This week we’re sharing an interview with Tomas Rothaus, author of the recently publish memoir, Another War Is Possible: Militant Anarchist Experiences in the Antiglobalization Era, out this year from PM Press. We speak about the anti-globalization movement and how it’s remembered, debates around mass mobilizations and Black Bloc street conflicts, mentorship and intergenerationality in anarchism and the importance of a sober audacity in political struggle. Tomas has three more, related books scheduled to come out in the next 2 years listed at PM Press’s website. We hope you enjoy.

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

You can follow Tomas on Bluesky via @BatallonBakunin.Bsky.Social or check out more of his works via his author page on PM Press’s website.

Announcement

Casey Goonan Hunger Strike

We’d like to share a quick announcement that anarchist prisoner, Casey Goonan, initiated on August 29^th a hunger strike in solidarity with the hunger stirke of T. Hoxha, a prisoner held by the UK of the Filton24, and the demand for her movement to a hospital due to malnutrition and medical neglect at HMP Peterborough. You can find the text of a letter describing the conditions and who to email below.

The Filton24 are a group of 24 individuals being lumped by the British state for a direct action to dismantle weapons at an Elbit Systems facility in August of 2024. You can learn more about the case at https://freethefilton23.com/meet-the-filton24/ . For some context, you can check out a recent interview by 12 Rules For What podcast on the impacts of proscription by the British government against Palestine Action.

The support letter for T. Hoxha reads:

• RALPH.LUBKOWSKI@SODEXOGOV.CO.UK
• HMPPeterborough.admin@nhft.nhs.uk
• pbfamilymatters@sodexogov.co.uk
• tony.simpson@sodexogov.co.uk
• Ian.whiteside@sodexogov.co.uk
• PBgeneralenquiries@sodexogov.co.uk
• Ian.whiteside@sodexogov.co.uk
• karen.reid@sodexogov.co.uk

To whom it should concern,
An immediate transfer of care for T Hoxha to a hospital in Northampton Healthcare Trust must be actioned. It is now day 18 of her hunger strike and medical neglect by your prison has since resulted in fever, persistent headache on the left side of her head, vomiting after taking vitamins, continued jaw pain, shedding hair and skin discoloration. Her condition is now considered in the “danger zone” by an advance nurse practitioner.

That an advanced nurse practitioner was not made aware of her case until Day 17 is incredibly improper practise for the treatment of prisoners on hunger strike, failing to begin a food refusal log until Day 5 of the hunger strike and failing to appropriately maintain this since as well as, the failure to provide consistent regular medical attention, providing electrolyte sachets and monitoring have proved HMP Peterborough to be incapable of fulfilling their duty of care to prisoners in their custody.

T has simply demanded her rights to fair treatment as an unconvicted prisoner of conscience. We are aware of the methods by which her rights are being removed by your prison as means of intimidation and isolation.

Another Sodexo prison, HMP Bronzefield, is currently in the media and public discourse due to two deaths, an assault and forced excessive lock up of prisoners last month. Given this, I am certain that HMP Peterborough will be soon also be investigated for direct medical neglect and abuse of authority in light of the seriousness of this matter.

The medical necessity of socialisation is a fact. Depriving T of the right to maintain correspondence with her community, or prevent her contribution to the improvement of your prison through work and classes indicates a concerted effort by the prison, you, to silence and allow physical harm to come to a prisoner in your care.

Your actions have placed T in immediate medical distress and ANY staff in your prison aware of her case who has maintained silence and hidden behind prison procedure will be considered responsible for the deterioration of T’s health and any health consequences both immediate and long term. I repeat, ANY HMP Peterborough staff that have allowed this life threatening situation to escalate to this point can be held liable.

Once again, I demand an immediate transfer of care for T Hoxha to a hospital in Northampton Healthcare Trust and the prison immediately reinstate, in both writing and action, the little socialisation T’s managed to have perfectly safely for a while now.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

. … . ..

Featured Track:

• Genova Libera by Brigada Flores Magon from Tout pour Tous
• Mentira by Manu Chao from Clandestino

. … . ..

Transcription

TFSR: We’re speaking with the author of the recently published memoir, Another War Is Possible: Militant Anarchist Experiences in the Anti-Globalization Era, out this year from PM Press. Would you introduce yourself further and tell us a bit about the book and yourself?

Tomas Rothaus: Hey, thanks for having me. My name is Thomas Rothaus. I’m the author, as you just mentioned, of Another War is Possible. I am originally from Argentina, although for a variety of reasons in life, some of my own choosing, many not, I’ve lived in a variety of different places, including mainly Paris, Athens, Germany for a decade, and a few stints in the US once upon a time, and then obviously Argentina back and forth as well, which is where I’ve been now for the last few years or so.

As to my political journey, which I guess speaks to the book, I discovered anarchism by stroke of luck. Once upon a time, I think 1994-1995 I was living in Athens – and I’m embarrassed to say it, because I’m one of those people who looks down on punk rock, and I know that that’s terrible, because we all come from there – but I discovered anarchism thanks to the least political and the least good band, probably, that one ever could imagine, which is the Sex Pistols. But because I heard Anarchy in the UK somewhere on the radio or at a party or who knows where, and I didn’t know what the word meant, and I was curious. So I went over to a library in Athens, and was lucky enough to find the Encyclopedia Britannica that had an entry on anarchism written by Peter Kropotkin. As you can imagine, it’s pretty well-written and pretty favorable to anarchism. I was like, “Hey, what is this?” I was maybe 12-13, at that time, and incredibly, this library in the middle of nowhere in Eastern Europe had one other book on anarchism, and it was the Haymarket Martyrs by Paul Avrich. I don’t know how familiar you are with Paul Avrich’s writings, but I am firmly of the opinion that he’s one of the best, if not the best, historians of anarchism. Not just because he rescues from being forgotten a lot of the momentous struggles in which anarchists in different places and times in history were involved, but also because of how he does it. I mean, he really pulls you in and makes you feel, and not just tells you their motivations, the realities in which they lived, things of this sort.

That book really struck a chord with me, and then I hit a dead end, because this was mid-’90s Greece, barely internet times. I didn’t speak that much Greek, so I couldn’t find anarchists. And I assumed, okay, this was maybe some crazy ideology from 100 years ago, must be gone now. What you will find a lot of in Greece, though, is the alphabet soup of authoritarian Marxists. And to make a long story short, I ran into whatever the local affiliate of the revolutionary internationalist movement was back there. That’s the Maoist, the whole Shining Path Gonzalo Thought folks, and I quickly understood, okay, they also want a classless, stateless society. They just have a different way of going about it.

Again, I was in my early teens, so don’t judge me too harshly. But they also, as these sects tend to do, made me feel special, because I spoke Spanish, and the glorious Chairman Gonzalo had just been arrested, and that was momentous, and I could translate texts for them. I had a stint with them until one fine night, November 17, 1995. November 17 is the anniversary of the student and worker uprising against the Greek military junta in 1973. And that November 17, there was an anarchist on hunger strike, and about 5-600 anarchists occupied the Polytechnic School, which is the school that the army had invaded with tanks and killed 30 or 40 people back in ‘73. And Greece has this wonderful thing, or at least for me back then, when I was bored watching whatever was on TV, of showing riots live on TV, like break programming and start transmitting live from the university. And after a while of watching, the press, as they do in many countries, will portray militant confrontation and anarchists as vandals, hooligans; there’s no politics behind it. They’re just out for violence, etc. And again, me being young and relatively innocent, I was like, “Oh, yeah. Whatever. They use the name anarchist, but they clearly have nothing to do with the ones I was reading about in the books.” And then it started dawning on me as I was hearing some of the chants and seeing the graffiti, and it was like “the passion for freedom is stronger than your cages,” and “neither fascism nor democracy: anarchism”. And then suddenly they were pulling down Greek flags and setting them on fire. I was like, “Wait a second, these are my people.” It all just went from there.

To finish up the life story, that was the beginning of my introduction to modern anarchism. And then, because I did move around most of my life, I did stints in the different structures or iterations of the broadly speaking, anarchist or anti-authoritarian or anti-fascist space, be it the CNT in France for a few years, the Barricada collective in the northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists in Boston for a few years, a decade in the Autonome Antifa world in Germany, social movements and anti-fascism in Argentina, just wherever I thought my time and energies were best placed within the context I found myself in. This book is, in a sense, me putting that on paper. Although obviously, if one has read it, or if you do read it, you’ll realize, wait a second, this covers a very small timeframe. And it’s because as it grew and grew and grew, it became clear to me, or better said, to PM, “Wait a second, this is way too much. There’s more than one book.” So we ended up focusing on the anti-globalization period, and chronologically, what came first.

