Anarchist Perspectives on Nationalism (with Rey Katulu)

This week, we’re sharing our interview on the Balkan anarchist journal, Antipolitika which released it’s Nationalism issue last July. It’s now available via PM Press (USA) and Kersplebedeb (Canada) on Turtle Island, alongside the back issues. Our guest is Rey Katulu (an editor of the journal and a co-host of the awesome antifascist podcast The Empire Never Ended) talks about the journal, about fascism, nations from an anarchist perspective and, surprising to some, nationalism as a project of socialist Yugoslavia..

• Transcript
• PDF (Unimposed) – pending
• Zine (Imposed PDF) – pending

To hear a past interview we aired (recorded by comrades at FrequenzA) an interview about issue #1 of Antipolitika with Rey from 2017, audio comes in at around [00:46:30]

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Featured Track:

• Song To The Siren by The Chemical Brothers from Exist Planet Dust

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Transcription

TFSR: I’m speaking with a member of the editorial collective that produces the journal Antipolitika, an anarchist journal from the Balkans, which released its third issue last summer. Would you mind sharing your name, any pronouns you want used, any affiliations, or other info that you care to flaunt for the audience?

Rey Katulu: Hi, I’m Rey, he/him. As you said, I’m one of the editors of Antipolitika, the anarchist journal from the Balkans. I’m also, among other things, one of the hosts of the podcast called The Empire Never Ended. I think that’s enough for now.

TFSR: The English edition of the third issue, and apparently the back issues as well, have become available via PM Press and Kersplebedeb on this side of the Atlantic. Congratulations on that.

R: Thanks!

TFSR: Would you mind telling us a bit about the Antipolitika collective, the goals and the scope of the project?

RK: Antipolitika is made by a network of anarchist friends, who all have some connection with the Balkans. They either live there currently, or they were born there, or they have another connection to it. If you’re our friend, then we will say that you are a part of our network if we like you. Also, the Balkans is not a very precise term, which is why we like using it. We decided to make this journal in 2015, it was during the Mediterranean Anarchist Meeting in Crete. We were talking about maybe there is a need to do something like that. We agreed to make a journal, which will be thematic, so every issue has a specific theme. All the texts contained in every issue are connected to the theme. We publish it very rarely, only three issues, but we make separate issues in different languages: Serbo-Croatian, English, and Greek for now. The idea was that we wanted to encourage people to write about various important topics from a specifically anarchist and anti-statist point of view, not just from a general leftist one that we are often very critical of. That point of view is not very developed in most of the Balkans. Of course, the exception is Greece, where the movement is very developed, as you know. In the last 15 years through various projects, such as the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair, we established really good contacts with anarchist comrades from Greece.

Another reason to start this journal was to make our friends from Greece translate their texts into English because they write a lot, but usually, it’s only in Greek, so other people can’t read it. That was also a different reason to start Antipolitika so that a lot of points of view from Greece could be read in the rest of the Balkans, but also in the rest of the world. The first issue’s topic was anti-militarism. This is a very important topic for us because the origins of what exists of the anarchist movement in the post-Yugoslav area has its roots in the anti-war movement. We established a connection with anti-militarist comrades in Greece. We did that together.

The second issue, the topic was Yugoslavia, meaning the so-called socialist or Titoist Yugoslavia. We wanted to provide some radical critiques of that state as a class, capitalist, and also nationalist project because, since the war that happened in Yugoslavia in the 90s, and the complete what we might call a neoliberal attack that happened afterward, a lot of people have nostalgic views of Yugoslavia, which is understandable. But we also wanted to point out that many anarchist and anti-state communists in the 60s and 70s developed some critiques of that system as a class and capitalist system. We wanted to remind people of that and use that as a starting point for what Yugoslavia was and not go below the level of what was already established in the 60s and 70s. The newest issue is about nationalism and I guess we’ll talk more about that.

TFSR: Just a clarification on the network. A) Is the network the editorial collective or involved in the editorial collective, or there’s just a Venn diagram where there’s overlap between the two? And B) There are other existing networking apparatuses in the Balkans such as the Anarchist Federation within the Federation of Internationals. I wonder if there’s anything outside of friendship that politically and ideologically unites the folks that are in the editorial collective? In a way that wouldn’t just be overlapping with the Federation.

RK: We are not a part of any Federation. No one who is a part of our network is. There is a wider network of anarchists in the Balkans, which is the network that organizes the Balkan Anarchist Bookfair. That includes some comrades from Greece and most of the anarchists that exist in the rest of the Balkans, I think practically all of them. Many of them have opposing views on some issues, and there are differences there. But our network that produces Antipolitika is a much smaller network of friends who work together and have a closer understanding, that was established in the last 15 years. It is based on friendship and close understanding. But also, some things are politically specific about what we do. One thing is that we insist on the anti-militarist approach and also on criticizing nationalism, and completely rejecting any idea of a nation. Unlike some comrades who are leftists who would maybe use the term anti-imperialism to describe your politics, which usually means that there is some understanding or critical support for certain nationalist projects, that’s not our approach. It partially comes from the experience of the wars in the 90s, but also from the experience of the moment in Greece. I would say that’s specific to our view, among other things. Currently, there are three editors, which means that we are the people who try to coordinate everyone in this network and think about… Occasionally, when the network meets, we [all] talk about possible topics or issues. Then the editors try to connect everyone in the network and think about who could be a good writer for a specific text, ask that comrade if they want to contribute or not, and remind people of the deadlines and such things.

TFSR: The fun stuff. Talking about this latest volume, I found it to be pretty rich and varied. It was a lot. There were so many different voices, several pre-existing texts that I had read coming from North America on the subject of nationalism. I wonder if you could talk a little more about the relationship between anarchists in the Balkans to nationalism and how not only the wars in the 90s, following the death of Tito and the breakup of Yugoslavia as a state federation, how it shaped Balkan approaches, but obviously there’s also similar issues in Greece and other parts of the Balkans, but particularly, I’m wondering about some of the experiences that have been expressed and shared between people that are in this editorial collective of the project.

