Beauty & the Beast: Servant Uprising!

Graham Kovich joins the show to plan an organizing campaign for the servants in Beauty & the Beast!

Graham and I imagine ourselves as two salt shakers, transformed into our alienated selves along with our fellow servants, under the repressive thumb of the "Beast" in a far-away castle in a long ago time.

What pressure do we as servants have to change our circumstances? How can we recruit Belle into an ally in our struggle? And what role does emotional leverage have in orchestrating a servant uprising?

We talk about this as well as the similarities between the conditions faced by these transformed servants with today's hospitality workers, and provide a sketch of an organizing campaign that could likely be imitated in many modern restaurants.

Check out Restaurant Workers News on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/restaurantworkersnews

Send comments and questions about labor organizing to laborwavenews@gmail.com

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laborwave-radio/id1536697871

Malls After the Revolution w/ Shawn from Srsly Wrong

Laborwave Radio presents a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution. ​

After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society.

Our fourth episode is Malls After the Revolution featuring Shawn of Srsly Wrong, a utopian leftist comedy podcast (srslywrong.com/).

"We can't just have a perfect mall that works and is static. We can think of a bunch of different things that are the conditions of a good mall that we can try to increase over time, such as making sure that community members have access. We could try to make a static mall, but it's like trying to paint the smell of oranges. Or trying to translate the taste of soup into a song. It does not follow."

Transcript edited for clarity and length.

Laborwave Radio

I'm really excited to have this conversation with you because your show often does talk about utopia. Library socialism, in particular, is a really fun series of conversations that you've had, but you wanted to talk specifically about malls and what malls might look like after the revolution, which I just think is a really cool thing to focus on. So before we get to the, after the revolution, I want to hear from you, why does it matter to think about malls and what's the current situation?

Shawn Vulliez So on the question of malls [laughter]. One thing when I was younger, even before I was political, I remember encountering anticapitalist anti-consumerism critiques that were talking about supply chains and production and like, you know, making really good points about the material limits of the planet we live on. But it was always sort of framed through this 'people are sheeple, they want to buy products and blah, blah, blah.' But obviously people don't like to buy products per se. They're not like "I love commodities specifically," but they want the things that they want and they like to go and choose between things.

And they like to go to a social space. My understanding is actually the mall in its original incarnation, when the shopping mall was dreamed of, it wasn't like, Oh, this is a place that we're going to extract as much money as possible. The thought was that by mixing the market and the community, you could create community spaces. So that's been sort of lost over the years with these mall security guards and stuff like poverty and homelessness crisis. People feel they don't want to shop at the mall if you let it be a community space because not everyone has the needs of society, or so the claim goes today. But yeah, I remember even a long time ago being like, actually shopping is good except for the money.

No one's like, Oh, I'm a shopping addict because I love seeing my bank account go down. They want to go look at clothes. They want to go look at books. Specifically with books, if I'm a shopping for anything, it's like, Oh, this little book can become a part of me by taking it with me home. But I know libraries are better, but there's something that's so satisfying being like, I'm taking this and I'm going to hold onto it for as long as I want. It's part of me. So I think that as utopians, as people who are thinking about what the world should be like, what it ought to be like and what it would be like in a just society, we can look at something like the mall as something that's complex and that has awful awful aspects of it that we can address.

But try to not let that get confused with either positive, like the community, or neither good nor bad, like taking things because you like them. And if it's a type of expression, like we criticize conspicuous consumption as people expressing themselves through their purchases. But, do you care about human expression? Because if you care about human expression and you value it, the problem isn't the expression it's the money. It's passing on the money. It's the supply chains and all of that. So I think to think that there won't be something like a mall after the revolution, in an ideal society, I don't buy it.

Laborwave Radio That's really interesting. You know, I've worked at malls. I'm trying to go back in my own memory here, but I worked at the mall of Georgia, which is the biggest mall in the Southeast. That was what they bragged about. Who knows whether that was actually true. It was supposed to be the biggest mall in the Southeast. It was trying to compete with the Mall of America, which I believe is so big it has like a roller coaster in it.

Shawn Vulliez It's just like slightly out of the MidEast or something?

Laborwave Radio I think it's in Minnesota, but I don't know. But the Mall of Georgia was just gigantic and it had a skate park built into it. And trampolines on the outside, like before you entered it. I worked there for two years. And a lot of the folks that did show up there were just young people like me at that time. I was a teenager back then. Because we lived in Buford, Georgia where there's like, absolutely nothing to do we would gravitate to this the mall, this social space, like you're talking about. Then I also saw the emergence of way more security guards. This was right when they started introducing Segways into the mall because the security guards got Segways to help speed up and make more expedient their work in surveilling and policing people.

And I also saw the kind of decay and collapse of the mall. This is something that I think is interesting about your wanting to have a conversation about malls is it seems like today, while there's still gravitation towards malls and that desire for maybe a social space, that's not purely consumerist like you're talking about, there's also this deep crisis that malls are going through. And there's a crisis of the shopping center because of online and e-commerce buying is making brick and mortar retail kind of obsolete. So is this, has this been your experiences? Does this map to the reality?

Shawn Vulliez I think so. I don't have data on the trends that I've seen, but I've noticed that the mall over time, the move towards, you know, more predatory types of stores, like stores that are selling worse products for higher prices. I understand the cost of real estate is really high for this stuff. And all it seems to me, like all the problems that you're describing could really be connected to how all this stuff is structured based on the profit motive every step along the way. If something has a community value, it needs to be paid for by someone and it used to be that it'd be paid for by the mall leadership because they're taking the rent and it's coming from all the different stores and stuff like that.

You can reliably think people are coming to the mall, but then with the current era where you have like Amazon and online shopping, where Amazon is like a mall that you can stumble into naked drunk at three in the morning and buy stuff that you don't even remember. Like that's a huge advantage. So if we value the social space of the mall, I think we are going to have to have a conversation about how the profit motive functions in these places. Cause I expect that the trends you're talking about would only continue. And it makes you think that maybe the mall would cease to be a viable business model. Like is there a future where municipal councils are putting tax dollars into sustaining the mall so people can go buy the cheap overpriced as seen on TV stores that were able to survive through all of this?

I would predict probably yes. If things continue the way they're going, because I could really imagine that city council meeting where the mall is so important. Like we're going to fund the Starbucks, we're going to fund all this stuff to make sure that, you know, the mall stays well, use government money to send out mailers, reminding people to support their local businesses. And it sort of like framed against the Amazon.

Laborwave Radio Like you're saying, if things continue with this trend, what I perceive as a possibility is these malls are just going to become empty spaces, like huge pieces of infrastructure that are just not utilized in any way, because we live under capitalism, which is a profit driven system. So there's no reason to fill this stuff up with the social good. The only thing that malls are filled with now is primarily for commodities and consumerism. So if they go under like what's going to happen to all these malls under capitalism, are they just going to be like caves that just are blights on the land?

Shawn Vulliez Probably knock it down, replace it with condos. I guess it depends on the land use in the city. They'll just like, let it rot, you know, the really tight cities that are replaceable with condos. Thinking about the mall brings up this concept that my cohost on Srsly Wrong., Aaron, brought up to me. He uses the phrase creative re-interpretation, the basic point is that no matter what your strategy, no matter what your theory of change at the end of the day, if you want to design a better society from this one, there's going to be a lot of creative re-interpretation of what's already there that's necessary. So that could be blighted malls that could be prisons. That could be police stations.

We need to find a way to creatively re-interpret what this space is. I mean, we can just knock stuff down and build it up again. But I think the ecological practice of knocking down buildings and building up new ones creates a ton of carbon emissions. You need to bring all these trucks in to take things in and out and stuff like that. And if we already have structures that are good to go, we need to figure out how to reuse them in different ways. And I think the mall is a really, really great example of that. I mean, you could even have malls that have housing instead of stores. It's not totally impossible, but I sort of favor this idea of the mall as it is. Like, how can we keep as much of the mall as possible while re-interpreting it just cause that tiny little point of like, I stand with the shopping addicts.

They're not sheep. They want to express themselves, expressing yourself is important and will continue to exist even in a just society. And yeah, that's my little Hill to die on.

Laborwave Radio I think that's a really interesting idea, that concept of creative re-interpretation, and I guess you could really see in some ways where we're observing this, maybe not with malls specifically, but I'm thinking about stadiums for professional sports leagues. Like for instance, the Superdome in New Orleans was creatively reinterpreted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to house people and become a zone for refuge. And you see that in other crisis moments too. Now with the NBA, this isn't necessarily creative reinterpretation, maybe in the same way that you are talking about it, but the players re-interpreted their stadiums that they play their sport in and do their work in as sites that can be turned into voting booths for election day.

So we're seeing some glimpses of this. Do you think there's other ways we're seeing glimpses of this, maybe when it's more particular to malls?

Shawn Vulliez I don't know about malls specifically, but I think we would probably see glimpses of it in various kinds, through all institutional forums, since we were tool bearing hominids. There's probably nothing more fundamentally human than looking at an object that's been used one way before and figuring out another way to use it. It seems like if anything we should be completely drowning in examples of this. Cause like, I mean, right now I'm using a computer. My computer desk was bought as a kitchen table.

Laborwave Radio I use a stool for a lamp stand. I've definitely jerry-rigged a lot of things in my house to just make the most out of it

Shawn Vulliez There's an interesting Buckminster Fuller quote. He says, Oh, what's the word he used? The basic premise of the quote is that when the Titanic is sinking, a door might make a great lifeboat and it's not the way you design a lifeboat, but it could save you in a pinch. And he says, technologically, our society is completely 100% lifeboats made out of doors. But if we really think about how to remake it, we can actually make a lifeboat that's legit made to save people. That's the premise of what he was saying. And I always found that idea really, really interesting. It connects into create a re-interpretation and like you're saying crisis situations when the Titanic sinking, we're not going to be holding out for a nicer boat.

Laborwave Radio That could be a perfect metaphor for encapsulating this moment in time of capitalism, right? Like we might be on the biggest lifeboat possible. So we're going to have to re-examine all the technology and tools that we currently have to get us through these cascading crises that we're experiencing, particularly with this pandemic. As you were mentioning before we started recording the pandemic has not just material and physical damage that it's re wreaking on people, but also deep psychological damage as well. And we're going to have to start preparing, I think, for the collective grieving that's to come, that's already happening in some places, but it's just going to get much, much worse. So I like that metaphor talking about the Titanic. That's probably what we're heading for with capitalism.

