Rev Left Radio - Anarchism: Philosophy and History (with Dr. Mark Bray)

Starting point is 00:00:00 We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn. We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. this is not my fault.

Starting point is 00:00:31 And I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. When the main function of a protect and serve, supposedly group is actually revenue generation, they don't protect and serve. It's simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house,

Starting point is 00:00:53 that can result in us not having clean drinking water, why should those be in anybody else's hands? They should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions. People engaged in to overcome oppression, to fight back, and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio.

Starting point is 00:01:16 I am your host and Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and we have a very special guest today. I'm extremely excited about this. Dr. Mark Bray is on the episode to discuss anarchism. Mr. Bray, would you like to give a little bit about, your background and kind of introduce yourself to our audience? Sure, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity. Right, so I'm a historian of modern European history, focusing on the history of political radicalism, human rights, and terrorism. I'm also a political organizer

Starting point is 00:01:46 myself. I've been involved in various campaigns over the years, including Occupy Wall Street, wrote a book called Translating Anarchy, the Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. Based on my experience as an organizer and nearly 200 interviews with Occupy Wall Street organizers in New York. And I have a new book coming out in August called Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook on Melville House publishing, which is about the history, politics, and theory of anti-fascism, focusing on North America and Europe. And so people should check that out. Awesome. Yeah. And are you teaching currently? I'm a lecturer at Dartmouth

Starting point is 00:02:25 and so yeah I teach European history classes awesome well yeah thank you so much for coming on it's really an honor to be able to talk to you your work your books have been have been awesome I'm looking forward to this next one thank you so yeah I'm excited about this conversation we are going to be discussing the history of anarchism the theory of anarchism and hopefully

Starting point is 00:02:45 a lot of our listeners will get a lot out of this episode so let's just dive right in I guess we can start with the basics what does anarchism mean and how far back can we trace its roots yeah so certainly how we define it has a lot to do with how we determine its origins how do we determine its history so there are sort of two basic schools of thought i would say in terms of when anarchism started and how old it is so some argue that to a certain extent we can trace anarchist or anarchistic ideas throughout history throughout different times and places that wherever there's been domination or authority there have been people resisting it and that some argue we

Starting point is 00:03:29 should see that as part of a larger continuity and really even if you look at a lot of the 19th century anarchists there was a strong argument that they put forward that what they were doing was not really all that new another school of thought is to really historicize it and see anarchism as a specific political doctrine that emerged in the second half of the 19th century in Europe and then spread around the globe. Now, I think that there are elements of truth in both and that we need to take both into account. So on the one hand, it is entirely true that people have been resisting domination and authority throughout time and place, and we should definitely not privilege anarchism in terms of

Starting point is 00:04:14 the history and scope of resisting oppression, especially since. anarchism as a formal political ideology emerged in Europe. On the other hand, I do think that we do a bit of a disservice to resistance broadly if we try to subsume all sorts of anti-authoritarian resistance under this specific umbrella term which emerged in Europe. So in my opinion, it makes more sense to think about different kinds of anti-authoritarianism, different kinds of resistance throughout time and place, and see anarchism as simply one among many. And in my opinion, limit the term to its historical context in the 19th century.

Starting point is 00:04:57 And I think really the anarchism that we've come to know over the past century and change, you can really see developing as a fully-fledged political thought in the 1860s and 1870s in Europe. And so in that sense, I think if we limit anarchism to its historical context, it helps us to unpack what, it's meant. And what has it meant? Well, I think really we can understand anarchism as the non-hierarchical, anti-electoral, direct action-oriented branch of revolutionary socialism that emerged historically in the 1860s and 1870s. So it came out of debates with Marx and his followers. It came out of debates with the followers of Prudon, who is credited, of course, as being the first person to coin the term anarchism. But I would argue is more of a proto-anarchist.

Starting point is 00:05:59 I would argue that his ideas have a lot of overlap with what anarchism became. But I would say it's really when you get Bakunin and his followers that it becomes what we know to be today. But that's getting perhaps a bit too far afield. So in short, without using too much jargon, I would say it's the revolutionary socialists who do not think that there's a role for the state in the revolutionary process, unlike Orthodox Marxists who argue that it's necessary to capture the state apparatus and wield it against class enemies in order to eliminate class contradictions and set up a platform for the birth of communism. anarchists see the state in all forms of hierarchical organization as inherently oppressive as inherently forms of domination, and so therefore the state is an enemy. And they also argue that the parliamentary, bourgeois parliamentarism is not a vehicle for revolutionary struggle.

Starting point is 00:07:00 Some orthodox Marxists argue that it's useful to form political parties in order to propagandize, in order to build power and in order to sort of exacerbate the contradictions between the promise of bourgeois parliamentarism and the reality of capitalist domination. Anarchists argue that essentially the means, the ends need to reflect the means and vice versa. And so if the goal is to create a non-hierarchical society, it doesn't make sense to engage in hierarchical processes. And so these are some of the sort of fault lines along which the difference between these two camps have played out historically and play out today. And so anarchism, once again, in short, is a non-hierarchical, non-electoral, direct action-oriented form of revolutionary socialism.

Starting point is 00:07:54 That's how I would define it. And I see it as a specific historical product with similar and antecedents in history without using the term to encompass the whole thing. Yeah, great answer. And I think that a little later in this conversation, we're really going to delve into how the anarchist views this state and break that down even more. But before we get there, you mentioned Bakunin, and you mentioned that sort of era when anarchism and Marxism really came to the fore and had a little debate. So if you maybe wanted to touch on what was the first international, and what role did the conflict between Bakunin and Marx, play in the antagonisms that still exist today between anarchists and Marxists?

Starting point is 00:08:35 Right. So it's important to understand the first international, which was formed, I believe, 1864, within a larger context of the development of left political history in Europe. So from the French Revolution onward, the sort of basic divide in Europe, the sort of basic left right was between a right that wanted to defend monarchical, aristocratic privilege and a left that wanted to create essentially Republican nation states. And these tensions came to a head with the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, and at the same time, an emerging increasingly radical, increasingly socialist workers movement challenged the kind of bourgeois Republican hegemony over claims to social trans.

