The BAD PODCAST – Two Hours of Unnecessary Yet Significant (to Us) Anarchist History

Transcript
(lightly edited for readability – beware the sarcasm and the lost tone of a transcript that was auto generated)

Aly
Good afternoon, morning, or night lovers to haters and anyone who feels hardly anything for us besides mild apathy. I'm Aly ....

Jim
And I'm Jim.

Aly
And we are...

Aly and Jim
THE Bozeman Antifa Dance (& Theatre Collective)

Aly
I almost forgot the "the."

Jim
You almost did, and this is the BAD Podcast.

Aly
And today, lucky listeners, we are doing an educational episode. So I posited this idea to Jim. I was like, you know, I really like podcasts where I do learn a little bit and there's, you know, some educational content to the episode. And we should try to research something related to anarchism and see if we can put together an episode of things that we find interesting but also have very interesting conversations spurred by it - because we don't want to just be like, facts, facts, facts. A lot of the podcasts that I listen to in parts for different things that I researched are just dry as fuck. I could only listen to 10 or so minutes.

Jim
They put me to sleep. I can't listen to them.

Aly
So my research is much less extensive than Jim’s. He went in.

Jim
So I'm going to put you to sleep.

Aly
No, I mean you went in on individuals, which I think is inherently more interesting than researching events because it's just more personal. We can be more drawn into an individual with their quirks and their thoughts than we can to something like the Spanish Civil War, which is so fucking complicated and weird. And, like, you can be interested in the weirdness of it and the thing itself, but it does feel less draining to me than a deep dive on a person like Emma Goldman - when I first started getting interested in anarchy. But then again, Emma Goldman's interesting, more interesting than most people.

Jim
Oh, she's fascinating. Emma Goldman's a famous anarchist who wrote an autobiography. You can get it free online, or you could buy it. But you could also get it for free. It’s called “Living My Life.” It's very long. It's, what, 900 pages or something like that, but it's a really beautiful read. You won't be bored.

Aly
Yeah, it took me a year, but that's because I was reading 15 other books at the same time.

Jim
I read it while on the job. I was paid to read her.

Aly
Shout out to anyone who stole from their job today, even if it was just time, because good for you.

Jim
That's a good syndicalist anarchist tactic.

Aly
And then take over your work through a union and then try to get voted on to a Senate. Just kidding. Don't do that.

Jim
Are you filibustering the podcast?

Aly
That's me.

Jim
And we are going to give a test at the end. No, we're not giving a test at the end

Aly
We are testing Jim halfway through on completely unrelated things that are fun and silly for some lighthearted reprieve - not that this won't be lighthearted.

Jim
Yeah, I'm sure people don't want us to just jabber on and probably get to the point, but...

Aly
No, all of my things will be, like, very chaotic. I can't read half my notes. It'll be a great time.

Jim
I just want to ask how you're doing.

Aly
I'm so sleepy. I'm happy that Echo's doing good on some new CBD treats that I got for her. Whenever my dog’s joints are doing well and she's able to run and play, I'm really happy because of that. But I'm tired. I'm trying not to lose sight of the passion and pure joy that I tapped into this weekend. And it's really hard for me to feel that and then have to go back to the grind. It's getting progressively harder.

Jim
Okay, I can't let that sit. What passion and pure joy do you have? Do you care to share?

Aly
Yeah, so a lot of it was unprompted by anything. Like, I was just full of joy Friday night and Saturday. I was feeling joyful at the little things. I was feeling really grounded in my body. There were a lot of moments where I had no anxiety, which, you know is a big deal. And then we had a beautiful potluck on Sunday, which added to my feelings of joy and erotically living. But you know, I was already in that space. I was already feeling really grounded, and I was like, “Wow, this is actually the happiest I've felt In a really long time,” and there was no actual reason for it. It just was.

Jim
Yeah, it was a very nice potluck. We weren't doing erotic things, but we were erotically living, so to speak. If you want to know what that means, perhaps go to other podcasts - that we have done - for that.

Aly
Like our last one?

Jim
Or that I have done in the other one in another forum with another person.

Aly
Yeah, Jim really wants people to listen to the podcast that he put a ton of work into with his ex so that it's not just sitting there. You know, you keep the website going and...

Jim
I don't know. Like, I do, but I can't listen to them right now.

Aly
Exactly. So listen to them because Jim can't. Like, somebody needs to listen to them. If you don't know what a crygasm is, go to whatever it's called. What is it called? Intimacy Cadre?

Jim
Yeah, intimacycadre.org. But we're at bozemanantifadance.org. And that's where we can you can learn about dancing...

Aly
We are.

Jim
...as a tactic against fascism. And today we're going to talk about anarchy.

Aly
We are, and I think we should give a quick disclaimer as well ... that being able to talk, quote un quote “eloquently” about anarchy, anarchist topics, or anarchists is not necessary to your politics. And I'm a perfect example of that because I have a lot of brain fog going on, and even though I know that I come off as an eloquent person - and objectively I am - I don't feel that confident still, like, talking about anarchism as if I'm trying to convince people of its merit. Or if I'm trying to talk to other so-called leftists who want to quote theory at me, you know? So I understand how intimidating it can be to be discovering your values or to be honing your values and feel like you can't talk about them with other people in a way that, you know, doesn't make you look dumb, or idealistic, or something. So I just want to stress that perfection is not a requirement for anarchism.

Jim
Yeah, you're in the perfect school of thought If you don't want to be a scholar or don't feel like you need to know the history of anarchy because anarchy is purely about not having hierarchies. So we don't want to have a hierarchy of the great voices of the past who teach us all about anarchy and follow them like people follow the Bible, or follow some great thinker, or read Rumi, or whoever the hell they're reading for their wisdom. Yes, there is a really interesting tradition, and we're going to share some of that tradition. And at the same time, if you never listen to this podcast, you could still be a perfectly good anarchist. So why are we doing this, then, if it's not all that important to being an anarchist?

Aly
Because it's a fun challenge and because I just enjoy sharing knowledge and having knowledge shared with me. I would love it if anyone out there in one of these other countries where people listen to us would write us an email and continue the conversation with more information that you know. Or if you have a correction of something that we said, I just want to learn, and I want to learn without judgment. And I want to share to people who are also interested in these things.

Jim
Yeah, and for me personally, I get a lot of inspiration from the past. I also get a lot of cautionary tales from the past. It's provocative. It leads to conversations with the people I'm living with. Like you right now, we can have interesting conversations, and we don't have to settle the truth of the past. But the things we learn and read inspire those conversations, inspire action, and a lot of times people have gone through things not entirely dissimilar from what we're going through now. And sometimes, they're going through things quite dissimilar, and we shouldn't necessarily try to imitate them. So we also got to be careful how we interpret that past, but it is an interesting path. Anarchism has...

Aly
Right.

Jim
...depends how you define ... it has a very long past or a very short past that goes back into the 1800s, which could seem long to some of you, but in the course of human history is pretty short. But there was a time where there were a lot more of us around.

Aly
I know, and so part of the conversation is recognizing the threads of similarity that tie us to some anarchists of the past while also realizing we're in a very different world than the 1800s. It is not as easy to storm the barracks and get weapons to hold off militias. And you know you can't just go out and stab a political leader in the street and then run into the hills. And those things may not have been good at the time either, you know? All of it's questionable. All of these things can be debated. So I think, yeah, we'll see what kind of tactics inspire us, what thoughts inspire us, and where there's also room for newness and change. So let's start with your kind of history of where you want to start with anarchism.

Jim
Okay, so you tasked me with this, and I have some background in this. Here are my “credentials,” my...

Aly
And also he doesn't have notes. I have, like, crazy, deranged notes that I'll be referring to, and Jim doesn't have brain fog that I know of. So he's just going to go.

Jim
I studied history in college. I studied philosophy too. More people know my philosophy background, but I also have a history degree. I focused mostly on history of the American West. I did not focus on anarchy, but I have a pretty good background in history. And so when I read history, it sort of fits into a map. For me,...

Aly
I so do not; so that's cool.

Jim
...it makes it a little easier for me to read because I understand some of the peripheral events they're sometimes talking about.

Aly
Yes. And because I don't understand the peripheral events, that's why I often feel adrift reading about history … because I don't know how it fits together.

Jim
Yeah, and there's a lot to fit together, and there's a lot of things about history that are complicated. And who's telling the history? It's generally told from the standpoint of men about men - upper class men and ruling class men. But that's what we have, and so anarchists obviously weren't ruling class. They almost ruled nowhere because anarchists don't believe in rulers. So they wouldn't be ruling anywhere. And so they're not the ones who wrote the history books. We do have some famous examples, and that's in itself a cautionary tale. Because anarchists don't believe in hierarchies or power, there is a tendency ... there's a worry that if we lift up too many of our past icons, then we get into a kind of hero worship that anarchy typically feels uncomfortable with. All the same, those are the works, and the people, and the writings that have survived, and a lot of them did amazing things. So just take that all in and take it or leave it. That's just a sort of disclaimer before we start.

Anarchy, like I said, is essentially a belief that there should be no rulers. And typically in history, it's been used in a negative sense. “Oh, you don't believe there should be rulers? What do you want? Chaos?” And the word anarchy has become equivalent for people who were not anarchists as chaos.

