Also media, welcome to Dick It appan here a podcast, and we're recording for the first time. All of the audio worked perfectly. It was great. Yeah, we the society that has put multiple human beings on the moon did successfully produce functioning audio software. It's wonderful. Uh yeah, with me to celebrate this is Carl Eugene Stroud. He's a language teacher and anarchist builtins and read Angles, who's a bus driver and an anarchist member of the Center for
Spesifical Studies. Yeah, both of you, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having us, Thank you for having us, for this wonderful celebration of audio recording technology.
It's all great, it's all wonderful. Speaking of things that are wonderful, this is this is this is why they pay me the AM I legally allowed to say that it is a below market rate, so why they paid me the slightly below market rate box. Yeah. So, speaking of wonderful, we are here to talk about a I guess putting things back together project, which is miltant Kindergarten.
And I guess I guess we should start with talking about what bulletin in kindergarten is and what it isn't in terms of like, it's not we're teaching we're teaching small children how to take apart buildings.
Yes, so Milton Kindergarten is a multi month study of a text, and in that way, you know, we call it a seminar' But it's not that much different than reading group or study circle or any of those kinds of things. Essentially, what we're doing is we're using one text to revisit and have conversations with different people that are at various you know, points in a path of radicalization.
We're you know, distinctly trying to spread the word about the importance and necessity of militancy in our movements, but also teach people about a specifismo, which is an anarchist
current that comes out of Latin America. But it's also like, you know, in in the socialist movement, anarchists can often be characterized by stereotypes that come from Marxists, and that in the libertarian and anarchist movement, any kind of mass anarchism, any kind of class struggle anarchism can also be characterized by you know, individualists and insurrectionists. And so we mean to you know, not convert people to a certain current
of anarchism. We see this as a kind of grouping of tendency, So all the participants come from different ideologies. This is just a reading group, so you've got to apply this stuff, you know, outside of this. This isn't some kind of be all and dull solution. We're not, you know, educationalists thinking that this is going to be the first step in some like process that we're just already on. But at the same time, we think that educational space needs to be defended. That's why this is
the third militant kindergarten. So yeah, maybe I'll let Read talk about some of the ones and how we've gotten here, and yeah, kindergarten up to now.
Yeah, sure, I think that's a good explanation. The group basically started off in the wonderful, amazing, complicated year twenty twenty, in the wake of the uprising over the summer. Both of us live in a relatively small town with maybe an outsized hundreds above its weight in terms of like activism and anarchism. There's probably more anarchist tendencies here than there are anarchists, and something that we saw in the wake of the height of the uprising was one a
huge amount of burnout that people weren't really addressing. The solution to burnout that we saw being proposed was just do it again, more harder, And we also saw the burnout as kind of coming from a lack of strategy and organization on the ground, people sort of repeating tactics because that's what you do, and that's what we were doing, so we're just going to try to keep doing it.
And both of us were unable to participate in the more aggressive street actions that were going on at the time, so we decided we individually needed to study and get better at our understanding of strategy an organization and try to rethink like some of the problems that had occurred and how to move on from there, and also to provide us, for people who are more active in different places, the chance to meet together and reflect in a non non urgent space where you could just like pause and
learn and discuss the topic. So we were, yeah, we hit upon We're both kind of simultaneously interested in the Spesso seasmal current from Latin America, so we both just kind of decided, yeah, we want to read some of these texts and we quickly came upon social anarchism and organization and we thought, like, wow, this is a really comprehensive introduction not only to this tendency but also to
anarchism and social anarchism broadly. Like it really covers just the basic principles and theory up to history and organizational theory, strategy, tactics, ideology in a much higher, morephisticated and like I guess, like modernized way then many other previous documents we'd read. It's like, if you took the platform, you know, the Macknivist platform.
We should explain what that is because people are not going to yeah, okay, going back.
So's it's the organizational platform of the Anarchist Federation of Riodaian hero which is basically their foundational document, and it's a very comprehensive look at the kind of theory and strategy and work that goes behind goes on behind founding an organization. Like that, it's similar to the anarchist platform written by X the Macknivist in exile in Paris, the Ukrainian anarchists in exile after the the Revolution in Russia.
They wrote this platform saying anarchists should maybe be somewhat organized and unified in their tactics and their strategies and received a whole bunch of pushback from it, but founded the sort of the platform. It's current of anarchism. But really, when you go back to the platform, there's not a
ton there. It's more of a document for organizing a like a military force in a already ongoing revolution, whereas what we found in Social Anarchism and Organization is a much more road kind of introduction to social anarchist organization that is more widely applicable to a variety of situations.
