Rev Left Radio - In Dialogue With Anarchism: Anarchopac

Episode Date: May 13, 2019

Zoe (AKA Anarchopac) join's Breht for the second installment of our sub-series "In Dialogue With Anarchism". Topics include: Anarchist social theory, organizationally-minded tendencies within anarchism, the Marxist and Anarchist conceptions of the State, our different organizing strategies, whether or not we can work together, and more! Check out Anarchopac's YouTube page here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3FD64RRsrCLpiZNkq7ZkSg  Follow Zoe on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/anarchopac?lang=en  Outro Music: "Jesus Does The Dishes" by Wingnut Dishwasher's Union.  Find and support their music here: https://diybandits.bandcamp.com -------- You can support the show by: Becoming a Patreon supporter (and receive access to bonus content including the Rev Left book club) here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio - OR - making a one-time donation to the Rev Left Radio team here: www.paypal.me/revleft  ---- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Black Banner Magic (Season 2 coming soon) Twitter: @blackbannerpod http://blackbannermagic.libsyn.com Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert):  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com   Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage Little Red School House: http://littleredschoolhouse.libsyn.com ---- Get Rev Left Radio Merch here (sizes run small, or order one or two sizes up from your normal size): https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio --------------- This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on Zoe, aka Anarchopac, for our second installment of our new sub-series in Dialogue with Anarchism. As always, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio and you want to get some bonus content as well as support the show, you can find us at patreon.com forward slash Rev Left Radio. Now, let's get to the episode. Hi, I'm Zoe. I'm online known as anarchopac. I make anarchist YouTube videos, and I also tweet a lot about anarchism. And I'm trying to kind of spread anarchist theory far and wide, so people at least understand it better, even if they disagree with that.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, that's part of our goal as well on the Marxist side from our end. And the reason I wanted to have you on is because, you know, not only do you have a big following and a lot of people look up to you when it comes to anarchist theory and history, but also because I think you have a really good, sophisticated analysis of things. You're not one of these people that just dismisses Marxism out of hand.

And so I thought that would allow us to have a friendly conversation for this second installment. of in-dialogue with anarchism. So I'm really honored and appreciative to have you on the show. First things first, just a little bit about your personal background. What are you pursuing your Ph.D. in? And what was the process by which you came to ultimately study these things and these topics? My PhD is an overview of what anarchists thought about revolutionary strategy in Europe and North America between 1860, which is when the movement begins. and 1940, which is usually viewed as the end of kind of so-called classical anarchism,

and then it becomes kind of modern anarchism. And how I came to decide to write this was that, so I first start reading about anarchism when I'm 16, I discover Kropotkin, and I'm like, this is amazing. I must read everything he wrote. And so I then obsessively read Krippokin and kind of won't stop talking to him about everyone I know, any of whom didn't, you know, wanted me to talk less about Kropokin. one group of friends actually like I was banned from talking about Gropokin because I talked about it so much

and then having spent ages trying to read as much kind of primary sources as I could I then started reading kind of secondary literature written by academics and I was very disappointed by a lot of what I read it was like they hadn't been reading the same authors that I had been

so they would kind of talk about Kropokin and not mention at all the fact that he was in favour of creating a revolution trade unions. And that was one of his core strategic commitments was you need to create mass organizations, which are trade unions. Otherwise, you won't be able to abolish capitalism because you won't have a mass movement capable of doing it. So I thought, well, I guess if no one else has written the book I wish existed, then I should. And hopefully it will change the conversation

and make people understand what anarchist thought about strategy, because so far, like, there'll be books on, say, Italian anarchism over a 20-year period or the C&T and the Spanish Revolution. but there won't be a kind of big overview that you can give someone and they can get what the main strategic views were within the anarchist movement and what the main debates were in the movement about strategy were. I'm hoping my book once it's published in a few years can provide that for people. Yeah, that's wonderful. I'm really looking forward to that and obviously we'll help get the word out about that

when it comes out. So let's just go ahead and get into the conversation. And to start off these conversations, especially with when I'm talking to anarchist, I like to establish intent and good faith. So with that in mind, why do you think having these long-form personal conversations about our similarities and differences is worthwhile? And how do you think these conversations get distorted online? I think that if you're going to disagree with someone about politics, it's important to first understand what they think and why. I'm very wary of the tendency to assume that people on a different political group to you are stupid.

They're not stupid. They've just hung out with different people. They've had different life experiences. They've read different texts. You know, so had 16-year-old me been in a different situation, I could have been obsessively reading Lenin instead of Kropkin. It was sheer chance that it was Kropokin I found first, and then that shaped me as a person. So I want to kind of avoid that way of thinking of assuming people who disagree with.

you are stupid and that means having discussions of people and trying to work out why they think about things the way that they do and hopefully they can also understand the same thing about you and even if you don't agree with one another you can at least gain a sense of respect for one another and not view each other as lesser yeah and I think online um why I think Twitter brings out the worst in everyone myself included yeah me too it it makes you concerned with point scoring rather than actually learning or pushing the conversation forward or persuading other people. And that's why I was very keen to come on and have this conversation with you because it gives the opportunity to try and push the conversation forward

rather than point score for retweets. Yeah. Yeah, no, I could not agree more. And, you know, as, like, I'm just as guilty, you know, with regards to this as anybody else. And I try my hardest. But, you know, just the whole incentive structure of especially, you know, Twitter, but social media broadly is exactly as you say and we all get sucked into it from time to time.

I'll even, you know, start posting stuff and I know like this is just going to lead to more headaches and annoyance for my own life for the next day or two, but I feel this compulsion to say something and say it in this very, you know, black and white way. And I think, you know, obviously those things are incentivized on those platforms and we should be aware of that even though we can't totally escape it.

