Speaker 1: . Hello and welcome to VARN blog. And today I'm with Carl Eugene Straude, language teacher and anarchist militant, and we're going to be talking about education, particularly a guilt education and militancy. I think, carl, you've been involved in running a seminar that is based off of a program out of Rio de Janeiro run by social anarchists that I think you guys have modified and called militant kindergarten, am I correct? Is that basically how it's going on?
Speaker 2: So militant. Kindergarten is like the seminar around, our sort of collective study of this, this text, and this text is a program that comes out of the anarchist federation of Rio de Janeiro and specifically exploring Especiismo, which is a strategy and organizational methodology of anarchism coming out of Latin America.
Speaker 1: All right, and you've written a pamphlet actually kind of explaining that as well. that that is available from Zambalaza books, correct, yes.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, there's a pamphlet on there. Also, other things that I've written can be found on anarchismonet Anarchismo with a K, and so, yeah, another pamphlet that I had written is how do you say Especiismo in English And specifically around like? in order to do this study, it's required a lot of multilingual investigation and interaction with texts that are not in English, which is maybe like a normal. That kind of multilingual study is normal for other people that are English speakers, but it can be a kind of huge obstacle for English speakers And also part of that is maybe not always recognizing when they're they're reading a translated text or they're really depending on translators to funnel information into English and make everything kind of look a certain way to us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is actually a pretty big point. You work in language education. I work in language education. Way back in my career I used to work at a university for for interpretation and translation, and this is often true with left text and the hegemonic language or hegemonic language being English. Because English speakers, for reasons I think, that actually we should probably have some patience with, because it's not their fault, don't need to speak multiple languages because everybody already speaks theirs, and it can even sometimes be a barrier to learning other languages, because it's often easier for other people to accommodate you than for you than for them to deal with you speaking their language poorly.
Speaker 2: I think that that also goes for even just having things in more than one language, that they're there in front of your face, that, like a lot of times, people who are part of that dominant language culture, they're not used to just multilingual interactions. The things are typically like kind of you know I don't know if I want to say whitewashed exactly but they're cleaned and sterilized and filtered through something that makes it very palatable and easy to interact with, and I think, yeah, a lot of people I mean, obviously, if you speak English in some other part of the world, then you are not only speaking English, and so that that's also a relevant part of it is that multilingualism is actually like a facet of other people's daily lives.
Speaker 1: Correct. I mean, one thing that we have to always remember with English is English is spoken by more people as a, as a secondary or tertiary or however much language, and it's by people as a primary language, i mean, and there are many cultures that are held together, particularly postcolonial cultures that that use their own forms of English. that can seem very strange, but once you know the language that it's interacting with in a multilingual setting, the English becomes pretty clear. I think of Nigerian English or Korean English, etc. There's just Chinese English. there's much, and you know, i think this is actually really important when dealing with some of the use social texts, because they are often more specific, and not just in like the neologism phrase that you're used to from French theory, but also in like there's a lot of even like common language that's very specific in some of these doesn't always translate to English. well, what didn't think we were talking about this? but it's actually really important And you know, in my field, which is like Marxist studies, this is actually a huge deal, and you're dealing with a language that isn't even that different from English German in which, like a lot of the received translations or translation patterns are actually quite weird and were set 100 years ago, but kind of arbitrary decisions of of like Victorian academics, and that, and sometimes a more literal or direct translation, actually makes something, make a hell of a lot more sense.
Speaker 1: I don't speak Portuguese, but I do speak, ish, spanish, and even discourse patterns, i think, are different. like you know, spanish is a. some of the Spanish theoretical texts are much more recursive than, say, english or German ones, and by that I mean they might go around the point longer and English, because we lose patience. I don't know the discourse patterns for Portuguese. I assume it's somewhat similar, but that's a big assumption.
Speaker 2: Well, so, like when it comes to the Portuguese, that's. That's not not exactly my, my domain. I speak French and Spanish And so those are the. I teach those languages. Sometimes I teach ESL, but but yeah, like I think that you make a really good point there about, like the way that theory is kind of interacted with in other languages, at least, like yeah, in my experience in French and Spanish the precision on a kind of perfect word is not there. That and what that does is it?
Speaker 2: allows for a kind of theoretical discourse that is not so immediately ideologically debated about, like what is that term? and I don't like that, and I was thinking of this other words, so we must be part of different tendencies, or that. That kind of wanting to have the perfect term, i think is a is an anglophone practice And that that same emphasis is not expected in other, in other languages, to the same degree. And again, i think that that actually is very related to multilingualism, because if we think about people learning a second language, the idea that the discourse can be so perfectly precise is not really there anymore. That possibility is is really shrink, is shrunken by, like needing to interact with English speakers from different places in the world even right, like we don't all have the same standard vocabulary and connotation can be really triggering to Anglophones. That's, that's something I find.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i mean we're, we're Creole language And kind of take where we are highly connotative And it's also and I think I always have this as a sympathy for my I also sometimes, you know, as a sympathy for my non English speakers, because I'm, like ever regionally highly connotative. So, like standard English is fairly standard, but like connotations are are still, even the age of internet, mass media, pretty highly localized. So it's, it's. I don't envy people with this.
Speaker 1: I've always told people English is a is a language I was always taught as a kid it was very hard language. I don't think that's true. I think it's a pretty easy language to learn enough. It's an incredibly difficult language to master And there's all kinds of class and social and ideological shades in every word choice that we pick. And I, while that is true, ish in other, like, yes, there's definitely class Spanish and regional Spanish. Oh my God, is there regional Spanish when you deal with Latin America? But it's, you're right, it's not as fraught in the same way where we're trying to like find the exact word, because this word indicates, even if it means the same thing, like this long tendency debate that we've been having in English so often, that might be 100 or 200 years old, like, and I think that's pretty alienating to I mean not just to multilingual people, it's alienating to, like, say, non-hypereducated English speakers.
Speaker 2: So yeah, because it can be, like you said, it's very coded in a lot of different ways, so someone could even learn like certain aspects of those codes and not learn all of them and still be caught off guard by the things they say that are, you know, not not the precise thing.
Speaker 2: And again, even in an educated context, or even in a leftist context where people are familiar with theoretical discourse, that can still be something that, like, someone has assumed they've learned really specific things to speak about something and they have a hard time dealing with people who use a similar term or the same term in a different way. I think that that's a big part of what, you know, marxists have been doing with anarchism for more than 100 years. right, it's just a lot of like like once we, once we get into certain terms, not accepting where there could be divisions of interpretation or where there could be commonalities and instead kind of assuming all the divisions are in the words themselves, like in in vocabulary specifically, not that they're not in language, but that they're in the specific vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i think you're not just right to see it between Marxist and anarchist and like the way they approach, say, socialism or communism, but even between Marxist and Marxist and the way that they approach, like the way they talk about strategic orientation or the specific definition that might give to imperialism or labor aristocracy. One of the weirdest things about my job is, you know, the job that I've given myself actually so it's not, it's not like my day job, but is going through and just explaining the historical evolutions of these terms and like, guys, we've used this word in many different ways for a long time and you're actually blanketing over it in a way that makes it where you can't understand even our own theoretical texts from like just 60 years ago, because we haven't pewned whole new meanings on those words. And you know, as a person whose mission it is to like get people to understand these militant socialist texts not all of them are Marxist, right, i often find that it can come off as highly alienating when I'm like, hey, i know what you mean by class, but let's look at what this person means in this context in this way, and I sometimes wish I didn't have to do that. but you know, there's a long tradition of, for example, marxist just going. all other definitions of class just aren't real, whatever the fuck that means, about an abstract category, and a lot of times I'm like, well, they're coherent, like they're not talking about the same thing we are, but I know what they mean. Let's quit pretending that like there's a platonic form of class that was found by Marx and put in capital and that all other forms are invalid because they don't use the same definitions. We know they don't use the same definitions. We can be grownups about it and just point that out, but it's you know, and I'm not saying there aren't Marxist.
Speaker 1: I mean there are anarchist tendencies to do this. I'm sure I'm not as familiar with those may use, but I can tell you that, like the, our definition is the right definition thing is particular to Marxism, which is also particular to English speakers, and I do find that if you're reading, say, particularly Spanish or Italian Marxist texts, they aren't nearly so fussy. So it's, it's an interesting thing to note. you know, in addition to the normal problems that had Germanic language, you have specific leftist subcultural issues that are blinding, and you know I liked it, one of the things I like to do, and I do it not because I am a big proponent of leftist unity for any sake I'm actually not But I do think sometimes it's important for us to.
