Taskmaster The Podcast - News From Nowhere

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

We're back with a "scifi" story by an old school anarchist named William Morris; the 3rd in our series about utopias. The plot is thin, but the politics are heavy in his description of a post-revolution anarchist England. We talk youth liberation, family abolition, and of course, work abolition. Sorry Darius is inside a tin can again, it'll be fixed for the next one!patreon.com/swordsandsocialismFollow the show @SwordsNSocPodEmail us at [e-mail]: @Himbo_AnarchistKetho: @StupidPuma69 patreon.com/swordsandsocialismEmail: [e-mail] The Show: @SwordsNSocPodAsha: @Herbo_AnarchistKetho: @MusicalPuma69

he's been reading the dispossessed and then sending me his thoughts as he's going through, because it's his first time reading it. Um, and there are some things in there now that I know if I went back and read, I'd be like, Oh, I actually kind of disagree with like when,

um, and like, yeah, yeah. Like, like I forgot that a Norris is like centrally planned by a computer. Um, I forgot it.

I forgot it's a big computer. They do the big computer. I forgot Liquid was a big computer. And I forgot... Which is something that News From Nowhere doesn't even... Yeah. They haven't invented the big computer yet. Yeah, I was about to say that.

But also, there are things from here, from News From Nowhere, that I still think are better than a lot of the things you hear now there are certain concepts that i think well there are certain concepts that i think are easier for someone in 1900s i mean the 1800s to wrap it around not because right now of how much technology has advanced and how reliant we've gotten on it and how much factory and like industrial stuff is necessary to maintain that. And then being incapable of understanding that the world operated and could operate and did operate very differently 50, 60 years ago even.

But especially 100 years ago. Bro. Are you fucking real, man? Come on. By the way, welcome everyone back to the podcast. We're talking, this is Sword, Sorcery, and Socialism. We talk about politics and themes in your genre fiction. Yeah, we got a little bit of a cold open here. Cold open. I'm Darius, as always, this is my co-host, Ketho.

How's it going, Ketho? It's going pretty good. go both ways uh i'm darius as always as my co-host katho how's it going katho that's going pretty good so today uh we're talking about uh a story from 1890 called news from nowhere by a socialist pioneer by the name of william morris now he was in england in the late 1800s he was part of what the Socialist League or whatever they called themselves. A lot of crotchety old fucks hung out and talked about the revolution. Yeah, it's also important to note he was an acquaintance. He was a friend of Kropotkin's and was also an acquaintance of Goldman's.

And like they all knew each other. All these are all the old anarchists from like the late 1800s. And what did he do? He was like a textile... He was a textile guy, designer, and then he did this writing occasionally, originally for the journal Commonweal. This came out in parts. It's called News From Nowhere.

Now, I want to... Aside from the cold open, I want to get off the bat and say, this counts as soft science fiction. The word soft, that's a load-bearing word. Because the only science fiction in this story is the expediency of the main character falls asleep and wakes up in the future. That's it. Yeah, that's the most science fiction-y thing about it.

That's the only science fiction fictiony thing about it that's the only science that's the only science fiction you think about honestly the fiction here is that he's woken up in an anarchist future yeah but honestly if you think about it the the way that the story is presented is more like a religious vision than it is a science fiction transportation through time yeah because he falls asleep and he explicitly says he has a dream of the future. I mean, I think that was kind of intentional. He was trying to reach a more, you know. I really think he just wanted his audience.

I think he was just trying to give his specific anarchist vision of the post-revolution and simply chose to do it through the frame of a story instead of just writing a dry political text. Yeah, this way more people would pick it up and read it. Because honestly, even just tagging something as fiction makes people more likely to read it. I don't know if that was true in like 1890. I mean, I guess that's true. It's very different now.

But I mean but even if you're thinking maybe not science fiction or fantasy but i mean books like uncle tom's cabin were really big in like the 1850s um so it's like there were popular fiction novels popular novels at the time i mean even if even if stuff is a little bit exaggerated about Uncle Tom's Cabin, I know that there were definitely some people who were swayed to be abolitionists by that book. in which this is a post-revolutionary world, about 200 years post-revolution in this anarchist future, right? Like that's what it is. It's in England, of course, because that's where all these guys lived.

If you don't know all the boroughs of London, you're going to have a rough time because he expects that you know every little borough and every little village and every location within the city of london which i don't so that makes my directionality a little weird because i don't care yeah it's also not really that important it's it's not this though is you know this is gonna be an comparison. But in the way that Starship Troopers was a vehicle for whatever the hell his name was. Heinlein. Heinlein to have professors just spout his political views directly at you unfiltered.

That's what Morris is doing here. But the vehicle is the people that the narrator talks to yeah they essentially end up to me feeling like Socratic dialogues where you know they talk to old Hammond

the old guy the one guy who remembers the past right the one guy who's a historian and remembers what the life was like before the revolution. Because one of the ongoing themes that people have had such good lives for so many years that nobody remembers what it's like to have life suck. And so one of the ongoing, what I want to call it, bits or gags from this book

is the narrator trying to pay for things. And then everyone being very confused about the fact that he wants to pay for things. Oh yeah. Everyone being very confused about the fact that he wants to pay for things. And they're like, you know, it's very much the, the,

you know, the black Panther meme of we don't do that here. Yeah. Someone they'll pick the, they even the first time he does it. He's like, Oh, those coins are,

those are from like, what? Like the, like Elizabeth, a Victorian era. Edwardian. Is it Victorian era? Okay.

We're going to put those, you might be able to find a museum that'll take them. And it's like, but it is kind of funny. The one little bit that makes you think, Oh, maybe he's traveled through time before he mentioned, I mean,

the, his coins have like oxidized in his pocket. Yeah. Which is pretty funny. Side note. Was it, was that a real job that existed at one point in england was the guy on the boat who would just put you out into the river so you could swim and then put you back to

the shore was that an actual job was that a guy i don't fucking know man go back in time and be the boat guy would you really do would you really want to do that for a bunch of like it would be but like 65 year old crotchety old man taking off their clothes and jumping in the filthy ass thames it's like he even he even points that out he's like wow the thames is so clear today and and the guy's like what are you talking about like it's always every day but the guy's like the guy's like i didn't realize you could have salmon in the thames and the guy's like why wouldn't you well because in 1890 you didn't have anything in the thames besides raw sewage yeah it's like it like fucking london 1890 was disgusting um like that's also one of the main themes is that london looks nice now uh because they got rid of industry yeah i like

like the the thing is though, it's like London is a particularly fun place to have that thought experiment with because like people think of like, Oh, civilization. And then look at like native Americans are like, Oh, primitives.