But I really, really like your point about this concept that we all grow up in different life situations and we have sort of by chance, you know, bump into revolutionary theory and a different tendency just based on whoever, you know, your influences are, your friends are, your mentors, whatever books you come across first. And that's always been a big sticking point with me when I'm talking to people of other tendencies on the, on the left is I know that, you know, the way that I got to my position was this long labyrinth, you know, of learning new things and bumping into new people and

just a lot of times random chance. You know, this book came in front of me or this person reached out to me and taught me this thing and I went off in that direction. So once you sort of zoom out and see that everybody has these different influences and life trajectories, it's much harder to just condemn somebody as like a cynical asshole or whatever when you can see that. You know, they're probably doing their best just like I'm doing my best. And if you talk to talk to me five years ago or 10 years ago, I would have had very, very different politics. So on top of our different influences, there's always this constant state of growing and learning and developing politically, which we're. we're all constantly going through. And, you know, kind of keeping that in the foreground of your mind really helps

make these conversations a little bit more, you know, healthy and a little bit more constructive. So let's go ahead and get into, well, before we get into our differences, actually, let's talk about what we respect in one another's traditions. I did this last time with working class history, and I thought this is a pretty cool way to start these conversations. It shows good faith, and it's sort of conceding something nice to the other person's tradition and that sort of forms a good basis to move forward on. So with that in mind, what do you respect, admire, or find useful from the Marxist tradition? And after you answer,

I'll do my perspective on the anarchist tradition. So I'm part of a tradition of people who view themselves as both anarchists and Marxists at the same time, such as Daniel Garin, who was a French libertarian communist, and I advocate a synthesis of the best of both anarchism and Marxism. I think both traditions have a lot to teach one another, and although they have a kind of complicated history of arguing of one another and misrepresenting one another, and in some cases killing one another, I think that there is the possibility for combining them. So in terms of what I like about Marx as a theorist. One of my favorite things about Marx is that he thinks in terms of processes and relations. So he thinks that to understand society, you have to look at

it in motion and you have to develop a conceptual framework that enables you to understand society is something which is continually producing and reproducing itself over time, rather than making the mistake of creating kind of concepts which treat society as if it's this static entity, which means you won't understand it because society is a really existing thing as people acting and doing different things every day. And you need to incorporate that into your social theory. And that's one of the really big things I got from reading marks that will definitely stay with me, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And from my end of things, I said this a little bit last time, but I just want to reiterate, like, I do not exclude anarchist history from

what I consider to be proletarian history, you know, the things that we should study. And, learn from to understand how proletarian movements and all their different variations develop and form and fight against, you know, bourgeois rule and imperialism, et cetera. And I think, like, the crushing of the Catalonian anarchists was a world historical tragedy. I really admire the Catalonian anarchists, especially, and, you know, how, you know, given, I mean, of course, there were lots of problems that developed in the later years of the Spanish Civil War between different left tendencies, but there were periods of time when, on the left, you know, We were more or less pretty united fighting against Franco and the fascists.

And there's a lot of beauty there that sometimes gets tossed aside by both sides who want to just sort of play a blame game or want to downplay the contributions from the other tendency, etc. And then the other thing that really sticks out to me is, you know, I do believe in this anarchist concern about, you know, making sure that working people are actually empowered, right? and this concern that the state, even a proletarian state, which we'll probably get into in a little bit, some of our different ideas on the state, but even a proletarian state, you know, can, if it's not careful, develop its own interests, you know, that are separate and different than the working class that they're, you know, ostensibly supposed to be fighting for and a part of, you know, I think, again, and like if you look in the Maoist tradition, there is this attempt to experiment with bottom up power, you know, revolutionary agency, inventing Venezuela, you have the Maduro government, but you also have the collectivos and this sort of bottom up and top down approach to finding that critical tension and that creative tension in between and developing along those lines is really interesting. And, you know, I think a lot of Marxists do feel this way, but sometimes they don't talk about it as much as they should. And I think there's a lot of history in the Marxist tradition, which grants this idea that, you know,

we have to be concerned about preventing bureaucracy. We have to be concerned about making sure that people have this constant infusion of revolutionary agency, that revolutions are built by mass participation and they're not ever built, you know, top down. So those are some things in the anarchist tradition that I do admire and respect. And yeah, I appreciate for sure. So let's go on to some of the misconceptions when it comes to our different tendencies. So what, in your opinion, Zoe, are some of the most flagrant or frustrating mischaracterizations or misinterpretations about anarchism that you sometimes come across? So there are a lot.

I'm going to focus on two of the big ones that I see a lot. So the first one is the view that anarchism is a singular entity. Marxists will kind of talk online as if there's this singular thing called anarchism, which isn't all the case. Just as there are many kinds of Marxism, ranging from social democracy to cancel communism, to Trotskyism, Maoism, and so on. so too are there many different kinds of anarchism which have significant disagreements with one another. So often I see Marxists saying that they'll critique a particular kind of anarchism

and they'll present it as being a critique of anarchism as a whole. So, for example, they'll say anarchists reject large-scale organization and building large-scale formal organizations. And this is true of some anarchists, such as insurrectionists like Carlo Kaffaro, but it's not true for the mainstream of anarchism historically who were syndicalists who advocated and built huge trade unions such as the CNT in Spain which had a membership of 850,000 in 1936 and it was organised through quite a complex federal system in which you had local trade union sections which formed local federations and they've been linked up through a delegate system to form

cantonal federations, regional federations, and national federations. So it's not just that they built big organizations, but they were very elaborately and intelligently organized through achieving the kind of goals they wanted. And the second main misrepresentation I see is the idea that anarchism is simplistic, that it doesn't have theory, that if you want serious theory, you need to kind of grow up and read Das Kapital and become a Marxist. And anarchists actually have a huge amount of theory, such as Kropotkin's Modern Science and Anarchy, or Rockers' Nationalism and Culture, or Bakunin's Statism and Anarchy. Anarchist theory, generally speaking, can be divided into four main subtypes,

and often within an anarchist text, they'll actually cover all of them, even in a short pamphletes, such as Malatester's book, Anarchy. So the four main subtypes are you have Anarchist Value Theory, which is things like explaining what freedom is and talking about how in order to be free, humans have to form mutually-carrying relationships with one another, such as your friends and family and co-workers. And if you don't have that, you won't be free. The second is anarchist analysis and critique of existing society. So this is a social theory. So they will give explanations of what the state and capitalism are, what their history is, why they're bad.

