This week on The Final Straw, we feature a conversation between our occasional host, Scott, and adrienne maree brown. For the hour, Scott and adrienne speak about “We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice”, her latest booklet available through AK Press, as well as sci-fi, abolition, harm, accountability and healing.
adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit. More of their work can be found at adriennemareebrown.net
If you like Scott’s interview style, check out their interviews with Kristian Williams on Oscar Wilde and Eli Meyerhoff on higher education and recuperation. Also, to hear an interview with Walidah Imarisha, who co-authored “Octavia’s Brood” with adrienne.
This week, I spoke with John from the Working Class History collective and host of their WCH podcast. We spoke about the new book, “Working Class History: Everyday Acts of Resistance“, that WCH has published through PM Press, their archives, methodology, the project of popularizing working class, movement and human-sized history and a bunch more. [00:05:53]
If you thirst for more conversation with John, you’re in luck as Firestorm Books will be hosting a presentation with him about the book on February 25 from 7-8:30pm eastern or UTC – 5. You can find out more at Firestorm.Coop/Calendar.
This week on the show, you’ll hear two segments: chat with Spencer Sunshine on the far right and the government’s reaction following the riot on January 6th in DC and some perspectives on political content removal and social media from anarchist media platforms ItsGoingDown and crimethInc.
First up, anti-fascist researcher Spencer Sunshine talks about the aftermath of the January 6th putsch attempt in DC, mainstream media and Democrat narratives of concerning domestic terrorism, reporting of participation of law enforcement and military in the riot, anti-fascist research, what the stepping down of Trump has meant for his radicalized base and Spencer’s thoughts on claims of rehabilitation by former White Nationalists like Matthew Heimbach. There was a good article published by IGD on the state’s response to January 6th and what it can mean to anti-repression activists here. Also, a great place to keep up on what’s going on in the far right in the so-called US, check out IGD’s “This Week In Fascism” column, soon to be a podcast.
Then, you’ll hear the main host from the ItsGoingDown Podcast and a comrade from CrimethInc (both affiliates of the Channel Zero Network) talking about implications for anarchists and antifascists of the silencing of far right platforms and accounts and how similar moves have silenced the anti-authoritarian left. We talk about perspectives the media may have missed around “deplatforming” by tech giants like Patreon, Facebook and Twitter and how easily the normalization of ejecting non-mainstream narratives follows the trail of profit and power, and the importance of building our own platforms and infrastructure.
The following is a conversation with ShineWhite. ShineWhite is the former spokesperson for the National White Panther Organization, a part of the United Panther Movement. There was quite recently a split in the UPM and ShineWhite is now affiliated with the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party.
In this conversation, ShineWhite talks about the White Panther Organization that he was representing at the time of this chat, how he became politicized in North Carolina Prisons, the terrible conditions amidst the covid pandemic and beyond, anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizing in the NCDPS system, the use of the Security Threat Group status in NC prisons and reprisals he’s faced for his call out in 2018 for NC prisoners to participate in a Prison Strike which dovetailed well with the Nationwide Prison Strike of that year as well as other organizing.
You can write ShineWhite at the time of this publication at the following address, using ShineWhite only on the inside of the letter:
Joseph Stewart #0802041
Alexander CI
633 Old Landfill Rd,
Taylorsville, NC 28681
You can hear the Sean Swain segment, read with the help of Nichole of Pynk Spots podcast (member of the Channel Zero Network) starting at [00:45:43]. More info on the subject can be found at KilledByPolice.Net
Social Media & Transcription
Just a brief announcement. TFSR is continuing it’s Patreon push to pay for transcription work of our episodes to allow our guests voices to get further. If you want to help in the process and have some extra moneys, for every recurring donation of over $10 we get we are closer to paying for another week a month of transcription. You can learn more at our Patreon. For people that donate at that level and above, we’ll be sending a zine a month, plus other thank-yous.
We are also going to experiment with a couple of new social media platforms. While we don’t suggest people join the Telegram Platform for organizing on, if you’re already on there you can find our telegram channel to find our episodes, found at T.Me/TFSRadio. Soon, we will be starting to post to Kolektiva video platform, similar to our youtube account.
This week, Bursts spoke with Bennu Hannibal Ra Sun, co-founder of the Free Alabama Movement and the National Freedom Movement, which is helping coordinate prisoner-led organizing across the so-called US. Bennu just finished a 5 year period in segregated housing for his organizing efforts. For the hour, they talk about the National Network coordination, the continuation of slavery from chattel slavery in which black and brown bodies were private property to the modern slavery of mass incarceration, pandemic behind bars, the importance of platforming prisoners in their struggles, the January Boycott FAM is conducting against prison industries, reform efforts and more.
This week on the Final Straw, we’re sharing another audio gift from comrades. Isbel Diaz Torres is a participant in the Taller Libertario Alfredo López / ABRA in Havana, Cuba, recorded in late 2018. In this chat, Isbel talks about the ABRA which is the only openly anarchist organization in Cuba at the time, about the LGBTQ movement and abortion rights which are both facing repression due to pressure from Cuban Evangelical and Catholic churches on the Cuban government, political discourse and difference, government co-optation, neoliberalism, animal rights, repression of dissent and the erasure of anarchist history.
In May of 2019, Isbel and his boyfriend Jimmy Roque Martinez were arrested on their way to the annual Conga Against Homophobia and Transphobia, essentially Cuba’s main Pride Parade and detained 24 hours in order to block their participation. As Isbel talks about in the interview, the state-run National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) had bowed to pressure from right wing Christian groups and canceled the event so activists were planning to hold an autonomous Conga resulting in several more arrests. A report with updates on the subject can be found at the Rosa Negra / Black Rose Federation website. You can also find an audio statement from Mario from the TLAL space on the subject in Spanish via BRRN.
This week on the The Final Straw you’ll hear me speaking with Cora Borradaile, who sits on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center and works around issues of tech security in movements and is an associate professor at OSU.
We discuss the use of phone cloning by US Marshall’s and other law enforcement while engaging protestors in Portland, OR. We talk about UpTurn’s recent report concerning widespread use of cellphone extraction tools to copy and search the contents of cell phones captured during interactions with cops. Finally, we talk about Keyword Searches, where (often without warrants) google hands over information from peoples google searches to law enforcement.
We’ll also be presenting a segment by Sean’s fiance, Lauren, about his current silencing and the injustice of his case. More on president-in-exile Sean Swain can be found at Swain2020.Org and SeanSwain.Org.
. … . ..
Transcription of the conversation with Cora Borradaile
BOG: So I’m speaking with Cora Borradaile who is on the advisory board of the Civil Liberties Defense Center or CLDC and we spoke before about a range of issues in May of this year, and before the George Floyd uprising and the resulting ACAB Spring. During the uprising researchers, journalists, and activists saw that applications of new, or new to us, surveillance methods were being used by security forces against the populace in the so called US, so I was hoping to pick Cora’s brain a bit about this and see, especially since upcoming months in the US also might get a little spicy with the election and all. Thank you Cora very much for taking the time to have this conversation.
Cora Borradaile: Yeah, it’s great to talk to you.
BOG: So just to list off a few things, like this summer we saw the use of military drones surveilling and sharing information with law enforcement in Minneapolis, lots of militarized gear being brought out in the streets across the US, or for late May at least protests against police violence, and collusion with para-state white supremacists have been ongoing in Portland, Oregon. In July we saw the deployment of federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) including Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and the Department of Justice (DOJ) sent out to fight against protesters in the streets of Portland and attack and kidnap people. Including journalists from that and other cities. the US Marshalls also had their own aerial surveillance to track crowds in Portland, it came out this summer. On the tech side of things, the public got wind, apparently from leaks within the department of homeland security, that DHS had been cloning activists’ cell phones. Could you talk a little bit about this and what cell phone cloning is?
CB: Yeah, from that report their were very few details so a lot of it is guesswork as to what could possibly be going on. I could imagine two different ways in which their cloning cellphones- One which is scarier than the other. The more likely I think, is the less scary version which is if they manage to physically get your cell phone, like if you’re arrested and your cell phone is confiscated from you. Even if it’s confiscated temporarily, then they’re copying everything from your cell phone and possibly making a new cell phone that behaves just like your cell phone. So it would allow them to intercept calls possibly receive messages that you were intended to receive.
The scarier version but probably less likely, is the ability for them to be able to do the same thing without having the need to confiscate your phone to do so. That feels unlikely to me that they were doing that. If it was some sort of remote cloning I would gather that they were just cloning the sort of network ID of your phone, and not the contents of your phone. This would still allow them to do things like intercept calls, and intercept data, but in both scenarios I think end-to-end encryption (E2E) apps that you use like Signal or Keybase or Wire, that enable E2E encryption, I think the messages you’re receiving there would still be safe and that the cloned device shouldn’t be able to have the keys enabled to decrypt those messages that were intended for you. And even traffic that is encrypted – if you are visiting a website on your phone that your accessing via HTTPS, where the S stands for Secure – I think that even they wouldn’t be able to see the contents of that web page either because there is a key exchange that happens between you and the web server that they would have to play man in the middle on. Which is more complicated to do in a way that you wouldn’t be able to tell that something was going wrong.
All that’s to say, it’s still scary and I think if you have poor encryption practices like keeping your phone in an unlocked form, they have access to all of your encryption keys for things like Signal and Keybase and whatever other secure messaging apps you might be using. You should do whatever you need to do to alert everyone you contact with to delete your contact from their messages, groups, and so on. And if you have a phone that is confiscated – and certainly in an unlocked form – I would not trust that phone again. If your phone is confiscated but it was locked at the time and presumably you have a good password so they can’t easily unlock your phone, I would still maybe do a factory reset of your phone and start fresh by installing everything over again.
BOG: So, I’m not sure what the basis of this is, but conversations that I was having with friends when we were talking about the latter of the two instances that you were talking about- the hypothetical that remotely the cloning of the network ID or SIM connection could be done. It would be similar to you getting a new phone but having the same number, and that if Signal was installed on that device and it was connecting to the same phone number, by a Man in the Middle attack via a cloned SIM, it would appear that the interception could still be happening but that everyone would see a notation that there had been a change in safety number. Is that maybe what would happen?
CB: Yes. That is perfectly said. Right, so for them to be able to both clone your phone and intercept messages without those “safety number has changed” messages happening would be very, very difficult. So yeah, certainly if there are reports of anybody who’s had a confiscated phone and then all of a sudden all of their contacts are noticing that their safety number has changed with them, that would be super interesting to find out. —
BOG: –Or they stopped getting messages.
CB: Also horrifying.
*Laughter
BOG: Yeah. You know, they noticed that they stopped getting messages, everyone notices that the safety number changed, then that means that hypothetically the cloned phone or whatever would now be in those chats.
CB: So I don’t know if it’s as simple as that, because when you add a new device on Signal all the other devices get a notification of that.
BOG: Oh I see. So if I had a desktop and at least one cell phone that was getting messages… Yeah, but if that device was no longer getting new messages because the traffic was being routed to a different device, you wouldn’t like –
CB: Right so, your contacts should at the very least get the notification saying that the safety number has changed. If it’s a remote clone I think the only way in which the cloned phone would be able to read the messages in preexisting groups, for example, would be if the device was physically confiscated and copied. Because there are encryption keys that are used to start those conversations which are needed.
BOG: Do you mean the messages that were in loops before?
CB: No, to continue to receive messages from conversations that had already been going on. If someone started a new conversation after the cloning then the other people in the conversation might not be able to notice, but if you were continuing a conversation that had started before the cloning I don’t think you would be able to get that information without having physical access to the device and being able to copy over the encryption keys that were used to start those conversations.
BOG: Because they’re being stored on the phone and not on the server.
CB: That’s right, yeah. So for example, when you add a new Signal device part of what happens is copying over the encryption keys needed to continue conversations. And there’s a QR code that, say if you have Signal on your phone and you start using Signal on your desktop, you link those 2 devices so that both devices are able to receive and decrypt messages that go to you as an identifier.
BOG: If you know that if someone in your group or one of your friends has changed their number, whats a good verification?
CB: Don’t message them on Signal, and ask them, right? Because who knows who’s answering. Try to find a different form of communication even if its via friend or via a regular phone call, but ideally via email or some other band that is unrelated to your phone would be perfect to ask them, ‘Hey, I noticed your Signal safety number’s changed, what went on?’ Most of the time, or every time this has happened to me, the answer’s been ‘Oh, I had to reinstall my operating system on my phone’ or ‘I dropped my phone in a pool and had to get a new phone’. That’s usually the reason for a safety number changing, but definitely what you want to do is find a different way to ask that, other than using Signal and ideally other than using the phone. Especially if we are worried about cloned phones. Because if you just use a normal SMS text message to send to your friend and your friends phone has been cloned, then it could be the cops responding saying ‘Oh, yeah I had to get a new phone’.
BOG: I’ve seen some people do a thing where they ask someone in a group, when their safety number changed, ‘Hey could you leave a voice memo with your name and current time that you’re recording the memo and send it into the loop?’ And that way everyone hears this person’s voice, and it’s the time when they specifically get asked to record the memo so it’s outside of Enemy-Of-The-State-level NSA level operation that’s probably not somebody compiling an automated voice message in that person’s voice.
CB: Yeah, that’s a pretty good method for doing that. As you point out, synthesizing peoples’ voices can be done, but taking into account what your threat level is – are you someone who they’re going to be throwing everything at and be able to synthesize your voice in a very short time? For the protest movements we’ve seen, probably not. However if you are the leader of a protest group, hmm… If you are someone that they’re really going to be going after because they think that going after this one person will completely destroy the movement – which I don’t think is the kind of movement time that we are in right now which is good, to avoid those specific people who could really destroy a movement – that’s a pretty good method.
BOG: If you could speak to that prior scenario, is that actually copying the contents of a phone? I think that was the subject of the recent article by Upturn called Mass Extraction —
CB: That’s right.
BOG: If you could talk a little bit about what the findings were there. I was kind of surprised yet kind of not surprised to see the local law enforcement here in Asheville spent at least $49,000, according to their studies, on cell phone extraction tools. But what are mobile device forensic tools, and what do you know about them, how widespread and what kind of stuff do they do?
CB: So these things have existed for a long time. We’ve been talking about them at CLDC for a long time but this Upturn report is really wonderful for just as you say, how widespread they are. Small police departments have them, medium police departments spend hundred of thousands of dollars on access to this over the course of 5 years, and some of the capabilities were actually, I suppose, not really surprising. But reading them all in one place and knowing how low cost access to that technology is was sobering.
So these cell phone extraction devices, they come in different forms but the kind that is most popularly seen is a small stand alone device that you plug a cell phone into and that stand alone device either tries to break into that phone if it’s locked or otherwise just copies all of the content of that phone for later analysis. Some of the things that were surprising to me was how much was available even when the phone was locked and encrypted. There’s a lot of data that is existing in an unencrypted form on your phone.
For example say your phone is locked, you receive a phone call and the name of your contact still shows up, right? It’s not the name that your contact is sending you, its not metadata associated with that contact. if your mother is calling you, it probably shows up “Mom” in your phone, and the reason it says that is because your address book has an entry with that phone number and the name “Mom” attached to it. So your address book entries are existing in an unencrypted state, for example.
Some of the other things that were sort of surprising that were pointed out, that exist in this unencrypted state even though your phone was in a locked condition, were Telegram files and Discord files, and files associated with Google mail. I think a lot of this stuff could just be from bad decisions that the app developer made. Like Telegram is not necessarily focused on security, and so for convenience or speed they may just not be hiding that information behind the device encryption.
There was definitely some reporting in that Upturn report about being able to brute force guess passwords and so there are some things that you can do to protect yourself from that, which is to have a long enough password. Or if you have an Apple device you can enable your phone to self-wipe if you have 10 incorrect guesses, for example. Which if you have a small child at home maybe you don’t want to do because I almost guarantee you will end up with a wiped phone by the end of the week.
BOG: With encrypted files, if there are messages or what-have-you that are saved in an encrypted section on the phone would that just get copied and saved, and tested against decryption later? Is that the idea?
CB: I think what’s happening in most cases is they’re taking a copy of encrypted information, possibly in the hopes that they could decrypt it later or in the hopes that they would be able to get the unlock password from you by other means, like a court order for example. You know, they did point to instances where they were still able to bypass security features like encryption because of security flaws, which is very common. If your phone is badly out of date and you haven’t been keeping up with installing security updates, always install your security updates. That’s a common thing in computer security, that there are flaws that can be taken advantage of that can allow bad actors to break through otherwise strong encryption. But I think if you’re keeping an up-to-date phone, I think that’s the best that any of us can do.
BOG: Another point that was interesting in the article, and I’m glad that they pointed it out, was the sorts of instances when this is being applied to people. You hear about Apple being pressed to give up encrypted information or give a back door when there’s a mass shooting, or a sort of incident that may involve multiple conspirators and the loss of life – something very serious. But in the Upturn article they talk about how through their research and requesting of records it showed that a lot of law enforcement agencies, even local law enforcement agencies, are attempting either to pressure people whose devices they get a hold of or apply for warrants to copy peoples’ contents of their phones for minor things that they’re being accused of.
Like if it’s something like shoplifting or graffiti or public intoxication, petty drug charges, sex work, these are a few of the examples that they give. Considering the way that policing works in the United States, and this shouldn’t surprise anyone in the listening audience, police tend to focus their attention on poor and racialized parts of the population. So if law enforcement gets people’s data, whether by asking for it and pressuring people into it or by using devices, and then saves it for a later investigation and there’s no sort of oversight of this, it seems very likely that the sorts of data that they’re collecting could be used to build future cases or for building profiles on people for things they haven’t actually been accused of so far.
CB: Yup. Phishing for data. Maybe they’re just trying to justify the purchase of this stuff. In Oregon they spend half a million dollars on cellphone extraction technologies, Portland alone spent a quarter of a million in a period of 4-5 years. That’s a lot of money to justify, right? If you’re only using it 3 times a year for homicide cases then maybe you can’t justify actually spending that money and you would just farm out, whenever you do need it for something like that, either to a fusion center or a pay-per-service from one of these companies. So it might just be they’re partially covering their asses and saying ‘Oh yeah, we use it 10 times a week’.
But we’ve also seen examples of law enforcement agencies that just collect so much data, almost for the purpose of just having data. The LAPD famously uses Palantir which is a horrible company, to do all sorts of data analytics for their region collecting data on pizza purchases and parking passes and all sorts of things that don’t seem relevant at all to law enforcement, but it’s almost a compulsion to just collect the data and see what they can do with it.
BOG: Another thing that I had seen was Google was recently in the news when court documents were unsealed in Detroit relating to witness intimidation and arson by an associate of R. Kelly, and this in regards to keyword warrants. Are you familiar with this case and could you talk a little about keyword warrants and what they are?
CB: Yeah, so keyword warrants. I hadn’t heard about them before this news story came out earlier this month, but it’s not surprising. I certainly was familiar with just how many requests for data Google gets and responds to, affecting hundreds of thousands of user accounts every year in the US. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Google, instead of just getting requests saying ‘Hey, I’d like to have all of the emails associated with email address thefinalstraw@gmail.com’, which seems to be the more straight forward type of request related to a specific account that might be included in a law enforcement issue… probably not though. To expand that to ‘Hey, I want to know all of the information you have about people who searched for ‘The Final Straw’ ’. So that’s the keyword warrant or the keyword search request that happened in this case. We’ve seen examples of Geofencing warrants happening for Google Maps asking for anybody who has searched for an address within a given region, that there were a few stories about over the last year. So yeah of course, the data is there why not ask for it? Google is not going to say no, why would they?
