PODCAST: Beyond the Ballot Box: Pacification and Intergenerational Memory in Social Movements

Episode Transcript:

Chris Browne:

I would like to thank you both very much for taking the time to come on the show. Let’s just start with the basic stuff. It’d be great if you could just, you know, maybe introduce yourselves both for our listeners. Briefly, tell us a little bit about who you are, your political background and your writing, because you’re both authors, of course. Vicky, let’s start with you.

Vicky Osterweil:

Okay, great. Yeah. Hi, I’m Vicky Osterweil. I’m a writer, worker and agitator, I’m based in so-called Philadelphia at the moment. I have been doing a variety of abolitionist and housing-based and anti-police anti-prisons and trans liberation I dunno, activism, struggle, I don’t know what you want to call it, organizing, agitating for a long time, for about 15 years.

And yeah, I also write a lot. I’ve written about culture and art, and I have a book called In Defense of Looting that came out in 2020 that quotes extensively from a previous book of Peter’s, How Nonviolence Helps the State. So I’m very excited to have this conversation.

Chris Browne:

Fantastic. Thanks, Vicky. And Peter, how about yourself?

Peter Gelderloos:

Yeah, my name is Peter Gelderloos, I am a lifelong anarchist. I do a lot of writing in the course of my other movement activities. I grew up in Virginia. I spent most of my adult life in Catalunya, like in and around Barcelona. I live in Cleveland now. Yeah, I have been lucky enough to, you know, most of that time, like, you know, had a social center nearby to participate in, other projects, you know, publishing, translation, prisoner support and just general hellraising.

And I am also really happy to be here in conversation with Vicky, who does a lot of great writing that I’m familiar with, analyzing the various things that are that are highly relevant, you know, going on from, you know, mutual aid responses to the latest disasters to standing by the importance of looting and rioting as some of the weapons, you know, from below, or some of the tools that we still have access to.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, brilliant. All right. So, yeah, I mean, for listeners, Peter Gelderloos’ new book, They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements came out with Pluto Press in September. So it’s just been a couple of months. Yeah, a fantastic book, Peter. I mean, I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago. Wonderful writing, very compelling. People may be familiar with another book you’ve done for Pluto as well. The Solutions Are Already Here. So I guess, what prompted you to, you know, to write this book?

Peter Gelderloos:

Absolute desperation and depression and hopelessness and anger and frustration. Like, seeing that our movements are making the same mistakes or not the same mistakes. Very, very similar ones again and again. And you know, this was before I got… yeah, I guess I finished it up around the time of the brain surgery, but I definitely pitched the book and did most of the writing, like, you know, before I got my cancer diagnosis.

So, you know, at the time like that desperation and frustration was like seeing friends and comrades with chronic health problems or, you know, other kinds of health problems, you know, not getting the support they needed, seeing certain kinds of participation in movements glorified or romanticized in a way that’s not actually helpful. And then other kinds of participation in our movements, which are as necessary or and many times even more necessarily being like, you know, invisiblized or, you know, actively marginalized or devalued. Lack of connection between, you know, older folks and younger folks and somewhat independently of that, like folks who are newer to movements and folks who have been in movements for longer. Definitely, you know, plenty of examples of folks who’ve been in movements longer, either insisting on, you know, some kind of status or not being very, you know, flexible or not being good listeners. But more often than not, like younger folks, not at all really being interested in, you know, the histories of these movements in earlier battles that have been, you know, extremely important and from which they could learn a lot.

So the book is a lot of interviews. And, you know, one of them talks about how, like, it is really important to have experimentation to sometimes kind of try to start from scratch because of how much you can learn. And I think that’s great, but it’s not great when that’s like people’s only option because we’re dealing with either an absence of history or an entirely falsified history.

People thinking that, you know, the movement in like the ‘50s and ’60s was, you know, based entirely on civil disobedience, thinking that, you know, Birmingham was a peace protest and now seeing things getting rewritten again, hearing that, you know, when they’re resuscitating, you know, the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and then apparently it was just, you know, the unions and NGOs and activists dressed as turtles in the streets. And that’s why everyone heard about that. And, you know, that’s what shifted the discourse on globalization or, you know, hearing people who were on the payroll, people who were, you know, pulling in six figures as tenured academics or NGO directors or what have you, you know, describe the revolt in 2020 as, you know, something that was like primarily protests and not primarily the burning of police stations and like, you know, collective self-defense, pushing police out of our neighborhoods. How this was like part of a global movement that it didn’t start in 2020, didn’t started in 2010 either. And yeah, just that erasure, was just extremely depressing. So, you know, I figured if I’m still going to be alive, I might as well try to vent some of this, talk about some of the patterns there.

Chris Browne:

Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, you’ve already touched on the Civil Rights movement and the most recent sort of uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I mean, it definitely feels like you are seeing these kind of patterns, you know, resonances between different moments, the same things kind of happening and, yeah, touching on the idea of like mainstream histories or official histories that it kind of inevitably exclude from them the broad nature of things.

I mean, maybe, Vicky, you could come in here because I know, you know, In Defense of… let me get the name of your actual book correctly! In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action – I mean, this is something that you must talk about as well. You were writing this, I guess, at the time of the George Floyd uprisings?

Vicky Osterweil:

No, actually, because of some lucky – and by lucky, of course, I mean unlucky and very frustrating – publisher problems, I actually wrote most of that in the wake of Ferguson in 2015 and 2016, and that came out in 2020. But it did come out in August of 2020 and everyone thought I had sort of somehow written it in the month and a half since things had started, which was both a compliment and reflection on how people think this knowledge is produced.

But no, I think I really like resonate. I think part of what’s been so… I’ve also been sharing that frustration that Peter was just talking about. And I think, you know, In Defense of Looting is a very similar project in terms of just like retelling these histories like, you know, back to the abolitionist movement, which is like maybe we hear about like Harriet Tubman, but she sort of walked people back. And that was mainly what she did. And mostly it was sort of like Quakers with nice houses, like hiding people in their basements. Right? And like, obviously, you know, it was a much more dangerous, much more militant and much more widespread and bottom up decentralized movement than the way that that comes down to us in the present.