And then they look at when you actually look at like their, their like waste disposal systems. So much better they weren't just better they were like centuries ahead of what everyone in london was just dumping their sewage directly into the river it's like is it a wonder why cholera never happened in in the u in the like in the americas until the fucking europeans didn't shit directly into the village well yeah because they were fucking idiots so people be like people be fucking europeans didn't shit directly into the village well yeah because they were fucking idiots so people be like people be like europeans are the smartest people

no they're fucking dumbasses they drank poop water and they were like how are we getting sick so the narrator wakes up in the future hangs out with cool boat guy yeah let you go swimming cool boat Guy is really chill, too, for somebody who's being really fucking weird. Chill Boat Guy becomes the handler of the main character for the rest of the story.

He just takes him places so he can see things. He's like, I feel unfair taking you from your thing. I can't pay you. And he's like, I'm just going to like, I got a friend who wants to do what I've been doing the past couple of days. Cause he's just sick of sitting inside and doing math. And it's like, why, what the fuck?

He's like, yeah, he likes weaving and doing math, but that's inside stuff. So he's just going to come out today and he can just write a note. So yeah, to get the rest of the sort of frame narrative out of way he then essentially of it it exists as a way for the narrator to be like i see a thing i'm confused by and then someone else around him will explain how it works and they get to do this fun thing of morris the author is doing that thing that fiction books often get to do where it's like, man, wouldn't it be real fucked up if people had to live in slums and work at jobs they hated?

That would be really shitty, wouldn't it? I love that kind of direct commentary on the current state of things. It is literally direct commentary on the state, but displaced into the future and having people in the future be like, I couldn't possibly imagine how barbaric it would be for prisons to exist. Yeah, freaking William Morris school abolitionist over here as well. Yeah, so I wanted to get the frame narrative out of the way because that's basically what happens. He goes and talks to people. He learns things. There's no real more plot to it than that he literally just travels around and looks at stuff and talks to people that that's it there's no more plot there's more plot in like a c-spot run book

i'll be honest with you oh yeah what this book is for is just morris laying out his political vision of the future what utopia for him would be which is partly why we included it in this sort of run of three episodes about possible utopias the main key is to take away from his utopia prison abolition school abolition abolition of law generally yeah i mean there's no government uh women's lib entire entire liberation of women's women's lib from a weird 1890s pre-feminist perspective it is women's liberation it is it is it is it's weird and it's framed in a way that makes you think that morris like that would not be okay today yeah but i but i do give him a little bit of that because in 1890 this would have been

the most progressive thing anyone had ever heard yeah this is the fact that you could just walk out of relationships with no consequences yeah there's no divorce court because no one owned anything so he so he does make some let's focus on that for a minute because his opinions on women are the ones that come off the weirdest the other ones if you're familiar at all with general anarchist theory a lot of them make sense obviously prison abolition you shouldn't have prisons and there's a whole diatribe about why you don't need prisons because you by eliminating private property you've eliminated the conditions from which most crime arises yadaada. He does still mention that like crimes of love and passion still happen, which I mean,

I think is, I guess that makes sense. Fair. Like people are still going to get occasionally get jealous of like interpersonal for interpersonal reasons. He still, he still has the same, I don't know,

weird, weird relationship with punishment. Like, like the way he did, the way he talks about criminals, I don't know, weird relationship with punishment. Like the way he talks about criminals. Well, it's like a mental disease. Yeah. Well, psychology was just becoming a big deal around that time. Like Freud was just like.

Yes. I mean, so they frame criminals as having like a momentary mental illness is the reason why you would do a crime, which is a little weird. It's a little weird, a little, yeah. that basically in and of itself also abolishes the institution of like legal contractual marriage because marriage is predicated on the man's ownership of the woman which is true right like that's that that's true and in his world people enter and exit relationships freely with no social repercussions or legal repercussions because there can't be legal repercussions. There's no legality. Like the boatman he hangs out with the whole time, Dick. I think that's his name.

Is he Dick Hammond? Yeah, it's Richard Hammond, like the guy from Top Gear. So Dick and his wife were together, had a couple kids. The wife kind of got a thing for somebody else left didn't work out and eventually comes back they get back together and it's fine no one's weird about it um and but they talk about sort of like women's role in society with like the jobs they do because everyone's technically free to do any job that their heart desires. Because one of his main thrusts is that work doesn't suck anymore because people only do things that they want to do.

It just so happens that in his future, lots of people still want to do manual labor. But I will get into that a little bit later because I have some thoughts on that. But in his world where women are liberated the women still seem to be doing a lot of housekeeping yeah they still seem to do a lot of household jobs a lot of serving a lot of um a lot of running shops a lot of picking vegetables a lot of cooking breakfast a lot of washing clothes he sort of explains it by being like well because they're everyone's free

to do whatever they want now people can do housework because they take joy in doing housework not because they're paid to do it it just so happens that most of the people that take joy in doing housework are still women yeah i think there's there's like a funny thing about that that he's almost unintentionally revealing a what i think is kind of a fundamental truth about all this is that it's like you can't not everything is reliant on just class division not like not everything is just going to be solved by materially it's not getting us to communism. Like modern materialism. Yeah, so it's like –

There's also gender and class. Yeah, there's this still – even without – even in this story, without the presence of class, there's still this belief that people will settle into predetermined, almost predetermined biological roles. The women will tend to do more housework that certain guys will gravitate towards doing certain things that it's like that still doesn't understand how socially constructed all of that is um it doesn't take the next step that like the like women doing housework and men doing manual labor as a hierarchical construct is older than capitalism. Yeah. And compare this to something. I mean, we're going to get into more of this sort of thing later, I think.

this even to something like the dispossessed or something where you have a big computer big computer is picking assignments for people but it's not picking anything for people based on gender or anything it's like women are just as likely to be assigned to manual labor as men are she still has some weird 1970s not really hasn't really read a ton of feminist literature yet ideas in that book but they're not quite as um not quite as uh old-fashioned as this one where there's still there's still a and i a degree of biological essentialism that isn't as accepted now i think i mean it's a very post-modern thing honestly. Yeah, but when it comes to women, he says a lot of good things. His world has a lot of good things in it. It's just that you can tell that none of – I won't say none because then somebody on Twitter will pull up somebody who wrote a pamphlet in 1870.