Speaker 1: I will take different positions held by anarchists, different kinds of Marxist tendencies, and remove the tendency name of who said what and just point out that, like some of these tendencies, for example, an anarchist and a Marxist-Leninist and a what a, a Bortigist, whatever you pick, a syndicalist, anarchist etc. might have different groups that are different, more different from each other on political questions than they are from people in other groups that would just automatically call them, you know, some kind of slur the moment they heard the, the. you know the term anarchist or Marxist-Leninist or whatever, which is not to say there aren't substantive difference between these positions, but a lot of the substantive differences, frankly, are so historical that I'm not always sure how relevant they are to contemporary struggle. You can disagree with me on that, but it's it's. you know, i could probably never have another debate about Kronstadt ever again in my life, like it's not again, not that it's not important to have your to understand it historically, but like we've been doing this for 100 years.
Speaker 2: So well and you know, that's that's actually, i think, relates a lot to to a specific Fismo and to kind of how this has been able to sort of get us out of out of these kinds of, like you say, like repetitive debates, because from our perspective, like kind of what ends up happening is that everything is just interpreted as ideological dispute.
Speaker 2: So it's almost impossible to even have a strategic dispute, because if you have a different strategy, people just assume like oh, you're actually just part of some different school of thought, okay, my bad, and that we we don't have space for for sort of disagreeing on those things and that, yeah, like you know, thinking about something like leftist unity, i think that, from from a specific Fismo perspective, like the idea with that is that the left is some kind of a grouping of tendency that makes sense in certain contexts, but that grouping those things together as part of a strategy is inherently ideal, ideologizing certain kinds of social level work that would need to be done, and that that that kind of placing ideology inside of social movements is something that weakens social movements, it doesn't strengthen them, and so the strategy is all about deepening that ideology on the political level but distinguishing that from social work that happens in popular spaces.
Speaker 1: That's an important point. I guess one thing I'm going to ask you is you know, you and I both, i would say we're largely militant socialist educators like to avoid any immediate sectarian difference between us And on one hand, right now I think, there is a general, and I would say specifically liberal, overestimation of what education kind of accomplished in and of itself, and on the other hand, there is a militant tendency, i think, to overreact to that and pretend like education either isn't important or the only education that's important is like whatever their weird sectarian unit says. So why do you think these kind of issues are like? you know, you're starting a program on a specific Fismo and it's particular, it's kind of particular, but you know, i looked at the text you said meet much broader, actually, in a lot of ways, view of, say, social anarchism and socialism in general.
Speaker 1: And yet you're also doing it in a context of, like, bringing in people who may not be familiar To, like, say, the militant left or the radical left. No, you, how do you communicate that, particularly when you're dealing with, like we've said, multilingual text, a lot of which are not translated in English? And I would tell people, even in a tradition that's, you know is academically documented as Marxism. There are basic texts that are not translated in English, like you have to read German or Spanish or Italian or Russian, or something to even begin to touch.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, like I think that that you know thinking about, we were same before with the vocabulary and the connotation. One thing that happened with us in the beginning of these studies was that We we ran into this term in this text constantly of militancy and militant and that, like as English speakers, were immediately like, oh, military, like I don't know, that sounds kind of bad or It's very hard for us to break out of Activism and activist and like these term and terms like that, which are not the wrong terms for a certain kind of thing. But also What we were able to find as we investigated militancy more was that it really was a concept that was missing from North American Socialist struggle or even just Social movements, was that we really didn't think about militancy, we thought about activism, and that it became obvious pretty quick that that that emphasis on activism and complete absence of a concept of militancy was part of the burnout cycle we were experiencing and And part of how there wasn't any like there weren't any older people who could kind of teach us their experiences, that that we sort of were left on our own to figure out how to educate ourselves, and Not because we were children either, it's like even as adults, it's like, and even even entirely plugged into these Radical spaces, it it never became apparent who had experiences to be sharing. Everything sort of worked on a kind of assumed ideological unity They couldn't really ever talk about, because if the subject really came up it would become divisive. And so that, assumed I Ideological unity, that works for a kind of activist action, a, a mobilization, but that doesn't work for any sort of consistency of struggle and definitely not for the theoretical work of connecting instances to each other.
Speaker 2: And so Militancy, just even as a term, was something we had to work with actually, because we couldn't just even understand really what that meant. And so right from the beginning, actually what helped a lot was Working, because because I hear this term all the time in in Spanish or in French That's just a normal term. It just means like the person, like Promoting a certain idea or practice or something. And so By relating it to the verb like to militate, like a militare and in Spanish that we were able to kind of understand what that maybe means differently, in a way that like Militar is like like you militate for something, and that you might not have to be an, an activist for something, you might just be able to be active when there's activity, and that that kind of explicitly having an ideological backing is, yeah, something that we were not used to needing to take up so explicitly, because I think in anarchist spaces that ideology, that political ideology, is assumed it's covered by a kind of morality or that the ethical values and and.
Speaker 2: And Like, yeah, like humanistic perspective is enough to to cover the ideological debate.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you admitting that actually cuts against one of my, like, lived experiences of dealing with anarchists, where I'm, like you assume, a united you met morality and I Don't think that's why I like It might be, you're right, it might be rise for an organization or a particular militant action or an activist thing, but in general, and I also think in a way, there's a whole lot that gets farmed out when you do that like, but by that I mean like okay, you assume that there's a shared morality and juror, say, anarchist or Marxist group has a, a statement about that, marxist are more likely to pretend they don't have a morality, which is its own special kind of frustration, trust me, it really annoys me, but it Nonetheless that you see both tendencies.
Speaker 1: But but what I find like, for example, i I believe in a lot of things that we would call human rights, but I don't ever use that language because I consider that language to be I Mean literally enlightenment, liberal, bourgeois, like Related to Christian tradition and natural law that we don't hold anymore, etc. And I find that you know a lot of, say, socialist morality, when it goes to reach for concepts and are explicitly already articulated in its particular sectarian concerns, will Just grab the liberal version of something and use it because it hasn't articulated its own form of x or y.
Speaker 2: Or in in the US, it'll just grab the like Christian puritanical version of that also, and so, yeah, we end up using just I mean because, because that's something else like I live in Olympia, washington now, but I'm from, i'm from Texas, from West Texas, and You know, i my whole life when I was younger, like you, you're surrounded by Evangelicals and you don't get to kind of take a passive stance to to that all the time, because it actually like needs a sort of active rejection if you're gonna create any kind of Values that aren't just those, and it doesn't even have to be a kind of You can't return to things, some things that might be common with that, but that like It's so pervasive that you, you have to be active toward it. You can't just Assume, oh, i'm not a believer and that's enough, for, oh, i Reject those extremist ideas and that's enough.
Speaker 1: I find that, for example, like And the north, the northeast of the United States is one of the least religious areas of the country, but it is thoroughly Protestant and the way that it orients towards the world. I actually got in an argument with another anarchist recently who's like, oh, you're just condemning him as Puritan and that's lazy. I'm like, yeah, this would lazy when conservatives do it, but we have to admit that You must forgive me because I'm gonna have to default to Marxist talk That's how I know how to articulate these things but that the social like, the relations of production, are actually formed Not just in a Superstructural way but in a deep way by prior social Conditioning. And in the United States that's, and most of the Anglo or Anglo-speaking world, frankly, that is a Condition that was defined by two or three particular types of Protestantism and that justification in the way we think of ideology. Even when we are generations out from having believers in our family, we still think that way in a lot of ways, the way we articulate this.
Speaker 1: And if you don't believe me, go to another capitalist culture That has a different prior Ideological form, like when I was in South Korea, it was definitely Confucianism, right, like a particular form of Confucianism at that and Watch how it it kind of fills in the gaps of capitalist social relations and see how different it makes certain interactions, and I think that's that's really important to understand and you're right, like you do have to actively reject it.
Speaker 1: Like I'm not, i wasn't raised Protestant at all, i'm from a bit, but I am also like you, i'm from Georgia, i'm from a very evangelical part of the country, my family happens to be Catholics and Jews. But like I Still know that there are certain ways that if I go on default, just in the way we use And I'm not a sapphire where fists I don't believe language determines things this way, but even it is portrayed by the way we use language. There's a lot of like Rejigual, christian Protestant was stuff even in me where it's not in my direct heritage Are my religious experience because I live in a culture that was defined by it and that was the. That was a religious, hegemonic culture prior to capitalism and and Concurrent with it. So it's still here, right.
