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Welcome to the new books network. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Motosanha Jeezer there from Critical Theory Channel.
Today I'm here with Dr. Steve J. Shown to talk about his latest book, The Book is called Dangerous Anarchies of Strikers, which was published by Brill Publishers in 2023. Dr.
Steve Shown is a lecturer in political science at Texas and A&M University. Steve, welcome to New Books Network. Oh hi, how are you doing? Great, thank you so much.
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise and most importantly why you wrote this book? What was the idea behind writing this book, Dangerous Anarchies of Strikers? Well, I've been writing for a long time about different forgotten anarchists and forgotten feminists. And this is just another contribution to that work and obviously reflects the fact that I think anarchism and feminism should be taken more seriously.
But I think you may have noticed when you looked at the introduction and conclusion that there are a number of concepts that I'm trying to explore. You'll find that mostly we're going to talk about the five thinkers who are in the book, but the underlying idea was to try to explore some of these ideas. And in particular, I'm looking at the idea of democracy and the connection that people make between voting and democracy because many anarchists have not been in favor of voting. And it's not because they don't want to have voting, but they don't want to see voting as being democracy.
And so one of the things that I looked at was is there a better way to decide but a nation is democratic? Is it, for example, if you look at how many people are in jail and you may remember, I said, you know, in the United States, there are a lot of black people in jail. That doesn't seem to suggest that the United States is democracy. And in China, you know, there were about a million Muslims being held in camps to be indoctrinated by the communist party.
So, I mean, if you look at things like that, the fact that there's voting doesn't seem to indicate that there's a democracy. And, you know, I also pointed out that democracy, you know, the voting is not really something that's missing anywhere, you know, they have voting in North Korea. And, you know, voting all around the world, it doesn't really indicate that people are being treated fairly. And that's very much an anarchist perspective.
And, you know, another underlying issue that I look at is political science as a discipline, has more and more since the 1950s become obsessed with voting and with predicting the vote and counting the vote, almost to the point that it's driven political theory and political philosophy out of a discipline. And you'll find, you know, you were just mentioning how difficult it is to get a job. It's very difficult for political philosophers to get a job because often when people retire, they replace them with someone who specializes in something else. So, those are kind of issues which I look at through my thinkings.
You know, the first three were all women and obviously there's a continuing problem, which is that women are definitely still, despite all the years of feminism and reform, still definitely second class citizens. And here in the United States two years ago, the right to terminate our pregnancy was taken away, you know, possibly based on the beliefs of some of the people on the US Supreme Court being religious and just claiming that suddenly the tradition of starry decisive, subled the decision, Stan meant the two important precedents who just crossed out. So, if you look and study, democracy has been about women's rights. I don't think if you look around the world that there are too many democracies.
So, those are the kinds of things that I've been thinking about. And, you know, obviously coming from an anarchist or a feminist point of view, it's a critique of what passes for democracies. So, I'm really asking what democracy is and that's something for the reader to think about. You've certainly raised a lot of important points.
You were absolutely right about democracy being in danger, being curtailed. And despite the fact that a lot of people around were able to vote, that doesn't necessarily mean that we're moving through more progressive or democratic societies. And I really enjoyed the book in terms of especially the structure of the book, because you have feminism and anarchism. So, you have two sections in the book.
First one is Women in Action and the second section is Internationalists, which you'll get to talk about. But before that, can you choose of five thinkers? What was the rationale behind, there are a lot of anarchists, but I'm thinking, why was the rationale behind choosing these particular five people? Was there a selection criteria you had?
I don't know, selection criteria sounds too technical for me. I mean, I've written about a lot of people. I've written about 12 feminists, many of whom were anarchists. But if you look at the five people in this book, really they're not sitting there in the anarchist literature, definitely despite their support for many ideas that we might think of as anarchists.