BOG: Basically, again by collecting information based on its availability then attempting to apply it. So in this case with the arson, they asked for people who had searched for the address of the house where a car got set on fire within a certain period of time and then cross-referenced that to a Geofence of what phones were in the area within a period of time, and were able to pinpoint and place charges. And not all of the information came out from that, some of the court records are still sealed. It’s kind of a frightening application of technology and as you say, a very happy-to-oblige industry.
CB: Yeah. I think the potential for false arrests and harassment of people, like say you happen to find someone in that area who you don’t like for one reason or another you can arrest them and hold them for a while even if you have no evidence. Harassment arrests are used all the time by law enforcement and have been for decades, centuries probably.
BOG: So I guess… use DuckDuckGo if you’re going to be committing an – – – – ?
*Laughter
CB: I would avoid Google, I definitely use DuckDuckGo. I prefer DuckDuckGo for selfish reasons, I find the personalized search aspect of Google to be somewhat infuriating. When I search for something I don’t want to find what Google thinks I want to find, I want to find the documents related to my search. It’s hard to avoid these tools, but I think DuckDuckGo, anything but g-mail for email please, and there are alternatives to Google Docs as well. Cryptpad seems to be getting better. Every month there are improvements. It offers collaborative online editing to documents, all E2E encrypted.
BOG: I am going to presume with this question that you are not a lawyer, am I correct in that?
CB: I am not a lawyer, no.
BOG: It seems things like intercepting phone calls, peoples text messages, or getting deep into their cellphones and all of the information that’s collected in them for arguably unrelated topics, might overstep into the realm of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), or might overstep into the realm of one of those amendments that protects our rights against unfair search and seizure. That just doesn’t seem to be the case? Or in these instances is it that these methods haven’t been brought before courts to be challenged?
CB: Everything I know about the law I learned from CLDC, and Law & Order in a previous lifetime. So what I do know about these from reading various news articles and conversations with CLDC is, as pointed out by Upturn, a lot of the extraction of data from cellphones was based on consent and not a warrant. It was about a 50/50 split depending on jurisdiction. So this was probably the case of intimidation by a cop to a person with a cellphone, to say ‘Oh, well let us check your cellphone”. I’m not sure if they give full disclosure of what they mean by ‘let me check your cellphone’, right? (laughs) ‘Let me copy everything there is on your cellphone off your cellphone, if you’re not guilty of this minor misdemeanor’. You know, they’re just asking permission.
That’s one of the things CLDC shoves down the throats of everyone at their trainings, which is don’t consent to searches. Just don’t do it! Even if they’re going to go ahead and do the search, even if you’re not consenting to it, say over and over again ‘I do not consent to this search’. Have a sticker on your phone that says ‘I do not consent to this search’. Because then it can’t be used in the court of law at least. The other thing that we’ve seen over the years is, parallel reconstruction. I don’t know if I’ve seen a well researched example of this but certainly people have hinted that this a common practice, where they’ll find out something via methods that wouldn’t be admissible in the court of law and then they figure out a way to reconstruct what they know using admissible methods.
BOG: Oh like in The Wire.
CB: Yeah, exactly. So that’s something that might be why they’re getting information that they can’t necessarily use. The other part is just general intelligence work. It’s not necessarily going to be used to arrest anyone, it’s not necessarily going to be used in a court of law, but they just want to know what’s going on, and so are going to collect as much data as they can. Unless you find out about it and unless you prove harm in a court of law, then how are you going to stop it from happening? Which is why this report about the Google keyword searches and Google Geofencing searches is so important. If we can find out about that and we can get a case brought forth and have it deemed unconstitutional to do this kind of search then that would stop those kinds of requests from happening. Then you could put pressure on a company – even a company like Google – you could put public pressure on them to say ‘Don’t respond to these requests, they’ve been deemed illegal’.
BOG: There are a couple of other, I guess not insights but points in that Upturn article that I thought were useful. Like if someone deletes information on their phone, are they actually deleting information off of their phone, and are there appropriate or useful, good tools for actually wiping data off of phones or does it just kind of sit there?
BOG: –MAGNETS–
CB: I don’t know of a good tool. I think that if you do a factory reset of your phone that’s most likely to help make that data inaccessible. Even then, is it actually getting completely deleted? It might not be. You have memory on your computer or on your cellphone, and when you delete something it just kind of takes the index away… I’m trying to use an analogy that people would remember. Do people remember libraries and card catalogs? (laughs) All of my analogies are too old.
BOG: I think it’s fair, go ahead.
CB: You think people will remember?
BOG: I think so, or they’ve heard the analogy enough they’ll recognize what a card catalog is.
CB: They’ve seen a movie with an old-timey library and card catalogs?
BOG: Ghostbusters
CB: So. you have a big library with books on all the shelves and the way you know where to find a book is to go to the card catalog. You look up the book that you want and you find its listed location on the shelf and then you go to the shelf and you find the book. Well now, when you delete a file from a computer, really all you’re deleting is the card from the card catalog. So when it comes time to put a new photo in the memory of your computer or cellphone, you go to the shelf and you find out ‘Oh, there’s supposed to be space here because according to the card catalog there’s nothing stored here, so this old data must be something that I don’t need anymore, now I’m going to delete that old stuff.’ Right, ‘I’m going to remove that book from the shelf whose existence was deemed not there anymore by the card catalog, I’ll throw it away now and put my new one in.’ So it’s not until you use the memory again that the old information actually gets deleted.
BOG: At least on computers there’s – for instance I had to reinstall my operating system recently. And when I installed it I went to encrypt the home folder and the file system and it asked ‘Do you want to overwrite everything else on the hard drive?’ Is that what you’re talking about?
CB: Yeah, so that would be the equivalent of actually going to all the shelves of the old library and removing all of the old books. So that’s pretty common when you’re setting up on a computer but I’ve never seen that option on a phone. I’m wondering, does a factory reset actually delete all of that information? I haven’t noticed that myself.
BOG: Microwaves. I mean I saw –
*Laughter
BOG: Yeah, I got nothing.
CB: Drop your phone in the pool, start over.
BOG: They invented this thing called rice though, where if you put your phone into a bag of rice it extracts the water… and the data…
*Laughter
BOG: Well are there any other things you’d like to share with the audience concerning digital tech or any insights?
CB: I did want to share one thing. You asked about them getting this data, and is this illegal search and seizure. There are still strange laws that date back to the 80’s, for example e-mail can be accessed by law enforcement form somewhere like Google with just a subpoena and not a warrant, necessarily. For a law enforcement agency to get information that would otherwise be deemed illegal search and seizure, they need to get a warrant from a judge that proves probable cause for them to get that data or that physical item. But if it’s email on a server held at Google then they don’t need to prove probable cause and they just need a subpoena which is essentially just a ‘Please can I have this information’. I think that’s where these keyword searches are coming in, I’m not sure that they actually need to have a warrant for those. So that’s maybe one extra detail on that front.
BOG: In those instances it’s in one centralized place, although if your doing a keyword search… Yeah I don’t know– I guess I don’t know how Google works on the inside and if it’s just constantly categorizing what people are typing into its different services for later use and then providing that in easily digestible pills to law enforcement. If you’re sending email and it’s unencrypted, it’s probably getting Hoovered up somewhere and fully readable anyway.
CB: Depends on who your adversary is. I don’t think the Portland police department has access to a big Hoover of data on a global scale, but they certainly can ask Google for all of the emails of the activists whose email addresses they’ve extracted from the phones they confiscated during protests.
BOG: Cora, thank you so much. Cora is an associate professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University with a focus on Security State and The Adoption of More Secure Apps, and also is on the board of the CLDC. Thanks again for having this chat.
I found this interview extremely illuminating, perhaps like many other people who might not have strong ties to either academia or popular education models of learning, I had sort of written Oscar Wilde off as this kind of white dead rich guy who carried little to no relevance apart from a model of queerness that we could look back on. This interview very much proved that this isn’t the case, and that he and the circumstances around him very much influence how we as queers and as anarchists can sense historical threads that pull on our lives very tangibly today. Thanks a million to Scott for researching and conducting this interview!
You can learn more about the author, Kristian Williams, who is most known for his book Our Enemies in Blue, which is a critical history of American policing and police, at his website kristianwilliams.com.
Help Charlotte Jail Support Rebuild!
One announcement before we begin from our comrades at the Charlotte Uprising, Charlotte Jail Support has been getting extremely targeted harassment for some months from CMPD and the sheriff’s department. In times of rebellion or revolt, it is the support infrastructures that are often the most vulnerable to repression and violence. All of their supplies have either been seized or destroyed by the police, if you would like to support them re upping their much needed materials, you can Venmoing them @Ashwilliamsclt or Cash App $houseofkanautica.
This is a slightly edited transcript of Scott’s interview of Kristian Williams on Kristian’s book, Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, published in 2020 by AK Press. Thanks to Jim of the MKE Lit Supply for all the work!
Kristian Williams on The Final Straw
First aired on 9/12/2020 at https://TFSR.WTF
TFSR: I’m talking to Kristen Williams, who just published the book Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde. Kristian, would you please just introduce yourself, your pronouns, your name and any information that you think would be pertinent to the listeners of the Final Straw?
Kristian Williams: Sure. I’m Kristian Williams, author of a handful of books, probably most famously Our Enemies in Blue, which is a history of the police in the United States. As you mentioned, my most recent book is Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde, which is probably the book that has taken me the longest to write. I started working on it about 13 years ago.
TFSR: Oh wow. Is it nice to have it out? Was it a big passion project for you?
Kristian Williams: Yeah, it was the thing that I was always working on, never finishing, and had a surprisingly hard time interesting publishers. I think everyone I approached about it, their first response was, “that sounds great, but no.” Eventually AK [Press] asked to take another look at it, and I don’t know, here it is.
Scott (TFSR): Well, that’s exciting. And I’m glad [for] that. The shadow of Oscar Wilde kind of loomed large for a long time on anything that was related to him, so I’m glad that’s not still persisting, and they published the book. I also just incidentally, as an aside, I was writing my dissertation with a chapter on Wilde and got super sick during it, writing about Dorian Gray. And I ended up in the hospital, and I couldn’t finish that chapter, so I don’t know if there’s like a curse with writing on Oscar. I always thought about that. All right. Well, I’m really excited to talk to you about Oscar Wilde and anarchism. The main argument of your book is that to really understand Oscar Wilde, or at least to understand Oscar Wilde as a political thinker, we need to think about all of his art and philosophy through the lens of anarchism. And it’s really exciting to read the book and see how Wilde kind of intersected with anarchism and anarchists at the time. To read about the history, like the fear of anarchism that we’re [still] presented with today, and then just like getting another perspective on Wilde as a person, his relation to the aesthetic movement, the beginning of the queer movements, and all of these things I think still are pertinent today. I think a lot of people have heard of Oscar Wilde, maybe read a little bit or heard his epigrams, but do you think you could just give a quick overview of who he was as a figure and a person?
Kristian Williams: Sure. Let me see if I can do this at all efficiently. So, Wilde was born into the Irish aristocracy, educated at Trinity College in Dublin and then in Oxford, where he excelled in classics. Immediately, [he] became of sort of an early example of a person who was famous for being famous. Having developed a kind of celebrity and notoriety before he had really accomplished very much, [he] then leveraged that notoriety into a year long, a little bit more, lecture tour in the United States on the aesthetic movement. After that, he went on to publish a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and then really rose to prominence with a set of four society plays, which were sort of nominally comedies about the manners and dramas of the elite of English society. At the peak of his popularity he became embroiled in a dispute with the Marquess of Queensberry, because Wilde was having an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, who was Queensberry’s son, which led Queensberry toward more and more public and offensive behavior toward Wilde, which then led Wilde to file a ill-advised lawsuit for libel, which Queensberry very aptly turned back on him and produced criminal charges for gross indecency, which was the criminal term for homosexuality. That led Wilde to prison for a couple of years. He lost his family, lost his fortune, lived the short remainder of his life in exile in France and died virtually penniless.
TFSR: Thanks for that overview. And I want to touch on a few of those elements that you brought up just, [but] because this is an anarchist radio show podcast—I [want to] to start with anarchism in particular—did Wilde identify as an anarchist?
Kristian Williams: There are two occasions when he did. One was an interview in which he said, “once I was a poet and a tyrant, but now I am an artist and an anarchist.” And another, in a separate interview, he said, [when] asked about his politics, he said, “I’m a socialist, but we’re all socialists nowadays, so I must be something more. I think perhaps I’m an anarchist.” There were other occasions where he sort of flirted with the term, and probably my favorite is in a letter. He tells the story of being on a sailing trip with these two young men, and them getting caught in a storm, and it taking hours for them to get back to port. And when they got there, they were freezing cold and completely drenched and they rushed back to their hotel and ordered brandy. And the hotel proprietors sadly explained to them that because it was after 10 o’clock on a Sunday, the law prohibited him selling brandy. But given the circumstances, he decided he would just give them the brandy. And Wilde’s comment was along the lines of, “Not a bad outcome, but what utterly stupid laws” and then he finishes by saying that, “the two young men are, of course, now anarchists.”
TFSR: If I knew that that was the way to convert people, I’d be taking more sailing trips with young men. I’m always wondering. So, he used the term sometimes, but clearly anarchism and anarchists were out and about in Wilde’s time. I’m wondering a little bit what the common conception at the moment was of anarchism, and anarchists, and how it might have changed since then.
Kristian Williams: At the time, it was considered practically synonymous with terrorism, and in particular of a foreign Eastern European sort of conspiratorial, random blowing things up kind of terrorism. That reputation has in different forms haunted anarchism really since the beginning. And while the sort of bomb throwing aspect has always been very much a minority affair of what anarchism is about, it wasn’t entirely baseless. I mean, there was a tendency called propaganda by the deed, which had this theory that a spectacular attack against the symbols of authority would reveal authority to be both artificial and vulnerable and inspire the masses to an uprising. In fact [though] it never worked out that way. It was a theory that was partly developed under the circumstances of autocratic rule in Russia, and then exported into Western democracies. In Russia, where it was basically illegal to even speak about anarchism, there was a certain rationality to moving to direct attack. And that was also in a way legible to the population who was also suffering under this kind of censorship. But when it moved into the Western countries, really the effect was to baffle the population and to largely turn them against anarchism, as it became synonymous with things randomly blowing up. Wilde, in fact, in one of those interviews that I quoted earlier immediately followed his statements that he must be an anarchist with, “But of course, the dynamite policy is quite absurd.” Meaning that even at the point where he was embracing this term, partly for its shock value, he also felt like he needed to distance himself from its more extreme and somewhat bloody elements.
TFSR: And that’s interesting. Do you think that there’s a way that he uses the term specifically for it’s just like surface level or superficial subversiveness or, as you said, the shock value?
Kristian Williams: I think that he always wanted to be just shocking enough to be interesting, and not so shocking as to actually get himself into trouble. Which was a line that he was not always successful in judging, obviously. And so yeah, I would suspect that some of his rhetoric about that was chosen, like in those particular instances, [it] was chosen for the way he positioned himself outside of the mainstream. When he said, “well, I’m a socialist, but we’re all rather socialists nowadays. So I must be something more,” it suggests that he’s looking for the position, which is just slightly too far. Interestingly though, in his most directly political writing, which is called “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” what he describes is a socialism without the structures of coercion or authority. And he’s very explicit about that. He doesn’t use the term anarchism anywhere in the essay. And in fact, he begins one paragraph by saying “Communism, socialism or whatever we choose to call it,” sort of signaling that the particular distinctions may not be that important and that in any case the word is certainly not the thing that matters.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, because there’s a strategic way to use the word anarchism to get people interested, to get people to talk about things, and to use the way that it’s presented and represented in media. But then attachment to the word doesn’t necessarily help it if people are sort of doing their own thing. That was really illuminating to me to hear you put it that way. Since you brought up “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” kind of the central argument of your book is that this provides a key to give Wilde’s whole body of work a certain kind of cohesion through the lens of anarchism. I was wondering if you’d talk a little bit more more about some of the ideas that he presents in that essay. And then if you want to move on to how it shows up in other writings of Wilde’s.
Kristian Williams: He begins the essay by saying that the main value of socialism is that it would free us from the burden of living for other people. Basically, in a society where everyone’s needs were being taken care of, it would be possible for people to pursue their own interests and to develop what is unique about themselves in a way that the burden of earning a living and the responsibility for taking care of your family, your dependents and all that sort of thing really limits a person’s ability to freely explore whatever it is that they find fascinating, both in the world and of themselves. And so he starts right at the beginning by arguing that the purpose of socialism is that it would make a kind of individualism possible. And in his conception, these two notions of socialism and individualism are tightly bound together. And that it’s possible for certain extremely privileged people to exercise a kind of individualism under capitalism, but for the vast majority of humanity, their lives are too taken up with drudgery and the struggle for survival. And a socialist economy would relieve them of that set of burdens, and therefore makes individualism a universal pursuit. He argues that when that becomes available we’ll see this whole renaissance of culture and art and science and intellectual and an aesthetic sort of blossoming of the human spirit. And then at the same time, he argues that any kind of authority or coercion is corrosive of that entire project, and that therefore no authoritarian socialism would be acceptable. What’s needed is socialism as this kind of voluntary association between free and equal individuals, which I’m not the first person to note is basically the anarchist conception.
TFSR: Right. That’s interesting, the emphasis on individualism. So in the way that puts him in a different place than some of the other aesthetic aesthetes and decadents. It made me think of that famous line [from the] Goncourt brothers about, you know, living our servants do that for us. The way that Wilde talks about some people, the people who are allowed to live some version of individualism are [enabled] to create beautiful things or even to think like that. Profound thoughts are relying on the work of others to do that. So his his individualism isn’t like a kind of selfish, narcissistic individualism, but one that is trying to extend that privilege to everyone.
Kristian Williams: Exactly. And what I argue in the book is that if we take Wilde’s political writing, and in particular, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” seriously, it helps us understand a lot of his other work, and that you see [that] marriage of individualism and socialism (and that version of individualism that should not just be the special property of the aristocracy) show up in other respects. And maybe the place where that pairing is clearest is in those lectures on aestheticism that he delivered in the United States. Where in addition to talking about the importance of sort of surrounding ourselves with beautiful things and treating life itself as a kind of art, meaning making the process of living as beautiful as possible. He also talks surprisingly much about labor and about investing in the skill and the craftsmen of the workers, such that the process of work becomes a creative pursuit and is pleasurable and then also produces beautiful things. Rather than everything being simply judged by its commercial value, and the worker simply being this kind of cog in a giant capitalist machine, where all of his initiative and all of the creativity is removed from the process in order to maximize the efficiency of profit.
TFSR: Yeah, that was really exciting to me to read your argument in the book. One line that that especially stood out to me. You make the claim that while socialism is more aesthetic than economic, because, “ it takes as its model the artist, rather than a proletarian, and as much concerned to free the repressed bourgeois as the oppressed worker.” And that sticks out to me because I think you can [take as model the artist], just thinking about anarchism today. But I was wondering if you maybe would elaborate a little bit on this idea of shifting the revolutionary subject away from the traditional understanding of the workers, that kind of disciplined [and] manly person, and maybe that can also verge onto a critique of work, too. There’s a lot of anarchism goes away from this kind of idolizing of the worker as the person that will lead us to freedom. So, yeah, if you could talk a little bit about what this shift in thinking allows us to see for revolutionary politics.
