Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 2)
Aired: 2025-11-24
Duration: 04:12


=== Graeber Versus Bannon (03:29) ===

[00:00:03]  Hello, Patreon supporters.
[00:00:05]  This bonus episode is part two of Graeber versus Bannon, Anarchism versus Leninism, with part one dropping on Saturday, this past Saturday, on the main feed.
[00:00:15]  I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:00:16]  This is Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:00:27]  You can follow me, Derek, and Julian on Blue Sky.
[00:00:31]  The podcast itself is on Instagram and threads.
[00:00:34]  Please support our Patreon if you're listening to this in the bonus sample slot on your podcast player.
[00:00:41]  You can find the whole episode on Patreon.
[00:00:44]  And you can also find me personally on YouTube and on TikTok at antifascistad.
[00:00:53]  So to recap, in episode one, I framed a clash of revolutionary imaginations through two avatars, David Graeber, the late anarchist anthropologist of Occupy, and Steve Bannon, the right-wing tactician of January 6th and Project 2025, who openly borrows from Leninist playbooks.
[00:01:13]  Both hate the status quo, but from opposite directions.
[00:01:17]  Graeber bet on prefigurative politics, acting as if we're already free through horizontal consensus-based organizing.
[00:01:25]  Bannon and his allies, by contrast, pursue disciplined cadre-building and long-march institutional capture.
[00:01:33]  This is a transitional machinery that's designed to actually seize and hold power.
[00:01:39]  I talked about January 6th, providing MAGO with a cautionary tale about spontaneity without a plan.
[00:01:45]  This was a riot that blended magical thinking, conspiratuality, and grievance with a lot of fervor and, you know, an absence of planning.
[00:01:55]  People died.
[00:01:57]  Many radicalized afterward, even further towards the right.
[00:02:00]  But on that day, they failed because emotion is not a substitute for strategy, logistics, or a parallel governing architecture.
[00:02:10]  I drew on Vincent Bevins' excellent If We Burn from 2023, in which he examines Brazil's 2013 transit fair protests.
[00:02:20]  This was a small anarchist-inspired movement that sparked mass sympathy after police brutality, but it was swiftly outflanked as better organized right-wing forces rebranded its slogans, filled the vacuum, and helped pave the road to Bolsonaro.
[00:02:36]  And the lesson of all of that is that explosions of leaderless energy or ideology-free or ideology-light or ideologically incoherent energy can be co-opted when they reject durable structure.
[00:02:51]  I also revisited May 1968 and the new left's allergy to hierarchy, which helped to make sacred the idea of spontaneous awakening in politics.
[00:03:04]  Occupy channeled that spirit, expanding horizons, shifting rhetoric, as in We Are the 99%, while struggling to translate moral spectacle into durable power.
[00:03:15]  Lenin's unfashionable and frankly dangerous argument for a disciplined vanguard capable of planning, seizing, and defending gains is in the shadows here.

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[00:03:28]  In this part two, I'm going to further ground the anarchist versus Marxist history.
[00:03:32]  I want to describe why Graeber is so wonderful and compelling.
[00:03:36]  And I want to tell a story about spontaneity and spiritual opportunism, and then I'm going to try to land the plane somehow.
[00:03:45]  You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample.
[00:03:50]  To continue listening, please head over to patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
[00:04:07]  You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.