State Power and Revolutionary Tactics: Unpacking Anarchist Theory with Zoe Baker

Ever wondered if the state really just serves capitalist interests? Zoe Baker, a libertarian socialist philosopher, joins us to sift through the logical arguments and historical contexts behind anarchist positions. From Brexit to Kropotkin’s nuanced view of state factions, we dissect the complexities of state power and its role in class oppression. This episode promises to challenge your preconceptions and illuminate the intellectual rigor of anarchist theory.

We dive into the tension between socialist movements and electoral politics, scrutinizing how the pursuit of votes can dilute revolutionary goals. By contrasting classical anarchist and Marxist perspectives, we explore whether electoral engagement can remain true to socialist principles. Zoe Baker provides a thorough breakdown of historical debates, including those from the First International, that shaped these divergent paths.

Our conversation extends to the various strategies anarchists have employed for social revolution. From mass anarchism to insurrectionist tactics, we cover the evolution of anarchist organizational strategies and the rise of platformism. We also touch on the impact of social media on radicalism, offering insights into how platforms like Twitter can distort and amplify extreme behaviors. Join us for a rich, historically grounded, and deeply analytical discussion that spans from the early days of anarchism to its modern-day challenges and strategies.

Chapters

• 0:00 Anarchist Views on the State
• 12:29 State Analysis and Anarchist Perspectives
• 18:26 Socialist Analysis of Electoral Politics
• 25:17 Anarchist Strategies for Social Revolution
• 36:06 Anarcho-Syndicalism vs Syndicalism vs Councilism
• 42:08 Anarchist Organization and Ideological Conflict
• 51:24 Anarchist Organizational Strategies and Platformism
• 1:02:18 Revolutionary General Strike and Anarchist Evolution
• 1:08:29 Historical Trajectory of Anarchism and Marxism
• 1:16:01 Understanding Marxist and Anarchist Differences
• 1:26:17 Twitter's Negative Impact on Radicalism

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to. Varmblog, and today I'm here with Zoe Baker, libertarian socialist philosopher with a PhD in the history of anarchism, author of the book Means and Ends the Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States from AK Press. When did this come out? Let's see, relatively recently.

Zoe Baker : 1:59

I think it technically came out last year.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03

Last year? Yes, Although you were probably working on it for a good part of the last five years.

Zoe Baker : 2:09

I started work on it when I was 21, and it was released when I was 28.

C. Derick Varn: 2:16

Okay, you've been working on this for a while. I know your work from your YouTube channel and finding essays that you've written, a lot of which, because of my focus, has been on the contestation, divides and overlaps between the history of anarchism and the history of Marxism. But I think today we're going to be talking a little bit broader than that. So I guess one of the most basic questions there's several histories of anarchism out there. What do you think your history added to the discussion?

Zoe Baker : 3:03

so I have a background in philosophy, specifically like analytic philosophy, so it's all about clarity, rigor, stuff like that, and the idea was is that I would use those analytic philosophy skills to systematically reconstruct the ideas of anarchism, such that a person doesn't just get a sense of what anarchists thought or events that happened, but, crucially, arguments for anarchist positions, um, which I think makes it better for, like, understanding why anarchists thought about things the way they did, because there's a lot of histories of anarchism that don't give you the arguments. Instead, the focus is just on, like, people's lives or you know, tracing, uh, the history of like a concept or something. But I really wanted to focus in on, you know, this is why they rejected seizing state power. This is, um, what they meant by freedom and how they used that to argue against capitalism, and so the term for this is like a rational reconstruction.

Zoe Baker : 4:03

So I'm reassembling anarchist ideas such that the logical connections between the components of it are explicit, because there's a tendency for people to like they read anarchist theory and because it's written for like a mass audience of workers who are either illiterate and having it's written for like a mass audience of workers who are either illiterate and having it read to them or, you know, have never actually had a formal education. It's in a very simple, direct style and that leads people to mistakenly thinking the anarchist theory is simplistic, and so I wanted to show the intellectual complexity of it while at the same time also being, you know, a history, um, so I don't just talk about the ideas and arguments, but I try to ground them in the historical context and specifically the context of the anarchist movement and their actual attempts to put a theory into practice. Um, because you know, these were ideas that were written outside of universities. They were written by workers after a long day of work, to be put into action by working class social movements. So I had, to like, ground it in that context and, yeah, so that's what I think I was trying to do.

C. Derick Varn: 5:07

I found your book clarifying for a lot of the for a lot of the arguments, and I was vaguely aware that you had a background in analytic philosophy.

C. Derick Varn: 5:17

I have a little bit of training in analytic philosophy and it reads really clearly. But you do go through the arguments fairly rigorously and I guess one of the things that we're going to talk about I use a phrase a lot called classical anarchism, and I tend to mean by that anarchism up into the Spanish Civil War, which I see, at least in the context of Europe, as a little different from anarchism after the Spanish Civil War. But maybe that's too broad of a brush, because even when we're talking about classical anarchism, we're talking about several different theories of organization and praxis. But I wanted to start off. I mean, anarchist view of the state is actually, I think, sometimes even contested amongst anarchists, even contested amongst anarchists, and when we talk about something like rejecting state power, we do need to know what anarchists thought the state was. So what were some of the anarchist views on the nature and definition of the state and how can that help us understand anarchist debates today? Debates today.

Zoe Baker : 6:37

So how anarchists define the state is really complex due to terminology. So some authors distinguish between government, which has existed since antiquity, and the state, which arose from the 16th or 17th century onwards as part of the emergence of capitalism. So anarchists reject both government and the state. But the state is a historically specific form of government rather than all governments. Other anarchists use the word state to refer to both ancient governments, you know, like fifth century Athens, and also modern nation states, and some just use the word government, they don't use the word state. Now, the consequence of this is that it's not always clear if an anarchist definition of the state is meant to apply just to the modern nation state or all governments across human history. So I'm going to avoid this complexity by just focusing on what they definitely think about the modern nation state. So they define it in terms of its powers, its function and its organizational form. They think that the state is an institution in which a political ruling class, such as kings, politicians, presidents and so forth, wield the exclusive power to make laws and impose these laws on everyone within a given territory by mechanisms of institutionalized violence, police, prisons, the legal system and so forth. And they think this power is wielded in order to perform the function of creating and maintaining the oppression and exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. And these ruling classes are composed of both the political ruling class, who directly wield state power, and the economic ruling class, such as capitalists, bankers, aristocratic landowners. So you know, states enforce private property rights, they grant capitalist monopolies, they repress workers when they go on strike and thereby serve the interests of the ruling classes. And for a lot of anarchists they also added, in the clergy and like the church as a key extra thing that the state serves the interests of. But that's obviously specific to certain countries where the church was very powerful, like Spain. Now, anarchists didn't think that capitalism created the state in this kind of one directional manner. They thought that capitalism and the state co-created one another. So it's both that capitalists need the state to do things like repress workers, enforce private property rights, but also that the rulers of states actually also need an economic ruling class in order to maintain their own power. And so they think they're these two classes with overlapping class interests, which are sometimes opposed in complex ways, but often aligned together based on their shared interests in maintaining their power versus the workers who they oppress and their shared interests in maintaining their power versus the workers who they oppress.

Zoe Baker : 9:40

Now, states, of course, can do things that go beyond this pure class function, right so? Like building roads, organizing education and healthcare. And so you should keep in mind that when anarchists are writing, the welfare state isn't really a thing yet, like when we think of states now, they're often doing things that historical states didn't do or just beginning to do. Uh, you know, when they're writing, the state primarily is the policeman who turns up at a strike to beat them up, um, and you know, even, like, say, the church is still organizing education. In many of these contexts, um, rather than government education. But they update their analysis as the state takes on more social functions, and what they think is that this happens when the state is forced to do this by social movements or when it's in their interest. Right so, like, mass education through the state can create more educated workers who then have the skills needed for certain kinds of economic formations, like, say, you know computing, um, you need loads of engineers, and you know schools can generate that. Or it's the case that, say, they're going to invest heavily in transportation systems because that can also be used to effectively deploy troops in order to repress people. So the manner in which they do things which seemingly go beyond the function of serving the interests of the ruling classes also like entangled with that function or can be shaped by it. Right, so you can have state health care systems, but if you're from a certain country that's outside an arbitrary border, then you know you're not going to get free health care due to the state's ideas around citizenship.