Kristian Williams: Yeah. I don’t know if he had an idea of a revolutionary subject, as you put it. Like, I don’t know that he thought that there was a particular class of people who were going to be responsible for the transformation of society, or at least not a particular economic class. What I meant in that passage was that rather than seeing the proletariat as the class that would become all of humanity, and therefore the model of how human beings would be, he looked to the artist. And so part of that, I think shows the influence of William Morris, who considered himself a Marxist, but whose politics are pretty hard to fit into any current conception of Marxism. And Morris largely thought that the purpose of socialism was to—rather than sort of a standard Marxist conception where industrialization will produce a particular class of worker who will then take over society—Morris thought that the purpose of socialism was to destroy industrialization, that he wanted to get rid of the factory system and its rigid division of labor, and in particular, this conception that there was a class of people who sort of designed and created and imagined the products of the world, and then there was this other class of people who were basically just like hired hands, who just did the work by rote without any input into the process. Instead, he wanted production to take the form of skilled artisans, bringing their full creativity to their work, and also therefore experiencing the work as an expression of their creative selves and finding joy and pleasure in the process of creation. And Wilde basically took Morris’s conception on the whole, which suggests that under socialism, rather than society being organized on the factory model with this mass of proletarians, who basically just like have the position in the assembly line and do the same rote task over and over again, that society would be organized as this free collective of artists and craftsmen, who would be able to express their individualism in the creative process while also providing for the needs of the society. So I don’t know that it’s a question of the revolutionary subject. It’s more a question of like: Under socialism, is the world populated by proletarians or is the world populated by artists? And the hope was that under conditions of freedom and equality, work would be more like art and therefore the individuals doing it would be more like artists and less like assembly line workers.
TFSR: Right. And that’s interesting these ideas, like you said [with regard to] industrialization, modernization. I mean, in Wilde’s concept of socialism there are machines that do the kind of dirty work so that people don’t have to and they kind of replaced that class of people. But this isn’t to enable some hyper-modernization, but to enable a kind of smaller scale of life that allows people to engage in the pursuits they want rather than this larger idea of driving civilization on, or something like that?
Kristian Williams: Yes, I think that’s exactly right.
TFSR: There’s another thing that they’re brought up for me that is interesting because, you know, when you think of aestheticism, you think of Wilde and Art—art with a capital A—there’s already a kind of class distinction that’s assumed within. High Art versus other forms of art, but Wilde maybe through Morris and also Ruskin, [who] I know was like a teacher of his, isn’t making this big distinction between high art and crafts or other forms of creation. So then he’s also kind of envisioning a classless art world—would you say that’s right?
Kristian Williams: I would say at his best, that is right. I think he was also prone to a certain amount of snobbery and ready to claim certain privileges of an Artist—with a capital A—that may not extend to everyone in society. And both sides of that showed up in his trial, where on the one hand when they tried to cite his writings as evidence against him and brought in The Picture of Dorian Gray and a set of aphorisms he had contributed to an Oxford magazine and that sort of thing, and they would ask him things like, “well, what is the interpretation that an ordinary person would put to these lines?” And Wilde would say something to the effect of, “I know nothing of the opinions of ordinary people, I’m only concerned with the opinions of artists.” And so he was willing to fall back onto a sort of special status for the artist, and in particular that artists could only be judged by other artists. At the same time, though, the prosecutor was absolutely outraged that the young men that he was associating with were often men of the lower classes. They were servants of various kinds or people who were just frankly out of work. And though nominally the court was concerned with the sort of homosexual nature of these relationships, the fact that he was bringing these servants into polite society was as much a focus of the cross-examination as any sort of sexual relation. And so the prosecutor would repeatedly ask questions like, “is this the sort of young man that a gentleman should associate with?” And Wilde would respond, “Absolutely—if the young man is interesting.” And he said over and over again, “I recognize social distinctions, not at all.” Meaning he didn’t care about their origins. He didn’t care about what they did for a living. What he cared about was their personal beauty and their radiant personalities. And that in particular was outrageous to polite society, in a way that [with regard to] mere same sex relations (there was a lot of that sort of thing at like the British public schools and then at Oxford and Cambridge) the men of Wales class were somewhat ambivalent about that. But the cross-class nature really was outrageous to public opinion and ultimately to the law.
TFSR: Yeah, and that’s something that you elaborate [on] a little bit in the book in a way that I found very interesting. That people at the time, [some of whom] were anarchists and some weren’t, were kind of thinking about the cross-class same sex relationships as a sort of liberatory engagement. And that made me think that there’s sort of seeds of the radical gay liberation or queer liberation movements already in place in the end of the 19th century when these things were kind of being defined. I mean, I don’t know if any of these thinkers would go so far, but I was like reading into this this idea that men across class having relationships would be a sort of undermining of capitalist society. Could you talk a little bit about how the ways of this kind of cross-class relationship were being fought by the queer and anarchist thinkers at the time?
Kristian Williams: Yeah, [and] this wasn’t just an anxiety on the behalf of the aristocracy. The men engaging in these relationships often did sort of theorize that it was going to destroy the class barrier and thus crash the social hierarchy, and that for them that seemed like an advantage. Of course, in retrospect, that all seems very naive, right? Like the ideas that wealthy aristocrats paying young men of the lower order for sex would destroy class relations just seems sort of fanciful. But it was a popular notion among radicals in those circles at the time. And I think to understand that, we need to remember sort of the difference between the traditional British class system and the sort of emerging capitalist system, where they still had the trappings of an aristocratic hierarchy, so that class position wasn’t simply a matter of who had money and who didn’t. And the divisions between the classes weren’t simply a question of one class being an employing in class and one class being a laboring class. The differences were also cultural, and it was possible to be kind of a destitute aristocrat, and it was also possible to make a fortune and yet remain ultimately sort of a middle class person. That [it] was a matter of both of the culture and the expectations and the values that people in those positions would have. But it was also a matter of how they would be regarded socially. So that in some way would even be more respectable to be an impoverished aristocrat than it would be to be a wealthy merchant. So there was this element where simply having kind of intimate contact with people of other social classes seemed subversive, seemed destructive of the barriers that kept them apart. And in particular, Wilde’s interest in the culture of the lower classes, and then also his interest in exposing them to what we would call High Art seems deliberately like trying to erase that cultural line between the upper and [the] lower. Though interestingly, he had basically no interest in the middle classes at all.
TFSR: Yeah, which I guess makes sense. So there’s something interesting there, too, because you know, Wilde initiated a libel suit against the Marquees of Queensberry because he left this card at the hotel, where Wilde was staying. [And] that at least one reading of it, you say in the book of that card, posing as a sodomite reads like a misspelling. So he is being accused of posing as a homosexual. So this just made me think about how the class positions weren’t necessarily tied to actual wealth. But you could kind of portray the image of an aristocrat. And I wonder to what extent that relates to an understanding of aestheticism, like the kind of the idle dandy and the aristocratic bend to that. But you’re arguing that even though that’s one understanding aestheticism, it actually has a kind of anarchist political and ethical value or valence or something. So, yeah, I’m kind of thinking [and] wondering about this idea of posing, posing as queer [or] posing as an anarchist, and how Wilde uses these different positions.
Kristian Williams: So artificiality was, in Wilde’s schema, a value rather than a vice. And part of that was that he had this idea that the purpose of life was this kind of self-cultivation, [this] sort of self-creation, which means that to a certain extent it is going to be an artificiality, that is going to be an element of artistry to the life that you create for yourself and the character that you develop in yourself, and also the presentation that you make to the world. And Wilde very deliberately created an image of himself early on as this sort of idle genius, and also as this person who in some ways was outside of the categories of conventional society. And he relayed that with his sort of flamboyant dress. He created that image by making a habit of saying outrageous things as he matured, the outrageous things that you said tend to have more of a subversive undercurrent to them. But especially early on, [it] seems like he was often just reaching for the thing that was going to outrage public opinion. So there was always this matter of posing. And one of his aphorisms is that it’s only shallow people who don’t judge by appearances. One of the things he meant by that is that it is the appearance that we choose for ourselves. That is the way that we decide to present ourselves to the world. And that that’s important, right? And that, you know, it’s like you can tell a lot about somebody from what they choose to show you. So there was always this self-consciousness to Wilde’s presentation, especially publicly, and there was connected in that a gendered element where he presented himself as the sort of foppish, flamboyant aesthete, which was always interpreted like the dandy, [which] was always understood as sort of an effeminate character. But it actually wasn’t really until Wilde’s scandal that it was fully identified also as a homosexual character. And so he was often seen and sometimes mocked as this living affront to the ideals of masculinity. And this is hard for us to kind of imagine now, but at the time that wasn’t necessarily associated with homosexuality. Which makes Queensberry’s claim that he was posing as a sodomite, a little bit complicated. And part of the work that the trial did was to construct this notion of what a sodomite is like, such that a person could be posing as it. And this gains a kind of circular momentum, where the image that it constructs is partly the negation of the ideal of a respectable middle class family man, but partly just the reflection of the image that Wilde has been projecting all along. And so in the course of the trial, what a sodomite is, the figure of the sodomite, is built so that Wilde will resemble it. Then once that equation takes hold, Wilde really becomes the icon of sort of what a gay man is expected to be like. I’m borrowing here from the work of Alan Sinfield, who wrote a book called The Wilde Century, which makes this argument in about 250 pages. So if you’re interested in that, and how exactly that happened, that is the place to look.
TFSR: It seems really important, and something maybe a lot of people don’t know, is that we’ve inherited a kind of gay male type or stereotype that can be traced back to Wilde, and these trials. That even over over 100 years, a lot of that hasn’t changed that kind of identity type that Wilde embodied, or even like the lampoon of Wilde’s identity still marks understandings of gay male effeminacy and campness, how Sontag talks about him. So I think you bring that out really interestingly. But like in your book, the thing that I think is really important that you add is that in the aftermath of Wilde’s trial, the queerness of Wilde sort of has an influence on anarchist thinkers at the time. In a way not only is Wilde’s queer identity becoming politicized and codified, but also there’s an anarchist element to that, and I wonder if you could elaborate a little bit on that—about the trial and how his sexuality became influential for anarchist thinkers.
Kristian Williams: Sure. This went in a lot of different directions and had several different elements. But maybe the clearest is that Emma Goldman. Other American anarchists as well, but Emma Goldman in particular was initially extremely sympathetic with Wilde, but simply as an example of the puritanical hypocrisy of the legal system, and as a victim of state oppression, it wasn’t until later that she became exposed to the sort of sexological literature that was elaborating the theory of homosexuality, where she realized that it wasn’t just a particular case of the state doing what the state does, but there was also an element [of] Wilde’s trial was intimidating and terrorizing for an entire group of people. And that it wasn’t just a matter of individual suffering and individual persecution, but that there was a group element to this. And so it became important to her to specifically stand up for the rights of homosexuals, sort of as a class rather than simply opposing the state putting people in prison, because of course we’re against the state putting people in prison. Another direction that that developed was that in Great Britain and in the US, the anarchist sexual politics at that time were already interested in sexual liberation, but mostly in the framework of a critique of marriage and free love and advocacy around issues of legitimacy, meaning really the rights of children who are born out of wedlock. And so adding to sort of queer element to that, they were already kind of primed for that development. And then what that meant was that it wasn’t just that Wilde’s trial affected anarchist’s sexual politics, it meant that a particular kind of sexual politics came out of that, that [they] were interested in gay rights as an expression of sort of sexual freedom overall. There was a natural affinity between the way anarchists were already thinking. And the sort of challenge and rethinking posed by the Wilde trial. Another direction that developed was that in Europe, and especially in Germany, individualist anarchists took a somewhat different lesson from the Wilde trial, and were less interested in conceptions of group identity and more interested in understanding it simply in terms of sort of individuality, individual rights and [an] individual person’s ability to express themselves and find pleasure in whatever way they chose, regardless of laws or social convention, or religious or moral precepts. And that, curiously, also circulated back into the United States, partly through Benjamin Tucker and his paper Liberty, which reprinted some of the European coverage of the Wilde trial, and also editorialized on its own, and very much in a more sort of individualist, libertarian kind of approach. So there were a couple of different developments from that in terms of how Wilde’s persecution shaped anarchist politics in the generations after.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s interesting. This is a still a kind of problem and paradox within queer liberation—the idea of an identity and a group type or a minority group demanding rights, and then [the] kind of queerness that critiques and wants to do away with identity. And obviously, the way you were outlining Wilde’s understanding of posing and artificiality is already showing kind of ambivalence to that, even as he’s being put in the position of defining this type. So it’s interesting to see these things that [still] are. Anarchists today are always fighting identity politics as well, whether or not they’re queer. So I think it’s interesting to see that these things were already happening at that moment.
Kristian Williams: Wilde himself directly addressed this question in a short story called The Portrait of Mr. W.H., which the story itself is complicated, and I’m going to do my best to sum it up quickly. Basically it involves a relationship between two men, one of whom has a theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets were inspired by and devoted to a young boy actor named Willie Hughes, the W.H. of the title. [He] then persuades the other man of this. The other man then goes and engages in a relationship with a third man and also tries to persuade him of this theory. And the whole thing is in some ways an excuse to make this argument about the history of homosexuality and its influence on culture. So it looks at the presence of homosexuality in ancient Greece. I mean, there’s no way to talk about this that isn’t anachronistic. I should say that, first of all. Like, Wilde never used the term homosexuality, but the presence of homosexuality in ancient Greece, the importance of homosexuality in the Renaissance, the importance of homosexuality for Shakespeare, and then more recent examples. The thing about the story is that they have this argument about the sonnets, but there’s no proof for it. And in order to try to persuade each other, each of the men engages in this fabrication of evidence [of] different kinds. The evidence itself, including the portrait of the title, is a beautiful work of art, but it’s also false. It’s also a fraud. And each of the men, once he persuades the other one of the importance of the theory, is then fatally compromised and dies–one of them by suicide, one of them by consumption. And at the end, you’re left with, on the one hand, this exercise in the construction of a homosexual genealogy, like a cultural genealogy of homosexuality. And on the other hand, the story itself exposes that construction as this kind of artifice and draws into question the wisdom of sort of latching your identity onto anything exterior to yourself. And so it’s both this exercise in the creation of a gay identity, and it’s also this deconstruction and critique of that exercise at the same time.
TFSR: Yeah, and that seems like it could also be like a fitting parable for the attempts to naturalize or biologize sexuality and gender towards increasing rights for so-called gender or sexual minorities. Like these stories that we’re telling ourselves here in that essay or whatever you want to call it, like a story essay.
Kristian Williams: Yeah, it’s a little hard to know how to characterize it. It queers our categories.
TFSR: I mean, it’s all just part of the seduction anyway. I think that you’re reading of that is really interesting. One of the things that [is] still kind of going on, this idea of identity. The thing that stood out to me after reading your book was that the legacy of Wilde, in a way, entangles these three groups, the people that are are kind of unwanted or undesirable anarchists, the aesthetes or the dandies or decadents or whatever, and and whatever was being defined at the time as homosexual, we might say queer now. And thank you for pointing out that we’re talking pretty anachronistically. But, yeah, just these three types. Right. Anarchists, aesthetes, and queer people even at the time were sort of confused in people’s minds and had this sort of like specter haunting people as like unwanted types. Could you talk about how that sort of legacy still persists today? [How] these entanglements of these different positions politically, artistically and sexually persist today?
Kristian Williams: Yeah. Well, I mean, some of it I think you’ve already hit on. Anarchism, as it existed circa 1895, was already a sort of hospitable environment for a gay politics to emerge in a way that most other sort of political realms were not. Because anarchism already had this critique of sexual morality, it already has its critique of the family structure. It was already advocating for birth control and the rights for children who were born out of wedlock and the equality between men and women and free love and all of that kind of stuff. So it was ready for the addition of the concern of homosexuals. And I think once that took root there, of course, gay politics have then expanded far outside of anarchism and even arguably outside of the left. But it’s now just very infused with the sort of culture of anarchism and also the values and those sort of self perception of what anarchists do expect ourselves to be like. The fusion between aestheticism and queer politics has developed somewhat differently, but it also remains there, right? Where on the one hand, this becomes an annoying stereotype, and on the other hand, it’s also something that gay men especially sort of celebrate about their shared culture, such as it is. Where it’s like there’s an expectation that there are going to be these sort of fabulous creatures with good style sense and immaculately decorated houses and an interest in music and theater and that sort of thing. And also for the same reason, it’s always a little bit suspicious when an adolescent boy takes too strong an interest in painting or poetry, right? So there’s a weird kind of both good and bad aspects to the two of those things coming together and forming a type, or a stereotype. The connection between aestheticism and anarchist politics is in a way more complicated. On the one hand, it means that on a shallow level it has helped inform the attraction of anarchists to sort of the artistic avant-garde, which has shown up really throughout the 20th century from Dada to the beats to punk, really. Greil Marcus territory there. And on a deeper level, though, I think that the notion that life should be the sort of splendid adventure, and that the way individuals live should be reflective of their character and personality, rather than bounded by convention and predictable and productive, but not necessarily very creative or interesting. I think that this has done a lot to maintain sort of the spirit and attraction of anarchism. And that puts us more in the lineage of the situation as to crime think, right. But then there’s also this this paradox, where especially in the last couple decades anarchism has taken a very moralistic and sort of puritanical turn that has also always been sort of a feature of it. You know, at sometimes if you look at a figure like the early Alexander Berkman, his ambition toward martyrdom and his sense of asceticism and his harsh judgment of other people is just annoying. So there’s always been that kind of puritanical element to anarchism as well. But at our best, that is counterbalanced by this free and flowing and urge toward the beautiful. At the moment, it feels like the sort of purist and puritanical element is more to the surface. And the notion that the life should be anything other than, [or] something more than, just the political struggle and the urge to purify oneself and the group of people around you. It seems to have receded. I worry that we’re at the moment insufficiently aesthetic, and I. I wish we could bring that back more to the surface.
TFSR: Yeah. I mean, it’s a beautiful idea. I really like the way that you politicize Wilde’s aestheticism because I mean, it is such an old argument in a way that’s kind of like tedious and boring. That, even like Sartrean committed literature is against the art for art’s sake, because that is like amoral or even elite. But your reading of Wilde’s shows that even within the stuff that isn’t explicitly political, there’s like an ethical and political understanding that we can get. You say one line that I really liked—your reading [of] the plays is that Wilde’s evasions often hide the seeds of subversion. So there’s a way of reading Wilde that when he’s not saying, like, I’m an anarchist and let’s smash the state, he’s not saying that, but there’s something that happens in his work that allows the subversiveness of his thinking to come differently, [while] not hitting you over the head.
Kristian Williams: Let me run with a couple of points of that. One is that I think that had his politics been more direct in his writing, probably his work would not have survived as well as it has. And while I think that there is even something which on the surface just seems like this exercise in silliness, like The Importance of Being Earnest. If you read carefully, it’s actually shot through with political concerns. Concerns about legitimacy, concerns about the rights of women, concerns about Irish independence and Fenian bombings, right? There’s all sorts of political elements, political themes, political subtext, political references in what at first seems like just this almost Dadaist banter about nothing in particular. But I think [that] had Wilde instead taken the approach of like a movement writer or a message writer, then the work would seem dated and less interesting and wouldn’t remain as fresh as it actually does. The other thing I wanted to say, and this goes back to aestheticism, is that my argument about Wilde’s aestheticism is that it’s not just the places, especially early in his career where he said things about, like the importance of labour and re-conceiving labour, conceiving of labor as a kind of art. It’s also that he pushes the sort of values where beauty doesn’t have to justify itself. And that’s really what art, for art’s sake means. It doesn’t have to have a moral message. It doesn’t have to have a social use. It doesn’t have to be commercially viable. That just the fact that something is beautiful and gives you pleasure is itself important. And I argue that that is an implicit critique of the values, especially of Victorian capitalism, and what Max Weber would later articulate as the Protestant Ethic. Which was supposed to value sobriety and hard work and thrift, and that every moment of every day was supposed to be invested with this improving moral weight, which meant making yourself a better person, but chiefly meant making yourself a better person through hard work. While aestheticism is just like a torpedo in the hull of that ship. Interestingly for us, I think it is also a good corrective to the more stoical and dour and sad faced parts of left wing thinking, the kind of Marxism that thinks that we should sacrifice everything for the party, or the kind of anarchism that thinks that the main purpose of politics is to morally cleanse ourselves of anything that may be socially compromised. That kind of puritanism, that kind of stoicism, that sort of often workerist, but also often workaholic element, I think need something to temper it. And I think the Wilde’s work, if we take it seriously, and also if we are willing to accept it as lightly as he produced it, can help us to avoid some of the temptations, if you will, of that kind of puritanism.
