It Could Happen Here - 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.

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. 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 how 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 Makhno was forced to make a tough decision. to the fall of the Tsar, and Makhno 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 mass's autonomy. Makhno 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 live in Ukraine for several years. I had to leave my homeland because of the political repressions against anarchists there. these conflicts it has several dimensions once like the the first and simplest thing is that Ukraine even though is like 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 like just 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. uh 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 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 apolitical in sense that like most of the army are not in the politics even though of course we aware that army is 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 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, it 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 to defend some land against some occupation for me is too simplistic for the anarchist and revolutionary approach. So there come like 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 in 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 domain questions will be like where are you and where were you in this event and of course the right side is to confront this imperialist occupation this can really give an opportunity to like for future and not for future actually already today for organizing and mobilization of a 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 unimaginable in 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 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. 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. 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. 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? 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 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 2020, 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 after and also several actions against some police stations

some of these statements were placed in anarchist fighter website and telegram channel 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. 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, it 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 about the most organized initiative you already know but there are 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. even don't know about everyone who participates. At this point, he started talking about an anarchist militant named Igor Walachow, who had been killed by a rocket in Kharkiv a few days earlier.

Before the war, Walachow 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 participations. 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 anarchist 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 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 like 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 are, 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 irregulars, their life outside of battle is much less regimented than what regular soldiers experience. 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, are of course generally not autonomous and what is what's been issued by superior command we should implement in life and should fulfill these 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. 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 feel 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 the Putin's 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, I don't know, generals or somebody else from above the military hierarchy. We here are now occupied with training, with organizational constructing, and with improving our internal life, not being really 100% orchestrated by any military hierarchy people. So what about 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 uh so because of this you already

supposed to be somehow more free uh and more apt 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, 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 a total political autonomy in sense that all the groups and individuals who construct the unit we are part of, they are absolutely free to express their analysis, political analysis, and conceptualization of both these events and our participation in them

according to their 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 a 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 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 instrumentalize to reach their own goals. And with some of these groups, of course, we had like just street fights, for example, the elements close to the Sazov movement, they try to influence a lot the Belarusian diaspora,

like oppositional diaspora in Kiev. For example, in the one year anniversary of the protests of 2020 in Belarus, there was a fight in Kiev between anarchists who came to participate in demonstrations, in this demonstration, and the Nazis who attacked them, aiming to somehow push them out from the Belarusian movement to influence it in their own way. Also, just the 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 course before as well. About the current military situation like of course we are now actually a part of one army with 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 like at the same part of the barricade. But this is a situation we need to deal with. There are different opinions amongst our comrades and 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, a 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 me, I do not support this second assumption and position. I see this quite not really politically smart, in 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 we need our own PR, our own publicity and media work,

and also, 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 as of 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, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to could happen here a podcast that you have heard me introduce like probably well probably like 70 or 80 times by now but you yeah you 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 tried to go back together and then fell apart again episode. And with me, I'm your host, Christopher Wong. And with me is Nicholas Scott, who's 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.

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, well, we definitely have not given enough attention and I think gets less attention in the sort of mainstream left analysis of what happened to Allende and what was going on in that period, which is the Cordones. And Nick has written about this a lot and is also writing more about this and is doing research. Actually, do you care? Do you mind if I mention that you're in Chile doing research right now? No, totally. I'm, you know, that's where I i am i'm here uh 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 is different about it than a lot of the the stuff that you'll read about Allende and about the cordones 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 Cordones emerge as a specific culture, a specific urban space across the city of Santiago. You know, the English translation of the Cordones Industrialis 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 pre-existing sort of transportation networks that they're able to take advantage of. The problem is that 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 Centro, the central part of Santiago. And they bring in an Austrian urban planner, Karl Brunner, to help with this. And they bring in an Austrian urban planner, Karl Brunner, to help with this. And while Karl Brunner essentially tries to do for Santiago what Haussmann did for France, widened boulevards, make the city more accessible to new forms of transportation, ideally the car, buses, things of that nature. The problem is that he limited his work and his studies, as I said, just to the center of Santiago itself. The other problem is that once Bruner 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, but you 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 pull 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 Parioquia, who is an architect, that something needs to be done. 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 intercommunal, which communal in the sense would be a rough translation to municipality in English. So it's really the first sort of intermunicipal urban plan that tries to link networks together.

And this is actually the first time that this word cordon industriel 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 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, largely for things of pollution, safety, all of 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 sectors. And so that's really where my dissertation starts. these sectors. And so that's really where my dissertation starts. That's where my research really sort of starts the stories in 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 Allende comes to power? Yeah. And I think that that's an interesting way to look at it because I think, you know, the process of sort of industry moving from the center of the urban core outwards is something that happens really across the world although mostly after that period and that that was 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 the kind of suburbanization that you see of industry in the u.s for example in

like the 1980s or is it closer to well well, I've talked about this, I guess, on the show in the Chinese context too, where you have – I mean, mostly pollution stuff has seen some industries sort of like – I mean, just literally getting pushed into rural areas, is it, is it like, is it like those same kind of impulses or is there a different kind of, um, like relation? I mean, like how far out of the city, like, is this stuff like getting pushed to? That's a great question. It's a wonderful question. Um, and you know, it is actually important. This is important to remember that at this time, the city of Santiago, um, you know, just outside the city of Santiago is still largely rural, right? Where the first cordone 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 planners 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 these same areas. city for these people to live right so they're moving into these 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 um 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 radical working class culture. But it seems like you have this countervailing factor here, which is that you have a bunch of people who are coming into industrial work for the first time out of the countryside, which tends to be a very radical faction. Like is, 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, 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, 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, right, which we can roughly translate as sort of urban poor, right? 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, right? 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, their 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, right? 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 as a claim of property rights, right? As a claim for their own proper home and everything that would go with it within a city infrastructure,

utilities, sewage, et cetera. 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 Cordones and the popular unity years during Allende. 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. Now, in doing 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, nitrates are not, saltpeter 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 so important to think about the Cordones as 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. Yeah, that seems like a much more... I don't know if productive is the right word although it is but i think yeah i think that is a a better way of thinking about it than what you usually see because yeah that that kind of the fact that yeah the fact that you have multiple different essentially like so you have multiple different essentially like you have multiple different sociological classes mixing

you have their tactics sort of fusing and that developing its own culture that's distinct I think from a lot of the 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 can draw similarities between that and between the codones but i think i don't know i mean it it it it'll use the version of this that that i know the best and that one i guess sort of also has a similar dynamic if you get you get a bunch of uh that you have this mixing of sort of the old urban working class, but then you have this huge labor migration from the South, from the rural areas that mixes in there. think is like a a distinct product of like this exact configuration of of sort of social classes hitting each other and to what extent it's kind of like a process that we've that you you you find in other places where you have uh you have these sort of migrant worker like first generation migrant 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 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, right? 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 Allende government so unique in this moment. But what also makes the cordonis unique is this sort of relationship between social space and physical space in the city. So, for example, the very first cordon that emerges in 1972, Sirius Maipu, as I mentioned earlier, on the southwest of the city. That one, as I mentioned, because it had such close contact with the rural sector on that edge, And 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 rural laborers seize 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 it type of strategy. This is, say, different from the cordon that my dissertation is focused on, Vecuna McKenna, which has, as I mentioned, a much larger segment of pobladores living nearby it, right? And so you have a 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, and within the historiography as well has always been associated with the Poblador movement, right? Because of this sort of connection to the countryside, because of the church's sort of, you know, missionary kind of work and going out into the poor populations, especially following Vatican II, in which they begin to sort of have more outreach into the poor sectors. But 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 población, but who worked in a factory? who may have lived in a población, but who worked in a factory? In other words, what was the relationship between the sort of social pastoral message of the church and the sort of socialism

of a factory worker? And in the case of the Facuna McKenna, there's actually very strong links here. So, specifically the San Cayetano Parish, which is located just to the west of the Cordone proper, was fundamental in helping some of the workers establish unions in the Cordone. 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, and it 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 empleados 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, to found it right. Because they can't do it in the factory itself because 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 Cayetano, who offers them help, and in doing so offers them a space to hold their first union vote. And that's actually how the union of Sumar gets founded. Sumar will go on to play a major role both in the Cordonas and then after the cordonis during the dictatorship it's a it's a very um very important factory uh in in this history um 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 i mean it brings us to 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 in a lot of latin america like takes i mean especially after vatican ii but like it takes this like very hard left turn like it takes this like very hard left turn that yeah i mean has all of these causes that like you know like you get like the the italian version of it is like you get a bunch of priests who are just like like like clergymen literally doing kidnappings of like random government officials and i think yeah i i guess in in in in this context, what's interesting to me, I guess, is how much – Okay, so what is the – you were talking about the sort of pastoralism of, of this, this sort of like social gospel message is, is,

is there, 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, the,

the influence of the church is larger in among sort of rural and extramural people. That's actually a really good question. And this is actually where I'm in the midst of sort of trying to figure 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 II, 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 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. So, 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 the 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, right? It's very much the sort of atheistic approach to the church, to religion that comes out of the early form of Marxism-Leninism from early 20th century.