Starting point is 00:09:25 transformation. And so this emerging socialist workers movement took on a lot of different flavors. There were the predominantly British and French sort of cooperative movement people who wanted to build workers' co-ops. This overlap to some extent with Prudonians who wanted to create workers' self-management in sort of privately run enterprises, organized to a People's Bank. And then there were Marx and his followers, and a little later, Bakunin and his followers. And so the fault lines between these different groups were very a little blurry and only defined themselves gradually throughout debates over specific issues like in the future society, should there be inheritance, should there be a right to inheritance, what do we think about the role of the state and other kinds of things? And over time, the two main most important factions developed between what the followers of Bakunin described as the anti-authoritarians, which were essentially what became the anarchists, and what they pejoratively described as the authoritarian, the followers of Marx, who called for a dictatorship of the proletariat. And so, even so, Marx's ideas were not really super well known throughout Europe in the 1860s and 1870s.

Starting point is 00:10:52 That process of Marxism becoming a dominant ideology really only developed by the end of the 19th century. And anarchism as a political movement didn't really even get going until the first international was defunct. and maybe in the late 1870s with the formation of the anti-authoritarian international, you can see sort of what we could really definitively call an anarchist movement forming. The conflict within the First International between Marx and Bakunin came to a head when Marx organized a conference of the First International in northern Europe where Bakunin's predominantly southern European followers had a little more trouble getting there, They voted to expel Bakun and his followers, and then Marks moved.

Starting point is 00:11:41 They headquarters of the International to New York City, essentially ending the first international, which I think formally ended sometime in the mid-1870s. I don't remember the exact year. And then later on, a second international was formed in the 1880s, which initially excluded anarchists and excluded anyone who was against the pursuit of the electoral process. and then over time anarchists made their own international. So to a certain extent, we can see the fault lines between anarchists and Marxist camps developing out of the first international.

Starting point is 00:12:18 And there have been times and places where these conflicts have been put aside in the interest of common struggles, but overall, ideologically, they still divide the two camps. Yeah, absolutely. And I read some biographies, and it's really interesting to hear the theoretical differences between Bakunin and Marx and all of that. But it's also really interesting to delve into their personal relationship. They had some, you know, they worked together. They've met multiple times throughout their lives.

Starting point is 00:12:46 And then, yeah, it ended badly when Marx, you know, kind of lived up to the critique that Bakunin made of him and expelled the anarchists. But it's also really interesting in me how each tendency has influenced one another. You know, I kind of situate myself along libertarian Marxism lines, which is a Marxism that is heavily influenced by anarchism. And on the anarchist side, there is, you know, aspects of anarchism like platformism, which is an attempt to try to organize and create a little bit more cohesiveness to anarchist organization. So, in your opinion, you know, how has each tendency influenced the other? And is that ultimately a good thing?

Starting point is 00:13:22 And has that been able to maybe bring them together, whereas, you know, historically it's been more difficult? Right. That's a good question. So certainly, Bakunan was hugely influenced by Marx. And essentially you can kind of understand Bakunianism as sort of a taking of Marx and a taking of Prudon with some other kind of Russian influences thrown in the mix. And that's sort of what you have, the early anarchism. And to a large extent, a lot of anarchists essentially adopted Marx's critique of capitalism in some cases entirely whole. just sort of use that, but disagreed about how to put that critique into practice the methods of struggle, forms of organization.

Starting point is 00:14:08 Now, the issue of sort of how anarchists organize and the degree to which they are formally organized is interesting because the global anarchist movement has sort of gone through waves of more or less organization in different times and places. And so I think it's incorrect to argue that anarchists are inherently opposed to or in favor of organization. There have been different times and places where the different groups and movements have leaned in one direction or the other. You mentioned platformism, which is a tendency within anarchism that argues for a specifically anarchist communist organizational model, which a highly disciplined, group of anarchists would sort of commit to this collective self-discipline, not in a hierarchical sense, but in a sense of actively endorsing collective discipline, self-organization, and political clarity. And it grew out of the failure of the Russian anarchists during the Russian Revolution to really adequately put forward a coherent, organized vehicle for revolutionary change and essentially,

Starting point is 00:15:27 lose the momentum that had developed to their Bolshevik adversaries. And Nestor Machnau, Ida Met, and other Russian emigres relocated to Paris and argued that anarchists need to be better organized in order to really put their ideas at the forefront of revolutionary change. Some more anti-organizational anarchists have accused this of being a narco-Bolshevism, which I think is, I mean, on the one hand, it is an attempt. attempt to take certain lessons from Bolshevism and apply them to the anti-authoritarian struggle, but I think is unfair insofar as the organizationally there is a significant difference

Starting point is 00:16:10 between platformism and democratic socialism. And also, if you really trace back the history of anarchist organization, and there's a book on AK Press called Something Having to Do with a History of Anarchist Organization, and I unfortunately can't remember the name, but the author traces the fact that really when you look at Bakunin's Revolutionary Brotherhood in the 1870s and you look at some of the earlier anarchist affinity group models, you can see elements of continuity with platformism, even if they're not as formally structured. In terms of your other point about kind of overlapping positions, there are plenty of anarchists and plenty of Marxists whose methods of struggle and goals for some people.

Starting point is 00:16:56 social transformation are from a common sense perspective, essentially indistinguishable. For my recent book on anti-fascism, I interviewed an Italian anti-fascist who comes out of the Autonomia tradition in Italy, the autonomous, well, really originated as autonomous Marxism, but changed significantly over the years from the ideology or position, rather than, put forward in the 1860s by, I mean, sorry, 1960s by Mario Tronte and other folks about getting back to the site of, getting back to the shop floor, getting back to workplace struggles in order to build a Marxism that develops out of the empirical experience of workers and not from the top down, from the party structure, that that kind of morphed in the 1870s

Starting point is 00:17:51 in a much more countercultural, anti-authoritarian direction. And so anyway, the point that I'm making is I spoke to this Italian comrade who was saying that today and over the past several decades, the autonomous tradition, the anti-fascist tradition has been dominated by autonomous Marxists, libertarian communists, who are libertarians, he said, but are communists. And so in that sense, are very similar to what anarchists are in terms of organizing social centers organizing non-hierarchically, focusing on direct action tactics, but they're sort of explanatory route they've taken, the kind of ideological point of departure, and their analysis comes from a more Marxist direction.

Starting point is 00:18:37 But, you know, at a certain point, some of these distinctions, when put into practice, are not really super important. Some people have argued that, you know, basically what we should be trying to do is create some sort of synthesis out of Marxism or anarchism. to me on an ideological level, I don't think that's really necessary and maybe not possible. I think the more germane question is, what are we doing, why are we doing it, and what do we want to create? And if we can create some sort of strategic and tactical and visionary, prefigrative unity around those questions, the sort of why sometimes is really just a little bit esoteric.