TFSR: Yeah. And the way you elaborated that is really helpful because we see how, you know, anarchists then and other people who might identify as leftist or Marxist are replicating some of the kind of capitalist mindset of that work and seriousness. And Wilde, [with his] emphasis on pleasure and pleasure as a kind of perversion, I think is specifically queer and specifically helpful in a way as a corrective, as you said, to those tendencies. While you were talking, I was thinking a little bit also about like James Baldwin, who makes similar kinds of arguments [yet manages an] avoidance of being explicitly political in his fiction, [and how] he still he speaks to anarchists, as another kind of queer figure. These people who value the ambiguity of art, are also evading that Protestant ethic that goes along with the kind of capitalist path of individual development. I’m just really grateful for the way that you you expand on that in the book. There’s a bunch of a bunch of things that I can bring up. But one thing that we haven’t really spoken about, but that also I think resonates with today’s anarchism is Wilde’s experiences in prison. And so I wonder, he was incarcerated for two years and then his final writing was on prison. And I think that a lot of people are coming into anarchism specifically now through the abolitionist movement. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Wilde’s experience in prison, his relationship to prison and how that fits into his writing, and what he gives to us today as current abolitionists?
Kristian Williams: Yes, I guess the first thing to say is that Wilde was against prison for his entire career. He thought that the whole notion of punishing wrongdoing was self-defeating and also barbaric. And in The Soul of Man Under Socialism in particular, he predicts that in a future society, there will be no need for crime, because there will be equality and there won’t be either the desperate need to resort to fraud or violence in order to meet one’s needs, nor the kind of resentment that results from being in the lower position of an unequal relationship. And that whatever traces of criminality remain, he argues, would just have to be the product of some sort of mental illness which should be treated by a physician, and not by the courts. So from early on, he was arguing a kind of abolitionist line. He also, partly from seeing the example of Irish nationalists who were being imprisoned, thought the prison could also be the sort of heroic and elevating kind of experience. And he had almost a Thoreauvian line that they could jail your body, but your spirit would remain free. What he learned when they put him in prison was that that was completely wrong. And he should you really should have known better based on what he already understood about the degrading nature of menial work and about the elevating possibilities of beauty and beautiful surroundings versus the degrading and oppressive nature of ugliness. And then he was put in this environment, which was really just designed to concentrate ugliness with the idea of breaking the prisoner’s spirit. And it was anticipated when he was put in prison that he would not survive the two years, that a man of his age and his class would not be up for the hardship and the deprivation, and were it not for the political intervention of some of his friends and the agitation of especially anarchists in Europe, who were demanding his freedom all together, he likely wouldn’t have survived those two years. And instead he was offered a number of privileges that were there to avoid the government’s embarrassment of him dying in prison. And he was very aware that that was the thing that was keeping him alive and that he was receiving this kind of special treatment. Much to his credit, he did his best to extend those benefits to the other inmates around him. [Mainly in that] he was allowed to request books and was allowed additional books from outside the prison. And reading his letters, you can see that among the books that he requested, there are books that he doesn’t particularly have an interest in, but he knows that the other prisoners would. And then for a while, he got the job of taking the library cart around to the cells to give prisoners the books they wanted, which importantly gave him the opportunity to talk to other people, because at that point, the prison system was entirely on a solitary confinement kind of basis. And then also gave him the opportunity to learn about the interests of the other prisoners, and again, sort of facilitate their intellectual pursuits. And then once he was released, he immediately set about agitating to improve the conditions for the prisoners and wrote a couple of long letters to the Daily Chronicle about conditions in the British prison system. In particular centered on the case of a prison guard named Thomas Martin, who had been fired essentially for being too kind to the prisoners. Martin’s specific offense was that he had given ginger cookies to very small children who were locked in prison for poaching rabbits. Wilde pursued both publicly and also less directly, through writing public officials and that sort of thing, the reform of the prison system, noting specific things that could improve the conditions for the prisoners, while also insisting that no amount of reform was ever going to be adequate, and in fact [stating] that the entire basis of British justice was badly founded and needed to be scrapped. This sort of reached its peak with his last published work (during his lifetime anyway) which was the Ballad of Reading Gaol, which I also think is his best poem, which his correspondence makes clear really intended as both a great work of art and also as the sort of political message that we were talking about earlier. It was intended as a pamphlet that would outrage the public against the prison system as a whole. And for what it’s worth, his agitation had some effect. There was a parliamentary commission that was investigating prison conditions at the time, and it took up many of the reforms that Wilde had suggested in his letters to the Chronicle. And just in terms of literary genealogy, The Ballad of Reading Gaol in particular became this almost scripture for anarchists talking about prisons in the decades that followed. So you you find references to it over and over again in the anarchist literature about prison, really all the way up into the 60s.
TFSR: That’s really interesting. I mean, there’s part of Wilde that is like the “Be Gay Do Crimes” sort, romanticizing the prisoner. But then there’s this seriousness, and it’s especially after his two years of hard labor imprisonment, where he is specifically acting against the prison system and going outside of the romanticism of the like criminal type or something like that. In your going over that history, another thing came to me that you show really well, there are somethings, like Wilde just seemed like a good person, like someone you want to hang out with and be friends with. And in that way, there’s [almost] another aspect of like Wilde the person and his actions that I think are worth reflecting on, [and] not just as a figure, thinker, a writer, but that he embodied this anarchism in his relationships with people, even about the way that he engaged in relationships, whether they’re like intimate or just in passing.
Kristian Williams: Yeah. For a person who is renowned or notorious for being extremely individualistic and extremely sort of egotistical, he was also very, very generous. And he was generous with his wealth when he had wealth, and he was generous with other people’s wealth when he did not. Toward the end of his life, he was practically penniless and living on the generosity of his friends. And yet when people that he knew in prison would get released, he would send them money. And one of his friends and benefactors got kind of annoyed with him about this, because here they are giving him money, so that he can keep body and soul together, and here he is just giving it away. And he said, but if my good friends like you take care of me, how could I not take care of my prison friends? Which I think really captures both something of his spirit and also something of the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity. Friendship for Wilde was not a trivial matter. He didn’t think of his friends as just like people that you happen to know, he saw friendship as this deep and complicated ethical commitment, this kind of like practice of life. Which I think goes back to his reading of the classics, and probably Aristotle in particular. And so it’s also interesting that, lacking the vocabulary that we have now about like homosexuality and queerness, he described those relationships and the possibilities of those relationships in terms of things like passionate friendship and really saw them as, in addition to the sexual component and the political implications, also saw them as this tight interweaving of two people’s lives, and a sort of practice of generosity and engagement. Like a way that people could relate that was in a way deeply ethical, and in another way unconcerned with the conventionality and what at the time was was viewed as morality. So, yeah, I think there’s was something very anarchic about how he looked at that. And again, it was that very generosity that turned out to cause him so much trouble in the trials. Like had he just been hiring prostitutes and paying blackmailers, it wouldn’t have had the, I mean this is somewhat bizarre from our point of view, but it wouldn’t have had the outrageous moral implication that it had—that he was like taking these young men to expensive dinners, and buying them champagne, and taking them to the opera, and buying the suits, giving them silver cigarette cases with personalized inscriptions on them. All of that was like… You know, prostitution and blackmail was just old hat for a Victorian aristocrat. But that kind of intimacy with people of the lower classes and that effort to sort of extend to them the benefits of the society was politically very troubling and morally outrageous.
TFSR: Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting how all of these things sort of overlap. I don’t know, like reading your book, I’ve always loved Wilde and had an affinity for Wilde and in a way Wilde has explained to me my gayness, my queerness. But then reading your book, I’m like, oh, my affinity for Wilde also has something to do with my anarchism that I’ve had over my whole life. And I just think the way that you tie those together and show them through going through his letters, his the biographical details, [and] the anarchists kind of response to him. And his work is really compelling. I guess the final question, you know, going back to talking about the role of art and the kind of corrective that we can bring to the sort of dour anarchist politics. The other aspect of him, maybe the term we could say is a utopian, and he uses that in The Soul of Man Socialism. Is there anything that you can say about Wilde bringing a sort of utopian anarchist politics or any way really you want to kind of send us off with, like, how Wilde speaks to us today? Because I think that this book is something that we can learn from in our current moment. So, yeah, any anything in that line that you want to kind of send us off with on Wilde, the utopian anarchist.
Kristian Williams: Yeah. You know his utopianism makes sense, given his aestheticism, given the emphasis on the imagination and on sort of the fanciful and the artificial and the the creative possibilities. And therefore, he didn’t see Utopia as this thing that we achieve and preserve, which might be more of the Puritan model. Instead, he saw Utopia as this this aspiration of humanity that was always just past the horizon. And so it kept us moving. And so he says in The Soul of Man Under Socialism that all the progress is a realization of past utopias. And the utopia is a country where once we land, we immediately set sail looking forward again. And so there’s the idea that in order to achieve progress, we have to be able to imagine the better world. That once we achieve the world that we think we want, we’re going to imagine a better worlds still. And that, rather than that being a frustrating Rosero problem, in fact [it] is this beautiful hope that we can always be doing better. And, you know, right now I think we are pretty desperately in need of some utopian imagination, you know, with the pandemic really throwing our our usual social practices into question, and revealing the threadbare nature of many of our institutions, and the failure of hierarchical leadership structures to address the crisis in any sort of meaningful way, along with the increasingly present effects of climate change and the existential danger that that poses. And then also with the bizarre and perverse political culture that we inhabit in the United States, with the kind of polarization that makes every position a point of conflict and makes any sort of like of, I don’t know, reconciliation or even notion that we will arrive at an understanding of shared humanity, seem increasingly remote. We really need to be able to imagine something better. The alternative, I think, is a very bleak nihilism that just sees the future as only an extension of the present. And I think that from that view, nothing good can come. I saw a picture of some graffiti that said, “another end of the world as possible.” And I think that that that captures pretty well the need for utopian thinking right now.
TFSR: Yeah. That even the dystopian stuff has dried up, I think. Yeah. I mean, you just said it pretty beautifully, so I don’t really have anything that I really want to add. I really love spending time with Oscar Wilde’s thinking and writing, and just thinking about him as a person. And you do, I think, a really important thing in kind of bringing him out as an anarchist thinker and bring him to us right now. And maybe it’s just like something worth living for. Like that in the end is like something, you know, he, sorry, my mind starts going in all these different directions…
Kristian Williams: Oh, good! That’s what I’m aiming for.
TFSR: Yeah. I mean, going from like living up to the blue China to dying so that he doesn’t have to see his wallpaper. But I think Wilde actually took things seriously in a way that’s instructive, even for all this kind of humor and artificiality. So, yeah, I don’t know. Again, I’m like really grateful for the book and for the chance to talk to you. And if you have any last things you want to add or also any other places you want listeners to go to the to access your work or whatever you’re up to at the moment.
Kristian Williams: Yeah, I have a modest website it’s kristianwilliams.com, Kristian spelled with a K. Whenever I have a new article or whatever, I put something about it there and put a link to it. And then there’s some sort of category-based archives that you can look and see what I’ve written about the criminal legal system or about literature or about comics. And yeah. So if you’re interested in seeing what else I’ve done, that that would be a good place to start.
TFSR: Cool, and yeah I recommend people pick up this book, Resist Everything Except Temptation, and of course, Our Enemies In Blue is super important too. But yeah, I’m grateful for the time that you gave to talk about Wilde with me.
Kristian Williams: Yeah, well, I appreciate the invitation. It was a good conversation.
This week we are airing a conversation that we had a few weeks ago with Aric McBay, who is an anarchist, organizer, farmer, and author about his most recent book called Full Spectrum Resistance published by Seven Stories Press in May 2019.
This book is divided into 2 volumes, and from the books website [fullspectrumresistance.org]:
“Volume 1: Building movements and fighting to win, explores how movements approach political struggle, recruit members, and structure themselves to get things done and be safe.
Volume 2: Actions and strategies for change, lays out how movements develop critical capacities (from intelligence to logistics), and how they plan and carry out successful actions and campaigns.”
This interview covers a lot of ground, with topics that could be of use to folks newer to movement and ones who have been struggling and building for a while. McBay also talks at length about the somewhat infamous formation Deep Green Resistance, some of its history, and tendencies within that group that led him to break with them.
Links to Indigenous and Migrant led projects for sovereignty and climate justice, and some for further research:
Wet’suwet’en Strong [groundworkforchange.org/wetsuweten-strong.html], which includes extensive educational material on allyship, racism, settler colonialism, and decolonization.
Interview on TFS with Smogelgem, a Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief of the Likhts’amisyu clan, on ongoing struggles against pipelines and moves to create a Wet’suwet’en lead climate change research facility on their lands at Parrot Lake.
You can write to Sean Swain at his latest address:
Sean Swain #2015638
Buckingham Correctional
PO Box 430
Dillwyn, VA 23936
You can find his writings, past recordings of his audio segments, and updates on his case at seanswain.org, and follow him on Twitter @swainrocks.
. … . ..
Transcription
TFSR: So I’m very proud to be speaking with farmer, organizer, artist and author Aric McBay. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, what stuff you’re farming, for instance, where you are, and what sorts of organizing you’re involved in?
Aric McBay: Sure. And thank you so much for having me on your show. So I farm just east of Kingston, Ontario. We have a vegetable CSA farm Community Supported Agriculture. So we grow about 40 or 50 different varieties of vegetables, and we provide those to about 250 households in our area. We do kind of a sliding scale to make it more accessible to people. And we normally host a lot of different educational events and workshops. But of course most of those are on pause right now.
In terms of community and activism or community engagement, I have worked on many different causes over the years. I’ve worked with militant conservation organizations like Sea Shepherd or doing tree sits. I’ve been a labor organizer, I’ve been a farm organizer. I’ve helped start community gardens. A lot of the work that I do right now is about climate justice and about other issues that are topical, at different times in my area, especially prisons, and housing right now. Prisons are quite a big issue that the nearest city Kingston has the largest number of prisons per capita of any city in Canada. So prisoners issues continue to be very important and I think that the situation with COVID has only kind of highlighted the ways in which prisoners are treated unfairly, and in which the prison system actually makes us less safe, makes our society more dangerous rather than less so.
TFSR: Well, you did an interview with From Embers at one point, which are friends of ours and members of the Channel Zero Network. They also had a show recently, or I guess a couple of months ago, about the pandemic and the history of pandemics in the Canadian prison system. And it’s like, yeah, it’s pretty sickening. And you’re on occupied Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee land, right?
AM: That’s correct. Yes.
TFSR: And this is Tsalagi and Creek land where I’m calling you from. So you’ve been thinking and working around big picture ecological survival, and as you said, ecological justice for quite a while. For someone picking this up on the radio and maybe not keen on environmental concerns, can you give a kind of a quick snapshot of where the civilization is in terms of destroying the Earth’s capacity to carry complex life?
AM: Sure, and it’s so easy to forget about or to push aside because the other emergencies in our daily life just keep kind of stacking up. So right now, we are in the middle of really a mass extinction on on this planet. And industrial activity, industrial extraction has destroyed something like 95% of the big fish in the ocean, has fragmented huge amounts of tropical forest and deforested many tropical areas, including much of the Amazon at this point. But it’s really climate change that’s kind of that global, critical problem. The temperature has already gone up nearly one degree from their kind of pre-industrial norm, but the emissions that human industry have put into the atmosphere of the greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, are already enough to set us on a path of significantly greater warming. That’s even if we stopped, you know, driving cars, or burning coal today.
And so that produces a bunch of different challenges. Of course, we’re going to see already more and more hot weather heat waves, like we’ve certainly been seeing this summer, more extreme storms happening more frequently. But in the long term, the outlook is potentially very grim. Depending on the emissions that are produced around the globe, we could be looking at not just one or two degrees of warming, but potentially five or six degrees of warming by the end of the century. And that produces a very different world from the one that we live in. Even two degrees of warming would be enough to essentially wipe out all of the coral reefs on the planet, to wipe out entire biomes.
We’re at the point where even relatively conservative international organizations understand that climate change could displace hundreds of millions of people, could create hundreds of millions of climate refugees around the world. And there’s never been any displacement like that. You know, when you talk about making a place where where potentially billions of people live, much harder to live in, and much harder to grow food. And, you know, we’ve seen things like the so called Arab Spring, for example, and the situation in Syria where those areas of unrest or those uprisings were triggered, in part by prolonged droughts and agricultural failures. And we have seen the streams of refugees coming from those places, especially in the United States, has really increased the amount of xenophobia and racism I think that a lot of people on the right feel comfortable demonstrating.
So the ecological crisis is not just about fish and trees, it’s really about the kind of society that we’re going to have in the future. For human beings, are we going to have a society where fascism is considered kind of a necessary response to streams of refugees moving from equatorial areas, as of local economies collapse? Are we going to see an even greater resurgence of racism in order to justify that? Are we going to see much more draconian police response to deal with the unrest and uprisings that could happen? So our future, our future in terms of justice and human rights really depends on us dealing effectively with climate change in the short term, because climate change is not something that we can kind of ignore and come back to and 20 or 30 or 40 years. There’s a real lag effect, that the emissions now those are going to cause warming for decades or even centuries. And the response is really nonlinear. So what I mean by that is, if you double the amount of greenhouse gases that you’re putting out, that doesn’t necessarily double the temperature impact. There are many tipping points. So as the Arctic ice melts in the Arctic Ocean, and that white snow turns to a darker sea, then that is going to absorb more sunlight, more solar energy and accelerate warming. It’s the same thing in the Amazon rainforests, the Amazon rainforest creates its own climate, creates its own rainfall and clouds. So you can easily hit a point where the entire forest is suddenly put into drought and starts to collapse.
We really need to prevent those tipping points from happening and to act as quickly as possible to prevent catastrophic climate change, because it’s going to be almost impossible to deal with, in a fair way once that happens. And that’s really the idea of climate justice, right? That the impacts of global warming are disproportionately put on people of color, on low income people, on poorer countries. And so if we want to have a fairer future, then that means those of us who are living in more affluent economies have a responsibility to reduce those emissions. Those of us who have more affluent lifestyles, their main responsibility to deal with that, to produce a future as well, that is fair and just and where human rights are still important.
TFSR: And like to, I think, reiterate a point in there, it seems like fairness and justice are good rulers to kind of hold ourselves to, but it seems like it’s for the survival of the species, as well as for the betterment and an improvement of all of our lives with these eminent and emergent threats. Resolving this and working towards working together with everyone is the best option.
AM: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s true. And I think one of the reasons that I’m interested in organizing around climate justice is because it’s one of the ultimate areas of common ground, right? It kind of connects people who are in many different places and working on many different struggles. Because activists who I work with, who are mostly anti-racist activists, understand why this is important. I mean, we’re already seeing that impact around the world. And activists who work on food security and hunger, I mean, it’s totally clear why climate change is important, because our ability to grow food in the future depends on avoiding catastrophic climate change. When I’m working with anti-authoritarians, it’s the same thing. So I really do see climate justice as an important movement building issue, something that can connect a lot of causes that might seem more disparate from from kind of a distance.