And so there's a great debate on whether or not to use liberation. And ultimately, 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 the 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, right? 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, you know, part of the church, should be considered that part of the church. And so, in that sense, we can look at, say, San Cayetano Parish and the work that it's doing with workers in the Sumar factory. And so, this has me thinking about, you know, what does it mean, you know, what do 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-based community? 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, 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 Allende's election in 1970. And by that, I mean, he initiates what he refers to as a revolution in liberty, which is sort of a communitarian reformism that is essentially seen as perhaps forestalling a Marxist revolution, a 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 yeah can we

can we talk a bit more about like what the christian democrats are because this is a 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 very powerful christian democratic parties in europe there's very powerful christian democratic parties like across latin america yeah can we talk a bit about like what that is and how that's different from like you know how it's 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 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, what 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, they get alleviation of poverty, a more just distribution of wealth, right? But their ideas of justice 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 for a communist or a socialist, right? You want a sort of radical communism, dictatorship of the proletariat,

these types of forms, a very stagist 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. to move a bit to 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 what's very interesting to me about both allende and what's happening in the cordones is that like okay so like that 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 of socialism and then you know like a lot of weimar like germany right is ruled by by the german social democratic party and it's like well you look at what they do

and they're not really like socialisting they're most i mean you know they're they're they're doing things like like they're doing things like welfare reform but that's a very different thing well and you know and you can see like the labor party in in the uk for example well like okay well they'll nationalize industries right but you you don't see the kind of movement against like the the you don't see the kind of movement against property and the movement against sort of like like you don't see an actual attempt to like eliminate which was he as 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 percent of the time when someone nationalizes something right it's okay so instead 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 structural change in how the bureaucracy is run. There's no change. Your individual relation to your boss does not change. He's still your boss. And that isn't what happens in the in the same way yeah i'm interested why

why why why this looks different here i guess yeah no i think this is a great question you know and and so to to get to ayinde it is imperative that we start um with fray in 1964 and in some we can start even in 1957 which which was Allende's first attempt at running for president. At this time, Allende 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, in 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. However, 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 Latin fundio, grand estate, right? Which means that productivity isn't necessarily where it should be. should be. But it also means 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 jumpstart industry wholesale. What Chile does really well is that sort of intermediary phase of making goods for individual consumption, right? Things of that nature. And so what Allende 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 in 1957. Who wins is Alessandri 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 guerrilla warfare be successful, right? And not only be successful, but be successful in defeating the hegemon of the hemisphere, the 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 involvement of the CIA in a sort of scare tactic and fear mongering campaign went on in the 1964 campaign. Unfortunately, we just don't have the documents yet for this period like we do for the 1970s and the 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 Allende in 1964. So Frey will come to power in 1964. And actually, the agrarian reform in Chile will begin under the Christian Democrats, under Frey's administration, financed in large part by the Alliance for Progress. Also, the nationalization of copper, in which Chile would take a very small, 51% controlling in the copper companies, but would still have large,

the American copper companies, Anaconda and Kinnikot 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 there have been a lot of times where the CIA has supported land reform, which is very weird. They do it in Japan, for example. And it's seen as one of these things. It's like, okay, well, we have to do land reform in order to like stop and stop an actual revolution from happening so we'll do a sort of capitalist version of it 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 where the cia gets involved um yeah well it's also i mean the the alliance for progress is official government policy um you know it will be the one that starts the alliance, and then it will continue into the LBJ administration following Kennedy's 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 borne out as one of the successes in so far as it is what initiates the agrarian reform in chile so so i guess so okay so what you're saying is that there are there's like there's there's a specific group of parties at the u.s backs at this period who are trying to do this sort of

who are trying to do some kind of reform um like who are trying to do this sort of like the the classic elaboration reform to save our revolution thing and then i guess the like later policy becomes just do the do kind of insurgency on behalf of the landowners yeah i mean the the way the fray you know as the Frey administration continues, it becomes clear that his sort of reformist approaches is simply not working. One is just not working on a macroeconomic level, right? Inflation is still happening, which has sort of been the, you know, enemy number one of the Chilean economy for most of 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. And, you know, Frey thinks that they can figure it out via these sort of reforms, be it the agrarian reform, be it 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. approach right as you were saying earlier you know the the boss is still there workers do have a stake and control of the enterprise um but private property still exists right the boss

is still the boss like with that like how to what extent is like like if if you have this on a scale of like on the one hand on like 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 much control do they actually, like, I don't know, like is this closer to something like the sort of like German co-determination system? Like how close to like Yugoslavia is this? Sorry, I'm trying to get a sense of like, yeah, because this is interesting. A lot 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 um the 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 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, near the end of the Frey administration, there's a massacre that takes place in the south of Chile in Puerto Montt

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, 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 reformism, 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 the 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 communists. 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 turn, right? But they are also very much in line with the Ayinde's view of legislating socialism. That's, I guess, another interesting aspect of this, because 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 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 a revolution like hold and stabilize the situation um is that the case like so so i i because i i okay this is this is again going back to me knowing italy but i know um chile is is that is that something like how 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 it has it like because i know like like u.s policy to you like 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 into the you know once they

established the idea of the popular front that sort of does become the line the big change is takes place in 1957 um 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 term. 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 Leninist insurrectional model. It no longer has to be a Cuban revolutionary model. It can be its own. So that when Allende proposes this pluralist way of reaching socialism, that's what the communists will link to. throughout the three years, throughout the thousand days of the Allende 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 shift. And that's really the sort of context that the Cordones emerge out of in 1972 is this sort of growing factionalism, growing sectarianism within the ruling coalition of the popular unity. Yeah, 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. I mean, partially that's just – yeah, influence of yugoslavia is fascinating to me because i mean because that explains that explains so much right like that that explains why there's this sort of democratic component to it even in 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 um produce something that is the first time that um so for example allende victory in 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 percent range. by plurality. He only wins by about in the 30% range. Now, historically in Chile, a plurality victory is not a problem because you command it to the Congress and the Congress typically will just rubber stamp the victory. Allende, however, you know, there's a lot of apprehension about what he means for the country, what he means for the sort of landed elites, 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 of 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 Allende 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 Rene Schneider. And the attempt is that they're going to kidnap him and hold him hostage and use that as a way to prevent Allende from coming to power. Well, the problem is that 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 at this took place. And as a result, then ranks are closed around Allende and it is decided that they will approve his candidacy, his election, ranks are closed around Allende 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 Poverty Unities 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 Allende would not change fundamentally the political system, right? 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 Allende'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 It Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this interview, where we walk through the Chilean revolution, the Cordones, and their lasting impact on Chilean society. If you want to find more of Nicholas's work, he has an article

coming out in 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 Happened Here pod on Twitter and Instagram, and we have two new podcasts coming out. The first is Ghost Church, hosted by the inimitable Jamie Loftus. podcasts coming out. The first is Ghost Church, hosted by the inimitable Jamie Loftus. It's a deep look at the historical and 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 Killjoy's new podcast, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, is dropping., which is this Sunday, May 1st, the first episode of the great Margaret Killjoy'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. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonorum

An anthology of modern day horror stories Inspired by the legends of Latin America From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. welcome to it could happen here a show that is once again today about the chilean revolution um here's part two of my interview with nicholas scott yeah i guess i guess the next thing we should look at is like how how this happens in this opening phase yeah it. 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, right? 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, right? 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, right? 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, right? This would overcome those sort of bottlenecks in the import substitution model, as well as allowing for a more redistributive structure of 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 Union 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 a point in the middle in which they control a large share of the Congress as well as the courts themselves. So they will not, 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 issue an alliance with the Christian Democrats. And then the sort of other main thing that takes place in 1971 is that Allende is able to affect using macroeconomic policies that were functionally Keynesianism, right? Vuskovic, 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

historiography of the popular unity years. He published a book called Leavers of Revolution that looks at the Javar textile mill, which was the first mill that Allende nationalizes in 1971. And what Wynne found during his research is that Allende's policies in 1971 allowed a majority of Chileans to purchase bedsheets for the first time in many of their lives. Bedsheets were not something that a majority of Chileans used, despite the fact that a majority of Chileans worked in the textile industry. The textile industry was one of the most developed industries in Chile at this moment. 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. However, 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 CUT, has for the first time its own open elections for its leadership. It was the first time the rank and 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 socialists, and at the percentage level, it was functionally the same, were the Christian Democrats. So much so that basically the Popular Unity Coalition sees that a quarter of the working class of Chile identifies as a Christian Democrat. Meanwhile, economically, 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 becomes the sort of watchword or rallying cry in 1972. And if the successes of 1971 had somewhat papered over the sectarian differences that we were discussing earlier between, say, the communists and socialists, by 1972, those sectarian differences are really spilling out into public view. So in mid-1972, you have the Communist Party, a member of the Communist Party is also a member of the Allende government, Orlando Mias, pins 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 alliance as the way to move forward in the revolutionary path. The socialists, however, specifically the left wing of the Socialist Party, which was sort of identified with Carlos Altimorano at the time, takes the opposite approach and says that no the solution isn't to consolidate to advance uh 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 yeah that we should essentially align ourselves with the popular classes with the rural laborers that

are leading charge of the agrarian reform. That's picking up speed rapidly in the countryside at this time, right? See 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 emerged in city of Maipú.

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, 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 Allende's vision for creating a socialist economy. And this was a plan that he had submitted to the Congress to restructure 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 50-50 between the state

and private industry. And you'd have a private property area, which would just be businesses' usual private enterprise. Ultimately, that plan had been stalled out because of opposition from the Christian Democrats that vetoed it and submitted their own alternative strategy, which then Allende vetoed, became a constitutional crisis that got remanded to the Constitutional Tribunal in Chile, which ultimately languished there through the end of the Allende government through 1973 during the coup has never really resolved. Nevertheless, workers saw the ability to be put into the social property area as the solution to what they perceived as a revolutionary socialism, right? To be in a socialized economy. And I mentioned earlier Peter Wynn's work on the Yarborough textile mill, that's exactly what the workers at Yarborough did, they decided to do. Now that is in opposition to Allende and 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 the Yarborough textile mill in particular. There were other perhaps textile companies that had been slated for incorporation. But the problem is, is that the workers successfully petitioned and pressured Allende and won their incorporation. And that unleashed what Wynne would refer to as a revolution from below. And that's what 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 in 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. And 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. And I guess this is a good moment to apologize to our listeners that I never really gave a good definition as to what a cordon industriel 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. Metal workers organized with metal workers, glass workers organized with glass workers, textile, et cetera, et cetera. And never the twain shall meet in practice, right?

