Speaker 1: It could happen here. Uh, it being a number of things. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is the podcast about things falling apart and also
Speaker 1: maybe putting them back together. And assuming there's not a
Speaker 1: nuclear war in the immediate future, you will probably be
Speaker 1: hearing this episode sometime in early March. I am Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: my co hosts as always well as often Chris and Garrison,
Speaker 1: and that's that's my job for the day. Done. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna sit back and chill. You guys want
Speaker 1: to take it from here, Yeah, I'll take it from here.
Speaker 1: We are doing one of our perennial things fall apart
Speaker 1: but also we sort of put it back together again episodes.
Speaker 1: And joining us today is j m C from Strange
Speaker 1: Matter as a new libertarian, socialist cooperative magazine. J MC
Speaker 1: great to have you here. Yeah, this is really great.
Speaker 1: So I guess we should probably explain with the magazine
Speaker 1: is not just in of itself, but also because it's
Speaker 1: a good lead in into um um into what we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about. So we basically, uh, there's five
Speaker 1: of us as co editors and we're all equal worker
Speaker 1: owners in it. It's a magazine called Strange Matters. And
Speaker 1: the point of it is to explore radical new ideas,
Speaker 1: not just in terms of politics and economics, which is
Speaker 1: going to be kind of half the focus is trying
Speaker 1: to figure out like you know, libertarian socialists talk a
Speaker 1: lot about dual power, which I know y'all talk about
Speaker 1: on the show a lot talk about building independent institutions
Speaker 1: under the direct democratic control of the working class to
Speaker 1: control real resources and are not the state or capitalist firms.
Speaker 1: But like, we talk a big game, but do we
Speaker 1: actually know how to do that stuff, and do we
Speaker 1: know how to do stuff like run like you know,
Speaker 1: a big company as a as a self managed democracy,
Speaker 1: or do we know how to like run a city
Speaker 1: as a as a radical democracy like rooted in neighborhood
Speaker 1: councils or anything like that. The answer kind of is
Speaker 1: not really. And there's a lot of like um open
Speaker 1: questions that we don't know yet the answers to, and
Speaker 1: that very few people are working on those answers. So
Speaker 1: Strange Matters is um partly about discovering, uh, those answers,
Speaker 1: not because we the editors have the answers, but because
Speaker 1: we need like some kind of space within which we
Speaker 1: can bring lots of different people different life experiences together uh,
Speaker 1: in order to talk about the stuff and figure it out.
Speaker 1: And then the other mission of it is to be
Speaker 1: a kind of general interest literary intellectual magazine doing the
Speaker 1: kind of journalism and philosophy and poetry and memoir and
Speaker 1: stuff like that that uh that UH perhaps gets shut
Speaker 1: out of capitalist society because it's not commercial or because
Speaker 1: it's too weird, because it's like, I don't know, historiographical
Speaker 1: essay about it's been called doon or something like that,
Speaker 1: you know. And and we think that there should be
Speaker 1: a place for that, um, just because it brings delight
Speaker 1: and meaning into people's lives, and it's what we're fighting
Speaker 1: for more democratic society in order to do so. That's
Speaker 1: basically our vibe UM. And the answering question is a
Speaker 1: collective editorial that we that we collectively drafted and edited uh,
Speaker 1: talking about our political views in particular and the recent
Speaker 1: history of libertarian socialism UM. And then asked for me,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm a writer who's written for a couple of
Speaker 1: other places like The Point in the Brooklyn Rail UH,
Speaker 1: and I also was involved in the d S as
Speaker 1: Libertarian Socialist Caucus and also the the Yeah yeah, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but a lot of history there, trauma, you know, some
Speaker 1: some uh yeah, but any who, uh and also the
Speaker 1: Symbiosis Federation UM, which is a federation across Mexico, the US,
Speaker 1: and Canada that is trying to put together. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a confederation of local organizations that are trying to
Speaker 1: do this kind of direct democracy stuff. Yeah. So I guess, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so the pandemic isn't I guess the perfect jumping in
Speaker 1: point for this. But I wanna go back and I
Speaker 1: guess getting into the meat of this piece because I
Speaker 1: think it's very interesting. I wanted to sort of talk
Speaker 1: about the origins of like what's called sort of new
Speaker 1: anarchism and how it's sort of begin to decay after
Speaker 1: after the collapse of occupying After well, I guess that
Speaker 1: the sort of kind of revolutionary arc ofens so basically
Speaker 1: before you do the decline, at least is the way
Speaker 1: that we wrote it, and I kind of think that
Speaker 1: it's the way that I would tell it. Um, you
Speaker 1: have to kind of do the rise first, right, because
Speaker 1: like there was this moment from roughly the fall of
Speaker 1: the Soviets in two roughly like two thousand and even
Speaker 1: kind of lingering in an afterlife afterwards where it kind
Speaker 1: of looked like anarchism was going to take over the world.
Speaker 1: And that's a bit of a joke. But it's also
Speaker 1: not a joke because in the context of like the
Speaker 1: radical left, which is of course obviously a kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, dissidents seen in any country where it
Speaker 1: happens to exist. Um, you know, everything ing receded in
Speaker 1: terms of the traditional parties because the fall of the
Speaker 1: Soviet style uh Leninist states uh, either through their collapse
Speaker 1: as in the case of the USSR, or in the
Speaker 1: case of their transition to much more like clearly and
Speaker 1: obviously like state capitalist uh semi liberalized model like in China,
Speaker 1: like the you you basically had like this total recession,
Speaker 1: not just in Leninism interestingly, which obviously enough right, like
Speaker 1: you know, it's basically a global collapse of Leinist style
Speaker 1: of governments, but also in like social democracy, um, because
Speaker 1: it's a lot of the I mean, it's actually kind
Speaker 1: of interesting why it's it's unclear why it is. Uh.
