Serenity Prayer socialism: An interview with Sean KB
Ed Remus
Platypus Review 175 | April 2025
On April 4, 2024, as part of its 16th annual International Convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a workshop at the University of Chicago in which Platypus member Ed Remus interviewed Sean KB, a member of the NYC District Council of Carpenters, a co-host of the podcast The Antifada, and a founder of the Independent Labor Club of New York. An edited transcript follows.[1]
Ed Remus: When and how did you become politicized?
Sean KB: I grew up in the 1980s, and my parents told me good people vote for Democrats and bad people vote for Republicans. When I was maybe 13 years old, a band named Rage Against the Machine came on MTV. This sounds corny, because it is: if you’re talking about the collapse of really existing socialism in Eastern Europe, you’re talking about the go-go 90s, the liquidation, the dissolving of what was left of Left institutions. By that time, and at that age, there weren’t many places to get a political education. I saw the politics of that band, and I didn’t know what ideas these were, but as a young kid something spoke to me.
I fell into the punk scene. We did Food Not Bombs; we protested the circus when they came to town; we didn’t save any elephants from animal cruelty, but we sure did make a lot of little kids cry. That was politics back then. I was vaguely involved in the alter-globalization movement — Seattle 1999 was a touchstone for people of this age. But I was the 90s equivalent of an anarcho-Bidenist today: sort of free-floating, anti-authority whatever, but well within the progressive spectrum of politics.
9/11 happened and set everything back. I was involved to the extent that I could be as a 21–23 year old in the anti-war movement, including in the giant march, the one day of action in front of the United Nations — the war went on anyways. It was a time of mass disillusionment for me and many parts of the Left in this country. Attempts to push back against the global War on Terror, civil rights issues, the Patriot Act; I would go to protests and demos for that, but I wasn’t part of an organized group.
Flash forward to the great financial crisis in 2008–09. I was at Hunter College, transitioning to my aborted attempt to go to graduate school after that. I had become interested in history, and I read a lot. I encountered Marxism for the first time as something that was shorn of my sense of what it had always been, that it was a dead ideology, an archaic Marxist-Leninist or Maoist state ideology. I was sitting in the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library, and I was reading a piece by a 1820s radical artisan called “The Rights of Man to Life and Property.” It was a pre-Marxist socialist take on the labor-capital relation. It struck me then that Marxism as I understood it was tied to actually existing socialism, was originally and still remained part of a larger quest to deal with an objective situation. Marx and Engels didn’t themselves create the communist critique; they were working out a real organic and grassroots working-class movement confronting capitalism.
Through that I got into David Harvey, who was accessible; I wended my way through his geographical historical materialism thing. But the financial crisis forced me, among many others, to take Marx’s critique of political economy seriously. From then til now, that has been a large part of the way I understand him. From Harvey I moved through various currents, like communization; I jokingly called our group of friends “Generation E,” the Endnotes[2] generation, raised on Gilles Dauvé and Théorie Communiste,[3] all trying to get at central questions and problems that weren’t addressed by official Marxism. It was a heterodox way to understand class, society, the world, and the dynamics of history.
After that, grad school failed, probably for the best. I was teaching labor history to apprentices in the trade unions; that was my big thing. My incipient academic career was falling down around my head, and I saw all these apprentices who were making far more money as first or second years than an adjunct professor would. I had family in the trades, and I thought, “you know what? I’m going in.”
From then on my politics have been a bizarre amalgamation of communization and workerism — neo-syndicalism I think you called it. But lately, and especially since the collapse of Bernie, about which we’ll discuss more on a panel this weekend,[4] I’ve been trying to move from what had been an apolitical workerism-syndicalism, into trying to understand the ways that, in an imminent sense, my own libertarian-communist sensibilities are derived from bourgeois revolutionary principles that need to be defended but overcome at the same time. I’ve moved into engagements with William Clare Roberts, Mike Macnair, and the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), et al., trying to forge for myself some sort of positive political vision that encompasses more than economistic workplace organizing.
ER: You discussed being politicized on the Left circa Occupy through the typical series of movements — anti-globalization, anti-war, financial crisis, Occupy — and then turning to Harvey and Endnotes. When you turned to those figures and sources, what were their politics at that point? Were you thinking about the political upshot of those perspectives? You’ve had this interesting intellectual-theoretical-political trajectory since then. Is that a story of continuity or change compared to where you were?
SKB: Harvey preceded Endnotes — I don’t think Endnotes 1 had even come out yet when I was engaging with it. I took class under Harvey, which was great. Where that grabbed me was a personal intellectual pursuit concerning urban space, the built environment, and geography. When I think of Chicago, I think of William Cronin’s book Nature’s Metropolis (1991). It’s always fascinated me: the interconnection between the city and the country, global flows of capital, movements of goods, the way that the built environment — and Harvey’s good on this, as Guy Debord was as well — how capital’s imperatives on the state impose themselves on cities, on towns, on suburbs. It was a good way for me to get into this, because Harvey famously did a fresh close reading of Marx’s Capital, vol. II (1885), and resurrected a lot of important points about the movement, the mobility of capital, about interest and rents. I had read Capital, vol. I (1867), but not deeply, and so he helped me get into the next two volumes, to have a more holistic viewpoint.
Endnotes comes into this because one of the main original collaborators of Endnotes became a personal friend of mine at that time. Endnotes had a certain openness to it, especially Endnotes 1,[5] which is a back and forth between the French communizer Dauvé and the theorists of Théorie Communiste; it opened up a lot of questions and had a lot of space to move around in to try to reimagine really existing socialism and to understand and move beyond the failures of the 20th century. This has been in my mind as somebody who’s tried to remain open to potential, and who understood that the doctrines and ideologies that are passed down to us are products of historically specific moments, which then become dogmatized. Which is not to say that you can’t learn from Lenin, but the point is to try politically to add a dynamism into our thought and practice that’s aware of how the capital and the labor relation, along with the working class, has changed over the last 100–150 years globally and locally.
ER:You mentioned capital flight, capital mobility, the state imposing itself and creating, redefining city and country as theoretical fixtures of Harvey, and then this kind of political openness with Endnotes. Did that mean anti-gentrification campaigns or trying to use the state to put limits on capital mobility? If that was your theory, what was your practice? With respect to Endnotes, you took that to mean openness, but to what? Openness to Lenin, to Left-communist thinking, to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to Kautsky?
SKB: Certainly an openness to Left communism. This is a strain I picked up and flirted with for a long time. Communization is majorly attached to that. I had also picked up the Robert Brenner thesis about over-accumulation in the world system, I picked up crisis theory. And up until recently, I had a sense that 2008 was going to produce what we have been going through: delegitimization of politics and people being largely discontented with the economy and society going through different ruptures. But I also had a sense that the crisis would do the work of politics for us, and this is something that it’s taken me a few years to shed. Because what is communization? Théorie Communiste is about spontaneity; it’s about workers’ identity becoming a barrier to self-organization and the overcoming of capital. So I had a sense that social forces would throw up different political potentials that we could attach ourselves to, critique, and steer in a direction that would reflect the various contradictions of class society. So by the time Occupy comes, part of me is saying this is an obvious reflection of imminent tensions and conflicts within society; there’s a populist moment where a communist critique can start to be relevant — that was overly optimistic. I always thought it would develop naturally towards an anti-capitalist movement, but it didn’t.
