Recorded on February 10, 2025, this “Authors Meet Critics” panel centered on the book Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order, by Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and Anthony Ince, Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Geography at Cardiff University and British Academy Mid-Career Fellow.
Professor Barrera de la Torre was joined in-person to introduce the book, and Professor Ince presented remotely. The authors were joined in conversation by Dylan John Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and Anna Stilz, Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Jake Kosek, Associate Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, moderated.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology, and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.
About the Book
The logic of the state has come to define social and spatial relations, embedding itself into our understandings of the world and our place in it. Anthony Ince and Gerónimo Barrera de la Torre challenge this logic as the central pivot around which knowledge and life orbit, by exposing its vulnerabilities, contradictions and, crucially, alternatives.
“Society Despite the State” disrupts the dominance of state-centred ways of thinking by presenting a radical political geography approach inspired by anarchist thought and practice. The book draws on a broad range of voices that have affinities with Western anarchism but also exceed it. This book challenges radicals and scholars to confront and understand the state through a way of seeing and a set of intellectual tools that the authors call ‘post-statism’ In de-centring the state’s logics and ways of operating, the authors incorporate a variety of threads to identify alternative ways to understand and challenge statism’s effects on our political imaginations.
Podcast and Transcript
Listen to the event below or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
[MUSIC]
WOMAN’S VOICE: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.
CORI HAYDEN: Welcome to the Social Science Matrix and to this fantastic panel. My name is Cori Hayden. I’m the director of Matrix for this semester. I want to say that it’s been a hard week in social science world with the loss of Michael Burawoy. And I think it’s fitting and in fact, rejuvenating and energizing to have this panel fortuitously lined up for today, that’s really going to push us to think how things could be otherwise. To think about a politics far beyond the terms that normally define our politics and our critical vocabularies about politics.
You’ll hear more about that in a second. But I just want to say I’m really glad that we are gathered here today for this particular panel. And let me just say a few words. The panel, of course, is one of Matrix’s Author Meets Critics sessions, and we are delighted to celebrate and talk about the 2024 book, Society Despite the State, Reimagining Geographies of Order.
We’ll be discussing that book with the authors Geronimo Barrera de La Torre from UC Berkeley Geography and Anthony Ince from Cardiff University. He’ll be joining us on Zoom. We will be joined for commentary by Dylan Riley and Anna Stilz, and Jake Kosek from Geography will be moderating, and he will introduce the panelists in a bit more detail.
Today’s event is co-sponsored by geography, political science, and sociology departments and the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. So thank you to all of our partners in this event. And I want to thank our amazing Matrix staff also. Chuck Kapelke, Sarah Harrington, and Eva Seto, who already have and will continue to make this event run smoothly.
Before I turn it over to panelists, I want to briefly mention a few other upcoming events for the spring semester at the Matrix. And as you can see, we have a couple Matrix On Point events. Los Angeles wildfires, something on virtual realities, mainstreaming psychedelics, colonizing Palestine, and other book panel. Please do check out the Matrix website and all your socials for further details.
And I get the easy job of standing up here and taking credit as if these are my events, but I want to thank Marianne Fourcade and Ambrosia Shapiro, who really helped put together– actually, in fact, did put together the programming for this semester.
All right, without further ado, let me turn things over to our fantastic moderator, Jake Kosek of the Geography Department at Berkeley. Jake’s research focuses on the intersections of nature, politics, and difference, drawing on geography, anthropology, and history.
He explores how cultural, racial, and national dynamics shape environmental politics with a particular emphasis on the politics of natural history and its role in shaping social and ecological systems. Without any further, I will now turn over the panel to Jake. Thank you so much.
JAKE KOSEK: Welcome, everyone. It is a remarkable moment for this panel. It’s like this panel was planned a long time ago. And to think about just the radical transformations of the state in the last couple of weeks and also what they make visible the structures of the state, what it looks like, how it might be working, how it might be working differently. The questions that are directly related to the book in some ways.
Also what the book holds is also the possibilities of other geographies. And the moment where we try to figure out as things are shifting and new forms and threats of state power emerge, the desire to find, and identify, and build alternative geographies couldn’t be more timely. And so two central themes of the book, I think, are just right at the tip of all of our minds and in this current moment.
A couple of things. I’m not going to go on long commentaries. I have lots of questions. But if there’s moments towards the end, I will start asking some of those. But I want to get to the questions and really wanted to center it on all of you. But just say two things really quickly.
One is the remarkable collaboration that goes on here. This book is a 10-year project. We don’t do that many 10-year projects, and you don’t do them so deeply collaborative in a way that the voice of the book is actually one voice. It is a collective voice, and you can see and feel it as you read the book.
The conversations that have gone on, the tensions and differences in the voice. There’s moments where it’s more open, where they point to different directions they could go. But also moments where the voice of the book is so clearly in one voice. That is a remarkable thing that happened over a very long period of time.
Another thing that just to mention, that the panelists hit some of the main themes, but other things you mentioned that really stands out to me is just the multiple voices around the state and anarchy here. When we think about anarchy, and they mentioned this very directly in the introduction.
As such, having such a Western European history, and to open that up is remarkable. It’s not just that it’s opened up here, but the voices and the citations and the engagements are global in a way that makes this conversation really quite remarkably different than the conversations we often have around state, capital, anarchism.
And I think that those pieces, just for those who haven’t read the full book or don’t know where it’s coming from, those two things I wanted to mention because both that collaboration and that sense of where are the conversations emerging from, and who they’re having conversations with is a different set of people, and I think it’s part of what makes the book really quite different and what it’s saying.
All right. A couple of things. First of all, I am so psyched that Geronimo Barrera de la Torre is here. In Geography, he is one of our newest hires, and we work very hard to get him here, and I’m very excited that he is among our faculty. He’s already changing the feel of the Department and the focus in the Department, covering a whole new area, bringing really questions of anarchism and a whole bunch of other things, methods into the conversation. So great to have him here.
His interests are really at the intersection of political and historical geographies, political ecologies, critical cartographies. It focuses on really the intersection of land or territory and landscape while engaging in much broader discussions on environmental politics, colonialism, and statism.
His research is grounded. One of the things that really stands out is how grounded his research is and really collaborative methods, not just with other academics, but with the community. And those are long term collaborations also. He’s working in Oaxaca for 10 years.
And so you can see that in his work that he does but also in the methods he uses, social mapping. His videography work is really just really deep and long term engagement with the community members around political issues there, such as forest conservation, agrarian change, social mapping, and his involvement with them around a bunch of political issues in the area.