TFSR: That was cool. That’s a bunch of the first chapter, or maybe the introduction of the book, right there. We all have some sort of spark or some moment where we’re like, “Oh, wait a second, that’s what anarchists are like?” I remember seeing this protest against the bombing of Belgrade in San Francisco when I was a teenager and seeing a black bloc, and I’d never seen a black bloc before, and I was like, “Oh, they look cool.” Beyond aesthetics, it was a nice introduction to getting into the ideas beyond that, like getting you a little hooked by what you see people doing and how you see them present themselves.

TR: Not to interrupt, but just because you brought that one up, that was just another one of my early, early anarcho experiences where I saw this interplay between theory and action. I was like, “Wow, that’s crazy”. I was actually in Athens at one of these huge mobilizations against the bombing in Yugoslavia or Serbia, and because obviously Greece is Greek Orthodox, they have a very strong bond with the Serbians for not the greatest of reasons, but nonetheless, it brought out hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. And I remember there was a corner where there were a couple of tables, and maybe 20 people max, giving away literature and selling books. And it was a group of some anarchist affinity group or collective from Athens, and they were doing that. We were just standing there, and I was a nobody. I just drifted towards them because I found them interesting. I literally wouldn’t be able to tell you, if I wanted to, the names of one of them. I remember at one point a fascist showed up. He was very quickly made to disappear. I thought that was impressive. And I was like, “Okay, this is a very healthy way of dealing with racists, so good for them.” And then, just like it was the most normal thing in the world, they packed it up, pulled out like five Molotov cocktails, promptly set the nearest police cruiser on fire, and made their exit. And understanding that I was like, “What on earth just happened here? This is my people!”

TFSR: That’s amazing. Just like, “Excuse me, young comrade, just one moment.” Click, whoosh, boom. “All right, we have to go. Let us know what you think about the zines.

TR: A lot of that happened also in the process of writing these books; you start digging up memories that you’d started to forget because it’d been a while.

TFSR: You mentioned the writing process, creating this monster of a book that you and PM decided to break into a few parts. What made you want to put this book together, this collection of essays? Why now?

TR: First of all, why now is, unfortunately, a bit of a trick question, just because it’s been such a process. And not to get all dramatic, it’s just new to me. And sometimes you underestimate what a project entails, and I’m going to go with I wildly underestimated this one. I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll write a book.” I remember when we started talking with PM about this, they asked for a writing timeline, and I was like, “Oh, I can probably get you a final manuscript by…” I think I said June of next year, and that was in July 2020. It took five years, so it was a bit more than I expected. The why now is a trick question in the sense that it actually wasn’t now. It was five years ago, and that was actually right before the George Floyd Uprising, which one would think might have inspired me. Because there’s an uprising, there’s a time of hope and upheaval and inspiration. But it was actually a bit the opposite, as soon as it happened, I was like, “Who cares about the uprisings and adventures of yesterday, when there is one happening right now. What are we doing here?”

That actually cost me some time more than anything, but it did, again, eventually reinforce one of the motivations, which was, in our case, all of the Barricada folks and the different anarchos of the early 2000s that I was around with, we were all very much inspired, for better or for worse, by the writings of I’m going to call us the crazies, but it’s a term of endearment, just so nobody gets it mixed up of the crazies that came before us. We devoured Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days and Dan Berger’s Outlaws of America and the Direct Action Book, even though I know she’s a controversial character, after the fact. But basically, all of these books, which spoke to the conviction and audacity of people in a lot of ways like us who came before us, and they, again, for better or for worse, and many times for worse, to be very clear, they very much informed what we ended up doing. And I say for worse, again, just an example: we read about the Days of Rage, from Weatherman in Chicago. And by any metric, analysis by third parties, their own analysis, being a halfway reasonable person, being able to interpret and read about what happened and what the objectives were and how it went, it was a fiasco. The only lesson that one should probably take from that is, “Hey, don’t do that. Don’t do that.” Whereas, of course, the one we took was, oh yeah, we should definitely do that, but we’re going to make it work, which, again, is very symptomatic of the fact that we were all in our early 20s, and we were convinced that we could do no wrong. Obviously, it’s important to be critical of that, but at the same time, I think it probably is the mindset of most young revolutionaries.

But anyway, fast forward 10-15-20 years, and I started to realize nobody has really written about our motivations, about our adventures, about our many successes. Partial, of course, because the big one of toppling the structures that oppress us and which we fight, we haven’t done that one, obviously, but we had a lot of partial victories, and we lived a lot of incredible moments, not just from a personal perspective. I really do think that’s very much secondary. It’s not wholly unimportant, but I don’t believe in this thing of using the movement as a space for your personal psychological growth, or whatever. It also can be, and it should be, and that’s also healthy. But clearly that’s not the central objective. It’s a political movement, not a self-help group. But we did achieve tangible, concrete, material gains in the struggles in which we were involved. And that’s not a detail.

You ask why it took so long? And I think there are some very specific reasons, and I go over them in the intro. The first one is political conviction. I come very much from this school of “in the political struggle, the individual doesn’t matter much.” Again, I understand this is subjective. People are free to disagree. It’s fine, but that’s just always been how I lived and experienced it. Obviously, the individual in our project of society is very important, but in the actual political struggle, you are not necessarily that important. For example, this thing of, “Oh, I don’t get along with people in my organization.” Yeah, it’s better if you get along with them. I prefer to get along with them, but if I don’t get along with them, and I think there are still people who do good work, and obviously, who don’t do any of the things that would disqualify you from being amongst us, then, whatever, they’re not my friend. It’s fine. But there was always in me very much this thing of you’re not important. It’s what you as a movement were able to achieve that’s important. Who are you telling the story of that movement of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, however many? Shut up and do your work. That was one limiting factor.

And the other is even more obvious, and it was, for me, extremely counterintuitive, and it’s going to sound wildly hypocritical in the context of this book, and this chat we’re having, which was I grew up to an unimaginable extent in the space of “loose lips sink ships” and I come very much from the school of “shut the fuck up.” Then 20 years later, being like “Hey, here’s a list of all our alleged, supposed possible crimes” was really, really counterintuitive, and there was a voice in my head going constantly, “What are you, crazy? Have you lost your mind? What do you shut up. Set it on fire, throw the computer into the trash.” But again, it’s not a coincidence that when the post-mortems or the analysis or even the stories and anecdotes and adventures of past social movements are told, they skew towards the reformists in our movement. Why is that? Because they’re the ones who are most free to write and tell about what they did. It’s not the same. When we used to do it back in the anti-globalization days, because we thought it was important to do it, even though we felt exposed, we would put on a ski mask and stand in front of a couple hundred people at some general assembly, for example, in Gothenburg, surrounded by hundreds of cops, and say what we felt needed to be said. But obviously, that’s a dangerous position to put oneself in. And I think the digital age has even made that worse, because maybe back then, you could print your zine, you could print your flyer, and you could discreetly get it out into the world. Whereas, now, I know if you’re good with technology, you can still protect yourself, but for many, it feels like you’re exposed. If you’re writing what you really want to say from your home computer or whatever, and maybe your encryption fails, or maybe you didn’t connect to the VPN properly, or maybe, who knows what. I think security culture is a huge hindrance to writing about our beliefs and actions, and yet communicating those beliefs and actions is incredibly important.

At one point, I began writing, not so much out of political conviction, but to be honest, I began writing for my kids. I have children, and while it doesn’t get talked about in the book, because just chronologically, we don’t get there, unsurprisingly, the life of an anarchist- I’m uncomfortable with the terms in English, because “activist” is a term that I’ve always frowned upon. And “militant” in English seems like, “Ooh, you’re taking yourself way too seriously,” and I don’t know one in the middle, but whatever, whatever you want to call it – an anarchist, activist, militant, revolutionary, etc, unsurprisingly, that life will often come with consequences. And when you have kids, they sometimes will have to carry the consequences of decisions that they did not make. I thought it would be nice for them to have at least some road map as to the thoughts and motivations of their dad, so that when they judge me based on the consequences that those had on their life, they might judge me less harshly. I have a great relationship with my kids, by the way, but one can never be too careful. And I thought it’d be fair to them.

