Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. And today I am talking to Cyberdandy once again and we are talking about the history of the IWW and its relationship to anti-communism. In short, most of the red scares hit the IWW historically pretty early, and sometimes first, so depending on the time period. But to do that we have to kind of understand what the IWW was, what it represented, its relationship to other socialist groups. So I am going to let Cyberdandy really start off on here and can you give our listeners if they are not into the lefty lore which we all kind of share. Let's say you are a baby leftist and maybe you know a lot about the Bolshevik speed. I don't know anything about the American socialist tradition, which is pretty common. What is the IWW and how did it start?
Speaker 2:Alright, so the basic way that the IWW will be introduced is to explain what the difference is between a craft union and an industrial union. And so when it began in 1905, the AFL, which was not the AFL-CIO yet, was a craft union which meant that it was only concerned with really high skilled labor and it organized workers based on their specific skill. So you would have a workplace where you would have different workers belonging to different craft unions and it wasn't organized industry wide, and so you would get all sorts of things like workers in one company not showing solidarity with workers in another and just a lot of discoordination and things like that.
Speaker 1:Or even workers in one area of the building not showing solidarity with other workers in one area of the building. Because craft unionization for people who want an example of it still existing, for example, if you are in the Pilots Union versus Delta being unionized, or if you want a very vivid example of it, the union laws that govern railways were exempted from the National Labor Relations Act and thus they are still organized on craft union lines. So the engineers, the engineers, the break people etc. Are different unions even if they're in the same well-wai company. My school building is actually craft unionized.
Speaker 1:So while administration and teachers are together, which is suspect other educational professionals are in the separate union because they're quote not contract workers. So they have different concerns, which I think is kind of a disaster because the state and the district in the past has actually played one off of the other. So it still exists today because of the CIO, which has a tenuous relationship to communism, because of the communist union joining into the CIO. The CIO is where industrial unionization becomes normalized in America, but the IWW proceeds the CIO by a generation, so that's important to understand. The AFL was often suppressed too, even though it was highly craft based. If you think that the industrial union is racist? You got nothing on how the AFL actually ran. Even they even opposed the concept of striking. To say that the craft unions are like guilds is almost an insult to guilds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it should really be emphasized, just like when anarchists make the critique that unions are just managers of the relationship between labor and capital. That wasn't even a critique from the eyes of the AFL. That is what they wanted and they were totally on board with what they called just plain unionism or just like. I forget exactly what the term is, but it's something like just simple unionism where they wanted to work out and negotiate as quickly as possible a way to settle disputes between management and the workers, and they did not have any kind of notion of class war or class struggle. It was really a unity between management and the workforce in a way that you wouldn't think makes sense if you're a socialist.
Speaker 2:The AFL idea was not an idea of class struggle. It was not an idea of workers really being against capital and they really weren't trying to do anything as far as advance the cause of socialism. They weren't opposed just by the IWW or by anarchists. The socialist didn't really like the AFL being the socialist in the socialist labor party and the socialist party Just really anyone that was not a liberal. It's almost like you could think of the AFL as a liberal version of a union at the time and in fact it was called yellow unionism. That is the first couple of things. The other major thing is that they didn't organize undocumented workers. They didn't organize unskill workers, miners, lumbermen, shipyard workers. All these people were not unionized by the AFL or by anyone else at the time.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty big problem as far as it goes. So where do you think that actually leaves the labor movement in America? Because you have the Knights of Labor who are not as craft union oriented but they also oppose things like strides. They're also kind of they're suspicious of unskilled labor. They're definitely suspicious of migrant and immigrant labor, although that's a problem in all the movements at the time except the IWW and the SLP. The socialist party of America is all over the place on immigration.
Speaker 1:We have that history. There's a specific thing in which the AFL I mean not AFL, the IWU comes out of, which is the mining labor. When people think about the historic period, the historic and heroic period of the IWW, they're mostly thinking about mining strikes. We do have to remind people the conditions in these mines in America were frankly almost futile because it was closed shop. You were paid in company script. Now that may seem really weird to us. Wasn't entirely weird in the 19th century, because for most of the 19th century there wasn't even a unified currency. That's really a post civil war thing, but these conditions were awful, awful, one of the things that I believe. This may be apocryphal, but I believe there's a quote about the miners talking to socialists organizing from Europe and the miners going. We're not even proletarianized.
Speaker 2:Well yeah, the way they had to live their lives was the IWW gets called a hobo union or other terms like that, because a lot of these workers at the time lived as hobos. You had to take trains to get to your mining camp and you would arrive there just with your bundle and you would live at the campsite and be working for the company for however months or however long your job was. So it wasn't like the way that we think of work, where you live at your home and you wake up and you go to your job. They lived at these mining sites with the other miners and so they had this really communal, collective sort of lifestyle when they were actually on the job and then when they were between jobs, they had to hop trains and go from place to place and use the famous hobo currencies and things like that. So, yeah, they were not what we think of.
Speaker 1:They basically had to be transient workers, which means that they were very hard to organize amongst craft union lines anyway, but they wouldn't even know what they would have attempted to. But even what we think of as like modern business unionization, which does come out of industrial unions in some sense, would have been very hard with these workers, because they're not in one area, they're all over the place. If they're not hobos, they're in these like company camps that you could easily get kicked out of, and if you're not in company housing then you're homeless, and so these conditions are pretty bad.
Speaker 2:The other part of that is that they had access to dynamite, which it does play into some of the notorious aspects of the Western miners and the Western Federation of miners and the IWW, just as far as how militant they were because they had this access to explosives and they could really go after people who wronged them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's important, but we also need to put that in the context of people were often gunning these guys down.
Speaker 2:Yes, that is what I mean, like massacres.
Speaker 1:So that's part of why it's, I think, like we have to keep that in mind when dealing with so many of these massacres. Because, and why they got so violent is, yeah, these guys had dynamites they're also. I mean, everybody was armed back then. But there is a real sense in which I think you see here this confrontation on a fever pitch. I mean people know about, I mean from Maitwana, some of these battles involved, like not just in peeking tits but also eventually the military and bombing. So it was not small affairs. So the IWW got in the miners union before it got militant, real fast, right, they kind of had to.
Speaker 2:And yeah, as far as the other labor organizations were concerned, like the AFL or even like the Socialist Party, a lot of the time they looked at Wobblies, which most people know that's when IWW was called. They saw them as basically like roughneck kind of you know hard ass shit kickers in one way or another and basically looked down on them for that. They would call them thugs and they really didn't recognize them as worthwhile to unionize and to be part of the civilization they were trying to build.
Speaker 1:So what is there a particular instance that has the IWW form Like? Is there a specific event that happens that causes the miners union to form into the IWW?
Speaker 2:So the miners union? Well, first, so it was the Western Federation of miners, which wasn't you know all over the country, and it was just one industry. They actually, I think, created another organization between them and the IWW, which was the American Labor Federation or something like that, the AL, something or other. But it wasn't really that anything happened. It was that they, a bunch of these militants and political radicals and socialists, got together in 1905 and they decided that they needed to do something about the craft union problem and they needed to do something to organize, not just nationally but technically, you know, even beyond that.
Speaker 2:And so you had people, like after the late 1800s, with the Haymarket affair and all and a bunch of other different things that were really making it look like a war, not like, in a lot of different ways, like kind of a civil war between workers and the capitalist class. They needed something more. So you had Lucy Parsons, mother Jones, daniel De Leon, bill Bill Haywood he was the Western Miner Federation guy, and you know a bunch of other things. All these people got together at a Congress in 1905 and, figured, decided that they wanted to do something, and that's when they created the IWW.
Speaker 1:Now, how far does the IWW go initially? Like what? What are its initial successes?
Speaker 2:You know, I don't I'm not exactly sure. I'm more so focused on, like, the ideology and what causes these ideological differences. They weren't ever the most populated union, I think in like 1905, they only represented about 50,000 workers. Yeah, that's no, that was just the, that was just the top five organizations that joined, but pretty much not, you know, not more than 100,000 workers.
Speaker 1:Which on one hand is small, on the other hand is still larger than most socialist organizations today. So it's, I mean I think it's still larger than the, than the DSA is, although I think the DSA is hemorrhaging numbers. But you know, socialist organizations over 100,000 are rare. The IWW is interesting because why is it associated with a particular ideology? Because there's no other branch of American unionism, even like the TUL and the TUL, which were the two the TUL, actually it's the successor organization, the TUL and those were associated with the common term right. But even those unions and the unions that affiliated with those groups never had reputations for being purely communist unions because it wasn't required to join them. And the IWW doesn't. Initially either, but very quickly it seems to be associated with syndicalism. And so how does that happen?
Speaker 2:So first of all, syndicalism the word itself just means trade union. In France Is so. When people say syndicalism usually they mean revolutionary syndicalism now, but the word itself really just means a trade union. So when you had early people doing the history of the IWW they would call it a syndicalist organization. Sometimes they meant revolutionary, but sometimes they really just meant this is a trade union.
Speaker 2:But the thing that causes the IWW to become more ideologically specific is the relationship that it had with not only the Socialist Party but also the Socialist Labor Party and the way that these three groups had agreements and disagreements over a few basic topics, the main one being direct action, which the Socialist Party eventually wrote into its constitution that it would not support any group. That was for any kind of sabotage, and we'll get to that word in a moment, but basically they objected to direct action. And then the other major thing is parliamentarism. So the IWW has always been non-parliamentary, but it hasn't always been anti-parliamentary, meaning that you could have an IWW membership and also belong to another organization that's affiliated with a political party, and that's totally fine. But a lot of the disputes over centralization and decentralization go back to wanting the IWW to be more parliamentary in its outlook. But yeah, so the whole thing with syndicalism is even revolutionary.
Speaker 2:Syndicalism isn't anarchism, and this is something that also gets. Equally confused is that the revolutionary syndicalist outlook is basically that you could use a general strike as a revolutionary device, and expropriating the workplace and running them by the unions is an important piece of that. But anarcho-syndicalism is the modification of that idea that says and those groups, those syndicates, are not going to be subordinated to a party or some other kind of centralized organization. So you could have a revolutionary syndicalist, even a Marxist revolutionary syndicalist, like the Council of Communists, or, on the downside, someone like George Surrell and the National Syndicalists, and this isn't really a development of anarchism or an anarchist idea into a fascist idea or into a Marxist idea. All three of these ideologies are looking at the same real developments within the working class and the revolutionary ideology that came out of it and then adding their own flavor to it. I don't know if that really answered your question.