And also, yeah, the diversity of methods is new. One of his newest projects that I’m really so excited about. I’ve only seen little glimpses of his new cinematography work. His new movie that’s coming out of a documentary, which really looks at this really interesting intersection of international carbon offset markets and the consequences and effects on a rural communities in and around Oaxaca.
It’s a remarkable piece of work, and I think it’s July is its first launch date, or what’s the film festival, or I think there’s something– August, sometime this summer. So keep your eyes open for that.
Anthony Ince is a senior lecturer, associate professor in human geography at Cardiff University and British Academy mid-career fellow there. He is a political and social geographer with particular interest in agency, social movements, and migration. His current research explores the role of civic virtue, citizenship, and dynamics of the far right and anti-fascist struggles.
I know him as a geographer. He is known as one of the long-standing central person in debates around anarchism and anarchist geographies. And so he’s been part of holding that space and creating and remaking that space for quite some time. And he’s also known for his co-leadership of the Cardiff Interdisciplinary Research on Anti-fascism and the Far Right, which is a lot of what he does.
Dylan Riley, who I failed to recognize, even though I know him quite well when I walked in the room today, is a remarkable professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. He studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism in really a broad comparative and historical perspective.
His work as a professor, the students that I’ve sent and taken his classes come back really transformed not just by ideas but also by depth and mode of engagement. A remarkable, a remarkable teacher and has been for quite some time.
His books, many things he’s published in many debates he’s involved in. I mentioned first his book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, Italy, Spain, Romania from 1870 to 1945, really argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil society in the pre-fascist period, which kind of raises some really interesting, tricky questions for us I think, we’ll hear about today.
Also how societies and states count comparative genealogies of census, where he argues that state-centered accounts of unofficial information that census work best where there is an intense interaction between state and civil society kind of paradoxically. Anyway, lots of different works and lots of these engaged in all kinds of interesting debates around state and political economy and beyond.
Anna Stilz, I have never we never met before today, but I’m so excited to have you here. I mean, I was reading about your work. And I was like, oh, my God. This is the perfect person. Who is the person who put this panel together? So as a professor of political science at UC Berkeley. She’s the author of a Liberal Loyalty, Freedom, Obligation and the State, which deals with questions about moral importance of political citizenship and state authority. Again, kind of perfect for being on this panel, her first book.
Her second book, Territorial Sovereignty, A Philosophical Exploration, investigates where there seems to be a good ethical justification for organizing our worlds into systems of sovereignty and territorial states and explores the limits of state, justified power over its territory, how we think about that relationship between state and territoriality and its boundaries.
Professor Stilz is working on a new book project on the challenges that climate change poses on the territorial state system, including climate displacement and the large scale changes in land use and global governance that may be necessary to adapt to this moment of warming climate. Or the state frame is so limited as it’s crossed over with the broad transformations of climate change.
All right. Those are the panelists. It couldn’t be a more tightly thought out group of people. And I’m so excited about today’s debate at Animo. And Anthony, why don’t you want to kick off your presentations and get us going?
Or I should say, sorry, I said that before. They’re going to have a presentation at the beginning here. And then Anna’s going to go, and then Dylan’s going to go after that. And then we’ll open it up to everybody. So that’s the order of the order of things. OK. Excuse me. Geronimo, please.
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: No, no, no. Well, thank you so much, Jake, for the introduction. Thank you, Annie, Dylan, for being here and for taking your time to bring this work. And also thank you for those who make this happen. And here also at Social Science Matrix, thank you so much.
So we’re really looking forward to this discussion to talk to your questions and afterwards, your questions as well. For this first minutes, we really want to make just a few comments on the main ideas around this book. But I will start also talking about how this project came about.
Mostly, yes, as Jake, the idea was to make something collaborative. And from the beginning, this project was thought as a collaboration from very different perspectives as Anthony’s in a, well, a different country obviously but comes from a different perspective in geography than mine, that I was trained at then first in Mexico and then in the US.
And so we have very different perspectives. And we met in 2013 in a conference, in a sessions about anarchist geographies. And I remember that I wrote back to Anthony after we met that session. And just, I was very interested in what he was doing, and he was telling me that he was also interested in what I was presenting at that time.
So then we start this collaboration, and we start working on different texts that we published later as a paper and also chapters. I’m trying to take different aspects of this idea around the post-test autism geographies.
And so we were trying to really fill this gap in, we’ll say, in political geography but in geography in general, about the role of the state in our discipline. But drawing from different perspectives mostly first and anarchism with frameworks, but also from anti-authoritarian perspectives and broader ideas.
And so we were trying to draw from our strengths, from our different perspectives in what is geography and what are the voices about the critique of the state of statism. So we start to develop these themes and these ideas, in these different texts.
And then we decided that we were ready to go for the book as a way of commenting not only in the discipline we’re starting to go and to have at the center of the geographical imaginations. How this state defined how we understand not only the discipline of geography but also territory, place, cartography, et cetera in a broader perspective of the politic and geographical imaginaries in our daily lives.
And so this is what we want to talk about with you today. And one of the critical questions of this book is why this? The state remains central to our understanding of the territory. Why is fundamental ideas of order come from the idea of the state, but also how the state remains a neutral vessel for good or bad governments, but also represents like the pinnacle of this political evolution of human societies, or as well, logical progression in the development of a complex and large societies.
So all these what we call myths that remain in question and challenge and are ingrained in the ideas of social territorial organization. Also, the idea of this book was to bring different voices about the critique of the state, not only from anarchist geographies, but also from this broader perspective of anti-authoritarian.
And the idea is to bring together these two different sensibilities that we call it, to weave them together into a radical geography of understanding the state and these logics. Because we thought that anarchism in a way is part of a very large, or we’ll say, a large family of anti-authoritarian perspectives that share these ideas around vertical organization of order.
So we thought it was necessary to decentralize also the ideas of what is anarchism and also considered the plurality of anarchism. So we were trying to decenter not only the idea of the state but also the idea of the critiques about the state.
So the book reflects that the role of the state needs to be called into questions instead, as a contingent religion institution, like the modern state, and a self-referential framework defining modes of knowing and mode of being.
So this book is an investigation into how states shape our understanding of the world, how they acquire the symbolic and material power to do so, and what and how ways of being and knowing help us to rest ourselves from its narrow conception of what life ought to be.
I would say just a few words as well about my work aside from this project because I think it’s important in how I’m approaching this project with Anthony. I mostly work with communities in Oaxaca, communities in the Indigenous Chatino and peasant communities.
