This week you’ll hear our chat with the author of Countering Dispossession: Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, the political ecologist David E Gilbert (not to be confused with the former Weather Underground prisoner in the US). For this episode, David and I speak about the book, the small community in south Sumatra, Indonesia known as Casiavera, the legacy of colonial land grabs, the people who live there and the agro-ecology of the rainforest at the base of the Arin volcano. You can find more of David’s work at https://DavidEGilbert.Com

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

Links:

• The Black Snake: Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and Environmental Justice by Katherine Wiltenburg Todrys
• Via Campesina: https://viacampesina.org/
• Landless Workers Movement (MST): https://mst.org.br/
• Sarakhat Patani Indonesia (SPI): https://spi.or.id/
• Mentions of Tan Malaka in the Southeast Asian Anarchist Library (https://sea.theanarchistlibrary.org/search?query=tan+malaka ) or writings on Marxists.Org (https://www.marxists.org/archive/malaka/ )
• Feed’em Freedom Foundation (Detroit): https://feedemfreedom.org/
• Our interviews on the ZAD: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/?s=zad
• Grassroots Indonesian Eco-movement Wahli: https://www.walhi.or.id/

Announcement

May Day

Happy upcoming May Day, comrades known and unknown! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you do, you’re surrounded by siblings in love and struggle, you can take pleasure in the beauty of the world around you, take strength from our predecessors who share our vision of a life unencumbered by state / capital & the other anchors foisted upon our shoulders, and with the energy to create a path towards our desires

Ángel Espinosa Villegas

We had an interview scheduled with Ángel Espinosa Villegas, a trans masc butch dyke, formerly a 2020 uprising prisoner who was transferred to ICE detention for deportation, however the screws seem to have decided to escalate the deportation to Chile rather than let hir continue to speak to the media. Keep an eye out for upcoming interviews with Ángel, and consider checking out hir GoFundMe. At the end of this post there are some statements from Angel…

Supporting The Show

Hey listeners… we’ve had a string of early releases with more on the way coming out through our patreon for supporters at $3 or more a month, alongside other thank-you gifts. If you can kick in and help, the funds go to our online hosting, and creation of promotional materials like shirts and stickers, but MOSTLY to funding our transcription efforts. We hate to ask for money, but if you have the capacity to kick us a few bucks a month, either through the patreon or via venmo, paypal or librepay or by buying some merch from us (we have a few 3x, 4x & 5x sized tshirts in kelly green coming soon), we’d very much appreciate the support. We’re hoping to make a big sticker order in the near future.

If you need another motivator, the 15^th anniversary of The Final Straw Radio is coming up on May 9^th, 2025 and we are not above accepting birthday presents. That’s 15 years of weekly audio (albeit at the beginning it was more music than talk), including 8 of which 7 of which aren’t in our podcast stream (you can find some early show examples in this link _by skipping to the last page of posts on our blog).

Other ways to support us include rating and reviewing us on google, apple, amazon and the other podcasting platforms, printing out and mailing our interviews into prisoners, using our audio or text as the basis for a discussion of an ongoing movement, contacting your local radio station to get us on the airwaves, and talking about us to others in person or on social media.

Alright, capping this shameless plug!

Angel statements:

These are press statements and direct quotes that Ángel Espinosa-Villegas has provided from inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, where she was held from April 1 to April 25, 2025. Ángel is currently in transfer to an undisclosed location, but has not been able to contact loved ones yet. These messages were received by loved ones on the outside throughout the past 3 weeks and she has given explicit permission to publicize these statements.

“We dance a lot, draw our hopes and homes on the walls of this place any way we can. We tell stories of home, hold each other past language barriers because we all know all too well what it’s like to be torn away from our families, hold onto hope, only for it to be crushed cruelly by these heartless fascist traitors. To remain utterly powerless at the mercy of the abusers of gluttonous power. People
are quite literally dragged out, hogtied, by these pirates that speak of protecting democracy yet dehumanize and humiliate us without so much as a look in our eyes before ripping us apart from our newfound friends, and, more distantly, our families we have here. They rob us of the little money we have and have no paths of recovery. They tell us clean water is a privilege and not a right. That
speaking to our families is a privilege. That seeing the sun is a privilege. That if we get too loud of this constant mistreatment, then we should get ready to eat mace.”

“Most people here don’t have the means to speak out against these human rights’ violations we face every day. But I will take any and every chance to fight, to expose the way they treat us that these human traitors have normalized.”

“This was supposed to never happen again. But here it is again. We need everyone demanding our freedom, to expose all the vultures robbing these vulnerable people of everything from money to merely see our families and small children. We’re not even allowed to say goodbye, to hug our children goodbye.
What madness is this? How is this STILL happening to us, I ask myself when I wake up. Is this country for the free? For those yearning for a safe, happy life? If this country and its people care about freedom and safety, then people should
refuse to let this government and administration work a second longer until they free us ALL.”

“A lot of women here are fighting their cases because they’ve been following protocol to obtain legal papers or asylum or were just rounded up randomly from racial profiling. One woman here lost her purse with all her money on a train and went to church to seek help. The church called ICE on her because she couldn’t speak English! Another woman here was late to her job and her boss called ICE
on her. Few of us have criminal records. Most were just following advice from their lawyers and continuing their appointments with ICE and USCIS to get their visa or temporary protected status or whatever it was they were doing. But because of Trump’s administration they’re all rounded up by ICE and deported.”

“I’m feeling alright, mostly numb since being locked up is so abusive and heart wrenching. Here… It’s a rollercoaster. I witness, every single day, cries of agony and anger and despair. I see people hogtied and dragged out. People being yelled at to gather their things and go into the unknown, being threatened with PREA for hugging as we say our goodbyes and well wishes. This place is much worse than prison in many ways. I hear guttural wails and sobs so many times a
day. It’s like being at a perpetual funeral; laying to rest this person’s life, that one’s dreams, the other’s hope. Knowing they’ll be inevitably harmed, kidnapped, sometimes disappeared or even killed when they go and we can do absolutely nothing.”

“We’re just hostages. Being one for so long now… I’m so hollow on the inside. I haven’t dropped any tears the last year and a half. I just can’t. Not even when I was sentenced. I don’t know how I’ll even begin to heal, but I sure as fuck ain’t ever gonna stop fighting. My hope and ambition to fight… I’ve just been refueling his entire time being down.”

“Fighting brings me solace. Helping others brings me solace, some
meaningfulness, a melting of stone in my petrified heart. I spend most of my time going around and helping people as much as I can; working the tablets, giving phone calls, cooking food, doing little chores and tasks for the older, sick, or disabled ladies.“
With love & solidarity,
Free All Dykes

. … . ..

Featured Track:

• Judas Goat by Filastine from Burn It (a benefit for Green Scare defendants)

. … . ..

Transcription<

David E Gilbert: I’m David Gilbert, and I’m a political ecologist from California. I’ve worked for a long time in Southern America and Indonesia, and now I live and work in Barcelona, Spain. I’m most interested in threading this line of what is an anarchist political ecology, what does an anarchist praxis look like, both in terms of theorizing, strategy, tactics, and politics, really broadly construed?

TFSR: Thanks a lot for taking the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it.

DEG: Of course.

TFSR: I’m excited to speak to you about Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, which you published through UC Press. Would you talk a bit about your academic work, the ethical framework or methodology that you work from, and what brought you to Casiavera?