Generally, even the anarchists at this time, who besides Goldman were mostly dudes, hadn't made that like theoretical step yet. Oh, yeah. Like to the fact that like child rearing and housework are more than just class capitalism. are more than just class capitalism. It wasn't that like, Oh, women used to clean houses for money. Now women clean houses because they like it. It's like,

you need to examine, like they hadn't moved on to examining the fact that women clean houses. Cause it's the only work that we let them do. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like it's, and it's like, you could say that that,

like that bias existed back time. Yeah, like it's and it's like you could say that that like that bias existed back then. I almost feel like it still kind of exists even within. And it's a lot of work to push back against. But I remember when there was that splitting up of was that Rose was that Black Rose in Portland that split that a bunch of women left the group because they felt like they were being essentially ignored and passed up in meetings for the dudes in the group. And this is ostensibly an anarchist group in 2020. It's almost like patriarchy extends beyond capitalism. Yeah. So it's like it's it's like even outside.

non-capitalism yeah so it's like it's it's like even outside and then you could talk about you know any given ml project just to make it and and it's like that's fucking it's like you'll get an occasional person like lenin who'll be like women sure cool yeah and then the next thing i'll come along and be like women no bad no uh and we need to be at home making more babies for the motherland man i you know i don't want to tick anyone off. Maybe Stalin, who had a 14-year-old wife, would probably have an intense reason to think that women shouldn't be in a position of power.

If we have Stalinist listeners at this point... Yeah, we don't. I know we don't. It's pretty amazing. I'm not actually worried about ticking anybody off. I think it's honestly more likely that we have trad cath listeners than we do stalinists well based on some of the subject they might click on an episode yes um also speaking of which i'm gonna change something real quick there is also kind of a lot of crossover between william morris's ideal society

and our last episode and jr tolkien's ideal society yes there there is a there is a hobbit-esque shire-esque feeling to this place minus the gentry remove the landlords from the equation news from nowhere's england is what most people think the shire is right because there's last episode about how what people most people think the shire is like before you think about the politics and the landlords that's just what news from nowhere's england is yeah well here's the thing's like when you're, when you're looking at what, if you remove the land of gentry from the Shire and you just look at it from a material perspective of like, what is it?

And then you can, like, I've read most of the big stuff from Kropotkin around that time. And it around like the 1880s and, and the 1890s. And what William Morris is talking about is pretty much the stuff that kropotkin was talking about and there's there's this something that kropotkin was really big about was the removal of the separation of labor of the division of labor and a removal of the

separation between city like urban and rural like the urban rural divide not really existing anymore. And that's what this is. That's what the Shire is to an extent. There are cities in the Shire, but they're not like cities. They're not cities. They're not like, they're not, they're not cities. And even the bigger ones,

like, even if you went as far as like the most human that you're getting nearby is like Brie. Yeah. But even then it's like the urban rural divide still is not really there. The only urban, really urban people is like, is gone.

Is butter. Well, even in like, in like Brie would be like Butterbur, the innkeeper because he lives in town and keeps the inn right but it's like um but so like news from nowhere's world aside from even like the politics of it just the aesthetics of it like you well yeah they were drawing they were drawing on similar things you can put to. You could put Tolkien in the news from nowhere's world.

He'd be perfectly happy. He just, from Tolkien's perspective, I assume that he just did not think it was possible. I mean, I personally think that's why most people don't... Go for it. Go for it, because they don't think it's possible. But if you do the thought experiment we do,'re like would you go live here yeah like tolkien would 100 percent like the professor would 100 go live in nowhere it's everything he could ever want i i want to bet that he's probably read this he probably fucking dead it came out in 1890 yeah this this goes back to what um

elias was talking about yeah about how tolkien absolutely read william morris and just never really acknowledged it um but like probably i mean probably because william morris is pretty radical for like an anarchist, especially, especially for a trad cath for the most part, like someone who was at the very least a devout Catholic. Yeah. To be like, oh yes, this very open,

very public anarchist and friend of Peter Kropotkin. But deeply influenced me. But so the, but like both of them, morris and tolkien they have a similar look back look look back to like the 1300s as like the time you should be drawing pace of life and aesthetic pleasure from. Because in nowhere... They're wearing 14th century. Everyone has memory hold,

like the 18th and particularly the 19th. The 19th century hadn't happened yet. This was 1890. I'm stupid. Well, the 19th century was happening. That's the 19th century that was happening. So in nowhere, the residents of Future Utopia have completely memory-holed the 19th century and the 17th. Because within their world, that was the time of bad stuff, right? That was the time of oppression.

That was the time of suffering. They also reference that feudalism was bad, but they don't talk about it being bad the same way a medievalist like tolkien would do yeah i get the 1300s the peasants had more free time well i mean morris in essence was a medievalist in a literary sense where like the whole reason he came up with fake worlds where he came up with you know totally imagined worlds was to be able to write romantic fiction a la uh you know more to arthur or something but in without having to adhere to like the world that we were in yeah like like you can even tell from the way he writes this he was a romantic writer i like i'm looking at i'm looking at the archive well the internet archive scan of

news from nowhere and it's got those very traditional classic flowery like first letters of each chapter oh the big fancy fairy tale. The first page of the book of chapter one has like an incredibly flowery border around the whole thing. There's only like a quarter page of writing on it because the border and the big letters take up half the page because like, this is what, this is the sort of thing he wrote. The sort of style he was going for