And we have been working from more than a decade together in different projects. But in a way, it has been a way to documenting the history of this place and these communities, understanding the internal colonialism and the different strata of this history of colonialism in this place in Oaxaca.
But more importantly, it’s been an opportunity for me to learn many ways in which I was taught geography and also to learn from and with community members, to really understand how intricate, how complex is the relationship with the state from these communities.
I will say, for example, the role of the commons in reimagining the world, but also how this is not something fixed. This is not something that is natural to communities. It’s always that it’s changing and remaking their own world. So in a way, this relationship with the state is based on this possibility to bring new futures for themselves and not just community against the state.
And that way, I think it’s also how we’re approaching here and trying to really decenter the idea. We’re not trying to define what is a state. We’re more interested in the place-based analysis and how different communities have related and challenged, avoided, disregard the state in many, many ways. So I will now turn to Anthony, and I will finish this presentation later.
ANTHONY INCE: So first of all, Thank you very, very much for having me and for doing all the tech work to make this possible. I couldn’t quite justify the carbon footprint of traveling all the way to literally the other side of the world to be here, but I’m so glad I am, even though it’s the middle of the night here.
So thank you also for the very, very generous introduction. In the UK, we’re always very self-deprecating. So it’s nice to have an American welcome in that regard. So I want to just build on some of the things that Geronimo has introduced by diving a little bit more into some of the central themes of the book.
And although this is a long process of writing, and thinking, and discussing together, kind of a low and slow kind of thing, this book isn’t like an endpoint as such. It’s really an introduction, a statement of purpose.
So we start the book with a slightly provocative question, which is what if the state had never existed? How would we act? How would we think? How would we make sense of our shared world differently? And this isn’t just a hypothetical question asked for fun. Counterfactual thinking like this can help us open up other ways of being.
And the state is so central to dominant ways of seeing the world. But if it had never existed though or perhaps was only one idea among many broadly equal ones, would almost inevitably think about the world and our place in it quite differently. So that’s the project we’re trying to come across here.
We’re trying to descend to the state from its position as the pivot around which our political and geographical imaginaries orbit. I was explaining this to somebody recently, and I sort of accidentally came out by saying, the book tries to understand how the state becomes ordinary, or regular, or uninteresting, so we can make it feel strange again. And I think the idea of making the state feel strange is something that’s quite significant to what we’re doing here.
So we’re not asking, like Geronimo says, a definitional question, what is a state? We’re talking more about its logics. And when we’re talking about logics, and we’re really interested in what we mean by this is the repeated rationalities and repertoires of order developed and reproduced over time that produce a thing called the state, a kind of equality of stateness.
The state in this regard is sort of an effect of a set of operational logics, not the logics themselves. Now, these do have real life effects. It’s no coincidence that many states, especially modern ones, have arrangements of similar or at least kind of equivalent kinds of institutions.
And the empirical study of these state institutions and how they functions is absolutely essential. We’re just trying to do something a little bit different here. So what our book is trying to do is think through these logical foundations of what we broadly call statism, that’s expressed through a whole wide range of everyday frames, be they cultural, social, cosmological, that incorporate the state but also massively exceed it.
And we take this deliberately expansive gaze because we argue at least, it needs to be expansive if we’re to take seriously. The multiple and often contradictory effects of statism, of states but also far beyond them as well.
So we’re quite critical of the state, but the book isn’t specifically a critique of the state. We’re not saying this is why the state is bad, and we should definitely get rid of it. We’re more interested in how it maintains its order over time and across multiple contexts and how it maintains its imaginative centrality amidst the many problems and crises which it faces and in many regards, may be unable or unwilling to resolve substantially.
So we think about this by considering how the state becomes ordinary. And we call this ontologization. The process of rendering the state is kind of just there. It just is. Not unlike something like Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism.
So through this thinking, we start to make sense of how the state becomes ordinary, unremarkable, and so on. But through this process, crucially, we actually spend most of the book writing about that. But through this, we also try to tease out some of its dissonances, its contradictions, its gaps, rips, bumps, and kind of frayed edges of what we call the statist fabric. And we use metaphors of fabric, and thread, and weaving right the way through the book.
It’s almost kind of very basic to say that the state doesn’t have a total grip on everything at all times, OK? So what do these gaps and dissonances tell us about other non-state, or in our framing, post statist logics of order? A lot of people have written on similar topics, but we’re particularly interested in the logics and rationalities, the ways of doing things rather than the specific outcome.
So we work with contemporary and historical sources. Geronimo has taught me an awful lot about historical work, which I’m not well trained in until we met. But we often focus particularly on accounts from below and at the margins of state societies. And these are generally really where the state touches people’s lives, either on the one hand, most violently, or on the other hand, not very much at all. And often, a kind of an awkward combination of the two.
So these kind of examples don’t just expose how fragile perhaps statist logics can be, but also demonstrate that alternatives are already living among us and can help us to triangulate what we’re particularly focused on is affinities that can be found across very different contexts, cosmo visions, and so on.
So importantly, rather than sort of capital P political alliances, which often rely on quite straightforward sort of ideological alignments or misalignments, we look to affinity between logics of order that can perhaps highlight points of solidarity across this anti-authoritarian family that Geronimo mentioned that might otherwise go unnoticed.
So I’ll just finish off briefly. Ultimately, we might not all want to abolish the state. In fact, probably most of the people in the room don’t. But even if we’re wanting to make the state better, we won’t get very far if we’re only or mostly looking to the logics of statism for inspiration, OK? So we’re looking to abolish the centrality of the state in how we look at the world because it severely limits our imaginations.
So in a context, the contemporary political context where we find complexity, and uncertainty, and fragility, becoming a more and more pronounced aspect of daily life, of political life, of social life, we suggest that, and I quote, which logics of order will emerge through this is a pressing question of our moment. So our book is a sort of a small contribution to perhaps responding to that question. So back to Geronimo.
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: OK. Thank you so much. Well, I just want to finish this presentation just to talk to you about the sections, how the book is organized. And as Anthony mentioned, we use some metaphors or ideas about weaving and threads.
So the first section is titled Threads and is trying to work on these connection, trajectories, tension, and conflicts among the different experiences that we refer to against and about the state, but also the shortcomings in conventional frameworks exploring the multiplicity, the plurality of ways of being despite the statism, and then the reflections on the state as an integrated fabric, transversing and conjoining the different forms of hierarchy and domination. And then we explore this idea of myths that have been crucial for us to understand this idea of post-statism and the statism idea.