Ordof Rucker, for example, has an in-depth analysis of why and how fascism emerged in Germany. The third kind is anarchist visions of a future society, so they'll describe the kinds of institutions or decision-making procedures, which anarchists should attempt to build during the abolition of capitalism in the state. And the last one, which is, in my experience, the bulk of anarchist theory is anarchist views on strategy. So how is it that we get from capitalism in the state, which we don't like, to some kind of libertarian communist future in which people are free and equal? living lives in which they can develop themselves as people yeah and that is one thing about you know your presence um online and on the left broadly that i really do appreciate and i've learned some of that from you as well that you know i sometimes even had that bias like there is a lack of of theory on the anarchist side but you know really engaging with with your you know online presence over time i've

really seen some of that come to the fore and i'm excited that you know you're able to talk about that here and get that misconception sort of cleared away because you know i do think that's important You did mention there's these different strains of anarchism that are sort of parallel to the different strains within Marxism. Do you have a specific strain that you more or less identify with, like Ancom, syndicalist, platformism, and bouncing off that, do you have any thoughts about what post-left anarchism is and where that fits into the overall rubric of anarchism? The core categorization of anarchists into syndicists, communists, and platformism doesn't apply historically, right? So the vast majority of syndicalists were explicitly committed to communism. Communism is explicitly stated as the end goal in the statutes of the IWMA, which is the anarcho syndicist federation.

It's also the case that platformists such as McNo were communists and also syndiclists. And I view myself as someone who's in favor of organizational dualism, which is where you have a mass organization, like a trade union. And parallel to that, you have a specific anarchist organization. So I really like Black Crow's Anacist Federation, for example, as an example of a specific anarchist organization. And in that sense, I'm very much like, you know, all the big anarchist thinkers who were in favor of this, they kind of disagreed on how to go about doing it.

So, for example, Malatesta thought that you need to have a union and a specific union. specific anarchist organization, but you thought the union had to be neutral, it shouldn't be committed to anarchist ideas, while other anarchists thought that you needed a specific anarchist organization and the union itself had to be committed to anarchist views. And so often they actually have, the whole idea of the different subtypes is often a construction of historians, which then the movement repeat, which then make them actual differences, even though historically people at the time didn't think in those terms. So I hope that answers that bit of the question.

Yeah. As for post-left anarchism, I'm not really super familiar with it. It's a thing that I kind of see online and I go, this is weird and different. I'm going to continue just to learn a lot about anarchist history. So I don't want to say anything about it in case I upset people who do identify with it. And I turned out haven't understood what they think. Okay. Absolutely.

Fair enough. And yeah, the previous answer to that question about these combinations of things and that this split between anarcho-com, communism and syndicalism and platformism isn't actually sort of real and tangible. I mean, it is insofar as it's replicated out of history books, as you say, but yeah, that's really interesting. So I'll go ahead and toss some of my ideas of what I think are the most frustrating misconceptions about Marxism and Marxism, Leninism specifically, and you can sort of give me your thoughts on that before we move into the next question. I have a couple different ones, so I'll just sort of say them all, and you can focus on whichever one you particularly want to pursue, or you can

focus on as many as you want. So one of the big differences is that I think sometimes MLs and Marxism-Leninism broadly, there's a confusion about our conception of the state. And some people tend to think that there's no real meaningful distinction between a proletarian state and a bourgeois state and don't really pay attention to the idea that Marxists have that the state itself is an organic manifestation of class society. And insofar as a social, as a socialist transition is still class society, you know, those state apparatuses are going to exist one way or another when you're talking about challenging, you know, global US hegemony and global capitalism. Another misconception, I think, is that people sometimes think, and this is often

played into by Marxists who do like, you know, ironic rehabilitations of figures like Stalin in the face of just absurd sort of reductionist understandings of our position on Stalin or what Stalin actually did and stood for. So sometimes MLs are pinned as, you know, uncritical supporters of Marxist-Leninist parties and Marxist-Leninist leaders, right? There's this idea I even see it bouncing around sometimes that, you know, we call ourselves Marxist or Leninist or Maoist, and that is indicative of this, you know, compulsion we have to worship individual figures when, of course, you know, we're just revolutionary communist and we take these thinkers as sort of a historical accident. We take their names into these different tendencies or divisions

on the on the Marxist side of things but obviously you know none of us believe that like all these people were perfect or amazing and sometimes that discourse and that complex nuanced discussion gets washed away on both sides you know there could be MLs that that prop up you know like literally Stalin did nothing wrong ever and and you know anarchists who say MLs are just you know Stalinists in waiting that we just want to capture power and be tyrants of our own sort or that we just want to build state capitalism and we're not actually interested in proletarian power. And then that sort of feeds into this concept of authoritarianism, that our conceptions of the vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat are just sort of Trojan horses

through which we can get in our own leaders and grab power and dominate, you know, workers or dominate societies in the way that we want to dominate them and that we want to strip working class people of their power. And, you know, of course, we talked about on the show many, many times, and we talk about on Red Menace a lot, you know, that is a misinterpretation. And then finally, sometimes we get pinned as nationalists when we make this distinction between national liberation movements, you know, liberations that like are fighting against U.S. imperialism and capital extraction and, you know, revolve around a national identity to get people together to fight against those things.

And then there's reactionary nationalism, which, you know, wants to reify imperial domination, Western dominance, exploitative, extractive imperialism, et cetera. So those are a few of some of the things that we get frustrated about coming from the anarchist side a lot and, you know, just take that wherever you want. What are your thoughts on some of those points? So some of that I want to talk about later when we talk about the state in depth. Okay. What I will say is that online, I have often seen people who present themselves as being critical of Stalin's regime while at the same time being very uncritical. So they'll make claims like everyone who was in the gulag was a counter-revolutionary.

And then you point out very specific examples of anarchists or genuine committed dissidents who were trying to advance the interests of workers. They are ignored or it's assumed that, well, they must be bad and terrible because they oppose the regime because they are unwilling to critique it. And I don't think it's the case that everyone who supports these regimes is like this. But I'm always very worried about people who, due to their supporting the good things these regimes did, ignore all the bad things that they did in the same way that you get defenders of capitalism who will talk about good things that have done to capitalism and then deny capitalism's role in loads of bad things, such as they'll say, look, capitalism is improved living standards, but won't talk about, say, the cost of improved living conditions in the West, which is the destruction. of Africa, India, and so on through colonialism. Likewise, some defenders of the USSR will talk about good things like massive increases

in living standards and literacy and in a very rapid timeframe in terms of industrialization, but then won't talk about bad things which I've read about, such as some dissidents would be diagnosed with mental illnesses, put in mental hospitals, and then pumped full of antipsychotics, so they then no longer were able to, you know, have a life and resist the state that they lived under. I just get very, very worried about the tendency to deny atrocities automatically because you're kind of batting for your team,

rather than go, yes, this thing happened, it shouldn't have happened. I'm against that. But I think there are other things that are good. I think it's important to not engage in kind of black and white thinking and talk about the positives and the negative side by side. Yeah, I couldn't agree with that more. And in fact, I think it's pretty anti-Marxist, right, to divide up a complex situation and make it black or white.