And so, there's a lot of research, which I'm sure will get to about Virginia Bolton, in Argentina and Uruguay. But there's also a lot of bad research that's not very accurate. So, one of the things I wanted to do was to take everything that she's known to have written, and then build a profile of her ideas based on that, not on a basis of what I call a myth. And also, in the case of Helen Armstrong, she's not really technically an anarchist, but it's interesting to see how the things that she did in Canada fighting for the rights of ordinary people, and particularly for women, fits very much with what people who are more obviously committed to anarchism, we're doing.
And so, those are the kinds of things. Also, there's a critique here, I think too, because if we go on and think about Akkadelekou, Shisui, and Japan, and if we think about, for example, really Tom Barker too, both the guys at the end, they're really people that thought about being a socialist or being a communist and try to decide the differences between them. And there's a lot of ideas like that, which I put in, that makes it interesting. But no, I think really it's just a question of, again, saying to people locally with these people, and they had these ideas, which are often seen as very radical, very revolutionary, but it's worth taking a look at them again.
Let's talk about Virginia Bolton, first that you mentioned. So the book is, there are lots of things I want to ask, but I'll let you talk about her in general. There was a journal that has been attributed to her. I'm interested to know her anarchist thoughts, what they were, and how they were manifested in their writings, and also her activities.
And do you think that head role as an anarchist is over-exaggerated or not? No, I don't. But the reason I don't is because I actually found everything that she did actually write, and based my analysis, you know, I gave people a discussion of everything that was in every article that she ever wrote. And so there's a basis there to see that she really is for medical as an anarchist.
She's pretty radical. She advocates violence in some places, but she also touches on many of the ideas that other anarchists talk about, like, for example, not viewing voting as guaranteeing democracy, and also a lot of sense of what justice would be, and how political systems that we have today are not remotely, you know, in accordance with any definition of justice. And, you know, she's like really all the five people that I talk about, there's a recognition that most people in the world live in absolute poverty, and all to talk about democracy and voting never seems to do anything about the rights of people everywhere. So on the other hand, I rejected the myth, the myth that she was, you know, you were talking about Lavaz, but that paper in all nine of her, all nine of its issues make no reference to her, there's nothing by her in it.
And that led to some scholars. I mean, she's been very popular to South American grad students writing dissertations, particularly in Brazil as well, even though that's another country. But they've moved on to the point of saying, well, maybe the one that doesn't have anything by her, or about the one in Buenos Aires wasn't the right one. Maybe there was another one where she lived, but there's no evidence that that other one existed either.
So what I was trying to do is say, let's find out, you know, let's look at newspapers, and something I've tried hard to do is to use the actual newspapers. You probably noticed at the time that these various thinkers were alive, there's a lot more opportunity to do that today. You know, you can look at newspapers in Uruguay and Argentina and Australia and New Zealand. And find a lot of stuff that earlier researchers didn't look at.
So I wanted to do that. And so what I have is I have a basis for the argument that she is, an important anarchist, but not on the basis of a lot of the stuff that's being written about it, you know, which is a myth. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park. We're making every corner of Ontario safer to make all of Ontario safer. That's how we protect Ontario. For all of us.
Learn how at Ontario.ca slash safe for Ontario paid for by the government of Ontario. Understand her role, she was arrested twice once for asking. Newspaper sellers to tear up the newspapers they were selling and another time, you know, for for opposing the war, the first World War. But she wasn't one of the ones who were arrested.
There was a very important strike in Winnipeg. And, you know, the people who were involved who mainly just wanted to have unions allowed to participate in, you know, negotiating wages and conditions. But a lot of people who benefited from not doing that, this is quite a typical thing across North America at the time. They represented her and her husband, George as being revolutionaries, as being Bolsheviks, you know, that went Bolshevik, was often used.
But really, they were just labor unionists who formed a union and, you know, they really were, you know, some of them were rounded up and put in jail, including her husband. And although they let them out pretty soon, afterwards, there was a real attempt to portray labor unions and Canada as being sort of criminal or communist, which wasn't true. She did many things. You know, when there were a lot of people on strike, she set up a restaurant to feed the women who were on strike.
