Rev Left Radio - In Dialogue with Anarchism: Working Class History

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Jon from Working Class History joins Breht for our first installment of our ongoing sub series “In Dialogue With Anarchism”. Find and Support WCH here: https://workingclasshistory.com Outro Music: Guerra by Bambu Find and Support his music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com ----------- 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 ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. You can support the show financially 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: paypal.me/revleft Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: 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. I'm your hosting comrade Brett O'Shea, and on today's show we have working class history for our part one of In Dialogue with Anarchism. This is going to be an ongoing sub-series where I have Anarchist on to talk about their positions versus our Marxist positions and not debate but have meaningful, constructive dialogue across tendencies. Before we get into this first episode of In Dialogue with Anarchism, I wanted to plug a few shows. One of the things here at Rev Left that we want to do is not only produce our own content for its own sake, but also turn around and give a helping hand to other shows trying to come up. And we really believe in this idea that if we have some level of success, if we have some platform here at Rev Left, the best way to use that is to turn around

and help other voices come up and have their chance to speak to people. So we have a couple of spinoff podcasts and a lot of just affiliated podcasts that just want to be under the broad Rev Left Federation banner. And so we're going to just pitch those to you really quick for those who are interested. And again, the point is with every show to give a different doorway for people to enter leftism, right? We want to find ways to reach the most amount of people. So one of our shows is called Little Red Schoolhouse. The goal of this show is to use education as a doorway into leftism. Both of the host of Little Red Schoolhouse are educators, revolutionaries.

They talk about and focus on the issues of education. So if you're interested in that, check them out. Another affiliated show is The Left Page. These are comrades from Brazil. And what they do is they use fiction. They use literature as a doorway into leftism. And they're also rooted in Brazil, so they have that whole Brazilian spin to their politics with Bolsonaro and all of that.

We encourage people, if you like the literary world, to check that podcast out. And the last affiliated show is Coffee with Comrats. These are two anarchist comrades of ours who talk about current events and do interviews. I'm sure you've heard of them. We've collabed with them in the past, so go check them out. Those are our affiliated shows. Those are shows that are just sort of under the Rev Left banner, but are totally autonomous from our editing process and all of that.

And then we have spin-off shows which are often recorded here in the Rev Left Bunker. They're more local, and we do a lot of the technical work. for them. And among those shows, which you've probably heard of some of them, but we have hammer and camera. We call them the communist Siskel and Ebert. They address film, right? They use film as the doorway into leftist politics and they're great at it. We also have a brand new spinoff show called Marxism and Mosh pits who uses punk music and, you know, music generally, but also other subcultures like skateboarding as pathways into leftism. It hasn't quite release its first episode yet. We do have them edited and ready to go. We will be released

them in early May but for the time being they still have their Patreon up and they have their Twitter up so if you want to start following them you absolutely can and then of course there is black banner magic this is an anarchist podcast focused on the occult so if you're on the weird left you're interested in witchery or magic occultism of any sort or you're an anarchist you know this is the perfect doorway for you they're actually doing a season model so they've taken about two months off uh to take a break and they're starting season two now so those new episode should be coming out very soon. So if you're interested in that, by all means, go and check them out. So those are some of our just affiliated and spin-off shows that we encourage people to go

check out. Again, the whole point of this is to make leftism and Marxism and anarchism and revolutionary politics as accessible from as many different doorways as possible. And before I wrap this up and toss it to our episode with working class history, I want to mention one more organization that we are working with currently, and that is Means TV. Means TV is a worker-owned anti-capitalist streaming platform and what their goal is is to create the sort of media infrastructure that we absolutely need on the left run by us and for us, not only for educational programs like this, but also for artistic endeavors by other leftists. They want to be able eventually to stream like animation or even television series, right? But the point is we want to exist outside of the corporate realm. and we want to exist outside of the capitalistic mode of production insofar as we possibly can

and create content and an entire platform to host that content on that is run by leftists, by workers, for leftists and workers. And so we've talked to them recently and we're working with them on a few different projects, which I'll announce as they come out, but Means TV is definitely something that we believe in and that we want to support and we encourage people to go check that out and toss them a few dollars if you possibly can. Again, you know, these programs and this infrastructure that we're trying to build on the left, it really requires funding. Especially if you believe in the need for a party to advance the class struggle, any sort of high-level leftist organization in this society is going to absolutely need some sort of funding.

And that's not going to come from sponsors and advertisements and it's not going to come from corporate companies. It's only going to come from leftists, right? It's only going to come from all of us chipping in. and Means TV is one of these platforms and one of these programs that I really believe in and I want to see take off. And we're going to do everything we can to help them do that. But we encourage you to do your part as well. So again, all these affiliated and spinoff podcast, as well as Means TV will all be linked in the show notes to this episode. So if anything we said right here is even somewhat interesting to you, you will be able to go into the show notes and find your way to that specific program.

Now, with all of that said, and again, I apologize for the length of that, but it needed to happen. With all of that said, let's move on to the first installment of a new Rev-Lev sub-series in Dialogue with Anarchism, this time with working-class history. all right so today we have john from working class history our comrade from across the pond who we worked on together for the spanish civil war episode he is actually traveling through the united states and stopped in omaha is in the left bunker in real life and we are going to do part one of what i hope to be an ongoing series called in dialogue with anarchism where i propping up the marxist position talk to anarchist and have a nuanced complex and comrade discussion, not a debate, but a discussion about our differences and our similarities,

etc. So how are you doing, John? Good. Thanks for having me. It's cold. Yep. Right now we're buried in like 10 feet of snow, so you get a nice little peek at what the Great Plains are like in the middle of winter. Even though it's March now, this is ridiculous. Yeah, I got got by the kind of Home Alone-style ice trap on the steps outside. It's dangerous. Yeah, I went ass over. Like half of my family and friends have fallen this, this winter. her alone and it's brutal out there. But I'm very happy to meet you, to talk to you, to see you, and put a face to a name. And I, you know, our Spanish Civil War episode was much lauded and liked by people from across the tendency spectrum. And so I thought you'd be a great first

guest to have Vaughn because we have that background. We know we're both coming from a place of good faith. And so this discussion can happen and be a little more meaningful because of that and more comfortable too. So I guess we can even talk a little bit more about like why we're having this conversation. And I guess the first question I can throw your way is, like, how do you think social media distorts these sorts of conversations that we're trying to have today? And why is it important to have these sorts of respectful and meaningful dialogues across different tendencies, you know, in this case, anarchism and Marxism? Yeah, I mean, I think it's an important conversation to have because political labels can be useful, you know,

shorthand for describing a set of positions or whatever, but also they can kind of set people against each other and often attract kind of tribal loyalty to labels and your team or your tribe or whatever kind of at the expense of you know constructive political activity and engagement and I think social media can kind of exacerbate that I mean it's kind of an alienated method of communication so it's very easy to treat people as if they're not people um you know so it's it's easy for someone say someone who like starting to be like oh yeah it's great we'll send you to a will send you to your death in a slave labor camp, ha ha, or, you know, we should have shot more of you

and then it's easy for anarchist to say that communists are the same as fascists and, you know, you should be no platformed in the same sort of way, which, yeah, is it so easy to do online. And but I don't think that means that we should try and create some, you know, think that left unity is the goal because it's not possible and it's not even kind of desirable

because people with different ideas should be to organise and do their own sort of thing. But it's constructive discussion in the workers movement, you know, I think is really important. And, you know, it's great that there are outlets, you know, like Rev Left Radio that kind of have that broad kind of discussion in a friendly and kind of constructive way. Because, I mean, I think a good example of, you know, or a way that, you know, personally I try and sort of think about stuff is, you know, as if you're at a meeting, like a union meeting at your own work or a meeting with your own. work colleagues, you've all got a real variety of different political perspectives, but you know, you know that you're in the same boat, you know, you've got the same employer, you're in the same situation, and you've got the same kind of economic interest. And so you find a way to be polite

and work together where you can to forge your common collective interest rather than kind of sniping about, you know, things that happened 100 years ago or, you know, or whatever, or like snarky memes and, you know, stuff like that. So I kind of think what would be good is if we can try and communicate with each other as if we're at like a union meeting together or workers meeting at our work. You know, we think we think of each other as fellow workers in the same boat rather than as political rivals and try and communicate like that. And like, don't get me wrong.