RK: In our first issue which is about anti-militarism, there’s a longer text written by a comrade from Zagreb, who was a part of the anti-war movement in the 90s, when the war in Yugoslavia was going on. That’s also a text that explains the background of Antipolitika in some way. Although some of us were too young back then or were not part of the movement at all, the origins of what we do have to do with that. That’s also simultaneously the origin of the current anarchist movement in general that exists in what used to be Yugoslavia. That was when anarchists from Croatia and Serbia, the two opposing sides in that war – the worst part of it was actually happening in Bosnia – established contact during the war and started doing projects together, anti-war projects, publishing newspapers, helping each other in various ways, organizing mutual aid networks, and so on.

For that reason, anti-militarism is very important for us. In a very real way, it shaped our perspective and is closely tied to why we are anarchists. Also why we cover Yugoslavia as a specific topic is – in a way that you pose the question now mentioning the death of Tito and so on – there are a lot of fixed conceptions about nationalism and our area, and the connection between the two of them, not only by people who come outside of the region but also the people inside of it. The views about what is the connection of people in Yugoslavia and nationalism, when nationalism appeared, what are the causes of the war, what was the role of Tito, was his death the cause of the war and so on.

I would say there are a lot of misconceptions there, so we are very much against this view that nationalism appeared suddenly in the 90s, for example. We would insist that the previous so-called communist system was deeply nationalist, although in a different way from what happened in the 90s. We can talk about that later if you want, we can maybe explain that more. But on the other hand, we are also against this thesis present in the Western liberal mainstream media and also amongst conservatives, probably, about ancient hatreds, or something like that, which is pretty nonsensical. There are no such things in the Balkans as ancient hatreds. All of these so-called hatreds are tools of the ruling class who propagated these national and chauvinistic ideologies, but they have no origin, that is older than the 19^th century, which is when the concept of nation was established, so such cater couldn’t exist before that, or before the existence of a modern state and mass media and so on. That’s also something that we are critical of, and also with that idea which is also very present and which is very implicitly authoritarian, that only a figure Tito could keep all of these people together. When he died, all of these ancient hatreds just came out and they started killing each other, which is completely nonsensical. We have an opposing view, we think that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia helped establish these nationalist ideologies and borders between people where it didn’t exist before they came to power.

TFSR: And just to name that from the Western gaze, as someone who grew up in the United States, the Balkans appear to have this unique relationship to nationalism and chauvinism, whether it be the nationalism that led to the outbreak of World War I with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, the genocidal violence during World War II, the multinational project of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or the wars at the breakup. What you’re saying makes sense, the idea of an ancient hatred presumes that there’s something essential within people who live in an area that they would share this essential feature of their identity and be in a central conflict with someone else as opposed to people that live within areas that are conquered and named to different things at different times and are more flowing and organic. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about the concept of balkanization as it’s used now, as you’re aware, in the West and the exceptionalist perception of this region in terms of national chauvinism? That’s too many words, I apologize.

RK: It’s fine. The whole nationalist model is a model that was established in Western Europe. Then the bourgeois classes in the Balkans copied that model in the early 19^th century and established new National ideologies there. To say there’s some specific Balkan connection to nationalism misses the whole point that it’s a deeply Western European idea in its origin. All of the nationalisms that were established and the chauvinistic ideologies in the Balkans had states like France, Germany, or Italy as the models, and they explicitly stated so, especially in the case of France. So that doesn’t make a lot of sense historically.

On the other hand, parts of the Balkans at least had a position in the 19^th century that can be compared to colonized areas of the world. Because they were ruled over by empires, like the Austro-Hungarian or the Ottoman Empire, and this was the area where these two empires had a common border, which caused a lot of wars that happened in the 19^th century. A lot of these nationalist ideologies were established in the context of these wars between empires, and local ruling classes trying to establish their own nationalist ideologies in a context of anti-imperial, even anti-colonial, you could say, struggles and wars. A lot of nationalism in the Balkans has this connotation to it. We can come back to that question as well. As for the Balkanization, we understand what the term means, it’s a negative term. It makes some sense historically why the term would be used as such, but this process of states separating from other states and having lots of small states in a state of war, or some antagonism is not specific only to the Balkans, of course. But okay, that’s how the word is used. There were attempts in the past to reverse the meaning. I think Andrej Grubačić, who is this anarchist historian of Balkan origin used this term to give it some revolutionary meaning, and he had a book called Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! I don’t agree so much with that perspective either. I think it’s also essentializing, a bit exoticizing the Balkans as some inherently revolutionary area, which it’s not, I would say.

TFSR: I know a lot of these questions are pointing to really simple things. But it’s really important to hear your perspectives to break apart and critique some assumptions that the listening audience may have, because it’s on the radio, also, I don’t know who is going to be listening and how much they’ve been thinking about these issues. So I want to create a project where people can step in, no matter where they’re coming from, if that makes sense.

RK: Sure.

TFSR: I remember learning in my teenage years that I mentioned the sparking of World War I is attributed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, who I had heard variously was an anarchist, but also heard was a Bosnian nationalist. One of the essays in the latest Antipolitika called “Jungslawen and Nihilist Nationalism 1907-1914” offers some interesting insights into the dynamics of nationalism, socialism, and anti-imperialism in that part of the Habsburg Empire, as it existed at the time. Could you talk a little bit about ideological and practical overlaps between anarchists and nationalists or even government officials in that period of the breakup of the empire?

RK: Sure. Gavrilo Princip is usually said to be a member of a nationalist revolutionary group called Young Bosnia, which at that point wasn’t a group. It was more a milieu or a subculture of usually high-school kids from different cities in Bosnia, who had this nationalist anti-imperialist anti-colonial perspective and they set as their goal the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He’s sometimes still portrayed as an anarchist, which he wasn’t. He was not a Bosnian nationalist. He was, we might say, a Yugoslav nationalist, although the group was called Young Bosnia. At the time, something like Bosnian nationalism didn’t really exist and was not completely formed as an ideology. But there was this ideology of Yugoslav nationalism, the idea that the South Slavs in the Balkans were one nation or should become one nation and should form their own nation-state. This was not completely contradictory to Serbian nationalism or Croatian nationalism. A lot of these people, amongst these Bosnians, were at the same time Serbian nationalists and Yugoslav nationalists or Croatian nationalists and Yugoslav nationalists.

