Last summer, as a part of the public reckoning with racialized police violence, chants and mantras like “Whose Streets? Our Streets” and “We Keep Us Safe” and “We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For” resounded in the streets and all over social media.

What would it mean to take these slogans seriously? To actually imbue people and communities -- rather than political representatives and corporations --  with the power to create and change the world around them?

Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef delved into the practice and philosophy of anarchism, in search of an answer. In this episode, Reem speaks with Bryce Liedtke (friend, anarchist, GSPP alum, and Policy Director of the Scout Institute) about how he reconciles the principles of anarchism with his work in the policy space. Then, we hear from Dana Ward (anarchist, professor emeritus at Pitzer College) about the historical and philosophical origins and transformations of anarchism, in the United States and around the world.

Additional Reading

• The basics of anarchism as defined by Kim Kelly in Teen Vogue
• Dana Ward’s Anarchy Archives
• Are You An Anarchist? by David Graeber

Transcript

Intro Audio:

Whose Streets Our Streets: 2:35-2:40

REEM: Last summer, while witnessing and participating in the countrywide demonstrations for racial justice in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police, I picked up Direct Action: An Ethnography, which is a book by anthropologist David Graeber. I’d heard it recommended on a podcast I like.

In Direct Action, Graeber meticulously chronicles his experiences participating in anarchist organizing spaces  in New York City in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Lots of that organizing centered on  anti-globalization efforts -- especially these actions that  would disrupt the proceedings of World Trade Organization summits. And through the retelling of these experiences, Graeber illuminates the philosophies and principles and culture and strategies and tactics of anarchist movements in America. It’s an incredible read under any circumstance, but was especially interesting in the context of the public reckoning with the police that was happening in the streets, in the media, in city council meetings, and even state and federal government.

COLLEEN: So that audio we just heard at the top of the episode was from one of the hundreds of demonstrations that happened last summer -- they’re chanting “Whose Streets, Our Streets.”

REEM: Right, so I’m reading Direct Action, and at the same time, hearing these slogans -- We Keep Us Safe, We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For, Whose Streets Our Streets -- and realizing, “whoa these chants are really compelling because they imbue people -- not political representatives or corporations -- with the power to bring about the world we want to live in. And that’s a deeply anarchist idea, according to Graeber.

COLLEEN: But REEEEEEEM isn’t anarchism just chaos and destruction?

REEM: Colleen, what a great question. Thank you for asking. It is not. To use the words of journalist Kim Kelly in a June 2020 Teen Vogue article, “anarchism is a philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power” and builds horizontal structures in place of hierarchical ones. And while there are different “brands” of anarchism, they all espouse the general principles of horizontalism, mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, direct action, and direct democracy. As I read it, anarchism allows us to imagine what the world could be like in the absence of coercive power -- like the state, and by extension police.

COLLEEN: So this framing really makes anarchism less remote. A lot of these ideas -- mutual aid networks, solidarity movements, strengthening democracy -- are all very familiar in Leftist spaces.

REEM: Exactly. And Graeber’s construction of anarchism really “scratched an itch” for me at exactly the right moment, when I was feeling both excited about this incredible popular energy around radical policies that emerged over the summer, and really cynical about liberal politicians’ willingness to do anything. And so as the summer is ending and I’m entering my last year of this policy program, I’m thinking to myself “oh man am I an anarchist?”

COLLEEN: And the question is: Can you be both an MPP student and an anarchist?

REEM: These two identities seemed completely incompatible to me -- you can’t dismantle the state while you invest in the instruments and infrastructure of the state. Right?

COLLEEN: This sounds distressing.

REEM: Incredibly so. I’m hoping that making and editing this episode will be healing.

The structure of the episode kind of follows my experience of learning about anarchism, which I actually imagine to be pretty common to people who get involved in any kind of philosophical or political tradition. You begin by feeling some feelings and thinking some thoughts, you talk with your friends and community about them, and then you seek out expertise -- whether that means reading the texts or taking a course or listening to podcasts or whatever else.

COLLEEN: So who do we have today?