I've been, especially in the past, you know, I think basically like, let's not be dicks. Yeah, exactly. Let's try not to be dicks. And I know I've been kind of guilty of that in the past, especially like being an angry young man or whatever and I think it's worth acknowledging it's kind of mostly a young male problem sure absolutely um you know because we you know we are kind of digs yeah aggressive a lot of egoic yeah a lot of the time and so yeah you know but I think it's good if we can try and like move past that and and see each other as fellow workers you know I couldn't agree more and you know to just to add to

that anarchism and Marxism they have a shared history they've had points where they diverged violently in some instances in parts where they come together, you know, parts where they've joined forces to fight fascist and capitalist, you know, Marxist and anarchists in the same union in some instances. So there is this long history, and anarchism and Marxism have always been in almost dialectical dialogue whether they like it or not. They're always, you know, referencing one another or seeing, you know, how that happens. I mean, Marx and Engels, really good first analysis came out of the Paris Commune, which in some ways can be described as like an anarchist uprising in some sense. It's certainly a proletarian uprising. And, you know, we have that shared proletarian

history in that past. And our episode on the Spanish Civil War, I spoke to the complexities there because there were Marxist and anarchists fighting alongside each other, and there were Marxist and anarchists who were at each other's throats. And then, unfortunately, that still goes on today, but you're right, social media really brings down the level of that discourse. And as I was telling you before we started recording, especially when I think of newer, younger people coming in through social media and trying to get into these left spheres, you know, if the first thing they see is, you know, this really intense sectarian infighting. It could be a turnoff to them. It could be a confusion to them. And other times, they might not feel comfortable asking real

questions that are on their mind about these differences because they feel like they're going to be dragged or attacked or dogpiled. And so hopefully we can, we can offer something here in this discussion and in this series going forward that can, you know, transcend that shallow discourse and get to more, you know, deeper and meaningful connections. And, you know, you and I are sitting in the same room we're friends there's no threat of sectarian violence exploding i mean so it's kind of sometimes it gets so silly where you know an anarchist would be like oh you're just going to kill us the first chance you get or you know marxist being like oh you're all actually liberals just pretending to be whatever you know it gets it gets very old and even i think um last thing i'll say on this

question um just my invite just just me posting that we're going to have this discussion did bring out some some you know sectarian anger directed towards me um and i'll have some you know anarchists sometimes that will reach out to people that are coming on as a guest that are on the libertarian socialist or anarchist side to things and try to convince them not to because, you know, I'm a red tanky fascist or whatever the fuck. And that sort of stuff is really

harmful and really silly and it doesn't need to happen. So I hope that this can be a start of a more meaningful discussion. Yeah, yeah, but you know fingers crossed. And I think, you know, that's a good point as well. It does ultimately this kind of behavior, it harms all of this. Because, you know, most people

who aren't like careerist politicos who just love abusing people on Twitter more than anything else. You know, most people have enough shit to deal with in their everyday life without having more sort of toxicity. It does make all of us look bad. It's not like, you know, it's, you post that sort of snarky meme and you get some likes from other kind of converts, but to the outside, we just look like, you know, weirdos and assholes.

Yeah, like squabbling with each other about, I don't know, some obscure Dungeons and Dragons type thing, like your elf lord is better than theirs or something, I don't know. From the outside, it does look like that, but zooming out and looking at the broader context, the world is burning, fascism is on the rise, neoliberal capitalism is militarizing, and so we have so many common enemies

that I don't think we have the luxury right now to be at each other's throats, especially over things like you said happened a century ago. We're living at the crossroads, of our species and this century is going to really dictate the path of our species I think going forward depending on how we handle these challenges and so yeah I mean if it comes to fascist and capitalists and imperialists you know you and I are 95% in agreement on and pretty much everything there's no reason we can't work together against their common enemies and in fact I think we

have to but moving on so I think the good way to start this conversation is as a show of good faith. Let's each say something that we admire or respect in the other's political tradition, specifically regarding movements or figures or achievements. So if you wanted to start saying something nice about Marxism, I'd love to hear it. Well, you know, the flags, they're good. But no, I mean, I think like the basis of it, really, you know, Marx's understanding and critique of capitalism, you know, I think has been unsurpassed to this day. And that, I think, is the bedrock for having a proper understanding of the capitalist system. And it's only by having that understanding that you can then kind of think about how to get rid of it.

That is a kind of problem in anarchism that, you know, some people don't have that kind of basic understanding. And then propose ways of combat in capitalism, which actually don't, you know, like starting co-ops or, you know, or things like that in a capitalist economy, not having that kind of basic understanding. and you know from something like capital a lot of people kind of misunderstand capital and think it doesn't really you know it doesn't explain exactly how capitalism works but it's like that's kind of not the point you know it explains how if capitalism worked exactly the way its proponents said it did it's still fundamentally based on the exploitation of our wage labor you know of the working class and of our life's activity and yeah in return when it comes to anarchism, I've always had like a deep love for, you know, things like, you know, the Catalonian

anarchists and the No Pissar and Banner they put over their city and workers self-organized and self-managed and fought off fascist and really heroic. And, of course, there are many leftists of all stripes, but the Catalonian anarchists in particular, there's so much to be admired and respected and loved in that movement itself and the tradition that it spawns. And, you know, I also, like coming to contemporary anarchism, I really, appreciate the militancy that anarchists often bring

to their fight with capitalism inside the belly of the beast. Sometimes I feel like some Marxists can be so programmatic that they lose that militant edge and they want to say that it's not the time or let's not do that right now. But in a lot of ways, militancy

against our enemies is an important thing and insofar as Black Block and anti-fascist action have this large anarchist current in it, which certainly does. Obviously they're Marxists as well, but that militancy that springs out of anarchist movements is beautiful. And at the end of the day, I don't think anarchist and Marxist have a disagreement about the ideal situation for workers, which is worker self-management, which is the abolition and the withering way of the state. We have differences about how we get there. We're going to talk about

the state in a little bit. But I think there's much to admire and love and respect in the anarchist tradition. And, you know, as a Marxist, I view proletarian history as completely fully in every way, including both Marxist and anarchist movements. We can learn from both. Both have succeeded in interesting ways and both have failed in interesting ways. And I think it's actually very Marxist to not exclude that anarchist history

and actually to take it in, to love it, to study it, and to learn from it. Because, you know, you're cutting off a big part of proletarian history if you just want to study just Marxist movements. Yeah, I agree. In terms of the militancy bit, I guess for the benefit of people who can't see us,

I am wearing a ski mask now. and I've got like five petrol bombs. It's true. Just in case. And I'm wearing a Ushanka Soviet-style coat on. All right. So we all know that inside both the anarchist and the Marxist tradition,

there are plenty of differences in sub-tendencies. So maybe we can start by talking about or identifying which specific tendency we adhere to and how or where the other sub-tendencies of Marxism and anarchism actually meet up in agreement. You might have touched on that a little bit with capital as a basis there. But if you want to talk about, you know, tendencies and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, personally, I would normally describe myself as an anarchist communist. I would just say, in terms of working class history, that's just my personal position. Working class history is a broader, you know, is a much kind of broader project. But, yeah,

I think overall, this is, you know, this is, this is an important general kind of question because I think there's, there's actually, there's more ideological divergence within Marxism and within anarchism than there is necessarily between different currencies, between the two different ones, if you see what I mean. So, like, you know, within, you know, what's called Marxism, so you've got some people that think you create socialism by voting for social Democrats. And you've got others, you know, who kind of support like the physical elimination of the ruling class, you know, within, you know, quite broad.