Speaker 2: And I mean, i see I definitely see a lot of the kind of self-righteousness Come out. That's just a cultural self righteousness. We don't think it's ideological, but like that in in. I think it's easy for us in the US to forget that, like you know, most of the world's not Protestant and so even the Christians in most of the world don't have the same kind of popular mainstream take that that is common here and so like again, like I think that that relates a lot to how kind of Comfortable with our own, our own culture we can be and sort of just not challenged to have to mix that with other stuff. That often and Yeah, and that's sense like Protestantism definitely fits in in other American like practices that are very That reinforce that. You know that that kind of bias or that sort of Discomfort with needing to deal with the plurality, yeah, i think that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: I think. Even Even the way say like we talk about virtue signaling to use something that the right talks too much about but I think it's real The way we signal virtue is very individualistic, in a way that like if you're in, say, a Catholic, like a predominantly historically Catholic country, even if it has a lot of evangelicals in it, now You don't see in the same way like it's just not a thing, you see, and I do think this is actually really important when we come to things like Just approaching like social organization and text and and whatnot that in a way that Articulate sees cultural differences without like essentializing them either, like, oh, you know, mexicans are Catholics, so they're this way, like no, that's not really what I'm saying either.
Speaker 1: There's a whole. Any culture is gonna have like a ton of these things, not just a pro to dominant religious one. The dominant religious one is super important and there is a way like, for example, if you're in Mexico, you could be a diehard atheist, but you have to deal with the Virgin of Guaya Lupe like and I don't like it's not part of like, it's not anywhere in my framework, i don't have to Accept it or eject it. I'm gonna take, you know, tamales on Christmas and Virgin Guaya Lupe day has no effect on me, but it's different in relation to your own culture. I think this is important thing about militancy, though. I wanted to talk to you about this.
Speaker 1: There was a turn away from militancy and both Anarchist and communist rhetoric Between the two Um, between, say, the 1960s and the 1990s. I'm thinking about Freddie Pearlman's militancy, the, the final stage of alienation, which we could argue whether or not that's a Marxist or anarchist text, is one of those texts that actually kind of comes out of both And I think that had to do With a very particular. This is thrown around too often as an explanation, but I think it's true here new left formulation of militancy as kind of out of Quadrays that were based off of like revolutionary cells in the 1920s. But we're totally removed from that Decontextually and we're highly alienating to people because they also required you to Constantly speak in a different way and a talk in a way that that was both highly academic but also on a weird war footing. And what I find interesting about going back to like to militate or you know, look at this term and say Spanish and French, those associations, while there is a strong association with the military, it's there and even in those other languages It is, it didn't, it doesn't look like that.
Speaker 1: So there's not this whole conception of like the rigid, sectarian, frankly weirdo, that Pretends they're in a terror cell in 1920 while they're on campuses in 1968 or 1975. That led to this rejection, right, like it's just That history isn't there in that particular subculture while there are student left subcultures in Latin America and it definitely isn't France, it doesn't, it doesn't have the same I don't know feel to it like I wanted to know what you make of that like. Like it does seem like you're you're almost having to dig back into, like a different languages conception of militancy to get it away from an association that it had had in, say, the United States left From like maybe the mid 60s until like when you and I were kids, like I think that that Maybe we're we're needing to like, like, i don't think we combat so much people's conception of the American, so much people's conception of Militancy inside of the left.
Speaker 2: I think it is a lot more on a Level, on a linguistic level, of being English speakers and just the fact that, like, people are as much as they might be triggered by that term militancy. I think they're also kind of Partial to the term activist and Likewise organizer, and I think that in other countries the term organizer is kind of alienating in a way that like doesn't seem very relevant, seems especially like bureaucratic, and that When we talk about that in a specific fismo, we talk about Activism and militancy the way, the way that I mean again like to think about the theory that would need to connect these instances, that Not everyone needs to be a militant and that it is a lot more important to be like Cultivating the quality of the militants who are working for, who are doing the work for an organization, and for the people in social movements, to recognize that For movements to be successful, militancy needs to be a factor in that.
Speaker 2: But that that is even something that's like been important in our study and, like you said before, like we in the militant kindergarten, we interact with people who We often term it like radicalizing and radicalized people, so that we're looking for Situations where these people come in contact with each other in learning environments, not Where where someone's got a kind of fake Way of sharing what they know with someone else, but where we're both genuinely part of a kind of collective study realized through that collectivity and What that. What that does is it positions activists as potential supporters of militancy, as potentially more active participants in social movements sometimes, but as also dependent on militants, and Kind of that idea that, like we don't need to decide. Like I'm a militant, we need to learn about what that is so that then we can make an educated decision about how much we want to commit to something, but without understanding that What, what is ended up happening and what we've, you know, related to A burnout cycle. That's very common in the US and I mean might be common other places also. I'm not as sure about that, but, like, what that's largely related to is largely related to is people not, you know, being able to, to Return to things, to learn in a way that's collective and not being able to share that, that learning in a way that Actually empowers us to choose whether we want to militate, and instead we, we literally tend to find ourselves Militating and burning out and the only way we sort of discover militancy is because some, like you said, some cadre cornered off some, some young people taught them their way to speak and You almost have to learn about the larger scene through this, like really tiny limbs, and that that kind of Sectarianism is definitely like a practice that a specific is, mo, is, is rejecting and That that's yeah, like not just being rejected, like you know, amongst anarchists, but definitely amongst Marxist as well, amongst all, all people involved in in social struggle.
Speaker 2: A term We've used in the militant kindergarten to talk about. This is also kind of like stationary, where people have like a thing they're doing, but they get really attached to the station they're at And what we, what we lose, is the movement that, like we don't. We don't need to necessarily articulate the critiques of the Individual stations, but being stuck in stations is not part of revolutionary Militancy. Moving through stations is is what we mean to be doing Cultivating that flow of militancy and not cornering militants and like cornering people into becoming militants.
Speaker 1: This is that. That's actually some interesting and good points, i think There you know we talk about cadre is one of the one of the ironies into this. Burnout cycles are also dependent on fairly alienated people Who have a lot of leisure time and you know, that's why they have, since the 1960s, focused so much on students, because It's fairly alienated people. You normally are in your 20s. You're pretty highly educated by definition of being a student, of the Student of the United States, and you're educated by definition of being there. So you have some skills or you wouldn't be there and they don't have to skill you, which is Also part of the problem. I, that's a big problem, and by that I mean like we should be skilling each other. We shouldn't just be using people skills in a way that just exhaust them. And You can just see this trend where it's like oh well, you know, left it's not as true anymore, i will admit, but when I was a kid, you know, and when I was in college, even like you would just meet people like left isn't what you do and your 20s, until you become a good Democrat because there's something to support you, or, if you really get edgy, you become a Republican and Of course that's that's. That's not a great model for anything. Like It's one limited to a very specific milieu. It's two, it's a rat race. And three, like you don't ever actually like build.
Speaker 1: I think you saw this more in Marxist organizations, but, like You know, organizations that have the same damn leadership for like three generations. You know, because you're just going through cycles of these young people who were Highly motivated I used to call it the children's crusade and That's a big, big problem I've become. You know, one thing I have taken from a lot of Communitarians and anarchists back into like talking about Marxism is like no, we have to think about this is building Functional internal communities to be able to keep people going, to educate them, to skill them, to help them, to help them to Immediately and long term, not just off the promise of revolution later, because we don't know that we're going to see that and that's a gamble That over time actually is less and less logical for someone to engage in. Like it's, like that's the only reason you're there and you're looking at like Well, revolution is like on a hundred, two hundred, your timeline, i don't give a shit right. Like that's a problem.
Speaker 2: I think that that relates a lot back to the, the organizational dualism of a specific mo, and this idea that the Ideological political level can focus on those longer term things and that that actually unburdened the social level to be able to focus on Shorter term wins that actually do Improve people's situation and their awareness of the conditions of their struggle. That, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: No, i think this is actually important because what I was reading, what I was reading your operismo document I mean the operation, especially Especifismo documents operismo is Italian, different.
Speaker 1: I was actually thinking Like, oh, this actually operates on principles that have been organically figured out by these Brazilian anarchists that look a lot like cybernetic theory about how, like, you build recursion in, you have different parts of the group, have a different Responsibility.
Speaker 1: Yes, you need ideological co in community cohesion, but those are at different levels and what you're doing, like on a day to day basis or in specific action, like And one of the the worst traits, i think, of rendering Politics down to either just an ideological position, which is the Marxist, sectarian left, or moral position, which is a lot of the anarchist, sectarian left, is, like these other levels of necessary things.
Speaker 1: You know, if you want a party, if you want a successful you know operations group, if you want any of this, you need a bunch of these things to be kind of Developing and conversation with each other, where you're not just trying to flatten out all these, like flatten out the both the long and immediate time horizon into one thing, but also like the different needs of your members, how to keep you from burning out You know how to make it so militants don't only talk to other militants, because I think, like it's literally even just this idea that, like every person you know, you don't need to convert them or quit knowing them, and and that I think people have that idea like not just that necessarily militants of an organization do.
Speaker 2: But I think people that aren't have that idea of what that would mean is like, yeah, i'm not, i can't commit to that because you know, i do love my parents and they're never going to be anarchists or they're, they're never going to be for revolution or something like that, and yeah, i'm going to lay that at Marxist fault.