REEM: The first interview is with Bryce Liedke, who is a 2020 Goldman School alum, the policy director of a Detroit-based economic justice organization called the Scout Institute, and most importantly, a dear friend of mine. Bryce is himself an anarchist, and he’s really thoughtful about what that means in the context of the real world we live in. Tangential but important: it was from Bryce that I first heard the phrase: fully automated robot space communism.

Then you’ll hear my conversation with Dana Ward, who is a professor emeritus at Pitzer College outside of Los Angeles. Dana has taught courses on the history and theory of anarchism for years, and he also maintains the Anarchy Archives, which is a massive online compendium of anarchist literature that’s available for free. In that conversation, we looked backward at some of the history of anarchist thought in the United States, and forward at the future of anarchism given the current state of American politics.

COLLEEN: Alright today on Talk Policy To Me, we’re literally unpacking a host’s personal crisis. A first for this podcast.

REEM: Talking Anarchism & Direct Action. Here we go.

[THEME MUSIC]

Reem Bryce, not only are you my friend, but you are potentially my most radical friend. Is this true?

Bryce I can neither confirm nor deny. I know I outed myself pretty early at Goldman as one of those guys.

Reem So what brought you to anarchism and anarcho-curiosity or maybe even more broadly, what constituted your political education?

Bryce I think for me there's two big phases to that experience. One is the culture and political events that we're all raised in. And I think whether it's listening to, growing up on hip hop, or you start thinking about the war on terror and mass surveillance, or 2008 and the financial crisis, there's these massive events that really primed a massive skepticism of authority at large. And just like, par excellence of abuses of power that’s often really arbitrarily doled out. And so I think that that primed me in a big way to have those sympathies for anarchism without having any of the vocabulary to go with it. So I kind of had that discontent feel to politics for a good while, but still considered myself just your typical liberal or progressive. But I think 2016 in particular really made me feel like I was in the wilderness after seeing how it played out in the primaries on the Democratic side, and then the aftermath, I felt really kind of politically lost in that moment, not identifying per se with Democrats and kind of the antics behind the primaries.

Bryce  After that, I went on a big bender of theory in history and like, where do I belong and all this because I didn't …  I think there was real, real complaints about the Democratic Party that totally resonated with me, and how insulated it was, and kind of the fulcrums on which power operated in the Democratic Party. So I went on a big bender of history and theory and I came across guys like Graeber and I came across Chomsky and I had this epiphany moment, this “Aha” of this is a decentralized progressivism and just a more profound understanding of freedom than what I had ever seen before.

Reem Something that brought me to write this episode and have a personal crisis is that I read David Graeber, was very convinced, I was like, "Oh, my God, am I an anarchist?" And then I was like, but I'm in policy school basically investing in this system that necessarily solidifies and strengthens and upholds hierarchical systems. And I don't know what to do with that, and I'm wondering if you know what to do with that, having graduated and having been introduced to these ideas way earlier. [39.7s]

Bryce [00:18:25] [00:18:25]You know, I don't know if I have it totally figured out, but I guess, you know, I think it has really changed my approach to policy. You know, even coming into policy school after I had already started to imbibe and try and live by some of these principles, so to speak, I still had this idea that, OK, you go to a policy school and you get this critical mass of knowledge and then you go out and you fix the things. It's a very technocratic way of going about all of this. And so removing myself from a really prescriptive framework of policymaking to a more facilitator framework of policymaking as well.

Bryce There’s a saying I like that’s like: You would never ask someone in the attic to evaluate the foundation of a house and so, really trying to live that to a greater degree, I think is how I want to work in policy spaces.

Bryce What has that meant for you? How does this affect your job search or the type of work you want to do? [

Reem I mean, definitely all of that is probably where I've landed. More democracy, more direct democracy is better. Actually maybe one uber-democratic idea that I came into policy school with is that I'm not convinced that the studying of... I feel like a lot of people come to policy school with the idea that they want to learn to do data analysis, to evaluate why are poor people poor? Why are Black people killed by police? Why is X situation so horrible? And I'm so much less interested in just collecting data about it and better data about it, more rigorous data about it and just being like, OK, well, this community is telling you that they want X, Y, Z. Why don't you save your money, save the intellectual firepower and just do what they're asking for and it'll probably work. It'll probably be way more effective than the very well researched nudge that you come up with.

