Woodbine Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

The Woodbine Podcast returns with a new episode featuring John Clark, author of The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (2013) and Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community (2019).

We discuss why anarchist movements have trailed religious communities, or have relied on disasters, to build deep communal forms of life. We talk about some neglected thinkers and histories, from Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) to the Sarvodaya movement. We hear about John's long-term research project on a "dialectical social ecology", as well as his experiences as a teacher in both university and autonomous settings.

John P. Clark is a philosopher, activist, writer, and educator. He lives in New Orleans, where his family has been for thirteen generations. He is Director of La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Loyola University, where he taught for 44 years. His books include Max Stirner’s Egoism (1976), The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (1977), The Anarchist Moment (1984), The Tragedy of Common Sense (2016), and he is at work on Awakening Earth Community, a dialectical social ecology. In recent years he has worked with such activist groups as No Bayou Bridge, No New Leases, 350 NOLA, and Earth First. He does educational and organizational work with La Terre Institute, both in New Orleans and at Bayou La Terre Woodland Center, an 88-acre site on Bayou La Terre, near Dedeaux, MS in the coastal forest on the Gulf of Mexico. For many years he was active in the alternative education and cooperative movements, and he is a member of the Education and Research Workers’ Industrial Union 620 of the Industrial Workers of the World.

LINKS:

John Clark's Writings: https://loyno.academia.edu/JohnClark

Dialectical Social Ecology: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1298373847207629/

La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology: https://www.laterreinstitute.org/

READINGS:

--"Élisée Reclus: The Making of a Communard" - John P. Clark, 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20220222160826/https://roarmag.org/essays/elisee-reclus-paris-commune/

--"Living Our Lives: The Communal Basis of Social Transformation" - John Clark, 2020: https://www.academia.edu/50699717/Living_Our_Lives_The_Communal_Basis_of_Social_Transformation

--"What is eco-anarchism?" - John Clark, 2020: https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v03sc-02.pdf

Chaia Heller & Mason Herson-Hord join Andrew and Matt to discuss their work with the Institute for Social Ecology, co-founded by communalist philosopher Murray Bookchin in Vermont in 1974. We reflect on the ideas and legacy of both Bookchin (1921-2006) and Occupy Wall Street; the need for joy and the celebration of life; the limitations within both Marxism and anarchism for facing our present ecological crisis; the task of counter-hegemony and keeping a set of ideas alive across generations; and the role of feminism and creating new forms of socialization together.

--"Ecology, Desire and Revolution: An Interview with Chaia Heller" - Rebecca DeWitt, 1999: http://www.cwmorse.org/archives/perspectives.on.anarchist.theory.vol3.no.2-fall1999.pdf

--"Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life" - Chaia Heller, 1999: http://new-compass.net/articles/notes-ecology-everyday-life

--"Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution" - Chaia Heller, 2005: https://social-ecology.org/wp/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/

--"A Government From Below" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2018: https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2018/a-government-from-below/

--"Assembled in Detroit" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2020: https://assemblymag.org/assembled-in-detroit/

Chaia Heller is a writer, activist, anthropologist, and artist who has been teaching political and feminist theory at the Institute for Social Ecology for nearly four decades. Chaia has been active in movements ranging from ecofeminism and the Left Greens, to the global justice movement, and Occupy. Chaia is the author of The Ecology of Everyday Life (Black Rose Books) and Food Farms and Solidarity (Duke University Press).

Mason Herson-Hord is an organizer and writer in Detroit, Michigan, where he is an active participant in the development of neighborhood assemblies and the solidarity economy. He is a founding member of Symbiosis, a North American federation of dual power organizations, and a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. His work has been published by outlets like the Next System Project, ROAR Magazine, The Ecologist, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Andrew volunteers at Woodbine and is currently working toward finishing a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen join Giulia and Matt to discuss their shared nomadic journey as artists, anarchists, parents, curators, teachers, partners, writers, thinkers, friends, and so much more. In 70 minutes, we discuss their last 50 years of collaboration. Meeting amidst the utopian movements of the 60s, they were influenced by their encounter and friendship with anarchist groups such as Anarchos, the Judson Dance Theater, and Situationism in America. Believing in the power of collectivity and the potentials of oppositional culture, their work has dealt equally with the spectacle of disaster and the invisibility of daily life. With a practice simultaneously reflecting on authorship and ownership, audience and autonomy, independence and institutions, they have been editors of the radical film journal Jump Cut, and curators and archivists of forgotten revolutionary cinema.