She spent a lot of time trying to improve benefits for women. And she used to go to all kinds of meetings on a provincial level as well as a city level and try to give the positions of poor people, particularly poor women. For example, Winnipeg is very cold and you need to dress up very warmly. But a lot of the women who worked made such little wages that they couldn't afford warm clothes.
And so, you know, she pointed out people were walking to work freezing because conditions were so bad, so there were many things like that. And I think there's quite a general agreement among historians today that, you know, she was unfairly left out as the account. You know, there's been some attempt to put it back. But the reason I wanted to give her a chapter is, you know, there are still books coming out about the great strike in Winnipeg and that, you know, she gets about one paragraph and most of them.
And I think you also mentioned that her role was sort of overshadowed by her husband. Am I right? Yeah, but not really. They did a lot of things together.
And you know, it's, you know, over the years when I pointed that out about other feminists, because people have said, well, maybe you shouldn't mention the husband, but I think that would be to distort it. I don't think the purpose of what I'm doing is to, you know, right from a political point of view, even though I agree with many radical people, I think we need to accept the fact that, you know, some women work with the husband to achieve the same kind of goals. And, you know, I think there are some ways that she stood out. You know, she would go to conferences and she was the only woman there and maybe the only woman who spoke.
So it is important to draw attention to that. And you know, it really asks a question about history. You know, how do we tell history? If we've mostly told it from the point of view of wealthy people and from the point of view of man.
And what about Elizabeth, Elizabeth Gurlif-Flin? What sort of, what was she, what was she born? What sort of labor organizations she was involved in? And I'm interested to know about her role in founding the American Civil Liberties Union.
Well, she was a wobbly leader, the IWW, the industrial workers of the world. So she was involved in strikes and many places, you know, in Spokane and New York and, you know, in Minnesota. And so she was a really important person in the history of revolutionary unionism, but gradually how free point changed. The point about the American Civil Liberties Union was that, you know, the S.V.
and I.J. was passed in 1917. And then it was made stronger the next year. And so she wanted to stop people being put in jail for expressing radical ideas.
And so that's why she became a founder of it. But later when she had joined the Communist Party, then, and was a leader of the Communist Party, she was expelled from the ACLU because some of the other people at the top of it felt that, you know, communism wasn't compatible with the ideas of the ACLU. Many years later, after she died, they then kind of allowed her back in. But it's a criticism that can be made of the ACLU that they maybe were too faced in the way that they looked at what she was doing.
And was she imprisoned for her ideas? Yeah, she spent two years in federal, prison in West Virginia. And that, you know, was because they took the view that the Communist Party, I mean, she was killed a couple of times in strikes, but pretty much she would get out the next day and then she would overturn the legal basis for the arrest a couple of times. But later in the life when she was a Communist leader, you know, the way that the US Supreme Court looked at the issue was that she was violating the Smith Act, which said that, you know, you can talk about communism, but you can't present it as being inevitable the way that Marx had characterized it as, you know, inevitable stage of societal development.
And so for that reason, she ended up in jail. It's also interesting as I wrote about it, you know, some people have wondered if a relationship she had in her life was a lesbian relationship. But once she was then in the jail in West Virginia, stuff she wrote was very critical of the gay women that she encountered that she definitely, you know, was very hostile to homosexuality. And people speculated on what the reasons were for that.
And probably it was because she had a Russian publisher, a Soviet publisher, and she was maybe catering to, you know, the moral fashion views of, that was still, you know, dominating the Soviet Union. So there are a lot of things to look at in her life. And maybe it would have made as much sense to write a whole book about her, but certainly a very important person if you want to think about the history of labor union, you know, particularly militant labor unionism. And when we go to the other section of the book, Internationalist, I was simply blown away when I read about Tom Barker.
I live in Australia, I used to live in New Zealand and I now live in Australia. I didn't know anything about him. So to me, it was really, really enlightening. And also his journey was in New Zealand and moved to Australia, didn't move to Latin America.
So it, and I think that character also, that that character also like requires a whole book to be written about him. And I'm not sure if the art books about him or not, I'm guessing there are. But anyhow, could you broadly introduce him to us, Tom Barker, talk about his advocacy for labor unionism and his idea for creating a global, one big union for sailors, how, and then he was charged, I guess, right? He was opposed to military conscription.