It's all through bureaucratic structures, labor leaders, et cetera. As I mentioned, it wasn't until 1972 that the 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 deciding to do it, they seize the territory of Sotoyos Maipu and 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 claims to represent the working class. You're a government that claims to represent the working class. You're a government that 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 Perlack 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 Sri Osmaipu. 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, the Cordon Industriel, 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.

are successful in transforming what is a very localized strike in the far south into a global lockout 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. And 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, that will reach a truce in november that includes a cabinet shake-up also includes integrating the military into the cabinet um 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 and the cordones saving the country and saving the government and how much of it was the military remaining loyal to the government that allows them to sort of reach what is referred to as the Truce of November. So I guess I want to back up for a second and talk about

what does the internal organization of the Cordonas actually look like? Are we talking about councils? Is this mass assemblies? How does this actually work on a sort of day-to-day basis? It's a great question. And this is actually the question that has sort of dominated a lot of the scholarship on the Cordonists. Frank Godichaud, who is sort of the leading scholar of the Cordonists, essentially used Marx's distinction of a class in itself and a class for itself to sort of unravel this question. So for Grishu, the cordon in itself is the sort of territory, right, that we began our conversation with. And then the cordon for itself is essentially the workers' council that is the governing body of the cordon itself, which was composed of already unionized workers, the cordon 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 someone that occupies a power or a position of authority within the union, i.e. already on the directorate or president, vice president, treasurer, or secretary. So that main councils are elected within the sort of general assembly of the cordon 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. They 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. 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? whoever wants to be on this thing? So it's a mix of both, right? So your 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 lays out the process for that. So our 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. You know, really what this, you know, what this sort of cuts to the heart of is that the history of the Cordonnays is a very effervescent history. It's really easy to see the Cordonnays in action, right, when they're doing things like seizing control of their territory and erecting barricades. 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. One reason that Goodishute is able to unpack as much as he has and uncover as much as 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 not just like an interpretive essay, it's the full transcript. And so that's, that in combination with some of these, Cordona's had local presses that we have existing documentary evidence from that sort of would give, you know, your standard diagram of council, commission, commission, 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

Cordone Vicuna McKenna. And this is the document that my research really is at the heart of my research. Because while Vicuna McKenna is recognized as sort of one of the most dynamic and strongest of the cordonus behind the original in studios, my poo, 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 masters at Tufts with Godeschi himself, who told me that we really don't know a lot about what was going on

day-to-day in Facuna McKenna. It'd be really great if we could somehow find a way to do that. And that kind of stuck with me. That really wasn't my concern at the time. My concern at the time was trying to understand how the Cordets had shifted from their emergence to the coup itself because i what i was seeing in a lot of the literature was that people were using sources from late 1973 once the cordonets 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, 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? 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 Fukuna Makena. And really, I was, you know, 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. Double thesis curse. 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?

And 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, right? But what I uncovered was that the document itself itself the document that is headed as the manifesto is actually a reworked version of a document that had circulated previously during the oktober crisis that was produced by the revolutionary left uh movement the mere the far left uh party aren't they aren't they uh aren't they like guverists they are they very much are uh this is the very far left um party that is calling for a more insurrectionary model

um it's also calling for a worker peasant alliance right so it is this very much more traditional um socialist revolutionary uh in that sense compared to the sort of allendeist 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 the word but essentially the petition of of chile and the mir takes issue with the fact that the bosses issued a petition in the name of chile yeah and so they issue a counter document that is the people's uh 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 Gouverneurist model. In the tail end of the October crisis, as Cordon bucuna mckenna is consolidating itself right it itself forms after a factory seizure at alec metal um which then unites these sort of two nodes that existed in the territory at the 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 of Aquino McKenna. And so in my research and in my master's essay at the University of Virginia, what I did

was I really compared these two documents and looked for where the difference is. What's showing up here that's not showing up in Mir's document? In other words, what glimpses can we get of the local culture of Akuna Makena 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 Mears document as well. But the crimes that are articulated are bare slight differences. But 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 in 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 Mears 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 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 Popol Ador movement for housing. 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 Vakuna 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 Poblador 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 seen as this, you know, hard line, this break in Chilean history, that there's a before September 11th, 1973, and there's an after September 11th, 1973. And very few studies cross that line, especially studies with regards to the labor movement. Very few studies cross that line, especially studies with regards to the labor movement.

Specifically, the dignity thing is really, really interesting to me too. So I did an interview like, oh God, like a month ago. I sort of have lost track of time, but I did an interview with an Amazon organizer. And that was one of the things that he brought up is that one of the things that like we are fighting for is dignity and and yeah and that's something specifically i've been thinking about more because like i i think we talked about this a bit in 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, if you are talking to a bunch of people 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 was one of the big demands in the modern Chilean protest movement. That was one of their huge sort of focuses. But it's also something like I have never, I don't think I've ever seen a communist party say the word dignity. I think it happens, I don't know,

every once in a while, maybe you see it if you get a document that's not produced by the sort of ideological engines, but it's produced by just a sort of ideological engines but is produced by just a bunch of workers in a factory but yeah that's fascinating to me because that

I don't know it seems like the struggle for dignity both it has this thing as like a very specific discourse from the church but is 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 a, like that, 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. 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.

It's a living organization. Yeah. Yeah. And it's fascinating to me that, that, yeah, that you, you can see these differences where even when they have influence, the thing that gets added is dignity. Yeah. I mean, there is, you know, and 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? 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 gain. 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 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 Allende period

is there were competing ideas of socialism. So, from the top down and from Allende period is there were competing ideas of socialism. So from the top down and from Allende's view, socialism was the traditional Soviet Union-esque approach insofar 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 Aquino 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. And 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

Allende government in 1973. Yeah, and I think this is a tension that like i mean i think there's there's different versions of it too that you see sort of across history like one of the ways that it manifests is this battle between the people who think socialism is about like is is national like state national corporation the 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 the question of dignity is it's like it's this it's like dignity is this expression that's like maximally bad for um like if if you're like you know if you're like a you're you're a material you're like a you know you're an historical materialist theoretician right it's it's 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 simultaneously like it's not materialist 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 could have a class compromise and that can give you dignity but then simultaneously it's the 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 factory is controlled by the state like exactly and yeah and this is why like you

see almost identical like the state is a boss just by a 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, this is why their uprising in Czechoslovakia looks almost identical to the uprising that happens in France. It's 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 kinds of political differences that manifest this really old tension in what the workers' movement is going to be that's been being fought out since 1830s. Right. Yeah. But I think that 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.

Yeah. 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, you know, 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 there's a sort of like practical like organizational like like you know if if if you today want to do

something like this like i think i think there's 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's not enough to just be like well these people want dignity what they actually want is socialism or like what they actually want is the abolition of the class system. It's 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 um 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 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 for an intellectual, right? Like, if you 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 the square peg and the round hole yeah and that can go really really really spectacularly wrong yeah exactly and you

know and that is you know what then leads to you know in the case of the cordonis that will then lead to tensions that will really break out into the open in 1973 in early 1973 when the um orlando mias the same person that starts that polemic in 1972, by this point becomes finance minister in the Ayinde administration and presents a plan to sort of devolve some of the factories that had been seized during the October crisis, right, back to their original owners. And then this creates a huge problem, a 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 Cordones across the city of Santiago in early 1973 that's very much in 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 what is the population of Santiago relative to the population of the entirety of Chile at this point? 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 the top of 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 pop city uh and then sort of metropolitan region itself uh is very densely populated and is it still 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 um 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 uh and so there is a 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, but it's very long north to south. And 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 Cordonas, the majority of them do exist in Santiago. That said, in Concepcion, 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 Cordonas that were moderately successful as well in fact there is and now i'm completely forgetting her name um but there is a historian that has published a book about the cordones in concepcion that's the one of the few studies that uh sort of tries to look at cordones beyond santiago itself you know and a very well taken point

um on your 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 yeah this is a this is a problem that you get a lot with like large urban movements like i mean i run into this with tiananmen all the time where it's like you know okay so tiananmen there's there, there's the big thing in Tiananmen, but this happens in cities all over China, and there's just nothing, there's almost nothing that has ever been written or has gotten out of what happened everywhere else in the country. 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 the 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 cordon is 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 uh the sort of coastal city the port city um where you have a much different labor force right uh with dock workers things like that you're going to have a much different uh 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 um 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,

this is 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 sort of like, yeah. In, in,

in terms of sort of, okay, I guess 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. the second one well i guess i guess we can start there yeah i mean as we sort of mentioned earlier there is an agrarian reform that is happening right and you are having uh a labor movement that is picking up rapid steam in the countryside right and you are having land seizures that is that are taking place and picking up steam um and so that's a lot of what's going on in the countryside is uh both uh an increase in land seizures, and increasingly militant land seizures is 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 allende 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 uh labor leaders locally in the countryside that are organizing rural laborers um 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.

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 that this this isn't like a sort of like like you're not dealing with like a like a Vendee peasant situation but you have this enormous sort of reactionary base in the countryside right yeah no you definitely don't yeah it's definitely not that um and you know there are attempts over the course of the Allende years, you know, the Mir 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 Servillos Maipu Cordone

is for the jailing and imprisonment of a series of rural militants and rural laborers that in the area of Melipilla, 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 this is an instance in which you're trying to see these sort of links both be made and strengthened between factory labor in cities and rural labor in the countryside. factory labor in cities and rural labor in the countryside. And I guess that brings me to the second point, which is like, okay, 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 was, so my impression about a lot of what is happening in 1973 has to do with the fact that Chile's truckers movement is really right-wing. And that has... Well, okay, so part of that is the CIA.