So I started for that reason, but actually wrote as the first chapter, one that’s not published, and honestly, it ended up in book four, because there ended up being a lot to write about, apparently, which was these nights are for Alexis, which obviously has to do with the uprising in Athens and Greece generally, when Alexis Grigoropoulos was killed in 2008, if I am not mistaken. Because a) for me personally, it was a life comes full circle moment, because I’m an athlete as well, and I just had a very serious injury. It took me a year and some change to recover from. I had been pretty depressed. I don’t want to get all melodramatic. It’s not the point of this chat, but obviously, injury, depression, and a newborn kid are some tough things to deal with all at once. And then suddenly this uprising appeared out of nowhere, and I was living in Germany, and I was watching it on TV, just like I was watching it on TV in 1995, except now I’m a little older, and now I actually know these people, because I had been on the streets with them. We had developed a very good relationship with a lot of the Athenian comrades from Genoa onward, because we think alike, and most of all, we act alike. And again, if you read the book, or people read the book, you’ll notice another thread that is very common there.

A lot of these things I say with the knowledge that they might be wrong. It might not be a good thing and yet I’m trying to be honest about it, it might be the wrong way to go about things, and I’m well aware, and yet I still feel this way. I’m going to share it so that others might say, “Hey, don’t do that,” or say, “Yeah, whatever.” So our affinity was very much based on combat, or on being on the streets, not necessarily that we saw eye to eye on every political issue or how to organize or how to whatever. But the point was, for me, these are my people. This is my place. I can’t not be there. And I literally put the money together and got on a plane at four or five in the morning, and one day later, I was in the TV image that I had been seeing in 1995, and so it was a very life-comes-full-circle.

But I also wanted to convey, again, originally, just for my kids, this thing of a) it’s not just masked people throwing Molotovs in the dark. There are some very serious political motivations behind that. There are some very lofty aspirations, if I may put it that way. And there’s a big sense of community and camaraderie. There’s a kitchen that we staff collectively and voluntarily that keeps everyone fed while others are out there keeping the cops at bay. There are assemblies where we decide everything democratically that are running nonstop. There’s an explosion of creativity and of art everywhere you look. There’s an entire ecosystem that flourishes behind rebellion. And it was very important to me to be able to portray that. And then just fate, I guess. I don’t believe in karma or any supernatural things because of being an anarchist and all that, but I do believe that sometimes, if you push hard enough, if you stand at the train station long enough, a train is likely to come by.

TFSR: As someone who was around and politically conscious and engaged throughout a lot of this period, I am super thankful to see something that has these experiences that either I had, or more likely, that people that I have affinity with, shared or moments that I was paying attention to, written in a way that’s not just like some Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Medea Benjamin or Ralph Nader-like arguments about anti-globalization or whatever, I’m thinking about books that I’ve seen published on this movement and representing specific perspectives that were calling for the cops to be sicked on anarchists and other autonomous or whatever organizers that were in the streets at a lot of these events. Can you describe a bit about the political context in which the anti-globalization movement was, as you experienced it? What were some of the competing influences, elements, and interventions, and how did you see anarchists as fitting into them as you participated in this movement?

TR: I could break that up a bit into two parts, which are at the beginning, how it coalesced, how it came to be, how it grew, and then the tail end. First, because they’re different realities. But in my case, I also experienced them wildly differently, because at the beginning of it, I lived in Paris, and so I experienced it through that lens of European anarchism, whereas by the end, I was in Boston, and so I experienced it also through the European lens, because of the summits, but mainly as a person who was living in North America and not in Europe. You have to remember, or for those who weren’t around, you should know, we were basically children of the ‘’90s. We were children of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And if there was one thing that you heard constantly, it was that history is over. Fukuyama’s idea The End of History. This is the final triumph of capitalism. This is the best of all possible worlds. This is just what the world is. We tried both things. One didn’t work. This is the world. It was a “resistance is futile” kind of perspective. And again, for a lot of people who happen to be in more privileged sectors of society, it wasn’t the worst of times. There was relative economic stability, there was growth, and there wasn’t too much social conflict. Again, obviously, there is a big caveat for those who were privileged enough to be in those sectors of society; I am well aware that for most of society, that is not the case. And it took a while in my case, I lived in Argentina also for a part of the ‘’90s. And that was the victory lap of neoliberalism. It was “let’s privatize everything. Let’s sell off all public assets.” It was just crazy.

And again, obviously, we’re all subjective here, because we’re not the biggest fans of the capitalist economic system. Unsurprisingly, though, this was not a model that was sustained, and so cracks began to appear. We all saw the Zapatista uprising, which was incredibly inspiring to people around the world. The war in Kosovo, while having very different underlying causes, was obviously still something that shocked a lot of us and made us realize, “Hey, this may not be as peaceful and stable as and great and humane as they painted it to be.” Argentina began to crack and crumble very rapidly. I think it’s not surprising that from that soil, something would grow out. I don’t know if it was luck or fate or it had to do with the general framework or with our work, because if there’s one thing that we’re seeing today is that instability, poverty, all of these things, the different failures of capitalism, are not inherently revolutionary, or, to better put it, they’re not inherently revolutionary in a left-wing or anarchist or liberatory sense, because I think we can all agree that there’s deep dissatisfaction with the capitalist system today in the US and in Europe and everywhere, but it’s not us who’s channeling effectively that dissatisfaction. Very much the other side. That’s a whole different discussion.

But in this case, we were able to give the opposition to the new dynamics of capitalism a left-wing and liberatory character. For us as anarchists, I think the reason this movement was interesting, again, I don’t know if we gave rise to it or it would have existed anyway, and we simply shifted its parameters and its forms of action and decision-making. I really don’t know, and it’s not for lack of trying to analyze it; I just can’t figure it out. But I think what is obvious is from the perspective of an anarchist conscience or an anarchist politics, there were some things that were really glaring contradictions to us, which was, there’s this discourse around freedom of movement, and yet people are being massacred in the Mediterranean Sea and left to die because they lack a piece of paper, which is a barbaric and medieval thing to be happening. To this day, even when I speak to civilians, as I call them, about immigration or politics, it’s one of them, for me, my go to, so you’re telling me that in the 21^st century, you think that it is okay to rip families apart, for little children to drown in the sea, for families or people to die of starvation and heat stroke in the desert because they were born without the proper piece of paper. You’re a barbarian. You realize that you’re a barbarian, right? I may not be the most diplomatic, maybe now that I think about it.

TFSR: That’s pretty fair.

TR: But because people don’t see that way at all, it’s been so normalized. It’s one of these things, and we’ll get to that eventually, where I’ve tried at some points in my life to make peace with capitalist society, at least in the time of rainbow capitalism. Again, I’m skipping around on tangents. I will answer your question in a second. But I tried because I thought you needed to try; the consequences are getting too extreme. You can’t keep doing this. You need to just fall in line. You need to stop. And pretty quickly, I realized there are just some things in my conscience, and my conscience is very informed by my anarchism, which just can’t deal with certain things. They can’t accept certain things as normal. That was one of the big things.

Back to the actual question at hand. So, there was this incredibly glaring contradiction, and it spoke to the core of anarchist ethics, which to us was, “Hey, yeah, I’m all for a more interconnected world. I’m all for debilitating borders and freedom of movement. In Schengen, borders were removed most of the time. That’s actually true. I remember traveling around Europe through those years; there was nothing at the borders between the countries 99% of the time. There was a sign, the way you would cross from one state to the other. Yeah, it was great. But obviously, it was a privilege reserved for white European Schengen passport holders. That’s why we termed it Fortress Europe. If you were in the fortress, you had a fair amount of freedom of movement. If you were outside the fortress, you would feel free to die. And if you were within the fortress without the proper paperwork, you were hunted. And I used to say it was such outrage, and it was so “how could they be checking for papers outside the subway in Paris? They’re hunting humans. This is crazy,” and now I see the reality today in the States, and it feels quaint what was happening back then, which outraged me so much. Again, I’m going off on tangents, but you see it in the book, and you see it as you hear me speak, the immigration issue is one that will rile me up until the day I die. I am gonna center myself again.

The point is, this movement spoke to me at the core of anarchist ethics. I’m uncomfortable with the term, but just so we all understand each other. Which is that humans are entitled to their autonomy and their dignity, and our solidarity if those things are stripped of them simply because they exist, and even more so, if their existence is endangered in the service of capital and the state. And when we were doing our actions in solidarity with the sans-papier, the undocumented immigrants in France, we were very clear about this idea that we’re not their allies. We are their accomplices, and we are going to use our privilege as people who do have papers to do whatever needs to be done to facilitate better or improve their situation or gain their freedom, in many cases, and physically stop deportations, materially attack the machinery of deportation, which is everywhere. It’s not just at the point of arrest or at the point of getting on a flight. There’s a whole infrastructure behind a mass deportation machine. That’s why, I think, very sadly, because when I started writing, a third of the book had to do with immigrant solidarity and attacking the machinery of deportation, and I thought, man, interesting. Not so relevant as I was writing it. I’m a little annoyed that it’s pretty relevant now.