This is similar to the Bernie Sanders campaign, which has already been given up on by all of the social democratic Left, and much of the Left in general. I saw the Bernie movement in 2015–16 as reflective of something. My fellow unionists and I assumed and anticipated that, like Occupy, a working-class, civil-society or economic struggle was destined to break out of those same tensions. It’s happening a bit today, with the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters, but it has become clear that these things don’t just happen, that struggles don’t just produce applicable theory and scalable practice.
ER: How did you relate to the rise of the DSA and the Sanders campaign? If you were to talk to someone like DSA member Ben Burgis, for him — unlike for those of us in Platypus — the history of the Millennial Left begins not with the anti-Iraq War movement, as you articulated, but rather, for him, the meaningful political history begins with the movement from protests to politics, namely from Occupy to Sanders. Burgis shares a similar idea that an economic crisis will inspire an economic reform movement to take hold in politics. You, however, described a kind of suspicion of the Sanders campaign. What were you thinking as you saw Sanders-ism taking off?
SKB: Like a lot of people, I was cautious about it, because you could see how it was directing people towards a political project of encounter with the Democratic Party, potentially even taking over the Party, and of course relying on state administrative policy measures in order to smooth out some rough edges of the American economy. That was also something I’ve been skeptical of, and for good historical and practical reasons. I understand the morass that you can fall into, which the DSA and many other people have fallen into subsequent to that. But it was also a moment of possibility. While I was never a Sanders supporter, I was interested in the Left-wing of Bernie-ism, i.e., not even the DSA but its further Left edges, which were trying to figure out how this political movement — you said moving from protests into an electoral campaign — could be a signal for and potentially an aid in creating other broader movements that might exist alongside this thing, if not ride the coattails. For people who are too jaded or don’t remember 8–9 years ago: just the fact that socialism was mainstreamed and being talked about on MSNBC was a sea change. We all expected to be able to swim in those waters while keeping a distance from the co-optation that it entails.
ER: You co-founded the Antifada podcast in 2018, and this is a significant time for Platypus because just one year earlier in 2017 our chief pedagogue Chris Cutrone declared the Millennial Left to be dead, because it had liquidated whatever potential it may have had for a genuinely oppositional Left politics into the Democratic Party via the DSA and their Popular Front politics of supporting Democrats, including but not limited to Sanders, in opposition to Donald Trump. Given this overall political context, I want to raise more specific questions about The Antifada. The description of the podcast on Youtube states: “The Antifada is the synthesis of antifa super soldiers and intifada bash the fash and a global uprising.” What was happening circa 2018 to convince you that a synthesis of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism was necessary? Did you look to any particular political figures or political tendencies in the long history of the Left to inform this synthesis?
SKB: I had to laugh at that description. As you and I spoke about earlier, I was sitting up one night drinking with my ex, and we were talking about an idea for a podcast name and “The Antifada” came up. We thought it was funny and a good way to trigger the Right. We kind of did a backronym to it, like “if we put these two things together,” because we knew immediately — and this has been an ever-present problem for us — that to put a reference towards intifada in the name of your podcast opens you up to having to account for yourself in different ways — your politics and the things that you say in a way that can be sensitive for a lot of people. The antifa thing, the antifa super soldiers — if people don’t remember, this was the Right-wing conspiracy theory. It had an element of truth to it: that the Democratic Party was going to be sending black-clad ninjas into nice suburban neighborhoods and to burn them down. It was a moral panic that took place on the Right, so we wanted to intervene in a funny way in order to state that our politics were really out there, but we’re able to laugh at ourselves.
That was a moment when Left podcasting was becoming a thing; people were making careers out of it. I’m not a media guy; my ex was a media person. I suspect that, given my druthers, I would have just been having loud conversations with people in bars around politics, but thanks to her influence we got the podcast going. The only reason that anyone has heard of The Antifada is because we had a connection to the Majority Report,[6] which was in the Bernie Sanders wing of Left media. We were able to use that as a platform to get bigger than some other really good podcasts at the time, like Swampside Chats,[7] Symptomatic Redness,[8] C. Derick Varn’s work, Douglas Lain’s work,[9] and people like Regrettable Century,[10] if you like a post-Trotskyist podcast. It was a propitious moment to start a podcast, and we were fortunate in that I managed to accumulate all sorts of close friends who would have been people that you talk to in a bar about politics, so we started by just having those people on. The peak of our podcast was the George Floyd uprising, because I think people were coming to us for analysis. There’s been a decline since then, but still a pretty decent listenership.
The anti-fascist thing has always been interesting on our podcast, because 2018 was the period of the alt-Right, and it coincides with the Trump presidency. There still was the feeling that — with Steve Bannon,[11] the Proud Boys,[12] and General Flynn[13] — there was the potential for some sort of fascist movement to occur. So we took it seriously on the one hand, but even at the beginning my co-host AP Andy was using Bordiga’s critique of anti-fascism to tamp down on our commitment to anti-fascism as a politics separate from a communist or socialist politics. We did pretty well on that — maybe aesthetically.
We talked about anti-imperialism a lot more back then than we do now. I’ve always had an anti-anti-American take about anti-imperialism, i.e., I’ve always tried to eschew and critique vulgar anti-imperialism, which is now rife on the Left, something that we’ve critiqued for a long time. We deal with this for topics like Gaza and Ukraine. We do try to give a considered anti-imperialist take, one which understands imperialism as a world system with different nodes and one central hegemon here in the U.S., and understands it as much as an economic relation as a geopolitical battle between camps.
ER: The Antifada has published over 240 episodes. I have to confess that as I skimmed the titles of your episodes, I realized that I am unfamiliar with most of your guests. But as a Platypus member for many years, a few consistent types of engagement stood out to me, and so I want to ask you about these one by one. First, between 2018 and 22, The Antifada hosted many Leftists who have been variously associated with Verso Books, Historical Materialism, Jacobin magazine, and Viewpoint magazine. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems like a common theoretical or intellectual premise of many of these engagements is undertaking an analysis of capitalism, by the history of capitalism or its current state, through the lens of world-systems theory, class analysis, historical materialist analysis, or intersectional analysis. Thinking of the publishers and publications I just mentioned, in the past eight years a political common denominator for them has been the Popular Frontism of the DSA and of the Sanders campaigns. You’ve been consistently engaging Leftists from this broad milieu. There are certain commonalities here. What motivated you to engage guests from those political currents, and what lessons have you drawn from those engagements?
SKB: You made me realize how much we’ve moved in a different direction from that period. We try to get our listeners to take history and political economy seriously, especially political economy. So we pulled in these writers from Verso, Jacobin, and Viewpoint writers in an attempt to give people the intellectual tools necessary to have a worldview that places the working class at the center. You’re right: they largely fall into the not just Popular Front politics but even the “defend the democratic gains of the 20th century” sort of politics, which I shared until not long ago. You mentioned 2022: that is when we started to have less Jacobin and Verso types on the show. That corresponds with me picking up — and him picking me up — C. Derick Varn as a collaborator. Varn is a good critic of Popular Front politics and the Left, someone Platypus should have at their next convention.
