Interview by Randy Lowens

Randy: We’re interviewing bell hooks, author of Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations and numerous other titles. You’re known to be a prolific author: do you have a personal favorite? Is there any one title that someone unfamiliar with your work should read first?

hooks: My work is so eclectic; it spans such a broad spectrum. I guess if you look at my children’s books, I like Be Boy Buzz the best. If you look at the love books, I like All About Love the best. If you look at the theory books, Where We Stand: Class Matters is one of my favorites. It’s a good thing not to have to choose one. I think part of Western metaphysical dualism is, we’re always being asked to choose one over the other. I’m lucky. I think it’s good that I have a body of work that addresses different things in different ways.

Randy: You don’t capitalize your name? Why is that?

hooks: When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors—bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother—to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who’d gone before us.

Randy: The books of yours I’m most familiar with—the two I cited—are a work of political theory and, the other, a work of cultural criticism. Do you see those as distinctly different? Is there any clear line between the cultural and the political?

hooks: I would say one difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. For example, the contemporary movie Crash I thought was a very weak statement about race and class. That was already there in the film. What I did in having a conversation about it was illuminate why it was a weak analysis of race and class. “It’s people; we’re all racist.” That’s just another bullshit way of people not wanting to name the power and institutionalized strength of white supremacy. We all may have prejudices, but we’re not all part of a system that reinforces, reinvents and reaffirms itself every day of our lives, systemically.

Randy: You mentioned your children’s books. I think last time we spoke, you were preparing to publish a book, Happy to be Nappy?

hooks: Happy to be Nappy was my first children’s book. I think when we saw each other I was in the production of Grump Groan Growl which was about anger.

Randy: I read that one to my daughter, by the way.

hooks: Oh yeah?

Randy: Do you have anything to say about the distinction? Are these books in any way political? We have a political audience.

hooks: They absolutely are. Both books were written to counter racism, patriarchy or both. Especially Be Boy Buzz was written to say, “We don’t really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don’t encourage boys to be whole.” I wanted to write a non-patriarchal book that would proclaim the love of boys.

Randy: (Pause) Some of my questions are written kind of wordy. (Laughter)

hooks: You shouldn’t worry about that.

Randy: You’re known, especially within our circles, for popularizing intersectional theory as opposed to reductionisms. Can you say a little bit about how intersectional theory plays out in practice? That is to say, your typical class reductionist at least has a priority; a Black Nationalist has something to prioritize. How do you practice intersectionalism?

hooks: Intersectionality allow us to focus on what is most important at a given point in time. I used to say to people, if you’re in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination—even though you understand it intersectionally—you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that’s what is needed to change the situation. I think that, again, if we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded? I think it’s crazy for us to think that people don’t understand what’s being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time. Like right now, for many Americans, class is being foregrounded like never before because of the economic situation. It doesn’t mean that race doesn’t matter, or gender doesn’t matter, but it means that right now in many people’s lives, in the lives of my own family members, people are losing jobs, insurance. I was teasing my brother that he was penniless, homeless, jobless. Right now in his life, racism isn’t the central highlighting force: it’s the world of work and economics. It doesn’t mean that he isn’t influenced by racism, but when he wakes up in the morning the thing that’s driving his world is really issues of class, economics and power as they articulate themselves. I guess I wish we could talk about: what does it mean to have a politics of intersectionality that also privileges what form of domination is most oppressing us at a given moment in time.

Randy: I’m reminded of Murray Bookchin and the analogy of society to ecology. Were you at all influenced by that?

hooks: No.

Randy: Do you have any opinions of the modern day anarchist movement, globally or here in the USA? It’s almost nonexistent here in the South.

hooks: Sadly, anarchy has gotten such a bad name. We don’t really see much evidence of it because people associate it with reckless abandon, which we both know it’s not. I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is. I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.