Speaker 1:It answers my question to some degree. I mean, what are the things that, like the fine point distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and, like council, communism is highly debated amongst anarcho-syndicalists and councilists themselves? But syndicalism, what are the things that people will say? For example, anarcho-syndicalism is a nation or you're getting on fascism and syndicalism is tied into the early what we might call left fascist program has nothing to do with Hitlerism or anything like that, and that never really manifested in America either.
Speaker 1:But once you know that syndicate just means union in this context, then national syndicalism's relationship to, say, anarcho-syndicalism becomes very clearly oppositional, because what they're arguing for is nationally organized syndicates which are tied to a centralized state and subordinated to that state, which is also actually what the Communist Party has ended up doing too in the Communist States, so like there's the all Chinese labor union or whatever, which they don't ever strike or anything like that. So these developments are, I think, kind of crucial for understanding how syndicalism became manifested in the IWW, because the IWW's syndicalism is just a politicized form of unionism and the two things that you put out is where they break with the Socialist Party, is on direct action, their saboteurs, and that's where they break with the Socialist Party and they break with the Socialist Party Is on direct action. Their saboteurs are basically property, violence and on subordination to a party.
Speaker 1:And so now, interestingly, the SPUSA never actually has its own unions ever, Ever so, which is very different from, say, the origins of, like the Socialist Parties or the Labor Parties in Europe, which all come out of unions explicitly Like the SPDA comes out of the all German labor. How do you translate it? I always call it League, but I don't think that's actually correct translation of the German. But whatever the LaSalle's group, obviously British labor comes out of a combination of Chartist and Labor unions in Britain. It is not that the American Socialist Party had no relationship to unions. That's not true at all. It definitely did.
Speaker 1:But it did not come out of a coalition of them into a party. It came out of people coming over from Europe with socialist ideas for the most part and combining that into both the worker end of the populist movement and already nascent labor movements in the United States, Like the more radical end of the Knights of Labor, the worker end of the populist movement, particularly people who are disaffected by William J and Bryant making deals with the Democrats. So that's how that happens in the US, right? But when you look at like the SPA's positions and I tend to be a defender of the SPA, but they make some really like, really milk toast positions that I think are that ultimately don't end up helping them either, Like they don't win based off this. So the IWW is unwilling to sign up to this program and thus are more radicalized and thus associated with anarchists. And I think also the association partly comes from the number of migrant workers, particularly from Adelaide, who joined the IWW. So I've talked about this.
Speaker 2:You go ahead. Oh yeah, I mean there were. I mean it's not an association out of nowhere. There were also a lot of anarchists in the IWW. But yeah, the organization itself was more diverse at the beginning and became more anarchist over time.
Speaker 1:So that, however, kind of leaves us with this thing where, in response to this, socialist party on one end and then we haven't talked about it as much, but there's also the daily onus and the socialist labor party, which is actually older than the socialist party, and the development of a parallel IWW, which was like we agree with the IWW about everything, except also we're subordinated to the SLP, which is our particular syndicalist version of Marxism. That's headed up by Daniel de Leon, which is highly sectarian, extremely sectarian, and because it's so sectarian has pretty strong growth limits, right, Although I think de Leon actually does start in the IWW proper. It's not like he just set it up separately immediately, right?
Speaker 2:exactly the other thing about him or about the socialist labor party is they also did start their own labor organization. That was a total failure. At one point it was called the socialist something alliance, socialist labor alliance or something that I have it somewhere. But anyway, yeah, they tried to actually have a party created, union, and it was a total flop. But yeah, de Leon was there from the beginning and one way to look at it is there is a difference between the East and the West and the IWW. Some of that was industrial differences. The West is where the mines were, where the logging was, all those kinds of things. The East is where you had more of your factories and stuff like that. But you also had political differences where the East had more of the doctrinaire socialist orientation and the West had more of the direct action anarchist orientation.
Speaker 1:And it kind of unscientific sense that makes total sense to me, because the conditions are so different. There's more institutions in the East and the Midwest and urban areas to kind of believe you can function through, whereas in these Western mining companies you have to turn on your own. The government exists in these areas, but kind of barely. It's not the Wild West that we think of, but it's not that removed from that either. So that's important to remember too. As for why there was such an attitudinal difference and why people would be like why are these Easterners telling us we can't do direct action Because I'll hear, if we don't do that we don't have anything?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the direct action worked. I mean, one of the slogans is direct action gets the goods. So I mean it worked. There was a very pragmatic kind of idea about it, and direct action is sort of like a catch-all word A lot of the time. It's basically any kind of like strike action can be considered direct action, but so can sabotage, and I think this is where we should talk about that word a bit. The word sabotage comes from the word sabote, which are these wooden shoes that the French would wear, and there's a myth that one day a French worker threw his shoe into the gears of a factory, whatever and as part of a strike, and put a stop to production as part of the strike.
Speaker 2:Action and that's where the word comes from is sabotage is kind of any action that interferes with the production process. So that could be working to rule, or it could be doing a property distraction or it could be doing even more violent things like assassinations or something like that, but it covers quite a wide range of activities. On the other hand, it will be accused of being anti-democratic. This is also something that Mussolini and the Fascists would like about it is they felt that it was a more pure form of socialism because it was anti-democratic. But the whole notion that something is not democratic simply because you don't sit around and debate it and then come to an agreement is a little bit of and my eyes, a bit of a bias that I think is held mostly by politicians or people who are used to sitting around and talking about what to do with their money.
Speaker 1:So one thing I think the net tension goes back to the tensions between Bakunin and Marx and in the first international, although Bakunin also accuses Marx of being anti-democratic because of the way they handle factionalism and accusing Ingles of like not delivering, mistranslating or not delivering all kinds of stuff. What you actually were talking to me about that and we're gonna do an episode on the first international, the International Worker Men's Association, partly interestingly because I think it parallels some of the problems you see here is there is a focus in Marxism on centralization, maybe not democratic centralism in the way that we, you know, associate with like Marxist Londonism, but from the beginning there's a focus on centralization and there is a focus on some kind of relationship to a state and party. Even though early Marxist are anti-statists, they're just not immediately so and there's a distinction that comes up around basically direct action as being anti-democratic. That comes up one of the things Marx accuses Bakunin of and I'm torn on that because on one hand I agree with you, it's kind of ludicrous to see democracy as being that procedural. However, I don't want a bunch of terrorists here Like doing whatever they need to do, even within the organization which, to be completely honest, the IWW never did so. We don't have, you know, it's not like we can. We have to worry about that in this case.
Speaker 1:So I find it interesting that when we talk about, like the important figures of the IWW, lucy Parsons, associated with Anarchism, mother Jones, associated kind of with Anarchism that was a little bit looser. Daniel de Leon, associated with his particular flavor of syndicalist Marxism, big Bill Haywood, I just always think of as a radical. Eugene Debs, associated with syndicalism and social democracy and Marxism, all three. William E Trotman, I don't, you know, I think more of an anarchist. William Z Foster, who is a syndicalist, marxist, leninist by the end of his life and never renounces syndicalism either, sees actually the Soviet cancels as kind of a form of syndicalism but supports Stalin explicitly and joins the and joins the CPSA, which I think a lot of modern people really have trouble understanding, and I see him as kind of a successor to Debs. But he's not in that initial group.
Speaker 1:So in the beginning you have all kinds of radicals. I mean the one thing that you could say that you don't have are liberals. You don't have liberals in the same way that you do, even in the CIO, like you know, john Lewis is a liberal, for example, in the CIO, is even associated with the Republican Party, I believe, although that meant something very different in the 1920s and it does now. I mean that was he was associated with a progressive movement in the Republican Party, but still. So you have a bunch of different flavors of radicals, but it seems like the tensions around the Socialist Party and we talked about the Socialist Labor Party and one thing that we have to point out about the Socialist Labor Party is the Socialist Labor Party. You know, de Leon considered himself the representative of Marxism in America, although totally self-appointed it wasn't like he was chosen by the first international for that or anything.
Speaker 1:And why we think of the Socialist Party as Marxist, as kind of reformist Marxist or Social Democrat, because Victor Berger was a Marxist, deb's was a Marxist. That's kind of wrong. There are tons of tendencies, including tendencies that, like Marx and Engel said that you probably should kick out in the SPA from moment one, that you know we don't talk about because it kind of makes people look bad. I mean, there's even groups that you might even consider proto-fascist in the SPA. They're not a majority, they don't have representation in Congress, but they existed.
Speaker 1:There are definitely people who would have fallen under the idea of like Jingo as socialism, so not quite national socialism in the way we have to talk about post-fascism, but in like the in the armchair socialism of Germany, of like the German historical school, or like the what you might call like just Jingo socialist, national chauvinist, et cetera, which Marx complains about and, you know, going all the way back at people who are very wary about racial integration and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:They're in the Socialist Party. So the Socialist Party is so multi-tendency that you kind of just have to call it reformist, because there are radical groups in the Socialist Party and Deb's is actually one of the more radical members in the Socialist Party and does become, you know, the leader of the party effectively. But it's a broad tendency group that a lot of the kinds of socialists that are in it today we would probably see as well to the right of the DSA like or to maybe even parts of the Democratic Party today. I mean like it's a really huge tent organization and so you know the Marxist Socialist Labor Party kind of takes their ball and goes home. We mentioned daily-owned founds is on parallel IWW. It's just like we're gonna have an industrial workers of the world, but it's ours and also we're not gonna make that clear that it's even different. So like why? I don't even think it wasn't like it was denoted as a different organization, it was just Nope.
Speaker 2:It was the same name, same, I think, the same symbols, everything.
Speaker 1:So that's fun. And then we've already mentioned that there are there's an increasing separation between the SPAA and the IWW, even though Debs is associated with both.