Moving on from that conception has been important for us, but these were people who were accessible in the public sphere in 2018–22; they had something to say analytically, or they represented something within Sanders-ism that we thought had some potential to it. Me being a unionist and Andy being an anarcho-punk kid, we have a way of viewing class struggle, a desire to understand class structure, to understand, in a Harry Braverman[14] way, how the labor process engenders consciousness and conflict. Having been influenced by Libcom[15] and Prole.info,[16] we saw that the working class could be a way that a new socialist political activity arises out of the workplace. This is what I mean when I call myself workerist.
ER: It seems there were years of denial of the Millennial Left being dead, and then suddenly circa 2022, people start admitting it. Your trajectory is keeping with a wider more general tendency on the Left. What changed in 2022? You say you moved Leftward; did you register an exhaustion of the intellectual firmament of the Verso, Historical Materialism, Jacobin viewpoint?
SKB: Between 2020 and 22, there were two huge events. Of course, 2020 is the bitter, sad end of the dream of Sanders, the DSA, and others who thought that this might be a breakthrough for some sort of social democratic politics. As sad as the end of Sanders’s campaign was in 2016, it was much sadder in 20. To the extent that it offered a potential, it was something that had to be confronted. This was the chance for there to be some sort of electoral breakthrough, now that the watered-down, socialist-ish politics is over.
The other big event is the George Floyd uprising and COVID. The uprising was a real test and opportunity for our theories of social change that we had on the podcast. We watched how the energies — certainly the proletarian energies — at the beginning of that protest movement became channeled into a broad-based but very shallow moment, which was ultimately co-opted by the Democratic Party and the state, and used as a lever in order to win Biden the election. Even the most optimistic witness of radical protest had to see that something was missing here, that the ability of capital and the state to defang it means that this entire mode of politics, where you imagine, in a communization way, that the contradictions of capital are going to lead to something that directly creates organizations and institutions necessary to confront capital and the state — it turns out that that politics and energy can strengthen the system as opposed to confronting it.
You said that Chris Cutrone in 2017 said the Left is dead. All I knew of him in 2017 was from Libcom forums, which said he’s the Trump guy. I didn’t take Platypus seriously if only because I never encountered them. You’re right; in general the realizations that I and others were having were coinciding because a lot of illusions were stripped from our eyes at that point, and a period of intense self-reflection took place. You’re right that by the time 22 comes, we were starting to grasp things. I know the moment that that happened for me, it was an article that I was reading and trying to work on. History is a Weapon is like the big thing that I did with Matt Christman,[17] where we’d discuss an issue in American or world history. A big one came up in trying to understand labor in the U.S. Matthew Dimick wrote an article in Catalyst called “Counterfeit Liberty,”[18] and it’s about how the particular legal and political structures of labor law within the U.S. both reflect and reinforce a deep unfreedom for the American worker, and distorts American labor unions to the extent that they become legalistic, collaborationist projects — not because they have bad leadership, but because it’s baked into the cake itself. So it was me as a trade unionist, realizing that you can’t defend the democratic gains of the 1930s. The Popular Front in the 30s was the ultimate liquidation of independent, socialist, working-class action within this country, subordinating it to not just the state and capital as a collaborator in that, but also to one particular political party as the 20th century goes along. It was the sweeping aside of that illusion that I had for myself, understanding that the NLRA[19] is not a font of rights and freedoms, but is in fact the abrogation of freedom. That sent me down a path where I had to start analyzing the Popular Front and the politics that followed from that, eventually leading me to William Clare Roberts’s book Marx’s Inferno (2016), and understanding Marx’s politics as a radical Owenite Republicanism.
A lot of what’s happened over the last year or two has been me moving away from the anti-politics that I had been at before — this neo-syndicalism — and trying to understand a way in which my conception of freedoms — freedom for workers, freedom for people — is deeply imbued within a radical bourgeois tradition from the 19th century that needs to be retained and used in order to overcome capitalism.
ER: The response you just gave anticipates a number of my upcoming questions about your engagement with Platypus, your engagement with MUG, your project Workers’ Inquiry, etc. But, concerning Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd riots: I think Nicole-Hannah Jones, coming from a progressive capitalist perspective, saw them as the 1619 Project riots. But it almost sounds like you’re saying in your own intellectual political trajectory these were the Endnotes riots; these were a kind of political test case for the theorization that was happening in that Left-communist milieu. Would you say that was the case?
SKB: Yeah, that’s an adequate way to look at it. You’re right; BLM was a test case for spontaneity, for horizontality. This conception already had already seemed weak by the time of Occupy, but now we have this leaderless movement out in the streets, which ends up probably producing less than nothing at the end of it. I suppose it was the 1619 riots. You’re right; it’s the confrontation with that that allows both of us to put away some of our illusions about political activity — or sub-political activity as the case may be.
ER: Whereas you said the political activity is actually undertaken by the Democratic Party — that’s the political upshot of that kind of spontaneous protest.
Moving ahead to your engagement with Platypus, in 2022 you interviewed Erin Hagood,[20] the president of Platypus who’s with us here today, and in 2023 you interviewed Cutrone.[21] What motivated you to engage these guests, and what political lessons have you drawn from those engagements?
SKB: They offered different analyses and critiques that were appropriate to the questions I was asking myself. They come from a similarly open-ended project that asks questions, that puts people in dialogue. Talking with them at the time seemed like a way to start engaging in a body of political thought that I had before seen as premature, and I’m not sure even Chris or Erin would disagree. I still have a critique of political action. We talked about what “pre-political” means for me, where I think the importance of civil society comes into my thinking. We’ve circled around Platypus a bit, and last year started to work a little bit together. The short answer is I’m interested in the same questions that Platypus is.
ER: In 2023 you interviewed guests from MUG,[22] and in 2024 you interviewed two authors, Mike Macnair[23] and William Clare Roberts,[24] who furnished some intellectual inspiration for MUG’s strategy. My sense is that Macnair puts forth a strategy of Left-unity, programmatic unity, and in particular there’s an emphasis on constitutionalism and an ostensibly revolutionary Left constitutional alternative to the existing constitution. Roberts seems to support this through his Marxological work by arguing that Marx was what he terms an institutional thinker — that seems to be consistent with the project of crafting a program around a new constitution that would involve institutional thinking. What inspired you to interview that series of guests, and what political lessons do you draw from those engagements?
SKB: I’ve known some of the members of MUG, Donald Parkinson especially; we never met in person but we’ve been on many of the same forums for a long time, and I respect him as a peer. It seems that MUG has been bringing the DSA into an interesting direction, one that might be able to break through the disorganized and desultory caucus-driven model of everything, that might be able to break from the Left-wing of the Democratic Party, entryism into the Party, etc.
By platforming them, as with anyone we host, it means we’re interested in their ideas and their activity. We found it interesting to talk with MUG people. Their constitutionalism is what gets me; I wouldn’t go that far. MUG’s important intervention is their potential ability to turn DSA into more than an agglomeration of random radicals and something that more approximates a party with an actual plan and platform. MUG has a lot of internal diversity, which is united around a project to have a republican socialist party, to form a constitutional convention, and to replace the Constitution on socialist terms. That’s not a project that I am particularly sympathetic to, but I’m sympathetic to their attempts and their trials in trying to craft a positive political strategy and program out of the wreckage, honestly, of the last four to forty years of the American Left.