DEG: Yeah. I first went to Indonesia about 15 years ago, working for a local NGO, where I learned really quickly how much I had to learn still about things like the importance of forests, biodiversity conservation, and how those things are connected to some really surprising geopolitical parts of our world. I ended up working in a place that had experienced 30 years of real civil war, Aceh, Indonesia, and I came right after a peace treaty had finally been called where Aceh became what’s called a special autonomous region. I learned really quickly that biodiversity conservation, these incredible more than human beings, orangutans that are highly endangered, rhinos, Sumatran tigers, these things are intimately connected to the geopolitics of oil and the trade of commerce through the Malacca Strait, one of the most important shipping fleets for the world’s commodities, where Aceh is right there, controlling these areas.

I started to realize really quickly that in the North and America, especially where I’m from, California, so much of what we think of as food, as industrial products, all of this stuff is actually coming from out there. Indonesia in particular is a huge supplier to all the world’s commodities. And all of them are coming through this shipping channel, this area, this broader economy of Asia, the Pacific Rim, China, and Japan. I became really fascinated in trying to understand, how we can disrupt some of those connections.

After I first lived in Indonesia, I ended up moving back to the US and working as an activist, campaigner, and researcher on a campaign against industrial food. Some of the biggest US agricultural companies, like this company Cargill. People call it the biggest company you may have never heard of. They control a huge amount of the food system, just how we get our food in the US, all types of things from corn to palm oil, specifically in Indonesia, to all sorts of commodities we never really think about, the stuff that makes up your lipstick, or the stuff that we use when we need to take a pharmaceutical medication. A lot of these feedstocks, these commodities, are coming from Indonesia, and other places in Asia as well. I worked hard on trying to figure out how to disrupt some of these systems, because, of course, this is capitalism, and it’s the problems of environmental and ecological crises, and the ways we’re consuming. We’ve become a consumer society.

That led me really deep for years to start riding with some organizers around land and peasants and the people that are trying to control these areas of Indonesia. There are hundreds of millions of people that live on the land out there producing all these commodities, rubber, palm oil, tobacco, avocados, cinnamon, and the pepper that Kentucky Fried Chicken buys by the metric ton. All of this stuff was coming from these areas, and these people were trying to figure out ways to do things differently rather than these giant industrial food systems.

A friend, an organizer, and more an environmentalist, working with a group in Indonesia that’s a lot like a Greenpeace type of group. They’re called Walhi, but they’re real organizers in a way that I don’t think Greenpeace really is. Greenpeace does actions and media. But Walhi is organizing communities and factions within these communities against all the plantations, the big extractive mining projects, and others in Indonesia.

This guy from Walhi told me to go check out Casiavera, this incredible town in Sumatra on the Aren volcano. It had become famous for what they’ve been able to accomplish in terms of overthrowing the domination of one of these big industrial agricultural plantations. A plantation that had really deep roots, an almost 100-year-old plantation that started during Dutch colonialism and then became reformulated and became even more terrible, actually, during the New Order—Indonesia’s long dictatorship, one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century, and one of the most long-running dictatorships under General Suharto.

Actually, I went there for the first time with this huge, huge delegation. There were representatives from over 30 countries that came organized through Via Campesina, the largest peasant union in the world. It’s a type of organization that’s working campaigning, but also organizing, activating, and getting people into protest, getting people really deep into cooperative forms of production across the world. They have over 200 million members. They chose Casiavera as a source of inspiration, not necessarily a blueprint, but ideas that we can think about, that can resonate with other movements. That was the first time I went there. I stayed there a few days, and I was really intrigued by what I saw there. So I ended up going back for my graduate studies in environmental anthropology, and I’ve spent now almost two years there. That was first in 2013, so it’s been more than a decade in my engagement and collaboration there.

This is a long-winded response to thinking about what ethnography means and my frameworks and how can it be both a practice and a scholarly endeavor that’s really trying to orient social movements in a way from within, or just give feedback to them, or even just create a history of certain movements. I think, my book is almost like a history of this specific place and the social movement that has unfolded there. But you know a lot about it was finding one of these stories that people really wanted to tell. I spent a lot of time in the worst plantations with the most land conflict, where private security was patrolling the plantation with attack dogs. And these are Muslim people who hate dogs, you know. Armed people with weapons, special forces, and police have killed people in these types of struggles. I have documented some of that stuff in my work, a fair amount. I have a piece of work about paramilitary forms and their connections with the police state in Indonesia, how they enforce plantation lands violence, and also the disruption of social movements, this idea of direct repression directly.

But for my book, I found a place where people really did want to talk about their history. It’s a long, troubled, difficult history, but people wanted others to know what they had accomplished. When I started living there, I quickly realized this area that was once just basically a messed up, exposed soil, really damaged ecologically plantation, had been turned into what looked like a beautiful natural rainforest. It was actually all planted by the people that occupied this plantation and were able to eventually reclaim it and start doing this amazing form of what we call agroecology, or tree farming, or food forests on this land. By the time I came to visit almost 20 years into their occupation or reclamation, it was full of over 40 different types of very important fruits and spices. These are commodities that they sell locally, but also into the world market. But they’re doing it in a way that was not capitalist at all.

That was really inspiring for me when I thought that social movements require protest and direct action, and this movement required a blockade to protect themselves from the police that came to kick them off the land that they had reclaimed without the legal right to do so, even though most of them have ancestral ties to that place, and almost all of them had worked as plantation laborers, as coolies, as they called them on this plantation. They did all these brave things, they called themselves reckless at times, carrying lightweight weapons, kind of how the black block is armed these days sometimes. They carried machetes, and they did all these things, men and women. But they also did this incredible building of this world, of this forest, of this ecology. They made over 15 cooperatives to sell different things. For example, they have a lot of banana palms. They have a banana cooperative. They have a cattle cooperative, and a dairy operation that’s also a collective.

The incredible building up of their economy that allowed them to sustain this reclamation and this type of activism, and recognizing that we need to understand people like ourselves engaged in struggles can’t always be doing just one or the other. There has to be some type of flow. There has to be some type of change in people’s lives. And yeah, all of those things I found incredibly informative to think about what different types of struggles could mean, especially for the Land Back. In the book, I try to be really careful and cautious and show how difficult that was for people, and that over half the families that tried to cultivate a plot on this reclamation failed. And there’s still capitalism, there’s still predatory lenders there, there’s still really bad ways of getting stuck with bosses and loans and miscommunications.

It’s far from perfect, but it really helped me think through what are the connections to Bay Area reclaiming land. Recognizing that Land Back is nothing less than the full Indigenous control of Turtle Island, for example, where the movement is strongest, I think we can say that at least It’s where this language of “Land Back” originated. Of course, Land Back movements are more broadly these streams of indigenous sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle that have existed all over the world for hundreds of years. But recognizing that that’s the goal and objective of Land Back, and the fact that a lot of the forms of community and collective organization that’s required to have a full-blown modern polity that can be a truly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, indigenous-led polity, all of those forms in California have been lost. Not just lost, but destroyed and shattered by white settler colonialism.

Here in Casiavera, a lot of these forms are in place, and some of them have been maintained throughout this colonial domination. There was and still is a customary council with a lot of power there. Also, the peasant union created a new structure that was very powerful and very present there. They also were engaged with the state in interesting ways. They were very anti-state, but their ultimate claim wasn’t actually to destroy or smash the state, it was to get their land back. And that’s what they did in a very smart and aggressive way. I think thinking strategically many different movements can think and build a lot from this more general concept I lay out, which is that we need to integrate and be smart about when we deploy direct action and these real economic mutual aid solidarity economies that we have to build as well.

