started filtering into all these other movements and this has been happening a little bit in the 80s too so there was like the anti-nuclear movement had a lot of this the the the feminist movement had a lot of this um there was a whole um stream of single other ecological movements uh were actually like pioneered in a lot of ways by anarchists in the 90s um so as well as indigenous movements in places like mexico bolivia etc so the the this is the kind of like rise of this neo-anarchist milieu that we're talking about which is not just about anarchists it's about people who act and think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it yeah i mean that's

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

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As much as we're about to get to how this sort of goes wrong, fails in some sense. I think that was the strength of this movement was that it was it it's tactics were really easy to spread and that led to a lot of people adopting it led to it sort of becoming this i guess activist consensus that you know like you use the consensus process you you know you you have horizontal organizations, you have, you do direct actions, you mobilize people and you don't have these sort of like hierarchical like parties. But that, yeah. And I think, I think the next part of the story that you want to tell us about, I guess, how that fell apart and the consequences of that.

basically what ends up happening is that like there was this moment of our ascent because i would identify myself as being definitely like part of these uh the the this general milieu i mean i came i hopped aboard a lot later with like occupy wall street but a lot of the kind of explosion of movements that happened around the world in 2011 again not, not always, right. It started with the Arab spring, which started with somebody setting themselves on fire in Tunisia and like, you know, and then that spreads to other countries in the middle East and, you know, protests against dictatorships and so on, but it starts getting kind of like transported beyond its initial middle Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know is that the, the,

the occupy wall street movement in North America and like other movements Middle Eastern context. And what a lot of people don't know is that the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America and like other movements that, you know, some of them were called Occupy, some of them, and one of them was Maidan in Ukraine, as a matter of fact, and other like, you know, the Hong Kong, the Umbrella Movement. The, and all these kinds of movements that, that proceeded from after 2011, a lot of them were basically in a single kind of wave, uh, a protracted wave of copycat movements, uh, that were trying to adopt the same kind of tactics of like occupying public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous and doing like direct democracy in those squares, modeling the kind of society that people wanted to create, you know, in this moment where it seemed like

you could have these direct democratic sorts of movements. And in the US, there's like a direct line of succession from like Occupy Wall Street through to like Black Lives Matter, through to like the anti-pipeline indigenous protests. There's a lot of like shared movement experience, a lot of the same people showing up to it or teaching the next generation, um, in those movements. And I think this is something, I mean, uh,

it's difficult to find like sources on this, but I mean, y'all are involved in social movements. I think that that's like a rough, that's roughly a description of, of what's happened. Right. Uh, unless, unless we're crazy. Yeah. And I think, you know i think i guess what you call the last wave that is occupy ice in 2018 yeah yeah you know like i remember like that was a sort of mix of i guess two crowds one is you know i mean like i i remember it was a bunch of you know people who'd been in occupy and then also it was a bunch of, you know, people who'd been in Occupy. And then also it was a lot of people who'd been radicalized essentially by Trump.

Yeah, there was a pretty big new wave of people. Yeah, around 2016. And that, you know, I guess the other thing that's going on through this period is the ascension of ascension of the right and the return also not just of you know not just a sort of the the fascist right but of leninism and social democracy as well yeah um yeah that's happened around like when bernie sanders was getting more popular yeah yeah and i think i think i think there's there's you know there's a couple of there's like two threats here there's the sort of bernie sanders thread thread, and then there's the rise of the tankies, which has to do with Syria and has to do with sort of this backlash against the 2011 revolutions. class turns into like just you know like erdogan's like hard right well i mean he's never like not a right wing but like erdogan's turn into just like firebombing cities and um right and then asad as well like the you know literally barrel bombing you know the peaceful protest stuff um

can overthrow governments if the government is not willing to bomb and shoot people uh who gather en masse in the central square because they're afraid of what the world's response would be if they did start doing that but you know when bashar al-assad did that in syria against the democratic opposition movements um you know that basically sent the signal nothing i mean nothing happened to assad right so that basically sent the signal that like oh he had a stressful couple of years but yeah yeah right yeah right yeah like like you can you can just shoot people and bomb them and like it and that basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot of these movements were trying to do which is to have like large numbers of people do non-violent civil disobedience And then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture of like