Bryce Totally. I think my big takeaway from policy school is we don't need more people to be creative and policy. We have all the answers, the communities that are having these issues have the answers. We're just not doing that.

Reem [00:22:12] [00:22:12]Right. Yeah, there is nothing new on earth.

Bryce [00:22:45] [00:22:45]And that's why I'm a big, true believer of the Green New Deal because,  it is right there in the text, community led projects. Right. We have a unified goal, there's a collective social goal. But it is determined by, you know, the most granular level of community. And I think that's a really beautiful approach to obviously a massive collective action problem.

Reem [00:25:06] [00:25:06]So one of the shared experiences we have had is canvassing for Bernie Sanders with your partner Lia. I was also thinking about what it means to feel very convinced by one principle of anarchism, which is that leaders will not save you, people who are in power are kind of inherently suspect. And also to be someone who is extremely excited about the idea of Bernie Sanders being president. 

Bryce [00:26:04] [00:26:04]I'm not attached to Bernie. I'm attached to his ideas. And so, you know, I think we have to be realistic and we have to say, “this is a person that gets me closer to my goals of deconstructing hierarchy. So I think insofar as we have politicians, the ones that get us closer to those goals are the way to go. And I think he represented a profound step in wanting to attack current hierarchies and concentrations of power and represented a more robust idea of freedom, so to speak, than what else was on the menu. And I think it's important to also be excited about things, and have fun. Like I think when you're exposed to lefty ideas or anarchism or whatever you know, I think there's a period of deep discontent and sadness and, you can't unsee that. And  everything in your world is now filtered through that view. And you can only see the exploitation and the oppression of it all. But then you get through that phase and on the other side of it is like, OK, we have to go to work tomorrow, you have to confront those realities that, yes, I'm going to have to elect someone. But, you know, electoral politics are the easiest and the least of my political engagements. So you do that and you can be excited about that, but then you keep on going.

Bryce  Chomsky, for instance, always talks about how voting is essential, you should do it, but it should take five minutes, and electoral politics really shouldn't take up a big part of your life because it basically is reduced into team sports and distracts you from building systems and institutions that can further your goals on a deeper level. And so, much more of my energy and time is spent on trying to make people believe and engage them in  thinking outside the box in terms of what's even possible, because if you only operate in that electoral space the spectrum of what you think is politics is really narrow.

Reem Kind of constructing a beautiful future for yourself and then helping others to see that beautiful future is itself a project.

Bryce I always told my students, I had this running joke that I came to policy as a science fiction writer. Because policy and politics and science fiction are part of the same project of developing a utopia. And so if you're not coming back to and trying to sketch out what your utopia is then, why are you even doing politics? That utopia gets lumped into naiveté between Democratic Republican mainstream politics, I think is just devastating.

Reem It's so limiting. Also I did not know this about you, that you are a science fiction writer.

Bryce I said failed science fiction writer.

Reem A science fiction writer! You're still alive.

Bryce Yeah. I just think they're part of the same exercise. Like what is the world we want to live in? And always be driving there, even if we can't get there right now.

Reem I wonder, do you think that there is a danger in framing hyper democratic, direct democratic society or even a society of tiny, like a federation of autonomous communities? Is there a danger in framing those as science fiction? Because then they seem entirely out of reach? I think there's a dismissal, like anarchism works in a society of less than one thousand but you try and, I don't know, like build a transit system….

Bryce As far as how you would actually structure a transit system and who works what, where and how, you know, I wouldn't pretend to even know how something like that would work. I haven't dug into the anarchosyndicalist framework and I couldn’t tell you how that would operate. But I guess what I come back to is we're so far from any form of democratic control of workplaces. So there's so much room to start implementing these ideas of decentralizing and deconstructing hierarchies. And even on a personal level, you know, I like the phrase: You have to deconstruct the state within you. So there's all these elements that can get us there. And it's such an iterative framework anarchism at large and even all its subcomponents as well. It’s so iterative. You don't have to have the grand scheme. You don't have to know how it works.