And again, I do think that social media plays into some of these reductionist and simplistic arguments and positions. And I do think also, like, when new people are coming into either anarchism or communism, they sort of haven't done the work to understand the history and formulate these complex ideas and these critiques. And sometimes they'll just take on like older or more veteran anarchist or communists what they say and just sort of regurgitate it without really the nuanced analysis that's required to have an understanding of these situations.

And the whole concept of dialectics and of Marxism as some form of science is this idea that you have to, you know, examine the totality of the situation. And if we want our movements to succeed, we have to honestly state. take stock of our past historical failures, flaws, excesses, and do everything we can to prevent those things from occurring in the future while taking what we did right and the successes and carrying those things forward. And so when you have this simplistic one-dimensional understanding of these complex historical events, you could have, you run the risk of replicating those problems and never actually, you know, thinking through them and working out, you know, how to

prevent the worst excesses and perpetuate the best successes. So, you know I totally think that that's important and I think that that's true for both sides we all need to to take that to take into account you know the successes and failures of our traditions and really work through them in a in a genuine good faith and constructive way that's the only way we're going to make any sort of advancements you know especially here in the in the belly of the beast but bouncing off that last question there's a lot that I sort of folded into to my answer to that last question and I know we're going to get to like strategy in the state in this in this interview as well so

So let's just start right now talking about anarchist social theory. You've mentioned that earlier in this episode, and when we were planning for this episode, you talked about this being a really important part of your analysis and something that you want people to understand. So what is the anarchist social theory? And in what ways does it differ from a Marxist conception of social theory? So it's important to keep in mind that different anarchist authors had different social theories. And many early anarchists were incredibly influenced. by Marx social theory, such as Carlo Kafferro, who I mentioned earlier, he wrote a brief summary

of capital, which Marx actually liked, and explicitly quotes Marx in his pamphlets. And Malatester would later complain that early anarchism was too Marxists, that they and yet developed their own way of thinking about the world, even though they developed their own strategies. So to talk about how kind of later anarchists thought about things, one of the key things you notice is that they think that society is constituted by human beings who have particular forms of consciousness by which I mean the particular ways in which people see and experience the world and conceptualise things, engaging in activity, which is when you exercise capacities to satisfy motivational drives and in so doing simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. So for example,

workers go on strike and during the course of the strike, they develop new capacities like they learn to engage in direct action and self-direct their lives. They acquire new motivational drives, such as the desire to stand up to their boss or become a Jews paying member of their union. They transform their forms of consciousness. So, for example, they learn to view their boss as a class enemy, or they realize that to improve their situation, they have to collectively organize with other workers. And through engaging in this activity, they don't just transform themselves, but they also develop new social relations. So they'll form bonds and mutual support and solidarity of one another. And they will also transform social conditions. So they'll get better wages. They'll make

their boss afraid of them. They'll grow the union membership. Now, this is often called the theory of praxis or practice. And this is something that Marx and anarchists have in common. They just arrive at different conclusions through it, which we'll talk about later with respect to the state. now the anarchist theory of practice underpinned all their views on strategy so when becunin or pujé advocate direct action they do so not only because it's effective but also because it will transform workers into the kinds of people needed for both abolishing capitalism and creating socialism such as them you know learning how to act for themselves and take initiative and so this comes up again and again whenever anarchists either advocate strategies or critique strategies, they will consistently talk about its effect on the

transformation of human beings. And that's why it's important to understand their social theory to understand the other claims they make. Now, one of the areas where anarchists generally speaking differ from Marxists is that they weren't committed to a base superstructure model. Some were. Bakunin, for example, talks about the economy as being the primary determining factor in society, but other anarchists like Rapokin rejected this. Instead, they thought in terms of a holistic interaction between parts, such as the economy, the state, religion, gender norms, and so on, in which the components, which is the most important,

varies depending upon what aspect of society you're looking at. So it might be, for example, in school, certain components are more important than in other aspects of society, like, say, gay subcultures. And it also depends on what society you're looking at, which bit's most important. So it might be in certain hunter-gatherer societies, religion plays a much more important role than their views on gender or in other societies. It might be the case that the economy is the most important thing. And they think this is an empirical question, which aspect of society is playing the key role in that moment,

rather than you building it into your model automatically. So to illustrate this, Kropotkin, when he talks about the state, he thinks that capitalism in the state, the nation state that is, as opposed to kind of government in general, he thinks that capitalism in the nation state co-created one another rather than capitalism by itself causing the nation state. So for example, in modern science and anarchy, he says that, quote, if capitalism has helped to create the modern state, it is also let us not forget the modern state that creates and nourishes capitalism. So you have two factors and they, as it were, dialectically create one another rather than there being a kind of the economy primarily

determining factor results in the state. So in the Marxist side of things like we do sort of, you know, carry forward this base superstructure metaphor for society, but we also fully, you know, concede the fact that, you know, the different superstructural elements, you know, turn around and maintain the economic base and that given a history of a certain society, certain superstructural elements will play more of a role than others. Like in the U.S., white supremacy is an absolutely important and overarching sort of superstructural concept that goes back to the very founding of this country. So, I mean, I guess I'm just sort of struggling to see where exactly we It's not the idea that the economy is the primary thing, and then the superstructure also causally affects it.

Instead, it's the idea that you have two equally important components which mutually create and determine one another. Okay, I see. And so would you say that the Marxist focused too much on productive forces and relations of production, as opposed to sort of seeing it as this sort of holistic, dialectical back and forth between two equally important aspects of societal. life? Well, I think it really does depend on who we're talking about. So I think Marx, for example, is much less of a economic reductionist than people like Kalkowski. And when you look at the history of Marxism, you have to understand that the primary person who shaped what people understood by Marxism in terms of who they actually read was Kalkowski and other members of the German

Social Democratic Party that it was a part of. And also Engels, while loads of key texts for Marx weren't available, such as the Grindreysel, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1848. And so as a result, there's a kind of bit, I think there's a big difference between what Marx himself says, which I think is more similar to what anarchists think, although also kind of different than certain kinds of orthodox Marxists, like Kowski.