So the idea is to this aestheticism is defined by myths that are the pillars that define this logic. And so we divide this section, which is I think is the core of the book in a way, in three sections. One is time, nature, and order.
And so we’re interested in this statist time scapes, the normative frameworks that delineate our lives through linear evolution is determinist time scapes. But trying to also bring other temporalities, other ways in which experiences in the past and in the present, the time has been thought differently. And what it makes us think about the contingency and fragility of the state and its logics.
Then nature helps us to criticize it, to really engage into the naturalization of the state and how it brings this– well, we try to go in depth into the relationship, but this patriarchal tendencies, patriarchal framework, and the divide between nature and civilization that has been carefully policed through the statist logics.
And then order. We try to question how states impose this particular order and how state logic saturates the meaning of order [INAUDIBLE] in the multiple orders that do not conform with these logics or use instrumentally and strategically elements of it.
And finally, we end up with the idea of horizons in trying to bring and contribute to the pathways of interrogating and taking seriously the role of the state in our geographical imaginations and expand the dialogue about the logics that sustain these logics. Sorry. To sustain the statism. And finally, we try to bring some ideas, not only the academic work or outside the academic work, as part to destatize our geographical imaginations. Thank you.
JAKE KOSEK: Thank you. That was great. So we’re going to start off with Anna. You want to start us off for the first commentary?
ANNA STILZ: Sure, great. So thanks very much for inviting me to be part of the event. I should also explain that, I’m going to have to leave a little bit early, and I apologize for that. I just have to go pick up my daughter from after school.
So yeah. I was very engaged by this book, and I really enjoyed having the opportunity to read it. So society, despite the state, offers a pretty strong and searing critique of the state as the dominant form of political order in the contemporary world. And it also gives us a plea to consider and take seriously alternative kinds of political futures that might be inspired by various anarchist traditions, particularly local, self-organized, cooperative practices like mutual aid organizations, for example, and also other kinds of non-state communities that are structured by different bonds, like bonds of kinship or family.
So I, in my previous writings, have had a little bit more sympathetic take on the state than the authors do. And that probably is why I was invited to be a commentator. But I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint a little bit because I actually think anarchism is very interesting, and I’ve always thought it was a tradition that’s very much worth taking seriously.
And I think we should consider the question of whether a non-state society ultimately would be a more ideal society, whether it would better realize democratic values like freedom and equality than even the most democratic state that we can imagine.
I think that’s a question worth thinking hard about. And as a higher ideal that we might aspire to achieve, an anarchist society has always seemed to me kind of attractive. But my role here is to be a critical commentator. So I’m going to just mention four questions that I have about the book. So I just want to signal like I’m not as one might think in some fundamental ways.
So my first question is just that while most of the book was critical of the state, and Anthony actually said this wasn’t a question that they wanted to engage, but it was a question I had. I wanted to get a better sense of what institutions count for the authors as a state.
So it’s very clear that sort of modern Iberian European nation states are definitely like paradigmatic cases of the state. And it’s also clear that things like a local mutual aid society is not a state. But in between these two kinds of very clear cases, it seem to me there are a lot of other things that might or might not be a state, and I wasn’t sort of sure.
So for example, I mean, I think of the modern European state as emerging around 1,500 or so. But the authors do discuss like archeological findings about the earliest states that emerged 3,000 years BCE. So there are some pre-modern formations that the authors are at least willing to countenance as states.
But they strike me as completely different from the Iberian nation states that we’re familiar with. So I just wonder, like some liminal cases, what the authors would say. So Ancient Athens, this is a direct democracy based on a highly restricted, highly inegalitarian citizenship. But it doesn’t have a lot of features that we might associate with the modern state, like centralized bureaucracy. It’s a direct and not a representative democracy. So I’m not sure if it’s the state or not.
I thought also of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that organized the five nations in what is now New York prior to European arrival. They governed the Mohawk and the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca peoples. Would that be a state? The Aztec or Inca Empires, would that count, or China under the Ming Dynasty? There’s just a lot of political forms, and I’m not sure if they’re states or not.
So I’m not sure if the authors are arguing only against the modern Ibarian nation state, kind of European nation state and post-colonial state, or they’re arguing against a y-intercept of political forms. So that was my first question.
My second question is I’d like to hear more about exactly what features of states are objectionable. Like it’s clear that the authors object to the states, and I think they object based on a variety of different things. The hierarchy, inequality, centralization, and coercion are all things that they find objectionable.
But I wonder. So modern states, they characteristically feature a set of binding procedures by which to make decisions for everybody in a territory. Sometimes but not always, those procedures extend some democratic rights to the people that are subject to those decisions.
But modern states also typically feature a centralized, hierarchical, often bureaucratic apparatus that coerces people to obey those decisions. We could imagine a polity though that did feature binding democratic processes that everyone in a territory was expected to comply with but that didn’t have a bureaucratic coercive apparatus.
Maybe the ordinary citizens of this policy would polity would enforce the rules themselves maybe through social pressure, or ostracism, or other kinds of informal sanctioning practices. And I’m just not sure if that would be objectionable in the same way that a state is or not for the authors. So I’d like to hear more.
So that’s my second question. I have a total of four. So I’m halfway through. My third question is that the authors sometimes speak as though all the bad stuff that states have done is like constitutively and definitionally part of the state.
So states are said to require an outside in the form of borders to citizenship and to exclude and other the people who are outside in ways that cast them as unclean, and threatening, and unruly, and oppress them. States are also said to inevitably engage in cultural assimilation to homogenize kaleidoscopic, pre-existing cultures. Colonialism, displacement, and removal are also said to be conceptually part of the state.
So I don’t disagree that there have been and often have been settler states, exclusionary states, assimilationist states. But I wondered whether there could also be anti-colonial states, multicultural states, maybe even states with open borders. Would those formations be possible or not?
And it seemed like for the authors, that there would be some constitutive or conceptual feature of the state that made those possibilities impossible, rule them out. And I also felt like while the authors valorize local self-organized communities, there have also been lots of local communities that were pretty exclusionary to outsiders. There have been groups that have been based on kinship ties that have engaged in what we might think of as quasi-colonial practices, conquering and subordinating, expropriating other neighboring groups.
So I kind of wondered, is the state ultimately a neutral institutional form that could be used for good purposes or for bad purposes, and local communities as well, like could be good ones and bad ones? So one example that I wanted to consider was the US state during the period of reconstruction after the Civil War.