Aly
Oh, if I hear that one more time, I'm just gonna...

Jim
The first time it was ever used in a way that someone says, “Hey, I'm an anarchist” and didn’t mean it negatively, I think a guy in the early 1700s said it - but more famously by a man named Proudhon in the 1800s. But that doesn't make Proudhon - who said “I am an anarchist”(he said it in those words only in French) ... I don't remember my French at the moment "Je sui anarchiste” or whatever. I don't speak French. That doesn't necessarily mean that anarchy as an idea only began with this guy named Proudhon, and we'll get back to Proudhon in a second.

But anarchy, as an idea where you don't believe in rulers or have rulers, is really an old idea. If you think about it, humans have been around - homo sapiens have been around - 300,000 years. And the modern version, the ones we recognize as homo sapiens, have been around 150-, 160,000 years. Well, civilization has only been around 6,000 years and patriarchy at the most - I was doing the research today - at most 8,000 years. Patriarchy, of course, is male-dominated society, but we can make that an equivalent for hierarchical society because there wasn't 152,000 years of women abusing men through something called “matriarchy,” where women... . Yes, you had matriarchal societies. They don't quite mimic patriarchal societies. But we didn't have 152,000 years of hierarchy. Basically, humans survived without hierarchy. Now, would it have looked like what we practice as anarchy? Who the heck knows? Because we don't even have a single practice of anarchy, and that's a whole other discussion that we could have. But for most of human history, where people are like, “What do you do if you don't have a government? What do you do if you don't have rulers?” Humans survived just fine.

Aly
You figured it out.

Jim
But once we started changing our relationship with the land through agriculture, through the building of cities, and then the rise of militaries to protect all of those things, that's when hierarchies started developing. And they didn't have to develop, but they did develop.

Aly
Direct correlation with women and agricultural communities being forced inside at those times of industrialization, rather than continuing to be in the fields and having a connection with the land.

Jim
This is even older. I'm talking 8,000 years ago, well before industrialization. We're talking about the first fields, essentially, is when you start seeing the first hierarchies developing. Yes, at first, you know, you're taming animals.

Aly
As well as their male counterparts.

Jim
You’re domesticating plants, you're growing things, and then you're building cities around those. And then you start getting more specialized labor and militaries. That's not inevitable. There's nothing inevitable about it, although if you're a materialist, maybe you think it was inevitable because you don't believe in human free will. But that's a whole not unrelated story to anarchism and socialism that we can get to. I don't know how much of that I'll go into.

So there's that. Then, you have different religious traditions. The Taoist tradition is notoriously anti-authoritarian and … . It's “notorious.” I guess that's a good word for me. It’s famously anti-authoritarian and anti-government in its religious beliefs. You have all kinds of religious sects - early Christianity, for instance, is very anti-government. Eventually, it becomes one with the Roman Empire, but there's a phase where it's like, “No, we don't want to have anything to do with government.”

Aly
And then you've got, like Confucianism, where it combines religion, philosophy, and politics.

Jim
Which is almost the opposite of anarchy in a way, although there are apparently Neo-Confucian traditions which are less governmental and...

Aly
Right.

Jim
But yes, so some religious traditions tend to support hierarchy - let's say Roman Catholicism - and some even within, say, Christianity, which aren't. Let's go to the opposite extreme, Quakerism, where there is no minister, where there's nobody preaching to you, where everyone in that church sits in a circle around each other. And they only speak if they feel the light of God calls them to speak, and they don't have a hierarchy at all in their religious denomination.

Aly
I wasn't aware that they sat in a circle, but I do know that a lot of our Montessori schooling ideas come from the Quakers.

Jim
Sometimes just square but, yes, and Montessori-ism has also been associated with what's called individualist anarchism as well.

Aly
Very cool.

Jim
I'm not sure I'm going to go into all these definitions. But the modern people that we think of as anarchists, who began with guys like Proudhon in in the middle of the 19th century or just before the middle of the 19th century, in Proudhon’s case, they were very inspired by things like the Enlightenment - which believed that reason didn't come just from God but that everybody had reason within them (just kind of like the Quakers believing everybody had the light of God). Yeah, take God out of it with the Enlightenment, and you've got the belief that people are rational, that you didn't have to get it from a king from a ruler.

And so, then, you have the French Revolution where the king is killed. The French Revolution, though, was problematic because a new hierarchy took over. And so there are a lot of people in France in particular who were like, “Whoa, like we had a revolution that only created Napoleon in the end ... created Napoleon Bonaparte, an even bigger hierarchical figure than the king himself. You know, we replaced the king with essentially - after a small transition period - an emperor. That's a problem.

At the same time, you've got the rise of capitalism and the rise of industrialization happening at the end of the 18th century. And capitalism, as we know, essentially creates hierarchy. It believes in the profit motive. It creates rich people, and it got people thinking, “Wait a second. It's not just the government that's the problem. There's not just political hierarchy; there's economic hierarchy.” And in the 19th century, when you have this big working class developing and you still have this large peasant class - the old hierarchies, the peasants and the landowners. So you still have that class, and now you've got the capitalists and the working class. You have a lot of people wondering, “Wow, this is a problem” because populations are now exploding with the agricultural revolution, and you have a lot of hungry people, a lot of people just getting abused trying to survive. And a lot of people are like, “That's a problem.” And they call it “the social problem.” And it led to a lot of thinkers thinking about what do we do about this. What is the source of this problem?

Aly
We live in a society.

Jim
And Proudhon more famously than saying he is an anarchist, said that property is theft - and he argued in his treatise where he says he's an anarchist that also it's about property … . And he goes into why he does not believe there is such a thing as a right to property. Now, Proudhon is problematic for other reasons. He's a sexist. He's an anti-semite - things that are antithetical to anarchism. Yes, so let's not make a hero out of Proudhon, but he did say something that was very influential to both men and women.

It was a minority of French society and there are other radicals who were not necessarily anti-hierarchical, but who in the end wanted to even out the classes. And all these people wanted a social solution, a more communal solution however you came about that - something that brought the lower classes up to the level of the upper classes. They became known as socialists.

So anarchists were a kind of socialist. Then, you had Marx, who with Engels, wrote the “Communist Manifesto,” who had a very different kind of socialism. So in anarchism, as it started to develop, the idea was ... there were many ideas of anarchism, but they mostly came around people coming together, whether they were in some cases peasants, most cases in early anarchism around the working class and labor - becoming the collective owners of the process without need of owners, without need of a ruling class … basically no hierarchy and shared ownership. In the case of Proudhon, he believed in sort of a common bank for the community. It's not exactly collectivism. His was called mutualism.

Aly
Right.

Jim
You can look all these things up - they're fine points - but ultimately there's a community, almost grassroots, solution to the problems. Everything starts from the people up, and then there is no up ultimately. And then, of course, there's arguments within early anarchism of how much we should pay attention to politics. Does revolution mean overthrowing the state? Does revolution mean radical disengagement from the state? These are arguments anarchists still have to this day.

Aly
And believe me, the opinions do vary. Jim
True. In Marxism, you know Karl Marx, the “Communist Manifesto,” … interesting that “communism“ sort of disappears as a word from Marxism until Lenin and the Soviets really resurrect it. But they believed that history was advancing towards Marxism. But they also believed in revolution.

Aly
Right.

Jim
They believed in overthrowing the ruling class. They just believed that to do that you needed a big, strong, organized state apparatus. To do that, you had to create your own working-class version of that. Then, once it took power, you would begin to dismantle it.

Aly
Right.

Jim
Because then you have early anarchists like Bakunin, Mikhail Bakunin, who was also an anti-semite.... . Marxists, they're the ones who bring this stuff up, and as anarchists, we should own that. We have some scoundrels who are very influential to our thinking who had some problems.

Aly
You can't get us on these people not being perfect because we don't believe that anyone can be perfect, nor would we expect them to.

Jim
Although they can be not anti-semite. We can reasonably expect people not...

Aly
Oh yeah, that bar is 100 yards below the ground, yeah.

Jim
...to be anti-semitic.

Nevertheless, Bakunin came to argue that if these Marxists ever have a successful revolution, they're just going to re-create authoritarianism - and you're not going to get rid of hierarchy or the state. And, then, what happens in Russia in the 1910s and early 1920s? Exactly what the anarchists feared.

Yeah, so eventually there's this big split between the anarchists and the socialists, and then there's another split between, really, those socialists who want to use the system and use it incrementally, and they're called democratic socialists. And they're the ones who - think of Bernie Sanders who calls himself a democratic socialist. So he says he wants revolution, but he's really about using the system to change the system - to bring about socialism - essentially the end of class ultimately. I don't even think Bernie Sanders is after the end of class divisions, but early socialists ... that's what they would have been ultimately after.

Aly
And if we give him a lot of credit, we can be, like, “Well, maybe he thought that at the beginning of his time in politics,” but we've lost all faith in...

Jim
Yeah. And in the early days, you had all these different kinds of revolutionaries in France. You also had these people called the Blanquists. There's this guy named Blanqui who decided he was a socialist and believed in, you know, overthrowing the government and revolution for the people. But he believed that a small group of elites should lead that fight. And so you had the Blanquists. You had various anarchists who didn't all call themselves anarchists in the early days. You had the Proudhonists. You had the Bakunists.