Zoe Baker : 11:14

So, lastly, the state is structured in a hierarchical and centralized manner. Again and again they say that the state is structured in a hierarchical and centralized manner. Again and again they say that the state is this pyramid in which a minority at the top commands and those beneath them obey, and I think this is mediated, or this chain of command occurs through a complex bureaucracy. And some of them also have ideas about how the bureaucracy can have interests which are also in turn distinct from both the political ruling class at the top, like presidents and kings, and the capitalist class, but they don't go into as much detail as I would like, but they seem to have like some sense of that, like kropotkin, and they think that these three components the the power that the state has. Its function and its organizational form are interrelated with one another. So the state is structured in a and its organisational form are interrelated with one another. So the state is structured in a hierarchical and centralised manner because of the function that it performs and was created to perform, which is establishing and maintaining the domination and exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. And I think the state is able to perform this function due to its powers of institutionalised violence. And how these powers are exercised is, in turn, shaped by the organizational form. So, you know, within the legal system there'll be these elaborate ranks of you know which court is above what, which judge over overrules another judge and so forth.

Zoe Baker : 12:30

And in terms of how it's like useful, I think the historical anarchist analysis can help kind of shift away from like, I guess like a crude economic reductionism where you know if the state does something, it's always because it serves the interests of capitalists.

Zoe Baker : 12:46

And the obvious problem of this is there are loads of times when states do things that don't serve the interests of capitalists or are done specifically to serve the interests of people in the state itself, right?

Zoe Baker : 12:55

So, for example, in the uk we recently had the brexit referendum. Why did that happen? Well, a key reason is that the prime minister, david cameron, was trying to keep certain mps within his party uh, happy, um and so his own distinct interests as a politician led to him doing something that then, for example, has harmed the interests of certain businesses who've been very negatively affected by brexit, because it's you know, turns out, it was necessary for certain parts of like the economy to function how they were functioning. Um and so I think that's like a useful conceptual system of thinking in terms of, like different classes and class being defined not just in terms of economic class, but also in terms of your relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion, namely the state. I think that's something modern anarchists should try and build on and update, because obviously society has changed since the 19th century and is more complicated. This is some quick thoughts.

C. Derick Varn: 13:53

Well, one of the things I appreciated about your books articulating the arguments is that there's a lot of Marxist assumptions that, particularly after the Spanish Civil War, the anarchism is primarily a moral response to the state, and I think your book actually does a pretty good job of debunking that, at least for some anarchists. And recently I've been looking up class theories of the state and I remember when I was coming up I was often taught that well, anarchists reject simple class theories of the state, and what I actually have learned, partly from your book, partly from the work of Wayne Price, is that's not so much true. It's just that so much of this language has been used by Marxists but Marxists themselves don't really have a particularly robust theory of what the state is. I mean Lenin's State and Revolution is about the best that you get. Themselves don't really have a particularly robust theory of what the state is. I mean that linen state revolutions about the best that you get.

C. Derick Varn: 15:01

Um, how do we view the like? Is the name like uh, can we view the state today and most anarchist theory as contiguous with or separate from the capitalist class? Like? It clearly has its own interest, as you point out, and and not not considering its own interest often leads marxists, for example, to make proclamations that, frankly, don't come true, like you know. Uh, but what? What do you? Um, I guess one question that emerges to me that I'm just thinking off the cuff is that how would the anarchist response to the like, almost comp, but competing elites within the state today, like what's the, what would be a classical anarchist? Uh, account for that, would you think? No, I'm asking you to think on your feet.

Zoe Baker : 15:56

Yeah, so Kropotkin has extensive analysis of the state in Modern Science and Anarchy.

Zoe Baker : 16:03

It's probably the most detailed analysis of the state that I'm familiar with in anarchist theory and in that he emphasizes, like he has this list of classes that the state emerged to serve, that have overlapping but distinct interests, and so he breaks it down not just in terms of economic ones, like landowners, capitalists, et cetera, but even with the political ruling class.

Zoe Baker : 16:27

He includes not only presidents and monarchs but also crucially, say, the army, as generals having distinct interests.

Zoe Baker : 16:37

And so I think they would just want a more zoomed-in version of what they already had, where they add in more variables, because Kropotkin he thinks in terms of interlocking tendencies which either go in the same direction or clash with each other, and I think he would apply that to the state itself, where there are different factions within the state that are often in conflict with one another in terms of their competing interests. So, for example, you know there'll be a certain politician who's trying to push forward one thing, another politician is trying to prevent it, or even within the bureaucracy, there are factions within the civil service and the UK, and so I think they would just zoom in more and add more and more variables to create an increasingly complex picture, but they wouldn't have any theoretical issues with doing so, because they're already thinking in this way. It's just adding more detail to how they're already thinking, and also certain variables that are less important now than they were historically, like the power of the church, for example, isn't what it was.

C. Derick Varn: 17:40

So one question that comes to mind immediately would be how, for example, would a lot of anarchists deal with parliamentarianism or congressional democracy with the state? And it is clear to me that you know really. I mean, that's the first debate that separates anarchism proper from Marxism proper as debates around electoralism in the First International. So why have anarchists traditionally seen parliamentarism as such a particular trap?

Zoe Baker : 18:20

Yeah, it is the Star Wars meme of it's a trap is what they were saying. Okay, the argument is that when the activity you engage in transforms you independently of your intentions, and so that it's not about good intentions, it's not about ideas, it's about the day to day activity you're engaging in and the social structure you're participating in. They're the key factors in determining what you do and why you act the way you do. And so they think that, due to this kind of three way interaction between people's consciousness, structure and actions, that you have to analyse. Well, what kind of activity is electoral politics and how does it transform social movements? And I think is that what it will result in is. So, first of all, in order to get voted into the first place, people will water down their socialist politics to appeal to as many people as possible, which you, you know, for context, at the time universal suffrage wasn't a thing, so it's going to be especially, you know, men rather than women. It's going to be men who own property, because there are some situations where people about property don't have the vote, or where people with property have more votes, and you know there's loads of like variables like that that make parties have interest to appeal to those bases like, say, small business owners, and so, over time, they'll water down their socialist politics. Even though the idea was, well, we're going to go into parliament to spread socialist ideas, what's going to end up happening is that you're going to increasingly not be advocating those ideas in order to be electorally effective. Second of all, they're going to develop an interest in stopping disruptive direct action on the grounds that it might scare voters away. So the interests of the party will become in opposition to the interests of workers engaging in direct action, and the party will try and stop them from doing that, which, if you're a socialist, is a bad idea, because they're wanting to mobilize workers themselves with their own direct action.

Zoe Baker : 20:20

They also think it's politicians who enter the state, are going to be transformed by it and they're going to come primarily concerned with maintaining their own power, rather than what they were initially there to do, which is, you know, long term goal of abolishing the state. So it's going to move us away from the goal of state abolition rather than towards it, irrespective of intentions. And the other claim they make is it's also going to negatively affect workers. So, rather than them learning how to self-organize and take direct action. They're going to be listening to politicians make speeches and promises. They're going to put their hope in the party. They're going to wait for politicians to save them rather than them organising themselves.

Zoe Baker : 21:00

And if a revolutionary situation arises, well, they're already used to just voting someone into power and trusting them to sort everything out. So that's what they'll then do in a revolution, which will then move away from the kinds of working class self-organisation which is necessary to achieve socialism, namely workers' councils, essentially. So those are like the rough off top of my head kind of points they make about why it's a bad idea just from the point of view of achieving socialism. So it's not like a moral argument, it's a practical one, which is that, well, if you have this goal, this is a form of action that's going to take you away from where you want to go rather than towards it. And so they're always talking about always evaluating strategy in terms of the unity of means and ends. So you know, we've got our end goal a stateless class of society and we need means to actually move to us towards this rather than towards creating a new kind of class society, rather than towards creating a new kind of class society.

C. Derick Varn: 21:57

How would that contrast with how you view, say, the Marxist stance on electoralism? And I'll just caveat that with the fact that I kind of see Marxist stances not entirely coherent if I try to make sense of all the writings he ever did. So I'll just leave that at that.