And within anarchism, you know, you've got some people that want to abolish language and want to abolish technology or civilization or, you know, whatever. and just you know what to burn stuff um so you know they're they're both really kind of broad and so you know individual currents within there are actually quite close to say within marxism things like council communism and ultra left communism and you know the situationists and things like that are actually very close to things like anarchist communism and anarchist syndicalism which is platformism yeah exactly and anarchist syndicalism being a kind of anarchist trade unionism and platform being anarchist communists who agree with this document called the platform which is a way of essentially a way of

organizing with a kind of tightly knit political group you know they're pretty close so yeah i kind of think that rather than use labels and identify with with these kind of labels what's kind of sounds more helpful to do especially if talking about history and things like that is look look at kind of everything that's happened in the workers movement and then think like you know pick and choose what's been helpful and what's been not you know what's what's helped us and what hasn't and you know and and there's good bits and there's things that have helped from all kinds of tendencies and none um and there's been negative things in all of them too yeah definitely and you know as for me obviously i mean i'm marxist i'm somewhere between mel and mllm i'm probably

like um probably like the black panthers would be described as m l slash mausay dung thought um i'm kind of in that realm um you know i think i have i have disagreements with both sides like formally but of course you know disagreements happen within tendencies but i think you're 100% correct in and sort of pointing out how inside these tendencies you can go like as you say from anarcho primitivism which is very far away from Marxism to anarcho communism or platformism which is very very close and in fact share birth together like we were kind of birthed together in that sense you know the debates between marks and Bakunin really set out these debates that we're continuing to have to this day and all the different flourishes and branches off of of those things um you know and

inside Marxism, you do have, you know, you have Marxist Leninist and Marxist-Maoists, sometimes going at each other's throats. And sometimes I think it's the tyranny of small differences. It's like, you know, you agree on 98% of things, but that those 2% of differences is what you focus on. And in some sense, I feel like that's true for principled Marxist and principled anarchists is that we share so much, but we focus on what we don't share, and sometimes focusing on that can lead to just absolutely hating each other. And I can't speak for all Marxists and you can't speak for all anarchists, but we're going to do our best to try to talk as much as we can from our positions. And I think the fact that, you know, I'm in the Leninist

area and you're in the anarcho-communist area, we do have a shared base that we can operate on and talk about from there, you know, jump off from there. Yeah. And in terms of the, you know, where we kind of disagree, yeah, I think that that is very true that, you know, you do hate what is kind of most close. But I think at the same time, yeah, you do need to have principles and there are some things which, you know, I know sometimes people say, oh, it's a shame that the left is so kind of divided when the right is not. But also at the same time, if we have values, then at the same time, it does mean that we can't work in some practical sense with some people. And for example, people who are racist or people who are sexist or, you know, permit sexual assault in their

organizations. Or especially in the UK, you know, on the left, transphobia is a massive issue, you know, even in the big swathes of it are, and this is something that's only become apparent quite recently. When you do disagree, you may disagree on just kind of small things, but sometimes if it's fundamental things, you know, if it's, you know, if it's sort of fundamental, you know, bigotry or support of discrimination or sexual violence or whatever against the part of the working class, then that is kind of a deal breaker type issue, which, you know, you can't ignore. But yeah, on the other stuff. Room to work together.

Exactly, yeah. You said earlier about left unity, and I think a lot of people might, you know, intuitively understand why left unity is something that people just generally don't think is real or comprehensible, really? You want to talk about a little bit more about that? Like, why is left unity as such not something that you find productive or otherwise useful to think in those terms? I guess because it's such a broad church that in terms of having one organization or that everyone was part of, the ideological divergence would be so broad that I think it would be too difficult practically

to work together on something. You know, if you have some people that, you know, even just for things like some people would want to support voting for Bernie Sanders and some people think you need to, you know, start preparing for revolution or whatever, you know. I mean, those are kind of like silly kind of, you know. But I think the left generally is too

but separate from trying to create a kind of false unity, you can still create unity in action, you know, so things like when there's active campaigns around particular things, in terms of your, you know, if you work for a big employer or there's a campaign at your work or whatever, you can work together with, you know, anyone on that sort of thing, or you're involved in a strike, or if there's a social movement like against a war or whatever, you can certainly work out a framework where you can collaborate productively with people you have other disagreements with. But I think you can collaborate on those kind of individual things or with anti-fascism. Those things you can have a framework so you can collaborate. But I think, yeah, you can't create

a unity that then would stop people from working on things that they disagree on. Yeah. And when you try to do this big tense stuff, it devolves into liberalism almost always because that's the dominant current and paradigm in our minds. And so when you try to do two big of a tent, it just always goes in that direction. I do agree with you 100% about all of that. And I think we're actually more effective when we're not trying to slam us all together into a big group, but when anarchists are out there doing their thing and Marxists are out doing their thing, and hell, even democratic socialists out there doing their thing. And yeah, we come around on these certain issues and help each other out and have each other's backs. But then we don't,

we have that autonomy. That autonomy is never compromised. And the ideological values and principles that we hold are never compromised and need not be. So, yeah, I completely agree with that. And this is the whole world the whole word left is like as you were kind of alluding to is just very vague and unhelpful and you know people can claim to be leftist who we would say are absolutely not like a Pelosi or like some liberal democrat thinks they're left and they're just not and so you can never even have a coherent political movement based around such an incoherent uh concept like the left yeah and and also some sort of anarchists and even some you know uh well and and some anarchists also wouldn't consider themselves part of

of the left as such because I guess the terms left and right were about government. Yeah, that's true. You know, about the left and right wing of a government, you know, of sort of parliament. And some anarchists kind of see themselves as outside of that. I mean, I kind of think it's a bit semantic, especially if you're aware of like the political compass, you know, with an authoritarian, libertarian, then left right thing. And then, you know, socialist anarchism is obviously towards the left side of that. So it's a bit sort of semantic, but just, you know.

Exactly. And I think the one, the one tendency of. of anarchism that really gets into that would be post-left anarchism. And, you know, you have egoism and anarcho-primidivism and insurrectionary nihilism as sub-tenancies of that sub-tenancy. But yeah, I think post-leftists especially would say that I'm not a part of the left at all. I'm off that chart or whatever. What are your thoughts as an anarcho-communist? Do you have any thoughts on post-leftism broadly? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. I mean, in terms of a broad sense, not really, because it's not something I've really spent much

time kind of looking into. I used to be more into the minutiae of differences kind of within the left and stuff, but I've kind of moved away from that in more recently. So I'm not so o'fay with all the things. I mean, although one thing on things like punitiveist anarchism, one thing I do think is kind of interesting and anti-civilisation anarchism, that sort of thing, is that that's all become, that was all pretty prominent in the early 2000s, but since the advent of the economic crisis, that very much seems to have died away and kind of gone away. And I think almost it was a kind of, you know, reaction to not a lot of sort of happening. And the working class not being such a visible political force. Definitely. I think that was a bit of reaction

to that. And yeah, it does seem to have largely evaporated. Yeah, it's interesting. Economics gets brought back in whether we like it or not. And, you know, I think people then start turning towards things like anarcho-communism or Marxism to make sense of the economic realities in ways that I think anarcho-primidivism doesn't really address fully. But again, anarcho-primidivism has interesting things to say about symbolic logic, about language, about, you know, certain detrimental things that were birthed in the agricultural revolution or whatever. You don't have to be a full-on anarcho-primidivist to at least engage with that and say, interesting food for thought, for sure.