And the other thing was, we were always, and I think a lot of people in the US are aware of this term, the “imperial boomerang.” We were always aware that the repressive systems and the architecture of repression that were going to be aimed at these marginalized or otherized communities, sooner or later, would come back to us as well. And that while you shouldn’t act out of self-serving “oh, I should act now because it’s going to be me tomorrow,” you should still be aware that it will be you tomorrow, it’s not a detail. And in the case back then, it was all this surveillance machinery of paperwork, of cameras, of stronger borders, that was going to come at political activists next. And hate to state the obvious, but this is exactly what we’re seeing in the US now as well. This incredible machinery, which again, makes the one that we dealt with in France in the ’90s look positively quaint, is already being directed at anybody who is seen as a threat. And not even a threat, because I’m sad to say, I don’t think we’re a threat to much of anything today, but a potential threat, it gets redirected almost immediately. In France, Italy, and Spain, and all across Europe, the main field of struggle became immigrant solidarity. It was only a matter of time before we started networking to unite those struggles, and that, I’m pretty sure, was the birth of the anti-globalization movement. We had that first mobilization to Cologne in Germany, I think it was an EU summit, I can’t remember. And there were literally thousands and thousands of us from all these different countries, and it just all snowballed from there.

TFSR: Yeah, even the term “anti-globalization” sounds, it seems so- I also feel weird about “alter-globalization,” maybe “global justice” feels fine.

TR: Yeah, or against capitalist globalization, it’s one of those things you get nit-picky about. When I titled the book The Anarchist Experiences in the Anti-Globalization Era, it was a few years ago. I probably should have gone with Against Capitalist Globalization.

TFSR: Nonetheless, I think this is an important contribution, not only by describing these specific moments and struggles against specific international bodies or international policies, or national policies, or whatever, the different struggles, or fascist movements, the different engagements that are participated in throughout the book that cover the years ‘94 through 2001 show this breadth of what could be considered different interventions, or different subjects to intervene against, that all fell in line with this concept of justice that people were engaging via. That was the medium for people. It wasn’t the anti-war movement because it wasn’t about just one war, and it wasn’t just about borders, because it also had to do with an end to neocolonialism, or stopping sweatshops, just a whole variety of different things. It felt like a mishmash of things that made a lot of sense when put together, but were hard to describe unless you’ve used a lofty term like “we’re looking for libertarian socialism in a borderless world where people, information, and goods can all transit equally, freely” or whatever.

TR: You’re absolutely right, and I think you’re correct to such an extent. As we were just talking, based on your question, I immediately honed in on immigrant solidarity, just because it’s what I most experienced and what was closest to me. But I think you’re very much correct, and that’s also what made the strength and the weakness of that movement. The strength in the sense that there really was a general unease and unhappiness with all these different factors of society that you just addressed. And that made for a big sense of “Hey, all of this is no good. We should create something different and new.” That was incredibly inspiring. And that’s why a lot of people, myself included, thought we might be on the verge of something radically new, which, with the hindsight of time and age, I think we were completely delusional. I, myself, included, was the most delusional. And if you read the book, you’ll realize that, not ashamed to say it. But it was also the weakness of the movement, because there were so many disparate goals, objectives, and perspectives.

There were those who thought that we could put a kinder, more humane face on capitalism, and we’d be good with that. There were the ATTAC (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions financières et pour l’Action Citoyenne or Association for the Taxation of Financial Transaction for the Aid of Citizen) people who thought that if we just taxed the rich properly, that would fix the excesses and the problems. There was the “how can they be discussing these things without us sitting at the table? We want a seat at the table” kind of crowd. And then there was obviously us going, “What table? We want to set the table on fire. What are you saying?” At the end of the day, that comes through- Uncomfortable is not the word, but it’s difficult for me to know when to jump around and when not to just because, like you said, this is one of several books, and so a lot of the things that I’m touching on might not be in this actual book, but I wrote an entire book about Genoa. There’s just a little excerpt in Another War about it. But I write a lot about how Genoa for us was the point of divorce where we realized, okay, this so-called movement for us, revolutionary anarchists, can be a vehicle, but there are a lot of people in here with which we do not see eye to eye at all, and not to be sectarian, which again, I am trying to be self-critical, we were wildly sectarian back then. And anybody who had to deal with us, I apologize for, but sectarianism aside, we really did draw the conclusion that we can use this as a vehicle.’ It sounds Machiavellian, but we can use these people in this crowd and this cover and this movement, but we need to very, very clearly understand who really is our ally and who isn’t. Because some of these people are not our allies. And that was an experience that we learned the hard way on the streets in general.

To make it relevant to the present, though it’s sad how much things are cyclical. I’m sure very many comrades had very similar experiences with the liberal crowd during the George Floyd Uprising, the conspiracy theories, the calling cops on people, the citizens’ arrests, the denunciations, the cameras everywhere, which was a problem we didn’t have to that extent back then, of course. I think it’s in this book. It’s definitely in the general one. I’m only singling him out because it’s a good illustrative example. I wish he were still among us. I would feel more comfortable singling him out, because I have no problem having the debate with him. Anyway, David Graeber, who is, unfortunately, no longer with us, was actually – a lot of people are surprised to hear this – one of the main proponents of a lot of the anti-black bloc conspiracy theories in general, and he was one of the main people amplifying them with some very absurd, very easily debunked. It was the 2000’s equivalent of the pallets and bricks, and “the police set the precinct on fire”. It was crazy. I think a lot of things we experienced were the same ones that people in the George Floyd uprising experienced. And you draw some hard lessons from that, whether you want to or not.

TFSR: Yeah, I do think that besides these moments where you had to, you decide: that is a divorce moment. That chronologically fits into this chronological narration. But I do think that there is worthwhile to be taken out of a) I don’t think it’s a bad thing for people to go with their own motivations to a thing, b) I think that constructing ways to be in space and take action simultaneously with other people and to coordinate around that as much as you can, even if you have divergences of ideas or goals immediately, I forget the term for it, the Prague Agreement, or later on, a very end to that I guess, would have been the St Paul Principles-

TR: Oh, and Quebec City and the color coding in the plans… No, I agree with every word you’ve just said.

TFSR: Yeah. And you can have one and the other, but I think that those moments where people would share space with people that they had conflict with and disagreement with, as long as it didn’t endanger them and would lead to a potentially fruitful outcome, even if you disagree with the Tutti Bianchi or whatever about this method that they’re making, the ability to take space together and be like, “All right, I’m not gonna mess with you during this, we’re in a different place.” When it worked, it was a pretty impressive thing, right?

TR: I agree wholeheartedly. And to be very clear, we went into that summer with exactly that perspective, and with the experiences of Prague and Quebec City behind us, where there was a very broad diversity of tactics and of ideas, and they worked to complement each other, which was beautiful and incredible and was central to the success of those mobilizations. But in Europe, especially in Italy, we realized, “Okay, but the other side doesn’t see it that way and doesn’t want that, and they’re acting in consequence, and they’re putting us in danger.”

TFSR: It takes two to tango, right? It takes two to agree to a thing. I wonder if you could talk a bit about the multi-generational participation in movements and spaces that you were able to benefit from. Can you opine a bit about the soil and the ingredients that help these movement cultures flourish?

TR: As far as the anti-globalization movement specifically, my answer is going to be, again, this is subjective and limited to my experience and where I was. I’m sure many others could have very different experiences. But for us, there wasn’t much of that in the anti-globalization movement. It was mainly young people in our circles with a few glowing exceptions, which I’m going to be forever grateful for. There was one, obviously, I’m not going to name him, or his university, or anything, there was a college professor. He was an old ”60s radical who very openly was like, “Yeah, I’m too old for this anymore, but I love that you all are doing it, so here’s money.” And he is who made it possible, again, I write about it in Another War, we made a pretty elaborate disguise, to get into Canada for the FTAA Summit, which included reservations at a ski resort, a fancy looking car, yuppie clothes, we drove halfway around Canada, and did not go straight to Quebec. We put a lot of effort into it, and we did not have the funds for that effort, but this good man did, and he made it possible.

I’m going to be forever grateful for that. And then there was poor Bill Ayers, who obviously came from a generation before, and the Weather Underground and SDS and all that. We had him over to speak at one of our book fairs, and we grabbed him after and invited him to lunch, and basically cross-examined the poor man about every single possible bad idea that we could possibly have. And I still remember the look on his face, of, oh, no, they want to do things that we did. This is really bad, and it’s not the ’70s. And trying to tell us, because he’s such a good guy, I don’t know if you’ve met him or heard him speak. You can just tell he’s a nice man, trying to be as gentle as possible, and telling us, “Hey, whatever you’re thinking about, no, no.” Those are the only two really older-generation interactions, seriously, that we had as far as the anti-globalization movement.