It’s been really satisfying to have conversations with Indonesian activists, feminists, and plantation scholars in Indonesia. There’s been some great conversations about what Casiavera means for the movement now, and how we think about getting land back here. Here as in Barcelona, here as in California, here as in Indonesia. There are a lot of differences, but I think these are the conversations we need to have now more than ever. Especially under Trump, where it seems no matter what you think about the state or your level of engagement with it, everywhere from city, to county, to state governments are trying to defy, evade, and disrupt in a way, and social movements that are about struggle. Everyone needs to be thinking about these things now in a way, Yeah, we needed to for a long time, but it’s just become hyper-clear in the last few months. Hopefully, we can continue to talk about some of the finer points of that kind of broad introduction.

I’ve been really inspired by the work that you guys have been doing on your show, and I’m happy to take it in any direction. But I’d love to try to leave some room at some point in the next few minutes to think about some of these different sites of struggle, and how they might relate. We could have a relational comparison discussion. I’ve been thinking a lot about Stop Cop City, also Standing Rock again. I know it’s been so long, but I’ve gone back and I read a new book about Standing Rock that was interesting. It’s called The Black Snake, and it’s by a journalist. I forgot her name right now, but she reminded me about the importance of the protest camp itself. Not so much that Standing Rock was a blockade, but it was more a camp. In Casiavera I talk about two acts of blockading that were pivotal to protecting this new reclamation or occupation, but it’s a lot more about the land itself and what’s happening on the land. I think that’s what the point of the book about Standing Rock was, that the greatest, maybe less revolutionary, but emancipatory potential of Standing Rock was everything that was happening in the camp.

The protest camp is kind of a weird term. Some of us, like myself, associate the camp with a negative thing sometimes. But I think in a Land Back sense, for Turtle Island and the people that were at Standing Rock (I didn’t go, there’s kind of a long story there), the camp is one of the most beautiful, central, positive parts of life, moving across the landscape, breaking camp, opening camp, having ceremony. So, yeah, that part really resonates with me with my experience in what I saw and learned in Casiavera. The blockade part of the struggle can only be a few moments even of just what people are trying to sustain. As an activist, I think it took me having to write this book to learn that lesson in a fundamental way.

I’ve always been down to protest and ride and get involved in actions, but I’ve never truly turned myself to this one place, one plot of land, or like the Rosebud protest camp and all the dynamics that are happening within just a few family groups as in Casiavera, or just a few hundred people that are getting to know each other at Rosebud. This is the thing that must be sustained by any means, and it’s such a tiny little micro-world. But Casiavera has impacted the lives of now thousands of families. It’s still small. It’s not even a big city worth of people. But I think that these human-scale, really foundational changes to the way things operate are going to be the way that we can enact some sort of hopefully at least semi-peaceful change. Thinking on the scales of changes of millions right now brings us so into the eye of the imperial, geopolitical war machine, that it’s hard for me to see what huge rapturous, revolutionary change would happen right now without it being unfortunately a highly militarized, repressed struggle. That’s why I’ve been really inspired by Casiavera.

In the book I talk about how thousands of other places bring together hundreds of thousands of families in struggle, impacting millions of hectares of land, which is the size of half of Northern California, or something. So what Serikat Petani Indonesia, the specific peasant union, which is just one of many in Indonesia, but the one that was most active in Casiavera, what they’ve done on that kind of scale is world-changing, you know? I think it’s unfortunately suffering all these rising authoritarians right now, in the last decade or two across the world. Unfortunately, Indonesia has been caught up in that now, in the last year or two or three. So it’s yet to be seen how much they could continue to grow their movements.

All of these these peasant movements in Indonesia, started around the year 2000 more or less. That was the first time they were able to operate at least legally, above ground, because of the New Order. 20 years is not that long to grow a non-violent movement. They’re not underground anymore, but that also means that they don’t have to operate only as criminals, right? We learned with the Zapatistas, they were underground for about two decades before their first uprising, their armed reclamation of their territory. And that was actually similar to SPI and Casiavera in particular. That’s actually almost the exact same time in the mid ’80s and late ’80s. It was underground, and then, in the late ’90s both movements went above ground. I find it interesting that there’s this convergence of time. Also with the MST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra] in Brazil, that was a really important time for them to consolidate and grow. And now all of these movements I feel are a bit like a wait and see what’s happening right now. I mean, Brazil is a little bit different, but the Zapatistas might be as weak as they’ve been in a long time, it seems… I don’t know.

TFSR: For folks who don’t know MST, that’s the the landless workers movement in Brazil, right?

DEG: Yeah. There’s a lot of interchange and overlap and building between MST and the group in Casiavera, across Indonesia in particular through Via Campesina. They’ve really been refining this land reclamation or occupation or squatting. There are so many different names for what these groups do. Brazil has the largest movement of reclaiming land from industrial corporations, or as in the case, more specifically in Brazil, often it’s really large, wealthy landowners, like individual families. But now more and more they’re incorporated as corporations, as they all are in Indonesia. They’re all corporations in Indonesia. So those two are the ones that I’m most familiar with in terms of what this strategy involves.

The MST has done more than the Indonesian unions have, in not only making it a matter of activism, occupying land, and economic collectives, and this idea of agroecology. The MST has gone even further with education, health clinics, all these things that come from Paulo Freire’s idea of pedagogy of liberation: you need the school, you need the health care, maybe you need the communal kitchen. I think that’s one thing that the Indonesian movements haven’t done as much of. Those types of movements just seem so important for the US right now. Like Cooperation Jackson. Build and fight, fight and build. Everywhere we look, we have places like that in the US, right? And they’ve been coming out in the last decade or two, maybe these very anarchist reconsolidations of the Third World Marxism of the ‘70s or Black Panther Party formulations but more anarchist now.

This is what happened in Indonesia just a few decades ago, where all these groups emerged. You know, Indonesia had the largest communist party outside of the USSR and China in the ‘60s, which was completely dismantled, destroyed, and killed by this New Order, this violent regime. Basically, after about a decade or two after this terrible pogrom against all the leftists, these more anarchist mutual aid groups started forming around the industrial plantations, which was the genesis of the movement in Casiavera. Then they federalized. Serikat Petani Indonesia was the coming together of 20-something smaller peasant unions that had reformulated.

I’m wondering if in the US this is the time to think about that type of strategy really strongly. The mutual aid solidarity groups that have been growing over the last few decades, is it time to federalize in terms of anarchist federations? It’s not about dissolving people’s autonomy, but to really solidify how much we can support each other. Then we think about some of the old-school white European anarchists and what they thought could come out of federalizing. Then add in indigenous ideas of federations that are some of the strongest in the world. In the US, with the Iroquois Federation at the moment of colonization, that was one of the strongest non-states or indigenous polities that ever existed. When the French and the British came up against that polity, they were stunned by its power, by its military power as well.

I’ve learned this history more now, and I wish I had a chance to get it in the book, but I’ve learned it more now living in Spain: Where did the actual military power come from with the revolutionary forces of Spain on the left during their civil war? It came from the federation of the workers’ unions that created their own self-defense units, guards. Because the unions were federalized, they were able to coordinate these truly anarchist self-defense units that were almost unstoppable for a while. I think these are the types of ramifications that could come out of looking really closely at Casiavera and what they’ve accomplished, in terms of where organizing could take all of us or where their organizing took them.

TFSR: Yeah. To address a couple of things that you said, I haven’t been paying as much attention since 2021 probably, to the struggles at Yintah and Wet’suwet’en land. There was a big long-lasting land occupation in so-called Alberta. I take inspiration from Indigenous organizing, mostly north of the border, with warrior societies creating some sort of federated framework and projects like Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson itself comes out of the Republic of New Africa framework and the folks that run it are very Leninist, but other projects that are affiliated with it will tend to have more communalist or libertarian municipalist perspectives, like the later writings of Murray Bookchin.