Randy: It’s clear from your books that you oppose capitalism. Do you think capitalism can be reformed, or must it be overthrown? Do you consider yourself a revolutionary in that sense?

hooks: I see myself, in terms of the question of capitalism, as I would support democratic socialism over a capitalist system, because any approach… or participatory economics, which is another great model that people like Michael Albert are putting out there… any system that encourages us to think about interdependency, and to be able to use the world’s resources in a wiser way, for the good of the whole, would be better for the world than capitalism. Capitalism is fucking up the planet, we know that. But let’s say, imperialism and capitalism together… I mean let’s face it, war in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich—and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people’s lives away from them. We know that so much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.

Randy: Competitive economics taken to its logical extreme.

hooks: Exactly.

Randy: I was taken to task by a feminist anarchist for taking the liberty of referring to you be your first name. The criticism was: had you been a male I wouldn’t have been so quick to have done that.

hooks: I think this is the kind of trivial personal stuff people focus on that has very little meaning. I don’t think it matters. To me, I think if someone read my work, they’d know I don’t have issues around how I’m identified. Even when people capitalize my name, I don’t freak out, even though that would not be my choice. I’m not attached to it, and in that sense I think we have to choose, what are the issues that really matter? We have to trust that. You have to trust that if you are calling my name in a way that is offensive to me, I’m going to share it with you. But you also have to know what your feelings are behind calling me “bell.” I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal, in ways that blind us to more important issues of life. I just think if we could take all the obsession with the personal (inaudible), and personal judgment and have people be concerned about the environment, what a different world we would live in. Or race… ending racism. It’s like, I was talking about Cornell West once, and somebody was saying to me, “Cornell is not a preacher; he’s not ordained”—and another preacher friend of mine said, “I don’t know about the importance of his being ordained. I saw him give a sermon. Lots of people joined the church and that would seem to be what being a preacher is all about.” We have to look at the substance of something rather than the shadow. Is it more important that you, as a white male, read my work and learn from it, or what you call me? I think it’s more important that you read my work, reflect on it, and allow it to transform your life and your thinking in some way. Now I do get a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.

Randy: I have read, from someone else, that your work is influenced by postmodernism. Is that true? Do you have an opinion about the end of history, in particular?

hooks: No. If anything I think postmodernism has the least impact on my work. My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives. To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work. But in general, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about postmodernism.

Randy: The final question that I wrote down, I think we’ve already touched on to a certain degree. Some political groups say they are against classism, and that often sounds to me like they’re saying they avoid prejudice on the basis of class, but don’t oppose structural capitalism. I think you’ve already talked about the personal versus the systemic aspects of…

hooks: One of the things my work Where We Stand: Class Matters tried to do was say, “We’re a country that would rather talk about race than class.” I think what’s so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy. When I think about the auto-industry and how it was one of the industries that brought all of these black men from the South to Michigan and other places to make more money than they could ever make in the cotton fields or the agricultural world of the South… what’s happening now is all of that is closing down, and we know that it’s going to reopen in Southern places, focusing on Mexican and other migrant workers to come and work cheaply and get none of the benefits. All of this stuff is amazing in terms of forcing people in this society to think more openly about class and about the intersectionalities.

The whole thing with Joe the Plumber—and then to find out that so much about Joe the Plumber was just fake—was the use of class (of white supremacy and class) to awaken old prejudices, to allow for a denial of the true impact of intersectionalities and class. The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO’s, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate… whose thievery and greed is determining their fate.

It’s interesting to look at all the aspects where everyday Americans, many of whom are not college educated, are thinking deeply now about our economic structure. See the way credit cards have exploited the working class and the working poor? I think it’s going to be an interesting next ten years for the United States. For people like me, what is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within.

Randy: That’s all of my questions. Do you have anything to say to our audience, off the cuff?

hooks: Dare to look at the intersectionalities. Dare to be holistic. Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that’s been a place of hope.

This interview originally appeared in Northeastern Anarchist #15 in 2011. Randy Lowens, the pen name of Don Jennings, who passed away March 8, 2012, in Richmond, Kentucky. #RestInPower Randy was a supporter of NEFAC (North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists).

SOURCE: https://blackrosefed.org/intersectionalism-bell-hooks-interview/

The post How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks appeared first on Void Network.

