Brief: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 1)
In this first of a two-part series, I dig into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.
How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions?
In 2013, Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist. In 2016, he openly called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In Trump 2.0, he’s been an ideological whip for the vanguardism of Project 2025. If Bannon has a foil, it was the late anthropologist David Graeber—Occupy organizer, anarchist, and author of The Dawn of Everything—who championed prefigurative politics and rejected the idea that the state could ever be an instrument of liberation.
Drawing from Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, I explore why a decade of globally interconnected mass movements failed to build lasting power—and how the right learned from their mistakes. We revisit January 6 through the lens of conspirituality influencers, we go to São Paulo to watch anarchist punk collectives lose the narrative to organized right-wing actors, and we return to Occupy to understand the spiritual hopes and organizational gaps that still shape protest culture today.
Part 2 will dig deeper into Graeber’s legacy, the theological undertow of spontaneity vs. structure, and what younger activists may inherit if we don’t learn from the last half-century of revolt and repression.
NOTE: Full citations are available on the episode page at https://www.conspirituality.net/.
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Hello, everyone.
Matthew here.
This brief is part one of a two-part series.
Part two will drop on Monday on Patreon for subscribers.
This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
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Chapter one.
Bannon Seizes the Ring.
The third, broadly, line of work is what is deconstruction of the administrative state.
And if you.
That is Steve Bannon in 2016 at a CPAC meeting.
Deconstructing the administrative state was third in his list of tasks for the Trump presidency after bolstering Homeland Security and enforcing economic nationalism, all of which are playing out now in Trump's second term.
Now, here is the late anthropologist, anarchist, and lead strategist of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, David Graeper.
Having sort of exhausted almost all possibilities working within the system, people simply come to the realization that the system is fundamentally corrupt.
We don't live in a democratic society in America.
We have a system of institutionalized bribery.
And the only way to challenge that is to reinvent democracy, to provide a model of what real democracy would actually be like by moving outside the system entirely.
So both Bannon and Graeber are hostile to the state.
They want to see it radically change.
They are revolutionaries, although at opposite ends of the political spectrum, wanting opposite outcomes.
Graeber, the anarchist, envisioned a world of equality and local mutual aid-based self-governance.
Bannon is a fascist who wants to consolidate power in late capitalism in the most efficient way possible.
But if we imagine for a moment that they are coming from the same values, they would be reiterating a 156-year-old debate in leftist revolutionary politics about strategies of spontaneous and horizontal versus structured revolution.
This rift began at the first International Working Men's Association in 1869 between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, the anarchist.
And over the next 50 years, the dispute evolved into all-out acrimony between the descendants of Bakunin and the emergent mastermind of Marxist revolutionary theory, Lenin.
My thesis today is that the current opposition to Trump has largely inherited many aspects of the idealism of Bakunin through David Graeber, the anarchist, and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Socialist, while MAGA has appropriated the pragmatic vanguard building of Lenin for fascist ends.
Now, it's one thing to recognize that this has happened.
It's another thing to really grasp what it means about what the opposition to Trump lacks or what the opposition to Trump has abdicated.
My agenda today is to look at how Bannon and his gang doubled down on their ruthlessness after January 6th, 2021, at the influence of the new left on current protest ideologies that oppose Trump,
and how the work of Vincent Bevins shows the poor outcomes of mass movements that lack political direction, and how in the background of all of this stands the ghost of David Graeber and the Occupy movement and its emphasis on prefigurative politics.
Now, on Monday, I'll track the history of the conflict between anarchist and Leninist theories of revolution all the way back to the arguments over the Paris Commune.
And I'll tell a story about how the implicit spirituality of the Occupy movement motivated a kind of opportunism.
And I'll also track the effects of Occupy values into the present debates over how to best oppose Trumpism.
Now, it might sound like I'm doing something interpretive or even alarmist here, but in fact, right-wing Leninism in the U.S. is self-proclaimed.
In 2013, Steve Bannon was the executive director of Breitbart, which Ben Shapiro later called Trump's pravda, which should already raise some eyebrows when he was in the process of resigning from the platform over a dispute with Bannon.