Speaker 2:While eventually Debs also lost his seat at the executive of whatever of the Socialist Party. That was part of one of the straws that totally broke the camel's back.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that you pointed out. So the IWW of the East tended to be Socialists. A lot of them would get associated later on. A lot of them become associated with the TUL and the TUL, which is when the Communist Party exists, and they try to do the same thing. Basically, out West there's a lot more anarchists and I told you like, organically, that makes a lot of sense to me. Also, there's already preexisting tradition coming out of Mexico of various kinds of anarcho-socialism From the Mexican Revolution, which I've never been able to prove had an influence on these ideas, but it feels like they must have because they weren't in close, like geographic proximity and they get to do about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, that's from newspapers and whatnot.
Speaker 2:It's always tough to figure that out because so many anarchists went to Latin America and were able to develop anarchist, lively anarchist movements there, totally separate from the English-speaking world. So yeah, like in the Mexican Revolution, you had two different anarcho-syndicalist groups and the zapatistas. Or like you had an anarcho-syndicalist, anarcho-communist and zapatistas, and not necessarily always agreeing with each other.
Speaker 1:How about to say the anarcho-syndicalist are the people who trade zapatistas to the center. Yeah, they did. Yeah, from the bonus. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really crazy to think about from our perspective today that like you would have that kind of a betrayal against you know, basically kind of like the mascots of the 90s anti-globalization movement, the zapatista, the EZLN.
Speaker 1:Although the EZLN in and of itself actually probably has more of a McGonest ideology than it does an actual Zapata, because the conditions are different. And the other irony to this and I did a whole show on this already, people can go back and check that out it's with Kyle and John Michael from Strange Matters Magazine. But the irony there also being that a lot of the reforms the zapatistas wanted as far as land reform, they got and the McGonest didn't get shit. So it's the whole thing. Just, you know, whenever you're like, oh, you know, you're like us, the Bolsheviks betrayed people. Every one of these revolutions is a being, a mess, but nonetheless. So I just I feel like you know, like I said, I've never been able to prove it. I mean I know, I know later on that McGon has some influence on. Later I WWP people directly, one of the McGon brothers.
Speaker 1:But in general it feels like there's also just more anarchists out and about. I mean, what's interesting about that? And I didn't warn you about this. I don't expect you know much about it, but like there's a weird parallel with the Communist movement in China, which is starts off as highly anarchist because Marxists don't have a whole lot to say about peasants and becomes more and more Marxist. But there's a weird strain of like there's some things that Maoists do that if you understand the history of anarchism you're like, oh, that makes that actually is closer to anarchist ideologies, particularly some of the focus on empowering the peasantry and stuff of the senior cultural revolution, which I'm going to have Marxist, when it's really mad that I said that. But well, it's also true, like we know this from Mao's biography, that he read anarchist texts way before he read Marxist texts, because I think you see that in an anarchist group like I don't even think it was his reading alone, but yeah yeah, he got.
Speaker 1:He was involved with the anarchist organizations when he went to when he was in university and also I mean he was organizing peasants that. So you know those conditions like. It also makes sense just from the standpoint of which industries that we talked about. The Wild West, part of it, east, there's industry that's where the manufacturing right yeah. There is not a lot of manufacturing in the West.
Speaker 2:What also, I mean we. I don't know why, how we have gotten this far without mentioning it, but they did try to be an international organization as well, the IWW.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Now they had Argentina, australia, canada, chile, china, ecuador, fiji, germany, ireland, japan, mexico, new Zealand, nicaragua, peru, on and on on South Africa, united Kingdom. There was actually like IWW attempts there as those places as that particular organization. Of course you know much more was happening the closer you get to the United States, but the yeah, they tried to be an international organization, the whole of the world, part of industrial workers of the world.
Speaker 1:I mean and this brings us to the Italian question, one of the things I always point out that's interesting, the more I learned about industry, about and maybe we can this is for another time, but it's come up with other guests of mine P H Higgins and I talked about it all way back in the early episodes of the show on autonomy up, but that Italian Marxism actually comes from the anarchist side of the, of the Um, of the International Working Man's Association, split Almost to a person, so like, so, and, and that I think really influences the IWW, because we cannot Downplay in the East Um In particular, but in general, how, how many, you know how these connections were made was that a lot of these socialists were Immigrants, recent immigrants themselves, and a lot of them were from 1848 and also Italian unification, um, which means you had a ton of Socialist anarchists coming, you know, coming out of these national movements that got suppressed, um, and coming in right after the Civil War and In, you know, being, in the Italian case, being a free flowing Eastern labor force for cheap labor, you know, up into the 1940s, um. So that really establishes that and I think there is here, I think we have much more documentary evidence that there's a lot of influence From these Italian Marxist anarchists on the IWW and the, particularly the forms that it takes, um, so I think there's that. But this gets us to the question now. We've established this that this wasn't just about how this, how this is established, but it's important.
Speaker 1:You know, we talk about the 1st anti-communist movement, right, not, it did not go under the name of the 1st, where it's scare wasn't freaking people out about Bolsheviks, that that hadn't even happened yet. Um, uh, it wasn't the whole liberal debate about what to do with the revolution again and happen yet, although that does happen in the context of the, of the growth of the IWW, kind of in the middle, um, but, and kind of, you know we'll get to this eventually is part of what ends. You know, the IDW's heyday, um. But during this time period, um, when we were talking about anti-communist, they were talking about they were often complaining about anarchists, right.
Speaker 2:And even in that time, anarchists would consider themselves to be reds and they considered the red flag to be the symbol of war, not necessarily the symbol of communism. There's a scene as a symbol of aggression. So even even anarchists would talk about raising the red flag and of it being a symbol that anarchists would use.
Speaker 1:I mean it's interesting how, how this color coordination happens, because this also, like, goes all the way back to piracy.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah red flags and with pirates means that you're dead, um, as opposed to a black flag, which means they might, they might take quarter, um, so they might keep you for ransom. But uh, yeah, I mean the reason why, the reason why the red flag was what it was and it was associated with socialism, because it was a war flag. And it was a war flag because it was literally symbolizing them, bathing the white flag in blood, right, that's what it meant, um, oh, so so, yeah, that's it being strictly limited to socialist seem to be, seems to be a post breakdown of the first international thing.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I mean you know when we call it the red scare. I guess I'm just saying it's not inappropriate For red it to be inclusive of anarchists.
Speaker 1:I don't think the division between Marxist and anarchist is even after the, the, the crack of the of the first international is actually very strong until I actually believe the double whammy of the of the Mexican Revolution and and the Bolshevik revolution, both, and they both happened around the same time, um, uh, is really what solidifies the split both in the United States and internationally, but it was weaker.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things that I mentioned with William C Foster even late, like syndicalism as being seen as opposed to Bolshevism, at least from someone like Foster's point of view, is is unnecessary. Like he thinks that you can have both. And when we talk about the origins of syndicalism as opposed to anarcho syndicalism. But there's a strong sort of, even in Foster's vision there's a strong sort of yes, there's a Pollock Bureau, yes, we have Uncle Joe Um, I don't know how much he's aware of the purges and whatnot, um, but there's a strong sense of like. But we have the Soviets and we could have, we could have syndicates here, and he kind of doesn't make a strong distinction between syndicates and councils and Soviets and all that. And, like we mentioned earlier, that goes all the way back to Debs. Debs also thought that there was no real tension here, like he had a program that that anarcho syndicalists could sign up to and that you know, we haven't seen that like ever.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I mean a lot of these. A lot of these distinctions come out of decisions that are made within organizations, right? So like, even if you go back to the first international, the Prudhonists, within the Prudhonists section there is a division over whether or not the collectiveized land and the ones in favor of collectivizing land uh became collectivist Prudhonists, who then also were in agreement with the Pocoonists and anyway. So it's like these kind of proposals, and what side you take on them in these very constrained contexts, give rise to these divisions that we we often totally forget that that's where their origins are, is not personal debates are, are are factional debates?
Speaker 1:They're not. They become ideological debates, like, like you know, how big of a difference is there between Bacoon and Marx? Well, they're big by the end of their debates. They're huge, similar with, like you know, I think. I think the more defining I mean we always talk about the Bacoon and split because it's like oh, the big thing between Marxist and Arrakis, but the you know the splits that are actually more defining for what Marxism is or actually a debate between Marx and Blanqueist and France, which is where the dictatorship of the proletariat comes from, and what that means in Marx versus what it means in Blanquee.
Speaker 1:It's debates over well, can you have non workers in your movement? Marx says yes, obviously for obvious reasons, certain Blanqueists say no. And then this debates with the Lasallians who thought they were Marxist. Like that's the thing, like, even though they were fighting with Marx himself, the Lasallians thought they were Marxist and Marx suppressed his criticism of the Lasallians for For organizations to develop, although he also didn't allow his faction to join in in the all German labor league or whatever, until which what would become the S P A Until? Basically, it was always dead. And it happens, it kind of happens at at Gretchen. It really doesn't like take hard until Ehrford but switch back to America, because that's what we're talking about. The I W W is actually trying to be international. It is, it is political and it gets suppressed hard. I mean, like if you're thinking about the group that gets hit the hardest by by pre 1917 Red Scare, it's the I W W.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let me just go through this list of different ways. That not not different instances of suppression, but different types. Yeah, go ahead. So you had employers, particularly the Phelps Dodge Corporation, which owned a string of copper mines in Arizona. They were trying to suppress the wobbly. So employer organizations this could also be something like the auto facture or auto manufacturers and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:You had the military got in on anti W W Stuff where the War Department claimed that you know, during hostilities with its soldiers they would get involved. You had the Justice Department. You had, and then you had all these patriot groups that were led by the Bureau of investigation. They acted as an auxiliary. You had Congress, you had, and then you had some specific laws, the espionage act. Then you had what were called the criminal syndicalist laws that were in like 20 or 30 states or something. And then on top of all of that, official, like above ground, totally public attacks on the I W W, you had vigilante groups doing terrorist campaigns, lynching, tarring and feathering, smashing up offices and labor halls and just getting in like very combative situations with wobblies. Those are the types.
Speaker 1:I think people don't even know that the espionage act was specifically named at the I W W. Yeah, the instances and the number of dead are actually a little bit shocking. I mean, in some cases it was almost like a low key, like not a civil war, but like like days of lead, but with unions. And yet you had these paramilitary groups, you had anti-anarchist sentiment being promoted, particularly after McKinley dies. The amount here is pretty staggering, so, and I think by 19. I think you sent me notes on this and you found out that by 1933, there was something like 700 convictions for criminalism.