Having seen that their platform gained traction within the DSA, I thought to myself, let’s read the thinkers that they’ve been inspired by, which is why we got Macnair on the show. Then, as a lark I got William Clare Roberts to talk about his Marx’s Inferno. Reading that book that helped me finish my most recent piece “The Left Undead,”[25] because Roberts gives good textual evidence for a subterranean Marxist politics, Marx’s politics, and one that existed until the Popular Front, which is still possible to — if not revive — at least use inspirationally to build a workers’ movement capable of gaining power.
ER: You mentioned that you will host anyone whose ideas or activities you find interesting. Has that been the curatorial criterion of the podcast from the beginning?
SKB: The only time, and I forget the person’s name, we’ve had a guest on that was terrible was when we hosted an actual Bernie Democratic Party surrogate person. I wasn’t the one that invited them. Honestly it was embarrassing to be there during that entire episode. Typically we don’t cross the line of inviting functionaries, people whose class politics consist of collaboration; we try to stay away from those people. But you have to understand the podcast as much like an intellectual exercise for ourselves, open-minded as we try to be. There are things that pop up our radar, about which we get obsessed, and then try to synthesize with the other things that we have in order to produce relevant theory. It’s a project of intellectual engagement, but not intellectual masturbation. We’re truly interested in the ways in which these theories and what real people are doing in the world might be able to forge a new socialist movement that might do something.
ER: It’s interesting where one draws that line. In Platypus we’ve probably hosted people in our spirit of openness that would qualify as functionaries. Of course, some would characterize anyone involved with the DSA in those terms; others would dispute that. What does drawing that political line look like to you?
SKB: The critique of the Popular Front was something that I’ve had in the back of my mind and I wasn’t able to articulate until 2018–20. The line for us has always been the people who maintain the Popular Front strategy — progressives in general. In terms of functionaries, maybe with the exception of Shawn Fein, I’m not sure we’d have a union bureaucrat on our podcast, although we would be open to change if the rank-and-file strategy works. The line is drawn at collaboration.
ER: Let’s move on to your two more positive visions and projects. I’d like to talk about your project Workers’ Inquiry. I want to read a long paraphrase quote from you in the podcast’s July 2022 episode, “New Org, Who Dis,”[26] because it crystallizes how you relate to the history of the Left on these questions and how you relate to other political organizing tendencies and currents on the Left today. You said,
Like many people after the DSA came up and started pushing things forward in the political sphere, I waited for something similar to arise in the union movement. It simply hasn’t happened. It’s time for us to start building something adequate to the task. We’re not building a union here, certainly not in the traditional sense. We’re not re-forming a new IWW. We’re not going to plumb the depths of what people like Labor Notes or Teamsters for a Democratic Union have been doing for decades at this point. We’ve been in a situation in this country for 50, 60, 70 years, where all the laws militate against working-class militancy and self-activity. The Amazon Labor Union is very inspirational, and part of why I think this project makes sense to do. But once they actually formally unionize they become trapped within the structures of labor law in this country, and certain things are necessary to do for workers that a regular union cannot do. Things like secondary boycotts, wildcat strikes, breaking of no-strike clauses, rank-and-file members communicating across locals and with other members in other places, which the unions themselves as bureaucracies often try to stop. We seek to build something that will get around the institutional limitations of American unions. What we want to start doing is very modest. It is inspired by a tradition that goes all the way back to C.L.R. James, the Workers’ Inquiry — gathering information, finding out about the actual conditions in a particular industry. Knowing what workers make at the company across the street is valuable information for workers who are thinking about trying to organize collectively.
Finally you turn to the political valence:
People are so disgruntled in this country. Where it ends up going is either into the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We want to offer an alternative vision for how workers can organize themselves. All the Leninists out there might get scared of this word but it is “economism.” Everyone’s got a little sect trying to capture the Left wing of the Democratic Party or get people to vote for their particular leader. What we’re arguing is that it’s actually early for that. The missing ingredient from all these different party formations that exist, from even the DSA or other groups, is an activated and militant working-class movement that exists outside of those things. This needs to be built before we can even think about crafting the perfect party line on Ukraine or on wokeness or on whatever it is. What we’re going to be building and doing is not against those things that are being done. If you’re in the DSA or a Marxist-Leninist party or whatever, this is not against that. This is a place to build a new syndicalist vehicle for connecting workers together, connecting struggles together for educating and for agitating. What comes after this initial phase of gathering and disseminating is an open question. Maybe that looks like the IWW, maybe it looks like something completely different.
I really liked that, the clarity of the historical and contemporary political vision. Whether people agree or disagree, you spelled out a lot. How did you get there? What has become of that? How have you made good on this vision?
SKB: The group, which is now dormant, was called the League for Industrial Freedom. I wanted to put “freedom” in it for the reasons I mentioned before: this distinction between labor rights to be adjudicated by the state and the freedom of workers which is something to be won. The conception behind it was based upon certain tendencies towards the decentralization of capitalist production and the fragmentation of the production across the line of the borders of nations. Global supply chains now mean that certain tasks, in the era of the mass worker, which used to happen in one area with 3,000 workers from the same communities and who could put up a fight against capital’s deprivation — those tasks have become increasingly transnational over the last 50 years.
The idea was to create a digital mechanism that could connect what we believe is true: that every workplace in this country has a militant in it, even if they don’t know it. An attempt to connect a worker who works at the FedEx shipment plant in Tennessee, which moves hundreds of millions of tons of capitalist commodities every year, with the worker who’s assembling, in a factory in Alabama, parts that had been manufactured elsewhere. What would happen if you were able to connect them with all the intermediates within the supply chain, including workers of China, India, or Vietnam, or even where the raw materials have been extracted? There was an attempt to confront a deficit of knowledge that we have — you mentioned the Workers’ Inquiry. There’s Bureau of Labor Statistics information out there, business information. You can find out where all the steel production facilities are in the U.S., but there’s no real way for any of us socialized into production to know where the different labor powers are that go into our work process.
The League was an attempt to gain that knowledge, to use digital means to connect people throughout supply chains. The Workers’ Inquiry was going to push knowledge back to us that we could synthesize and turn into an effective Bureau of Labor Statistics but for communists, to understand the conditions of the labor market, within the capital market as they existed, so we’d be better able to fight on an economic level.
Turns out, it’s really difficult. We gave it a shot. If anything, the current project, the Independent Labor Club of New York (ILC), is a successor to that, posing similar questions but trying to answer them in a different way that is caught up to the more political orientation that we’ve gained over the last couple of years.
ER: At the risk of abusing these terms, it sounds — having read your most recent Substack article on this[27] — it was a move from economism to socialism in the sense that the Workers’ Inquiry is very specific to labor organizing, and it seems in your Substack post you’re posing the question of civil society as such, the organization of the working class not merely at the workplace or point of production but really in a totalizing sense, all throughout sites of social reproduction, which recalls the Kautskyian mass-party model. What motivated that shift and how do you understand it today?