There’s a network that a bunch of the “Cooperations” like Tulsa and a bunch of similar whether it be Land Back or social, ecological, alternative economy, parallel economy, dual power projects have gotten together, that’s called Symbiosis Network. I don’t know how active they are right now, but at least in 2019 and 2020, they were pulling a lot of inspiration from what was happening in Rojava, and there was a lot of back and forth. So when people were talking about “Make Rojava Green Again” [the host meant to say “Demand Utopia” – Ed] a lot of the folks that were a part of that movement in the US were also clued into the Symbiosis Network, which I think is great.

With what you said about the communist movement in Indonesia, it’s also worth pointing to the fact that the Bandung Conference happened in that country as well. The conceptualization of the Third World as a positionality outside of the Soviet sphere or the US sphere, and communities, a lot of them indigenous and anti-capitalist, looking for another route outside of the industrial megaliths of those two empires, tried to go their own way with some sort of federative option that was outside of the First and Second World, which is probably one big reason that that was a target of US imperialism and those pogroms that you were talking about, right?

DEG: Yeah. I mean the fact that the power of the West, the arms the West was willing to send to Indonesia right at that moment, post World War Two, where the Cold War was forming, and they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this really difficult transition as a new Indonesian Republic, as it was called. Their first president, President Sukarno, you could see he loved the West. He also loved Russia, and there was no propaganda like the Russian military planes for him. I mean, he was a true freedom fighter. He truly fought the Dutch for freedom in Java. He had a great appreciation for the independence of both forces.

It’s so easy to be judgmental and be like, “How could you ever support capitalists and imperialists?” But Sukarno and Indonesia had just been betrayed by the Japanese of all people, who at the time were the liberators of Asia. Japan and Indonesia called themselves comrades or brothers. But what happened was Japan ended up invading Indonesia during World War Two, and being as brutal and sadistic as the Dutch had been. It was this great betrayal for Sukarno and the other young revolutionary leftists. They were true socialists, but this betrayal made them much more pragmatic towards all these different blocs. And you know, the idea of being a non-aligned nation was where this young republic wanted to place itself, its leaders, as they were busily trying to attend to how to create a nation at all, from all these different Indigenous polities that were truly strong and all had their different ideas of where they wanted this nation to go.

But in the end, of course, US imperialism did predominate in Indonesia. These fires of revolution on the left were extinguished completely in Indonesia for a very long time. The formation of capitalism was this imperialist economic exploitation of plantations. Indonesia was one of the original places for this plantation model: the Dutch East Indies, the Caribbean, and Africa. This plantation model early on was known as the Java Model because it was perfected in Java by the Dutch and then exported across the world by many different colonial powers. And now the revolutionary thought is starting to rekindle, and the nation is a true plantation oligarchy to this day.

I think it’s important to understand that now there’s this vibrant, pretty underground scene of anarchists, of people that are digging up Tan Malaka’s thought. He was one of the early founders of the Indonesian anti-colonial struggle and one of the first founders of the Communist Party in Indonesia. These ideas are really strong again there, but it’s coming from this incredible history of the domination of the oligarchy. And of course it’s one that’s highly connected to the United States and Europe, through the flows of commodities, like we started talking about during the opening of our conversation. But it’s also highly connected to China and India through the flow of these same commodities. So we’re living in this very complex world now. I mean, it’s always been a complex world. But the north-south thing that we love to put into this conversation of how to destroy capitalism, it’s no longer north-south in that simple formulation. And we’re starting to learn that we’re in a moment of geopolitical realignment in the world right now, and what that means for all of these relationships is really hard to understand. I think we’ll never understand them without some history. We’ll never understand them without some perspective, and also without some time of letting them play out.

What we can return to in Casiavera is the importance of getting started. There are many things that I think are quite anarchist about Casiavera’s movement, including the fact that they call themselves “anarchos” and talk about Proudhon, but they also talk about themselves as socialists. I was really surprised that people were talking about Heidegger. It’s a place where people read a lot of books, they read a lot of political books, they read a lot of philosophy. It’s all been translated into Indonesian. But they certainly identify themselves as anarchists, believing that property, individual property, is theft. And people quoted that to me, which I think is straight up out of Proudhon. But when you start to think about, “Well, where did Proudhon get it from?” Maybe from the French experience in the New World? There are just so many different ways these ideas exist in the world. And who am I to say that in Indonesia, they’re learning from European anarchism or the other way around? I really don’t know, but yeah, “property is theft” was an important one.

Also just relentlessly trying to refuse hierarchy and rotating leadership throughout these councils was very important. On the flip side, though, Indonesian peasant union have had the same “leader and founder” for 20 years. And we see that also with the MST that they’re pretty much a Marxist-Leninist-inspired organizations that practice a lot of indigenous, anarcho-indigenous, ideas and practices up to a certain extent. And then we start to understand they could go a lot further, I think, and activate themselves a lot more if they had some more rotating hierarchy. Of course, that’s another big, long conversation about how to create mass movements, through what type of structuring, the party, and all that.

But I think Casiavera never got too hung up on those ideas and part of it was because it’s just a lot of work to occupy a plantation. In their context, they needed to make a living. They also needed to sneak around and avoid these little security forces and start planting things in the cracks of this plantation. Then they got really bold and blocked this road, and they eventually destroyed the workers’ barracks and offices in the middle of the plantation in active protests. After that, they had to get busy trying to figure out how to make this land productive, how to manage it together. They had all these different ideas about what forms that collectives would be, cooperatives, and in the end, they settled on this really simple solution. Individuals could have defined plots, but they couldn’t buy or sell the land. They only could use it as long as they were actually using it. They only have a right to it as long as they were actually using it.

So they figured out how to hold on to the land, and they also figured out how to start making a living from it. But there’s no commodification of the land. It’s not commodified for labor either, because they don’t pay each other to work it. They have work exchanges, or these collectives where people work together and then they receive a percentage of the profits back, if there are any. Often there’s not. They’re all doing other things too to make a living. Many people do construction. Many people have a government job. One of the main peasant union organizers was working within the state for a long time as an agricultural extension officer, you would call it, I guess, in the US. Like someone who works for the FDA. You see these pragmatic decisions, but also that guy was like a straight-up anarchist infiltrator. That guy is the real deal, and he worked for the New Order.

And of course, almost everyone did that’s a certain age. Maybe they did work for the government, but many people were alive, living their lives during that time. So many people have some really surprising, disturbing stories like, “Oh wow, you were the guy with the gun that was hunting communists, and now you want to be an Indonesian peasant union member.” And people know that guy’s history, but it’s also a way of healing some of those traumas and bringing people back in instead of just ostracizing and only creating more conflict in a community. Bringing someone in is an act of forgiveness, right? And so we learn about these things, about how to operate. Some people call it Realpolitik. That’s some crazy [German] word about why it’s excusable to execute someone if it’s going to accomplish the revolution. And so I don’t know if I love that word, but the actual ways of dealing with each other and working together, building and getting over trauma, all of these things movements are struggling with. And conversations are happening, and we need a lot more of them, for sure.