You had all kinds of different branches of people who eventually became known as anarchists, and they would sometimes ally with each other and sometimes have bitter fights. They formed this revolutionary group called The International, known as the First International Workingman's Association. And they would meet every year, and they would come to agreements on their revolutionary platform until eventually Marx and the Marxists kick Bakunin and the anarchists basically out of The International. And then there was for a while two Internationals, but they all fell apart. And then there was a Second International.

Aly
They had a huge fight, right? Yes, Marx was the drama.

Jim
And anarchists at first thought they're going to be around in that, and eventually the Marxists kicked them out finally for good. And then the anarchists ‘cause they're, like, “We're fed up. We're not getting involved with this kind of stuff anymore if you're just going to kick us out.”

Aly
You're fired.

Jim
That would be the least that the Marxists would do to anarchists over the years. Many, many, many thousands of anarchists were killed by Marxists and Communists in the Soviet Union and in other places. Anarchism was outlawed in the early Soviet Union by the mid-1920s.

And in Paris before all the anarchists and the Blanquists and the Marxists had all split up, they did have a bit of a revolution in Paris in 1871 known as the Paris Commune - which was started really by the National Guard of Paris. And the National Guard of Paris, you would think, “Oh, the military did this.” Now the National Guard of Paris was weird because it was a local military organization in the city where officers were directly elected by the rank-and-file troops and could be removed at any time for any reason. So it was actually a somewhat radical organization, even though it was an official organization in Paris, and the main governments were always suspicious and didn't really want the National Guard armed because you had all these radicals in the National Guard.

And the Commune starts. Actually, when the government in Versailles - it's a new government because they had just lost the war against Prussia, and the Prussians are actually still surrounding the city of Paris at the time - and it's kind of a mess... . But the government in Versailles wanted to take the cannons of the National Guard. And, at first, they get there and would have been able to do it if they had horses to pull the cannons away. So, eventually, they rally, and they convinced regular soldiers to turn on their officers.

Aly
Hell yeah.

Jim
And that's how the Paris Commune starts. And then in the Paris Commune, you have all this change immediately. They bring in proclamations like women having full equal rights … 1871 in Paris.

Aly
Okay!

Jim
Women were fighting, including Louise Michel, who … I just read her memoirs of this woman who becomes an anarchist … who is a radical school mistress and just starts fighting. There are women fighting in the streets on behalf of the Paris Commune, and they start collectivizing. It's a much more anarchist...

Aly
Oh yeah.

Jim
...movement … not completely anarchist, and it's very confusing. And it was only around for a few months.

Aly
Right, totally. That reminds me of the Spanish Civil War, though, and the women who fought in that - like the images of the women holding rifles in their outfits and feeling really involved and passionate - are interesting to look at.

Jim
Couple months. So you know, the Paris Commune is crushed. Thousands and thousands of people are killed. The anarchists get kicked out of The International.

Then, you have Haymarket Square in Chicago. Workers were fighting for the eight-hour day. Anarchist didn't really care about the eight-hour day, which they saw as reformist, sort of.

Aly
Oh my God. It is. We need to keep fighting for fewer hours, not less, right?

Jim
Right. On the other hand, that's what the workers wanted. So anarchists typically were allied, even though they weren't super enthusiastic about the struggle. So they were at Haymarket in Chicago, where people were striking and some anarchists called a rally. One night at Haymarket Square. It was like May 3rd. I think [transcriber’s note: May 4, actually]. It's May 3rd, 1886. May 1st, there was a big rally, and this is where May Day comes from. The workers’ international workers’ holiday celebrated everywhere but the United States, even though it happened in Chicago. But, eventually, the police show up even though it's just kind of a rainy, stormy night, and everybody's just given their speeches. Nothing much is going on, and then somebody throws a bomb into the middle of the police. And then the police just start firing indiscriminately. Nobody knows who threw the bomb.

Aly
But there's some speculation that it was maybe one of the seven, right?

Jim
The bomb may have been made by one of the eight that they arrested. Yeah, and so who knows? But they never found that person. He was probably not the bomb thrower. They may have been the bomb maker.

Aly
But that just shows you how much speculation and weirdness is involved.

Aly
Right.

Jim
But we don't know.

They arrested eight people. Many of them weren't even there that night. Some of them weren't even there when it happened. There's no tying some of the people to some of the things that happened. It's almost like the January 6th thing where they're saying, “Well, they were instigating,” but they weren't instigating it. The mayor had been there in the crowd. He said it was peaceful.

Aly
Right. Or if, like, cops said the people getting arrested for being at a music festival that wasn't even that close to where they're building Cop City in Atlanta, GA, but getting arrested for supposedly being conspirators.

Jim
Like, nothing was going on, right? So they arrested these eight anarchists. And people thought this is fucked up, not just anarchists thought that this is fucked up. Almost everybody thought it was fucked up.

Aly
Good. We got a little bit of justice in public opinion.

Jim
But it didn't matter. Five of them were sentenced to death. Four of them were executed. One committed suicide just before the execution would have happened. They were eventually pardoned, maybe even exonerated by the - a few years later - Governor of Illinois. But this became a worldwide story, and it really influenced American anarchism. And it influenced a lot of other people. It influenced Emma Goldman to become an anarchist ... reading about the travesty of what happened to these people. Because they were like, “Well, whatever happened there, you can't just execute them for their ideas.” Because even the prosecutor at the trial said, “Hey, these people are as guilty as anyone else, but their ideas are dangerous.” He said it right at the trial. So they were being persecuted for being anarchists.

Aly
They were.

Jim
At the same time, so now anarchists are being are being ostracized by other leftists. You've got Haymarket. They're being mowed down in the streets of Paris. So a lot of anarchists are like “Hell with this,” and they start saying, “Well, maybe if we're smaller numbers and now we're more in hiding. Maybe, if some of us just feel the inspiration to do our propaganda through some dramatic act like assassinating a leader...” - something known as “propaganda of the deed,” which didn't necessarily mean assassination. Propaganda of the deed meant some great act that the individuals moved to do it would inspire people to revolution. It just happened to be it was often bomb throwing, assassinations, and the particular political violence - called attentat or the propaganda that deed.

So you had a lot of anarchists doing - or a minority of anarchists doing - that. But that was one tactic that was going on. You also have the development of what wasn't simply rooted in the working class. So the thought is, “Wait a second. If you have this labor union, and this labor union, and this labor union all organizing, what's to stop them from becoming the new hierarchies of society?” So really, anarchism should be about all the people, and you should organize together as you see fit with each other. And that became known as anarcho communism. And that was a guy named Peter Kropotkin.

So I could go on and on and on. I don't necessarily want to go on and on, but it's really interesting how anarchism develops out of this - out of out of a time in capitalism and industrialization when there's so much class division, when it's first becoming really evident in the cities and not just in the countryside where it had always been evident that, “Wow, we've got a fucking problem.” And who's to say any of this is right? If we don't need kings, why do we need anybody at all? Why do we need any rulers? Why do we need representatives even? Why can't we just do this ourselves? And a lot of the theory and things came out of that pot. And it was an incredible time where there were hundreds of thousands, maybe even up to a couple million anarchists in the world - always a minority. But still, it caught on in a way that really scared the mainstream society, and the repression was brutal.

Aly
And we've gone through fluctuations in terms of anarchism’s popularity since then because in 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, there were actually more anarchists in Spain than there were communists. And George Orwell famously went to the conflict and was like, “What the fuck’s happening? There are so many different kinds of people.” There were socialists of the time ... obviously, a lot of anarcho syndicalists - those were the main voices in the CNT, which was the workers’ union that they had democratically elected to the Senate.

Jim
Do we want to explain anarcho syndicalism?

Aly
Yeah, you can explain it better than me. My idea of it is basically using the system to get your needs met temporarily, usually through a workers’ lens.

Jim
Yeah, it's a worker-based anarchy. So in the early days, we talked about Bakunin’s collectivism. Those were typically trade unions, which were skilled workers. This is not necessarily skilled workers. This is all workers, and the idea is they don't need bosses. They don't need formal foremen; they can organize themselves and run their own industries and their own businesses. And so it's very similar to the early forms of anarchism in that way. So it's a labor-based...

Aly
Right. Right.

Jim
...kind of anarchy, and in Spain you also would have had a big peasant population, and they...

Aly
Yes. Yeah, and in Barcelona, ...

Jim
...were all organized as well.

Aly
...you know, where all of this occurs, they actually said that the CNT was open to anybody who was not a ruler of some kind. So they basically were like, “We won't let police in. We won't let politicians in. We won't let anyone in the military. But you could theoretically be a non-working middle-aged person with a disability and join. So they did have radical horizontalism in that aspect.

And I will spare you guys the details of the Spanish Civil War. I'll just echo what Jim said that we have these same central conflicts of wealth disparity, political distress, and a lot of conflict with militarism. And so after the CNT has a landslide victory in their local political election, the far-right militaristic group called the Falange - not to be conflated with other right militaristic groups like a weird Catholic one - and just literally all of these groups did a coup. They were like, “Oh, you got elected. We're gonna undo that.” And I know also there was some confusion. People think that the cause of the Spanish Civil War was because one of the militaristic right political leaders was assassinated, but the ground had been laid for the Spanish Civil War to happen long before that.