And if you just look, you know, if you go by movement. But yeah, I’ve also been shocked. I was shocked that 2020 was like, you know, the phrase ‘memory holed’? That was sort of so successfully forgotten here. And I think maybe surprise isn’t quite the word, because I think what we saw is that like the reaction to 2020 was like actually largely done through pandemic denial, weirdly, like pretending the pandemic didn’t happen and thereby sort of pretending 2020 didn’t happen, and that we were just going to sort of return to normal and like, this was actually very a successful ideological counter-revolution.

But I was still shocked because as I think, Peter, as you were referring to you, if you were sort of a militant in Barcelona or in the U.S. from like 2011, you know, from the Okupas, you know, movement up to 2020, there was a pretty continuous like it was never more than a year or two when when there wasn’t some kind of struggle ongoing that you could plug into.

And it was incredible how quickly nine, ten years of like built up experience, like was suddenly forgotten, like in the sort of incredibly inspiring and important and nonviolent fetishizing movement around Palestine solidarity. And I say I say both of those things like both with love and respect and deep frustration as well.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s two things which, you know, are right there in the subtitle of your book, Peter, which is, you know, forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. So I guess there’s kind of two key ideas here, one of which is nonviolence and one of which is, you know, forgetting or memory, I guess. And collective memory is really what we’re talking about here, because it’s more than what just lives in your brain as an individual.

It’s more of an expansive understanding that runs through the book. Memory as a collective good. So maybe you could unpack a couple of these ideas because they’re really key central to that, to the book. You know, what does nonviolence in the subtitle refer to, are we thinking just about a tactic, or is it more of an overarching sort of philosophy, ideology?

And yeah, let’s start with that and then maybe let’s talk about memory a bit more.

Peter Gelderloos:

To be perfectly honest, Pluto kind of forced… they wanted it in the title. And I’m like, No, absolutely not! And so, you know, the end of that negotiation was it got into the subtitle, I would have preferred pacification, which is a related but different thing. So yeah, I mostly wanted to write about memory, but just to be clear, like definitely the criticisms that I’ve written and I know the criticisms that most other people have written about nonviolence, they’re referring to an exclusive methodology, not just like any given tactic that can’t be referred to violence.

And for me, one of the principal problems with nonviolence is that it’s based on an absolute opposition to violence. And violence is such a vague, ambiguous and loaded category that it’s useless as an analytical tool. And the things that actually cause the most harm are generally going to be referred to by, you know, the fewest members of society as violent, like, you know, driving a car is going to be referred to by very few people as violent.

And that’s, you know, participation in, you know, a form of harm that’s killing millions of people through air pollution, global warming, etc., etc., etc.. Whereas like, you know, throwing a brick through a window, like if you’re standing right there, you’ll probably describe it as violent. But like, you know, no one has actually been hurt by that necessarily. So in like the actual usage, like in movements, nonviolence really means an attempt to impose a tactical limitation across an entire movement.

In practice, that usually happens without, you know, debate, joint agreement or anything like that. It often happens through demonization in the media, through snitching to cops and things like that, which, you know, kind of leads to the joke that, you know, nonviolence isn’t nonviolent. In the past, we might have spoken more about like the methodology, you know, developed largely by Gandhi as one part of many currents in the struggle for independence from colonialism in India or, you know, we might have talked about forms of nonviolence developed by, you know, Dr. Martin Luther King or, you know, the SNCC, etc..

Really nowadays, far and away, the most relevant form of nonviolence is the kind developed by Gene Sharp, which is very, very media oriented. It’s extremely superficial. It has no class analysis and very specifically and explicitly inter-class, as in like, you know, make use of whatever, you know, alliances with rich people… what’s the name, Popovic, one of the main proponents and most, you know, active and global proponents of this is like, you know, actually like documentedly in connection with the CIA and the US government and, you know, has been very positively appraised by, you know, various military and diplomatic figures in the U.S. government as like, you know, being able to use like this methodology, which is media oriented and which tries to make alliances with, you know, elements of like the elite, elements of what are or potentially could be the ruling classes of a country to change one regime with the next. So they’ve never accomplished any kind of, you know, profound social transformation. It’s just that it can be useful either for media oriented protests or for, you know, switching, you know, one government out with another.

So pacification is maybe like a more useful framework, just kind of like understanding the reality that for a long time now for, you know, half a century and more governments around the world and private corporations and, you know, the nexus between the two, look at society… I mean, previously they thought, you know, they were appointed by God, that being ruled by a government and, you know, having rich people and poor people, that this was just the natural order of the universe and therefore peace also was the natural order.

And therefore, if there was any riotousness or lack of peace that was clearly being caused by external agents coming from the outside, etc., etc., that that’s shifted like since the liberation struggle in Kenya, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Detroit, in Los Angeles, in Bristol, to like an understanding of counterinsurgency, which is that, you know, society under the state is always in conflict, it’s always in rebellion. And the goal of the state is to permanently manage that rebellion by trying to keep it in passive stages, or at the very least, nonviolent stages focused on demands, because that really legitimizes those with power. It treats them as though their existence were legitimate, as though it’s okay for them to, you know, be there, exercising the power and the resources that are stolen from all of us and from, you know, all the living systems on the planet.

Yeah, and that’s been updated since the US, you know, murder rampages, whatever, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, it’s, you know, been made more effective. But it really, you know, needs to be emphasized that this is used in the most bloody way, in the highest body count in places like, you know, Palestine, Iraq, Somalia. But the same methodology is also deployed in the US and the UK and France.

And a large part of it is getting us to participate in our own exploitation, getting us to participate in the fact of being ruled, whether that’s by making demands or having protests that are oriented towards the media and towards, you know, this idea that there’s some possibility for shared existence between those on top and the rest of us.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there’s a couple of things. In your chapter that starts off talking about ecology and environmentalism, you talk about these kind of two diametrically opposed paradigms, environmentalism or land defense, in terms of how human beings relate to nature and, you know, I guess you kind of put forth the idea, quite compellingly, that it’s the state and not people in general as it’s sometimes understood, that is the major threat to sort of nature and the commons and life.