Part of that is just this... Part of it is the CIA's ability to keep striking truckers afloat when they're not working it on strike. Part of it also is a consequence from this moment in October, right, in which the national business elite, the national economic elite in Chile transformed that trucker strike into the boss's strike. 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 uh is even more um crippling in some senses than the initial one yeah and then also also as i will mention literally every time even though i okay i don't know if I can say that on air, but the part that I can say on air is to their eternal ignominious non-glory, the AFL-CIO is also

heavily involved in that, which is fun and good, and AFL-CIO, please stop overthrowing governments and helping neoliberalism. It's a very interesting...l cio history in relation to chile 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 um 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 at some point, I don't think it can happen here, but I just did the podcast name. But yeah, 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 my, my, my,

my, 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 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 ah 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 yen day totally yeah so by this point you know as i mentioned by 1971 the opposition is largely um disarticulated you have the national party you have the sort of far right organization um that would be translated as uh fatherland and freedom patria liberidad or i translate it as fatherland and freedom because i think it has a better it conjures it better others will translate it as fatherland and liberty um but i'm a sucker for alliterative forms and so that's the the translation that i use i also think it conjures more of the sort of fascistic elements which

very much was a fascist organization yeah um but you're neoliberal in it too yes no i mean a lot of you know los chicago boys will um have ties to uh patria libertad um and so there have you know rightist shock troops that are fomenting uh conflicts in the streets um that are also setting off bombs that are crippling the power grid um especially much later in 1973 um but following that moment in 1971 when the popular unity government eschews the alliance with the Christian Democrats, 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. 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 Allende Coalition will win the March 1973 elections. And that is really the moment that scholars agree that the switch is sort of flipped for the opposition, and they realize that they can no longer defeat the popular unity coalition at the ballot box, and that they now need to use extra constitutional 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 and symbol of women protesting as a way to delegitimate the Allende government and to delegitimate key figures in the Allende administration. So earlier earlier there is a key protest that happens

which is the march of angry pots um and this is a you know a very traditional form of protest in latin america which uh the casa lazo right the sort of banging of pots and pans in 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. distribution centers controlled by the right. Nevertheless, they essentially use this symbol of women heads of households marching in the streets in opposition to Allende. 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 Allende at this point. This will then force the resignation of some of these figures from the Allende cabinet. And then one of the key figures that is then replaced in the cabinet is none other than Augusto Pinochet, who will be welcomed into the cabinet and specifically will be welcomed 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 in which you have a rogue regiment of the Chilean army deploying tanks in front of La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago. That is put down.

It's also one of the last moments that the Cordones themselves will mobilize and all the Cordones in Santiago will seize their territories. All the cordones in Santiago will seize their territories, erect barricades, 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 Mera 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 11th, 1973 is what scholars specifically Peter Wynn refer 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 uh in very real sense palpable senses um you also have a shake-up amongst uh different members of different branches of the armed forces uh 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 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? So it 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 11th, 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 force or any sort of resistance, right? 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 so you already had um 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 uh cordon vicuna mckenna will actually be the place that will witness some of the fiercest fighting of what would be referred to as the Battle of Santiago. Often when we talk about the Chilean coup, we talk about it strictly as September 11th, 1973. The Battle of Santiago actually rages for a few days

after September 11th. It's not just a quick in and out mission in and out mission. There is, there is, there are forms of resistance that take place. And Facuna McKenna is one of the places that this takes place. There are two Chilean historians, Mario Garcés and Sebastian Leyva, that published a masterful, wonderful book that is all about, it's called the Coup in La Légois, and La Légois was a historic population that was just to the west of the Facuna McKenna factory, and the workers of factories in Facuna McKenna, 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 Poblacion of La Ligua. In fact, I have some testimonies of workers and documents that I've uncovered. One worker in particular described the battle that raged there 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? Allende, it's unclear to this day if Allende 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 over the radio of Chile. And then after that, we know 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? 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 arm with the sunglasses on, it'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 over time became so associated with him because of such a jarring image of him sitting there um that it sort of functionally recreated the sort of purging that he takes that he'll carry out essentially uh you know also what they will do immediately is that they will uh close um the congress they will dissolve the CUT, 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, pliegos, 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 institutionalize forced disappearance. Um, they will institutionalize forced disappearance, uh, and all of these things, um, constitute how they are essentially able to hold onto power. Uh, in those early days, there's a state of siege that is declared, uh, which means that all civil liberties, um, have essentially been suspended. Uh, and all of this is in the name of national security.

And that's really the key thing. Um, and so everything from the labor movement is shut down um and then it will begin to re-emerge and that's really like where uh 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 like yes it was the end of the cordones induced with a capital c and a capital i but the idea of the story. Yes, it was the end of the Corzones Industriales with a capital C and a capital I, but the idea of a territorial labor organization will

reemerge in the late 1970s and into the 1980s when protests against the dictatorship begin to flourish. I guess this is sort of projecting into the future, but this is something that I was 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

cradones the sort of the the pro-democracy movement that eventually like through pinochet's incompetence and their skill uh like brings down 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 student protests but i mean just just sort of like like leftist street movements in chile because i mean like i don't know like i i guess the 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'm wondering like how 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, the activists that you spoke to, that is a very commonly held view. And it's a commonly held view for a couple of reasons. One is that 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? I'm not trying to say that they were not by any means. They clearly were. We have great studies of this. Kathy Schneider's book, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet's Chile is just a wonderful study of this. They were protagonists,

and the geographic space, the site of the Populaciones 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. Now, by the late 1980s, 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 and the early 1980s, specifically in the space of Hakuna Makena, 1980s, specifically in the space of Hakuna Makena and workers that are coming out of that tradition play incredibly instrumental and key roles. So for example, there's a gentleman, Manuel Bustos. He's 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 Sumar's Cotton's 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 that should tell us that they perceive them as a legitimate threat and that they perceive labor as a legitimate threat. And this really 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 a great deal in showing that early in the dictatorship, you had a series of labor leaders who were opposed to Allende, who were still labor, right, still pro-labor, but anti-leftist and anti-Allende, 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, 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 connective 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 has been exiled out of the country. Um, 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, and 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-Leninism. 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 has essentially been purged over that course of the 1970s into the 1980s.

But in addition to these sort of national level developments, which, you know, for me, Bustos is the straight line that connects the territory of Vukunamakena to this national level. Within Vukunamakena 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 Vukunamakena 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, 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 can strike, however, after 30 days, the management can begin hiring scab laborers, essentially, to break the strike. And if a strike lasted past 60 days, that the management was allowed to fire all the striking workers because

after 60 days, they were considered to have walked off the job and were no longer considered employees. Also, one of the key innovations that the sort of technocratic advisors to the dictatorship implements in the new labor code is the individual labor contract, right? Which means that workers now are contracted individually, 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 and we need to focus them territorially. And for me, that is a straight line between the legacy of the Cordonas and what we're seeing in the 1980s. And then the other sort of discursive straight line between the legacy of the cordones 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 a dignified life in the extant source material that we have. 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 neoliberal 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 a sort of like, do you also get a sort of like another sort of geographic shift in how factories are distributed through the years? a policy of deindustrialization and you have a total reversion to what we can think of as a 19th century economic export economy um for chile right so you have uh much more focus and investment into commodity exports be it um the fishing sector the agricultural sector things like that right so like for example if you go into your grocery 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. 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.

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 is the ability for management to fire at a mass level and have that be legal. And so you have skyrocketing unemployment amongst factory labor such that, like, yes, by the 1980s, you have a refounding of a national labor confederation, also the acronym being

the COOT. 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. 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 Coupes 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 Fukuna Makena and these national level organizations is whether or not there should be one labor confederation or whether or not 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 in organized labor like it had in the pre-1973 period. And so by the dawn of 1990s, when democracy, or rather when democratic elections return to Chile, you have labor in a much different position. And that's why you have this very weakening series or period under the concertation government, the ruling coalition, the governing coalition that takes power in 1990 with Patricio Aylwin winning the presidency. It's just much different uh and it's it's straightjacketed legally because the 1980 constitution is still in place right it's

still in place to this day uh and that's actually then it's the period of concertation that is the period where you really have the most weakening of um labor it's also the period we have the most privatizations that are taking place of former state-owned companies it's we could say that it's the period that is the most neoliberal period uh in chile relative to the civilian the period of civilian military dictatorship yeah and i guess that's sort of like that that that's the thing that i guess gets you to well the last sort of 20 years of like of student-led protests and of sort of ecological protest i mean i guess like the mapuche have always been like fighting but the the way that oh from from spanish clone yeah i mean it's the only

indigenous group that was never conquered by the spanish yeah but i get but i guess like like the 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 Pineda to the presidency. Sebastian Pineda is his first term in 2010, and so it's the first moment that someone from the concertación is not elected as the president. They had governed from 1990 to 2010. So that's really what Peter Wynne and other scholars have

referred to as the Pinochet period, which extends all the way from 1973 to that moment, is inclusive of the concertación 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. And that's when you have a new cycle in Chilean social movements led by the students, right? Prior, you know, post the, 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, i.e. free and fair elections, and the content of democracy. And so a lot of people will refer to 1990 as the return 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. But in that period, you know, in the 1990s on, street protests were not seen as an effective measure, as the way to protest, right? They obviously were effective in the period of dictatorship. But after that, there's 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 um of resistance and protest in chile and you know and it's no surprise then that in october 2019 when the Estaído, the uprising, takes place, that it's students that were once again the vanguard of this. And when they're jumping turnstiles in the subways in protest of a proposed transportation hike.

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. Yeah. And I guess that also, like, the left-wing forces that took over the state, 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 i forget the name of it yeah the 1980 constitution remains intact yeah yeah and god i i used to know the name of this i said in one of the other episodes i think

i think like the guy who wrote it like was like an enormous hayek fanboy and called it like the constitution of liberty or something and it yeah it was it was a hands it was a hand-selected team of very few individuals that was hand-picked by the dictatorship to write the constitution um you know there was the there was a veneer of of democratic support insofar as the dictatorship in 1980 holds a referendum on whether or not to vote up, down, yes or no for the new constitution, right? 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 is 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 Alparazo away from Santiago. But in the old National Congress building is where the new constitutional convention is taking place. And actually two nights ago, there was a marathon voting session uh in which a series of social rights were adopted into the cost 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 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 and 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 so really, 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 4th of this year in which Chileans under a, it's a mandatory 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 yeah 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. Um, and you know, I stayed up far too late the other night watching that vote. Uh, I think it went to like two in the morning. Um, but it was a, you know, it was an exciting thing to see. Um, and you know, it is an exciting moment to, to be here in Chile. Um, 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 importance in this history especially you know this year is the 50-year anniversary of the cordonis emergence and so uh it's a great time to to sort of spread knowledge of this this moment in trillion history yeah and i guess uh do you have anything like that you want to plug uh no i don't have anything specifically uh um 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 uh and hopefully i'll have a book yeah i'll have you back on when it comes out yeah um yeah well in the meantime uh you too can form a large section of industrial

democracy in your workplace that involves taking it over um yeah go go do that uh this this has been it could happen here you can find us on twitter and instagram at happen here pod actually by the time this is dropping we will be a few days away from uh margaret killjoy's new series cool people who did cool stuff uh which is rad you're gonna hear a lot of cool people doing cool things it is dropping on mayday on may 1st and uh after that we have we have another show dropping which is which is ghost church about ghost churchy things it's gonna be good it's jamie loft. It's Jamie Loftus.

