Stuff You Should Know - Can Anarchism Work?

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

Teenage punks going through a phase probably come to mind when you think of anarchists, but anarchism is a legitimate political philosophy based on the idea that governments are unnecessary and do more harm than good. Could we actually live without them? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everyone, we're coming to Salt Lake City, Utah in Phoenix, Arizona this fall. Yeah, October 23rd, we're gonna be at Salt Lake City's Grand Theater, and then the next night, October 24th, we'll be in Phoenix,

and we added a second show to our Melbourne show, right? That's right, a second earlier show in Melbourne, so you can get all the information for all of these shows at sysklive.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

And this is getting to be kinda normal, but it's just us today. Everybody, Jerry's fine, she's not in the hospital. She's just checked out. She's not in hospice. Nope. She's just been busy lately, so everything will be back to normal soon.

She said, guys, 10 years is all you get from me. I know, seriously, kind of since that anniversary, she's been, she just doesn't care. Checked out, as I said. We're kidding, of course. Ish. But speaking of not-ishes, but-isms, let's talk about anarchism, Chuck.

Yeah, this one was interesting. I think I pitched this one a long time ago, and he never did it for some reason. I think it just probably came at a time when we just didn't have enough time to do it. Yeah, I think you're right, but this was interesting. Because anarchism can be a lot of different things. Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of people have the idea

that anarchism is anarchy, and that the whole point of it is to just basically demolish all institutions, descend into lawlessness. Disorder, chaos. Yeah, exactly, where you just take what you want, and you kill somebody, and it's fine, or whatever. That's not the point of anarchism.

That is the definition of anarchy, but anarchy is not what anarchists are actually out for. There's a couple of threads in there that are the basis of that. It's not just a complete mischaracterization, but it's just so off-base that it might as well just be, you might as well just be talking about something totally different.

Yeah, and there are many, many forms that anarchism can take, and there are many schools of thought, and there's no way we're gonna touch on all of them, but we're gonna do what we do, which is a nice overview of some of them. Yes, so our apologies to all anarchists for what we get wrong, but I do wanna put a call out, any follow-up info

I am totally open for, so send it our way. Any corrections, anything like that. Yeah, totally. So there are a few things, like you said, there's a lot of different varieties of anarchism, but there are a couple of tenets that any variety of anarchists would agree with, like this is the basis of anarchism, right?

So anarchism, we should say also is like, it's a political thought, it's a philosophical, political idea, and the basis of the idea, no matter how you approach it, is that humans are better off governing themselves than they are in creating lasting institutions where they send people to those institutions to make decisions for them.

Right, so the power structure as it exists is not doing us any fapers, fapers? That's even worse than favors. Favors, in that a truly free and equal society, and you know, it dips into communism and socialism here and there, and we'll cover all that, but that is sort of the goal, like you said, just to down with these government authorities

and elected officials, it should be run by the people in full. Yeah, exactly, I mean, it's really as simple as that, right? I mean, that's the basis of anarchism that you're better off without them. Not that they even can be good. The most died in the wall anarchists will say like, no, any artificial institution that's created by humans

to govern other humans is necessarily bad. It creates disorder, it creates chaos, it is run by violence, like they will point out the whole way that the system is kept going is through the threat of violence. Yeah, it's hard to argue with a lot of this, to be honest. Totally, yeah, it makes a tremendous amount of sense. I think really there are two things

going against anarchism in practice today. One, the longstanding image that was developed at the end of the 19th century and beginning of 20th century that didn't do it any favors, the image of the terrorist anarchists, which we'll get to. And then two, the fact that there hasn't been any longstanding examples of this to point to.

But that's not to say that there aren't examples of actual anarchy or anarchism, I'm sorry, in practice that have been successful, it's just no one's ever been able to do it like on a massive national level yet. Right, unlike the community scale we've seen it and currently see it, which we'll get to that stuff too, but yeah, you're right, it's probably too late

with the world as it is, not probably. There's just no way you could do that today. Well, there's a lot of people who would disagree with you about that. Yeah, sure. Mm. Right, you're like, okay, go do it. And I'll come over when you got it up and running.

But the word, a very word anarchism is the Greek in its root, anarchia, means without rulers or without authority. But this article is pretty good actually, who wrote this one? Kiger, Patty Kiger. Patrick Kiger, was it Kiger or Kiger? Kiger, the R is invisible.

Okay. But he points out that the aim is social change at its heart. Mm-hmm, yeah, that's another good point, I left that part out, like that's ultimately the goal and the point is it's like you can do all this stuff, you can get all the services that you get allegedly from government institutions,

from your friends and neighbors and community, and that the point of anarchism is to enact that change now. Don't wait for it, don't like go petition for it, just go do it and constantly be doing it to make your society better. Yeah, and sometimes they'll, depending on where you're coming from with your group, there may be a little environmentalism thrown in

or a little even religion thrown in. There's other philosophies that are comorbid or can be comorbid with anarchism, for sure. Like feminism is one that they pointed out too. Which one? Feminism. Oh, sure. And I ran across that a lot that there's a lot of people

that equate feminism and anarchism as feminism is just in and of itself a type of anarchism because feminists have a proven track record of just going and doing being the change that they wanna see in the world rather than waiting around for it or asking for it. One example I ran across was the rape crisis centers of the 70s that sprung up