TFSR: I think your work does a really good job of pulling together, the fabric, sort of like weaving together these pieces and patchwork to say that these are all interrelated. And for us to ignore one of these elements means that we create a much weaker fabric, if even something that’ll hold together at all. Your most recent and huge two part book was entitled Full Spectrum Resistance, and the first subtitle was Building Movements and Fighting to Win, and the second was Action and Strategies for Change. Can you share what you mean by “full spectrum resistance”, and what you hope these books will bring to the table for folks organizing to not only stop the destruction of complex life on Earth, but to increase the quality of our survival and our living together?
AM: Of course. So I wrote this book because I’ve been an activist for more than 20 years, and almost all of the campaigns that I worked on, we were losing ground, right? I mean, that was the case for many environmental struggles, but also in struggles around the gap between the rich and poor, around many other things. But I saw in history and around the world, many examples of movements that had been incredibly successful. And the fact that a lot of the rights that people take for granted today – a lot of our human rights – come from movements that learned really valuable lessons about how to be effective. Movements that didn’t know necessarily know at the beginning, what would create kind of a winning outcome. And so full spectrum resistance is an idea that I think encapsulates some of the key characteristics that successful movements need to have, especially when they want to move beyond maybe a single issue or a local concern.
So one of those components of full spectrum resistance is a diversity of tactics. I think that’s really critical. I think one of the reasons that the left hasn’t been as successful in recent years, is that it’s really been whittled down to a couple of main tactics, it’s been whittled down to voting, and to voting with your dollar, right? To kind of ethical consumerism. And those are very limited tools. And they’re tools that leave out the vast majority of tactics that movements have used in the past, right? Successful movements like the Civil Rights Movement, or the suffragists or their movement against apartheid in South Africa. They used a huge range of tactics. I mean, they certainly use things like petitions and awareness raising tool at different times. But they also use tactics that allowed them to generate political force and disruption. So a lot of people don’t realize that, you know, to win the right to vote suffragist movements use property destruction and arson quite frequently. When people are talking about Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement, people often use Nelson Mandela, ironically, as a reason why we shouldn’t be disruptive. They think of him as this really peaceful guy because he spent close to 30 years in prison. But Nelson Mandela helped to create the underground armed wing of the African National Congress. That was a struggle that used armed self defense and sabotage extensively in South Africa. And allies used all kinds of economic disruption, especially divestment around the world to try to pressure the South African government. And we can take a look in more detail at some of these case studies if you want. But I think a diversity of tactics is really critical in building movements that win. Because if we stick to only one tactic, then that really limits our ability to escalate, and that limits our ability to adapt. It’s easy for those in power to understand how to undermine one tactic, if it’s the only one that we use.
I think another aspect of full spectrum resistance is cooperation among different kind of…constituencies, you might call them. So those in power can stay in power through divide and conquer, right? That’s one of their primary tools is to split resistance movements or social movements into different manageable chunks, like “militants” and “moderates”. So they can split the people who are willing to go out into the street and protest with kind of maybe a broader, more moderate group of people who support them. And they can just go ahead and arrest you know, a small group of militants in the street, if they’re able to separate those people.
Let me, actually let me give you an example of how a diversity of tactics and this cooperation can work. One of the movements that I talk about, or one of the campaigns that I talk about in the book, is an anti-apartheid group that organized in New York City at Columbia University in the 1980’s. And they were an organization that was trying to get Columbia University to stop investing in companies that did business in South Africa, right? South Africa was kind of a resource empire at the time, there were huge mineral resources that were being extracted, and people were making a lot of money. But because of the racism, because of the authoritarianism of that apartheid system, people around the world were really struggling to generate political force to put the pressure on to end the system of apartheid.
And so Columbia University, like many universities had big endowments, big investments. And there is this group is called the committee for a free South Africa at Columbia University. And they started with kind of classic strategy of awareness raising, so they held discussion groups and teachings about apartheid. They had, you know, petitions to try to convince the government of Columbia University to divest from South Africa. And they really did everything that you were supposed to do, right? They did all of the things that we’re kind of told, told that we are supposed to do in order to succeed. They built that public awareness and understanding, and they hit a wall. They got to the point where the administration and faculty and student representatives in the student government all voted for divestment by the top level of government, their board of trustees overruled them. And I think that point that they reached is a point that a lot of our struggles eventually meet, right? Where we’ve done the things that we’re supposed to do, but still those in power refused to do what is right. And it was a real turning point for those anti-apartheid organizers. And their attendance at events started to decrease after that, because well people thought “hey, this struggle is over, the Board of Trustees isn’t going to diverse, so what can you do, we just lost this one.” But those organizers, they weren’t willing to just give up, they realized they needed to escalate to win.
They decided to plan a series of disruptive simultaneous actions, they started a hunger strike. And they took over a building, they blockaded a building on campus and said “we’re not going to go anywhere until Columbia University divest.” And this was a big risk for them, right? Because they’d seen this declining participation. But it actually worked. They started with a handful of people at this blockade. And more and more people started coming. There’s this fascinating statistic about this campaign. Before the blockade, only 9% of the student body considered themselves at least somewhat active in that campaign for divestment. So only 9% had shown up to a rally or you know, signed a petition. But in the weeks to come, 37% of the entire student body participated in that blockade, by joining rallies or by sleeping overnight on the steps.
So, you know, that kind of divestment campaign, I think is very important. Now, in part because that campaign worked, Columbia University eventually did give in and did agree to divest. And that shows to us, you know, the value of a diversity of tactics, the value of disruption, the value of cooperation between people who are using different kinds of tactics. I think that really is something that we can learn and apply very effectively. And then the current day, another key part of full spectrum resistance is that solidarity between movements, to avoid the divide and conquer tactics that those in power try to use. And the fourth thing is really an intersectional approach is to try to synthesize the different ideas and the different philosophies that motivate different campaigns and that motivate different movements. Because we’re in a time when I don’t think single issue campaigns can succeed anymore, certainly in the context of climate change, but also in the context of rising authoritarianism. We need to look at how we can build that shared analysis, build genuine intersectionality in order to create movements that are truly powerful and effective.
TFSR: So with the Columbia example, it’s really interesting to point to that, I hadn’t heard of that before, and that seems like there’s a lot of lessons to be gathered from that. With what we’re talking about with the scope of climate change, like the larger scope of climate change, obviously, is you can break it down into smaller and smaller points of this extraction thing happens in this place, those materials are transported here, they’re processed here, they’re consumed or subsidized by these populations are these organizations. So I guess, like the level of amplification of resistance that you’re willing to apply to a situation should scale according to what you’re trying to succeed at doing.
With this wider scope of resistance to something that you could look at as a whole as the way that governments backup energy infrastructure, and monocrop industrial agriculture, the scale of this…I get kind of lost between that point of pressuring the people at the top of the university to divest once all the other steps have been denied, like the scaling between that and looking at, say, for instance, the US government and pressuring them…I kind of just get lost in the clouds at that point. I’m like, well, the US government is going to want to continue business as usual as much as it can, in part because of its investors, much like Colombia, but also because it’s sustaining a more “holistic” system. How does the anecdote of Colombia and the resistance there fit into a wider scope of looking at governments and the ecological destruction that they’re involved with?
AM: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think one of the biggest challenges of the climate justice movement is the way that climate change and fossil fuel emissions, it all just feel so overwhelming and so diffuse, it’s hard to figure out, where should we actually focus our energy. But I think that many, or most movements in history, at some point, faced a similar problem, right? I mean, the anti-apartheid movement that Colombia was was a part of and were supporting. That was a movement that lasted for generations, the African National Congress was founded in 1912. And certainly at different points it was very unclear what people should do, you know, what was actually going to work against such a violently repressive regime. And so for me, I think there are a bunch of things that we can and should do to help address problems that seem really overwhelming or diffuse. And one of them, of course, is just to keep building our movements and to keep building our capacity and our connections. Because as long as we feel like we’re kind of isolated individuals or isolated pockets of resistance, it’s hard for us to see how we can tackle bigger problems. And that isolation is not an accident. Any authoritarian power especially wants to keep people divided and distrustful. So it’s important that we build cultures of resistance, that we build real connections with each other, and that we celebrate movements in the past that have won, so that we can kind of build up our capacity.
And I think it’s also important to look for areas where we can have early wins or kind of low hanging fruit. Areas where the problem is not as diffuse, but where the problem is more, is much more concrete or much more tangible. And so a great example of both of those things that work would be some of the mobilization against fossil fuel that has happened in so-called Canada in this year, and in recent years. So I don’t know if all of your listeners have been following this, but in February and March of this year of 2020, we saw some of the biggest Indigenous solidarity mobilizations in Canadian history. And those were kind of provoked by a particular flashpoint on the west coast. So there’s a settlement called Unist’ot’en which is on a pipeline route, there’s a site where the Canadian government and a variety of oil companies have been trying to build a series of pipelines to the west coast so that oil and fracked natural gas can be exported. And the Indigenous people who live there, the Wet’suwet’en, the traditional hereditary leaders have been very committed for many years to stop that from happening, and have essentially built this community on the pipeline route to assert their traditional rights and to assert their Indigenous sovereignty.
And in February at the beginning of February 2020, the government sent in really large armed force of RCMP officers and other officers, to try to kind of smash through different checkpoints that Indigenous communities had set up on the route leading to this site on the road, and also to destroy the gate that was keeping oil workers from going in and working on the construction of this pipeline. And the community there had been really good at building a culture of resistance over years, not just amongst Indigenous people, but among settler allies across the country. And so when that raid began, there was a really powerful response from many different communities. So a Mohawk community located just west of me, Tyendinaga, they decided to blockade the major east-west rail line that runs through Ontario, and that is kind of a bottleneck for the entire country. And other Indigenous communities started to do this as well, to set up rail blockades. And essentially, the entire rail network of Canada was shut down for weeks. You know, there were massive transportation backlogs.
And there were other disruptive actions as well, things like blockades of bridges – including international bridges – blockades and slowdowns of highways. And there was all of this mobilization that a year or two ago seemed inconceivable, it seemed impossible that any kind of disruption would be able to happen on that scale because nothing like that had happened before. And it was a really powerful movement that did cause the government to back off and cause the police to back off and start these new negotiations. And you know the COVID pandemic was declared at the same time as a lot of this organizing was still happening, so it’s kind of unclear what might have happened if that action had continued without a pandemic. But the rallying cry for a lot of organizers at that point was “shut down Canada”, which the pandemic did on a much larger kind of unanticipated scale.
But I think that example of the Wet’suwet’en solidarity and the disruption around it really points the way to potential successes and potentially more effective styles of organizing for the climate justice movement. And I think they have done a lot of things, right. They built that culture of resistance. So they didn’t just wait around for kind of a spontaneous uprising to happen, which I think almost never happens. They had built these connections over many years and build capacity and people had trained each other and trained themselves. And they had a particular location that they were trying to protect, right? So it wasn’t just “let’s go out and protect the entire world and protect all people.” You know, it’s hard to mobilize movements around something that’s so vague, but there is a particular community of a particular group of Indigenous people on a particular spot. And I think it’s much easier to mobilize folks around tangible sites of conflict like that.
The last thing that they did that was really effective, and that I think we can learn from, is that they turned the weakness of having the fight against this diffuse industrial infrastructure into a strength. So instead of just saying, “Oh, well, there’s so many pipelines, there’s so many rail lines, there’s so many highways, nothing we can do is going to make any difference.” The movement kind of said “Hey, there are all of these pipelines and rail lines and highways that are basically undefended, and that we can go and disrupt – even if it’s only for a day or two – and then move to another site. This actually gives us the potential to be incredibly effective, and to cost oil companies a lot of money and to cost the Canadian economy a lot of money.” Because that’s often what it boils down to right is “can we cost a corporation or a government more than they’re getting from doing this bad thing?” And I think that the Wet’suwet’en struggle has been an example and a demonstration of how to do that.
TFSR: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that points to a really cogent point in terms of how to think about this sort of resistance. There were, what, 200 years for the Canadian government to think about its relationship to Indigenous communities and the sovereignty of like…them just pushing through sovereign territories to get what they want to extract, to run railways, to put pipelines in or whatever. And so appealing to the logic or the “reasonability”, or the sense of justice of the people that were representing the bodies that were sitting in the chairs in the suits in government – who were enacting the logic of capitalist settler colonial government – was not working.
But what did work was showing that if you do not see this point, we will shut down your ability to do this, or we will escalate to the point that you will have to like, step up further, and push back. And I think it’s a point that often gets lost. And I think, consciously, it’s been inculcated out of us, I guess, that’s a way to say it? Like, in the United States at least, we’re educated that the example of the suffragettes, the example of Gandhi, the example of the resistance to apartheid in South Africa, all of these examples, the winning view that’s given by the power structures when they educate us is that reasonability won out because of the justice of the cause. And because people went out and put their bodies on the line, but also like their petitions were eventually heard, their voting actually was the effective measure that changed the balance of power and that forced those in power to recognize the justice of the demands. And I think that’s like pandemic offers an interesting insight into, again, how that’s BS, like marches don’t stop people in power from making decisions. The threat that marches bring with the amassing of angry people who can do damage, or who can disrupt things, is what actually makes people in power look at marches and why that specific way of engaging is considered dangerous to those in power and why they want to stop that sort of thing.
I think that there’s a parallel to be drawn between that great example with the Wet’suwet’en folks and the resistance that was given to the attack on Unist’ot’en and Gitdimt’en gate, alongside of what we’ve seen, during this pandemic, in a lot of countries, and particularly the United States – where I’ve heard this morning on the radio, which, hopefully, hopefully, it’ll be wrong by the time this gets broadcast – but the US where I’m based, has a quarter of the deaths from COVID-19, around the world, and yet we are something like 5% of the world population. Those are similar numbers to how many people are incarcerated in this country versus the rest of the world. And people in power, at this point are not representing that they have the ability, the capacity, the interest, the will to actually stop this pandemic from spreading, and killing off the people that are most marginalized – starting off with the people that are most marginalized – in our society.
And so it seems like appealing to that same wing of power, the ones that profit off of ecological destruction when it comes to scaling back ecological destruction, and trying to reverse that trend, doesn’t seem that reasonable. But the sort of like direct action instances that you’re talking about, in coordination with other methods of dialogue and culture building, feels really important and exciting to me. I don’t know if you think that seeing the reaction of governments during pandemic is comparable to the vast amount of knowledge of ecological destruction, is an apt comparison or not?
AM: Yeah, I think you make very important points. And I think that, especially under capitalism, one of our continuing challenges with those in power is that they always consider profit more important than life, right? They always consider profit more important than human safety and human wellbeing. And that applies whether we’re talking about incarceration or COVID, or climate change, or police departments. And because of that, those in power are almost never convinced or persuaded by arguments to do the right thing. And that’s the case in the examples that you’ve mentioned, as well. If we look at those historical movements, we have been given a really sanitized kind of false narrative about how things like the Civil Rights Movement worked, or the suffragettes – or the suffragists, rather – we’re told, hey, that, you know, the Civil Rights Movement, just finally convinced people because people like Martin Luther King were willing to risk getting beaten up. And that’s what changed things. But that is not primarily what changed the people who are in positions of power, right? I’m sure there were a lot of people on the sidelines, especially in the north, who saw Black people and white people being beaten up by police on the Freedom Rides, for example, and that changed their opinion about things, or that helped mobilize them to do something about racism. But the racism, especially in the Southern states, and segregation, that didn’t end because of the Civil Rights Movement, giving a good example, that was dismantled, essentially, because of different kinds of force, political force, and sometimes physical force.
So in the Civil Rights Movement, we can look at the example of the Freedom Rides, when groups of white and Black organizers rode buses through the South where they were supposed to be segregated. And those buses were attacked by police and vigilantes, violently attacked, people ended up in hospital, buses were set on fire. And that didn’t actually end until essentially the federal government intervened, the federal government sent in troops to escort those Freedom Riders around the South to kind of complete their journey. And I think that’s something that people forget often, that racist violence didn’t just end because of a good example. It ended because there was some other form of force being employed. And I think people also forget that a lot of the non-violent demonstrations, the Civil Rights Demonstrations in the south, were protected by armed groups like the Deacons for Defense. The Deacons for Defense were an armed group before the Black Panthers, that was in many cases made up of military veterans, Black military veterans, who decided that they were tired of seeing civil rights marches getting attacked by the KKK or their police, and said we’re going to use our right to bear arms, and we’re going to go down there and defend people. And so a lot of the nonviolent actions that happened, were protected by armed Civil Rights activists.
So these sorts of things get written out of the history, especially by the in power, because those in power want to seem like the good guys, right? They want to seem like, “Hey, we are the ones who are going to come down and give you the rights, if you can provide us a good example, we’re just going to gift you these rights, these human rights” and that’s almost never have things will wind they will one because people were willing to struggle and people who are willing to disrupt.
I think that ignorance of social movement struggle is a form of white privilege. I have seen this at many different workshops, and many different talks that I’ve given, that often at the start of a workshop, I’ll ask people when they’re introducing themselves to name movement that inspires you, or name a campaign that inspires you. And oftentimes, the people who are coming to that workshop who are white organizers, who are newer organizers, they don’t have such a large repertoire to draw on, right, they’re much more likely to name a movement that happened locally or a movement that’s been in the news. Whereas a lot of the organizers who are people of color or from other marginalized communities, they can list off a ton of movements that inspire them that they’re learning from. And that’s important because marginalized communities understand better how to deal with those in power, how to get rights and how to protect your rights. And that’s often through social movements and through struggle, whereas people who are used to those in power looking out for their interests, especially, you know, middle class white men, they can afford to ignore social movement history, because they haven’t really needed social movements in the same way, or they don’t appreciate them.
And so when we have situations like we have now with growing authoritarianism, much more obvious racism, the climate emergency, people who are in positions of privilege, they find themselves at a loss, because they don’t know that movement history, so they don’t know how to respond. And it’s often movements of color movements of marginalized people, those are the movements that are going to teach us how to deal with these deep systems of injustice, these deep systems of inequality.
TFSR: So I guess, shifting gears back to like questions of wider approaches towards resisting ecological change, over the last couple of years there have been a few groups that have garnered a lot of headlines, and gained some sort of recognition and interplay with mainstream media, with governments around the world. I’m wondering what your full spectrum approach towards resistance sort of use the efficacy, or the impact of groups. I’m thinking of 350.org, Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, do those feel like single issue approaches towards ecological struggle? Because I know that there was some critiques definitely in the UK about extinction rebellion, specifically, the leadership weeding out people who are wanting to bring up questions around not only ecological devastation, but also around racism and around the existence of industrial capitalism, and its impact on that.
AM: Yeah. And I think that’s a big problem. I think that you can’t really address climate change without talking about capitalism, you can’t address climate change without talking about racism. And I think that, in general, the big liberal movements against climate change, or the big liberal organizations have failed. Partly for that reason, probably, because they’re not, they’re not looking at the root problems. They’re not radical organizations, right, they’re not going to the root of the issue. And so they’re not going to be able to use the tactics that will resolve it.
I think at this point, companies like Shell Oil, and you know, a variety of petroleum companies were very aware of climate change, going back to the 1960s. I mean, they had more extensive research at that point into climate change than the general public. And when I’ve done research into organizations that have fought against offshore drilling, for example, you can see that even in the 1980’s, oil companies like Shell are already building their oil rigs with taller legs in order to compensate for the sea level rise they expect to see. So the issue is not that those in power are totally ignorant of climate change, it’s that they’re making a lot of money from climate change and they think with all of the money they are making, that they can deal with the consequences for themselves personally, although not for everyone else.