Bannon met with Ronald Radosch of The Daily Beast in 2013, and this was at a book launch party at his Capitol Hill townhouse.
And here's Radosch.
Quote, we had a long talk about his approach to politics.
He never called himself a populist or an American nationalist, as so many think of him today.
I'm a Leninist, Bannon proudly proclaimed.
Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
Lenin, he answered, wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too.
I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today's establishment.
Now, Bannon is doing some shorthand here, because the state that Lenin led a revolution against in 1917 was the provisional Russian government, which still under the thrall of Tsar Nikolai II, was committed to capitalist industrialization, its imperialist delusions of colonial competition, and continuing to send Russian troops to certain death in the Great War.
The goal wasn't to destroy this state outright.
The Bolsheviks were aiming to establish a transitional state within it, a step towards Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, which would institute socialist policies and gut the capitalist state from the inside out, leading to full communism.
Here is Steve Bannon in early 2024 talking about the unfolding enactment of Project 2025, which also maps out a transitional state, but of a very different kind.
This time, we're training much more than 3,000.
The Heritage Organization, Center for Renewing America, all these different organizations that are conservative or on MAGA are training tens of thousands.
Of 3,000 will be the first wave that hits that will really staff the Trump government at every level, from Department of Energy, Department of Defense, every billet that needs to be filled will be filled pretty quickly in the second term.
So he's talking there about a vanguard seizing the state.
And there is nothing in the world that could have motivated Graeber to think along similar lines for the benefit of socialism.
And this is because, in line with the anarchist tradition, Graeber was fundamentally, morally, perhaps even existentially opposed to the notion that the state could ever be an instrument of desired social change.
He placed his hope and the hopes of the Occupy generation on the notion that living as if the state was irrelevant would in fact show everyday people that the state was irrelevant and that they could manage their relationships on their own, guided by their natural cooperative nature.
There are very reasonable and humane historical, social, and moral reasons for the left to have abandoned Leninism in favor of a more undefined resistance to capitalism.
But that abandonment of Leninism makes for an unfair fight when Steve Bannon picks it up, like the ring in Tolkien.
Chapter 2, January 6th.
Let's rewind the tape a little to remember a spontaneous uprising that haunts our present day because of what right-wing Leninists like Bannon and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation learned from it.
These were the anarchic events of January 6th, 2021.
Now, on this podcast, we've covered example after example of people sliding into fascist influence.
Some are pulled rightward by demagogues who spam their resentment and revenge buttons.
Others drift into fascism because they were otherwise politically checked out, or because fascism is good at converting ennui and cynicism into a passionate yearning for spontaneous change.
It can make people feel like something is finally happening, as if it's a miracle.
I think where we really shone bright was in analyzing the irrational aspects of spirituality that helped this fascist era explode, but may also help it implode.
So on episode 34, we reported on the online responses from the Conspirituality Influencer set to the attempted insurrection on January 6th.
We covered Mickey Willis, the propagandist and creator of Plandemic, who was cosplaying as a journalist there that day, calling the riot beautiful and insisting the mob was peaceful, even as his own footage showed doors being smashed open and officers being attacked.
Christiane Northrop, the former OBGYN turned anti-vax spiritual influencer, live streamed from a waterfast retreat, claiming the uprising was divinely guided and inevitable.
Lori Ladd, a Galactic Federation channeler, framed the riot as proof of a 5D consciousness shift and said that it was perfect and necessary.
And of course, we can't forget Jacob Anthony Chansley, the Q shaman who blended New Age mysticism with fascist cosplay, but then later interpreted his arrest as a shamanic descent into the netherworld.
Now, if memory serves, I recall that Derek and Julian and I kind of enjoyed the comic relief of these bozos who stood at the edge of an edgelord movement to disrupt the transfer of power and topple the government by taking vague orders from a charlatan.
It was reassuring to know that the naive outnumbered those who came in tactical gear with zip ties on their belts that day.
But at the same time, four people died.
And when the dust cleared, many of the rioters continued to radicalize in jail before Trump pardoned them.
But on that day, they did fail.
Why?
Because, like their leader, these would-be insurgents were not able to think ahead.
They didn't have a plan.