Speaker 2:Right, and those were just that one kind of law. Then the espionage act. They were actually deporting people to the Soviet Union. They would load up foreign, anyone foreign with a socialist or anarchist orientation. They would literally ship them to the Soviet Union, and that happened famously to Emma Goldman and Alex Berkman. But yeah so and then yeah so, just like those two things alone, and then all of the other ways in which they would go. After the I W W, we haven't even gotten to the free speech stuff or like the way that their anti-war activities became another way of attacking them. But even outside of, like their strike activity, one of the largest campaigns they went on were the free speech campaigns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that that was surprised people that the I W W actually became as associated for free speech campaigns as they were associated with radical strike activities. And how did that start?
Speaker 2:I don't know how it started, but I know what they would do about it is they would like their central, like whatever general labor, whatever their board or whatever, would basically just put out a call to all the locals or anyone who is, quote, unquote, footloose and tell them hey, this is where a free speech thing is happening. And they would go down there and they would get arrested in mass and cog up the jails. And you know we saw this kind of tactic in the 60s, but the Wobblies were doing this back in like the early 1900s and these campaigns could last anywhere from a few days to months at a time where they would go and get consistently arrested and just drive the administration fucking insane trying to figure out how to deal with all of them. And this was all like because you know, during this time people were, you know you could say stuff that was barely radical and all, and you know different cities would would try to arrest you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I think a lot of people know that, like, basically, even though the 13th and 14th Amendment extends the Bill of Wites to to states which prior to that, by the way, they didn't that they didn't really enforce that until the 50s, really Right. So you have all these states with blatantly unconstitutional laws and pretty much it was designed in a way where no one had standing to challenge them and thus get them deemed unconstitutional. That seems familiar, but yeah, I think this is. This is the reason why they fought for free speeches.
Speaker 2:Like is because they were being prohibited from organizing because of speech codes, I mean like it was Well, yeah, and one of the main things they would do is they would soapbox. You know they would go and you know this is how, exactly this, how they would organize. There was a lot of word of mouth. It's not like they were putting ads in the newspaper or something.
Speaker 1:No, so you have that, you have the, you have these vigilante groups, the Knights of Liberty, which were interestingly kind of the black will version of the clan, and that that's also naming your being a reactionary group and calling yourself of liberty Ironically seems to be something that's like constant throughout US history. Oh, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But anyway. So you have attacks from Knights of Liberty. Did the IWG get attacked by the clan at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know the exact incidents but yeah, they were, they were, but I think like more specialized vigilante groups were formed to attack them.
Speaker 1:And that's not just given that like half of the Pinkerton's bread and butter was just fighting the fucking high W W Right. So so you have. You have all this. We have got hundreds of dead. Now that doesn't even get us to. I mean, things really intensify after 1917 and then the anti-war activist stuff. So both both the beginnings of an anti-Bolshevik Red Scare and a fear of the Mexican Revolution happening simultaneously, and also all these sedition laws being passed during World War II, I mean World War I by Wilson, you know, really led to the IWW getting hit really hard during the Palmer raids. Like, like, I mean, we talk about the Palmer raids, people know about the Palmer raids, but like you know, this is, you know, this is where J A R Hooper comes from and the FBI.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, and so we had 700 conventions on anti-Semicalist laws, but then there's like some, like 10,000 people arrested during the Palmer raids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and 556 foreign citizens were deported.
Speaker 1:And an organization of 100,000 people. I just want to point that out. This is a lot.
Speaker 2:Right. So even before the Palmer raids themselves, the Bureau of Investigation was being used to attack the IWW. So yeah, it was definitely oriented towards putting down the IWW, because that's what they were doing even before Palmer Palmer's raids.
Speaker 1:So you know a lot of the stuff that you see. One of the interesting things about, say, mccarthyism, which I think McCarthyism affected a larger number of people, but it was a colder fight and I know it doesn't seem like that because that's the one we know is documented, but like, and it's awful, I don't want to, I don't want to downplay the 50s red scare at all. I mean it was thorough throughout society and it's not that it doesn't have a body count either. But the early 20th, late 19th century anti-red stuff was more explicitly violent. I mean it was. There was a lot more warring, gunfights and stuff and, to be fair, it was mostly aimed at people around the labor movement, particularly IWW. But I mean there were gunfights between the populist movement and the police too, even when the populist movement was in charge of like there were times when the populist would win state elections and like the local Democrats wouldn't let them be seated and they would come back with guns. So like I think people underestimate how fucking crazy the late 19th, early 20th century was. But there's a real sense that like there's a lot of real, real fear and basically we're going to talk about the decline of the IWW because you know, it begins as a much more massive group after this time period, you know, after the 1920s. Basically, you start seeing a decline.
Speaker 1:By the time you get to the 1940s the IWW is pretty small. By the time you get to the second half of the 20th century, it's in that weird sectarian number limit that I don't really understand why this is the number limit. But if you have, if you're a sectarian group that collapses or if you're a sectarian group that never has a mass period, you tend to cap out between three and five thousand people, which is like where the IWW has been for most of the 20th century. After this time period In the United States I don't know, I think it's international membership is still larger than that, but it's it's. That's roughly where it is in, so much that we have numbers. This is a huge movement in the early 20th century. A hundred thousand people, even though we mentioned, is fairly small. Yes, the Socialist Party has a significantly more support based on that, but until the CIO, I don't think there is a union movement that has, outside of the AFL, that has that number. Actually, I don't know.
Speaker 2:We got to also, you know, put that in perspective that the way the numbers work is that, unlike a political party you know these are not people go in and out of the IWW or groups like it. The turnover is really high. So if you are, if you are counting, you know if you have, year after year after year of like a hundred thousand members, it's not even members, it's people whose dues have not lapsed right. So if you have year after year after year of this is how many people are still paying their dues and there's a high turnover rate, that is a much bigger portion of the population than you're counting in any one specific year that are coming into contact with and actively participating in what is basically an anarchist movement.
Speaker 1:So interestingly, despite all this government suppression, you and I are both of the opinion that the IWW's heyday does not end because of government suppression. In fact, if anything, the government suppression maybe makes it slightly more popular. The one of the favorite ironies of American history is like if you go send cops to beat those people, that's going to probably become a mass movement very quickly. That's a tendency in American history. But what do you think? I think the Palmer raids do hurt the IWW pretty significantly.
Speaker 1:But then the DEBS campaign you know DEBS prison run kind of collapses right Like and the Bolshevik revolution happens. And I was telling you after this I think the 20 conditions that are attached to the program, that are the conditions during the common term, which require a whole lot of purging and a lot of ideologically missed tests, which beyond what you would need to sign on to their program, because I think actually DEBS would have been willing to sign on to the 1918 Bolshevik program and I think a lot of anarchists wouldn't even have a problem. If you go read, like the ABC's, about the algorithm which is the old Bolshevik program, it's, I think people are actually surprised by how much we need this.
Speaker 2:Well, this is something I was about to say is, you know, emma Goldman didn't even publish her disillusionment with Russia until 1923, or something like that. The enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks after they won among anarchists was fairly high for quite some time. It took a lot of firsthand accounts from bona fide anarchists to convince other anarchists that something had really gone terribly wrong there. Part of that is because the Bolsheviks very effectively painted a victorious picture of themselves and their accomplishments. There wasn't any real reason for anarchists to doubt that. As far as they were concerned, a lot of anarchists defected to the Communist Party here or became Bolsheviks in Russia, stuff like that, I think ultimately that is where revolutionary mojo was transferred over to.
Speaker 1:Part of that has to do with the fact that the Mexican revolution was so fucking unclear on like did the good guys win? We don't know. The Bolsheviks were clear winners in 1917. There was a lot of enthusiasm. They did a lot of good outreach, actually even to the United States, although the response to them you have this defection to the Communist Party, particularly early on. You also have a lot of these organizations split. Zenovia, for example, hangs out. Who is going to be the recognized party in the third international for a long time before the SEP USA has formed and then actually breaks up a lot of these organizations. That begins a long decline of the SBA, which died slowly over 50 years. The IWW didn't die, but it dropped back dramatically. One of the things I think it did and you might disagree with me on this is it's image as an anarchist organization. Primarily, I think, comes from the fact that if you were open to something else, you left. I also think that it doesn't help that from 1950 to 2000, the IWW seemed like a historical reenactment society.
Speaker 2:I think for most people most potentially radical workers in general, throughout what would be considered the beginning of anarchism, all the way through till the 30s, I don't think they really always gave a shit about some of the finer details of the differences between a Communist and an anarchist. A lot of these membership numbers represent just what the dominant organization was in the territory. If we look at Spain or we look at Russia or whatever, it's not like what the numbers tell me, is more like that is the church that you went to, because that is the church in the area, more than like you really had a lot to choose from and some people weren't here, some people weren't there. They would be pretty ideologically minded in order to go against the popular form of revolutionary socialism in your area, just anarchism itself. They didn't even call themselves anarchists until 1870, 1880, well, after the first international, as far as defining what their positions were against Communists. That took real world experiences to really make people aware of how those differences played out.
Speaker 1:I was about to say. So much of this is actually post 1917, pre 1992. A lot of our experience in this and, let's be honest, our experiences of socialism at our age cohort in particular, is that it's a weird lifestyle group that exists around campuses and that had some relationship to the new left. That may or may not have been massed we don't know because we're not the right age cohort again and they lost somehow. Yes, I can define all this now, but I'm just coming at how we came up with this.
Speaker 1:When I encountered radicalism in my teens, it was almost always anarchist or Trotskyist. That was the only thing you could find in America at the time. If you knew about the CPUSA, you made jokes about them being an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Even as early as the 1990s it was a thing Also. Anarchism now, I think, comes out of a post debates in the 1970s and 1990s between the municipal as anarchist and the pre-Nivist anarchist. All these kind of post-left are post-Bolshevik, depending on where you're coming from forms of anarchism that were popular amongst basically Gen Xers and by popular I mean we're subcultural groups. I have to remind people and I do this sincerely when they're complaining about anarchists now they're probably not actually complaining about people with a strong understanding of the tradition in which we're talking about.