And I think there's a tendency for when you read anarchist authors, critiquing Marx, they essentially are critiquing the representation of Marx by Marxist parties at the time, rather than what Marx actually himself thought, which I think was a lot more sophisticated. Yeah, yeah, that's incredibly interesting. And certainly throughout Marxist history, there have been, you know, this economic reductionism, this sort of, you know, hyper-focus on the productive forces to the exclusion of other important variables.

And so, yeah, that's really interesting sort of critique. and I would like to think about that and explore that further. But moving on to the big sort of elephant in the room when it comes to these discussions between anarchists and Marxists, and that is the concept of the state. So in what ways do you think the anarchist conception of the state is misunderstood? And what is your general position on the state as an anarchist? So there are two things to explain here. Firstly, what the anarchists mean by the state, and second, why do they reject the sea?

of existing state power. So many Marxists define the state in terms of its function such that any collection of armed people which performs the function of serving the interests of a particular class is a state. Anarchists, in contrast to this, usually define the state both in terms of its function and in terms of how it's organized. So for anarchists, a state is a hierarchical and centralized institution which uses professionally organized violence to perform the function of reproducing class rule. The state so understood is wielded by a political ruling class, so generals, politicians, high-ranking civil servants, monarchs, and so on, in their interests, and also in the interests of the economic ruling class, such as capitalists and landlords,

against the masses, the working class. So Kropokin in modern science and anarchy says that, he says that the state is, quote, the perfect example of a hierarchical institution. institution developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all of their possible groupings to the central will, the state is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian, or it ceases to be the state. And this was an analysis of the state that they developed based on the state as a historical institution and the state as something that was currently existing in that society. So Kropotkin's writing in 1913, so this is before the Russian Revolution and before later

attempts at creating a worker's state. And this is a point that Kropokin makes several times, sometimes in kind of all caps rage. The state is necessarily centralized and hierarchical, otherwise it's not a state, it's something else. So keeping how anarchists define the state in mind, we can now talk about why they didn't think we should use the state to achieve communism. So anarchists were committed to the theory that there's a unity.

between means and ends. And this is because given the theory of practice, when human beings engage in activity, they transform themselves in the world. It follows that when people engage in certain means, they will transform themselves, and how they transform themselves will shape the end that they arrive at,

irrespective of your intentions. So if you organise in a really authoritarian way of a personality cult, you might intend to create a free and fair society, but because of the means you're using, they will transform people within this organization such that they become involved in this kind of highly authoritarian organization and then end up producing an authoritarian society, even though they start off as genuine, committed socialists who really want to make the world a better place. So Anarchists think that the state is a social structure just like any other. It's constituted by forms of human activity.

Participating in the state will therefore produce and reproduce particular kinds of people. particular kinds of social relations, and this again occurs irrespective of your intentions or your goals. Reclu, for example, says that socialists who enter the state have placed themselves in determinate conditions that in turn determine them. So if the state is a centralized and hierarchical institution, which is wielded by a political elite because of its centralized and hierarchical nature, it means there's going to be a leadership, even if they're elected, there's still a leadership who do the day-to-day activity of making key decisions and implementing decisions. And Anacus think that just the activity of being in that position will transform them

into oppressors, concerned of reproducing and expanding their power over other people. So I have a brief reclue quote here, which isn't very well known. So he says that anarchists contend that the state and all that it is, implies are not any kind of pure essence, much less a philosophical abstraction, but rather a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subject to its influence, those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think of themselves superior to the common people, yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general

level. So given this, anarchists think that we shouldn't see state power because the forms of practice which constitute it won't create the kinds of people which are needed for achieving a communist society because a communist society is a stateless class of society in which people self-manage and self-determine their lives while the state is a hierarchical centralized institution in which are leadership and positions of power. And they'll then, rather than doing what they're meant to do in theory, which is that, look, we've defeated the ruling class, we're now going to abolish ourselves and establish communism. Because of how the process transforms them, they'll go actually know, I want to keep this power for myself and my friends. And as a result, an authoritarian

class societal will be created by these socialists rather than the communist society that they started out trying to create. Okay. So yeah, there's a lot there and that's really interesting. and for people that want to hear a more like develop just purely Marxist conception of the state or Leninist conception of the state. We did an episode on state and revolution a few months back. I encourage people to go check that out. But bouncing off of everything you just said right there, here is one possible response to that, looking back over history from 2019 and thinking about these proletarian movements, right? You know, whatever your thoughts on the state are, and a lot of those are very fair. I mean, hierarchical, somewhat authoritarian and centralized, those are true, you know, sort of aspect.

of the state, but one thing that Marxist-Leninist movements have been able to do, in my opinion, that anarchists haven't, is not only to build socialism, they're able to defend it over long periods of time, and moreover, they were able to challenge U.S. global hegemony and imperialism on a global stage in a way that anarchists necessarily haven't. And so if we take this idea of means and ends seriously, which, you know, I do, I think there's a lot of important stuff there, you know, you can sort of think of socialist states as trying to create the conditions in which human beings, through the process of revolution and defending the revolution, produce the sort of education and revolutionary agency in the masses to be able to take

these proletarian experiments further and towards the direction we all want to go, which is a stateless, classless society. But you can't create a stateless, classless society, you know, on the fringes of global capitalism. You can't create it when the biggest and most powerful nation states are highly authoritarian, highly hierarchical, highly centralized. And so in order to create the conditions to make that move towards communism, global capitalism and imperial hegemony has to be defeated. And any gains we make in the revolution, as we've seen time and time and time again, have to be defended. You look at the Paris Commune, you look at Catalonia, those are instances of a more, quote unquote, anarchist approach to organizing, and those things

are crushed. If you look at Rojave, you look at Chiapas, as much as I love Chiapas from the bottom of my heart and forever will love the Zapatistas. What happens is they're sort of relegated to the peripheries of global capitalism, never able to fully challenge it. And so maybe, you know, a part of being able to challenge the highly authoritarian, hierarchical, and centralized U.S. or, you know, global imperial hegemony is to create the sort of organization that can actually fight back against that. And sadly, you know, that requires. sort of similar structures to fight back if we want to defend this experiment over the long term and make new progress for proletarian movement. So what's your response to that general critique?