It's Jamie Loftus doing Jamie Loftus things about 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. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America 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. Hello, welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that is my podcast now. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me is the Webby Award winning Sophieichterman as our producer as well as the actual hosts of the show who uh

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 our like all of our regular intros oh i loved that um yeah so uh what are we talking about today also on podcast garrison davis and christopher wong hello yeah so so today we are we are talking about the sort of long and incredibly tragic history of japanese anarchism well okay i should justify this japanese anarchism before world, okay. I should specify this. Japanese anarchism before World War II because after World War II was an entirely different story, and

as much as I love people in construction helmets just 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 Nobosuke Kishi episode has a lot of people in construction

help us with sticks but you know this is you know okay so the the history of anarchism generally is is the history of tragedy but even by by anarchist standards the the history of japanese anarchism is just an absolute welter of heartbreak and loss um 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 world the end of world war ii and he's korean uh every single other person is either going to be executed by the state assassinated kill themselves drink themselves to death so this is uh this is 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 the the as long as no one gets thrown down a well uh well okay it's it's unclear whether anyone got thrown down i'm sorry i'm skipping ahead

and i don't actually know we will we will get to the wells uh 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 uh sakitaro stan um i'm sorry we can't cover all of them and the other thing about the history of anarchism in japan that is weird is that the beginning of the story predates they're actually being anarchists in japan or specifically they're being japanese anarchists um 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 um 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 a this is like the

hotbed of anarchism right like they're they're killing the czar they're they're they're doing all the things they're going to the countryside they're the russian anarchists are sort of on the move and a lot of famous russian anarchists wind up like in japan uh bakunin is there for like he 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 beiji uh 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 well 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 as like all things

bakunin are but the the most prominent anarchist to spend time in japan is uh lev meshnikov um meshnikov is like he's like a pretty big deal in in russian revolutionary circles like he's he's considered like okay so the the the big sort of like anarchists left wing movement is the populist right it's called the red knicks um and there there's two big figures in it there's uh nikolai chernichevsky and uh this guy uh lev menchikov and you know he's uh menchikov like he knows everyone he knows like 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 um he he has 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 um 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 oh well i love that for him so he's still around yeah this is very sad you know well i mean he he you look look this is this is the goal of russian cosmism no is it actually cosmism i have no idea yeah i think it's 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 the their their whole thing was like i okay so they they 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 that that you know their whole thing was like they like they're 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 this is all true this is this is amazing i've been i've been trying to fight for um the anarchist necromancer league for so long which our slogan is um raise the dead to fight like hell for the living that's that's incredible but yeah no like uh the Russian cosmism it's a weird one the cosmism it's like a weird mix of like like

natural philosophy quote-unquote which is just like different films of like like natural philosophy quote unquote which is just like different films of like folk magic or whatever and like religion and spiritual stuff but also it's like a predecessor to like the modern transhumanism um it's an it's an interesting little collection of of ideas that was popular at like the very beginning of the 20th century it's part of my thesis that uh no one normal has ever been involved in the production of a rocket like i mean jack parsons you have yeah cosmists are like on the soviet end and then there's just like the nazis and it's like oh zero normal people i have no counter argument there was that because there was the guy who did all the multi-stage rocketry, the nihilist who killed the Tsar, who built the bomb that killed the Tsar, 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 could learn about the bomb maker who killed the czar and his uh what he brought to the world in terms of rocketry and uh manned rocket travel anyway please continue on what 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 cosmos and how they relate to japan the cosmos actually nothing to do with this uh unfortunately oh um but yeah but uh uh lev uheshnikov, like he also he like fights with Garibaldi to reunify Italy. He's just like all over the place.

But he's an interesting guy because. Okay, so there's like a lot of foreigners who go to Japan, but he like makes Japanese friends and like learns japanese before he goes there which makes him like utterly different than like 99 of the people who are writing like westerners who are writing about japan this period who like don't speak very good japanese and never leave their houses so nothing has changed yeah yeah well 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.

Okay. Yeah, it's time. That's one of the burning 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, so one of the things that Meshikov 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 meshnikov himself who he becomes heavily influenced by by the major restoration which he thinks of as like this like he looks at this as like as a revolution like this is an antifedal revolution this is the most successful social revolution of the 19th century it's like

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 with the meiji restoration where i mean so the major restoration sort of ends the fuel system in 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 so japan has been ruled by a shogun for like a long time. And the shogun runs a feudal system.

It's very elaborate. Everyone has all these sort of hierarchical castes. But eventually there's this kind of, like there's this sort of – it's complicated. It's this kind of nationalist movement by a bunch of – like a bunch of the samurai clans who – this is happening in the 1860s. And they mobilize 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 i because i'm a hack of a fraud and a fraud i'm forgetting their exact slogan it's something

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 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 in the 1860s like japan is sort of forcibly opened to the world by like commodore perry showing up with a bunch of like the largest gunboats anyone has ever seen um and this like this forces japan to sort of like abandon its isolationist positions and yeah and you know and you you get this sort of class of intellectuals who are looking at this and are going like okay if we don't do something like we're gonna get colonized and so they do and the thing that they do is that they do this

revolution and they overthrow um they overthrow the shogunate there's all this like there's what there's like a trillion anime set in this period because there's like there's there's like like there there are there are squads of samurai swordsmen like running around like stabbing each other in tokyo with like kyoto and like it's it's wild it is it is a it is a time and and this sort of this is what sort of consolidates the modern japanese nation state um 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 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 uh uh meshnikov finds is like he so he gets to japan in like this in like the 18th 1870s um and he's seeing like the first signs of discontentment with with the the sort of the the the major restoration um which is the restoration of the emperor um because there's a lot of people who look at this and we're like oh hey we're gonna 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 uh meshikov literally like gets there in the middle of an uprising and he's just like in this reason he has no idea what's going on

because the guy he'd been talking to winds up being in the uprising and you know so he gets there but what he sees also is he sees his upheaval but he sees that this enormous network of like cooperative movements um and he sees a bunch of mutual aid groups he sees like villages who are like pooling all the resources they can send kids to like school in the cities he sees like he sees the government failing to provide services for people because there's an uprising going on and also that the government and so people are sort of people are taking care of each other and this has an enormous influence on him um and he starts to you know like the way he thinks about anarchism changes and he's like he starts to think about sort of like anarchism as cooperation like mutual

cooperation between people like mutual aid enters the sort of lexicon and okay so there's a there's a a a modern historian named uh sho konoshi who writes this book called uh anarchist modern anarchist modernity cooperatism wait hold on yeah anarchist modernity cooperatism and japanese uh russian intellectual relations in modern japan and he makes the argument basically that like catchy title yeah there's there's two there there's there it's it's a better title than i'm reading it because there's there's two there's like a 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 okay read it 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 the development of narco-communism because this guy he knows everyone like the anarchist geographer like uh elise recluse i can't pronounce his name i think it's reclue reclue yeah i think so but i i can't not with a gun to my head i'm not sure yeah anyway yeah like they're roommates like like they live together for like a while and like he he writes the japan entry and like the encyclopedia uh 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 you

know i 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 other thing that happens in this period is that like, um, so there's a bunch of like, Meshikov, like has a bunch of friends in Russia who all got arrested because they were in, like, terrorist groups. And 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 in russia so there's suddenly there's all these people who are like reading about the russian populists uh in japan and 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 um like the other example is anarchists yeah yeah for japanese anarchists there'll be like one like yeah there's like a couple of russian anarchists and like yeah but uh like uh mashikov leaves at one point the other big thing with this is tolstoy who is like tolstoy in in like the 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 his political work which is important because Tolstoy is like a Christian anarcho-pacifist right yeah and 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 you get the seeds of this anarchist movements that eventually sprout into a man named uh oh god this guy's name is actually hard kotaku shusui i i'm butchering the last part of it i'm sorry my japanese does not extend to this many u's and i's in a row but kotaku kotaku he's he's an interesting guy because so he doesn't so he has like a whole career before

he becomes an anarchist he's like he's a very primate journalist intellectual like he writes in a newspaper it's very famous everyone reads it and he's the heir apparent to this other like very famous sort of liberal uh journalist who again because lev meshnikov knows literally everyone was like a friend of lev meshnikov i don't he just knows every single person on earth it's incredible yeah I know that rules that's like goals you know unless he ever turned if he ever snitched

to be terrible apparently he never did so yeah I mean he's still around so I mean he still could snitch he's still around he still has the chance oh I guess everyone he would snitch on is dead so makes makes it harder the ethics get blurry area yeah so kotaku is like he's kind of like a standard liberal but he gets involved with the anti-war movements um specifically this is

the the anti uh uh well it's anti a lot of wars because the japan is fighting an enormous series of wars in like the early 1900s um yeah they kicked russia's ass at that point yeah yeah they fight uh japan they fight japan sorry they fight china yeah and do you know who else is fighting china i 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 kotaku writes this book called imperialism monster of the 20th century which is like there's a better title good title yeah yeah great 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 like 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 this is 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 burned with fervor to join the race for an empire like a wild horse freed from its harness. empire like a wild horse freed from its harness so i you know the one thing that he got incorrect is 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 with a straight face um what russia would be also how

could it be imperialism if lenin hadn't yet defined the term for us oh this is okay this is the whole thing okay so so kuroko gets like a lot of shit from this book because like from later on from japanese leftists because they're like he's insufficiently materialist it's like yeah he is mostly just talking 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 like when japan is invading china they have like i think it's like 50 total factories

yeah like the the everything is completely backwards yeah like it's like yeah and like you know like like 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 transition to capitalism like if 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 industrializations everything does nothing none of it works and kotaku gets like again he has he's like a lot of shit for this but it's like no he's right like lenin is lenin is wrong lenin's analysis if you try to apply it japan does not work and goodness does so imagine yeah and you know kotaku i think like he's keyed into things that the marxists aren't

but 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 these people who are like oh imperialism is the highest age of capitalism and then all of their parties vote to go to war with each other in world war one like you know okay kotoko i think like gets this because his relationship to socialism and anti-imperialism are like backwards from the marxist 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 he wants wars to stop and that's the right direction to do shit yeah 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 instead of the other way around you know yeah and and you know and 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. And I mean, he's, he, 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 this is 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 six conflicting accounts like i've seen accounts to say he joins he joins the iww i i don't know i've seen accounts that say he joins the IWW. I don't know. I've seen other people say he lived in a commune. He definitely read Gropokin. He 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 this guy is enormously influential in the history of Japanese left. He is the guy, when he comes back in 19 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 as an like instead of like doing parliamentary stuff and he translates like kropotkin's work in japanese he translates the like the communist manifesto he does labor organizing he's just 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 the other like

big current that's making anarchists period is feminism because okay so i stop me if this is in 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 it's not not even now it's not the best yeah i mean i will say it could be improved i will say it's it's better than this this is like sure like the the major regime is sort of like consolidating stuff as, as it's consolidating itself, it gets like progressively more like patriarchal misogynist. I'm going to,