And so that’s a huge problem and in some ways it’s slightly different from COVID. You know, in Canada, I think one of the reasons that we’ve seen a much stronger national response is because very early on the prime minister’s wife tested positive for COVID. And so clearly the impacts of the Coronavirus have been disproportionately bad for communities of color and for low income communities, but there still is much more potential for affluent people to get it. Whereas something like climate change, I think those in power have felt very isolated from especially in more northern countries. So that’s a huge problem. And that’s one of the reasons that just appealing to the good sensibilities of those in power is not going to succeed.
Maybe I’ll speak mostly about Extinction Rebellion, because when I was doing my book tour last here, and traveled from coast to coast in Canada, I ended up doing workshops about direct action and movement strategy for a lot of different Extinction Rebellion groups here. And I think, you know, from what I’ve seen, the people who have participated in those events have been very committed and strongly motivated, they understand that it really is an emergency, but they don’t always have a lot of history in kind of activism, or they don’t have as much movement experience as some of the other groups that I’ve worked with. Which can be good and bad, right? I mean, I think, you know, a lot of the liberal left, the reason that groups keep failing to address the climate crisis is because there’s kind of a standard issue dogma about how we need to convince governments to change and ask politely, and so on. And that’s really a dead end. So I think for people new to a movement or getting newly active, they are potentially more open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.
But I think that the Extinction Rebellion kind of movement in general, in Canada, and definitely in the UK, has not done a very good job of, of including the needs of Indigenous communities, and has not done a good job of including the needs of communities of color. And in particular, I think we see that in the relationship between Extinction Rebellion, and the police. This was a discussion that came up in almost every XR group that I have spoken with, that that kind of official line from XR in the UK is that you’re supposed to have a good relationship with the police, you’re supposed to go to the police in advance of an action and let them know what’s going to happen. And, you know, as a direct action organizer myself, and on many different issues, that sounds absolutely ridiculous, for a lot of reasons. One of which is that you lose the element of surprise, which is one of the key strategic advantages that smaller resistance movements need to have. But also, because if you go and try to cozy up to the police, or try to expect them to give you a good treatment because you’re bringing them a cake or something, I mean, that is really kind of a white focused thing to do, right? And that ignores the long standing grievances of Black and Indigenous communities in particular, because of the violent treatment that they’ve experienced at the hands of police. And of course, that has become even more obvious in recent months, and you know, the amount of attention and mobilization is long overdue. I think that’s been a real weakness of Extinction Rebellion, and I think it’s going to need to address that, and other climate justice movements will need to address that in order to succeed.
I think another challenge to Extinction Rebellion has been that they still are kind of assuming that if they make a strong enough argument that those in power will change their behavior. Because one of their big demands has been for those in power to tell the truth. And from my perspective, as an organizer, that almost never happens, right? Well, those in power rarely tell the truth and you don’t want to give them the opportunity to dominate the messaging. Those in power, whether it’s the corporate PR officers or government PR, I mean, they almost always dominate public discourse. And so if we have an opportunity to put in our own message, we should be doing that not kind of punting it back to those in power so they can either repeat the same business as usual line, or try to co-opt or undercut what we’re saying. I think there’s a huge strategic mistake. And what it means is that even if you’re blocking bridges, you can be doing that essentially as a form of militant lobbying, because you’re putting the potential for change in the hands of other people. And I think that movements that have succeeded in overturning deeply unjust systems In the past, they have been able to build up communities of resistance, they’ve been able to build up movements that can direct the changes that need to happen, and movements that are led by the people who are affected. In climate justice, that means, you know, we really need to highlight the voices of Indigenous communities, we need to highlight the voices of communities of color in the global South. And if we don’t do that, not only is it morally wrong and a moral failing, it’s going to be a strategic failing as well, because we’re not going to have the experience and the perspective we need at the table to create movements that will win and to create strategies that will win. It’s a real dead end.
So, you know, from my perspective, the most exciting movements that I see around climate justice are being led by communities of color, are being led by Indigenous communities, and that are incorporating people from a lot of different backgrounds. But keeping in mind that it’s not an option to fail here, it’s not an option to say, “Oh, the government should reduce emissions. And if they don’t, I guess, oh, well, we’ll go back to what we’re doing”, we actually really have to commit ourselves to to winning this struggle. And I think a lot of affluent white communities, because they’re insulated from the effects of climate change, at least so far, they don’t have that same motivation. They don’t have that same drive to win, they don’t have that same genuine sense, I think maybe of desperation even. So for them, the risk of getting arrested a few times maybe feels like a bigger risk than the risk of the entire planet being destroyed. I think the calculus of risk for Indigenous communities is often different, which is why we see them taking so much leadership like in the case of the Wet’suwet’en.
TFSR: So there’s the example of the Wet’suwet’en in terms of not only a sovereignty issue, but also the ecological impacts and the solidarity that they’re offering to the world by trying to blockade the extraction and eventual burning into the atmosphere of, I believe the tar sands, right, from Alberta. And then skipping to a not specifically ecological movement, the Black leadership and leadership of color in the Movement for Black Lives and the movement against white supremacist violence and police violence that sparked off with George Floyd’s assassination, but also has spread around the world because anti-blackness is so endemic in Western civilization. I’m wondering if there’s any other examples of current movements, particularly around ecological justice, that you feel inspired by that are led by communities of color and frontline communities?
AM: Hmm, that is a great question. I think that we have seen, you know, in Canada in particular, but all over we have seen many different movements that are Indigenous lead, I think that’s often the movements that I end up working with or supporting. The Dakota Access Pipeline is another example of a movement that has been Indigenous lead and has been very successful. I think, around the world, I see a lot of hope in organizations like La Via Campesina – the international povement of peasants and small farmers – which is a very radical movement that looks to overturn not just fossil fuel emissions, but also capitalism in general, that looks to create fundamentally different relationships between people and the planet, and to create community relationships. I think that sort of thing is really exciting. And I think when you look at food and farm based movements, there’s a lot of mobilization potential there, because food, like climate, is one of those commonalities between people that’s common ground. Everyone has to eat every day. And so I’m very excited about the tangibility that movements around food like La Via Campesina have the potential to lead to. I think there are a lot of migrant worker and migrant justice movements as well that really understand the connection between climate and justice in a way that a lot of liberal movements don’t.
I also think that a lot of the really effective movements and groups that are led by people of color, they’re often more local, kind of environmental justice movements, they are not necessarily as big or as well known. And they sometimes don’t want to be, right? I mean, they’re not trying to kind of mimic the corporate structure. They’re not trying to become a gigantic NGO. And I would encourage people to look for those movements that are close to you, to look for those movements that are led by communities of color and that are led by Indigenous people, and to try to connect with them and to support them. If that’s not the work that you’re doing already, how does that work connect? And how can these movements help to support each other, and to develop a shared understanding, and a shared analysis of what’s needed for action.
TFSR: Cool, thank you for responding to that one. One thing I thought of was the Coalition for Immokalee Workers – which is an immigrant led struggle based out of Florida – they do a lot of media work, but they also are addressing like the real impacts of the epidemic on undocumented populations and farm worker populations in so called USA.
So people who are also familiar with your work are going to be familiar with the fact that you co-authored a book called Deep Green Resistance, alongside Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen some years back. And DGR, besides being a book, is also an organization or a movement, a call out for a movement. And I know one notable thing that was mentioned around Extinction Rebellion was the idea of putting your name out publicly and saying “I’m going to be participating in this direct action”. And that was the thing that I recalled anarchist being critical of DGR, and ecological resistors, where people were asked to sign up publicly and make a pledge to participate in this movement. But I know that you’ve left DGR, you have made public statements about why you have left Deep Green Resistance, but I would wonder if you could reiterate those right here and talk about the group and like why you came to leave it?
AM: Sure. So when writing Deep Green Resistance, what I really wanted to do was help people to understand the climate emergency and to understand better some of the tactics that would be required to deal with it. I do think now versus 10 years ago there’s a much greater understanding that we are in a climate emergency, and that more effective action is called for. It wasn’t my intent for there to be a group or an organization by that name. I kind of figured well, other people who are doing work already and other organizations will hopefully incorporate this analysis, or it will help to mobilize new people as well. And when some of the people who had read the book said, “Oh, we should make an organization about this”. I said, “Well, okay, great”. And it was really a fairly short period that I was participating in that, in kind of the first few months, because unfortunately, what happened when groups started to organize and people started wanting to get together for kind of trainings and conferences, my co authors became very transphobic. There were, you know, people who are asking, very reasonably, “oh, can I use the correct bathroom when I come to this event?” And they would say no. And, you know, it reminds me a lot of what’s been happening with JK Rowling recently. Instead of kind of responding to this critique, or instead of responding to people’s concerns about this, they really doubled down in a way that made it impossible for me to keep working with them, or to keep working with that organization.
I’m someone who is fully in support of trans rights and trans inclusion. And I think that their anti-trans attitudes were really detestable and really destructive. In part, because, you know, a lot of experienced organizers who had been getting connected to the organization left after that, totally understandably. So, it was really disappointing and heartbreaking. And I think that the choice that they made, basically destroyed the potential of that organization to be effective, to be kind of a viable movement organization, because it was such a toxic attitude. And I believe that, in general, it’s good to give people a chance to change their opinions or to learn from their mistakes, because there’s no perfect organization, there’s no perfect movement, right? There has to be potential for growth and for improvement, there has to be potential for everyone to kind of take feedback and learn. But at the same time, if it’s clear that someone is not going to do that, then I’m not going to keep working with them, because it’s not a good use of my energies, and it’s not an I don’t want to be connected with an organization that’s going to be transphobic, or that’s going to endorse any other kind of oppression.
It was a very disappointing experience in a lot of ways, but I think there’s still a lot of valuable content in that book in the book, Deep Green Resistance. I think it still had an an impact and beneficial ways in that it helped to in some communities or in some sub cultures, to accelerate and understanding of the climate emergency. It’s just disappointing that that was the outcome. I think that hopefully it will be a lesson for other activists in the future and for other organizations, to really, from the very beginning of your organization, to set out so much clearer ground rules and clearer points of unity about anti-oppression that everyone will agree on. I think a lot of movements or organizations can emerge out of kind of an ad hoc approach, can kind of coalesce together. And I think it’s really important to pause and make sure that you’re on the same page about everything, before putting in too much effort before putting in too much commitment.
TFSR: So besides the transphobia, another critique that’s come to the DGR approach that that was sort of laid down in the book, was valorization. Maybe not in all instances, but in some instances of like a vanguard, or like a military command structure. Which, in a military scenario and like combat zones, I’ve heard it like I’ve heard anarchist talk about like, yes, it makes sense to have a clear lines of communication, someone who’s maybe elected into that position for a short period of time, and who is recallable, be a person that will make decisions on behalf of whatever like a group is in an activity. Is that an effective approach towards organizing ecological resistance? On what scale is that an effective or appropriate model for decision making? And is there a conflict between concepts of leadership versus vanguard command structure?
AM: Sure, I don’t think that we should be having military style command structures. Part of the critique that I was trying to create speaking for myself, was that consensus is not always the ideal decision making structure for every single situation. And I think, especially in the early 2000s, in a lot of anarchist communities, there was this idea that consensus is the only approach and if you don’t believe in always using consensus, then you’re kind of an authoritarian. And I think that’s really an oversimplification. I think consensus is very good for a lot of situations, right? It’s good for situations where you have a lot of time, it’s good for situations where people have a similar level of investment in the outcome of a decision or where people have a similar level of experience, perhaps.
But consensus has some flaws, as well. And I think one of them is that, you know, if you have a group of, say, mostly white people and a handful of people of color, who are trying to make a consensus-based decision about something that has to do with racism, then you’re not necessarily going to get the outcome that you want, because that is a system that can downplay inequalities in experience that are real, right? Some people have more experience of racism or, or systems of oppression and consensus doesn’t always incorporate that.
So we were talking a lot about the Wet’suwet’en example earlier, the Wet’suwet’en struggle. And when settler allies have gone to Wet’suwet’en territory to help, they actually have to basically sign off and say, “Yeah, I’m fine to accept Indigenous leadership for the duration of my time there. And if I don’t want to accept it any more than I can leave.” And I think there’s a place for a lot of different kinds of decision making structures. So for me, it’s like tactics, right? I mean, there are some tactics that are really good in some situations, and really not very helpful and others. And I feel like with decision making, it’s the same way. For myself, I prefer to work in consensus situations most of the time, because that’s a way of making sure that you’re incorporating a lot of different perspectives. But I think when you do have a very tight timeline, you know, it makes sense, as you mentioned, to consider electing people or to have people who are maybe on a rotating basis kind of in charge for that action. I think that there’s room for a lot of different approaches in terms of decision making. And like our tactics, our form of decision making has to be matched to our situation and to our goals.
TFSR: So it feels like when talking about ecological devastation, and like the precarity of where we’re at as a species, in particular – again in western civilization – that there’s this misanthropic approach towards looking at problems and solutions in terms of human caused ecological unbalance. It’s sort of a Manichaean approach. And people talk about there being too large of human populations, or historically, that sort of numbers game kind of leads to a eugenicism position. That puts blame on poor people or indigent people, and darker skinned people, as they tend to be more marginalized in the settler colonial societies in this parts of the world. And often, like, even just those nations are taking up more resources, those nations are developing in a way that’s inconsistent with you know, ecological balance.
It feels like that sort of approach is one that ignores the question of how populations are interacting – or the economic systems that populations are kept within – with the world with, quote unquote, “resources” with other species. And there’s often a presumption affiliated with that, that we as a species are alien to or above the rest of the world, that we’re not a part of nature, that we’re separate from it. And I think there’s some kind of like Cartesian logic in there, because we can think about ourselves to be self aware, in a way that we understand. We presume that not only is there a lack of agency to other elements, within our surroundings, with other living things…I guess it goes back to, like, in the western sense, stories of genesis. Of human beings being given control over the natural world to determine how those quote unquote “resources” are used, as opposed to being a part of that natural world, and that we have a responsibility for ourselves and for our siblings. Can you talk about why it’s important to challenge like, sort of the fundamental weaknesses of the misanthropic approach that looks as us as outside of the natural world? And how shifting that question actually allows us to make the changes that will be required for us to possibly survive this mess?
AM: Sure, yeah. I mean, I understand why people get frustrated with humanity. But I think, both from a philosophical perspective and from an organizers perspective, blaming humans in general for the problem really kind of obscures the root of the emergencies that we’re facing, and it obscures the things that we need to do. I think some of what you’ve talked about, it’s really different forms of human exceptionalism, right? There are some people who don’t care about the environment at all, who are human exceptionalist, who think humans can do whatever we want, we’re immune to the same kind of rules that other organisms follow. We’re immune from the effects of the weather or the planet or the ecology. And of course that’s ridiculous. But at the same time, we have at the other end, people who really believe a different form of human exceptionalism and believe that humans are doomed to do bad things, that we’re kind of doomed to destroy the planet. And I don’t think either of those things are true. I think, you know, if you look at that history of humanity and our immediate ancestors, for millions of years we managed not to destroy the planet, or even put the planet in peril. It’s really a fairly new phenomenon that specific societies, and especially specific people in specific societies, have been causing this level of destruction. And that destruction is not really about population, it’s about wealth.
If you look at someone like Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon who’s bringing in what? $12 billion a day that he’s adding to his his fortune, $12 billion in profit every day, compared with someone living in, say, Bangladesh, who’s barely emitting any carbon dioxide at all. There’s a huge disparity. And I think that people like Jeff Bezos would probably be happy to have us say, “Oh, well, the problem is just humanity. The problem is we’re going to destroy the planet. And I guess we have to build rocket ships and go to other planets, because that’s the only way to solve this problem.” Whereas really, it’s about wealth and capitalism. It’s that people in very wealthy countries, and especially the richest people in those countries, are doing most of the ecological damage, and who also have the power to stop doing that ecological damage if they chose and if they were willing to give up some of the money that they’re making every day.
So as an organizer, one of the reasons that I avoid that misanthropic approach is because it just doesn’t give us a lot of options, right? Like, if humans inherently are the problem, then do we just wait for humans to go extinct? I mean, I’ve certainly heard people say, “Oh, well, I guess the earth is going to come back into balance.” So you know, that kind of line of thinking. But for me as an organizer who works on many different issues, from prisons to gender equality, to you know, farm worker issues, that’s not a good enough solution. It’s not good enough to just throw your hands up and say, “oh, what can we do? It’s human nature,” because it doesn’t address the root power imbalances. And it also doesn’t give us any models for how to live better. Because that’s also what the misanthropy kind of obscures. It obscures the fact that the majority of Indigenous societies for the majority of history have lived in a way that has been beneficial for the land around them. And there are still many traditional communities and many societies that managed to live without destroying their environment and destroying the land.
And so I think, you know, if we say, “Oh, well, humans are just the problem”, then that kind of frees us up that burden of of learning more and actually changing our lifestyle, maybe, or changing our approach. I think it’s really important we look at the root of the problems that we’re facing, which in terms of climate, and many other things, is really about capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, these overlapping systems of inequality. And I think, again, the solutions that we need to find have to do with looking to those communities that have been living in a better way, whether that’s Indigenous communities or communities that have struggled for genuine equality, genuine racial equality, gender equality, all of these things. And those are the kinds of communities that can help us to not just survive this climate emergency, but after that, and now to have communities to have societies that are actually worth living in. That are fair and inclusive, and where people aren’t constantly in this competitive struggle, and on the edge of precarity in this, you know, doggy dog situation. I think it’s a very good news story to look past that misanthropy and to look at societies that are worth living in.
TFSR: So your two books, in a lot of ways – just at least by the titles and by what we’ve been talking about – a lot of what they map out is strategies for resistance and strategies for challenging the current system. And I’m not sure if there’s a strong focus on what you’re talking about right now the like, “what are people doing in other places, what have people been doing?” Are there any examples, or any good roads towards gaining that knowledge that you can suggest? You mentioned just listening to people that have been living in other ways and to the people that have been most affected by the impacts of climate change and racialized capitalism? Are there any authors or any movements in addition to the Wet’suwet’en for instance, that you would suggest listening to or looking to?
AM: Sure, well, in closer to me, I think the Indigenous Environmental Network is a movement I look at a lot, the Migrant Rights Alliance is an organization that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to. So a slightly older book that I think is important is called Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth, which is edited by Steven Best and Anthony J Nochella, and that’s a compilation of writings from many different people that kind of brings together anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism. I think that book is a really great place to start. And I think also, for me, a lot of the case studies that I talked about, a lot of movements that I talked about, are examples of people who’ve tried to kind of bring this intersectionality together in the past; Black Panther Fred Hampton was an incredibly powerful organizer who brought together, you know, this anti-racist, anti-capitalist approach. People like Judi Bari, the environmental activist who put forward a philosophy she called “revolutionary ecology”, that synthesized feminism and Earth First! and kind of working class analysis of capitalism.
I think people like that are really important to listen to. And I think, you know, it’s no coincidence that Fred Hampton was assassinated by the police, or that Judi Bari was bombed by the police. Those in power are really terrified by movements that take this intersectional approach and by people who do this, because, you know, when we start moving in this direction we can be incredibly effective and bring together a lot of different groups and movements, and have a really powerful transformative impact.
TFSR: Thank you so much for having this conversation. Aric, could you tell listeners how they can get ahold of any of your books or where they can find your writings or follow your ongoing journalism?
AM: Yeah, so you can find out more about Full Spectrum Resistance by visiting fullspectrumresistance.org. And you can also download some additional resources and read or listen to the first chapter there. If you want to look at some of my other work, you can visit aricmcbay.org, A-R-I-C-M-C-B-A-Y dot org. And I also have a Facebook page, Aric McBay author.
TFSR: Thank you again, so much, for taking the time to have this conversation. And yeah, I appreciate your work.
AM: Thanks so much. Likewise, it’s been a pleasure.
