
Organising from Elsewhere Podcast
Welcome to Organising from Elsewhere — a podcast weaving activists, researchers & facilitators in an emergent exploration of how we listen, move, and decide together in a time of global unraveling.
From somatics to science, Indigenous wisdom to systems thinking, we’re reimagining collective action from the ground up — beyond extractive habits, toward relational ways of being. Follow us to join the exploration!
Organising from Elsewhere Podcast
Organising Post-Collapse: What the Left Still Doesn’t Get! w/Richard Hames
Let's explore new ways of organizing to navigate the collapse of current systems and build for a resilient future. This week's conversation hosts Richard from Novara Media, who discusses his experiences with organizing in contexts ranging from music schools to anti-fascist movements. The discussion delves into the impact of different organizational strategies and highlights the need for radical new visions that challenge the status quo. The episode concludes with a critical reflection on the left's difficulty in articulating positive futures and stresses the importance of not letting figures like Elon Musk dominate the narrative of what's possible.
00:00 Introduction: Articulating Positive Futures
00:36 Exploring New Ways of Organizing
02:26 Introducing Richard: Background and Experience
03:44 Organizing in Music and University
07:51 Anti-Fascist Organizing in the UK
12:13 Decision Making in Anti-Fascist Movements
15:15 Challenges and Tensions in Horizontal Organizing
19:35 The Role of Fear and Vertical Structures
31:09 Historical Context of Anti-Fascism
38:40 Mass Movements and Collective Exuberance
43:30 The State's Indifference to Activist Movements
45:14 Energy Transitions and Government Interests
46:05 The Ineffectiveness of Mass Arrests
47:16 Organizational Challenges and Learning
49:46 Adapting to Changing Political Contexts
55:37 The Role of Togetherness in Political Movements
01:05:45 Strategies for Post-Collapse Survival
01:23:11 Final Thoughts and Future Directions
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There is a, difficulty that the left, articulating. Positive and engaging visions of the future that aren't about collapse, and people like Elon Musk, who have a future to sell, right? They have a future to sell. and we should not let them sell only their future in the marketplace. So, if you want to think about organizing for post collapse, I think you need to work out how to distribute the things you care about as widely as possible in the most, equitable way possible Knowing that you know almost nothing about the world that comes afterwards. That's the, that's the project, right?
What if the ways we organize are part of the crisis that we face, and also a key to what comes next? Welcome to organizing from Elsewhere. We're exploring new ways of organizing, ways of listening, moving, and deciding together that can help us navigate the collapse of so much that we hold dear. And work to overcome the systems of extraction and oppression. We believe that at the heart of this social, ecological spiritual crisis is this paradigm of separation, and we are weaving a collective of activists, researchers, and facilitators who are asking, what would it mean to organize from a different assumption an ever evolving emergent experiment. Bridging the fields of science and consciousness decolonizing our thinking about indigenous knowledge and developing somatic facilitation practices to bring about much needed systemic change. This podcast series works like a game of tag. Each guest is invited to become the host for the next episode and choose for themselves a new voice to enrich this exploration. Join us on a journey of reimagining how we work together in collectives, organizations, and social movements. Listen into exciting and unexpected perspectives that have emerged when organizing differently. And stay tuned until the end of the episode where we're excited to unpack and reflect on what has been shared. So take a deep breath and let's dive in. Enjoy this week's conversation.
Wolfgang:Welcome everybody and I'm here today with Richard. Richard is an editor with Novara Media and has written two books on the far right is writing another book on collapse and collapsology. Intrigued to hear more about that. Welcome Richard.
Richard:Thank you so much. Nice of you to promote me out Novara Unfortunately, I'm not actually an editor. I'm just a, uh, a lowly audio producer. But, uh, I think of myself as, you know, an aspiring editor, perhaps.
Wolfgang:Perfect. Um, next time we hear the title will be the correct one by reality having changed.
Richard:Uh, yes. Well, I, at that point, it'll be, you know, CEO Founder King, this kind of thing.
Wolfgang:okay. So that gives us a sense of your ambition and your outlook. Um, but we are here today to talk a bit more specifically about organizing and, um, I think the, the first question for me to you would be, if you can tell me about any experiences you had in organizing, um, either specifically political organizing or just like working together with people in an organization, um, that you think kind of shaped how you think about organizing.
Richard:Yeah, so my, I think given the topics that I explore in the things I write and the things that I, talk about in the interviews that I do with Novara, it will not surprise anyone to know that I was trained as musicologist and so what I did is I went to music college, And. I did a lot of organizing of musicians around, you know, quite complex kind of tasks. Um, type music is, is, is tricky to organize in because a, no one has any money. And B, the specifications for everything that happens are always like incredibly complicated. Um, and not particularly, uh, standardized. And therefore it's not like having a string quartet or a, you know, single pianist and then a singer where it's always the same. Every new piece has different demands. But more interestingly than that, I think from the perspective of thinking about organizing in a deeper way, I was also involved at the time in attempting to organize that university, uh, which had no real political, um, dynamism to it at all. It's a very conservative institution. It's, I think the oldest conservatoire in the uk. I'm not sure about that, but it's, it's, it's definitely the. The sort of top of the pyramid of Conservatoires in the uk. And what that means is that it, it really attracts a very broad group of both international students and extremely posh students who had gone through this, this, this stack of, uh, music education that exists in the uk, which is mostly private schools, residential schools and so on. And so I had sort of turned up to music college on the assumption that musicians would be a bunch of kind of political radicals of various sorts, um, who would be interested in sort of the wider world in politics. I had this almost 1960s idea of what a musician was and what a musician could be. And I discovered much to my embarrassment and I think retrospectively kind of just revealed my extraordinary naivety, um, that they were not like that at all. And in fact, they were not really very interested in, in politics. But I did, I did fall in with a group of people who were, um, through the kind of classic maneuvering of, kind of fancying, someone who I met on a demo. Then, uh, being invited to a squat where they were, they were staying for a time and, um, going to that squat with them and then them saying, oh, I'll be here again tomorrow. I returned the day after hoping to see them. They weren't there. I returned the day after that. They weren't there. I returned the day after that they weren't there. And so on and on and on. I never saw them again. But I did get a political education out of this experience and so I was sort of thrust into it. And what I tried to do from them was, was organize the cleaners. Um, in my university there were just three of them. Very small institution. Um, and although that process was, was very tricky to persuade people in the, the student body to, um, to get involved with are. The prospect, the mere fact of the, um, it being possible that we would organize, uh, seems to have jogged the senior management out of its complacency. And they did in fact give the cleaners a pay rise. They did in fact renegotiate the contract. And so that, that was extremely easy. In some ways, there was a, there was a very, straightforward method that was employed and that we got the much more experienced union organizers from elsewhere. We brought them to this much smaller institution. So people who have been previously working at U-C-L-B-S-P, uh, which is a big university in London, people who've been previously working at Birkbeck, which is sort of the same. Um, and we just brought them to this small institution and they, you know, threatened not exactly in those words, but that they, they intimidated the, the, the senior management merely by their presence. And that was pretty effective. And then I guess like, if I sort of skip ahead quite a long way, the other substantial piece of, of organizing that I did, um, there was loads of various bits of. Interaction with the student movement. Um, of course, throughout that whole period, I went to university in 2011. Um, so a year after the student movement had had sort of, uh, reached its heights and then there were loads of things to do after that. I got in with a, got in with a bad crowd. Uh, I think been the effect of my, uh, my more conservative peers. And, um, you know, the, the, sort of skipping ahead a bit to 2018, uh, when I was involved in anti-fascist organizing in the UK against the, the new found, um, threat of the DFLA, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance, the Democratic Football Lads Alliance is to take from the Football Lads Alliance in that the Football Lads Alliance, uh, was a, was a group that started after there was a series of terrorist attacks in the UK in 2017. Uh, people may remember those. I. They were a bunch of football lads, football hooligans, um, but self-styled lads who mostly came from, um, organized football fandoms and they organized big demonstrations in London. And then they had a sort of internal split when they got annoyed that one guy was taking all the money from the merch they were making, and they formed the DFLA, the democratic version in which six guys split the money, turned the batch. There was a big, there's a big democratic internal move. And the significance of this for the anti-fascist movement was that in distinction from the EDL, which was the English Defense League, which was a much more conspicuously, thuggish and aggressive force. The DFLA were very keen to play respectability politics. They were very keen to say, we are legitimate political actors. We present ourselves with a coherent program. These are our demands. This is what we want. We can speak eloquently. Or at least coherently about what we want and we don't, we're not associated with to Robinson. So to Robinson is the, the sort of the central