Speaker 1: People have different theories, but they're you know, people often
Speaker 1: describe it in in um you know, Fisher's term the
Speaker 1: the writer Mark Fisher capitalist realism. The attitude in the
Speaker 1: nineties was that, uh, you know, there's there's only one
Speaker 1: world that's possible, and it's the best of all possible worlds,
Speaker 1: and that's the capitalist world, where everybody's gonna have McDonald's
Speaker 1: in every country, and two countries that have the same
Speaker 1: McDonald's are never going to go to war, which we
Speaker 1: kind of found out the hard way this week that
Speaker 1: that's not really the case. Well, and if people had
Speaker 1: paid attention more to other parts of the world, they
Speaker 1: would know that, like, well, there were civil wars in
Speaker 1: a bunch of countries that had McDonald's. It didn't stop
Speaker 1: people from shooting each other, as as the United States
Speaker 1: should tell you, people will kill each other whether or
Speaker 1: not they have access to chicken McNuggets. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I think like that, that's that's a period
Speaker 1: that has it's full of the most wrong anyone has
Speaker 1: ever been, Like you got Franchis Fukiyama, like the most
Speaker 1: wrong person ever You've got. Yeah, You've you've got a
Speaker 1: lot of sertif idealogues you like, have sort of deluded
Speaker 1: themselves into thinking this stuff is over. And yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you're right. That that that sort of plays into this,
Speaker 1: you know, into sort of the collapse of of of
Speaker 1: I guess, the party state left, and then the way
Speaker 1: in which that at, you know, the alternative to that,
Speaker 1: I guess becomes new anarchism, and anarchists practice, even if
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily ideology with all the groups, kind of
Speaker 1: seeps its way into the rest of the activist scene. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So basically the story that we tell is that there's
Speaker 1: some you know, the sepathist of rebellion in triggers these Uh.
Speaker 1: It's not just that the stufferthiasts are able to create
Speaker 1: their autonomous territory and chap us, but they it triggers
Speaker 1: this wave uh that UM. We use a term that
Speaker 1: sometimes it's used in academia called neo anarchism for this. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, there's an anarchist revival in the nineties UM
Speaker 1: around the world, and it's not just people calling themselves anarchists.
Speaker 1: It's all these movements that were inspired by the libertarian
Speaker 1: socialist broadly speaking UM sabathistas UM adopting kind of similar
Speaker 1: methods in their local contexts in different countries, fighting against
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of things. Initially it's against like
Speaker 1: you know, neoliberal trade deals, but it also ends up
Speaker 1: being against like sweatshops, because that's basically what a lot
Speaker 1: of outsourcing is is. You know, if if they have
Speaker 1: unions in this country from the social democratic period, they
Speaker 1: shut down the factory fire, everybody moved it to someplace
Speaker 1: where some dictatorship is going to shoot anybody who tries
Speaker 1: to do a union. Uh. And then that you know
Speaker 1: that lowers Uh. Logistics has gotten sophisticated enough by this
Speaker 1: point that you know, it ends up being cheaper for
Speaker 1: the company even though they have to transport goods all
Speaker 1: across the world and do just in time delivering that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. So um. The a lot of the
Speaker 1: the the anti globalization movement that sprouted up around the
Speaker 1: two thousands was like, um, against all these things and
Speaker 1: usually using the kinds of direct actions, which is when
Speaker 1: you act kind of independent of the state and not
Speaker 1: trying to like, you know, convince politician to do something,
Speaker 1: but taking direct action to get your results, your desired result. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, and all this kind of stuff uh that
Speaker 1: we're at using direct democratic consensus methods uh in the
Speaker 1: way that they organized stuff. Uh. That that was that
Speaker 1: was all basically an artistic and so there was this
Speaker 1: way in which anarchist methods, anarchist tactics, anarchists like attitudes
Speaker 1: towards what activism even is, started filtering into all these
Speaker 1: other movements. And this has been happening a little bit
Speaker 1: in the eighties too. So there was like the anti
Speaker 1: nuclear movement had a lot of this, the feminist movement
Speaker 1: had a lot of this. Um there was a whole
Speaker 1: um stream of single other ecological movements were actually like
Speaker 1: pioneered in a lot of ways by anarchists in the nineties,
Speaker 1: um so, as well as indigenous movements in places like Mexico, Bolivia, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So the this is the kind of like rise of
Speaker 1: this neo anarchist movie that we're talking about, which is
Speaker 1: not just about anarchists, it's about people who act and
Speaker 1: think like anarchists without necessarily identifying as it. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's the kind of thing that I hope we
Speaker 1: can kind of more encourage as well in the next
Speaker 1: few decades as those types of ideas can be I
Speaker 1: want I want to make sure that we can take
Speaker 1: these ideas and make them very approachable for people, even
Speaker 1: if they don't use the terms that we might use.
Speaker 1: You can still kind of suggest these types of thoughts,
Speaker 1: and this suggests these types of kind of lenses and viewpoints. HM.
Speaker 1: As much as we're about to get to how this
Speaker 1: sort of goes wrong fails in substence, Like, I think
Speaker 1: that was the strength of this movement was that it
Speaker 1: was its tactics were really easy to spread, and that
Speaker 1: led to a lot of people adopting me. It led
Speaker 1: to it sort of becoming this I guess activist consensus
Speaker 1: that you know, like you use in consensus process. You
Speaker 1: you know, you have hozontal organizations, you have you do
Speaker 1: direct actions, you mobilize people. You don't have these sort
Speaker 1: of like article parties. But that yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: I think the next part of the story that you
Speaker 1: want to tell us about, I guess how that fell
Speaker 1: apart and the consequences of that. Basically what ends up
Speaker 1: happening is that like there was this moment of our ascent,
Speaker 1: because I would identify myself as being definitely like part
Speaker 1: of these uh, the this general of you. I mean,
Speaker 1: I came I hopped aboard a lot later with like
Speaker 1: Occupy Wall Street, but a lot of the kind of
Speaker 1: explosion of movements that happened around the world in again
Speaker 1: not always right. It started with the Arab Spring, which
Speaker 1: started with somebody seeing themselves on fire in Tunisia and
Speaker 1: like you know, and then that spreads to um other
Speaker 1: countries in the Middle East and um, you know, protest
Speaker 1: against dictatorships and so on. But it starts getting kind
Speaker 1: of like transported beyond its initial Middle Eastern context. And
Speaker 1: what a lot of people don't know is that the uh,
Speaker 1: the Occupy Wall Street movement in North America and like
Speaker 1: other movements that you know, some of them were called
Speaker 1: occupy some of them, I'm one of them was my
Speaker 1: Don in Ukraine as a matter of fact, um, and
Speaker 1: other like you know, the the Hong Kong, the the
Speaker 1: the umbrella movements, yeah, the and all these kind of
Speaker 1: movements that that proceeded from after twenty eleven. A lot
Speaker 1: of them were basically in a single kind of wave,
Speaker 1: a protracted wave of copycat movements. Uh that we're trying
Speaker 1: to adopt the same kind of tactics of like occupying
Speaker 1: public squares, uh, declaring them basically autonomous and doing like
Speaker 1: direct democracy in those squares, modeling the kind of society
Speaker 1: that they that people wanted to create, um, you know,
Speaker 1: in this moment where it seemed like you could have
Speaker 1: these direct democratic, uh sorts of movements the the end.