TFSR: One of the things that you’ve talked about is the continuation of the influence of Indigenous lifeways. This community lived through Dutch colonization, which attempted to change everyone’s life and turn people into laborers for export for the profit of the Dutch corporation that was running it, or running the government as a corporation, or also running smaller plantations. Then you’ve got the Japanese exploitation. Then you’ve got maybe a national independence period where there was some waviness about what was going to happen, and then the New Order. You had the imposition of modern nation-state frameworks and property ideas that are central to Western capitalism were being imposed over and over again. And one of the successes that you point to in the book is the fact that despite, whether calling Indigenous practices communist during the New Order period and hunting people in the mountains for collectivizing territory, or James C. Scott sort of idea of evading the awareness, visibility, legibility by the state, you had communities resisting throughout this time, carrying the knowledge somehow, even though a lot of the knowledge was also destroyed, of how to take care of the land and live with it. They still had matriarchal values. They still had indigenous councils based on lineage. Can you talk a little bit about some of these structures as you understand them that were able to survive, and what sort of stuff they’ve been able to relearn? Was that relearning through things like communication with MST and Via Campesina and learning from other indigenous communities elsewhere? Sorry, that’s a lot in there. I guess I’m wondering about the survival of indigenous practices through various colonizations that survived until today if you could talk about those.

DEG: In many ways, one of the most remarkable things about Indonesia is the fact that there are so many indigenous [communities], some of them matriarchal, some of them more patriarchal. Some of them are quite anti-hierarchical, others quite hierarchical and patronizing even. But all of these ideas have existed and changed and made up every piece of their culture throughout the period of domination by the Dutch and then by the Javanese and then this crazy military dictatorship of mostly Javanese people. The fact is that these institutions—most of them, I would say—remained, at least in Casiavera. Very clearly we can see the matrilineal control of land as a collective, that was governed by the councils of family lineage members that were elected by the families. There’s a women’s council, there’s a men’s council, there’s a mixed council. This is a really incredible, fantastic, interesting, and different way of thinking about property and governing it that still exists today. Of course, it’s changed a lot over the last 300 years, but when we start to think what a world of freedom or autonomy or well-being would it be…

Maybe it’s just because I was schooled in civics as an American when I was very young, but I think about the balance of powers. I think that this might be a fundamental idea, that this matrilineal council in Casiavera exists, it survived, it was changed, it was altered. It was probably diminished a bit, unfortunately, by the Dutch and the New Order as well. The Javanese patriarchal, very hierarchical dictatorship. It was anti what is called Minangkabau culture, in this case, in West Sumatra. But the Minangkabau survived, and It’s one of the balances of powers, with the peasant union, with the state, and also, I think, the church, or in this case, the mosque, formal Islamic state or religious powers.

There are almost four main powers that ended up pushing out the plantation company. The state didn’t really do much pushing, but it also didn’t ever bring to bear its worst forms of repression on Casiavera, and part of that is because of the Minangkabau matrilineal council, and the fact that the Minangkabau aren’t the people that are the most marginalized or made “other,” or the people that are the most subjected to racism in Indonesia. They’re kind of a mainstream indigenous society there. The state was a lot less willing to be like, “Look at these peasant Minangkabau people. We’re going to erase them off the map,” like they have done with some people, like the Dayak peoples in Kalimantan, for example, or in Sumatra with the Jambinese peoples, who are a much more racialized minority indigenous group than the Minangkabau.

But also because in of Casiavera many members of leadership in the mosque began actually to abhor the plantation. This is not a common thing in Indonesia, but in this case, many of the religious leaders felt that it was an absolute affront to have a retired military police general run this plantation. They thought that the exploitation of the land and the people that were working there just wasn’t acceptable. Then, of course, you had the peasant union, so there was this balance of powers. They all formed to work in different ways to push out the plantation or to dismantle it from right within itself actually in an interesting way. Without that indigenous polity, without those structures of rule, the customary council, I’m not sure that it would happen.

I think that that’s where people get hung up when they start to think about these types of movements, especially here in Europe. People have so much learning to do about what indigenous means. And how everywhere in the world there’s an imperfect idea of indigenous politics. Many people here are just like, “Yeah, that’s an interesting story, but we don’t have anything like that here.” But Spain is full of these local assemblies or councils. They’re usually organized around very small communities or villages. Even Barcelona has a city council structure, or we call municipalism in the language of Bookchin, that you mentioned, or Rojava. Those councils, while not equivalent to Casiavera indigenous Minangkabau customary councils, they actually have a great potential to operate in the same way in terms of the balance of powers. It’s just that their power is much greater.

In the US system, you can think about what does a city council truly control. They certainly don’t control much to do with any of the apparatuses of violence of the state. In Indonesia, they don’t technically either, but they have created, in certain places, more room to operate, like a more forceful “no,” or a more forceful affirmative decision in a place can be made that really does conflict at times with what we in Indonesia call the republic law, but that would be like the federal law in the US. I’m also a little bit hesitant to allow that whole crazy box to open in the US because we think of a lot of localized rules as being tyrannical and scary and violent and white and racist, white nationalists and white supremacists in the US. So there’s a hesitancy to disparage the role of broader state structures that could help keep minorities safe in the US in a way that maybe is different in Indonesia.

TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, when you talk about constitutional sheriffs as a concept in the United States, it’s about the autonomy of the settler role. That’s maybe a thing that we’re talking about a still settler-majority country, and the model is around applying white supremacist expansionism throughout it as a shared content. But then again, in small communities sometimes when there is input from polities, lower levels of governance can be more directly democratic. I mean, in our city, the city council can be vetoed at any point by the City Manager, which is an appointed position, and they have control over the budget, the police department, and everything.

I thought it was interesting to hear you talk about, to use a term that Bookchin uses—it is not his term but one that he uses—for this dispersion of and use of the land, the concept of usufruct. I think you bring it up in the book, this idea of not ownership necessarily but right to something by use, but that that something exists past your use and can be used by someone else. That as a concept of exchange that Bookchin said in some of his writings is a fundamental of many indigenous communities. In a sense of, “We don’t own this. We live with this. And it can’t be distinctly ours.”

It’s cool how the council in Casiavera has worked to minimize the consolidation of ownership because they’re post-civ model that’s aware of problems that they’ve experienced along the way, and they’re trying to work through as they go, allowing for stuff to fall through the cracks, because people are human, and they don’t want to bring down a fist and alienate everyone in the community, like when they started telling people “no tree crops,” because that more permanently ties you to a land base, and then people started doing, and they’re like, “Well, ok, we’re not going to stop you from that.”

The term that’s used in the book, smallholder, is an interesting idea to me within a collective. The Soviet model was forced collectivization that was centralized under the State, and that was obviously a failure. People were not invested in the land that they were directly working on. They viewed it as a job. That forced collectivization in the standard of the state being the representative of the collective poisoned the well of that good will, if not, through bureaucracy, squashed the creative potential of the people involved. The Proudhonian reference that you make of smallholders, small business people, or whatever, doing a thing, living in community with each other, maybe trading, maybe hiring someone for a couple of days a week as a wage worker, but they get to go back to their plot, and that person who hires them is not in control of their means of survival directly—They’re just picking up a little money on the side That heterogeneity, I think, is pretty natural, and even would be probably considered an ideal model of how a community operates to a lot of conservative people in the US. A small town with a main street, you’ve got a teacher, a couple of doctors. You’ve got all these roles that are filled by people in the community. It’s relatively sustained by the community, and people make decisions collaboratively within that community about what happens to the community and to the resources or to the land that they’re living on.

And because it’s modeled in a place with certain sets of experiences and cultural frameworks, as you’ve said before, it’s not a blueprint. People shouldn’t read Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land as something to pick up and put down somewhere else and stamp into some other landscape with other people, because it’s not how it works. Maybe a part of the indigeneity, or the essence of it that’s in there, is that it’s of the place and of the time of the people that are in relation to the land. So not only are social structures that are developed out of that community and those relationships but also people’s communal relationship with the land, fostering diversity, bringing back space for other animals to come and live. Sorry, that was a big mouthful. I love the fact that the book is not a recipe that can just be picked up and plastered out somewhere else, but that it’s a general framework and an invitation to a set of practices that people would adapt to their own situation and learn with as it evolves and as people’s needs evolve.