Well, I do think that matches onto the history, right? So if you look at Spain, for example, the anarchist militias were initially effective. And then what happened when the CNT didn't implement anarchist theory and decided to form a coalition government with, state socialists and Republicans. Well, how many as the workers' militias, were taken over and absorbed into the main army, and they were no longer at this point operating as kind of self-organized working class institutions, and it was this state, centrally organized army, which was militarily defeated by Franco, not the kind of system that anarchists had advocated due to the, why I think was

a mistake of forming the coalition. And this is talked about in depth in a book called Ready for Revolution, which goes through the whole history of the workers' militias in Spain and what happened to them. And something to keep in mind is that anarchists have been advocating workers' militias since the 1870s. Becunin advocates in the 1870s, the Paris commune happens, which he thinks is a kind of implementation of his ideas.

Marx praises the Paris Commune, and Bakunin then thinks that Marx is just kind of pretending to support essentially anarchist views because they're popular, and then disregards everything. Marx writes about the commune, which I think was a mistake. And in the Russian revolution, the Russian anarchist movement was a lot more influenced by insurrectionist anarchist anarchism than the European or Latin American movements were. and as a result was a lot more disorganized than the anarchists elsewhere, which I think was one of the main failures of anarchists during the Russian Revolution. But in Ukraine, they were able to fight effectively. And when they were defeated, they were defeated through betrayal by the Bolsheviks. So as far as I remember, for example, they were key members of McNus army were invited to a meeting, where they were then betrayed and murdered, as opposed to being kind of militarily defeated.

and they played a key role in the campaign helping the Bolsheviks militarily. I do think that anarchists need to think very seriously about effective military organization in the modern world because technology has changed. When anarchists were advocating the things they were, you didn't have tanks like today. You didn't have the kind of artillery that you have now or drone strikes and so on. So I do think anarchists shouldn't just repeat what classical anarchists thought. I do think we need to modernize and think very seriously about fighting a modern conflict with the modern state. But I also think that the history is complicated.

And it's not a simple case of, oh, look, anarchists can't defend themselves. Yeah, I think that's incredibly fair. I would push back one more time and then we can go on to the next question because I think this is really interesting. And a lot of people like this discussion. It is a counterfactual, right? the idea that what if the Bolsheviks never took state power and what if the anarchist line won the day, you know, how would that have gone? And we'll never know for sure. But sometimes I do feel like, especially with regards to the Russian revolution, anarchists will sometimes

chalk up, you know, their failures or their defeat to this idea that the Bolsheviks betrayed them. And if it wasn't for the Bolsheviks, you know, we would have had a much better chance at fighting back, et cetera. But what the Bolsheviks also did was they fought a brutal civil war where, you know, multiple countries from the West, including the U.S., capitalist imperial nation states, descended, teamed up and descended upon the Bolsheviks to crush their movement, you know, and aligned with the Mensheviks, etc. And it was that sort of centralized, disciplined party structure and the formation of what a lot of anarchists would be repulsed by that allowed them to defeat those enemies and move forward. Now, without that, if that was sort of

a priori taken off the game board, you know, what would the Russian anarchists? anarchists been able to do to defend themselves against that onslaught, right? The odds are very much stacked against you. So sometimes I do think, and you know, this is said in a very comradly way, that sometimes anarchists put too much weight on the idea that they were betrayed. And often it's sort of obscured that anarchist also from the very beginning and also like socialist revolutionaries, the SRs, parts of the Mensheviks, were constantly also attacking the Bolsheviks. There's this one example of Bukharin, a Bolshevik leader in the beginning, giving a speech to other Bolsheviks saying that they shouldn't be as harsh on the anarchist as they are and try

to work with them. And an anarchist actually bombed the very place that Bucharn was giving that speech. So I don't know. I'm just tossing those ideas out and you can take them wherever you want. And then after you have the last word, we'll move on to the last question. Okay, there's a lot there. Yeah, I'm sorry. So I agree that we, you know, with history, it's very hard to work out what would have happened had different decisions been made. And that's part of why I'm trying to back against the kind of simplistic narrative of, you know, anarchists can't fight. That's why they lost. And I think that we need to do the same thing with the Bolsheviks and try to look at things

in all their complexity and look at the fighting that occurred between anarchists and state socialists and I agree that they were both killing each other and for different reasons. I think that if you read certain texts by Trotsky and Lenin, they say that the Civil War got in the way of them destroying workers' control, implementing one-man management of industry, centralising, which they were in favour of, because they thought it was necessary to economically develop the country, as opposed to it being forced on them by the Civil War. as far as I remember Chautsky says this in terrorism and communism and this is often kind of ignored by Marxists to often equate we did this because of the civil war

even though not all the things they did were because of the civil war although it is true that many of the things they did were shaped by the civil war and I think it's also important to keep in mind that anarchist offers before the Russian Revolution predicted that other countries will invade and this is something that you're going to have to deal with as a revolutionary they want to kind of naive and thought, look, we're just going to establish communism. Everything's going to work out. Pekounin, Gileam, Kropokin all say that the revolution has to be international

because if it's not, if it's in a single country, they're going to get invaded by everyone else and they're likely then to be defeated just because of being outnumbered. Yeah, so, yeah, I'll have to go check out that terrorism and communism work and follow up on that idea that Trotsky and Lennon were talking about that. But yeah, so that's interesting. That's a little back and forth for people. I hope that sort of clarifies some of our differences and some of our critiques to one another. I appreciate you taking the time to bounce my ideas off of you and responding to them. So let's sort of zoom in towards the last big question before the conclusion.