Speaker 1: For some of that I'm willing to take. Take one for the team here and I can actually tell you, when you start seeing that a Marxism After the trauma of the second international falling apart, the Bolsheviks come out with their 21 necessary, necessary conditions and it kicks a lot of anarchist out of any related social movement. But it evens like Eugene Debs can't join that. They're the communist international, so it immediately breaks the group. But one of the things that's required is constant purging of people who are not militant enough And who not, who do not hold to the 21 required steps. And then you add to that in 1921 the adoption of a total faction ban. Well, if that's your image of militancy, which I always like to point out, that's not what they did when they actually won in Russia either. That's all post that. But if that's your, your image of militancy, that's. That is a recipe for constantly having to cut out comrades, family, friends, split, you know, over small stuff, over minor disagreements, and I think it creates a particularly fragile political grouping actually that tends to, over time, unnecessarily become more and more authoritarian, because You're you're literally kicking out a lot, of, a lot of the diversity and thus a lot of the people in your group that would keep it in check and keep it. And then you have to have a lot of the quality checks and come in from having multiple stuff like that that you lose when you're constantly purging people. And I do think that's built into a lot of people's notion of militancy and then, probably even more important for English speakers, particularly Americans, that's also built in the Protestant churches, those two things together, because you know you think of like the church militant. You think of the crazy sectarian you know Pentecostal weirdo like yelled at you at school or something like, like, and I don't want to deal with that. Like you know, personally I just don't like that's that. That's not a vision of, of social inclusion. That, i think, is, i think most people naturally recoil from that like it because it's it's alienating. You don't want to cut off everyone who has a disagreement with you. It also seems to posit that, like politics is only possible if you have total unity on everything, which is a ridiculous proposition The person who argues with people all day. And then I think, on top of that, you actually picked up on it. You didn't say it outright, but I think it's implied in a lot of what we talked about language.
Speaker 1: Militants speak in a way that often only militants understand them. Like it could be opposed militants, but they know what you mean where a lot of the other people around you are like what the fuck is this guy saying? Like, like I don't understand. Like what's the difference between the popular and United Front? again, like, why am I supposed to care about who did what to whom in Spain? like, why do I need to know the specific weirdo definition of imperialism? to like, do any? like you know I, these are all Marx's examples. I'm sure if I really thought about I could come up with anarchist ones. But like, i think that's also like it makes you ineffective as a militant or an organizer or whatever. I think it's interesting.
Speaker 1: We're talking about you were talking about things sounding bureaucratic. Activist to me is almost the same word as militant as far as like what its root means. But at this point I associate it so thoroughly with NGOs that like it kind of makes me feel gross. And then organizer, you know I, i work with a union, i'm a union rep, so I'm an organizer. But I often don't know what the hell people do when they say that like, i'm like OK. So What do you mean by like? I guess that's true for militant, but if someone's militating for something, i can at least look up what they're militating for. If they're organizing I don't always know that I'm going to know You know I'm organizing for the day I say, yeah, but what is it that you actually do? like?
Speaker 2: Well, and you know, that's that even you know that that being able to look up what it is and like learn about it, that that's a lot of what we're trying to do with with militant kindergarten is that Militant kindergarten is not an end. The Center for Especifismo studies is not an arm of a political organization. That's important because it does have ideological elements. It is an anarchist organization. We are studying an anarchist text from an anarchist perspective, but we are not the the. You know the objectives of the organization is not to form militants for an organization, but to help people understand what is a Especifismo, what is the best, what is militancy? from that perspective, what do we expect?
Speaker 2: What do we expect Especifismo militants do, or how do they conceive of things, and then people can determine what they, what their relationship to Especifismo is. They can determine what they, how they can interact with other other people who do maybe consider themselves as, as some people who, who don't that, that that kind of being able to look it up and know, and that it's also not just a kind of personal, like opinion, personal opinion about politics, that it's actually a collectively formed opinion connected to internationally articulated positions and things like yeah, established over time that that that kind of transparency is. I mean, yeah, it takes, it takes away the possibility of a very manipulative political level organization, but what it opens the political organization up to doing is staying relevant by actually communicating with people, and that that's the.
Speaker 2: That's the dialectic we're working with. An Especifismo is between having these ideals and what's actually the real context, and the theory being that this thing that's able to actually make those ideals present in the real context instead of just At a meeting or in a text or yeah some some removed situation, because I think that that's, that's part of it.
Speaker 2: It's not just that sectarianism is, you know, problematic on a numbers level. It's problematic on a relevancy level that, like there is no way, if your organization or your practices are holed up in themselves, that they are relevant to what's going on. Like you said, you need that feedback from what what's happening in order to have a critical, a self critical perspective. If you don't have that, that practice, then you don't have a thing to be trying to Be relevant to. That even relevance becomes an ideological element and that's.
Speaker 2: That's probably worst case scenario, right. Like we're relevant because we have the best ideas yeah, we're relevant because we have the invariant position.
Speaker 1: Relevant because we have the correct program, even though our program hasn't worked at what it said. It doesn't like you know 100 years. We're relevant because we're the oldest thing and we've been around the longest, so we yeah, yeah, we're relevant because we have, you know, a direct this is where Catholic thinking but like we have a direct line to the Apostles of Communism, you know, like You know, we can all think of organizations that claim such things, you know so like like one thing that that we found right at the beginning.
Speaker 2: so so, like you know, we studied this text as just a kind of traditional study group, like just any leftist study group might be, and it's it's a it's a pretty long, dense, theoretical text which is, yeah, not, not easy anyway, but it's especially not easy for American English speakers. that's not a common thing we deal with. and so We read it and people, kind of, you know, came in and out of the study group week after week, and when we finished, we had a lot of other people involved and we just decided, like you know, a lot of people miss the beginning this was dense, let's start over and we literally just started over and in doing that we, you know, deepened our understanding of the text but also kind of started to establish What became referred to as kindergarten.
Speaker 2: Is this idea that, like, kindergarten is obviously like a return to basics, right, like let's go back to the first lessons.
Speaker 2: But then it's also this idea that, like, even after you are done with kindergarten, kindergarten didn't disappear, right, you went to first grade or second grade or whatever, but like kindergarten still like a place in the school, like it's still a place where new people show up and there's people there and materials for them to learn what is going on in kindergarten.
Speaker 2: And I think, like that's an important thing not to forget, because that's exactly what that was, what, what had always been typical in study circles here before was that we would study something and then, before it's even done, we're fighting this tendency to be like OK, so what are we learning this for? or like, ok, so are we going to do what this book says? or, and and it's it's hard, kind of, like you said, to engage with the theory and the method of the methodology of a text and learn it and just learn it, instead of constantly asking this question like OK, so are we part of this tendency? we just read about, because that's what makes people unable to learn about things that I don't know opposing tendencies or read about I don't know how, how capitalist businesses organize or what are, what are their motivations and things right because it's like well, I'm an anti capitalist.
Speaker 2: So if I ever learn about that, what if I became one of them or something you know?
Speaker 1: yeah, there's a, there's a fear contagion that I think I often find hilarious because I'm like well, you know, some of the things that these businesses do, they do because they work and some of what they work for we don't want to touch, but some of what they work for is that they're not going to be able to do that They work for. We do like, and often I feel like we're we're trying to reinvent the real just because, like, we don't want to say we took anything from prior. Organizations are like the way churches are organized or you know, i remember the whole the left is not a church debate and I'm like, no, it isn't. There's a whole lot of stuff churches do That if we could do them, we'd have a much more robust left wing movement. So, yeah, i mean it's not a church, but so what like? And I think that sort of that's important.
Speaker 1: I often point out to people that, like You know, yes, there's a long comprehended history from cybernetics. That's my interest and I it overlaps with a specific piece, mo, from what I read from the stuff you sent me, it's not quite the same, but what the people who really perfected cybernetics were like Capitalists who were weirdly interested in Soviet theories And utilize them in capitalistic ways. And then one of those guys helped the Codor, nice and Chile organize an information systems that actually seems to have worked, that empowered workers, not just in the. I think a lot of people think it's the computers. That's not it. It's actually just enabling people to get communication facilitated between workers groups and ways that decrease the dependence on bureaucratic systems, and so workers groups could do things and get information much quicker.
Speaker 1: Did it totally get rid of our acquisition? no, and it also didn't help that the social Democrat didn't do it, the military. So you know, when a military leader defected they were able to do what they do, but nonetheless I think it's really important. But if you had some kind of vaguely like well, this comes out of the business consulting world I mean, specifically in the case of Stanford beer, that was literally his job You would have been DLA, like just immediately. I also think about that, like, ok, so you do. You think the Soviet Union shouldn't have used factories when it was not. Not that it should use factories the way it did. I have a lot of concerns about some of that, but like, because that's a capitalist technology that's dumb, like.