Starting point is 00:19:17 Yeah, I agree. And I also would add that, you know, there might become a day when the differences between different tendencies become really important, but we, especially in America, the United States at this point, we just aren't there. And so, you know, any insistence on, like, really highlighting, you know, sectarian differences is, is undermining to the overall movement, regardless of what tendency you claim. Yeah, I mean, obviously, of course, I'm sure you would agree certain sectarian differences are quite important, depending on which sex we're talking about but to the degree that we can we can rally around certain kinds of visionary goals of creating a more egalitarian society i think that we can we can certainly work together across various

Starting point is 00:20:00 different kinds of lines and you know so yeah yeah absolutely i agree with that 100% okay so i want to move into this question because i find studying the spanish civil war to be you know really really good at explaining kind of, you know, crucial turning points in these different ideas, especially in anarchism, especially, you know, in Marxism. And it even got to the point where, you know, elements of the left were fighting one another during the Spanish Civil War. So what role, in your opinion, did the Spanish Civil War play in the development of anarchist ideas and movements, especially in opposition to forms of state socialism, like Stalinism emanating from the Soviet Union? Right. So the Spanish Revolution, in my opinion, represents the most successful example of workers' power put into practice, by which I mean not a party acting in the name of workers, not a state that claimed to represent workers acting on their behalf, but actually workers' power from the bottom up, everyday people deciding how their labor would be spent.

Starting point is 00:21:14 how the resources it created would be put into use. In my mind, it's the most successful example. Nevertheless, as you point out, there were a lot of challenges that came with it. So you're right that the Spanish Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, can really help us understand a lot of the fault lines that come with these different ideological perspectives, but it was also, of course, a product of its time and its place. When the revolution emerged, an important debate came about in the left over whether the civil war situation should be taken advantage of to create the social revolution or whether the social revolution should be put on the back burner in the interest of what communists and their allies are. At this point, communist, I mean Stalinists and Soviet agents argued was the more pressing. task of winning the war. And in order to do that, they argued it was necessary to defend Boucho property. And so I think in order to discuss, you can't just to discuss the merits

Starting point is 00:22:27 of those two positions in abstraction without understanding that at this point, Stalin and the Soviet Union were shifting their focus away from fomenting revolution towards maintaining their own security within the balance of power in Europe, as Hitler and Mussolini were gaining power. And subsequently, even after the Second World War, the Soviet Union really never fully returned towards actively promoting revolution in Europe. In the Spanish Revolution, the anarchists were joined by the Pum, the unified Marxist workers' party, which were essentially.

Starting point is 00:23:14 a Trotskyist party, even though ironically Trotsky himself argued that they should just join the socialist party, but that's a whole other discussion. And so it can show you how in certain times and certain places, even though, you know, Trotsky helped to gun down the Kronstadt sailors back in 1921, something that anarchists have not forgotten in this time and place, George Orwell, who wasn't necessarily a Trotskyist per se in an active sense when he joined the Pum. but he and his comrades were on the same side of the barricades as the anarchists. And when discussing, for example, anti-fascism, which is a topic that's in the news today and something I've written about recently, the legacy of anti-fascism in Spain became very

Starting point is 00:24:03 complex and fraught because some people, essentially the term antifascismo, came to be associated with the Stalinist argument for prioritizing the war over everything else and therefore from an anarchist or an anti-authoritarian perspective develops sort of a mixed connotation although of course plenty of anarchists were involved in the struggle against franco both during the war and afterwards the term isn't as straightforward as it might seem from afar and so the question of left unity in the abstraction to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense that the question should be more what are our goals what are our politics and who can we work with even if only on certain specific tasks without forgetting our differences or subsuming them

Starting point is 00:24:49 and there are certain situations where certain left factions probably really are never going to get on the same page and I'm all right with that because ultimately really especially considering how weak revolutionary left politics are in the U.S. it's even less of a question of like converting people to what we believe so to speak so much as it is to put forward certain ideas at the forefront of struggle so that if they are truly up to the task of directing struggle people will adopt them from a more common sense perspective right yeah that's very very interesting i think that's 100% on point um you mentioned Stalinism earlier um there are there are many leninists out there that will scoff at even the term i've heard a lot of pushback

Starting point is 00:25:32 um from you know marxist leninists that say that Stalinism isn't even a real thing and that it's just a slur that, you know, people further, you know, on the anarchist side of things call Leninists, you know, on par with the pejorative tankie. So how would you describe Stalinism? What exactly would you say that it is just so we can kind of be clear about what that word means and what it connotates? Right. Well, obviously, as you, and I'm sure plenty of listeners know, there are plenty of Marxist Leninists who oppose Stalin for various reasons who were more supportive of Trotsky and of other kind of positions. And so the two terms are not synonymous. I simply use the term Stalinist in a very basic sense of people who agreed with or supported Stalin

Starting point is 00:26:22 to one extent or another. I'm not using it necessarily in an ideological sense. I mean, obviously Stalin had certain positions. You know, Stalin was responsible for returning the Soviet Union into a much more patriarchal, nationalistic position, the whole debate over socialism in one country versus global revolution. These are kind of some fault lines along which you could make an argument for Stalin or Stalinism being a thing,

Starting point is 00:26:53 but I'm not even interested in having that argument, really. I use the term to describe people who were on board with what Stalin was doing or who defend what Stalin was doing. And to me, if we're really, serious about, about history, about workers' power, about being honest about the history of the 20th century, and about understanding why the Soviet Union went down the tubes, and why so many people in Eastern Europe and elsewhere were so desperate to escape so many of these countries that fell under Stalin's control. I think we need to have a critical eye on what he and his legacy

Starting point is 00:27:30 were about, and to me, they are indefensible. all right thank you um so let's move now on to some listener questions about the actual philosophy of anarchism um i have you know a couple questions that um listeners to the show wanted to make sure that i that i asked and i might have changed the wording of the question a little bit to make it more conducive to the interview but i will name the people so that give them a little shout out that's great this question comes from russell liffson and more or less the question is what is the relationship in your opinion between communist and anarchist what would you say, and you might have touched on this earlier, but just to be extra clear,

Starting point is 00:28:07 what would you say are the main differences and similarities there between those two ideas? Well, thank you for your question, Russell. So in common parlance, and I assume in the way that the question was phrased, communists are understood to be more or less orthodox Marxists, because one thing that I touched upon earlier but ought to be clarified is that from about, excuse me, from about the turn of the 20th century onward, most anarchists globally have subscribed to the communist variant of anarchism, meaning that the ultimate goal is libertarian communism, and that as opposed to Bakunin, for example, who argued in the tradition of Prudon

Starting point is 00:28:52 and others that the future society ought to grant to workers the integral product of their labor, meaning that when a worker produces something, they should be entitled to what they produce in accordance to from each, according to their ability to each according to their production. By the late 1870s, anarchism experiences a shift towards anarchist communism under the influence of figures like Kropotkin, Malatesta, and others. And then that essentially adopts the communist maxim from each, according to their from each according to their ability to each according to their need, which that slogan predates Marx, but of course became the slogan of Marxist communism.