was very like arthurian um you know it was very romantic romantic medieval literature if looking at going from looking at descriptions of morris from like wikipedia and other places he's described as fusing marxism and the tradition, presenting himself as an enchanted figure in a time and place different as Morris, the romance character, because it's very much a romantic vision. And Morris, I mean,

it's important. I think that we find out the whole Marxist with romanticism because Morris never actually self-described as a, as an anarchist. Never. He called himself a socialist he called himself a libertarian socialist specifically so even though he was like bffs with freaking kapokkin and kapokkin was like i am an anarchist also back then libertarian socialist i know i

know basically the same thing i know but he but he expressly did not accept the label yeah well as anarchist fuck you i'm labeling at you in poster i mean he is he is but it's like but from his perspective he wasn't so it's like which is bizarre given the fact that this is a place with essentially no government uh other than people willingly just getting together to decide stuff and then i mean even criticizes democracy within the book which is which is great because that's even a thing that people are still arguing about now because anarchists have been arguing about it since the dawn of anarchism and will continue to argue about it until the heat death of the universe yes as to what constitutes even if as whether it constitutes democracy and if it does

whether that's good or bad even if communism is truly achieved luxury gay space space communism is achieved that'll still be the argument of the day always is it democracy and if it is

are we deciding is this a majority minority thing or either i'm like when he describes the process he their decision making process he talks about the fact that for big decisions everybody gets together and talks about it and if there's a a dissenting group they have a second meeting where they try to figure out the differences and if they're still dissenting group they have a third meeting and by the fourth meeting they're like look do we have to override you or not and then and then they're like listen if we're like building a bridge the people who disagree just don't work on the bridge they just go home and they don't work on the bridge yeah like um you don't you

don't have to and i guess from a from a perspective of infrastructure sort of stuff, that kind of makes sense. Because it's like, if you're thinking about a world where people don't own anything, where people don't possess anything, it's like, if you don't possess the house on this side of the street that's going to get demolished when they build this bridge, are you really going to care that much

if you can literally just pick up your stuff and oh look i'll get another one when you weren't even living permanently in a single location anyways yeah but like are you really going to care if they tear that one down is that decision making process democracy don't ask me i don't know i'm not going to talk about it other things in this book are still what i would call uh surprisingly sort of to the point accurate for things that you'll hear anarchist talking about today like his views on education like just letting kids learn they don't believe in school at all they don't believe in it but he's actually actually kind of speaks to my heart when he's like we don't want kids reading too much from their little fucks them up we don't believe in it. He actually kind of speaks to my heart when he's like, we don't want kids reading too much when they're little.

Fucks them up. We don't let them read books until they're 14. What is her name? Like Ellen or Eileen? Ellen. She eventually at one point says that people have so much free time and things are so good that people don't need books as much. Which I think is funny.

I think it's almost like a joke coming from the author where he's like we write about depressing shit because that's what's in the world it's an ongoing thing where all the they talk about the fact that authors writing all these books were writing books because life sucked yeah it's like so when life is good you don't really have to write all this shit that drama in a story comes from things being bad. That's sort of an authorial sort of assertion there, that a good story comes from drama, and drama comes from things being shit. So in a world where nothing's shit,

there's nothing interesting to write about. Well, yeah. It's also funny because this story itself is an example of a story not having drama and still being written and passed out. The drama in this story to me would be metatextual in that it's a reference to how shit life is when he's writing it in the real world. So it's like everything is relative to the struggle yeah but like they don't like kids don't read when they're little because they think it fucks them up and kids it's like kids you know like when they're really young they don't do a lot of like you know mathematics and stuff but it's like not a lot of people like doing that so why would they i did one of the points he made that I did really enjoy was when, because the main character is used as like the foil where he gets to be the contrarian, right?

Like that's his role. He shows up and goes, well, what about school? What about math? And then the characters within the world of nowhere get to like refute his stupid points. Like that's the structure of the book. And so he'll be like, well, what about people learning math? Shouldn't kids know how to do math? And the guy's old Hammond will be talking to him,

and he's like, okay, did you have to learn math when you were a kid? Yes. Do you remember any of it? No. Okay, then you clearly didn't need to learn math. Was I forced to learn calculus? Yes. Do I remember any of it? No. It's like the important stuff for math, like basic algebra, you'll learn because you'll need to use it so yeah his whole thing is that children learn by doing like children will literally children will just run off to the woods together and like

hang out and like learn how to like ride ponies and build fires and like do shit in the woods together and he's like i can just come out here and hang out and then like at a certain point they start doing whichever i'll call it a job but for them they don't call them jobs just doing whatever labor to use like sort of the old socialist term yeah whatever labor appeals to them so if a kid is like i don't know i kind of want to build a road then that kid will go hang out with the road builders for a little while if the kid's like i think clothes are cool the kid will go hang out with clothes tailors tailors there we go yeah that's the word seamstresses and tailors

seamsters seamstresses to uh i don't know yeah but you know what he goes out the kid will go and hang out with them for a little while. And so this version of education that Morse proposes is one that is still controversial today because of the idea that children do not need to be directly taught things. They will pick up the things they need throughout the course of their life and needing to do them. Hey, listen, as long as all this like freaking information is just publicly available it's like it's like people figure

like like you could you could someone could probably make come along make the arguments like oh well what about like sciencey stuff that's like kind of important to knowing like a model of the universe you know you know i mean where someone's like oh look the earth is round it's like but but but i'm gonna be but i'm gonna be honest with you even with this we still have people who think the earth is flat we still have people think the earth is flat and as long as the information is made publicly available anyone can figure that out at any time whenever they feel like it more information available to us now at my favorite tip this episode than any person in history before the year 1995 yeah i have more available to me right now than the collected total knowledge of all humans before the invention of

the internet and there are still more people out here now that think the earth is flat than there were 20 years ago there are more people now that think the earth is flat than like 200 years ago yes there's no point the ancient the ancient greeks knew the earth was round some guy in egypt was measuring shadows from obelisks and yeah it was like oh of curves. It seems to be circular. So, like, the idea... Somebody made a really, really, really close estimate of the circumference. That was that guy. It was that Greek guy in Egypt that, like, was using the shadows of obelisks to measure the sun's path and did, like, a circumference of the Earth. It was, like, closer than anyone would be until we had satellites or something.