Yeah, and you know, Okay, so we've covered a spacifismo on here with Andrew once. I think we've talked about it a little bit in some other episodes. But yeah, do we want to get in to what about A SPECIFIESMO was sort of different from older kinds of like well just like other anarchist tendencies and other sort of kinds of platformism, and talk a little bit about how it sort of came about because it's one of the tendencies I guess that some people adopted in the US,
but I don't. I don't think it's as famous as a lot of other tendencies here.
Yes, so you know, a lot of the motivation behind organizing the center for us Specifismo studies this came after us studying this text a few times locally, we decided to formalize this into militant Kindergarten. And a lot of that came from the need to articulate what is a specifismo in English, because a lot of the resources, a lot of the ideas and writings come from Latin America, and so they're written in Spanish. A lot of the
theory has been developed in Spanish. Especifismo originally comes from the Anarchist Federation of Uruguay in the nineteen sixties. They began to articulate a kind of organizational strategy that imagined what the way we've described it is kind of two rails for a train, and this train is bringing this revolutionary rupture. So these two rails are the social level, which includes all kinds of class struggle. This is class
struggle against domination, exploitation, and oppression. And that the other rail is the political organization.
And so this is.
The anarchist principles and ideologies that yeah, I think we share probably pretty broadly with most all anarchist currents, at least you know, coming out of the socialist movement. But when it comes to the way to balance these and to keep them both working towards the same ends, we
see a need to keep them theoretically distinct. And so a lot of what we've done at the Center for Specifiesmo Studies is try to articulate these ideas in English so that we can start to develop what that means here and not just sort of translate or take a translation and sort of try to input an idea into
our own context. So, like you said, like I think that some of the we we could take for example, the Black Rose Rosa Neegra Anarchist Federation in the US, that's the largest organization of a specifict anarchists in North America. They are distinctly influenced by this current. They have sister organizations in Latin America, but they're just one kind of organization that's that's kind of known on a national level. And as far as planting its, you know, ideas in
North America, we're definitely still doing that work. So a lot of what we've done is also developed second secondary resources. This includes like audio versions of this text, but also like things we've produced through our study and through these discussions that come out of kindergarten. So last year, for example, we made a minizine. There was like a kind of working group that worked on a mini zine to define some basic terms and make something really really really basic
in introductory to a specifismo. We also I've written a few pamphlets, one of which is how do you say a specifismo in English?
And so that is.
Yeah, exactly trying to address this idea. And you know, some people they hear a specifismo and they're like, oh, that's you know, exotic and cool and like new, and that's a reason to be attracted to it. But then you know other people might hear that and they have kind of other reactions where they sort of try to put it into a really specific box. I mean, what our understanding is is that it's important to be able to acknowledge what current you're kind of plugging into where
your ideas are coming from. It takes a lot of pressure off of us to not feel like we're inventing everything and we're supposed to be coming up with like the most perfect, cool ideas, but it's also a humbling experience of like, yeah, we know about this because other people have done this militancy before us to make these things available for us to have preserved these ideas.
That's the political level of the two rails.
Right, So that's that is preserving this so that it is possible to say I have this opinion about a specifismo and it relates to my context in this way or likewise that it doesn't you know, if we don't have anyone doing that militancy to preserve those ideas, then it's actually not even up to people to be able to pick them up and use them the way that they see fit.
One of the sort of barriers is, I think kind of when you're alluding to of like specifiesmo as a tendency in the US, is that it wasn't like, it wasn't really it wasn't developed in the American context, and that has different sort of you know that that that that that that has sort of like a range of different effect x. And one of the things that I think is very interesting about it that I think is definitely a product of the context that it was developed
in is the strategy of social insertion. Yeah, and I was wondering if you could talk a bit about social insertion and how you see that working in the US and how sort of like, how do we think about this sort of in the wake of twenty twenty and the kind of restructuring of what is sort of happening is out of social movements in the US.
Yeah, I think the twenty twenty lesson is very important for thinking about social insertions for anyone who doesn't know, it's just the practice of anarchists who are organized in the same organization being present in social movements within them, supporting them, trying to help them achieve their own goals rather than take them over, or something like you would
see in maybe a entryism from Trackeeasts or something. But yeah, I think one of the major problems that we ran into when we started reading this stuff is like social insertion requires there to even be social movements.
Yeah, that was an issue in the US for a long time because we didn't really have social movements in the way that like Latin America does.