I'm going to read from the book reflections on the way to the gallows, which is this, this is a great book. It's, it's also a collection of, yeah, well, so that,

that's a, oh God, I forget. One, collection of yeah well so that that's uh oh 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 um and they this book is like a collection of jack of japanese feminist writings mostly from people who get killed by the state because that's what happens when you're a feminist japan in this period um oh yeah it's bad all right okay so i'm going to read the quote from this in 1892 the government forbid 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 five 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 and then also like one of the things that really strikes 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 if you go back really far like all women and 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 explicitly gets worse um like so one of the things with the the 1898 legal codes is that it like it literally just legally enshrines like patriarchal control the households and this this is this is a massive reactionary shift in jack in sort of jeopardy is like domestic and political culture like this like that that kind of patriarchal control 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 like just that didn't exist and they just legislated into existence and like you know i mean like the the things that the things that they're applying here like women need consent

of their father to marry um is for this another quote for 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 this is this is an incredibly reactionary state and there's also like there's a lot of sex trafficking going on, like, like actual, like there's a lot of people just being grabbed off the street. It's a, it's a, it is a disaster. And it is into this patriarchal mess that like several generations of Japanese narco feminists step into. is kano sugako 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 she's 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 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. There are so many. drama things nothing has changed there are so many times

the flat circle like like there are two different times when the most famous japanese anarchist man and the most famous japanese anarchist women wind up in a relationship uh it ends with it 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 nuts. They're just doing polycule shit. They just need better mediators.

This is the thing with the Japanese anarchist movement has a huge feminist wing, but the men still suck like they just keep being bad and so you know the other thing about this is that uh kano sugako is like enormously more militant than like almost every other 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 um and this becomes known as the high treason incident and the state like gets wind of this they arrest her they arrest uh uh kotaku and they arrest like 22 other i think 22 yeah 22 other anarchists um now like five of these people are, like, even tangentially involved in this plot.

But they... This is... Okay, so 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 you want to kill this other group you want to kill this other group you want to kill

and so they convict uh like shusio um and uh kanasagaku like they all get convicted they all get executed yeah and so this case is also interesting because there's a bunch of people who the the state like wanted to kill but they couldn't because they'd already arrested they'd already did like this is like two years after like a mass arrest of like half of the japanese 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 and so this 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 like a couple alive and that's why they're alive because they were all in prison oh god wait how are they gonna kill the emperor i the plant didn't get very far i think they were trying to use a bomb but the police got wind of it very, very early. Not classy. So they never really got much past the planning stage. Okay. This is a shame.

Yeah, yeah. Do you know what else never gets very far past the planning stage when they're trying to assassinate the Emperor of Japan? 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 that is that is actually exactly what we were talking about margaret thank you so much and we're back i i was genuinely trying to see if i could like think of an 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 real solid critique we have here i really hope that uh 10 years from now this all seems very dated like of course someone's major company has tried to never mind please continue one can dream so kano sugaku is dead

kotaku is also dead uh and this this means that it's time for sort of like another generation of 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 they kill they kill like 22 of the anarchists or something okay and i mean this is this is a huge purge but they wind up executing just like there's just like a like a sympathetic like buddhist priest it's executed um uh when is this uh this is 1911 sorry okay yeah this is 1911 um and actually there's another interesting thing about this. Kano Sugaku becomes the first woman ever executed by the Japanese state. She will not be the last.

Like, oh boy. Feminist icon. Yeah. Equal rights, equal fights. Yeah. there's another like very influential anarcho-feminist uh who's emerged slightly after like just like in like 1914 1915 um is ito noe she's an egoist anarchist who eventually yes finally finally we bring it up uh that that's all I have to say buddy 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

it just straight up is contemporary feminism in a way that a lot of the stuff from this period isn't. If you go and read the arguments she's having, she's arguing that sex work should be legal and that everyone should be able to get abortions because women should have autonomy over their bodies. Yeah. It's like, oh, hey. Egoists keep winning. Well, sometimes. This is is not gonna end well for her but you know what that is also it doesn't end well for any of us in a long enough timeline you know like all that matters is the time what we do with the time we are particularly bad

okay fine yeah so yeah and i think so she's able to do this for like a year and the japanese state looks at this it is like absolutely not and shuts the magazine down um and so she gets forced to move on to other things and the other thing she moved on she moves on to is uh being extremely heavily involved in the free love movement of course yeah yeah and and but also and this is the thing that's that's interesting about this sort of period of japanese uh anarchism is that like the egoists are all also syndicalists yeah so yeah yeah yeah yeah and she 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, there,

there's so much, there's so much beef. This is, this is Osagi. It's incredible. There's, there's this, like we haven't even gotten to the wild part of this relationship yet.

Okay. So, so, okay. So she, she comes into contact with her partner or person who will become her partner uh osagi sakai who is like dating another very famous japanese narco-feminist who uh 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 this is the

thing that keeps happening with free love of this period. It's like, you gotta lay down. You gotta 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. see did she kill him or did he survive that no he survived okay yeah i'm just i have there's a special place in my heart for uh slit slit throats of patriarchal men yeah anyway so osugi sakai is also very heavily involved in labor organizing and he he's one of the guys who like turns anarchist labor into like a serious political force. Okay. Which is.

Maybe it's good that he survived. Yeah. Like it's probably net good, but all of the guys in this story like suck, except. Do I have an except here? What about the Korean guy who? Oh yeah. Yeah. We'll get to him yeah he's he's i kind of like 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 um but yeah so osagi sakai has like he has 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 near the workers movement. Like,

okay. I'm into this. Absolutely not. Yeah. And this is because like, again, he's been around for ages. Like he becomes an anarchist around the time when, kotaku doesn't like that's no six so he's been

like around and he's one of the guys who survives the high treason incident because he was already in prison um okay all right and so he like he's one of the people who like keeps the sort of flame of anarchism alive after like their oppression 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 natural disasters it's 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 gonna start with one

of the ways that the uh genocide of korean people in japan at this time starts is so there's a bunch of uh korean workers in a longshore union that's been organized by this built-in like leftist union guy named yamaguchi sakai and okay so like they're in this longshore union there's this disaster they start doing mutual aid they start going out they start taking care of survivors are 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 to like koreans are raping japanese women and it turns into this thing about like looting and then

like korean malcontents 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 ryoku islands like they're killing you too um they kill 2 000 koreans in tokyo and another 2 000 in yokohama and like 2 000 koreans in yokohama that is half the korean population of the city fuck and these people die like horribly like because it's not just like so the police is 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 street and murdering people with them like people just like have fish hooks and they're just murdering people in the major revolution like they're taking their katanas and going into 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 um well okay so the the one of the other thing that happens in this period is that the the japanese government just starts like arresting random leftists and executing them yeah and that's what was supposed to happen to no way to ito no way and osagai sakai but they get arrested by a squad of military police led by uh mashihiko amakasu who just he just murders them um there's like conflicting

stories of how this happened uh there's 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 him 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 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 throne in the well story and i remember it it stuck with me so much because the first time i met uh 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 not like like literal like like six-year-olds and stuff because yeah, they, they came and killed not just the grownup 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 I, 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, 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 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 you need to go

fight the koreans and so they do and like i mean yeah 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 like it it consumes they're 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 like 60 000 people burn 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 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 has this enormous sort of like cultural effect shifting people back to the right and shifting people back towards militarism because now they've like you know like they've detasted blood they've like they've gotten this sort of sense of it and it yeah it is brutal um and uh before we go we're gonna kill off uh one more anarchist wait we're killing off the wrong team can we kill off the other team instead i

unfortunately no none of them die in this story. It's the worst. All of the assassination attempts fail. It's so sad. Yeah, I'm sorry. That's alright. What I asked you to do is, I forgot how depressing this is. Because I was remembering part two of this, which is this absolutely hilarious kind of pointless ideological battle over things that are

kind of dumb. And then I forgot about the first part of the story, which is everyone gets executed. So the last person who we're talking about he gets executed is is fumiko kaneko who is fumiko kaneko so 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 a 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 kaneko was like the exception to that because you know she she lived there for a long time um and she she winds up marrying uh pak yo who is a very influential korean anarchist and they they do a bunch of organizing they specifically like their their thing is they're trying to like get they're trying to like end the the japanese occupation and you know they're doing great work and then unfortunately after the earthquake uh she and pak you'll are and uh stop me if you've heard this one before they are sentenced to death for a supposed plot to kill the emperor wait we now yeah we already did this part you're just repeating yeah yeah they do it again. This is the second time.

Like, they just keep doing this. And this one, it's unclear if there was actually a plot. And if there was a plot, it's unclear to what extent Fumiko Kaneko 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 here's, like,'s like an incredibly detailed sketch of like all of the oppression in japanese

society but i'm just gonna tell you like the person who's like like the court examiner who's like and and you know there's an interesting thing that happens where she and pakio are like they're handed pardons as like the sort of like mercy of the emperor thing and pakio like takes it but frigo kaneko 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 a big like um it was like a big media scandal all of the stuff with them being arrested right and i'm i'm based yeah yeah 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 picked they've they've arrested two random people who like have done nothing and they're just going to kill them but familiar mechanicals like no like i i believe in the things that i believe in and i 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 in the genre of anarcho-feminist uh japanese anarcho-feminist prison memoirs which is an entire genre there's like multiple books because this it keeps happening and these

people get arrested and sent to prison and it's called the prison memoirs of a japanese woman it's great uh 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 um yeah and so now having killed off the leading intellectuals of anarchism again for the second time in a generation uh 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, like twice in like 11, 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. Well, but this,

this is, this, 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, they have, they have one last glorious last glorious and absolutely baffling hurrah. Okay. Of infighting, extremely weird and funny infighting. Okay. So, yeah, 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, Margaret. Yesaret you have a new podcast i do about that it's on this very network cool zone media on this very network i have my own podcast is it called cool people who did cool stuff and does it i believe so does it come out on may 2nd and is it produced by the Webby Award winning Sophie Lichterman? Perhaps. And do episodes drop every Monday and Wednesday? I think they do.