And maybe malls is a good place to focus on for the re-interpretation of our tools that we have. So let's talk about it after the revolution, like what do you think malls could look like after the rev?

Shawn Vulliez So imagine this: you want to get something that whatever instinct we have to go shopping now, you know, desire to attain and express and all that. But when you go to a place, it looks like a mall. There's people there, there's food, there's toys, video games, clothing, all the things that you like, all the things that you love, the abundance of the mall is there, and there's people around happy. Everything's normal, except in your head you know that the things there are built to last intentionally. The things there aren't just designed to break after a short little while of time, you know that no one there is trying to like screw you over.

No one in the mall is going to tell you something incorrect about a shirt to make you take it home. No reason to do so. Because the only thing that really changes from the consumer end, the consumer user experience, is when you go to checkout at the store, you're not giving over a credit card to have power tokens taken away from you or bio-security resource tokens. You're just checking it out. You're saying, I'm taking this shirt now. This is the identifying color of the shirt I like, and I'm taking it home. It is reflected on the backend through a series of both local and larger scale computing services that you don't have to worry about.

But specialists deal with that manages what their scarcity of and what there's not scarcity of anything that you take from the mall, like an enormous multi-varied library. Most of the time, you're gonna be able to keep it as long as you want, because the fact of the matter is that on earth we've always had the abundance to provide for human need. We've always had that ability and chosen not to use it. So in this alternative version of malls whatever you take out from the mall, there's a place to return it. You can return it at the mall. You can turn it in a booth on the corner. Maybe you can return it through your mail, like an Amazon type thing in reverse. You can figure out all sorts of interesting new ways to keep this circulating abundance going through the economy.

What we call on our show library socialism is the idea that you can use less materials and provide more abundance. It's a materialist concept recognizing we've got tons of evidence to show that if you share things, you create abundance amongst people. It's a social principle. So I think the mall of the future is going to be very similar to the current mall in all the ways we like, and all the weird stuff about malls is not going to have to exist anymore. I'm not saying we're turning the oceans to lemonade. This isn't a ridiculous idea. We know that libraries work. We know that people don't really like destroying things. So like people aren't going to be like, no, I'd rather keep losing money to be able to destroy things instead of return them somewhere.

I know so many people who are burdened by the fact that they have all this stuff that they don't want and they don't know how to get rid of it in a responsible way, they don't know how to make sure that it's actually used by someone who needs it. We've figured out, in the future, mutual aid groups and redistributing groups to do this sort of stuff. Because it'd be great if we could get an institution that's responsible to do that. Instead of putting the responsibility on all of us as individuals to be these ethical agents within this very twisted system.

Laborwave Radio I want to talk a little bit about what those institutions could be to enable this type of revolutionary mall. But I do have a quick question about the interior of the mall itself, because one of the things from my memory of working in malls was just the high bombardment of advertising space you're subjected to working there, and being a consumer there. It was like non-stop ads. And now it's even to the point where if your phone's in your pocket and you walk by a store, you're going to get an email or a text message from that place like, Hey, we got a discount for you. Now the ad space is connecting with you and into your phone. So there's still so much space in malls. There's so much stuff we could fill it up with. What do you think the advertisement space could be creatively reinterpreted to look like instead?

Shawn Vulliez It's such a beautiful question. Can you imagine the answers to this question we would get if people came together and thought about it? We've got all this canvas around, what can we use this canvas for? The first thing that comes to mind obviously is arts, photography, infographics that are relevant to people's lives and helpful. An example for something like the coronavirus crisis could be public health information that you could post. Think of all the different ways we could be using the public relations infrastructure of society, people who are getting together to think about how do we convince people of things?

How do we connect with people's attention? How do we capture people's attention and put it towards what we want? I think that sector too can be creatively reinterpreted as a whole, because there are things that are worth drawing people's attention to a responsible use of the advertising infrastructure of the planet. If we're to creatively reinterpret, now we're going to keep all the billboards, we're going to keep all the signs, everything, all this canvas is going to be used. Somehow there's so much we could do with it. Imagine if we were putting even a fraction of the resources that go into the advertising industry to ask those same questions, but about the social good.

Laborwave Radio I don't know why this question popped into my mind, but I got to ask it because it's there. One of the things for me in my experiences at the mall is around the desire for cheap thrills, which I would get with my friends through shoplifting. I would just shoplift, or it was usually my friends and they were using me as an unwitting distraction. But anyway, that's all my own personal baggage. How would we get cheap thrills after the revolution if malls were reconfigured in this beautiful way that you're talking about? What about us teenagers that typically would go to the mall to shoplift? What are we supposed to do with this space now?

Shawn Vulliez So there's two ways that I can answer this question. One of which is that I don't think you can ever take cheap thrills away from teenagers, even in the most just society, the most supportive society possible. You know, there's something about going through that time and becoming what you're going to be and you're learning about yourself, your brain is changing and all this stuff. There's always going to be kids who don't check the book out of the library and just take it, you know, like some degree of that is going to exist. And I think structurally in society and socially of one another, we should be accepting of that as a reality that like, you know, teenagers need just a lot of room to fuck up and there should be room to fuck up.

But also I think that's probably around the age, maybe 14, 15, 16, where you want to start training. So in a utopian society and a perfected society; not perfected, but the preconditions of freedom, you know, having a society where people's basic needs are met and we can sort of begin that process at the long move towards the horizon of utopia. Obviously you never encounter something perfect. There's always challenges, but we know that people can overcome those challenges. And so that's what being a utopian means to me. And that's what I see in other utopians that I respect like Karl Marx when it comes to youth who are aging up through those teen years in a utopian and perfected society, we want to be bringing them into levels of democratic process that we don't even give adults in this society.

We want to give them power in a real sense, like a real social power that's responsible, which is people's power being proportionate. Like we don't want to make teenagers all powerful, but we want to make them participate in committees where they reconcile their differences with other people, learn new things, teach each other things and go through that deliberative democratic process, probably even from a younger age. But especially during those teenage years, we want to create these institutions where people's voice matters in the world. And I think for a lot of people who, when they were younger or now misbehave under a system that is depriving them of a bunch of different things, I think a lot of those people would find that there's more satisfying ways to misbehave, intellectually or democratically to play the devil's advocate on tough questions in ways that are actually productive, not in ways that you're like harassing a stranger, but like for the purposes of coming with the best possible ideas in that context.

I stole Pokemon cards a lot because my friends put me up to it. Also I plead the fifth otherwise. But I don't know that I would've done that if I knew that I was valued in society and what I thought mattered. And I had enough to understand about politics and economics and this sort of stuff. I think the amount that people will act out in ways that harm others, there's a lot of variety in how much harm is caused by different types of shoplifting by youth, but they would do it less if they felt respected and known and useful, and they had opportunities to enrich themselves and they weren't told that what they care about and what they dream of is impossible. I think that sort of way that we talk to children and young people while they're developing who they are, who they will become, about being realistic about stuff can be really damaging and sort of a type of systemic abuse and deprivation. You know, actually interestingly, the real in "real estate" comes from royalty. There's a real connection between saying, be realistic and go according to the orders of the King.

Laborwave Radio It's really interesting the way you're describing this future society as not a fixed state. Even the mall itself as a brick and mortar thing doesn't necessarily operate as a static institution. It's something that we can continue having a process of deliberation and changing and reinterpretation. Is this how you look at the future society? Like a revolutionary society is not necessarily stuck or perfect in a fixed state?

Shawn Vulliez A hundred percent. I actually think this is maybe one of the most dangerous ways of thinking about revolution in an unrealistic way where we think of revolution as something that happens as a thunderclap where on one side of the line everything is good and everything's bad on the other side of the line. If you look at the history of revolutions, revolts, et cetera, these things take 10 years that go back and forth in different ways. There's different power dynamics and stuff that erupts through something like a revolutionary period. And I think there's also different ways that different types of revolutions happen that we don't consider revolution because they don't meet that thunderclap format and they can be based on technological change or social technological change, cultural change.

A lot of those things I think are legitimately revolutionary to a degree in that they do get at the root, as people say, but without having that overthrowing of society effect I think that is on the spectrum of revolution. But then even in the cases where we're looking at like, okay, we're going to take over the parliament building and do something else instead of parliaments, or do parliaments in a better way or whatever variety that people have of that, that process is going to take easily 10, 12 years to resolve. And it's not guaranteed to resolve any one direction. Understanding that connects to sort of a wider understanding of how developmental change happens in society and that this sort of insight that being is becoming. Ayn, Rand said "A equals A" and she's really obsessed with things are what they are, but actually legit A doesn't equal A because A is always becoming.

Every moment is always differentiating. Like anything, things degrade over time, things grow over time. People learn over time. That's the shape of things. That's the shape of the universe. So if we're not going to think according to the shape of the universe we're going to become totally lost. You can't just have a perfect model that works and it's static. We can think of a bunch of different things that are the conditions of a good mall that we can try to increase over time. Like making sure that community members have access to hosting their own space or running their own- I'm at a loss for words, something other than business to describe what it would look like- if people were in a free associating society, where they can provide worth and provide value to their community.

I think that's what people who are involved in business now and consider themselves business people think they're doing. That's what they want to do. And they're doing it according to the container that we've given them. But to return to the point of the non-static mall, we could try to make a static mall, but it's like trying to paint the smell of oranges. It's like trying to translate the taste of soup into a song. It does not follow.

Laborwave Radio As you're speaking about the preconditions for a better mall, a revolutionary mall, one of the things that my mind landed on was thinking about the parking lots at malls. Because the other thing about malls is they're not just huge brick and mortar buildings. They're also these giant parking lots. And I wonder what you think those can be reinterpreted to look like after the revolution. What will the mall parking lots look like?

Shawn Vulliez I guess it depends how we structure our transit system. I'm really interested in the development of what's been called personal public transit, which is like things that fall in the space between having a car or a bike that's your own versus going on a crowded bus where disproportionately women are going to be harassed a certain percentage of the time, et cetera. There's some real problems with buses and stuff from a social perspective under inequality. I don't want to downplay those or overplay them either because buses are massively important and we should be funding public transit to the highest degree. But if we're going to think utopian about this, maybe there's something you can construct in society where we have that sort of library of transit vehicle, where people are taking a vehicle that's proportionate to the trip that they're taking every time.