Speaker 1: In the US, there's like a direct line of succession
Speaker 1: from like Occupy Wall Street through to like Black Lives
Speaker 1: Matter through to like the anti pipeline Indigenous protests. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of like shared movement experience, a lot of
Speaker 1: the same people showing up to it or teaching the
Speaker 1: next generation UM in those movements. And I think this
Speaker 1: is something I mean, uh, it's difficult to find like
Speaker 1: sources on this, but I mean, y'all are involved in
Speaker 1: social movements. I think that that's like a rough that's
Speaker 1: roughly a description of of what's happened, right unless unless
Speaker 1: we're crazy. Yeah, I think, you know, I think I
Speaker 1: guess what you call the last wave that is occupied
Speaker 1: ice In Yeah, yeah, you know, like I remember, like
Speaker 1: that was the sort of mix of I guess two crowds.
Speaker 1: One is you know, I mean, like I remember it
Speaker 1: was a bunch of you know, people who'd been an
Speaker 1: occupy and then also it was a lot of people
Speaker 1: who radicalized essentially about Trump. Yeah, there was there was
Speaker 1: a pretty big new wave of people, yeah, around around
Speaker 1: just sixteen and that, you know, and I guess I
Speaker 1: guess the other thing that that that's going on through
Speaker 1: this period is the the the ascension of consession of
Speaker 1: the right and the return also not just of you know,
Speaker 1: not just a sort of the fascist right, but of
Speaker 1: Leninism and social democracy as well. Yeah. Um lapped around
Speaker 1: like when Bernie Sanders was getting more popular. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think I think I think there's there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's a couple of there's like two threats there. There
Speaker 1: there's the sort of Bernie Sanders thread, and then there's
Speaker 1: you know, the the rise of the rise of the tankies,
Speaker 1: which has to do with Syria and has to do
Speaker 1: with sort of this backlash against the justin eleven revolutions
Speaker 1: that you know, like some some of that backlash turns
Speaker 1: into like just you know, like aired ones like hard
Speaker 1: right bobbing. It's never like not a right wing but
Speaker 1: like air to wance turn into just like fire bombing
Speaker 1: cities and um and literally barrel bombing, you know, the
Speaker 1: peaceful protests stuff. Um can overthrow governments if the government
Speaker 1: is not willing to bomb and shoot people who gather
Speaker 1: on mass in the central Square because they're afraid of
Speaker 1: what the world response would be if they did start
Speaker 1: doing that. But you know when Bashar Alasad did that
Speaker 1: in Syria against the Democratic opposition movements, Um, you know,
Speaker 1: that basically sent the signal nothing, I mean nothing happened
Speaker 1: to us side, right, So that basically sent the signal
Speaker 1: that like oh he had a stress of years. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, like like you can you can just
Speaker 1: shoot people and bomb them and like it. And that
Speaker 1: basically defanged the kind of central tactic that a lot
Speaker 1: of these movements were trying to do, which is to
Speaker 1: have like large numbers of people do nonviolent civil disobedience
Speaker 1: and then through those like direct actions, cultivate this culture
Speaker 1: of like direct democracy in the hopes that, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the assemblies that are created in that space could in
Speaker 1: some way become the germ of the organs that could
Speaker 1: run society, or at least that's like when it's taken
Speaker 1: to its logical conclusion. Because usually people who are involved
Speaker 1: in this, they get involved in it, they think the
Speaker 1: assembly stuff is really cool, they start learning more about it,
Speaker 1: they get radicalized by being in the assembly because like
Speaker 1: when you're in a direct democratic something you're actually making
Speaker 1: the decisions like together, and then you come to an
Speaker 1: agreement and you execute the decision. You start asking yourself
Speaker 1: like why can't we do everything like this? Um? And
Speaker 1: then um, you know all that that's what directs a
Speaker 1: lot of people in this kind of anarchistic direction. But yeah,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why these movements starts to decline
Speaker 1: is because they get smashed um the But I think
Speaker 1: that there's always this other thing going on, which and
Speaker 1: I wonder how y'all felt about this, like reading it,
Speaker 1: like you know, there's there was this kind of both
Speaker 1: like an external critique at first from people like you know,
Speaker 1: Boskar Sencrove, Jacobin and things like that, but then also
Speaker 1: like this increasingly over the years in the last half
Speaker 1: of the internal critiques of anarchism coming from anarchists themselves.
Speaker 1: Are people in this general kind of you libertarian socialism
Speaker 1: talking about how like anarchists didn't have solutions to the
Speaker 1: most pressing crises in the twenty century. Like if you like,
Speaker 1: if you guys had to say, I know it's like
Speaker 1: kind of pretentious, but like, what is the most pressing
Speaker 1: crisis of the century, What are like the top three
Speaker 1: just off the top of your heads without thinking, what
Speaker 1: would you list if you have to list three, two
Speaker 1: or three separate things? Climate change, creeping authoritarianism, and rampant
Speaker 1: disinformation about basic facts of reality. Sweet? Okay, so let's
Speaker 1: tackle each one of those, right, Like, what's what's an
Speaker 1: anarchist got to say about climate change? Well? Okay, disrupt
Speaker 1: the pipelines, like you know, do uh, Like, you can't
Speaker 1: have infinite growth on a finite planet, so you have
Speaker 1: to have like, you know, we we have all the slogans, right,
Speaker 1: I mean we've all heard them like a million times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have the diagnoses of the problem. But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: But then like, okay, so how are we going to
Speaker 1: like you know, I guess we're gonna build some co
Speaker 1: ops and then the co ops are gonna democratized per
Speaker 1: auction and then we can do d growth somehow, but
Speaker 1: like also disrupting existing production. But there's like a missing
Speaker 1: step here, right, because like, you know, the reason why
Speaker 1: we have all this production in certain ways, because the
Speaker 1: entire economy depends on it's been set up that way. Uh.
Speaker 1: So you implied in the idea that we're going to
Speaker 1: do de growth somehows that we need some way of
Speaker 1: constructing a different economy, and how do you construct a
Speaker 1: different economy right through some kind of planning? So really
Speaker 1: the question is like how do you do economic planning? Uh?
Speaker 1: Second one, um, I got a skip creeping authoritarianism for now,
Speaker 1: because that's actually like feeding into the more the ending
Speaker 1: of the essay. But the but the other one, right, disinformation?