--"Escape Routes" - Ernie Larsen, 2021: https://herri.org.za/5/ernie-larsen/

--"Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation" - Ernest Larsen, 2014: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/LarsenAnarchistActivists/index.html

--"The Dialectics of Making Movies: Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen interviewed by Lia Yoka" - 2009: http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/assets/pdfs/MILLNER_Dialectics_of_Making_Movies_Yoka.pdf

--"The Last Word: To unite filmmakers and film critics" - Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, 1979: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/LarsenMillnerEdl.html

Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen collaborate on film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and other research projects. Together they have produced more than a dozen films exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, and storefronts. Millner creates installations such as The Domestic Boobytrap, which detournes U.S. army manuals to manifest the vulnerability of domestic space, with blueprints and models of boobytraps placed in everyday life situations within the nuclear family. Larsen's feminist detective novel Not a Through Street was nominated for an Edgar Award. His nonfiction novel The Trial Before The Trial, describing his “disruptive” service on a grand jury in New York, was published by Autonomedia. He is currently writing a novel about the French anarchist Ravachol.

As co-creators of the collaborative video project State of Emergency, they involved 15 artists in protesting U.S. invasions of the Middle East. In 2008 at the Oberhausen Film Festival they co-curated  “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” 10 programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. They co-curated the Fall Flaherty Foundation series in 2013 at Anthology Film Archives, under the title “Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition.” They are co-curators of Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form non-fiction films and videos, for Facets Media. They organized and contributed to the collaborative book Capital’s Greek Cage (Autonomedia), an exploration of Greece’s near-collapse in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Their most recent video How Do Animals and Plants Live? is an inquiry into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki on July 27, 2016.

Video Data Bank: https://www.vdb.org/artists/sherry-millner

Autonomedia: https://autonomedia.org/?s=larsen

Facets DVD: https://www.facetsdvd.com/searchresults.asp?Search=millner&Submit=

Sandi Hilal and Pelin Tan join Malek and Matt to discuss alternative pedagogies of unlearning in Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and within refugee spaces in Europe and the Middle East. Together we talk about questioning our social coexistences, decolonization, conflict, and care. How and where do we learn new ethical and artistic practices amidst collapse, as our relationships to infrastructure and institutions change within moments of rupture? We speak about the contested meanings of public and private space in a colonial context; the need for designing self-organized autonomous infrastructures to cultivate free thought; and the intifada as both a pedagogical practice and a producer of new forms of knowledge. What does it mean to have a collective creative praxis, “one that is not grounded in practices of empathy, but rather in the knitting of the commons”? How does our work intervene in built environments, and create new spaces from which to speak?

Urgent Pedagogies: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/

Campus in Camps: http://www.campusincamps.ps/

Decolonizing Architecture Art Research: https://www.decolonizing.ps/

Arazi Assembly: http://araziassembly.org/

Sandi Hilal is an architect, artist and educator. She is currently the Co-Director of DAAR, Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, an architectural and art collective that she co-founded in 2007 with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Sandi is the initiator of the living room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host, and to activate the rights of temporary people to host and not to eternally be a guest. She co-founded Campus in Camps in 2012, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with the aim to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production connected to greater transformations and the democratization of society. Her latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019), co-authored with Alessandro Petti, is a book, a catalog, and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. Hilal co-authored with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Turkey. Tan is a curator of Urgent Pedagogies in design&art by IASPIS (Stockholm), and collaborates with artist Anton Vidokle on essay films about the future society. She is a member of the Arazi Assembly based in Mardin.

--“Camps as Trans-Local Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2017: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/refugee-heritage-conversations-pelin-tan-camps-as-trans-local-commons/6760

--“The Question of Collectivity: Dispossession, Surplus, Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2019: http://collectioncollective.art/text/the-question-of-collectivity-dispossession-surplus-commons

--“A Conversation with Pelin Tan: Field as entanglement and transversal methodology” - Ishita Sharma, 2020: https://topologicalatlas.net/blog/a-conversation-with-pelin-tan-on-studying-place-as-a-constellation

--“Planetary Migration under Anthropocene: Crisis and Solidarity “- Pelin Tan, 2020: http://migrazine.at/artikel/planetary-migration-under-anthropocene-crisis-and-solidarity

We’re joined by Jose Rosales, Carla Bottiglieri, Luhuna Carvalho, and Giulia Gabrielli for a roundtable on Marcello Tari’s book, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, published in English this spring by Common Notions.

We discuss a genealogy of the concept “destituent power”, alongside the historical movements it’s been a response to: Italy in the 70s, Argentina in 2001, and the aftermaths of both the Arab Spring and Occupy movement. We think with Tarì alongside Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Tronti, and Agamben on the existential and methodological questions of use and inoperativity, strike and gesture, de/subjectivation and conversion, territory and exodus, civil war and political theology, and infrastructures of reproduction.