Zoe Baker : 22:19

So what do?

C. Derick Varn: 22:20

you think the difference would be?

Zoe Baker : 22:22

So Marx can be quite vague about specifics. You know he has like lines that can. Then you can read all kinds of thing into right. So it'd be like, you know, we need to organize the working class into a political party aimed at the conquest of political power. Well, someone you know, certain people in touch with, that is obviously this means, you know, we don't do electoral politics, we just do armed uprisings and seize the state, while others are like yes, this obviously means second international social democracy. In terms of what he actually advocated, you know he does write the program for the French Workers' Party and in that he does refer to universal suffrage as a means of emancipation. There's the interview he gives after the Paris Commune where he says that in Europe it might be through insurrection, but in places like the UK it can be through peaceful means. So he seems to have a contextualist view where what we should be engaging in varies. But in general he is in favor of engaging in electoral politics in order to essentially spread socialist ideas.

Zoe Baker : 23:23

Um, and he and he doesn't, at least in what I've read. So I'm not like a mark scholar. I've read a lot of him but I haven't read, you know, all complete works in german, etc. Um, but from what I've read, he doesn't kind of go into those kinds of details because it, you know, he's writing for himself as opposed to he is in, you know, this party and he is saying this is what this party needs to do. Um, he's so. Therefore he doesn't. There's certain kinds of questions and topics which he doesn't go into for that reason, and instead I think a lot of the writings about Marxist electoral politics are like Engels's letters to members of various social democratic parties, without asking for his advice, and you know he absolutely advocates electoral politics and attacks the anarchists for being against it.

Zoe Baker : 24:16

But something I'm still kind of figuring out is to what extent did they view it as necessary for seizing state power, as opposed to just building up a party that can then seize state power? I'm still unsure of the extent to which they were in favour of an electoral road to socialism, because early on they have this two-stage model. First we have the democratic revolution that establishes a republic, the ready-made state form, as engels calls it, um, and that has gives us all the things we need, like certain rights, like freedom of speech, etc. To organise a mass workers party which can then conquer state power, and so then we have the socialist revolution after the first democratic revolution. So I feel I'm still trying to figure out the specifics.

Zoe Baker : 25:05

I think it's easier to talk about. Well, what did the Social Democratic Party of Germany think and what did the different factions within it think I think that there's way more hard evidence think, and what did the different factions within it think? I think that there's way more hard evidence. And I think with marx there's a lot more big interpretive questions, in part due to, like, vague language and certain things he just doesn't talk about yeah, one of the things that I have realized in studying the, the history of marx and lenin, is how many concepts uh come from non-marxist factions.

C. Derick Varn: 25:35

Uh, in the, in the second International, get blended with Marxist ones and we just kind of take them as always being there. A big example is Democratic Centralism that comes from LaSalle's faction, not Marx's, and yet by the time we get to Kotsky and Lenin, it runs through the whole thing and it's just assumed. So to Kotsky and Lenin, it runs through the whole thing and it's just assumed. Um, so it. It is interesting to me to look at that. But then I also look at other Marxists like, for example, uh, um the the Bordigas and Dementis section of left communists, who uh almost take a harder line towards any, any involvement with anything democratic at all than most anarchists historically did. So it ends up being kind of a mess. Can we talk a little bit about what was the early anarchist strategy for achieving workers' power in the 19th and early 20th century?

Zoe Baker : 26:44

Okay, that's a huge topic because there's many different kinds of anarchists. So I'm going to cheat and just talk about what the majority thought, rather than getting into like there's this sub-faction of sub-factions, of sub-factions who have this view. I'm just going to go broad brushstrokes. This is what most people think, this is what you're going to find in Bakudi, inca, potkin, malatesta and so forth. Okay, so what do they think? Well, they distinguish between periods of evolution and periods of revolution. So evolution is slow, gradual and partial change. Revolution is rapid, fundamental, large scale change. And they want a social revolution which abolishes capitalism in the state simultaneously in favour of organs of worker self-management, like community councils, workplace councils and organs of armed self-defdefense, so workers' militias. And this revolution, they think, requires both expropriating the capitalist class and also violently destroying the state. So there's a common straw, man of like oh, you know, anarchists ignore the need for violent confrontations with power. And then you read them and they're just like unbelievably pro-taking up guns to defeat the state. They, you know, in many ways are actually more pro-violence of a certain kind than I can find in Marx, for example, certain like wings of anarchism, in particular. Anyway, so the question for anarchists then, is well, how do we go from an evolutionary period to the revolutionary period, or when the social revolution occurs?

Zoe Baker : 28:19

And the majority of anarchists since the first international argued that we should form mass working class social movements which struggle for immediate reforms in the present, by direct action and organized in a manner that prefigures an anarchist society. So they use the same system of, you know, bottom-up decision-making. They're coordinated through federations, there are general assemblies in which people have a say in decisions, rather than, you know, a top-down such kind of centralized structure, and they think the goal is to win these reforms. So you know, shorter working hours, better pay, and also even like political rights. Like you know, shorter working hours, better pay, and also even like political rights. Like you know, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, by engaging in direct action that imposes costs onto the ruling classes such that they acquire an incentive to give into the demands of workers, the obvious example being a strike where the capitalist loses money that their business can't go on. So in order to preserve themselves as a capitalist, they have to do what the workers uh, want.

Zoe Baker : 29:20

Um, and anarchists historically did this, you know, in like won the entire day in spain. They played a key role in winning the weekend in france, um, and so the main social movement, anarchism historically was always tied to was, like the trade union movement, and anarchism has been biggest when it has been a mass trade union movement. And the idea was is that we want reforms, but not reformism, so it's reforms as a means to a revolution, as opposed to. You know, we can just gradually erode capitalism until it collapses, like they still advocate, a revolutionary confrontation, and so they think that we have to engage in the struggle for reform in a manner that develops a social force that is driven to and capable of initiating a social revolution. This goes back to the unity of means and ends, and that's part of why they advocate the kinds of struggles that they do so with trade unions, for example.

Zoe Baker : 30:13

The idea is workers aren't just going to change the world, like winning a strike, getting better wages. They're just going to change the world, like, you know, winning a strike, getting better wages. They're also going to change themselves in certain respects through the kind of activity they're engaging in. Um, so they might, you know, learn to take initiative and act themselves, rather than waiting for a politician to save them. They develop class consciousness, they learn anarchist theory, uh, they develop the capacity to horizontally associate with others, you know, through their experiences in general assemblies and in so doing, workers are going to become the kinds of people who can then create an anarchist society, because we need people with these consciousness, these drives, with these capacities in order for society to actually be reorganized at like a macro scale, with everything collapsing, and they think this process would repeat over time, such that you get an increasingly large number of workers who go from only aiming at some improvements within existing society to being revolutionaries, who are organized and united as a class within federations, mass organizations, like millions of people, and they've developed initiative to act for themselves.

Zoe Baker : 31:13

And what this means, then, is that the mass movements being generated by the struggle for reform can then, under the right kind of objective circumstances you know, like an economic crisis, a war, things like that initiate waves of insurrection, which they call the period of incubation between evolution and revolution, and that will turn a revolutionary situation into a revolutionary period. Then anarchists intervene in the revolutionary period as an organized mass movement in order to ensure that it becomes a social revolution, so it abolishes capitalism in the state and that workers are creating anarchist societies. They're using anarchist systems of organization and decision making, even if they don't actually identify as anarchists. And what this means is that what the workers who are participating in those forms of organization and decision-making, even if they don't actually identify as anarchists, and what this means is that what the workers who are participating in those forms of organization or, you know, bottom-up worker self-management they're going to be transformed through their experiences of doing so, in a similar way to how the workers who joined the struggles for reform were in the evolutionary period. So they think in terms of a militant minority that's going to create the revolutionary period. And this is a militant minority, you know, that's not like 50 people, it's, you know, a mass movement of organized workers on a huge scale. It's just that, historically, trade unions have always composed a numerically minority of workers. Right, even the biggest social movements don't literally mobilize the entire country in like one go, especially, you know, outside, like a revolution, and so they think that, well, this minority that will then become the majority during the revolutionary period itself, um, and then that majority, you know, reorganize society on like an anarchist basis, and then we go back into an evolutionary period where we continue to like, refine and figure out better ways of living together. Trial and error, figure out, you know, how can we actually structure a socialist economy? Um, so they think this process is continuous. It's not just like, um yeah, we've achieved anarchism, everything's fine. It's like they're constantly framing things in terms of a never-ending process of developing and figuring out better ways of realising anarchist goals.