Reem And I think that's something else that I picked out of Graeber from somewhere. I appreciate that he's like: "Yeah, that is hard. That's a hard question. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try.” We should start trying, like you're saying, start on a small scale and see how it goes. And maybe it'll work and there's truly no way that it could work worse than what we have now. So, I appreciate that it's real, but also optimistic and has faith in humanity.

Reem Do you have a label that you apply to yourself? Do you call yourself an anarchist? Do you call yourself an anarcho socialist? Does it matter?

Bryce I think I would describe myself as an anarchist for sure. I don't think the labels matter as much as long and so far as we're talking about social forms of anarchism. The distinction between individualistic anarchism and social forms of anarchism is really important and the latter being the one that people think of first, like, “Oh, you know, they just don't believe any rules and they just do what they want.” And there's no sense of coordination and collaboration and social fabric, whereas the collective versions are the opposite. So I think that's the important distinction.

REEM: To close on an uplifting note, I asked Bryce to share his thoughts about the Reclaim The Streets movement, which we’ve chatted about before. Reclaim the Streets is an anarchist cooperative that stages what are essentially street parties that literally reclaim public spaces by blocking traffic. There’s art, loud music, dancing, food, childcare. It’s a really iconic example of what it means to use direct action to model your utopia -- or act as if you are already free. In political science terms, this is often called prefiguration.

Bryce I guess the piece there that does it for me is that this stuff needs to be fun. It can't always be doom and gloom in Leftist movements. And the Left has a big penchant for making things gloomy, for lack of a better word. There's a tweet that I really love and I keep coming back to. But the tweet was something to the effect of like, “To become a fascist, all you had to do was be on the internet in 2011, whereas to be a Leftist you had to read like 11 German volumes.” And I think that captures a massive problem that we have on the Left. And it's very much true. And so when you see all these radicalization pipelines of white guys going through the Joe Rogan to the military guys, to the libertarian militia, kind of pipeline, I mean, it's because they're being recruited in fun spaces. Whether it's them at the gym doing jujitsu and then getting someone in their ear about whatever, those are real pipelines, but it starts somewhere fun.

Reem The jiujitsu to QAnon pipeline.

Bryce I mean, it's very real. You know. There’s even a wellness parallel as well, like the spirituality kind of realm and also in the gamer community. So you have all these other places where people are just doing the stuff they would normally do that would be fun, but then are primed for political action. And they don't even realize it a lot of the time. And so what attracted me about [Reclaim] The Streets is I love to dance and I love techno and all the like, but, you know, creating a space that kind of primes you to be collaborative and have fun and be participant in something with anarchist values in the background.

REEM: Colleen, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

COLLEEN: I, in so many ways, I think of myself as someone who is a believer in institutions. And so I think a lingering question for me is: What is the role, if any, of institutions in a horizontal future? It’s hard because I think our templates for institutions are hierarchical. But I don’t think that that precludes institutions from being horizontal, and so I guess as someone who is a policy student and who believes a lot in the power of institutions but also believes that we really need to racially reimagine so many of our institutions, I think this has offered me a call to action to try and imagine what horizontal versions of existing institutions might be or where we just need totally new institutions that are horizontal or even, how do you reconcile the tensions between institutions and anarchism? And is that even possible? But this is also making me think about “What are these institutions or what is the role of institutions and how do we think about them and how do we envision them and how do we enact them? Some of the things you talked about with Bryce reminded me of the power of narrative and storytelling in not just articulating the stakes and why this is important but also the potential as forms and visions that we can look toward for articulations of these futures and that we can grapple with and that we can say “oh that sounds great” or “oh i’m not really sure about that” and I can respond to it with new stories and new narratives. As someone who before coming to policy school was in the art space, I think I really came into policy school with a lot of questions about “How does narrative and storytelling play a role in enacting the futures we want to see?” and I think that that is particularly salient for me here. I think also in terms of bringing more people into the fold as well, because there are so many myths or misconceptions or confusions about what anarchism is. We’re starting out by being like “Isn’t anarchism just chaos and destruction?” I think the popular image of anarchism is fire in the streets. And so how do we counter those popular imaginaries with new visions and new stories?