Yeah. was like closer than anyone would be until we had satellites or something yeah it was like and it was still pretty close for like measuring off of what's essentially a shadow and like a freaking compass yeah so the point being that like you dear listener can see where we fall on this issue that he's right about this i think kids should be free just hang out and do shit freaking listen this is the thing that i find so funny it's like people now even some like i feel like even some anarchists are like what is this youth liberation what is this nonsense i'm like bro you guys haven't i don't i mean what do you want a liberation for bedtimes it's exactly it's like when you when you sit down and think about it it's like it's like before like people had to wake up in the morning at a certain time

did bedtimes exist for anyone it's like no no they didn't that leads into another thing that more it's just went to fucking sleep when they felt like it yeah and their parents like yeah you go go to bed because you didn't have to be up in the morning yeah so it leads me to another thing that morris i think is still generally on the right track on here along with children education is like more or less not really family abolition but sort of but not really i mean it kind of it's kind of the... It still sort of focuses on a family unit, but the family unit is no longer rigid. Oh, yeah.

I think that's honestly the only thing that people like Marks really meant. Yeah, so the thing we have here is that you have Dick and Clara who were married, had a couple kids. Then they broke up. The kids just went and lived with an aunt or a grandma or something. They went to one of Old Hammond's sisters. Old Hammond, I'm assuming, is Dick's father, I think.

I think it's his great-great great great grandfather so i don't remember he's like he's old and that's that's that's one of the like weird little hidden things in this oh and everyone yeah they do some okay yeah side note they does some weird thing where like when people get to live for fun uh suddenly everyone starts living to like 150. Unironically, I feel like these fans would increase. Not that much, but they would increase. Well, yeah. But this guy says that people have passed Methuselah

in this nowhere world. Yeah, it's like he mentions that he's like 54 and everyone's like, what the hell? You look way older than 54. Everyone basically goes, what the hell? You look way older than 54. Everyone basically goes, you're 54? You look like shit. Yeah. You look like shit.

And he talks about how hot some lady is and finds out she's like 80. And he's like, oh. Anyway, the family set up, those kids just go to live with one of old Hammond's nieces or sisters or something. And that's it. Like, it's not a big deal. He just goes, yeah,

I handled it. Cause that's what you do. And then if I thought, I assumed these two would get back together when they do, the kids will come back. That's just how it is. But also no family is held together by any force at all. And so it's understood in the book that children can also just leave their

family if they want to. Yeah. I mean, that's communal. The kids can just kind of fuck off if they don't like their parents for some reason. I mean, and the community just kind of collectively raises an eye on them. So that's exactly, I mean, because at the end of the day, humans still do make like, they don't make necessarily monogamous relationships with one another but like there's still plenty of evidence that goes back a long time that like two people

will have a kid will have kids the group everybody will help raise them but you know it's still like their kids their kids you know it's like this is this is the nightmare scenario for um Heinlein because there's just a group of children in the woods unsupervised yeah like no one's beating the shit out of them beating the shit out of these kids and so Heinlein would believe that these kids would then go on to immediately just like murder and assault any random person they can cross where morris is like yeah they're in the woods learning what plants are so they're gonna grow up to be happy well-adjusted adults i think the only thing i would be concerned about with kids running around it would be either a wild animals or b poisonous plants the poisonous plants are injury um yeah well if they're with a group i guess the kids

won't like leave them behind but yeah but still um and there also are like they're never that far from because again talking about that uh removal of the divide between urban and rural even out in the woods you could it's never that far from a house where there's an adult. Like, even in the woods. So he's cool on school abolition. He's pretty cool on family abolition. I want to talk about, I think the last thing, maybe the last thing. I always say it's the last thing, and then we talk for like another 30 minutes.

That's just how we roll. One of the main things I want to focus on then is I think the main focus of the book, which is work. Oh, yeah. All these other things are in here but the main focus of the book is work which i think is reflective of the fact that that was the main focus of every socialist anarchist communist well yeah even i mean even in this it's like this is explicitly something that came about post-proletarian revolution. Like it says explicitly post-proletarian. Old Yemen goes on a whole rant about like multiple chapters.

It's very long. Yes, it's very long. There is one very funny gaffe where he's like, it's like, is there politics? And he's like, there are no politics. And like the chapter is really short. It's like, is there politics? And he's like, there are no politics. And the chapter's really short.

And he's like, he goes, if you're to ever write a book, just write that there are no politics. And then he just says, okay, I will. And then the chapter ends. Then he goes on to the next topic. Yeah, and it's like actually a direct reference because he says, after the model of old Horobo's snakes in iceland um the answer is there are no snakes in iceland yeah where there's like there's a book the natural history of iceland by neil's horobo published in 1752 um the book was famous for having a chapter about snakes consisting of

only one sentence which stated that no snakes of any kind exist in iceland and then it was over yeah so he does that except for politics he's like no politics of any kind exist in england um so let's talk about work god don't i wish yeah um let's talk about work so we mentioned earlier that he focuses a lot on he basically is on a lot of the same wavelength as Santa Claus, as Peter. Yes. He's very Kropotkin-ite. I want to call it a mostly agrarian form of socialist laboring, socialist society. This is something a vulgar materialist would call too peasant aligned. No, it's too peasant aligned. It's also just too utopian. It's a little. I mean.

In part as a direct response to a different book. The other book being Looking Backward, which sort of epitomized the views of state socialism. That we would know would go on to be the sort of Bolshevik deal. Right? This is a libertarian socialist response to state socialism this is early early on in the movement the infighting between before anyone had been before anyone had been uh significantly successful on any front yeah they were already fighting about whether you should use the state or abolish the state yeah post post marx um socialist argumentation really so post first international scenarios so this is a response and one of the main things he talks about a lot is he's countering the argument that without

coercion no one will do any work. That's what he's talking about. The abolition of work. He said the first step is to, once you've had your revolution, is you have to create a thing called an anti-work subreddit. I'm just kidding. That's your first step. Yeah, do that and then show up on Fox news uh create an anti-work subreddit

then have a division to a reform work subreddit then call for a general strike every six weeks um no so it's about why he believes that labor i'm gonna going to say generally I'm using the most generic definition of the word labor. Why, how any of that would be accomplished. Basically the idea of things being done. And in that it's through the framework of this sort of Kropotkin ask idea that in order for stuff to be done,

sotkin-esque idea that in order for stuff to be done what you do is you remove the division between work and life and art or passion i mean even even marx makes that argument which is why it's so funny to me but yeah yeah so but it's the idea that like, yeah, I mean, Marx does make it the idea that work becomes pleasurable because it's no longer work. Like, I think a lot of, I'll call them internet based arguments, fail because people have different definitions of what work is. Is work a task that I must go complete because it is necessary and if I don't accomplish it, bad things will happen? Or is work the physical act of doing a thing? Yeah.