Starting point is 00:29:39 And so many anarchists are in favor of libertarian communism. And in that sense, the ultimate goal of Orthodox Marxists and anarchist communists is more or less the same, which is a stateless, classless society. question is, of course, how to get there. And so for Orthodox Marxists, the way to get there is to create a political party, to create a hierarchically organized workers movement that can put forward the politics of communist revolution through the political party, through the workers party, or however you want to call it, and therefore use the platform that bourgeois parliamentary democracy creates against it. And as this movement gets stronger and stronger, at a certain point, the true face of capitalist society will reveal itself, its true anti-democratic face will reveal itself, and forestall this parliamentary advance, at which point a revolutionary struggle ensue. Of course, the famous and controversial innovation of Edward Bernstein and the reformist socialist of the turn of the century was to argue that actually this electoral process, will continue unimpeded, and we will eventually get socialism through the ballot box. Now, that has not happened, and I think that the failure of reformist socialism over the past century or so

Starting point is 00:31:07 really ought to make us think twice about the potential of voting socialism into office, but that's another topic. And once that revolutionary struggle succeeds, Orthodox Marxists argue that the state needs to be captured and use as a weapon against the capitalist class to break their ability to organize a counter-revolution. As we discussed earlier, anarchists are critical both of the electoral route and of the capture of the state because they argue if the goal is to create a classless, non-hierarchical society, then we need to reflect that in everything we do because I think that we can see in a number of examples of quote unquote really existing socialism that once a bureaucracy is put in power

Starting point is 00:31:59 of a state regardless of the intentions of the individuals as an organizational apparatus we can see how even when enemies are crushed these kinds of organizational forms tend towards reproducing themselves and therefore finding new enemies in society and so I don't think that we can assume that a hierarchical bureaucracy is going to eventually fade away as Marx had foreseen, and therefore I'm sympathetic to the anarchist critique of those organizational models, and I think the goal ought to be to build power from the bottom up. Those are some of the main kind of differences around elections, around the state, and also around another difference is sort of understanding and understanding of history,

Starting point is 00:32:48 and of material change. So historical materialism is really important for Marxism, the notion that the evolution of history through material changes in the productive forces create certain opportunities in different times and places for social upheaval. I think that there's a lot of truth in it, but I think sometimes it can,

Starting point is 00:33:16 maybe that the degree of historical materials its role in history has been overstated in a sort of one-dimensional Marxist interpretation of the relationship between the productive forces and social change. Anarchists, in my experience, pick and choose from elements of that, but aren't necessarily wedded to any specific interpretation of historical change. And sometimes that's a weakness. Sometimes it's a strength. Overall, I think the openness is useful in terms of anarchist ability,

Starting point is 00:33:46 the anarchist ability to draw from different kinds of currents of thought in developing a political vision. So those are some changes offhand. Sorry if that was more information than you wanted. No, that was absolutely great. I think a lot of people will find that fascinating. You did mention the notion of counter-revolution. And when we're talking about, you know, tactics on how to how to get to our common, you know, long-term goal, a big critique of anarchism is their inability to maybe suppress or deal with a counter-revolution if they don't have, you know, the apparatus of the state to organize, you know, that defense. So what would you say to that critique? Right. Well, that's an important question. And every time you organize, I mean, any revolution

Starting point is 00:34:33 is going to have to deal with how to wage a struggle against counter-revolution. So, you know, the question is what, if you're not going to organize hierarchically, how are you going to organize? How are you going to organize. And I do think that there is a critique to be had against the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution, which Chris Ilam makes in his book, Anarchism in the City, which has been published by AK Press. He talks about how the anarchists for various reasons in Catalonia and elsewhere were unable to create a new organizational structure that could replace the government, the generality in Catalonia, to work from.

Starting point is 00:35:21 So I think it's incumbent upon anarchists to have a vision of what an alternative, non-hierarchical federal structure would look like. And so just for listeners who are unfamiliar, for example, the International Workers Association that anarcho-synicalist unions formed in the early 1920s represented hundreds of thousands of workers organized into workers' federations across Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:35:49 And so it is entirely possible to organize hundreds of thousands of people along federal lines where decision-making flows from the bottom up and where rather than having representatives who make legislative decisions on behalf of their constituents, we have delegates who are empowered to put into practice decisions that people make at the bottom level. And within that, I think that we can organize, to a great extent, democratically managed armed forces for waging a social revolution, for responding to counter-revolution. Now, certainly the track record of hierarchical regimes in crushing counter-revolution has been better.

Starting point is 00:36:41 If your only criteria for evaluating political success is military capability, hierarchy works better. That is pretty well demonstrated. But what ends up happening in so many cases is those kinds of consideration, those kinds of military considerations, those kinds of considerations of efficiency, sometimes historically went out and cloud the kind of liberatory potential of the revolution. So, you know, the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War, right? Mao won the Civil War in China, right? Those things need to be recognized, but what came out of it? What came out of it were repressive regimes that people were desperate to flee from, that had massive famines that prioritized the needs of the bureaucracy over the needs of the people.

Starting point is 00:37:41 And so to me, that's not what we're fighting for. We're fighting for workers' power. We're fighting for a better world where people aren't thrown into horrible working conditions. And so I think that it is entirely possible to organize workers' militias that are non-hierarchical to respond to counter-revolutionary threats. But the conversation of responding to counter-revolution needs to take place within a larger political conversation about what are we trying to build and what is gained and what is lost by how we get there. and if we essentially give in to just military expediency, then what we're fighting for may be lost in the process. Yeah, well said.

Starting point is 00:38:30 The next question, which we just kind of got into, and maybe we can go a little deeper into, this is a combination of questions from listeners, Malthay Lawrensen, Ethan Linnehan, Alex Adams, and Jeffrey Whitman. The basic question that they all asked in different ways was how do anarchists? view the state? Because, you know, the Marxist perspective is that it's a tool of class domination, and if the right class has it in their hands, it could be a tool of liberation. Anarchists

Starting point is 00:38:58 clearly disagree with that. So what exactly is the anarchist view of the state, and why is the state inherently a bad thing? Right. So anarchism at its fundamentals is the critique of domination and hierarchy and oppression in all its forms. What those forms have meant or rather how anarchists have interpreted them, have changed over time. And so anarchism today, like Marxism today, is much more expansive in its analysis of oppression than it was 100 years earlier. But anarchists argue that capitalist class antagonisms are super important, but are not everything, are not necessarily the explanatory motor for understanding all of all phenomena in society.