Zoe Baker : 33:24

One last point is that a significant number of anarchists but it's hard to figure out how many think that in order for this process of social revolution to occur, anarchists need to not only organize in mass movements open to all workers, like trade unions and so forth.

Zoe Baker : 33:42

They should also organize what are called specific anarchist organizations, which unite anarchist revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their action both among themselves and within broader mass organizations, and push the revolutionary struggle forward by persuasion and engaging in actions that provide an example to others.

Zoe Baker : 34:01

So it's not kind of authoritarian vanguardism where they're taking everything over and ordering everyone out. And you know, the specific anarchist organization doesn't take power and establish like a one-party dictatorship. They're just within mass struggle as a militant minority, persuading people, talking to people, spreading their ideas and they emphasize again and again, engaging actions that provide an example. So you know, you see a bunch of workers expropriate their workplace and that then makes other people go. We should copy that. And they think that the point of this specific anarchist organization is also to counteract the tendency of mass movements to become reformist over time and abandon revolutionary goals, or for the revolutionary period to result in the establishment of a new ruling class rather than a social revolution, and so, yeah, that's an attempt to briefly summarize what most anarchists thought, but it's very complicated.

C. Derick Varn: 35:06

Yeah, I mean it is an incredibly broad question. I guess one thing we can get into when we talk about early anarchism is what were the various broad tendencies? I don't want to go into every single possible tendency that ever emerged in the 19th century, as someone who has tried to document this for both anarchists and Marxists. That can become exhaustive in and of itself just within one tendency. But what were the broad tendencies of anarchists in the 19th and early 20th century?

Zoe Baker : 35:40

so um in the book I use this like distinction from a story called lucien van der vol, where you distinguish between mass anarchism and which was insurrection anarchism. I'm not a fan of the terminology because it leads to people misunderstanding things like the. The insurrectionist anarchists were in favor of the mass movement and the mass anarchists were in favor of insurrection. So they're not ideal terms but I couldn't come up with better ones. But the basic distinction is what I just explained in the previous like segment. That's like mass anarchism, so mass formal organizations generating a social force capable and driven to achieve a social revolution through the struggle for immediate reform via direct action, what what van deral calls the insurrectionist anarchists, which used a variety of terms. Often they just call themselves anarchist communists, other times they call themselves anti-organisationists, some call themselves individualist anarchists, but they aren't intermaxed on us, so they don't mean that. What they think is that they reject organizing through formal federations and advocate just organizing through affinity groups and informal social networks between those affinity groups. Mass Anarchists also advocated affinity groups. They just didn't only advocate them, they also advocated federations like the CNT, for example, had loads of affinity groups within it but also was itself a formal organization, and they thought that these affinity groups, the insurrectionists thought these affinity groups should engage an escalating series of armed attacks or revolts that create this kind of chain reaction of uprisings. That create this kind of chain reaction of uprisings and this was kind of very much inspired by the Paris Commune initially. So, you know, we just got to keep doing Paris Communes because look how much the commune spread Socialism. Italians, you know, anarchism and socialism emerged in Italy due to the Paris Commune. Loads of key people become interested in socialism because of the communes. They think, okay, we've just got to keep doing insurrectionary waves and that will over time generate increasingly large numbers of mobilized workers who are radicalized and then will eventually, you know, culminate in a revolution. Their initial attempts at doing this don't work out, and so that over time there's this kind of switch from attempts at mass insurrection, or at least inspiring mass insurrection, in favor of assassinations and bombings. And they think that, you know, these actions will spread ideas and inspire workers to rebel because they can see that the ruling class can be attacked, and anyway. So that's a brief attempt to summarize the anti-organizationists. But yes, there's some complications, but even that's like, that's what they generally think. And then within mass anarchism.

Zoe Baker : 38:39

There's loads of different subcategories depending on, broadly speaking, to questions which is you know, what do we think about trade unions and what do we think about specific anarchist organizations? So there are people who advocate what's called pure syndicalism or revolutionary syndicalism, which is the idea that the revolutionary trade union is sufficient unto itself to achieve anarchist goals. We don't need a specific anarchist organization, we just participate in the trade union, and the trade union is an organization that can achieve our goals and we don't need other things. Then there are the proponents of organized social dualism who are like no, we need both the mass org and the specific anarchist org, so trade unions are not sufficient in and of themselves. That's what, like Malatesta can think. And then the question is like well, there's a separate question which is should the trade union be explicitly committed to like an anarchist program, which is what anarcho-syndicalism is like? The CNT originally isn't committed to anarchism explicitly and then later is, and the people who advocate it being committed to anarchist communism, um, and rejecting state socialism, are called anarcho-syndicalists.

Zoe Baker : 39:45

Uh, then, within uh organizational dualism, there's basically differences about different labels, for essentially, you, you know, how should we make decisions? What should be in our program? So some, for example, think we have to have this like narrow program and others want a much broader one that includes basically anyone who calls themselves an anarchist. Some want it where majority decisions at Congress are binding on everyone within the organization, irrespective of what you think, and others think that's a bad idea, and instead majority decisions should only be binding on those who voted in favor of them. The program is still binding on everyone because that's a requirement for entering the organization, but decisions at the Congress, independently of the program, are only binding on those who vote in favor of them. So that's roughly the different subtypes on those kind of key questions.

C. Derick Varn: 40:47

One thing that comes to mind is I've done a lot of research on cynicalism and both anarcho and otherwise, and I wanted to maybe ask you to clarify what is the, what is the substantive difference between anarcho-syndicalism and syndicalism in general, such as a syndicalism like William Z Foster or someone like that, and councilism?

Zoe Baker : 41:12

So this is still something I'm figuring out, with. One obvious difference is that there are some syndicalists who were pro electoral politics, so they thought the trade union should be independent of political parties, but they also thought workers should organize in political parties and electoral politics was fine. There were some syndicalists who would advocate a lot of anarchist ideas but deny that any of them came from anarchism and attack anarchism as like individualist and all the bad things. I remember reading one French syndicalist, who you know, who did this, who wrote this long thing about syndicalism and anarchism have nothing in common, even though this isn't true. He later collaborated with the Vichy government and became like a fascist. So it's kind of bizarre some of the journeys people go on. Obviously you know not all syndicates, just one random French guy.

Zoe Baker : 42:08

Then, with respect to like council communism, so the off top of my head, the, the program of the council communists in Germany, is like very anti trade union because the trade unions collaborated with the war along with the Social Democratic Party. So we have to reject both the Social Democrats and the trade unions because they collaborated with World War One and so abandoned internationalism. And this then leads people to think well, if they're anti-union and syndicalism is pro-union, then they have nothing in common. If they're anti-union and syndicalism is pro-union, then they have nothing in common. And what this ignores is that for the syndicalists, they were also against kind of bureaucratic, reformist trade unions. That's why they advocated syndicalist ones and often emerged out of splits from bureaucratic trade unions. Second of all, they didn't view the trade union as an end in and of itself. So the standard position was that the syndicalist trade union is building the new world in the shell of the old. So during the revolution the union sections will go from, you know, struggling against the boss, and become the organization for which the economy is self-managed. However, they weren't dogmatic about this idea.

Zoe Baker : 43:24

So during the Russian revolution, the Russian anarcho-syndicalists were actually against participating in the trade unions because they were so entangled with state socialism and the Bolsheviks, and instead they advocated participating in the factory committees, so like the workers councils. And that's very much in line with some of the things that you know the council communists said, but in terms of detailed specifics it's it's kind of. It's still something I'm trying to figure out because you know there can be differences in language but not ideas. So you know what the council communists think is a worker's state through, you know, the council system, anarcho-syndicus could look at that and go like, oh, that's just what I advocate, but I don't think it's a state right, um, but there might be specific differences on how to go about organizing that system of workers councils, where there are, uh, disagreements. But it's something I'm still trying to like figure out, um, because I wasn't able to do that when I was like writing this book.