Speaker 1:I think you're right. The distinction between Marxist and anarchist was an ongoing thing that was clarified over the course of about 100 years. Some of that, a lot of that, I said with the Marxist, not all of it. The other thing that you have with anarchism now that makes it a little bit more opaque is that there are a lot of different tendencies that become anarchistic, some of which are historically completely unrelated to the ones we're talking about. There is that as well, the cynicalists and the anarcho-communists or the anarcho-collectivists. Those groups are clearly tied into the red faction To some degree. Even American anarcho-individualists are, depending on which ones you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're way more like they're weird, though yes.
Speaker 1:They're a little exceptional.
Speaker 2:You know, sterner wasn't even read by anarchists until this guy, mckay, republished them way later. The reason anarchist freedom today is because an American individualist anarchist republished them. Yeah, basically just despite Marxist, anachronistically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically, despite Marxist, also to create an individualist tradition in Europe that didn't really exist. There is an individualist anarchist tradition in Europe, but it mostly comes out of Italy. It doesn't actually come out of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:What my team of anarchists would call it is the illegalist tradition.
Speaker 1:That I think I have often like there's a lot, you know, in my audience there's a lot of express contempt for anarchism. I don't share it. Even though I'm not I don't think you would consider me an anarchist my opinions on the state are very close to Marxist and that like, I don't think you can immediately get rid of it. However, I actually do see a lot of the critiques anarchists made about. There's this game Marxist play a lot, where they're constantly shifting their goals, like, okay. One that I've noticed recently is like oh, we need more and more developmentalism. And then I'll cite Ingalls. And then I'm like hey, but that passage you cite in Ingalls, if you read the next paragraph, in the paragraph before it, he's actually saying that we've met developmental needs for communism in 18, fucking 80. Yeah, so what do you mean, like? And so I'm like why is the goal always shifting? Why is this? You know? Why is this? Why is the amount of productive? Oh, it's from real life experience. And I'm like okay, whatever, you're shifting the goalpost Like, and that's a real problem.
Speaker 1:Conversely, I kind of agree with you that anarchist sectarians have tend to tend to have extreme positions because they also tend to not have any relationship to power whatsoever. So it's an easier position to take. And that's not historically true. Like syndicalists and even anarcho-synicalists, even if they had a strong distrust about bureaucracy et cetera, they were not as idealistic as some people are today around. Like, we can't have any hierarchy and by hierarchy I mean like, like like all these old anarchist organizations, they did everything by voting right.
Speaker 2:Now anarchists want to say that voting as a process itself is something that anarchists are against, totally anachronistic. That is not. I mean it is. Anarchism today has become so much more like a virtue. Ethics, then, the sort of pragmatic development out of working class struggle that it began, as I mean it.
Speaker 2:Really like Prud Hone, his ideas about mutualism came from people who called themselves mutualists in France, in Lyon. He didn't come up with that shit. Likewise, a lot the collectivists didn't come up with like Bakunin. Bakunin didn't come up with that shit. That was what workers and workers organizations already wanted to do and were already doing, and this is the case with a lot of different anarchist positions. Originally, is they the anarchist idea wasn't so much philosophical as it was just a practical idea of how are, why are we going to let politicians mediate or represent us when they're not getting anything done? It was a really simple, like, like common sense kind of distrust where, if you are a militant worker and like your socialist politician was making all these promises but you're not seeing results on the ground, how many times does that have to happen before you become an anarchist?
Speaker 1:And there was no like versus Leninism for people to go to either. One thing that I like to I think a point that you made here about why so many anarchists became communists, and it wasn't about I mean, it was ideological in that they were all radicals, but it wasn't so much about like the clear, like they weren't having like come to Jesus moments on the road to Moscow, about the transcendent truth of democratic centralism. It was more these are the people I work with, these are people I trust. We know what. These are radicals. Okay, they have some history of success in Russia. I don't understand all that, but I know that we, that the people I trust, do. Here's where we're going.
Speaker 1:And that happens with living, real movements that have the potential or are becoming partially mass, whereas sectarian divisions being hardened and rigid, and I think this is true for Marxists too.
Speaker 1:So nobody people don't think I'm chastising anarchists for this. In fact that actually Marxists in some ways have become worse. That tends to come from failure and that tends to come from like there is no tradition for you to belong to in the same way, and so you can up, you can, you can hold it invariantly as a remnant because there is no living tradition for which you really belong, there's no one actively doing something, and so, like the ID, the IWW, for example, became a little bit more brah-based again and we're not this is beyond the scope of our discussion today but I saw it become more brah-based again and less hostile to Marxist and stuff again pretty explicitly in the in the 2010s and the late in the late aughts, because they started actually doing stuff again, and I mean like prison unionization actually succeeding there, small shop unionizations and actually I mean like, yeah, in very blue areas of the country and stuff like that's like important in Seattle and whatnot, but still they did it and there's stuff happening and and then it becomes a less sectarian organization.
Speaker 2:But Marxism after 1968, you know after the situation is, or after autonomous or whatever are a lot more tolerable for an anarchist to begin with too.
Speaker 1:So it's in both directions. No-transcript. Well, I've talked to you about this like autonomous or interesting, because they're both amenable to anarchists. But also autonomous come out of Marxist-Leninism, which I think is not really well understood.
Speaker 2:Well, there's two kinds.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:There's a bunch of kinds, but yeah, go ahead. There's the ones that are like I think in Germany there's something called autonomy, which people get confused with autonomous Marxists, but it was its own kind of movement in the 70s.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean. But then there's the autonomous Marxists as well.
Speaker 1:And there's cancelist and there's, but even Marxist-Leninist. Honestly, when you were talking about the history with Mao, like their relationship to anarchists has fluctuated dramatically at different time periods, even in their sectarian groups, and right now that's pretty precipitously anti-anarchist, and you know what I think that's about and we're off topic, but I think that's about people dealing with their primary disillusionment with Occupy. And then the reason why a lot of people have become more, I think become more Marxist-Leninist has not because they understand the mortal science of Marxist-Leninism or even consistent propagators of Mao, dung and Stalin, because when I quote them, when I quote, they don't even often understand what time period of Stalin's work they're pulling from and they're like quoting 1951 Stalin but maintaining 1932 Stalin positions and then trying to equate them with positions held by Dung, which literally makes no sense, which tells me that what's going on there? And I know in some cases, yes, people are well thought out sectarians, but in a lot of cases this is responding to failures in the same way that we talked about.
Speaker 1:Well, you would join the church? Well, okay, but you've all been traumatized also by this big event that had failed, like 1968's. One of them occupies another, the DSA right now is another one. And so I think you know, and Marxist are often given to like not actually considering even mass psychological motivations for people they tend to. You know, there's this wild shifts, often in the same person between hyper volunteerism and then like hyper determinism that makes that's totally incompatible with each other. That I often see with Marxist.
Speaker 2:Well, a baby, a baby Marxist and a baby anarchist tend to have very different impulses Like the impulse of a baby Marxist is to be a system thinker, to imagine what the system is, that is the good system that we should all fight for. The baby anarchist is a contrarian and someone who really impulsively tends to rebel against any kind of system, and over time each has to deal with the other aspects of reality and come to terms with them.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think that that's fair. I also think you know with the, so so am I completely unscientific and unfair stereotypical way of talking about the way this happens with these two groups of people you talked about this with. Like the, the average Marxist is a system thinker and a fucking ideology nerd. The average anarchist is a fly by your hip anti-authoritarian who also does, who somehow doesn't end up right wing. That's an important caveat, because that tendency also is the fuck you dad tendency is strong amongst reactionaries to oh yeah.
Speaker 1:But nonetheless, both has to come up with, you know, fundamental failures, the contrarianness, but I also think it's partly like which one's dominant, it's partly like based on the most recent failure.
Speaker 2:So for there's yeah, oh, there's that, and I really think there's something about who's doing better youth outreach. At the time, I know I I was the subject of some very well put together anarchist youth outreach when.
Speaker 1:I was growing up, zine culture was very anarchistic and I come out of the culture, so like I feel like like I knew, yeah, good.
Speaker 2:Zine, culture and also even info. Shoporg had a youth section. Also, anarchists were the only people I could find that would say anything negative about the school system and that combo to me. I was, like that's my people. They don't like. They don't like school for the same reasons. I don't they. They like to party there, they like adventure. They're they're not just trying to achieve status. You know all these kind of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny when you, when you talk about that, I was like coming out of Zine culture, it was. That stuff is why I didn't like anarchists, like I mean I like I'm not against partying, but like y'all are some undisciplined motherfuckers. And in my experience of the battle. So Seattle, which is where I dealt with Trotsky, anarchist and international answer and you know I've talked about this before I mean it was my first. I went out there from as a, as a, as a working class kid. I actually worked and saved up money to go.
Speaker 1:I was 18 years old and I encounter a bunch of anarchists and a bunch of Trotsky and and like a bunch of people who would later on become Stalinist, but we're not yet because that the WWP was there and and also Pat Buchanan and all this libertarian stuff and and and and I encountered at the battle for Seattle and I just remember people declaring victory and me going what the fuck did you think you won? Why? And that was this that led to this conservatizing reaction of me. However, the I have dealt with Marxist long enough to see the, the systems theory, and then there's another kind of fucking daddism that Marxists have right now, which is basically violent revenge fantasies.
Speaker 2:Hmm, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:Which, which, at different periods, have been associated with anarchists, but like right and so, and so I kind of think what that is and the fact that we can talk about this is personally types and lifestyles is because we are kind of removed from these being mass movements, although at times they have come close. The end of the 1990s, it did really feel like the anarchism was on the horizon was on the horizon. It was interesting. I remember someone complaining this was so fucking funny actually. Oh, the, the, the Marxist tradition the United States had had been succumbed by recent interviews of anarchists in 2019. And I was like you idiot, like you clearly don't know the American socialist, but you post, post in you left. After the great exodus of the anti revisionist and where they all just became, I don't know. Actually, that's a whole another question what happened to all the anti revisionists in the 70s? Did they just all become like Jesus, freaks or whatever? Like, yeah, they became normies, but what kind of normies? We don't know. No one fucking studied them.