Speaker 2: You know that that kind of reminds me so like.
Speaker 2: one thing that also happens when you interact with with people in other parts of the world and other languages is that you encounter different problems of connotation.
Speaker 2: So recently I kind of encountered something interesting because in like an early video trying to understand a lot of this, because, like, that's another thing, is like in order to do these studies.
Speaker 2: one thing that came out of this because these are translations is this producing secondary sources, not as a way of, you know, not needing to go to the main thing, but as a way of supplementing that to, to produce these sources in English so that we're not always dependent on the phrasing from the translation or from the initial text, but we're able to actually articulate the same ideas into English, in an English text. And that in in making those secondary sources, i made some videos that are just kind of like short introduction videos to as best as a feast mode, defining some terms from social anarchism and organization, and one of the slides in in one of those little presentations is about technology and how like technology will be used by workers to reduce working hours and to provide what we need Instead of like just produce profit for capitalists and that that was taken by by French viewers as being kind of a like a fully automated luxury, communist kind of a thing that, like technology was going to be the thing that brought that about.
Speaker 2: And it's totally that, like in the US context, we as as anarchists, we have to kind of sometimes explicitly nod to technology so that it's clear we're not the anarchists that are against civilization and attempting to go to some kind of a proto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, particularly in the world, Particularly in Olympia. Yeah, yeah, you're not John Sarasen, kevin Tucker, are Derek Jensen, to have a whole spectrum of those guys? Yes it, yes, you do have to differentiate that, whereas, like I guess you have similar. I was actually. This is, this is a related problem.
Speaker 1: I was thinking the other day about co hey C toes marks in the Anthropocene which, reading I know it talks about degrowth socialism and I was like huh, this degrowth socialism have the same communication and German and Japanese.
Speaker 1: I know CTO knows English, this is not, but but I was still like this book was originally written in Japanese and we're having to beta about it around, books that are written in English, like half of socialism or whatever. And from reading the book, i'm not sure he's arguing the same thing And is this an issue of like the connotation is different Or did he oversee that and know the term? and actually that does change the way I read that book, depending on what the answer to that is, that's so there's a lot of that. I mean, yeah, because also the May use are so different, like It's. It's just You know very clear that some of these things, like you know, it's interesting because it probably doesn't come up in Spanish, because there is kind of a Spanish version of primitism primitism, but other than, like jot commit, i can't think of a French one actually.
Speaker 2: So It's, it's, it's kind of that's an interesting problem, and I've like a very real, present problem, like you said, like it's not like some kind of online thing, like that's a real, present current, that like in in North America, like we do have to, at least in the anarchist world we have to distinguish ourselves from, and so That's, that's like yeah, it seemed totally normal to me But super stuck out to them as being something really really bizarre.
Speaker 2: But, you know, sort of related to that like one thing. That another thing that came up like with our early studies is in Especifismo we talk about this organizational dualism and that. That that's we use the terms political level and social level to talk about these two axes of action, and that we're In English, like you know. We talked about this kind of triggering terms and vocabulary. When English speakers read political level and some of this has to do with the structure of sentences in English We put that modifier political before level. So there's not a lot of understanding that of a sort of hierarchy of Terms in a sentence where we see that political is modifying level and That doesn't seem like that big of a deal, except that what happened is that in practice people just read political level as politics Mmm, it just is, read is the same thing, because we saw the word political first and political level becomes a term and.
Speaker 2: And we see that I think happened a lot of. We've encountered that a bunch in our in our discussions. You know, Something very common in an anarchist organizing is mutual aid. But we don't tend to think about that being aid. That's mutual.
Speaker 1: We just tend to think about it as a term mutual aid, mutual aid which Which easily degenerates into charity if you don't understand the mutual part of it.
Speaker 2: And and that that is not a problem grammatically in French or Spanish, because those modifiers come after and they need to agree with whatever the noun is they're modifying.
Speaker 2: So it is very clear when you're talking about a thing modified by something else and or a kind of that thing, whereas in English whichever word comes first, we have a tendency to jump on that and really see that the whole rest of the term through that first, that first part of a term right, because the adjective is actually the well, the advert Adjective, sometimes ever the modifier, usually in English, is they actually Differentiating thing, not the noun most of the time, like there are.
Speaker 1: There are a few exceptions to that, but you're right, we see political level, we're like well level. It's not that important, political being the modifiers. What's the like levels? Yeah, and I think that's that's actually a key one. Another one I think is interesting is And I've dealt with this before what social means in different languages or even in English at different times, like We tend to think of social, as You know, as cultural maybe, and not as just, like you know, although it still shows up in social class.
Speaker 2: But that's one of the few times where that we ignore the first word and you know, i think part of that is also something else that we talk about in a specific fismo is Like popular power, popular protagonist, and that in English it's not as common to use the term popular when we're talking about Social things.
Speaker 2: We tend to use popular to talk about celebrities or something trends, marketing, and that when we use popular, that's another term that that, yeah, i guess in in our theory that's become important to I don't know if it's recover or to establish that in English but to, to be able to talk about popular as a, as a modifier of the, the, the massiveness of social organizing that's necessary for Transforming society, for revolutionary rupture, that that we can't be thinking. That when we think culturally, we need to recognize, like, how, maybe, maybe this is pretty common all over the world today, but, like in American culture, like culture is subcultural and broken up into a lot of things, and that's pretty, pretty obvious to people right now. Everybody knows, like I don't know, the other people at the coffee shop Don't listen to the same music you do, or whatever right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just a given but we don't recognize that, like if we're confusing cultural with social or cultural with popular, then we are We're thinking of something significantly smaller than we need to be actually conceiving.
Speaker 1: That's actually a great point, but I was actually thinking the only time where popular is older, meaning really gets saved in and English is populism, and that has a different set of connotations. It might be problematic, but like, like, that is Where that, you know, that's the only place where you really see it like, yes, we might say popular uprising, but I guess it's It's so confused by the, you know, marketing and popular, popular uprising is the point where Pepsi decides to make an ad about the uprising, or right, yeah, bad idea.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, there's a lot of that. Some of that can be, some I can be changed by translations, but, like you said, with militant, the, the connotations to the, to the two obvious translations that you could use for it. In English, activists, which I think Literally was a way to rebrand people away from militant, because it it's at its root, means the same thing, like to activate, to militate. There's a slight difference in connotation in English, but there's a huge difference between the connotation a militant and activist, but not between militate and activate, which I think is which you know we can over. You can overdo you like historical epistemology, but it does seem to like tell you something And then organizer, yeah, i think it's just, i don't, i don't actually don't think it's correct for what they're doing, in so much the organizer still has meaning. It's actually more specific than militant, like. So It also interestingly, an organizer. An organizer Has the implication of a bureaucratic function, even in English, because it implies that you were organizing people as if they are objects, whereas a militant does not necessarily imply Any relationship of authority over other people in your group. It just means you are militating for that group and you know, like.
Speaker 1: I think that's, you know, the and these things are subtle and to some degree, maybe they're not super important, but there are times where I think they are. And You know we talk about the tendency on the left for bureaucracization. I know I do. It's something I really worry about a lot and I can't help but think that, like all the language that I see a lot of leftist users, like purely bureaucratic language, and that that, in a way, betrays a maybe not even intentional orientation that they have developed because of the structures of Actually, i would say more than language or legal structure. So you know, these are things that are important to deal with. You know, when I was going through these texts, i actually found it very interesting to go back and rethink about these things and think about what it would mean to educate people and To make some of these things strange again, like. That's one thing I will tell you. We talk about multilingual education in the beginning. I think this is another thing that's good.
Speaker 1: When I, when I was a, when I lived outside of the United States, which I did for seven and a half, eight years One of the things that it did is it made my own language weird to me in ways that I had to recognize things about it That I had not before, and Not that I think. You know I tend to Disagree with a somewhat liberal assumption that if you change language actually fundamentally change way people think. But I do think if you look at language you will learn the way pay people the, the way people think, and So There's a whole lot that becomes kind of clear Even in, like power relationships or specificity or all these things, the moment you start making these words weird by having to engage with them In a completely foreign context, a the context of another language. That's even better if you're dealing with non-native speakers and they make you like, make you start asking like why do you say that that way? and you're like I Got no fucking clue. But yeah, go on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, i think that that that that relates a lot to in in English, like, basically, like English speakers like We're I Think it's the same as as white people not maybe be needing to recognize white culture because it is the dominant culture and what that allows people to do is not be aware of their engaging in a White dominant culture until they're actually a face with some other culture, and that I think that Because English is this dominant thing globally, people all over the world that don't speak English as their first language Are forced to learn things about their own language because of how they have to interact with English, and that Even just that kind of confrontation, kind of like you said, like it's not England, it's not American English speakers fault or other English speakers in the world, it's not their fault that they're part of this dominant system, but it's also okay to you know, make them deal with multi lingual Texts or to look at something in another language.