“We can imagine a horizontal and happy future for everybody – but we cannot impose this on society. The society has to come towards us, talk about it, prepare the revolution and manifest the revolution, as a society, not as an anarchist political organization. The society will do the revolution, not the anarchists. The anarchists will be there to offer their power and bodies to this struggle, but society has to decide: do we want totalitarianism, or do we want anarchy? There is no other question at this time.”

Tasos Sagris and Void Network were featured in the New York Times article Anarchists Fill Services Void Left by Faltering Greek Governance.

Interview Transcript via Antidote Zine / source: THIS IS HELL Manufacturing Dissent Since 1996

Helping Refugees Means Fighting the State. And Vice-Versa.

Understand that this is not a struggle that we do for the refugees but with the refugees. The refugees can take care of themselves, and they can self-organize. If we help them and if the society around them is beneficial and helpful to them, then they can establish their own horizontal assemblies and create free spaces.

Chuck Mertz: Anarchists are providing services in Greece now that the government is not, due to austerity. Let me repeat that: anarchists are doing what government cannot in Greece, and that is provide the necessary services to survive. So what is happening in Greece and why? And what is the New York Timesgetting so wrong about anarchism and Greece?

Here to tell us, Tasos Sagris is a member of Void Network, a poet, a theater director, and for 28 years has been an anarchist cultural activist. Welcome to This is Hell!, Tasos.

Tasos Sagris: Hello, hello.

CM: How much is there an organized group right now within Greece of non-state actors not only providing the services one would expect from the government, but also the social guidance usually provided by the government? How much are the non-state anarchists defining what Greece is today?

TS: We could say that this is part of a struggle that has been going for decades now in Greece from anarchists. Of course, me personally, I cannot speak as a representative of the anarchist movement, because the anarchist movement is very pluralistic. It includes many, many initiatives and many groups. I can speak only from my own perspective.

Greek society faces austerity measures; the poverty of the people and unemployment is becoming worse and worse. At the same time we have had a great influx of refugees from different places, they were in war and now are in other countries. Of course the natural instinct among anarchists on this phenomenon is to help these people, and to work with them for a better life. We can’t say that we replace the state. The fight against the state continues and intensifies, also through the paradigm of our help and solidarity towards the refugees.

Anarchists defend areas, neighborhoods, and social centers, the occupied buildings of the movement. Anarchists also created refugee squats, occupied the buildings where refugees can have their own assemblies and practice their self-organization with the help and solidarity of anarchists and autonomous people, also far-left people. All these people can fight together for a better future.

CM: One of the amazing things I learned through doing research about Void Network and about anarchism in Greece is that this apparatus for helping out the poor and the people who had been affected by austerity had been put into place, and then when the refugee crisis came about, that same system was ready to help out the refugees who were in a very scary position.

How much are refugees right now dependent upon the anarchists to provide them with the services that they so desperately need?

TS: The state calls it the refugee crisis; it is just an effort of people to escape from the war and try to come into Europe. Anarchists established camps on Lesvos island and on the other islands where the refugees were coming. Anarchists established welcome centers on the islands. Then anarchists created an open camp in the central park of Athens, where the refugees were passing through on their way to the north in Greece, to the border, on their way to Europe. There were anarchists in the welcome centers in the beginning; there were anarchists in Athens; there were anarchists in Thessaloniki, in the north of Greece; and there were anarchists at the borders. So we created a network of people who welcome and help the refugees to continue their way to Europe.

When the borders closed, of course we had to create spaces in the big cities to accommodate and shelter the people, to self-organize. Understand that this is not a project or a struggle that we do for the refugees butwith the refugees. The refugees can take care of themselves, and they can self-organize. If we help them and if the society around them is beneficial and helpful to them, then they can establish their own horizontal assemblies and create free spaces. The only reason that the anarchists are around is to defend the neighborhood from the police and the Nazis, and from other possible problems that they cannot bear alone. It is a mutual help. It is the real practice of mutual aid.