figure of the, the British Street and Far Rights and has been for 15 years. Now, the DFLA were very good at getting across a political message. And so there was this question inside the anti-fascist movement about whether or not we should oppose them politically, by which we mean should we engage with their arguments? Should we try and make their arguments, seem silly and or wrong, rather than simply trying to overpower them with force and our maneuver them out, organize them, which is the thing that the Antifascist movement had for a very long time, tried to do with the EDL because the EDL weren't putting forward any guru in arguments, so you could just outmaneuver them and they would disappear. And so the may experience of organizing here was, was negotiating between. One group of anti-fascists who said no, who we shouldn't try and put coherent arguments or we shouldn't try and refute the arguments, we should just try out and maneuver them. Uh, who associated with the a FN, the anti-fascist network, which has been around for a decade at that point, and this new group of activists from the feminist anti-fascist movements who were trying to bring explicitly feminist politics. And the reason why that's relevant is because the DFLA was saying it was part, it was part of the, kind of the Europe wide, anti-Muslim sort of pedophile scare or, um, sexual assault scare imagery was claimed sometimes accurately. Some was not accurately that, um, Muslim migrants to the U to to to Europe. And that of course also to the UK had been sexually assaulting women. Um, and so this is a sort of feminist issue without women's freedom from, from violence. But it was being taken over by the far right. And so the feminist anti-fascist movement were very keen to make that sort of political intervention. And ultimately, my assessment of that would be that although it was successful at doing that, and the DFLA were driven off the streets, the long-term consequences of that intervention were to demobilize the anti-fascist movements in the UK even further than it already had been demobilize. And this was a, yeah, a long-term sort of detriment of that intervention, um, because it didn't stick around once the politics of the far right moved on, which it always does because they have this flexible opportunistic politics. The feminist politics were no longer relevant. They lost interest. They dis they wanted to do other things. And so there was, there was a long-term decline anti-fascism as a result of this short-term victory. And so that I, that, that all very complicated I'm sure would disagree with me there. But I would say that the, that was my, that, that's one of my sort of central organizing experiences.
Wolfgang:And can you tell us a little more about how that kind of tension between the different strategies was, was held and how decision making processes within the anti-fascist movement, or at at least around this particular topic, what they looked like? Mm-hmm.
Richard:I think that my impression, if I'm gonna be really honest, is that a lot of the decision making processes that people undertook were basically based on seniority, seniority of various forms of, uh, charisma or powers experience. So, and this is true for both the a FN side, that's the, the side that didn't want to make political arguments against the FFA and through the feminized fascists who did want to make political arguments, both sides were dominated by. Particular people who, although they appeals to forms of horizontal organization, nevertheless, made decisions more or less through small committees, I would say, but where the committee was basically beholden to them. So small groups, people who they would get together in other meetings, in side meetings, or just in the pub or just in various kind of bits of the movement, who would then present a more or less completed plan. Um, and so I think the decision making processes seemed democratic. They seemed like there were assemblies, there were assemblies held, there was lots of discussion, lots of negotiation, lots of large meetings where votes were had and so on. But if I'm honest, I think a lot of decisions were made in small groups before those meetings, uh, after those meetings, and then imposed upon those, those larger, larger formations, the thing about a anti-fascism is that a lot of the organizing is about just one day. It's about like what will happen on the day. And you do need a almost quasi, this is putting it too strongly, but like a almost quasi-military style operation on the day to make sure no one gets hurt, or at least to make sure no one on your side gets hurt. Right? You need, you need to have discipline. That means you need to have people making calls whose authority in the moment supersedes questions about the wisdom of that call itself,
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:right? You have to follow orders even if the order is kind of wrong, because you need to stay together as a group because in your large, um, numbers is your, your, your strength. It's not, you can like fight with sticks the antifascists, right? It, it's that you, there are more of you.
Wolfgang:yeah. So, so coherence around any decision is better than, um, losing coherence in search for a better decision.
Richard:Yeah, that's, that's very well put. Yeah.
Wolfgang:And I mean this, this experience of, um, a decoupling of the official decision making processes and official decision making spaces from where decisions are prepared or actually made with lots of implicit power and like personal relationships that are being leveraged, et cetera. It's probably an experience that a lot of people share who have worked in officially horizontal organizations.
Richard:Yes.
Wolfgang:but what, in your example, seems to be specific is this need for and experience with explicitly vertical structures in specific situations of confrontation
Richard:Which everyone agrees on. Yes.
Wolfgang:And, and that, that would be interesting to me. Um, how, how the, the commitment to this form of organizing is being anchored at an organization that is outside of these organizations, at least, like trying to be or, or purporting to be horizontal.
Richard:Yeah, I mean the tactical necessity of having vertical organization, hierarchical organization, even to use before like a military style organization is agreed on by everyone. And through a sort of process of maneuvering, it was agreed that, that the side of the, the feminist movement, right? That was capable of we just bringing all people to the streets because they had a larger, a larger appeal because they're, they're fact better at organizing than the, than the anti-fascist movement that had become relatively. Secluded or cloistered or sort of separated from the rest of the left, um, they're frankly better at organizing than them. And so they managed to make themselves the, the, the leaders of this, this, this process. And so they were, they were all appointed there. Um, I think also the thing is that that kind of verticality was already in place. It was just, it was officially denied and now, you know, and then it became explicit. And that was, that was part of the, that, that, that, that meant that the transition was actually easier because it wasn't like there was some sort of new unfamiliar person. It was just like the person who was normally not in charge was now actually in charge.
Wolfgang:Yeah, yeah. For me, it feels, if, if I imagine to, to split my time between being in a situation with almost military style organization, which I participating in this fully understand and buy into, and then spending a lot of my time outside of this context in, for example, assemblies and at least like officially working, um, on, on what distributed and, and, uh, horizontal decision making systems that it feels like two different modes or maybe cultures even of organizing that are meeting there. And I would imagine. Being in such a situation that I would feel that as a tension maybe sometimes. And I wondering if that's something that you, that you encountered or was the, the, the horizontal aspects of organizing so superficial that it's basically didn't touch on people's expectations a lot.
Richard:I, so I guess the thing is that I, I would say that the horizontality of it was that it was always understood for the most part that it was possible to integrate information from across the movement.
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:So what I mean by that is you could say things, you could say whatever you wanted. Right. Um, and that was taken seriously often that the thing that you had said was sort of relevant to the movement and that it would be integrated or, or rejected into a plan that was broadly speaking, organized by a small group of people. What happens on the day is that you get much more official, Forms of, of doing that. So I, on the, on the day, for example, I was one of the sort of people on the edge. So along the edge of, of demonstration, you need people going up and down to carry information from, from the, from the, from the back to the front. Uh, uh, this is a big demonstration. This is maybe like six, 700 meters long. what that meant was that there were sort of official channels of, of speech. And my job was to go along and be like, how you doing? How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? How you doing? To everyone along the line. And then integrate that information to be like, people are angry or people are sad. People are scared, people are like annoyed. People are thinking about that. People are worried about that group. People who just arrived in the South Street. You know, that kind of thing. But also to act as a little pole, a little node so that could integrate lots of information and then distribute it as I saw, I saw fit. Um, I think the main, the main mediating experience here that allows you to move seamlessly from relatively horizontal to fully vertical is fear and the conjuring of the possibility of violence, which felt very real on the day itself. I seem to remember that we were actually helped out by the fact that there was another group, people called Fluff, so football lads and lassis this time. So not football lads, football lads and lassis against fascism. That was an anti-fascist group. But the problem was that they. Dressed and came with like football insignias, and they kind of dressed in all black, kind of like the people we were there to oppose. Well, and they at one point appeared out the side of the demonstration and there was mass panic. It was like, oh my God, they're here. They're here. The fa are here. But it wasn't, it was, it was, it was, it was people who were, you know, on our side just who had had a very DA different aesthetic, um, from us, uh, and who, who, who are very friendly, who very like charming and so on. But that experience of fear, I think managed to solidify the crowd around the, the, the imagination that, oh yeah, there really is something like out there that we need to be collectively kinda worried about.