And I suppose, again, in talking about the state and orienting actions back towards the state, I think one of your interviewees in the book, again talking about the kind of modern environmental movements, you know, groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil here in the UK, there’s this kind of appeal to the state in the forms of civil disobedience that are taken that is maybe distinct from a different kind of direct action that doesn’t make that appeal ultimately to the state.

Yeah, those are just some thoughts that kind of resonated with me but I don’t know if there’s anything more to say about either of those things before we move on to anything else?

Peter Gelderloos:

Sure. I mean, I would argue that if it’s an appeal to the state, that it’s not actually direct action, and mostly I mean that because there’s like a constant slippage of meaning with like the more institutional left trying to kind of water down or kind of change the meaning of these different terms. Most recently, that’s happening in like a hardcore way with mutual aid, which, you know, Vicky recently wrote a great piece on like mutual aid in practice after like, you know, a hurricane, like, just swept through Appalachia, like ravaged Appalachia for like the first time ever. So I was actually wondering if I could ask Vicky a question? Like when, you know, the shit hits the fan, when you have something like a hurricane or, for example, you know, the recent flooding in Valencia, like, very near where where I was living, it’s very clear to people that it doesn’t matter that, you know, folks have had like no participation or no experience in social movements, mutual aid arises as a relationship very, very quickly, whereas state authority tends to collapse pretty quickly in these kind of boundary pushing moments like a major storm. 

And that, you know, unlike all the imaginary that’s fed to us through Hollywood, etc., you know, people’s response isn’t like, Oh it’s the zombie apocalypse! like, you know, every man for himself! It’s all, you know, kill each other and everything like that. Like people help each other. People are the most effective first responders. And like, you know, the vast majority of lives saved, food distributed and so on is is just done by regular people like manifesting this relationship of mutual aid. So yeah, that’s for listeners, like I know you both know that, but I guess I’m wondering like given that that’s the case and like given that states actually don’t do a good job of like, you know, protecting us in those situations, like do you have any thoughts or have you had any good experiences? Like, you know, we’re kind of always facing this kind of uphill battle, making these arguments just because of what people have been educated as like, you know, normal and like, you know, their sense of history and everything like that. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts or good experiences on helping people, like, you know, imagine that not as just something that arises in emergencies but like that, you know…?

Vicky Osterweil:

Yeah, totally. I mean, I have a few good examples that I can’t share, unfortunately, but that are very exciting – coming soon to a town near you. But I think like, you know, one thing that happened in Asheville, so I have a lot of people in Asheville through having been through the town a few times and I’ve got a lot of friends and like within three days they had like this huge national chat.

Within 24 hours they had like a squad of people who could fly planes and helicopters – like, this is mutual aid folks who are like, ready to show up. And one thing that I think was really interesting about Asheville is like because Asheville is sort of this central hub in Appalachia and like one of the most profitable sort of tourist cities in Appalachia, FEMA was actually like pretty effective quickly there in a way that they weren’t in the rest of the region around Asheville, which then ended up producing this very interesting sort of like ideological moment, feeding on like, ‘oh, no, FEMA’s actually doing okay.’

And there was like a whole controversy online because, you know, right wing chuds, you know, some MAGA guys were like, we’re going to hunt FEMA. And everyone’s like, oh my God, those poor FEMA agents, they you know, they never… I mean, I’m sure that was scary, but they never actually did that or acted. They just sort of posted about it. Anyway. All of which is to say, like, when I finally was able to get to Asheville about six weeks after the storm, which was just when power was being restored. But it was like a few weeks before they got water back, which was just like last week. And I talked to a few people who were sort of saying they were obviously very grateful that things were sort of returning to normal. And they’re very sad, right, because everyone had sort of dropped everything and just worked together on a single project. And I think that like, what’s so distressing about the memory thing is that for me, like part of what has been so radicalizing, like just by dumb luck, like by super chance, I was in Barcelona in 2011, like in the summer at the height of La Acampada.

And like, it was like early social media days. I was talking about it and got invited in and I remember the feeling of that. And then I remember the feelings from Occupy and like the feelings of Occupy Sandy where we went down and we were like helping people really directly and like for me, like those memories of those moments are so crystal clear and are so powerful of like, Oh, I felt free and like, good.

And they were different moments. Some of them were like direct action, like taking the Brooklyn Bridge during, you know, Occupy or whatever. And some of them were like meeting people, you know, in this devastated sort of Rockaway Beach, right? Like, and just like helping them and seeing what that looked like. So I think like part of what I think is effective and part of why I started talking about just sort of doing mutual aid projects of any size, and the important thing is sort of actually starting small, decentralized stuff, is because in my experience with the projects I can’t necessarily discuss here and these other projects I’ve talked about the past, is that when you do it, if you actually have an effective material thing that helps people and that is fun to teach them or give to them in some way, I mean, obviously in the wake of a disaster, like ‘fun’ can sound like a callous word, but I think one thing that the sort of the history of riots will show us is that like police and government officials, the thing they consistently say is the scariest about the riot zone is how happy everyone is. Right. And if you’ve been, which of course I never have been, but if you’ve been in a sort of mass disruption situation, which I haven’t been, the report is from other people that that it’s like a sort of very fun and liberated space as well. And so I think when you have those combined experiences of like I’m literally helping you, you’re helping me, we are having this beautiful feeling of togetherness that creates the reality of it.

And unfortunately, so much of that requires it actually being done, like with you and to you. And like that’s I think that’s part of why it’s so distressing to watch the movement get forgotten in a mere few years, because we know millions of people had that feeling in 2020, like we watched them have it. And like even polling, which is this like tremendously reactionary thing, was showing the burning of the Third Precinct was more popular than either Trump or Biden. Right? And if that poll had been taken one week earlier or later, that probably wouldn’t have happened again. But like, you know, there was this moment where like genuinely like the US proletariat, you know, underclass, whatever you want to call it, was like ready to burn everything down. Right? And it was like was psyched for it. So I really think that those feelings… it’s actually really valuable to remind people of those feelings.