because the establishment just didn't take violence against women very seriously and women set up clinics to handle this themselves. That was a big time feminist move in the 70s and it's hard, constantly progressing socially. That's an anarchistic tactic, I guess. Well, yeah. And it seems like depending on where you lay your head

as an anarchist, you might wanna concentrate more on economy, other people might wanna concentrate more on the like how to overthrow the authority. I didn't see like, it's interesting when you look at like, let's say the mutualism school where they're all about the workers controlling their own factories, controlling the land or the anarcho-communist who say no private property

for anyone, it's like a big giant commune and no one competes for anything. Like are there schools of anarchy where they tackle everything? It seems like they're getting very specific. I think because these came out of like the minds of people who had very specific views on this stuff, right? Like you said, communism and anarchism cross paths here

and there's even a variety of them combined because I mean, they do share some qualities, right? But the idea of communism, okay, let me put it like this. Liberalism is the idea that people should be free and equal. Communism is the idea that people should all have the same access to everything they need and that it's the state that is meant to support that stuff. With liberalism, it's the state that's meant to make sure

everybody is treated equally and everyone is free. Anarchism says, yeah, we totally agree. Free and equal, we want everybody to have everything that they need, but it's the state that we disagree with you guys on. So that's the real distinction between communism and liberalism and anarchism is that they all kind of have the same ideal,

which is freedom, equality, equal access to everything, resources, that kind of stuff, but whether or not there should be a state or you need a state to do this is the big distinction between those. And I think that's where the kind of the narrow-mindedness comes from on some of these. That makes sense.

Thanks. I think so. When it comes to how to get rid of the current establishment, I guess you would say, there are many schools of thought on that. One is called the anarcho-syndicalist. And I looked into this a bit more. I think many modern anarchists find this

to be a bit old-fashioned, but this is the idea that it's called a direct action system where the labor unions affect the change and they want to abolish the wage system. And by direct action, that means sort of what you were talking about at the beginning, which is instead of electing someone, even the head of a labor union,

to go take care of something, we do it ourselves. Right, that's like direct representation or direct democracy, I mean, rather than representative democracy, right? Sure. And then there's, so another way of putting direct action is where if you like those rape crisis centers that feminists created in the 70s,

if you go and just create the rape crisis center as if there's no such thing as the state, you just go take care of it yourself, that is inherently anarchistic in nature because you're just ignoring the state, you're just going and solving the problem yourself. If you went out and protested that the state needed to provide rape crisis centers,

you're doing the opposite of an anarchistic direct action in that by protesting, you're petitioning the state and by petitioning the state, you're legitimizing its power. You're saying you have the power, I'm asking you to use it for this. With anarchism, it's like we're not even recognizing that you have the power here, we're just gonna go do it ourselves.

Good luck with your capitalist or communist or whatever experiment, we got this handled ourselves. Yeah, and you can go about it through means of nonviolence or violence, anarchism is one of those schools of thought where it's really all over the map from like violent revolution to hippie communes. It's really interesting. Yeah, there's definitely like a pacifist anarchism for sure.

I think that's actually, from my understanding, that's a significant portion of anarchists that violent anarchism actually, it is still around. Like you see the black block at protests, which I read up on that, that definitely deserves its own episode at some point in time. But you know, the people wearing like balaclavas

or masks of some sort, throwing Molotov cocktails or breaking windows or dressed in all black, that's actually not a group, that's a tactic of protests. And some of them are anarchists, but not all anarchists are black block, right? There's a big distinction in that sense. So there are anarchists out there who do believe in violence, at least against property, if not against people,

but I really think that they're in the minority and that most anarchists believe in direct action, just going and doing it yourself, or some sort of peaceful change, either within the system or just outside of the system. Yeah, and there's a social theorist from Germany, a Germany name, Andreas Wittell. And he said, he kind of breaks it down

into two main groups, which is social anarchism and libertarian anarchism. Obviously, the libertarian anarchism is all about the individual person and make sure that it just kind of takes it down to that person level as far as freedom goes. Even at the expense of society. Right, where social anarchism is all about the society,

that's the one that leans more toward socialism and communism. Yeah, so that's more like creating a harmonious community that cares for itself, that doesn't have any leaders. The idea behind that is that organizations will just happen, right? If you have a need, people will just come together and solve the need, and then the organization

will just dissolve as the need is fulfilled. You don't have to create a permanent structure to fulfill that need, whether it's there or not, that people can be elected into and basically grift from. Yeah, and not to jump ahead too much, but that whole idea is kind of one of the founders of anarchism in the mid 1800s in France, a man named Pierre-Joseph Prouton.

That was one of his things that he wrote in his book. What is property is that his feeling is that, and one of his key theories is that when this vacuum is created by getting rid of the government institutions, it will just sort of work itself out. Right, that people will take care of people, and that it's actually the organizations and government

and the constant threat of violence that is actually the problem, not that people need to be kept in line by those things. That's a radical idea and a big risk that it will be like, I mean, he even uses the word spontaneous, like spontaneous order will happen. But again, and I'm sorry to keep going back to the same,

well, I don't wanna use up some of the ones down the line, but the rape crisis center is a good example of that. There was a need in the community, and it was fulfilled. And there's still a need, so there's still around, but there's nobody getting fat and rich off of the rape crisis centers that sprung out of the 70s. Same thing with protecting LGBTQ. I think IP, is that right?