Like if I'm planting my garden in the backyard, the big internet divide is whether that's work or not, right? Well, I mean it's really funny to me that there's a big internet divide because this is the work or not well i mean it's it's really funny to me that there's a big internet divide because this is the sort of thing that i feel like that this is the sort of thing where if if anyone's read any theory they they look at these arguments and they beat their head against a wall repeatedly because that's not for reading i i know but it's just like it's like literally reading just a little bit of marks because because the initial concept for his labor and work was that you know labor is more complex but you know labor is is any like any meaningful activity that produces something and work is coerced labor explicitly like the only solid definition in the marxist

i'm sure there's other like expansions on it but the core is what work is coerced labor so whenever someone says they're anti-work and then someone comes in it's like you think they would just go no people will do nothing and i'm, it's being against the coercion, not the doing the thing. Well, they're not abolishing work. They're just abolishing the hierarchy above work. Work is only work because there's coercion. Yeah, that's all the other reason it's called work at all. So I know we're getting into the weeds here of like stupid internet arguments.

We need to because this – This is essentially the 1890s version of that. This 1890s version of it because what he's saying is these abolished work. Nobody has a job. No one has a big J-O-B job. Now there are – people do tend to say I will do this thing for six weeks or three months. I will do this task because that is what I feel like doing. The key being that at basically any point that can go, I've had enough of doing this task. I will simply go do a different one. And that's the key is that it's not, you know,

our main sidekick is the weird boat guy who lets you go, who takes you out swimming for your morning bath in the Thames. But, like, immediately it's just like, no, I can quit because it's not a job. It's just a thing that society has decided somebody could do that makes life generally better for everybody else so if there's somebody else around someone around who wants to do it that's neat but like nobody would get in trouble and society wouldn't stop functioning if nobody showed up for it same thing with like the people building the roads it's generally described that like people essentially just take turns and not because anyone tells them to but because there's like i've been working in an

in a inside a building for six months i'd like to i'd like to go do a little physical labor so i'm gonna go do build a road for a few well it's like the example I give of like, I don't know, of mutual aid and benefit in a scenario like this is like, say you're in a community and you gather together and you're like, okay, we need clean water. We need clean water to drink. And everyone there is like, yeah, yeah, we need clean water. And they're like, we should build the like water filtration system

and they're like yeah yeah we should do that and it's like if you have nothing else to do like literally if you don't have a job if you don't have to work at something else if you know that the thing you're about to go build is going to benefit you and your family and your friends and your community directly. You're going to be ten times more. Willing to god damn do that. Morris says. That in nowhere.

There are certain things. That society no longer has. Because they decided. That the labor. Required to make it happen. Wasn't worth it yeah he doesn't he doesn't say exactly what any of those things are it's like people i'm assuming it's people can agree i'm assuming it's electricity yeah if people can like agree that oh we need something for the community

and the community will work together to do it like the the fact the matter is we've progressed enough with technology that people know what it's like to have these things they will work together to have these things if no one was pointing a gun at their head telling them to do it but the funny thing is is we would do it a lot safer like people be like oh but who's gonna go up on a skyscraper with the thing i'm like the solution is there would probably be no skyscrapers because no one would because no one would do something that the only reason anyone does something that fucking stupid useless and dangerous is because is coercion it's like so it's like the point is we shouldn't have to do that well that's his point is that there are certain things that society gave up because the cost of doing them was more than the value you got yeah not doing them yeah it's like it it's like a lot of times and if they still really need the thing that you get by doing the dangerous

they find a safer fucking way to do it they find it slower safer it's like the whole reason a lot of these safety things get bypassed that safety rules have to be put in place at all is because these companies have to cut corners have to in quotation marks they don't have to they is that they cut corners to save money so it's like it's like they don't come up with safer ways to do it because it's more expensive to do it but if you don't if you're not being coerced to do you'll just make it safer because there's no money it's what the fuck yeah it's all it's all just so self-evident once you lay it out and people are still like oh no my so what morris is arguing for here and saying is that like i mean sometimes some people want to make clothes and so you just go do that until you don't want to anymore.

And then maybe you do math for a little while. I don't know exactly what the math guy's doing. He just does math for a while. Then he's like, I'm tired of doing math. I want to be the boat guy. I'll be boat guy for a while. And that's even shit that Mark's like, your boy Mark's talked about. Like, oh man, I'm going to make stuff this day and the next day I'm going to go fucking fishing.

I'm going to go sit out there and fish and I'm going to read a book. Talk about like, Morris goes on for a while about shopkeepers. Because it does get in some weird areas about how like basically the children of the rich used to be afflicted with the disease of laziness and how like essentially they had to be shopkeepers for a while because they were genetically too lazy to do any actual work yeah i mean that's a little weird but it also falls into like like i don't know it falls into the whole like also doing crime is a mental disease that you can yeah temporarily afflicted with it's it's a little bit real 1800 shit it's it's a little

bit that and it's also something that's less common anarchists now but something that's still extremely common um in mls is like a hyper valorization of the proletariat um like believing that they're just morally superior and it's like bro if you took any random proletarian and smacked him in a position as the bourgeois they would act the same as the bourgeois like that's the whole point that's the whole point of materialism yeah is that it's that you're it's your material reality that determines your behavior that's marxism and and yet people will still hyper valorize the proletariat to the port where they don't understand like if you change the material conditions that the bourgeois was living in they would cease to act like the bourgeois after a while yeah and this so he does

do a little bit of that like the bourgeois needed like two generations to learn how to do work it's like it would take significantly less than two generations you can do it in like a year yeah well if they wouldn't be able to survive if they didn't do it yeah yeah you could do it pretty quick they would do it really quick i've learned a lot of jobs in less time than that. But like, so that's a little weird, but it's very much like shopkeepers are this weird position where he's like, well, cause he kind of has to work around that.