When winter came, they opened the first big squat in Exarcheia, on Notara Street, very near the park. Then other refugees were coming more and more, so the anarchists opened more and more buildings around Exarcheia square. Now there are around ten to fifteen buildings. Some of them are for accommodation areas; there is a building for kids; there is a community health clinic in the square that the refugees are using also. There is also a specific squat for men who are without family or without children, who stay alone in order to avoid problems with the families. So this network of buildings, they help each other and they coordinate their defense and everyday life.

In a society of inequality and exploitation, the organizing methods of anarchists look almost irrational. When you speak for horizontality, this doesn’t sound like “organizing.” The horizontal way of organizing among anarchists seems non-organized. But anarchist tools of organizing are becoming more and more popular all around the world.

CM: But all the actions that the anarchists have been taking, and the social services that they have been providing within Greece, as you pointed out earlier, date back to 1990. So this is not only in response to the current government, nor is this only in response to austerity, which is something that has just been imposed recently upon Greece.

So does it matter who is in government, or the policies that they implement, when it comes to anarchism and its social movement in Greece?

TS: As we have been saying for many years now: whoever is governing, we will be ungovernable. We continue a long struggle to try to communicate with society and to offer society the analysis that capitalism and the state destroy their lives. This is taking place with two different strategies. One strategy is attacks on the police and attacks on the state and capital: big demonstrations, public visibility, and of course riots and fights with the police. When there is political power that can confront and defend places, neighborhoods and social centers, then you can build social services from an anarchist perspective. As long as you do not have consistency of struggle and consistency of fighting the police in the city, then you cannot defend the public spaces, you cannot defend the squats.

It is crucial to understand that the effort that the comrades make and the risks that the comrades take to fight with the police in the city, in the streets, gives the anarchist movement the power to defend social centers and to defend occupied buildings. In these occupied buildings, we create revolutionary relations. We create horizontal assemblies where we put the revolution into practice. It’s in the streets and against the police, and against the state and against capitalism, that we fight the world as it is now. But inside the occupied spaces, inside the social centers, in the neighborhood assemblies, in the assemblies of the social centers, we have the existential experience of the revolution, of the anarchist society as we dream it to be.

So it is not that we wait for the future, for the anarchist society to appear. We create the conditions of the existential experience of the anarchist society now, and the social centers are open to everybody, to share this existential experience with us. So this is an experiment of the revolutionary anarchist society here and now, and this creates more power for the struggles in the streets and the fight against the police.

CM: When I saw the New York Times article back on May 27, headlined “Anarchists fill services void left by faltering Greek governance,” by Niki Kitsantonis, I was reminded of our conversation a couple years ago with Christos Giovanopoulos, of Solidarity for All, another activist group in Greece that is trying to provide social services for those who need them. Mr. Kitsantonis starts his story on anarchists providing services in light of austerity with this line: “It may seem paradoxical, but Greece’s anarchists are organizing like never before.”

What does it say to you about the author’s understanding of anarchism when he sees anarchism and organizing as paradoxical? And how are anarchism and organizing not necessarily contradictory?

TS: The thing is, in the eighties, the anarchists in Greece were seen by the public as more unorganized than they seem now. In every country, when the movement is young and new, and also small, it seems more antisocial because it seems much more against the common beliefs around anarchism. As the years go by, and more people come into the movement, and there are people who are older in the movement, and people from many different social backgrounds, from different workplaces, from different universities and schools, from different races or from different sides of life, the people also get a deeper analysis and more consistency.

In this way, you succeed in explaining directly to society more and more what the anarchists believe. Now in our times, after the struggle against austerity measures that included the participation of anarchists, and the analysis that anarchists offered to society through pamphlets, through postering—millions and millions of posters all around Greece, in each neighborhood—explaining the reasons for austerity measures, explaining to people why capitalism and the state destroys their lives…now society has an easier time understanding there is a lot of organizing behind all of these efforts.

Of course anarchists organize attacks against the state and capitalism. Anarchists use the methodologies of defense in the streets. Molotovs are the main tool of defense against the police, because it keeps the police away. When the police know that inside the big social demonstrations there are anarchists carrying molotovs, they cannot do whatever they want to the people.