This is a state that went into local communities in the US South and very forcibly interfered in their internal self-organized processes, and I’m not inclined to think that was a bad thing. I’m inclined to believe that a little more interference was necessary. The state did not interfere enough. It withdrew before the job was done. So I’m open to thinking that there’s some kinds of state action and interference that’s actually ultimately good.
And my last question is when I think about the contemporary world, I wonder if we need the state to achieve certain important and progressive aims. There’s always been a strong set of left traditions, from unions and social democratic parties to Marx and also Lenin, that argued that the left needs to take control of the levers of state power in order to achieve its aims.
And I’m thinking here about goals like the large scale redistribution of wealth, the taming of corporate power, the control of artificial intelligence, and the resolution of the climate crisis. How are these aims to be achieved in our society if not by harnessing the power of the state to dislodge the organizing and wealthy interests that often block progress and to enforce policy on these fronts?
Now, it’s definitely true that the state can and often has served as a protector for elite interests. I don’t want to deny that, but I think it’s also true that the state can be and sometimes has been harnessed by mobilized popular democratic majorities in the interests of socially just ends.
And doing that requires major investments in political organizing to build popular power. But I think the state’s regulatory, and planning, and coercive capacity is going to be necessary to transform the world in the service of these kinds of progressive aims. Because the state is the only organization we have that can plan and carry out these kinds of large scale social initiatives, like providing public health care, education, as I said, redistributing wealth, building a resilient climate infrastructure, and so on. It’s hard for me to imagine that we’re going to decarbonize the world economy in the next 20 or 30 years by relying on self-organized mutual aid collectives.
So I think that’s why the Marx and Lenin argued that the working class needs to seize the state and wield its coercive capacities to reshape society. I think a proposal to get rid of the state here and now might not usher in a kind of world of equal freedom for all. It might just usher in the domination of the richest and most powerful among us and the organized corporations that dominate so much of our life.
So unless we remake society and probably do so using the coercive power of the state, I think getting rid of the state is just going to leave ordinary folk potentially prey to forces of private oppression. So I’ll stop. Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
DYLAN JOHN RILEY: Yeah. OK. So thanks a lot for sharing the book. And I have many of, I guess, my reactions are very similar to Anna’s. But I did also want to start off with a real appreciation of the project of the book. I think it’s actually very important for people in academia but also just outside of academia, on the left and among progressives, to think about anarchism, to think about radical critique of the state, to think about the notion of a political order beyond the nation state.
I think that’s often, I think the political imaginary of the left is impoverished by not being able to imagine a political order that goes beyond the state. I also have to say that I really liked the composition of the book with these kind of alternating sort of analytic sections and then these little intermezzos.
I especially appreciated the discussion of Asterix the Gaul. That was great. It was sort of the little village as this sort of image of the stateless society that was very evocative and appreciated that very much. But yeah. So I guess I too have some questions that I’ll just raise, and you can see if these are useful or not useful and you’re thinking about it.
So I guess the first question I had in a way is similar to Anna’s question. In a way, I’m just wondering who the target of the critique that is being developed is at times in the book. At one point, you describe a view that suggests that the modern liberal state is an inevitable endpoint of a process of social or social evolution.
But I was just thinking kind of analytically, I mean, if you think about the classics of political sociology, it’d be hard to argue that a Weber, or a Hintze, or a Perry Anderson, or Charles Tilly or even [INAUDIBLE] writing on Latin America, would see the idea of the modern state as the unfolding of this kind of telos.
I mean, their work, it strikes me, is very much about contingency, non-evolutionary thinking in a lot of ways, and particularly within the Iberian tradition, a rejection of the idea. I mean, obviously there’s the idea of a rational state. But for Weber, it’s only instrumentally rational, and that actually, the modern state includes deeply a rational or irrational element that is kind of intrinsic.
It’s intrinsic other side of the rationalization process in the instrumental dimension. So I just wondered like what you guys think about how are you situating yourselves in a relationship to that sort of tradition?
So the second point I was thinking about is the question of contingency. So a number of points in the text, you say that the state is contingent, and the evidence for the contingency is to reference the fact that the state is a recent historical form. But I’m not sure that the evidence that the fact that the state is recent, some 200 years, depending on exactly how we want to date this, let’s say 200, 300 years.
Why would its recency be evidence of its contingency, and its an abnormality in the trajectory of humanity, as you put it at one point? Surely, there must be some reason for why the political form of the modern state is sort of universalized in a certain kind of way. And even its origins, if we want to say the state is of European origin.
But I think you could make an argument that these political forms have developed in a number of different ways. I mean, clearly, one of the reasons that the state emerges is because of this dynamic of war-making, which has its roots really in the European feudalism.
So it is recent but not contingent. I mean, there’s lots of reasons why one would get organizations like the state. So I was just wondering how you guys are thinking about the relationship between the historical argument and the argument about contingency.
Now the third question is a little bit more specific, and it has to do with the issue of colonialism. So you say that the modern state emerged in tandem with colonialism, and that the state and colonialism nurture each other, establishing the boundaries between humans and non-humans, civilized and savage.
But I wonder whether that’s– I mean, as a general matter, I wonder actually about that in the following way. Two sides of this. First of all, were the first colonial states modern states? I would say not, actually. They were basically, with the Dutch, it’s a kind of merchant dominated oligarchy. It’s not really a modern state.
And then in the Iberian Peninsula, these seem to me to be late feudal absolutist states. And that’s actually very important because what really drives them out, in a sense, is the search for solving the problem of the second sons, right? That is to say what do you do when you have limited land, right? And you have to do something with these noble sons?
Then in the British case itself, was colonialism a state project? Perhaps. I mean, it depends on what we think about, how to define a state. But clearly, these merchant companies and the chartered corporations, they were not, although chartered by the crown, they’re not exactly state. I mean, they’re a little bit more like private enterprises.
So I just don’t know exactly. I think maybe some thinking needs to go into actually how we understand the relationship between colonialism and the state. Of course, it’s true that in the later period, there is an infusion. I mean, in the period of classic imperialism. Yes, it’s clear. But of course, in the 19th century, that’s connected to a new kind of new phase of capitalist development.
So I was just wondering, how do you guys think about the relationship between the state formation, colonialism, and the different phases of colonialism to imperialism and that whole set of issues?
Then I guess the fourth question is just about this question of cartography, which is really interesting and lots of really fascinating stuff in the book. It’s very worth checking out. But I wondered, even on this, I mean, in my understanding, I mean, obviously, in some ways, map making has gone along with state formation but not always.