-- “Xeniteia: Contemplation and Combat” - Mario Tronti & Marcello Tarì, 2020: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4757-xeniteia-contemplation-and-combat

-- “Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline” - Hostis, 2020: https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/

--“How Does One Shoot a Frozen Clock?” - Luhuna Carvalho, 2020: https://illwill.com/how-does-one-shoot-a-frozen-clock

-- “Spirituality and Combat: A Conversation with Marcello Tarì” - Matt Peterson, 2021: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/118/391829/there-is-no-unhappy-love-the-communism-of-destitution/

Carla Bottiglieri studied Classics and Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy and Performing Arts/Dance at the University of Paris 8, France, while working in the field of contemporary dance and theatre. An independent researcher, she deals with an unidentified territory on the margins of aesthetics, clinics and politics. She has been studying different methods in the field called somatics, which she understands as practices related to the “use of bodies”.

Luhuna Carvalho has just finished writing a thesis on Operaismo and Autonomia, and is a part of the RDA69 social center in Lisbon.

Giulia Gabrielli is an artist and researcher interrogating, in solitude and company, the question of how to live.

Jose Rosales is a researcher based in Queens, currently co-editing a series of conversations entitled 'Diversity of Aesthetics' alongside Andreas Petrossiants and Vicky Osterweil.

Mary Boger, Michael Lardner, and Kazembe Balagun join Amogh and Matt to discuss the New York Marxist School, the Brecht Forum, and the Marxist Education Project--experiments in both radical pedagogy and autonomous space in NYC dating back to 1975.

We trace together the how and why of our political histories, as well as the Brecht Forum’s organizational evolution from collective, to committee, to board of directors, to staff--and finally back again to collective. We’re warned of the challenges and contradictions in running such a program through the forms of the non-profit industrial complex, and the need to insist upon self-conscious, voluntary participation in a strategic project aimed at building community rather than audience. Such a space is a place to think out loud together, process and analyze current events, and develop a revolutionizing curriculum. We’re reminded of the Brecht Forum’s core organizing principle of being both non-dogmatic and non-sectarian--to emphasize culture, art, poetry, and music as being essential to the process of both movement building and becoming a better person. How and where do we organize ourselves to undo the individualization, fragmentation, demoralization, commodification, and brutality we experience--to work toward an intergenerational re-socialization and self-education based on compassion and care?

--“The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School: To the Next Generation” - Mary Boger, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/remembering-arthur-felberbaum

--“Reflections on the Brecht Forum / New York Marxist School” - Liz Mestres, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/reflections-brecht-forum-new-york-marxist-school

--“Our Legacy” - Marxist Education Project, 2014: https://marxedproject.org/our-legacy/

--“Brecht Forum Promo Video” - Kazembe Balagun, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQbziBfDEg4

Mary Boger, a founding member of the New York Marxist School/Brecht Forum in 1975, is a long-time Capital teacher for movement activists, and has been involved in solidarity and human rights struggles for many years. Her CUNY Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology is entitled "A Ghetto State of Ghettos: Palestinians under Israeli Citizenship."

Michael Lardner has worked in truck stops and road construction, and as a typographer and designer, with decades of coordinating complex printing processes. In 1977 he began his engagement with The School for Marxist Education, which eventually became The Brecht Forum, and since 2014 he has done coordination and programming for The Marxist Education Project. He has helped organize the Revolutions Study Group, the Capital Studies Group, and the Literature Studies Group.

Natasha Lennard and Matthew Whitley discuss some themes and questions from the updated paperback edition of Natasha’s book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, published last month by Verso.

We talk about acting and thinking in the absence of Trump’s dominance of the mediasphere, and how we relate to debates around the “crisis of liberalism” and “collapse of the center” in a now-Democratic Party controlled government. We reflect on 10 years after Occupy, with indigenous and abolitionist movements now centered in any imagination of liberation, and the many crises that won’t be solved legislatively. We ask how to not let emphasis on prefigurative mutual aid practices--which create interdependency and care, intimacy and community--cede the ground of “policy”, which reimagines the structural conditions within which we live. And how do we find and use alternative, authentic, strategic voices in our present media ecology to articulate and build legibility for utopian horizons of flourishing and autonomy?

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum and the New York Times, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research and is the author of “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life" (Verso).

Matthew Whitley is a writer and organizer affiliated with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council - MACC NYC. He is currently a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, with a research focus on alternative economies in Catholic social teaching. He also serves on the steering committee of the Emergency Committee for Rojava and co-edits the radical artists' imprint Cicada Press. His poetry chapbook, "Do You Like the Word Crisis?", was published by Commune Editions in 2019.