Wolfgang:yeah. That makes a lot of sense psychologically, I think. And I mean, what in all of what you said also shows up and, and where this example of the, the group that is actually an ally, even if they don't look like one. Um, also kind of nicely points out, there probably was a strong sense of us versus them, a strong sense of we, um, the anti-fascists are united in a way towards this, this like shared, uh, enemy. And I'm wondering how, how. That kind of connectedness between people felt, is that, uh, something that was nurtured in, in the organizations for a long time, or was that also very much heightened due to the, the, like, stress of the event? So how did that feel?
Richard:There were two quite distinct modes opposing the far right that were on display. So the a FM, this movement that had opposed the DDL for, for a decade at this point. And it got very good at that, that movement or that sort of part of the movement opposed them because they thought the fascists were horrible and that they felt a natural solidarity with the people who might have been attacked by fascists, specifically people who sort of racialized people.
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:but there was, there was another quite different version of this, which was that there was a group of, uh, feminist organizers who felt themselves to be the kind of person who the fascists were implicitly attacking, but who were also in this very complex situation where their. Ostensible vulnerability as women was being conjured by the far right to justify attacks on Muslims. So we have to, you know, white men defending white women against brown men. Right. That's the, the classic kind of, you know, imperialist lineup. But it's also exactly the thing that they were there. And in this case it was a be bunch of mostly white women who were trying to assert a certain kind of like, um, collective deity. And part of the organizing process between the two groups, between the feminists and the A FN was to attempt to de-legitimize each other's capacity to be effective opposition, which is why the coalition was so fractious, was so difficult, was so like complex and why it fell apart immediately after the, uh, well, not immediately, but like a few months after the, the, the, the task could being accomplished and why there really wasn't a sort of follow follow up. So, you know, on, on the one hand there were people who, whose primary thoughts was that they, we are anti-fascists. And on the other hand there were people whose primary identification was that we are feminists and that these are very different identifications to begin with, and they lead different tactics and they lead to mutual mistrust. And I think that was where the whole thing broke down. My role in this was to be something like a mediator. Um, I'm not a woman, for example. Uh, and almost everyone in the feminist group was a woman, but I am also and there, and therefore, that since I wasn't, I didn't feel like I was part of that group. Um, although I, obviously I, I, I'm a feminist. Um, but I was also a member of a, of another group called Plan C, which was, I. Involved in organizing this as well. So, and that group was the one from which almost all The prominent feminists had also come, and therefore they knew me and I could act as a sort of go-between, between these different camps. I spent a lot of time trying to like explain, at least to the anti-fascist side, the, the kinds of tactical and strategic things they thought they should be doing in order to, not, break up this coalition that was kind of forming.
Wolfgang:Yeah, so be between those two groups. There probably wasn't a history of of like getting to know each other in collaboration, but this rather like short term coalition that you're describing where you just had to make do without this preexisting level of trust.
Richard:I think the thing is that in these organizations, lots of people, lots of individual people do know each other and they do know each other and they do trust each other. What is not trusted is the method of organizing and organizational methods, I think die very slowly and get changed very slowly because they just become the vocabulary of action. In, in, in doing politics is just feels, I think, to people quite obvious whatever vocabulary they, they happen to have. So it seems obvious to some people that the way to oppose the far writers that argue them. It seems obvious to other people the way to pose a far right is to blockade them. And it seems obvious to other people that the way to pose far is to attack
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:or to outnumber them. You know, the whole definite flesh of things. And I think that because Antiracism has this jumpy history, because of far right, it has a sort of like a jumpy history. It's not always present. It goes up and down. It changes form. Sometimes it's on the streets, sometimes it's in the ballot box. You know, these different kind of forms it takes because there is that erraticness of the farm, right? Antifascist also erratic. And because of that it's very difficult to have stable institutional history that can both A, learn and B, adapt to new situations. So they can store what worked in the past, but also understand what is different about this time. And because it can't do this, those two things. It can't always successfully say, okay, this is the tactic we need this time, because it inherits, I think quite like a stereotyped view of what strategy is from previous rounds of organizing. And so it just sort of tries to apply the same thing, but or what it imagines to be the same thing because there organization that can be the memory of the movements.
Wolfgang:Yeah, I mean this relates to an experience I've made quite a lot of times in, in very different, areas of organizing. Also, like outside of political organizing, um, and which we often to in, in our arguments, which is just copying a method of organizing this that has worked somewhere else or at some other point in time and applying it in a different context doesn't mean it's gonna work in the same way in this new context as well. Um, and I think that's a fairly general point because something that works in, in the context of one complex system doesn't necessarily work in the context of a different complex system. And you point out, if, if you have enough organizational longevity to kind of have institutional memory and learn and adapt over time, then there might be like an an evolved capacity to do that. But it even in, in, in like, longer existing organizations, I've seen it a lot that, people nonetheless follow a fad and think this new thing that they are doing over here needs to work here as well. So we implemented, um, in the, world of business and tech where I spent some time, there was almost every other year there was a new method to try and a new paradigm to adopt. And everything needed to be agile or everything needed to be design thinking. Um, I. And this like copy and paste approach to organizational methods, I think in general is, is very problematic.
Richard:Or something, when you copy and paste on a computer, it makes it seem like you've, you've,'cause you can take everything on a computer, like all the information, you can put it somewhere else instantly. That is not the case. When you are thinking about the movement between the civil rights movement and occupy, like, there's no way in which you're taking everything if I, I'm not even taking all the sort of formal elements
Wolfgang:What would you then say specific elements of this form of organizing or the overall shape, or is it the story that is being reused? So what would you
Richard:I, I would imagine it's actually much less than even a particular kind of level of formal structure. I'd imagine. It's something like a story. So it, it's, it's something, and of course you're always doing it as a repeat. So in Occupy, you are trying to attain the kind of moral clarity that the civil rights movement has attained in the us, right? So you are, you're trying to say, oh no, we are just an extension of this same thing that everyone now, in the year 2010 or 2009, everyone now agrees apart from some real fruitcakes that the civil rights movement was, was good. And so by appealing to this like mode of organizing, we are, we are also like, you know, assuming that kind of unproblematic post political kind of, uh, status in American politics. Now, the problem is that nothing has that politic in politics apart from the civil rights movements because it's really the only thing that you know, at the end of, end of, you know, Jim Crow and so on was a good thing. Um, but yes, by trying to bring in the collection of formal techniques, you're also trying to bring in a story of legitimacy about, from the previous, uh, movement, which just doesn't make any sense.'cause like you're not going to be able to do that, don't think that means it's doomed to failure or anything lots of things work in different contexts. Um, that seems like straight, very straightforward. People have voted in lots of different ways. But nevertheless, voting still works not in lot of context.
Wolfgang:Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, the question always is which parameters of the context are changing and what impact does that have on the thing that you're using? And then how, how greatly do they vary, et cetera. Um, and that also just methods get adapted. Like might mean something in one particular case and look very different in, in another one, in, in terms how you actually implemented. talking a bit more about, these organizing traditions or the taking ideas and, and far methods or just stories that have been implemented elsewhere. Do you see, if we zoom out a little, any other, like interesting, continuities, interesting, if you will, schools of thought about organizing that have, Survived for a long time that are still influential.