REEM: Talking to Bryce was really grounding for me, and I do feel convinced that there is space for policy people in actualizing anarchist utopias. But some unanswered questions remained, and new ones emerged: Looking beyond Occupy Wall Street, what’s the history and tradition of anarchist movements globally? What are the important differences between anarchism, libertarianism, and Marxism? How can some of the popular myths about anarchism -- that it’s inherently chaotic, that it’s violent, that it never works -- be debunked?

COLLEEN: Which led you to Dana Ward.

REEM: Right. Dana has been teaching anarchism in Pitzer’s political science department for a good while, and his knowledge of anarchist history and philosophy is encyclopedic. In the style of a true academic, there’s a few bits in our interview where Dana mentions major anarchist philosophers that might be unfamiliar. We’ll do our best to fill in the gaps.

COLLEEN: Ok, here’s Dana.

Dana I'm Dana Ward, I'm a professor emeritus at Pitzer College, I've been retired since 2012. I've been teaching one course a semester in the spring. But because of Covid last semester, that was my last semester. I didn't teach this semester. And I'm going to probably give it a try next semester, but it's my course on anarchist history and thought.

Reem  And you've also founded the Anarchy Archive on the Internet.

Dana Well, the Internet was a way in which you could bring information in print form to people. And we began exploring ways of using the Internet to teach. And that led eventually to the idea for when I returned to Pitzer. I started using the Internet to teach anarchism by having my students markup classical anarchist texts, which weren't easily available. And we ended up basically producing the collected works of the anarchists, which you can find at Anarchy Archives.

Reem ]Yeah, and it's such an impressive compendium of everything. I was looking at your old syllabi and read Bookchin for the first time on the Anarchy Archives. [9.1s]

Dana Yeah he's how I got involved with anarchism.

REEM: That’s Murray Bookchin, an American anarchist who made lots of contributions to anarchist thinking about municipal democracy, and was really controversial for his devastating critique of what he called “lifestyle anarchists” who he argues are overly focused on personal liberties as opposed to social freedoms.

Reem Oh, really? Can you say more about that?

Dana Well, so I was at Berkeley in the sixties, late sixties. I graduated in ‘71 and with the Cambodian invasion, I was elected to the Coordinating Council for the Social Sciences Discipline. And I remember standing up and giving an orientation about who I was and my beliefs and so forth. And at that point I called myself a Marxist and said that I had problems with the dictatorship of the proletariat and the role of the Lumpenproletariat, the role of peasants and so forth and so on.

Dana And somebody came up to me afterwards and he says, you know, you're not a Marxist. And I said what do you mean I'm not a Marxist? He said you're an anarchist. Anarchist? I don't throw bombs. I'm not into chaos. What do you mean I'm an anarchist? And he says, no, no, you you need to take a look at what the anarchists had to say. And so I did. And I went to graduate school in Chicago.

REEM: This was the beginning of a long academic journey for Dana that took him across the country, and across the world. In the ensuing years after this classically Berkeley interaction, Dana’s studies took him to Chicago, Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, New Haven, and Afghanistan, where he continued to build upon his political education. It was during his time at Yale, while working as a TA, that he was first introduced to participatory democracy, as a kind of precursor to anarchism.

Dana After Chicago I went to Yale where I got my Ph.Ds -- a double Ph.D. in psychology and politics. And while I was there, I was the T.A. for Robert Dahl and Robert Dahl was probably the most famous political science scientist of his generation. Dahl was the father of pluralism. And as a result of TAing for him, I became very deeply immersed in Democratic theory, and this was the first time that anarchism was ever mentioned. Now, I went to Berkeley, Chicago and Yale, top three departments, at the time, anarchism was never mentioned. You know, everything I learned about anarchism, I learned outside of academia. But Dahl gave me kind of a lead into participatory democracy, which was at the time, how I identified myself. I was basically a radical, participatory Democrat and then gradually became self identified as an anarchist. So that's essentially how I got into it.