When the movement is small and young and it’s just the beginning, the movement isn’t able to overpower the ability of the media to describe you as they want to. So in a way, the New York Times tried to offer this ‘paradoxical’ comment as the way that they want to describe the anarchist movement in America. The anarchist movement in America, though, as a historical movement, offered a lot of inspiration to us over the decades, from the First of May in Chicago up to today—the American movement is very inspirational to Greece. Even, of course, the struggle of the Black Panthers. The social services programs of the Black Panthers is something very influential to the anarchist movement in Greece. There were many, many activists listening to this paradigm and taking inspiration from it.

The New York Times is just trying to play with the popular idea about anarchists, that they are disorganized. But we have to understand that the anarchists are very, very organized. Still, in a pyramidical society, in a society of inequality and exploitation, the organizing methods of anarchists look almost irrational. In a society based on inequality, in an economy based on inequality, when you speak for horizontality, this doesn’t sound like “organizing.” When you have chiefs and bosses and prime ministers and all these hierarchies in society, the horizontal way of organizing among anarchists seems non-organized. But anarchists have their own tools of organizing: horizontality and solidarity.

We think very, very seriously that these tools, these methodologies, are becoming more and more popular all around the world, and they are becoming more and more logical all around the world. Because people are still really terrified by what governments do to their lives. So for sure they come to the point that they have to self-organize, and the only way to self-organize is the anarchist way to self-organize, the horizontal way.

CM: Here’s Kitsantonis writing in the New York Times again. He says, “Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, anarchists have joined leftist groups in occupying portions of Greek universities to promote their thinking and lifestyle. Many of those occupied spaces exist today, and some are used as bases by anarchists to fashion the crude firebombs hurled at police during street protests.”

How much are anarchists involved in firebomb-making? Because it seems to be something that the New York Times wants to make certain we know: that a big part of anarchist strategy in Greece is violence. How integral is violence to the anarchist cause within Greece?

TS: Of course I have to explain that because of the history of struggles in Greece, we don’t have this debate about violence and nonviolence. Greek society in the last hundred years, we’ve had four or five revolutions, and four or five civil wars. Violence and nonviolence is of course debated; liberals try to impose the conversation in the mainstream media, but in the general society, the violence and nonviolence debate is not very crucial.

To explain more: of course anarchists organize attacks against the state and capitalism. Anarchists are using the methodologies of defense in the streets. Molotovs are the main tool of defense against the police, because it keeps the police away. When the police know that inside the big social demonstrations there are anarchists carrying molotovs, they cannot come closer and do whatever they want to the people. This means that the use of molotovs produces distance between the people and the police. It also offers to all the normal people the opportunity to escape, to run away when the police attacks the people. The police uses unbelievable amounts of very strong tear gas against demonstrations in Greece.

On the other hand, we have to understand that the mainstream media will try to use the violence on the side of anarchists as something that brings them outside the movement or brings them outside of the society. In the same moment, the society that has the experience of all these austerity measures, and also the experience of the lack of power to reply to all these measures, they see they benefited from the attacks of the anarchists against the police, because the police cannot do whatever they want in the city.

Of course, they can use massive militant power and kill us all. Or they can throw tons of teargas and produce asphyxiation in thousands of people, thousands of demonstrators. How much are they going to do this? How many are they going to kill? Somehow, the refusal of the anarchists and of Greek society to appear like pacifists puts the state in its place. It sends a message to the state that you cannot kill us all. We are here to fight.

Society has to come towards us, talk about it, prepare the revolution, and manifest the revolution as a society, not as an anarchist political organization. Society will do the revolution, not anarchists. Anarchists will be there to help and offer their power and offer their bodies for the struggle. But society has to decide: do we want totalitarianism or do we want anarchism?

CM: You’re quoted in the New York Times article saying, “People trust us because we don’t use the people as customers or voters. Every failure of the system proves the idea of the anarchists to be true.”

What’s wrong with voting? Is anarchism anti-voting? And does that make them anti-democracy?