Speaker 2: that that will not break their eyes and it will. They will survive the situation. That that actually leaving and not knowing every single thing about what was said is okay and and a normal humbling thing for people who are not native English speakers. I think right and yeah, oh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that you know. It's actually funny because there's there's another side to this that we have not hit on, but I think it's very true is That when languages it may stream for you a lot of times you can. We've talked about the specific ways we use languages alienating. There's other times where we use general language and We don't realize That we're not talking about the same thing because it's like disguised by using the same word.
Speaker 1: And if you really deal with that, if you're having to deal with that in an area of translation, i think you become hyper aware of of those instances as well, like where there's like kind of a natural language vagueness that You have to deal with There and different I will say this different languages. Actually you talk about French and Spanish. Different languages deal with it differently. French literally has an academy that has to prove words, which is part of why I think French neologisms get so specific and weird, because they're you know, they have to go through the Academy Francaise and they can't show all this foreign influence. And then Spanish is a lot more organic, it's a lot more like English in the way it handles that, but they're both different than English and I Think that's really important to do, because I think It's a way that will model for you Dealing with people who think differently from you in your own language that you don't even notice.
Speaker 1: And yeah, there's obvious forms of that race, gender, i mean, those are the big ones. But there's also regional differences, i would even say subclass differences, like we have to deal with. Like there's pretty big cultural differences within, say, the working class or any oppressed class like that you have to kind of deal with. And if you're just assuming that a way that just because they seem nominally like you come to some abstract category and you don't look at it very deeply, you can make some very mistaken assumptions that will really affect your ability to achieve your goals or to achieve political power, to free yourself from some kind of oppressive structure, et cetera. Like it really is kind of important in some key ways.
Speaker 2: I think that that's also where, like multilingualism and, in this sense, also internationalism really what's the word? like I mean, they require a kind of theoretical understanding of what you're trying to do. That can't be so based on the exact word. It can't be so based on exactly your ideological values, because there will be a need to interact with other ideological values, and that kind of theoretical perspective is able to, like it has been able, for us in our studies, to inform our local context that, like it's not just a sort of internationalism as a word to put on your list of principles or something It really is this idea that like, if you're able to develop collective study, collective and, in this case, collective study of a text right For this militant formation and with ethical practices that are related to an actual liberatory pedagogy, then what you start to produce is collective analysis.
Speaker 2: And then that collective analysis is not just based on hot personal takes, it's based on, like, a tradition of other people's words also, and that intertextuality is extremely important for figuring out what is politics in English in the US today. That, like, what is revolutionary politics? It obviously can't be personal opinions about politics And I think that, like, it's taken us a really circuitous route to find how to start producing what would be political analysis, what would be political theory or political ideology that's relevant for our context. But we didn't do it by just digging deeper into a locality. We did it by having this dialogue between this international current, which is growing in relevancy to our local context, through our study of it, and it's not in a way that's like I really like this idea. Let's pick it up. It's actually in a studying it that we're able to produce analysis we could not have been arriving at on our own.
Speaker 2: So, like, in addressing what are the difficulties of a text, or why study a text right, like if you don't already have objectives for it, it's hard for people to engage in difficult learning. That's a big part of why people don't learn languages, because they have this idea that they are not going to I don't know travel or they're not going to use that or something. That's kind of what Americans always say about learning Spanish is why they would learn. It is because it's useful. But there's this sort of idea of like you're letting all that use be determined by something outside of yourself. There's not a kind of like what would I use that thing for? And in that sense, like, these personal opinions about politics are really limiting to what we can do collectively, and I think that through our study we've been able to actually like be part of producing these new ideas that we were actually struggling to even understand in the beginning, and not only are they more clear, but they are more locally relevant. Now We've been able to refine them and relate ourselves more to what's going on.
Speaker 2: Like the necessity of being relevant with our ideas is no longer a sort of debate point. That seems like a very obvious thing now, and I think in the US what we would say is that, like, a lot of our organizing is stuck in this middle space between social level and political level And that we don't really know what we're to do with that. We have a very like ideological click that knows it needs to get bigger but doesn't know how to even talk amongst itself, and so it won't get more political and ideologically unified and it won't get more popular either, and that kind of. In a very concrete, practical sense, what is Besafis most talking about is just picking a direction for that grouping or organization to be moving toward. That staying where it's at is never gonna be sufficient.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. Actually, there's a great bunch of points. One of the things I think about there is you made a great pitch for methodological, not just nominal, internationalism. It's not just that we, in fact, i often tell people like your position on what's going on in another country is, frankly, generally not relevant. What is relevant is that you understand the situation in that country, can speak to its relationship to the international world and can support people who ask you for support. But in some degree like, for example, i was talking to someone about Peru or something and I was like, in some degree, our position on, like, what happens to Castileo is not relevant at all to what happens to Castileo. It's just not. And that's not why you should learn this. It's not so you can have some kind of grand political strategy that you can move with these leaders in other countries. It's more about, like one, building solidarity, building bridges, but also really understanding the way the world interacts with each other and where these fracture points are and how that affects your own society, et cetera, and I think that's actually a super important takeaway from what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Another important takeaway is ideological unity and the discipline that comes from that tends to come from actually doing something together more than comes from like profess belief.
Speaker 1: That's also super important. I think I have a lot more unity with people I work with, even if I don't agree with them on hardly anything. And yes, that doesn't mean in some cases you do have to pick who you work with carefully, but in a lot of times the ideological question is It's just backwards, like the assumption is the ideological unity comes first, and I'm like I don't mean to tell people that we should be like Democrats and Republicans, but it sure as fuck isn't true for Democrats and Republicans that ideological unity comes before whatever the unity around power, the unity around their projects, like, in fact, if trying to even figure out what their ideology is is really fucking hard, and so, yes, it is some generic form of liberalism in some broad sense, but that's so broad that it's not particularly helpful. So I think those two points are great and I think they're good points to tie this up on. If you were going to tell people to search out what you guys are doing, where would you tell them to start You?
Speaker 2: can check out our website, which is aspesofismoestudiesorg. And yeah, like the kindergarten, i mean a big part of that is that militant kindergarten is an annual project that we mean to be maintaining. So we do mean to go back to kindergarten because kind of the last meaning of that is that, like kindergarten teachers think about kindergarten every year and like not in a way that's old, but in a way they're willing to refresh and like re-engage with, and so we also mean for kindergarten not to be just a you know oh, i learned it that it is there for people to come and learn and complete and know and go do whatever with, but that it's also there for people who want to engage and militate, for other people to still have that station to go to. So we kind of think about it like if the text which is dense to read is like a shelter out in the woods somewhere and it's really far away and there's useful stuff there. But we can't take everybody. People have to take themselves there. We can help whoever's willing to make the effort, get there and we will make sure that we all leave together and come back together. But we have to do part of that work on our own. We can't carry a whole person there, and what that means is that by being present in our collective effort, you are factored into what needs to happen. Your needs are part of what's being addressed, but it's not going to be easy just because of that. There's not some magic way to dumb all this down, to make it not really hard and not something that we study forever.
Speaker 2: A major thing about this from an educational perspective is that kind of expropriating our skills that we get from universities and things like that, and that's a big thing that I've been able to do is that I can study a text for a long time.
Speaker 2: So a lot of what's allowed us to have this kindergarten is studying the same text for so many years and not needing to be dogmatic about it, and I think a lot of that has to do with studying it in a context that's pedagogically oriented.
Speaker 2: It's related to education And this idea that educational militancy is something that, as educators, we don't question. If you're put in a situation with people learning, your ethical dilemmas are a lot more clear And the amount of effort you'll put into defending that is pretty high, and I think that's something I kind of realized about myself as an educator that when we start doing these things collectively, other people realize too in this way that it's not a lip service to say we're all teachers and all students, that there are ways where we can create environments where that happens, and there's also ways we can create environments where we take turns doing that. And it doesn't have to be that you needed to know everything before you came into that space that there is space for new people to open up perspectives that we couldn't see otherwise. And that is exactly why we want the political level to have contact with the social level, why we would want radicalized people to have contact with radicalizing people.
Speaker 1: That's actually great. It's also a way to like as a teacher. Something I think about is reduced dependency on the teacher. if the teacher is part of the zone of proximal development to use Vagatsky talk good old Soviet education talk Then there's expertise is still important, but it is not hierarchized in the same way And also it becomes less frail, like I just tell people like you think of teachers that you have who refuse to change their teaching about something from when they started in, like 1992 or 1985. You know, like those classes are like worksheets They suck, they're not very effective either, unless, even if they're a super dynamic lecturer, they've been given the same lecture for 35 years. You know that there's a problem And also I think it's good for both sides, like you said. In that sense And it's funny because people would laugh at this in terms of politics, but the moment I actually like think of it like your experience of a classroom It becomes a much clearer dynamic of what you need to do And I really think that's great.