He was charged with industrial terrorism. He ended up in jail. He went to Chile, Latin America, Chile, Latin Argentina, and also America. It's a fascinating history.
So I'll let you talk about him and broadly introducing him to us talk and his contributions. Yeah, there is no work about him. I mean, that's really very strange. And you know, a lot of what's written about him is based on an interview that was done by historian.
And so, you know, again, to stress the importance of looking at newspapers by looking at all kinds of newspapers, I was able to find a lot of history of him. And so he started out as a union leader for the streetcar or tramway drivers. And he wrote a lot of articles in the IWW paper in New Zealand and because he was opposed to conscription, he got into trouble. And there was a man who put up the money for a bond.
He was let out jail. But he was concerned that, you know, he wouldn't be able to not get into trouble again for the next year, which he was required to do in order to get out of jail. So for that reason, he moved to Sydney and where he then became involved in the same things and trying to resist the draft and then sticking out before ordinary workers. One of the things that is interesting is he was unsuccessful in New Zealand and Helen Armstrong was unsuccessful in Canada in stopping the draft.
But in Australia, Tom was successful. I mean, the fuss that he was able to make about it meant that the government changed their mind. And so they'd already brought people in, you know, when the draft started and they let them out again, the government changed its mind because of a lot of protests that he was, you know, the center of. But unfortunately, because he was in jail at one point, some other radical union workers started burning down businesses.
And so they became the people who were arrested for doing that became the Sydney 12. And so there was, you know, and obviously there was a lot of dislike of what they were doing. Fortunately, no one was killed. But the fact that businesses were burned down really prompted the Sydney police to to exaggerate what had gone on.
And so some people were framed. And so for quite a few years, then, you know, Tom's concern as he moved around other places was to try to get them out. And it really took, you know, a labor government a few years later to let the last people out of jail. And it took a lot of important court decisions to, you know, basically decide that they've been railroaded.
So, but, you know, he, of course, after the last and imprisonment, they deported him to Chile. And that may seem strange, but they were doing it at that time. And, you know, of course, nowadays Australians have dumped undocumented immigrants on islands elsewhere. And, you know, that's, you know, that's something that still goes on.
But and of course, Chile didn't like the fact that it had a lot of radicals there. And so they passed a law to avoid it. And they pretty much ran him out of the country. So then he found himself in Argentina where he had more freedom, you know, at the docks.
And so he was able to form his idea of having a, a sailors union. He actually brought it about there. And then eventually moved on and, you know, went to London where he was, he was originally from England and went to Scandinavia and participated in a lot of important, you know, radical conferences that were going on at that time. And you know, maybe the most fascinating thing of all is, you know, he spent some time in the US to, you know, trying to, trying to get people to go and volunteer for a new kind of, you know, system of industrial organization that would have been set up by the former Bob Gleason in Siberia.
And but eventually he ended up back in London as a member of the Labour Party. And he was the guy that flew the red flag one day, you know, in the city of London, you know, which caused a lot of controversy. So someone that really lived a tremendously interesting life, you know, he was in many ways an apologist, you know, for Stalin and for the system. So he, one of the things I tried to do, and this applies to Flynn too, you know, they tended to change their opinion when it came to communism.
But all the people who were murdered by Lenin and Stalin, you know, you can't really, can't really claim that that didn't happen. And the final person in the book is someone from Japan. If I'm pronouncing his name correctly, he was called Kutukou Shushi, whether I like you correct me if I'm wrong. So he was an anarchist who ended up in jail in Japan.
He educated himself by reading when he was in jail. He became the translator of a lot of important books. So can you introduce him, please tell us about his activities, his anarchist ideas on why he ended up in jail? Yeah, and he ended up being executed for his beliefs.