Dana And at the time, of course, there was no real anarchist movement. There was a radical movement of which I was very much a part. I was shot during People's Park at Berkeley, for example. I was a neighborhood organizer in Chicago, Alinsky style. I was trained by a guy that was trained by Alinsky and did a lot of neighborhood organizing while I was in Chicago. And then when I went to Yale, I got involved with a number of projects that were designed around urban homesteading, where we got old houses for a dollar from the government, created tool cooperatives, and the people who worked on the houses then got title to the house. I was just involved in radical politics, nothing specifically anarchist, because there really wasn't much of an anarchist movement.

REEM: Dana’s describing what he calls a “dead period” for anarchism in the United States. If the major swells occurred with the labor movement of the early 1900s and the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s, this mid-century stretch was rather quiet.

Dana And so I came into anarchism in that dead period where the ideas were floating around, but there was no movement. And it's not until the battle in Seattle that you began to see against the WTO, World Trade Organization, that you begin to see the emergence of a real anarchist movement. And I would argue today that anarchism is the common sense of the various movements that you see on the streets today.

Dana In a way, anarchism has become almost ubiquitous, because if you think about horizontalism, horizontalism has been a concept in anarchism from the very, very beginning, the anti hierarchy aspect of anarchism. And so to the extent that horizontalism has become kind of a dominant mode of organizing and then anarchism continues, even if people don't recognize that they are, in fact anarchists like myself in the 60s. And the other important element of the recent uprisings, particularly in Portland, for example, last summer, is the idea of mutual aid. Mutual aid is central to anarchism. And all anarchist communities have to function on the basis of mutual aid. And mutual aid has become a widespread concept now used by a wide variety of ideological orientations.

Reem For someone who is not super literate in what is anarchism and what is not anarchism. How do you define it in your words?

Dana Anarchism is a historical movement, and you have to pay attention to the context in which it developed. I regard the first anarchist as being Godwin And in the process of defending the French Revolution, Godwin came up with a critique of the state, which remains the best logical explanation for why states are illegitimate. He derived his philosophy basically from the Protestant dissenting tradition in England, which basically argued that there should be no intermediating institutions between yourself and God. And he took those arguments and applied them to the state. And in essence, his argument for why no one should interfere with your relationship with God is the same as why the state should never interfere with your relations with other individuals. But it's Proudhon, of course, who becomes the first person to call himself an anarchist in the late 30s. And of course, it was Proudhon who first inspired Marx. And everything that is useful in Marx comes from Proudhon.

REEM: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French philosopher and anarchist who was active in the mid-1800s. As Dana will discuss in just a moment, he espoused a model of anarchism that was rooted in flattening the power structures of workplaces -- he was a big “labor” guy. If you’ve ever heard the phrase “Property Is Theft,” that’s Proudhon.

Dana And Proudhon created a system that anarchism essentially has been pretty true too, and that is a system of federation. So anarchist federations are different from the American federal system, in that the arrow of authority isn't from the top the central government down, but it's from the most local units pointing up. So block associations, neighborhoods, cities, counties and so forth. It's the lowest levels that have the authority and the ability to commit a community to action. You can still coordinate with larger geographical organizations, but it has to be on the basis of free association and consent. It can't be on the basis of coercion. So central to the anarchist idea is that coercion cannot be used. It has to be persuasion because coercion always entails changing an individual, a human being into an object. You substitute your will, your will is taken away and in its place is the will of the state. So mutual aid, horizontal ism, opposition to coercion, these are all central concepts that are developed out of the historical practice of anarchism. And the other very important part, of course, is opposition to capitalism. So you can't support capitalism and consider yourself an anarchist.

Reem How to the layman, would you define anarchism as different from, like contemporary libertarianism and how is it different from socialism and communism and Marxism?