And I mean, even in the case of thinking about the case of the enclosure movement, I mean, it’s important to understand that enclosures in the is my understanding of this anyway. In the British case, this is largely a movement of private actors who are making maps of their estates, which they are then using in the context of cases that are brought before parliament.
But this is really a dynamic, not from below, of course, but it’s a dynamic that comes out of agrarian capitalism as much as it comes out of the state. Or at least that’s my understanding. Maybe I’m misunderstanding this. So how does mapmaking and state-making go together?
The other thing about that I was thinking about this I’d be interested to hear is, of course, the real breakthroughs in cartography are made in Renaissance Italy, which is one of the places with the weakest and least integrated states in all of Western Europe. And it’s very much associated with these kind of merchant oligarchies and so on, which are not particularly modern state-ist in its origins. Of course, later, it’s a different matter. But just how are you kind of thinking about that?
And then I guess the sort of fifth point that I wanted to just ask you about is really to go back and very much resonates with Anna is saying, is that, well, what does this all mean in the light of contemporary politics? I mean, what does it mean to have a radical critique of the state?
I mean, so one thing I would say and this may be a slight point of difference between Anna and myself. I actually think that Marx and Lenin offer a deeply radical critique of the state, that is smash the state. And he’s only after you use it. So you need the state, and then you smash it, right?
So the state, this is, of course, coming out of the civil wars in France and then obviously taken up again in the state and revolution. Lenin’s point is that the anarchists are great. They’re not Kautskians. Great. But they’re like, they’re just missing this little point, which is that you need to use the state before you smash the state.
So how are we going to do that? And then I guess that raises this whole question of this moment that we’re living through now. I mean, I think these guys who are running the US state at this point see themselves as anarchists. And they may be wrong, but I mean, we’re basically, are we not living under a kind of anarcho-capitalist regime? So what do we do about that? Anyway, thank you very much, because it was really a fun read, and I really appreciated your sharing it. Thank you.
JAKE KOSEK: Geronimo and Anthony, do you want to take a couple of minutes now, or what do you want? We have some time for you to respond directly right now, or we can open some questions too.
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: With me or–
JAKE KOSEK: Sure. Why don’t you start?
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: Yeah. OK. Well, I’m going to maybe go around different of these questions because I think there are some of those related. And then maybe Anthony can help me with others. So I want to start just, I think that’s one of the main different perspectives on what to do with the state.
So I will start first about the idea of what is really what we’re thinking about the state here, because we’re really trying to make a framework about the logics, not exactly what the state per se. So that’s how we’re trying to draw not exactly boundaries about a modern state and non-modern state.
Because we saw also in the works that we examined in archeology, for example, in anthropology, that the definition of the state was sometimes anachronistic in the way that through the perspective that of we now define what data state. We’re trying to portray or to make other organizations as a state in the past. But we don’t necessarily know what that mean for them in that moment.
But for us, what we were interested in was the logics around this perspective that were shared across many of these types of states. So that topology we’re not exactly following, but more interested in the vertical and hierarchical coercion that defined many of these types of states.
And for example, with the first question, we were, in one of the chapters, we were quoting some Chinese commentators, thinkers from the ninth century. We see that they were exactly considered by some, arguing around this idea of anarchism because we’re exactly counter to the ideas of the state in China at that moment.
So from that moment, we’re considering that these ideas have been, through the history of when these type of coercive, centralized organization of authority, there is a voice always that is trying to attack these perspectives.
And so for that idea, this is what we are considering also other voices that organize differently. For example, I’m using the example of autonomy in Mexico. But they are using this different organization of their own zones, autonomous zones. And they have their own infrastructure, their own health, their own education. They say Zapatistas, Rojava, et cetera. There have been examples of this that does not require the hierarchies that we are assumed that we need to organize this infrastructural structure.
So yeah. For the need of the state, I mean, I think Anthony will help me more on that. But I think we’re clear in the sense that we’re trying to make the argument that through history, we have been taught that taking control of the state has never come true. Yeah. The dreams of using it for good. And that was, yeah, what anarchist said in the 19th century, and we’re repeating ourselves here today.
Yes. So in a way, I mean, the difference here in the US has been difficult for me to talk about. There is a difference in the genealogy I think of libertarianism and anarchism. So sometimes, and it’s here, it’s here in the US. And this idea of libertarianism as this capitalist ideas of free markets and free private property or not, really get rid of the state.
I don’t think it’s nothing to do with the anarchist perspective. The anarchist is coming from the socialist family in the 19th century, and this is a different and even take, the name of libertarian. Because in Spanish or in French we use libertarian, libertarios, et cetera, as anarchist, as the other far right capitalist perspective.
So I think [INAUDIBLE] for example, has a very interesting book about these projects, mostly the US-based libertarian projects in the Pacific and in Latin America. They are trying to buy territories to implement these ideal places for anarcho-capitalism, which for me is like a really paradoxical, contradictory ideas.
But they also show, is the state is required to make this happen? Because they needed the state to secure that private property, right? They need the state of Guatemala, for example. They need a state in any Pacific area to really secure that rights of this private property. Should I stop here? Yeah. So we have time.
ANTHONY INCE: Sorry. Hello. I would also echo Geronimo’s point about when anarchists, left wing anarchists of the socialist tradition, talk about abolition of the state, We’re not talking about just getting rid of the state and leaving everything else intact. That’s very much the kind of the right libertarian tradition there.
So the anarchist abolition of the state comes with a whole set of other transformations. And those were very much similar kind of transformations that Lenin and co, for example, were trying to do with the state through the state. And I understand in that Russian context, there was definitely a valid argument there, even though it didn’t work out so well for, well, Russian people.
It’s a shame Anna had to go. I wanted also to pick up this definitional question and these questions of obligation, political obligation, which again, is something that actually, in fairness, the anarchist tradition has not really pushed that in ways that it perhaps could or should have done.
But I would highlight, How do we create conditions where people feel politically obliged to act in concert, kind of universally or together? And what kind of sanctioning practices might there be? She used the word sanctioning practices.
And it’s good that Dylan’s here because I’ve read his book or parts of his book on the civic foundations of fascism, which also connects with some of the early, early work that I’m beginning to do on citizenship and the civic.
But there’s quite a lot of empirical evidence and kind of theoretical frameworks that allow us to see political obligation beyond the state. So the work of Mohammed Bamyeh, for example, he wrote this wonderful book, Anarchy As Order, where he talks about the state as actually a kind of a growth on our civic environment.