Now, if we’re talking about movement culture more broadly, absolutely. They were, in my particular case, I think, fundamental. I think in everybody’s lives, there are maybe some events that cement certain things in your mind and in your trajectory. I think I got hit with a one, two, if not 1-2-3-4-5 punch of epic, militant, devoted, committed, sacrificed anarchism when I was at a very young and impressionable age, which was, again, the first book I ran into, the first experience, which was, November 17, 1995 and then shortly thereafter, I found myself living in Paris, which a) was fresh off of a general strike, which the reborn French CNT had had a central role, is definitely not the word, because, not the case at all, but an active role. It was the first time, probably in a long time, outside of Spain and maybe Sweden, that an anarchist union had an active, not so marginal role in a mass-scale workers’ movement that brought a lot of new people in. And if you gravitated to the spectrum of the CNT, you’re gonna quickly find there the exiles from the Spanish Civil War. I’m super embarrassed.

Obviously, this is my first book, so I hate saying “it’s in the book”, and I feel like I’ve said it six times at this point, but anyways, so there’s a whole chapter clearly about me running into them, because that was an incredibly formative experience for me. It was, “Okay, anarchism isn’t just subculture kids fighting the cops in the streets,” which, for me, wasn’t that extreme, as it may be in the States for people, because Greek anarchism isn’t that subcultural. It still is, but it’s not all crust punks and Mohawks. Again, I’m generalizing, please. Nobody should get offended. It’s just so we understand each other quickly. It’s not that subculture, but in France, there is a subcultural aspect. And there was the whole Redskins Antifa scene, and I was very much drawn to it, and I was a part of it.

But there was also a literal room in the back of the CNT space where you could open the door and be transported to the 1930’s. It was incredible. I am a native Spanish speaker, and I speak French. That’s not an issue at all, but I feel more comfortable in Spanish. And one fine day, as I was headed to a meeting of the anti-deportation collective, who also happened to meet there, I opened the wrong door and heard people speaking Spanish, and they were all in their ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, I mean, to me as a teenager, they looked ancient. They might as well have been 200. They were Spanish Civil War exiles. One thing is the intellectual comprehension of something, and another thing is to understand something intellectually and then experience it and live it in practice. To see and hear straight from the words of these people, their experiences, their sacrifices, their losses, and the conviction that they still had and the belief in humanity, and then the anarchist idea that they still carry, that’s jet fuel to, “Oh, yeah, I’m gonna go fight the cops now.”

To be very clear, the essence of their work and their experience and even of the lessons that they tried to convey to me was, “Yeah, that’s all good and all.” But creating anarchism and growing anarchism and getting us closer to a free society, the actual fighting part is anecdotal. Sometimes it’s more important, sometimes it’s less important. But carrying the flame, agitation, propaganda, texts, meetings, debates, self-care, mutual aid, lasting structures. These are all the things that they created and generated and maintained that made it so that when each new generation came, they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, they didn’t have to learn every lesson from zero, and they didn’t feel like it was them or nothing, which is a thing that I feel like is often very much the case in the US.

And I hope people can correct me if I’m wrong, because I am speaking from somebody who is well aware that they’re from the outside looking in. But my time in the US wasn’t a hundred years ago, maybe 20 years ago, and I feel like next to nothing is left from that, and that, I think, informs how we have to repeat certain processes over and over and over, and how we lose, anarchist generations in the US tend to be short and they tend to be young. And I think that’s because US anarchism mainly only takes certain forms, which are great, and I’ve been a huge proponent of all my life, to such an extent that I didn’t allow myself to be an anarchist if I didn’t feel like I was doing those things, which meant putting my body on the line, facing the fascists and the cops, risking often my freedom, my physical integrity, my life, whatever it may be. And I paid lip service to the idea that a strong and healthy movement needs everybody. It needs all kinds of people. It needs people who do shifts at the bookstore. It needs people who hand out flyers. It needs medical support. It needs a million things I am not going to list now because it’ll get boring. I understood that, but I couldn’t allow it for myself.

I think the US movement often, I don’t know where you plug in if you have a family and you can’t risk arrest and you need childcare and you just want to go to a demonstration from point A to point B and hold your flag and not risk being beaten, shot, assaulted, whatever. I think we lack those things. I don’t know necessarily how to create them anymore, but I know that in places like Spain, the Spanish states, France, Italy, and Sweden, where they exist, anarchist generations tend to be longer, and the anarchist movement tends to be more multi-generational. I’m pretty sure I went off on a tangent, and that wasn’t the original question.

TFSR: No, it is what it is. But I was just striking out one of the other questions, which is great because this one leads into the other, which is, “Can you assess what’s going on with that?” Some of the magic that I feel from this anti-globalization era was the international character of the struggles. Sharing of information across informal and formal networks, and these windows into shared engagements around the impacts of the coalescing international order of the post-Cold War capitalism, what some, like the Zapatistas, called neoliberalism, and also this pull of taking “think globally, act locally,” to quote a bumper sticker. I think that was very much a part of the era in which people were envisioning this other world as possible. At its best, there were visions of a world beyond capitalism, where many worlds were possible in the decade between the collapse of “real existing socialism” and the inauguration of the global war on terror. Can you speak a bit about this explosion of interconnectivity and possibility, and the role that you think it played in those moments?

TR: Yeah, I think some of this we covered already, so I’m going to try to be brief. As you might have noticed, it’s not necessarily my strong point. As far as the possibility, I’m not sure how much of it was illusions of youth and how much was actually reality. And maybe things could have turned out differently if it weren’t for 9/11. We really did feel like we were on the precipice of something new and exciting. Then again, I suspect that every major social movement and moment of upheaval in history probably felt the same thing. I’m sure in the ”60s, they felt something very similar. And in the George Floyd Uprising, no doubt that many of us thought, “Oh, wow. Things might be different from now on.” Turns out, they are different, just not how we expected. If I’m honest and objective, though, in our case, we were super few, we were pretty marginal, and our political analysis could get… and even some of us within my own collective made fun of me and others of us for this, your entire analysis is basically, “hey, push hard enough and it might fall. And if it falls, we’ll have a general assembly, and it’ll be great,” which is not exactly top-level theory, pretty sure.

Case in point, we really thought we could take Genoa and establish, at least for a few days, some kind of commune as proof of concept. I’m embarrassed to say this to you out loud on a podcast. I tried to make this happen. Like what? And that’s why the Genoa book is actually called, we changed the title so many times, but the Genoa commune is part of the title. And I even had to argue with PM, because they’re like, “What Genoa Commune?” It’ll make sense when you read it.

TFSR: You had to be there.

TR: Anyways. As far as us coming together, despite this being essentially pre-digital age, aside from email and Indymedia, for all of those not familiar, the Twitter of our time. I still insist on what I said before, I think it had a lot to do with the subject matter and the glaring contradiction it presented to us anarchists, which moved us. Particularly, there’s all this discourse about free movement, globalization, one community doing away with borders, but only for goods and for white people. What is this? It’s not a coincidence. I think that in all these different countries, it was anarchists and anti-authoritarians that were at the forefront of these battles, and then it was just a short jump from there to us coming together to do something about it. That said, independent of what we may think of their utility, which I think might lead to the next question, it seems odd to me that this phenomenon of mass international mobilization seems to have completely died off, considering that, if anything, travel is cheaper and more common today than it used to be. And our conflicts are maybe even more similar now across borders than they were before. Not only do we have the immigrant solidarity crisis, I don’t want to say immigrant crisis, because that’s right-wing talking.

TFSR: It’s their language, yeah.

TR: Yeah, the crisis of solidarity with those affected by the right-wing crazies. We also have common opposition to this new far-right international, which obviously has its nuances, and it’s also something that I think about and write about a lot, but that is not the subject matter for today. But that would be something that would clearly offer itself to an international broad-front opposition, similar to the style of the anti-globalization movement of the ‘’90s, and yet there’s nothing of that sort. And again, I’m not passing judgment. I’m not saying it would be good, I’m not saying it would be bad. I’m just saying I’m surprised that that dynamic hasn’t evolved, and doesn’t seem to be a thing that will evolve.

TFSR: Yeah, in the early 2000s I remember this tension being present in the wider anarchist discourse on Turtle Island between people traveling to militant and confrontational street actions like summits, which was called all sorts of things like adventurism, a waste of resources, lifestyleism, smashy-smashy people being driven by addiction to fire or whatever, versus the slow work of local organizing. And these parallel distinctions that were happening at the time of red anarchist versus green anarchist, or insurrecto versus organizationalist, or other simplified discourses that I think your narrative does a pretty good job of troubling. I wonder if you could speak of this tension and the lessons that you’ve learned about militancy and community.