SKB: It was the engagements over the last couple years — intellectual, political engagements on the podcast and outside of the podcast — that made me realize that a purely economistic or syndicalist project was insufficient.
You mentioned the Kautskyian model of the mass party, which is very Mike Macnair. But to put it in the context of the U.S., it’s more like the Knights of Labor. If you know anything about Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor in the 1860s–80s, it was a union federation understood as a totalizing, working-class, civil-social institution that did bargaining, strikes, and fights as part of a larger package of different ways to address the social crises that capitalism brings about. The Knights had a choral society, a militia, child and family services, and their own newspapers. In a Kautskyian party way, they addressed not the purely economistic issues that workers had at their workplace, nor did they address the political issues, but instead they crafted an entire working-class world that was relatively successful for that period of time.
Civil-social life in this country has dissolved, certainly in the last three or four years since COVID. There’s the Bowling Alone thesis from the 1990s,[28] talking about the death of churches, bowling leagues, trade unions. The atomization and alienation of capitalist society — especially with the internet — has increased to the extent that a real core of what it meant to be a socialist, what it meant to be working-class and its expressions, let alone the meaning of the party, are now almost inconceivable without rebuilding some sort of the social structures that are necessary preconditions for a party. That’s why our conception of it is pre-political. The ILC posits itself as the precondition for the arrival of a working-class party. Because it is a civic association in the same way that the Kiwanis Club, the Elks Club, or the Rotary Club presents themselves as repositories of middle-class or petty-bourgeois civil and social life and interests in the public sphere, so too do we imagine that the ILC could be a central node for rebuilding what’s left of working-class collective life in this country.
ER: One of the issues that will come up in the Q&A, one of the political tensions, will be precisely around syndicalism vis-à-vis politics. I want to try to get at that through some of the history you mentioned. From a certain point of view in 2024, the act of undertaking civil-social organizing in anticipation of a working-class party is haunted by the Popular Frontist specter of a revival of a more workerist political strategy within the Democratic Party. It’s easy to say in 2022–24 that Sanders-ism, democratic socialism, and Popular Frontism are exhausted. That was not easy to say in 2015. There’s a particular historical moment giving rise now to that imagination.
In terms of how the history of the American Left figures here, there actually was a Kautskyian party in the U.S., the Socialist Party of America (SPA) — Eugene Debs. Interestingly, some of the syndicalists in and around it, precisely because they didn’t take a Marxist approach to the party question, actually as soon as Woodrow Wilson undertook some outreach to labor in 1912, there were figures like Mother Jones and others who were syndicalist in their politics who left the SPA for the Wilsonian Democratic Party as this proto-“Labor Party” or workers party, which it was to become in its self-styling more fully politically in the 1930s, but you see that already there. Why pose it as the Knights of Labor versus the SPA? Does it relate to how you relate to politics in this period right now and the question of the party?
SKB: If there’s going to be a revival of capitalist-party workerism it will probably be the Republicans, not the Democrats. It will be a retrograde one. There’s already the MAGA movement towards something that looks like reactionary workerism and economic nationalism. You’re right that a pure syndicalist movement could certainly be prey to that, and your story of Wilsonism is important too.
At the end of that Substack essay, I say that we should ascribe to our banners, “One hundred years of the Popular Front is enough!”[29] The 100th anniversary of the Popular Front is coming up. Breaking the Popular Front can’t be done in theory; it has to be done in practice. What that looks like is hard for me to picture. It would be necessary to have working-class institutions, run by and for the working class of this country, separate from either of the two political parties and from the political structure itself. One of the ways you could open the door to a return to a Kautskyist party in the U.S. is by pushing for the notion that the administrative state deals with the real kludge of the last 100 years of the growth of this thing, and understanding socialism as the post office, but more. I say this in my article, understanding socialism as when the state does stuff is a deeper problem than many people will admit — it goes back to defending the democratic gains of the New Deal period.
If we start to understand ourselves as the locus of power, and that socialism in the U.S. especially — because we have a different history from Europe, certainly a different one from Eastern Europe or China — socialism is the revolutionary growing over of civil society against the state; the subordination of the state, not our merger with the state. I’m not sure how that’s going to work with the rest of the project, but it has to work. This is going to be part of our pedagogy and practice hopefully. We’ve got a great start; our core is unemployed people, students, care workers, but also, I’m proud to say, union Teamsters, iron workers, electricians, and carpenters. There’s something about what’s left of the militant Gompers-ite craft union, business union institutions in this country that might help inform a more civil-society oriented, socialist, workers’ pre-political movement.
Q&A
I want to connect two things that you said. First, when you were engaged deeply with Endnotes, you said, “the crisis itself will produce politics.” As I understood it, you moved away from this and came to the realization, which you formulated clearly, that what brought you to this idea of bourgeois associationism was the realization of the political effects of the Popular Front. I want to bring these two things together: maybe it’s both. Maybe it really is a fact that crisis produces politics — it’s true — but there is a question about the subjective factor, and how these two things relate to each other. How do we think transformations into capitalist politics and the Left? There is the question of leadership of these transformations, of taking responsibility. Does the current crisis — one could even say the end of neoliberalism — produce a new politics, and, if so, how does this new politics relate to the potential for your project? Couldn’t one also make the argument that it’s part of the politics of the current transformation, that what you are suggesting has to be done by capitalism anyway, because capitalism relies on democratic participation — capitalism has to rely on the organization of the working class?
SKB: Did you make up the term associationism?
I thought I read it in your article “The Left Undead,” but now I can’t find it.
SKB: That’s been something that’s been rattling around my brain for a while, maybe it’s something that I picked up along the way.
Association comes from Charles Fourier, one of the early utopian socialists.
SKB: I may have been reading Roberts and his take on Marx’s relationship to Fourier and Owen, et al. Associationism is an interesting thing to play around with in the future. Your questions are about crisis, building politics, and the subjective factor of that. I hear this as posing the question, is there a danger that, because capitalism relies on democratic mass politics in order to legitimate itself, this particular project might end up doing that?
The danger, but also the potentiality of having critical consciousness of the current transformation of capitalism that might be usable for the reconstitution of the Left.
SKB: One of the themes of my article is post-neoliberalism. We’re getting a look at what that feels like; we’re seeing it in the air. Is it a multi-polar world? Is it a return to economic nationalism? Is it a revival of the American state as the guarantor of the American worker in the workplace and outside of it? Is it a reimposition of gender norms by the state? A pushback against progressive wokeness? It’s hard to tell at this point, but we know from our readings and having lived through it, that Trump represents some sort of break from neoliberalism.
There’s no small chance over the next three or four years — presuming Donald Trump wins, which it looks like he probably will — that the Supreme Court might actually eliminate or defang the NLRA. Then we’re faced with being in a real crisis period for the American working class, deciding whether we’re going to roll over and let our collective organizations go by the wayside, or whether we’re going to start fighting on pre-Popular Front terms, i.e., like the Knights of Labor or the Maguire wing of the socialist AFL[30] in the 1890s and early 20th century, a civil-social socialism that fights directly against capital without the state mediating it. That might be what we face within our lifetimes with Project 2025, which is the Heritage Foundation’s — not even Trump’s — plan in order to neuter or at least politicize the administrative state away from its deep-state, Democratic Party tendency. We might be in radically different political circumstances moving forward.
