Shuli Branson on Anarchism and State Power
This month we have a takeover interview from Laney Lenox.
I (Sam) am off for a few days this week so Laney Lenox (writer and researcher, previously interviewed here) took over the newsletter for this edition. In it she interviewed the brilliant Shuli Branson.
Shuli Branson is an anarchist, anti-Zionist Jew, transfemme writer and educator. She is the author of Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life. They host the podcast, The Breakup Theory, conversations on ending things and collective liberation. She is currently working on a series of essays about the seductions and dead ends of anarchism, as well as a book on trans youth liberation. You can find Shuli’s current writing and support their work here.
In your book Practical Anarchism, you talk about how anarchy is often colloquially used to mean chaos, or even chaotic violence. I think it’s interesting that you’re describing it in a way that is refuting that idea, but you’re also discussing it in a way that’s a little bit different to how anarchy is talked about within some anarchist circles . . . Can you give an explanation of what you mean by “practical anarchism” and how you see anarchism?
So, part of this was the book that I was asked to write was about thinking about anarchism not simply as the Black Block, or whatever tactic, within protests. Because often the perspective we have on anarchism tends to talk about the ways that it confronts state power. Not to say that anarchist thinkers and organisers believe that the way to overthrow the state is through direct confrontation, but often we’re brought into that moment. So, I was interested, in the vein and spirit of a lot of anarchist thinkers, to talk about anarchism as something that we do everyday, not only in these exceptional moments of spontaneous insurrection, or even planned insurrection, but things that we’re constantly doing that make life possible right now. . . So, I want to bring our attention in Practical Anarchism to practices, daily practices, things that we do all the time, as locations for making the world different.
You put this really beautifully in Practical Anarchism: “I want to argue that if we find anarchism in our daily life, we may just be able to discover what living is.” It’s interesting that you’re talking about nihilism, that’s one part of your understanding of anarchism, but it does have this really hopeful and beautiful side.
I’ve gotten a lot of nice responses from peoples’ experiences of reading it and feeling compelled to do things. But as time has gone on, I’ve been more in this sort of nihilist mode and like, how did I write a book that seems so positive? Because things have just gotten worse and worse. And yet, for me, my anarchism, while I can acknowledge the worsening conditions, I have to maintain some kind of hope. And that hope for me is something about the efflorescence of life no matter what. Not to say that, you know, we’ll accept whatever conditions are given to us. . . There’s that book Blessed Is the Flame about concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism . . . It’s not like they made good lives in the camp, but they engaged in resistance and fighting back, whether or not they would live through it. In that moment, there's joy and pleasure in that resistance. My anarchism maintains a commitment to being here, continuing to be here, and continuing to think that there’s things that we can do all the time to destroy this world. But also, to realise that we’re already living in other worlds all the time.
There’s all these different possible futures in the here and now, and maybe we tend to not necessarily think of it that way.
Yeah, I mean in that kind of multiverse theory of every choice we make forks out into different possible worlds. Again, I like thinking this way because there’s all these different possibilities at any moment that crowd each other out. It’s not like there’s a right way to act, but each place is generative of something, each decision is generative of something else. . . Any action you take, you’re like, I could very well have taken a different tact. So, that is possibility, it’s not an end goal. Right here, right now, there's the possibility to act in different ways.
“I have to maintain some kind of hope. And that hope for me is something about the efflorescence of life no matter what.”
In both a recent episode of the podcast that you co-host, “The Break-Up Theory”, and in an essay on your Patreon titled “No State Solution”, you articulate your perspective on the state of Israel both as a Jew and from the perspective of an anarchist that is, in principle, against all states. Could you explain how your view on the Israeli state does (and perhaps does not) fit within the context of being against the project of nation-states in general?
When I talk to Jewish people that are against the massacre and genocide in Gaza, but they support Israel, they’ll sort of be like, “Well, I’ll accept your point of view, because you’re an anarchist, and you don’t like any state.” They want to specify that if people are talking about Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, that they extend that to all states. Because they think that it’s antisemitic if you focus simply on Israel and it not having a right to exist. . . That’s easy for me to say: I don’t think any state should exist; I don’t think any has a right to exist. But I also counter that there is something particularly bad about Israel . . .I have personal, emotional feelings about that because, as a Jew, the way that Israel evokes my Jewishness to defend its murderous regime, the way that it takes the Shoah as an excuse to perpetuate similar, if not the same kinds of actions, against another group of people. I was teaching in a class on Utopia, David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and he says this thing about the Utopia behind states is the like claim to solve the problems of human condition, whether be like mortality or whatever . . . Israel is clearly a Utopian project, just like the US was in its foundation. The problem it’s trying to solve is supposedly antisemitism, to create a safe place for Jews. But we can see that in taking that on as its purpose, that it’s necessary for it to kind of create more death and more destruction.
Something that Sam always asks is, if I died (or Sam and I both died?!) and left Everything Mixtape to you in our will, who would you interview next?
I might say Samuel Delany, since I have tried to interview him, and ended up with a sweet correspondence, but no interview. For a dead person, I'd maybe say Guy Hocquenghem, since I've spent so much time with his writing.