If you're just one person you're going to drive a one person size car, and if you're not getting groceries, there's not even going to be a trunk. And then you can just leave it somewhere where the system is going to help connect it to someone else. If we can configure all that stuff in the post-revolutionary context, the way that the parking lot would be, presumably I guess the land could be used for any number of things, but you need a lot less space, maybe parts of parking lots would become sort of transit hubs for this type of thing. Maybe we'd have a system of small cars guided by rails that go in the sky. I don't know. I'm not sure, but also social space is massively important. I thought about this also with the street corners, you know, where two streets cross each other, and there's this big circle of pavement. I feel like we should try to use that more as communities and also as activists, you know, like throwing many block parties by surprise of various kinds and just blocking the road and just doing it. Like, I think we should sort of feel entitled to do that under the system, but when it comes to the parking lot in malls of the future would be chipped away at over time and put towards more productive use than just collecting rays from the sun, which is what pavement does.

Laborwave Radio It reminds me of this quote from Henri Lefebvre where he talked about underneath the concrete is the beach. I think we could even think of parking lots like this. Like we could dig them up, break them up and plant trees there. We could turn them into woods. We could turn them into the forest. We could turn them into beaches and have these parties that you're talking about too.

Shawn Vulliez That'd be totally epic. If you could just go to this beach party right outside the mall, also borrow swimsuit.

Laborwave Radio That would have made my teenage years in Buford, Georgia, much more entertaining and enjoyable. If it wasn't just the sun beating down on me on this hot asphalt of a mile long parking lot. I'm getting angry thinking about my childhood. About how cheap the malls were that I've been subjected to. We should go for these revolutionary malls.

Shawn Vulliez For real. You were, I know for a fact that you were let down when you were a kid. When I think back to myself as a child I can be moved to anger, not for myself, but if I think of myself as like another kid, I'm like, how the fuck did all of you let this happen to this kid? How society is organized where that is the context in which children have to become aware of themselves. It's so just horrible. I think one of the things that we could do more in our utopianism, in our leftism, is bringing in that sort of Mr. Rogers or Raffi perspective of how does this affect children?

Because I was thinking about a utopian mall where kids can have the fun side of the mall experience, like trying out the video games, seeing toys, you know, going to different stores and all that stuff, while being safe and not being exposed to things that are gonna make them not like themselves for no reason. And all the other weird stuff that we do to kids. The beach thing gets me wondering how much more things can we stuff into one place? Like, can we just create this one magical community place where we have all these great things that people love doing where it's like, Oh yeah, I'll see you down at the place that has everything we like. It could really be a beautiful thing.

Laborwave Radio What do you think the institutions of this future society would need to look like in order to create the conditions for this type of mall to even exist? So if I'm going to be a little bit simplified in that question, what kind of government would we need first to even actually start enabling a move towards the social good?

Shawn Vulliez So I want to be open-minded. I want to acknowledge a lot of possibilities and I want to even say that maybe it's possible that bad governments structured through bad systems, very technocratic, even elitist, could come to a conclusion. I do really believe in people. I think people can come to the right conclusions, but I think that power can be really corrupting. And I think that lack of education is sort of a type of corruption, like not having the context or it results in corrupt outcomes. Corrupted outcomes are corrupted by the lack of information so that it's not the person themselves is turned evil or sour or something it's that the decision-making process is corrupted by the lack of information.

It's not really a popular opinion, but the only game in town is direct democracy. We need to engage everyone. You can't bring power to the people unless you distribute literally power to the people. You have to give people, like the example I gave with teenagers, proportionate power over their own lives where they know that they matter. They know that they can participate in decisions that matter. They don't just have freedom of speech to like run their mouth in a vacuum. They have freedom of speech to say, this is how it should be. This is how it should be. And then coming to a conclusion that they know that this system of governance works. Like, I can see that my opinion mixed with other people's opinion and the knowledge that we all share together to create a conclusion that made as many people as possible happy causes us as little harm as possible and et cetera.

That's what the end game would look like. That's what we try to hope to achieve in the end. I think there's a pretty strong argument that if you want to run things for social good, the best bet is to let people run them. Actually let people run them. And I understand that this comes in a time where we suffer from a lot of propaganda and there's a lot of different reasons why people can be alienated from either their own interests or their own reason or their own ethics because of the way that these profits structures work. And I want to acknowledge that like 110%, but I really think at the end of the day, socialist, revolutionary, you know, anarchistic politics, even what really motivates liberals and really motivates conservatives at their heart is they want what's good for people and support.

I'm talking about conservatives specifically who don't hate certain people and liberals who specifically don't hate certain people and stuff.

Laborwave Radio So a small group then. [laughter]

Shawn Vulliez So yeah, we can say that people who are really legitimately civically engaged, ethically engaged in the world, they can come to a variety of different conclusions based on a lack of information. But ultimately we can't assume that we're just dealing with thoughtless sheep. We can't just assume that we're dealing with people who are like half good and half bad. And we're going to have to put the other half in prison in order to build a nice mall. It has to be a developmental process. And like I mentioned before about the way of the world as it is, is that we're constantly in change. Hegel called it dialectics. Things are in a sort of dance with their own differentiation.

I don't think we can think of a beautiful mall occurring without the engagement and developmental shape of people becoming engaged, getting access to more information and using reason and ethics together to try to push themselves to further frontiers. That's how I see the structure of a utopian society and to a degree, that's how I see the process of getting there.

Laborwave Radio Talking about direct democracy, I've been reading some CLR James and he had a lot of comments on direct democracy. One of the things he said that I think is interesting, that kind of falls in line with what you're saying, is that he focused a lot on Ancient Athenian forms of direct democracy...

Shawn Vulliez Every Cook Can Govern, it's a great essay.

Laborwave Radio Exactly. Yeah, and he pointed out that basically the assumption here was that you could pick somebody's name out of a hat one day out of the year and put them into a government administrative office. And they just had to do administration by rotation. So the idea was anybody can do it. But he said for today it would be hard to impose that because the difference was that the Athenians were actually oriented towards government with the full expectation that one day their name was going to be drawn out of that hat.

So they actually paid attention to these things. They were cultivated and socialized in a way to anticipate this possibility of being in a position where they have to administer the social good and have to participate in government in this directly democratic way. What you're saying seems to suggest that that's lost today, but we could regain it. I fully agree with that point. The other thing that I think is interesting about CLR James and some of the people that are influenced by his work is that he pointed out that this form of direct democracy was prior to the emergence of the state, that it wasn't a state bound system, and that this conflation of government with the state is a bad conflation. So I wonder what you think about? Does it necessarily mean if we do direct democracy that the future society would be an anti-statist one?

Shawn Vulliez I think it, again, depends a lot on the definitions here, but I tend to think that the way that state institutions are run, and when I think of the state I think of property enforcement and representative bureaucratic systems that call themselves democracy. They actually didn't used to call themselves democracy until very recently when the word democracy became popular. When I think of this usage of the state I think of a variety of things that are really contingent that are not necessarily the functioning of a good society. So I do think in the end game, it's not that you wouldn't have governance. It's actually that you'd have more governance, more detailed governments, more participatory governance, but it wouldn't be enforced by threat.

It wouldn't be enforced by guys who wear a certain color who are disproportionately abusive in their homes. It wouldn't be enforced by an education system that is not built on teaching children how to think about things or what their place in the world is, and actually very antagonistic to teaching them anything that relates to that. And I think it's also a really good point to note that these democratic institutions in practice are disconnected from the state. David Graeber wrote a great book, The Democracy Project, in it he points out that basically all through human history, as far as we can tell, there's been these outbursts of direct democracy, either by face-to-face council organizing or whatever else where groups of people came together and made decisions.

But the thing is the people who are doing that were never the people in power, because the people in power could just tell people what to do. As a result, because of the way that history is written by the winners, they say, but in history... they're not winners. They're actually huge pieces of shit. History is written by the huge pieces of shit that put everyone else down. So the people who are being held down, obviously come up with democracy, spontaneously, come up with talking to each other face to face solving problems together, regulating problems within the group, and then pushing forward for more participation, bringing more people in distributing power to them. It happens all over the world and in all these different contexts.

There's this interesting tidbit that I got from Abdullah Öcallan. He says that the first time the word freedom was ever used was in Sumeria during a slave revolt. When you think about the big scale of history and all the different times where people came together to say, let's get this boot off of us. And then in that context, they all looked at each other eye to eye, and they had differences like I'm a plumber, or I'm a candlestick maker- this predates plumbing in my imagination- I'm a candlestick maker, and you're a guy who carries water buckets. We're different. But for the purposes of this, you know, we're brothers.

I mean, unfortunately that's very gendered for most of history or in a lot of contexts, but we're siblings, we stand together for equality and to distribute power to all of us. And if we think of the long scale of that it feels like the natural politics of the left, the extension of the things that we care about to say, how do we take this instinct? That's this beautiful thing that shows up all across history and all these different forums and without being unwilling to criticize, you know, for example, ancient Greece's various practices, which I do not co-sign. But being like, this is just one of the places where the flower of democracy in a way briefly bloomed and there's maybe something we can learn from it.

I'm not big on economic metaphors, but Martin Luther King, Jr said, we want to build a movement where we can cash the check of the past historical movements. All through history you've had all these great promises made by human spirit of what we could do. And we knew it was possible. We need to build the context in which that we can cash that check that has been written as long as humans have struggled and thrived for freedom and for better lives for the people around them. It's such a beautiful idea to me that we could. The mall could be a space for democracy. Like the mall could be the place where you can go and sign up to be sorted into a problem-solving group.

Or you could say I'm willing to also I'll help solve any problem you need. And then you get put on the garbage and toilets committee or whatever. But like in that group, like there's real serious questions about what toilets should be in society. I love the idea of bringing in lotteries as part of it, because it really is about having confidence that it's not just some prick making ideas, like there's a process and that it's a process that you can see and it's a process you can be part of. And I think people should have a say in their lives specifically on the things that really affect them. Not necessarily like everyone votes on everything all the time. I don't think that's actually the spirit of direct democracy.

The spirit of direct democracy is having a vote on things that affect you and having a system where power is decentralized, where people are standing next to each other, not above or below each other, like we have for this current representative system. It was literally invented and suggested as the compromise between rule by the rich and democracy and democracy was seen as chaotic and synonymous with anarchism.