Yeah, although I do think it's a bit of a stretch to say that before language, you know, childbirth was, you know, really pleasurable experience and not painful. And it's only like after we got language and stuff that that became painful it gets that that that you know i haven't obviously had a had a kid myself but i doubt it yeah exactly all right moving on so we'll talk about the state and organizing tactics next but before we do how about i offer a critique of some strains of anarchism and you can respond to it and tell me what you think and then you can throw a critique back in my my direction all right so one problem that i i have with some anarchists is that there is a tendency, I feel, on the anarchist side of things, to ignore Marxist proletarian history,

either just straight up just not mentioning it and only mentioning like Rojava and Chiapas and Catalonian anarchists and the commune as the only proletarian history worth looking at and learning lessons from. And sometimes I also feel like those mass movements are reduced to the leaders who are leading them. So, you know, it wasn't tens of millions of Chinese people who were genuinely trying to rebuild their society, but it was mass. dictatorship. It wasn't, you know, millions of Soviet Russians doing their best to overthrow their backwards Tsarist bullshit government. It was Lenin, the dictator, and then Stalin, the mass murderer. And so, you know, by doing that, I think sometimes anarchists strip away the fact that

even the most quote unquote authoritarian Marxist movements are still utterly undergirded by mass movements from the bottom up and literally couldn't exist without it. And so, you know, when I read some anarchist propaganda or some anarchist stuff that otherwise I think is good and interesting, I feel like that is often left out. And there's a side piece of that where anarchists like to bring up the Black Panther Party, but they don't like to bring up that they were Marxist Leninist or they'll overemphasize the fact that some have since become anarchist and therefore Marxism and Leninism is bad, but BPP can still be claimed as, you know, something that the anarchist can get behind, et cetera. So those are broad concerns that I have and how would you reply

to some of those critiques? I think there is some truth to that in the way that history is talked about. I mean, on the flip side, I think you could say that the equivalent is true from a Marxist perspective where a lot will say be written about the Russian Revolution and not so much about Spain. But I don't necessarily think that's much of a problem because, you know, that's, if that's a perspective you've come from, that's kind of what you do most of you're reading around. sure, you know, and that's what you'd mostly be aware of. It's a big part of it.

You hear about these struggles or things which are in line with your political philosophy and then so you study them and then when you write, you kind of talk about them. So, yeah, I think that is true. And what you say about there's other movements, you know, in China and Russia and all those things. Yeah, it's true they are, especially, you know, the Russian Revolution, perhaps the most momentous event in world history. Definitely. You know, and yeah, it was a huge working class and peasant, radical.

movement which is worthy of studying and I think it is worth you know in all these things you know there's a huge proletarian element from an anchor's perspective I think you'd also see that there's there's bureaucratic or state capitalist elements at the same time kind of coexisting but yeah I think it is important to look at movements like that and you can draw lessons for you know from those different kind of currents in in terms of the panthers you know that is kind of accurate as well I know in terms of WCH we post up we do post stuff about a variety of you know traditions you know, including stuff by the Black Power Movement and the Panthers and that sort of thing. Yeah, you actually don't do that very often.

Right. Well, I mean, I'm thinking, you know, I think we don't really use the term kind of Marxist as Leninist, that kind of thing. But because we kind of see it as jargon. Sure, sure. Which wouldn't mean much to most people. So, but when we talk about things like, you know, the CNT in Spain, like Anacus Union, we often won't say it's anarchist either. You know, we just try and use non-jogany words. Accessible language for regular working folks.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, so, so, but, you know, so, so I'm just, so I'm not trying to say that, you know, I or we are perhaps guilty of that as well, but, you know, for, for maybe different reasons. But you had a critique of, of Marxism, maybe you want to, you want to throw my way. Yeah, which, just because we're sort of, you know, talking about, and again, this isn't, this isn't something which is shared by all Marxists, kind of by any means. And it's probably less of a, you know, less of the sort of case now. But I think that at least, you know, in terms of some strains of sort of orthodox Marxism, there's a kind of, I think like you said earlier, a programmatic approach and that can kind of see things like capitalism initially being created as a, you know, a positive step because then it set the groundwork for a future communism and which in itself is problematic, especially for, you know, pre-capitalist societies and indigenous societies and things like that, you know, you know, often. often which actually had superior kind of ways of living to the way we're doing it doesn't it doesn't

fit into you know it doesn't fit into you know creating an industrial working class and then you can then create communism in the future but there's a lot of stuff that we can learn from precapital societies hunter gallery societies and you know indigenous people in different parts of the world and how they how they organize things which is you know far better than the way we do now sustainable and communal exactly you know stateless and you know say it in a lot of hunter-gatherer societies, there wasn't a concept of work, you know, work and play were kind of the same, it was more of a spectrum of a thing like work was playful, and a thing that sometimes in Marxism there's a kind of a glorification of work and the working

class, which aren't kind of good in themselves, you know, because I think we're working class because we have to be, we have to work for a wage, but ultimately we want to get rid of that situation, we kind of want to abolish the working class, and I think we should abolish work as well, you know so work isn't a separate sphere of life that we see as being separate from anything else which you know might sound a bit kind of utopian or or abstract or something so trying to make it concrete those are things that people do for work people also do for fun you know so like look after children or do painting or make music or write things or build things yeah build things yeah look after people all these things or you know plant plant food and grow food and you know or

all this kind of stuff people do for work, but people also do, you know, for fun and for pleasure. And I think ultimately, yeah, you know, we can learn from things from like hunter-gatherer societies and stuff where what is productive activity isn't a separate thing from the fun bits of life. And that's something that it would be good for us to try and create. And, you know, I'm totally sympathetic with that critique there is absolutely a mechanistic or deterministic or you can even call it like economist strain in Marxism. That can be very stagist, and it sees, as you say, it would see capitalism as more or less a wholly progressive force that, you know, overthrew feudal relations and therefore is actually progress in its own right. And I agree with your critique of it. Interesting enough, Sylvia Federici in her Calabana and the Witch goes through this history of the transformation into capitalism and actually disagrees with Marx that capitalism was progressive. She calls capitalism and the birth of it actually a counter-revolution against some of the,

the populist and communal movement, egalitarian movements that wanted to, you know, prevent the commons from being enclosed and, you know, wanted to prevent, you know, that transition happening. Capitalism was, in some sense, a reaction to that. And so I think that the orthodox Marxist determinism that looks at capitalism as a wholly progressive step is an error. And people will call Sylvia Federici a Marxist, right? She is a Marxist feminist, but Caliban and the Witch is taking Marxism to task from within the tradition and taking Marx to task for that. And so I think you're right in saying that we're getting better at that. But when I go back and I study like Soviet era Marxist or before that, it can be completely mechanistic and very much almost like, hey, history is going to kind of unfold in its own right. And contingent argument to that is class reductionism, where you do see a little segment, and I think it's an increasingly smaller and isolated segment of the Marxist left, but that have these chauvinist positions that say, hey, we don't give a fuck about your.

your id-pull. You know, this is class struggle, you know, blah, blah, blah. I think the best currents of Marxism have been, you know, Marxist women of color. You know, even in the BPP, there's this contradiction between patriarchy and machismo and men dominating the situation and women in that organization feeling isolated or alienated or having to fight back against their own comrades to try to get, you know, to an equal place with them.

And so that has happened. But I think in the same way that, you know, anarchism has really been updated by the struggles for the LGBTQ community and, you know, women's struggles in some sense it's always been there and same for marxism there's always been anarchist feminist and marxist feminist we're getting better at it that is a critique and it needs to be stomped out and anywhere it still exists on the marxist left i encourage other marxist to put an end to it and think way more complexly about the history of you know the evolution of capitalism and i think starting with so if you're a marxist and interested in this argument i mean read caliban and the witch

and you'll see a really interesting critique of exactly what you're bringing up which i think is 100% on point. Yeah, I mean, mentioning the BPP, yeah, is, is that's a thing that's often kind of, you know, ignored in histories of it is that at points in its history, it was a majority women organization. The class reductionism is not something which is exclusive to Marxism. You know, it's the same problem in anarchism, you know, where people say, oh, you know, all this other stuff is identity politics. And what I always do, you know, in times of trying to challenge that is first get them to say what is identity politics and get them to define it. And as yet, I have not seen anyone who starts going in slacking the off actually give it a

definition that they can then defend. Because if they define, you know, you can slack off identity politics if you don't say what it is. But if you get them to then define what it is, they always avoid doing it. I think basically because they realize when they do, they say it means the concerns and struggles of people of color and women and LGBTQ people. and that sort of thing. And obviously they don't want to be seen to be saying that. So, you know, that's always a fun sort of thing.