Serbia was at that point a so-called independent nation-state already and was sometimes seen by these nationalists as comparable to what the Italian state of Piedmont was in the 19^th century, the state that united the whole of Italy into one nation-state. Some of them saw Serbia as the Yugoslav state which would be the leading force that would help destroy the Austro-Hungarian empire and unite the whole of Yugoslavia. A lot of these kids or very young people in Young Bosnia were very poor. In Bosnia at the time, there were still remnants of a feudal system. It was a region that was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for a long time. They were landowning classes, and there were serfs. A lot of these people came from the serf class. But also since 1878, although officially, Bosnia, was still part of the Ottoman Empire, it was defacto ruled by Austro-Hungary, it was a weird system where they were ruling it defacto, although still officially saying that it’s part of Turkey. This is why there was this focus on fighting the Austro-Hungarian empire because it was ruled as a colony, there was a governor appointed from Vienna, and the whole system existed of that kind. Members of Young Bosnia were very poor, very dedicated nationalist revolutionaries, who, because of their objective heroism – often idealized – the will to self-sacrifice, and so on. The truth is that their ideology was very nationalist, and we don’t criticize this in a moralistic way. We just say if your goal is a liberation of humanity on individual and collective levels, nationalist ideology is objectively a big obstacle to it, regardless of what motivations of individual nationalists or nationalist groups are, or how you can justify it on some emotional or psychological level, which we understand.

There is a connection with anarchism, and that’s because the anarchist movement really was the revolutionary movement of the 19^th century. Everyone who wanted to be a revolutionary of any kind, even a more bourgeois nationalist revolutionary, had to be inspired to some degree by anarchists. You couldn’t be inspired by Marxists at the time, the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party were not inspiring for revolutionaries. Anarchists were. And for this reason, also people like Gavrilo Princip were very much inspired by them. These people read a lot. They read a lot and they read all the time. A lot of literature they read were were books by Kropotkin, Johann Most, Bakunin, Stepniak, and so on, and they were serious about reading, they had book clubs and they discussed these ideas. They read anarchist newspapers published out of Vienna, and so on. But they also explicitly said that although they had sympathies towards some anarchist points and thought that these are maybe realistic solutions for some faraway future, what we need now is a nationalist revolution. We want to establish a nation-state for the Yugoslavs. Even though they had socialist and republican inclinations, they even said, “Okay, even if it’s a monarchy, we would support that, because the most important thing is to establish this nation-state, and to destroy the Austro-Hungary.” For that reason, we cannot call them anarchists of any kind, although they were influenced by them, which is understandable. They explicitly said they were not anarchists. It’s curious why some anarchists today even refer to them as such. The problems with these ideologies are very clear if we look at what their trajectory was. A lot of them were killed. No one believed they would be able to do it, but they successfully killed Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Prince, which set off this chain of events that led to the First World War. They planned (I wouldn’t use the word “[their] doing”) but the events happened that led to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the establishment of the Yugoslav nation.

TFSR: I think it’s also worth noting, and I don’t know how much of it is poor perspectives on current-day anarchists. Maybe people just want to be like, “Look what we did, another regicide, one of many great ones that we conducted.” But I could see some very surface-level overlaps between things that are in the world of anarchism and things that are in the world of nationalism around a focus in some circles on direct action and a valorization of martyrdom, a focus on the devolution of power from larger structures down to smaller structures, and also, especially in some individualist tendencies within anarchism, a focus on elitism. I didn’t know if maybe these things were what the Young Bosnians or whatever other group were focusing on like, “I liked this Nietzsche guy.” Or “That Stirner person said a few interesting things,” or if it’s just a misunderstanding. I don’t know. Does that spark anything?

RK: I think you’re right. They were influenced by a lot of things that you mentioned. I would say that was a superficial influence of anarchism that was caused by anarchism being such an important revolutionary movement at the time. They were very much focused on things like direct action, they used the term “direct action”. They were fascinated by all of the assassinations that anarchists were doing at the time of heads of state, and so on. But they would superficially see those things as anarchist, they would say “anarchist methods,” for example, “we apply anarchist methods” and by that, they thought of assassination. There’s nothing inherently anarchist about assassinating someone. Or they would use the term “general strike”. The generation that brought that term into Serbo-Croatian language were these people. Not all of them were in Bosnia, there were lots of groups like this in Croatia as well who were connected to the ones in Bosnia. In Croatia, especially amongst the student youth, the idea of a general strike was very popular, which came from an anarchist influence or revolutionary syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist influence, but they again gave a nationalist meaning to it. They didn’t see a general strike as a way to realize social revolution, but a nationalist one. And they explicitly stated so. They consciously used some superficial aspects of anarchism, libertarian socialism or revolutionary syndicalism, but gave it a nationalist meaning. This was not the invention of the people in the Balkans. This was already going on in France, in Italy, by followers of people like Sorelle, and so on. Those who influenced people such as Young Bosnia and the student groups that I mentioned in Croatia, were the French people and Italian people who invented fascism. They were the proto-fascists who tried to synthesize aspects of allegedly revolutionary socialist ideas with extreme nationalism. There is a certain proto-fascist quality to some of these groups as well.

TFSR: I appreciate that answer. Thanks for letting me pop that in there. Because I think that to some listeners, maybe, we were getting in the weeds with that question a little bit. But I think that there’s a lot of like I said, issue 3, which is the one that I’ve read all the way through, goes deep into these topics of nationalism from anarchist perspectives in very particular cases because I think that from doing that you can draw out some more generalizable conditions and compare them between different situations. It helps to broaden and deepen the conversation on what is nationalism, and what are the horizons that it offers and how do anarchists fall into the trap of thinking within those horizons?