Laborwave Radio Maybe it was actually more synonymous with anarchism then we were admitting back then. I think that what you've laid out and sketched here is really beautiful and interesting. We have parking lot beaches and spontaneous block parties, liberatory schooling, direct democracy, and shared power. We have malls that are geared towards socializing and the common good. All of this stuff sounds great. What I like to talk about in these series of episodes on after the revolution is how do we get there? How do we materialize our imagination? Obviously that's the most difficult question, and we're not trying to say we're being prescriptive here and we know the way necessarily, but if you were to suggest some possible pathways for getting to this revolutionary mall, how would you suggest it could be?

Shawn Vulliez It is a complicated and variable process. I think the one true and glorious revolution that shall bring humanity from a lower stage to a higher stage of self-organization and wholeness is going to have a lot of things within it that we can't predict explicitly and will be made fools for if we try too much. But I'll be a little bit foolish. I think we shouldn't underestimate the realm of ideas and the realm of increasing understanding and education about what is possible, because a lot of people are sort of trained into the sense of impossibility. And I think that's something that's really great about this series in particular is helping more people to at least consider a wider variety of what is possible, because I've heard someone say self-confidence is tied to how much possibilities you feel you have.

People get less self-confident when they're like, Oh, I can't do this. It's this pushing down kind of thing. Specifically talking about the ideological realm for a second, when we teach someone that something else is possible, we make them more free. We make them more free to think. And so it's a small type of freedom. Don't get me wrong, I think you can't liberate someone from like bondage or wages just because you told them a good idea, but we need to know what is possible. And we need to recognize that possibilities and potential realities are a type of fact.

They're not just dreams. They're a type of fact because if we really think through them and think through them together and we hear back, Oh, well, that's an interesting idea, but what about this at your mall? That process at its best form is the most beautiful thing. It's like this group reason process where then we're all thinking together in detail like, so how does the ice rink work? Or how does this part work? And that's the process where genius comes from it doesn't come from individuals. It comes from people really working together. And so part of being able to create that is giving people the factual education that a better world is possible and we keep impossible on a very limited place.

The applications of the word impossible should be very limited. We're talking about things like me flying up suddenly into the sky, without any reason and disappearing, like that is maybe impossible. It's close to impossible. Maybe something could happen. I don't know. I don't claim to know every detail of up there [laughter], but like impossibility is something that is inflated intentionally by the advertising industry, by politicians, by people who are trying to sell us things because they want to convince us that the joy of the mall comes through swiping the credit card. And we need to call bullshit on that. Paying money is the least good part of the mall.

A lot of people I assume are going to hear this are going to go to jobs and feel like they're just an ordinary person who's powerless. They're not someone who wakes up in the morning feeling like they're going to revolutionary war every day or something. But revolution is something that everyone can participate in. And small forms of participation makes ripples in society and human consciousness that are profound. And then in terms of organizational strategy, I think we need to look to thinkers like Modibo Kadalie, Abdullah Öcallan, Murray Bookchin towards a sort of anarchistic, neither state nor anarchy, but dual power directly democratic prefigurative organization.

So that's a lot of complex ideas that I can go into more in detail into what it means if we want. But I think this is our best bet and puts us in the best position to deal with anything that we might face. It puts us in a better position to make it that when even like, say for example, socialists run for office, there's a higher chance they're going to win. Or even if they don't that the people who are in power know that they're accountable to these groups that are growing and large and have committed points of view. So in order to win over the support of these organizations, they actually have to change. I don't think we can just get there through the electoral process, and I actually say this as someone who's worked professionally as a campaign manager in Canada for multiple elections, and I've been involved in electoral politics from the left and socialists electoral politics. Electoral politics can be part of the picture, but unless we have a real organized group movement where there's directly democratic institutions that people already participate in and where they are getting education, I don't see another pathway that makes sense in terms of organizing on the left to push it. But actually I should say also that's the massive vision. There's mass politics and then there's smaller group politics. Small groups of committed people change the world all the time. And we need to have that to a certain degree.

I would just emphasize that when participating in mass organizations we should be very conscious to remember that other people are not sheep. We're dealing with people who are in many ways smarter than we imagine, and therefore we should show patience and constraint for the process. I'm not going to show up to a political space to try to whip the perfect amount of votes to ram through the thing I want, because we're building institutions and building political consciousness that extend beyond me and my group to make more people in the world believe that the institutions we are creating together are really legitimate.

It's about trying to make as many people understand the process as possible. Which means we can't go around thinking that people are sheep or that I need to trick them into voting a certain way at a certain time. That's the logic of electoral politics. That's the logic of running an election, and this is one of the things that disturbs me about participating in elections in the past. When the rubber hits the road, you're not trying to convince people of this or that policy or idea. Most of the time, you're trying to get a ballot in the box and the qualitative features of different ballots don't matter.

Our system is set up like that, where if it doesn't matter what the context in which the ballot and the box gets in, it encouraged the sort of thinking about people as puppets to be controlled where you're sending out mailers because you want to shock and confuse them. But in a better system you want to educate them, build their political consciousness, turn them into the types of citizens that you'd want in a free society.

Unfortunately, that sort of thinking from electoral politics can seep into radical politics, because people start thinking in the world in terms of, well, look at the Republican party, they're so awful. So that means that everyone who votes for them inherently has got something wrong with their seed. You know, like, there's a certain percent of the population that has something wrong with their like deep core. And there's a certain percent of the population that's redeemable. But I think understanding child's psychological development, the propaganda industry, all this stuff, demonstrates that there's potential in everyone, or at least a vast majority of people to achieve a level of political consciousness and achieve a level of decency that we'd agree with. And a lot of what we perceive in these rooms of the horrible things that people do are stimulated and engaged actively by institutions like political parties and so on.

I don't think we can assume that the horrible way that people treat each other around us is the result of unmediated human instinct or something like that. Because we know for a fact that we're constantly polluted with people telling us you're either better or worse than other people. You have to always figure out when you meet someone, am I better than them or worse than them? Or you have to rank people. Like, who's your favorite friend? I've always felt that question is so disturbing. Who's my favorite friend? I love these people. You're gonna make me pick one? No, I don't have a favorite friend. It's important to me to not. It's actually a really weird question, but it's completely normalized.

And this is what we tell children. No wonder they act the way they do or come home crying. All of the current system is so disturbing, and we need to start thinking about how would we think in a just society and start trying to embody that now to the highest degree that we can.

Laborwave Radio What you're saying reminds me of something Tithi Bhattacharya said in a recent interview. She described how she will ask her students why is it necessary to do the pledge of allegiance when you're growing up. If you loved your country, why would you have to be indoctrinated to do this? And she said, if you have to do that, why do you not similarly have to be trained to learn songs that are pledges of love for your parents? Obviously one's organic, and the other requires to actually go against human instincts that probably are being inhibited in this society. But the other thing you're saying that I just want to tease out here is the implication of this conversation is that realistically, we need to start thinking of every worker at a mall as a future revolutionary. Because if malls can be revolutionary spaces, it means everyone in the mall can be brought into the making of this revolutionary space. And that all of our organizing really needs to approach people with that level of confidence, and the attitude that we're talking to agents of a revolutionary society. Would you agree with me on that?

Shawn Vulliez A hundred percent yes. Totally. Because we live in an unjust society. So we want people to be agitated towards revolutionary change, to grasp the problems by the root and help fix them. That's contingent of course on the situation. I just want to know that we don't necessarily want to talk to everyone and be like, the purpose of political life is always revolution. Or to tell them that the purpose of political life has to be always fundamentally changing everything about society, because presumably you'd be able to achieve something where you wouldn't have to do that. You know? So I see the development of revolutionary consciousness is being very deeply tied and sort of like a component part of political consciousness.

At the mall you're going to encounter people who come from a variety of perspectives, a variety of either partisan politics, but more primarily people who are low information on the political world. Maybe they tend to vote a certain way if they vote at all, and they carry with them a bunch of assumptions about the way things are and the way things should be. Murray Bookchin talks a lot about ancient Greece in the same way CLR James did, and one of the concepts from ancient Greece that he takes is "paideia," which is the concept of political experience. He maps it to Marx's idea of revolutionary subjectivity and says basically the building of the revolutionary subject that Marx talks about should be better understood as the building of deep political citizenship. Not to a nation, but a real responsibility to the community around you. And the reason that I specified this difference is because I suspect that if you go to the mall and you say, "Hey, we're organizing a revolution," you'll find some people. You'll find some people for sure. It's not guaranteed. There'll be a leftist, but you'll find some people who are down, but there's another way to approach where we can talk about politics more broadly, and if we do that, and that's the first step that we're bringing people into the realm of what should be.

It's the start of a process that leads to revolutionary consciousness. I see it as very developmental. It's almost on the edge of language. I struggle talking about it. Like what it means that being is becoming. What it means that you can't just be something you have to change over time and what the implications are, especially when thinking about political thought and democracy. That the people that you meet have revolutionary potential. Even people who are soaked in propaganda can teach you things. And I think a lot of the time we sort of hand wave people away saying your concerns aren't valid because you're a product of propaganda. But it's like, no, let's just unpack those concerns. Because even if they think it's not true, or even if you know that it's not true, that what they're accusing Joe Biden of is not true or something like that, are they concerned about something that has legitimacy? Are they being moved from an ethical place? They're against child trafficking or something like that? You know, like it gets distorted and pulled out and all these loops by all these institutions of power and money and stuff like that. But these people have souls, like souls in the sense of they're legitimately concerned and aggrieved by the idea of harm, the way that we all are.

How do we bring that out of people? How do we meet people where they're at, not in a way that we're compromising our values, but we're helping grow them from the seeds of political consciousness they have into the flower of political consciousness. There's an interesting Hegel quote that Bookchin references where he says, basically, you can't hate the bud, but love the flower.

David Graeber: A Celebration & Discussion of Ideas w/ Tony Vogt & Shane Capra

Full transcript below.

David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He passed on September 2, 2020.

We discuss his ideas and celebrate his memory in this conversation with comrades Tony Vogt, member of the IWW and co-founder of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, and Shane Capra, an organizer and participant in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and member of the IWW.

Our discussion covers topics of leadership and charisma, the tension between play and games, and falling in love with a ghost you cannot capture.

Before getting into the episode, wanted to give a shout out to our most recent patron, Adam, who became a strike captain via our Laborwave Patreon.