They didn't know how to grasp the levers of actual revolution.
And so what we saw instead was confused rioters rifling through random folders and random offices.
And when they got frustrated, they just took shits in the hallways, and the New Age nitwits cheered them on.
They had no prioritized list of political objectives, no capacity to disrupt transit, traffic, or communications, no infrastructure access or technology hacks, no buy-in from the military or any bureaucrats.
They had nothing but surges of emotion, hymns and prayers on the Senate floor, and their trackable phones uploading riot live streams to Parlor, if you remember Parlor, where they could be found by the FBI.
Now, they and many of their supporters echoed the sentiments of one New Age lady writing under the now defunct handle Shavani Kumara, who at 2 a.m. on January 7th, 2021, posted the following to Facebook, probably from her hotel in Washington or close by.
Today was epic.
I am honored to have followed the calling to shine my love light here and be witness to this momentous day in our collective experience.
Now, you can't see this, but it's kind of like a Dr. Bronner's label because there's random capitalization of the important words throughout.
I arrived in D.C. at 6.30 a.m. and was graced to get near the front of the Save America event where Trump and numerous other speakers, including Rudy Giuliani, Vernon Jones, Madison Cawthorne, spoke to a massive crowd of peaceful patriots.
This is the third time I've been called to DC to be a pillar here.
And she goes on and on and on.
And this was peak and spirituality, a ritual of grievance, entitlement, magical thinking, a belief in miraculous, spontaneous change because the storm was coming.
They didn't know when or how or what would happen after.
And so they steeled themselves with reassurances that everything was unfolding as it should.
Make the popcorn, enjoy the show, trust the plan.
Now, four years on, QAnon is the silent victim of its own failed prophecy.
But many of the same convictions are plain to see in the Charlie Kirk Christofascism now ascendant in the Trump sphere.
Okay, so maybe you can hear me teeing up my on-the-other hand statement.
So here it is.
The current popular resistance to Trump has real-world roots and moral authority.
It is aghast that the government can be shut down, that snap payments can be stopped, that ICE is breaking into daycare centers, that Trump is blowing up random boats off the coast of Venezuela, and that women are losing access to their reproductive rights.
Unlike QAnon or MA uprisings, mainstream resistance to Trump is not a vessel for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.
And in addition to its moral gravity, it draws on a deep well of inspiration, cultural memories of civil rights, and now also a conviction in the efficacy of strategic nonviolence.
And altogether, these qualities can drive hundreds of thousands of people into the streets.
But what is that mainstream resistance asking for beyond Trump going away?
How will it keep his successor away?
What is the plan?
Who is prosecuting it and how?
Will these crowds of people have to settle for nominating and backing Gavin Newsom or whoever else the party pushes forward?
In terms of how they envision wresting power back from fascists, resistance demonstrations are also vulnerable to being ungrounded, aspirational, and confounded by magical thinking or even spiritual faith.
The model can rely implicitly on the hope for a spontaneous political shift.
It can imagine that awareness and enthusiasm and a vague commitment to common sense, because of course we don't accept kings, right?
That this is a pathway towards seizing the levers of power.
Now, I'm not playing false equivalence here in saying that the January 6th insurrectionists who believed they were enacting a divinely ordained rescue operation are politically or morally comparable to the hundreds of thousands who show up for things like the No Kings Day protests.
Rather, I want to say that the MAGA attempt to seize indefinite power failed on that day, but not thereafter, for the same reasons that mainstream, broadly coalitional, digitally organized protest movements against fascists can stall out without ever gaining traction.
It has to do with whether the movement has a functioning parallel infrastructure, or at the very least, a concrete agenda to the one it is intending to overthrow.
And if it doesn't have these things, it'll be limited to making a mess in the Capitol building in 2021, trying to keep Trump in, or it may disperse and waste a lot of valuable energy in 2025 in the effort to get him out.
The most cunning minds in the MAGA movement realized they had a problem with holding and defending power, and they moved to correct it.
Paul Danz, the original director of Project 2025, openly linked the project's motivation to the failures of Trump 1.0.
He framed the project as a direct response to the disarray and disorganization of the first term and transition.