They still do exchange things. Like people still need to go to a shop and get things they need, but no one's exchanging money. And it's not even a, it's not even a barter system. It's a gift system. I think would be the technical definition. This is a straight-up gift economy.

It's a straight-up gift economy because you don't go to the market and say, here are the chickens I raised. Can I have some tobacco, please? Well, thankfully, none of that actually happened ever. You literally just go and go, I would like tobacco. And the person with the tobacco goes, here you go that's it that's the entire exchange you show up and you're like i need a new shirt and the person says here is a shirt that's it you're done now you're done there's no like well in exchange i will do this other thing for you because morse doesn't even want you to do

that. Because as soon as you are doing the, like, well, you gave me a shirt. So I fixed your fence. Suddenly you're still keeping like an internal ledger of who's done what for who.

And suddenly you're back to having balance sheets, whether there's cash attached to it or not. Like you're still sort of keeping a tally of favors or some bullshit so it is a uh is an economy entirely of gifts you do exactly whatever it is that you want and you get exactly whatever it is that you want and if you want something that nobody has you have to do it yourself or you just don't have it. One of the two. I just don't.

I like I feel like a lot of people. I don't know. I feel like a lot of people have become so attached to certain things. This is my big issue with shit like marketing. It's like how much stuff do we have that we don't need and we wouldn't want if someone had not told us to want it it's like so many people so many people are wrapped up in like oh how are we gonna get x how are we gonna get y how are we gonna get z and i'm like it's not even necessarily like oh having that sort of thing is like bad and like i'm like i hate the technology and i think i'm like crotchety

about it i'm just like i literally just think materially i just literally think that materially if you were in this scenario people wouldn't give a shit anymore and they wouldn't want it it's like you well at that point you're agreeing with morris because morris is obviously there's a lot less new age tech things that and even imagining people wouldn't watch and even if you did want it instead of being like this which is designed to break like my phone which is designed to fall apart um instead of being like a smartphone now if we still did make smartphones or some shit in in some anarchist future you would have one and it would last you 30 fucking years and you wouldn't care yeah it's like so much of what we want and what we think of as being necessities aren't necessary and we would stop caring about them one generation after they're

gone well and if somehow we were still making smartphones it would be by somebody who makes them because they enjoy the act of making a cell phone yeah or or everyone in the community is like wouldn't it be cool if we all had smartphones and everyone takes a turn at the freaking little machine that you that someone takes a turn in the fucking mine where you get the rare earth minerals you need to i mean but the thing is is again if you have to do that sort of thing people would find better ways to do it you know they don't need a smartphone that bad yeah like they they'd make the value judgment as to whether or not it's worth it to go down there and dig this up or they'll try and find out figure out a way to go dig up

those materials or get those materials without sending people into a mine it's like there are weird there's some weird research into like using bacteria to extract minerals that's really weird but it's like but it's like there's so many potentialities on how to do that and would it even be worth it if in the end you would have to send someone into a mine to go get the shit? Or would you just find a better way to do it? Would you just find a better way to do the functions of a smartphone without needing to do that? There's just so much that people get wrapped up in. How am I going to get coffee?

It's like, are you going to need coffee that bad? It's like, eventually, need coffee that bad it's like eventually i think you'll stop i mean like morris morris's utopia still has tobacco so i know but but it's like at a certain point you're just like without certain things being given to us and essentially forced on us would we want them or need them at all? And would we care if they were gone? And would it severely impact our quality of life? No, no, it really wouldn't.

And I think a lot of people just, and I think when I say this sort of thing, people are like, oh my God, you're like a primmy or some shit. And you want to go back to the dark times where we had nothing and there was no like global trade or some shit. And I that's not what i'm saying at all like any anytime i've said this sort of thing online people are like oh my god you want to like regress back to the dark

ages and i'm like guys i just want us to figure out what of this stuff we have we actually need and actually want without like being coerced into wanting it like that's all i'm saying and i think morris is agreeing with that oh it's like it's like there are things that people want and they will work together to get the things they want as long as it isn't like exceedingly dangerous and extremely difficult to do so if the value isn't worth it it's like that's that's just basic like honestly that should make an economist happy because that's basic fucking value judgment like that's that's cost benefit analysis right there like even a liberal economist should be like oh wait that makes sense I will say the one thing that still catches me and occasionally annoys me is the – and you get a lot from older text and in certain strains of communism now is that we're talking about the valorization of the proletarian labor.

I mean, Morris still does that. We're like the coolest people he finds with the guys who are like building a road yeah or the people who are like harvesting wheat they're even are presented as like they like talk shit about the guy who does math even though that's even though it's really funny because i feel like in a world like that people would just kind of like naturally rotate on shit yeah and he presents people's naturally rotating through shit but at the same time it's still like everyone talks about going out and doing physical labor as like the best part of their like rotation it's like a weird moralism of like the physical weird moralism of

that like the physical labor and browning of the skin from being in the sun while you harvest wheat is still like the best among equals of work you could be doing like he doesn't really say it but just the language he uses around it is still very much like you know man rolling up his sleeves wielding a hammer is still sort of the

idealized version of exerting effort in a work capacity. You know what I mean? And that still just annoys me personally, because I'll be honest, my ideal capacity for doing things is just not doing a lot of things. But that's just me. Otherwise, I think, again, there's no real story here.

This is just a political treatise. And we, I think we've talked about it as, as such, that this is just a political, a political treatise guys as a, the man who had a vision of the future. I'll be honest though.

You don't really need to, if you haven't read it, you don't really need to. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting as If you haven't read it, you don't really need to. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting as like as like, OK, this is the 1890s and someone wrote this. Pretty neat. You can also read the dispossessed.