RK: I also wanted to point out one other thing, which I think will illustrate how what we’re talking about is a real practical problem and not a moralistic one. A lot of these people, although they had these admirable, heroic, self-sacrificing qualities to them, and goals such as destroying an empire, which is good. But, on the other hand, because they were nationalists, they didn’t have a problem with supporting, for example, Serbian chauvinistic views of Albanians or Serbian imperialist ambitions in the rest of the Balkans. They didn’t have a problem in joining Serbian state-sponsored guerrillas, the Chetniks, even before the First World War, who were waging guerrilla warfare in what were still parts of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, often committing atrocities against the Albanian population and so on. Even later on, some of these people who survived the First World War became important figures in the Yugoslav Kingdom and occupied some academic positions or political ones. One of them became an important historian, Vasa Čubrilović, who was also one of the assassins of Sarajevo, who was very young, he was a minor. He was not sentenced to death, he survived the war and became an important academic and also adviser to politicians in both the monarchist Yugoslavia and later the Titoist one, where he became a government minister after the Second World War. He became an expert in ethnic cleansing. I think he came up with the term. And a lot of thought behind it had to do with this nationalist ideology that we talked about. They would be influenced by the 19^th-century nationalist ideas, and also by these early proto-fascist ideas that we talked about. They used terminology such as “non-national elements”, for example. Unlike many contemporary nationalists, these people had a correct view that a nation is something that you create. It’s not a natural phenomenon, you have to create it. And they wanted to create a Yugoslav nation and then they said “Okay, there are national and there are non-national, or anti-national elements.” People who are not nationalist or are the wrong ethnicity, or you could be whatever, and then you need to cut them off in some way. That could mean that you need to educate people in a more nationalist way, you need to create nationalist propaganda, nationalist literature, art, and so on. It could also mean genocide in some cases, or necessarily would also include ethnic cleansing. In their view, Albanians were such an anti-national or non-national element in the Yugoslav lands that needed to be ethnically cleansed. Vasa Čubrilović wrote a scientific paper on how to ethnically cleanse Albanians from Yugoslavia, offered various solutions, and offered it to the government to implement it, not only to the monarchist, but also to the Titoist one later on. And at the same time, he was always very proud of his Young Bosnian origin and there was no contradiction between the two things.

TFSR: This is maybe a little bit into the weeds, but you were talking about how a lot of these nationalist movements were reproducing or growing from ideas that had developed in Western Europe during the 19^th century. Nationalism is a product of modernity. An important influence in the development of fascism was the Romantic movement and the rejection of certain elements of modernism without rejecting certain methods of modernism. When I read about history from that period, or even people right now that are riding with these conceptions of “essentialism,” like who belongs in an area, what a nation is composed of or comprised of, and what its nature is, they are saying, “These structures work to build barriers to include and exclude, and then linguistically, culturally, whatever, but we have to pull back to something that is ur, that predates and lies underneath this modern creation, that pre-historical- You know what I’m getting at. Words fail me, but I wonder if you could talk about how this romantic turn is not just a non-modernism, it’s a rejection of modernism, and how that shapes the creation of these ethno-states.

RK: Nationalism is a deeply modern project, it couldn’t exist in a pre-modern period, because it requires the existence of a nation-state, a modern state with all of its institutions that didn’t exist pre-19^th century. The modern state has a specific totalitarian characteristic to it. In the previous political systems that existed, there was much more autonomy. By that, we’re not saying that it was anarchy or something like that, but there was less of this total control by all-encompassing institutions, which is the characteristic of the modern state. Then you have this integrating ideology, which is the idea of a nation. Of course, this is all happening in the context of capitalism, which is destroying, and annihilating actual, real communities, cultures, and so on. This may maybe too simplified an explanation. But people have, I believe, some inherent tendency to live in collectives, they need some culture to belong to. Not in a modern national sense.

TFSR: We’re social animals.

RK: Yes. A community is the word that I’m looking for. They need a community. When you destroy actual communities, there is still an authentic need for a community. What the modern state gives to that authentic need is a false answer of this imagined community, which is the nation. The need for belonging to a community is authentic. But then the nation is a surrogate false answer to that authentic need. In that sense, it’s very modern, because you need an alienated population, atomized by capitalism, that has a longing to belong to an authentic community but cannot have such a thing. Then you give them this nationalist chauvinistic ideology instead, which supports the interests of the ones who are in the ruling position. Fascism is a more extreme version of 19^th-century nationalism. But there are both anti-modern and supermodern aspects to fascist ideology, as you mentioned. I look at fascism as not necessarily a political movement, it has some qualities of such a thing. But I think essentially, it’s a reaction of capitalism or the bourgeoisie in extreme situations, when the rule of capital is maybe endangered to a certain extent, because of the cyclical crisis of capitalism that it always goes through, or the strong anarchist socialist communist movement that exists. You have this reaction in the form of fascism. And I think we can also look at fascism, partially maybe it’s something that has the qualities of a political movement, but also something that is maybe even more related to the police, the institution of the police. It is not I think by accident that often there is overlap between cops and the membership of fascist organizations or groups like the KKK in the US or the Golden Dawn in Greece. Because they serve a similar function in capitalist societies, they are there to terrorize people, protect the privileged classes, direct anger or resentment in ways that benefit the ruling class, and so on. But more importantly, to terrorize people. So, the ideology there is almost an afterthought, it’s not so important. We can get into analyzing all of the contradictions of the ideology, but the contradictions are there because it’s not important. Are they against or for modernity? They are for bashing people – that is what they are. They also have nice uniforms and so on, to think of themselves as heroes. A lot of these alt-right, new rights types, the so-called intellectual or arty fascists are not important, because on our podcast, we read their stupid books, they present themselves as important thinkers, and so on. Usually, we find out that it’s very banal things that they write about, they’re more to give some image of respectability to some of these ideas that a lot of liberals somehow are- They’re very gullible and a lot of liberals have this tendency to accept people who are educated or have good manners and who don’t look street thugs as people that you want to have a conversation with, and so on. I think this is the function of people like that, these fascist ideologues who are discussing things like modernity.

It’s not really about ideas, it’s about giving some respectability to people and some cover to people who are doing what is important. That’s violence or terrorizing people psychologically and destroying social movements. So this is why we have supermodern tendencies in early Italian fascism, which were into avant-garde movements, such as futurism, who wanted to destroy Roman statues and buildings and had such plans. Then you have this very romantic anti-urban ideology amongst the German Nazis who wanted to abandon cities and so on. Of course, they didn’t abandon cities when they came into power. But a part of their mobilization had an ideology like this. I don’t think it’s the most important thing when it comes to fascism.

TFSR: The article “In the dungeon of nationalism, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the national question”, which is also in this third volume of Antipolitika, really dives into the project of the construction and the reconstruction of nationalism by the Leninist government that arose out of the communist and anti-fascist formations during World War II. The approach that is described in this piece reminds me of the programmatic Marxist-Leninist approach of overcoming capitalism by way of constructing a bourgeois revolution but for the national hangups. As in there are steps to get to a place, we need to walk through each step to get there, otherwise, our development will be incomplete. Is that a fair comparison? Can you talk a bit about some of the misconceptions of the former so-called socialist Yugoslavia of the relationship between the SFRY and the national question? What does the Yugo–nostalgia miss? What are they leaving out?