But yeah, that is a problem amongst anarchists, you know, as much. And on WCH, we kind of see it sometimes post things about the women's suffrage movement. And then people say, why is this working class history? Why is this working class history? You know, most of the suffragettes and supported World War I. And it's like, well, you know, the trade union struggle, well, is when we post stuff about trade union struggles around that time, or the union supported World War I. you know but they don't say because the union supported world war one you know that means it's not

working class history exactly you know and and those kind of those kind of attacks where people say and yeah in a way that's kind of why we chose the name working cast history which sounds kind of class reductionist but we really want to make the point that it's not yeah you know we you know it might have been better to go but we wouldn't we thought about going more popular and calling it like people's history you know but we wanted to really make the point that you know the working class is diverse, you know, the majority of the world's working class is not white, you know, people of color and women, you know, all sides of the spectrum. And I think you do, you do that wonderful with working class history.

I think you do a really effective job at that. And as for the id poll argument, I'll just say, like my quick idea of what identity politics is, is that identity politics actually exist on the political spectrum. What is white supremacy and fascism in the U.S., if not white identity politics? you know what in liberalism it's devoid it's stripped of class struggle so then you just have identities being used as bludgeon's to overpower other identities and you get this idea of like the oppression olympics and stuff there's no way to unite people across identities and liberalism it just becomes a game of who's more oppressed because of my identity and i think on the left what we're doing the best of us are doing and i hope we're all doing this and i think we are is that we're saying you know actually class struggle and solidarity are made much stronger and much more informed and much more effective if we understand, study, respect, and learn from the different oppressions faced by people of different identities and absolutely completely embrace and internalize that to our movements. But the class struggle is the element that gives us the ability to make

solidarity across identities. It can bring a woman in the Philippines on the same level as a working class person from the UK as the same level as, you know, whatever, worker in, you know, any other place in the world. And that's the thing that can bring us all together. But we don't need to eliminate or ignore the fact that people have these identities. We bring it in and we talk about it. We learn from it. And in fact, we have to do it because, you know, socialism without that understanding can just be chauvinistic. It's just deterministic. It's reductionist in the worst way. And it excludes, as you say, the vast majority of the working class. It's fascists who like to appeal to this idea that, you know, the working class is white and male. And, you know, that's what we need to

organized around our whiteness and our mailness, that's fascism. So fuck that. I don't want to see that on the left at all. And so I think both traditions have a little problem with that, and I think both traditions are being updated with the times, hopefully. Yeah, and I think at the same time that some people are criticizing identity politics, some of the more prominent critics of it are actually themselves espousing their own type of, especially working, what you might call it working class kind of identity politics in itself that because I think if you want to talk about identity politics as a thing which which can be problematic you know it's if you think that getting representatives of particular groups into positions of power or influence in capitalist

society is a way of improving things for people from that group and and you know which is worthy of that idea is worthy of critique because I don't necessarily you know raise the levels of kind of anyone else. But some of the people who criticize identity politics of people of color or women, at the same time, what they counterpost to that is that working class people should elect social democrat politicians, you know, you should elect Bernie to represent the interests of people with working class identity in capitalist society. And, but that is identity politics, you know, and it's, it's, but, you know, the working class is a bit different because we're not an, you know, Like representation, I think we can talk more about representation in a bit,

but representation in capitalist society isn't necessarily an improvement, you know. How would have electing Hillary Clinton to president affected, you know, women around the world? I mean, bombs would have still been dropping on them and their families, so it's not. Intersectional bombs. Yeah, of course, you know, that's woke capitalism. All right, but yeah, so let's move on to the next question. And I think a big, and we have a few more questions, I think two more.

So I think a big difference between anarchism and Marxism that's particularly relevant to our current conditions is organizing strategies and how those strategies reveal those underlying differences in principles and theory. So what are your thoughts on the differences between the two tendencies when it comes to organizing? Yeah, so I think in practical terms today, this is the kind of main, it's the main difference between the two tendencies. Although, again, there's probably more similarity between, say, left communists on a Marxist side and anarchist communists, then there would between. say certain things within Marxism, say between left communists and Leninists, but this actually segues quite well, because I think an important distinction is about representation. So there are a lot of organisations which purport to represent the interests of the working class in capitalist society. So primarily things like trade unions or labour unions and political parties, so various

Labour parties, socialist parties, or whatever. And so most kind of Marxist left, groups have strategies that involve at least part of the strategy is getting positions of power and influence within some of these organisations, you know, within unions or in local or branch leaderships or national positions and getting bits of power within the capitalist state where possible, you know, either in local elections, national elections or even within broader political parties, you know, where a group enters a bigger political formation and tries to get influence within kind of different bits. And this part of, I mean, obviously there's stuff that goes alongside that grassroots organising and things. And on that, you know, we'd kind of

agree because, but the elements of trying to get positions of power and influence within these representative organisations of working class would be ones that anarchists disagree with. So, and again, elements of Marxists would think the same thing. Definitely. So, but, you know, I guess anarchist, the anarchist view is that the interest of working class can't really be represented within the official structures of capitalist society because these structures have been set up specifically to maintain capitalist rule and to integrate working class resistance into capitalist system.

So, you know, with trade unions or labour unions, for example, often you kind of you get a dispute and then union leadership makes a deal with the boss behind the backs of the workers and then um where they agree to less less than what workers were demanding and then um you know that's the story is all the time you know people always know that that sort of happens and then often the narrative of kind of left groups is that there's been a set out and that the leadership of the union is a problem is yellow or reformist and so what is needed is that those leaders need to be replaced by radical

or revolutionary leadership or people in their kind of group but you know in my view kind of history shows that doesn't really kind of make a difference like I don't know in I don't know how many strikes I've kind of studied hundreds maybe

maybe thousands you know and been part of kind of a couple but it's kind of almost depressing seeing the same kind of of things happen like again again again and that does kind of happen regardless of the political makeup of the leadership of those unions. So I think the problem is not that union leaders are bad people. It's that the whole kind of institutional and legal framework that unions exist in,

which unions were permitted to exist in by the capitalist state hobbles us and our ability to fight. So unions in a capitalist society are kind of inherently tied to the interest of the employer under capitalism. So, you know, say General Motors has to be profitable to pay its workers salaries. And so that kind of ties the union at General Motors to the interest of general motives, to the interest the employers. And on it, even on like a bigger kind of national level, capitalist nation states need to be financially viable. They need to attract foreign investment. They need to get loans from international financial markets. So they have to like balance their books. And so, you know, union leaders, whether they're left or right, whether they go

or bad, they have to deal with this kind of material reality. So, you know, as an example of that, in the late 70s in the UK, the Labour Party, the government, the Labour government and the Trades Union Congress, which is like AFLCIO, it's the umbrella of all the unions. They agreed to a pay cap, you know, so that no workers should get over a certain, I think, 5% pay increase to control inflation and keep UK PLC functioning, you know, effectively so that UK workers could keep their jobs, you know, or so they could create jobs and not lose jobs and that sort of thing. So the union leaders in their situation,

They don't see what they're doing as selling out. They see like what they're doing as, you know, keeping the union alive, you know, keep providing jobs for their members and that sort of thing. And on a kind of micro level, you know, I've sort of seen this in my own, you know, at my own job in my union branch where, say, the leadership of the local branch are mostly kind of leninist types of various stripes. And, you know, they do a lot of great work, you know, organizing on a, on a rank and file level, you know, great people, great militants and that.