You can join the Patreon as well by going to patreon.com/laborwave. As Adam has recently joined, they will be receiving in the mail very shortly a custom made Laborwave t-shirt, illustrated zine of our Dinner Table After the Revolution episode, and some really cool hand drawn stickers. We also continually give gifts as we go, and you get access to the early release of our episodes. So welcome Adam to Laborwave, we really appreciate you joining the Patreon. I also want to give a shout out to In The Red Records, they have recently given Laborwave permission to use the music of their artists on our show. So you'll be hearing during our musical breaks music from In The Red Records.

Today we chose, in celebration of David Graeber, to keep the music fun and spirited in keeping with his legacy. So this song is called Shake Real Low by King Khan and BBQ Show, and you'll be hearing it in the outro to this episode. My guests on this episode are two comrades. Tony Vogt, who in introducing himself omitted the fact that he is also a co-founder and participant in the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, which puts out really great content and recently started releasing YouTube videos, discussing broad ranging subjects, and particularly a lot of focus on Star Trek and the leftist themes within.

So check out the Anarres Project at anarresproject.org. Shane Capra also joins us, who is one of the founders and participants in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking. Both of these projects you can learn more about in our show links. We've also got some really cool episodes coming up, including another in our mini series, After the Revolution, where we talk to Shawn from the Srsly Wrong podcast about Malls After the Revolution. We're also going to have conversations with the Angry Workers, do another discussion of Comrades Read Together, talking about the book No Shortcuts, and we're planning and scheduling a conversation with Marianne Garneau, editor and writer for Organizing Work and Nick Driedger, a consistent contributor to Organizing Work, about the future of the IWW.

All of that and more coming up on Laborwave. Please follow us on our social media, we are at Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and leave reviews and like our content on Apple podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. We hope you enjoy this conversation about David Graeber. Laborwave Radio: Joined today by two comrades to discuss the life and legacy of the now recently passed David Graeber. Before we talk about Graeber's life and legacy, and some of these ideas, I want to give my guests the opportunity to introduce themselves. So I can see most quickly Tony, on my screen, so how about we start with you? Tony can you just introduce yourself to our listeners?

TV: I'm Tony Vogt, I am a long time Wobbly, as was David Graeber, and I'm also part of the faculty union at Oregon State University. I'm an instructor in philosophy there and I've been involved in social movements for the last 40 years.

LR: And Shane can you introduce yourself?

SC: My name is Shane. I'm one of the organizers that runs the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, I'm also in the IWW but I'm just a little baby, and I've been doing lots of different anarchist and radical projects since I was a teenager.

LR: Yeah, I'm really happy to have you both here. Full disclosure, I had been an attendee of the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and I thought it was a great week out camping and getting exposed to a lot of new perspectives. And learning how to climb trees, I have not yet utilized those acquired skills, but one of these days. And Tony and I also have a great history in that he's often served as a mentor to me in my learning and political imagination. So this is a great crew to have this conversation with.

I'm not going to like give too much of a rehearsal of David Graeber cause I think a lot of folks are fairly well acquainted and aware of who he is. But just very briefly, Graeber was an anthropologist, and he was also known as a very key proponent of anarchism as a political perspective. He wrote a lot of books, probably the most famous, I would say is Debt the First 5,000 Years. He also wrote The Democracy Project, The Utopia of Rules, more recently Bullshit Jobs. And for anarchists in particular, I think his big, big book is Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which was a little slim primer that quite frankly is a great introduction and a lot of his work and thinking.

He passed away recently on September 2nd at the age of 59, causes still unknown to my knowledge. But what we were going to do is just kind of have a little panel discussion about some of his ideas that influenced us the most or the ones that we want to like chew on the most, talk about things we like, maybe things we didn't like, and just give a little bit of a celebration to somebody who I think lived with a very rebellious spirit and a rebellious soul. And I imagine he is probably having a lot of fun wherever you might be today. So who would like to maybe kick it off with just, when I invited you to the talk, what was the first thing that you thought of when you thought of Graeber and things that he's impacted you by?

SC: One of the first things that I was thinking about was like, I am in my early thirties, so you know, I was a teenager when I was getting involved and stuff, and I basically started organizing and identifying as an anarchist as a teenager, right at the time when the Green Scare was happening. So it was like 2005-2006, and 9/11, the Anti-War Movement, and the Green Scare sort of all combined to end the spirit that sort of drove the Global Justice Movement. And I think in a lot of ways, I came into this sort of era where, you know, I was reading all these books that were like, oh, there is going to be these giant mass summit shut downs and black blocs and this really building momentum, and it was all gone.

And so it was sort of like being in love with a ghost. And I think David Graeber's work, you know, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and Direct Action: An Ethnography really sort of like laid out this map of that ghost we were sort of inheriting, and it was all sort of smashed to bits and gone at that point. And so that was sort of like the teenage me, was like reading these books, being animated by them, and finding none of it. So that was my first brush with David Graeber.

LR: I feel similar in that I came to political activation later in life. So I was already in my mid twenties—my chronology is so fuzzy, I don't even know how old I was ever—but I think I was in my mid twenties and it was really in Occupy Wall Street. So Occupy Wall Street happened at the same time that a lot of other things were happening for me personally. And I didn't directly participate as much as I wish I had, I did a little bit, but not that much, and this was in Atlanta. And then when it was crushed and when it was over, I was kinda more shocked by just what happened, you know, how it was like brutalized by the police and just within a week swept away.

And within that, I started actually trying to dig in and learn more and come to educate myself about it. And I came to the Democracy Project eventually, and I came to like fall in love with Occupy Wall Street, and feeling like I missed out on it. And I think that that's kind of a similar to what you were saying Shane, it's almost like, you know, chasing a ghost, like trying to like get tapped into this moment and spirit in time and place that just was always out of my grasp a little bit. Tony how about you share?

TV: Yeah one of the things about Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology is it's a great introduction for anybody who's unfamiliar, not just with Graeber, but with anarchism. And it's really accessible, well, pretty accessible, it's still a slight bit academic and scholarly, and he's been critiqued for that, but he was a scholar. Even though he was an anarchist scholar, even though he came from a working class background—and he had some important things to say about being working class in the academy—but it's a spirited book, it's fun, it's got verve, or chutzpah. I think it has sparked a lot of people to search further into the history and Anarchist perspectives.

And I've given it as a gift to the number of people. I'm just going to say, I mourn his passing. I miss his voice. He was onto some really interesting things in these last few years that he will now not get a chance to develop. And so I guess it's up to the rest of us. SC: I think, to sort of go off of something that, Alex, you were saying about Occupy Wall Street and this idea of being in love with the movement that just ended before you joined up. I was sort of invovled as a teenager and one of the things that radicalized me—I was this young anarcho-punk kid and I was getting more politically serious, and when I was 18 I was riding my bike around and got a flat tire.

And I went to this collective bike shop that was in the basement of a community center called Stone Soup, and sort of just by wandering up after working on my bike I met these weird people doing Food Not Bombs, and they had this library and this Infoshop community social center space. And in a lot of ways what was sort of animating that was this Direct Action Network, Global Action Network—which was part of the DAN stuff in the global justice period—hung on longer than it did in other places, I would say it ended in probably 2007. And so I was sort of in this echo of the Global Justice Movement in the things that I was reading about in David Graeber, but I was doing more community organizing than, like, these gigantic spokescouncils of 500 spokes and all these affinity groups, and there was barely any of that around, until when Occupy Wall Street happened I was like, "Oh yeah this is it, and here's the rule book that we took from zines and reading David Graeber."

And we were like, "Okay, we're going to go down to Occupy Wall Street." And we didn't really know to expect. So an affinity group I was in a went down, and our only goal was to not get arrested. But we got to Occupy Wall Street the very first night, and we were in this march that was going to Wall Street. We got to a fence and we were like, "Okay, now we pull down the fence," and everybody was like, "Oh there are a lot of cops, these cops are going to stop us, the cops are stopping us, let's go back to the park." So we were like, "What?!" We were expecting this stuff of the global justice period, and then we went back to the park and had a long-ass meeting.

And we were like, "This sucks let's leave." We thought it was never going to go anywhere. And one of the things that's memorable of that was David Graeber being there and inventing the People's Mic in order to make that bad meeting happen. But I remember leaving really fed up, and like you missed your moment and then you missed your moment.

LR: Yeah. I mean, it maybe seems like a weird connection, but it actually reminds me of the Great Gatsby. You know how Gatsby has this romanticized vision of the love of his life, Daisy. And he like has pined and yearned for years and years to reconnect and recapture this love, this moment in time that he idealizes was like the peak of his life. And then when he comes back to encounter her, he realizes that it was all in his imagination more than the reality. Like the reality really didn't live up to the expectations at all. It was kind of crushing. So anyway, that's what it connects to for me, you saying that. It's like, there are these moments where I think, even still today, we're prone to probably glamorize and highly exaggerate the rebellious moments in time, the experiences of it, the reality of it.

A lot of times, anarchist organizing has a lot of boring meetings. It's not just throwing Molotov cocktails and soup cans at the police.

TV: I must be an outlier because I generally like meetings, political meetings, Wobbly meetings. And my first really wonderful experience at a meeting was in 1983 in the anti-nuke movement. My affinity group got arrested with about a thousand other people and thrown into a big circus tent, surrounded by barbed wire. We had refused to give our names upon arrest. So the cops were closing in and I experienced my first spokescouncil meeting with about 500 people and saw it work and it blew me away.

So there are these moments in movements that truly are real. And you don't have to romanticize them. And they're hard, they're scary, but they're real. And I think Graeber was inspired by some of those moments himself. I also experienced that to some degree in the Occupy movement, even in smaller cities in Oregon. Of course Occupy was everywhere, right. There was an Occupy Antarctica.

LR: Well it reminds me of—so, in the preparation for this talk, I revisited some of Graeber's works that I like the most. It has been a little while since I read them. So I kind of remembered a lot of like, why he's so appealing as a writer. I will say like Tony, you mentioned earlier, he was maybe a little academic at times, I acknowledge that that's true, but I will say he's one of the few academic writers I encounter that actually writes to be understood, which I find refreshing. And you can tell he's having fun as he's writing. I think that there's something there's just some fun that you have as a reader, but what you were saying about meetings, about those moments, it reminds me of his work in The Utopia of Rules where he's talking about bureaucracy and the kind of hidden underlying appeal of bureaucracy, even for radicals and even for anarchists.