Dana Well, libertarians, first of all, stole the label deliberately and consciously from the anarchists. The anarchists were known as libertarians in the 19th century, particularly in the middle part of the 19th century. But the modern libertarian movement is just capitalism. Raw tooth and claw. Modern libertarians simply want to be free to exploit other people. They are simply capitalists that don't want the state interfering with their exploitative practices.

Dana  And the basic idea, I think, is if you believe in the right to life, then you have to believe in the right to the means to life. A right to life without a right to the means of life is meaningless. And so I think that would be a fundamental distinction between anarchists and libertarians, is libertarians simply don't want to be interfered with as they pursue life. And if it means stepping on other people, then fine.

Reem Clear difference between anarchism and libertarianism in the contemporary sense. What is the difference between these big government -- Marxism, socialism -- ideas, and …

Dana Well, the fundamental difference that divided the debate between Marx and Bakunin was the difference between political and social revolution.

REEM: Mikhail Bakunin is another big name in anarchist texts. He was a Russian philosopher and anarchist of similar tradition to Proudhon. He was most active in the mid-1800s.

Dana So Marx argued that you had to capture the levers of power, the levers of state power and rule in the name of the proletariat. That's what he meant by dictatorship of the proletariat. But it was always in the context of elections when he used that term. He realized, of course, that the elites would not give up power freely and consequently there wouldn't be any elections. It would be some kind of violent takeover. Bakunin, on the other hand, argued that simply putting different hands on the levers of power changes nothing about structures of power and consequently anarchists oppose all forms of political revolution, all forms of trying to take over political parties, gain power through the ballot and so forth. But rather, the idea wasn't to capture the levers of power, but to destroy the levers of power. In other words, smash the state.

Dana To me, as long as you don't address that basic structural hierarchy, then any amount of revolution is just going to replicate systems of domination and hierarchy.

Reem So I want to talk about what is NOT anarchism and maybe let's bust some myths here, say “anarchism is synonymous with disorganization.”

Dana So, anarchism requires order. The question is, what kind of order? Is it a top down order or is it a self organizing organism? And of course, you know, anarchists argue that it must be self organizing. It can't be an order that's imposed. And of course, there would be if tomorrow we woke up and we were in an anarchist society, it would be a disaster. We haven't been trained. We haven't been socialized. We haven't incorporated the values, the perspective widely enough to sustain a horizontal system. And so I think it's important to try to create as many autonomous spaces as possible so that we get practice with autonomy, so that we learn the pitfalls and we learn the patience that's necessary to bring people along to a common consensus, a common understanding, that's not something that's easily done. It burns a lot of people out.

Reem OK, another myth is anarchism has never succeeded and we have no models of how it could work.

Dana Oh, that's so patently false. Now, if you mean no large-scale entity on the size of the United States, then, yeah, that hasn't existed. But you can go back and point out to any number of examples where anarchist societies have flourished, where they have come to their demise is from external forces, primarily fascist militant forces. So probably the best example of anarchy in action is in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, during which time a revolution took place. the Spanish Revolution and the Spanish Civil War were simultaneous, or at least for the first year and a half. And Orwell writes about this in Homage to Catalonia, where he comes into Barcelona after the fascist uprising. And he's amazed because the streetcars are running, the bakeries are producing bread, electricity is being produced, water is flowing. And the fact of the matter is that for decades the anarchists had organized and created a participatory democratic system so that when the central government fell, they didn't skip a beat, they simply took over. And so worker-owned and operated enterprises are always going to be a very important part of any anarchist community. And, you know, the best examples of those anarchist collectives and so forth come from the Spanish Revolution. But there are many others.

Reem ]OK, the last myth that I would love to debunk with you is that anarchism can't work without full societal participation, and I kind of struggle with this one because it feels like, for example, the story that you were telling previously about anarchist societies that have been successful in the past, being overturned by fascism. And a pessimist might say fascists will always exist and bad actors will always exist. And so how can one succeed with the inevitable presence of these bad actors?