TS: Democracy is a very big conversation. When I was traveling in the United States of America on tour for theWe Are An Image from the Future book, all the anarchists in America were telling me—and normal people from America, from many different parts of America—they were saying, “You Greeks, you gave us democracy, now you have to tell us what to do with it.”

The problem with democracy is that it creates inequality. It forms inequalities and continues to use them. Of course the terminology of democracy is that the people have the power in their hands, can take their lives into their hands. But we cannot speak about representative democracy in this way. Representative democracy today doesn’t even exist, you know. The parliaments are so entrapped by huge economic interests around the world, it is not the parliaments that govern. They become soldiers. Technocrats and people who cannot speak politically get votes and come to parliament to “represent the people.” The people don’t feel represented anymore. Representative democracy is dead. We have to face this problem.

When you realize that representative democracy is dead, there are two ways: fascism or anarchism. There is no other way. Society has to decide. Does it want more democracy, which means dictatorship? The other side of democracy is dictatorship, because democracy is there to defend the rights of economic interests. When people revolt, immediately democracy passes into dictatorship, passes into a state of emergency. This state of emergency, like we see now in Turkey for example, is a dictatorship.

People have to decide: do they want more dictatorship? Do they want totalitarianism? Do they want a technocratic capitalism as a monopoly on the mentality of the people? Or do they want to think about something more than this?

If they want to think about something more than dictatorship, something more than a technocratic totalitarianism, then we are here and waiting for them. Anarchists are open-hearted people creating horizontal assemblies with people to give them the chance to speak for themselves, to organize together, and to find solutions together. We don’t have a political way of manipulating people. We don’t want to manipulate people. That’s why we say we don’t want the people as voters, we don’t want the people as customers. We want people to participate, to share their experiences, to share their hearts, take care of one another, and to build communities that can fight capitalism and fight the state. This is the first step.

We have visions for the future. We can imagine a horizontal and happy future for everybody. But we cannot impose this on society. Society has to come towards us, talk about it, prepare the revolution, and manifest the revolution as a society, not as an anarchist political organization. Society will do the revolution, not anarchists. Anarchists will be there to help and offer their power and offer their bodies for the struggle. But society has to decide: do we want totalitarianism or do we want anarchism?

CM: Tasos, thank you so much for being on This is Hell! this week.

TS: Thank you very much, and I hope all the people in the United States will understand what anarchism is, slowly, investigate what anarchism is, and take part in the struggle, because we need all of them. I hope that slowly the people will get more used to political analysis, because the problems are getting so big that the people will have to understand where they are very soon. Thank you very much.

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more info about Void Network: https://voidnetwork.gr international site in English and Greek

Void Network facebook page (mainly in Greek): https://www.facebook.com/kenodiktuo/

This is Hell is a weekly longform political interview program broadcast across Chicago on WNUR since 1996.

Every Saturday morning, Chuck Mertz works off his news hangover by talking to the journalists, authors and activists working to make this world a slightly less hellish place. Expect in-depth conversations about the forces that drive politics, and gallows humor about a world with more questions than answers.

This is Hell! broadcasts every Saturday, 9AM-1PM US Central on WNUR 89.3FM Chicago and podcast to the world shortly after.

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The post Not a struggle for the refugees, but with the refugees: Anarchism at work in Greece. appeared first on Void Network.

Commemorating one year from Occupy Wall street movement and the movement of open public assemblies in thousands of squares, parks and streets all over the world, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber speaks about the past and the future of exploitation and global revoltwith the poet and writer from Greece Tasos Sagris from Void Network (co-editor of the book “We Are an Image from the Future / The Greek Revolt of Dec. 2008”, AKPress). 

1. Debt is Enslavement

Tasos Sagris: During summer 2011 all major cities of this planet faced mass riots and demonstrations. During all these period Void Network was spreading everywhere the graffiti “WeWon’t Live like Slaves”. In your book “Debt, the first 5000 years” you try to write a history for people without history and observe common subjects with uncommon ways. Can you explain us in short terms how Work, Money and Debt are historical ways of enslavement, exploitation and violent domination in our days like they were for thousands of years now?