direct democracy in the hopes that, you know, the assemblies that are created in that space could in some way become the germ of the organs that could run society. Or at least that's like when it's taken to its logical conclusion, because usually people who are involved in this, they get involved in it. They think the assembly stuff is really cool. They start learning more about it. They get radicalized by being in the assembly because like when you're in a direct democratic assembly and you're actually making the decisions like together and then you come to an agreement and you execute the decision, you start asking yourself like, why can't we do everything like this? And then, you know, that's what directs a lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah, one of the reasons why these movements start to decline is because they get smashed. But I think that there's always this other thing going on, which, and I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it like you know there's there was this kind of both like an external critique at first from people like you know vasco sincro of jacobin and things like that but then

also like this increasingly over the years in the last half of the 2010s internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves are people in this general kind of milieu libertarian socialism talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the most pressing crises in the 21st century like if you like if you guys had to say i know it's like kind of pretentious but like what is the most pressing crisis of the 21st century what are like the top three just off the top of your heads without thinking, what would you list if you had to list three, two or three separate things,

climate change, creeping authoritarianism and rampant disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet. Okay. So let's tackle each one of those, right? Like what's,

what's an anarchist got to say about climate change? Well, okay. Disrupt the pipelines. Like, you know, do like, you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet.

So you have to have like, you know, we have all the slogans, right? I mean, we've all heard them like a million times. Yeah. You have the diagnoses of the problem,

but yeah. Yeah. But then like, okay, so how are we going to like, you know, I guess we're going to build some co-ops and then the co-ops are going to democratize production and then we can do degrowth somehow. But like also disrupting existing production.

But there's like a missing step here, right? Because like, you know, the reason why we have all this production in a certain way is because the entire economy depends on it. It's been set up that way. production in a certain way is because the entire economy depends on it. It's been set up that way. So you implied in the idea that we're going to do degrowth somehow is that we need some way of constructing a different economy. And how do you construct a different economy, right? Through some kind of planning.

So really the question is like, how do you do economic planning? Second one, I'm going to skip creeping authoritarianism for now, because that's actually like feeding into the more, the ending of essay but the but the other one right disinformation another great question right like what do you do with social media like okay again anarchists talk in general a lot about like okay we're going to democratize all the companies because we're democratizing everything we're democratizing neighborhoods we're democratizing cities so We're democratizing neighborhoods. We're democratizing cities. So it's kind of the same thing, turning everything into like a radical direct democracy. Okay, but if we're going to have social media, first of all, should we? Like was it a mistake to invent a centralized system instead of the more decentralized internet that existed before social media, right?

That's kind of an interesting question. But then assuming that we do, how do we restructure it? Not just in terms of how it's managed, but like, okay, we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever. And let's say that we're the workers at Facebook. What do we do? How do we structure it so that it's not a giant misinformation engine? Once you actually have the responsibility and the power of being in the saddle, which is what we spend so much of our time kind of just trying to do, you have to actually make decisions about what to do. And honestly, there aren't that many. I mean, what do you do with a utility like that? Like, for example, who ought to be in control of a utility like that? Is it really just the workers of Facebook? Aren't all the people who are users of it, don't they have a right to be making decisions about it too? And is it just an American institution just because it's an American LLC or is it like a global institution because everybody on the planet's on it?

Is there, you know, are there ways that it could be reconfigured like fundamentally in terms of how users use it that would change the experience in some way to actually make it make you less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand, if you try to manipulate people in order to, you know, not see something that's going to be misinformation, isn't that well, you know, like censorship or, or some other thing that we generally would oppose, right? Like the tool of centralized social control. So these are really deep questions.

And again, there's generally a kind of silence. And of course, in that case, there's silence from the social Democrats too. And there's silence from the Leninists. I mean, well, the Leninists just kind of fantasize about turning Facebook into the tool the central party state uses in order to

crush dissent forever or whatever but you know social democrats are like this nationalized facebook and it's like you know yeah sure we could we could do that and then you know the nsa owns owns facebook i'm sure that's a that's a better scenario yeah i mean i tend to think somewhat differently about what it means to have an anarchist solution to those problems. Like, for example, I don't see anarchists or social Democrats or Leninists having any kind of stopping climate change solution, because I don't realistically see the organizing potential capable of actually stopping what's going on in any kind of reasonable timeframe. And I certainly don't think that the existing, you know, neoliberal structures or the