Zoe Baker : 44:20

This is the next one about anarchism versus marxism. I'm going to try and actually establish what do we actually agree and disagree about?

C. Derick Varn: 44:32

Yeah, but it's interesting to me when I try to deal with the substance of these debates because when I've gone through some of them I have been like we're just not understanding each other's languages and frameworks and sometimes the frameworks look similarly because they use some of the same words but they use them differently. Similarly because they use some of the same words but they use them differently. It's an interesting thing to kind of parse for me for similar reasons, because I have been like okay, clearly we're getting caught up on just the word syndicate versus the word council, but what some of these groups actually believe are practiced is a much different matter. I guess this kind of breaks me to the er conflict between anarchists and Marxists, being that anarchism doesn't really have a founder but Marxism undoubtedly starts with Marx.

C. Derick Varn: 45:26

In what way did the debate between Bakunin and Marx change the way anarchists were headed? Did it lead to, like I think from your book I kind of gathered it led to the development of platformism and all kinds of even early on, all kinds of different marxisms, I think. I think one of the the interesting things is when everyone tells me like oh, I believe in orthodox marxism, like that was a contested term by like 1890. I don't know what you mean by that. Um, so in what ways do you think that that conflict really did set up a lot of tendencies that were going to come later?

Zoe Baker : 46:10

So that's obviously a big. So I think it's important to separate the history of the international and the ideas that developed with it from the conflict Right. So if you look at the history of the international and the actual resolutions that are passed by sections of it, they're essentially advocating syndicalism before it was a thing. All the core ideas that syndicates advocated were first advocated in the international. So, you know, the trade union is the new world and the shell of the old. The idea of, you know, struggling for reform to build up a mass movement, the emphasis on, you know, the collective ownership of the means of production and land, workers taking direct action, even opposition to electoral politics, was advocated by some sections of the international that became anarchist but at the time didn't use the label, and so those things clearly led to anarchism. But with respect to the conflict between Marx and Bakunin, it really centres around an organisation called the alliance. That's the kind of driving force of the drama. So Bakunin advocates organizational dualism. So you have a mass public org open to workers and the secret specific anarchist organization of dedicated revolutionaries. He thinks the specific anarchist org should be secret, not for, like, nefarious reasons, but to avoid state repression. Um, and he tries to put this theory he has into practice by transforming his existing social networks because he was kind of like a social butterfly into an organization. And there's various attempts that don't really work out, can't go into different names like the brotherhood, the international brotherhood and finally the alliance. The history of the alliance is itself a mess because there's, you know, at various times multiple different organizations that all called the alliance but all different and have different histories and it's very complicated. Um, but the key thing to emphasize is that there's this kind of loose social network within the international that is not a formal organization and it just contains key members of the collectivist wing of the international, which is what the anarchist movement develops out of. So not all collectivists become anarchists, but all anarchists were initially collectivists. And it has meetings and Bakunin writes loads of letters, but you know it didn't have congresses, it didn't have delegates, it wasn't like a proper specific anarchist organization, it was really just a loose social network. It has a program that Bakunin writes but because membership is really based on Bakunin's social butterfly nature, there are people who are technically in the alliance, who don't actually agree with its programme and are just there because Bakunin's like you should join and it wasn't, you know, like a secret society, like the Freemasons, because often it's claimed that it is like that, but it wasn't. There weren't rituals, there weren't ceremonies. All the primary sources point this out. Now.

Zoe Baker : 49:17

Members of the alliance were really important in creating the first anarchist movements and sections of the international in Italy and Spain and Spanish anarchists. They create an organization which is also called the Alliance but is different from Bakunin's alliance as a social network. But there is some overlap between key people. And then, once the international is fully up and running, in Spain they've had very successful congresses. It's, you know, absolutely massive. The Spanish anarchists in the alliance vote to actually to solve the organization because they're like well, we've done what we set up to do, and Bakunin writes letters being like no, it, it has this, you know, role as a unite revolutionaries, et cetera, and they like ignore him.

Zoe Baker : 49:52

Now the reason why this is relevant is that Marx thinks that Bakunin is the dictator of this organization called the Alliance that's plotting to take over the international and essentially turn it into his like fiefdom. He's going to like impose anarchism on the international international and essentially turn it into his like fiefdom. He's going to like impose anarchism on the international. And so marx then sees congresses that are voting against electoral politics as really just being an extension of bakunin's nefarious plot. As opposed to, workers in this part of the world have their own ideas, have thought about it and arrived at this view that disagrees with marx. Marx instead sees this as like Bakunin's plot, and the reason why he thinks this is because he's been told by people he knows, like a guy called Uten.

Zoe Baker : 50:38

Now, this false belief that there's this conspiracy to essentially turn what should be a working class organization into Bakunin's fiefdom, who's you know Russian aristocrat, leads them to go well, we're going to do our own secret conspiracy to make the international committed to state socialist strategy, to expel Bakunin from the organization. And you know Engels will write letters being like how can Bakunin think that atheism should be part of the program of the international? He's so silly about this. And then you read Bakunin. And Bakunin think that atheism should be part of the program of the international. He's so silly about this. And then you read Bakunin. Bakunin's like well, yeah, the program of the alliance obviously shouldn't be the program of the international. Uh, because so you know, there are loads of workers who believe, who believe in god and we can't exclude them by making atheism part of our program, but it should be part of the program of the organization of revolutionaries.

Zoe Baker : 51:24

Now, the reason why this whole history is relevant is that after so Bakunin dies in 1876. Now, key anarchists who develop a lot of the theory were members of this social network called the Alliance and that includes, like Malatesta, and also there's a successor to it with a slightly different name, called something like the Intimate International, and Kropotkin's a part of that. And they continue to advocate Bakunin's theory of organizational dualism and it's out and then over time, you know, this culminates in platformism as a particular version of it. But the starting point is Bakunin and then the flame is carried on by people who knew him, who were in the alliance, who then found actual formal organisations in the way that Bakunin was never able to. He was never able to actually really put his idea into practice, despite trying to.

Zoe Baker : 52:20

So it's kind of interesting that, like a failed attempt at an idea continues onwards after the collapse of the international due to all the feuds, in terms of how it led to development in various forms of Marxism.

Zoe Baker : 52:34

I'm not too sure about that Because, so you know, the early big Marxist social movements, like in Germany and Austria, which weren't really involved in the international like Germany kind of gets involved for the Hague but aren't really invested in it. It's just because Marx and Engels keep writing letters insisting that they join so they can expel Bakunin with a majority, and I feel like, though, that those kind of social democratic movements would have been heading towards Marxism regardless of, like, the Marx Bakunin conflict, like how it played out. I think it did become part of like the mythology of both movements in terms of how they think of themselves, because they both wrote accounts of what happened and which their side is right and the other is wrong, but I'm not sure of how it shaped Marxism beyond the explicit commitment to the conquest of political power and the formation of a political party, which is one of the resolutions that Marx and Engels pushed forward at the London conference and then later at the Hague. So, yeah, that's an attempt to answer that.

C. Derick Varn: 53:42

Yeah, I think where things get a little muddy for me in, that is the Italian anarchists and the Italian Marxists, because there's a lot more overlap there, people going back and forth between the red and the black, internationals and um well, in Italy, the, the first socialist movement, is anarchists and they actually introduce marks into Italy.

Zoe Baker : 54:05

They do the first translations or summaries uh, after the failure of propaganda of the deed Marx into Italy, they do the first translations or summaries After the failure of propaganda of the deed. You get some people, like Andrea Costa, who become, you know, favour electoral politics because it's like, well, the thing we tried really didn't work out at all, so I'm going to try something new. And then other people, you know, stick to anarchism like Malatesta, and attack Costa for, like you know, to anarchism like Malatesta and attack Costa for, like you know, betraying the movement.

Zoe Baker : 54:32

And often this slide is weirdly entangled with repression, because what happens is some people get the idea of protest candidates where there's a guy in jail and we're gonna elect him into parliament, and then, you know, they're gonna have to let him out, basically. And so people even put like Malatesta's name, they try to make him go on the ballot and he has to write letters being like no, don't make me an intellectual candidate, I'm an anarchist, I will stay in prison. Um, but yeah, so that can win, but that was like you know, once you start doing it for protest, then it's easy to go, well, why not do it for other things? And it kind of of snowballs, right?