Speaker 1: Another great question, right, like what do you do with
Speaker 1: social media? Like? Okay, again, anarchists talked in general a
Speaker 1: lot about like, okay, we're gonna democratize all the companies
Speaker 1: because we're democratizing everything. We're democratizing neighborhoods or democratizing cities.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of the same thing, turning everything into
Speaker 1: like a radical direct democracy. Okay, but if we're going
Speaker 1: to have social media, first of all, should we like
Speaker 1: was it a mistake to invent a centralized system instead
Speaker 1: of the more decentralized internet that created that existed before
Speaker 1: social media? Right? That's kind of an interesting question. But
Speaker 1: then assuming that we do, how do we restructure it?
Speaker 1: Not just in terms of how it's managed, but like, okay,
Speaker 1: we have the democracy of Facebook or whatever, and let's
Speaker 1: say that we're the workers at Facebook, what do we do, Like,
Speaker 1: how do we structure it so that it's not a
Speaker 1: giant misinformation engine? Right? Like once once you actually have
Speaker 1: like the responsibility and the power of being in the saddle,
Speaker 1: which is what we spend so much of our time
Speaker 1: kind of just trying to do. You have to actually
Speaker 1: make decisions about what to do. And honestly, there aren't
Speaker 1: that many. I mean, what do you what do you
Speaker 1: do with with the within with the utility like that? Like,
Speaker 1: for example, who ought to be in control of the
Speaker 1: utility like that? Is it really just the workers of Facebook?
Speaker 1: Aren't all the people who are users of it? Don't
Speaker 1: they have a right to be making decisions about it too?
Speaker 1: And is it just an American institution just because it's
Speaker 1: an American LLC? Or is it like a global institution
Speaker 1: because everybody on the planets on it? Um is there?
Speaker 1: You know, are are there ways that it could be reconfigured,
Speaker 1: like fundamentally in terms of how users use it that
Speaker 1: would change the experience in some way to actually make it, uh,
Speaker 1: make you less liable to misinformation. But on the other hand,
Speaker 1: if you try to manipulate people in order to UM
Speaker 1: you know, not see something that's going to be misinformation,
Speaker 1: isn't that well, you know, like censorship or or or
Speaker 1: some other thing that we generally would oppose, right, like
Speaker 1: the tool of centralized social control. So they like, these
Speaker 1: are really deep questions, and again this is generally a
Speaker 1: kind of silence, and of course, you know in that case,
Speaker 1: there's silence from the social democrats too, and there's silence
Speaker 1: from the Leninist I mean, well, the Lennis just kind
Speaker 1: of fantasize about turning Facebook into the tool of the
Speaker 1: central party state uses in order to crush dissent forever
Speaker 1: or whatever. But you know, social democrats are like less
Speaker 1: nationalized Facebook, and it's like, you know, yeah, sure we could,
Speaker 1: we could do that. And then you know the n
Speaker 1: S s A owns on Facebook. I'm sure that that's
Speaker 1: a that's a better scenario. Yeah. I mean, I tend
Speaker 1: to think somewhat differently about what it means to have
Speaker 1: an anarchist solution to those problems. Like, for example, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't see anarchists or social democrats or Leninists
Speaker 1: having any kind of stopping climate change solution um, because
Speaker 1: I don't I don't realistically see the organizing potential um
Speaker 1: capable of actually stopping what's going on in any kind
Speaker 1: of reasonable time frame. And I certainly don't think that
Speaker 1: the existing you know, neoliberal structures or the authoritarian structures
Speaker 1: that exist in you know, other countries or in this
Speaker 1: country are going to stop it either. So when I
Speaker 1: think about solutions to climate change from an anarchist perspective,
Speaker 1: I think about how can anarchist organizing help people deal
Speaker 1: with the consequences of climate change, And I see to
Speaker 1: see the potential for actually like mitigating climate change coming
Speaker 1: more from there's as the consequences of this become more
Speaker 1: dire to people, if anarchists are better, are good at
Speaker 1: providing relief and helping people and organizing through that, and
Speaker 1: eventually there's some potential to actually get people organized to
Speaker 1: stop the causes of the problem. But um, I just don't.
Speaker 1: I'm not an optimist of about our ability to stop
Speaker 1: the worst of it at this point, um especially not
Speaker 1: after the most recent I p c C report. And
Speaker 1: I guess I'm kind of in the same boat when
Speaker 1: it comes to disinformation, um I. And this is not
Speaker 1: just like anarchists, I feel like lack as you've stated,
Speaker 1: at a like a good idea about like what do
Speaker 1: we do with Facebook, what we do with you do,
Speaker 1: what do we do with the way all of these
Speaker 1: things are set up in the harms that they do
Speaker 1: at scale. Um, Nobody and I include the people currently
Speaker 1: in charge, has any real good ideas for that, because
Speaker 1: they they haven't. Like I've been working in this space
Speaker 1: for a very long time, I've I've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time talking with and debating with a lot of
Speaker 1: the folks who are leading minds kind of in the
Speaker 1: fight against disinformation, and I just don't feel like there's
Speaker 1: any sort of solution that is an immediate term solution
Speaker 1: because so many the problem is so advanced as it is,
Speaker 1: so as I guess that's kind of like where I
Speaker 1: land on a lot of this stuff is we certainly
Speaker 1: need to be thinking about solutions, but I kind of like,
Speaker 1: I think it's less likely that there's going to be
Speaker 1: like you were you were saying, the kind of debate
Speaker 1: is between is there some way of like reforming or
Speaker 1: fixing making Facebook more democratic, or is it just we
Speaker 1: need to decide that maybe we don't have some of
Speaker 1: this stuff. And I tend to land towards that that like, well,
Speaker 1: I think the solution is going to be maybe maybe
Speaker 1: Facebook's a bad idea, maybe we should maybe we shouldn't
Speaker 1: have There's aspects of it that are necessary, obviously, and
Speaker 1: I think aspects of things like Telegram and Twitter that
Speaker 1: are useful, But um, I I think the they're also
Speaker 1: fundamentally tied to the algorithms that drive them, which is
Speaker 1: also what drives so much of the toxic aspects that
Speaker 1: I think if you're divorcing the medium from the algorithm,
Speaker 1: you're talking about something that is very different and longer
Speaker 1: than media. It's longer than media. It's it's so radically
Speaker 1: different that it's just it's it's not even useful to
Speaker 1: compare them. It's like it's like it's like comparing Discord
Speaker 1: to Facebook. It's like they're not they don't operate the
Speaker 1: same way. That's the Yeah, that's exactly kind of where
Speaker 1: I where I tend to be on on that. And
Speaker 1: I know that's not like I I to the extent
Speaker 1: that like, uh, that's pessimistic. I guess I am kind
Speaker 1: of pessimistic about anarchisms ability to stop the worst of
Speaker 1: things that's happening. Where I kind of look at myself
Speaker 1: as an optimistic anarchist is in the I believe anarchism
Speaker 1: offers solutions when these things go as badly as they're
Speaker 1: going to do in a way that you know, the
Speaker 1: present systems or you know, more authoritarian systems that people
Speaker 1: propose can't solve the worst consequences of these problems as
Speaker 1: as well. That's that's kind of where I feel like
Speaker 1: it is can feel a lot simpler to default to
Speaker 1: like the dual power framework of a lot of these things,
Speaker 1: because otherwise the problems are so complex that you cannot
Speaker 1: approach them from from from every angle, because you really
Speaker 1: do need to simplify and condense them and collapse them
Speaker 1: into something that is more simplified, which often results in
Speaker 1: like a dual power kind of framework for what you
Speaker 1: actually start doing. Yeah, and I think you have to.