Speaker 2:Well, the other, the other really intelligent thing that anarchists used to do, that Marxists are doing more now. Well, you're one of these people doing it now, but I'll tell you what it is is anarchists used to look at like, what were the most advanced technological things happening, like Linux, open source software, decentralized production, 3d printing? Anarchists would talk a lot about this stuff and say, look, this is these are reasons we could have autonomous communes or whatever. Now, not so much. Most anarchists are, like you know, more towards the primitivist end.
Speaker 1:Are there like a towel?
Speaker 2:or that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which means they're actually Democrats.
Speaker 2:Whereas you have people like you, marxists, who are looking at systems theory or MMT or like the stuff that's cutting edge now, and even though both those things aren't new Not remotely but but yeah, like you're not dealing with dinosaurs all the time.
Speaker 1:Now, well, this is. This is interesting actually, because I do feel when I came into Marxism in the mid aughts, before Occupy, before like right before the Great Recession I predate it when I became like my transition to Marxism really kind of started around 2005. And it came. It actually came out of trying to play through paleo, conservative and libertarian ideas, consistently, believe it or not, and then like hitting a wall and being like no, I know too much about the origins of property to believe this shit. Okay, well, and I also I actually become more skeptical of economics in general, including MMT, including Marxism. Then I then I used to be because, but I initially I was like I got hit. Well, neoclassical economics didn't make any fucking sense to me, even though I studied it. And Austrian economics, when people talk about like, oh, we, you know, marxism is not rigorous historical materialism and dialectical materialism bullshit. And I'm like have you heard about prexology?
Speaker 2:Like, like, because you talked about bullshit, right.
Speaker 1:You know, and so so I reject. I end up rewriting that stuff. And then I do think there was this core of exposure from being a working class kid who was also in the punk scene and in the punk rock scene and you know it was kind of bizarre because I think like it's politics were both highly like anarcho-communist and also highly fucking reactionary, like at the same time often, sometimes in the same people.
Speaker 2:Where were you at? Because that's how it was here too.
Speaker 1:Oh, and I was in Georgia.
Speaker 2:So Phoenix can be that way Very reactionary to.
Speaker 1:And you met like Trotskyist in college and you thought they were nerds yeah, that was my. Or are you met like international answer? Okay, like in the anti-war protest and I was like these people are insane.
Speaker 2:Well. So what is the material? The materialist analysis of this to me is you know, the thing you had to do as a punk rocker was you had to create your own albums. A lot of the time you had to record them yourself, you had to print them yourself, you had to start your own label. It's hard to get a politics out of that that would support something like the recording industry, Right. So there I think there is like a real practical reason why anarchism is appealing to punk rockers, because it's pitted against the recording industry and what could be considered commercial viability, the market, all of these things are not helpful for any kind of punk. Like you're not going to, you're not going to be able to live off of like a consumer society buying your records. It's just never going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that as a person who perpetually like. The idea that you would make money from art didn't even occur to me till I was like 20. Because all you ever did was lose money, and it was something that you know it's hard to justify doing, particularly as a like. I was working class, Like, and like. I mean that in both senses of the term. I mean that in the technical term, which most people are, but I also mean it in like.
Speaker 1:If you look at American demographics statistics, we were right at the like the pale grant line with four kids, master medical debt, and my mother didn't get a college degree until I was 19. And my stepdad was a mechanic, and so you know I don't come from I don't come from abject poverty, at least not by the time I was a teenager, although I mean, I've been homeless as a child and lived in a car for a couple months with my mom, so I do know what that's like. My experience of radicals, though, and then the punk scene was that, was of that like nascent, what we now call PMC, a category I don't love and don't like to use, but whatever of like okay. Well, these are like downwardly mobile upper middle class kids, and my experience of them in politics was that I like to use their money to fund my art.
Speaker 2:And I'm from, you know I'm from like the more working class orientation of punk as well my family background. It's always hard for me to put a finger on it, but single mother, townhouse pal grant is how I took some college classes, so I think that puts me pretty squarely in the middle class. Yeah, the working class.
Speaker 1:The work, yeah, the I. To get like really sociologically technical here, I would say you are the, you are the the working lower middle class, right, you know yeah yeah, you are well above the poverty line, although, remember, the Piper line in America is like ridiculously fucking low.
Speaker 2:Right why.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think I do believe unchanged technically since, like the eighties, which is kind of crazy to think about, but because I feel like I've been told the poverty line was like under $20,000 a year like my entire life and I'm just like yeah, I remember hearing that, but money is worth so much less now. So how's that the case?
Speaker 2:Um, but anyway uh, oh, yeah, so the type of but I was listening to like boy and anyone who is into politics was considered a politician and like a middle class kid or suburban punk or something. So that whole added it was even to be political at all. But alone what kind was considered? You know a bit, uh, college.
Speaker 1:It's interesting. I think about that too, because it's hard to put myself back in like my, my teenage years I knew about like the clash and clash and crass and all these like political but commercial punk bands and new wave bands. I actually went through the library and try to get all the books from the fucking rage against machine. Uh, their second album, which has like the back picture of all these books, including Chris. For a while. That's how I encountered Chris flash.
Speaker 1:First I didn't realize this, I was thinking about it once, but also like, uh, I read like the back panthers and all this. This was part of like zine culture so, and I didn't have the money for these books. So I would go and get them from the library, which I'm sure got me on some fucking list, um, but although that's, it is pre-911. So maybe not Um it. So we would read these and I couldn't make heads and her tail out of a lot of them. I'm not going to lie.
Speaker 1:Like you know, like a 17 year old reading Marxist theory before the internet is readily available, like, yes, it exists, but I have to go to the school library to access it at any speed. Worth doing, and remember this is at a time period also, it takes, like what, 25 minutes to download a picture, like so different internet. Um, so in this time period, uh, it was in the milieu and honestly, you know this is going to sound crazy, but I think I was almost as exposed to, um, some of these ideologies from the punk scene and then from the role playing scene, cause they were all like because, because in this time period the dominant role playing game is not magic, the gathering, it's well, that's not a role playing game anyway, but it's not, uh, it's not Dungeons and Dragons I was trying to pull up, it was vampire. The mass grade and radical political ideologies are in that game.
Speaker 2:Right, you have the goth punk spectrum for your character in Van Right.
Speaker 1:So, like there's, there's a whole like vampire clan that has like Marxist and anarchist in it, and so I got exposed. I got exposed to some of these ideas through that too, um, but when I encountered them as a, as a very young adult, um, in, like got a punk community which actually landed me for being homeless a little while, and then in, uh, um, like, really homeless. I was kind of homeless, uh, last two years of my, my teens anyway, but but I stayed with friends or whatever, but like street homeless, um, and then, you know, right before the, the battle for Seattle stuff, which I went for zine reasons, which is, you know, which is an interesting thing to think about, and uh, I I've rejected that shit hard by that time. But it's also interesting because I think I was still part of that that, like I was not coming to it from, my parents were kind of a political I mean, they're working class people like like their politics were incoherent. Frankly, my mom was like a who-dog dealer, crap. My dad was like pro death penalty but also pro socialized medicine. You know, like in the nineties, so like, and by that I mean my stepfather, and my actual father is a calm man, so I don't know if he has politics. Um, so there there was. This milieu is really interesting to me.
Speaker 1:When I encountered it in college, like in Georgia, the, the college Democrats were still a relatively radical idea. Um, uh, I mean, like at a university, and this is hard to think about now and people like think about where we were at the end of the nineties and they don't realize how a reactionary decade that was. But when, like Greg Palast, uh, no, it was not even Greg Palast, it was, uh, the guy who like a truth or guy Kinda Truth wisdom was a was, but this is pre-true for. So this is like after 9-11, but before, greg Palast was more of a, of a the 2004 election was stolen guy, but this is before that yeah, yeah, okay um, I Encounter like I encountered the college Democrats.
Speaker 1:They were dumb. I encountered an international answer. Any anti-war movement and Like talking about people talking about critical support for Sudan Hussein, even if you're an anti-war person, is not very palatable. And and I Also hit like I went to Sea Island because the second G8 protests were like in my state as opposed to in Seattle and Nobody showed up, like it was right after 9-11 to you. I mean, it makes sense that no one showed up, but no one showed up.
Speaker 2:And so it was this big conservatizing Like time period, because the left in that time period dude Really sucked like that's what I remember it basically being non-existent and the parts that were around were like, so like, not even caught up with the rest of the world, the left in the rest of the world. I don't know what the fuck happened to the new left after After like the 70s. By the time I was getting politicized, those ideas weren't around no, I mean, are you a medium?
Speaker 1:and you meet like this lost generation dude Right who's like even even at that time period, don't have to be your granddad, right? Usually, actually, in reality they were 10, usually about 10 to 15 years younger than my grandfather, but but still like way the fuck older me and I would just be listening them like talk about the civil rights movement and the Governed campaign and then like maybe some trottiest thing they did and my eyes would glaze over and I'd leave like and yeah, I mean like what the fuck happened? The new left, I would say, go read culture of narcissism. I mean I look at what happened with Bobby seal or all those people. They mean pretty much people gave it up. But Actually the best book on this and I've been suggesting this now for like 10 years it's max L bonds revolution in the air, because he actually does talk about we didn't really look at what people became when they left the movement.
Speaker 1:And you know if, if, if these organizations, numbers would be left. If you took all the left organizations in the 70s and there was tons right, from the SDS all the way to the various Communist parties to to even the beginnings of the DSA, the Trotsky's groups, etc. In the 70s there was something like If you added them all together, there was just under a million people involved, which is a like even in the United States. That really is huge. But they were split up over like a hundred twenty hundred thirty organizations or something and they hated each other for stupid reasons. But also, like no one really paid attention to what happened to them, like they just sort of Like everyone just sort of went away by the time you get to Reagan and we.
Speaker 1:We often think of that as a baby boomer phenomenon, but the funny thing is a lot of them weren't baby boomers either. A lot of them are actually slightly older than that.
Speaker 2:That's true. Like Paul Goodman was like Already, like a mentor to To boomer kids.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, and ironically some of these people don't get hurt of again until, like the Obama campaign because they taught at the colleges he did or whatever, but like it's. It was very Interesting to grow up in that time period because I, like you, like the left, more or less didn't exist and where it did exist it was, it was subcultural and Weird as fuck. Even if you were in the subculture stuff, I was into the subculture stuff. Even when I was a quote conservative, I was still like going to golf shows and shit like it was. It was. Yeah, it's very strange time.