C. Derick Varn: 55:10

So I guess the Italian Socialist Party yeah, I guess I was going to ask you then what is anarchist platformism and how does it affect things?

Zoe Baker : 55:24

Okay, so platformism is a tendency that arises after the russian revolution by key participants and especially the revolution in ukraine. So people like nesta mackno, peter arshinov, uh is also either met um, and they look back at basically their defeat in the russian revolution and try and think well, what can anarchists do to succeed after that failure? And also because they're looking at the state of the anarchist movement and in certain places it's not doing great and they're worried about essentially the rise of Bolshevism taking over anarchism as the main movement internationally, as opposed to just in Europe. Like you know, anarchism was bigger in South America than Marxism was at the time, stuff like that. And so they propose that the specific anarchist organisation should be committed to a narrow programme, as opposed to it shouldn't include individualists, it should. It should just unite, you know, anarchist communists essentially under shared strategy, such that the organization is all moving in one direction, rather than, you know, one section of the organization wants to organize in trade unions and other things. It's not a bad idea and then they're engaging like contradictory action, it's like no, the organization should be moving in one direction in order to allocate, you know, limited resources and energy to achieving specific, concrete goals.

Zoe Baker : 56:57

And so, in order to enable this what's called theoretical and tactical unity, they think we need a system of binding majority voting, which did exist in some mass organizations like the CNT. So you know, majority Congress resolutions binding on everyone in the organization. But that wasn't really a thing in specific anarchist organizations which were much smaller and where there wasn't as much of a necessity for it, because both of the size and the fact that you know, the entire membership is anarchist, versus where there's a strong anarchist base in it but loads of people join just because they want to be in the union. And the binding Congress resolutions in order to enable that. And then also what they call collective responsibility, which basically just means you agree to do the things that we will agree on, as opposed to essentially like a lack of discipline, like, let's say, we need revolutionary discipline, uh, in order to achieve our goals, um, and that they frame it in terms of the organization's responsible for its members and its members are responsible for the organization, which roughly just means that, insofar as your member, you act in a way that aligns with the common program and the common program is, in turn, um, a reflection of, like what you think, um, but what happens is that they they phrase all these ideas in such a way that to some anarchists it essentially sounds like a narco-bolshevism and it gets misunderstood as saying that essentially, this specific anarchist organization is going to be like an authoritarian vanguard, it's going to rule over the workers, it's going to establish, you know, one party state based on you know what can sound like democratic centrism, and they then have to issue all these clarifications of like no, we don't mean this. We don't mean that we don't want to be an authoritarian vanguard, but that all gets forgotten and everyone just remembers the initial response and not the follow-up where they clarify everything.

Zoe Baker : 59:00

Because the original title for the platform includes the word draft in the title and it really was a draft and I think they should have worked longer on the draft before releasing it. Um, but they weren't ready, I think, for the discourse. Um, but yeah, anyway, and platformism was always like really small in the historical movement. After all, this drama um, it briefly takes over, or takes over, it briefly becomes becomes adopted by the specific anarchist organization in France, but a few years later, what are called symphysists, who are like the enemies of platformists, who want a broader program, don't want binding majority decision making. They regain control of the organization and it never becomes a big thing. It's only actually much later than now. We have, like in the modern world, all these platformist groups. They're more platformist now than they were historically, which is often not the case for anarchist stuff. There were more anarcho-syndacists historically than there are now, but platformism is the other way around.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:02

Yeah, that's interesting. Platformism is often for good and ill.

Zoe Baker : 1:00:09

Oh, that's the anarchists that agree with the Marxists the most, maybe well, yeah, I would argue that it's really just expanding what anarchists have been advocating since Bakunin and, like, malatesta, writes these letters in which he says, on a number of topics, it's just a difference of language. They actually advocate the same thing and really it's just that there are a few slight differences between what Malatesta advocates and what the platformers advocate. So he wants a slightly broader program and he rejects the binding majority decision making. He thinks it's incompatible with the unity of means and end, so he thinks he'll create an organization that isn't capable of achieving an end to society.

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:51

One of the things I learned from your book is that I was actually convinced by the Kotsky critique of the general strike and Sorrell's response to that was to try to make it a myth. But your book clarified to me that Kotsky was actually responding to a straw man that most anarchists and socialists who believed in the general strike did not actually believe it was this unitary event which immediately abolishes capitalism. So what was the anarchist's understanding of the general strike in the 19th and early 20th century?

Zoe Baker : 1:01:33

Okay, so I can frame this in terms of response to the straw man, right? So the big straw mans are, I think you can pick a pre-planned day for revolution and just do the revolutionary general strike whenever you want. But it assumes that we're going to have all, or most, workers in the country in a union and then they all go on strike together in one big go, which isn't going to happen because there's never been union organisations that are that large. Third, it requires that capitalism will collapse just due to workers essentially folding their arms, ceasing work and then, yay, class is abolished. Fourth, that it only focuses on defeating capitalists and ignores the need for political struggle against the capitalist state.

Zoe Baker : 1:02:18

So these critiques do apply to some proponents of the general strike, especially the very early ones, and also some sections of this of early prince syndicalism, but they don't apply to what anarchists meant when they talked about the general strike, and this is, you know, from the debates in the first international onwards. So they're very explicit that the general strike. So we need to distinguish between a revolutionary general strike and just a general strike. Right, you can have a general strike to win the eight hour day, which is what they did in Spain, but it wasn't a revolutionary one. So a revolutionary general strike, they didn't think it could be launched on a preplanned day. They instead think it's going to develop out of smaller strikes for immediate improvements that over time become a strike wave and they grow in frequency and size until a point's reached where this strike wave has created a revolutionary situation and then a revolutionary general strike becomes possible because so many workers are mobilized and class conscious and taking action, that then we can push towards the revolution. And they think they think their task is that they're a militant minority of workers who are going to organize key industries, that the economy can't function without, in particular, shipping, railways, energy, things like that, because this acts as a force multiplier, which is that, you know, if we stop shipping and railways and energy, well then raw materials aren't being moved, factories can't work and this means that a strike by one sector of the economy can have a massive effect on the entire economy. So we don't have to organize, you know, all the workers in all the industries we just got to focus on strategically significant industries and that this will force, you know, workers outside of the strike to stop work and thereby potentially be politicized and mobilized into the strike wave and this is something they realized from actual real world experience. Like the London Dockland strike in 1989, which begins as a small strike and then over two weeks, is this mass mobilization that shuts down the entire dock and factories have to close because the supply chain's messed up and this ends in winning some better wages.

Zoe Baker : 1:04:28

But the anarchists see this and go what if we did this, but bigger? And it was organized by anarchist trade unions rather than you know what was this kind of reformist thing? And they think that this mass strike wave, it creates a situation where the militant minority, they, can initiate expropriation of the means of production and establish workers' control. So workers aren't folding their arms and waiting for capitalism to collapse, they're expropriating. And the idea is that, you know, the strike committee that can transform into a workers' council, for example, and that this will inspire workers elsewhere to engage in expropriation, so that what becomes what starts as a strike wave becomes an expropriation wave.

Zoe Baker : 1:05:11

And, crucially again, it's a process. It's not, you know, in one day. It's based it's it's based on the idea of it spreading over time. Obviously, you know, not over the course of several years. You know it's going to be in a relatively short space of time, but it's not like you know, in a few hours, um, and they, they always emphasize this need of, you know, the general strike with expropriation is what makes it revolutionary, as opposed to just a normal general strike by you know, you're just not at work and trying to get better wages, and they were aware, especially from practical experience, that the state's not just going to sit around right, they're going to be trying to repress the strike wave from the beginning.

Zoe Baker : 1:05:47

And so, therefore, they thought it was necessary for the trade union to have a pre-organized armed division of action groups who would be in place to attack the police and military or persuade them to, you know, put down their weapons, basically, and that they would also, you know, seize weapons from armories and distribute them to workers.