RK: Yugoslavia was established after the Second World War, and was, as you said, based really on the role that the partisan movement had during the Second World War, which was the anti-fascist resistance movement, that Yugoslav one, led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which was one of the biggest (along with the Polish resistance movements) resistance movements during Second World War in Europe. The thing is that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was a Stalinist party. Often it is said Marxist-Leninist, which is the way Stalinists called themselves, but we can call them Stalinists. This was a deeply nationalist ideology. Exactly as you said, there is this parallel between how they viewed capitalism to how they viewed nation-states and the need to establish nations or to have bourgeois revolutions. If we look at earlier history when orthodox Marxism was established at the end of the 19^th century, it was based on the worst aspects of Marxist theory, I would say. One of these aspects was this progressivist view of history, an evolutionary view of history, a linear view of human history, there are phases in it, they’re progressive, and one leads to another, and so on. It’s a view that capitalism is progressive, it’s better than feudalism, feudalism is better than what existed before, and humanity must go to these phases because this is how you will eventually reach socialism or communism or anarchy, or a stateless classless society without nations, and so on. It’s a paradoxical view that to reach a society without state or class or nation, you need to support statist, classist, and nationalist societies because that’s the way you get there. You cannot skip it somehow, was the idea. That’s what they call a scientific view. To be against that, many not only anarchists, but most socialists of the 19^th century in the Balkans didn’t think in such a way. They were thinking, “Okay, we want to have a communist society, then we shouldn’t support capitalism.” For example, some of them had an idea in the Balkans, there were remnants of old institutions still alive in the Balkans, the way they organized cooperatively, like in Russia, what was called opština, and similar things existed in the Balkans. Some of these socialists of the 19^th century thought, “We can use these institutions that exist already, people being self-organized, to produce together, live communally and so on, as a basis to create some communist, socialist, anarchist, whatever you want to call it, society or the future. We shouldn’t approach these institutions in some static way, as they are, because they have a very patriarchal character to them, we should change them, but we can use them to create something better, and not destroy them to create a proletariat, a miserable class that will work in factories, because that’s the way to create communism.”

But orthodox Marxists, that’s exactly what they thought. For example, in Serbia, at the beginning of the 20^th century, an orthodox Marxist party was formed, which is the Social Democratic Party of Serbia, which was later in 1919 one of the groups that founded the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. But even before the First World War, they had this ideology. At the same time, in 1907, for example, in Serbia, in Belgrade, you had anarchist groups and revolutionary syndicalist groups who were workers and who were very radical, who were often on strike, occupying factories, having demands, and so on. Then you have the leadership of the Social Democratic Party we didn’t like that the workers were striking so much, and you have their correspondence where you can see that these Marxist leaders are saying, “These workers are crazy, all they want to do is be on strike. If this happens, then we will never reach socialism, because Serbia is still a backward, primarily agrarian country, and we need foreign investment to develop industrial capitalism. If the workers are undisciplined and striking all the time, this won’t happen. No one will invest and we can’t have communism.” In the same way, they approach – because it goes together with this idea of nation and nationalism, because the characteristic of a modern state, which is what you want to have, it’s a nation-state, and every population, every ethnicity, whatever that means, needs to become a nation. If it’s not, then it’s backward.

In the 19^th century, there was this idea of a Balkan Federation. But the 19^th-century socialists gave it a more libertarian, more anarchistic – although not all of them were anarchists – meaning. What they meant by it, is we want a federation of communes (they’re inspired by the Paris Commune) not of nation-states. But social democrats and then communists, Stalinists gave it the meaning of a federation of nation-states. Originally, what they wanted was for this federation to encompass also Bulgaria, Albania, Romania, ideally, also Greece. But this was not possible after the Second World War, because Greece was still controlled by the Western powers, although there was a civil war, and there was a split between the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Communist Party or Stalin. And Albania and Bulgaria went to the other side supporting Stalin, and then you had Yugoslavia left. What they decided to do then was to form a new Titoist Yugoslavia as a smaller version of the Balkan Federation. They were always against this older monarchist idea of a single Yugoslav nation, which is the idea that people like Young Bosnia had, who wanted to form one Yugoslav nation. The Stalinists were not for this, they thought that that idea was an extension of greater Serbian chauvinism and imperialism. What they wanted to do was to help further establish separate nations, such as Serbia and Croatia, Slovenia, and then form national movements to establish nations where they didn’t exist before, like Montenegro, Macedonia, and also, in time, a Bosniak nation, a nation that would consist out of people of who are Muslims from Bosnia, who would be eventually established as a separate nation, although at first they didn’t call them that. They considered them a nationality, which Titosts considered a different thing than a nation, it was a lower phase in their worldview. For this reason, the Titoist Yugoslavia was established as a federation of nation-states. Every republic was defined as a nation-state and designed as a nation-state for a specific ethnicity or group, and some of them had more than one. Serbia was a nation-state for the Serbian nation. But Croatia was, for example, defined as a nation-state of Croats, and also of Serbs who live in Croatia. Bosnia was defined as a nation-state of ethnic Serbs, ethnic Croats in Bosnia and also Bosniaks, the Muslim population there. Other republics were established in such a way as well. This also meant in this system, which sometimes you can call it state capitalist, whatever, but for sure, it wasn’t a liberal capitalist system, but a capitalist system, where you have workers and bosses and a market and so on. It also meant that they established new ruling classes in each of the republics, and these were not classical bourgeois classes, because this was not liberal capitalism. But they were bureaucratic ruling classes, which were organized in national so-called communist parties. There was the Communist Party of Croatia, the Communist Party of Serbia, the Communist Party of Montenegro, and so on. These were ruling classes that had a nationalist character to them, they were ruling over a republic, which was defined as a nation-state. What gave them this position of power was a nationalist structure, one that said, “We have seven different nations in Yugoslavia.” This is why we say that this was a completely nationalist state, everything was about nationalism. What happened in the 90s was the historical situation changed and a war happened because of specific reasons. But it’s not like nationalism appeared in the 90s. It was there the whole time. It was imposed by the Stalinist ideology of the Communist Party.