TR: That tension was very much present, especially in my organization, and that was a constant debate. It was a valid critique, because these summits, whether they be in your city or whether you were mobilising to another city, required a lot of resources. They required material resources, as well as the time of our militants or activists, which is not infinite. They often brought repression upon them, both prior to and after the fact. There was also a question. I was never the biggest fan of cultivating the anarchist image, but to some people, that is important. And there was this question of, is that the outward-facing image of anarchism that we want to give of a horde of people dressed in black, fighting cops and ripping apart cities again? There can be opinions both ways. It’s a valid opinion to hold, even though I may disagree. We at Barricada always felt, and we were very vocal about that this was a false dichotomy for a variety of reasons, and that abandoning mass confrontations would erase us from the public view, because it was what put us in the public view, and it put us in the public view in a negative light in the corporate media and for your standard liberal citizen. But we were of the opinion – and this was maybe informed by maybe my influence and my time in Athens – that what matters is how the people you want to reach view you. I don’t care so much about how a 60-year-old Democrat-voting, middle-class, recently-retired person views anarchism. Obviously, I prefer that we reach the point where they are sympathetic to us but as a first step, I care about the marginalized: I care about youth; I care about those who were willing to fight next to us; I care about the people of color in York who see that, “Oh yeah, the 50 kids dressed in black come to my neighborhood and fight Nazis, they’re on my side. I can depend on these people. I can trust them. Let’s hear, maybe, what they have to say. Let’s develop a relationship with each other.” I care about the immigrant who understands, holy shit, the architecture of borders and paperwork really directly affects my life, and these people are saying “Fuck that I’m going to stand next to you, I don’t care what paper you have or what language you speak.” And I thought that our militance and our combativeness and the visibility of it – that’s why we were more proponents of mass action than clandestine action – was a way to speak to those people.

Just to be clear, because people sometimes have difficulty understanding that two things can be true at the same time. This doesn’t mean that all the other ways of communicating with people don’t matter or are less important, or whatever, but this was a very spectacular one with which we could reach a lot of people very quickly. That’s why we were adamant about doing all the other legwork. For those familiar with Barricada and with me, the fact that nobody could accuse us of not doing the other work, and only being there for the spectacular work. We literally published a monthly magazine, sat in a hundred meetings a day, and went around neighborhoods distributing flyers. If there was grunt work to be done, we did it, end of story. That was one aspect.

The other one is that we really did feel that the experiences and the experience that people took from these mass confrontations increased their agency, and it increased the sense of what was possible when they went back to the local communities and day-to-day struggles. Cases can be made both ways, and with most things in life, it’s not black or white. It’s not always good. It’s not always bad. It depends on how that mobilization goes in the context of that city. I’ll illustrate it real quick with two examples, which could be Quebec City and Gothenburg. So Quebec City is actually a long chapter in the book, because I thought it’s the one that best illustrates that dichotomy between grassroots organizing, workplace organizing, community organizing, and a large-scale summit where a horde of anarchists from other cities descends on the city. But in Quebec City, we had a very good interplay of both of those things, because first of all, it’s a city with a relatively developed culture of resistance, at least for North American standards. NEFAC [North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists] was relatively strong and well implanted into a few community and workplace organizations. There were months-and-months of groundwork to reach out to the local community. There were open meetings. There were thousands upon thousands of flyers given out. By the time the summit came around, the local community had reached the conclusion, “Okay, these people are on our side, and the occupying, invading army are the thousands of cops.”

TFSR: And this after a recent bad experience that a lot of people had with a riot in the city, right?

TR: Exactly, exactly. And it was actually the work of anarchists that in the popular neighborhood, a “popular” is probably not the right term in English. But like the working-class neighborhood work. That’s not the word either. But anyway, we were the ones responsible for the fact that not a window was touched. And as big a fan as I am of the anarchist riot, it just wasn’t right in this context, and it was an act of great self-discipline. Nobody touched anything. Again, it wasn’t a coincidence. We had lots of meetings. There was a whole structure, both militant and not, that went into “Let’s do things correctly. Let’s focus on the actual targets. Let’s not blow the social credit” – it is probably not a good term either, the credit we have with these people – and “Let’s make this something that both we as a movement broadly, but also our local anarchist and activist community can take away as a building point for the future.” And if you talk to Nicholas Pheobus, who’s interviewed in the book, who’s still a community organizer and a union organizer to this day, he bluntly says, “I was against the summit. I didn’t want a horde of hippies and liberals and traveling kids coming into the city. I didn’t see the relevance to the workers of my city. But, once I realized we couldn’t avoid it, and once I realized the impacts that it was going to have on the residents of the city, we put our time and effort into it.”

It ended up going well because of all these things that I just mentioned, and it incredibly strengthened and expanded the scope of possible action within Quebec City for the next decade, not a few months, not a year, for a decade. And we opened a large squat/community center and held it for, I can’t remember now, months or a couple of years, an extended period of time, we acted with a completely different degree of audacity and possibility. We were more experienced as organizers. It was a net positive. End of story. And that was from somebody who was within our organization, very much opposed to these things. I think that’s a clear-cut example of a positive of these summits for long-term organizing.

Then there’s the Gothenburg case. I’ll be more brief on that one. Because we ripped apart the central street of Gothenburg, and because Sweden was unprepared, let’s say, for the level of confrontation with which they found themselves. There’s a whole long chapter in the book about that. I’m not going to bore you with all the details. There are a lot of very specific reasons why events in Gothenburg developed the way they did. But once they developed, the Swedish police and the Swedish state were wildly unprepared for what they had gotten themselves into, which is why they ended up shooting somebody, also because they were overwhelmed. I’m not justifying the shooting, but I’m understanding what led to it. And there, the anti-fascist movement, I ended up going back to Sweden quite a few times after the fact, and I heard conflicting voices. I heard from people who said, “No, it really killed us for a few years, because we were seen as the bad guys, the vandals. Anti-Fascist Action was a bad word. It spooked people away. People went to jail. It was a whole wave of repression. It wasn’t great.” But I also heard from people who said, “No, no, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

And as somebody who already held these ideas, to see so many comrades fighting with that level of commitment, to see them break out of police kettles, to see them jump out of windows, to see them charging police. I understand that this sounds like a romanticization of the moment of battle. I am very much guilty of that, but I also am so because I understand, or it’s my opinion, that the moment of battle against the cops and the state is also a moment of unmediated negation and rejection of those things which we oppose in theory. And it’s a moment where, at least for a brief period of time, they no longer dominate our lives or the space around us. And that’s not unimportant. It’s not unimportant as a message to our enemies, and it’s not unimportant as a message to our allies, friends, and potential allies and friends.

TFSR: Leading into the next question. At a few points in the narrative, you take lessons away from around the idea of bold and confident action, as well as the usefulness of planning to win. What would you suggest to listeners taking radical action and preparing for unexpected outcomes, in some cases, being prepared to exceed their goals in an action?

TR: Oh, boy.

TFSR: Genoa Commune? [laughs]

TR: First of all, I’m going to go from worst to best, because I’m concerned sometimes that if one reads my writing, I romanticize conflict and this moment of conflict. And to go actually back one second, I really do believe, and I stole that from Crimethinc., that there really is this feeling of: you step into another world, in the anarchist riot. I don’t know how to describe it now spontaneously, but it really is a feeling that’s difficult to describe, and that is incredibly liberating. Of course, like most things that are exhilarating and liberating in life, it comes with great danger and great risk. Before I move on to audacity and the great things that we experienced and achieved when we thought we were overshooting.

It’s critical to understand the risks, because I think sometimes, and this is going to be contradictory, but I also think it’s part of maturing, is understanding that you may think contradictory things, that you haven’t fleshed out certain ideas. Obviously, the risks are incredible. Literally, you could be permanently injured for life. You could lose an eye, you could get shot by a fascist in the street, or you could end up in prison. You could end up killed. This isn’t any of us being dramatic, just an objective fact. Of course, statistically, it is a low probability, but it’s a much higher probability than if you are a civilian going about your life. And I don’t use the term ‘civilian’ casually; it took me a long time to realize, and again, obviously, not all things are equal. We didn’t fight in a war. I didn’t see bombs exploding. It’s not the same. But I also realized that my experiences and those of people who lived their lives similarly to me are not those of a civilian. We have some different traumas. We have some different experiences. It’s just different.

