Everyday Anarchism

Shawn from the SRSLY Wrong podcast joins me in a crossover episode to discuss what everyday anarchism and library socialism have in common. (Hint: It's David Graeber). Along the way we discuss breadtube, Kropotkin, basic income vs. jobs guarantee, Cory Doctorow, political identification, utilitarianism, and more. Plus you get to hear me do comedy sketches, exactly like you never wanted.

Later this year (hopefully!), I'll start a year-long series analyzing and explaining David Graeber's first big book Debt . This episode is a prequel that introduces you to some of Graeber's conclusions about economics and money, and how they fit in with Modern Monetary Theory In 2019, less than a year before he died, Graeber wrote a piece for the New York Review of Books in which he explained, ver...

James Fallows returns to the show to discuss what left neoliberalism was and its place in the late New Deal era. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a craft beer has benefitted from left neoliberalism and its dreaded "deregulation." Anyone alive in the 21st century has suffered under the corporatist excesses of right neoliberalism. Did they have anything in common? And where do Jimmy Carter and Ralph Nade...

This episode is a crossover with Good in Theory , a political theory podcast by Clif Mark . I highly recommend Clif's podcast; in addition to interviews and one-off episodes, Clif did a series in which he adapts and explains Plato's Republic - the entire thing! Almost every topic in political theory is addressed in The Republic - and Clif guides you through the foundations of all the arguments we...

Last year I recorded this interview with Cyril Schäublin , the director of the new film Unrest . Unrest is a masterpiece. The film tells the story of unrest and labor organizing among the anarchist watchmakers of the Swiss Canton of Jura. Also, the tiny part at the center of a mechanical watch? It's also called an "unrest." Cyril and I talk about decentering Kropotkin in the film (sometimes litera...

In this episode, following up on my conversation about Byzantium with Anthony Kaldellis and leading to my conversation about democratic Athens with Clif Mark , I talk to James Corke-Webster and Lisa Eberle about their work on Roman governance. In contrast to images of Rome as a centralized and bureaucratic monolith, James and Lisa explain how Rome functioned as a network of cities, linked more by...

In this discussion episode of Anarchism 101 , Leonard Williams and I discuss the American anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre and her work " Anarchism and American Traditions ." For more from Leonard, checkout our discussion of his book of anarchist crossword puzzles .

In this episode of Anarchism 101 , I read Voltairine de Cleyre's 1909 essay "Anarchism and American Traditions." Later this month, I'll publish my conversation with Leonard Williams about this essay as well as de Cleyre's life, activism, and ideas.

In this episode I'm joined by my most frequent guest: Ruth Kinna. Ruth and I continue our conversation about William Morris by discussing his science fictional work News from Nowhere . Ruth and I discuss how this work differs from Edward Bellamy's more famous fantasy of state socialism, Looking Backward, and how Morris could produce this anarchist utopia without declaring himself an anarchism. Ple...

In this episode I'm joined by Richard McCarthy , a longtime activist around food issues, most especially the creation of farmers markets. In addition to his work with the New Orleans Crescent City Farmers Market, we spend most of our time talking about Richard's new book Kuni . Co-authored with Tsuyoshi Sekihara, the book explores Sekihara's efforts to revitalize and reorganize a rural area in Jap...

In this episode, Deaglán Ó Donghaile and I discuss Oscar Wilde's connection to revolutionary anarchism, and in particular his idiosyncratic manifesto, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism." For more on Wilde's radicalism, you can check out Deaglán's book, Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle .

Continuing my series, Batman vs. Anarchism, I'm joined on this episode by my esteemed colleague David Hill to discuss Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. David and I discuss David Graeber's theory that all of Nolan's Batman villains are anarchists - and what it means that Batman is a heroic terrorist. You can check out Graeber's original essay, Super Position, or hear my introduction to this series...

Although we lost David Graeber several years ago, we are still getting the bittersweet joy of reading new books by him. This week, Cory Doctorow joins me to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia , a short book in which Graeber convincingly melds the oral histories he learned while doing doctoral research in Madagascar with 17th century European tales of a pirate kingdom on Madagasca...