And he defines it as the distinction between play and games, desiring play versus desiring games. And these moments of Occupy, these explosive moments, these were moments of rebellion, not just Occupy, but things that seem spontaneous, I think tap into our desires for play, which is spontaneous creative moments of expression. But he says bureaucracies are more about the desire for games, which are rule-bound affairs where you understand the rules, there's no ambiguity about it, and by abiding by the rules of games, you actually can win at, I guess, the games of life. I think that these are actually still a lot of the arguments we're still having within radical circles about: How do we organize?

What's the necessity of the logistics behind things? How much do we need to have games versus play? And everybody's kind of trying to invoke these different desires and inject it in movement spaces. Maybe that sounds really abstract.

TV: How can we make decisions together that honor the radical imagination and bring out all of our capacities? And I think this is something that's an ongoing project within movements. Nobody's really figured it out, but there are moments when it happens. And it's really worthwhile. Graeber spoke to this somewhat. He's got on YouTube, I think—God, was it a TEDx talk? Did he actually give one? He has one called something like Political Pleasure, which is sort of subversive and he begins by saying, "I've got to admit, I like meetings." And then he goes on to talk about how meetings have been robbed from us, like the coming together to make decisions and not just make decisions, but honor each other's capacities for a radical imagination and play.

And I don't know if you two know his essay called What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun? Yeah, it's a great essay, and he actually argues for a a materialist metaphysics of play and intentionality, from any kind of organization from the subatomic all the way up to the biological. So he's actually saying the universe is imbued with this kind of a sense of play. It has the potentiality of that. And it's built into, even on a material basis, its built into our very bodies, and it's built into everything around us.

That's a really interesting essay. And of course he's building on kinds of philosophies that are opposed to mechanistic philosophies, trying to open the space for imagining a whole different world and how to relate to it.

SC: I don't think you can be some sort of pure insurrectionary person who just shows up to the riot and reads all the rest of the time. Mostly people enjoy meetings to whatever extent. It seems like it's like, some meetings are bad and some meetings are good. I think the impulse of direct democracy is beyond the concept of meetings though. But I think the essay about play and his style of writing are a big factor of why he's popular. If you think about other quasi-academic or academic people who are a public mouthpiece for anarchism, like Noam Chomsky.

I love Noam Chomsky but he's boring as fuck. And David Graeber really brings it in and he's like, "I'm going to write an essay about Batman. I'm just going to be really goofy." And you can even see it in his online presence. When someone critiques him online he gets kind of mad at them, but he responds in funny ways. And we need that in leadership. Humor and play are part of—I don't know if folks are familiar with the book Joyful Militancy but I think it's a useful injection into an anti-Marxist and really rigid way of trying to change the world.

Not Marxist, more vanguardist I guess.

LR: I think you're right. That is one of the things that appeals to me is that he's having fun and he's kind of bringing fun into politics. And I think it's valid, but right now I'm perceiving, in general, an extreme problem of morale and inspiration. And of course we're a living through a pandemic, and in the Pacific Northwest, wildfires getting more and more intense every year, the police shootings of especially black folks in the streets, just continuing without any breaks. I get why it's easy to feel cynical right now, but morale can really spread and undermine our organizing efforts in and of itself and that we need to have things to fight for and to believe in, and be sparked and motivated and animated by an imagination of something better.

Because what I found in all of my organizing experience is that trying insist on practicality by all means and just go for inches motivates nobody. And nobody wants to come back to the meetings. Nobody wants to participate that much. We need more joy, we need more fun in our movement spaces. And I think Graeber's work helps bring some of that into the conversation.

TV: Yeah, one of the ways I think he helps is because he's really good at reframing things, taking unexamined assumptions about everything: debt, work, meetings, political action, human evolution. You know, his latest work with his friend David Wengrow—he is an archeologist—and they were trying to reimagine how human beings evolved, and departed from the story that we all know: that we all started in small bands, and then there was agriculture and it established cities and they became hierarchical and so on and so forth.

And he actually writes with his archeologist collaborator, that's not the story that archeology tells or anthropologists now tell. It's wrong, really, basically wrong. And so he proposes another way of looking at ourselves as an evolving species. He says the first cities were often robustly egalitarian. He says our species did not. In fact spend most of its history in tiny bands. Agriculture did not mark an irreversible threshold in social evolution. And then he says, even as researchers have gradually come to a consensus on these questions, they remain strangely reluctant to announce their findings to the public, even scholars in other disciplines, let alone reflect on the larger political implications.

So there's a whole essay he puts out called How to Change the Course of Human History (at least the part that's already happened).

LR: I want to follow up immediately on that because when I was reflecting on Graeber's passing and the ways that I think my ideas have been mostly shaped by him. One of the biggest things for me that I've come to realize is that I believe fully one of the monopoly powers of the state that's not often highlighted enough is a monopoly over the political imagination. Like the state has a monopoly over violence. We hear that all the time, right? But I think that the state also has a monopoly over the political imagination, meaning the understanding and definition of what politics is, narrowly defining it, and then creating this kind of shallowness around what's possible.

And the Margaret Thatcher motto is a classic, right? "There is no Alternative." That's an obvious example of monopolized political imagination. I used to think that it was a shallow imagination, I even just said that word shallow. It's not. It's actually a rich and fully developed imagination, it's just a bad one. It's an imagination that believes that the world has to look this way. And that's just another story that we've told ourselves. So for me, I've realized so much of my frustration in organizing spaces has come from recognizing that what people call common sense and pragmatism and practicality is actually a highly utopian imagination in and of itself that they are not even aware of.

And I can link that insight so closely to Graeber's works, and the way that he has blasted away assumptions like Tony is talking about.

SC: I think that's a good point, and gets into some of the stuff that Gramsci was talking about with cultural hegemony. But I think David Graeber takes it in a lot more of a broader strokes zone in a pretty accessible way of doing it. That seems to be a lot of his power, of like, here's his book Debt, and it's going to erase how we're supposed to academically and culturally think of money. So Tony, did that book that was supposed to come after that essay, How to Change the Course of Human History, actually come out? Because I would be fascinated to read the book.

TV: Yeah, and his collaborator's name is David Wengrow. So Graeber and Wengrow. I think it's going to come out, I think I read somewhere that it's going to come out maybe in the next few months. I mean, he did this for Debt. He did it for what we call productive work. He had this thing he used to say regularly when he talked, which he said, "Now think about it, we think of productive work as like working to produce a mug or a glass." He said, "But you only do that at one time. Then the rest of the work is cleaning it, taking care of it for 20 years."

So he's trying to reframe work as caring work and as the work of maintenance and sustaining our lives together, and not just merely defined as productive work. So he was really good at reframing things. I appreciated that in him. LR: Because the production under capitalist terms is a narrowed definition of production, right? It is the production of things specifically, but not the production of people, as I've heard David Graeber describe it.

SC: I'm not sure if you're familiar with Paul Goodman, his role in the '60s, and even in the '40s and '50s, sort of being this anarchist gadfly that put out these works that focused on these certain subsets and tried to turn things on their head and make him make us look at them in different ways. He's not really well remembered, Tony probably has a better grasp on him than I do.

TV: I used to read him back when. It's been decades and decades. But that's interesting you mentioned him in relationship to Graeber because there's a way in which there's a similarity there. They're both very accessible. They're both kind of provocateurs with really good imaginations. They both can be really funny. That's an interesting connection.

SC: And they both died pretty fucking young. The role that they played in somewhat similar in my mind, just for a different era, where it was like, this is the one voice for anarchism or this sort of version of an anti-capitalist that's going to get any air time. And they're sort of goofy. And it's been important. One of the things that, you know, rereading some of the essays on possibilities, and one of the things that he talks about is the idea of a joking relationship, and what is politeness. And that joking relationships tend to be more horizontal and egalitarian.

Like, the ability to have jokes with each other. You know, you don't say poop to the queen was the thing he wrote. But I think having a public leader or figure, or like a mouth piece, and having them be funny, is really important for movements. But also inflected around this anarchist "What is leadership?" question. So it was striking to me, especially with their later work, how similar it was. Like, Bullshit Jobs is like the same book as People or Personnel by Paul Goodman. It's just really interesting.

LR: I wonder though if that brings up one of these tensions around leadership, and kind of things in organizing spaces that shall not be said out loud, and that is that charisma matters in organizing.

Like I think that anarchists, and I include myself within this category, are very invested in horizontal networks and like trying to blast away hierarchies wherever possible. And more specifically social hierarchies, right? Sometimes organizations need a bit of hierarchy or at least bureaucracy within them. And because of that, I think there was a real tendency to want to push against like the charismatic leader model, which was maybe a model that, like Martin Luther King Jr. represented better. But at the same time, it is fair to acknowledge that Graeber had charisma. And I think that that's a lot of the reason that he actually gained influence, not the only, he was still a brilliant writer. He had a lot of insights, but his charisma mattered. He was funny.

And I know you said Chomsky is boring. Which, I guess now. But Chomsky in the nineties was a pretty lively. And I thought he had his own brand of charisma, amongst particular people. So I don't know, Graeber was really prone to ask a lot of open-ended questions, even end his essays with questions rather than conclusions. So I'm kind of just throwing this out here as an open question. How much does charisma really matter on our organizing and how much are we willing to even acknowledge it.

SC: I think it matters a lot. It's sort of a skeleton in the closet for a lot of folks, and it can replace a lot of other things, or mask over a lot of other things.

But yeah, the anarchist hand-wringing around leadership is not functional, in my opinion. We both need leaders, and you can have leadership models that are accountable. And saying we don't have them—in some ways like Joe Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness. You can have organizational models that don't have leaders and have that be systematic, but I think pretending to not need them is no good, because it's sort of just this opaque movement that has no public interface, and what it has is only at a local level.

It feels fairly hard to understand.

TV: I wish Graeber had written more about that. I'm not sure what we're talking about when we're talking about charisma. I kind of know, it's like, okay, does it mean that you are able to get people to listen to you? Are you able to move them? And if so, then there are people who have that developed more so than other people. And as anarchists, we hope those are also people, like I hear Graeber was to some degree personally, aware of their own charisma and willing to step out of roles when he felt like he was given too much authority, he wanted to reflect it back to the people who wanted to give it to them, and say, "No, do for yourselves."

At least there are some stories from Occupy about him doing that. So I don't know, charisma. Because you can have charisma on the right and the left.

LR: Yeah, I think the challenge is the right openly embraces it and they unify under it. And the single leader is a model that works perfectly well for them. So we have this challenge, because yeah I understand what you're saying, charisma as defined in what way. But it's difficult for me to bounce from any space to any space where I don't see some type of charismatic leader having influence over that group. And I think like Shane is saying denying it doesn't benefit us. And maybe that's one of the legacies of Graeber that, he probably wouldn't have put it this way, but Occupy had a legacy of claiming no leaders.