I think, yeah, I'm sorry for everybody, I'm leaving off there, but I definitely know it up to Q for sure. There's a lot of violence against kids like that who have been kicked out of their homes and live on the street. So crisis centers have developed to take care of them too. So, I mean, there is actual real life things

you can point to where people do this kind of stuff. There's people who work at nonprofit groups, they don't make much money, but they're there because they're trying to make their society better. They're trying to make their communities better. Like that's a real life example of what this guy's saying would happen spontaneously.

It actually does happen. Again, the question, Chuck, is could you administer hundreds of millions of people like this? And the answer is probably not, but those hundreds of millions of people probably wouldn't be connected in any way, shape, or form, aside from the fact that we're all humans. If there was no larger federal government

keeping everyone together, or even a state government, they would probably dissolve into, hopefully, harmonious communal bands. That's the ideal version of anarchism. See, I think that people would, I think they might dissolve into those bands, but I don't know if it would be harmonious. Within the bands or outside of the bands, or between them?

I think between them. So, I totally agree with you. And I think that this is kind of an unspoken thing of anarchism. At the very least, as far as I whittled down to it, it's been unspoken, but I'm sure they talk about it a lot. If you live in an anarchistic society,

or group, or whatever, you've got to be able to back that up. So, the impression that I have is that that wouldn't mean that you are violent, but they would be more than willing to defend themselves against outsiders. Right. And there's actually a group in Chiapas,

the Zapatistas, which was an indigenous Indian movement in Mexico in the 90s that's still around today. I've heard of them. They were, so remember the guy with the face mask who smoked a pipe, subcommodante Marcos? He's still at it today. And there are anarchist villages in Chiapas, Mexico

that have been self-sufficient since the 90s that you would not want to go in and mess with them, but they've got it going on. They have equality. There are women who are like commanders in their defense forces. They have their own schools. They're set, they're fine.

They're doing just fine, but they're also heavily armed. Well, I mean, did you ever watch the Wild Wild Country documentary? No, I still haven't yet. All right, well, we won't dive into that, but yeah. I don't wanna ruin anything. Okay.

Let's take a break. All right. And we'll go watch that real quick together. Okay. We'll be back in 12 hours. And we'll talk about that famous anarchist symbol and a bit of history right after this. Hey, oh, and no, try to go, try to go.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

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blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody,

about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, dude, so anyone who's ever owned a skateboard, it's probably scribbled the anarchist symbol on their notebook when they were 12.

Not knowing what it meant. This has actually only been around since about the 1960s, which kind of surprised me. Yeah, I guess I didn't think of when it would have come up. I guess I assumed it was, it just came about the moment I noticed it. It's like a youngster in the 80s. First proposed by a group called Anarchist Youth,

of Paris, in the 1960s, they needed to logo up, and that was very kind of recognizable, it made sense. The black flag is also another symbol of anarchists dating back to the 19th century. And of course, the band Black Flag, that's where they got their jam. Had no idea about that one until today or yesterday. About the band?

Yeah, I mean, I knew about Black Flag, but I didn't know where they got their name. Yeah, and it was, I mean, I knew about Black Flag, but I didn't know where they got their name. Yeah, and I think it means more than that to them, but they definitely, I don't know if they were dyed in the wool anarchists, but they certainly didn't shy away from screaming about it. No.

You know? Not at all. Not at all? God bless Henry Rollins. But the point of the Black Flag from, what did you say, the 1880s? Yeah. The point of the Black Flag was that it was meant to be all the colors of all the flags in the world.

You know, if you put the presence of all colors is the color black. Yeah, man. So it kind of like melds them all together and I guess discredits all of them by doing that. It absorbs them all. All those pretty flags just divide us, man. Melt them down, make it black. Wow, you sound just like Black Flag.

All right, so let's go back in time a bit to perhaps the origins of anarchism and the Chinese philosopher Lao Su, who founded is, do we say it with a D, Taoism? Yeah. Okay, that's what I thought, even though it's spelled with a T. And his whole jam was that people live in harmony with each other, with nature.

That's how we get to happiness, is to live in balance. And of course in India, the holy men there, it was espousing some of the same philosophies of giving up property for spiritual enlightenment. And then of course, Greece. You had philosophers in Greece that were not big fans of government interfering with what they had going on, which is interesting.

Right. It's specifically Zeno. Yeah. Who is also going to go on to colonize Earth. That's Zeno. Oh, gotcha. X-E-N-U. Yeah, I know.

I know, you're just kidding. I knew that X, I didn't realize it was a U. I was being serious about the O. I think it's Zeno. I think you might be right, man. Well, let me check the tattoo of my lower back. Does that say Zeno? Oh, yeah, it does.

It's weird. Why is it in a whale tail? I don't know. So Zeno's whole thing too was that if people are good enough, then we don't even need cops and courts, which is kind of crazy. Is it though? Well, I mean, that's the whole thing that we were talking about.