On this episode, Mark Bittman and Ricard Salvador discuss our broken food system and what we can do about it. Jumping off from Mark's fantastic book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk , we discuss the exploitative nature of the food system, why it's poisoning people and the planet, and how the corporate-captured USDA and FDA can't do anything about it. What comes next? We're not exactly sure - but it's goin...

Lawrence Rhu, my undergraduate mentor and friend of more than two decades, joins me today to discuss Stanley Cavell, one of his mentors and one of American philosophy's most idiosyncratic and humanist thinkers. Spurred by the publication of the recent posthumous publication of Cavell's Here and There: Sites of Philosophy , Larry and I talk about the affinities between Cavell, Emerson, and everyday...

Today I'm joined by the author Scott Branson to discuss their book Practical Anarchism . Scott and I discuss the similarities between our approaches, as well as some key differences related to terminology. For more from Scott, you can check out The Final Straw Radio , a podcast and radio show that they co-host.

Also known as Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Anarchism This week, 3 of my former students - Joy Frost, Mark Muchane, and Rook Schrader - join me to discuss Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. These three students and I made a class about the concept - a class that was banned by our school! Lucky for you, the students made it happen anyway, and share what they learned in this episode. H...

Ruth Kinna joins me to discuss Anarchic Agreements: A Field Guide to Collective Organizing , from PM Press. In this very short book, Ruth and her collaborators (Alex Prichard, Thomas Swann, and Seeds for Change) lay out a series of questions and possibilities which face any attempt at anarchist organizing, dealing directly with the seeming contradiction of anarchist constitutionalizing. The book a...

This podcast finally turns its attention to the Kurdish Women's Movement in Rojava. My guest is Dilar Dirik, whose new book The Kurdish Women's Movement: History, Theory, Practice takes a sociological approach to examining and explaining the freedom struggle in Kurdistan over the past four decades. Dilar and I discuss the role of Abdullah Öcalan in the movement, connections between the movement an...

Mathematician Philip Ording joins me to discuss his book, 99 Variations on a Proof , in which he finds the solution to (or "proves" his solution to) the same cubic equation over and over and over again - each time in a different style. Philip and I discuss how this approach can be described as mathematical anarchism, how math can be understood as everything from inflexibly authoritarian to infinit...

My guest today is Brian Terrell, a member of the Catholic Worker, a goat farmer, a peace protester, and a personal friend of Dorothy Day. Brian discusses the life and philosophy of Dorothy Day, helping us make sense of a movement which is both Catholic and anarchist. You can learn more about Brian's work with the Nevada Desert Experience here: http://nevadadesertexperience.org/ My previous episode...

David Goldblatt joins me to discuss the ethics of the 2022 World Cup. This World Cup is a triumph of corporate capitalism and corruption over workers' rights, human rights, and the environment. On the other hand, it's not clear that what David calls "a World Cup for our times" is really worse than any of the world sporting events held in places like China and Russia over the past decades. In this...

This week I'm joined by friend and colleague David Hill, composer of the Everyday Anarchism theme music! Our topic is Minima Moralia , a disconcerting book of aphorisms written by Theodor Adorno in the wake of the Holocaust. David and I discuss Adorno's legendary hatred of awesome things like jazz and anarchism, his role as an enemy of left-wing student activists in the 1960s, and the everyday nat...

I'm joined by game designer David Thompson to discuss his game Resist!, a solitaire card game about the Spanish Maquis's battle against Franco in the 1940s. David and I discuss the game design process, the little known history of the Spanish Maquis, and the way that the board game industry runs on mutual aid Here are links to David's description of designing the game and an account of the Spanish...

Although I'm a little late, I finally get around to honoring the 150th anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune. My guest is Carolyn Eichner, author of The Paris Commune: A Brief History . We do an even briefer history of the Commune on this episode, as well as a discussion of the Commune's legacy and the sites in Paris you can visit to honor the Communards.