Is there a danger that an organization like this can be co-opted and used as a way to further capitalist exploitation? Probably. But one of the problems that a lot of people have in this country is that they’re not exploited, while others are too exploited. So what would a true critical understanding of capital and the need for jobs do for our movement? How do we interface with particular capitals? How do we build power if the state is going to change or back away from the role it’s had all the way through the 20th century?
In the background of the article, I kept saying that perhaps some force is going to arise out of all these different crises. It did arise, and it’s me and Andy and you guys and everybody who’s trying to rethink these things. We are the change we want to see.
There’s a lot of 1930s to the present, jumping over later decades. What lessons, if any, have you drawn from the attempt to do a U.S.-based labor party in the 1990s? Why is that not on the horizon?
SKB: What happened?
It didn’t happen, there was an attempt and it failed.
SKB: Was that the one Adolph Reed, Jr. was in?
Yes.
SKB: There were trade unions that were part of this effort, right? I’m not an expert, when I studied a lot of labor history it tended to be from the 1930s to 70s. We give short shrift to the whole post-war period. That might be an example of the way in which the institutionalized labor movement in this country is ultimately incapable of breaking with the Popular Front. What the Labor Party was positing was that a true workers’ party could arise if the radical end of the AFL-CIO unions, if the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) were able to express their political interest. But what would that be? What is the interest of the TDU? What is the interest of the carpenters’ union? They’re either parochial for historical reasons, or their vision of politics is the New Deal, but more: more arbitration by the state, more collaboration, more tariffs, labor laws that breathe new life into existing and decaying unions. If already by the 1980s, you had a labor movement on its back foot for structural reasons, it’s not surprising that the political expression of that is going to have the same deformed Popular Front tendencies to it.
If we’re going to do something pre-political, it’ll hopefully be the amalgamation of new working-class organizations that are separate from the old Wagner Act labor unions, which are deficient because they’re a product of the 1930s, of Fordism, and of the Popular Front. The party that would come out of that pre-political amalgamation would necessarily be different from attempts within the labor unions to try to find their own political expression.
When you were giving your history, I was thinking that over the last 20 years or so there have been multiple opportunities where the question of civil-society practice has posed itself. David Duhalde gives a nice history about this, where he says the anti-war movement collapsed into Obama’s election, and its subsequent discontents with that are behind Occupy; even there in Wisconsin, but also the Tea Party. The reason I bring that up is that after the DSA had the Trump bump, I started to hear things like “base building” and “we can’t be tied to the electoral cycle.” The Marxist Center, which had a lot of people involved who joined MUG, collapsed as well.
SKB: I tried to join them mid-collapse, but they dissolved in the course of my application process.
How do you see that your project can do better than these earlier practices? I remember being at Occupy, and there was this idea that this can’t last forever and it has to get serious, and that was the impulse to try to do something electoral. This is why Bernie was considered progress — that it’s “real,” it’s not a protest, and it’s about “state power.” You keep saying “independence.” The Marxist tradition talks about independence, class independence. They talk about it at the level of political independence, not necessarily at the level of the worker’s interests, where in the mid-20th century you had to win over the unions or they might rough you up in more ways than one. I am always optimistic and enthusiastic to see lots of civil-society projects happen, and then a very unfortunate event will happen, like October 7, and instantly all of them are forced to take a line — “what is your position on this, are you for genocide or not?” These civil-society projects reveal how much they’re still part of capitalist politics. Yes. they’re independent, and yet politically they still get subsumed under the same thing.
SKB: On the second question, in Alcoholics Anonymous, they recite the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I’m calling for Serenity Prayer socialism within our group.
There’s a tendency for new groups to have a 25-point program that lays out everything from positions on the Ukraine War or Gaza, internationalist issues, all the way down to culture issues that tend to be an important preoccupation for people on the progressive and conservative sides. These are important when you’re a political party; it’s important to have a line on things to orient the membership and broader society towards your political vision. But part of the power of something that’s pre-political is that you could put aside a lot of those questions and have an anti-abortion, Catholic socialist alongside somebody who’s very much invested in that politics, as they should be. There is this tendency to have a line for everything, but we need to step back from that and look at all these dispersed forces that exist in this country, with this real lack of power which we’ve seen over the last four years, and realize that we can only confront things that we can do something about. We can build this conception of working-class power whose wellspring does not come from the state nor the Constitution, but rather from civil society itself.
Your other question was about Occupy, Obama, AOC and disappointment in base building. What was that?
Why do you think this civil-social organizing can be done better than before? Not just over the course of the 20th century, but in the last two decades, there have been multiple initiatives to “build civil society before we get involved in politics.”
SKB: There’s no guarantee that anybody could do it better than it’s already been done. Mass politics is dead. Even Trumpism is not really a mass politics — I’m thinking of Anton Jäger in this sense[31] — it’s more like a personalized, Napoleonic, Caesarist sort of politics. Mass politics is dead because the preconditions for mass politics don’t exist, which is an act of the civil-social sphere that expresses the interests of society or of an outsider class. That’s something that we’ve all lost. The question on doing it better is an open one. When an event like October 7 happens, we don’t have to jump out and take one side or the other, with the exception of an abrogation of responsibility to not call for a ceasefire, due to the atrocities and genocides. You always have to be critical about that and ask, “what does a call for a ceasefire even do?” It legitimates the forces that are funding the genocide over there. The more important question we should ask ourselves is, if instead of having 20–30 members, we had 20–30 thousand members, how might we intervene when we can do something, as opposed to begging those in power to stop providing 2,000-pound bombs for Israel to prosecute its atrocities?
ER: To what extent could an orientation towards labor unions be a liability in terms of this vision of civil-social organizing? In one sense, it would be an asset. As you answered in the first question, there could be changes in the relationship between the state and organized labor, that a certain openness for organizing might come about. But at the same time, it strikes me that if one is truly trying to organize across the culture-war lines, the very premise that what you’re doing is fundamentally oriented to labor unions will alienate a lot of people. Suddenly, it’s a non-starter. It would be like starting around churches. How does that factor into your vision of moving beyond economism to socialism, organizing civil society?
SKB: I got a lot of ideas about what it would take, for example, in my industry and union, to get out of the death spiral. I realized that there are limitations that are imposed upon any leadership that comes into, say, the car producers union or the operating engineers union. I could imagine a path on which unions might be able to succeed, but I’m realistic about the trade unions, and I understand that it’s not a problem of leadership, that there are deep structures — labor law, class power — that mean that trying to capture the trade unions will necessarily bring us into a relationship with other powers that force us to concede things that we shouldn’t concede. With labor unions, you want to interface with the rank-and-file members, but also with anti-union people, to help people to understand why it is that they’re rightfully, in many cases, anti-union. We want to welcome those people in and say that a mass, autonomous institution of workers’ power doesn’t have to look like the car producers’ union or the teachers’ union, for example. If we keep acting as though the existing trade unions are the only way that unions could be done, we remain in a mindset of powerlessness.