Richard:I mean, there, there are, there are loads. I, in my, in my own experience, maybe I can talk to some more about anti-fascism, which I think is a kind of interesting history of, organizing. And one thing that's really strange about anti-fascism is that from the 19, say nineties onwards in the uk, I think anti-fascism imagines itself to be a minority pursuit, which very strange because by the 1990s, um, everyone's anti-fascist, like, you know, there is this real consensus around, around the bad, the how bad the Nazis were, and they're not going back and we don't want the back and so on obviously at the same time, the BMP, there are members of the police force that are in the BP that's kind of widely, uh, known scandal. Uh, it's illegal for the police to be in the BP and yet when the BMP membership lists are, are leaked, um. It's found that there actually are loads of cops in them. That's obviously, you know, that suggests that anti-fascism as a position is not widely or universally held. But I would say that probably apart from very rare exceptions, there actually is the guiding principle of much of the organizational structure of the post-war settlement. Obviously in, in Germany, it's literally the Constitution. Um, the same is true in Italy, uh, although not quite to the same extent. Uh, it's certainly illegal to organize as a fascist in Italy. Uh, it's obviously illegal to do pretty much anything. It even looks like fascism in Germany. Um, and obviously, yeah, obvious reasons. Uh, the same is true of the uk that it bans various forms of hate speech. and what this means is that the field of contestation. For anti-fascists, I think is misunderstood for a very large, a very long period. I think in some extent it's still understood. There is this famous chance, who protects the fascists, police protect the fascists, but this is to really misunderstand what the, what the, what the function of the police is. The function of the public order police is to keep order. They don't care what your politics are. They just want ly circus to carry running as a, you know, a kind of a grand marketplace, right? They want it to be calm so that tourists can take photographs. They want Fargo Square to look sort of bubbly and exciting, but not like it's, there are politics going on that it's gonna be disruptive. But that's, that, that's the fundamental job, and I think anti-fascism is being hampered by failing to appreciate the extent to which liberalism has gotten hold of a lot of the parts of the British state. This is now going backwards. So it may well be that there is, you know, in 10 years time, it is actually true that the police do protect the fascists that they are in cahoots with them. not impossible, but I think it's a, it's a misunderstanding of the, kind of the stakes and the field. but of course it's part of the cultivation of a collective identity as anti-fascists. Then you are in some way, deeply radical that you're fighting against depression. And that is not in, in the, that's not the majority opinion. And so I think the organizing tradition that I would point to in anti-fascism is this kind of assumed position of the, of the outsider, the contentious outsider, even as liberalism in the, the late nineties had like the strongest anti-fascist constitution, I think it's had for a very long time.
Wolfgang:Mm.
Richard:There are exceptions to this, of course, as a national front and so on in the 1980s. So it's not, it's not long. Since there has been an explicitly pro state and the state kinda likes it, fascist people to the uk it's not like it's distant memory, but it's, it's, it's not, it's not the dominant paradigm as I I I, yeah. In terms of like, you know, bringing things around. That's the sort of, the continuity I would sort of point to is this, this imagine status of anti-fascism as being radically outside the, the parameters of normal politics.
Wolfgang:That for you is like connected also to a specific tradition of organizing from that role of the outside of
Richard:yeah, exactly. So, so, so what, what you're trying to do, if you're the role of the outsider, is to actually not produce a mass movement and this is my impression, people who have, who have spoken to, who sort of embody this tradition is that you sort of don't believe that people in general are opposed to fascism. They're sort of like, ah, maybe they are, maybe they are. You know, it's, it's not clear. And so we have to do this alone in small groups, in small cliques are we have to physically fight them. We have to find out where they are, and we have to defeat them. And very clearly the problem with this is that you end up doing that and then the state really dislikes you.
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:I'm not saying that you could have had like some sort of compact with the state. I'm not saying that, but I, there are other forms of wider community-based organizing that are a, less contentious b mobilize in an instinctive form of anti-Asian resistance that does exist widely in society, and c don't get you in trouble with the state in the same kind of way. And so there's a kind of a radical, there's a, there's a kind of a, an attempt to become always more radical.
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:yeah. Uh, I think amongst our fascists, and this produces effects where they, they marginalize themselves in, in, in unproductive ways.
Wolfgang:Yeah. And, and that process probably has a very strong path, dependency. So it's a process of increasing radicalization. Marginalization. And one that probably very rarely goes back to it, like broadening the appeal again, or in the example that we talked about earlier, where there is a coalition that that broadens the base, at least temporarily. It's very fragile and it doesn't like hold for long.
Richard:And the thing is that there's a, there, there are times when the skepticism about the state's commitment to anti-fascism is warranted. And there are, there's one particular warrant case, uh, in its thousands where lots of people are basically like sent to jail for very long periods of time for doing anti-fascist work. But the thing they're trying to do is they're trying to allegedly, confront the fascists in like a physical way. And that seems to confirm that the state is against anti-fascism. Even though what they're really doing is, is, is, is gonna go to an organized fight, right? And the state doesn't want to go to organized fight, but the point is that there's, there's, there's like a physical element. And the way that the ash responds to that is not by saying, oh, maybe we don't need to do this physical resistance stuff. Maybe, or, or we do. But like, maybe it'd be better if we have 10,000 people who could do it collectively as a group. But they respond in the, in the, the sort of mid noughties by deepening security culture, by saying, okay, well we need to protect ourselves more and more and more and more and more. And what that means is that you don't trust people. You don't let people into your organizations unless you vetted them, have to go to the house. You have to see what they're like. You have to, you know, meet their friends. You have to, people have vouch for you and so on. And that makes these movements smaller and smaller and smaller over time.'cause they don't reproduce themselves. Because they're not welcoming spaces to be. And that's the intervention that then we get onto this feminist anti-fascist movements, which is open, which is welcoming, which is organized around a mass identity that appeals to a sort of majoritarian opposition to racism. That movement. Yeah. Manages to, to sort of, make a very decisive intervention, which then doesn't for get followed up.
Wolfgang:Yeah. Do you have, just to, to contrast it with this, experience with an organizing tradition that works from this position of the outsider that has this long term perspective of shrinking and shrinking evermore, apart from this, this one, um, intervention, do you have any either experiences with or perspective on decidedly different organizing traditions that, for example, focus on mass involvement, that focus on, including people out of the, social or societal mainstream? And if you have like an example or two, maybe you could show some of the concrete differences in which organizing looks just very different for this other type of movement.
Richard:So I, I guess I, I mean, I, I cover, in my job I've covered justice PO and the Palestine movements and various other bits of environmental activism. So I could sort of speak to those, but I guess maybe the thing that is most strikingly different and most strikingly sort of interesting, and there's, I think now being sort of forgotten, is the, the early student movement. So the period of around 20 10, 20 11, which consists of large demonstrations of. I would say like conspicuous and actually revelatory irreverence. So the idea is that you're trying to be silly, creative, dynamic militant, completely opposed to being, engaged with by the state. Like obviously you're asking something in the state. So the context foot here is that they were trying to get the state not to raise student fees, right? Very simple demand didn't work. But the thing that it comes afterwards is that it produces through its irreverence, through its size, through its scale, through the, the extraordinary number of different kinds of things that happen. You produce a mass movement, right? That is actually really militant to really creative. And that's the kind of place where in your white paper, you write about this, starting from a, from a premise of separation. That's the place I. That I have felt in my life, the greatest release from that separation, the greatest feeling of an exuberant collectivity. A a feeling of, of comradeship, right? That's the place where I felt this, I infinite feeling of possibility. And it sounds very silly in some ways. I think looking back on it just to be like, oh yeah, you know, um, we're gonna set the scar on fire and we'll have communism tomorrow. That's, that, that was the kinda of the feeling of it.'cause it's actually just a series of relatively low level public order disturbances, right? That don't, don't change the, the policy of the toy party and, and don't manage to change it really in any distinctive way for 14 years. But it feels absolutely revelatory. And I think that is the thing that I. The, the security culture of anti-fascism really struggles to get to. It has its own adrenaline, it has its own violence, it has its own intensity, but is the intensity of threat, of fear rather than the intensity of like sudden lease of life, sudden freedom. Um, which, you know, you could point any number of things. You could point March 26, which is this massive BlackRock demonstration. They're like, like the ones they have in Germany. You could point to, obviously the original collection of, of student protests that take place, in the, in 2010. you could point to the, occupation of the University of Sussex and just like the feeling of that day just flowing across this campus. Um, reclaiming buildings basically for the movement after a very long occupation. You can point to all these things and they're all immensely exuberance. And that there is a real deep feeling of comradeship that emerges from those things.