And that is revolving around strategy, right? We live in an era increasingly defined by climate chaos and the sort of suffering that it brings. Moreover, I think anarchist and Marxists, probably more than a democratic socialist or other leftists, really do value the construction of dual power as a primary tactic toward building our capacity as a revolutionary movement. So what are the similarities with regards to our views about strategy and organization, and what do you perceive to be the main differences? I think the kind of core view on anarchist stuff and organization is that you have to build organizations which prefigured the future society. And historically this had a narrow meaning referring to you have to use the same kind of. of decision-making procedures and organisational structure as will exist in the future society

for the reason that in order to create communism, people have to learn how to self-manage their lives through workers' councils, and they're not going to just suddenly learn this one day. They're going to have to learn it during the struggle against capitalism itself. And then as anarchism goes on, prefiguration is broadened to include a much wider set of commitment, such as the idea that, you know, we have to establish egalitarian gender relations in our organisations as a way to prefigure a future non-patriarchal society. And the reason why anarchists advocate these prefigrative politics is going back to the whole unity of means and end stuff. Our means have to be consistent and match our ends. And this means we have to

organize an act in a way that's like how we want things to be in the future. And the idea is that we can experiment with different things in the present to try and work out how things could work in the future, such as, you know, should we use consensus in this situation or should we use one person, one vote or majority vote, and kind of working out nuts and bolts of how to actually make decisions in a way that is both effective, but also doesn't result in oppressive social relationships that will prevent us from achieving the kind of society we want. and I'm in favour of, like I talked about this earlier, you know, organisational dualism where we have mass movements and then we have specific anarchist organisations getting involved in those mass movements, acting as a militant minority, trying to push them in an anarchist direction,

spread anarchist ideas, spread anarchist methods of organisation and I think we really need to make socialism a mass movement again internationally because, you know, where we're much smaller than historically we used to be. And I think we need to really focus on changing that and trying to have a kind of growth mindset of trying to get as many people involved as possible because if we want to stop climate change, I think we need to get very serious about overfrying capitalism very quickly, or at least forcing capitalism to not destroy the environment pending revolution.

And to do that, we need to have large organisations, large mass movements a small bunch of people won't be able to do it yeah so yeah i i largely agree with that and you know as a marxist um as a leninist i'm obviously organizing a lot and i've been in a lot of different organizing circles and this idea in 2019 you know despite our historical differences i think anarchist and marxists completely agree that prefigurative politics with regards to how we organize in the here and now and especially with how we structurally you know um sort of root out patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormitivity in our cadres, in our organizations, that's essential. And I actually don't think that there's any real meaningful difference. In my experience,

organizing with Marxist, anarchists, and others, you know, people on the left are taking this much more seriously in the 21st century than they might have, you know, a century ago or longer. So I don't think there's any real difference there. And obviously, we both agree that mass movements are absolutely essential. There's no revolution that can be built and defended over any period of time without a mass movement. So getting into some of our differences, and of course you can rebuff anything I'm about to say. But, you know, one critique that Marxists might have of anarchists is that, you know, this idea that anarchists need to go into already existing social movements and sort of try to agitate within those movements, it's good and admirable. And I think Marxists

do that to some extent as well. But our concern is this concept of tailism or movementism, this idea that, you know, you sometimes might end up tailing social movements and not being able to provide the sort of leadership or coherency that is needed to take the class struggle to the next level. Sometimes this results in sort of over fetishizing spontaneity, like the yellow vest or Occupy Wall Street, for example, where there's this idea that the spontaneous uprising will happen and then anarchists get in there and sort of agitate within that spontaneous uprising and once there's a sort of critical mass, this will spill over into a revolutionary movement or can build revolution. And from the Marxist perspective, at least, what's needed

to take movements beyond the spontaneous level of development, beyond just the occupies and the yellow vests of the world, which are good and not bad, right, but they're sort of limited. They sort of hit a wall and they hit this wall over and over again. And the only thing historically, or one of the main things historically, that's been able to carry that momentum into an actual organized challenge to U.S. capitalism or imperialism or whatever is the party form, right? This idea that the most advanced segments of the working class create a party, you sharpen and train and educate workers coming into the party to be more effective organizers. You can fund working class people to quit their jobs so they can start to become full-time

revolutionary agitators and organizers and sort of create the, what you're concerned about with regards to prefigured politics, create the sort of revolutionary that we want to be and prefigure the sort of world we want to make in the context of party building, of building these organized structures that can actually form working class leadership that can take class struggle to the next level. What are your thoughts on that idea of tailism and spontaneity versus the party? I think it's important to keep in mind that contemporary U.S. anarchism is very different to anarchism globally and is different to anarchism historically. that the kind of focus in a lot of U.S. anarchism in small affinity groups

that will use consensus decision-making and participate in riots and kind of hop from G20 to G20 to smash shop windows. Like that that kind of set of strategies is quite a recent thing. With specific anarchist organizations, they do many of the kinds of things that you're saying, need a party for, and anarchists have been advocating specific anarchist organizations since Bakunin. Specific anarchist organizations are advocated by Bakunin, by Kripokin, by Malatester, so the three of the biggest theorists of anarchism. And the idea is, is that if you have a

mass movement or mass organization, which has an anarchist program, what you'll have is that most of the people in it will join for their own immediate interest, such as getting better wages if it's a union or whatever current issue they're wanting to fight against. But they won't actually be committed anarchists. So you'll have this illusion where you think, look, we've got all these, we've got this huge anarchist organization when actually it's not the case that everyone in it is a committed anarchist. But you need the numbers. You need to get lots of workers involved in order for them to be transformed so we can move towards a revolution. So therefore, you should have the specific anarchist organization which exists parallel to it

in order to spread these anarchist ideas to these people within these mass movements or mass organizations so that they can then join the specific anarchist organization and become committed revolutionaries who exchange ideas of other revolutionaries and try to work out how to more effectively act and develop working class power and spread class consciousness and historically the term party was used in a very broad sense to mean a group of people of a shared set of political ideals. So if you read early anarchist documents, they actually call for what they call an anarchist party and refer to the anarchist party in contrast to the Marxist party or the socialist

party. And then later the term party becomes associated with kind of vanguard parties, with the Leninist and Trotskyist and Maoist parties, and then anarchist. kind of stopped using the term and no longer refer to anarchist parties. There are even some anarchist organizations who refer to themselves as the anarchist vanguard, but again, stopped when it developed connotations that they didn't like. Sure. So sort of extracting outside of our theoretical differences and given the realities that we face in 2019