And this included January 6th as a pivotal event that underscored the need for a more tightly controlled, disciplined second term.
Like Bannon in that opening clip, Danz emphasized that Project 2025 was designed to build a personnel machine to ensure that loyalists and ideologically aligned officials could be placed throughout the federal government quickly and effectively, avoiding mistakes and vulnerabilities exposed by events like January 6th.
Lenin viewed himself as an inheritor of the scientific socialism pioneered by Friedrich Engels decades before him.
The idea was to meticulously study the material conditions of social change to be able to predict the correct moment and actions needed to seize power fully.
In that tradition, and through their empirical study of the weaknesses of Trump 1.0, Paul Dans and Kevin Roberts and Steve Bannon did exactly that by placing their attention where the rioters and protesters do not on how every nut and bolt of the administrative state must be captured and torqued to serve their ends.
There is no comparable structure or even impulse that opposes Trump at this moment, at least that I can see.
So why is that?
Chapter 3 Sous les pavé laplage I've got two kids who will be of protest age soon, and I don't want them to have any illusions about the benefits and limitations of various resistance ideas because I don't want them to get burned out with confusion and disappointment because I've seen that happen to a lot of people.
And it happened to me.
And it's because I was born into a forgetful culture.
When I was 18, I started canvassing for Greenpeace, and that connected me to a whole network of charity shop-clothed eco-activists, punk musicians, and anarchist pot smokers.
We traveled in beaten-up vans from the annex out into suburban grids to knock on doors and raise money for protest campaigns against paper mill effluent or military testing that disrupted whale migrations.
Our pitch at the door was not, hey, let's overthrow capitalism, but let's ask the capitalists to be better citizens.
But in the van rides and bar nights after, the vibe was anarchic.
We knew everything was wrong and everything needed to change.
We were raising money for Greenpeace.
We took our cut, but a lot of us thought it was bullshit.
It was too little too late.
I started going to protests, very clear on what was wrong, but pretty fuzzy on what I would prefer or how I would build it.
It was exhilarating to protest.
And I remember a confrontation with a military officer.
I remember looking him in the eye, saying something direct, speaking truth to power with regard to whatever the protest content was.
I invested a lot of emotion in that moment because this singular human encounter had to change something, right?
Didn't it all boil down to two individuals facing each other down within the machine of the state?
When I got arrested with a dozen others for occupying that recruitment office, I felt resolute and proud, but I wasn't sure what I had accomplished or what any of us had accomplished.
We were released without charges in the morning and we felt lucky and we had each other and we skipped down the street to the diner for a celebratory breakfast.
But what could possibly be next?
Who was with us?
Who had our backs?
Who could direct our energies with some kind of vision or experience or eldership?
It didn't occur to me to even ask whether there could be a legitimate political structure that could support me.
And it didn't occur to me in part because the tradition of radical party organizing in Canada was at that point invisible.
In 1940, the Canadian Communist Party had 20,000 members, and then the government outlawed it under the War Measures Act and jailed its leaders.
At around that same time, the Communist Party of the USA numbered 85,000 members, and then came the Smith Act, McCarthyism, and COINTELPRO.
By the late 1980s, when I was canvassing for Greenpeace, these parties were all but invisible.
So, I grew up in a leftist amnesia with this strong impression that we were always and forever alone in opposing capitalism writ large.
Who could build a movement on this?
I have to confess also it went even further to a point of kind of narcissistic pride.
This feeling of my revolutionary passion and solitude makes me very unique.
But being unique, instead of being part of a class called the working class or the class of people who do not own the means of production, this is extremely exhausting.
And so I'm not surprised that I drifted away from this dead-end world of repeated, disconnected, inconsequential arrests and zero structural change.
Like so many people in the neoliberal period, I retreated into the self-project.
I took up yoga and yoga teaching.
That became my job.
So I think about my kids and this ongoing discussion of what these big capital P protests do.
On the positive side, the no-king-style events are accessible and provide recruitment possibilities.
But on the drawback side, they can function as a kind of state-sanctioned catharsis that capitalism can absorb or even co-opt.
But on the deeper level, many may also default to a belief in spontaneous political awakening.