TFSR: The way that you’re describing it, if the makeup of this nation here is defined by the various people with different religious and maybe linguistic tendencies and cultural histories, what have you, in one area, if in Croatia, it’s Serbs and Croats, and it’s not defined by Croatian ethnic identity, as you said, whatever that means, how does that differ outside of naming from just the creation of geographically defined states within federal republic? Where does that lay the seeds for nationalism as in ethnonationalism? If people are identified mostly by where they’re living and who their neighbors are, but not necessarily by what differentiates them as essential characteristics from their neighbors? Do you understand what I’m asking?

RK: I think so. I don’t think it made a lot of sense, anything they did. It’s difficult for me to answer that, because I think it’s to a great degree nonsensical, but they had this idea that nations will be formed and nations are reflected in nation-states. I guess they had an idea that they would overcome this ethnic nationalism into something like civil nationalism. The Croatian civil nation will also encompass people of Serbian ethnicity who lived there, I think was the idea. Also for the other republics, something this, I think they had in mind. But there are problems with this, of course, because you create this situation, which is often ordinary non-political people who come from Yugoslavia also have this view that nationalism appeared in the 90s. This is true: people were not nationalist in the sense that people were not obsessed with chauvinistic ideas, they lived their daily lives. Younger people in Croatia were not aware if they came from a Serb or ethnically Croat family, they had to ask their parents in the 90s if they were Serbs or Croats. That’s true. But that doesn’t mean that nationalism didn’t exist there as a structure that then made you know what you are at a certain point. Are you this or that? In that sense, it always existed, although ordinary people in their daily lives were not obsessed with these questions, there were ruling classes who rolled over these national structures, and it was very important for them for it to exist in such a way because this was their source of legitimacy and power in the structure that they had. In the 90s, that meant war. You had to choose a side or become a deserter or something like that.

I don’t know if this is an answer to your question. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense. But they were also saying that they were against nationalism at the same time, which is pretty insane, considering that they were doing all of this. They also said they believed in some future where there will be no nations, but you cannot just not have a nation, first you have to have a nation and then in time, humanity will reach the level of not having nations. One thing that we talked about in our podcast, my co-host, Boris, talked a little bit about the history of political organizing of Yugoslavs in the United States in the 1930s. There were a lot of socialists and communists among them, and they tended to have these socialist clubs, where immigrants would hang out. It was not important for them if they were coming from Serbian or Croat or Bosnian or Slovenian families and so on, they were hanging out together and doing their things in their socialist clubs. Then the Communist Party made them at some point dissolve these organizations that had this old Yugoslav character and organize in separate Serbian, Slovenian, and Croatian groups. There was almost a rebellion amongst these workers who couldn’t understand, like “Why are they making us not hang out with our friends. Aren’t we supposed to be against nationalism?” And of course, they made them do it because that’s the progressive way to do it in their pretty nonsensical ideology. It’s very paradoxical. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense.

TFSR: The story of that being then reimposed when the Stalinists come back in, especially the point that Boris made about when the newspapers are already in the same language, why are we producing three newspapers when all of us are the same workers’ organizations anyway? Since it was imposed from outside, it’s ideological. I could see there being in reaction to American Anglo-Chauvinism, maybe you combine in certain ways or combine in different ways depending on… But it should be defined by the people that are actually struggling and organizing and living there. But your point about the step of civic nationalism and the creation of that is well taken, and I think that answers my question, because that is a modernist model of experience within a nation-state.

RK: Although I think the line separating civic and ethnic nationalism is not very clear. Often one becomes the other, mutates, and so on.

TFSR: Agreed. But then we find the difference between the ideological, like what were the germs of the French Revolution and the role of people in the French Revolution? What are we trying to reproduce here because we think it’s a necessary step towards the anarchistic communist world that we’re building, we’re building the workers for? Because even if you’re literally publishing things that were said from within the Yugoslav Socialist Federation or the SFRY, these are things, these are actual statements, these are proposals and carried out directives from within the party at the time. But a lot of the nostalgia that’s going on right now, as you said, washes over the role of nationalism within that period. I wonder what left reactions from either within the Balkans or former Yugoslavia or from the internet, or whatever, you’ve gotten to the articles that you’ve published. Do get a lot of pushback where people are like, “That’s not what happened”?

RK: At first, Antipolitika got a worse reaction from a lot of lefties than pushback, which was just ignoring us. Pushback would be nice. But lately, there is less of that. Now they’re not ignoring us so much. There were some debates a little bit here and there. But I think this point of view is getting noticed more. In a lot of areas of what Yugoslavia used to be, there are anti-nationalists, but they usually come from a liberal perspective. Then, unfortunately, a lot of leftists have nationalist views. You often have leftist nationalists and liberal anti-nationalists. We are trying to somehow create a perspective that would be a radical anarchist, definitely not liberal, anti-nationalist perspective. It’s a bit difficult to communicate with people even to have arguments if such a perspective doesn’t exist. It’s not only about the points that we make, it’s also about using the language differently, meaning different things when you say “state,” “nation,” and so on. For this reason, I think it takes some time to create the readership in a way or to cultivate it that we will be able to have a conversation with. Although there’s a lot of interest, a lot of copies are distributed across the Balkans and much more than we thought, so we will have to reprint all of the issues. It is being read.

TFSR: With the way that you’re talking about the anti-nationalist liberal perspective, I have appreciated the more anti-nationalist perspectives coming from the left, whether it be anarchist or anti-state communist, around this- I remembered “The rise and rule of the extreme center” as one of the additions within this edition. I think that the critique of radlibs, of extreme centrism, whether it be from specific ways that international institutions, military and policing structures, or think tanks get directed towards anti-extremism studies, including the directed against anti-fascists, for instance, or the visions of a future beyond national borders, where it means the expansion of NATO or some other international militarist organization. That has to be spoken about because it’s so hegemonic at this point in the dialogue of the powerful, the mainstream media, especially in the West. It’s good to think about.

Can you talk a bit about the art that’s in there, I think it’s beautifully laid out, and the cover is provocative, but the art that you use, the photo montage? I already expressed to you off the mic that I’m disturbed by some of the visuals of Americana paintings that you used. It feels like a lot of the imagery is from so many different eras and artistic movements that it feels really in juxtaposition to the texts. But at some times, it also seems to pop out and say a lot, as commentary.