sort of thing. You know, a totally dedicated, not, you know, reformists or set out at all. But we see on a micro level these same things happen that happen in bigger disputes. So, for example, like the local leadership of my branch, when the National Union, a few years ago we had like we had a national pay dispute and the union balloted members for strike action. And we got like a 55% vote in favour of strike action on like a 25% turnout. So not a great vote on a low turnout, but this was kind of denounced by the left under the, you know, the leadership of my branch has a sellout and they weren't respecting the one of the members, blah, blah, blah, but, you know, when we've had local disputes around things in our own workplace where we have a high density than the National Union, you know, we had something where we had a strike ballot with 80% in favour on a 40% turnout, which again, it's not for us, that's pretty good, you know, so it was a lot better, but, you know, but at the same time they decided they didn't want to take any action because they thought we'd lose

and they thought if we fight and we lose the union's screwed basically and you know so they made the same decision as the but do you see what I mean so you know the other people at the leadership of the National Union you know from their perspective they thought the same thing especially nationally the vote wasn't that good

they thought if you try and call a strike and it's not very well respected then you lose your bargaining power. So it's, you know, it's a tricky sort of thing. So I think, you know, ultimately the issue about leadership, trying to get leadership or influence in these organisations, is a flawed kind of strategy. And, you know, so instead of that sort of thing, I mean, we should just be organising directly as working class,

you know, amongst ourselves to support our own interests. So, yeah, we try to organise independently, even across union lines where we can with non-union members and ultimately we build ways that we can communicate together so that ultimately we could get to the point where we can decide to take action ourselves you know even if say union leadership or workers leadership agree something we don't want we're then organized enough to continue action ourselves like say teachers it in west virginia recently you know again you know that the same old sort of cycle repeated but there the workers were well organized enough themselves

through the methods they'd kind of come up with that they could organize stuff themselves and so I guess for you know for and obviously that is something that you know Marxists and stuff do as well sure but normally there's that two-pronged approach

but I think you know we think that one prong is wrong essentially so we should just do the grassroots kind of approach and two questions one is there a different between the U.S. and the U.K. with regards to the makeup of unions, because here we're just very liberal. Our radical history has been, well, I'll let you answer this one first. Our

radical history has been sort of demolish in a way that in Europe it hasn't, and there's still these leftover things. So here in the U.S., there's no real mainstream union that is headed by a Marxist or an anarchist organization whatsoever. And I guess the second part of that question would be, is that critique of Marxism applicable even outside of the union structure to just this idea of a hierarchical structure so in like a Marxist party you'd still have a representative of the working class

you know the vanguard party or whatever you could take that wherever you want yeah so in terms of the bit about yeah I think this is the other crucial bit it's not just unions it's also about the state but I think because we're going to talk about the state in a bit

it's best to push that into that question definitely and in terms of the UK yet since the kind of 1980s after the defeat of a nation-wide minor strike in 1984-5 you know workers have very much been on the back foot there are a few unions which are kind of nominally socialist and there are some unions which are led by people who you know are socialists like the fire brigades union and so the fire brigades union the rail and maritime The Rail Maritime and Transport Workers Union, RMT, the Civil Servants Union, PCS, and the Teachers Union, which has just changed its name to N.E.U. National Education Union. So there are some national unions which are led by socialists. That's not to say that the membership is majority socialist or whatever. It's more that, you know, often even, you know, in the US,

which is deeply anti-communist. Often, you know, especially in the 60s, a lot of people would elect socialists or communist to positions within the unions because they knew they were good fighters. They'd fight for their interests. And it's kind of the same in the UK, although more than anything else in the UK's,

most positions in unions are unfilled. And it's socialists who kind of want to stand for them. I see, I'm more likely to get elected because you're volunteering. Yeah, yeah. So my whole response to the, organizing strategy is very interesting totally you know accept all of that i think a big difference does lie and we'll get to the state in a bit but the idea of a revolutionary party so kind of zooming

more broadly at the differences between the two you know defending a leninist perspective on revolution is that an organized party structure a revolutionary party that level of organization and funding and coordination and communication allows and actually has allowed in history for more effective long-term resistance to capitalism and building up movements, whereas sometimes on the anarchist side of things, I think it's pretty universal on the anarchist side that you reject this idea of a vanguard party, you reject the idea of building a revolutionary communist party as the vehicle towards revolution. And, you know, when it comes to particular organizing in the here and now, I've been in both organizations dominated by anarchist and dominated by Marxist and with a mix of

them and they're all egalitarian, they're all horizontally organized, but of course we're talking about little localized community organizations, not big movements. But I still believe that, you know, from my perspective, Leninism and the idea of the Vanguard Party or the party structure as a whole has proven to be more effective than a partyless, you know, horizontalist anarchist model. I mean, we see it in national liberation struggles be effective. We see it in in the Soviet Union and in Cuba and in China and to a lesser extent because it's still capitalist Venezuela but there's a workers party and that organization

has been able to make a lot of gain for Venezuelan people and so I still think that history is borne out that the Leninist party is the most effective way to organize and confront organized capital and sometimes I think by anarchists rejecting that I don't know what formation you do some anarchists depend on spontaneous insurrection the platformists are a little bit more organized

conscious, but I guess just what are your thoughts on that Leninist argument? Yeah, well, you know, I and most anarchists believe in organization and organization on a political level. I guess within kind of class struggle anarchism, there's two sort of broad trends. There's anarchist syndicalists or anarchist communists, and normally anarchist the organizational tool they choose is unions, you know, so work as unions, but with a political perspective. That's not my perspective, so I'm probably not best to speak about that. But from a, you know, an anarchist communist perspective, yes, you know, we believe in the idea of political organization. But I think, you know, quite a lot of us are I think they're in a similar boat

to a lot of Marx as well. We may believe in a theoretical organization, although there is not one which currently exists. You may be where we are that we actually feel that we can be part of. or, you know, it's a, you know, the idea of a theoretical party rather than an actual party. And so, yeah, you know, I think having an organisation with clear kind of, a clear set of political principles and ideas that can provide leadership, you know, I don't have an issue with, you know, leadership as such, I think is sort of important, but I guess what would distinguish that from being called a party is, in a way, it's semantics. Sure.

But I suppose what's normally understood by the word party is that a party will seek to attain levels of power either in organizations such as, you know, like campaigns or unions or within a state structure at some point, either at the present, you know, or in the future. And so, you know, in terms of the organizational form, that, you know, there's differences around things like Democrats and, you know,

how to make decisions, but none of those are unique to anarchism or Marxism as such because there's kind of crossover. So, yeah, I think the key difference would be about, is it a part, you know, if you take the definition of party being as one which will try to represent a group in a body like a union or a state,

then that's what we wouldn't agree with. But in terms of a organization, So we definitely agree on like, you know, when I say a party, I definitely don't mean like an electoral political party, like a social democratic party trying to win power in a capitalist context. For sure, I don't mean that. And I definitely don't mean trade union power because, you know, there's all these leninous critiques of trade union consciousness and how limited it can be. But the idea that the most advanced segments of the proletariat form a political party, go out through mass work, organize the de-politicized or the unorganized, bring them into this larger structure. I mean, the Black Panther Party, that's the sort of party I mean. They did. do this exact sort of thing, but there's also, there's nothing inherent in that because the state was never an option to take. There's nothing inherent in the way the Black Panther party organized it. I think most anarchists would a priori object to, but that organizational model of building a party because you're right, the end goal is eventually to, if possible, capture state power. And so I think that trajectory is really where the anarchist and Marxist has split. I definitely

don't want to imply that anarchists are against organization, there certainly aren't, but they are, they do reject this, this Lennon, this vanguard idea, they do reject this idea of a revolutionary communist party as the vehicle, and they prefer instead for sort of grassroots, horizontal, consensus-based

decision-making, would you say that's correct or too simplified? I'd say, yeah, I mean, not necessarily, I think a lot of libertarian, meaning libertarian left, kind of organizations now do use consensus, that's a kind of recent

that's kind of a recent thing so but yeah I think there's nothing about consensus which is inherently anarchist as such but that's just the way that a few well quite a lot of actual groups seem to work now but that's a bit more yeah but that's not inherent to it

but yeah otherwise okay well then I think this is all leading towards the discussion of the state so let's talk about the state and this is probably the most obvious difference between us the anarchist and Marxist position. So I just formulate the question. What is the anarchist position on the state? How does it differ from a Marxist view of the state? And why does this ultimately matter so much? Yeah, I guess in a way, the approach of the state is kind of the crucial, you know, difference in terms of some elements, it's kind of the, in terms of the difference between some elements, it would almost be the only difference. But, yeah, you know, either way, a definition of state is important. And I guess just to start off with kind of, you know, addressing kind of misconsonsor. I think a lot of people misunderstand the anarchist conception of the state.