And I think this belief flowed into the vacuum left by the repression of Western communist parties.
But it also had thoughtful roots in the emergence of the new left and the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, where the emphasis was on the role of miraculous consciousness shifts in provoking organic social and political change, where the assumption was that no revolutionary organization was actually needed if you taught yourself to act as if you were free.
In the uprising in 1968, the popular slogan painted all over Paris was Sous les pavé laplage, under the cobblestones, the beach.
And it referred to the sand under the old cobblestones, which protesters pulled up to throw at police, symbolizing uncovering something natural and free beneath the imposed rigidity, beneath capitalism and social repression, lies human freedom, joy, and the potential for a radically different society.
It was very poetic.
But we have to remember that only 30 years before, leftists around the world were demanding something very different, a workers' revolution that would, in an organized manner, expropriate capital from the oligarchs and owners, redistribute it, and seize the means of production.
So what changed?
What happened to this old left?
By the late 1960s, real and perceived problems with state communist projects, along with a ton of propaganda about the USSR and China and Cuba, had prompted a self-reflexive turn.
The focus would be more on creative expression now than planning out the end of capitalism in an organized and aggressive way.
My kids are poised to inherit from the new leftists, as I did, an allergy to hierarchy and ideology.
And then there's also a liberal drive to emphasize the supposed power of nonviolent, inclusive, horizontally organized mass demonstrations.
Both tendencies share a very positive, idealistic belief that spontaneous awakening, both experienced and seen by others, will change the political order.
But failing to examine this with Marxist tools will leave my kids and me, I think, vulnerable to the ghouls who have used those tools, people like Steve Bannon.
Chapter 4, Vincent Bevins in Sao Paulo To help flesh this out, I want to talk about the opening case study from the excellent 2023 book by Vincent Bevins called If We Burn, the Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.
Bevins analyzes the global surge of mass protests from 2010 to 2020.
He tackles the problem of why these widespread populist movements focused on progressive politics, but that this often led to blowback.
Bevins focuses on uprisings across 10 nations, including Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey.
And these are uprisings that are often characterized as leaderless, spontaneous, horizontally organized, relying heavily on digital coordination.
Bevins reports that while these explosions created political vacuums, the movement's aversion to formal organization and party politics meant they were ill-equipped to capitalize on revolutionary opportunity.
Consequently, existing power structures or opposition forces were standing by to jump in, to fill the void and impose meaning on the illegible chaos.
Bevins starts his analysis of the mass movement decade with his on-the-ground field notes from Brazil, tracking the Movimento Paso Livre.
So that's the acronym there is MPL.
I want you to forgive my Portuguese through this section because it won't be great.
The MPL campaign was a campaign against a rise in bus fares.
And I'll do a little summary here of this section because it's so rich as a class study.
In 2011, MPL consisted of less than 50 dedicated militants who organized marches on bus stations and invasions of bus stations.
They carried out mass fare evasion by jumping turnstiles or breaking them.
And they made a lot of splash in the media, but ultimately failed to stop any fare hikes.
So who were the MPL?
They were a network of punk bands.
They were a political movement.
They were a combination network of punk bands and political movement.
Key founding members were heavily involved in the music scene, where the bands had names like Anarchic Menstruation, Point of No Return, and Class War.
Politically, MPL was guided by anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left libertarian philosophies, positioning themselves explicitly against the hierarchical and centralizing tendencies of the old left.
They lived by the principles of horizontalism and consensus.
They operated with no leaders or specialized roles.
And this was their commitment to the prefigurative, or the kind of politics that encourages the social behaviors and equalities that the movement dreams of establishing organically.
Their concern was autonomy, and they believed that the bus fare issue was accessible and existential to the city's working class, that it could be a rallying point for working class autonomy, and that this would spark a broader revolution.
And they proclaimed this even though they resolutely refused to telegraph their plans for what would happen after revolution.
And their slogans reflected this, being both micro-focused and super broad.
Again, forgive my Portuguese.
Pula catraca, or jump the turnstile.
Por uma vida sem catracas, for a life without turnstiles.
Vem pra roa, come out to the streets.
O gigante accordu.
The giant has awoken.