Like the whole idea of this stuff working out is, is not one person breaking bad. Because as soon as one person does, one person gets a little taste of power, then it's corrupted. Yeah. Again, though, I think that comes from the idea that the community takes care of itself,

polices itself. I think the members of the community would not be very happy about that, especially with social anarchism. And I don't know what they would do. I don't know if they would just move and leave the guy out or cast him out. I don't know what you would do in that situation. There are a lot of prickly things like that that would,

you could only work out in theory now, you know? Although maybe it has happened in some of the experiments that have gone on by now, but I don't know, but I don't think that it would necessarily spoil the whole system, you know? You have a pretty dark cynical view of stuff like this now. Well, I think I've seen that actually in reference,

not your cynical view specifically, but that if you do have kind of a dim view of humanity and that we are generally dark and generally greedy, generally all the bad stuff, then yeah, you would probably not think that anarchism would work. But if you have this idea that humans are genuinely positive, peaceful people who just want to be happy that if you remove these institutions,

that would be allowed to shine and a lot of the problems would come out. Like one way I saw it put was, like yes, there's a lot of cheating under the capitalist system in democracies. In just about any form of government, cheating can happen, right? The writer I was looking into put it like,

a lot of these people, especially in capitalism, are forced to do jobs that they don't want to do. They spend the hours of their lives doing things they don't want to do. How would that behavior change? How would their personality change if it was just like, go do whatever you want to do, man. No one's telling you what to do. Go learn to farm and make your own food

or go learn to juggle for money and buy food. Who cares? Go do it. Would that person cheat other people anymore? I don't know. Yeah, here's my thing. I don't want it because I am a pretty positive person. Sure, I know you are. And I do think that people are mostly good

and you could probably assemble a pretty great community by and large, but it doesn't take many is my whole deal. Like you get two or three people in there and it starts to sour and they get a little power grab and they talk another person or two into it and then that ruins it. So I think an unpleasant minority could spoil it for a group of otherwise, you know, just delightful anarchists.

Right, the happy kind. Right. So, okay. So back to history. Yeah, because I think we could have this conversation like five more times and we're still going to arrive at the same point. We just don't know. We don't know what would happen.

What you're describing is the beginning of a civil war in the middle in this little community. Yeah, maybe. You know. All right. So like you said, back to history. We made it as far as Zinu and Zino specifically who basically was the first one to at least elucidate the ideas behind anarchism,

which was maybe we don't need the state. Maybe we're better off without it. Right. And then not a lot happened until the 17th century. Yeah, and this is a classic case of what did you expect to happen when in England, these peasant farmers got a collective together. They called themselves the diggers. Not the duggers.

Not the duggers. And they said, we are tired of this. All the turmoil that's going on here, we have a civil war going on and we're going to try and live without the government and we're going to cultivate our own land and start our own kind of radical group out here. This guy named Gerard Wyn Stanley. Great name. Who was the founder.

He was a Christian radical and he put out a pamphlet in 1649 called Truth Lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals and talked about power corrupting, property incompatible with liberty, all the kind of hallmarks of anarchism and what happens. The community gets larger and larger and then the government says, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Crush that. We can't have this at all. Right.

And that's what happened. The government, the landowners, they said, you guys can't camp together anymore. Go away. And the diggers, they disassembled. We've seen it in our own country anytime. Oh yeah. And I'm not going to argue for the virtues of branch Davidians or preppers like at Ruby Ridge, but if there's one thing our government doesn't like is people kind of hold up in their own,

trying to do their own thing with it and they have guns. Right. They don't even like it when they don't have guns. Look at Zuccotti Park. Yeah. Like they were basically flaunting urban camping laws and they came in with the cops and riot gear and busted the place up. Yeah.

Like they don't, these experiments, at least in the US and in a lot of Europe too, the experiments in anarchism don't have a very long lasting effect because they do tend to attract a lot of followers, especially when they rise up as they tend to when the ruling class is really squeezing the working class. Yeah, sure. When the conditions that, you know, part of the whole reason we live with the government, at least initially, was because there was that social contract, right? I'm going to give up a little bit of my liberty. I'm going to give up a little bit of my freedom in return for all these services and protections that the government affords.

Well, when the government kind of stops giving you all that stuff it's supposed to give in return for you giving up your freedom and your liberty, you start rethinking how much freedom and liberty you want to give up. Yeah. And as a result, when anarchists come along and start telling you, hey man, there's another way. Try changing your mind to think like this. It gets kind of popular. And so as a result, the state comes crashing down on it and says, no, stop talking about that.

Everybody go to jail. Well, yeah, I mean, that's why you have, and we'll talk a bit more about this, but things like the battle in Seattle and Occupy Wall Street, who I don't know if they, are they registered anarchists? Do they have their little cards? They had a lot of anarchist stuff going on and there are plenty of anarchists there, but I think they were so anarchist that they wouldn't even say that they were anarchists. That would be too much of a label. That's funny.

I'm not making fun of them. No, no. So the diggers might have been squashed, but about 100 years, 120 years later in England, those ideas sort of lived on with an English philosopher named William Godwin, who once again, someone rises up, probably stands on that little box in Hyde Park and says the government is corrupt inherently. They're a bad influence and we need a decentralized society. And his whole idea was small, little small autonomous communities, which to me makes a little bit more sense than trying to win the world over. Right, right. Yeah, and he was the first one to really write down anarchist thought, right?