You say that we’re inheriting a challenge of civil society ruling the state — that seems to be the goal — and that history thus far has seen a subordination of civil society to the state. You also mention the likely imminent dissolution of the NLRA — and the National Labor Relations Board with it — and how that leads to a vacuum regarding where to go from there. The NLRA marked the apex of the union movement and the completion of its integration into the state apparatus, and even more specifically, the Democratic Party. What would we make of tha, and how does that inform where we go from here? Should we have an understanding of civil society as actively extracting what might be understood as historically achieved gains in the process of something clearer? In addition, despite the fact that it seems apparent that civil-social organizing is a necessary prerequisite for any politics, politics seems to have captured civil society; it’s as if we have nowhere to start from.
SKB: Many people, such as Macnair, Cutrone, and Varn, have said that the conditions facing labor and the socialist movement today are more like those of the 1890s than those of the 1930s. We’re in a period of inter-imperialist rivalry and working-class disorganization; we are confronting the overweening power of capital, such that we need to start from basic premises moving forward. Beyond the Knights of Labor and the Kautskyian party as it existed in the U.S., there is another American formation: the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). There has been a whole panoply of attempts to act within civil society, to build on top of this class power, both economically and politically that we look back on. We learn our lessons about integration; we learn our lessons about subordination through agitation, education, and organizing.
There might be some sort of demonstration effect. One of the issues we’ve faced in the League for Industrial Freedom is the lack of face-to-face contact coupled with our globe-spanning ambitions. With the ILC, it’s more important to start with local chapters, the New York chapters; it’s where our people live, and where we want to build. The ultimate vision would be to bring the revolutionary American spirit and tradition of unionism and labor politics in general to federate that across borders; to try to do, in a more civil-social way, what we attempted to do with the first project.
One of the good points that Spencer Leonard and others make, is that America’s unique in certain ways; our labor history reflects that. The Popular Front has erased an entire history of social struggle that is still resonant. However, it’s often more resonant among the Right than the Left, such as the libertarian impulses of anti-trade-union workers. It’s not that they’re retrogressive; there is a rational kernel to those ideas. If you have an organization, a group, and an educational process that can bring people in and say, “you're not wrong, stupid, nor even anti-solidaristic, although it may express itself that way; you’re putting your finger on something within the trade-union movement: these are unaccountable, collaborationist enterprises that ultimately, especially over the last 50 years, act as services rather than civil-social organizations.” Whatever we build will have to be orthogonal to the Left and Right in this country, which scares people because they think we’re making concessions to MAGA or Trumpism. No, actually there are rational kernels within that when we switch our frame to what socialism looked like in this country 120 years ago as opposed to the last 90 years.
There is a desire to orient towards a different tradition than what has historically, popularly motivated organizing thus far. The failure of the Popular Front makes us look at different traditions. How ought we deal with the fact that the concrete opportunities experienced by other traditions seem more ambiguous today? Before, the state’s capture of trade unionism hadn’t been accomplished, whereas today it has.
SKB: What would it look like to contest power with the central labor council of your local municipality? What would it mean to form an organization that had enough working-class representation and power that you could overcome the AFL-CIO unions in your town as the locus of working-class economic activity and collective power? These things are necessary; there needs to be a socialist or communist central labor council out there.
Concerning the opportunities, it’s the unfortunate truth that almost every American knows: the 1950s aren’t coming back; the mass worker’s not coming back; and the prosperity of the unipolar power of American capital is not coming back. Yet, both sides of the political spectrum dream of the 1950s or 60s. Republicans want the return of the nuclear family, good jobs, and the ability to form small businesses, etc. For the Democrats, there’s a hope for the return of the mass unions in the 1950s, given the right policy framework. We have to oppose that sort of thinking. As much as we look towards the 19th century for archetypes of what we can imagine, we also need to understand that the post-neoliberal era isn’t going to look like the 1950s nor the 1890s. There will be new configurations of class power, exploitation, and politics that arise.
I’d like to give a historical example, concerning the relationship between pre-political and post-political. In England in the 1990s, there was an organization called the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA), which was formed by ex-anarchists who had been involved in Anti-Fascist Action[32] in the 80s, like the antifa super soldiers you mentioned. These were the guys who fought skinheads in the streets and were proud of their strictly working-class, thuggish attitude.
SKB: Against the National Front?[33]
Yes. And in the 90s, particularly after Labour became New Labour, Anti-Fascist Action launched a campaign to start the IWCA. They tried to align some other groups that didn’t quite work out, and they went off on their own, doing civil-social community organizing. What they became known for was a campaign — they became embedded in a working-class community in East Oxford — for running drug dealers off of estates. They said they went to the working class on the council estate and asked, “what are your concerns?” And they replied, “the mostly black drug dealers are ruining our estate.” The IWCA ran campaigns, like self-defense groups, to run the drug dealers off. They got involved in local council politics. They ended up becoming known for opposing mass immigration and expressing real concerns of the working class they were embedded in concerning mass immigration in Britain in the early 2000s. They’ve since disintegrated, but I wanted to raise a couple of points that come out of that. One is that part of their orientation was that they saw in the early 90s there was a decimation of working-class organization and those left behind by industry, which was being tapped into by the British National Party, the electoral, post-National Front organization. They said their move from Anti-Fascist Action to the IWCA was partly trying to say that one way of being anti-fascist was to actually beat the National Party at their own game. There’s some parallel here in the sense that the turn to civil-social organizing among the working class comes out of anti-fascism. Otherwise the fascists are going to organize the working class; we have to get there to disrupt them. How do you deal with socially conservative attitudes that would spontaneously come up through organizing? But the other thing is to situate that historically and say, “that’s part of the post-political Left.” How do you understand your relationship to the historical periodization of being after the fall of the USSR and the long failure of the New Left? You talk about actually existing socialism being before and after the New Left. Is that still the moment that we’re in? Do you see a parallel with what I’m describing about this post-anarchist IWCA? Trotskyist sectarians would have a lot to say about all of that; they would seem to address the concerns that you’re raising, but there seems to be an assumption that you won’t be like them, and that they were a dead end. What do you think of those organizations?
SKB: The Trotskyist thesis is that the failure of the working class to seize power is the failure of the leadership. Of course, their leaders-in-waiting depend on which sect they’re in and how large they are. They’re either close or far away from that particular task. So to address Trotskyist sectarians, I would say that the pre-political aspect of this imagines that a vast organization will throw up its own leaders that might not necessarily be weighed down as much by the past. The important question to ask is about pre- vs. post-political. If we’re still in a post-90s period, is our attempt itself post-political?
In terms of this IWCA, it sounds like a fascinating history. I’ll look into it, because it sounds like an interesting test case. I’ve never considered MAGA or Trump to be fascist. The ILC would not be, nor should it be, an anti-fascist organization. We don’t have to tread the same terrain of suburban, middle-class discontent that others do. However, you’re right that a real danger is that these issues will organically come up.
The working class you’re organizing might not be satisfied with the Serenity Prayer when their concern is mass immigration.
SKB: That’s a good point. For the time being, the demographic we’re looking for is and will be working-class intellectuals, organic intellectuals, and militants who don’t have a space. We’re working collectively on our minimal points of unity in addition to a constitution. Perhaps institutions and institutional formation could help us avoid the failures of the past. But I’m not sure how much a constitution can confront organic sentiments coming about.