David Graeber: One realization really startled me when researching the book: that is, the realization that throughout human history, most people have been in debt. Think about it for a second. Could the majority of the human race really be improvident failures unable to manage their affairs, and thus justly dependent on the rich? Of course not. Rather, states and elites have always colluded to ensure that their subjects become debtors; not least, because debt is the easiest way to take a relation of violent inequality, of violent extraction, and make it seem not only moral, but make it seem like it’s the victim who’s to blame. That’s why mafiosi always dress up extortion in a language of debt. But it’s the same with conquering armies, and gradually, all ruling classes seem to figure out the trick. So debt produces a form of slavery that seems voluntary; “well, you didn’t have to take the loan out to begin with, did you” – though, in fact, the vast majority of loans in history were not commercial loans, voluntarily undertaken, but loans taken for survival by small farmers or craftsmen who had lost the networks of mutual aid that could have otherwise kept them afloat in hard times, or loans to pay taxes or some similar government extraction. In the colonial world you can see it happening quite clearly because colonial governments were very explicit about using tax policy as ways to get everyone into debt so as to extract more and more work out of them.
The same is true of wages by the way. In a technical way, loans and wages are very similar. They’re both based on an illusion of equality: except, we are supposed to pretend that two independent, legally equal individuals enter into a contract not to be equals any more: in one case, as a debtor, until the loan is repaid, the other, as a laborer. Obviously, in each case, the money flows in opposite directions. But when you start exploring the historical origins of either, you end up in slavery again. Debt was used as the main way to turn people into slaves, or to get them to sell off members of their families as slaves. But most early wage laborers actually were slaves. That’s true in ancient Greece, to the Medieval port cities of the Indian Ocean. Free people almost invariably refused to work for others wages (except maybe, in democratic Athens, for the state, since that wasn’t seen as working for others but for the demos, which included oneself.)  The first wage laborers were always slaves that were being rented out by their masters: the owner got a half share of the wage, the slave got the rest for upkeep. In a fascinating ideological twist, capitalists have managed to take what was always considered a form of slavery and to present it to us as the very essence of human freedom.

2. Global Movement and Direct Democracy  

Tasos Sagris: Anarchists and antiauthoritarians offered a lot until now to the movements of our times. Among them the most popular are the diversity of Direct Democratic ways of organizing, the non hierarchical decision making processes, the self-organization, the consensus, the non representation and the uncompromised non negotiation with the authorities. Even though it seems that anarchists really lack, for the moment, clear political propositions for solving the every day life problems of our century or a clear strategy for destroying 21st century capitalism…what can be a way  for bringing the movement of the movements further towards the direction of real social, economic and cultural emancipation?

David Graeber: In the US, at least, we’re trying to build a genuinely democratic culture – a matter of habits of horizontal decision-making, skills, capacities, that have never really existed before except among some very isolated populations like Quakers and Native Americans. It’s not so much the institutions, necessarily (which can always be improvised when we need them) but the habits. Most US citizens don’t have the slightest idea how to conduct themselves democratically. Or even how to think democratically – hence, for example, the notion of “public opinion.” Opinions are what you have when you have no power. The rulers don’t have opinions. They have policies. Policies are what you have when you’re inflicting on something on people who have no say, just opinions. We need to get rid of both. One things really start to fall apart, and we enter into crisis mode, people are going to have to decide what to turn to: the right, which will offer some new form of violent post-apocalyptic authoritarianism, some kind of mafia system, or a more horizontal solution. The verticals will be able to offer a certain stark efficiency, but systems like that are ultimately stupid and inflexible, because they’re unimaginative.  Our systems will be far more intelligent, but we’ll never be as good at violence. We’ll have to develop some really strong capacities for effective democratic organization, and making it pleasurable, fun, and satisfying as well as just effective, in order to be able to win out nonetheless.