As my second book gives away, I’m a big soccer fan. I live in Argentina, flares and fireworks and very loud firecrackers go off all the time, and you can imagine to this day how hard it is for me to not duck and cover every single time. I go to two games a week. And this happens 200 times a week, and still I’m like, “Oh, shit!” Or the smell of flares is very similar to the smell of things burning, or tear gas. And I realized that it heightens my adrenaline. There’s nothing going on. There’s just some dude with a beard who popped a flare. These are not things that civilians deal with.

But anyway, back to the question at hand. It’s incredibly important to be aware of those things. And I think when I speak so fondly of the experience of combat or of confrontation and of what’s possible, there’s a lot of survivorship bias there. Obviously, I am not in prison, I’m not dead, and I have all of my body in one piece, pretty much. Very ironically, I remember being told all my life, “Hey, your politics, you’re gonna get hurt. It’s gonna injure yourself. You’re gonna get injured. You’re an athlete, you should take care.” Yeah, I have more than a dozen surgeries on my body at this point, and none of them have to do with the risks I took for politics, and they all have to do with playing sports, so it’s unfortunate. But anyways, and I also have to often tell myself, “What are you talking about? You did suffer some very serious consequences.” There are things that I will talk about in upcoming books when certain statutes of limitations have expired, but I can’t step foot in large parts of the world, and I can’t visit some of my children at will. I have consequences with my work that have to do with the choices I made because of my belief in the anarchist idea, to put it loftily. So I’m not without having to suffer consequences. I actively remind myself of that sometimes.

Now, to the part about audacity, which I think is one of the central points of my book, and I hope that it is because, as far as I don’t want to be responsible for anybody taking a terrible decision, we often took decisions which we thought had a very low probability of success, and we took them because we felt that the moment demanded them, or that our conscience demanded of them, or whatever. Things that an anarchist fanatic might believe. I use the term endearingly. To us, it was, “Yeah, this sucks. This might turn out terrible, but we need to lead by example. What is anarchism if not leading by example? This has to happen. I don’t see anybody else about to do it. I guess we’re going to have to do it then.” Which, again, is informed by how I reached anarchism, which was all the previously mentioned, plus I had maybe the misfortune of picking up Nechayev and “The Catechism of the Revolutionist”. And I read about all the Russian anarchists, and it was all like anarchism wasn’t something that gave me things, it was something I had to give to. In my mind, which is why the writing ended up actually being super helpful, because it helped me understand. And again, not by myself, I don’t think I would have been capable. I understood with the help of many comrades, “Yeah, okay. But you can give other things that aren’t the ones you’ve been giving all your life. And there can be different chapters in life and in struggle, and you don’t need to relive the same one constantly until death or prison. That’s not an obligation that you should put on yourself.”

Anyways, to try to get back to. So, illustrative examples. The inaugurations, the 2001 Bush inauguration. Somebody at a spokes meeting the night before said, “Yeah, but what if we get onto the parade route? What then?” And I remember, we all smirked. I said, “I wouldn’t be too concerned.” And then, 12 hours later, there was essentially a battering ram, destroying a Secret Service checkpoint, sending the Secret Service scattering for their lives, and us to within one metal barricade and one pretty flimsy line of cops of the actual inaugural parade. And the only reason we hesitated then was because we didn’t discuss what to do at that point, because we had said, “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re never going to get there.” And that hesitation and that moment of having a spontaneous general assembly in the middle of the street between the Secret Service Point and the parade route. How endearing are anarchists, what other social movement or political movement would do such a thing? That was a situation where I think failure to expect the impossible or the most audacious possible outcome limited how far we could get. And then there’s this phenomenon of, I think, we all have internalized a lot of respect for the state and the cops because of our experiences in life. No matter how much it outrages us, we still can’t walk into the nearest supermarket and just walk out with whatever we deem that we might need. Chances are, we’ll be arrested. Insert whatever example. And we watch cops all our lives, and we have the idea that, “Oh, if you break the law, you know somebody’s going to come and arrest you. That’s how it works.” And it takes a while to break that conditioning. And maybe because I grew up in the third world, where the state doesn’t have as tight a hold on society in the day-to-day, and maybe because I was wildly ideologically fanatical, and I think that informed a lot of my decision-making. And in many regards, that fanaticism led me to decisions that had surprisingly positive outcomes. That if I had taken a less fanatical decision, the outcome was preordained. And in many cases, I got lucky, because I took a very dangerous decision and got away with it.

But for example, in Gothenburg, this is one we’ll never forget, when, during that summit, the cops surrounded the convergence center where basically most of the anti-fascists and anarchists happened to be at. There was a confrontation, etc. Eventually, we had to retreat into the school building, and the cops were all around the outside. There were like 400 or 500 of us, and I remember with a few like-minded comrades going up to the second or third floor and looking out the windows. I can’t believe seeing just hundreds and hundreds of comrades surrendering themselves to the cops. And for us, it was like, “Wait, yeah, I’m sure the chances are we’re gonna get arrested, but if I’m gonna get arrested, it’s gonna be with a helmet on and trying to break through these lines somehow. I’m not gonna turn myself over. Have we lost our minds?”

Hey, I’m trying not to be judgmental. But for us, it was something unimaginable. Long story short, though, we did break out in the most dramatic of ways, jumped out a window, ran through a line of cops, climbed on a container, and flew into the crowd on the other side. It was an incredibly audacious, memorable, and inspiring thing for us and for others, and it was only possible because for us, it was you either go down fighting or you don’t go down. The same in Barcelona, there were cops swinging. They had surrounded us. I was gonna put my head down, cross my arms, and hope they don’t break a bone, and miraculously, I was on the other side of the cops somehow, etc, etc, etc. I think that mentality changes your reality. It doesn’t come without potential serious consequences. But what is anarchism, if not a bet on something that’s difficult and dangerous in the hopes of a radically different reality at the end of that road?

TFSR: Yeah, even in the approach of reflecting on Fukuyama’s statement about the end of history, which is a cruel phrase of the Marxist idea of a stateless, propertyless society, or whatever, the end of the dialectic. When that is what is being presented to you, and you’re like, “No, no, actually,” You do miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take. And I totally agree about the idea of consequences and unforeseen consequences, but even outside of those specific actions, I’m sure there’s a million examples that folks who had written a book about community organizing could have brought up to say, like, “Yeah, I didn’t think talking to that guy that I thought was racist down the hallway about how the plumbing was messed up in the house when we were trying to organize a tenants union in the place would actually lead to finding out that dude can work with his neighbors.” You know what I mean? Different scale, maybe a little less of an exciting story than crowd surfing over a line of cops after making your way along a bunch of metal containers or whatever.

TR: I do want to make two points, which I think are important. I skipped over one of them before. It is important, and this is also something that I’ve gone over with comrades many, many times, to expect the best, to hope for the best, to plan for the best, but to be prepared for the worst. And you need to do that when taking action that could endanger your life. You need to do that for a couple of reasons. One is self-preservation. You need to be mentally prepared for what could come. For sitting in a jail cell, for not seeing your friends and family, for losing your job, and for sustaining an injury. You’re best served if mentally you’ve run these scenarios through your head, and they are not surprises, if the time comes. It shouldn’t be your overarching thought, because just like in the sphere of sporting competition, what you should be doing is visualizing and imagining and planning for success. But you can’t neglect the consequences, and that’s also something that in affinity groups or organizations, people should demand of the comrades and friends around them, because the person who is not prepared for the worst possible case is a danger to everybody. That’s the potential snitch.

TFSR: Yep, that makes sense.

TR: And again, I don’t say that in a bad way. It might be the person, and it never crossed their minds that they could be facing a 20-year sentence. That’s the person most at risk and most vulnerable to being preyed on by the state. You need to make sure that people understand what they’re going into. That was the one. And the other, I do want to make a positive point. There was a recent text from Crimethinc. “Safer at the front,” which I highly recommend. I think it has a lot to do with what we’re discussing about audacity, about how a) it creates a lot of moments which are net positives for us as a movement, but also just even from a basic self-preservation perspective. And there’s also something I discussed a lot with comrades with whom I worked in this regard. It’s counterintuitive, but you’re safer at the front or in the proverbial front, I’m speaking of the example of mass militants and mass confrontation. Statistically, most arrests are not of the person in the front wearing a helmet and fighting the cops. They are people who are in less organized sections of the mobilization, of stragglers, of people who are not as well prepared. Those make up the bulk of the arrests and charges. If you want to be best protected, your best chances are by preparing yourself properly and being around serious people. It comes with higher potential consequences if caught, but a lower statistical chance of being caught.

TFSR: And you are more likely to get hit by a less-than-lethal round, too.