Starting point is 00:39:50 And so when it comes to the state, this anarchists have understood the state as perhaps the most egregious form of domination and hierarchy and have argued that regardless of who administers the state, regardless of what purpose the state is used for, its hierarchical oppressive aspects will persist. And in some ways, it's a really kind of early understanding of the dynamics of bureaucracy and the dynamics of institutions and their self-perpetuating character.

Starting point is 00:40:28 And I think that the anarchist critique of the notion of a worker state has been borne out by the history of, quote-unquote, really existing socialism in the 20th century. obviously certain regimes have had more successes than others in it I don't want to put all of them in necessarily the same basket there's a big difference between Cuba and North Korea for example but nevertheless if the goal is creating a classless stateless society that is administered from the bottom up I think that we can see that the institution of the state while it certainly can provide certain benefits as we discussed a few minutes ago towards crushing counter-revolution all also can essentially, in a certain sense, take on an identity of its own that the, as, not that I'm a paraconnest, but as people who advocate for participatory economics have analyzed with the Soviet Union, that there is a sort of a new class that kind of took over, a bureaucratic class that took over, I forgot, coordinator class, maybe they call it, in the Soviet Union, and that the interest of bureaucrats in maintaining their status sometimes comes into conflict

Starting point is 00:41:41 with this sort of political rationale for why they're there. And so ultimately, I think when you look at that and when you also look at what happens to socialist politicians when they get into office and the kind of demands on any political system within a capitalist society to bend its will to the market, to all the socialist parties in Europe who've enacted or approved of austerity measures. like Syriza and Greece shows you how as long as you leave the market in place, as long as you try to make the state work, it's going to have to deal with all these considerations. And that's why anarchists are critical of it. Yeah. I've had this idea lately that's kind of been going

Starting point is 00:42:21 around in my head as far as ways to make revolution or whatever. You know, there's the voting route, which we've talked about all its failures and limitations. The armed revolution, like violent revolution in the United States at this point seems like a pipe dream. It would probably descend into civil war. The state and the far right would team up to crush any attempt from leftists to revolt. And this idea that's been cropping up in my head over and over again is this idea of kind of building up alternative systems inside the belly of the beast. And I think that there are some movements in Greece where people sympathetic to anarchist ideas are attempting to do this. What are your views quickly on that concept of revolution or ways to approach a revolutionary policy?

Starting point is 00:43:06 in the context that we live in today? Yeah, I think you're entirely right. Straightforward armed struggle as a motor for revolutionary transformation isn't feasible in the United States or many countries today. And I think historically we can look at the workers' movement and other kinds of revolutionary movements have essentially had this notion of trying to create the new society within the shell of the old by creating organs of workers' self-management of neighborhood community control. control and trying to create foundations from which people can exert power in their everyday lives and sort of thinking of the conflict with the revolutionary conflict as being to some extent a component of self-defense when the success of alternative forms of workers' power and community and collective self-management come into conflict with the ruling class's interests

Starting point is 00:44:03 rather than sort of the motor from which change happens. All right. And our last listener question, before we move on to the last topic, this one is from Nolan Renton, and his question was basically, what are your thoughts on post-left anarchists? This is a tendency that I think many on the left might not be as familiar with or as educated about. Do you have any thoughts on what exactly that is and how you respond to it? Sure. So, you know, I identify primarily with the anarchist communist and anarcho-sindicalist traditions within anarchism. And I'm very sympathetic to more organizationally minded forms of anarchism, which the post-left anarchists are very critical of. So post-left is sort of a loose milieu of sort of individualists. insurrectionaries and anti-organizational folks who are critical of what they see as kind

Starting point is 00:45:10 of outdated, quote-unquote, workerist modes of social struggle and ideological commitment. I don't see the really the potential of anti-organizational politics to create the new world that we want to see or to engage significant numbers of working class and marginalized people in social struggle. I think that a very clear vision of a post-capitalist society of communist values is really important for us to clarify our values and to promote as an alternative to the capitalist system. So I'm not especially fond of those kinds of tendencies. But, you know, to each their own. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:03 Would you say the big difference is their focus on individualism? Well, I mean, I would say the big difference is a rejection of formal organization. I think that I believe that there are some that identify as individualists, which I also think there's an important distinction to be drawn between individualists who come from it simply from an organizational perspective and individualists who are egoists who think that. The source of value is what's good for me personally, which I strongly disagree with. I think we need to have a sense of a collectivity, and that's what really this all boils down to. And then some of it has to do with sort of strategic tactical questions of insurrection versus organization, spontaneous change versus long-term social struggle. and I think that there are plenty of examples of stodgy old anarchist communist groups or anarchist

Starting point is 00:47:03 unions and that they need that those traditions like any other tradition needs to be refreshed now and then but I don't think that we should throw out the baby with the bathwater agreed all right our last topic today would be anarchism today so let's go ahead and bring a little more modern times what role did anarchist philosophy play in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is something I know that you've written about? Yeah, sure. Anarchist philosophy, whether formally understood or more informally in terms of its influence on radical politics in the U.S. played a huge role in Occupy Wall Street in New York. As I document in my book translating anarchy, about a third or so of Occupy Wall Street organizers in New York City

Starting point is 00:47:53 identified as anarchists, excuse me, and more than half had politics that I would describe as anarchistic, meaning they were anti-capitalists who were in favor of direct action as a mode of social struggle and were opposed to authoritarian hierarchical forms of organizations. So as with Occupy Wall Street or with, with any other kind of political struggle, I think we always need to think beyond simply the role of committed ideologues and any struggle

Starting point is 00:48:23 towards understanding how ideas and opinions and social norms and taboos come to influence broader milieu of struggle and recognize that committed ideologues are a minority in any movement or any struggle that has taken on any significance, and that's always how it will be. And so Occupy Wall Street, in my opinion, was an example of how anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics came to animate how Occupy Wall Street organized through assemblies, through direct democracy, through a strategic focus on direct action, a reluctance to officially endorse any political parties or any candidates.