And that was just one wacky thing. They had weird police that were employed by the right just to do their bidding. So there was a lot of conflict about that, but there was so much conflict with people feeling like they were literally serfs when they were supposed to be employees. You know, they would go to a factory with no shoes on their feet. They would work in the fields, you know, and pass out and have barely any pay for needs to be fulfilled for their families. So the same things that we see over and over again with capitalism - because it creates these social problems; it creates actually a need for these social problems.

And so the interesting things that I picked up on in my research were that, first of all, after the various motley crew of left people won the battle ensuing from the coup, they had a dance party for five days in the streets, and then...

Jim
I wish I was there.

Aly
And then they planned to go back to work, you know, on their new theory of having democratized workplaces and sharing - to labor more equally. But a lot of them were like, “Actually, I don't really want to.” So because of this realization that the revolutionary spirit exists, people wanted to actually change how they lived, which was a very radical thing to me. So we see a lot of communities where thousands of people formed collectives, where they approached money differently, and approached constructing society differently. So, in a part of Catalonia, money was abolished entirely. People in this area had a self-run general store where people wrote down what they took and were encouraged to take what they needed. People still worked, but for the common good … not for a boss ... not because they had to. And there was a lot of variation with how mutualistic the general stores were. Because in some areas, it was very strict, and it was like you can only take what we have a lot of. And if there's something you need that is in short supply, you might not be able to have it. But in other places, they were very generous, and they did focus on who really needed the item more. What can we spare? They looked a lot more at privilege among the people.

So thousands of other collectives were formed in Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia that all lasted for different amounts of time - but at times, were all fully autonomous. And they all did value mutualism in some way and decided together through various different kinds of voting how things like money and labor would be handled. In the Catalonia countryside, peasants took over and organized the land, sharing what they produced collectively and passing their supplies to other cities. So you also have places that had more of certain things, sharing what they had with the other communities.

Jim
Yeah, that that was beautiful while it lasted. And interestingly, it wasn't the right wing who knocked out all these beautiful things. It was the Marxists again; it was the communists who were their allies in trying to fight off the right wingers of General Franco.

Aly
Right, you've got all this weirdness with Italy and Germany.

Jim
Right, it becomes a proxy war before World War II. It's before World War II. And so you have the fascists on one side and the leftists and the communists on the other. So the Soviet Union is supporting the government - alongside the anarchists again. But, then, they end up screwing the anarchists and killing them and destroying things, which of course divided the opposition to the right wing. And the right wing ended up winning the war.

Aly
Right.

Jim
I guess we go into those details, but it was beautiful while it lasted. And if people want to read about some of the stuff in Barcelona, you mentioned Orwell. His book “Homage to Catalonia” is a beautiful book. Orwell himself was not an anarchist, but he was very sympathetic. He actually was a communist. He was in a communist group that also got repressed by other communists. And so he became really sympathetic, and it made him very anti-authoritarian. And that's why you get books like “Animal Farm and such.”

Aly
Yeah, right, 1984. But I was looking at different things that kind of inspired me in history, both in the 1900s and more recently, and It seems to me like the kind of revolutionary seeds were sown in Barcelona because as recently as 2008, anarchists and anti-authoritarians who self-identified through other labels took over 40 social centers and 200 squatted houses in the city. And they created an independent community where work - as we typically think of it - was abolished. They work for themselves and teach themselves the skills they need. They pirate dumpster, dumpster dive, repurpose steel, and create squats. They organize in consensus, and they have a, you know, logic of mutual aid above all else. They also create workshops of both the practical and spiritual nature, which I thought you would like. So they share the skills that they need related to building houses and growing food but also share ideas on what it means to live a meaningful life and have a tightknit community.

So that's, as far as I know, still happening, probably not with the same amount of people as in 2008. But I know Peter Gelder Luce, who wrote the book “Anarchy Works,” which I referenced for a lot of these facts, lived with them in those squatted communities for a period of two years. And he said it was one of the greatest experiences of his life. They have a great time.

Jim
Oh, great. It is, and so what inspiration or what lessons drew you to these particular stories?

Aly
So in that one, the more recent one, the fact that people took initiative, I guess. Originally people took initiative in the Spanish Civil War, but you were kind of forced to. For me, it's people deciding that they deserve better, being able to imagine something else - because we so often talk about how we accept the suffering that we do because it seems inherent to life. It seems like the only option even though, as you've mentioned, no, the current way that we structure things both in the US and around the world is kind of arbitrary. It feels like people decided to do this, and we didn't rise up against it. So you know, I'm always thinking about how we could decide to do something else, but it gets harder and harder if you don't have this history of, like, a full-on rebellion happening in your city or in your country. And I definitely feel like the so-called revolutions we've had in the US are very disingenuous and not of the same notion.

Jim
Like, the American Revolution wasn't really a revolution?

Aly
Yeah and the Civil War. Oh, and you know, the Boston Tea Party, and different, like, black-led rebellions happened. But for the most part, I don't know why it seems harder to organize in the US, but to me it does. So when I see people accomplish something, even if they just abolish money for four months, they fucking abolished money. A lot of us cannot conceive of living a week without thinking about money.

Jim
Yeah, I don't know how I could do it here without money because we don't have the networks of mutual aid or solidarity, and that's what these early anarchists that I was talking about and in these stories you're talking about that are both more recent and from like 90 years ago, they’re...

Aly
Right.

Jim
...they're grappling with all of these things, you know. They're saying, “Hey, we don't need to do it this way. We can do it differently.” And then for moments, they were doing it, and they weren't stopped usually because they disintegrated and power dynamics developed in their communities. There was a little bit of that in some of these places. The Paris Commune was having some of that, in part because it wasn't just anarchists there. It's happening because they're being repressed. You know, the police come in. The property owners come in. The military comes back in and crushes them. Other leftists who didn't like them come in and crush them. But if left alone, they're often very successful.

I just thought of this question I didn't anticipate coming up, but what would keep it, maybe, from becoming a cult? We have lots of examples, say, even in the United States of hippie communes. And they aren't all organized hierarchically around a personality, but they all seem to kind of fall apart at some point. And it's not all repression. Why do you think happens?

Aly
I mean, I can't think of a cult in my history of reading about cults that didn't have at least one leader. So you need ongoing check-ins to see if hierarchy is developing and what to do about it. A vital thing also is making sure that there is not just one belief system - philosophy, religion, whatever political stance - that is preached and accepted in the group. I think you know we always talk about how we want to fight against the idea that all anarchists wear black. So we wear color; we are very fun - not to say that the ones who wear black aren't fun, but a lot of the times, they're not. Anyway…

Jim
It's okay. We love you, you stern and severe...

Aly
There's a place for you in the revolution. We can team up. Yes, but we're making our place. We're carving it out of stone - so essentially just celebrating differences as long as the differences do not encroach upon other members’...

Jim
Is there a place for us, though, and our colorful stuff?

Aly
...economy … so doing what you want to do as an autonomous individual while still observing consensus for group decisions and making sure that you are not actively causing harm to other members … you know, taking too much of the food supply that you don't need, which leaves someone else with less … not being aware of your own privileges that you may still have despite being in a different environment. You know, we all need to take stock of who we are, what we believe, what we need and then consider that in contrast with the other incredibly diverse individuals around us.

Jim
Yeah, and I want to say, “You know what? It may fall apart.” It may develop hierarchy. It may have all kinds of dysfunctional problems happen. And I still would prefer it to the world we live in now because the world we live in now is just institutionalized injustice. This one gives us a chance not to have injustice, and if injustice develops, it's a lot easier to resist it and start over because the power structures are working within a culture where there shouldn't be a power structure. So it should be a lot easier for us to resist than, say, the military or the police state. And so I don't have any illusions that necessarily every anarchist collective is going to work. I'm guessing a lot of them aren't going to work over time. That's okay if things don't. They aren't sacred. They're not sacred like we treat our country, like it's some God that we're supposed to bow to its national idols - the flag, and the Pledge of Allegiance, and the National Anthem. And it's not sacred. So if we start with the basis that these things aren't sacred, we're not as attached to them when they inevitably fall apart. Maybe they won't fall apart, but if they do fall apart, then it's a lot easier to pick up the pieces and start over again.

Aly
And I want to question, too, what definition? Whose definition of success are we going off of here?

Jim
Yeah, good question.

Aly
Like, a lot of people would say that a romantic relationship, you know, between two individuals who are dating isn't successful if…

Jim
Not us.

Aly
Not us and not anyone with us right now.

People would say, generally in our society, that a romantic relationship wasn't successful if it only lasted a year. That's how some people measure success - because some people are very concerned with quantifying things.

Jim
Yeah. Congratulations on your 60-year marriage of misery, right?

Aly
But that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to congratulate that, and we're supposed to say, “Oh, sorry,” you know, if you broke up after a year. That's not at all looking at what happened qualitatively in that relationship. What actually occurred? What was learned; what was experienced?

Jim
You giving me advice?

Aly
No, if anything, I'm giving myself advice. I'm just looking at you.

People will continuously try to tell me that anarchism doesn't work because of only the few examples that we have of it.