Zoe Baker : 1:06:04

And now the workers are armed, and so, rather than ignoring the question of political power, they actually advocate smashing the state and replacing it with working class power. Uh, and so they don't ignore the need for they don't? The general revolution, drone strike isn't purely economic, it's a platform from which to look to launch the social revolution, just because it mobilizes so many people and causes so much disruption. And the cnt did have these action groups who, when the they were, you know they were preparing for a situation like this. But then what actually happens is there's a fascist coup, but the action groups mobilize and they already know, you know all the shooting positions, where troops are stationed, where weapons are, so they can then defeat the fascist coup. Um, in in, you know, significant parts of spain, and that's because they've been preparing for. You know what their theory said they needed to. It's just it occurred in response to a fascist coup rather than a massive strike wave.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:01

So that actually is significantly clearer. One thing that I was surprised in going through your history about and I think I'm going to use this to pivot just for a brief bit, and then we'll wrap this up on the difference between anarchism and between, like, say, the 1960s and the 19 or the 2010s in the broadly speaking West. I always use the West in quotation marks, I'm not even sure it's a coherent idea, but one of the differences is that the anarchism I encountered in the 90s and aughts when I was young was very anti-programmatic, for example, and I was surprised how much understanding programs is important to understanding early anarchism. What are the kinds of things that have shifted or been abandoned from this period of anarchism to today? And again, I realize this is a super broad question, so we can kind of do it like with some key examples. Of course, we can't be exhaustive.

Zoe Baker : 1:08:08

I think it really depends on the place, right. So like, ok, the Cuban anarchism is still the same as classical anarchism during the cuban revolution, um, for example, it's not like you know the new stuff. There's other examples in south america of anarchists who this is just, they're still doing classical anarchism but with a few additions and updating it. Um, well, essentially what happens in the english-speaking world is there's it's very complicated, but you, there's various factors that lead to it. So, for example, in the US anarchist movement it gets repressed and it's mainly immigrants and they're either forced to they were kicked out of the country and made to go, you know, deport as black fascist Italy, for example. You know deporters, like fascist Italy, for example or they just get really old and their children become integrated into mainstream America and are no longer immigrants in these radical communities. And so there's this decline of the historical anarchist movement in America. And when anarchism resurges in America, it develops out of things like conscientious objector camps in response to World War II, there's loads of influence from the Quakers and like the peace movement, and they don't actually have that much knowledge of historical anarchism or access to historical anarchist sources which are overwhelmingly not in English and have never been translated and essentially they kind of reinvent their own thing, which they're calling anarchism, and there's some things in common with it, but it's also distinct and it's weirdly connected with, you know, the counterculture and there are some people who are, you know, trying to keep the classic stuff alive. It's just there's all this other thing going on at the same time, or in the english-speaking, in england there's a rise of anarchists who reject the very possibility of revolution just because atomic weapons exist and this makes them go. Well, this is no longer viable and it's in response to that that you get a group of UK anarchists who start calling themselves class struggle anarchists. They're actually just classical anarchism, it hasn't changed. But they're having to rebrand themselves in response to this kind of, these new kinds of anarchism that are emerging as part of the new lab um, and I think now and then it in turn is obviously then altered by, you know, the auto globalization movement and then later occupy.

Zoe Baker : 1:10:29

I think what's been happening increasingly is that I feel like more modern anarchists are getting to grips with the history and with what historic anarchist ideas were. Um. I especially as more stuff's being translated, you know more books are coming out. There seems more familiarity with it than historically. So, for example, you know, david Graeber is very explicit that he doesn't actually really know much about the history of anarchism or its ideas. He very explicitly says this um, which is, you know, when you read him, oh, this actually makes a lot of sense because what he's saying is not really in many respects like a sort of anarchism.

Zoe Baker : 1:11:02

Um, it turns out there's a reason why, which is that, you know, he wasn't super familiar with it and that's not. That wasn't the key for where his anarchist politics, uh, how they like, developed, um, although pretty sure he did have like relatives who were involved in, uh, the spanish revolution, but anyway, um, and there's also, I think, been I think there was a phrase there were loads of people who we might call like anarcho-liberals. So they were essentially like they come into contact of anarchism through like chomsky or graber. You know, I like them both, despite having issues, you know, with many of the things they've said, but they essentially then don't go beyond that and they they're calling themselves anarchists but they haven't really engaged with anarchist strategy and unlearn a lot of kind of liberal assumptions but that, but that feels a lot less prominent than it used to be in early, like my experiences online, for example.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:59

When I was in my 20s, what I would now what Bosch Carson's horror called anarcho-liberalism, I would probably have called Chomsky Graeber. Naomi Klein thought so. I encountered it a lot, both online and in the real world, but it and a lot of you know, uh, talk about absolute banishing of hierarchies. A lot of talk about affinity groups, although what they meant by affinity groups was closer to what, um, probably you know, modern demographic, demographic issues or whatever, would mean by affinity groups, and not what anarchists historically meant by it. And so, again, a lot of the mystification of words. And one of the things I've liked about anarchist research in the recent years and going back to this old, to this older stuff, going through the arguments kind of systemically, um, uh, I think you've inspired a couple of other people to start doing this um is that you can start seeing where these, these ideas, come from, but also things like absolute consensus and and whatnot.

Zoe Baker : 1:13:09

That wasn't how historical anarchist groups actually operated yeah, that they, they, they some use what's called unanimous decision-making, but they don't have consensus and you know the various hand gestures and procedures and kind of structured norms around consensus decision-making. They just think we will have to agree. But mass organizations used majority voting, federations used systems of majority voting. Um manatesta advocated unanimous agreement. But when this isn't viable, we do a majority vote. It's just that. You know, the decision of the majority isn't then like violently imposed on everyone. Right, it's the key thing. So it's still within a voluntary association, but they still advocated majority voting within a system of free association and that was the main anarchist position.

Zoe Baker : 1:14:02

As far as I can tell, often they don't actually really go into specifics about how they actually make decisions. They just say we will and then they seem to. But it can be actually surprisingly hard to get specifics um and. But there are some definite examples where it's like, yeah, they're very explicit majority voting plus unanimous agreement and then various specifics about how to organise that. And the anti-organisationists tended to be more pro-unanimous, which also makes sense because they're organising just in the Finti groups and don't have to deal with the question of well, how do we make a decision as a trade union with 600,000 members. That's not something they have to deal with.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:46

This is a. I guess this is a good point. To wrap it up, you mentioned that you're writing a book about the differences between anarchism and marx, and obviously we're gonna have to wait for that book to be finished to for for the for that to be explored.

Zoe Baker : 1:15:02

Yeah, I've written too many books at once.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:04

I'm making a mistake oh yeah, as a, as a public school teacher, a podcaster, and and, and now a book writer, I, I feel you, um, it's just all of a sudden you realize like I'm doing 85 things a day, um, but I was gonna ask you, like, um, in the in the 90s and aughts, it felt like, uh, anarchism was a predominant form of leftism that you would encounter in the american radical sphere. Uh, particular forms, I mean it was like book chin and then like bob black and hiking bay and primitivist and you know, uh, stuff that's very removed from actually what we're talking about today, except for, maybe, book chin. I think book chin's kind of kind of in this historical trajectory. But, um, blah, blah, blah, cliche, cliche, cliche. Uh, 2007, return to marxism.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:01

Um, and it kind of seems like that, that kind of social democratic renewal moments, uh, over, um, it does seem like getting a grip on the differences between, uh, marx and anarchists is kind of important now again, uh, and it's going to be harder to do because, um, not just because of the actual historical, you know, difficulties, but also because there are multiple, multiple Marxist interpretive traditions that interpret the dispute with anarchists in different ways. So, you mentioned earlier, are anarchists too violent a la Lenin? Are they too soft, a la Ingalls? What's the specific problem? So I guess the question that I'm really asking is why does it matter that we understand the distinction between Marxist and anarchist? Now, you know, almost 150 years, after a lot of these debates happened.

Zoe Baker : 1:17:07

So I think, first of all is the fact that we're still having the same debates, the same topics keep coming up. You know, should we engage in electoral politics or not? You know how should we organize, how should we make decisions, what should the role of committed revolutionaries be in social movements? So the same basic questions come up.