Starting point is 00:49:09 And in that way, thousands of people engage with these kinds of politics and ideas in a way that I think that when we look back at this decade of resistance to the United States, we can see Occupy Wall Street as a crucial starting point of a kind of non-authoritarian direct action-oriented mode of politics that's worked its way through Black Lives Matter, through standing broad. through anti-fascism, through the resistance to Trump, through a number of different modes, which is not, of course, to ascribe supreme importance to Occupy so much as to say Occupy represented the flourishing of a certain kind of politics that has taken root more broadly. And anarchism, maybe not in a capital A sense,

Starting point is 00:49:59 but in a lower case sense of a frustration with the top-down politics of the Soviet era of the kind of stodgy socialist parties is an animating current in radical left politics and reflects the degree to which in this kind of interconnected technological era, people are really more interested in engaging in politics that they can have more participation in

Starting point is 00:50:26 rather than waiting for some leader to tell them what to do. Absolutely. One way I kind of look at it is this historical development in the last couple of decades here in the United States especially. You had the big WTO protest in Seattle in 1999, and then you had the anti-war movement against Bush and the Iraq and you know, war and the Afghanistan War. Then you had Occupy Movement in the wake of the Great Recession. And then you had Bernie Sanders identifying explicitly as a socialist, something

Starting point is 00:50:54 unheard of in American politics. And now you have this really aggressive and beautiful flourishing of anti-fascism in the United States. I see these things as all connected, as all, you know, leveling up in a sense of a left-wing movement in this in this country which the internet has completely facilitated in you know unprecedented ways would you kind of agree with that way of looking at things and situating the occupy wall street movement in that context sure and you can you can stretch it even farther back i mean you know i think that if we're talking about anarchism or rather anti-authoritarian politics more specifically we can see that that the popularity and importance of those kind of politics probably hit their modern low around World War II

Starting point is 00:51:43 after the failure of the Spanish Revolution coming into the 1950s. Globally was at a low. In the 1960s, it started to pick up again in different ways. You know, you can look at May 68 in Paris and the development of autonomous Marxism and other kinds of currents connected to the counterculture, connected to an anti-Stalinist current within the international communist movement that developed through anti-authoritarian currents in the feminist movement in gay and lesbian liberation movements in the in the 70s and 80s. The anti-nuclear movement was very anti-authoritarian in many ways. And so there's this sort of upward trajectory of anti-authoritarian politics towards the

Starting point is 00:52:27 end of the 20th century that came to a head in the global justice movement, as you mentioned, and then in not only Occupy Wall Street, but many of the Squares movement, the King's AMA and Spain, squares movements in Greece in Egypt and elsewhere that were really to many, in many ways, forged from the bottom up. The question is, of course, always the back and forth between anti-authoritarian politics from the bottom up and socialist electoralism. And so Bernie Sanders obviously capitalized to a great extent on the furor that was generated through Occupy Wall Street, a fair number of occupying.

Starting point is 00:53:07 people in New York and elsewhere really went to bat for Bernie. And, you know, listeners can make their own mind over whether they like Bernie or whether they like electoral socialism. That's all fine. But from a revolutionary perspective, we need to recognize that even if in many ways Bernie would have been an improvement over Trump, if our goal is societal transformation, we can see how the social democratic playbook has played out in these European countries where standards of living can improve to a certain point, and then you hit the market wall, and then it meets its limitations, all the while, and this is why some Marxist Leninists have accused social Democrats of being national chauvinists in a certain sense, because social democratic welfare states always necessarily, like any other economic systems, feed off of the exploitation of the global South, even if they provide better living conditions in the global north.

Starting point is 00:54:06 So I think that we need to, you know, people, listeners can make up their own mind about Bernie. Personally, I'm not a fan of Bernie. I'm an anarchist. I oppose the electoral route towards revolutionary transformation. But whether you support him or not to have a clear vision of the limitations of social democracy, I think is really important. Yeah, absolutely. And I only mentioned Bernie not as, you know, some hero of the left, but just merely in the sense that he was able to bring an, like this, the term socialism into the American mainstream, I think, was writing off the back of the Occupy Wall Street movement,

Starting point is 00:54:40 which made class a huge issue nationwide. So only in that respect, it was I trying to mention that. Yeah. And as you said, any gains made in the electoral system in a capitalist democracy can always and almost will always be drawn back in times of capitalist crisis, which always come. So if you build up a social democracy and, you know, another recession hits or another crisis hits, those things will be rolled back. Alstarity will be implemented as we've seen over and over and over again. For sure. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:11 So you mentioned anti-fascism, as did I. So what role does anarchism play in the rising anti-fascist movement in the U.S. and in Europe? And what has its role been historically? Well, you know, the relationship between anarchists and socialists, broadly speaking, in the anti-fascist tradition is really interesting because the different socialists and communist parties have struggled to determine their orientation to direct action anti-fascist strategies. So on the whole, historically, most socialist and communist parties have emphasized pushing towards legislation and state bans against fascist groups or hate speech or however

Starting point is 00:55:51 you want to define it. And certainly after World War II, continental European governments put such bans in place. Now, the current anti-final. wave that we're talking about in the U.S., these groups oppose the legislative route towards banning quote-unquote hate speech or fascist groups, for several reasons, one of which is they're generally, they generally manifest in anti-state politics, also because these bans are often used more against the left than the right. Now, this kind of divide within the socialist milieu over how to respond to fascism mirrors in some ways some of the debates between Marxists and Socialists and anarchists, or at least between the direct action-oriented wing

Starting point is 00:56:45 of the socialist movement and the more electoral wing. And so if we look at the history of anti-fascism, we can see that towards the end of the 20th century, especially in the 80s and 90s, as the global importance of anti-authoritarian socialism and anarchist politics were on the increase, on the upswing, as we were describing, as the popularity of the Soviet Union was on the way, direct action anti-fascism, or what is often referred to in English as militant anti-fascism, also in Italian, they call it militant anti-fascism in German. they often call it autonomous anti-fascism. In French, it's radical anti-fascism. And these terms essentially do you know a sort of an overlapping of pan-socialist politics and direct action responses to fascism, that this direct action current mirrors the anarchist emphasis on direct action or the, in your case and your listeners' case, libertarian communist emphasis

Starting point is 00:57:51 on direct action, which stands in. contrast with, for example, the French Socialist Party's connection with SOS Racisma, which was essentially kind of an NGO anti-racist group that pushed for legislation. And so in short, I think that there's a lot of overlap between the growth of anarchists and anti-authoritarian politics, a shift towards direct acts and strategies, and the development of this kind of, in many cases, countercultural anti-fascist movement, especially as it emerged in the late 80s and early 90s. out of resistance to incursions by white supremacists in skinhead and punk scenes. And, you know, today in the United States, with the Trump campaign, with Trump's victory,

Starting point is 00:58:37 with the growth of the so-called alt-right, a lot of people have seen militant anti-fascism in direct action against fascists and white supremacists as an eminently reasonable response to people who are trying to roll back generations of struggle for racial equality. feminist struggle and so forth. And I think that there's an important a battle to be had in the public sphere about really making it clear that there's no space for fascists

Starting point is 00:59:09 and no space for white supremacy and society. Yeah, you had this interview with NPR that I listened to four or five times back to back and I had everybody in my circle listened to where you went, I think the show was on the media, an NPR show, and you went on to discuss anti-fascism, and the host was a very nice, well-intentioned, liberal person, and she was had like audibly taken aback

Starting point is 00:59:35 by your explicitly illiberal approach to combating fascism. I would really recommend anybody go and listen to that. Did you feel good about that interview when you walked away from it? Well, thank you. Well, honestly, I didn't know what to feel because they record a lot, and you don't know what they're going to pick to put on.