So especially when it comes to things like defending public services, you know, like state-provided childcare or education or health care in the UK, in the UK at least. You know, what are those things? Lucky you guys don't have to put up with the tyranny of the tyranny of free medical, you know, not free operator, you know, free hospitals and stuff, you know. Can't imagine. That'd be horrifying. It's terrible, you know. You know, so, you know, so some people face with that, some people kind of say, well, why anarchist defending the state? You know, and but basically, because that's not what we see as being the state, you know.

It's essence, we see the state is a body which kind of incorporates all the lawmaking and law enforcing institutions in a given area, which is run by a small minority people and which has a monopoly on the use of violence in the area or outside to enforce. those laws so namely police prisons and the military so you know for us these are the only inherent features of a state all the other kind of you know what you might see is positive things like health care provision are they're optional sure so you know in some places you know these they're provided by the state when the state has been forced to you know either by um working class struggles or by economic pressures or that sort of thing so um for For example, in the UK, health care is provided for free, for the most part, by the state. But in the US, it's not.

But every state has lawmaking and law enforcing bodies that have a monopoly of violence in that sort of area. So that's the fundamental essence of the state that we want to abolish. And I think, you know, it's kind of worth saying at this point that, you know, sometimes if you have discussion with people from a Marxist's perspective, they kind of say, that's not realistic, you know, large modern societies can't function without a state, you know, but that is the aim of Marxism as well, you know, you know, the abolition of states and even kind of, you know, Lenin really wanted the state to, after a while, kind of wither away. I think anarchists would be pleasantly surprised if they read state and revolution, because

Lenin sometimes does sound like an anarchist a little bit. Yeah, well, I know what anarchists kind of say to that book is that, you know, things like the power to the Soviets was a slogan that kind of anarchists were. were using at that time and that, you know, that's Lenin then adopted. And I do know that Anacus have said that but I haven't seen evidence that that was, you know, or who did say

it first. So, you know, I don't know if that's one of those. So, you know, if a listener actually knows one another, that would be good to know. Let us know. It's something, you know, I've never seen it actually a proper primary source cited. But, yeah, so what's the biggest difference in terms of the Marxist

view? Well, with definitely some strains of Marxism like Council Communism. There's There's not really a difference. But I guess theoretically, I suppose, the biggest difference, you know, between anarchists and most types of Marxists, Leninists, et cetera, is about in a revolutionary situation, what do you do? Do you destroy the state or do you set up a worker state? I mean, I kind of think that's maybe not,

we could discuss it with a bit, it's maybe not really a helpful distinction to look at in that much detail because you can just end up in semantic, agreements about what is a state. Sure. So I kind of think a bigger difference on a practical level is how do we relate to the capital estate today? Because for, again, most Marxist groups on those kind of Leninist spectrum anyway, part of the

strategy means campaigning or voting for or even kind of joining other left-wing parties to get bits of power within a capitalist state structure. Sure. Yeah. And, you know, anarchists and some types of Marxist. well, like left communists, reject that. And instead, you know, just think what we need to be doing is organising independently as working-class people to assert our own interests, kind of regardless of anything else, and to take direct action in our own interests. I mean, and I guess an example of that would be during the Iraq War in the early 2000s, there was, in the UK,

there was a huge, well, everywhere there was kind of big protest movement against it. And in the it was huge. We had like the biggest demonstration in British history, one half million people in London, you know, they were kind of A to B marches. So there wasn't kind of disruption. And essentially they were easy for the government to just ignore. Yeah, Corning off, let them get their thing done and then walk away. Exactly. Listen to Tony Ben, who is an old Labour politician. And then be like, yeah, jolly good. And then go home and so you know as a kind of sort of practical example of strategic differences the anarchist movement in the UK at that time you know we were kind of pushing for then okay we've got this

movement but if we want the state to listen to us we have to start disrupting business as usual we have to start using direct action you know to disrupt business as usual disrupt profits or disrupt the actual war machine, you know, by, you know, depending on what people can do, you know, doing things like going to the military bases, trying to occupy them, trying to blockade them, that sort of thing. Or that's not possible for kind of everyone, but, you know, doing things like there were attempts to organise strikes against the war. There were some excellent walkouts by school kids all up and down the country on the day, I believe on the day

the war started there was a call to do that which was really fantastic and they kind of went and had these kind of wild demonstrations that shut down streets and whatever and you know that was great but you know at the time I don't want to start mentioning names of groups or whatever but there was the biggest left party that kind of dominated the stop the war coalition

rather than you know push for that sort of thing they thought this this large social movement was an opportunity to get bits of state power so they set up an electoral coalition to try and get bits of state power and kind of diverted a lot of energy into that and I think ultimately people only do have so many hours in the day

and so much energy for doing things and so a lot of energy and resources and money went into setting up this kind of new party which then you know didn't get anywhere utterly ineffective and waste of time. Yeah, and ultimately at least. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, and adopting direct action and stuff,

we might not have been able to stop UK involvement in the war anyway. Sure. But I think we had a better chance than setting up a new party and then trying to, you know, get however many years later. You know, so that I think is a kind of practical difference. Okay, yeah, totally fair. So I guess the way that I was started just by kind of explaining the Marxist position on the state, and I really do encourage people to read state,

and revolution because it is sort of Lenin defending and articulating the Marxist and Engels view of the state, which is this view of the state that I hold. And the short, you know, version of that argument is that in a class society, the state is sort of an organic manifestation, because when you divide society into classes, the state becomes the tool of whatever class is dominating at that time. And so, you know, eventually Marxist agree with anarchists that we want to get to a stateless, what we mean by communism is a stateless, moneyless, you know, know, a society, classless society, a transcending class society. But for Leninists, we believe that until that class society is transcended, the state

is an inevitable thing. And if we don't take it, you know, the reactionaries, our enemies will take it and use it to crush us. And when you're talking about squaring off against other nation states, when you're talking about trying to challenge U.S. hegemony, for example, the only way that you can do that on a global scale is by building up an organized state force that is case. of pushing back against the organized state force of capital. And so, you know, ideally we want to get away from the state,

but the way that Leninists argue we get rid of the state is by transcending the conditions of class society, which inevitably give rise to the state. And that might mean taking over the state. But if you read state and revolution, Lenin argues that we don't just take over the bourgeois state wholesale. Even Marx talked about that. You don't lay your hands on the ready-made machinery of the bourgeois state.

But by taking it over, the idea is to fundamentally alter it, you know, strip it of, It's police and military functions as they currently are. Strip it of its bureaucracy. Now, how that worked out in actual historical instances we can argue about because there was a bureaucracy that was built up, a bureaucracy that Lenin on his deathbed was warning the party about. He wanted to get away from it.