One thing, one practice I’ve been doing at talks, especially when we talk about movement or 2020, is asking people to just think about where they were on those days and to just try and get back into that physical or mental space, because I think we can make the arguments that are very valuable about like this is the importance of memory.

But there are also all these people who have those memories in them. I mean, I imagine, Peter, if you knew folks from Catalunya, like folks who’ve been in the struggle for a long time, they lose like 15 years on their life if they like, start talking about a moment like this from 30 or 40 years ago. I mean, just like their face just gets filled with energy. I don’t mean to be like ageist about it. It just mean they’re suddenly like, full of this incredible energy. And if you can get people to enter that space again, either through argument, through history or through sharing or in creating smaller but effective versions of that space, that I think is the task that a lot of us have to do now, because I think… not that the Liberals were ever going to help, but like there aren’t any off ramps anymore.

There are almost no illusions left that anyone is going to help. Like, the fascism is here. It’s everywhere. Like the liberals are utterly like loving, giving power over to it and like fundraising off of their opposition, right? It’s like we’re in this space of like there’s nothing to do but get to the work. But I don’t actually think militants can force a massive uprising movement to happen, nor would it necessarily be desirable that they could.

And I think that was like sort of what the ‘60s was about, right? The long ’60s, the guerrilla movements, they’re like, we’re going to spark the struggle on, and no matter what the theory it never really works that way. Although I think they also get too much shit and there’s like interesting things going on there that’s communicative. I don’t want to, you know, totally throw out under the bus or whatever. In short. Yes. I think bringing people into spaces where they experience pieces of that feeling of like, we can do this for ourselves, if you can figure out a problem to solve, whether it’s a disaster or abortion care is one that’s going on right now or, you know, some other thing that people are finding really hard, but that is actually materially quite simple to solve, it’s just politically difficult, if you can solve those things for people, it radicalizes people to have that experience no matter where they’re coming from ideologically. And I think that’s really important and then produces memories that can then be re-evoked with argument, I think.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, thanks, Vicky. That was great. There’s so much there to touch on. I mean, I had written a question about whether we think joy, fun, festivity, etc. are valuable and maybe under-appreciated components in effective movement building, but also, as you say, things that kind of then build that collective memory. I think in in Peter’s book you mention Reclaim the Streets, you know, attracted people out of a desire to transform the urban space they live in, oppose car culture, reassert the commons, attack gentrification and enjoy a free, non commercialized culture, which is, you know, a pretty precis of why that might be quite fun to be out in the streets together. And then I mean, you said so many other things but…

Vicky Osterweil:

Just a very quick note on that. I was working with some much younger activists and I taught them “whose streets? No streets! Tear up the concrete!” And they got so excited by that chant, like I hadn’t even been at those demos. I just had been with people who had been at those demos, you know, and so like that, like passing on stuff as simple as like the best slogans and chants is a way of keeping that fun. They just got psyched, like they thought that was hilarious. They wanted to learn more. They wanted to know about the movement.

Chris Browne:

I mean, I guess we’re talking about memory. I think Peter you’ve already kind of touched on this, like how this sometimes a lack of interest on the part of like younger social movement participants to engage with the movement elders, in addition to the loss of memory because of like intergenerational rupture, like movements getting crushed at various points. And then there just not being the people around to learn that history from, or being forced to kind of learn it, you know, through books and so on, which I guess has its own kind of issues. Could you say a little bit more about some of the reasons why we have this kind of intergenerational forgetting?

Peter Gelderloos:

Actually, I think I want to start by building off of what Vicky was talking about, but like in a little bit of a contentious way, like absolutely agreeing with what you said in the importance of that joy. But then, like, sometimes when more time goes by, when there are like more of these, like extremely intense but also joyful and transformative experiences, and then we still don’t get there, you know, we don’t get to the promised land of revolution. Like, for example, I mean, in Barcelona, yeah, there were just like major insurrectionary moments of like, you know, taking over the city again and again over a ten year period. More so in Greece, you know, comrades in Chile like, you know, sometimes spoke about this, like a similar experience.

It just became so emotionally exhausting and the going back to normality, I think, is just kind of like crushing again and again. And it kind of returns us to like this idea of how we’re sort of brought up to expect progressive change and to not expect there to be like very… well, I mean, at best we’re taught that there will be ups and downs in the struggle, but even that is like, you know, highly linear, just like in the language, you know, like the metaphor of like crests of waves and, you know, troughs, like dips, it’s like up and down.

It’s like, you know, better or worse rather than, you know, it’s a moment for deepening our roots. It’s a moment for taking up space. It’s a moment for, you know, sending out blossoms of fire into the world. It’s a moment for like growing, you know, stronger trunks and branches and mycelial networks, like just understanding that each of us have different things to contribute and also that the struggle more broadly is going to go through like very different moments and in a somewhat cyclical way, but not entirely, like not having that expectation.

It’s like hard to hope. It’s like hard to live in this world, in this society and have like any hope. Like it’s really easy to look at right wingers, to listen to their discourse, to like, look around the world and say, okay, these these folks are believing what they want to believe because there is no possible way that they’re operating from any sense of reason or observation or anything like that.

Clearly, like, you know, we’re dealing with irrational beings. And I mean, I think, you know, all of us have the same capacity and all of us, you know, do that sometimes, like all of us are prone to believing the things that are easier to believe. And when you go from being an anarchist, because, like you’ve looked at history and you know that like we can’t trust political parties and the state to solve things for us.

We can’t, you know, trust some new form of capitalism. You know, also looking at like, you know, in our own lifetimes, which is happening in a lot of places, like people go from that to like single issue, you know, kind of professional activism, NGO style activism or, you know, join like an authoritarian political party or just like focus on like, you know, some very small focused thing, like intentionally severing any connections with a larger movement, I think in many cases is because it’s exhausting to, like, hold out hope.