--"Anti-fascist Practice and Impossible Non-Violence" - Natasha Lennard, 2018: https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/

--“Why 'Mutual Aid'? – social solidarity, not charity” - Matthew Whitley, 2020: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/why-mutual-aid-social-solidarity-not-charity/

Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Jennifer Scuro discuss Richard’s recent book The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, published by AK Press in December.

We discuss communism and love as an experience and a practice, of both commitment and devotion, towards new valuations beyond exchange. We think about forms-of-life versus forms-of-governance, and the role of the “precarious commune” and Gemeinwesen in our conceptualization of a communism of love beyond capitalism. We talk about contemporary revolts, and the need for revolutionary alternatives to “revolution”. And we use the framework of critical disability studies to talk about attention, care, and labor, and how our relationships of love are currently valued.

--"Love: a counterpower to capital worthy of its name" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://roarmag.org/essays/communism-of-love-gilman-opalsky/

--"The Communist Secret of Love" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://illwill.com/the-communist-secret-of-love

--"The Eternal Return of Revolt: A Conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky - 2020: https://illwill.com/the-eternal-return-of-revolt

Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of six books, including Specters of Revolt, Precarious Communism and Spectacular Capitalism. Dr. Gilman-Opalsky’s work explores the powers of everyday people, particularly those typically regarded as powerless. He challenges the idea that politics is solely the business of the professional political class, and highlights how impoverished and marginalized people participate in changing the world in the most important ways.

Jennifer Scuro, Ph.D. (she/her) is author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, 2017). She recently was interviewed for Shelley Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability, and is working on a series of video interviews with Monica Vilhauer, Rogue Philosophers, discussing practical philosophy, philosophical counseling, and public philosophy.

Kazembe Balagun joins Malek and Matt to discuss Raoul Peck’s new 4-part film on HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes. We discuss recent Hollywood dramatization and the visualization of abstract political concepts, as well as decolonial thought, media, and art in the 21st century. How do we confront the ghosts of the past, and where do we find hope and meaning when politics has failed us? How can we face the unimaginable and unspeakable horrors of European violence of the last 500 years without mystifying this reality? How do we divorce the archaeology of humanism from techniques of dehumanization, and how are we to understand the global adoption of these techniques in the 21st century? Where do we locate our own hearts of darkness, and what excavations are we called to do while living within the everydayness of American capitalism? How do you contribute a revolutionary analysis when there’s not a revolutionary organizational form to make sense of it? How can we decenter whiteness as we reconstitute what it means to be a human being, looking to friendship and solidarity for the development of a new common language?

--"Set It Off: The Current Uprising is a Chance to Reset American History" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://rosalux.nyc/the-current-uprising/

--"What We Learned in the Trump Era" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://indypendent.org/2020/12/what-we-learned-in-the-trump-era/

--“Towards a Syrian ‘Politics of Life’” - Malek Rasamny, 2020:

https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/towards-syrian-“politics-life”

--"The Revolution Post-Explosion" - Malek Rasamny, 2020: https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-revolution-post-explosion/

--Essential Reading & Viewing - Raoul Peck, 2021: https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes/raoul-peck-essential-reading-films

--“Exterminate All the Brutes” Syllabus: https://www.hbo.com/content/dam/hbodata/documentaries/exterminate-all-brutes/resources/eatb-syllabus-210412.pdf

Kazembe Balagun is a writer/cultural historian/activist, and former program director of the Brecht Forum and member of the Red Channels Collective.

We’re joined by friends Amin and Georgia as we approach the 10-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Together we discuss the general assembly as a module, cultivating spaces of freedom and experimentation, the performance of knowing, not knowing, and unknowing, the experience of threatening power, the accident and rupture, practicing the politics of life, and we remember David Graeber and the many we've lost.

--"The genuine does not exist: Interview with Georgia Sagri" - Apostolos Vasilopoulos, South as a State of Mind, 2012: https://southasastateofmind.com/article/genuine-not-exist/

--"Interview: Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain - MTL Collective" - Annabelle Boissier, Arts Cabinet, 2017: https://www.artscabinet.org/repository/interview-nitasha-dhillon-and-amin-husain-mtl-collective

Amin Husain is a New York-based artist and organizer who has taught courses on art, activism, and strategic use of media. With Nitasha Dhillon, Amin is a co-founder of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy movement-generated theory magazine; MTL, a collective that combines theory, research, aesthetics, and organizing in its art practice; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place. He is directing and producing an experimental documentary film about land, life and liberation in occupied Palestine titled, On This Land.

Georgia Sagri’s practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her book Ίαση: Stage of Recovery will be published by Divided Publishing.