You know, I also researched the Manchurian Revolution. That was caused by the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation from 1921-1931, and people would say that that is a failure because it only lasted a few years. I would say that it's not a failure because they demonstrated that they could organize mutual aid banks for a primary and secondary school system, and a peasant run militia that existed for defense from the Stalinists and the Japanese imperial army - which are huge deals. And when they could no longer defend the province, they still continued to believe that revolution was possible. They just went underground and relied more on other types of protests for getting their propaganda out there But they held their ground in a way that – like, if I could even imagine what that was like, I would probably call that a spiritual experience to do something that you believe in with other people from your own will for the good of not only the people that you're working with but potentially people in the future. So, to have this wide-reaching, far-reaching goal for human beings to live in true connection with one another and to accomplish that against just a disgusting blob of power, it brings tears to my eyes. If you tell me that that's an example of anarchism not working, you're probably not a person I want to talk to about much of anything.

Jim
It's interesting, though, when I hear these stories - French Commune, Manchuria. Spanish Civil War - and whether they’re successes - as you're arguing - or failures - as others might argue - it does suggest to me that there is something deeper that must happen for anarchy to take root, as it has for most of human history. And those are the things that make me very disenchanted with typical political or economic solutions. So if we say we're just going to organize, say, as the workers did in Spain for decades before the Spanish Civil War happened, it must be more than that or there wouldn't be the such a strong reaction from fascist militaries or monarchists in Spain or France, or communists and imperialists in Manchuria? Why are there all of these people who want to rule over other people, and why is it so hard, even within our own movements, not to succumb to something as bad as ruling over someone who's not asked to be ruled over?

Aly
Right. I mean, we have all of this knowledge, and I would say the seeds have been planted by various people and groups all over the world by now - even though we have fewer examples of revolution here in the States. We still did have revolutionaries on our soil. We did still have Haymarket. You know, all of the strikes that happened after ... and all these things. So we're in a period where we really have to question our own souls. Or if you don't like the word soul, your being, your conscience … . And maybe ask questions and not need answers ... but kind of exist in a space that is open for new information. So that's kind of vague, but do you kind of pick up what I’m putting ...

Jim
Yeah, I think we need to go deeper in ourselves. There is a whole - wasn't sure I was going to mention it or not - but there's a whole strain of anarchism called individual anarchism, and that can be confused with, say, libertarianism, because there is a branch that kind of goes that direction ... that becomes more egotistical and egoist. And there's a long strain of that, which is I don't think very anarchist because if you don't care about other people except yourself, then you're going to re-create hierarchy, I believe, because you're not going to care about their interests.

But there is a strain that says we aren't going to really have social revolution unless we work on whatever tendencies there are towards hierarchy - trying to unjustly take power over people - unless we work on whatever is deeper in ourselves that allows for that. And some people are like, “Well, that sounds still very bourgeois. Like, there's people starving right now. There's people, you know, being abused right now. That seems a little bourgeois to be working on yourself.”

But I think it's both. You know, I really do. I think you've got to look inward because something is not allowing these social changes to fully take root in the larger society - even if it is, as we believe, our nature that we want to have respectful equal relationships with each other (men, women ... across the board ... black, white, yellow, red ...you know, all the different ways people have oppressed each other). Something's not allowing that to happen. There has to be more than just the economic and political realities. There has to be something in ourselves that's creating those economic and political realities, and at the same time it can't just be that because there are also rich capitalists. There are people who are dominating. There are people who are creating the environment and the structure that makes it difficult for us as individuals to just to break out. So...

Aly
And to the people who are like, “Well, there's someone starving on the other side of the world.” Yeah, there are people starving in your neighborhood. Go outside and talk to your neighbors.

Jim
And that can be part of your own individualism, right? “I am not awake to what's going on outside my door.” The world of people is part of being me as an individual, discovering the deeper individual. And I might not be seeing what privilege I'm not owning up to.

Aly
We cannot fully escape the bias of our perception, but if you're sitting there and being like, “Oh well, I'm not going to do any internal work because it's not the most effective thing in terms of, like, a utilitarian perspective.” Okay, well, then, how many unknowing microaggressions or slightly unsafe actions did you commit today without even fucking realizing it? How are you making the people around you feel in the moments that you have with them? Roasted.

Should we take a quick break for trivia and then return to something that I find very inspiring that is continuing on this?

Jim
Okay

Aly
Yes, okay. So we're going to do trivia with Jim … silly things. Where's my first question? I did say that this was messy handwriting. Okay, ding, ding! First one. When the cast of “Barbie” held a planking contest, who won? First option, Issa Rae; second option is Ryan Gosling, third, America Ferrera; four, Simu Liu.

Jim
I don't remember.

Aly
So, so just out of the characters, Issa Rae was the black president; you know Ryan Gosling and America Ferrera.

Jim
Right, right, right. I know who they all are, but I don't remember. I barely remember there was a planking competition.

Aly
No, no, no. So they had a planking competition outside, like during rehearsals. So you're just guessing which one.

Jim
Oh, you're just asking me about something going on during the...

Aly
But I actually just realized that I forgot to write the correct answer because I was looking up how to pronounce Simu Liu’s name, and so I was, like, stressed. It was actually Margot Robbie. It wasn't any of those, so I didn't give you the correct option. I was, like, looking through the names of the different cast members, and I was going to write Margot Robbie as the fifth one, but I just didn't write her down, and then I...

Jim
Okay

Aly
...didn't say her...

Jim
And I probably would have....

Aly
...name when I listed it the first time.

Jim
...guessed her just because she just seems so ridiculously athletic.

Aly
Right, but so is Ryan Gosling and Simu Liu, the Asian guy, who did the...

Jim
True, but I just think there's some different level - like she did Tonya Harding, you know? She was freaking skating and...

Aly
You'll be endlessly impressed by that performance, but anyway, I don't know how to do my own game. It was Margot Robbie who won the competition.

Jim
Okay, I lose.

Aly
This one is correctly written. Okay, how long on average does a one-dollar bill last? So one, 6.6 years; two, 8.3 years; three, 5.7 years; or four, 3.8 years. So we're on a range, but six, eight, five, or three?

Jim
Eight.

Aly
It's six, and I found that interesting because money is a fucking construct, and I was out here thinking that on average it would probably be like 10 or 15 years. I feel like dollar bills are pretty hardy. But on top of the fact that it's a made-up thing that we base an entire society off of, it's also adding to landfills like everything else and...

Jim
So I wonder if they're lasting longer now that people use less cash.

Aly
Maybe. I mean, this was an accurate statistic. This came out in 2022, so there's...

Jim
Okay, I'm glad I got that one wrong and that would not be good if I got the number…

Aly
Now you're, like, it's 6.6, and I know this. Okay, and this one I just found funny because at work, we're always talking about people getting married and...

Jim
The human head weighs eight pounds.

Aly
Yeah, I knew that.

Jim
That's from Jerry Maguire.

Aly
So I was thinking it was from a movie.

Jim
The little kid goes, “The human head weighs eight pounds.”

Aly
I was thinking of like, yeah, a movie where they said that, but it wasn't that. But I did know it was eight pounds.

So because of all the wedding hype just in my periphery that I hate, how long is the longest wedding veil in the Guinness World Records, and where did this wedding take place? So we have 17,000 feet in Venice…

Jim
Wow.

Aly
…21,350 feet in Barcelona, or 23,000 feet in Cyprus?

Jim
That's wild. How could any of those be possible? I'll have to go with the longest ‘cause it's the most ridiculous - 23,000 feet in Cypress.

Aly
That is correct, and it is also 63 1/2 football fields.

Jim
23,000…

Aly
23,000 feet long from head to....

Jim
That's over four miles.

Aly
...the end of the gown. Yes, can you think of the workers making this ridiculous thing? How? Like, she must have had a fleet of people carrying it.

Jim
Yeah, because how could you possibly drag something four miles long?

Aly
She couldn't, and that just speaks to excess. I also don't know what year that was. That would have been interesting to know. But yeah, that was crazy. And then bonus question, this is like the little games that they do on, like, you know, maybe it is NPR ... but it's, like, where they just have you make up a theory for something. Make up your best...

Jim
I don't listen to that.

Aly
...guess as to why there are 100 folds in a traditional chef’s hat? Why do you think that there are exactly 100 in those white hats?

Jim
There are 100 because there are ... umm … there's 100 energetic arteries that go around the human head.

Aly
There are 100 ways to cook an egg. I didn't know that, but supposedly they're honoring that they designed it with the hundred ways to cook an egg in mind because they felt it multicultural. I don't know.

Jim
What does that have to do with the chef’s hat? One hundred ways to command, “100 ways to cook an egg…”

Aly
“100 ways to cook a name.”

Jim
Yeah, but I was thinking of the “50 Ways to Leave your Lover” song by Paul Simon. “You scramble them, Jenny Gamble.” I mean, like, it's hard to rhyme that, isn't it?

Aly
It is, yeah. I don't know if I've ever even heard that song. We should listen to...

Jim
Sometime, I could put a clip into the song here, but...

Aly
So that's the game. I fucked up my own game. We're moving on. So our conversation there made me think of...

Jim
“Set yourself free. Make a new plan, Stan. No need to be coy, Roy. You just listen to me.”

Aly
Oh, is that the song?

Jim
Yeah.

Aly
Oh, well, I know that.

Jim
“Hop off the bus, Gus.”

Aly
I didn't know It was called “50 Ways to Leave your Lover.” Is that what it's called?

Jim
Yeah.