authoritarian structures that exist in, you know, other countries or in this country are going to stop it either. So when I think about solutions to climate change from an anarchist perspective, I think about how can anarchist organizing help people deal with the consequences of climate change. And I tend to see the potential for actually mitigating climate change coming more from as the consequences of this become more dire to people. If anarchists are good at providing relief and helping people and organizing through that, then eventually there's some potential to actually get people organized to stop the causes of the problem. But I just don't, I'm not an optimist about our

ability to stop the worst of it at this point, especially not after the most recent IPCC report. especially not after the most recent IPCC report. And I guess I'm kind of in the same boat when it comes to disinformation. I, and this is not just like anarchists. I feel like lack, as you've stated, a cot,

like a good idea about like, what do we do with Facebook? What do we do with YouTube? What do we do with the way all of these things are set up and the harms that they do at scale? Nobody. And I include the people currently in charge, has any real good ideas for that because they haven't. Like I've been working in this space for a very long time. I've spent a lot of time talking with and debating with a lot

of the folks who are leading minds kind of in the fight against disinformation. And I just don't feel like there's any sort of solution that is an immediate term solution, because the problem is so advanced as it is. So I guess that's kind of like where I land on a lot of this stuff is we certainly need to be thinking about solutions. But I kind of like, I think it's less likely that there's going to be, like you were saying, the kind of debate is between, is there some way of like reforming or fixing, making Facebook more democratic? Or is it just, we need to decide that maybe we don't have some of this stuff. And I tend to land towards that, that like, well, I think the solution is going to be maybe Facebook's a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't have, there's aspects of it

that are necessary, obviously. And I think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that are useful, but I think the, they're also fundamentally tied to the algorithms that drive them, which is also what drives so much of the toxic aspects that I think if you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm, you're talking about something that is very different. It's no longer the medium. It's no longer the medium. It's so radically different that it's not even useful to compare them. It's like comparing Discord to Facebook. It's like they don't operate the same way. They're not – they don't operate the same way. Yeah, that's exactly kind of where I tend to be on that. And I know that's not like – to the extent that like that's pessimistic, I guess I am kind of pessimistic about anarchism's ability to stop the worst of things that's happening where i kind of look at myself as an optimistic anarchist

is is in the i believe anarchism offers solutions when these things go as badly as they're going to do in a way that you know the present systems or you know more authoritarian systems that people propose can't solve the worst consequences of these problems as as well that's that's kind of where i i feel like it is can feel a lot simpler to default to like the dual power framework of a lot of these things because otherwise the problems are so complex that you cannot approach them from from every angle so you really do need to simplify and condense them and collapse them into something that is more simplified which often results in like a dual power kind of framework for what you actually start doing. Yeah. And I think you have to, I think if you're an insurrectionist, if you're a revolutionary, whether you're an anarchist or, you know,

a Leninist or whatever, you have to be looking at what's actually happening in Ukraine right now and recognize that, all right, well, to what extent do you think you're going to be able to organize people in such a way that allows them to deal with thermobaric weapons? You know, in what way are you going to organize people that allows them to effectively resist cluster munitions? And I think that when you kind of look at it that way, which is what it would take to overthrow any of the large hegemonic powers in the world right now, a much more realistic set of solutions is, all right, well, let's work on building power by building organizations and communities that are capable of taking care of themselves in the holes that these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing

because they too are crumbling. And that's much smarter than being like, all right, well, I'm going to try to get a bunch of my friends with rifles and arm up a couple of drones and go up against people who have access to MLRS weapon systems and whatnot. Yeah, no, I think that that's a really great point. and whatnot yeah no i think that that's a really great point um i the way that i would think about it is the starting with the big picture problems is a bit misleading because as you said like nobody it's quite likely that nobody has solutions to these problems certainly the social democrats don't they sure haven't solved them like yeah you know and and i say this is somebody who's like half a social

democrat by temperament um it would be really nice if we elected a little social democratic government and they swooped in and you know did like new deal stuff i like new deal stuff i like wpa stuff as much as the next uh you know um person who uh likes arts programs and infrastructure development well you know some infrastructure development not others right uh the war the war complex we can do a little without but you know the the thing about it is those big problems you're right it looks like there's not going to be like a big solution uh and that we're going to kind of have to cope with the consequences of of it at least at first yeah but even coping this is this is kind of where i think the real kind of substance of of the problem that libertarian socialists are