And and so like a lot of people on some level are like choosing to believe in things and to perform things that they know aren’t true. But reason has has nothing to do with it. You know, they’ll invent the reasons for it after the fact. And we live in a society that is always there to manufacture alibis for, you know, any kind of complicity with the system.

Like, I want to add that to the importance of like connecting with how how those liberated moments make us feel. And that’s so important. And I’m really glad that you brought it up. But also like the return to normality, like, I mean, it can even be traumatizing and at the very least exhausting. And that kind of creates the conditions over time for people to start to lie to themselves if they can get like a high paying job with an NGO or like, you know, as a union bureaucrat or like, you know, be one of the few folks who can get like a tenured position in academia these days, like, you know, all the better, you know, then there’s even more reason to claim to believe those things. But even just to the easy answers that an authoritarian group provides us or the easy answers, like the simplification, the flattening of the terrain that like single issue siloed activism provides us, even that is like enough of a psychological benefit to lie to ourselves about our own histories, our own experiences.

And aside from that, I mean, you know, your question of like, you know, why do we have these these losses of memory? Why do we live in this context of like social amnesia and lack of continuity? I think enclosure, I think a lot of it comes down to enclosure. And I think what constitutes the commons needs to be understood in a much broader way and what constitutes enclosure needs to be understood in a broader way.

And we also need to understand that that enclosure, it’s not just about profit and accumulation. It’s also a war measure. It’s also like a military strategy. You know, capitalism was able to learn so much about itself and the modern state was able to learn so much about itself through the process of colonialism, through the process of inventing whiteness, developing whiteness.

And it learned how vital it was to destroy the commons. And, you know, if you were looking at things like a purely economic sense, that would mean, you know, destroying value or closing off avenues of, you know, the production of profits and the accumulation of profits. But it was even more important below that on, on a military level, reasserting control because of course, you can’t have capitalism without the state, that in order to rule people, in order to conquer people, and subject them to state authority where, you know, we’re looking at traditionally stateless peoples who were conquered, who were, you know, invaded and conquered and colonialized, their access to the commons had to be cut off. And that was too difficult because there was no architecture in place to do that the way there already was in Europe, you know, with like fencing to like, you know, some kind of authority structure like, you know, largely through the church and these older aristocracies where there were like, essentially a built in hierarchy that enabled police and surveillance and and all of that.

If that architecture didn’t already exist, then the option of the state was to to destroy the commons. It’s like, you know, the mass slaughter of the bison in the Great Plains, you know, the torching of entire forests and, you know, villages and all that. Memory is also a commons, like, where we’re sold this idea of like individuals, which is just like an absurd fiction, like individuals don’t exist, like none of us have… like language doesn’t exist individually.

Respiratory systems and immune systems don’t exist individually. Food culture doesn’t exist individually, life doesn’t exist individually. But the democratic subject is an individual, you know. Their survival is guaranteed through rights which inhere to the individual, etc., etc.. You know, that individual is a prisoner and is like the end result of a very long historically, but also an ongoing process of alienation. And memory is a part of that. And so like there’s yes, centuries of violence that go into making us forgetful beings and making us, you know, isolated, isolated beings.

Vicky Osterweil:

I think one of the ways that that functions as well, I completely agree that the importance of joy has to be put against like… if I was able to write books, if I found it easy to do that and to also do all the work I have to do, what I have always wanted to write about would be post-movement despair, because what you’re talking about is that return to normal.

I’ve witnessed it. You know, I described 2010 to 2020 there being, you know, never that long a gap. That meant there were constant, you know, peaks and troughs and there were these constant movements that would fall apart. And every time no one would grieve, people would get really angry at each other. And like, I think because when that window… you know, what you were describing, Peter, in a sort of micro way, as you see that window of liberation starts to open and then it shuts again.

And you sort of have to be naive in that moment and believe you’re really going to get there. I think that’s what makes it powerful. And then if it shuts and if you haven’t trained about this, you have thought about this and you don’t grieve for the shutting of that window, you blame the people around you because they must not have been pushing hard enough.

They must not have meant it hard enough. And it’s often built on real problems, real violence within the movement, real exclusions within the movement. But then those are blown up into like totally catastrophic, demobilizing, scene destroying drama over and over again. And that, to me, always looks like unprocessed grief. And I think part of why, to keep on my hobbyhorse, the Biden administration was so successful at repressing 2020 was because we never grieved the COVID dead, which is like one of the most like large mass deaths in the century.

You know, like other than wars, is one of the greatest mass deaths – or including wars – really this huge, huge moment of both mass death and mass collapse of possible socials, right? Whole worlds collapsed, like, of, many of them, you know, sort of a kind of capitalist urbanism. But still dreams and lives were also foreclosed and people were disabled.

And what we did was we just went back to normal and everyone was told to like not… like there was no grief. And I think that really opened up both the conditions for forgetting and the conditions for a mass fascist movement because much like World War One, the trauma of the trenches that was that immediately forgotten and repressed in Europe sort of produced the stormtroopers in, you know, across the continent like, you know, these traumatized men who were obsessed with violence and speed.

Right. Like, I think I think we were facing a similar thing where this ungrieved… you can’t even really talk about the pandemic. Right? It wasn’t even an issue in 2024 in this election somehow, like, you know, it was never talked about. That also produces a forgetting and a fascistic repression of our own lived past, that people, like middle class people accept it because they want to go back to work and they think they’ll be safe, even though they statistically probably might not be.

But whatever they think they’ll be safer. But also because most of us had to go back to work, we were forced to. And you can only hold that cognitive dissonance for so long without struggle. You know, like, when the Great Resignation, when everyone quit their jobs, when that couldn’t hold on and when like we didn’t have any more support and we got kicked off our health insurance and we lost our unemployment benefit – at least in the US.