Speaker 1: I think if you're an insurrectionist, if you're a revolutionary,
Speaker 1: whether it you're an anarchist or or you know, a
Speaker 1: Leninist or whatever, you have to be looking at what's
Speaker 1: actually happening in Ukraine right now and recognize that, all right, Well,
Speaker 1: to what extent do you think you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to organize people in such a way that allows
Speaker 1: them to deal with thermobaric weapons. You know, in what
Speaker 1: way are you going to organize people that allows them
Speaker 1: to effectively resist cluster musician munitions? Um And I think
Speaker 1: that when you kind of look at it that way,
Speaker 1: which is what it would take to overthrow any of
Speaker 1: the large hegemonic powers in the world right now, a
Speaker 1: much more realistic set of solutions is, all right, well,
Speaker 1: let's work on building power by building organizations and communities
Speaker 1: that are capable of taking care of themselves in the
Speaker 1: holes that these powers are increasingly going to be experiencing
Speaker 1: because because they too are crumbling. And that's much smarter
Speaker 1: than being like, all right, well, I'm gonna try to
Speaker 1: get a bunch of my friends with rifles and and
Speaker 1: arm up a couple of drones and and go up
Speaker 1: against you know, people who have access to m l
Speaker 1: r s, you know, weapons systems and whatnot. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: I think that that's a really great point. Um I.
Speaker 1: The way that I would think about it is the
Speaker 1: starting with the big picture problems is a bit misleading, because,
Speaker 1: as you said, like nobody, it's quite like that nobody
Speaker 1: has solutions to these problems. Certainly the social Democrats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, and I say this is somebody who's like
Speaker 1: half a social Democrat by temperament. Um. It would be
Speaker 1: really nice if we like did it a little social
Speaker 1: democratic government and they swooped in and you know, did
Speaker 1: like new deal stuff. I like new deal stuff. I
Speaker 1: like w p A stuff as much as the next. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, um person who likes arts programs and infrastructure development. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, some infrastructure development, not others. Right, the war,
Speaker 1: the war complex we can do a little without. But
Speaker 1: you know, the thing about it is those big problems.
Speaker 1: You're right, it looks like there's not going to be
Speaker 1: like a big solution, uh, and that we're going to
Speaker 1: kind of have to cope with the consequences of of it,
Speaker 1: at least at first. Even coping this is this is
Speaker 1: kind of where I think the real kind of substance
Speaker 1: of of of the problem that libertarian socialist are facing
Speaker 1: right now. Even coping would require a greater level of
Speaker 1: organization than we have proven able to muster up to now.
Speaker 1: Not because the methods that we choose don't work. Because
Speaker 1: in fact, as you point out, and as I actually
Speaker 1: really want to forcefully argue, and because because we do
Speaker 1: in the end of the essay, like authoritarian methods don't
Speaker 1: work and can't work for a lot of the specific
Speaker 1: problems that we face, uh, and history shows that very definitively.
Speaker 1: But um, there is also a serious way in which
Speaker 1: even kind of developing these like you know, local highly
Speaker 1: like you know, rooted in a community, uh like direct
Speaker 1: democratic institutions that control real resources, scaling that up to
Speaker 1: the point where it actually could start replacing some of
Speaker 1: the gaps left behind by uh you know, U states
Speaker 1: and capitalist firms that are too dysfunctional or too focused
Speaker 1: on their own goals to to to to meet those
Speaker 1: needs that would actually require us to be able, for example,
Speaker 1: to know how to build up a cooperative sector in
Speaker 1: a city, or how to kind of like network the
Speaker 1: tennis unions that already exist, you know, across different uh
Speaker 1: you know, regions, maybe even across like a continent, and
Speaker 1: then construct like the way in which they self manage
Speaker 1: each other or or not each other self managed together
Speaker 1: the you know, the the larger group or it would
Speaker 1: require and you know, there's a lot of people working
Speaker 1: on these problems, but sometimes there is a kind of
Speaker 1: like you know, you'll you'll see this like obstacle in
Speaker 1: the road, because, for example, like what do you do
Speaker 1: when the it might not even be the state properly speaking, right,
Speaker 1: it might be like a posse that's funded by some
Speaker 1: rich billionaire asshole who's got like his uh, you know,
Speaker 1: his notion that some people are just better than others
Speaker 1: and that you should institute the dictatorship of the tech
Speaker 1: bros um, you know, and then that billionaire funding a
Speaker 1: bunch of people who have got now like you know,
Speaker 1: some industrial access to industrial infrastructure, and they don't like
Speaker 1: the fact that you're doing your d I Y like
Speaker 1: you know, commune or whatever stuff in there on their turf.
Speaker 1: So how do you fight back against that? I mean,
Speaker 1: some of it you can fight back against that kind
Speaker 1: of our current level of capacity, but some of it
Speaker 1: does kind of require us to start thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you build up financial independence?