Starting point is 00:59:53 That's just how these kinds of interviews go, but I was happy with what aired. And really, as you point out, the bottom line is liberalism insofar as it promotes the coexistence of fascists and non-fascists in society, insofar as it says that the crimes of fascism and Nazism were the product of individual moral failings of personal evil and not the result. and not the result of ideological struggles, and insofar as liberal notions of diversity are often infiltrated by the far right in order to say that in terms of speech, speech diversity is that you get to say that racism's bad, I get to say racism's okay,

Starting point is 01:00:42 in terms of history, you get to say the Holocaust happened, I get to say it didn't happen, that these kinds of notions of liberal interpretations of diversity, liberal interpretations of kind of political sphere where different kinds of political tendencies just simply interact on the level of discourse, that all these kinds of perspectives obscure the real violence that fascists and Nazis and white supremacists and clansmen and what have that they have perpetrated in the past, that they are perpetrating now, that unless we do something they will perpetrate in the future. And so if we're serious about a kind of revolutionary politics

Starting point is 01:01:19 that breaks with capitalist society and breaks with the discourses that support and protect capitalist society and support and protect fascists and Nazis, we need to be very comfortable with the fact that we have an evaluably revolutionary socialist perspective, and so for some people that'll be more Marxist

Starting point is 01:01:41 to other people more anarchists, that is in direct conflict with these kinds of principles with the kind of underlying class systems that produce them. And when that comes to fighting fascism, that simply is to say that we are not looking for a civil libertarian solution for coexisting with fascists. We are looking to destroy fascism, period. And that's, I think that that's how we have to go about it, and that we have to really make these kinds of perspectives more intelligible to the mainstream, because I think it's really kind of common sense that if there are people trying to organize to murder us all, we should

Starting point is 01:02:18 stop that you know i mean that it there's a framing from the liberal media that that people who are advocating anti-fascism are somehow nuts but i mean look what's happened we just you know we need to do whatever we need to do to make sure it can't happen again yeah and we just saw up in portland that stabbing of three three people that stood up to this you know avowed nazi hurling racial slurs at two teenage muslim girls and they paid you know they paid with their life. This is not theoretical. This is happening and it's happening all over this country. And to sit idly by is just a form of cowardice. And moreover, this attempt by the far right to, as you say, hide behind these liberal constructs of free speech. A free speech, like they'll call their rallies,

Starting point is 01:03:06 free speech rallies. And they'll be out here doing sig hail salutes and, you know, with wearing swastikas on their arms and stuff. But so many people, I'm in a lot of debate forms with ideas I don't necessarily they agree with libertarians liberals conservatives so many of them fall for it they frame it in their own minds as a free speech issue and then they say absurd things like anti-fascists are the real fascists and that's all because they've been conditioned with this liberal mindset this idealist version of rights where you know just the abstract concept of free speech is is almost sacred And so the far right is cleverly using this conditioning against us. And sadly, it seems to be on a lot of fronts working.

Starting point is 01:03:54 Yeah, and I mean, historically, this is not the first time. If you look at the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s in Britain, when the famous Battle of Cable Street happened in 1936, when Jewish groups and leftists and a whole coalition of anti-fascists blocked the march of the British Union of Fascists through the predominantly Jewish East End of London, the British Union of Fascists and their leaders were complaining over and over

Starting point is 01:04:22 about this violation of their freedom of speech. Meanwhile, this is at the very same time that the Nazi death machine is, well, the final solution hasn't begun in the 1930s, but still Jews are being systematically deprived of their rights, and we can see how really, also absolutist civil libertarianism is untenable and when you really get down to it no one really

Starting point is 01:04:49 believes that there are all sorts of legitimate infringements upon any kind of right because rights are never valued in their absolute form they're always products of a give and take in a society and the notion that these rights are more important than the lives of people who are getting murdered doesn't stand up to any sort of sustained scrutiny and you know we should basically be wary of anyone who is losing more breath complaining about the free speech quote unquote rights of fascists than people who are getting killed by fascists exactly exactly i just wanted to point listeners one more time to that on the media interview with you because i think that was one of the first times in my in my opinion that i've heard you know a mainstream news

Starting point is 01:05:32 source take these ideas seriously and overall i felt it was it was a very fair presentation of of your ideas and i was really glad to see it out there thanks yeah okay so we have about two more questions then we'll wrap up here um so are there elements of anarchist philosophy in contemporary revolutionary movements uh does apatistas and chiaphas come to mind the rojab and kurds come to mind um what would you say to that idea um yeah there's certainly elements of overlap and i think once again this is a kind of a good example to think more deeply about the history of anarchism and the meaning of anarchism in terms of the fact that on the one hand, anarchism is a historically specific doctrine. On the other hand, it's a reflection of

Starting point is 01:06:18 broader, more widely held methods of resistance, ideas of resistance, and egalitarianism, and anti-authoritarianism. So it's not as if the people in these communities simply turn to an anarchist playbook and said, all right, let's do X, Y, and Z. The indigenous populations of Mexico, the Kurds have their own traditions of egalitarianism, of resistance, and have certainly, you know, like any group or any group of people, any movement is influenced by various sources in terms of the Rajava Revolution, certainly Murray Buchan's anarchist anarchistic writings about libertarian municipalism were very influential towards the course that the course that the Rojava Revolution has taken, and it has a lot of anti-authoritarian currents, which

Starting point is 01:07:12 have a direct link to anarchist ideas specifically. So I think when we discuss the question, it is worth asking what the specific influence of anarchism as an actual political doctrine has been, but also worth thinking about broader currents of anti-authoritarianism that sometimes develop not so much purely for quote-unquote ideological reasons so much as they are, you know, common sense, good ways of organizing groups of people, that hierarchy has a lot of problems, that when you have small groups of people deciding things for larger groups of people, you can run into problems. And so I think that, especially in the case of, you know, in the case of the Rajava Revolution, where the PKK many years was a hierarchical Marxist-Leninist party,