Wolfgang:It sounds very similar to the experiences I had in early 2019. In the, early stages of the larger scale exile protests, for example in the so-called April Rebellion, with taking very central spots all over central London and occupying them for multiple days, for a week, even at Trafalgar Square. And then this feeling of, of possibility and of comradeship and, a bit, a little bit of threat in the mix when you wake up in the morning because someone's shouting police is moving in. And that's also adding to it. But, what still feels most alive in my memory is this sense of, being together in a situation that has this, this possibility that suddenly something can happen that you didn't think was able to or could happen before. In both cases, the movements were politically not very effective in the end. And, a question that we ask in the white paper that I've been asking myself, ever since these experiences is, is there anything in the way we organized, in the way these, these movement waves happened, internally, so not cracked down of the state or, that negotiating positions in terms of, of relative strength of power, but in the way that we organized in these moments, that has also contributed to the movements being weaker or less resilient than they could have been. And so, question to you. Do you think there is something in the way we organize that limits what, what can come out of it?
Richard:I mean, I think there are, there are many things, right? Um, so not with Antifascist thing, because I think that's actually quite separate because it succeeded, right? Like we did manage to get the, you know, the DFH dispatch, um. But with the other two, with extinction, rebell and, and and, uh, with student movements, I think the basic problem is that we, we assumed that the government cared about what we thought. Um, there is almost a kind of a, there's a kind of liberalism, I would say even in the most radical of these, these actions that assumes that the state's function is to govern with respects to what the the people want. and this is not true, uh, at all. So like in, in that sense, Again, not to say that the state is like fascist or the state is like authoritarian or so it's just not responsive to, or obviously the conservative government was not responsive to this kind of pressure because they don't care about these people. They didn't care about the lefty students. They don't care about, like the people who will vote green in 2024 and possibly beyond. Right. Not of interest. They have a social majority in the country. They have that constituency. It doesn't matter what they do. And then they have these other sort of impulse inputs, which are for the student movement, the kinds of like, you know, uh, financial interests that wanted to, jack up student fees so they could like, sell them as financial products. these, these loans that were given to students and then the, in the case of, uh, extinction Rebellion, very clearly, right, they have an interest in, in, in the continuation of, various kinds of fossil fuel extraction, even as they also have interests in the green transition, right? They're simultaneously interested in developing a lot of like new renewable resources and also in carrying on with the oil and, and gas and um, even some extent at that point, coal as well. because there has never been an energy transition before I. There have been, and this is getting off the topic of organization, but I think it's actually really important. The reason why they didn't want to wind down oil and gas in the UK and still don't is because that has never happened before. We have never stopped using an, an energy source. We still use as many trees as we did before. We still use as much coal before. We still use much oil to before and as much natural gas and as much renewables and as much nuclear. Right. All that happens is that you add new things. That's the whole of the energy history. And so we've never stopped using energy source. We never will. So until we're forced to, right by the, by the organization of the, the disorganization of the climate. and in that sense, I think there is a kind of the limitation of this is the belief that you can appeal to the state now, to, to make it make you do things for you. And that's just not true. Now XR is much more like, The anti-fascism movement in its attempts to jam up the co the courts and not that the anti-fascist movement was trying to get arrested. The similarity there is that the state has some sort of like object to the what's to maintain. In the case of anti-fascism, it is, social order in central London. In the case of the, XR protests, the thing the state is trying to maintain is, um, its court system and the, the function of its court system and both protests like directly challenge that and try to say this thing, we will, we will attack this thing directly without appealing to you in any way. We'll just tack this thing if you don't give into our demands. The problem is of course, that it turns out the state is actually not that bothered about mass arresting people. At least in certain phases, right? You have a very right wing net police commissioner. You have a very right wing collection of judges. When you have a very right winging government, it doesn't really bother them at all. So they just, they just process them. And then you get to the situation, you're right now where Roger Hallam is in prison for five years, right? Like yeah. This is the kind of chat around that you get. Um, yeah. And so the limitations of the organizing are simply, the state is not interested in listening to you, which I think is Yeah. Is, is, is very, is very different diagnosis of organizing than I think in the white paper. And if I may say, I think you're diagnosing a different problem. The question that you answer in the white paper is not, why does not organizing work? Why haven't we succeeded? The question is, why is organizing painful or like bad to do? Or like upsetting or like, why do organizations fall apart? Is not saying to say, saying, why don't they succeed? Lots of organizations stick around for very long time and fail and don't achieve their goals. Right.
Wolfgang:That's a, that's a really good point. I think, I mean, what you've been clearly describing is an assumption that is built into like high level strategizing in these organizations. For example, xr, that is just not true. The state is not listening. That's not what it's there for. Um, so any, any demand, any attempt at a conversation with it will just not lead to anything.
Richard:Well, I mean, I mean, sorry I didn't mean to sound that pessimistic. I actually do think the state does listen. I think that the conservative government in 2019 backed by oil lobbyists with a right wing police commissioner with like, you know, was not interested in listening to you. Not to say the state will never be interested or like there's no conversation to be had with it clearly. Are conversations to help with them. But I think what both XR and the Antifascist movement demonstrate is that if you want to have that conversation, you better have something in your sites that the state actually cares about.
Wolfgang:Yeah,
Richard:it's not democratic legitimacy.
Wolfgang:yeah. You need to have some actual leverage, some actual, um, means of making the state listen. And I mean, that for me is the more fundamental point is even if you have a slightly different political arrangement, even if you have a, a labor government under Kistama, the state as a whole does not become much more responsive, by a change in, in these, like I. Attributes or, or parts, um, because as a whole, its main reasons for existence is not to, achieve the best outcome for, um, a majority of people. But, actually it's other things. It's other incentives that are governing people's behavior that are governing the behavior of larger scale systems in that context, et cetera. Um, but either way, whether, we look at it in a, in a bit more differentiated way or in this with more black and white way, these are questions around strategy leverage. How much relative power do we have? Can we make an opponent? Listen, what can we make an opponent do at all? And then the question around organizing is one of organizational capacity. So how, how do we hold the organization together? How can we. For example, make the organization resilient against external pressure and adaptive to changing environments, et cetera. for me, this question of if organizing methods are limiting our success is something that becomes relevant when we look at The capability of organizations to adapt to change primarily. So what, what I experienced in XR during 2019 was this, this surge in interest, the surge in momentum, this feeling that a lot of people and most of them with a quite explicitly, um, liberal middle class background. So there was definitely a lot of bias, um, built into that. Um, but for, for a lot of people it was for the first or a very long time this feeling, okay, this can actually work. There is something we can do some sense of, of, of agency and of, of self-efficacy. and then it first ran into a massively ramped up reaction of the state. Um, in, in late 2019. The reaction was just way more massive than I think a lot of people we included had expected from the experiences half a year ago. And then. Covid happened and brought, brought every attempt to now maneuver differently in the change political context, basically to a standstill. And then the question is, with changing political circumstances and the status reacting in a different way, and then there's a pandemic. Are you as an organization, capable of like pulling together, as you described it before, enough information from different movement and enough, do you have enough interface with social reality outside of your movement? And do you have enough capacity to process that information to come up with a plan, a strategy, how to adapt some kind of, rethinking of what you're doing now that the context has changed. And my experience is that that kind of learning just doesn't happen. the adaptability on this like fundamental level to fundamentally change circumstances sense is very, very low. And that, I would argue is a consequence of the organizational setup and of how much information are you able to integrate, how well do, do you have like learning and feedback processes established in your organization? And if you haven't, then chances are your organization will just stop up.