This week, we’re happy to air a conversation I had with the author and activist, Modibo Kadalie, author of Pan-African Social Ecology as well as Internationalism, Pan-Africanism and the Struggle of Social Classes. A version of Dr. Kadalie’s conversation with Andrew Zonneveld of OOA! Publishing, entitled Pan-Africanism, Social Ecology and Intimate Direct Action appeared up in the recently released collection Deciding For Ourselves, edited by Cindy Milstein out from AK Press. Dr. Kadalie has also been involved in political organizing including resisting the draft of the Vietnam War, labor organizing in Detroit and Memphis, ecological protest, community self defense in Atlanta and currently is working on writings about ecology and living in the territories of southeastern Turtle Island, including those of the Creek and Seminole peoples, and working at the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology in Midway, Georgia.
In this hour, Modibo talks about autonomous community organizing, the contradictions between the survival of the species and capitalism, CLR James, his read on Pan-Africanism and Social Ecology, the pandemic, and direct democracy. We also talk about Geechee history in south so-called Georgia, the weaknesses of nationalism, hierarchy and revering individual historical figures and the strength of spontaneity and community action.
This conversation was recorded before the killing of George Floyd and but after the increased awareness of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery nearby to Dr. Kadalie in Glynn County, GA, which reflects in the discussion. Modibo shares some criticisms of official Black Lives Matter, liberal cooptation and the veneration of representative leadership.
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Featured Tracks:
Marvin Gaye – Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) – What’s Going On
Quincy Jones – Everything Must Change – Body Heat
Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come – Ain’t That Good News
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Transcription
TFSR: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat, Dr. Kadalie.
Dr. Modibo Kadalie: It’s very good, thank you very much. I’ve seen thiscollection. It’s a very good, very easy read, deciding for ourselves, it’sgot quite a few different perspectives. What makes it so good is that everybody talks about where does this ideal society exist, where can you find it, and what we got to do is showhow it’s emerging all over the world. The collection is a really good read. I recommend it highly.
TFSR: Awesome, we just received a copy from AK Press which we are excited to dig into. I’d like to say first off that I really appreciate the wide focus lens that you use when discussing the history and popular movements and popular participation in discourse. When you have Q&As and discussions. It seems like a lot of your public presentations are focused on the idea of de-centering the individual as the focus, and you engage other participants in lively discourse, rather than a monologue. I feel that says a lot about your politics.
MK: Don’t you find monologues boring? I think their peculiar emergence in a liberal individualistic society. The lecture shows you that somebody’s got the answers, and you’ve got to listen. It is very boring and authoritarian.
TFSR: Absolutely. One thing that I noticed from some pieces that are in your collection from OOOA! was you talked a lot about the impacts of, among other people, C.L.R. James on your thinking. We’ve never had anyone talk about his writings and what he brought to the Marxist tradition and the postcolonial struggle tradition. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe like some of his thoughts that influenced you and interactions that you had with him?
MK: The most dramatic thing was he was a critic of the nation-state. Of course, I was disappointed because he never went as far as I wanted him to go. He was a critic of the nation-state, yet he venerated certain pan-African statesmen. I don’t think he ever made a distinction betweenclassical Pan-Africanism, which is statist in its nature, and neo-Pan-Africanism, which is what I am. I’m a neo-Pan-Africanist, I believe that Pan-Africanism as any kind of humanism has to emerge from my people sitting down,talking, and discussing things to decide how they will go in their society, consistent with their natural ecosystems there that they depend upon for their survival. And these ecosystems are mutually dependent on human beings, symbiotically, relating in a natural world. And I believe we’ve got a real serious problem because capitalism has taken human beingsinto a very bad dark place. It’s a real detour that people have degenerated, and the technology, it is not very impressive when you look at it from a social-ecological perspective, all the patterns and human knowledge and all that stuff. Beginning with the industrial revolution, it was really inhuman what they did. It’s a very vicious and horrible period we live in. And they’ve been successful in making us believe it is the golden age of human thought and existence. To me, it is just the opposite. You get weapons of mass destruction, human beings fighting all the time with other human beings. Capitalism is driven by the private ownership of property and wealth accumulation. The writers of history look at human society as something which is not only great but the modern technology is wonderful, but the tragedy of it allis that they cannot see the inhumanity. We are on the verge of completely destroying the planet. Nobody seems to understand that human beingswho try to own everything and try to rule everybody, there is a danger. The danger for the survival of the species and human society and human advancement not in the materialistic sense but in a humanistic sense.
TFSR:I think what you are saying plays with the definition of social ecology that you give in some of your pieces. Can you break that down a little? Because people may not be familiar with the term?
MK: The term ‘social ecology’ was coined by Murray Bookchin. His contribution was that he saw that human society was natural as opposed to the people who thought human society was unnatural. The rest of the natural world was natural and humans were pitted against the rest of nature. Bookchin saw that human beings and human society were a natural outburst of nature, and what we have to do is reintegrate human society with the rest of the natural world as a naturalsymbiotic relationship, a mutual affirmation.
TFSR:Where do social ecologists feel like it went wrong? You pointed out the industrial revolution- and I think some people might point to the application of Cartesian Logic, but some people might go back to primitive accumulation.
MK: Well, I have a serious break with Bookchin at the point when you start venerating the Age of Reason, venerating the American democracy. I really don’t think American democracy ever existed. I think that in the American state, there is a particular bastardization of democracy, of direct democracy, for sure. Now, there’s gonna be a debate about that. Because there are people who believe that the American and the European experiments with the rise of the nation-states in the Age of Reasoning and, of course, what they call modern science… I believe that science hasexisted, as long as human beings have tried to live collectively on the planet. So I’m a little different there, and I’m gonna write more about that later. But I believe that American democracy is no contribution to human social history. And we can see it’s not any kind of contribution to ecology at all. Look at America today, look at what’s happening in the North American continent, this is probably the most unnatural of the continents, because, by the way, you have to put this element in it, this idea of individual ownership of property, the unbridled right to own people, including other people, as it began. And this private property is against human collectivity. Human beings have existed socially and as a species for documented over 200,000 years. And if the greed and avariciousness and competitiveness that we know now, that defines individual relationships with one another, the kind of exploitation and the kind of brutality that human beings exact upon each other and nations, exact upon one another.
And as you know, nation-states in their legal systems have a right to kill people. They call it capital punishment, and war. They venerate people who kill people, those who kill the most other people are the people who are the heroes. So I mean, capitalism and individual private property really must be looked at seriously, because that’s just where human beings, and that’s where the detour began to take place. Now, there was some hierarchy before, old against young, against women and men, but it never reached the point that it exists now. The point it exists now is almost unimaginable. Can you imagine, some nations can wipe out every living thing on the planet with their weapons? And they got all kinds of technologies circling the planet, most of its purpose, of course, they tell you, the purpose is to facilitate communication, but most of its purpose is to seek some advantage over one another. So that they can develop this diplomatic concept that they call Mutual Assured Destruction. What an inhuman concept! I’m laughing because I’m hurt so bad by it.
Bookchin and C.L.R. took me up to a point. But they were people of their time, just like I am a person of this time. So hopefully, we can write this stuff down so other people can take a look at it and critique it and see where they don’t take it.
TFSR: So if we decenter the individual, just in terms of decision-making or deciding what’s best for the communities in which we live and the repercussions that we have to live with as individuals, I can see people who have been raised in places like the United States, we’ve been taught what democracy is to be this representational constitutional republic, whatever it is, that people would reject the term Democrat outright, because that’s what has been fed to them. Are there any visions of democracy that you can talk about that you’ve been personally influenced by that have had a different, more decentralized and human-level version?
MK: Even you can look at the most popular movements of our time, which have started off as direct democracy. And even the native people that were culturally and socially destroyed with the North American genocide, (when I say ‘we’, I don’t mean ‘me’) the American government wiped out all these democratic forms which they could have learned from. Anytime you see a picket line, when a local group, when a local society is under great pressure and in crisis, like in a storm or flood, people do what they have to do. People get sandbags, they don’t get paid for that, they line on the riverbanks with sandbags, they feed themselves, theyfeed other people that are in this pandemic. But let me give you a good example of how we don’t even know because we’ve been so brainwashed, don’t even know what’s happening for us.
For instance, Black Lives Matter. When Black Lives Matter started off, it was completely democratic. People were marching in the streets and raising their slogans and saying what they needed to say. But by the time the social workers and various people came in from the outside, as people came in, it became the Black Lives Matter. Next thing we’ve been raisingindividual people who were running for office, who were credited with founding the Black Lives Matter movement. First thing, it became the Black Lives Matter movement, because the media did that, the media named it that. And so it became. So they had to interview somebody, to interview these people who claim to be articulators of the program of the Black Lives Matter movement, but the Black Lives Matter movement was spontaneous of people from the suburbs of St. Louis. And basically, when we look at it, we’re looking at what I call a state creep. The state is taking it back over. And now people are running for office and using the Black Lives Matter environment as credentials. So they become members of the bureaucracy. But what you’re looking at is the shadow of the Black Lives movement, the aftermath, what the state has creeped up and done. Like the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement started in Montgomery. These people spontaneously began to organize themselves. Martin Luther King didn’t really know what was going on. And they organized an alternative transportation system on their own, boycotted the bus. They boycotted the buses. But that wasn’t an important thing. The important thing is a lot of those people were getting to work on time. Taxicab drivers were organizing, people who had cars organized themselves. And so they maintained a transportation system because the city continued to function despite what they call the boycott. Martin King came in, they got somebody who can speak, they always get the best speakers to articulate what the masses want. But they usually are not clear on what’s going on anyway. And even now, I don’t know if you know about a young black man who was killed in the streets of Brunswick, Georgia.
TFSR: Yes.
MK: Okay, let me tell you something about it because you have to look at it. When the history is written, if we don’t say anything, it is going to be the NAACP leaders, the ones who call the rally on the steps of the courthouse, and then, of course, they interview his mother. And that’s the story we get on TV. But what happened was that Ahmad was a very popular young man. And his friends went over to that suburban, almost all-white community after he was killed. After they got the story straight, because they had to go through the story to get the story straight, the officials. The official story was that he was trying to rob, there was a burglary in progress. And the police came in with these other guys helping to stop this burglar. And so after the story got out, people didn’t believe that, they were his friends. So these young people went over to the community where he was killed and started walking up and down the street and saying, “We runwith Ahmad, all of us, we run withhim“. And so they started running down the street. But there were no preachers there with no Bibles, no black leaders with no suits and ties telling them how to conduct themselves. And then when the guy who took the video saw that these kids were getting some publicity like that, he then released the video. And then when the video was released, then everybody knew them. But these kids are not gonna get any credit for any of that.
TFSR:Because they don’t have a non-profit or a pulpit.
MK: Yeah, because people don’t look for direct democratic, spontaneous people as being significant in human history. But that’s where the new society is born, and that’s why we have to write it like that. And once they see it, and once you look at it, everybody knows, yeah, that’s what happens. Because you can verify it, like in the case of Montgomery, the Montgomery Improvement Association was having regular meetings, but the black bus boycott, it already jumped off. And I saw it in Detroit, in New Orleans, when these people were trying to keep their community running. And next thing all the drug stores are flooded. So you are going to the drug store and ask the cashier to get you some Pampers, but there is no cashier in there. And the kids need Pampers, people need medicine. So they go in and get it and give it to people. But then when the media gets it — they’re looting the drug store.
So we just have to begin to look at history from a real directly democratic eye. Because that’s how it’s been happening the whole time. And you can see it even in the dark ages. If you look at European history, that gives you a good example.
Before all these philosophers, like Locke, and Hume, and Berkeley, even Rousseau started writing. That was the Dark Ages. And that was between the period of the fall of the Roman Empire, the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and the rise of these kingdoms in northern Europe and the periphery of the Roman Empire.
These are the Dark Ages because the church was not strong. There were no strong kings, these are the Dark Ages. But the people were organizing guilds, the artisans were organized, they were directly democratic forms. So when they say the Dark Ages existed, then what we got to do is shed some light on the Dark Ages. And when they say that African people were not capable of civilizing, that’s why they have classical colonialism, we have to show that these people were civilized, self-organized, but they don’t look at directly democratic organizations as being any form of civilization. And that’s why European capitalists in these states who now rule the world, or some form of their organization all over the world, this is a very dark period of civilization in human history. And I don’t know if we can survive it or not. What do you think?
TFSR: I hope so.
MK: I think we will.
TFSR: You pointed to how these directly democratic forms are coming up when people are feeling under pressure, you pointed to Katrina, you pointed to more recently during the pandemic, these examples of mutual aid and goods redistribution. I think there’s a lot of hope in there. I think the scale is lacking, and not that things have to be centralized, but if things can integrate together, if these things are happening in a bunch of different places, there are forms of communication between them, but it seems like networking and sharing resources.
MK: All the time now I’ve been zooming my ass off. I’ve been on a Zoom in Europe, people from Belgium and France, and I’ve been all over the screen and read my screen right in front of me. Young people understand it. But the point is, as long as you measure human beings by some material wealth and some private accumulation of property and federate these corporations because that’s all they are, they are just people organized to amass enormous material, wealth, and control. These things have to be dismantled along with the state. They put up these big centralized states, people have to become unmediated human beings. You can’t represent me, I can’t represent you, we have to get together and talk about what we want to do and figure out what we want to be. And we can figure it out. Human beings have always done that. Human beings wouldn’t exist for 200,000 years in some kind of without any kind of mutual aid or some kind of cooperation. And if they were selfish and individualistic, there would have been no more human species, human society. That’s why we got to this point by people understanding that despite all that… Sometimes people do it without even knowing it. If you went to Montgomery, Alabama, and asked anybody black, even a month or two before the bus boycott broke up. If you asked them, “Do you think that black people in Montgomery, Alabama can organize an alternative transportation system that can get people to work on time for a year?” “No, can’t do that? Who is going to teach us how to do that?” Well, you teach yourself, you work yourself, you work yourself through. I feel very strongly about it, I guess you can tell that.
TFSR: And you’ve done a lot of thinking and observing of that, too.
MK: Oh yeah, it’s a marvelous thing to behold. It’s like anything else, beautiful. If you know what to look at, it becomes greatly beautiful, if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you won’t be able to appreciate it. We are all learning, of course.Do you have any examples that you marvel about in your life time?
TFSR: Well, it’s hard to not have like the tinted glasses of retrospect and be like, “Well, that was weak for this reason, that reason, but definitely like the mutual aid stuff…
MK: Where are you now?
TFSR: North Carolina, Asheville.
MK: Asheville, North Carolina? And where did thatbookstore come from?
TFSR:That came from people getting together and saying, “We want this in our community.” And that’s how it gets supported, it definitely doesn’t make money.
MK: Y’all trying to make money in a massive fortune?
TFSR: It would not work. That’s probably the joke at the beginning of every presentation.
MK: You want to have a whole book chain of all these books, so you can get on your computer and count your money?
TFSR: Here, we have a couple of mutual aid projects that are distributing goods that are donated from people and doing deliveries of groceries or handing out sandwiches and coffee to houseless folks or folks who just need a little up in the morning.
MK: Who taught you to do that?
TFSR: Our program’s named after the Black Panther Party Survival Program, and they learned from someone, too.
MK: Does it make you feel good?
TFSR: Yeah, absolutely.
MK: And you know who’s not going to be there and who’s going to be there when you get ready to do it. That’s how it works.
TFSR: Yeah.
So we’ve talked a little bit about the decision-making and the organizing aspects of what some of the things that we’ve experienced that humans are capable of in our societies. Shifting a little bit, you mentioned militarism and mutually assured destruction. Trump just dropped out of the Open Skies Treaty. And before that, he removed the US from the INF Treaty and the Iran nuclear deal. And there’s talk of sparking an arms race with Russia and there’s been saber-rattling with China. A lot of the people that are listening to this show have grown up under the war on terror, and haven’t known a time when the US hasn’t been actively engaged in a war abroad. Besides the police interventions that were going on in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, or whatever you want to call it.
MK: I grew up during the Cold War. I thought the Russians would come. We used to duck and cover under the seats in the school expecting a nuclear attack. But the only country that used nuclear weapons against the civilian, nuclear weapon against anybody is the United States government.
TFSR: And you resisted the draft, right?
MK: Yeah. That didn’t make sense. As dumb as I was, that didn’t make sense. For whatever reason, I wouldn’t go into that one. That’s the whole history of the last century. Nation-states fighting armies. Only ones that have armies are Nation States. Nation-states got armies, and they got legitimate armies. You can be a nice guy from Northern California and get drafted into the military. You can’t get drafted now into the military. And you can go into a place that you have never been before. And because you’re an American military person, you can kick down somebody’s door and shoot him in the head and get away with it. And then come back a hero. Cowardly, what you can do is just become technologically savvy and send drones over there to do it.
TFSR: And then afterwards, you carry the trauma of having done that sort of thing as a human being in a lot of cases, right?
MK: Yeah. And you do it because other people tell you to do it, you don’t even have a chance to think about it, you follow orders. I don’t mind following something that I’ve agreed with other people that we are going to do. I don’t follow somebody telling me what to do, that I never had anything to say about. And I think that’s a human, not so much an instinct, but I think human beings are wired to work in common with other human beings and to not destroy other human beings, except over something material. And we are taught that I think.
TFSR: Yeah, because we’ve been taught that, I wonder how – especially for those folks that have been living under this war on terror thing or those of us who grew up during the Cold War – how do we move away from being influenced by these leaders who… it’s obvious that Trump and the administration feel that not only have we lost the prestige of our imperial halcyon days of the Cold War, but the economy also could do for a boost, and all these other associated things with militarism, like patriarchy and white supremacy. And these things are waning in some ways, because of the threat of social justice movements, or just people being good to each other.
MK: It’s the way they mobilize everybody behind the banner of patriotism and stuff. So it’s not just a war on communism, or war on terrorism, it is the war on poverty, the war on the virus. The American policymakers know one thing, they know that to get everybody behind a policy, you got to declare war. There is a war on everything, on drugs, etc. And so what we have to do, is get out of our mindset, this jingoism when we get involved in a debate about policy. Anytime it says a war on something, what that means is that they’re trying to rally people and appeal to their nationalist fervor. You have a war on virus – what the fuck is that? So what you have to do is criticize, there is no war on viruses and we’re not all in this together either. Some people ain’t even in it, but they’ll send you to be in it. The fact is that there are people who are unevenly affected by this kind of thing.
So, what you have to do is you have to explain it to people that these are viruses, these are naturally occurring viruses that are part of the evolution or the failure of the evolution of the human body to adjust to the environment, to their immediate environment. And then you have to explain it scientifically that there is a cancer pandemic. People understand that very well. Because cancer is the human body trying to adjust or accelerate evolution in an uneven way. So, all these tumors and everything come as a result of the human body trying to adjust. And these viruses are like that. These viruses come in for several reasons, they turn down the natural support system of other life forms on the planet. They are trying to survive, their bodies have viruses, too, and what we need to do is understand how we have to live within the scope of our own context. And we have to put scientific knowledge in the service, not of developing a vaccine, and showing that a vaccine is gonna make a lot of people a lot of money, a lot of people will get famous. So that’s why over a hundred different corporations are putting money into vaccines as an investment. And explain the system to them, and how the policy arguments are not fruitful. The argument that we have to look at is how do we take control of our own local communities and help other people do that. And we have an opportunity here too, because the virus attacks community, locality. And that’s why you have outbreaks here and there, and you have to work it from that angle. But the rhetoric gets to be really emotional.