DEG: Yeah, that is so inspiring. The point of overlap is fascinating to me. Not to romanticize the rural too much, but this idea that we could have ways of living that appeal to many people in this world. I don’t know if we could say that they’re fundamental to human experience, but there may be something to this idea that we can live in a way, as you said, in heterogeneity, and I say in the book like bricolage, or a mosaic, of types of work where we own our means of production. Maybe it’s the land, maybe it’s your 3d printer. You could think of any form of cottage industry.

TFSR: Your labor.

DEG: Yeah, exactly. That would allow us to have a more satisfying, more interesting life. Also having the ability to change our work over time over the course of our own lives, these are things that certainly are possible under neoliberal capitalism or late-stage modernist capitalist economies, but in a way, there’s something fundamentally opposed to that concept of work within the bricolage approach. It’s much more about maintaining autonomy and freedom in that family orientation around economic activity. When you go to a place like in Casiavera, where corporations don’t exist, you realize how rich everyone is. I don’t want to overstate the wealth of this place, but people are sending their kids to college there now. Many of them own family cars. Most people have motorbikes, not everyone. There is certainly some dire poverty in the place, but it’s a quite well-off place. You feel that in the quality of life, the quality of living, the material possessions, the sense of wealth.

Of course, the Minangkabau was famous for its wealth during the colonial encounter, as many of these places were. In fact, quite impoverished British white settlers were often astounded by the wealth, leisure, and quality of life that they encountered as they went off to destroy those ways of living. I’m locating a lot of the origins of that problem in the capture of rents, wealth, or money by corporations. It’s a simple message, but it’s a powerful one when you see how Casiavera has put that into practice in a way that’s far beyond most places I’ve visited in California. Although there are some kinda communes, eco-villages, and hippie spots that I’ve been to, where you start to get a sense of that. None of them are so comprehensively large or like a full-scale community or even a town. Casiavera I would call a town.

There’s a lot there to be inspired by, and there’s a lot to think through, like that idea of smallholder, being the owner of your own means of production, while at the same time being engaged with other different forms of production and making money and getting by that do satisfy a lot of people’s needs and how that overlaps with what we think about as conservative rural America and how strong it could be if we could somehow create a truly anti-racist rural bloc in America, how strong it could truly be. The latent potential that exists I think is huge.

Interestingly enough this idea of a libertarian that we so much associate with a certain type of Tea Party politics have maybe inspired MAGA. Maybe there still are libertarian strains of thought operating like Ayn Rand in MAGA, but it seems that recently it has shifted a little bit just to straight oligarchy. Anyway, those libertarians were important to this rise of the right recently, and of course that was from the original Communards of the Paris revolutionary commune, the libertaires, libertarians in a truly anarchist sense I would say. There is this fundamental overlap or interest in this form of life that spans the political spectrum in the US.

Also, the New Afrikan movements you mentioned earlier—I forget exactly how we got to New Afrikanism. Oh, yeah, Cooperation Jackson. That type of survivalist New Afrikan instinct also overlaps in an interesting way, of course, with indigenous ways as well. I think that’s really a fruitful ground for all of us to think about how to organize around this concept of the smallholder across the economies, landscapes, and territories, both urban and rural. That seems like a wonderful place for us to get to in this conversation, that commonality. Not to be silly about it and to say that one day we’re gonna activate the links between the right and the left and all this, but just to know that when we’re thinking about the bases and where to organize. There are a lot places we could look into.

TFSR: Yeah, and not to beat my drum, but this is a necessary part of every anarchist podcast when somebody says the word “libertarian”: The majority of the world uses the term “libertarian” to talk about anarchists—libertarian socialists, libertarian communists, libertarian municipalists. It’s just the jackasses in the United States that use it to mean theocracy, apparently, at this point. The theocracy of property and masculinity.

You mentioned the ecological damage that the monocropping and the industrial system translated to the soil and to the forests of the Aren area around Casiavera, the side of the volcano that people have made into a communalized and repossessed area. Can you talk a little bit about how the smallholder model of working with the landscape and growing this diverse forest has repaired the landscape and enriched the diversity of the landscape?

You’ve mentioned that the occupation is not technically legal, but they do have lawyers working with them. They made two claims, some of which are based on law in Indonesia, the anti-colonial perspective that they are uplifting the livelihoods of indigenous communities that live on the land by increasing the material wealth of people. That’s one argument that they made, and that’s based on a shared value, ostensibly, that they have with that document. And the other side is that they’re repairing the ecology of the area. I think it’s cool that they’re able to argue those things and stave off some of the worst attacks of the state, even while it’s still tenuous. Some of the shots from above, the satellite photos, seeing the comparison of what the soil looked like when it was going through the period of being a cattle ranch, and then when it transferred over to tobacco and whatever. Could you talk about that, please?

DEG: It’s remarkable. When we start to think about what our world, our planet, needs, how to heal and repair it from all the devastation, we start to think about the climate. In Casiavera, they took this land that had been completely degraded and made into basically barren soil by these mono-cropping systems. First it was just all cut down and logged by a Dutch logging company. Then tobacco was mostly planted and also ginger just a single line of one crop over and over with pesticides sprayed, exposed soils. And so the rains would come—In Indonesia, up in the mountains, it’s super hard rain—wash all the soil away. This went on for decades. They had some cattle up there that were just trampling everything. I found some early old-school NASA satellite photographs that showed how huge this was. The whole plantation was just basically bare soil in the ’90s. You can see this from space, on the whole flanks of this mountain, this giant area.

By the time I got there, it was often an emergent canopy rainforest of hundreds of species. Some of the tallest were trees like teak, meranti, and red cedar, these really valuable timbers. Those have been planted by the people. I learned that over 60 different plants and trees that were living in these forests were planted on purpose, and then there are many other follow-on species. So it looks like a rainforest, it smells like a rainforest. And it turns out, of course, that type of what we call land use change, or just changing the environment, actually sucks up all this carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it in the new soils that were created, and the trees themselves as they grow. So we’re actually talking about way to be a natural carbon cleanser of the atmosphere. Growing these types of agroforests on the many millions of hectares of degraded land that exist across the world can actually be a contributor to cleaning up our climate.

And then, it goes much beyond that there. These are living rainforests now. It’s supporting really important species, like these primates called gibbons that are not critically endangered but are an endangered species, I believe, in Sumatra. They live there, they make the most remarkable calls to each other in the morning. There are now Sumatran tigers in that area, of which there are only a few hundred left on the entire island. In that area, there are elephants, also critically endangered. And then beyond that, you have this watershed and water cycle effect. This is on a mountain, and it’s actually a watershed that is now sustaining the flows of rivers in a way that that bare huge flank of the landscape didn’t. In fact, that was just contributing to flooding downriver.

So these are all the cycles that are very important across the world. They make a threefold contribution just by reforesting. That’s one of the reasons reforestation has become so popular for people to talk about, but the people that are actually doing it in a way that has ecological value in this sense are most often indigenous people, as well as campesino people in Latin America who are doing it a bunch. We just have to remember that the best way to achieve those types of incredible ecological changes is… This word, empowerment, has become such a cheesy word, but what does empowering the campesinos of Latin America really mean, to let them do agroecology? It means a massive land reform. It means political struggle. It means, perhaps, at times, armed struggle. I think that that’s the point of disconnect. Often people have a really hard time making that jump. They will say: “Okay, forest, rainforest, tigers, orangutans… Hold on, revolution?”

