Show notes
Episode Summary Margaret and Casandra talk with Cindy Milstein about what anarchism actually is, why you should try it, possibly for life, the many horrors of fascism, and once again why community is all too important. They also talk about Milstein's new book from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, "Try Anarchism for Life." Guest Info The guest is Cindy Barukh Milstein (they/them). Milstein can be found on Instagram @CindyMilstein on Twitter @CindyMilstein, on Wordpress at CBMilstein.wordpress.com on on Mastodon @CBMilstein. Their new book, "Try Anarchism for Life" can be purchased from our publisher at TangledWilderness.org Host Info Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Casandra can be found doing our layout at Strangers. Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness Transcript Margaret 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm one of your hosts today. Margaret Killjoy. And also with me is Casandra. How are you doing, Casandra? Casandra 00:24 Pretty good. Margaret 00:26 Today's episode is an episode that a lot of people have been requesting, which is, 'what is anarchism?' This thing that we keep talking about on this show. And how should you talk about it with other people? Or I don't know, whatever. It's what isn't anarchism, and with us today as a guest is the author of Cindy Milstein. And I think that you all will hopefully get a lot out of this conversation. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero network of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Casandra 01:05 Hi, Milstein. If you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns. And just a little bit of background about why you're talking with us today. Milstein 02:05 Yeah. Hi, to both of you. My name is Cindy Barukh Milstein and I use 'they' and I'm talking to you two, who are both part of Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness publishing collective. And you are about to put out my...your first book, and my somewhere in a bunch of books I've done called, "Try Anarchism for Life." Yeah, so I'm super excited to think it's actually in the mail to me now the real copy. Very excited to see it. Casandra 02:45 That's handy that you authored a book about anarchism, and we want to talk about....anarchism. Milstein 02:53 Wow, coincidence. Good coincidence. Margaret 02:57 Wait, are you an anarchist? Milstein 03:01 Time will tell. Margaret 03:06 Is that like a 'we all aspire to this,' thing? Milstein 03:08 Yeah, that was gonna be one of my answers to what anarchism is. Or like that, you know, a friend of mine was talking about recently how they're from Greece, and how people don't actually, they....I forget the whole anecdote, but anyway, that you can't say your something until after your life is over, then people can say it about you. So, Casandra 03:33 Oh, interesting. Milstein 03:34 You know, because we're all,we all really are aspiring to be an anarchist. I hope. And, and, yeah, I guess I do use that label. And it's on the title of some of my books so... Margaret 03:45 Okay, well, that leads us into the first question, which is a question that I get a lot, that you might get a lot, which a lot of listeners of the show have. Milstein, what is anarchism? Milstein 03:59 Oh, okay. Joking ahead of time, that if I am Jewish, yes, one Jew, they have two opinions. But if you ask anarchists, we probably have even more, and if you're Jewish anarchists, thousands. So I guess I was thinking about this, there's so many ways to describe anarchism, but lately I've really been thinking about it as like life, how we make life in common life and care. And do that in collective ways through self determination, self organization, self governance, because most of what we're facing that is not anarchism are different forms of deaths machines. So yeah, lately I've been thinking about what is that? You know, what does that mean to be staunchly in not just an advocate out but like actually, actively engaging in forms of bringing in essentially life? But yeah, I guess the other ways people...or I describe anarchism often is a compass, or sort of horizon made up of a bunch of ethics, which you often highlight on this show through various practices of like mutual aid and solidarity and collective care and all sorts of other nice warm and fuzzy ways we do good in this world or try to create better worlds. But yeah, I guess the nutshell other version, I would say is, to me, anarchism is both the absence and presence, and the absence of all forms of hierarchy and domination or striving to lessen them as much as possible. But, it's no good unless there's a presence of something to fill in those absences. Like, I don't know, anarchism isn't just like, we hate everything, let's like, you know, hate capitalism, patriarchy, chaos, whatever. But what is the presence of what we want and that's actually for me, where anarchism really shines, as a philosophy and practice of freedom, and liberation and liberatory practices of