and our similarities in this idea, like, you know, you are representing a sort of organizational-minded form of anarchism that takes organization very seriously, which I admire and respect deeply. So, like, can we work together? Is there anything here preventing folks like you and I from working together towards a shared goal, given where we currently are in 2019? What are your thoughts on our ability to work together and where those limitations are? Well, I think there are two things. So it's very much a case-by-case thing. So there are some groups that I would absolutely never work with. So there's a group in the UK, for example, that organizes something called the Stalin Society. And as an anarchist, you know, I could never work with the Stalin

society. Like they turn up at demonstrations with like massive banners of Stalin. So I don't think I could work with them. There are some groups who actively try to take over social movements and use them as recruiting tools for the party in a way that I don't like, such as the Socialist Workers Party, the SWP in the UK, who also wouldn't work with because of their rape scandal. But there are other groups or individuals who I'd be totally okay with working with. So I think it's a case-by-case thing. It's not a we can never work together. And second of all, I think there comes a point where we can't work together

because if one of you wants to seize state power or create a worker state and the other one wants to not do that, there is no working together. You have different immediate objectives. And so you can't work together on that. But maybe there are other things you can work together on. So to give an example, in France, after the Russian Revolution, there's a huge amount of arguing between anarchists and Marxists, and they write incredibly nasty things about one another in each other's newspapers. There's actually even a shooting in which anarchists are killed by a few Marxists at a meeting. But despite this, they still would work together on certain other things, like, for example, organizing food for.

or the Russians when the famines were happening, or doing prisoner, helping imprisoned revolutionaries, they would come together and work on those issues. And so I do think it's a kind of case-by-case thing. Certain issues or social movements, absolutely yes, we can help one another. Other things, I think we have to be realistic about our differences and kind of respectfully disagree,

but not in a way where we hate each other and kill each other. I think we should very much try not to repeat the very violent history of the 20th century of anarchists and Marxists killing one another. We don't have to repeat that history. We have to learn its lessons. Yeah, incredibly well said, and I honestly, I agree with every syllable of that. I totally am in line with everything you just said right there, and I could not agree more. So again, thank you so much, Zoe, for coming on, for having this.

discussion. You know, these are sometimes very difficult discussions. We know that probably both of us are going to get some shit from people on social media when we inevitably post this episode. But I really appreciate it. I respect and admire your work. And I hope you keep it up. Before we let you go, what are some recommendations you would offer for those who want to learn more about anarchist theory and history? And where can listeners find you online? So if you want to read primary sources by historic anarchist authors, there are two books I recommend. The first, is The Method of Freedom Anthology by Malatester, who's my, I think he's the best anarchist theorist of all time. And then there's the direct struggle against capital anthology by Kropokin.

Both are published by AK Press and both primarily focused on anarchist views on strategy. So if you want to learn what anarchist think about strategy historically, these two books will give you a really good overview. And they're mostly full of very short articles, which is really nice because when you have 10 minutes to kill, you can read some Malatesta and it's done. It's not like a huge commitment, like reading Capital, for example. In terms of secondary literature, so there's a book by a guy called Tokato called Making Sense of Anachism, which is his overview of Malatester's life and ideas. And he's the editor of the Method of Freedom Anthology and is also currently working on publishing Malatestas complete works in English. And

he's an amazing expert on anarchism and explains a lot of stuff very clearly and there's a lot of interesting things on how Malatester developed his ideas over time in response to lessons from contemporary social movements, failures. So he participated in some insurrections and it didn't work out and then he rethought things and became very interested in the trade union movement. The other book I would recommend, which you can find, it's an expensive academic book, but there is a PDF of it on Libcom for free. And that's anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and post-colonial world, 1870 to 1940, which is an anthology edited by Stephen Hirsch and Lucien van der Waal. There's this weird idea that anarchism is this

kind of European movement when actually it was an international movement. There were anarchists in Egypt, Argentina, Korea, Japan, and so on. It's spread throughout the world. And this book goes through that and it's very interesting. So as for where people can find me, so I'm a YouTuber, I make YouTube videos under the name Anarchopac. You can also find me on Twitter why post kind of random things that are in my head at the time. I'm trying to be less, how to put it,

aggressive on Twitter. Me too. I'm trying to actively be a nicer presence online and less kind of attacking people. Yeah. But yeah. Absolutely. And we'll link to your YouTube and your Twitter page in the show notes of this episode if anybody's interested. So thank you again, Zoe, for coming on. I really appreciate it. Keep up the amazing work and we're here if you need anything at all. Oh, thanks. It was nice to be on. I like talking to you. Let's keep in touch and I'll keep following you and I'll keep shouting you out and thank you again so much. I really appreciate you

coming up. Yep. No problem. It was lovely. Have a good day. That's fine. We're kids building models of a world that we might want to live in. in our stomach since liberation or starvation but have we made it anywhere at all

if the dishes are never done if we can't live without dishwashers how would we live without cops and so you're asking me who does the dishes

after the revolution well I do my own dishes now I'll do my own dishes then you know it's always the one to don't who ask that

fucking question So I don't So I don't So I'm also not an atheist You know the universe is chaos But chaos like favorites And you know lately I've been thinking about How I'm on Jesus

Because Jesus You want the dirty homeless It be sacrificed And he said Try back to find God To anybody who would list turn in water into space bags turning water into space bags

turning water into space backs with robots and anarchists Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. Is there anything there that you want us to... Yeah, you did. You did awesome. And in your, uh, somebody that does hundreds of interviews, your speech mannerisms, there's no filler. There's no ums or Oz. It's very coherent and fluent. And that makes editing a lot easier. So this episode would probably be up a little sooner than the normal. Because that was the rubbish collectors turned up where we were... Oh, yeah. And I was like, oh, and I was like, oh, no, that's so loud. This is really audio quality. No, it's fine.

Yeah, we could barely hear it on this end and we'll patch it up. I could hear it really loud on my end and I was getting so anxious. I was like, no. Why must this happen? I didn't know you turned up at this time. That's hilarious. Yeah, we'll do our best to make sure we take those wrinkles out. But yeah, thank you so much.

This was really good. I'm really excited for this. I look forward to re-listen to it and being horrified at how I actually sound. I always find it weird hearing my voice. I'm like, no. It took me a long time to get over that, and I'm still not fully over it, but yeah, it was great.