Speaker 2: I think that there's a, you know, there's a class line that a teacher is kind of always positioned on right And in that way, like it really relates to this idea of engaging with people who maybe have different motivations in struggle And that, like, just being a teacher doesn't put you on the side of students No, absolutely it does not. But being a teacher it puts you in the position to figure out how to be on the side of students.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it's a choice you can make, you're on And like I think that you know there's a very much idea that like we need teachers, but that it's not because we need, like the authorities to be teaching us the thing. We need the people who are willing to engage with the line explicitly and who are willing to take on the ethical implications of messing that up right. Because, I think that's not nothing And that's definitely overlooked by people who don't work in education or, again, like militants who are not militating for education.
Speaker 1: That's a great, actually that is a great point to end on and I definitely agree with that. I think a lot about what you've said tonight actually is something I think a lot about. Like creating groups that educate themselves, making sure there's always opening levels for people to start, making sure that they're. I think one of the challenges and maybe it's something that can be that you can be creative about is, you're right, kindergarten teachers build up expertise in kindergarten teaching. You can't handle a group of 12 graders and they do it easily. But I do sometimes wonder I do think a lot about this is if a group like this gives you the power to every now and then be like okay, now you got to go through a 304 course and take a year away from this and then come back with more expertise and stuff like that. Because the other thing that group education like this does is it deprioritizes, having one person as a state official in that spot literal spot to do the job, and I think that's also super important. But but yeah, i mean there's there's there's so much here to talk about and I think you've done a good job talking about it. I'm gonna link all the stuff you mentioned in the show notes, and so people can check this out, and I will. I will say, you know, i'm a Marxist.
Speaker 1: Our relationship to anarchism is always what it is, which is complicated. It ranges from comrades who we have a different timescale about to accusing each other of being in the CIA a fun pastime. A lot of people spend a whole lot of time doing it, and I think it's interesting that something like this is actually useful, regardless of. You know, yes, it comes from an anarchist position, yes, it is an anarchist text, but I think I agree with like like 95% of what I've read so far. So it's like. It's like. Well, yeah, it is, but there's a lot of ways that that we could utilize this just in like socialist militancy in general, and it would enable us to work with different groups and ideologies as long as they're not utterly reactionary in their stated ideology in a way that's useful and productive, as opposed to the. You know the self-righteous signification that we often see in all of our ideological mil-yous. It is still fucking alienating. Anyone is not in it.
Speaker 2: It's like I mean in that sense, like I said before, like unburdening the social level and burdening those social movements of the ideological disputes, like just having those on our own before we go to those social spaces, could really streamline, like working together and people might actually know, oh, we should work with them, we shouldn't work with them, we should work with them on these things and not on these other things, and we don't have to figure that out in the social space.
Speaker 2: I think that that all kinds of different revolutionary is socialist currents and tendencies in the US, and maybe in other places too, are very bad at that, and that we don't have to pollute the the social level with our ideology, that we want ideology in social movements.
Speaker 2: We don't want social movements in ideology. That's that's the really important distinction there. And it's also, like you know, i think, that when it comes to like your, your show, or I've seen, i've seen a growing interest in this. You had the STP people on recently and, yeah, i think that that there is a growing international tendency to learn that that this is becoming its own kind of thing where we're able to see you know, relationships or commonalities in the practice of what we're doing and all of those aspects you mentioned, like leaving it, leaving space open for new people to show up, and like not not holding ourselves away with only the most experienced people who already speak a certain lingo and yeah, yeah, that's all super important and, conversely, i think, maybe also teaching people.
Speaker 1: It's okay to feel weird when you encounter certain lingo, because you know there is another tendency and we haven't talked about it, but this tendency to also patronize the shit out of everybody.
Speaker 2: But like I'm gonna talk to them, like a worker who I assume is illiterate, i'm always gonna dumb down like this really hard text because it's hard to read and it's like no people could also learn how to read hard stuff and maybe we do it slowly maybe we, maybe we learn new methods because we're doing it so slowly and being afraid of that is such a problem that yeah, like goes back to, like you said, that methodological emphasis on, on internationalism and maybe even into, like the methodological interest in collective study, instead of just learn the content and take it out, go back to activism. It's like maybe we need to actually work on how we're doing.
Speaker 1: That might be, part of what we're working on too absolutely and in fact I would say methodological study right now is the only way you're gonna avoid general illiteracy. So like, by that I mean like our entire society right now is geared towards and I'm gonna almost like Jonathan Hader, some conservative or something, but I think it's true geared towards commodified interaction of very brief seconds that are meant to tie you in, to sell you stuff, and the best way to get through that isn't. I'm a superhuman with super discipline and I can undo the executive function problems of that everybody else has through my sheer will, because good fucking luck, guy. Like I always talk about this in terms of generational problems, but I'm also like, yeah, but even like baby boomers. The moment you gave him a computer they got stupid.
Speaker 1: So the the the issue here actually is like, what social supports can you do? you're more likely to do the work if there's people who you need to engage with and you're more likely to stretch it out because you're gonna talk about it and integrate it and you're gonna have a reason to like jog that part of your executive function and you're more likely to learn it. You know how you just you know I'm a very educated person. I feel like people can tell I can lord it over people if I want to, but you know how much stuff I have to teach myself to be able to do this. Actually, i do it partly for me because otherwise my, my, my reason to learn and process and like make it articulatable just isn't always there like it's like oh, if I'm just doing this for me, like who cares?
Speaker 2: like I think it can sometimes be. It can sometimes seem a little dishonest when I say it, but at the kindergarten sessions sometimes I feel like I learn the most and it's a little unfair to new people because it's like like I'm able to use so much of their questions to learn so much. That like, yeah, it sometimes seems a little a little imbalance because it's like by by interacting with new people, my perspective is so like freshened up and like renovated that and and because I I've done that I've been reading this text for for years already I have like very specific problems that I get really stuck in and can't kind of get out. And that fresh perspective is so helpful to me that sometimes, yeah, like it can seem almost one-sided because like all of their investigating new curiosities just totally opens up new paths for me to understand larger aspects of the text and yeah, it's like I said, like it can sometimes maybe seem not, not, not true, but it's definitely like the way I feel.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's like I get so much out of interacting with everybody. Yeah, i think you know, same with with this discussion right now is that, like we have to remember, conversation is improvised and like yes, it's inscripted.
Speaker 2: We're, we're making this up, and that means we're going places we weren't ready for, and that's that's actually like a super important part of thinking is not just having the ironed out polished part of thinking, but the shooting off the hip, you know, like not knowing where we're going yeah, you know it's funny, i was actually thinking about this the other day.
Speaker 1: I don't write a lot of articles I'm working on a book but I generally I I do. You know I don't love Derrida, and for those you don't get why I said that. I think one thing that Derrida did point out, though, is this overreliance on textuality for seriousness of learning, because conversations seem pretty ephemeral but the dialogue is super important. I do not, like I can have a dialogue with a book, but that dialogue is not gonna, generally speaking, unless the author is still alive and can literally hear what I'm saying. Is is not gonna lead me in any like two-way street about how to develop my concepts, how to change my approach to people, how to, and so I've been a big proponent of both thinking out loud and getting stuff wrong and emitting it super important and also and taking the responsibility for that. But also like going through these conversations and sometimes finding people that you share like 60% of a worldview with, because I don't think performative debating is all that useful, but the the 40% of contestation is where a whole lot of stuff can come out that you're not, that you might not have even known, that you know or maybe have had to like, like, integrate on the fly and then it sticks with you because it becomes some. You've scaffolded it to use education, speak for a second. You've scaffolded on to some other concept or experience. It's meaningful, and now you have this in your toolkit to scaffold more stuff on. The dialogue is super important for that and as a teacher, you know it's my day job, it's.
Speaker 1: I do feel that way, like, like. For example, there are books that I teach that I thought I hated that. You know there are a few. I still hate that.
Speaker 1: There's gonna be no amount of how many times I teach them that they, they don't bug me, but like that I've grown with because I've taught them, because I've gotten so many different perspectives over the of them over the course of 10, 15 years and when, when people used to say, oh well, i learned as much as my students do, i used to say they were full of shit. And now I'm like, no, they, you probably do, actually, and if you don't, maybe you're not paying attention. It's not that you don't have the responsibility and authority to like be accountable for no one stuff, but like you can't do it on your own and knowledge isn't something you just implant in someone's head and they just use it, like you can download it. And and when it comes to like social activist knowledge, that's even more true because, even if what you're, what you learned, is like perfect for a milieu that you were in when you were 25, material conditions constantly change. So, like you know, not you know.