But when you start to learn what political ecology means, and the history of Indonesia, and it’s not an accident that the sub-discipline of university research/activism that political ecology is originally came to exist was in Indonesia. Why? The teak forests of Indonesia were all cut down to create the Dutch and Portuguese colonial fleets that dominated the world. These things are just so intimately connected in a much more fundamental struggle kinda way. A lot of people come to learn about endangered species through WWF, and the whole board of WWF is corporate America, with banking or finance even. So of course, a lot of it does come down to how we learn about these issues and experience them.

That’s the beauty of Land Back, that in all of our neighborhoods and communities, there are movements. There are indigenous First Nations. There are the Ohlone people in the Bay Area where I’m from, (and I talk about this in the conclusion of the book) they have reclaimed a ton of land in the Bay Area, where land is so expensive, so policed, so enforced, that the minute you don’t pay your rent, you’re going to be evicted by armed sheriffs. Moms for Housing occupying one house had resulted in hundreds of riot police responding to their eviction. Even within that milieu, the Sogorea Te Land Trust, represented by a few Ohlone peoples, an Ohlone family basically, has been able to find a way to reclaim land in a place like the Bay. They now have six different land reclamations in the Bay of a number of acres each. They’ve pursued more of a legal, land trust model. Basically land being donated to them by philanthropists and state agencies. But, you know, I’m down for it. I think revolutionary struggles are needed, and I think Sogorea Te Land Trust is needed as well.

That’s how we think about the revolutionary connections with ecology and soils and just how critical that type of work, that type of guerilla gardening, is and how it can be in the cities. The Bay Area has shown that. Detroit has shown that with Feedom Freedom. Many places in the south with Planting Justice. These spots that are taking urban areas, restoring soils, and growing food, this is in fact a revolutionary practice that people have taken very seriously for a very long time. Anyone who wants to somehow convince you that growing your own food is not a political revolutionary practice… They might be right if that’s the only thing people do. But in the end, it’s also a politically activating activity, getting involved, reclaiming land, and planting food on it. You get activated in different ways. I think that those folks just aren’t really paying attention. I think it’s actually one of the most important places we can all put our efforts in on the day-to-day. We all need our own little patch of reclaimed land where we’re trying to grow a squash or something.

TFSR: Yeah, and when you’re directly getting your livelihood off of the land base that you’re on, you’re going to pay more attention to it. You’re going to be invested in defending it. It’s going to be a lot harder to cut off your supply lines for your community if you are building some independence because it’s directly underneath you.

I think that there’s also an element of the conservation ideology that things like the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, and other organizations are very much based on, this concept of the separation between human beings and the natural world. An important part of this indigenous influence in the concept of being in a place that the book talks about is the fact that humans aren’t separate from nature. We are nature. We are part of nature. It’s a matter of if we are living in balance with what’s around us and who’s around us, or are we living in opposition, extracting, and then trying to move on to another place to extract from, that sort of disconnection from a land. I’m not trying to get all blood and soil on us, and I’m also not trying to claim that people identifying with the land base makes them Indigenous. But I think that there’s a close tie between that investment, understanding of and viewing the land base as a member of your family that you’re not going to screw it over. You’re going to worry about what’s going to grow back next year. You’re going to worry about what you’re leaving for the next generation or the next seven generations.

DEG: Absolutely.

TFSR: So how have your friends in Casiavera been doing these days since the writing of the book? There are a lot of people’s names that are dropped, whether made-up or pseudonyms. You’ve obviously built a lot of relationships with people, and that’s a valuable part of the story that you tell. Do you keep in contact with folks? How’s the organizing going?

DEG: Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s been really neat to know that the book’s been received well there. And yeah, I’m in touch with folks for sure. And I mean, these struggles are never done. That’s something I’ve been learning over the decades now, especially in these places that are trying to hold back these giant, mega projects. You may win a victory, and then 10 years later the project comes back in almost the same form, but maybe they’ve changed the legal structure around it, or the scope of it a little bit, and they’re gonna slide through. Or like Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline was built despite all that movement energy, and there have been some recent pipeline successes. So many of these places, we build from them, we learn from them, even if they might not exist anymore. I’m so, so glad to say that Casiavera still exists. You know, it’s there. The form is there, people seem to be doing good.

There are some interesting new threats to the land that actually speak a lot to the way that capitalism is changing in our world. One of them is local government authorities wanted to build a hotel on the land, and they wanted this kinda touristification of the place, because it was so nice and so beautiful now, with this forest and the cinnamon trees growing in there and the avocados. They’re like, “Let’s build a hotel on it. We’ll only kick off most of the people. We’ll keep most of the forest there.” And so then, they had to reactivate the network, especially the peasant union.

One of the most important people that I talk about in the book, the founder of the West Sumatran Peasant Union, which then became part of the Indonesian Peasant Union. His parents named him the name of the volcano, Aren, where he was born, which I think was such a powerful move at the start. You have to have certain feelings about that child to name your child the name of the place you that’s also a volcano. It panned out. He became an early pioneering lawyer and organizer for destroying the dictatorship. That was their first and main thing when they were young. Then he learned he needed to bite off that revolutionary goal on more concrete material factors, like land occupations and how effective they were to actually improve people’s material conditions before any broader revolution had happened. Aren told me, that they had to rejuvenate their form of organizing, and they defeated this hotel proposal.

That was no joke. There were a lot of people involved, a lot of money, and a lot of investors were interested. The State loved the idea. Of course, this kind of gentrification and touristification of the world is a serious issue now. To my younger self, I would have been like, “That’s nothing like building a mine in a place” or something. And it’s different, but it really threatens people and cultures across the world at this point, the touristification of the world. It’s not just the fact that tourists come. That’s not the main thing. It’s the fact that the capitalist economy finds a way to control the economy of that place, and everything can change through touristification.

So, yeah, they defeated that, in this really inspiring way. I wish I had had time to get this into the epilogue. There was a bit of a twist in that struggle, where after the fact, the peasant union and some of the collectives that have been operating there were like, “‘You know what? That was kind of a good idea.” They didn’t build a hotel, but they built a really simple coffee shop that now is run as a collective, where they’re serving coffee grown literally in the backyard. They have snacks that are all local produce, and it fits into their mission. Hopefully, it’ll be another way that they can gain economic sustenance and well-being from. I mean, it’s basically capitalist, I guess. I don’t know. They’re buying and selling. I don’t necessarily think that markets are bad, and I don’t think markets are at all the same as capitalism. That’s how I think about it in my own frameworks. They are commodifying the place a bit more, I think, with their tourist cafe stop. But I also think it’s kind of cool and a sign of how it’s growing and still sustained.

There’s been some tough things there, just those mundane parts of life, like people passing away, an new kids being born. For me, the big question is how are they going to manage this handing over of both power and also control of the land to the next generation? And this is an outstanding question, a question that is never answered in the book but that I pose. People talk about their children inheriting their plots of land, but that’s technically not allowed by the way that the council and even the peasant union set up this form of non-property use. As you said, usufruct, the right to use it is only as long as you’re actually using it, but then you’re not supposed to let it go on to your children. How are they going to reformulate for the next generation, make room for them, bring them in?