Dana Yeah, that's to me one of the biggest tensions and one of the biggest problems, and it involves self-defense. And as you suggest the wider the participation of the entire society, the less likely external forces will cause the organization to implode. But there's no guarantee, there's no way to make sure that that it's going to be a struggle no matter what. And it will be a struggle to maintain, even without any serious outside conflicts, internal personality conflicts and so forth. Group inequalities, the wider you get, the more likely there are going to be inequalities between one area and another area. And you have to address those issues and it can be very difficult. But those problems exist in any system, not just anarchism.

Reem Yes.

Dana And, you know, people point to anarchism as being impractical but I would point to capitalism as being impractical.

Reem Absolutely.

Dana Just look around at the polar caps.

Reem Yeah, absolutely. Right there with you.  

Reem How do you think about your positionality as an anarchist in the Biden era and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency? And maybe I can specify this question a little bit more, which is that I see two dynamics in my own generation of political experience. And one is people losing faith in democratic institutions, like I did in the aftermath of the 2020 primary and looking to other ways that the world could be, basically kind of frustration with both sides of the aisle, and therefore, like me, seeking a different thing, realizing that representative democracy is not working. Or this other dynamic of people experiencing relief that the chaos of the Trump Administration is over and finally balance is restored and we can stop paying close attention because reasonable people are finally back in control.

Dana The only way that there's going to be a fundamental difference between Biden and Trump is if we keep the pressure up, if we don't keep the pressure up, it's going to just be business as usual. And the protests over the summer, I think, are very important. We're beginning to see, for example, in LA, just yesterday, the Education Board decided to get rid of the police -- about a third, I think, of the police that are in the schools. That's a good thing. And that would never have happened without the agitation over the summer. So we have to keep that pressure up and we have to do it in a way that demonstrates alternatives, that shows that it is possible to have much more of a mutual aid orientation as opposed to a government program approach. Again, if all you do is vote, you’re going to get what you deserve. 

Reem Yeah, and what you said maybe I can add resonates with what I read in Direct Action, which is that David Graeber describes the main difference between direct action and a march or demonstration is that a direct action also models what a better world could look like as opposed to trying to just spread a message. [20.5s]

Dana [00:58:36] [00:58:36]Yeah that prefiguration is another fundamental idea of anarchism, and that is that we have to prefigure the society that we want and we can't through. If you expect coercion to produce a different society, you're going to be disappointed. And consequently, how you intervene in the existing political process is very important. And that's why it's important to do it in a horizontal way, using mutual aid showing how there are different ways to relate. Landauer, Gustav Landauer was an early 20th century anarchist who's getting a lot more play in recent decades, and he had a very important insight. And he basically said, look, you can smash a chair, you can smash a table, but you can't smash the state because the state is a relationship. If you want to eliminate the state, you have to change relationships so that that has to be our focus. We have to change the way in which we relate so that we relate on the basis of mutual aid, on the basis of consent and on the basis of collective action. [77.1s]

[THEME MUSIC]

COLLEEN: You might have caught Dana’s mention of People’s Park as he spoke about his time in Berkeley. It’s a historic and contemporary site of direct action and mutual aid, and is currently the center of a major battle between the University of California, which wants to develop housing on the 3-acre plot of land, and community advocates, who want to protect the park for public use, and use by the unhoused people who have called the park home for years. Many advocates are deploying non-violent direct action strategies in their efforts to protect the park -- highly appropo, as the park was originally established through students’ direct actions. Stay tuned for an episode by Talk Policy To Me reporter Michelle Pitcher, who will take us deep into the history of People’s Park.

[THEME MUSIC]

COLLEEN: Talk Policy to Me is a co-production of UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans.

REEM: Our executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck.

COLLEEN: Editing for this episode by Reem Rayef and [MICHELLE PITCHER/ELENA NEALE SACKS]

REEM: The music you heard today is by Blue Dot Sessions and Pat Mesiti-Miller.

COLLEEN: I’m Colleen Pulawski.

REEM: And I’m Reem Rayef. Be well.