At a descriptive level, it sounds like what you’re doing is creating an organization of what we in Platypus consider to be petit-bourgeois intellectuals, i.e., Leftists — people politicized by Leftist ideas, more than by going to the workers. Is that accurate?
SKB: For now. Who listens to our podcast? I was happy to find out that we have a big following among petty-bourgeois linemen working on the electrical grid. It may just be my background, what I do for a living, but we’re able to draw people through our content and through our project. They may be middle-class in terms of income, but they’re more used to gang labor, industrial labor, and perhaps craft labor. We want our leadership to be composed of such people. Like Platypus, we want to spread out more broadly. But the one problem we will have is figuring out how populist to be. You have to confront the merger thesis. What do you do about the separation between a core of more advanced workers, like a vanguard of workers, and a larger mass of people who are less engaged with the socialist program? As much as we’re trying to do something new, we’re going to run into and work through problems from the 19th and 20th centuries.
To what extent do you consider your organization ILC to be Marxist? Should it be Marxist? You describe yourself as workerist and neo-syndicalist. Is that correct? I thought that was funny because “workerist” is usually an epithet — “It’s a Right deviation!”
SKB: Yeah, we’re taking it back!
It implies some sort of non-Marxist deviation. In the future, as more workers participate in your project, how would you educate them on socialism? Do you have to? What would it mean to educate them on socialism? You mentioned your own intellectual biography and a lot of names came up: Mao, Bordiga, Kautsky, Macnair. How would you be able to educate workers about socialism, about the Left?
SKB: Is it Marxist? Yes, because the neo-syndicalist, workerist thing was in the past. The last couple years of the engagement has put me, for the first time, into a category where I can consider myself a Marxist politically. Yes, we want to have a Marxist organization. That doesn’t mean that everybody within the organization needs to have an advanced understanding of theory. We’re working on reading lists. The real test of our ideas is whether lay people could actually understand our theory, history, and political project or not. One of our 12-month plans is to put together a curriculum, and now we’re sounding like a Leftist group. It’s one thing to explain to people concisely what it means to say “One hundred years of the Popular Front is enough.” The engagements that we’ve had with Platypus, Macnair, and certainly with Roberts will help us create a short curriculum that could help people understand the basis for this organization and its potential. If you’d like to work on it with us, anybody can join for now. |P
Transcribed by Desmund Hui and Allen You
[1] Video of the interview is available at <https://youtu.be/3gPFqtRjP3Q>.
[2] Endnotes is a theoretical journal and book series published by a discussion group, founded in the UK in 2005 by former participants of the journal Aufheben, after an exchange between Aufheben and the journal Théorie Communiste. See <https://endnotes.org.uk/>.
[3] A theoretical journal founded in Marseilles in 1977 by members of other journals, namely Cahiers du Communisme de Conseils and Intervention Communiste.
[4] See Carlos Garrido, Howie Hawkins, Caro Hoffmann, and Sean KB, “From politics to protest” (April 6, 2024), which was the closing plenary of Platypus’s International Convention, <https://youtu.be/3gvpkj_3YW8>.
[5] Endnotes 1, “Preliminary Materials for a Balance Sheet of the 20th Century” (October 2008), <https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/1>.
[6] The Majority Report with Sam Seder. Originally on the Air America radio station, the show was first hosted by Janeane Garofalo in 2004–06.
[7] Hosted by Ezri xB and Jake Verso. See <https://soundcloud.com/swampsidechats>.
[8] Hosted by C. Derick Varn and Amogh Sahu. See <https://www.mixcloud.com/symptomatic-redness/>.
[9] Douglas Lain hosts the Diet Soap podcast and runs Sublation Media; Lain had previously been involved in Zero Books before it changed ownership.
[10] See <https://www.youtube.com/@theregrettablecentury726>.
[11] Steve Bannon served as the White House’s chief strategist for Trump’s first presidency for seven months before Trump discharged him. At the time, it was common to hear the claim that Bannon was the true political mastermind behind Trump, even after he had left the Trump administration.
[12] Founded by Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes in 2016 to be a men’s social club; it was soon vilified as a neo-nazi proxy for Trump.
[13] In 2016, U.S. Army lieutenant general Michael Flynn was a national security advisor to Trump for his campaign; he was briefly the U.S. National Security Advisor in early 2017. Anti-Trump allegations concerning “Russian interference” at the time made Flynn a target of suspicion due, for example, to Flynn having worked with the Russian television channel RT in 2015.
[14] Braverman was an American Marxist most widely known for his book Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
[15] Short for libertarian communism. See “Libcom.org: an introduction,” Libcom (September 11, 2006), <https://libcom.org/article/libcomorg-introduction>.
[16] An anonymous author who posts at <https://www.prole.info/>. Prole has had several books published by PM Press, such as The Housing Monster (2012) and Abolish Work: “Abolish Restaurants” Plus “Work, Community, Politics, War” (2014).
[17] A series within The Antifada.
[18] Matthew Dimick, “Counterfeit Liberty,” Catalyst 3, no. 1 (Spring 2019), <https://catalyst-journal.com/2019/07/counterfeit-liberty>.
[19] National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act.
[20] “Ep 175 - Imperialism: When Capitalism Gets too High w/ Erin Hagood,” The Antifada (March 16, 2022), <https://fans.fm/p/21V7vzk>.
[21] “Ep 219.1 - Millennials are Killing the Millennial Left w/ Chris Cutrone,” The Antifada (July 11, 2023), <https://www.patreon.com/posts/ep-219-1-are-w-85851263>.
[22] “Ep 221 - Mugged by reality w/ The Marxist Unity Group,” The Antifada (July 26, 2023), <https://rss.com/podcasts/the-antifada/1045773/>.
[23] “ep 238 - The Renegade Century w/ Mike Macnair,” The Antifada (February 14, 2024), <https://rss.com/podcasts/the-antifada/1343145/>. Macnair is the author of Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity (London: November Publications, 2009) and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), which was founded in the early 1990s and publishes the Weekly Worker.
[24] Ep 240 - Our Social Hell w/ William Clare Roberts,” The Antifada (February 28, 2024), <https://rss.com/podcasts/the-antifada/1351248/>.
[25] Sean KB, “The Left Undead: For civic-social organization as pre-political task” (February 20, 2024), <https://seankb.substack.com/p/the-left-undead>.
[26] “New Org, Who Dis,” The Antifada (July 22, 2022), <https://rss.com/podcasts/the-antifada/796748/>.
[27] KB, “The Undead Left.”
[28] See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), which was developed from his essay “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (January 1995): 65–78.
[29] KB, “The Left Undead.”
[30] American Federation of Labor, founded in 1886. In 1955 it merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, founded in 1935, to become the AFL-CIO.
[31] See Anton Jäger, “From Post-Politics to Hyper-Politics,” Jacobin (February 14, 2022), <https://jacobin.com/2022/02/from-post-politics-to-hyper-politics>.
[32] Founded in 1985; dissolved in 2001.
[33] Founded by A. K. Chesterton in 1967.