Zoe Baker : 1:17:30

Second of all, a lot of Marxists argue through quoting scripture without understanding it and definitely with without, um, you know, and you get this thing where two marxists quote the same marx passage at each other and then interpret it differently based on their preconceived archaeological positions. Um, and they tend to just repeat whatever certain historic marxists say about anarchism is true, you know, they'll just quote some lenin thing about how anarchism's made no contributions to socialist theory as fact, just because lenin said it and it's, like you know, so wrong that you don't even know where to begin, kind of statements, and so, given that, well, and how many people are getting into marxism online, especially you know the rise of, basically you know, stalinism, that somehow kind of removed from any context yeah, it's.

Zoe Baker : 1:18:27

It's like first as tragedy, then as farce, but for marxist leninism it's kind of. I view it as, like some people get really into like being a K-pop stan. Other people are 20th century dictatorship stans or you know various kinds of social movement stans that happened like long ago in the past, and they build their sense of self around their stan culture and they don't actually really do anything. They're just. You know, they function similar to when you know, like a Taylor Swift stand is arguing with a K-pop stand. It's like that's essentially their political activity, but about politics, and this leads to just widespread misinformation spreading. And you know I try and counteract that misinformation, so like I recently, you know, I saw a tweet claiming that Starbucks workers aren't proletarians. I wrote a two hour video essay on what the proletariat is because I was annoyed so much.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:24

Oh yeah, the great barista gate of the 2022 to 2024.

Zoe Baker : 1:19:32

Our blue hairs aren't proletarians, but you know these kinds of things keep coming up as you get this increasingly vulgar socialism that is even removed from the aesthetics and terminology of Marxism or the actual ideas even of Marxist-Leninism. It's quite bizarre how it's becoming this caricature of itself, because it turns out, people pretend to read things or understand things that actually they haven't.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:57

Uh, imagine that, imagine, imagine that happening um and yeah, so I try to.

Zoe Baker : 1:20:05

you know how can I make the world slightly less terrible? It's like well, at least hopefully I can help some people get a firmer understanding of what the differences are, what the positions are, so then we can have an honest, good faith discussion about what we personally think, as opposed to you know, what did the historical people think? But because of how socialists argue, unfortunately you know, it's often grounded in history, so you have to do the history to have those discussions.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:29

Yeah, I was. I recently did a long series of deconstructions of Ingalls' Unauthority, which is a I'm just going to say it, it's a bad text Like. It actually is not self-coherent. It hurts, like in ways that Ingalls doesn't seem to see. It actually hurts other Marxist theories. So you know, this kind of uh misinformation unfortunately goes all the way back to the beginning. But the people often citing well, you know, engels authority settles the question. And I'm like have you even read that text? Do you understand its argument? Can you, can you break the arguments down? And you know, yeah, I'm a marist, but I was just kind of aghast, like, break this text down. What is it actually arguing? There's shifting definitions in this text. There's contradictory accusations. There's also like some kind of split between political and economic power that you wouldn't think that Marx and Engels would believe. You know you don't you?

Zoe Baker : 1:21:36

you wouldn't think that, uh, marx and Engels would believe you know, um, because so I. I once had a person tell me that I needed to read Engels's book on authority and I had to explain that it was not a book. But they, they hadn't even read it and realized how short it was. It's you, maybe they have a very expansive notion of what a book is. Uh, something I used to do regularly was I would post tweets which were just marx and engels quotes but say this is what anarchists think, because it's something that anarchists do think. It's just, you know, not in their words. And then you know these people would be getting super mad, calling it childish and idealist and pretty bourgeois. And it's like this is from capital, volume one, which you have never read. This is from anti-during, which you have never read. But your entire personality is based on being so theory-pilled that you can't even immediately.

Zoe Baker : 1:22:18

You know I had Engels' quote describing communism. I was told by, you know, self-proclaimed Marxist that this described a free market society, because it used the phrase free and equal association of the producers. And then you know they didn't realize that I was quoting one of the most um? And? And then you know they didn't realize that I was quoting it. One of the most famous angles, quotes of all time. Um, and these kinds of things. That, yeah, it just makes me sad and all I can do is try and go well, so some people do want to actually learn and I know it's so much work to do the historical research because you know I do it. It's a nightmare. So hopefully I can do loads of work and help people who are overworked and don't have the time or energy. I pack it all together in one big book. They can read it and, you know, gain some understanding without having to like be a workaholic for 10 years, basically.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:09

Yeah, I do. I used to be, I used to be one of these people who would say, like, don't go to the secondary sources but increase them, like no, you have to historically contextualize this. And there's, I mean like just with Marx alone. I mean, you say you wanted to read the works of Marx, engels and Lenin. You're dealing with hundreds of thousands of pages of work actually that are in some ways contradictory to themselves, depending on when you're citing, ways contradictory to themselves, um, depending on when you're citing.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:38

And you know, uh, and so many marxists have been invested in turning all this into, like a singular, coherent theory that's been, like you know, invariant and identical from, I guess, 1847 till today. And uh, yeah, you can't really have studied this, regardless of whether or not you're a Marxist or an anarchist and believe that. And similarly with anarchism, I always hear Marxists make a lot of the frankly, dumbest complaints against you know, like college anarchist art that I'm like, yeah, but I'm like a lot of historical anarchists would probably agree with you about these ideas. You can't blanket condemn this because somebody annoyed you, because they picked up a crime. Think once or something like I mean, you know I pick on crime, think a lot, because they annoyed me in college.

Zoe Baker : 1:24:25

I also feel like, yeah, there's. There's this double standard right, where it's like if we're going to judge Marxism, it's we're judging marks, we're not judging like a random member of the Social Democratic Party who's memorized some Kowski but doesn't actually really know that much. Right, you know, like that we don't form our opinions about Marxism from like that person. It's instead, no, we have to look at Marx and Engels and seriously study them With anarchists. It's like. You know, you can think people just talk about it having never read Malatesta or actually read anything by Kropotkin apart from the Conquest of Bread, and therefore they don't understand anything in it because they don't know the context in which it was written and what he says elsewhere. At the same time, they totally misunderstand it because they don't have the context.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:10

Yeah, it's a disaster. So thank you for the work you do, Zoe. What would you like to plug? That's the weirdest thing about being in the socialist media space is we have to do the petty bourgeoisie with the air thing at the end. So I'm just going to do that right now and get it out of the way in our double consciousness.

Zoe Baker : 1:25:28

So both workers and capitalists at the same time, as Mark says, borrowing Adam Smith. So yeah, I have my book Means and Ends. You can get it from AK Press. If you don't have money, there is a free e-pub on the site LibGen. Eventually it's all going to be on the Anarchist Library for free, but I was going to wait until it had been out a while so AK Press could make some money and keep going, because, you know, radical publishers operate on small amounts of money.

Zoe Baker : 1:25:58

I have a YouTube channel, Zoe Baker, and I also post all my scripts onto my blog like a narco pack. So if you dislike my voice or prefer to read, it's there on my blog, along with all my page references. Crucially, I always have citations, I'm a maniac for citation along with all my page references. Crucially, I always have citations I'm a maniac for citation. Lastly, you know I have Instagram. I used to be on Twitter regularly, but then I stopped because it prevents me from working. So it's like I can either be on Twitter or I can work. I can't do both, so I'm not on Twitter.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:28

Yeah, I was off Twitter for six months, no, 10 months and I came back in the last couple weeks to book guest and I almost immediately regret it because I'm already like I've done like 600 tweets in three weeks. Shit, I need to stop, um. And also, I think twitter is a bad. You can get a really malformed view of radicalism from twitter yeah, if twitter was radicalism, I would be unbelievably depressed.

Zoe Baker : 1:26:59

You know, twitter's not a nice place and it actively incentivizes the most brutish, terrible aspects of human beings in order to gain gratification in the form of a number going up and just to increase, you know, engagement, so that there's more time on device, so there's more advertising. Yeah, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:22

Uh, all social media is pretty much just like that after they figured out how to monetize it, but twitter's particularly bad. It does seem like twitter actually encourages. You know how can I make people the angriest and what's the most lunatic thing I can say, so more people hate, follow me, like it's a bizarre set of incentives. Thank you so much for coming on and we're going to end this here. Have a great rest of your day.