Again, this narrative is very US centric, but like that’s what happened here. Like we had to as a class, accept that the pandemic was over in order to not live in constant cognitive dissonance. Right. And it’s only people who like, are either already sort of activist or have disabled or immunocompromised people in their lives who’ve been able to hold that cognitive dissonance.

It’s driving us nuts, you know, like, I mean, it’s so hard to handle it all, which is to say, like forgetting is an active strategy of the state that represses the movement. And it’s been complicated this four years because anti-Blackness became an avenue on which both the right and liberals found it too hard to push.

So they started pushing on like gender, sexuality and bodily control and bodily autonomy. It was very sideways. It was a very sideways counter-revolution, you know, in some ways and hard to name. But I think forgetting is actually really… I really appreciate this Peter, because I think forgetting is the result, the tactic that ended up making it possible as a counter-revolution after, you know, Trump was hiding in a bunker underneath the White House.

Right? I mean, like as rioters were ripping out the gates, like, not something I ever thought I would… Only in fantasies do I think I would even experience. But like that I would forget that, like, people would forget that happened like a mere four years ago? Feels unbelievable. People remember those movies about the White House being destroyed, Olympus has Fallen, more than they remember when we actually almost destroyed the White House, you know?

Peter Gelderloos:

Yeah. Or like when all of the international airports in the country were shut down and like that was direct action. Like that was illegal. It wasn’t making a demand, that was like, you know, Trump was – for those who don’t remember this, which is a tragedy, like, you know, even if they weren’t born, like I want them to remember this, and that’s another part of collective memories.

You can remember things that, you know, happened before you were born. But Trump was referring to this, explicitly as like a Muslim ban and even though it was like so clearly against every law that’s on the books around like discrimination on the basis of religion and race. Like he wasn’t even hiding it. And, you know, all the legal mechanisms couldn’t stop it, like our movement stopped that by illegally occupying and shutting down like every international airport in the country.

Yeah. So. Yeah. Forgetting is, you know, it’s definitely a part of state strategy. And I’m really glad that also you like you brought in grieving in like the lack of space to grieve as like a really really important part of all of this.

Vicky Osterweil:

Yeah. Grieving is fundamentally unproductive time and you’re not allowed to have that. Even your free time, you have to be producing and consuming, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think the airport shutdowns, just to put a period on that and then I’ll leave it, is like that set the tone; he lost immediately, right? There is January 21st, right, where like a bunch of black bloc, like, you know, they got mass arrested, but they did take all the news story away from his inauguration. Then his first big move got shut down by airports and that it took him years to recover momentum, political momentum in a real way. And if we can’t do that again, it’s going to be ugly.

You know, if we can’t do something like that again, I mean, who knows what that would look like, but…

Peter Gelderloos:

And just to emphasize like it, it doesn’t need to look like the same thing and then it probably can’t. So like reviving relationships of mutual aid, because I hesitate to…. like the way that a lot of NGOs are out there trying to turn mutual aid into like some kind of reference for charity.

I don’t think we should use mutual aid to describe like a single project. Mutual aid is a relationship that exists more broadly. There are definitely projects that try to spread and to resuscitate or, you know, encourage the spread of like mutual aid as a relationship. But like, you know, it’s not something that you can give to someone else, but like projects that can be more lasting that, you know, are survival focused, you know, like maybe that could be like the direction that it goes in and it might have to be like a little bit more subterranean or less visible to start with, you know, at this moment. I think also, you know, history, you know, our history shows us this, like anyone who comes to you with like a blueprint for the revolution, like, smack that blueprint down on the ground! Like it’s not going to do – it doesn’t work like that. Like, you know, these are experiences that we need to dialog with, that we need to converse with.

But they’re not like, you know, a set of like unquestionable answers and so it’s like we need to remember, like all of these different things that we’ve done all to have like, you know, kind of all of these different tools, all of these just references in order to develop new tools. And nothing is ever completely from scratch is, you know what, someone I asked – a friend in Athens – about like the anarchist movement having to start from scratch so many times, and he’s like, no, it never starts from scratch. There is something, you know, good about, like that creative space of, you know, creating things that are a bit new, even though, like, nothing is entirely new. But yeah, like it could look like so many things. And, and I think we need to start by looking around us. Like, this relates to the connection between memory and imagination and probably not being able to transform society in ways that we can’t imagine and just how much less imagination we have like individually and collectively, now compared with 100 years ago.

Like if you look at anti-capitalist movements 100 years ago, they were like, you know, writing novels all the time about, you know, this is what the future will look like once you’ve abolished capitalism. Like these working class presses, just like publishing these left and right, and now it’s so hard to imagine, like any future that’s not desolate. And a part of that,

I think this is in the book ‘Here at the Center of the World in Revolt’, it talks about like the difference between the imaginary as like, you know, what is created or what is produced and the imagination as like the facility that creates these imagined futures and that basically capitalism has invaded the imaginary and has enclosed or destroyed that commons of the imagination without like a single shot being fired and without us even realizing that that invasion was happening, that that war was happening.

So we kind of just let it happen. And most of us no longer have the ability to, like, imagine anything better. And that is like devastating because, yeah, if we can’t imagine, I don’t think we can create it.

Vicky Osterweil:

A thing I like to say that I was thinking about earlier a lot of the time is, because you’re talking about doing new things, I used to like to say, let’s at least make a different mistake this time, right? That’s what we can use history for. We’re not going to win. Probably. Like I mean, it’s fun to believe you are, in every struggle, obviously, and you want to and you fight like you’re going to, but like, let’s just make a new mistake. Let’s not make the same mistake, you know?

Peter Gelderloos:

Please. Yeah. At least like another thing that this society does and another aspect of alienation is that it disembodies us and like that that happens in so many ways. And like, you know, if you’re someone who has chronic health problems or, you know, if you’re someone, and this next one is not my experience, but if you’re someone who has like a body that is like criminalized in some way, then, you know, you experience a very different and more violent aspect of like, forced disembodiment.