Richard:But I, I guess like people did learn to some extent, or at least they think they learned because you get Roger Hallam and India Ilow who go away and set up in today Britain, and that doesn't do very well. Although there, there's a sort of long term success there. I think that people have argued for the social change lab, did some work on this. Um, but then there's a, they also go up set of just a oil, just a oil manifestly like. A more agile beast, a more like focused beast in some ways than xr. is a kind of learning, but it's a kind of learning that doesn't happen at the level of the organization, but people who exit and then go and do something else, right? And so it's, it's, I think that kind of cycle in which, you know, founders basically sort of spawn off new projects which have new sets of foundational rules. That kind of process is a much quicker way of doing that learning cycle that is taking an organization that has a relatively well established collection of roles and relations. People feel engaged by the processes, they feel a certain sense of rightness about those processes changing, all that stuff. Very complicated, making a new thing much easier.
Wolfgang:Yeah, I mean that's, that Roger would probably like 100% agree to that and, ask everybody else to think about things in exactly that way, more pragmatic way as well. Um, for me, I think that the question is more of our, our, the things that we are thinking about in the white paper is are there ways in the very early stages of setting up an organization of, laying down some ground rules or principles of working together, maybe even before it's become a new organization when it's just a few people in the room, that set the organization on a different track so that it's not, you built this enormously complicated system of roles and mandates and decision making rules, that is. Actually almost impossible to change once it's established itself. So it's a very path. Dependency. Is there a way to, to set things up so that they stay more agile, more nimble, become more resilient? And for me, JSO in, in one way is an example where I think that has happened because the organization is more focused, is smaller. I think the, the core membership of JSO is way more coherent than it was in xr. And that enables it also to be more radical and stay more radical and, and to avoid, at least to a degree, this mainstream, through, through growth of the organization. So way, I would say maybe that's also a learning from xr. Um, so the, the basic, Hypothesis of the white paper is to say, if we start thinking about ways of organizing, methods of organizing, not from the assumption of separation, basically everything we talked about is about groups that have different interests at different perspectives, have different backgrounds, and then they need to come together and negotiate and build coalitions, and they're fragile and there need to be mediators like you and Go-Betweens and everything. Is there a way to start from an assumption of togetherness, of connectedness that is so deeply baked into the organizational culture, the, it, I don't believe in that particular concept, but it might be a nice analogy here in the DNA, um, of, of the organization.
Richard:don't believe the DNA radical,
Wolfgang:I, I, it's, it's complex as always. Um, I don't think that in human organisms, DNA actually determines things
Richard:Right.
Wolfgang:degree usually simplifying think it does, and in organizations even less. But still, there is something like, uh, like a core set of principles, uh, like a core set of practices that, that the social space. And if you bake something different into that social space, that then things might go very differently. That's basically the hypothesis. And the question is, do you think that's a plausible perspective, or do you think that's just totally naive?
Richard:No, I think, I think it's a radical attractive, and by radical I mean that I think that it gets, in the kind of etymological sense of this, right? Radical means going to the root, it means the foundations. And I think that in some ways, like it is a radical perspective on politics because politics is defined so much in the sort of post schmid era. So Carl Schmitz, the, the Nazi jurist who nevertheless has some like very perceptive things to say about politics, about the fundamental structure of politics. So much of it is defined by what a Schmidt describes as the, um, the friend enemy distinction, this, the self of a and so on. The ways in which you can group people together to, to do, in Schmidt's case obviously heinous, despicable things, which nevertheless like have this basic structure. And I think that despite ourselves, despite, you know, as I was saying, widespread opposition to fascism, something like that friend enemy distinction is everywhere. and politics, I think is basically a sort of a, a friend enemy thing. not always, not forever, but it is, and that's why it's radical as a perspective, because it tries to, I think, immediately dissolve that friend enemy distinction as far as I understand it. At least in sofar as it tries to make the friends all agree to each other. And there's a kind of sliding scale. like I'm kind of, I'm, I'm kind of interested in how, how much togetherness you're interested in having, right? let's say you're taking a rental struggle, right? A struggle to bring down rents. Now very obviously, as everyone can see, there are two groups, people involved from this. People who take the rent, people who give the rent, people who are, are obliged to give the rent. They want the rent to be low. People who take the rent want the rent to be high, right? That is very straightforward. That's as some objective tension. And like when you're thinking about this organizing principle, togetherness, who are you including in your togetherness? Are you including people who have to pay rent or people and who have pay rent and their allies, or are you including also the landlord? Are you including, and so I feel like although you are, you are starting out from a very radical principle. There's a moment of like. Lack of clarity, at least for me, about who is supposed to be included in that.
Wolfgang:definitely. And I think what happens if you don't take that seriously and if you don't recognize the moment where you are implicitly making political decisions or taking a political position by including or not including people, I think you can see that with what happened in the, 1970s and eighties. large parts of the, counterculture left, social liberalization, emancipation movements of the sixties and seventies kind of immigrated into these personal transformation spaces
Richard:Absolutely.
Wolfgang:and, and try to base the whole philosophy around, um, that can't be a friend enemy distinction if we want to make social progress and we are all part human family and is the age of Aquarius and blah, blah, blah. Um, and what you got in the end was a totally depoliticized movement, that was extremely vulnerable to be yeah, commodified in less than a decade. And, and now you have like personal transformation in the form of, um, retreats that you're booking which is totally disconnected from any political struggle. So where this, we are all one big family kind of thinking leads without any political sensitivity. I think we, we've seen that already and that doesn't need to be repeated.
Richard:I do think absolutely that there is something very profound in a reorientation towards what we think of as the self. I think that's an extremely profound thing that you can get from politics. And certainly I would not be here in 2025 had I not had an inkling of what that experience might be in 2011. Right. I've been here for 14 years, mostly on the basis of one or two very small inklings of a feeling of togetherness with other people. But, and this is to say the same thing I said again, like in some ways that those moments of irreverence or collective power or a feeling of excitement or world making. Those moments were all moments that were defined in opposition to someone else who would arrest us or who would. Attack us or who would tell us off who would disapprove or was, our enemy in that moment and with the project that you, you are undergo taking, which I, I think is remarkable and I wish you all the best and I'm very excited to see the fruits of it and indeed maybe participate in it in certain moments with those kind of project. I wonder how much you can produce that kind of shared experience of togetherness without an external enemy, which you are positing. And obviously you can say our external enemy is oppression. Our external enemy is racism. As such, external enemy is sexism as such is brutality, is violence, and so on. You can just posit these things, but I don't know that it will be as gluing as the real experience of the thing that you said when you know you are staying at a 10 inch, five square and crucially the thing that glues you together is like the police are coming. Right. So this moment, but it has to be defined in opposition to something else. I'm, I'm interested in that the dynamics there, this goes back again to what I was saying about anti, anti-fascism, is the glue that brings people together is fear is threat. It's like militant opposition. And I wonder how you think about that sort of dynamic and in what you are doing and whether or not the exercises that are going to pursue of stimulating that feeling, feeling of togetherness will have this element of agonism, of enmity and so on.