Godwin? Was he? From what I understand, if Zeno wasn't, this guy was really the first one. Not necessarily the first to practice it, but he was the first one to start writing down the tenets of anarchism. But it wasn't until that guy, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who you mentioned earlier, came along about 50, 60, 70 years after Godwin, that the world's first self-proclaimed anarchist came along. Yeah, and he came, interestingly, he came from a very poor family of peasants and won a scholarship to study in Paris. So he had a little bit of his feet in both worlds.

When he wrote his book, what is, are you going to read the French version? Qu'est-ce que c'est la propriété? What is property in which is contained the very famous, still with anarchist line, property is theft? And that was one of the big catchphrases, and it's still a big catchphrase with the anarchism, anarchist groups. Yes, it's frequently a punchline in anarchist jokes. And I said, property, property is theft. And he was the one that I mentioned earlier that he sort of had this radical idea that if the government leaves, spontaneous order would come about, would it just emerge? So he also, he did believe that property was theft, but to Proudhon, there was a distinction between, say, somebody owning their own plot of land that they cultivated, owning their own home, owning something like that.

He had a big problem with people owning the things that workers used to make wealth from, right? People extracting wealth from the work of others and not actually doing anything themselves, which is the current system that we live in now. It's called neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is just basically using all the power of the state or a significant portion of it to further the interests of corporations, of the people who extract wealth from the people who actually produce the work. That's neoliberalism at its core. That also deserves its own episode from us someday. And that was what Proudhon, although the word wasn't coined at the time, but that was what he really had an issue with and what basically anyone even remotely anarchistic has a problem with is neoliberalism. Yeah, and he buddied up with a couple of important figures, historical figures, one Karl Marx, who at the time was just a little German economist trying to make good.

He was not yet the father of communism. And then another guy named Mikhail Bakunin, who was a disciple of Proudhon's, but was also an anarchist. And he was different in that he came actually from nobility in Russia, and he was one of these who wanted to leave his privilege behind. Yeah, he definitely walked the walk for sure. Like he said, so long life of privilege, I'm going to become an anarchist. Anarchy. He did. But he is where anarchy takes a very dark turn. Sure. It wasn't fully vested in him, but it definitely began with him because he was the guy who basically said, and he ended up splitting from I think Proudhon and Marx, definitely Marx.

He was the guy that said, there's only one way to get this going, and that is you have to smash the state. The state is not going to give up its power. These bureaucrats aren't going to be like, you know what, you guys are right. The people who own the capital aren't going to give up their position, their wealth. It's just not going to happen, right? And the only way to deal with this is to basically wage war against the current system and then replace it with an anarchist system. And he definitely diverged from Proudhon and Marx, I believe. Well, now he's a little more closely tied to Marx. So was Proudhon that he really diverged from in that respect? Yeah, Proudhon was the one that was like, hey, like little by little, we can just shift away from this government in a gradual sense.

Right. And Bakuna was like, no, we need to go and stomp in there and smash it with violence. Right. Proudhon was like, well, wait, let's all just smoke some grass and talk this out. Yeah. Yeah, Bakunin definitely had a little more, he was a little more aligned with Marx because in the 1860s, they were co-founders of the first international working men's association. Right. That they tried it with their jam was they wanted to free workers in European countries from what they considered to be exploitation, low wages, bad conditions, stuff like that. Again, like the ruling class squeezing the working class and anarchism suddenly starts to get a lot more followers. And that was a real big problem, at least for the power in the West, in Europe, in the United States.

Anarchism got really popular for a little while, and specifically the branch espoused by Bakunin, and then later on, after he died, his follower, Peter Kropotkin. I think I nailed that. Yeah, Kropotkin. Yeah, that was close. Really took up this violent, basically terrorism. There's no other word for it, anarchist terrorism. It was the tactic they took on, and Kropotkin said you could, with a single attack, make more propaganda than a thousand pamphlets. And the whole point was to start bombing everything, just destroy the state by creating foment and chaos.

And it was a really bad time to just be the average person walking around America or Europe because you might get blown up by a bomb that somebody planted on Wall Street or something like that. Yeah, and actually, you were kind of right, I see now that after they established that International Working Men's Association, Bakunin and Marx eventually clashed and sort of their ideas diverged as well. But I think you were right. It wasn't necessarily the violence thing. It was Marx thought that you had to have this very strong state to control everything and distribute it equally among people. And Bakunin was like, you're nuts, Marx. You're nuts. Yeah.

Should we take another break? Sure. So we're going to travel stateside right after this. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

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Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So like I said, anarchism is starting to get a lot of followers, but it's at like the most dangerous, violent period in the history of anarchism. And it like really had a big effect, Chuck. Like it was very much died in the wool terrorism, bomb making, bomb throwing, um, rioting, uh, assassinations.

Yeah. Get this. In less than 10 years, anarchists killed the president of the United States, the president of France, the prime minister of Spain, the king of Italy, and the Empress of Austria, Hungary. I know, right. In 10 years. Like that's just unimaginable. Um, and so the state quite understandably said, um, we're going to crack down on you anarchists. And the United States in particular was, was successful with the earliest by jailing, um, anarchists, jailing immigrants.