These inter-generational connections are really important for our movements, for all of our movements. I’m starting to feel that now, passing over 40. I’m like, “How many young activists am I building with?” There are some. I feel grateful to have some in my life. A lot of them are through the universities, though, which is cool. I mean, that’s one of the coolest parts of working at a university, that I do get to interact with a lot of young people. But I start to worry about the most anarchist, mutual aid, info shop vibe place organizing. Are there these institutional structures that are gonna allow the transfer of knowledge from everything we learned, from Occupy, to our veterans, to our people who have been incarcerated? Are we gonna pass it on? I don’t even know if any of our websites and blogs are gonna even last 5 years, let alone 15. Whereas, you know, in the ‘60s—I grew up in Berkeley—there were a lot of magazines and pamphlets and posters around in my parents’ house and their friend’s house, the Berkeley bar, radical newspapers. That’s how I learned about a lot of my own history.

I’m thinking about that for Casiavera a lot. And I think that there’s no doubt that these types of projects… I shouldn’t call them projects. But these types of movements are only going to be these liminal, not-forever type of movements until we get broader systemic change. We see that with the Zapatistas, I think. Right now people are worried about them being engulfed in drug violence and immigration problems. The tide is rising in many ways, I think, and it always will unless we have broader systemic changes that allow places like Casiavera to not just be these tiny little islands floating in this really exploitive sea. I think that’s the broader horizon, understanding that these places are going to inspire us, they’re going to give us some real tools and insight into how to organize, but that they need broader mobilization to survive, at least as long as 100 years or something. Nothing’s forever, nothing would be permanent, right? But let’s think about how to achieve permanence. It only really comes through, I think, broader revolutionary change.

TFSR: Yeah, it doesn’t mean the structures have to exist as they stand, but we do have as enemies, incorporated things that have power, that have institutional memory, that accumulate over time, whether it be states or corporations, our enemies that are trying to extract, centralize, pull profits and disinter us and don’t have a care because they aren’t living entities for the actual soil that we all live with and on. How do we not reproduce that, to talk about Freddie Perlman’s thoughts on wanting to have that longevity and becoming the thing that we are trying to defend against by adopting its ways and methods?

I think that networks of communication, reciprocity, mutualism, and respect can lead the way toward the possibility of intergenerational, federative resistance. And it’s not like we’ve got forever to work on this too. You know, between nuclear war or the climate, the global temperatures rising, the seas dying off. It’s dire, but I like the fact that this book is a good contribution to the general conversation that you find in like one of Peter Gelderloos’ more recent books, for instance, The Solutions Are Already Here. This tells a little bit of the story that I think Peter was trying to point to as possibilities and places that we can learn lessons from people doing it, making mistakes along the way, making imperfections, but putting themselves into it, investing, and creating the world that they want to live in.

DEG: Yeah. Big shout out to Peter, another Barcelona expat or immigrant or exile, we should say, maybe.

TFSR: So I guess the last question I have is, are you working on anything else these days? Would you suggest any interesting subjects, groups, movements, places, or struggles for further study around the topics that you’ve discussed today or are covered in your book? I made a list of some of the organizations, like Walhi, Via Campesina, or the landless movement, the MST. So I’ll have some of that stuff in the show notes with links to organizations, but any other shoutouts or stuff that you’re working on right now?

DEG: I’m really interested in trying to break down ways of how we understand the history of social movements in a way that can inform our present conjuncture, our moment right here, right now, around strategy and tactics more. I want to use those tools of humanistic inquiry and scholarship. I’ve been thinking a lot about tactics of anti-capitalist strategy and what those might mean for different places. And also trying to push forward my ability to draw comparisons or relations across Indonesia, California, Barcelona, and South America, like Amazonia. So yeah, I have another book that I’m working on that is very much about this idea of not so many places, but what are different tactics that are out there in the world? I have chapters I’ve started to write on. Some of them are inspired by my experience with Via Campesina, SPI, and MST, like the occupation, but also the blockade, of course.

Another great one is the ZADs or the Zone To Defend movements in France which are movements to stop big capitalist infrastructure projects, and they’ve been really effective with the protest camp, kind of like the Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock struggles. They employed basically the same type of thing, created big protest encampments in the way of some of these projects. So, yeah, I’ve been learning more about the ZADs in France now that I’ve been out here. And to set within this idea of like. “Ok, I don’t know what you think about the US state, but I don’t see it being the source of any actual well-being or potential for change right now.” So we need these tactics of direct action more than ever. But we need to know how they apply in a more broad sense, which pillar first against what.

I’m trying to learn more about different types of like workplace strikes. Mad respect for Amazon workers organizing wildcat strikes. I was part of the largest academic strike in US history a few years ago with the UC Berkeley system incorporated through the UFO. Mad respect for these people. But I just have to say it: The workplace strike seems dead to me. So what is the strike? The debt strike, or the rent strike? Those things also seem to lack a certain ability to actually do them in the US. I’m hoping to learn if some places are putting the strike into a new form that we can really use.

And the riot. There’s been some really interesting riots in the recent past that I think should inspire a lot of us. There’s also this group called Waging Nonviolence. They have some people that are trying to look into protest numbers right now, under Trump. They’re arguing that more people are protesting now than during the first Trump administration. It’s just that the press isn’t covering it this time. It almost sounds too hard to believe, but they’re being very diligent and counting protests and protest numbers. They’re being very rigorous and academic.

So yeah, that’s what I’m trying to work on right now. What does internationalism mean within all of this? The communists had their First International. There was even the First Anarchist International in the early 1900s, but where’s the role for internationalism today? Those are the things I’m trying to figure out how to research in a real experiential role as an activist-academic. There’s been some learning curves, but hopefully I’m going to have something out in another year.

TFSR: Cool. And your website is davidegilbert.com, is that right?

DEG: Yeah. Thanks.

TFSR: Cool. Yeah. That’s a place I’m sure you’ll be updating. And are you on social media that you want to shout out, or are you off of that stuff?

DEG: Yeah, you know, I jumped off of Twitter, although my account’s still up there, to Bluesky, but I’m not super active on it. But it’d be great to connect with you there, if I’m not connected yet, and I’m sure you have an awesome audience. I’d love to start using that platform a little bit more, if that’s the right one. It’s wild, Telegram is just huge in Europe, and I didn’t realize it. I’d heard about Telegram before I came out here, but now it’s so active, and it’s just not as public. But I don’t know, how do you share Telegram handles? Do I have to give out my phone number? I don’t want to do that.

TFSR: I can find you, but there are some suggestions on if you’re going to have a Telegram account to hide personal information. So you can make yourself non-searchable by your number or sign it up to Google number. Sometimes that works. Usually, if you’ve got a channel, just a broadcast-only channel, then you can get a short link that’s like t.me/whatever the name of it is.

Yeah. Telegram is an interesting platform. It should not be trusted for security. It’s a Russian-based corporation that has handed over information from radical groups and from attendees in different channels there to both the Russian Government and the Belarusian government, and I’m sure other governments beyond that. When people are organizing demonstrations, law enforcement has back access to it, so if security is a concern for either the attendees of a group or for communications, it’s not great.

I’m a fan of Mastodon, but it doesn’t have the same following, and it’s way, way more decentralized.

DEG: I like that one too. I need to just get a solid, small community of people I follow on Mastodon, on one of those servers. I think I’d be happy with that. I’m just so happy It’s Going Down back in my life, once I signed up for Bluesky, I didn’t realize they were on there. I was like, “Oh, this was worth it alone. Thank goodness.” I was so sad and pissed when they got kicked off of Twitter.

TFSR: And Facebook and Instagram. [laughs]

Thanks a lot for having this conversation and for writing this book. I’m stoked to be able to share this with the audience and looking forward to the next stuff that you come out with.

DEG: Thanks. It’s great to connect with you.

TFSR: Yeah, mutual.