Aly
I didn't know it was called that.

Jim
“Must be 50 ways to leave your lover.”

Aly
Okay, yeah, I do know that one.

If we're refocusing, I was very encouraged reading about East London Big Flame, a group in the UK in the 1970s. Have you heard of them?

Jim
No.

Aly
Okay, so my little messy notebook says that East London Big Flame was an anaractivist... I was trying to say anarchist and activist at the same time ... an activist group who were anarchists who focused on meeting each other's emotional needs through group therapy modalities.

Jim
Oh lovely.

Aly
They called these open forums for feelings, and it was also called “Red Therapy” colloquially. They did this through somatic practices - intensive trips away from meetings where power dynamics solely were deconstructed - and just assisted group therapy for each individual whenever they had something come up that they needed to process. So they believed that everybody in the group was traumatized in some way or another, if not just by existing under capitalism. And so they had therapy for people who were experiencing issues with someone else in the group. They could have just individual or partner therapy with that individual, whatever they wanted to do. They didn't force people to heal their problems together. But if the individuals wanted to do that, they could.

And so they believed in grassroots political organizing. Only they did not believe in electoral politics under any circumstances.

Jim
Nor do we.

Aly
Correct. And they were, quote “critical of the state” - not only its overtly oppressive arm like the police and military, but also the welfare state. They targeted its inadequacies, its patriarchal attitudes, and the way it was used as a form of social control for…

Jim
Mutual aid, not charity.

Aly
..so for example, the NHS's control over women's reproduction … social workers were used as soft helps and education as a form of indoctrination. So a lot of times people will be like, “Oh well, welfare babies. You just want the state to provide everything.” No, don't get us confused with…

Jim
Liberals. Yeah, we don’t want the state at all.

Aly
We don't want the state at all. And anything that we use from it is simply from people in our community needing it right now. And that being the option … absolutely not ideal … and I don't want the state to be our motive for revolution in any way.

Jim
So, by state, this gets to - I'll shoot him in - Errico Malatesta and a biography of his I read. He was an anarchist, Italian anarchist of the late 1800s and died around 1931 or two.

Aly
Oh yes.

Jim
But he stated that … now I don't remember what we're talking about.

Aly
Just the state occasionally giving you services, but that that's not something to rely on.

Jim
Oh, “the state” ... “The state” does not just mean the government. The state means also the economic system. So it's both. So it's both capital and government. So if often when people say they don't want government assistance, they mean, “Oh, we'll just put it in the private sector.” From an anarchist, especially Malatesta, but general anarchist perspective, is that is still the state assisting - because it's still coming from the hierarchy. The state is both the business community and the government.

Aly
Right. And so they are deciding what you need and how much of it you need and that is not you being able to self-advocate for yourself in any way or help your neighbors advocate for themselves.

Jim
So the idea is when we say it's okay that you get government assistance with … don't mind you getting your food stamps or whatever. Even though we're against the idea that the state should just provide those things, we understand in our society that if the state didn't provide those things, everything would just go to the rich people. And so a revolutionary approach isn't just, “Oh, let's just get rid of the government.” We have to scrap the whole thing. And so the solutions that people have to survive in this system, we're not just against taking away people's food stamps because we know they're going to starve. We want a much more radical revolutionary approach to that, where we're actually taking care of each other. And if that care isn't happening, then of course we would support getting your welfare or getting whatever. But that doesn't mean we still aren't critiquing the welfare state.

Aly
Right. And so they did set up many alternative living arrangements with collective houses. They came up with their own solutions to the problems of cooking and childcare. So people both in the group and out of the group were able to find supportive communities that did last for several years, some of them 10 years providing these services to each other. Because we are capable of providing them to each other, we actually have a lot of the means that we would need for a revolution right now. We just don't have access to them in the way that we would need.

So in terms of these people, they constantly looked at the challenges of maintaining a non-hierarchical group, and they said that habits of privilege will seep through even a very, you know, balanced group that has done away with conventional structures. However, they find this challenge worth every bit of struggle that it causes.

So two other things that they said were that the policeman in the street is why we need a revolution. The policeman in your head is why it doesn't happen. And they also said you can change your mind in a minute, but it takes your feelings and body a bit more time - getting at the idea of somatic movement being a way to help us through these habits … through this conditioning … and help us realize that there's a different way.

Jim
So would you say that is what you and I are trying to practice here in Bozeman?

Aly
It sure is, and that's why I was so excited to come across them.

Jim
Yeah, I mean, they've got a lot of the same pieces. We bring friends together for - we wouldn't call it group therapy - but it's like that for people to be able to share their emotions and their feelings and have a trusting community. Yeah.

Aly
And I want it to be group therapy.

Jim
Therapy is a bit of a loaded word, but, you know, in the positive connotations…

Aly
Right, right. Because at this time there was also an anti-psychiatry movement that was really backed by Wilhelm Reich, where groups of people were taking to the streets to declare that they were not actually less worthy because they were mentally ill. And they were against even the pathologizing of that word - of mental illness - and saying that they're lesser or that they don't deserve the same joy and beautiful ideals we want for everyone. So yeah, therapy is a loaded word, and therapy typically is extremely hierarchical - where there's one person who has the information, and they distill it to the other one.

In this group, once again, there was nobody who had the correct answer, but it was the process. So that gets us to just the way that the anarchists who we enjoy reading about are very process oriented rather than results oriented. They care about the results. We can't ever say that we don't want a good result because I'll be wrong, but it seems like Emma Goldman found so much beauty in the process, as well as heartbreak, as well as disenchantment, as well as all these things. But she was in the process, and she was present with each thing that she did. And she was present with herself while she was doing these things. Would you say the same about Malatesta and Louise Michel, who I know you researched as well? Yeah, you can talk about Louise Michel, too. Preface.

Jim
Louise Michel, she was at the Paris Commune. You know, I mentioned her earlier. She is just one of these incredible, fierce figures. So a lot of people have maybe heard of … well, a lot of people in America have not heard anybody.

Aly
Right.

Jim
Emma Goldman is probably the most famous anarchist since she was not an American, but she was largely based in America for much of her much life and identified till she got deported to Russia.

Aly
Well, she got banned.

Jim
But Louise Michel is a French woman who … she was a bastard … illegitimate parents, but she was illegitimate. You know, her father … there's no mention of her father anywhere. He did not live with her. Her father's father did. And even though the father … who knows what happened to him? Nobody knows. She did live with her mother and mother's mother, that father's mother, and the mother's mother. And so she had her two grandmothers. But anyway, she was raised in … they weren't super poor, but she became a school mistress and made no money. She refused to get married off; she never married.

Aly
Yes, no long veils for her.

Jim
Nickname is the “Red Virgin”.

Aly
I have heard that and didn't know it was her.

Jim
Yeah, and she taught schoolchildren, and wrote poetry, and professed her loved to Satan, and had all these weird ideas. And she's rambunctious and sometimes getting in trouble because she lived down in the countryside, which was really conservative. Imagine that; it's not much different today. But her family supported the Republic, not the monarchy. They were, and this…

Aly
Was that considered a radical choice?

Jim
No, not radical. It was a choice. Radical would have been…

Aly
It was a choice.

Jim
…would have been to support the social revolution.

Aly
I'm just wondering why it…

Jim
Think of the Republicans as the more….

Aly
…was considered radical at the time.

Jim
…liberals of today.

Aly
Okay.

Jim
And the others were the monarchists, who are the more conservatives of the day.

Aly
Yeah, but then there's always another faction that's actually…

Jim
And then, yeah. Yeah. Then, you had Napoleon III who became emperor during this time, and she was very against Napoleon III. And her family was against that, but she was more outspoken. And she got in trouble for saying nasty things against the emperor, pasting a … or no, she didn't get in trouble for this … but she once said she pasted an anti-Napoleon thing on the back of a policeman or something like that

Aly
Like just on his back?

Jim
On his back, you know, like “Kick me,” but in this case … . So she's rambunctious. Eventually, she's like, “I gotta move to Paris because that's where all the action is.” And that's where all the people are. And she starts in her training as a teacher meeting all these other radical people and being influenced by them, such that when she became famous during the Paris Commune for fighting and for just her heroism in it, she's eventually deported for it. And so she became a sort of a martyr.

Aly
All the cool girls get deported.

Jim
She got deported to New Caledonia, which is near Australia way up in the Pacific Ocean.

Aly
That feels very random, but yeah.

Jim
That's a whole other story. But she's this fierce feminist. She's not a feminist in any watered down form like “Oh, you mean by a 19th century version of a feminist?” No, I mean, she's a feminist, she believed totally in the equality of women and if anything, she really - I don't think she believed women were better than men - but in some ways she did. I mean, yeah, she definitely believed in equality of genders and actually and didn't believe you had revolution…

Aly
She believed in the equality of gender.

Jim
She also believed in animal … that because humans mistreated animals is one reason we have hierarchy - our relationship with animals. Pretty radical view for the 1800s.

Aly
Definitely. She was an ecofeminist, really.

Jim
Yeah, she saw the same logic, and there was an ecofeminist named Karen Warren who influenced me, who made that argument that there's this false logic of domination of humans over animals. And it is the same logic that men have used over women.

Aly
Absolutely. Oh, yes.