Wolfgang:I think in one way my, my intuitive answer would be it has, or, or it will have these elements almost necessarily because if we are doing this in the service of struggles for equity and, and justice, where there is actual oppression happening right now, and not just in an abstract way, a system of oppression, but actually physical violence, dealt out by actual people, um, I. Then there is the opposition preexisting. and if you want to be in support, then you pick a side and it's pretty easy to see which one you pick. Um, at least from, from like my or our perspective. So I think in an intuitive sense that's already there. the kind of, opposition that you are describing. And then I think on a more abstract level. if you take this idea of separation being, um, a problem at the heart of how we think about the world or how we deal with the systems that are around us and separation, not in the sense of, yeah, there are always system boundaries, but in the sense of you ignore that at the same time there is, um, you are part of a causal web and you are part of larger scale systems and you're ignoring that fact and focusing on this, what's within the system boundary. and, and the system boundary at a specific level in this hierarchy of systems. if you say that's the core problem, this narrowing of focus and what we need to do is widen the focus, understand that we are part of bigger systems, understand, what role we play in ecosystems in, Social systems and how we ourselves are dependent on these larger systems in order to survive are dependent on the climate being in a certain, bandwidth of, of possible states, example. Um, then anything, any system, any strategy that works against this, recognition of connectedness and recognition of embeddedness and recognition of the boundaries that imposes on our behavior. Anything that opposes this or undermines it or obscures it, that's the enemy. So it's a bit like in the, in the, we had this example of Germany's, like built in anti-fascism. The, the enemies of, democracy, don't, in like German understanding, don't deserve the same kind of protection as political actors that operate within democracy. So you have this idea of a democracy that can defend itself. And I think what we are implicitly arguing for is something like, similar to the slogan life, we are life defending itself. This idea of, if systems are actively undermining this interconnectedness between us and between us and nature, then it's these systems we need to be working
Richard:Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I, I've been thinking a lot about that kind of like very pure antagonism towards division a lot because I'm trying to, at the moment, write a book about collapse and the point about. Collapse that I'm trying to, to get to is that I think collapse is, is is sort of a, a moment and it's certainly a figure that we get a lot in this environmental world. I mean, I think, uh, someone from XR gave me a badge that just said Collapse aware. And I felt, I felt like I was being inducted. So this was sort of quite a nice club. no, that collapse is certain by any means at all. But nevertheless, the, the, there is a, a thing about collapse that the significance of it is that it disintegrates the larger scale niche systems of meaning that we have available to us. And so we are sort of end up disoriented in a quite literal sense, right? We end up being unable to orient ourselves in the world, able to, to describe what it is that we are doing and those systems of meaning as they, they fall apart at integrate, throw up all kinds of chaotic productions, chaotic sort of symptoms in their moments of disarray. And so. The question then is like, how do you find orientation? And one of the principles that we've sort of come up with, and we're thinking with the, with the person I'm working on this with is to think about what we describe as the communist core. And the communist core is, is like a transportable object. So you could say, okay, how would I like smuggle out a value of universalism from this immensely elaborate global system that we currently live in, which is actually pretty good at sustaining the wish for universalism, even as it actually frustrates its realization. so you have massive international solidarity for Palestine, for example, but at the same time you have, logistical systems and global, supply chains that directly frustrate the organization of the global working class at the same time. We have the system that of universalism, but we have this do wish for universalism. The question is strategically, if you think we're going to go through a collapse, how do we smuggle out this norm, this idea of universalism through that difficult period so that it can be seeded into the future somewhere else? And exactly the thing you're saying, antagonism to the thing that divides us from our entanglement with the world. That as like a sort of a summary or like a pithy little, kinda like Maxim is one of the ones that we sort of come across as a kind of candidate for a kind of seed that could develop a, the meadow of communism, uh, after the collapse. Yeah.
Wolfgang:That's super interesting and something to look into more detail in perhaps another episode. because we, I'm realizing we have been talking for quite some time now. Um, I think what, I'd like to bring this back to is again, this question of what does that mean for, organizing in, not necessarily a political context, but that's mostly what we're talking about here. Um, how would you look at organizing around this communist core? What would be your approach to. you are able to smuggle it out, and then what do you do with it? How do you build around it? Do you have developed any ideas around that already?
Richard:So in, in some ways it's not organizing because what you're trying to do is to find a thing you can transport into the future to give to people who are not you,
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:to nevertheless sort of orient themselves. one of the analogies that I've been. Toying with, that's how makes me sound completely like just absurdly grandiose. That, so I'll, I'll try and make that invocation explicit. So as the dismissal, is thinking about Aristotle. So Aristotle is a, is a writer, right? Whose, whose work is mostly lost. We actually don't have most horizontal's work, but we have, the bits we do have become extremely influential on the formation of early modern philosophy in the forms of classism. Um, he's referred to as the philosopher in, in monasteries, uh, where there are only two sources really. There's the AL'S work and some other attended Greek philosophy. And then there is, the Bible of course. And there there are bits where they're like, oh, a Aristotle didn't really understand this. Because look what Jesus says. And, you know, there's kind of, there's, there's sorts of debates they have amongst themselves, but his status. But the point is that he's immensely influential in conditions he could not possibly anticipate. Right. So, so he's influential over people who he has no real relationship with. Right. And he can't even really FM So he is influential over a collection of, like, people whose job it is to study a religion whose founding premise is like something that doesn't even exist in ale's world, which is monotheism. that might not be true. It's possible that Aristotle was aware of Jews, but that's, you know, whatever. The point is that the, the point still generally stands, right? The, the, the medieval Europe is not the terrain which Arsal thinks he's gonna work on. And so if you think about organizing for a post collapse world now, or the kinds of things you would have to do, you basically need to like produce a lot of books like physical books. The contain extremely legible, but beguiling things for future people to read, such that they can be influenced by them. And then you need to distribute those books extremely widely. Books are very durable objects. Obviously you can burn them, but you can keep them in a box for 500 years and they survive. So, if you want to think about organizing for post collapse, I think you need to work out how to distribute the things you care about as widely as possible in the most, equitable way possible and comprehensible way possible. Knowing that you know almost nothing about the world that comes afterwards. That's the, that's the project, right? Like if, if you're gonna think about organizing post collapse, that it's not really about concrete situations. It's about developing something heuristic that is abstract and adaptable enough that it makes sense in all situations that it will encounter, but that it always points people back towards the achievements of universalism,
Wolfgang:Yeah,
Richard:even though we never mentioned make it happen in this, in this society.
Wolfgang:so that would be basically developing. Memes that do well in an environment that you don't know,
Richard:Yeah, exactly.
Wolfgang:in your understanding of that, would that mainly pertain to ideas, theories, like, I dunno, Aristotle, theory of, art and the theater that was like influential throughout early modern, post middle ages, art all throughout Europe, uh, like unity of place time and, and action and things like that. really the idea encapsulated in a book read by specialists, Or would you also see things like specific skill sets or ways of doing things like rituals, for example, that could be transmitted
Richard:Okay now, now you, now you've got me already thinking about this, this kind of like form of. Um, devious, uh, influence, uh, over the fu far future. It strikes me that all these things are saying, which give Aristotle a greater of authority, right? The fact that he manages to come up with, oh, a, a theory of botany. Oh, a theory of time. Oh, in ethics, a theory of politics, a theory of action in drama. A theory, you know, because he manages to do all these different things, he becomes very influential because he becomes authoritative and so on. Probably if you were gonna smuggle out a communist core into the future, one of the best things you could do is forge a new Aristotle. Like, just kind of like, make a forgery and just pretend that it's Aristotle. Maybe that's actually a better gesture than like trying to, trying to present yourself as a particular kind of unique author.
Wolfgang:borrow someone else's authority, basically.
Richard:Yeah, exactly.
Wolfgang:That's a, that's an interesting strategy. Um, the, the thing that I've been thinking about when listening to you was, so this, this form of knowledge transmission reminds me a lot of, of books like a canal for Ovitz, um, classic science fiction, where the knowledge of humanity is being, documented and preserved in monasteries, in libraries over, like in the book spans, I think two or three epochs of civilizational development throughout which this core of knowledge keeps being transmitted. So that's one way of thinking about it. What been thinking about is even if collapse is, as you said earlier, an event, it will have a duration. And throughout this duration, people will have a very hard time, in general to survive, to coordinate, to not be constantly overwhelmed and stressed that have like islands of of calm. Um, and I think for all of it'll be extremely important to have specific skills. if you are a trained meditator and are able to be happy regardless of circumstances, that would be a big plus in that situation. But also, if you are living in a neighborhood and you and the people around you are able to get together and coordinate, mutual help will be a great plus. So what I'm wondering is, is there something to transmit, to prepare that is not only a time capsule for the far future, but is is a tool for next week?