They really overreached and said, you know, a lot of anarchists are immigrants. So we're just going to start jailing immigrants that we even suspect are anarchists. Um, there was a riot previous to that in the 19th century in Chicago, the Haymarket, right? The very famous one. Yeah. Uh, we, man, this has got a lot of tangential shows. We maybe should do one on the Haymarket affair in general, but this was in 1886. Cops came in to break up a meeting, an anarchist meeting in Chicago in Haymarket Square. Uh, a bomb was thrown. Uh, there were riots that happened.

Six cops and a bunch of other people died. And even though they never fingered the actual bomb thrower, they just went in there and basically said, all right, you eight. Are very prominent anarchists. So we're going to convict you all of this murder of these murders. And, um, I believe that was what four of them were actually hanged. Yeah. And it was, that was just completely corrupt justice wise. Like those guys weren't ever actually, they had not thrown a bomb. They hadn't created a bomb.

They were, they were just scapegoats that were hung because they were anarchist leaders. And it was a good excuse. They think that probably it was a paid agent provocateur from the other side. Possibly like one of the Pinkerton detectives who are also super active. That is the, I don't know if it's the predominant view, but I've heard that plenty of places that that is a real possibility that it wasn't even an anarchist. That this was an anarchist meeting and this gave them the cops a reason to break it up. It was the antifa. And then you talked about it. President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon.

Ew. I would say Zolgos. That's pretty good. Gozar. Silencezolgosz. We'll just call him Leon. And yeah, he assassinated McKinley. He went to go and again, he was another immigrant and it's, of course, they shouldn't have rounded up immigrants, but it is interesting in that most of these major anarchists, prominent anarchists were immigrants. But of course, it was a time of immigrants too. For sure. There was a lot to do with it, but he went to meet McKinley and like a public thing where there was like a greeting line and had a pistol in his hand covered with a hanky and McKinley reached out to shake his hand. He shot him once and it ricocheted off his coat button, shot him again and it lodged in his stomach. Everyone, I don't know much about McKinley, but as everyone like descended upon this Leon guy, McKinley said go easy on him boys.

Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. And he died of infection from the gunshot wound, I think less than a week or maybe nine days later and Leon was executed in short order. Yeah. And an electric chair. And I imagine it's not like modern day electric chairs are great, but I imagine one in 1901 was pretty brutal. I would guess so. Five volts for 500 hours. Yeah. I know it took three zaps to get them. Although I would guess actually it's probably even faster. I don't know. I could see it going either way. Back then they were just like, well this we executed an elephant, so let's just use that amount.

Right, exactly. And it would just sometimes go off by itself. Right. So there was one other thing I want to point out. There was a steel strike that you and I have talked about before. It was in Homestead, Pennsylvania. And I don't remember what episode it was in. Might have been the unions. Yeah, I'll bet it was because it was a union striking. And remember there's like that whole anarcho-syndicalism, which is basically like using unions as the source of anarchist power. There was one of these strikes going on and the Pinkerton showed up for that one.

It was definitely Pinkerton's and they killed like eight striking workers. So an anarchist named Alexander Bergman shot the, I don't even, he wasn't even the owner of the steel mill, I don't think, but he was an industrialist, Henry Clay Frick. And he was executed, I believe. But aside from assassinating Frick, he had the distinction of being the love interest of another prominent anarchist, a much more prominent anarchist named Emma Goldman, who we would be remiss not to mention. She was an early feminist anarchist pioneer writer who was just really laid a lot of stuff out. Her writings are collected on the internet. But she was also very much involved in the early movement for female controlled birth control. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, which I don't think she made an appearance in that episode. We definitely, you can't talk about anarchy without mentioning Emma Goldman. So she and Bergman were an anarchist power couple. Pretty much. They were the Brangelina. Yeah, they were. Is that still a thing? No, no, no. They were the Tristan Thompson and Khloe Kardashian of anarchism.

We also should mention Sacco and Vanzetti. This was in 1920, the two immigrant anarchists from Italy, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vincetti. They were, they were for sure anarchists, but they were by all accounts wrongfully convicted of killing a payroll clerk and a guard at a robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. And this was a very big deal. It was, I mean, I think like in 1920, or maybe it was just after 1920, 20,000 people went to Boston Commons to in protest. That's, that's a lot of folks in 1920 to gather in support of these two like anarchist immigrants who people feel like it didn't get a fair shake. Yeah. Well, supposedly even before they were convicted, the guy who was there when it happened confessed to it. And he was part of, I think, the Morelli gang, a mafia group that had actually carried out this crime. It was just that the officials in this area were like, we want to get rid of these two anarchists. We'll just pin this on them and execute them. And that's what happened.

And there was a huge, that's just in Massachusetts, bombs went off in New York, Paris, Buenos Aires in protest of this execution. But the government was like, what are you going to do? They're dead now. Yeah, executed in 1927. And many years later, Michael Dukakis is a belief governor of Massachusetts finally tried to, tried to right that wrong historically. By driving a tank down the highway in their honor. That's funny. So Chuck, the anarchism kind of died out there, at least the very violent terrorist branch of anarchism died out around this time. In the 20s, a little before that, it kept going actually fairly peacefully for a while in Spain. And there were anarchist villages all over Spain, right before the Civil War.