Yeah. I mean, there's there are some like there's no big computer. Yeah. That's the that's the really big difference. When we eventually talk about the dispossessed, we're going to talk about the big fucking computer yeah we'll talk about the big computer there are some things as much as i love le guin there are some things of hers that i do not agree with yeah because it's like computer is one of them yeah the dispossessed an artist is still technically centrally planned yeah which news from nowhere is which nowhere is not nowhere yeah people just make it whatever

the fuck they feel like. So in a way, this is a little, yeah, I mean, it's, there are things. A little more anarchic. There are things that the dispossessed gets right that I think, gets right, whatever. That gets. That we agree with more. That we agree with more, yeah. In the dispossessed.

Which, of course, my opinions are categorically and ontologically correct, but that's my point. And everyone who disagrees is evil. Anyone who disagrees with me is ontologically wrong. Oh my God. I don't even see, like, I feel like my understanding of the word ontologically doesn't really even work in that phrase,

but I don't, I don't know if it does. I'm just using that word. Cause that's like, cause that's like the whole, like, isn't that like Descartes? I feel like that's Descartes'

ontological proof of God or whatever. I was just referencing the meme where it's like, wake up every day. I just always found that meme really funny because I was always like, does that word even work there in that position or am I just wrong about the definition of ontological?

I am the last person who will be able to answer that question for you uh so it's like i'm just because the only the only context i've heard it used in is in descartes or that meme which is like yeah so no fucking idea descartes proof of god is really really funny because it's terrible dude so many of those enlightenment thinkers were had such bad thought i mean i think i mean i think therefore holds out way better than fucking god exists because we can imagine perfection and therefore something had to be there to uh for us to be able to imagine perfection and you're like okay day cart you're smoking some crack you're doing

something to you're doing something to you're doing something to make the catholic church not kill you right now yeah you're you're like post rationalizing something for the catholic church to not hate you as much that's exactly what in my intro class that's what i literally wrote in my discussion post about it where i was like i feel like he's just doing this so the catholic church doesn't get pissed at him because it's really unconvincing. Super unconvincing. So that was it. I mean, it's just a fun little discussion

about a guy we largely agree with. He's still a little weird about women. Yeah. Still a little weird about manual labor. I mean, Kropotkin was still a little weird about women, especially also the gays. Again, if you actually look too hard at anyone yeah from before i don't know 1985 i feel like even if you just anyone just don't look too close at anyone except me my bees are all perfect yeah all perfect

like like there's i'm sure that if i dig deep enough there's evens like leguin or something i don't know i mean the grids leguin's biggest problem is that she was a pacifist well yeah well yeah there's that but i don't know i don't i don't know if that's like if that's like the sort of thing where i'm like you're just a bad person now because of that shit but no she's just wrong yeah um uh so thank you all for listening sorry it's been a bit of a gap since our last episode we've both been very busy and I have been exhausted

we should be getting a little more routine now again with our not so big a gap with the episodes shortly after this we will have a bonus episode coming out we're going to have a conversation about the recent movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

We're going to talk about the actual sci-fi of the multiverse, jumping between different worlds, the idea of endless, every decision branches off into a separate universe that exists off every decision or action that could be made. We'll talk about that. And we'll talk about sort of the two sides of nihilism. I'll have to double check my definitions because I do have some friends who will be mad at me if I get this wrong. I mean, I don't – yeah, it's nihilism and existentialism.

Nihilism and existentialism and nihilism existentialism is like the the nothing matters so it sucks and nothing matters and that's fine we'll make things matter through our actions and decisions that's like isn't that like that meme where it's like it's like nothing matters and the existentialist like i know and it's like but that's like it was a bad thing like it's a bad thing it's like it's like i've seen it's like but that's like it was a bad thing like it's a bad thing it's like it's like i've seen it as you know the bus where the guy looks is looking at the wall and the other guy is looking at the sunrise and the guy looking at the walls like nothing matters and the guy looking at the sunrise is like nothing matters that's essentially the two

viewpoints of everything everywhere all at once yeah at once. Yeah. I can't remember the, I can't remember the full meme, but that's, that's basically what it is. So we're going to have a bonus episode on our Patreon talking about that. Cause sorry, it's not a book. Then we are going to come back with our next book. This episode is going to be the followup to our most popular episode ever.

We are going to do the light. Fantastic. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. our most popular episode ever we are going to do the light fantastic yeah for those of you who sorry go ahead for those of you who are like regular listeners uh i don't know if you would ever know that the color of magic is our most popular episode by double the next episode yeah that and that that episode is like twice as popular as the episode after that. So Color of Magic by far and away is the most popular episode we've ever released. And so we figured it might be worthwhile to try and figure out why. So we're going to read.

And then we were reading some reviews and found out that a lot of people think that Color of Magic is one of the worst books in that entire series. Yeah, which we only didn't know because we're not filthy Brits. Yeah, I didn't know that because nobody in America reads Terry Pratchett. So we're going to read The Light Fantastic, which is the second book of the Discworld series, and see what that's all about. and see what that's all about. After that, we do have some fun things planned going into August and September because we're coming up on one year as a podcast,

which is neat. Besides that, thank you all for listening. Like I said, we have a Patreon if you want to listen to it. We've got a few episodes up there already and we'll have that and everything ever all at once out soon. Anything else from you, Ketho? No, no, no,

I'm good. I'm good. I think that's, that's good. Thanks for hanging out. Uh, stay cool. If you're listening to this,

when it comes out, cause you're probably in the middle of a heat wave. Like if you're, if you're one of our, uh, apparently hundreds of listeners out of the UK. Uh, if you have, if you have a stone house, stay inside, please. Yeah. If you listeners out of the uk uh if you have if you have a stone house stay

inside please yeah if you're one of the are you are apparently hundreds of listeners in the uk please don't die please don't die in the worst recorded heat wave uh ever just constantly remember it's not the hottest summer on record it's the coldest summer of the rest of your life. Yeah. Also, you're suffering in the heat. So are all the TERFs. Well, it's a noble sacrifice. Think about it that way. So all of you stay inside. Lock the TERFs outside.

Go pull Glenner out of his house and make him stand in a park. All right. You guys have a good night. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time. Goodbye! Are you fucking real man come on