Speaker 1: What like, how do you build up the kind of
Speaker 1: independence where it's like, if we get kicked off of
Speaker 1: the capitalist uh social media, for example, which is a
Speaker 1: great deal of what we use for fundraising, what kind
Speaker 1: of institutions could we create that would be like alternatives, um,
Speaker 1: that are not like the ones that the Nazis created
Speaker 1: when there was a purge of some of them that
Speaker 1: gab like highly dysfunctional, Like you know, it didn't even
Speaker 1: work for them. Uh not that I mean I'm happy
Speaker 1: about that, but like you know, my point is, like
Speaker 1: the same thing could happen to us, So what would
Speaker 1: we do? Um the like they're there are all these
Speaker 1: kinds of things that are more little picture questions in
Speaker 1: a way, but they scale up relatively quickly to at
Speaker 1: least like medium sized questions where we need this kind
Speaker 1: of like um these these because because part of what
Speaker 1: it is is also that like it's not that these
Speaker 1: questions are impossible, it's that they're kind of neglected. And
Speaker 1: there's um there, there's these uh the thinkers like Christian Williams,
Speaker 1: who is an anarchist from the Pacific Northwest, who wrote
Speaker 1: a pamphlet about this called Wither Anarchism. And there was
Speaker 1: another pamphlet, uh an essay and CounterPunch by a person
Speaker 1: named Gabrielle Coon who's an autonomous Marxist basically like a
Speaker 1: libertarian Marxist Marxist anarchist type um called what Happened to
Speaker 1: the Anarchist Century? And both of those essays which I
Speaker 1: highly recommend that people read. They may they make points
Speaker 1: basically like this, you know, like where where the focus
Speaker 1: on how to construct those institutions and the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: of how to do that has kind of receded from
Speaker 1: anarchism um as it's actually proud actist uh init Like
Speaker 1: so there's like a rhetoric of revolutionary transformation, but not
Speaker 1: always the attention to the nitty gritty of how you
Speaker 1: actually can like build resilient institutions that actually like carry
Speaker 1: that through which you know, a hundred years ago people
Speaker 1: talking about like the one big union and the general strike,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of like, um, well a it didn't
Speaker 1: work in exactly the way that they were thinking it.
Speaker 1: What even in the most successful revolutions like in Spain
Speaker 1: and b it was also like the there's there's there's
Speaker 1: a certain way in which our tensions are focused on
Speaker 1: other things. And it's not that those things are bad,
Speaker 1: it's just that like there's been this kind of neglect
Speaker 1: of the question of large scale organization and how you
Speaker 1: do coordination, like you know, in order to tackle problems
Speaker 1: that are kind of like at the scale that that
Speaker 1: I was talking about before. UM and so Basically the
Speaker 1: argument of the essay is that in the absence of that,
Speaker 1: like for the socialist movement that emerged after turned away
Speaker 1: from NEO because I'm thinking basically that it had no solutions,
Speaker 1: which I don't think it's true either, but it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, like rather it was true in the moment,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't have to be true, but it was true,
Speaker 1: but enough people thought that it was that they turned
Speaker 1: to like the social democratic route. But with the failure
Speaker 1: of Corbin and Bernie that kind of burned a lot
Speaker 1: of people out too, and a lot of what is
Speaker 1: seems like it's coming up now, and I'm wondering, I
Speaker 1: wonder what you guys think of this, Like a lot
Speaker 1: of the people that we see showing up in movement spaces,
Speaker 1: who we see kind of like getting politically activated for
Speaker 1: the first time or whatever, a lot of those people
Speaker 1: are really interested in Leninism and on specifically, because I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know how true that is. That's
Speaker 1: at least that's that's that that that part is not
Speaker 1: true at least at least at least here in Portland. Portland.
Speaker 1: Yet no other, no other part of the country is
Speaker 1: like Portland other than maybe Eugene, Like, Okay, that's that's fairy.
Speaker 1: Like Portland. Portland is a big enough anarchist city that
Speaker 1: there are entire decade long like like into anarchist wars
Speaker 1: that no one else in the US has ever heard
Speaker 1: of that are like the most important thing that's ever
Speaker 1: happened in Portland's Oh boy, welcome to the Green Red.
Speaker 1: Let me tell you, Chris, you have just piste off
Speaker 1: sixty people who could not explain to you if you
Speaker 1: gave them a year, could not explain to you why
Speaker 1: they're angry. And I mean, I mean to to be
Speaker 1: to be fair, like I I am an anarchist in Chicago.
Speaker 1: When the first time I introduced too of my Twitter
Speaker 1: mutual together, they almost got a fist fight. So like
Speaker 1: that make yeah, that's that completely scans Even with like
Speaker 1: d s A stuff, I feel like there's there was
Speaker 1: at least was a trend a little bit to stay
Speaker 1: away from some of the more Russia Communist kind of
Speaker 1: like types of aesthetics and ideas because it is a
Speaker 1: turn off for so many people and it does encourage
Speaker 1: us and it has like encouraging forefront a form of
Speaker 1: authoritarianism that maybe is not great. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: Like I've seen sort of both friends of walking. So
Speaker 1: I think the last like a year has been very
Speaker 1: different than I think the previous five. I've seen it
Speaker 1: on Twitter, but I don't know how much it expands
Speaker 1: into as I think. I think it's like I saw
Speaker 1: lot ex happens in the d s A is that
Speaker 1: the Leninists essentially took over the International Committee and they
Speaker 1: had this kind of delicious division label inside the d
Speaker 1: s A where like you have like you have a
Speaker 1: part of the d s A that's essentially a social
Speaker 1: democratic machine, and then you have the International Committee, which
Speaker 1: is which is the foreign policy wing essentially run by
Speaker 1: by essentially run by by the Leninists. And I think
Speaker 1: I don't know, I think I saw it there. And
Speaker 1: the other thing I think I saw a lot of
Speaker 1: that I've seen even from people who are ordinarily not Stalinist,
Speaker 1: is what you know, part of what was talking about
Speaker 1: this is the sort of like climate Stalinism or like
Speaker 1: climate house Off like that that is a huge problem
Speaker 1: that you know. I mean, I think I think part
Speaker 1: of it also just has to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that people don't like Okay, so like we we have
Speaker 1: actually existing, uh, climate leninism, like we have it. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's China, like the CCP changed, it's
Speaker 1: literally changed. State ideology in in in the mid two
Speaker 1: thousand tends, as you know, as an attempt to deal
Speaker 1: to deal with with within with pollution climate change. It
Speaker 1: did nothing. Like they pressed every pricey it doesn't it
Speaker 1: didn't like it didn't work. Yeah, yeah, I mean they
Speaker 1: did carbon markets, they did. They literally just banned coal
Speaker 1: and entire provinces and it didn't work. They they change
Speaker 1: your contravaluations. I I problem people. Yeah, Like La Late
Speaker 1: lays this out specifically with China to an excruciating degree,
Speaker 1: like like in detail. If you're really interested in this
Speaker 1: type of like climate left authoritarianism. They call it climate
Speaker 1: Mound the book, but you can call it climate climate Leninism,
Speaker 1: you can call it whatever. But they they lay out
Speaker 1: how it could work and how use cases of it
Speaker 1: have not worked, um to a pretty pretty intense degree.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in that, I would recommend reading the book.
Speaker 1: Climate Leviathan definitely influenced a large portion of the writing
Speaker 1: for this show. Yeah, And I mean to your point,
Speaker 1: I don't think that this is the only trend I do.