Richard:yes, I think so. But they're quite antithetical in some ways to the kinds of things that I'd want to transmit. So I be, I'd be reading, um, as a preparation for thinking about collapse and, doing this, this course and, write of the book, um, about Ibn Khaldun
Wolfgang:Mm-hmm.
Richard:Ibn Khaldun, people might know is, a writer He's born sometime in, in the 14th century. And he travels around a lot. So he's sometimes in what we think of as Tunisia, so what we think of as Algeria. Sometimes he's in Spain. His family crucially has. One of these families that in the Muslim invasion of Spain, has done very well for itself, and then become very, very powerful. And then about 200 years before he's born, they have to leave Spain because the Spanish do what's called the Reconquista so that the, the Spanish, Christians come, they, they take over Seville again, which is where his family was prominent or they threaten it rather. so he goes back to Paul, he's the sort of man of the Muslim, medieval period Mediterranean. And he has this theory, which is basically that there is a sort of cyclicality to history. So the di dynasties rise and they fall. And the reason why they rise is because they are able to be very cohesive. So here's this word. I think I'm pretty pronouncing that wrong. Obviously it's in Arabic. So he has what this word is often as group feeling. So the people in the desert have, are strong and they are tough. And they are have this group feeling they really believe that each other have, they need that like have each other's backs. And you can see why it's really tough to live in the desert. And then they, they charge into town. They take over the town which has become fat and lazy and like decadent and so on, and not socially cohesive. They take over, they become the new rulers. And then what happens? They become lazy, they become decadent, they become like, you know, obsessed with a sort of personal, comfort and so on. And another group comes in, takes it over, another group comes in, takes it over. And so if there was a kind of a norm, the reason, the reason why I'm thinking about this is in terms of like post collapse, if there is a norm that. Producers success for small groups, people, I think it is basically social cohesion, forms of tough togetherness, which crucially are not forms of universalism, right? You have to not believe if you wanna survive in difficult environments like the deserts, like the step central Asian step, where the huns come from, where tamalay comes from, where the Mongols come from. Like, you know, these very brutal conquerors who nevertheless have a great deal of success if you wanna survive, you have to not be a universalist. And so if I was gonna, you know, this kind of self-help stuff you're talking to mutual aid is gray and very effective, but like when it works is rarely universalist. And that's the kind of the difficulty intention in trying to advise someone about, you know, survival in a difficult environment is that you have to advise them against things that you think are really. Deeply true. Which is something I, I, I think universalism is deeply true. And so there's, there's a tension. Yeah.
Wolfgang:And it's attention that we would. Not only, not resolve within that podcast, but probably not resolve in time before it starts to play out in real life. And with some luck or bad luck, depending on the perspective, we will watch what happens when it happens. I think this, tension is something that I've been not thinking about, like in explicitly these terms a lot, but that's, kind of in background, there's this theory in, Moral psychology, the so-called moral foundations theory, Jonathan Haight, um, has mainly developed which basically says there are two different sets of values, between the left and the right are progressives and conservatives. Pick your terminology. and one is based around universalism and the other one is based around cohesion, and loyalty. And, he says these are just two very different moral foundations. And from the perspective of one foundation, the other one looks evil and vice versa. And there is no, like right or wrong in stance has been quite influential in academia and outside of it. There's an alternative theory to explain how these different values come about establ themselves. That is called the evolutionary coalitional theory that basically says we don't have different moral foundations. We all have the same moral foundations, which is about avoiding harm. The question is just who do you include in your endeavor to do that? And then depending on the size of the group, you are optimizing your strategies for harm reduction, for end up with a strong in-group focus and somewhere on the like right wing authoritarian social dominance spectrum or with a universalizing approach where you try to include as many people as possible, um, in your ingroup until the concept of an ingroup doesn't make sense anymore. And then you end up with liberal progressive values and, and universalist ethics. And the argument they make is, which, and this is probably, very close to example, which of these values is more successful in cultural evolution? Depends on the circumstances and the kind of evolutionary environment and the coalitions that you form within that environment.
Richard:yeah. I, I, I, I would definitely make the point I probably should correct what I said earlier. I, I definitely would make the point that there are loads of strategies including, for example, um, the Rome Empire, which lasts much longer than any of these, people who sweep into. The city's in the mo grab and take them over when the Roman Empire is in a flourishing state where it does well for itself, mostly those are phases in which it adopts increasingly universalist outlooks. It integrates barbarians, so to speak, into itself. It lots them land. It allows them to like become Roman citizens. Um, loads of, you know, loads of the emperors are not people we would regard as Italian, right? They're, they're, they're from all over the empire. when the Roman Empire plays this sort of integrative function, not that Romans have a universalist, it always has slaves, for example. and it's clearly, you know, chauvinistic a huge number of ways. But when it adopts a more universal stance, it actually does better. It's when it closes in, it's, when it becomes more insular that it does, that does worse. And so for culturally evolutionary perspectives, it's not as you're saying that like, I. Just closure is better and you should stay closed because then you'll survive. but there are, there are many, many, many factors including where exactly you end up. But my, my thought is that the reason for suggesting it earlier was that like, I feel like a post climate collapse world looks much more like the deserts of Algeria then does like the France or
Wolfgang:so that's, that's how I would've understood you basically saying within the context of something like the evolutionary coalitional theory to say, we are expecting, circumstances, environments where a certain set of moral values will be more adaptive than another one. in this case, the, the in-group cohesion focused ones will probably be more adaptive than the, the widely universal ones. Universalist ones. Yeah. yeah, as I said, that's not something we're gonna solve today. It's something that, we I, I will, take with me and hopefully our listeners will take with them and, ponder. what I'm wondering is we, we touched upon a lot of things. Um. Success as determined by strategy and by, capabilities for, development and evolution, organizations changing versus people changing. Do you start from scratch or do you change, the tension between the communist core and the cohesion in, demanding pressures of collapse? Is there anyone in all of these topics that we touched upon that you would like to speak to in another podcast where you interview someone
Richard:I think probably Jairus Grove.
Wolfgang:who is Jairus Grove?
Richard:Jairus Grove is a geopolitics theorist who wrote an exceptional book called Savage Ecology. Geopolitics in the End of the World, who touches on these, this, all these, these things and more, um, and methodology, and the question of indigenous knowledge, uh, engagement, you know, uh, activity and so on. but who also has just extremely rich theories about plasticity and about, um, how we sort of stay alive and stay critical through the period of climate change. So I think Jaris.
Wolfgang:That sounds like exactly the person to talk to in order to develop our thinking about these topics further. So I would invite you to do exactly that. So let's reach out to them and organize an interview that you will be leading. Um, and I will be listening in with great interest, for today. Thank you. That mind expanding and leaves me as a. every good conversation does with more questions than I started it with. any last words you want to share?
Richard:a word of caution I think, about collapse, which is that is a, a difficulty that the left, broadly speaking has at the moment articulating. Positive and engaging visions of the future that aren't about collapse, but that are about, space exploration and, people living to a hundred regularly. And like just a whole lot of things be really good. And we have a very pessimistic correctly, I think right pessimistic outlook, but we are lacking a real feeling And I would be worried from a that left becomes too mired in worrying collapse and seeds, the entire terrain of the future, or at least the immediate future to the right. And people like Elon Musk, who we, who have a future to sell, They have a future to sell. and we should, we should not let them sell only their future in the marketplace.
Wolfgang:That's, a very important welcome word of caution. And so let's add that to the homework for the listeners. What kind of future can we sell and with this, thank you and speak to you soon.
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