Shuley Branson
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, I wanted to just build on this culture thing because when, you know, when after October 7th, when people are getting together to try to figure out how in the United States to do some kind of work and action and support and solidarity with Gaza and the Palestinian liberation movement, like people were just sort of like, what the hell can we even do?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And one of the things that I would say to people is like just putting up stickers and writing about Gaza on the walls, like in graffiti has a huge impact. And it's overlooked often, I think, as like something that's
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
effective, but we can see that there has been a giant cultural shift after October 7th in terms of people's awareness of Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and then support for the Palestinians. I think that it has to do really, you know, post-October 7th with the fact that this was like kind of plastered everywhere. And so it's easy to kind of think that that isn't action.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
But to me, in a way, doing something like that is more effective than the kind of marching in circles that we can do that we call protest. And, you know, like going back to punk, I think also punk gets a bad rap sometimes because, you know, in that line of like the kind of book chin lifestylism. Yeah, yeah. I don't think we should downplay it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Like punk created its own culture of people doing everything themselves to make it happen. It's where I got radicalized too. And they were like, it was anarchist, right? It was like explicitly anarchist and you were living in an anarchist way and like creating things in an anarchist way. And it was this whole other world.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So like if we put our anarchist energy into culture, it's part of making a world that we want to live in you know, over and against this world, this hell world that we're also trying to destroy at the same time. So I think we shouldn't kind of just like dismiss this as, as less important than, than the other kinds of actions that we can take. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
I think if I can build off this too, and I'm going to try to do some tying together of things, but one of the ways that I think about my contribution is to think about, don't look there, let's look over here. And that can mean multiple things, which is often when people think politically, they're looking at these big things.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
moments or big actions or like top down solutions, which means that we take our attention away from these other places where we're doing all this stuff. Like, like Carla was saying, like we're already doing a lot of, of important kind of like life making work. And then also there's moments in our movements where we have to,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
be like you all look over here while we do stuff over here right like you you don't want to be seen all the time so we have to be able to direct our attention to the things that we do and then also keep some of that stuff under wraps and that means it's hard sometimes to see and because it's so decentralized and anarchism really functions through decentralization like we we're not always aware of how much power we actually have and what's going on uh at any one moment
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And going back to the kind of moments, even tracing back to, you know, the battle of Seattle. And I think it's like ever more present today in all of the kinds of organizing for street actions that are being done, that a lot of the groundwork for any of these moments is done by anarchists. And then it's not either claimed by anarchists or it's stolen from anarchists. Like,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
like we make everything sort of run and anarchism makes everything run. And then it just gets ignored because it's not about taking credit. It's not about kind of imposing itself. And so I think like that kind of in between of, um, Seeing what we're doing and sharing that knowledge and then keeping under wraps so that we can keep chugging along.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And then just also being aware of when our work is being stolen and then repurposed for something that goes against what we want. I think these are all ways for us to prepare for those moments of explosion or eruption where anarchy really manifests and then we can kind of taste freedom for a moment.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, thanks for the chance to share. And like I always say, if anyone is interested and wants to get in touch, I'm happy to hear from you.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And just to reiterate, like all the stuff that we're already doing is now going to have a home in cause. So like my essays and podcasts, Vicky's review reviews and essays and Carla's many projects, which include podcasts and writing and these interviews and Danny's writing and classes. Yeah. This is all moving there. Plus new things.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
I think the crow is like what ultimately sealed the project for us, honestly. Yeah, yeah. Hell yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
A collective called a murder, which is also pretty badass.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
As I've been gathering images for our project, I've been specifically trying to find images of crows attacking people because I think that's good. So it's like, you know, the follow-up to what you were saying, Carla, is the crow's revenge.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, I mean, connected to the financial aspect, but I think when we were initially discussing this, the experience of being a writer is trying to find outlets for your writing. And if you're trying to get paid for that, you have to sell it to people, right?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And so it's very hard to get paid at all for writing, and it's very hard to place your writing in venues that publish it, especially if you're coming from an anarchist angle, because people do not really want to publish... things that come to anarchist conclusions. Like they want you to do all the analysis and whatever, but they don't want you to think about like what, what an action is like.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So like, you know, you could write for some of the lefty so-called lefty socialist, whatever, uh, But they don't. Yeah, they won't feature anarchists. They basically even just act as if anarchism doesn't exist, never exists, you know, never existed. They erase the whole history of it. The only serious kind of political forces, some kind of democratic socialism.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
So to us, we wanted to create a place where we can do the writing we want to do without having to make compromises in what we want to say. just to get published because that, yeah, just that game of like, of shopping your stuff around is it's demeaning. It's totally time consuming. It distracts you from actually doing the work. So we were like, let's band together.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And instead of each of us going off, wasting our time trying to, to write.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
It's so glaring. Jacobin is definitely a big culprit. And then the podcast associated with The Dig, they will be talking about history where anarchists have been...
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
Yeah, when Carla and I initially had the seed conversation of this, Carla said something about collectivizing as writers. We talk about it with all these other workplaces and industries and whatever. And it was like, when she said that, I was like, Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense. We're off here doing our own thing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And as Vicky said, you do it sort of with the knowledge that it's not sustainable. You steal your time to do it. Even the supposed jobs that are there to enable you to write actually make you do all this other work. So the time for writing is always... like endlessly deferred.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And, you know, we have that image also like of the patron or something, or like Virginia Woolf says, you need like money enough to have a room of one's own. But if we put ourselves together in this way, then we are trying to, yeah, I don't know, create more time for ourselves to write.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
And then like going back to something Vicky said earlier about like reinventing the newspaper, there was a time in anarchism where like, I think we talked about this amongst ourselves, like where like every block had like a Yiddish anarchist newspaper, right? It wasn't like you had one newspaper telling all the anarchists what to think.
Behind the Bastards
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It was like, it was hyper-local in a way and there was so many voices. And so I think that's another thing that we want to do is like help for that proliferation because in the sort of spirit of collaboration, like the reason to write
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 161
as an anarchist for me is to have conversations to produce the possibility for people to like receive it and then and contact me and i get into conversations with people and learn things from them yeah and i think there's an angle there too where like i think we're kind of okay so i was a tiny baby when all this was happening so i'm gonna i'm gonna have to rely on y'all for this but like i you know one of the things i get from sort of reading the record about like