Right, or when we do, they're like extremely spontaneous or kind of chaotic, or they're also there they could be extremely co opted or managed by a political party, Democrats, some socialist group, Republicans, whoever. And so that's kind of one of our major sort of projects of theoretical translation
into North Americas. You can't just plug this into North America and say, Okay, we're going to go join ex social movements to achieve these goals and obtain this amount of influence there and some we really have to start. I think what is useful about that problem is that it forces us to start really trying to theorize what actually is happening here, what social movement actually is there, And that leads us to start thinking about things more literally,
like movement. What does it mean to be moving? What is the role of anarchists in movements? So we can think of the idea that we've developed is the idea of anarchists who are organized as anarchists, the role of them in movement is to actually literally be moving between different kinds of spaces, different movements, and starting through their movement to generate a kind of flow of people and of ideas and energy and momentum, acting as a small motor within a big, a big system, if you will,
not striving it, but getting things going. And so I think that's kind of more the level that we're here in the US is we still need to just theorize what is out there and how can we help it, How can we plug into it, How can we start getting things moving in a direction that is actually going to meet the needs of these movements or these movements
that aren't yet articulated. Well, you know, you see this with like the rise of tenant unions and tenant organizing, still in a very like nascent stage, but people are seeing that need and they're starting to get that moving
from a variety of socialist tendencies. And I think, yeah, the idea is important in this context because we have to we have to be finding these spaces, we have to be moving to them, and we have to be returning to our own spaces to be able to actually understand what we're encountering out there and figure out how to suss course or move to something else or that to a new situation.
Yeah, like maybe similar to read said, they're this idea that the politics need to be moving, that anarchism needs to be a movement, and that in that way, like we can't allow our ideas to be stuck in certain you know, just stations or organizations or spaces that are friendly or that.
We're really familiar with.
We need to be able to engage those ideas in the relevant spaces where we do live. That looks really different in different parts across the US and North America. So the idea that you know, we would be able to just simply take one thing and apply it across the board would also, like yeah, be really limited here. And so I think a lot of what we're we're well, a lot of what we've seen in terms of the utility of a specificismo as a as an influential current
in the politics in leftist politics in North America. Is this theoretical aspect and how we can see both like we learn more about social movements, more about the necessity of them being popular, more about popular power, and at the same time as in doing that, that shows us more about what is political unity, what is uh, you know, unity of strategy, what is unity of theory, what is a unity of commitment? And that those things we want
to as we keep learning about them individually. That goes back to this trained idea of their being to rails
is we need them to be on independent cycles. You know, we know that that social movements don't last forever, that mobilizations and uh, you know, insurrections will fade away, that there are ebbs and flows of the engagement, and that when we're talking about a massive popular level, we should expect that even more right, plenty of people will only even if they're engaging militantly, only be engaging militantly with social movements, not with political ideas, not with political organization.
And so the idea that something needs to endure someone even needs to be able to tell the story from the last time that things got spicy, so that we understand even what happened without even necessarily having the the critique or the analysis, even just simply the retelling is something that is grossly missing from our struggles in North America. And so that's where we see like there being a complete absence of political organizing, and especially when we think
about being on an entirely different cycle. So that kind of goes back to kindergarten being an annual thing, and you know where we live, like in the winter, there's not a lot you can do, and so it kind of made sense to develop a seasonal pattern of this, right where like exactly as things are dying down. It's kind of like, well, the people who do still have capacity, the people who are still attempting to be active, how can we keep that little bit of movement moving and going.
The idea of the metaphor of a small engine, a small motor is often used in a specifiesmo and that that's what the political level is trying to be. Is a small motor just assisting in something larger that's happening, but it needs to be connected to something larger that's happening.
Yeah, And I think a key part of this for us that we've found is that in our context there exists sort of these two levels. To some extent, there
are political organizations and there are social movements. But what is often missing, Like we were struggling with this, trying to find the way into one or the other, and what we discovered is that like this kind of educational tendency of really open, really educational, really discussion based learning kind of starts to generate that movement between the two. Like by having this space open to beginners and experts, so to speak, you're able to actually get more movement
opened between the two. So it opens up political organizations, people who have not participated in that before don't have a way into it. And it opens up social movement to people who may be politicized but are not organized in some sort of social and it starts to mix everything together in this learning space where we can build trust as a learning commun unity and assisting each other in connecting these kind of two necessary levels of organization.
I've been thinking a lot about how you were talking about how we don't have any kind of organizational continuity between movements and the kind of disorganization and the loss of just memory that happens with that, And I think it's one of these weird things because you can find people who've been in like all of these movements, but if you're relying on just you know, okay, well you could you can get the story of what really happened in Occupy Oakland if you know exactly like the right
for people and you can't like you can't say their names because like you know, and I mean this has always sort of been a problem with parts of social movements because I mean, there's stuff that necessarily has to be clandestine, like you know, and there's reasons for op racial security, but also just means the stuff gets lost. And yeah, I think having having a like having a thing that goes as a way to transmit got a
thing that goes. Wow, incredibly technical language, you know, but having having an organization that can act as a bridge between these sort of moments and also is able to sort of you know, a lot of people's spaces for discussions, for reflection, for learning. That's also sort of a bridge between like a like I don't know, I guess like capital p political organization, and the social stuff is it's it's a really interesting idea, And yeah, I don't know,
I think I don't know. I think I think this is like, this is a very cool project, and yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of it as the new session sort of approaches.