Starting point is 01:08:01 where, if I remember correctly, Subcomendante Marcos, when he first went into the, into, to the jungles of Mexico was more of a orthodox Marxist, but became more anti-authoritarian through his interactions with indigenous communities, that the shortcomings of formal hierarchy are evident to anyone who hasn't entirely drunk the Kool-Aid on any sort of specific party line and actually recognizes the lived experience of working with other people in groups. And so in that sense, I think there's direct anarchist connections and also just sort of a common sense anti-authoritarianism from groups and movements who have seen the flaws of doing things in too much of a top-down way. Yeah, and I also think it speaks to the fact that, you know, a one-size-fits-all approach to revolutionary movements is just untenable. You have to take into account the material conditions on the ground.

Starting point is 01:09:02 The Rojabin Kurds are in the context of, you know, surrounded by theocrats. and literally fighting ISIS on the front lines. The Zapatistas have a deep, as you mentioned, a deep current of Mayan history that they weave into their revolutionary movement. You can go back to the Catalonian anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. Everything is going to be different based on where those events take place and any sort of dogmatic or doctrinaire approach to revolution is always going to be a hindrance

Starting point is 01:09:33 and ultimately going to undermine the overall attempt in my opinion. Yeah, and that's like going back to anti-fascism, just because it's been on my mind recently, if we look at the development of anti-fascist movements in the interwar period in Europe, the fact that the directives of national communist parties in Germany, in Italy, and elsewhere,

Starting point is 01:09:56 came from Moscow, and that often intra-party feuds in Moscow between Stalin and other leaders had more to do with the direction of continental, strategy than the conditions in Germany or Italy, and that in many cases, the rank and file of these movements and other movements were much more attuned to the realities of struggle, much more eager to take the fight to the fascists than their leaders who were thinking about really largely irrelevant considerations in other countries shows some of the dangers of imposing a

Starting point is 01:10:29 one-size-all, one-size-fits-all model of politics. Absolutely. All right, so for our final question, it's going to probably be the most difficult question. It always is because it's looking forward. So we mentioned earlier how armed revolution seems just like an impossibility in the U.S. at the moment, given the material conditions. We talked about the failures of electoral politics and voting in socialism, quote unquote, as a total dead end. So in what ways can revolutionary leftists of any and all stripes work toward their goal of a new society that is both practical and genuinely revolutionary? Yeah, well, I mean, I think that it has to do with values and institutions.

Starting point is 01:11:09 So organizing can be done on any number of issues that we need to be putting our time and effort, any number of struggles that are going on. But I think if we want to build a new world, if we're serious about revolutionary transformation, the question as we're doing it is, is number one, are we building power? Are we building power that can sustain itself beyond a specific struggle, beyond a specific campaign that is open to more and more people feeling invested in it, to participating in it, and creating kind of vehicles of social struggle that have decision making from the bottom up that are popular and that have some teeth to them, that are confrontational, that have an antagonistic relationship to whatever. arena of struggle they're involved in, whether that be labor organizing, environmental justice, community organization, anti-gentrification work. And can we really infuse a political critique to show how any given campaign or struggle is related to larger systems of domination and

Starting point is 01:12:20 oppression in this capitalist society? And connected to that is values, is putting forward, this relates to anti-fascism, it relates to even the question of socialism, putting forward the widely held, putting forward the perspective that capitalism is not the only possibility, that we could create a society where people have their basic needs met, where people don't go hungry, where there aren't white supremacists threatening us when we walk out our front door, that if we can kind of combine promoting these values, changing the way, people see their relationship to their neighbors, relationship to struggles that are going on around them, that they can get involved, that these institutions can grow, that these institutions

Starting point is 01:13:08 can federate, that they can develop a political analysis of their antagonisms between them and the powers that be. And if we can create sort of these networks and models of alternative forms of collective self-management through struggle, and then be ready for the inevitable backlash that comes when the state decides that these are a threat. And that's why, in my opinion, an absolute pacifist stance is untenable because at a certain point, once you get powerful enough, the state will try to crush you. And that antagonism that develops needs to be opened up in a way where people resist. And as Lucy Parsons said, never be deceived. that the rich won't let you vote away their wealth or something to that effect and I think

Starting point is 01:14:02 that that's one of my favorite left quotes and I think really shows how at a certain point we need to build power and be ready to take power absolutely well thank you so much for coming on it's been an honor this is just full of wisdom and an interesting insight that I think anybody on the left and even people that are just trying to learn about the left will find extremely valuable So as we wrap up, I was going to give you an opportunity to tell our listeners about the books that you've written and then after you, and where they can find them. And then if you have any recommendations outside of your own work for people who want to learn more about anarchism. Sure. So just to reiterate, I wrote a book called Translating Anarchy, the Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street on Zero Books that, you know, if you just Google translating anarchy, it's Amazon, various booksellers sell it.

Starting point is 01:14:50 And it's, you know, a theory of politics book about Occupy Wall Street and anarchism more broadly as it relates to contemporary social struggles. In August, I have a book out called Antifa, the Anti-Fascist Handbook on Melville House. You can pre-order it now if you go to the Melville House website. It's available for a relatively cheap price of $11.99. And it is the first transnational history of post-war anti-fascism in English. It covers social struggles of anti-fascists from the beginning of the 20th century to the present in North America and Europe. Also, in the spring, I co-edited a book called Anarchist Education in the Modern School, a Francisco Ferrer reader, which is a collection of the radical anarchist pedagogical writings of Francisco Ferrer,

Starting point is 01:15:37 who was a Caton anarchist, a pedagogical figure who was executed by the Spanish government in 1909. That's coming out on PM Press in the spring. I'm going to be doing talks for the anti-fascist book around the country in the fall, so keep an eye out for any talks where you live. What are the odds of you coming here to Omaha? Not bad. Oh, man, I'd love to shake your hand. You're sweetening the pot with this great podcast.

Starting point is 01:16:01 Thank you again so much for coming on. You're a comrade. You're a friend. You're a great leftist thinker. And I really appreciate you coming on my humble little show to put out your ideas because they're super important. And keep it up, man. Keep it up.

Starting point is 01:16:13 I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks a lot. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:16:55 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:24:39 Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Rev Left Radio - Anarchism: Philosophy and History (with Dr. Mark Bray)

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