facing right now even coping would require a greater level of organization than we have proven able to muster up to now not because the methods that we choose don't work, because in fact, as you point out, and as I actually really want to forcefully argue, and because I, because we do in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't work and can't work for a lot of the specific problems that we face. And history shows that very definitively. But there is also a serious way in which even kind of developing these like, you know, local, highly like, you know, rooted in a community, like direct democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to the point where it actually could start replacing some of the gaps left behind by, you know, states and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused on their own goals to meet those needs. That would actually require us to be able, for example, to know how to build up a cooperative sector in a city, or how to kind of like network the tenants unions that already exist, you know,

across different, you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent and then construct like the, the, the way in which they self-manage each other or, or not each other self-managed together, the, you know, the, the larger group or it would require, and, you know, there's a lot of people working on these problems, But sometimes there is a kind of like – you'll see this obstacle in the road because, for example, what do you do when the – it might not even be the state, properly speaking. It might be like a posse that's funded by some rich billionaire asshole who's got his notion that some people are better than others, and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech bros, you know, and then that billionaires funding a bunch of people who've got now, like, you know, some industrial access to industrial infrastructure. And they don't like the fact that you're doing your DIY, like, you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf. So how do you fight back against that?

I mean, some of it you can fight back against at kind of our current level of capacity, but some of it does kind of require us to start thinking like, well, how do you build up financial independence? Like how do you build up the kind of independence where it's like if we get kicked off of the capitalist social media, for example,

which is a great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives um that are not like the uh the ones that the nazis created when there was a purge of some of them that gab like highly dysfunctional like you know it didn't even work for them uh not that i mean i'm happy about that but like you know my point is like the same thing could happen to us, so what would we do? There are all these kinds of things that are more little-picture questions in a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at least medium-sized questions where we need this kind of – because part of what it is is also that – it's not that these questions are impossible.

It's that they're kind of neglected. And there's these thinkers like Christian Williams, who's an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism. or an essay in Counterpunch by a person named Gabriel Kuhn, who's an autonomous Marxist, basically like a libertarian Marxist anarchist type, called What Happened to the Anarchist Century. And both of those essays, which I highly recommend that people read, they make points basically like this,

like where the focus on how to construct those institutions and the nittygritty of how to do that has kind of receded from anarchism as it's actually practiced. So there's a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not always the attention to the nitty-gritty of how you actually can build resilient institutions that actually carry that through. Which, a hundred years ago, people were talking about like the one big union and the general strike, but that's kind of like, well, a,

it didn't work in exactly the way that they were thinking it would, even in the most successful revolutions, like in Spain. And B, it was also like the, the there's, there's, there's a certain way in which our tensions are focused on other

things. And it's not that those things are bad. It's just that there's been this kind of neglect of the question of large-scale organization and how you do coordination in order to tackle problems that are kind of at the scale that I was talking about before. And so basically the argument of the essay is that in the absence of that, like for the, the, the socialist movement that emerged after 2016 turned away from neo-anarchism thinking basically that it had no solutions, which I don't think is true either, but it's like, you know, or like rather it was true in the moment, but it doesn't have to be true, that it was that they turned to the social democratic route. But with the failure of Corbyn and Bernie, that kind of burned a lot of people out too. And a lot of what seems like it's coming up now – and I wonder what you guys think of this. A lot of the people that we see showing up in movement spaces, who we see kind of getting politically activated for the first time or whatever, a lot of those people are really interested in Leninism and on specifically because I don't, I don't know how true that is. That's at least not, that's not,

that part's not true. At least, at least, at least here in Portland, that's very much not the case. Yeah. Well, Portland,

Portland is also, yeah, no other, no other part of the country is like Portland other than maybe Eugene. Like, okay, that's, that's fair.

That's fair. Well, Seattle a little bit too. Let's be fair.land is a big enough anarchist city that there are entire decade-long like and like inter-anarchist wars that no one else in the u.s has ever heard of that are like the most important thing that's ever happened in portland oh boy welcome to the green red let me tell you chris you have just pissed off 60 people who could not explain to you if you gave them a year could not explain to you why they're angry i mean to be to be fair like i i i am an anarchist in chicago when the first time i introduced two of my twitter mutuals together they almost got in a fist fight so like yeah that makes sense that makes sense yeah that's that completely scans