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, you're paying... Get your podcasts. Get your podcasts.

Half off today. Two for one. Exactly. And where can people follow you on the interwebs? Well, for now, you can follow me on twitter before the mass exodus uh at magpie killjoy 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 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 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, which is the best. Is that the episode? Episode.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Duda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess I'm starting this one. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's a show. If you listen to this episode, you probably listened to starting this one. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here. It's a show. If you listen to this episode, you probably listened to the last one.

I hope so. You know what it's about. Yeah, please do. Don't start. I mean, I guess you could start with this one because this one is sort of wildly different from the last one, but. This one we're rewriting it so they all survive. Yeah, I mean, no one gets executed this episode yes that is that

is a win that's and the cosmists come the russian cosmos come and they resurrect at least keniko fumiko um 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 um and that voice you're hearing is uh margaret killjoy host of cool host of cpw dcs cool people who did cool stuff a cool 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.

The cosmos. I don't know. Maybe, maybe they'll still pull it off. All right. As, as of 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, the labor movement in Japan reemerges. And it reemerges because there's the war. Japan fights it over one. And there's just 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. 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 20 K because the size of the Japanese industrial working class isn't that big. isn't that big and also the amount of repression is unbelievable but you know having 30 000 people in your union means that i your union is now the site of japanese intra-left conflict which is wonderful i mean it only took three people there is actually like a fuck people up yeah it's great there's like you know there's a period where everyone kind of gets along like

like all of there's like everyone in everyone kind of gets along like like all of there's like everyone in japanese love knows each other like all 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 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 uh but with with with the the uh the japanese confederation of uh 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 anarchist published like emma goldman writing about how it's bad actually and suddenly these two factions are like yeah these two factions are like fighting tooth and nail for control of like the entire left because like these these groups

are like the anarchists the communists are in every social movement like they're in they're in labor they're in the feminist movements they're in this movement they're like we haven't really talked about but is going on in the background of all this which is the uh burakuman liberation movement um the burakuman are this like this hereditary class. I'm pronouncing that extremely badly and I apologize. But this hereditary class in the old fuel system, which is technically abolished in the late 1800s, but

discrimination against them continues. It's very similar to the untouchables in India. And so they have this sort of movement and the anarchists back it. And the communists waffle on it because they're bolsheviks it takes them like a while before they're like no no 1925 we're fully backing this now and so yeah i mean 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. There are new things. Yeah. 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 it supposed to be in the federation bureaucracy like the people are like the the sort of high level of the bureaucracy itself or is it supposed to be in the unions who are like the part of this federation and 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 uh want to make sure they can purge anyone who they don't like and also want to make sure the 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 reformers pull out of the union whoa so the anarchists win well sort of well they they it's a pyrrhic victory there's like nothing yeah well it's not there's nothing so like 20 000

members go with the reformists like 12 000 go with the bolsheviks about 8 000 go with the bolsheviks and about 8 000 go with the anarchists oh okay so it's not the best but they they rebuild and and into this phrase steps uh arguably japan's greatest anarchist theorists of this period harashuzo and this guy is a character like he's he's he's barely known in japan i mean there was a sort of like renaissance in in harashizo scholarship when this one guy named john corrupt wrote this book called harashizo harashizo and pure anarchism and interwar japan which is a mouthful of a title but i'm just gonna 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. Yeah. Fuck yeah.

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

He wants to be like a sailor. So he gets on a boat and he's going to be a sail, uh, he tries to be like, I don't know if it's a long short one, but like, 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.

Like 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 i i guess i understand

why all these people are anarchists because like that is a terrible job but yeah so it shizu 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 um okay and while he's wandering around taiwan he becomes a christian and he like goes to school it's like a theologian but he drops out but then he somehow still becomes a pastor because i i don't know this guy's career is wild uh no shizu is not like a. Uh, he rapidly starts pissing off like everyone around him because he's like, every, all of his sermons are just him antagonizing rich people and preaching this

like very, very left wing version of the gospel. It's like read the Bible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's incredible. There's this great quote from,

uh, uh, Hata Shizu and pure anarchism and interwar Japan about his time as a pastor from like someone who was there. It was, uh, pastor Hata sermons were superb so much so that i thought it was a shame that more 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 priest is going around yeah yeah i see well

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 but like what if we did that here and and like as he's getting like as he's pissing off more of the church um and as like their their infighting gets bigger he's becoming just more and more of an anarchist and by the end he just like gets he gets booted out by his church and he's just like okay i'm an anarchist propagandist now and so 1924 he just like leaves and he's like well i'm an anarchist now okay um and shizu becomes what's known as a pure anarchist and this is something that is like entirely unique

to japan that like there's nothing there's this doesn't exist anywhere else um and this is different than like 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 um you know and you get some like like osu isakai's like combination of egoism and syndicalism is like it's cool but like it's i like that idea but yeah yeah it's a good idea but it's also not like it's like he's not 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 the french

syndicalist and the cgt which is this big union uh actually they're still around today they're so in like the very early 1900s they were there there were sort of anarcho-syndicalist 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 I. 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.

Just never, ever. That's like their whole thing. They sat out May 68. That's impressive. This is a triad, I think. Yeah, and they sat out May 68. It's incredible. Yeah. This, this, this is a union. Yeah. Yeah. And they set up a 68. It's like, it's incredible.

But you know, but you know, in like 1906, right. The Japanese are looking at it like city coast, looking at this, like, Oh my God,

this, this, this union has like millions of people in it. Like it's enormous. It's a syndicalist union. Yeah. Which is cool. And so,

yeah, yeah. And like, you know, they, they, the, the Japanese anarchists do is sort of their standard syndicalist things.

Like they're building up democratic unions. They're like working towards a general strike that sees the means of production. They're like fighting for a society where production is run by workers themselves, blah, 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 it's it's kind of it's a version of anarcho-communism but like what if you like really really rigorously applied anarcho-communism and and this this is the thing it doesn't exist anywhere else because everywhere like in the west and in latin america like syndicalism and anarchism 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 anarcho-communist theory in like a hundred years. Like, like they, they, they, you know, they basically cease to be separate tendencies,

but in Japan, the syndicalists of the an comps like fighting it out to the death. And if this this 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 this this causes like a huge fracture in the anarchist movements um 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 okay

so okay okay so you're 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 the discipline of the factory system. And the entire world is supposed to be reduced to two classes. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat. One class of people who have nothing to sell but their labor. One class of people who exist purely to extract wealth from people.

Because you entirely support this by owning things. And eventually these are supposed to... extract wealth from people because you entirely support this 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 meet themselves in a final conflict where the proletariat defeats the proletariat. It's called Ragnarok. Yeah, yeah. Ragnarok.

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 moneyless society it's like a free association of workers and this is what communism is and famously this never happened uh-huh

yeah what about the immortal science yeah yeah you know the immortal science 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 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 they still work in a factory. And the other problem is that there's never just two classes.

And this is a problem that like, yeah, yeah, who would guess? All the other ones are our enemies. Yeah, that's weird too. But this is a real problem, right? Because the Marxists run into this in Russia, where it's like, okay, so we did our thing, we did our urban proletariat revolution, but there's all these peasants.

And they don't like us because we keep taking their grant at gunpoint. But you know, you have this one one problem and famous way to get popular yeah it goes great right nothing bad ever happens they don't famously have to kill enormous numbers of these people but then like you know there's something weird happens which is in china uh stalin managed to get like the entire like the entire urban chinese working class like built a working class killed and so mao has to like make a revolution with peasants and so you know peasants become this sort of like you know this this sort of like this this is what the actual revolutionary subject of communism winds up being like from like china to columbia is these

peasants but like you know okay so your theory of the industrial proletariat's 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 uh mostly there's this enormous like 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 marxist theory is like well okay these people will inevitably be absorbed into capitalism right by they'll be driven by competition or whatever to the market but like they're not it's not happening they're just they're sitting there and they're still just really poor and paying their landlords and you have to be more patient yeah well you just got to wait for all of japan to be like annihilated to be saved by the second

coming of yeah uh-huh yeah yeah it's it's going great but and there's also like there's all these other like classes too like there's there's these classes of like there's just like petty traders for example or like they're 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 the sort of class schema at all like if if marxism thinks 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 pretty bourgeois like their reactionary is blah blah and there's this whole history of like anarchists organizing people like this who'd march is just sort of

like steer at like bolivia has this where like anarchists organize these like uh these indigenous like they're not really positive these indigenous artisans whose things like they go to a market and they sell their craft and the marxists were just like why do we care about these people like why yeah 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 in factories and then you have the lumpen 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. Like they're the only ones who get to have any fun. Yeah. You know, and I think like, like this is a problem that, that Shuzo sees. And I'm going to read part of Krupp's book about his solution to this, because I think it's really interesting. Given 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. 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, or it's just the haves and have-nots. It's 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 pure anarchist that they don't believe in class struggle okay 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 what does it actually do and the answer is it gets people slightly more money under capitalism which is nice too yeah which which is nice but it's also

like shuzo like adopts this tube there's no other japanese anarchist who who has this metaphor it's like he 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 lower-level people in this bandit gang, like, take over, they're not actually going to stop being a bandit gang, right? It's just that the distribution of where the bandit gang wealth is going changes. And this is a big thing for the pure anarchists. Because the pure anarchists are, you know, they are looking at the industrial working class and are like, this is tiny and they're all exploding

in the countryside. And so because of that, they look at this, they look at the union movement and they look at it at class struggle, like classical TM, like class struggle. And they're like, well, this doesn't cause a revolution. All this does is just

reorient who's in power inside of. That's what the Bolsheviks did, right? Yeah, but it's not just what the Bolsheviks did. They applied this to the Bolsheviks, but like it's also like there is 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 farmer you're not you're not even fighting from like for like the guy down the tree who bakes bread it's like you're you know these these things that are like that are what they call 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 this is what they're arguing it's like 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 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 so interested in class power they're both sort of just going to like Lenin making, like Stalin making himself dictator, or you have a bunch of democratic, like Soviets, because they're both so interested in class power. They're both sort of just going to reproduce this, this whole system. And yeah. And so they, they, they, they have this thing that they,

they, they counterpose, which is like class struggle is just about like stuff that's happening inside the system, but that's different for revolution, which is like destroying this, the system entirely. And this is where you get into his stuff about the division of labor

which is i think is really interesting because it i 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 shuzo's like one of his big things is that like the division of labor is inherently exploitative because it like it destroys sort of royal 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 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 this is like they're doing this in like, like 1927. Yeah. But 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 uh more things that are exploitative and the well no resolution theoretically theoretically not well yes yes but we we have we have to get through we have to get through the last exploitative thing which is the thing i talked a bit about this earlier but like the pure anarchists 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 this i think i think primitivism might be the wrong, but it's definitely a lot of like the anti-tech stuff. It's interesting. Okay, so 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 pure anarchists are like, 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 i 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, 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 industrialized.