Jim
So, Louise Michel, I don't remember why we're bringing up Louise Michel exactly.

Aly
We were talking about something in the spirit of revolutionaries. Just talk about her. Talk about whatever you want to.

Jim
So she… . So yes, the process mattered to her, but…

Aly
Yes, yes. You knew what we were talking about. You were just trying to trick me.

Jim
No, I wasn't. I swear to God … swear to whatever.

Aly
Swear to Satan.

Jim
Swear to Satan is so Louise. Louise Michel was partially about the process, but she really believed the revolution was coming. She really believed that once it happened, humans would - utopia would probably be the wrong word for it because she also didn't believe you could predict the future - but that human nature was basically good. And if you just took off the yoke of oppression, the best of people were more likely to come out. And she really believed in that. And she also believed in science. So she's vague about what she means by science, but she believes as science advanced and people's understanding of science advanced, they would realize there's no reason for all this oppression – that it's all based in religious nonsense … even though she was kind of religious. She had a spiritual side, too, and she had a very active dream life, and she loved to write poetry, and…

Aly
Yeah. So, I mean, she believed the revolution was coming, but she also took the time to write poetry just because she loved it. You said that the poetry that you read of hers wasn't particularly good, was it?

Jim
No, but...

Aly
It didn't move you, at least.

Jim
Yeah, it's not the most beautiful. None of it's memorable.

Aly
But do you think she was writing poetry for her poetry to become famous … because she probably didn't care about fame for her writings?

Jim
No, she didn't care about fame for herself, period. But then she became really famous because people were like, “Wow, this woman's kind of amazing ‘cause she's, ‘Kill me. You know, if you have any guts, you'll kill me. You won't let me go because you know, if you let me go, I'm going to fight for revenge against every last…

Aly
Right.

Jim
…one of you.’” You know, she'd say that at her court cases, and…

Aly
Sounds like a beautiful TV assassin or something.

Jim
Although she wasn't really an assassin either, but she wasn't like…

Aly
Yeah. No, she was a real person.

Jim
Yeah, she would say, “Yeah, I believe these things, but I didn't actually kill anybody.”

Aly
But to me, I really love the fact that she wrote poetry and that she wrote a lot of it. So…

Jim
She wrote a lot of it. I think she wrote an opera about the earth being hell - like it's lost; I don't think it exists anywhere - but that the earth is actually hell. And it's run by these cool demons. And so she's an early Satanist. It's kind of like…

Aly
Yeah. And she's like mental and creative as fuck. Like, there's no opposition between having revolutionary aims and wanting to explore the scope of your imagination. Those are actually incredibly entangled in some people - not in others. Some people are just for the revolution or just for art, and we can't fully judge that either. But for some folks, it's so entangled that you can't disentangle it. You can't say this aspect of the person is more important than that, and I just find the more in touch I become with myself, and the more I research these things, the more I'm like, “There is no separation between all the things that we talk about.”

Jim
She's a free woman. Yeah, she's a free woman in a society that was determined not to let her be free. She's thrown in prison multiple times, shipped to New Caledonia, brought back lots of time to prison. But she's free. She's not afraid to be herself.

Aly
She chose to live as if she was free.

Jim
So she did the things that a free person in her mind would do.

Aly
Yes, she killed the policeman in her head.

Jim
She was once shot in the ear by a man. This is after her memoirs are done. She's shot in the ear by a guy - a Catholic fanatic. That's come up a lot - Catholic fanatics - today.

Aly
If you're Catholic out there…

Jim
I’ve had a lot of good Catholic friends, but…

Aly
I haven't.

Jim
Hi, Matt. But she’s shot in the ear, and she was so true to her principles that she paid for this guy - or made sure this guy had the greatest attorney - worked for his defense, and got him acquitted of shooting her in the ear. Right? She nearly died from that.

Aly
Oh my God. And she still doesn't believe that he should be locked up. So she was an abolitionist, maybe an early abolitionist. Yeah.

Jim
Yeah. Oh, yeah. She didn't believe in the police. She didn't believe in the court. She didn't believe in the prison. She didn't…

Aly
She didn't believe in prisons.

Jim
…believe in the state. Before she became an anarchist, she had radical pro-, let's say, -republican, not republican as in Republican and Democrat, but republican meaning no monarchy in France. But then became an anarchist.

Aly
Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of anarchists weren't ideologically consistent in terms of prisons, like some still thought that people should go to prison for certain crimes. So even though obviously with our definition of anarchy, the ones that we respect, believe a consistent….

Jim
Not the ones I know of….

Now there's all kinds….

Aly
Wait for that.

Jim
…of inconsistencies. Peter Kropotkin is probably one of the greatest theorists of anarchy and was beloved. And then he came out in favor of the Allies in World War I, which split anarchists. And Malatesta felt betrayed. And Malatesta and Kropotkin were quite close.

Aly
Right. And it's like, how the fuck can you do that? What? I bet Emma felt betrayed. I didn't know that as well.

Jim
And Malatesta was, of course, against World War I, as well, because they just saw it as a war of the capitalists. The capitalists were all going to war, and they were the only ones who were going to profit from that war.

Aly
I mean, and also the capitalists themselves weren't going to war. The capitalists were sending the poor to go to war for them.

Jim
Yeah, exactly. Yes.

Aly
As wars are fought.

Jim
Thank you. That's a good point. So yeah, in Malatesta, he was a … . God, his whole life was either in prison, escaping prison, escaping from one country to another, being incognito in countries that he wasn't supposed to be in, eventually getting caught, eventually going to prison, getting out of prison.

Aly
In comparison to that, I do feel a little bit boring. Doing internal work here, but there's time to be in and out of prison.

Jim
And yet everyone thought he was the kindest man, like the sweetest guy. He would give – like, he was not born poor, either. When he his parents died, they gave him some houses that they owned. He immediately gave them to the people that were tenants of those houses and just refused to own them.

Aly
Beautiful. We need landlords to do that now.

Jim
And Malatesta got into lots of intellectual disputes. He was all about organizing. He was really into the Internationals. He was about, you know, organizing people for revolution. At first, he was kind of into syndicalism and then he was like, well, this is not really working. He was sort of into propaganda of the deed. So he would evolve away from those things, but really he wanted the people to be able to organize. And so when he wasn't working as a mechanic or ice cream – he was an ice cream vendor at one time, and actually Emma Goldman ran an ice cream place, and…

Aly
Yeah, I was going to say that, yeah. Her and Berkman, yeah.

Jim
…anarchists like to run ice cream … . And Fedya, too.

Aly
I think he did the least of the work, but…

Jim
So he was working when he wasn't in prison. He was trying to run radical newspapers and get pamphlets and give talks and organize. And then he was, like, trying to get down to the action where there was a revolution going on and…

Aly
He was there. He was busy.

Jim
He was. He was just this tireless, endlessly young spirit, and Emma Goldman knew them both. Even though Emma Goldman was in the United States during that time, she would travel, and Malatesta actually came to the United States at one point, and they met. She met Louise Michel in London, where she spent a lot of the last years of her life. A lot of exiles would end up in London. That would be the sort of safe place. That was also probably the place they felt like revolution might be lagged behind also. But they were safe, I guess, because the government wasn't as scared of revolution.

Aly
Yeah, I know. Emma enjoyed the art scene in London there. And she lived in a very peaceful house somewhere in France.

Jim
Yeah, she ended up in France. Yeah, so these people were beloved. When Louise Michel died in 1905, there were 100,000 people at her funeral.

Aly
Wow, that speaks for itself.

Jim
Yeah. And everyone knew she was an anarchist. There were 100,000 people who wished her well at her funeral. So there was a time when there were a lot more anarchists and where people really thought there might be that social anarchist revolution. So it wasn't completely naive, but it was also. It was crushed. Anarchism as a mass movement was certainly crushed. And it hasn't really been a mass movement since, except for maybe pockets of people who don't necessarily self-identify as anarchists, like Zapatistas in Mexico and…

Aly
Yeah, and there was the Oaxaca Revolution in Mexico in 2006, where hundreds of women took over the news station. And they had taught themselves the technology. People later said that they must not have actually done that and they must have had people on the inside who understood the technology. But everyone said, “No, we literally taught it to ourselves,” and they were able to broadcast for, I think, three months across Mexico. And they just had people one after the other wanting to get on and talk about the times that they had felt at the hands of the state. And they had a children's program where the children delivered speeches, and it was just a really radical time. So I mean, all of these events and all of these people live on in the meaning that we derive from learning about them and talking about them. But it doesn't stop there because, as we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, we don't believe in idolizing anybody.

Jim
No.

Aly
We're not like, “Oh, great. These things happened in the past, so that's…”

Jim
It’s not let's start publishing pamphlets and go around….

Aly
We could do that. If we thought that was a fun way to work on our graphic design skills, but no, that's not the tactic that stirs our heart … our hearts … we do have separate hearts.

Jim
Well, I guess we've got the modern version of the pamphlet - the podcast. Yeah, but so does everybody else…

Aly
Yeah, but not everybody else is using it.

Jim
And it was a radical act to have that thing back then because your newspapers were always getting shut down by somebody for being too radical. Here, nobody's going to shut us down because nobody cares.

Aly
Mhm. No, we would probably get unmonetized if we had a YouTube channel, but we don't. I mean we do, but we only have one video on there.