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since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. little bit to stay away from some of the more russia communist kind of like types of aesthetics and and ideas because it is a turnoff for so many people and it does you know encourages and it does like encourage and forefront a form of authoritarianism that maybe is not great yeah i i don't know like i i i've seen sort of both. Okay, so I think the last year has been very different than I think the previous five. I've seen it on Twitter, but I don't know how much it expands into actual spaces. is that the Leninists essentially took over the international committee. And they had this kind of division of labor inside the DSA where you have a part of the DSA that's essentially a social democratic machine,

and then you have the international committee, which is the foreign policy wing essentially run by the Leninists. And I think – I don't know. I think I saw it there. The other thing I think I saw a lot of that I've seen, even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinists, is part of what I was talking about is the sort of climate Stalinism or climate Mao stuff. That is a huge problem that – I mean I think part of it also just has to do with the fact that people don't – okay, so we have actually existing climate leninism like we have it it's it's it's china like the ccp changed it's literally changed state ideology in in in the mid-2010s as you know as an attempt to to deal with with with with pollution climate change it did nothing like they they pressed every policy right yeah it doesn't it didn't work yeah yeah i mean they

did carbon markets they did they literally just banned coal in entire provinces and it didn't work they uh they changed their country valuations i i they probably shot people yeah yeah like lays this out specifically with china to an excruciating degree like it like in detail if you're really interested in this type of climate left authoritarianism, they call it climate Mao in the book, but you can call it climate Leninism, you can call it whatever. They lay out how it could work and how use cases of it

have not worked to a pretty intense degree. If you're interested in that, I would recommend reading the book Climate Leviathan. It definitely influenced a large portion of the writing for this show. Yeah, and I mean mean to your point i don't think that this is the only trend i do i agree with you that out of like the conjuncture of 2020 there was this um i i think that a lot of the more like establishment reformist aspects of the movement were discredited and that pushed people in different radical directions like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism i am seeing a lot more faces

that are interested in in those questions for sure uh and that's kind of counter to the trend that i was describing from the last like five years of like you know people becoming more disinterested because of the real or perceived lack of solutions however i do think that it's important and this is kind of following on Chris's climate Leninism point, to understand that there's at least a counter trend where a lot of people have not only moved away from libertarian socialism, but they've also moved away from democratic socialism. And if you follow that pattern, which is a pattern that I at least have seen within the DSA, within various trade unions, among a lot of intelligentsia-type people like journalists, professors, blah, blah.

You see a very common set of arguments, and I think it's very clear that as the century proceeds and the crises get worse and start killing even larger numbers of people than they already are, we're going to see this argument a lot more. numbers of people than they already are we're going to see this argument a lot more um yeah and and the argument is something like this i mean i there's a quote from a tweet uh and and you know one could argue that the tweet doesn't matter old friends old enemies the you are naive if you think this is the tweet climate you are naive if you think climate change can ever be solved without an authoritarian government at this point that's and that's that's the whole thing so it's a it's a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous right it has this like shocking and scandalous effects you know we need authoritarianism to to solve climate change it's scandalous you know whatever but then it's like okay wait but what do you mean by authoritarian am i just being hysterical reacting it's like, okay, wait, but what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just being hysterical?

It's the same as saying you're naive. If you think that climate change can be solved without nuclear power or climate change can be solved without really big hammers. Like we have authoritarian governments. We have nuclear power. We have really big hammers and climate change has not been solved. Is it possible that any of those things might be a part of a theoretical solution that may happen someday? Yes, but it hasn't. And there's like, if you're trying to say that authoritarian governments are better at dealing with climate change than the governments that

currently dominate, number one, hell of a lot of authoritarian governments are responsible for our current situation, RE climate change. Number two, the soviet union which i suspect most of these people see as a guiding light horrible for the environment turned the largest body of water in eurasia into a poison lake yes right not not not good at the environment you know and here's here's what's interesting about the thing to me the other thing that it's doing is kind of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to oppose this idea without specifying what the idea is like and like in other words authoritarianism like but like i mean let's let's be blunt right what they're implying as a leninist is the one

party state the secret police press censorship in the command economy yeah so does that help you fight climate change that's actually an interesting and a kind of like you know distant 5 000 foot view you know from the god's eye view or whatever like uh the that's an interesting technical question do these institutions actually help or hinder a response but we're not even having that conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to get you to think that. So again, does a tweet matter? Well, I think a tweet matters if it comes from a member of the National Political Committee of the DSA, because at least ostensibly if DSA is, which is the person who did that tweet, because at least ostensibly if DSA is a mass movement as it purports to be uh the mass movement of socialists in the u.s and you know and the national political committee is ostensibly the leadership of the dsa which i personally don't believe but that's certainly how they think of themselves um then this indicates that the largest most important socialist mass movement in the U.S., at least self-branded, has people in its leadership who believe that the secret police might help in addressing climate