We have to have a war on this and a war on that, and then, of course, everybody’s thinking that Biden is going to save us. And Trump has betrayed us. That’s what the liberals think, and the more conservative think that Trump is trying to save us, and all you other dummies are trying to stop them from saving us. But the point is, people will have to have an enlightened discussion about the relationship between human society and the rest of the natural world. And we will have to understand that the nation-state and the corporations and individual ownership of property stands in the way of human beings realizing the scientific and ecological future. A lot of people are going to say “What the hell are you saying?” But over time, and we have to sacrifice ourselves, your children will understand, that generation will understand. But if we have nothing written down, no kind of discussions like this on tape, then they will have to reinvent the wheel, because these things will be suppressed. So we have to keep these things alive, so they won’t be suppressed. So I don’t see my role too much, I just trying to write something down so that people have something to think about in the next generation when the real pandemics come. What we have right here is nothing compared to the real pandemics, the real wars and stuff and real confusion.
Young people understand climate change, but the really important thing, all of the major real issues have nothing to do with state policy in the sense. Climate change is across borders. Borders don’t mean anything to climate change or the pandemic. And it doesn’t mean anything to these immigrants. People gonna go where they go and people gonna fight where they need to fight. And then they go organize themselves to make the fight. And we have to put a mirror in front of them. So they’ll see who they are, what they must do, and support them in doing it and not try to interpret what they’re doing in some capitalistic bourgeois bullshit way. I get tired of reading these people, you read them, and they reach, they get to the point where all the shit is wrong, obviously, they’re wrong. But you know what they end up doing? But we got to develop, we got to change the state so it can really save us, we got to make sure the corporations are accountable. That’s where they fuck up right there. We got to get beyond that point.
TFSR: They haven’t rejected the state structure or capitalism fully, but they recognize the climate crisis is real. And they recognized the patterns of disease and how capitalism facilitates its spread. I just keep thinking back to all the money that’s been poured into the airlines, and how much of an effect on the ecology there’s been since fewer flights have been going, and how cheap the planes are right now, and how it’s just trying to stay alive. But it’s literally the vector for not only massive amounts of pollution for people to make pleasure trips in a lot of cases or business trips or whatever. But it’s also the vector for so much of the disease spreading. So many of these huge places where it’s become pandemic are not that far from an international airport and then it’s complicated by racialized and class-based impacts of capitalism.
MK: I just enjoy looking at the sky and not seeing vapor trails. I don’t know whether you noticed it, but in the morning, the sun is much brighter and the grass is much greener. And seeing like nonhuman nature seems to be responding, releasing itself in a very good way. I’ve seen animals come out of the woods. I have a comrade in China, he texts me and he says, he’s from Beijing. He says the sky is blue in Beijing. I thought it was great. You got to see the sky. That has an impact. And I understand that the fish coming up into the Grand Canal in Venice now. You don’t have those big luxury liners going up in there. So you can catch a fish off the Grand Canal. People don’t see that. The earth is telling us something.
TFSR: Yeah, and we need to heed that and we need to stop this shit from coming back.
MK: It’s gonna come back, but it’s not gonna come back without being seriously challenged next time. It goes like that way. I have another little difference with my friends. They think that I’m some kind of a historical generator of spontaneous upheavals. Because they think that what we should be doing is agitating and telling the masses, they must fight and engage blah, blah. No, no, no, this isn’t the period of propagandizing, this is the period when we conceptualize stuff, and when they erupt, that’s when we should be agitating. And they say, “Spontaneity, what is that?” “That’s the NewSociety trying to emerge?” “How come they never take over?” Because they aren’t trying to take over, they just try to understand who they are, what the world can look like. And over time, it’ll become clear to everybody. Let me just draw a line right here, I have drawn a line with my mentor C.L.R. James, when he venerated certain black heads of state, he says, the states are evil and we must go beyond them. But then he turns that around and venerates the guy like Lenin, a guy like Kwame Nkruma. If you’re gonna be against the state, you gotta be against all of them, whoever they were, whoever they are. He’s circumscribed by us all the time. He can only act in a certain way. And Bookchin, he’s gonna raise the Age of Reasoning and the American Revolution. I broke with him there.
I just want you to know that I’m thankful for these guys. But we got to go further than that. If we stay where they stood… And I’m sorry that there are people who are venerating these people now without understanding what they represented in the development of certain ideas and certain political trends and stuff. You should never venerate anybody, no individual person should be… When you put out a work, or you engage in the discussion, like you and I, it’s supposed to be for critical purposes. So you can understand one another better.The axe doesn’t get sharp on his own must be sharpened by file. That’s a metaphor.
TFSR: It’s a good metaphor. I was talking to a friend the other day about having this conversation and she was asking, “What are you reading?” And I mentioned your book and she asked about social ecology. And she also asked “What’s the definition of Pan-Africanism?” and I gave like the Wikipedia definition. I wonder if you could break down what that phrase means to you and what it means to be a neo-Pan-Africanist.
MK: Pan-Africanism is a concept that arose to counteract the colonization of Africans on the continent of Africa and the segregation of African people in the new world along with some other colonies in the Caribbean and Central America, which were black. The original Pan-Africanists saw that the empowerment – that’s why I call them classical Pan-Africanists – that the empowerment of African people requires that they create state bonds, state formations, and unite them like the United States in North America so that they can be on the world stage as representatives of the will of the black masses, both in the United States, the Caribbean, and in the continent of Africa. That’s what classical Pan-Africanism is. Now, most people don’t make this distinction. My distinction is neo Pan-Africanism is for the empowerment of all African people, wherever they might be, without the state, the empowerment of African communities all over the world in unity with the rest of the people all over the world. So that’s what I call neo-Pan-Africanism. Now, most people don’t make that distinction. So if you talk to somebody, you tell them that that’s the distinction that I’m making. So they won’tthink that you haven’t thought about it as well. To be clear, classical Pan-Africanism is associated with a response to classical colonialism. Classical colonialism is the period in human history where European nation-states sent their direct administrative apparatus to administer their colonies. They lived there. Neocolonialism is the period in human history where indigenous groups of people emerge to take over control of these states and administer them like they’re doing now. The period of classical Pan-Africanism is a response to classical colonialism, the idea of neo-colonialism, neo-Pan-Africanism is a response to that.
TFSR: And is the need within the neo-Pan-Africanist push, or as you experienced it, or that delineation that you make, you said that the nation state format is an unnatural, or at least a detrimental form…
MK: Yes, it is unnatural, and it needs to be swept aside, along with these various confederations of states, like the Organization of African Unity. People see them as that. People just say, “Why don’t they act right? Why don’t they be what they’re supposed to do that?” The Organization of African Unity and various governments, they call socialist governments in Africa, like in Tanzania, sometimes, Ghana sometimes, and even Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela never was anything but really a classical Pan-Africanist and, actually, he was a more broad-based classical Pan-Africanist, because he united with the Cubans as well, and the Chinese as well. But he never was a socialist, even of the old classical socialist ilk, but he’s like Martin Luther King. You can say nothing against Martin Luther King because that’s being racist, and he’s denying black people and he was turning against your race and all that, but you got to criticize him. Even Malcolm X. These people understood liberation in the context of nationalism, black people, white people have got nation-states. And what we need to do is have nation-states of our own, and that’s how you liberate yourself. To me, that was bullshit from the beginning.
TFSR: But you do feel that it’s important that people of African descent have been able to organize together, right?
MK: Yeah. Being organized together in places where they have a commonality with other people organized with them too. I don’t see it as a separation thing, it’s like right here, down here in Midway. There’s Black people and white people. Black people can organize and then white people want to come and we can organize together on how we want to live. And as time goes on, you will see more and more of that.
TFSR: Can you talk a bit about the community that you live in and some of the history of resistance there? Your interactions with the authors ofof Dixie Be Damnedand other essays that you talk about are really impressive.
MK: Well, I live on the coast of Georgia. And during the reconstruction, during the Civil War, this was a rice plantation area. And you had rice plantations up and down the coast of Georgia and up and down the coast of South Carolina. But even before the Civil War, there was a shift in the south, where big money was invested in cotton, cotton don’t grow well down here. If you look at the Black Belt, that is a demographic area where there were large black populations before the migration to the north, you don’t find the coastal areas included except in various places. But you’ll find the use of those plantations in central Georgia, central Alabama, up and down the Mississippi on both sides and up into Western Tennessee and Eastern Arkansas. That’s where,in North Carolina, South Carolina. But when the Civil War broke out, the market and rice were already gone. So the rice plantations don’t look like the cotton plantations, the rice plantations were left alone and they workeddown here. The owners only came as traders who actually traded that it didn’t last so long during the Reconstruction. People just claimed the land for themselves. And then they didn’t give any kind of acknowledgment to white ownership. And they just claimed that, that’s why when Shermancame down, he issued Field Order #15, and he said that all of the land, from the ocean to 31 to 32 miles inland couldn’t be claimed by the emancipated slave as their own. So they did.
So as the country grew and developed, there was an erosion of that ownership of land, but people held on for a while. I was born down here. When my parents came from central Georgia… And by the way, these people voted. They couldn’t run for office in the South, because the state government didn’t allow that. But they could vote for white people.
So I had all kinds of Gullah Geechee communities and all kinds of African retentions. And all kinds of independent, autonomous institutions. So that’s who they were. The Geechee had a reputation of being a rice-eating, fish-eating, mean, recalcitrant, disagreeable person, short, black. And those are the people I grew up around. So it has a collective history.
And even the people who ran the county government really didn’t bother the black people too much. When the paper companies took over some of the lands, they just want to make sure that the people brought the wood to the sawmill like in many other places. But that tradition was a part of who I am. So I never believed that black people were not resourceful and could not govern and decide for themselves what they want to do. I never believed that. Other people believed that, I think in central Georgia, there was less of this kind of self-organizing activity. But in coastal Georgia and coastal South Carolina, there were a lot of legendary leaders who guided the people to some kind of autonomous existence. And their history is written. There’s a place called Harris Neck, Andrew went over there, he was amazed because they still live over there, even though there’s a great push from Northern, New York people primarily from Long Island to settle down here after they retire, instead of going all the way to Florida. So it’s always changing. But that’s the context. You want to come down here sometime.
TFSR: I’d love to.
MK: When this is over, you come down and take a look around.
TFSR: You also have a Social Ecology center down there, right?
MK: Yeah. We just found that about three years ago, after I retired from my teaching career. We set up, primarily myself, Andrew, one of my students, and another friend of mine, a guy who found a Geechee Cultural Center in Riceboro, which is about four miles down the road. But he passed on. So we became the convenersof the Autonomous Research Institute for Direct Democracy and Social Ecology. Now, that’s a complicated name. But we wanted to have a name that was not confusing to what we were doing. If we called it the C.L.R. James Center, that would be an amorphous venerationof some individual person and that wasn’t serious. We wanted people to know that it was autonomous, which means we have a different kind of fuels, historical development. And we want to let them know that it was an institute for direct democracy, we’re not interested in people writing about their heroes and famous baseball players or anything like that. And it is for social ecology. But we believe that direct democracy, social ecology cannot be achieved without having a direct democratic social organization. And a group of people who could see that. History shows that, the Native American people show us that. I’m writing about some Native American people, it will probably be released next fall. So I’m here working now and talking to you of course.
TFSR: That’s awesome. Are the Gullah and Ogeechee communities what one might consider to be Maroon communities?
MK: Yeah, you can consider it, but Maroonage has taken on all kinds of forms. It’s not just people running away and setting up their own… Some of those communities right on theridge in the front of plantations and interacting with some of the people. And some of the people went far distances and set up very complicated societies and stuff. So the type of Maroonage is dependent upon demography, history, the type of plantation and was the type of monocrop that was being raised, and how people fed themselves, what kind of transportation was available.
TFSR: It’s kind of attesting to the adaptability of people.
MK: Oh, yeah, they adapted. They were all overif you study Maroonage, they were in Mexico, and across the islands, the big islands, they have substantial populations in the hinterlands, like in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and, of course, in Cuba, and Jamaica. In Haiti, that was Hispanola, and after slavery was over, a lot of those people just simply took over the land in the Caribbean and grew crops to feed their families. And that’s why in places like Trinidad and Guyana, they had to import plantation labor. So the black people who were slaves developed their own autonomous communities. They grew crops on their own, no monocrops. So if you wanted a monocrop labor force, they had to go to inland and get that. That’s why he has an in the population in Guyana and Trinidad, coming out of that type of relationship with labor with capitalist mercantileagricultural laborers.
TFSR: Is the nature of the writing that you’re doing right now on indigenous populations about what might be understood as social ecology of… to put that term onto what communities were experiencing and living? What’s the topic?
MK: Well, the two examples that I’m using to do some detailed writing, the Forte Moseexperience and Spanish experience in northeastern Florida. How the Seminoles evolved from this interaction. And how the Creek Seminoles where the creeks came from autonomous, complicated, hierarchical society. Do you know anything about anthropology and archaeology in St. Louis, upper Mississippi, and middle Mississippi areas? Have you heard of Cahokia?
TFSR: Yes, Kevin Tucker writes about Cahokia. He lives right outside of it. So I’ve heard it referenced.
MK: In that connection, I’ve talked about how Cahokia ,which was a hierarchical kind of society, and peoplelook atthe big leaders in Cahokia, but I was trying to explain how Cahokia… People left Cahokia, people didn’t like it. That’s why the Creeks were fleeing Cahokia and that’s why they migrated down the Mississippi and all the way up to Northern Florida. And they went along creeks that’s why they were called Creek Indians, but I hook them in and then the African populations which fought with the Yemassee in early Charlestown, the early Charlestown settlement, and they went south to St Augustine and then to Cuba. That’s what that’s all about. Then I’ve got another section, which is a more naturalistic section, it’s got to do with the Great Dismal Swamp and the history of that geographic area. I’m looking at that one as a part of the lore, the place and why it became known as the Great Dismal Swamp, but it really wasn’t dismal. Depending on who you were, if you were running away, it was a paradise. But I think it’s coming in the right size. I remember the first book I wrote, that thing was way too big.
TFSR: I still use it as a reference, though.
MK:It had all the documents in the back. I think that’s just saving grace, the rest is shit. I lose to self-organization every once in a while. But that was where I was in the 1970s, a young man trying to put it together.
TFSR: And at least he referred to the book very clearly on the cover as the raw notebooks.
MK: It’s raw, really. Because my students, one student, in particular, he came by the house and I was rummaging through some stuff andhe said “What’s over here?” It was oneof those manuscripts. He put this together. He grabbed the thing, and took it back to the office, and started hunting and pecking, I said, “What are you doing?”, and he said, “I want to put all this together”. They organized it and put it in a book. It’s very raw. It offers no real solution. But it shows certain attempts: it shows the 6th Pan-African Congress, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and its lack of democracy. And it shows the African Liberation Support Committee. So it came from the minutes and stuff that I was keeping at the time. So it has an empirical side to it, I think
TFSR: It’s interesting to hold that up to your shorter book The Pan-African Social Ecology, because a lot of those events that are in a lot of cases you and Andrew talking about or that you referenced during speeches, to be able to dig back into this book and say, like, “Well, here’s the notes from that time, here’s a little deeper context of what was going on with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers or the 6th Congress”.
MK: I guess it has that value, but it doesn’t speak to any kind of ecology. When I started exploring questions of ecology, I was really out of the anti-nuclear movement, I just thought the nuclear shit was dangerous to the planet. But I didn’t have a real conceptual context you put it in. And I was just trying to deal with some Marxism and critique the limitations of Marxism, especially the vanguard party in need for the revolutionary people to lead the ignorant masses to victory.
TFSR: It’s so patronizing.
MK: It’s preposterous. But I think we got a nice size for people to actually read this. There are pictures in it, too. A guy from Nova Scotia was in my last zoom session. And he saw a picture of me on hillside. That was me. I owe a lot of that to Andrew [Zonevald]. Andrew edited and put this book into great context, and the introduction is of great detail. And when I mentioned something he says “Oh, man, we should have put that in there”…
TFSR: I like your working relationship. It’s really awesome. I like Andrew a lot, too.
MK: Yeah. And Andrew brings it out. He knows when I get contradictory, he says, “What does this mean in relation to what you just said?”
TFSR:That’s the beauty of conversation.
MK: When there’s an election, I do vote in the local election, and I vote for sheriffs, representatives on the county commission, but the rest of the stuff, I don’t vote for. But I know these people. And that guy who’s running for the county commission chair thing, I sat down with him, and he says that he’s gonna make sure and he made it part of… He’s been on social media and essentially, his thing is to get people involved in the decision-making of their local government, and he said that he will have some town-hall meetings where he don’t say nothing unless they call along. And he’ll organize in such a way that everybody gets their say. And he’s committed to what he calls participatory democracy, which I don’t know what that means for him. But participatory democracy is not the same as direct democracy. But if we really get it kind of close like that. And if he wins, which he stands a good chance of winning, more people understand that we’ll be able to set up a couple of forums, regular forums, where people can actually decide something about their local government.
TFSR: It seems like that critique of the stuff that was going on in Jackson for a while.
MK: You can’t just stop at participatory. You can’t have people come in and they talk and talk and they listen to you, and then they go do what they want you to, you can’t do that. Not only do people have to decide, but they also have to actually implement, that’s what direct democracy means.
TFSR: Because there has to be, some sort of accountability and recallability. Right?
MK: Yeah. There has to be a direct recall. And no hell of a lot of money involved beyond the task, if you enlist somebody to do something, you paying for that and that’s it. No lifetime appointment, no president-for-life shit. So I’m involved in that. But if the guy doesn’t win, he’ll at least raise the credit, but he got a good chance.
TFSR: That’s better than a lot of us have right now. We just got to not stop at participatory.
MK: In terms of the state legislature and state governments, I don’t vote in that kind of stuff. But people are really upstanding Trump, it is primarily a black community still in East Liberty County.
TFSR: Again, some meandering. Here Modibo shares some criticism on decision-making in vestiges of Leninism, and projects like Cooperation Jackson, and the Zapatistas.
MK: That’s all that they were doing. They were trying to push the gathering over and think it was supposed to be an anarchist gathering in Detroit or somewhere, and they were pushing, the people in Jackson have been in the vanguard of what they call this concept they introduced as organizing dual power, which means that they were kind of stuck with the Leninism. And I really think that they need to examine that. I don’t want to get associated with that. Because dual power, to me, is a statist concept in itself. When I started writing about the origin of dual power, and how it’s a statist concept, and how we got to break with Leninism. And I couldn’t explain that in an article and stuff. So I just want to hit on a road. That turned out to be about 12 or 14 pages. Andrew said, “Why don’t you put that with your critique of direct democracy and republicanism?” So I put it there. And then it turned into a chapter and like the explanation of what representative democracy is and the difference between participatory democracy and all these sham democracies? So I never did. Because if I got associated with that, and somebody was gonna write a book and reference that book, and reference somebody else in that book, and then I’d be associated with people trying to organize the democratic institutions. The point I’m making is that getting organized is shit, people don’t do that. All you have to do is shepherd the process.Frankly, I found it kind of vanguardist because I know what’s going on in Jackson, Mississippi is not a direct democracy. I know that so I’m not gonna even go there.
TFSR: I feel like in the book, at least, that’s one of the goals they point to and say they get a lot of influence from Rojava and the Zapatistas. I know that there’s a history of Leninism in the backgrounds of both of those.
MK: Well, the Zapatistas, I gotinto a tiff with Andrew on that. Andrew was sympathetic to the Zapatistas, which is a Leninist, Marxist organization stuff, plus their stated goal was to take power in Mexico, they see themselves as operating in the kinds of... And then when the Cheran people emerged, that’s what you need to be looking at, the Cheran people.
TFSR: I don’t think I know that. How do you spell that?
MK: Cheran. It’s in the book. The women who stoned the logging trucks that were taking logs from the forest.