RK: Of the three editors and a lot of people who collaborate on Antipolitika, I’m probably the least qualified or whatever you want to call it person to talk about this, because I don’t know much about it. What I could say is that I wanted it to look nice. I think it looks nice. But, for example, the two other editors know a lot about art history. A lot of our comrades from Greece are also very knowledgeable in that area. There’s a lot of influence in what we do coming from the avant-garde movements, specifically the situationists. There is an awareness of art, but also – similar to how we talk about politics and why it’s called Anitpolitika – the will to overcome it as an alienated area of life that is dealt with by specialists and somehow integrate them into the wholeness of our daily life as we want to have it. So, I wasn’t so involved in that part, [I was] to some extent, collecting some photographs, and illustrations, but the layout is done by other people. Also, one of the editors chose the illustrations that disturb you. That was their idea. I think it’s a very good one. That whole process is done in a similar way as I described, the way we do it with the articles, it’s a collaborative way to do it with some coordination between us.

TFSR: Since you didn’t say much about or I didn’t ask about the Antipolitika, what does “anti–politics” mean?

RK: We have this short text that we print in every issue, the point is to say that politics is, we are told, a specific area of life that is usually dealt with by some specialists. The point is to say that we want to see life as one whole thing that has different qualities to it, but you cannot separate something politics from the rest of it. Also, to make a point of this was specifically an anarchist view of life, and what we call politics from the start, for example, Marxists in the 19^th century often said to anarchists that they didn’t have a political program or something like that. Because they didn’t accept this idea of politics as something done by politicians, political parties, parliaments, and so on. You can say that everything is political, and nothing is political at the same time. This is maybe what we mean by Antipolitika or anti-politics.

TFSR: Well, just to cap off the part of the conversation about Antipolitika, how can folks engage with the editorial collective? Is there a next volume already in the offing or in planning at least?

RK: We have a blog, it’s Antipolitika.noblogs.org, the PDFs of the first and second issues are available there. Soon, there will be a PDF of the third issue there as well. There is a contact there, if anyone wants to, they can send us an email, and we’ll see that immediately. We are thinking about the next issues and are already working on them. Not only one but a few. We’re trying to do things faster by doing them simultaneously. We are preparing issue four. We don’t know exactly how we’ll call it but the work title is maybe ‘Patriarchy’ or ‘Gender’, we’re not sure how we’ll call it. But there are some texts already written, others planned and currently being written for that issue. Then issue five, for now, we call it ‘Total Self-Management’. Anarchists or anti-state communists often have this question: “Okay, you’re good at criticizing, but what do you want?” It’s an issue that provides some answers to that question. We use the term “total self-management,” we think that self-management is a better term than “democracy,” because it’s less abstract. The “people’s rule” is an abstract category as well. Self-management is a bit more direct and self-explanatory. We want to discuss various historical and current self-management projects. It is also the term self-management or samouprava in the Serbo-Croatian language was also the crucial term of 19^th-century socialism in the Balkans. Everything was about that. We want to reaffirm this idea. In addition to that, we are also preparing a German-language special edition of Antipolitika, which will be the selection of texts from the first three issues. It’s already translated into German, now comrades are proofreading it. We hope that by the end of the year, this will also be ready.

TFSR: Some listeners absolutely should recognize your voice from the Balkan-Americanski anti-fascist podcast, The Empire Never Ended. For those poor souls out there who haven’t heard of TENE pod can you tell us a little bit about the podcast?

RK: The Empire Never Ended is a podcast that I do with two anarchist friends, Fritz and Boris. We are three nerds who come from the anarchist, anti-fascist, and punk scenes. We’ve been friends for many, many years, and often talk about some of the more bizarre things that for unknown reasons interest us. All bizarre fascists that exist out there. We would often caught ourselves having conversations about that. At some point, we decided to do a podcast about that. Unlike Antipolitika, I have to say, it’s not, in that sense, a political or radical project, because it’s also a way for us to earn some money and to try to do less of the horrible jobs that we are used to, like working in call centers, and so on. I want to be clear about that. Antipolitika is purely a project that, as we say, is a political, anti-political, radical one, this one has also this job aspect to it. But of course, it’s political in the sense that we approach every topic from our point of view. Currently, we produce five episodes per month. Two are free for everyone, three are available on Patreon. We already have more than 260 episodes. We tried to do them in thematic arcs. We explore one topic in many connected episodes. These arcs also consist of sub-arcs, and the arcs are getting longer and longer and longer. We have two areas that we focus on. One is fascists, usually American or Western ones, for sure. Then the other focus is Balkan nationalist history. We tend to do one arc about American fascists, then a second one about Balkan nationalist history, go back to American fascists, and so on. Yeah. That’s what the podcast is.

TFSR: The podcast has also been interacting with and documenting and promoting the documentation of ongoing fascist organizers. It’s not just history, right? Friend of the pod, O9A, for instance.

RK: Yes. When we started the podcast, we were focused in the first arc on very bizarre current Nazis, Nazi Satanists, and so on, influenced by this very bizarre person from Britain called David Myatt and his non-group group Order of Nine Angles, who also for some reason cannot stop writing to us over various social media under different names and always insisting that it’s not him, although it’s completely obvious that it is him. He’s a very disgusting, but also very funny character, we have to say, who became a part of our lore in some bizarre sense.

TFSR: It’s hard to prove it if you don’t have the proper evidence, right?

RK: Exactly.

TFSR: As an avid listener, if listeners can’t tell, and also as a Californian by birth, I’ve appreciated the contributions in the latest arc on eugenics on the TENE pod. Where I was raised, there were years of agricultural experimentation that had occurred about 100 years before and numerous sites named after Luther Burbank, who was a famed horticulturist, and also eugenicist around the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. It’s too much to fully go into right now, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the basic rundown of what eugenics is that you’ve been covering, its application to the so-called “race sciences” and what you’ve been covering in the show concerning the relationships between projects in the US and Nazi Germany. Again, to restate, it’s easy to get into the weeds with some of these historical questions, but I think that it’s really easy once you start talking about not only the ideas, you can see the germs of where they are now, but also making connections that get overlooked in public education in the United States of trajectories of what was happening that’s now decried by a liberal order that are still underlying currents.