Speaker 1: I agree with you that out of like the conjuncture,
Speaker 1: there was this um I I think that a lot
Speaker 1: of the more like establishment reformist aspects of the movement
Speaker 1: were discredited and that pushed people in different radical directions,
Speaker 1: like one of which very much is anarchism and libertarian socialism.
Speaker 1: I am seeing a lot more faces that are interested
Speaker 1: in in in those questions for sure. Uh. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of counter to the trend that I was describing
Speaker 1: from the last like five years of like you know,
Speaker 1: people becoming more disinterested because of the real or perceived
Speaker 1: lack of solutions. However, I do think that it's important,
Speaker 1: and this is kind of following on Chris's climate Leninism
Speaker 1: point to understand that there's at least a counter trend
Speaker 1: where a lot of people are have not only moved
Speaker 1: away from libertarian socialism, have not only moved, but they've
Speaker 1: also moved away from democratic socialism. And if you follow
Speaker 1: that pattern, which is a pattern that I at least
Speaker 1: have seen within the d s A, within various trade unions,
Speaker 1: in a lot of among a lot of like intelligencia
Speaker 1: type people like journalists, professors, blah blah. You see a
Speaker 1: very common set of arguments. And I think it's very
Speaker 1: clear that as the century proceeds and the crises get
Speaker 1: worse and start killing like even larger numbers of people
Speaker 1: than they already are, we're going to see this argument
Speaker 1: a lot more. Um and and the argument is something
Speaker 1: like this. I mean, there's a quote from a tweet.
Speaker 1: Uh and And you know, one could argue that the
Speaker 1: tweet doesn't matter, but you are naive if you think
Speaker 1: this is the tweet climate You are naive if you
Speaker 1: think climate change can ever be solved without an authoritarian
Speaker 1: government at this point. That's and that's that's the whole thing.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a nasty little tweet because it's ambiguous, right,
Speaker 1: it has this like shocking and scandalous effects. You know,
Speaker 1: we need authoritarianism to to to solve climate change, the
Speaker 1: scandalous you know, bougeois or whatever. But then it's like, okay, wait,
Speaker 1: but what do you mean by authoritarian? Am I just
Speaker 1: being hysterical reacity. It's the same as saying you're naive
Speaker 1: if you think that, um, climate change can be solved
Speaker 1: without nuclear power, or climate change can be solved without
Speaker 1: really big hammers, Like, we have authoritarian governments, we have
Speaker 1: nuclear power, we have really big hammers, and climate change
Speaker 1: does not be solved been solved. Is it possible that
Speaker 1: any of those things might be a part of a
Speaker 1: theoretical solution that may happen someday. Yes, but it hasn't.
Speaker 1: And there's like, if you're trying to say that authoritarian
Speaker 1: governments are better at dealing with climate change than the
Speaker 1: governments that currently dominate number one, hell of a lot
Speaker 1: of authoritarian governments are responsible for our current situation, are
Speaker 1: climate change. Number two, the Soviet Union, which I suspect
Speaker 1: most of these people's see as a guiding light. Horrible
Speaker 1: for the environment, turned the largest body of water in
Speaker 1: Eurasia into a poison lake. Yes, not not good at
Speaker 1: the environment, you know. And here's here's what's interesting about
Speaker 1: the thing to me. The other thing that it's doing
Speaker 1: is kind of signaling that it's like patently ridiculous to
Speaker 1: oppose this idea without specifying what the idea is like
Speaker 1: and like, in other words, authoritarianism, like but like, I mean,
Speaker 1: let's let's be blunt, right. What they're implying as a
Speaker 1: Leninist is the one party state, the secret police, press
Speaker 1: censorship in the command economy. So does that help you
Speaker 1: fight climate cheese? That's actually an interesting and a kind
Speaker 1: of like you know, distant five thousand foot view, you know,
Speaker 1: from the god's eye view or whatever, like, uh, the
Speaker 1: that's an interesting technical question. Do these institutions actually help
Speaker 1: or hinder a response? But we're not even having that
Speaker 1: conversation because instead it's this kind of underhanded attempt to
Speaker 1: get you to think that. So again, does a tweet matter? Well,
Speaker 1: I think a tweet matters if it comes from a
Speaker 1: member of the National Political Committee of the d s A,
Speaker 1: because at least ostensibly if d s A is, which
Speaker 1: is who the person who did that tweet? Because at
Speaker 1: least ostensibly if d s A is a mass movement
Speaker 1: as it purports to be the mass movement of socialists
Speaker 1: in the US, and you know, and and the National
Speaker 1: Political Committee is ostensibly the leadership of the d s
Speaker 1: which I personally don't believe, but that's certainly how they
Speaker 1: think of themselves. Um, then this indicates that the largest
Speaker 1: most important socialist mass movement in the US, at least
Speaker 1: self branded UH has people in its leadership who believe
Speaker 1: that the secret police might help in addressing climate change.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting thing and it's also very disturbing. And
Speaker 1: the thing is this, this person is not actually like important,
Speaker 1: He's a symptom because this is something that's happening across
Speaker 1: the board. And a more intellectually serious version of this
Speaker 1: argument was put forward by the Arxist intellectual and historian
Speaker 1: um a professor of human ecology called Andreas mom And
Speaker 1: people who are really into like Marx Nerds stuff will
Speaker 1: probably have heard, Yeah, what a very good book called
Speaker 1: Fossil Capital. Everything he's written after Fossil Capital is a disaster.
Speaker 1: I like some of the sabotage. It's it's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a little romantic and impractical. He wrote an ethical
Speaker 1: discourse instead of a thing about like the risk of
Speaker 1: eco sabotage, which is the actual important part of the
Speaker 1: degree to which it can matter because eco sabotage. There's
Speaker 1: this idea on the left that like, what we need
Speaker 1: to do is be targeting fossil fuel infrastructure. And again
Speaker 1: it's like what it's it's like what that ds A
Speaker 1: dude said, like, yeah, that could theoretically be a part
Speaker 1: of but as if it's like nine dudes who do
Speaker 1: it and then they go to prison or get shot. Well,
Speaker 1: that doesn't really fix climate change. I think the book,
Speaker 1: the book A Ministry for the Future really lays out
Speaker 1: all of the all kind of like the best case
Speaker 1: scenario for all these types of things and how they
Speaker 1: can work together to overall trend in this direction. Because yeah,
Speaker 1: that type of like eco sabotage in conjunction with other
Speaker 1: like political effects can be impactful on what things happen.