all sorts. So, I really like to think about that part of anarchism. And, and so therefore, the, that means that anarchism as a practice, which to me embodies the whole of your life every second of the day, is constantly juggling tensions, and between, you know, what we don't like and what we do and what we want to destroy, and what we want to create, or in a way, the core tension in anarchism is how do you create these beautiful societies and worlds based upon kind of balancing out freedom for each of ourselves and freedom, collectively? And, and that's hard. That isn't easy. But like, that's what anarchism is and is not. Like, we just want people to be free and do their own thing, which to me is capitalism or liberalism, or all these other things, like, "Fuck you, I'm gonna do my own thing." But anarchism is like, "No, you know, I should be able to become who I want to be. But I can only do that if you can do that too. And how we do that together is where it gets fun." And to me, that's what enter you know, a lot of what anarchism is about, that presence of all we do. So I don't know, what do you two think? Margaret 07:04 I mean, okay, one of the things that you touched on....I actually do I would define anarchism as this like striving for freedom, but I would I define freedom a little bit differently than, well, certainly liberalism or capitalism would. You know, my argument being we're not free if we like live alone in the woods, I tried it, actually, I still had a society to fall back on. But, you know, freedom is like, not just the individual in a state of nature, or whatever. Freedom is, is something that we create, and build cooperatively with each other, because if freedom is the ability to like, maximize my own agency and act in the ways that I would like to the most or whatever, right? We can create that with each other. And I basically, I make the argument that freedom is a relationship between people rather than a static state for an individual. And so, I do you believe in maximizing freedom, in that I believe in creating relationships of freedom between people. And I really like, and I don't remember who said it, I think I'm kind of paraphrasing it from Ursula Le Guin, is that anarchism is about the marriage of freedom and responsibility, that basically we need to all be as responsible to each other as possible so that we can maximize all of our, our freedom. And so that's like, kind of what I set out to do as an anarchist, is create these relationships of freedom. But, I guess I would say like, if I'm talking to someone who is like, "Well, what is anarchism?" I think at its like, core, it's like, simplest is, you know, yeah, like, as you said, you know, are like people trying to live in a world without oppressive hierarchies, right? You know, traditionally, in the sort of Western philosophical tradition that anarchism is most often reflected through, you have basically the idea of like, it comes out of an anti capitalist movement, it comes out of a movement against capitalism, and they said, "Well, also the state," you know, they were like, "The state and capitalism are intrinsically linked, we are opposed to all of them, or both of these constructs." And then people very quickly took it from there to be like, "and also patriarchy, and also white supremacy and also all of these, like systemic institutions of oppression." And, you know, anarchism is the movement against those things, but has, as you talked about, always been tied into, for most people also a sort of positive vision, the creation of a society without these things as a, as a desired thing to move towards. Milstein 09:39 Yeah, no, thanks for filling. I was I was thinking when you were speaking, it's like, so much of anarchism to me is it's like isn't a fixed thing. To me. That's why I like the idea of a horizon, your always kind of walking towards this beautiful thing, but you're never actually going to quite get there. But you know, like, you're never...you can see it but you can never fully, but so it's this process. And yeah, one other thing When you were speaking, I was reminded of as often I talked about anarchism is, like us together, figuring out different forms of social organization and different forms of social relationships that emphasize, you know, freedom and liberation and that it's impossible without the social, you know, like we we, we are social creatures. We can't possibly do this alone. Casandra 10:20 But I thought anarchism was about chaos. You mean anarchists are organized? Margaret 10:31 Sometimes we spend too much of our time on organization. Milstein 10:34 Or trying to organize. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, another way, another way. I think that's why I like tensions, because another tension to me is the tension between sort of, you know, freedom and spontaneity or how do you know, like, in a way, maybe it's playfully in the, in the, like, the word anarchism and anarchy, you know, you can't...anarchism is like we can make, we can try to figure out ways to like, create, you know, neighborhood assemblies and info shops, and mutual aid societies and all these other things. And then there's all this fun, spontaneous, spontaneous chaos and play and joy that happens that we never even thought of, and that we actually balance both those things we're not you know, just...Yeah, anarchism is like, I also think of anarchism is like being really dynamic and flexible and open, and kind of like, "Oh, that's a cool new idea. Let's try that." Versus like a lot of things like borders: "No, this was the line in the sand." or state: "No, you have to do that." You know, that's really different. Casandra 11:35 I feel like one of my favorite things about anarchism is that there are different ways to do anarchism. And that seems like counter intuitive still, even to a lot of anarchists. I'm thinking about like, I don't know, Twitter anarchists: "No, there's only one way to do this." Margaret 11:57 Yeah, the idea that we're like, gonna find the the one right way is inherently broken. And I really liked the, you know, the quote from the anarchists adjacent, but not anarchistic or not not anarchist Zapatista is that, you know, "A world in which many worlds are possible is the goal." Yeah, and I like that it's, it's not about coming up with easy answers, or providing easy answers to people, which is actually I mean, it certainly limits our recruitment, because we're, we can't just be like, "Oh, well, here we have the answer. Anarchism is the answer." Anarchism, it's said is like a system by which to come up with answers collectively, amongst people, you know, it's like a, it's much easier to tell people what to do than to tell people to become free thinking individuals who work things out with each other, you know? Milstein 12:51 Yeah, yeah. No, like, maybe the emphasis on like experiments and processes and us together. And the way you use the answers as plural is, you know, most other sort of forms of...yeah, like, politically engaging, first of all, are limited to like, one sphere of your life. But you know, anarchism is like, "How can we make the whole of our, of our lives feel whole," and, but to do that, there isn't like, one way to do things. And so you know, actually, when people get...the more, I just find this time and time again, to always is so beautiful, it's like, the more people you get together, the more incredibly beautiful creative solutions you have, or ideas or experiments. And, you can actually try multiple ones of them at once. And that makes for this kind of beautiful ecosystem, which is maybe another thing we didn't talk about anarchism, I think it's very, like, ecological in, not in the sense of necessarily like, you know, environmentalism, or making things, you know, but, like, very holistic, and understands things in ways like complicated ecosystems where it's okay for difference to coexist in an ecosystem, and actually, that makes us more resilient and stronger, is like some of the most, like, I love walking, you know, and observing the world. And when you walk around and just see some of the most like, you know, sort of ecosystems that are thriving, they're thriving, because there's multiple different types of plants and animals and species, and, you know, engagements and interactions and experiments going on. And they all shift and change through that. So, how can we think of that? So? I mean, often when people think about anarchists, and you're like, "Oh, and what kind of anarchists are you?" and you know, "I'm a feminist, anarchist, or queer anarchist, or Jewish anarchist, or, you know, et cetera, et cetera," and like that's like, some sort of problem and anarchism, and I think we're just actually trying to articulate that freedom and that ecosystem has to bring in the fullness of who we are. And the fullness of who we are isn't always the same. And it's that beautiful kind of interplay between what we care about in our own lives and our own, you know, experiences and identities and yeah. So, I'm just kind of rambling, but I don't know, lately, I've just been thinking a lot about the anarchist ecosystem. And that's actually, you know, I mean, so much of, you know, like white Christian supremacy homogenizes everything from calendars to, you know, time, to how we make decisions, to, you know, capitalism gives you the same, you know, type of, you know, hamburger or coffee no matter where you are in the world if you know if it's trying to like flatten out everything or actually destroy all sorts of foods so all we think of this certain foods, you know. And most like large scale forms of hierarchy and domination to succeed, they they flattened, I mean, we're looking at fascism, unfortunately, appearing in a lot of parts of the globe right now. And it's all about an essence creating this, like, pure identity, that's homogeneous identity, that should be able to survive while the rest of us should be killed off. And I mean, ultim…
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