The state doesn’t create citizenship as a practice, as a social and political obligation to one another. It actually intervenes in those relationships. And so we can’t automatically assume that political obligation is created by the state. And we see this in all kinds of places in civil society, where in fact, actually, the state can disrupt these obligations to one another, not least through the creation and policing of state borders and the various things that happen at them and around them.
So that’s one thing I wanted to pick up on. And also, this matter of large scale infrastructure and public services. We need mass strategic social functions. We need infrastructure, and utilities, and all of these kinds of things. But do we specifically require states to enact them?
Now, states are able to mobilize lots of things very quickly across a large scale. So that is efficient. That is efficient. Is that the right or the best way to do it? Well, that’s up to a kind of wider debate, but I would flag up that in many regards, states have actually taken ideas from below and implemented them as their own.
So in the UK, we have the National Health Service. I don’t want to talk about the US health system slightly more– slightly different, let’s say to the UK, the European model. Well, the National Health Service was modeled. It wasn’t just a wonderful idea that the government came up with.
It was actually modeled on grassroots, very large scale, well-developed infrastructures that were produced, particularly in South Wales among the coal mining communities, where they created a sort of a proto-National Health Service that was then seen by Aneurin Bevan and a number of others in the Labor Party after the Second World War and saw and thought, that’s a great idea. Let’s take it basically. Let’s not steal it. I won’t use the word steal, but let’s take it and claim it as our own.
So alongside these contemporary examples. Rojava, Chiapas, if we want to go James C. Scott, the Zomia Region, for example, there are many examples of autonomous regions. But there are also others that are perhaps less well known about, where people have produced and cooperated and created social goods from below at quite a large scale and high complexity of development.
We also see non-state forms of regulation as well. The international organization for standardization, it’s exceptionally dull, I know. But ISO numbers, you see those ratings on safety and so on. That is global, that is cooperative, that is led by technical expertise, and it’s voluntarily opted into by states but also by businesses, by organizations, and so on. And the ISO is a great example of global non-coercive regulation that really, really works.
So let me have a look at my notes. Was there anything else? Was there anything else that you wanted to come back to?
JAKE KOSEK: So let’s do some questions. If you’d state your name and department or where you’re coming from and address the question.
AUDIENCE: Hi. My name is Jane Mongo, and I’m from the political science department. I’m a PhD candidate. Thank you so much for this. And I think the book is fascinating and interesting. I know very little about anarchism, and this was a good introduction to it.
And so for me, I feel like the most important question that needs to be answered for me to buy the whole argument, or at least begin to buy the whole argument, and you might have addressed it in the book. I’m just beginning to read it, so I might not have gotten to that point.
But I just wonder, what is your understanding of human nature? And I’m asking this because Thomas Hobbes, the most passionate proponent of the state or sovereignty or whatever, they always based it on human nature. They are like it’s chaotic. Like if there’s nothing to rule over them, people will eat each other.
So I guess if, I don’t know if you’ve discussed it. If you could, then maybe you could share that. If you didn’t discuss that, maybe you could also discuss, tell us maybe why you didn’t necessarily see it as relevant.
JAKE KOSEK: Let’s just open with that. The small treatise on that, you can open that. If you can do that in two minutes and like and also really touch on who else has talked about human nature in the state, that’s great. It’s a good question. Which of you two would like to take that one?
ANTHONY INCE: Why not? Let’s give it a shot. It’s a great question. And I think we do attend to that a little bit in the book, this idea of the state of nature, as this world where life is, what is it? Violent, brutal, and short. Which I know has many different iterations. If you look at Rousseau, it’ll be different from Locke and so on.
So we take quite a broad brush stroke on that. And we pull apart that idea as an empirically and also conceptually slightly simplistic, let’s say, way of thinking about human societies. So if you look not just from the anarchist perspective but also others like Protevi, I can’t remember his first name. He wrote this wonderful book called The Ages of the State.
Where in fact, if you look at not just historical examples of non-state societies but also kind of evolutionary psychology, and in many ways, biology as well, that state of nature just doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny.
So there’s that empirical side. But we also have, from the anarchist or kind of slightly anarchist leaning area of political theory, we think about human nature in a slightly more open way. I mean, for example, Peter Kropotkin, one of the great anarchist geographers and frankly, one of the best beards I’ve ever come across.
He writes in his final book on ethics, which is unfinished. He died before he finished writing it. He writes about how the human nature is, in many ways, it’s slightly deterministic, and it’s in that slightly kind of Victorian way of thinking of things. But I think there’s a lot of validity to it.
Human nature is not defined fundamentally. We can’t a priori create a kind of an image of what human nature is or isn’t. It is produced, in many regards, it’s a materialist thing. It’s produced through the material conditions where we live. So he bemoans in perhaps his most famous book, Mutual Aid, the many ways in which the cooperative ethic of living has been sort of eroded over time with particularly but not only through the expansion of the state and also capitalistic enclosure of things like commons.
And that, he says, again, it’s slightly deterministic. I don’t fully buy it. But he says that has actually affected what human nature is. So human nature is always becoming. It’s never finished. It’s never complete. And I think that’s probably where I think we would stand. Geronimo, you might say something slightly different there but–
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: Yeah. Just quickly. One of the last book, what’s the name, from David Gabriel? He is examining just these ideas. And he’s exactly saying that no one really reads this text because they are arguing that this is just a model for their argument.
They are never presenting any evidence for that idea of the state of nature. It’s just how they’re trying to argument through these ideas, and they don’t give any evidence of that, aside from what Anthony already said. But even they didn’t think that was the idea.
JAKE KOSEK: I had one in the very back in blue and curly hair. And then back up here.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for the talk. A really sympathetic to the ideas in it. I guess the title of the book makes me think society, despite the state, society itself is also this kind of totality that emerges as a concept alongside the state. And if you think of the Age of Revolutions, it’s all these attempts of society to impose its kind of legislation, autonomy over the state.
And one thing that Marx and Tocqueville say is that they ultimately fail, and the state only gets stronger every time society tries to do that. So I’m just wondering, should an anarchist also be suspicious of the concept of society as well, or is it possible to have a mass society that is autonomous or anarchistic, or is this only a small scale thing?
JAKE KOSEK: You want to take some questions? We have a few minutes. Why don’t we take a couple questions around, and then you guys can kind of pick which ones you want to respond in the short time we have. So I think Cori had one, and there was somebody else in the white shirt there first and then Cori.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you for this wonderful presentation and discussion. My name is Hanna Hilbrandt, and I’m a visiting researcher at the moment in geography, but a professor for social geography normally at the University of Zurich.