Speaker 1: But it's can won't necessarily be you know, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not as simple as we would like it to be,
Speaker 1: because yeah, it's it turns out a complex world has
Speaker 1: complex consequences and complex and and I think I think
Speaker 1: this is you know the trend that Mom was on,
Speaker 1: the trend on that you know, there's there's a big
Speaker 1: environmental authoritarian like thing among among liberals. This is a
Speaker 1: huge thing. In political science was a big thing, and
Speaker 1: in ecological studies that was essentially making a similar argument
Speaker 1: to to I'm almost making this like, well, okay, you
Speaker 1: need some kind of air quotes vague authoritarianism to deal
Speaker 1: to climate change, and you know, it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: basically this this attempt. There's like these people have seen
Speaker 1: climate change, but they have no actual solution to it,
Speaker 1: so they wave their hands and pretend that like this,
Speaker 1: like you know, the state is going to descend from
Speaker 1: this guy and save them, and it's not. And I
Speaker 1: think that's you know, I think I think we're we're
Speaker 1: sort of I don't know, I think as we just
Speaker 1: I guess kind of wrap this up because we unfortunately
Speaker 1: they're running out of time. But you know, this like
Speaker 1: this exact moment like like these like few weeks are
Speaker 1: this moment of incredible like rupture on the left right,
Speaker 1: because we we have we've had we've had in some
Speaker 1: way social democrats be discredited by the fact that like
Speaker 1: Corbin and Sanders both lost right their political project has
Speaker 1: been discredited. Um, we've had a serious sort of anexist failures.
Speaker 1: But then you know, and in the last couple of weeks, right,
Speaker 1: it was all of the sort of big state like
Speaker 1: authoritarian people like tied themselves to a bunch of imperialists
Speaker 1: and you know, May staked their whole entire politics off
Speaker 1: of them being the anti imperialist class. And then you know,
Speaker 1: the state, who's like a bunch of their press, people
Speaker 1: like literally work for right and who who they've been
Speaker 1: arguing like is is the contramperist powers does imperialism? And
Speaker 1: so like, Yeah, I think we have this moment where
Speaker 1: everything is in chaos in which we have to be
Speaker 1: the ones that that that have solutions or have or
Speaker 1: have the tools to build them. And I think that's
Speaker 1: why that's why this project is important, because that's that's
Speaker 1: something that we need in this exact moment. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think there's a tremendous value in being humble about seeking
Speaker 1: out solutions to these questions and not doing what so
Speaker 1: many do on the left and pretend that their tendency
Speaker 1: has an absolute answer, because all we have is theories.
Speaker 1: And the reason I know that to a point of
Speaker 1: certainty is that no one has solved any of these
Speaker 1: problems yet absolutely, And and so there is a tremendous
Speaker 1: degree of humility that people need to have in terms
Speaker 1: of like, all right, well, we are attempting to arrive
Speaker 1: at the conclusions that can lead us to a better world,
Speaker 1: as opposed to we are trying to force through this
Speaker 1: thing we know will work. Um, because you don't, you know,
Speaker 1: if you're a Marxist leninist, and you think that we
Speaker 1: need climate MAU, you don't know that that will work
Speaker 1: because it hasn't yet. And if you're an anarchist who
Speaker 1: thinks the solution is bombing as many oil refineries as
Speaker 1: you possibly can, well, you don't know that you're ever
Speaker 1: going to get enough people on board for that to
Speaker 1: mean anything. Um. And I think that there's the conversations
Speaker 1: that we need to be having. I think it's it's
Speaker 1: important to see them as conversations as opposed to polemics
Speaker 1: aimed at just getting people in line behind this shining
Speaker 1: vision of a of a clear set of steps. Um.
Speaker 1: It's important to envision the end goal. I say that
Speaker 1: a lot. You know, we need to be looking and
Speaker 1: and accepting the possibility of a better future, but it's
Speaker 1: important not to be dogmatic about the road to get
Speaker 1: there because nobody, nobody really has a clear idea of
Speaker 1: what that looks like. Yeah, So the piece ends up,
Speaker 1: and if you want to see the ending of it,
Speaker 1: it'll it'll be up in um in sometime in the
Speaker 1: next couple of weeks. But the basic gist of where
Speaker 1: it goes is precisely to the practical question, right, Instead
Speaker 1: of like making these like polemical arguments that are rooted
Speaker 1: more in like kind of like what tribe you've decided
Speaker 1: to identify with within the broad family of socialism than
Speaker 1: in like actually trying to like solve problems for the
Speaker 1: people around you, right, or help contribute to the solutions.
Speaker 1: Like it's actually what we want to ask is like,
Speaker 1: if we have like the giant ecological crisis, Uh, how
Speaker 1: do you how do you actually do it? Is it
Speaker 1: by trying to force people from the top down to
Speaker 1: do it as Um under his momb kind of draws
Speaker 1: on the failed uh policies of war communism as and
Speaker 1: inspiration for that. Or is it potentially by having like
Speaker 1: democrats democratized institutions that incentivize people with carrots instead of sticks,
Speaker 1: Like Naomi Klein basically uncovered a want of her journalism
Speaker 1: and this changes everything. So this is kind of like
Speaker 1: the debate that we have to start having in order
Speaker 1: to be able to together formulate the kinds of solutions. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: well I think that's gonna do it for for us today. Um,
Speaker 1: what do we what do we we do? You got
Speaker 1: you guys gotta gotta gotta plug You want to throw up,
Speaker 1: throw up before we roll out. Yeah, if if you
Speaker 1: want to follow us at at Strange Underscore Matters UM
Speaker 1: on Twitter. UM. We also have a Facebook and you
Speaker 1: can read our articles at Strange Matters dot co op,
Speaker 1: which is our website. Uh and if anything that you
Speaker 1: read there that you've heard here inspires you at all,
Speaker 1: please consider donating. We're going to be in the next
Speaker 1: month raising money uh for for the magazine and we
Speaker 1: want to pare writers above market rate because we think
Speaker 1: market rates too low. So but in order to actually
Speaker 1: do that, and none of the money is going to
Speaker 1: the editors from the fundraisers, so if if, if we're
Speaker 1: going to be able to do that, we've got to
Speaker 1: meet our fundraising target. All right, Well support them and um,
Speaker 1: you know, figure out how to save the world. It's
Speaker 1: it's up to you. And I'm speaking to exactly one
Speaker 1: person right now and no one else, but I'm not
Speaker 1: going to be more specific. It could happen here as
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone Media dot
Speaker 1: com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for it could happen here. Updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media dot com slash Sources. Thanks for listening.