change. That's an interesting thing, and it's also very disturbing. And the thing is, this person is not actually important. He's a symptom, because this is something that's happening across the board. and a more intellectually serious uh version of this argument was put forward by the marxist intellectual and historian um a professor of human ecology called andreas malm and people who are really into like marx nerd stuff will probably have heard yeah mom's name yeah what a very good book called fossil capital everything he's written after fossil capital is a disaster i i like some of the sabotage stuff it's it's i mean it's a little romantic and impractical he wrote an ethical discourse instead of a thing about like the

risk of eco-sabotage which is the actual important part of getting well and also the degree to which it can matter because eco-sabotage there's this idea on the left that like well what we need to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure and again it's like what it's it's like what that dsa dude said like yeah that could theoretically be part of a thing that but also process if it's like nine dudes who do it and then they go to prison or get shot well well, that doesn't really fix climate change. I think the book Ministry for the Future really lays out all of kind of like the best case scenario for all these types of things and how they can work together to overall trend in this direction. Because, yeah, that type of like eco-sabotage in conjunction with other like political effects can be impactful on what things happen but it's not necessarily be you know it's not it's not as simple as we would like it to be because yeah it's it turns out a complex

world has complex consequences and complex yeah and and i think i think this is you know the trend that mom is on the trend on the you the trend – there's like these people have have seen climate change but they have no actual solution to it so they wave their hands and pretend that like this like you know the state is going to descend from the sky and save them and and it's not and and i think that's you know i, I think we're sort of, I don't know, I think, as we just, I guess, kind of wrap this up, because we, unfortunately, are running out of time. But, you know, this, like, this exact moment, like, these, like, few weeks are this moment of incredible, like, rupture on the left, right? Because we've had, in some ways, social democrats be discredited by the fact that, corbin and sanders both lost right their political project has been discredited um we've had a series of sort of anarchist failures but then you know and in the last couple of weeks right it was all of

the sort of big state like authoritarian people like tied themselves to a bunch of imperialists and you know staked their whole entire politics off of them being the anti-imperialist class and then you know the state who's like a bunch of their press people like literally work for right and who they've been arguing like is is the counter-imperialist power just does imperialism and so like yeah i think we have this moment where everything is in chaos in which we have to be the ones that that that have solutions or have or have the tools to build them. And I think that's why this project is important because that's something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah, I think there's a tremendous value in being humble about seeking out solutions to these questions and not doing what so many do on the left and pretend that

their tendency has an absolute answer because all we have is theories. And the reason I know that to a point of certainty is that no one has solved any of these problems yet. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And so there is a tremendous degree of humility that people need to have in terms of like, all right, well, we are attempting to arrive at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world as opposed to we are trying to force through this thing that we know will work. Because you don't, you know, if you're a Marxist Leninist, and you think that we need climate Mao, you don't know that that will work because it hasn't yet. And if you're an anarchist who thinks the solution is bombing

as many oil refineries as you possibly can, well, you don't know that you're ever going to get enough people on board for that to mean anything. And I think that there's – the conversations that we need to be having, I think it's important to see them as conversations as opposed to polemics aimed at just getting people in line behind this shining vision of a clear set of steps. It's important to envision the end goal. I say that a lot. We need to be looking and accepting the possibility of a better future. But it's important not to be dogmatic about the road to get there because nobody really has a clear idea of what that looks like. Yeah.

So the piece ends up, and if you want to see the ending of it it'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the next couple weeks but the the basic gist of where it goes is precisely to the practical question right instead of like making these like polemical uh arguments that are rooted more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided to identify with within the broad family of socialism than in like actually trying to like solve problems for the people around you right or help uh contribute to the solutions like it's actually we what we want to ask is like if we have like the giant ecological crisis uh how do you how do you actually do it is it by trying to force people from the top down to do it

as Andrea's mom kind of draws on the failed policies of war communism as an inspiration for that? Or is it potentially by having like democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks like Naomi Klein basically uncovered in a lot of her journalism and this changes everything. So this is kind of like the debate that we have to start having

in order to be able to together formulate these kinds of solutions. Yeah. All right. Well, I think that's going to do it for us today. What do we, what do we, you guys got a plug you want to throw up, throw up before we roll out?

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