Speaker 2:We're very off topic, but yeah, we're so off topic, I know, but you you had, like you know, you had people like AIDS HIV denialists hanging out with like Like fruiterians or like Raw vegans, and like you had every weird possible fucking thing there could be was on the left.
Speaker 1:At that time it was yeah, I was anti-vaxxers now, which I now strongly associated with the right back then I associate with would like the far left yeah, fruiterians and breatharians and people on weird diets who, like nearly died yeah, just Conspiracy. Theorism was rampant.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it is more now or less now.
Speaker 1:to be honest, I Think it's probably more in general society. Well, let me take it back. I Think it's more in general society as a politics, because one of the interesting things about 90s and 80s political conspiracy, political conspiracy, theism, is it? The political part of it was actually kind of rare, but like everybody fucking believed in aliens, like that, right, yeah, it's, it's. It's interesting it does not.
Speaker 1:And I know people get mad at me when I say gen X is by and large either a political or reactionary, but but it's in general a political or reactionary. And if you think about our childhood, because we're in the tail end of that, I feel like it makes sense, like, and then if you look at the historical context and was, I guess, to be a historic materialist, to get Out of our own, like Narrativizing here, the Soviet Union fell China, look like it was liberalizing harder than even the left was at that time period in particular, you know, economically liberalizing but not politically liberalizing. Socialism had gone from in the 70s seeming ascendant and into the developing world to completely collapsing. Why?
Speaker 2:right.
Speaker 1:Like it, and I think people like now, so Marxism did not seem all that appealing, because it's like, well, clearly it was wrong. Well, like, did they not all just disappear? Like, and and in retrospect that was not true, and there's a lot of anti-communist myths and like, I think you and I both think we're about to go Into another period of a pretty profound anti-communism, and One of the things I think is interesting about this to tie this conversation back into the initial conversation though is that and you have these ways where there's almost mass movements are in the case of the early 20th century, they are mass movements and they fizzle out. Repression does not tend to, does not tend to suppress the mass movement nature of them, but repression is a lot easier to do when the mass movement is fizzling out. So the 1950s is the way the 1950s is for a reason, and there's a lot of ex-communists leading the way on that, and I think we we forget that, and one of the things I think we're gonna see In the next few years and I've been talking about this with you for a while Is we're gonna see a lot of anti-left stuff from people who we used to consider comrades.
Speaker 1:It's very soon, and we've already started to see it really but they just haven't been important. The one thing I can say about what makes this current generation so hard to predict in this is I don't think it's going to look like traditional conservatism Although we'll see an uptick in that too but I don't think that's where people are gonna go. Yeah, I think. In fact, I think a lot of the anti-communist stuff that we're gonna see is gonna come from the center of both parties.
Speaker 2:So well, I totally agree with that. I mean, I've already been saying that for a few years and trying to look at the anti-communism of the Democrats as being a really important thing to start paying attention to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that vote that happened last year think of us last year. Um, yeah, it's last year, because when the Democrats still had a majority of the house To condemn communism, that also basically put like the DPRK and Norway in the same camp if you like, read it and there's so many Democrats line on to that, including progressive Democrats was Was ridiculous and people like well, as a cynical strategy. You know that doesn't make sense because they're gonna call you socialist anyway. I'm like yeah, but that's not the only reason why they're doing it like Like you think this is just about owning the Republicans. This is also about reminding Progressives not to get too close to the likes of us and that all that was fine when you're fighting Trump, but it's not a change, it a little bit the topic.
Speaker 2:I go back a little bit to what we were saying about the way the Soviet Union plays into the left and even the IWW.
Speaker 2:I think what happened and this isn't really doesn't have anything to do with the Soviet Union itself, but the fact of its existence it made socialism seem like something that a state does instead of something that rank-and-file people do or that grassroots people do, and I think a Lot of the world got conditioned to this idea that socialism or communism was really a the type of thing that you did if you're a government, but not the type of thing that you did if you were a normal person.
Speaker 2:And and that obviously has nothing to do with any of the ideas or anything, but just like the same way that we think about how. What would be a parallel to this, like owning a hockey team isn't something that I Don't know, I can't think of an analogy, but I think it kind of de-centered the agency of Ordinary people to have the main ideologies competing at such a high level of organization that when that fell apart by the time that fell apart, the populace is not just here but a lot of places had lost all of that, that practical Know-how and like mental orientation towards politics.
Speaker 1:Me. It's interesting to me. We're talking about a lot of the differences between anarchist and Marxist and then we we've Got nostalgic about our own relationship to this tradition as a subculture. You know, 80 years later, but even in Ingalls, if you read the critique of the offer program, which is mostly supportive of the offer program. But one of the things he points out is like Socialization and nationalization aren't the same thing, like even.
Speaker 1:Like and it's not like they were that the Ingalls was always deposed in nationalization. But he was because he wasn't, and he talks about it like in in some warm France and other places. But the the goal is socialization and that is not the same as nationalizing industry. It's much bigger than that and that you should never lose sight of that and that's from Ingalls right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think Lenin understood that difference too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah, the state and revolution is incomprehensible without understanding that right like I Mean. That's why Lenin's, why Lenin is why the critique of the program is so important, and it's not just because, oh, that one little clause that makes it sound like you can have markets in a socialist society, which is not what Lenin says with that clause, but is what people have used it for. But it's that the way that he thought you would get rid of the state and state revolution is based off of the off of the Criterion spelled out in the critique of the growth of program and If, if anything, that I have learned to take anarchists pretty seriously on is this.
Speaker 1:Um, no, marks and Ingalls didn't hit labor, they didn't hate work. I mean, one of the things that marks Ingalls even talks about is like it whenever you, you should say rights, you should also say duties simultaneously. Blah, blah, blah. I'm sure anarchists love that, but Well, an existentialist would yeah, I tend to, I tend to.
Speaker 2:It's freedom and responsibility right. Yeah same Anyway yeah, no.
Speaker 1:This is why I think like, yeah, of course we have duties, but an equal duties too, and that's that's something that I think pretty much everybody saw side up. But One of the things that I really think about all the time is is that I Don't the number of socialists who even Believe that true, like true socialization, and whether your way of the state is still possible and I'll actually even talk about that at all, even though it's not crucial to marks, it is crucial, um is kind of astounding to me and it's and it's kind of almost universal that no, I know I'm not crazy about that is that I feel like a lot of Socialists or what a democratic socialist or whatever would at least grant that a good chunk of stuff could be socialized.
Speaker 2:But now it's like, no, everything is seen through the framework of nationalization, like it doesn't matter how stupid and simple the thing is. The idea of socializing it isn't, isn't part of the, the imaginary which is like how could you be a hundred percent against socialization?
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, it's For me, and this will be where we end. One of the greatest victories of anti-communism was not just the eradication of the you know so many leftists and the medication of our ideas from a public spear. It's also that it changed our own ideas. Like One, there are communists who will make arguments for communism that are actually structurally anti-communist arguments. Now Like, oh well, we can't do this, so we have to accept this, the blah, blah, blah, and I'm like, okay, that's not. You know, not that there aren't things you have to. I'm, I am a materialist. I don't believe you can.
Speaker 1:Just, I'm not David Graber, I don't believe it's all about belief, but I I think that there's this, this constantly pushing everything back into horizon, and there's also this way in which, like, a Lot of anti-communist myths have been accepted, even by communist, and then a lot of them have just been inverted like, oh well, you made up this lie about us.
Speaker 1:Therefore, the thing that that this critique must either be completely false or, if it's not false, it was good anyway, like, let's, let's go and defend, use often barrier, because that's that's something to do, and I think that is absurd. But what it tells me is that these anti-communism has actually limited our own imagination and capacity and and made our subcultures rigid and and and it's and when there's a failure it really shows up because all of a sudden the left seems. I mean, I think right now it's not as bad as the 90s, but it's close Like, and it's amazing that all it took Was a second Bernie defeat and everyone lost their fucking minds and that's yeah, and that on the scale of of world historical defeats. That's pathetic. Why To have that low of a bar and a threshold?
Speaker 2:Yeah, why the the normal Occurrence is having at least that much of a defeat.
Speaker 1:Like, like, come on, but it. And if you want to see this where it gets really pathological, don't look at the United States. What happened to the British left after Corbyn? Oh yeah, it doesn't seem to even exist like at all. Yes, there are individuals, but you know well, I mean, how many.
Speaker 2:What is it? Ten years post-occupy? All these, the left has been putting all their bets on an electoral strategy and then it just they shit the bet on it. So what you know, they're not gonna go back and like Say they were wrong about any of that, they're just gonna fucking double down and but do I look?
Speaker 1:okay, and Cornell West, which look.
Speaker 1:I actually I don't think cornered, that says a ridiculous figure. But like I'm like you guys don't see that this is just a reversion back to the 80s and 90s With, like you had the Saturn, saturn like outputs of the Green Party over and over again, oh yeah, and and and. Then, like then you'd have these like dark horse left candidates like Dennis Kesson as a microvel, and the Democratic Party Are Cynthia McKinney and they get weirder and weirder over time and they were utterly ineffective and they can usually only command about one or two percent of the vote and it seems pretty clear that we're headed straight back into that. But since people have come up under Bernie, they don't even recognize it. This is the reversion to a norm like.
Speaker 2:Just don't understand how, all, how like, why can the historical left to learn this lesson about electoralism? But today's left can't Walk like? Why were like? You didn't have to be an anarchist to understand that it could be a waste of money at least a waste of money to To go into electoral politics. There's just no set. Actually, money might be the main thing, I think.
Speaker 1:I think I'm money or bombs.
Speaker 2:The fact that nobody's fucking paying dues into an organization, whether it's a union or Whatever. I think they don't understand how much of even radical politics is about money. It's like always has been, it's always been a matter of how to raise funds, whether it's a strike fund or taking over the fucking Bank of France or whatever it is like. But now no one wants to put their money into anything collective, unless it's like a Kickstarter campaign for like a Board game or something.