But although originally he was a liberal, he practically became a socialist and finally an anarchist. And so a lot of it had to do really with a social change that was going on in Japan. It became more open to ideas that, you know, we would be more familiar with in Europe at the time. But there were a lot of problems, you know, in the Japanese system, you know, there was a lot of corruption, a lot of people became wealthy, but he was concerned there were a lot of people who didn't have enough food to eat.
So he gradually moved away from a pro-capitalist liberal position into becoming a socialist. And, you know, also I think, you know, we have to mention Kanos Segakar, Segakar because she was his partner and she was much more the leader of an attempt to kill either the emperor or someone in the Empress family. Whereas Godoko kind of was sort of associated with it and then came to see that it would be counter productive. So he moved away from it.
But from the point of view of the Japanese government, they felt he was the one they wanted to get. So they portrayed him as the ringleader of a plot. And so a lot of people ended up being executed or long-term, long-term in jail for something that didn't really happen. I mean, they didn't actually go and take a bomb, you know, to the Imperial Palace.
But, you know, they were arrested before that happened. But you know, as you might imagine, in Japan, it would be taken very seriously to attempt to kill someone in the royal family. So the gradual evolution, and he came to see direct action as being much more important than political operation. You know, and this is a classic difference between anarchist unions and socialist unions.
He believed in having strikes and resisting policies. And gradually that became what spurred him to become an anarchist. And he was often watched by police. And so one of the things he did when he got out of jail one time was go to California where he met Wobblies, I-W-W people and met some anarchists too.
And so probably already while he was in jail just before he went to California, that's probably when he changed his opinion and became an anarchist proper. And he was communicating with people all over the world, you know, with Emma Goldman and other radicals who saw on him an opportunity to change the nature of Japan. But the trial that he and his partner had, they were not really given a fight trial. So a lot of them were hanged and not pretty much put in hand to any discussion of socialism and anarchism for quite a few years in Japan.
And he was also a critic of Christian faith, am I right? Yeah, I mean, it's ironic because at first the people he worked with, the people he was involved with in organizations, they were often Japanese Christians. But it's very strange when he was reading a lot of books in jail and when he came out, you know, he was much more suspicious than when he came back from California. He got the sense that maybe more of an awareness that some Japanese Christians were trying to convert non-Christians to Christianity and he started to see them as allied with the government, which he was always supposed to.
And so his last work that was published after his execution, you know, has had some influence in China as an anti-clerical book. It exists only in Japanese and Chinese, so I haven't been able to read it, but you know, it's maybe a change, maybe it's consistent, maybe it is consistent with the rest of his ideas. And before we come to the end of this interview, I'm curious to know if there's any other project or books you're working on, anything that we can expect to see sometimes soon? Well, this work that we're talking about is going to be released by Haymarket, Borg, Science, you know, in a few days.
It's going to be $30, but for a present, I think you can buy it for $24. So in fact, you can order it now for that price. So for anyone that feels that the heart back is a little bit, you know, it's a little bit expensive. Well, there is an alternative for that.
The other thing that I'm doing right now this year rather than teaching is working on a biography of the first woman elected to Congress. And you know, Jeanette Rankin was a name elected from Montana. And you know, there's a lot of coverage of her. There are books about her, but a lot of people present her as sort of a triumph for the system, a triumph for women's rights, a triumph for, you know, the improvement of the United States in a political sense.
But what I'm trying to do is to emphasize how radical she was, how she was cheated out of reelection, you know, how the powers that be did everything they could to make her less likely to succeed. Nonetheless, she lived for a long time. And you know, she did serve another term in the beginning of the 1940s and then eventually she was a major opponent of the Vietnam War. And so I'm just trying to really say again, you know, using this kind of new way of doing research that I'm trying to pioneer, you can look at old newspapers and they're available in so many different forms.
You can maybe get a better understanding of history that way. So that's what I'm trying to do with that book. Great. Steve, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us about your wonderful book.
The book we just discussed was called Dangerous Anikis Strickories, which was published by Brill Publications. And as Steve mentioned, the paperback edition will be out soon. Thank you so much for your time to speak with us on the new books network. Okay.
Well, I've enjoyed talking to you. So thank you very much for having me.