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

they do and so this gives you like an identity that that divides workers from one sector like say if you're 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 is not gonna like the baker is not gonna understand what you're doing um and you know wanting to argue against this political position that i know is 100 years old i keep trying to be like no no no that misunderstands the nature of specialization at all you know but then i'm like all right i i can't go back and convince these people. They're all dead. Yeah. I think like, I think. Okay.

This is, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to put on my, my, my marks, my like weird left calm marks noise and go. It's a critique, not a platform. Okay. Which is not, they, they actually want it as a platform, but like, I think it would have been a great critique and not a very good platform. Yeah. Their platform.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think think there's there's interesting elements of it like they have this argument that like okay so if you have your like your your syndicalist like society right where okay so you 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 you need to coordinate your labor okay because because 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 coordinating 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 like well that's just gonna turn she's like thing is 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 creating an administrative body that's gonna like rebuild the state again

and yeah i like okay like i'm making this like shrugging gesture that the audience can't i'm like you know. Yeah. Okay. So I don't think he's right about most of this. I think he's sort of wrong about almost all of it. The thing that stuck with me, though, when I read this is his specific critique of syndicalism, which is that it maintains the structure of the old world. 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 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 and i think there there is an interesting sort of like like i think there was a genuinely 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 the critique of why would you want to build a society like structured along the lines of production like why like why do you want to structure your society around work like that's awful i i like that about the pure anarchists where they were kind of like let's let's let's throw away the marxist shit for a minute and

like just actually like figure out what we want. And I like that about it. But I dislike the idea of like, well, it would be my problem if syndicalism and most of the syndicalists I met believe in syndicalism as a method and not an 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 that like a lot of the like nitpicky branches of anarchism 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 some people like this shit like you know maybe they're gonna be fucking different imagine that we could have a plurality of uh economic models systems but you know whatever um i'm now arguing with dead people who i probably would have gotten along with in real life like well i don't know because these guys like they 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

so one of the other things is like the 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 movement 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 the thing that they have about it like because they're completely convinced that syndicalism will inevitably just like turn into like soviet communism it's like yeah it's it's incredibly silly um but like 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 okay some bad arguments about uh uh like specialization and stuff like and like some anti-work stuff too that like is going to be around later yeah 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 um in 1920s in 1926 the the federation of black youth or kokuran has its first public meeting and they they have a bunch of cool slogans their slogans roll they have uh the emancipation of workers must be carried out by the workers themselves we insist on libertarian federation destroy the political movement get rid of reject the proletarian party get rid of professional activists down with all oppressive

laws and ordinances that is an entirely based platform yeah it's sweet all right it's 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 backed by like remember those those printers unions that i was talking about last episode that osagie sakai had like set up so they're all heavily involved in this um and they do a bunch of cool labor stuff like they they get involved in like uh there's a bunch of tram worker strikes they get involved in they're in this uh the 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, the, the ordinary people in the union are anarchists. And so you have the, there's,

there's like, there's this fun tension going around there. You know, they're, they're, they're doing the stuff. Um, and then the anarchist form,

um, Zengoku Jiren, which is the, the all Japanese libertarian federation of labor unions, which is a, it's a federation of 25 unions. Wait, these are the anarchists that you're talking about that are doing all this.

Oh, so I, sorry. I, at this point they, they haven't split yet. Oh, okay.

Cause I was like, this sounds like all this 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, okay. So the,

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 okay 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 okay 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 farmers 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 sako and vincetti uh who the u.s is killing for being anarchists and also italians just like yeah the one time anti-italian racism was real and a hundred years ago shit was real different than it is now and it doesn't yeah yeah yeah yeah and for for one year this like this works great uh you know like the the yeah the union's up to like i think they get up to like 20 000 30 000 members like it gets pretty big but then 1927 uh intense conflict between the syndicalists and the anarcho-con the the

pure anarchist breakout and this gets so bad so fast that like the international working man's association which is the like the the giant international like federation of syndicalist movements like sends them a letter that are like hey uh syndicalist anarcho-communists get along every literally everywhere else on earth they're chill you guys like chill and uh the anarcho-communists in kokodran uh their response is, we are fighting, quote, the betrayers, opportunists, and union imperialists in Sengoku Jiren's ranks.

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

Okay, uh-huh. Look, in the 1928 conference uh so uh singoku jiren which is the the union federation like they have they have this conference they have the yearly conference 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 uh both sides just start screaming at each other and i'm gonna read this description from harashiso and pure anarchism in toward japan uh-huh kokura and members barricaded the uh barrack to the anarchist syndicalists jeering and catcalling 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 unfurling 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 god no okay to to be fair to the pure anarchist oh one so okay a bunch of the syndicalist unions start leaving and uh one of them does actually join the bolsheviks but like all the other ones don't because they're not and you get this period there's like they have like the syndicalists and the the pure anarchists of dueling magazines uh there's one called black flag there's one called black battle and like so cochran 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 the uh the this is more depressing than everyone getting murdered after the earthquake not the genocide part of the anarchist killing part yeah well i mean yeah yeah it's. It's like... It's incredible. You know, 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 yeah well but there's interesting stuff too where it's like like they're also so because they have this thing that's like okay so the urban workers are like exploiting the boy okay the line about it's complicated because it's like they 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 all right make the oppression go away that seems 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 leftist movements aren't but uh unfortunately you know

okay there's a big debate as to whether this split like actually like like how big a role this split had in the collapse of anarchism because like by by by 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 um yeah but you know they run into this problem where like like kokorin 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 going to like get shot. I mean, that's the clandestinity spiral, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's just a problem in like Harashizu himself becomes just like incredibly depressed by the suppression of the movement. And by 1932,

he just leaves like he's just out. He like renounces anarchism. He abuses his wife because this is the suppression of the movement. And by 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, he did it to him. So he, yeah, he drinks himself to death. He got it done on his own. Yeah.

And you know, so he, he, he, he dies and he like kills himself well i i don't think he was doing it on purpose but he just yeah he dies from drinking too much in 1934 and that year actually the narco-communists narco-syndicals 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 they do one last

rural uprising okay 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 and yeah it's you know okay anarchism does reemerge after the war but that's like that that's a whole nother story and entirely uh what i will say about it is uh if you see those those construction hats from like 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 um and you know anarchism in japan like survives to this day uh there's there's a book called the manual for a worldwide for a worldwide manuke revolt that

like one day i swear to god i'm actually going to read but he is uh really big in china well okay i say 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 uh like the the people who wrote the lying flat manifesto um we're like we're very heavily influenced by this stuff what's the lying flat manifesto oh okay okay so we did an episode about this a while back but lying flat was this thing in china i guess still going on but like people were just like it's kind of it was kind of the version of anti-work or a bunch of 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 lived on like i worked like one day a month and then lived on like nothing so i didn't have to work or 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 yeah it takes kind of like yeah yeah they're great they lots of fondiogenes quotes lots of like the manifesto they released is like very it's like very anarchist and yeah like that whole thing and that was like like this is a big enough social movement that like like xi jinping like mentioned it in a speech okay and so yeah like japanese anarchism still has influence to this day yeah it's a big deal for them they were like kind of kind of concerned about it. Yeah. The same way a whole bunch of oligarchs got concerned about the anti-work stuff.

You saw anti-work hit pieces in the past six months. It was 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 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 Bolshevism. 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 then people are like don't you spend all your time fighting tankies on the internet 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 um also i don't like you gotta manage the polycule drama like you gotta manage it's gotta be kept under control like you cannot allow your entire scene to be factionalized over rival polycules and anarchists control your polycule drama quotations and uh parenthesis impossible. See, that's why you just need more.

No, maybe it's not true. It's like you need more multi-generational anarchists because I think people in their 40s 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 40s

give just as much of a shit about all the drama. Anarchism. Wonderful idea. Yep. 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' New Cool Zone Media Podcast, Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus. By the time this drops, episode one will be out and episode two will be dropping. Fourth with the next Monday, I believe. Yes, exactly. And we also have another podcast on Koolzone Media with one Margaret Kiljoy called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. Margaret,

you want to tell us about that? Oh, should I start working on that? I'll get it done by Monday. Oh, okay. 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 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 uh 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 like every now and then like people break out out of jail by like someone goes to jail on purpose but they have like hacksaw blades in their shoes and shit that would be cool too um 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 thank you so much for joining joining us today uh for for chris to talk about the wonderful history of Japanese

anarchism and the many deaths that are associated in those poor people like the basic like a mini Korean genocide yeah yeah

intense well that does it for us today you can find us on Twitter and Instagram aside. Yeah. Yeah. Intense. Well, that does it for us today. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Happen to Your Pod and Cool Zone

Media. See you next week. And go listen to podcasts. We have many of them. Wow. 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, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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