Speaker 1:I'm a dues paying Union member, but but, um, they're cheap either the. I think that I, I think I know that it's just a hard thing to remind people and and I also, I mean we can see, we can see what the electoralism does and the incentive structures that induces. And I hate to pick on the DSA, but we need to. When you look at the DSA because, like, how much of their resources go into just maintaining the, the, the staffing apparatus to be able to run campaigns, and the cost that that incurs, which basically means that 80% of every local goes into what amounts to campaigns in New York and California, which, by the way, the DSA already had effectively a cadre and caucus in as early as the 1980s, like it goes. But it's actually an older thing there In New York and so it's like, okay, so now you need. You need what 80,000 people to do what you used to do with 5000 to be originally effective. But To.
Speaker 2:I mean like it's like people expect, it's like they think politics is something you could get done for free or something like that, like Requires money and our time.
Speaker 2:The fact that small donations, you know, did so much for the Bernie campaign To me, I think, is actually a big achievement for the left, who hasn't been able to get anybody to spend money on anything, and it really like Makes like a case for the conservatives when the left doesn't even want to put money into their own cause. That you know, when they accuse the left of just wanting things for free and wanting handouts.
Speaker 1:Well, this is one thing. I think that I maybe this is gonna be one of the more unpopular things I say tonight, and I I have been surprised at Like even our new sectarian organizations, like there's all these new kind of weird political movements right that are popping up, but they're like hashtag movements, they don't even require time. And then one of I will say why a lot of people aren't hesitant to get money in and and I will probably leave this alone it's how many times I've been ripped off, like how many of those donations to one of the 85,000 nominally BLM organizations, since anyone could use the, the, the nomenclature.
Speaker 2:Right. From an anarchist perspective, that's exactly. I mean that that's the right incentive structure. You want people to be afraid of wasting their money. You still want them to put money into it, but you want them to care enough so that doesn't get wasted on politics in some stupid way.
Speaker 1:Are wasted on enriching somebody. Um, right, yeah, I mean yes, obviously, but also what I don't know. I mean I, I guess this is a fundamentally different problem. Then the IWW and the early 20th century, and that, even though for some people, sticks are higher and needs are actually there, you know, like this is not, this is not all about, oh, it's all PMC, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:You know, yeah, there's that that that probably a lot of that strata of elites probably does define a lot of Higher level interest in these movements, because they define high-level interest in all movements. But one of the problem of bureaucracy and resources, but one of the problems that we have here is that you know what I was talking about like these new, like political, weird political things that that are almost like cargo calls to have tons of followers on Twitter, whatever, but they don't have any manifestation in the real world at all, even like compared to other weird sectarian groups because, right, they, they don't have any drive to build institutions, because it doesn't seem like they're even interested in collecting cash other than for individuals through like Clicks, parasocial interactions, podcasts support things like that, and you know, I say this is a person with podcast too, but I'm not pretending to build a political movement off of this.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, that's that that's an additional problem to this whole thing about representation and the way that a podcaster becomes a representative or whatever. For yeah, for a phantom movement or something, but when you don't have.
Speaker 1:When you don't have a Skin in the game, be that money, time or whatever, you can also have delusions A lot easier, because that's what I mean. Yeah, what incentive do you have not to like?
Speaker 1:because right, it's not like it's not like you're actually doing any fucking thing right. And I think we encounter a lot of Marxist right now who have like kind of fundamentally broken in reality and I'm actually I am just one time I'm gonna come down on Marxist Broken reality on one, what their beliefs can affect, because like people really care about what, what you say, you believe, as if some minor podcaster somewhere is really changing the world, and to Like it's like you're ideologically purging, you don't have power and you don't have any reasons to you. But two, even more importantly in some ways they can feel like having these opinions are doing this advocacy is consciousness raising, but it's not even the consciousness raising of, like the late new left which that was stupid too, by the way but but like oh yeah, I just did that whole Marcusa thing.
Speaker 2:But I just did that whole Marcusa thing, but.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think you know I'm gonna keep all this in because it is good stuff, although I'm gonna I think I'm gonna to know about an hour and a half in we give up on our actual topic because we finished it, yeah, well. Well, just for the continuity, the wobblies were able to raise money.
Speaker 2:They had a treasury, they did all that shit. So, okay, yeah, they raised money and Fuck they even kind of had. I mean, they didn't have a money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they raised money and fuck, they even kind of had. I mean they didn't have a militia, but they kind of did. Yeah, could you imagine today? I Remember one time I said this and I was being serious and people thought I was joking, but I was like I will take the DSA seriously when it has a soccer team and a militia like yeah, oh, like the YMCA has a soccer team or what you know what I?
Speaker 1:like if it takes the social Stuff beyond, like communist Movie group, because the social functioning is actually important way, yeah, and I think anarchists often get this, and Marx is like no dude, like the SP, like I was somebody informed me recently, I was verifying this like Like half of the clubs in British football Come out of like workers and immigrant organizations initially, and I was like, and which makes their current status really darkly ironic, admittedly, but like it's just like, yeah, that there's a reason why these social things are important. And you know, yes, politics is not a church, the left is not a church, but maybe you should learn something from a fucking church.
Speaker 2:Right or a corporation. Fuck, I mean, yeah, I mean, I bet there's a Facebook soccer team.
Speaker 1:The what. The last thing I will say about this, though, is I will say this germal age about money is actually kind of pervasive in society as a whole, because churches are dying from it too, and I Don't know. Like, like that's the part of me is like, well, people like, yeah, circumstances compel your alienation, but people really don't want to, don't seem to actually indicate that they, they don't like it, like, even though they say they don't, and they act miserable, and every indication socially is that they're miserable, but but like To like. One thing about both Marxist and anarchist politics and I think people do need to understand this it does make demands on people. Yeah, like, it's not just something that you can just believe, and If, and if you just if you're just a philosophical Marxist or you're just a philosophical anarchist, then that's cool, but you might as well be like a philosophical Tolkienist or something. I mean, it's just it. At that point, it really is an intellectual subculture. And Look, I'm, you know I'm just as I'm as much of a nerd as anybody is.
Speaker 1:People watch this show can tell you I would treat in the history all the time, and I think it's important that we talk about the historical stuff as a way of understanding and contrasting our own situation, but we also have to be honest about where we are, and you know, I'm not as involved with anarchist millions any more as they used to be actually used to organize a lot locally with, with people who are both involved with anarchist movements in the PSL, until they kind of tore each other apart. And then COVID happened, and nobody does anything Although, ironically, breckhammer actually showed up to some of this and recruited people, but that and actually accelerated decline of some of these organizations. That was fun. So for people who think that's just on the internet, no, it's not. But. But the one thing I would say is, when you actually do like activists work, you will have to work with people who are not necessarily of your ideology, and that you know. So, like anarchists and PSL people will work, will work together all the time.
Speaker 1:Conversely, though and I know you probably agree me on this a lot, of, a lot of activists work at this point is basically spinning your wheels Like it's. It isn't actually doing much, and so you know a lot of people I know who devoted a whole lot of time to it, particularly in the Trump administration, have kind of walked away, and I think that's also what happened in the 1970s with the new left and so and I also think from my studies on Christopher Wach, that's actually a lot of what happened in the 1950s during the Red Scare too, even though the state was definitely helping that out, but that a lot of people left on their own, and I think we need to understand that and understand our own relationship to that. And, yeah, people have to put the, you have to have skin in the game. It's money or time.
Speaker 2:Well, and and then there is gonna be a cost, a cost benefit thing that's gonna eventually play out where You're gonna have to say has all this time and money been worth it?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, if you have something back for your money, don't do it like that. That's the other thing I'm like. If people just like give me some money for this noble sacrifice for socialism in like a thousand years, fuck that shit. Like even churches give you something right now, what? Yeah?
Speaker 2:No, exactly, yeah, and I think you know we Can't, you know we can't just keep running, our running away from Our that part of things. It doesn't have to be like fucking digging a hole in the ground, you know, in building houses in Mexico or something, but there you got to do something.
Speaker 1:As a person who has dug a hundred ground and literally built schools in Mexico Actually, literally, it's not a bad thing to do if you have the oh no someone else to paying for you to do no, I'm saying, I'm saying it's hard, but yeah no what did you do the housing for humanity or no?
Speaker 1:No, no, no, I, I my my job actually to. It was a was a community owned school. It was a private school was community owned, but it's for rich people. But they would assuage their consciousness and ours by building schools for poor people. So I would, you know, go out and help and we would put up buildings and we would teach English to, to a little Mexican ranchero kids, and We'd also like help their parents Do stuff like Get, get microloans to like, build To like build like ovens with chimneys. I mean, I know it makes it just makes Mexico sound more backwards than it is. But like, like the.
Speaker 1:The uneven development in Mexico is extreme. You know, they're plot that you could be a month array and you might as well be in America actually as far as like, you know Luxuries and stuff. But then if you go to some of these rancheros it's like this plate, this, this community, has no running water. It doesn't have necessarily consistent electricity, you know, and like it doesn't have necessarily even like consistent Wood burning infrastructure. So it's so there's, you know that's. It's a good thing to do if you can do it, the the.
Speaker 1:The unfortunate thing is, unless you get a job, like I did, it's unfortunately like a province of assuaging the conscious of the upper middle class, because usually the other people go forward to do that, which is which is kind of the problem with activism, right, because of this money problem right now, since we're not doing micro stuff around it and and we're dumping all of this stuff into, like electoral campaigns, then we don't have the money to do this. And when people tell me, well, the left has no money and I'm like it doesn't have as much as the right, but actually, yes, it does, like it has money, like we have active, we have actually made Socialist advocate millionaires. They, they are, they have, they exist, are at least hundred thousand years, they exist.
Speaker 2:Lifestyle habits, I mean, come on, it's right. Speaking of lifestyle, though I gotta, I gotta head out, yeah yeah, for two hours and a half.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on. Cyber, dandy, I'm trying not to use your real name and I'm gonna put so people who want to dig into this. You sent me some notes. Is it okay if I share those in the show notes?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, they're, they're rough.
Speaker 1:but yeah, yeah, but you include your sources so people can look at them. Thank you so much, so where can people find you?
Speaker 2:cyber, either my website, cyber dandyorg, or on YouTube at Cyber dandy.
Speaker 1:All right, and I will put those also in the show notes. Thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you, talk to you soon, thank you.
Speaker 2:You're welcome to join us today. Thank you, talk to you soon, thank you.