And the challenge and critique to that message that came out of Occupy has, in some ways almost discredited Occupy entirely amongst a certain cadre of leftist that I don't think should be listened to all that much. But unfortunately, they have a platform and they get listened to, and now I see Occupy—even in this anniversary that's just a passing of Occupy—it's characterized as something that was just a drum circle of a bunch of hippies that had no relationship to real people in real life. Because it's like they take these cheap shots about the kind of a leaderless of it, and the horizontal networks of it. So maybe this was one of the legacies that Graeber helped introduce into anarchism itself or into the public consciousness around movement spaces that has had some negative impacts.

SC: I guess this is sort of like, you know, you can kind of see it that way. Certainly a lot of Occupy went in funny directions, sometimes went nowhere, and then ultimately was just repressed, which was ignored. But you really have to think about the bigger picture of what Occupy accomplished. And whether whatever tiny more disciplined organalle, whether it's an affinity group or a vanguardist group or whatever, saying what your impact as that has done? And I would argue Occupy Wall Street captured the energy post-2008 that put class analysis and discourse back into the American public.

And that's directly what led to the Bernie in my eyes. And then that's directly what led to the DSA in my eyes. And where that will lead, who knows. But that's a big impact, that's a cultural shift that would have been impossible without all those hippies beating on their buckets.

TV: It also created space in communities of color that kind of had a problematic relationship with Occupy, in that it was often too much of a white space, but that white space got challenged a lot too. And there were groups like Occupy the Hood. And there were indigenous people that were in relationship to the movement and demanded that they talk about decolonization and not Occupy. So it gave rise to these ripple effects that I think were tensions, but they were creative tensions. And I think productive.

LR: I agree too, with the kind of chronology that Shane provided in terms of one thing influencing the next succession of events.

I think prior to Occupy there were also some explosive moments, like the uprising in Madison amongst labor unions and a coalition of forces, and the Arab Spring, and I think these things were confluences that also helped spark Occupy. And then I agree, Occupy put class politics back on the map, able to talk about it again. And Bernie Sanders openly embraced the rhetoric and language of Occupy Wall Street in all of his campaigning. I mean, he regularly referred to the 1%, and that language we got, we were able to use again because of Occupy. And I agree Bernie's popularity and success led to the success of the DSA. The interesting thing to me is that you will hear some people that have large platforms within the DSA, and like Jacobin and other platforms on the left right now, that acknowledge that Bernie helped them build their socialist organization.

And they will be the same people that'll shit on Occupy at the same time and try to dismiss it as having any bearing or any influence. So they won't acknowledge what I figure is a pretty clear connection. And also I place myself in this legacy too. Occupy helped radicalize me and turn me into the organizer I am today. Those are metrics you can't really capture very easily. How many other people were sparked and inspired and came to a radical politics because of Occupy that we don't know?

TV: Occupy Portland and Occupy Oakland I think I had a whole lot of folks taking on different projects, initiating projects within the movement. And then when Occupy was basically crushed by state repression, like you mentioned earlier Alex, coordinated efforts put it down within a week. It didn't smash all of those projects. A lot of those projects continued. A really small example is here in Corvallis, Alex has been a part of this, our friend Joseph Orosco initiated an Occupy reading group that is still going now, and it started in 2011. There are these demonstrable ongoing projects that change and evolve over time.

LR: Yeah, and that reading group, the Occupy reading group was happening prior to me arriving. I used to live in Corvallis, Oregon. I don't anymore. But prior to me arriving that reading group existed, it was still continuing. And because Occupy had sparked my imagination and helped radicalize me, I was attracted and gravitated to the Occupy a reading group by a flyer. And I started going and quite frankly, no shade to any of my previous professors, but I learned a lot more in those reading groups than in my four years of higher ed. And then my additional years of getting a master's education. So I agree. I think there's lots of things happening that still are directly connected to Occupy that you just can't measure.

And you can't say that it was a complete failure or that it wasn't a real movement or mass politics, or whatever people's claims are these days that want to be critical of it.

SC: I think each time there is a big movement, peak, or a crisis, a new crew of people get dumped into the left, and a lot wash out, but a lot stay. And some of this stuff happened through Occupy and then a lot of people just joined in 2016 because it was "Trump and the rise of fascism" and that was a big sort of birth, and I'm sure the George Floyd response and this wave of Black Lives Matter is going to be an even bigger group of people radicalized and dumped into the left. But if you didn't really know what it was like pre-Occupy, like the foundations or the cultural shift are just not there, or inconvenient to whatever political line you're trying to take, like Jacobin and things like that.

LR: So maybe we can shift a little bit here, because something else we were talking about within this recent conversation around Occupy and leadership is that Graeber had ideas too around vanguardism. One of my favorite essays of his was titled, The Twilight of Vanguardism. And what I really like about this was kind of, again as Tony was talking about, his ability to reframe just basic assumptions, basic assumptions even on the left, around what a vanguard even means, how it's defined, and who has the hegemony over that idea. Because, you know, a lot of people hear vanguardism, they think Leninist political party of intellectual cadre that basically disconnect themselves from the movement and repress all the people on the bottom.

But that essay was interesting in that he kind of highlighted the origins of even the ideas around vanguardism and even its own inflections within it. Some are more of the intellectualized nature of the vanguard, but then there's this other inflection of vanguardism that's more like the avant garde. Where it's like creative provocateurs and artists, and people that cut against the grain of popular thinking are the ones that can help spark the imagination and spark people in action, maybe even use their charisma in these positive ways to build organizations around them. So just throwing that out there, interesting ideas around leadership that he had even there.

TV: I always appreciated with Graeber that he definitely saw a role for the counterculture, and for artists, and for creative folk, and he had an affinity for that. That's one of the things that you sometimes find it on the left that's easily dismissed. Like again, you know, it's the drum circle, it's reduced to the drum circle, or something like that. It's so much more profound than that. And I love that essay that you're talking about Alex, I would encourage your listeners to read it.

SC: I think it's interesting cause in a lot of ways what I would say was sort of this death knell moment of like, the Soviet Union had fallen apart, we were the last ones standing. He's got those essays with Andrej Grubacic that are sort of like, "the new anarchism, we are the new radical paradigm." And I think those were really important to me as a younger anarchist, being like, all of this is irrelevant, and I didn't need to think about it ever. It's just now that I'm going back and reading any Lenin or Mao, and I'm just like these people suck.

He built so much of the foundation of my thinking around that that I never even bothered. And now I'm going back and I'm like, oh yeah I really shouldn't bother.

TV: I'm trying to think of criticisms of Graeber. I guess I wouldn't call it criticisms. One of the things I wish he had done more in is writing, and I think he might've started doing it more toward the later years, is really acknowledge how much many of his ideas were sparked by for example, people like Sylvia Federici and radical feminism, radical left feminism.

And indigenous peoples, he took inspiration from as an anthropologist, but also as a political thinker. And sometimes he would acknowledge that and I just wish he had made those connections more explicit.

LR: Yeah. I think you're right, that he has made explicit reference to his affinity for the Italian Autonomist movements, but then kind of like once some time, maybe twice some time and then kind of left it alone and stopped talking about it. But you can see without his writing that he clearly had this more autonomous streak, this feminist streak that I think came more out of the Italian Autonomist tradition too, represented by Federici. And this was one of the things that I both like, and also I think you can push on and say that it's a critique of him that's valid.

I like that he was willing to make generalized statements. These are kind of sins in academia, you can't make any sweeping generalizations. He would do it all the time, just to like try to get to a question that he wanted to actually reflect on. But in doing so I think he also would pass over the influence and the ideas, where they were really originating from, and maybe not give enough citation to the people that were probably getting him to think of the ways he was thinking too.

SC: I mean, I guess that's the difference in my eyes between academic and public work. Like who's the audience for your work? And in a lot of ways, I think depending on the book or whatever the essay is, he was kind of talking to the public, slash other anarchists or activists. And that's an interesting audience. And it was a pretty big soap box.

LR: If I could pose this question, trying to get to today. You know, anarchism, I think had a real uptick immediately in the wake of Occupy. And then I think—I'm not trying to say this is a bad thing—but I think DSA and like the brand of like democratic socialism had reigned primary among the left for a little while there. And then these insurrections happen and we're talking about anarchism again. We keep going in flux between all of that, like the flavor of the week on the left. But what do you think about today's anarchist organizing? Like how much power is there in terms of an anarchist movement or the influence of anarchism on the left today, and how much do you think Graeber has kind of helped nurture this movement?

SC: Let's get to some of my critiques of David Graeber, and how I've really sort of gone back to these inspirational works from when I was younger. There was a great essay called Revolution is More than a Word, by Gabriel Kuhn. In that he sort of talks about the phase of David Graeber saying anarchists are ascendant and if you're going to be radical you're probably are going to be an anarchist, are over. And sort of trying to analyze problems within anarchism. And this is in the rise of the DSA and in some of these other, you know, the re-rise of tankies and that sort of vanguardist thinking.

In some ways I think one of the things that David Graeber was really good at was invoking big idea thinking. And he sort of argued in a lot of ways that anarchism is not all of these sects or big-A Anarchism, it's direct democracy and direct action, and anybody who's pro those things and is loosely anticapitalist is an anarchist. And so, that's a very powerful idea because it sort of loosens the cage that we place on ourselves, but it also kind of melted anarchism in a really weird way.

And this was something that Spencer Sunshine in a dissertation talked a lot about, is when you do that you make it such a small-a anarchism that basically any non-profit that runs on consensus becomes anarchist. What does that mean for the left? And did we miss our moment? Because we had this moment where anarchism was very ascendant. And it is and it isn't now. But we haven't capitalized on that, in my opinion, we sort of let it melt into "whatever you're doing is kind of anarchist. So you're anarchist, so great."

There was no strategy behind that at all. And one of the things is, what actually made the global justice movement was big-A Anarchists in their own groups and in a coalition and in spokescouncils. And so I really feel like, we're always on the front lines of social movements but we never win anarchist goals. We're always just sort of the front lines or the shock troops for liberalism. We haven't seen whether that's true of the George Floyd struggle yet, but it seems like that is one of the negative impacts, in my opinion, of David Graeber is like, he made everyone an anarchist and made no one an anarchist.