TR: That is also true. I have to apologize. I really try, but obviously, I have a couple of decades of conditioning, of having normalised certain things.

TFSR: Sure, sure. Well, that was it for the questions that I had scripted out. And I’m really glad that we got to have this conversation. Except for that, do you have a sense of when the statute of limitations is going to run out, and the next book can come out?

TR: Actually, the next book is only about Argentina and the uprising of 2001, but it weaves in these two stories which seem unrelated, but end up having a lot to do with each other, which are Racing Club, which is a football club in Argentina, winning its first championship in 35 years, and the uprising of December of 2001, both of which happened within the same week. And I use that book to weave these two stories together and tell the history of anarchism in Argentina and how it informed a lot of the creation of the Argentine soccer clubs, which are actual clubs in Argentina. They’re not franchises. They’re not some businessman’s property. They are clubs with members and votes and elections and social centers and different activities, etc, etc. And that has to do with them being founded way back in the day by immigrant collectives and by political groups, anarchist, socialist, communist, etc, as places for workers to have leisure and athletic time. Anyways, I weave those two stories together to their culminating point in December of 2001, and I talk about the neoliberal crisis of the ’90s, the dictatorship of the ‘’70s, etc. That one is coming out in January 2026, so in a few months.

TFSR: That’s exciting.

TR: Then the one about Genoa. I think it’s called the Battle of Genoa: The G8 Summit of 2001 and the Genoa Commune. I’m pretty sure that’s the title. That one comes out basically right on the 25-year anniversary of the Genoa mobilization. Comes out in July of ‘26. And those are all outgrowths of PM basically said, “Yeah, just write and then we’ll figure it out.” At one point, I was like, “Ah, it’s like 1000 pages. It might be too much.” So we left an extract of Genoa in Another War, but we basically pulled it out and made it its own book. And we completely pulled out what was Argentina and made it its own book. I do want to say just because it’s something that makes me happy, and I hope will make other people happy, as you might have noticed, Another War is pretty generously illustrated, which is something I put a lot of effort into. It was important to me to convey as much as possible the spirit of the moment, the look and feel of the moment. And I feel like, obviously, there’s only so much you can tell. Showing goes a long way. Another War is pretty generously illustrated, but the Argentina book has over 150 illustrations. It’s a very, very graphic project.

There’s Genoa in ‘26 and then basically, what’s the continuation of Another War, which is called the Anarchist International, is the fourth book, which, in theory, should be, I guess, January of ’27. But that’s the only one that I’m not done writing. I am maybe halfway through. And I’m not gonna lie, and not to get all melodramatic here again, possibly, as I’ve been writing it, I’m realizing, “Oh yeah, this is harder to write significantly.” Because for Another War, I consciously made the effort of putting myself in the mindset of a young, early 20s anarchist fanatic, where everything is onward and upward, and we only ever win, basically. So it’s easy, it’s a nice place to be in mentally. Obviously, as that movement dies out and we become orphans of the movement, those of us who didn’t re-assimilate into society and start looking for ways to continue to fight in other contexts, obviously, when you’re not riding the high tide of a movement, things become more difficult, and our forms of action become different and maybe more militant. And the consequences of those actions, obviously, are according to that sometimes. There’s a character arc and a development. The mood changes. Things get real; the subject matter becomes more traumatic. So it takes me more time just because it’s less black and white; it’s more nuanced. It’s more difficult for me to make the conscious decision of, “All right, today, I may be in a bad or in a good mood, but I’m going to sit now and relive all the trauma of when I got expelled from wherever, when I was arrested from wherever, or how many times I couldn’t see my kid.” It’s not quite as fun. It’s taking a little longer.

TFSR: But I think for folks that live through those eras, or maybe some of the same situations, it could be pretty helpful to hear someone else speak to those things.

TR: Hopefully.

TFSR: Just quickly, how do you feel about this being described as the sequel to Evasion?

TR: I see you’re in on that gossip.

TFSR: [laughs] Bee mentioned it to me, and I was just like, “Am I going to be able to have this interview or is that person [bleeped]” “No, no, no. Different author.” Okay, that’s fine.

TR: Oh, wow, okay. Oh, that’s gossip I don’t have. When do we stop recording here?

TFSR: Oh, I can stop recording now.

TR: No, I don’t mind. I just don’t know what I’m allowed to- You know that gossip, I didn’t mention it because I feel like aside from a handful of people whom might still be around, it’s probably boring minutia. I know those of us who were around are like, “Oh, that’s funny.” I’m pretty sure for most of the world, it’s, “What are you people even talking about?”

TFSR: That’s why I think I might just cut this because even though they did reprints of them after the warehouse burned in Olympia, I don’t really want to even utter that name if it’s going to get someone to curiously go and look up the text.

TR: I don’t want to lose credibility here as a serious person, but I think, as light summer reading, Evasion is fucking great. I literally to this day, if I go to the beach or something, that might be what I take, because it’s just some dude’s random, pleasant, low-intensity adventures. Good for him, yeah. That’s all it means to me. For me, it has next to zero political validity – is not the word I’m looking for, but something around there, and it has some things that enrage me. Like the whole poverty, homeless, you’re not doing it right, because I understand that that’s not the reality, and that’s exactly why we were so critical of it back then, like, “What the hell are you saying? This is outright insulting for working people, people with families. Have you lost your mind?” But if you’re a young, 20-something-year-old with no responsibilities to anybody except yourself, and you choose to live that way, cool, great. Good for you. And if you want to write about your adventures, yeah, obviously, they’re entertaining, because they’re very different from what most people’s lives are. And it spoke to us and to me specifically, because, as I think I gave away in our talk, anarchism, for me, was nothing but just a constant bombardment of responsibilities. You need to do that. You need to give it your all it demands. And that’s why it was always very much at war. We even had a term for it. If we had called it lowest-common-denominator anarchism, it’s like, “Oh no, we can’t do this thing because one person can’t do it.” No, anarchism is for us, a set of obligations based on our conscience, and not everything has to be for everybody. If you start an anarchist coding collective tomorrow, I can’t show up there and be like, “Oh no, you can’t do this because I don’t know how to code, and I’m not learning.” I just shouldn’t be in that collective. What is the problem here?

TFSR: Yeah.

TR: So we thought it was great entertainment, and we were, but we were very critical, because obviously, we’re around at the same time, we were super sectarian. If you were familiar with us, you might have experienced it.

TFSR: My familiarity is from Green Anarchy and the AJODA [Anarchy, A Journal Of Desire Armed], actually. There would be the regular commentaries about what NEFAC is up to, because I was on the green side of things on the West Coast at the time, and I was hoping that there was going to be more about what was going on inside of NEFAC. I know that the bulletins are there and everything, but if anyone ever wrote an actual history of what happened and what y’all engaged with, I don’t need to hear like dirty details of who was fighting who, or whatever, but that’d be pretty interesting.

TR: It could be for another time, if you’d like, or just between us, I have no problem, happily. We had a bit of a “true line” struggle, to use Maoist terms, within the organization, which was the people like us who wanted to stay within movements, as well as having different fronts of specific struggles in our cities. And then people who really wanted to go a more classic route. The way Black Rose ended up going, for example. The NEFAC, at its height, just in Boston, there were like five collectives. It’s crazy. And yet, there’s nothing left to that. Nothing. Which is unfathomable, because a lot of times I’m like, “Oh, I’d love to go back to Boston. I’d love to visit,” and I’m like, “You’ll just get depressed. It’ll just be sad, like nothing is left. It’s just a place.”

But anyways, to close up, with Crimethinc., I’m sure you have this gossip. You have probably other stuff. We beefed publicly a lot, which is not important. That’s something that I say a lot in the book. It’s important to defend your ideas, but it’s also important to look kindly upon those with whom, at the end of the day, you probably have 99.9% more in common than with anybody else on this earth. We were trying to defend, we saw ourselves, I’m embarrassed to say this, as the defenders of the ideological purity and image of anarchism from the green, primitivist, anti-organizationist trash. Zerzan even canceled visiting Boston because word got around that we were going to pie him. Which is true. That was not a rumor; that was true, and I was very disappointed that he didn’t show up. But Crimethinc. ended up doing great work. And if you have to ask me today, from the outside looking in, who seems to be the best organ of anarchism and who puts out the best ideas and in the most comprehensible and easy to absorb way, I think it’s Crimethinc. Hands down. They outlasted us by two decades, so I’m guessing maybe they were doing something right and we weren’t.

TFSR: Or spite. Maybe they just had more spite. Thomas, thank you so much for taking the time and for writing the book, and I am really excited to check out the next parts.

TR: No, no, thank you so much for the podcast.