And the Civil War was the fascists who had assembled in Morocco and were supported by Hitler and Mussolini came pouring into Spain and managed to overrun the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. So the fascists won. They had a lot of help again from Hitler and Mussolini and the Franco regime took over Spain. But for a little while there, anarchism, not the violent kind, but the peaceful communal kind of anarchism had been successful in Spain for a little while. Yeah. And then years later in the United States in the 1960s, the whole counterculture sort of brought back at least some of the ideas of anarchism. If not outright anarchism through activism and even one of the groups, a hippie activist group, they called themselves the diggers after that group from England. The anarchist cookbook, of course, came out in the early 1970s, very famous, legendary, infamous even, cookbook. They gave recipes on how to make bombs and weapons and stuff. How to make drugs from toothpaste?

Yeah, all kinds of cool stuff. And you know, if you've ever been to college, someone at one point was like, man, yeah, get the anarchist cookbook. Check this out. We'll smoke some grass and read the anarchist cookbook. I was like, you say grass. Like it's 67. I don't even think it was hip in 67. Probably not. I think dorks have always said grass. But the guy who wrote it, William Powell, said later on he renounced all of it, tried to get it taken out of print. The publisher, of course, was like, you don't know these rights and we're still making money on it.

That, Chuck, is an anarchist nightmare. Sure. It happened to this William Powell. To be under the thumb of like an organization making money off of something you don't believe in anymore. Right, but that was originally your idea. Right. And your work. He's just, I'll bet that guy hasn't slept since like 1992.

And of course, once the internet was born, some of these ideas started coming back up because all of a sudden information could be exchanged so freely. And people on the outskirts of, on the fringes of society who felt like they didn't quite fit in and wanted to be anarchist could get in a chat room. Well, yeah, some of them. But I mean, that's a mistake in painting them with that brush. Like there are definitely normal people who you would not suspect are anarchists that are actually anarchists. They have those views. Again, they like work in nonprofits. They work in the rape crisis centers. That's what they do with their life.

They use old computer monitors rather than buying like the latest one or anything like that. There's just like a lot of different, I guess, lifestyle choices you can make that are actually anarchistic within the larger society. And I think there's a lot more people doing that than one might suspect. And again, it is, like you said, in large part because the internet makes it so easy to go find these other ideas. And it's so frequently, and I think this is why I really enjoyed researching this episode so much. It's so easy on the internet to go find a different way of thinking. There's something really joyful in finding a way of thinking that you've never really thought about before or seeing the same things, but in a totally different light. That's just probably the greatest gift the internet's given us.

And this definitely falls within that list. Well, yeah, I mean, some people say even that like the rewilding movement and living off grid at its heart is anarchistic. Yeah, Amon Bundy and his whole crew, they very much denied being anarchists, but they were totally anarchists and still are. They were one of the successful ones. Yeah, I mean, there's probably, there's something attached to that word that I could see some groups not wanting to be associated with. But when they describe it, they're like, no, we're not anarchists. We just want to live out here by ourselves and hunt and gather and grow on stuff and not have a government over me telling me what to do. Right.

Yeah, you're anarchists. Right. I just want to reuse an old computer monitor. Right. You're an anarchist. An anarchist. Sorry, pal. Yeah.

And then famously also, again, as we mentioned before, Zuccotti Park and Occupy Wall Street taking over that park and just setting up basically an anarchist commune. And it wasn't just anarchists. There were a lot of protests. There are a lot of different groups with a lot of different agendas, but like they refused to centralize. They refused to elect leadership. Yeah. And that, I mean, is at its core, like they said, our core, our core tenant is anarchism. So it was an anarchist experiment at least.

And there's a really good article in Al Jazeera called Occupy Wall Street's Anarchist Roots. It's by a guy named David Graber, who is an anthropologist, but he's also personally an anarchist. And he's really easy to read and really does a great job of putting out like what anarchism is. And that was one of the better ones I found of his. Yeah. So check that one out for sure. All right. So we've kicked this around between each other here, whether or not this could work.

But smarter people than us actually put thought into this stuff. And they write books on it and articles in the Atlantic on it and stuff like that. And there are some examples you can point to because like you said, you can't really, you can't point to any large scale examples of this. You can point to like small communities, for instance, in Denmark, I've heard of this before, Christiana. It's not a person, but it's a place. It is an 84 acre, some say utopia, within Copenhagen that kind of popped up in 1971 when a bunch of squatters and hippie artists who like to smoke grass took over some abandoned buildings on a military base that was no longer in use, said this is a free zone. We're not under your authority, Denmark.

And more and more people came. And because it's Denmark, 47 years later, it's still around. And the government did not squash it. In fact, the government said, you know, why don't we just sell you that land? And they, for below market value, and they were like, great. Yeah. So they took them up on it. And there's now Christiana is a free anarchist zone within Denmark.

Could you imagine this happening happening in the United States? No, and I think that's a really good point, Chuck, because Denmark is known as the model of representative liberal democracy. Yeah. So they're like close enough to the cusp of anarchism anyway that, yeah, it could happen in Denmark. But no, like that's not going to happen in the United States. I wonder if Danish government officials were like, geez, I don't know if this is the best idea, but everyone's looking at us and we are Denmark. Right.

Like we kind of have to allow this. Everyone's looking at us. Unless someone says no. Is anyone going to say no on record? All right, fine. Okay, fine. Just give us some money for it. Okay.