3. Political Violence and Tactics of Struggle

Tasos Sagris: The anarchists all over the world accuse the pacifists for causing victimization of the people and spirit of defeatism in the movements. The liberals in America accuse Anarchists for alienating the people through violent tactics and direct actions. The media all around the world spread fear and massive stupidity. In north Africa the “Arab spring” is lost in the smoke of armed street fights, Nato air bombings and rich gangs of Islamic fundamentalism. In western metropolis crisis becomes the best excuse for the reappearance of racism and neonazism and the street violence of youth gangs becomes more and more uncontrollable. The hate and anger is everywhere, you can feel it. Can we offer new directions to all these anger? What signifies historically the difference between political violence and street gang hooliganism?

David Graber: We have to be realistic about the role of violence. Violence is the enemy’s strongest card to play, because violence – especially organized violence – the one form of stupidity to which it’s almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. We have to remember that violence is ultimately a form of stupidity. That doesn’t mean we don’t do it – there are many situations where we simply have no choice, it’s the only way to confront the massive violence and stupidity of the system. But it will never be how we win. Because violence is also one of the very few things that tends to be more effective if done in a top-down, command structure fashion. We’re never going to defeat the 101st Airborne Division in a stand-up battle in the street. And anyway they have nukes. So the end-game has got to be to maneuver the enemy into a position where the people they send to shoot us refuse to do so, or simply go home, or join us. Now, obviously, we’re not going to maneuver the  enemy into that position if we’re practicing pure Gandhian non-violence either.
I agree with the APPO movement in Oaxaca: both Gandhian non-violence, and outright armed insurrection (at least if it continues for any time), will necessarily end up producing vertical structures and destroying democracy. But there’s an enormous territory to be explored in between. 
As for hooliganism – well, I guess the other real problem with violence is that it’s so terribly seductive, almost drug-like in its addictive qualities, once you get over the initial inhibitions. I think anthropology provides some useful insight here. One thing it teaches us quite clearly is that groups that consist exclusively – or almost exclusively – of young males from about 15-25 are really bad news (think about the atrocities of national armies all over the world!). The key thing I suspect is to make sure your groups that are prepared to engage in militant tactics if they have to be mixed in terms of age and especially gender and to ensure that they spend most of their time collaborating on something other than violence.

4. The Global Revolution

Tasos Sagris: If the “future is uncertain and the end is always near” (especially after Global warming did this clear)… can we think the movements of 2011-2012 as the beginning of a new global revolutionary era or they are just the last glimpses of the great revolutions of the past just before the greatest domination of Global capitalism ever?
   
David Graber: I doubt the coming years will look precisely like what we think a revolution should look like, but probably most revolutions in the past haven’t looked like what we think they should look like for those living through them. 
I agree with Immanuel Wallerstein that future historians will be talking about the “world revolution of 2011” – in much the same way as they talk about 1848 or 1968, which also didn’t involve any outright seizures of power or revolutionary regimes. And anyway what sort of criteria is that for an anarchist? Such revolutions transform political common sense, our horizons of possibility, and I think that’s already happened. But even more: I think historians will remember this moment as the beginning of the struggles over the dismantling of the US military-financial empire. It will be dismantled. The struggles are over what form the next thing will take. 


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The post “One year after Occupy Wall Street: DEBT, CRISES and GLOBAL REVOLUTION” a talk of DAVID GRAEBER with TASOS SAGRIS from Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

The post «ΧΡΕΟΣ / ΚΡΙΣΗ / ΠΑΓΚΟΣΜΙΑ ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ» Μια συζήτηση του αναρχικού ανθρωπολόγου David Graeber με τον Τάσο Σαγρή από το Κενό Δίκτυο ένα χρόνο μετά το κίνημα Occupy Wall Street appeared first on Void Network.

 

The post THE SOCIAL HORIZON OF POST-ANARCHISM a conversation of Saul Newman with Tasos Sagris-Void Network // Ο ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΟΣ ΟΡΙΖΟΝΤΑΣ ΤΟΥ ΜΕΤΑ-ΑΝΑΡΧΙΣΜΟΥ- μια συνομιλία του Saul Newman με τον Τάσο Σαγρή /Κενό Δίκτυο appeared first on Void Network.

This post re-edited in 2017 for Void Network site and social media

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