But everyone who lives in this society has at the very least a kind of like psycho emotional disembodiment where we’re constantly trained to look our lives from above. You can like do these exercises with people where you’re like, okay, imagine the city you live in or imagine the country you live in. Imagine the society. And like they’re automatically going to something that’s like, you know, Google Maps.

It’s like satellite view, bird’s eye view. And that’s really sad because like, that’s a flattening view. It’s a simplifying view. And it also is a view that that is the view that allows us to act as our own governors, to act as our own cops, to act as our own rulers, because it puts the interests of like, you know, whoever is on top of the pyramid, you know, looking down on society, it makes us empathize with them more than we empathize with our own lived experiences.

So when we unite in society, like we should be looking through our own eyes, hearing with our own ears, feeling with our own body, and recognizing that there are millions of people in like an extending network all around us and that actually, like, you know, every point is the center of the universe. There is no like, you know, single center.

And all of us are the best situated for making decisions, not for everyone, but from making decisions from where we are for ourselves and in relation with those around us. And like, yeah, the only place where people are like, “oh, chaos! That wouldn’t work. You need like a centralized structure,” is in like, you know, so-called like political science because like you go to programmers, you know, computer programmers or like, you know, evolutionary behaviorists, like, you know, biologists, like chemists, anything like that, and say you want all decisions to, like, flow through to be validated by a central point?

Like it’s, you know, the most intelligent kind of things are decentralized networks, obviously. But, you know, the moment it comes to like, you know, the organization of society is like, oh, no, no, no, no, you can’t. You all aren’t qualified to, you know, use your senses to be in your bodies, to, you know, make the decisions about your own needs and desires.

So, yeah, embodiment.

Vicky Osterweil:

And that’s, I think, part of why trans people threaten the right so much because it’s a transition, to transition is to reject the disembodiment and to, like abolish one gendered relation to the body in favor of one that is real and pleasurable, and that doesn’t just scare the right. It scares a lot of liberals and a lot of cis people in general as well.

But like transphobia is not a distraction. It is a crucial part of maintaining this disembodied forgetting, this disembodied being in the world in the same way that homophobia and queer phobia and misogyny have been as well over time.

Peter Gelderloos:

Absolutely. Yeah. So I’m living in Ohio now, which, you know, for those listeners who are not in the US, was actually not a battleground state for the presidency, but definitely for the Senate. And like until like about a week before the elections, every single Republican ad had two bases and two bases alone. Like it is true that the Democrats had no idea that, like, you know, oh, like people are, even though unemployment is is very low, like people are in a very difficult economic situation because like all the inflation from the pandemic hasn’t gone away.

And they’re looking at the stock markets and going ‘Oh, the economy looks fine, what are people complaining about?’ So yeah that is an issue like the fact that, you know, the Democrats are so alienated and that is an issue. But the Republican campaign here and in so many other parts of the U.S. had only two points they ever mentioned.

One was transphobia and like extremely vicious encouragements of violence, you know, against trans people. And the other were like blatantly racially coded and also like inciting of mass violence towards immigrants. So like xenophobia and transphobia were the two platforms, the only two platforms of the Republican campaign in Ohio. And the Democrats did not respond to either of those.

They collaborated completely in the rightward shift. They didn’t stand up for trans people. They didn’t stand up for immigrants. Yeah. So I’m glad you named that.

Chris Browne:

There’s been so many great things said, where I was like, Oh, I’ve got to jump in here. And then the moment passed! But one thing we’ve not talked about so much, but which I think is relevant here is like physical space and place. I mean, you were talking about your senses. And I think, you know, this kind of being out in the world and experience seeing things in real life and not just that being parsed sort of through whatever online platform seems pretty important. So, you know, you talk a lot about the transformation and liberation of like physical spaces in resistance and building collective memory, because it’s clearly something that the state is also very keen to control, physical space.

So we know it’s important. You were already talking about enclosure and stuff and you talk about, you know, the highway system, interstate system as a sort of a way that that physical space has been controlled, manipulated to its own ends. So yeah, could you say a little bit more about physical space, place, you know, liberated spaces, how all of this comes into questions of building that collective memory?

Peter Gelderloos:

Yes. Like people who have, like, you know, more influence over their lived environments, who live in a place that they can interact with and like, you know, change, that assists in memory. Also, you know, people who like, you know, live in close relationship with others like, you know, that improves memory for people. And also on the flipside of that, folks who are forcibly displaced are much more likely to have memory problems.

And, you know, even like more severe, both psychological and physiological consequences or, you know, illnesses that are related to memory and cognition. And yeah, I think without a doubt that’s related also to, you know, a general part of like state counterinsurgency strategies and enclosure, which is to prevent people from having any kind of permanent or inalienable relationship with the land, with their ecosystem, with their built environment.

You know, we we don’t really get any say in the architecture. You know, we rent, you know, apartments or whatever that, you know, you can get kicked out of in 30 days notice. And, you know, like very few people get to be like from a place anywhere. And in contrast, a lot of, you know, certainly not all because they’re not a monolith by any means, but many indigenous movements really do the best job of, you know, maintaining collective, intergenerational memory. And such a huge part of most of these same indigenous movements is about fighting for that inalienable relationship with place. And you know, it doesn’t happen within like a concept of borders or anything like that. It’s a relationship to place which is also completely open to, you know, the need to move, to migrate, to emigrate.

But, you know, always like in relation with the territory. And it’s also said that in English, like, you know, territory like has this connotation which is possessive or property related, that’s, you know, certainly not there in romance languages where like the connection – territory, you know, terra, tierra, etc. are like, you know, the land, the earth is, is like, you know, present right in that word.

So keeping us from putting down roots, eradicating roots is definitely a very important part of a counterinsurgency method. It’s a very important part of capitalist alienation and enclosure. And it makes it so much harder to remember. One of the things that I kind of, you know, learned as a kind of technique in Barcelona that I’ve since tried to deploy wherever I go, is giving these history tours where, like you’re in the place where something happened, talking of bringing up grieving, which Vicky was talking about earlier, an important way of, of grieving is like, you know, marking the space where, you know, the cops or the white supremacists without badges took someone from us, where they killed someone. If we have the power to do it without permission, but, you know, if we need permission, like, you know, I don’t think we need to be purists about it, doing something to like, you know, mark that space, whether it’s gathering there every year on the day in which that person was stolen from us or putting up a plaque or, you know, something like that, like a graffiti wall, you know, taking over that corner where George Floyd was was murdered.