Speaker 2: That's an important part of like our contemporary lives too, is that, like we don't not only just like that changes we age, but like we don't live in the same places our whole lives. No, and it becomes a really complicated thing to interact like in in social movements, if you're really dependent on a like strict understanding of how, how that works or what your place is in that, and because as you physically just change towns, that's not gonna work anymore, it's not gonna be relevant. And so I think that that's also something that we mean for the Center for Especifismo studies to function as, over time, is that we do also have like a session, sometimes like in our locale, where, where a lot of us are based in Washington and you know, maybe, as we go forward, that might be something that happens in other places too, but most of our meetings are online, specifically because the the likelihood of getting a concentration of people together in a locale that are going to do this collective study is a lot lower, and kind of, like you were saying before, the idea that, oh, we need to get the ideological unity first and then we can do everything, that's gonna not happen if we also need to learn and and we need to kind of have that learning space, not be so attached to these changing social milieu is that we're a part of and in that way, like I think, the digital aspect of this pedagogy is also really relevant, because something that that like young people deal with is that they move all the time but, like, another thing that's happened with a kind of, you know, precariousization of other people in society is that that's that fact starts to last longer and longer into people's lives, and to the point where I'm not sure that anyone even dreams of living in the same place their whole life that that sort of isn't even what people are thinking of, and so actually being able to respond to that in a way that's going to be able to address that over time, i think is important, so that we're not establishing educational practices that need a perfect recipe of people who are there right now, because I think that's another thing that that affects student organizing right, which is usually where, like learning is considered something that's like a high priority, but but student organizing cycles through people and you know necessarily to like there
Speaker 1: would be a better way to do it, where you're gonna have people in the same area for like 10 or 20 years, because most people move away to college.
Speaker 2: So but that that very much relates to adult education, and this idea that like and again like to multilingualism, is that, like, you don't need to wait until you move to Mexico to start learning and interacting with Spanish you can do that on a daily basis, right now already, and everything you know is also available on Spanish on the internet.
Speaker 2: The internet's just that much bigger in the topics you're already interested in, and then all the stuff that you've never learned, that you've been meaning to, is also there in Spanish and you could do that. And this idea that, like we need to physically go be places, i think is is not totally wrong, but it's also becomes an excuse. And if we use our learnings, if we use online for learning, i think that that's a you know, a really important way to get us one off the internet at some point. But also to like to not just think the internet's a place for personal opinions and hot takes that it is a place for collective work and an actual political organizing.
Speaker 2: That's not like no, this isn't the political organizing like you said. This isn't a kind of educationalism where if we just teach people the stuff then that's gonna fix the problems. But this is an aspect of that larger deliver yeah, that's again another great point.
Speaker 1: I, i think about an argument I once had with someone, a fairly famous leftist, who was very highly educated and went off about how you had to like move the Germany to speak German. And I was like it's true that to understand German as is contemporary used, that it really helps to go live in Germany for a little while. But I was like, but it's not necessary, particularly when you're dealing with historical texts, because that's Germans, not Germans in common use now anyway, and I really pissed them off for some reason. And then I think I pointed out I'm like you also make this like an unattainable class thing, because unless you have lucky enough to have a job, like I did the cartoon around the world, international travel is a sign of being bougie as fuck. So but you know, particularly with Spanish like I live in a, in a neighborhood where you're just as likely to hear Spanish as English, and not like I try to make myself use it because otherwise I'll lose it. There's another thing with language you need to use it or it gets real stagnant. I've gotten to the point now with German where I can read it, but I don't think I can speak it anymore, or at least not like, not without sounding like a American that doesn't know what he's talking about, and that was not true. But but, but I can still interact with with German texts. I still do that on and it's still useful for me, and I pointed that out just so like. It's like. Well, you know, you lost it, like you lose parts of it, true, but there's parts of it I need. I also can tell you, if I was to, like, say, hang out with German, a German speaker, it probably come back in a couple months. So you know all about.
Speaker 1: You know, i think people should embrace multilingualism as much as possible. I always feel real, you know, i live in Utah, where there's a lot of multilingual people because of the Mormon thing. But I always feel real strange when I'm like, when I'm like Americans are so impressed because I like have a cursory elementary of an understanding of like four languages, and then I'm like, yeah, but like everyone I knew in Asia like spoke like six, like, and they all had to speak English. Because, good god, if you didn't speak, whatever the local language is, you better speak English, like you know, it's just. It's just. You know what we find impressive? because it's an act of will. It's like De regour for even working-class people in other parts of the world.
Speaker 2: So and that's why, like, it's not that that's another point that's good to make about. Why it's not okay to make it about travel and about some kind of class thing is that, like, working-class people learn English all over the world and yeah, and that that that, i think, also relates a lot to this. Like I was saying, like tendency to learn and like that, that a big part of this is that if these texts are hard, they're gonna be hard for everybody, but they're especially gonna be hard for working-class people who don't have time and that's like a thing we're doing at night.
Speaker 2: So, if it's like if, if, learning, if, militant education and militant formation is something we think is important. It also is something we're gonna have to see as an inherently being like inconvenient and like an extra thing to figure out where we can put it, and something that's gonna challenge us not just mentally, but like even just with our time and our energy, and so we will need support to do that. And yeah, like learning a language can be so alienating because people can just be quick to be impressed and then not very quick to understand all the challenges that go with trying to maintain that or something. And yeah, like that.
Speaker 1: I think, like you know, in in the US we tend to just kind of want to show monolingual people that were multilingual and that that's, and then that when people are thinking of learning a language, that that tends to be sort of the goal is like I'll be able to show people that I speak that language, not thinking that everyone that they know that only speaks English has no idea and that anyone that's impressed by that is not a speaker who will be impressed by the content of your, your conversation in this other language and yeah, yeah, actually one more thing to add to this, and then I really I'm gonna wrap this up, but I think that's a great point and one of the one of the the hardest things for me as an English speaker was moving to rural Korea specifically rural Korea, because there weren't English speakers there and having to remind myself what it's like to not have verbal facility, like to basically be a four-year-old in the language that you are learning, because it really makes you rethink your conceptions of intelligence and how you express that and how you show it and the way people express it to you, and I think that's super important for like not treating people who aren't necessarily educatedly articulate like they're stupid, and it really helps if you've gone through it, and especially recently the more recent.
Speaker 1: That is the exercise, your humility is because it's like oh if you did that this morning probably you're not that fool yourself this afternoon oh yeah, would you're like I couldn't figure out how to ask for for an apple, or I figured out a swear word by accident?
Speaker 2: and maybe my intelligence is more relative than I thought exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, it's very important to do so. Thank you for coming on. I think these are issues that are both important and yet woefully under discussed anywhere and and like left me'll use in English, and so I really appreciate it and, like I said earlier, i'm gonna put all that in the show notes. Have a good, have a good day, girl. Thank you for coming on. Thanks. Thank you for supporting Varn blog.
Decoding Language, Ideology, and Militancy: A Conversation with Carl Eugene Straude on Multilingualism and Leftist Movements
Jun 01, 2023•1 hr 54 min•Season 1Ep. 181
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Episode description
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Carl Eugene Stroud is a language educator and militant social anarchist. Are you ready to explore the world of education, militancy, and multilingualism? Join me as I sit down with Carl Eugene Straude, language teacher and anarchist militant, for an eye-opening conversation on the challenges and importance of translating texts from other languages for English speakers. From examining unique discourse patterns of Spanish and Portuguese to understanding leftist terminology and ideology, we leave no stone unturned in this fascinating discussion.
We dive into the complexities of coded language in leftist contexts, shedding light on how it can be alienating for those who aren't fluent in all aspects of the language. Carl and I also discuss the potential of left unity when it comes to strategic disputes and the concept of militancy in socialist education. Plus, don't miss our exploration of how language can shape our understanding of power dynamics and the role of multilingualism in fostering greater cultural awareness.
Throughout the episode, we delve into the challenges of navigating leftist terminology and the importance of ideological unity in building a more robust left-wing movement. Carl shares his insights on the potential of international dialogue and local relevance when it comes to language learning and political analysis. As we wrap up, we discuss the need for continuous language learning and examine the implications of burnout cycles on highly educated and motivated individuals. So listen in, and discover the impact of language, ideology, and militancy in shaping our world!
Work-related to the discussion can be found here:
https://www.anarkismo.net/article/32701
https://zabalazabooks.net/2022/12/18/a-companion-to-the-english-translation-of-social-anarchism-and-organisation/
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/carl-eugene-stroud-the-tendency-to-learn
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