Jim
So what is revolution, then? Because class problems, if anything, we have them worse than ever. We have all kinds of other things we're woken up to besides working-class struggles. There's struggles all over the place for all kinds of people who are being abused by either patriarchy or racism or whatever. You know, lots and lots and lots and lots of abuses. Revolutions is a big idea. The world is huge.

Aly
I think, generally, it's helpful to make the scope a bit smaller. We always bring it back to hyperlocal. You know, it could be the revolution to go out and talk to your neighbor. Whatever the revolution is, I think is going to be highly personal.

Jim
What do you say to someone who says that sounds pretty bourgeois? “Like, that's not the revolution. That won't change anything, and there's still going to be people hungry, poor, dying while you're talking to people.” That's a critique I have read in Marxist writings.

Aly
And I don't have a critique that sounds scholarly to refute that, but I would probably just share my experience and say, well, you know, for a long time I thought that it would be revolutionary if the only person that I could save in terms of just keeping alive was myself. And there was a time when I could have ended my own life … and coming out of that experience and slowly discovering joy in the small things and non-human nature and animals and friends and love and music and dance. Viewing these things from a perspective of newness has felt so moving to me. And when I started to move my body, I felt a freedom that I could not have previously conceived of. I'm not claiming to cure any social problem by my own individual being. I would also say that no individual being can. I don't have the power of a government backing me, and thank Satan that I don't. But I do have the ability to inspire other people to feel freedom in their bodies, and I think that's contagious. I know it's contagious. I see what happens when we inspire people to feel that freedom. And I think the more you feel that freedom, the more you can't accept the dire conditions of life that we are living. And so maybe we still live them. We straddle this line of living in the world but not being of it. But the more people who can't accept this life in their beings, in their bones, and their muscles and their blood, the more of an opening I think that creates for a different type of revolution that I also can't conceive of now - to exist. Because I couldn't conceive of feeling these things when I was suicidal, but now I'm feeling them. So I'm not claiming to conceive of what the revolution for me and my affinity groups will look like, but I have complete belief that it will happen - whatever it is.

Jim
Yeah, I think the degree we can make through our interactions, through our individual interactions, through our small group interaction is the degree to which we make the state irrelevant. It’s revolutionary - and I like how you describe it, you know, contagious. It's almost like we are a virus, which we have seen in our modern society can be far more destructive to economies, perhaps, than armies. And I still think within that there's no tolerance for capitalism. There's no tolerance for reform. There's only tolerance for justice, and if you extend that as far as you can, that's all the power you have any - let's say - right to.

Aly
And that's going to get messy, and accept the mess.

Jim
And if you go more than that, then you're no longer practicing anarchy. You're no longer practicing the society that you want.

Aly
Right, to have a large movement, you probably have to sacrifice some values.

Jim
Yeah, and we're not going to sacrifice. So to me, a revolutionary army is probably a reformist army, which means it's not…

Aly
Right.

Jim
…actually revolutionary.

Aly
Not to say that individual affinity groups can't coordinate and can't share resources like we were seeing after the Spanish Civil War.

Jim
Yeah, there's whole ways of decentralized structuring. You can read Kropotkin, I guess, probably to find out more, but it's...

Aly
Even though that guy's a fucking hypocrite.

Jim
At least he wasn't an anti-semite and a sexist like some of these others.

Aly
There's that.

Jim
Fuck you, Bakunin! Fuck you, Proudhon! Yes, and thank you for “property is theft,” but...

Aly
But the same way that we can't predict what any potential anarchist community will look like, because that would be us projecting our current ideas onto individuals that we don't know, I can't predict what my revolution will look like, but I know that it's already happening. At the same time. I know that the revolution of my change and experience from a few years ago to now is mind blowing. And if I can connect with other people who are having that experience, or who may be about to have that experience, that's where it really feels just so fiery and incredible to me - really working on building community with people who have been disgraced for so-called mental health issues is what really moves me … and I think dance and singing communally, painting, having protests in the streets that are just not what you would expect to see in a street are all ways that we can explore the somatic freedom.

Jim
I feel like it's far more profound and more effective and will change far more than all the ... . If I do take one negative thing from the history of anarchism is that they're still focused on very patriarchal means of revolution. The government comes at us with guns; we're going to come at them with guns, and it's very limiting to the ways power has infested our lives. If we have a much more complete way of dealing with that, than if enough people catch on - which we have no control over - then that will be truly radical transformation of society - but still we can't have any control over it. So you know people will raise their armies up, their mass movements, their general strikes - which is an anarchist tactic. The general strike was invented by anarchists. But, those tactics, I have nothing against it. Go for it. But for me, I've got to work locally and with the people close to me. And even though we're broadcasting to the world, we are a local group. That's why we're the Bozeman Antifa Dance - even though people all over the world are listening to us in the United States of America.

Aly
That's in Montana.

Jim
A lot of people have no idea what Montana is.

Aly
The United States of the KKK.

Jim
Near Yellowstone National Park. People do live out here … not many … some. Some people think too many. I don't. I don't necessarily agree, but….

Aly
But we all could live all live better.

Jim
And that's what we're about.

Aly
And to create a slightly safer world where you can, too - once again, not assuming that because you think you're acting in a way that is safe, that that is going to create a feeling of safety. That's also something that needs to be discussed in any group that you're in where you're trying to create a sense of safety. But the number of times that I feel unsafe by fucking random interactions with men as a woman caused me to think if they had any shred of awareness and were thinking, “What can I do to maybe make women feel more safe or to help women feel more safe?” The number of those times is just like too many to count, and I think what change could we even elicit from having people think that once a day, “How am I trying to help people feel safe around me?”

Jim
Yeah, that feels like it could be our next podcast.

Aly
It could be so many things. This has been quite a long episode, but I think a beautiful one.

Jim
I hope so. I hope people weren't bored. I know I went on for, like, 30 minutes at the beginning.

Aly
I felt it. And I fucked up the game, but actually that was probably hilarious. So I'm releasing guilt.

Jim
Yeah. Why do we care?

Aly
What if my head is just like full of all this information? I don't think my feelings can even be transcribed into thoughts. I just feel.

Jim
Final thoughts?

Aly
Color. I feel vibration. I have felt at moments like I'm just truly so connected with my environment that I am, like, almost so aware of my body that I cease to have a body. So it's the opposite of dissociation for me. It's like I'm so grounded in my experience that I feel almost noncorporeal for a moment. So these deep experiences of justice, feeling so grounded and so overjoyed to be here experiencing life at the moment, that I am with so much mystery of what's going to happen. And I have tears in my eyes. Yeah, this is what I've been feeling, and I don't think that can be a useless thing … that can be a non-effective thing.

Jim
Yeah, it's beautiful. I don't have any snarky remark to that. That's awesome. Lovely.

Aly
Well, thank you, and I really loved all of your research that you did. And I learned so much.

Jim
I know we didn't even share a fraction of it, which is funny. And there's so much more I could do.

Aly
But I really loved hearing about Louise Michel. I love that.

Jim
Yes, Louise Michel's memoirs are online for free. Malatesta's biography is not the most interesting that you can read - there's a million writings by Malatesta, lots of them mostly relatively short.

Aly
On the Anarchist Library. Are they all in the Anarchist Library, though? Jim
You could find them pretty much in the Anarchist Library. Other stuff is Emma Goldman. There are some bad documentaries that I saw on Haymarket Square that you could find; so you might check in with me, but my recommendations are just do what you want. I don't rule you.

Aly
Please email us.

Jim
Or not.

Aly
I would love it if you emailed.

Jim
If you got this far, what is our email?

Aly
Bozeman Antifa Dance. Bozeman Antifa at ... it's just bozemanantifa@gmail.com. Okay.

Jim
That's correct. We're on Instagram.

Aly
I thought we had a really long one like our website.

Jim
We're on Instagram. @bozemanantifa is our handle. We've gotten off of X slash Twitter. I mean we are there, but we're not. We're not posting.

Aly
We're not. I never was. It was Jim on Twitter.

Jim
Well, actually, because their Instagram was tied to our....

Aly
Oh, I was there by proxy, yeah.

Jim
Like snippets of your post would appear on … like the first so many characters. We have a Facebook page, too, but that's not that important. Our website is bozemanantifadance.org.

Final feelings?

Aly
I feel pretty good.

Jim
I definitely can't compete with what you just said.

Aly
Oh, it's not a competition.

Jim
I hope somebody makes it through the two hours, and if you do, yes, please, please, please, please consider reaching out to us.

Because we're not as lonely as we were during one podcast. We were talking about how we didn't have any friends. We've got some friends now, but they don't necessarily ... who knows, maybe they're listening to this podcast, but a lot of people who listen to it don't live near us. So we would like to hear from people all over the world … hear about your journeys in anarchism or what you think about anarchism. If you're not an anarchist, share something we said that you found offensive or wrong or something you found inspiring or some story from your life. We'll do group therapy.

Aly
Oh, I would love a story. We should all share more stories.

Jim
Yes, I'm all about intimacy and believing that learning how to be intimate will reengage us with that human nature that I believe is naturally anarchistic. And we've lost some of those habits, but they're still there, I believe. And that's what I'm working towards. So that's my rambling final thought.

Aly
I love it. Until next time, bye-bye.

Jim
Next time.