LR: I do agree that he had this kind of "anarchism is for everybody" approach, which maybe it is, but I think that there probably was some danger in like trying to make it a broadly appealing and safer for folks to explore, because anarchism is a scary word for many people, particularly newly exposed to the radical left ideas that it could've kind of emptied all meaning and content of what anarchism actually is in practice, or made anything and everything fit within that rubric.

TV: I've heard this critique of him, and I kind of understand it but I also think I depart from it somewhat. I think that his writings are full of examples of how people, in very concrete ways, act and structure themselves in ways that are according to his vision of anarchism, in his understanding of anarchism. I don't think it's just completely formless, but I get the critique and maybe it's because he was championing anarchism at the time that both of you have talked about. And maybe that moment has passed. It has.

But now you see, for example, there's more attention being paid to Black anarchism. And there are Indigenous voices reminding us that a lot of Indigenous societies were anarchist before there was anarchism. And that in fact, European anarchists and libertarian socialists actually drew some of their ideas from having read accounts of Europeans living amongst indigenous people. So I think we're in flux, and always have been, and always will be. And so, and I'm not sure about trying to pin down anarchism as a specific set of practices.

I think his argument was that it was more like general principles. And if you generally follow these principles, the result will be something anarchistic. I would like this discussion though, about what are anarchist goals. If we are always in movements and inspiring movements and a central part of movements, but we ended up with reformism or liberal kinds of achievements. What would we rather see? What are anarchist goals?

LR: I think that's a good question. Before trying to answer it in any way, what you were saying reminds me of Graeber's consistent example of communism in action. He kind of said in some ways like he famously says we are already communist. And his example was, if you work on a project, like a construction project with two other people and one of them says, "Hand me that hammer," the other two don't say "What's in it for me?" You know? That's like the capitalist logic, but people work collaboratively because, his argument is, the most expedient and efficient way to do work together is communism. And he was an anarcho-communist.

So mainly his treatment of anarchism was trying to really hone in on the small, the very granular levels of daily life, and arguing that those granular levels of daily life when scaled up would create something of an anarchism in practice.

That reminds me of, it's very Colin Ward, the Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow sort of thought, that basically the only thing stitching this society together, and all society together, is the anarchist and communist impulse to have mutual aid and to run our lives in these sorts of ways. And I don't think it needs to be outlined like, "Everyone must be an anarcho-syndicalist something something." I think that's good, but that's not really what I see as the goal that should be sold. I think one of the things that David, Graeber sort of left off the table was, if it's just direct democracy and direct action, the question should be asked: Are you against the state?

Are you against capital? Are you against all forms of unjustified hierarchy? And how do you think that's going to be achieved? Without that, those questions of strategy, like a million billion nonprofits and just kind of everybody (are anarchists). And I recognize that that has got power in it, which is part of why David Graeber is massively appealing, but minus those conversations we're sort of left it in the dust by people who will start asking those questions, whether we think their answers are good is another matter.

TV: I totally agree, that wasn't his forte, strategy. The thing about having so few anarchist voices, contemporary voices right now that are public like he was, is that we want—I wanted Graeber to be able to do what we all need to be doing. He couldn't be everything. He was really good at some things and he left some things pretty much untouched. Like I think you've identified, and that's up to us.

LR: I like this conversation around what are the goals that we want to accomplish through anarchism and the strategies to get there. I think that's a really, really hard question, to be honest, because going back to the Occupy people always said, Occupy lacked demands.

That's completely untrue. Occupy said we demand everything. So I think that that is the same. If we're going to talk about anarchist goals it' like everything, right? We want it all. But if I have to be a little bit more specific, you know my position is as a labor organizer, I tend to focus on that because that's where I obviously have my most immediate influence in that. And what I would like to see in terms of some anarchist goals being realized is the labor movement at-large busting out of the labor relations framework that is completely stifling and restrictive and narrowed in term—well, full of a political imagination, but in a very narrowed sense.

Mostly the goals for a lot of organizing campaigns of labor unions is to acquire a collective bargaining agreement. And that's the victory. But that leaves a lot to be desired. There's a lot of questions still in terms of—if any worker's are on this podcast right now that I've talked to me, they would know that I say a lot—winning language in a contract is half the battle. The bigger battle is then enforcing the language that you want, and that is big. And then there's a lot of weapons that bosses and the state have to insure that you don't have the power to enforce those contractual victories. And the IWW I think is not specifically an anarchist organization or an anarchist labor union.

However, I think it's much more prone and open to anarchist strategy and practices. And I think that the broader labor movement, whether they would scoff at this or not, you could probably learn a lot more from at least the IWW's goals and principles, and how they really do prioritize direct action on the shop floor amongst workers to exert power, because we don't necessarily need a contract to win. And that's not just breaking out of the labor relations framework, I think if I'm being more specific, it's breaking out of the state monopoly over politics. Like we don't need to fight the political battle on the state's terms all the time, and the mainstream labor movement I think is a little guilty of that.

TV: Well, we also need that greater vision that the IWW provides. I mean who is saying these days: The abolition of wage slavery? The taking back of our life energies and our time from the capitalist system that uses us up, and uses up our whole lives, right? So I think you can't just have strategy in a vacuum. You have to have strategy towards something. And so the vision is really important. You've got to know what kind of horizon you're struggling toward. Otherwise you have no way to measure whether you're moving there at all.

SC: I think that's true. I agree with all of that. I think then there's spontaneous—well things are generally not spontaneous—but like for instance the George Floyd stuff, you know, whatever gains might be had on a city-by-city basis, in terms of defunding or abolishing the police. It's slam dunk of a paradigm shift that it is more legitimate for a social movement to be like, "Actually, get rid of the institution. Nationwide, we don't want it, just abolish it." And for a lot of normal, non-activist people to start saying that, that's an anarchist win unto itself.

And I think what Alex was talking about in terms of what if we ruptured the labor movement so it was not funneled into the normal union-drive model and the bureaucratic top-down model so it is this grassroots resistance movement. These are paradigm shifts. They're not like, "And then we've got this reform X, Y, and Z. It's very explicit" Maybe that's the level that we're talking on.

Going back for your listeners, if you haven't read Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and you don't know a Graeber, that's a good place to start. And one of the reasons is because he takes on those really big questions people have, like, what do you mean do away with all national borders? What do you mean do away with all laws? What would happen? And he looks it straight in the face. He's like, well, let's look at that question, was would happened? No spoilers, read it. The other thing I wanted to say about Graeber is that he did have a pretty articulate critique of capitalism. At some point there's a YouTube video of him giving a talk in the last couple of years.

And at some point he talks about how capitalism has failed on all its promises. For example, he says, the promise that every generation will be better off than the generation before it, that's not happening. The promise that capitalism will make the world safe because it'll get everybody involved in economic networking and we're gonna all depend upon each other and so that will lead to the abolishing of war. Well, that didn't work. Technological progress, assuming that you could only have any kind of technological imagination and inventiveness under capitalism, which he says, is bullshit basically, but he says you know, all of the promises of all of us having our own individual hovercrafts by this time.

He's being facetious, but he says even technologically—the iPhone is great, for its purposes, but it's also built on the suffering of others. It also has costs in terms of ecologies and human labor and suffering that really should make us all question what technological progress—who is for and what it is, literally. And he says, can we really reduce it to just the iPhone? Everybody says the iPhone, the iPhone. Isn't our imagination greater than that? And capitalism hasn't been able to deliver on that. And so if it can't deliver on all these promises, why are we still enthralled to it?

And he says, one of the things that keeps us enthralled is culture. Specifically morality, a sense of shame. If we don't do what we're told and do it well, if we don't do our work, if we don't pay off our debts. And he, if you haven't read Graeber on debt, or look up a YouTube video where he's talking about debt, it's really mind blowing. And his approach really opens a lot of space for reimagining how we should relate to each other, what work is, so on and so forth. So he says, what capitalism depends upon now is the ability to shame us.

LR: Well, we've had this conversation for about an hour now, I'm wondering if you all think maybe this is a good way to conclude, because I think we could probably talk for a long time, about Graeber and anarchism and politics more in general. It would be fun to just go around and just have some kind of concluding thoughts. Anything we want to share about, even suggestions and recommendations for Graeber his work or work to follow it. I do also mourn him. Tony, you were saying this earlier. His passing struck me more than I was anticipating it would. And it was a really great experience getting to revisit, reread, and also anticipate this conversation with comrades, celebrating his ideas, having some friendly critiques of them as well.

So I really appreciate you both taking the time to do this with me.

SC: Great. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, it was certainly a blow to be like, "Oh, I thought this person was going to keep on..."Passively I was like, "Oh yeah, David Graeber will keep doing his thing." And I sort of instantly was like, oh we really lost something here, this was a big, big blow.

TV: Yes.

LR: But let's end on a better note than that. (Laughs) Kind of returning, maybe being a little redundant here, but again, for me, Graeber's attention to the imagination and the creative powers that we have within all of us is the stuff that I consistently return too. And that in particular, I find motivating for me when I'm kind of trapped in these moments of despair. Because the organizing is frustrating. Being within institutions that have their own accumulated history and rigid orthodoxies and ways of doing things is frustrating.

And just desperately beating my head against the wall trying to get people to just imagine the differences, imagine alternatives. It's a taxing and exhausting thing. So revisiting Graeber and coming back to him, there is a lot of power in sharing these ideas and sharing the imagination and just nudging people. Even with workers. When I'm doing my organizing work, I just ask them to imagine your workplace tomorrow the way you want it to look. And even that conversation can open up things for them, and for me, that I just hadn't even thought of before, and can we allow us time and opportunity to really sustain our organizing energy long into the future. So that's, that's where I leave with Graeber.

TV: Yeah, I don't have anything to add that. That's a good end point for me.

LR: Well, with that, I really enjoyed the conversation comrades. Thank you for joining me. LaborWave Radio and we should bring you back on again in the future. Talk about organizing projects. I particularly with a lot to do an update one of these days on the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, if folks do not know about the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, you should definitely look it up when we're able to do things in person. Again, it will be a great opportunity to learn some of the ropes of practical Anarchist organizing day-to-day. Thank you Tony and thank you, Shane.

Links:

Anarres Project for Alternative Futures

anarresproject.org

Institute for Advanced Troublemaking

https://advancedtroublemaking.wordpress.com

In the Red Records

https://intheredrecords.com

Music:

King Khan & BBQ Show: Shake Real Low