Yeah, I think what you're just saying about, like, how do you learn about what happened to occupy Oakland without having to go through like three layers of signal chats or something to find the right person to learn from anonymously being a preface with allegedly this happens is a
real problem that we've thought about. Like, I think a big thing for us that we've found is a role that we can play, is that there is a need out there for there to be some sort of we call it mask off anarchism, like there needs to be a public facing, approachable space where you can actually just learn about stuff. And yeah, there is definitely a need for operational security culture or for clandestine things so that those things don't need to be everything for those who
even exist. You need levels that are more open to people. Otherwise those things just become increasingly lost. They go down the memory hole, as they say, or the Latin American groups like to talk about anarchism becoming ghetto wised further and further, like separated from mainstream society and there's no
ways in unless you, like, you know, a guy. So that was something that was a problem we were encountering and something that like from our particular circumstances, we felt like we could provide and maybe start and modeling for people as a group.
I think also, like you mentioned there like this idea of memory and what what Black Rose has referred to in their program as muscle memory. Like for our organizations, this idea that like I mean, organizing seems so mysterious to us because we don't have this like kind of active like living memory of how to do that. It's not just a thing we do by second nature or
like without without really needing a lot of work. And so I think in that sense, like we could also think of there being two kinds of struggles going on, where like on the so the struggle is the class struggle, and the antagonists are the dominant people in society. It is the ruling class, it is the status quo, it is the capitalist system. But on the political level there's also struggle because it's not about everybody you know, just
being one uniform block. It is about that struggle though, not being trying to topple each other, but instead trying to develop and create unity.
It's not find unity.
It's not a look for the people you have the most consensus with, because that in itself is even really limiting that we need to be able to form new agreement. We need to be able to find and struggle for that unity with people who aren't trying to just aim for a divisive end.
That there needs to be an antagonist on.
The social level, but on the political level, the goal is unity. It's not it's not struggle for the sake of taking down the opponent. And so in that sense, like something else that we do in Militant Kindergarten and in the Center for Us BECIFIESMO Studies is not just try to do a reading, but try to produce a reading. Try to leave behind some kind of trace of our reading. That that's an important aspect of this.
So all of our.
Sessions we take thorough notes, and those notes are available to all the participants.
People can go back.
Through it later to look at what was said if they missed a session, or if they'd like to follow along with those as they as the conversation goes to help add you know, other aspects of support. Then what we do is we have a whole other team that goes through those notes afterward and produces a kind of internal journalistic writeup of what happened in that meeting. And so we will also be releasing those this year as part of our kind of monthly publishing that we'll be.
Doing so for people who are interested in this, When is it happening and how do you get involved?
It starts on January thirteenth and it runs till April twentieth of next year, twenty twenty four, and we're going to be holding the sessions on Saturday two to four pm in Pacific time in US, which is not the greatest time for everybody, but it's where most of us are based, kind of on the edge of time here on the West Coast, and the best way to get
involved is to just send us an email. We have an email specifies most studies at gmail dot com, and that's the way to sort of start the enrolling process. You just need to take the one on steps, send us an email and we'll get you signed up in all the materials and zoom link and all that stuff.
Yeah, and we'll put the email in the description. You have probably links to the website too, I think. On that note, unless you have anything else that you want to say or plug.
No, I think that's it.
Yeah, good Brett. I would like to see people there. It's going to be an interesting year. I can guarantee that. Yeah, we're yeah, like the literal year twenty twenty four. Who knows what's going to happen, and even kindergarten is going to be pretty interesting. We've had a lot more people contacting us than last year, so it's going to be a pretty big and diverse group. So it'll be interesting to see kind of what everybody's able to produce out of that gathering and learning space.
Yeah, you know, maybe another thing just to say real quick, is just that even if somebody doesn't feel like they could make the time, it's still worth reaching out to us. We you know, will be developing other seminars and things in the future. And if you don't think that you'd be able to make to all the sessions, like, don't
worry about that either. That's part of why we do this every year is that we expect that, you know, working people without a lot of time will need more than one year to you know, get all this information. So we expect people to need to kind of be cobbling together a few sessions here and there for several times. And yeah, you're definitely welcome to do that, and shouldn't feel as if it's like a kind of start and then you're stuck and afraid to start.
So yeah, yeah, it's a sort of an endurance study group. So yeah, we don't want anyone burning themselves out. Just do what you can start together and together.
Yeah, it sounds like it's going to be a great program, And yeah, excited to see what comes out of it, and yeah, if you want, if if you want to get your theoretical stuff in before fighting season presumably starts again around the election. Yeah, now is the time. It's gonna be really chaotic for the next like long time. So this is this is your opportunity now.
Yeah, we'll need some good ideas to arm ourselves with. Yeah, this one it's gonna be rough. Yep.
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