And you read letters from Lenin talking to comrades before his death. He would talk about this as a real big worry on his mind and how to avoid it. But I think the big difference here too, looking over states like Cuba and the Soviet Union, and countless others with Marxists and anarchists disagree is that we think that, like, sometimes the material conditions are such that you can't just go straight to statelessness, that, you know, sometimes you are forced because of external and internal contradictions and pressures, you're forced to take formations that you otherwise would not have.

Lenin, we know, like you were talking about the Soviets earlier, when the Soviets were more or less ended and those were taken over by the state, you know, system, there's an argument there that there was an attempt to let the worker self-manage. It wasn't working out as well as they wanted it to. They had to nationalize it to make it more coherent and give it more form and organization. And so they did that. And then anarchists will look at that and say, look it,

the Leninists are liars. They acted like they're building Soviets and worker control, but the moment they could get power, they did. They're all tyrants and dictators, blah, blah, blah. And we think that's fundamentally unfair and that it misses so much of the study of the situation that the Soviets were in and what they had to do. That does not explain away things, right?

You can't just talk about material conditions and say, you know, that's why the purges were good or something. You know, there is limitations to that sort of analysis, and there are deviations that you can take and say, well, you know, material conditions forced us into this position. No, they didn't. You did that, you know. So I do agree that anarchists have a good critique there. But, yeah, so just this idea that the state is actually inevitable manifestation of class society and that that's why Leninists view it the way we do. What are your thoughts on that, feelings on that, etc.? Yeah, I guess, you know, I think, you know, especially in terms of trying to stay,

I think trying to avoid going into the historical minutiae of things like Russia and stuff like that, how to address this without doing that. And I guess depending on how you define a state, you know, if you see it as an institute of, if you see it as just a kind of body of class rule, then I think on some level, anarchist could be supportive of some level of what by that definition could be considered a state if it's, say, a body of violence to be used to further the interests of the working class in an area. But I think that's not how we would necessarily see it because the definition would be sort of slightly different in that, you know, I think we see

that a state would need to incorporate kind of law enforcing, you know, decision making. And I think for it to be meaningfully considered a state, it would need to have a more. monopoly of violence and it would need to be controlled by a small number of people so you know for example in the spanishes civil war there were anarchist militias you know which were like armed bodies which were there to fight the you know the forces of the nationalists and the fascists but we wouldn't kind of consider that a state you know even though it was you know because they were grassroots people's militias as opposed to a top-down military strategy exactly and like you know the officers were elected and you know people didn't have to follow the orders that they were given and

that sort of thing you know there was there was uh and and people you know officers were all elected and delegated so you know so that kind of thing we wouldn't see as a step so i think the for us the kind of the key thing is i guess drawing some lines like and it is got sort of tricky like what can you do you know to as you may see it defend the revolution whatever and what can't you do for amicus the important thing is that, you know, the bodies that have been developed in the struggle by workers, which in the past were workers councils in the future, they're probably going to be different. They might be big WhatsApp groups, or, you know, or, you know, or whatever weird shit, the future

throws at us. Exactly. You know, that those kind of democratic organs, which, which working class people have developed to kind of, which are the embryo of a new society. that those are paramount, you know, and that the workers' democracy in those is paramount and isn't overridden by an external force, which is stating it's acting in the interests of a class. And so I guess, yeah, for us, that's the main thing. You know, whatever body we come up with, you know, if it has to fight a military conflict or whatever, that it is subordinate to the organ

the Democrat, because, you know, when workers, when we organise and when we fight, you know, historically people set up democratic ways of managing that, you know, often directly democratic ways of doing that and that I think we just need to ensure that those are always sovereign and that, you know, something shouldn't usurp the power of those. And sometimes, you know, it might mean if you argue about historical things, it can be a bit like angels on the head of a pin or whatever you know could things have happened differently i mean they didn't so they happened the way they did so in a way they couldn't have happened differently but you know would it have meant that you know something like you know the russian revolution wouldn't have succeeded

in october 1917 maybe you know um but you know maybe then something would have happened later you know it's it's once you set on a new path yeah exactly you know um watch the back to the future film and things like that. So, yeah, so I think that that's the key thing for us. They're not being a body which can override the democratic organs of struggle, which workers come up with. And that's why anarchists, no matter your degree of sympathy for these various states, when you look at the Soviet Union or Mao's China or Fidel's Cuba, for example, these are all instances where most anarchists feel like there was a sort of usurpation or an above workers' entity that can control and dictate that. And that's why you have, you know, various degrees of.

problems with it and you know maybe even in the early days of the bolshevik revolution there's still many things that could have gone many directions and i think a lot of anarchists that really studied that period see that there's something here that could have been developed in a new direction and you know leninus will argue well we couldn't do that blah blah blah of course we're not able to cover every single aspect of our differences and similarities and this is an ongoing um subseries for us at rev left so we'll have other guests on and cover different dimensions of this and of course anybody listening from either of our podcast if you want to hear us talk about a different discussion or anything like that let me know and I'll try to weave it into future conversations with anarchists

but I really appreciate from the bottom of my heart you not only coming on the show but coming to Omaha to sit in the studio and have this discussion face to face I think being face to face actually helps a lot because you get to read body language you get to see the humanity in another person which makes it harder to be an asshole to each other there's no reason we would be anyway but I really appreciate you coming on I love working class history and I've been a follower of that since I pretty much since it's been created. I mean, even before I've left, I really liked that, that approach that you took and I learned from it and it's inspired sort of our attempt, some people would say it's a failed attempt, but our

attempts to not be overly sectarian and to have these sorts of discussions. And so I thought you'd be the perfect guest to come on and sure enough you were. So I really appreciate that. No, I really appreciate coming on and, you know, it's great that it worked out in Omaha. And again, you know, you guys are doing a great job. well. Thank you. And yeah, having that open, respectful and friendly dialogue. And also I think, you know, it's, it's kind of a shame that I think maybe because, I think maybe, because our project is called something about history, I think we often attract less ire from people, you know, something about, because I don't know, I think maybe you picture like kind of old

people in tweed jackets and stuff, which obviously people can't see me, but that's exactly what I'm like. albeit still with the balaclava and everything. But, you know, you have an episode about something or with certain people, but that doesn't mean that you support everything they say. It's about, you know, but I think you can sometimes get the eye after that. Like, oh, you're, you know, this or that, like, you know, you're a tanky piece of shit. Exactly.

You purge, you, I bet your bit you wish you could purge me right now. you're just looking at who you can purge you know and I mean yeah maybe you are but that's you know you're purged but but yeah so I think you know it's good

you know that that open and respectful dialogue is good and I hope we can have more of it yeah thanks for thanks having me definitely yeah it's a pleasure and an honor and if I ever find myself in the UK I hope you to meet up with me and show me around oh before we leave did you want to plug one more time

where people can find working class history online yeah that would be cool Yeah, so if you don't know, our working class history is online at working class history.com. Our podcast is called Working Class History. It's on pretty much all the major podcast apps. And otherwise, we're on social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all that. If you just search Working Class History. I can't recommend enough. Thank you again, Conrad.

Wake up to a missile knee deep in your front yard. Couple of guns, par. That's one of fun stars. Chemical weapons make it difficult to run for. run for. You just gonna get caught. Police come in and all your guns gone. Now the tanks come. You really need the slang rocks. Corrilla warfare, we might have to go there. Let's look at Palestine. You know a rock's there. The southern Philippines, my man shit is real there. Little boys are popping choppers from a wheelchair in a Sudan too and in Chiapas too. One slip of ski master army is on top of you. We are in combat. Don't let the news tell it. They just want to sell you soap and in and sec repellent. But don't ever forget it. The world is burning down, where do you see your fan when this I turn it turn it out? Why? Solicid and a porno-giera. Na bujah and barra de quera.

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Don't puzzle me Evil begets, evil begets, evil and violence do the same and the rate we seem to be going ain't never going change.