I was really fascinated by the arguments, and I kept wondering, how would they be taken in geographies or areas of the world where the state is not as present as we think of it, potentially from here or from Europe, in areas where non-state armed forces or the Pentecostal Church or what have you would be ruling society in much stronger ways.
And so I guess my question is to what extent you’re also engaging with the kind of epistemological critique of Eurocentric views of the state, and to what extent we can just already denaturalize or decenter the state just by reading geographies from other places, potentially Southern places, the majority world.
JAKE KOSEK: We’ll take Cori and then one more, and then you have 5 minutes or so just to answer all these huge questions. An impossible task. There we go. That’s what we set up for you. I’m good at that.
CORI HAYDEN: I think the discussion so far has almost proven the point of your book. One of the biggest points, which is that it’s almost impossible for us to have a discussion without obsessing about the state. The whole discussion has been about the state, and the whole point is to try and think otherwise.
So I want to invite you to tell us about, for example, the radical pluriverse as an alternative formation or something. Just curious about some of the terms that anchor your imaginations otherwise, because we have been very focused on the state when you are joining us to not do that anymore. Thank you.
JAKE KOSEK: There’s one more person back here. Yes.
AUDIENCE: Yes. Hello, I am David Dopazo. I am a diplomat, so I represent the state, working for the French embassy. But I am also a historian and scholar. My question is actually following yours. When you look at all the social movements in Europe, in Western Europe especially, and people fighting to defend the health care system, the pension, the education, even the police and the mean for the police to act, is there not a way from inside to take the state and smash the state, and at some point, the society embracing or most part of the community becoming the state?
And my perspective as an early modernist is always like the society is within the state. And it’s very difficult when– I mean, the question about when the state start was super interesting for that. And my second question is very quick. When you look at the Web3 and all what the blockchain can offer today, do you think there is a digital space for anarchy, or all of that is just all the opportunities for a radical capitalist?
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: Thank you so much.
JAKE KOSEK: Let me give you another 10 if you really want some challenge.
GERONIMO BARRERA DE LA TORRE: I would have some of them and then– OK. Yeah, I would say, first of all, I don’t think there could be a universal set is exactly the idea. I haven’t really place based perspectives on how to organize the territories and the politics in that territory.
So the idea was to try to play with this word exactly because it comes up with the idea of the state. But what we can say about it in spite of it, in trying to, yeah, take that language without state, right?
I would say more about the radical progress that we were trying to bring together these other voices, these other perspectives of trying to organize territories otherwise, in despite, or negotiating, or avoiding the state in any way. We’re trying not to divide or make a stark division between a non-statist or a medium or something like that.
Like we’re trying to bring together those ideas that are struggling to organize themselves in the contradictions that they are already into, right? Because it’s not possible to be outside of it, but yes, to organize within. And that’s why we use despite as the idea.
And one of the things that from, well, from the historical anarchism, that they will always say that solidarity was like a rare resource in this world. And we’re trying that’s why we’re trying to come up with this idea of picking up the different ways in which to build these solidarities among different ways of organizing these territories.
And so you will see these different projects in these territories, how they share ways of organizing through the commons, through horizontal ways of organizing the territories or through different gender organizations, et cetera, noise of knowing nature, ways of constructing knowledge and healing, et cetera, et cetera, is a way to try to see the multiple, the diversity in these ways. Because the state is already diverse, and we’re arguing that through the diversity, how we can really find ways to build these places despite of the state. Yeah.
ANTHONY INCE: Yeah. Really interesting questions. I think the question about areas where the state is not very present is actually really quite significant or not present in the way that traditionally sort of like European, Westphalian model of the state would be.
It comes through actually quite strongly in Geronimo’s work independently of our book as well. So definitely read his articles, and I would defer to his authority heart, if I can use that word. What anchors our imagination? That was a really good question, whoever asked that?
One of the things we work with towards the end of the book is this notion of disregard as a way of navigating between state, non-state/gray areas in between them. Disregard is a sort of it’s not ignoring the state. It’s not pretending that it’s not there. It’s not about hoping that it’ll go away. And it’s not just about evading it at all costs.
Disregard is devaluing. It’s a really conscious word. If you think about what disregard means, it’s really consciously this like decentering or very consciously, sort of touching it very lightly and instrumentally. So we talk about a few examples of disregard towards the state, where people have actually engaged substantially with the state in some cases, but in ways that somehow sort of disrupt its authority, disrupt its centrality.
So one very niche historical example is the IWW, the wobblies in the states. So I’m using an American reference here. Hopefully some people know of them, where they would deliberately fill the local jails and cause utter chaos for these small, small kind of police forces in the kind of farming towns and what have you.
As a political vehicle for or as an opportunity to organize but also as a political vehicle for disrupting the capitalist state that they were challenging. So I think disregard is something I want, I personally at least want to push on a little bit more, as well as this notion of affinity as well.
Affinity, which is slightly different from solidarity. Because solidarity sometimes come with a certain sort of 20th century baggage of it has to be organizations formally constituted and so on. But that doesn’t necessarily connect very well with the way that actually, the reality of solidarity is if anybody reads David Featherstone’s work on solidarity, it really comes across. It’s not just the institutions that are doing the solidarity. It’s actually the people, often in spite of those kind of hierarchical institutions like trade unions, for example.
So one other thing about digital spaces is a huge thing, but I’m old enough to remember to have been sort of politicized around that sort of global anti-capitalist movement around the turn of the millennium.
And during that movement, there was a huge amount of digital innovation taking place among activists, anti-authoritarian activists that were creating logics of organizing digital space in ways that were collaborative, non-hierarchical, open, and so on.
So Indymedia, for example, if people remember that, and actually, the sad thing about it is that these sort of techno Bitcoin bro-types have actually picked up on those logics and have actually appropriated that for hypercapitalist, sort of right libertarian ends. And that was a weakness. That was always going to be a weakness of that in hindsight.
But there are spaces in there that continue to be those digital spaces. I’m not an expert on them, but there’s something there, I think. I think that’s everything from me. We probably haven’t covered half of what Dylan was talking about, but I’m afraid that might just be for another time. It’s half past 1:00 in the morning for me, and I’m ready for bed.
JAKE KOSEK: Anthony, Geronimo, and Dylan, thank you very much. This is obviously the very beginning or continuation of a deeper, longer historical conversation that we’ll keep having. But really thank you for the book and thank you for sharing it with us. It was great. And thank you, Dylan, for thinking with us on it. And thank you all for coming.
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