You know, that’s really important to try to hold on to those spaces. It’s harder in the States because it’s, you know, a society that was founded on genocide. It was founded on on erasure, on the pretense of a blank slate. Obviously, you know, the vast majority of indigenous peoples, you know, that were here at the beginning of the invasion, you know, they didn’t disappear.

They weren’t, you know, totally… they were absolutely subjected to an extremely violent process of genocide, which is ongoing today. But, you know, they’re still here fighting, fighting back. But, you know, at the very least, the strategy and on a judicial and a cultural level, you know, the reality was of like, you know, a society that was, you know, founded on a blank slate, which was, you know, placed on top of a huge complex of violence, is what I’m trying to get at. Those differences in property law and things like that in investment in, you know, the destruction of any commons, you know, from the beginning of like the founding of this country makes it a bit easier for this kind of like constant cycling of the landscape where, you know, buildings, you know, they’re not meant to last very long. And you know, entire neighborhoods are demolished, renamed, rebuilt. It’s like the landscape itself is like changing under our feet. But also that’s something that we can fight against. Like we’re not powerless.

I hope that, you know, more people remember this. There was like a choice at a certain point. It happened at different moments in different parts of the country. But there was a choice. And, you know, I remember like, you know, some of the conversations, not to let the police murder anyone else in our area and our, you know, the place where we were living, without some kind of response.

And if we’re only ten people, we do what ten people can get away with. If we’re 100 people, we do what 100 people can get away with. There’s also been these other horrible, wretched takes that, you know, this wave of rebellions stems from like the recession of like 2007-2008, which is absolute bullshit. It helps the state erase all of the the major rebellions and uprisings that don’t fit within this, you know, ridiculous reductionist, you know, materialist theory. Before that, before 2007, before 2008, you know, there were like a growing number of small counter-attacks and and riots in response to police killings.

And there was a conversation that was becoming increasingly continental and then global about making a decision to always respond. And without that, I honestly, having spoken with with people who were like right there in Oakland in the first days and weeks of the Oscar Grant uprising, you know, having been around in 2010 when other things were happening, you know, also in 2014, and you know having spoken with people who were like, you know, in in St Louis, in Ferguson at the very beginning of all that, 2020 etc., knowing how some of those initial things kicked off before there was sort of like a tradition of like, you know, if the police murder someone, like we fight back, I don’t think that whole arc would have happened without that decision. And instead of having that memory, because it’s very difficult and it’s dangerous to talk about because like if you talk about it in a careless way, you know, you might get put in prison or other people might get put in prison.

But I think we need to find a smart way to take that risk, because security culture can’t just be about avoiding prison like it has to be about like having stronger resistance movements. And we can’t have stronger resistance movements without the memory and without like an understanding of how rebellions happen. No one controls and no one is like, you know, calling the shots.

No one can decide like, you know, this is the day that it will happen. Like, I spent a lot of time in Greece, like several months in Greece, while the big insurrection was happening, you know, throughout 2009, after like in December of 2008, the police killed like a 15 year old kid in a neighborhood with a lot of, you know, a whole lot of anarchist projects and activity there.

Like, you know, the movement, you know, had decided like, you know, whenever the police do something egregious like this, there will be riots, there will be a response. And, you know, no one had any idea that like in December of 2008, like it would turn into an insurrection that spread across the entire country and like led to pretty much every police station in the entire country, and most of the banks, getting burned – along with a lot of other things, you know, on the level of neighborhood gardens and social centers and like, you know, pushing back on all of these different levels, not just fighting in the streets against police, although none of the other things would have would have been possible to that extent without the ability to, you know, make the police run away and make the state so afraid that they were worried that if they called the military in the streets, they would actually lose control of everything and some of the soldiers would cross the line and switch sides.

There’s no like architecture to the revolution or if there is and it’s implicitly a counterrevolution, like, you know, like no one knew that it was going to be more than just like, you know, one or two nights of rioting. So there’s like a certain magic to it that, you know, we don’t decide when the revolution starts, but we can make it more possible.

We can create more tools for ourselves to use. We can create more experiences, more memories, and we can also fight against pacification. Yeah.

Chris Browne:

Yeah. No, thanks, Peter. We’ve covered a huge number of bases, but I guess I’d signpost listeners as well who are interested in, you know, reading the book, which I thoroughly recommend. You know, at the end you also kind of offer this really valuable selection of kind of revolutionary assertions. I mean, we’ve talked about the distinction between a revolutionary imagination, you know, as a capacity that we need to regain as distinct from like blueprints.

So you’re not offering any blueprints here, but, you know, a selection of assertions, principles or lessons lived and learned from your time in struggle, in social movements and they’re really clarifying for people who want to just have a quick way in to some of what you talk about in the book. And I would also suggest people check out the blog post that we have from you on plutobooks.com, which again is a really nice, succinct condensation of a lot of what we’ve talked about here today.

But unless one has anything else they’d like to sort of add at the end, then I think we could wrap up.

Vicky Osterweil:

I mean, yeah, just, you know, it was always going to have to be us doing it. And no matter what changes in the political situation, it remains us who can do it. And we can. And it’s both easier and harder in ways that we can’t anticipate, which is a very elaborate way of the old anarchist chestnut, you know, the thing is to start, right?

Peter Gelderloos:

Yeah, I like that. I appreciate that. And it’s us. And also like who we are is, you know, it’s not any one person’s decision. It’s this like, collective, you know, many headed beast.

Chris Browne:

Great. Well, thanks. Thanks again, Peter and Vicky, for your time today. Once again, the name of the book from Pluto is They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us: Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. And, of course, Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action is available as well, from Bold Type Books.