RK: We did a few episodes on eugenics, we’ll do a few more. It’s a horrible topic to discuss. It’s also difficult to say what it even is, I guess, they would say it is a set of beliefs and practices that aims to “improve the genetic quality of the human population.” What it meant actually in practice was that there were a bunch of racists who decided to give some scientific justification to the racist theories that they had and were very successful in it, because many of them were very established scientists, supported by institutions, such as Stanford, Harvard, but all of the universities really, and they existed on an international level and are very well-established and supported by various states and ruling classes and so on.

They were established as a movement in the 19^th century, and to some degree, they still exist. They were extremely popular in the 1920s-1930s, which is when they established close connections with the Nazis and influenced the Nazis very much. The United States was seen as a leader in this area. They were the country where the eugenics movement was the most established and part of the ruling establishment under the scientific academic one as well. The Germans, even before the Nazis came to power, were looking at the United States as a role model. California, especially, was a big part of that. All of the eugenicists saw themselves as partially scientists and academics, but also activists who wanted to influence legislation. So, in practice, what they wanted to do was sterilize people by force, certain populations that they saw as unfit to reproduce. They also had an exterminationist idea. They wanted to kill people. They also influenced legislation in America, there were laws in California and maybe other parts as well, that were a reflection of these ideas and theories and beliefs. This is especially something that impressed the Nazis. They wanted to reproduce such things there.

The German eugenicists call themselves racial hygienists, that’s the term they used, and they had very close connections with the US ones. Eugenicists in America would later whitewash their own history after the Second World War because it became less popular to say that you’re into race theory and such things after the Holocaust and the Second World War. But the way they whitewashed their history was they made this false dichotomy between the real scientific eugenicists and the pseudo-scientific ones. They said, the pseudo-scientific ones were the Nazis, and legitimate scientists were not. Such division doesn’t make a lot of sense. Because many of the very well-academically established eugenicists were also big, big fans of German Nazis and supporters of that system, had close ties with people there. They wrote books that influenced Hitler, who mentions them in Mein Kampf. That was a way to whitewash the moment. There is a lot of continuity. These people never went away. They changed the language they used. Maybe some of the more explicitly Nazi ones stopped being the leaders of scientific associations, and then the ones who call themselves reformists, who were also fans of Nazis but said maybe the Nazis overdid something, really became the more prominent ones in positions of power after the Second World War. But all of them also helped re-integrate Nazi scientists into the international moment after the Second World War, including the guy who was the professor who was the mentor to Dr. Mengele, for example. Mengele was sending specimens like human eyes to his professor (I don’t know for what reasons) but that guy was later on integrated into academic life in institutions by these American academics after the Second World War, and was publishing texts in US academic journals, and so on. Also repeating this idea of how we need to get rid of all of these Nazi pseudo scientists, that’s the guy who got human eyes from Mengele. It was a very well-established, very influential, very powerful movement of American elites and American academic university elites and political ones as well. They had a close connection with Nazis and influenced Nazis.

TFSR: That point about the changing of the language, the whitewashing, the removal of the people that are saying the quiet part out loud from establishments of policy, or academic power in the US is pretty clear, when you listen closely to people that are talking about public social support networks existing through the government, what is it promoting, who is it promoting in terms of if we have social housing, if we have subsidized medical in the United States, the cutting back of these while they may be actively genocidal in their outcomes or less exterminationalist in their terminology. An important thing that I think that your podcast does is that you make it more explicit, you draw the lines, you name the names of people that are of those tendencies and the lineage up to today. When Fritz mentions the bell curve, you can see this tendency, or American Renaissance and the discussions that are happening in that space. I appreciate it personally. I think you guys are funny as fuck also.

RK: Thank you. We try.

TFSR: My parasocial relationship is just flourishing.

RK: [laughs] We try to have humor there as well. It’s spontaneous. But it helps when you talk about these very bleak subjects, but also to approach it in a way that’s not- I think we are successful in making the point of how all of these people are evil and dangerous at the same time as laughing at them for how ridiculous they are.

TFSR: It does a job that some other podcasts that I listen to sometimes, where they’ll focus on something terrible in the world, and just be like, “That’s pretty bad, huh!” and you are laughing that line in a hipstery manner that almost seems like is working to diminish the cruelty or the terror of what is being talked about. Whereas I think your project does a very good job of avoiding that, not making the terribleness the joke, making the terrible people the joke, and how ridiculous their approaches are.

RK: That’s one trap, what you just described, and then there is the opposite one of liberal journalists who are doing the job of fascists for them by scaring people with fascists, which is what fascists want, they want to scare people. You often have these fascist groups that list all of the mainstream media on them that they exist, that they‘re very proud of because they seem very scary in it and nothing else except scary. As we discussed earlier what fascism means. I think the main point of them is to scare people, to terrorize them, to pacify them. I think a lot of these perspectives that come from liberal media are doing the job of fascism for them in a way.

TFSR: Yeah. That’s interesting because that’s a step beyond the critique that’s been in the last decade about platforming fascists, normalizing, like “Look, Richard Spencer is a dapper blah, blah, blah who eats macaroni. Everybody eats macaroni, cool.” My last question is have y’all considered making a book or have some printed thing that synthesizes? I know you, you’re doing a lot of reading, I really can hear the pain in your voice when talking about reading Imperium and so much Ezra Pound. Not to draw people away from subscribing to the podcast, but have you thought about any print projects related to this that synthesize some of these things?

RK: We did. We thought about that immediately when we started doing this. Didn’t do anything about it. There are a lot of things that we do, but it is something that we occasionally think about. There is an anarchist publisher out there who’s sometimes putting some pressure on us to do something that. Maybe.

TFSR: A coloring book, if nothing else. All the freaks, here we go. Cool. How can people listen to, subscribe, and support The Empire Never Ended?

RK: It’s on patreon.com/TENEpod, but it’s also on a bunch of other places where you can listen to podcasts, of course.

TFSR: Well, Rey, is there anything that you wanted to mention that I didn’t ask about?

RK: No, I think that’s about it.

TFSR: Thanks a lot for having the conversation and for the projects that you’re involved in. I think they’re pretty awesome. Really appreciate.

RK: Well, thank you very much. And thank you for this great conversation.

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