In June of 2013, Mayor Fernando Hadad proposed hiking transit fares again, and the MPL hit the streets again.
And in response, major Sao Paulo newspapers published editorials explicitly calling for the police to crack down on the protesters.
On the 13th, police came at MPL with rubber bullets and tear gas, injuring 50, and that included a journalist named Juliana Volone.
And an image of Juliana sitting on the pavement with her right eye apparently shattered by a rubber bullet was shared instantly on social networks.
Miraculously, she didn't lose her eye, but the image shocked millions.
The next day, June 14th, mainstream Brazilian media responded to this imagery by flipping the script.
Suddenly, they condemned the police crackdown that they had previously called for.
And this happened in correlation with an explosion of public sympathy.
By June 17th, the crowds had grown to hundreds of thousands of people participating across multiple cities, and it shook the Brazilian political system to its core.
So what happened with this mass mobilization filled with rage and indignity?
Well, the Workers' Party government of Dilmo Rousseff either misinterpreted or reframed the MPL's radical demands as reformist or progressive and assumed that they could be brought into the existing parliamentary structure with promises of lowered bus fares and maybe other treats.
But the MPL refused the invitation.
The Communist Party of Brazil, which is a Marxist-Leninist part of Rousseff's ruling coalition, denounced MPL's actions as adventurist or unstructured and chaotic.
And they argued that their actions would only destabilize the country.
But then all other smaller socialist parties were violently expelled from the street protests by shouts of sempartido, sempartido.
No parties, no parties.
They really did not want any sort of new structure moving in and taking hold of the revolutionary spirit.
However, what happens next helps us understand the vulnerability of such spontaneous political actions, vulnerability to a kind of ideological drift.
And what Bevins says about Sao Paulo gives us a stark example of how organized right-wing opportunism in the absence of solid leftist infrastructure can take advantage of working class rage.
So Bevins and his colleagues started noticing a strangely wide range of demands on the placards at the marches, many of which were contradictory to the MPL's anti-neoliberal anarchist-inspired agenda.
There was also a lot of patriotic imagery, the yellow and green colors of the flag, for instance.
And during one March, a group of newcomer muscleheads in yellow and green team Brazil football jerseys confronted the core MPL punks who had approached them saying, hey, you know, nationalism is kind of the opposite of what we're all about here.
You know, let's leave the t-shirts at home.
The response was that these new guys didn't give a fuck about any of that left-wing bullshit.
Unquote.
That's a quote from Bevins.
So what were these muscleheads there for?
Free bus fare, social housing?
No.
It turns out they had their own objectives.
They wanted to seize the power of MPL's rebellion and recast it into a right-wing form.
And some of them were really good at it.
Fabio Osterman, a lawyer, political scientist, Harvard Kennedy school grad, saw the unexpected mass demonstrations as an opportunity to create a liberal vanguard within the radical protest movement.
And so he helped establish the Movimento Brasile Livre, or the MBL, through a Facebook page that called for protests on June 18th.
And, you know, this is only five days after the initial MPL confrontation with police forces and the ensuing explosion of sympathy.
The naming of this new movement was an intentional shitpost move because MBL or Movimento Brasile Livre sounds nearly identical to MPL, Movimento Passe Livre.
And that served as a form of contestation to promote their goals of free markets and tax cuts, not free transportation.
The naming deception was so effective that it fooled even the mother of an MPL leader who attended an MBL rally thinking their kid would be there on the front lines and might need a sandwich.
So this is real Chris Ruffo shit.
Another right-wing group actually called itself Vemme Praroi, or come out to the streets.
And this is after the original MPL slogan.
Bevins quotes an MPL leader who described this appropriation as a typical maneuver employed by fascists who take elements from the left and invert their meaning, adopting the aesthetics of the anti-globalization movement while shilling for capitalist interests.
This guy could have been describing Bannon.
The chaos created a promising political vacuum, but the MPL was committed to the old anarchist ideal of horizontalism, and no other structured opposition emerged on the left.
So in response to the crisis, the more tightly organized and power-hungry Brazilian center-right parties called for the impeachment of Rousseff, and the far-right started its long march into that space.