47 years later, they finally spoke up. I'd like to check it out, man. I bet you that's a fun place to go hang. I'm sure it's pretty cool. I'm sure it said everything's covered in murals and everything, but that's pretty great. Yeah. One of the things that I found kind of interesting from this article there was Somalia. Yeah, for sure.

That actually serves as an argument for both sides of the coin, right? Like a lot of people point to Somalia and say, look, there's your example of what happens when you don't have a state running things. Because Somalia's government collapsed in 1991 and it was never replaced. There's like local warlords. There's pirates. There's extremists. There's religious extremists. And then there's also, I think, clans and tribes and communities and groups living in peace.

And you can actually point to the living conditions today and say there are factors that are better than it was before Somalia's government collapsed. So yeah, there's lawlessness. There's pirates. There's warlords. But there are also like a lower infant mortality rate. The life expectancy is longer than it was before the government collapsed. There's more access to sanitation. And so if you're an anarchist, you would point to this and say, actually Somalia has a lot of evidence that people can take care of themselves without the government.

That anarchism isn't across the board worse than any government at all. That there are some governments that are worse than no government. And Somalia is a pretty good example of that. Yeah, because in Somalia's case, it was a corrupt dictator in place. So conditions were just abhorrent. Conditions still aren't great. It's not like everyone's packing up to move to Somalia. But like you said, there are literal facts and figures that show that it is better than it was in some ways under this dictatorship at least.

Really interesting. You got anything else? Well, we should mention Greece real quick. Oh yeah. Because Greece has undergone a lot of really interesting changes over the past 15 years or so. And they have a lot of refugees coming in from Syria and a lot of social services have gone under. Anarchists stepped in apparently in Athens at least. They took over 15 buildings anarchists did and turned them into shelters for 3000 refugees.

Wow. I think that these unauthorized housings are better than the camps that you guys are setting up government. They're terrible. They're dirty. They're not safe. We're providing food and medicine and our places are safe. These centers that we have are safe. So that's one kind of other small interesting example.

Yeah. Still today, right? I don't know. I'm not sure. I got to look into that. So I just want to sign off and saying like, I'm not espousing one thing over another necessarily. Sure. I think it's up to each person to make up their own mind.

And if this caught your interest at all, I would encourage you to go read more about it because you could spend the rest of your days reading about anarchism and still not even get through half of it. But I'll bet along the way you would develop your own ideas about the whole thing, whether positive or negative. Yeah. And at the very least, I hope we cleared up some myths about what that word is, you know, because I think it's a lot different than people think. For sure. And hey, if you live in Christiana in Denmark, send us a note and send us an invitation. Yeah.

And I might just come there one day and check out what that jam is all about. I might retire there one day. We could do a show there. That'd be awesome. Yeah. In front of like 75 people. Yeah. For free.

That would be pretty cool. Well, they could pay us an old computer monitors. Yes. And magic mushrooms. If you want to know more about anarchism, again, go out on the Internet and read all about it. But you can start by typing that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this a very polite way to talk to us about how we talked about

suicide at various times. And this is at a time when just this past week in real time, we lost Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. They took their own lives and it's, you know, caused it's a big, it's caused a big resurgence in people talking about suicide and how we talk about suicide anytime someone, a big high level person, takes their own life, it's going to be in the news. So it's on everyone's mind right now. So I want to thank Jared for writing in so kindly.

Hey guys, for I say anything, I want to thank you both for what you do. Years long fan and can't tell you how much joy and fulfillment you brought to my life. After listening to the episode on Frida Kahlo, I think I might actually have a way to contribute to the knowledge sharing your show is all about. In the episode, the topic of suicide was brought a few times. I thought it'd be worthwhile to share some of the most updated guidelines to how to most safely talk about suicide. So he says this, use preferred language that is died by suicide or took his or her own

life, don't say committed suicide. Because the idea there is, if I remember correctly from another email is that committed indicates that it is a crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Isn't that right? Yeah, from what I remember. And, you know, apologies for saying this, it's one of those things is so ingrained as how you say it, committed suicide, that it's just hard to retrain my brain.

Yeah, saying died by suicide, it's tough, but I mean, we can retrain ourselves to say that. Yeah, and we're trying to. He said also exclude details about method, location, notes or photos from the scene. And then finally, don't try to guess or infer the cause of suicide. Simply indicate that suicide is always caused by multiple factors. Yeah, good points. Yeah, those are all really good points. And I learned from reading this.

So he said he thought he passed along, not as a critique, but rather as a way to share information with two people who constantly seem to be doing whatever good they can. Thanks, guys. That is from Jared. Thanks, Jared. That was very nice of you. It sure was. And I got the impression from his email and if not his from another person who wrote in

to say very similar things, that the point of all that is to not help any contagiousness that it has. Sure. Because apparently it's very contagious. We need to do an episode on that, but now I'm scared to death about saying the wrong things. Yeah, agreed, but you know, we'll tackle it. Okay, so in the meantime, if you, what was his name, Jared? Jared.

Jared, thanks again. In the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, I'm at Josh on Clark on Twitter and on Instagram, and Chuck is all over Facebook these days. He's at Movie Crush Pod. He's at Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He is at Stuff You Should Know, right? Isn't that the official one? Correct, sir.

And then you can send us all an email, including Jerry to StuffPodcast.HowStuffWorks.com, and always just go visit us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.