About five years later, Bolsonaro takes power, and he brings the full wrath of his emergent fascist state down on the heads of the MPL by criminalizing protest and jailing people without due process.
Chapter 5.
The Prefigurative In the background of the story Bevins tells is the echo of the Occupy movement, which operated on anarchist principles, mentored by figures like the late David Graeber, who built his ideological influence in the movement with passionate defenses of prefigurative politics.
Again, where participants model in their activism the same egalitarian world they would like to see, guided by axioms like that from Audrey Lorde from the 1980s.
The master's tools cannot dismantle the master's house.
So in this case, activists prioritized correspondence between means and ends over strategizing for a new system in the future in the hope, again, that acting as if you are already free will illuminate the path to freedom.
Graeber was famous and loved for saying things like, direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free or proceeding as one would if the existing structure of power did not exist.
And for anyone familiar with New Age or commodified South Asian wisdom culture, this should ring some bells because it sounds like be the change you want to see in the world or fake it till you make it.
Now, I think this attitude can confer some psychological benefits.
But just a few years later, we should note that Anons would be convincing boomers on Facebook that Trump's draining of the swamp had already happened and so they should just act as if it had.
Occupy erupted and Graeber's star rose within it.
And in 2011, Graeber coined the phrase, we are the 99%.
And that became a major rhetorical influence on the Sanders primary campaign of 2016.
So for many, this was an ideologically robust movement that demonstrated the possibility of self-organization, collective action, and human solidarity.
And it permanently broadened the participants' political horizons.
But it did not result in significant policy changes or systemic reforms.
And in the years following, Marxist critics argued that Graeber's anarchist influence, including the refusal to adopt concrete demands, forestalled the possibility of a mass movement fighting for structural changes, and it led to the burnout and demise of the movement itself.
Graeber's core rationale for refusing to issue concrete demands was that Occupy should demonstrate and provoke a general crisis of credibility in existing governmental and financial institutions.
Once that was established, the hope would be that self-organization strategies would naturally take root.
But what's clear from the rise of global populism since, however, is that a general collapse of credibility in government very easily leads to really dark places.
Bevins' ultimate answer in the wake of this surge of protests never gaining traction is really simple.
The movements he focuses on, he says, prove the old thesis proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1902 in a little book called What is to be done.
Bevins argues that whatever else Lenin did or whatever else we think about him, he was correct about the organizational necessity of a dedicated, disciplined, cohesive vanguard, a secret, professional, inner core party to achieve revolutionary political change, particularly in opposition to undirected, spontaneous movements that value full democratic transparency.
Lenin argued that not only was this vanguard necessary for achieving power, but more importantly, it was necessary for fending off the inevitable counter-revolution.
So is there currently a dedicated, disciplined, and cohesive vanguard within organized opposition to Trumpian fascism?
No, there isn't.
Does the Democratic Party have the political and ideological depth to fend off Trumpism in the long term?
When Mamdani, in his victory speech, says the following, And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power.
This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one.
This is what he's pointing at.
He's saying, along with the rest of his leftist comrades, that fascism is a persistent threat in capitalism and that structural changes are required to stop it.
But the party he represents does not agree with him and will likely work against his answer.
So into that space where no real party structure exists, people can exercise but also dissipate a lot of energy and hope.
And in the worst cases, their anti-establishment passions can be weaponized against them, as when the Bernie Bros swung to Trump.
So I'll pause there.
And in episode two, I'll go farther into the Graeber legacy because it's so rich and compelling.
And it spotlights spontaneity versus structure as almost a spiritual question presided over by leftist figures now elevated to the rank of, you know, seers and saints.
Graeber wears that halo for many, and for me too, most times.
But equally powerful is the ruthless realism of the Leninists.
And one thing I'll suggest is that this debate and these pathways mirror the tension in religious institutions between mystical and orthodox means.
And I think it's worth reflecting on that.
Because you know what?
The fascists are reflecting on it.
They believe in spontaneous mystical change, but a lot of them are also converting to Orthodox Christianity.
And it's for the same reason Kevin Roberts knew they needed Project 2025.
They knew they needed a parallel institution to take the reins when their revolutionary climax arrives.
