Collapse w/ Dean Spade (02/22/24)
Death Panel podcast host Beatrice Adler-Bolton speaks with Dean Spade about how we respond to crises, from climate collapse to covid, and how the state’s primary response to these crises is to try to narrow the possibilities for political action around them.
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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts or visit her website)
Dean Spade 0:00
What we have will be what we do and what we build. And so anything that tells us to like wait on them is not in our interest. And like this is very hard. We have to have so much grief about this... and cannot inspire us to immediate actions that are not based in illusion of tech solutions, or governments solving it for us.
[Intro music]
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:45
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I'm Beatrice Adler-Bolton, and I'm here today with a friend of the Panel and fantastic returning guest, Dean Spade. He's joining me to discuss climate collapse and the state, topics that he wrote about in a great essay that came out in November in In These Times, called Climate Disaster Is Here—and the State Will Never Save Us, which we'll be talking about today. Dean has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for decades. You may know him from his work in the early 2000s with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, from the two books that he's written, both of which each have their own Death Panel episode. The first book is Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, which was published in 2011. And his second book called Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) was published in 2020. Or you might know him from the documentary that he made about pinkwashing in 2015, or any of the number of many other things that Dean does. He's also a law professor, longtime activist, the list goes on, and I'm probably just embarrassing him.
So anyways, you can look Dean up. You don't need any more bio for me. Dean, welcome to the Death Panel. An honor as always to get to think together.
Dean Spade 2:32
Thank you for having me.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 2:33
And I'm really glad you could join me today to talk about collapse, and also ways of thinking about how we relate to the state, and what certain theories of power can do to narrow the political horizon. And also how that makes us feel, you know, these are all topics that you touch on in this essay that you wrote, again, called Climate Disaster Is Here—and the State Will Never Save Us. It's really interesting, and I think it also offers a really generous jumping off point for talking about how our lives, movements, political resistance, are and will continue to be shaped by as you write, Dean, "cascading disasters, and the escalating violence that state systems foment in response."
And you know, in your essay, you talk about this need to really start considering and preparing for the effects of worsening ecological crisis and societal collapse in our movements, and working against the kind of toxic nihilistic pessimism that understandably arises out of the very clear and obvious evidence, over and over, that appeals to people in power and attempts to tinker with the structure of the state, or with various aspects of financialization or, you know, the calculus underlying the economic valuation of life, are not producing justice, liberation, they're not stopping climate collapse.
And ultimately, you know, this points to what for me, this essay is really about, and why I can't stop thinking about it since I first read it, which is that, you know, this is thinking through why some of the narrow ways that exist on our political horizon to address the kinds of problems that we're facing, from climate to COVID, to settler colonialism, you know, appeals to head of state and people in power can make people feel overwhelmed, disempowered, in denial, afraid, avoidant, indifferent, et cetera.
So I want us to start all the way from the top, get into all of the things I just ran through. Dean, can you just sort of talk about why you wanted to write this essay, I guess the kind of context of it, why you wrote it now, and maybe get into what I would say is this kind of incredibly broad relevancy of what you touch on in this essay that I'm trying to gesture at here, which obviously ties back into a lot of the themes that we've talked together on the show in the past, either relative to like the mythology of the benevolent caring state who's coming to save us, the indirect nature of policy work itself, structurally speaking, versus the kind of direct nature of things like mutual aid, autonomy, sovereignty, state and administrative violence.
There are just so many threads to pick up in this essay, so, both in the stated text and also just like sort of unstated building off of it. So I'm sort of curious what the central threads were for you when you were writing this piece, Dean.
Dean Spade 5:08
Yeah. I mean, you know, I am in my own process of dealing with my denial around the state of things, like that -- I mean, in some ways, all -- all my entire political life, is that right? You spend your entire life being like, just learning deeper and deeper, like, oh my God, like just spending your entire life trying to comprehend the violence of colonialism and learning about more and more and more and more elements and sites and dimensions to how it's living now, and things that have happened to people and contexts, you know, trying to comprehend what racial capitalism is your whole life.
So all of us who are in these struggles are constantly coping with extracting liberalism from our mentalities, which is never going to be finished, or extracting white supremacy from our mentalities or, you know, any of the -- patriarchy. But I think in particular, as I, in the last few years, have more and more looked at these questions of ecological crisis deeply -- and I think I want to name that I became political during a time where a lot of the struggles I was in didn't look at ecological crisis, because ecological work was a lot of like white led conservation work. It's been so much effort for frameworks that can -- that can really think about racial capitalism as the cause of ecological crisis.
And then for like local community work that centers people of color and indigenous people to be -- you know, like to mend back what the problems that a white -- like a white led sort of eco movement created in siloing our movements, our social justice movements, so that like lots of people doing like feminist and anti-police and prison work, etc., weren't also doing or seeing the connections with ecological work, because that work was like sort of coded as this like white conservation work. So I'm a product of that, and many years of my work insufficiently theorized and integrated work about ecological crisis. So that -- you know, I will say that was -- that's kind of what I'm recovering from. And I'm also just recovering from a general culture of denialism, like I think we think, you know, right wingers like deny climate change. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how even people who know climate change is real, don't let ourselves know and are denied information that would show us like how urgent the current context of ecological crisis, not just climate change, but all these other elements of ecological crisis that are happening.
All the problems happening with air, water, food systems, everything, that are not just the climate piece. And so, I'm in my own process of that. And I think I wrote this piece, in part, because, I mean, as you know, the piece kind of hangs on kind of reviewing a couple of cli-fi books. And part of what I noticed, and what I'm curious about, is the storytelling in our culture about this, both the storytelling in the news headlines and the storytelling in like speculative fiction, and how, how the denial is fed by a couple of things. By like, one, the ways in which we're all taught to be pacified, we're like someone else is gonna deal with this, you know, AOC and Bernie are going to deal with this through the Green New Deal. Or, this is so big, I couldn't possibly do anything about it, so I'm hoping that these big nonprofits and politicians will deal with this. Or the other side of it is like, I think liberalism is like kind of a cult of false optimism. It's like, we're supposed to believe things are getting better.
There's progress narratives, there's experts who are gonna work things out for us, these systems ultimately deliver justice if we just wait long enough and deliver the right kinds of input into them. And so there's a type of like relying on like, oh, there's a headline that something, there's like a new tech solution that's going to be delivered, that's going to clean the oceans or there's like one good thing happens somewhere and that gets reported on by a nonprofit or by a news source, and there's a kind of, I think, like pattern of, I just need to feel better, because I think most people actually feel like a deep sense of underlying overwhelm about conditions in the world in general: genocide, colonialism, ecological collapse, and feel quite disempowered, because it is really scary that we live under these giant systems that keep producing this, and we can't seem to stop them. Like that's like legitimately terrifying. And so there's a kind of, dear God, just let me feel better, that I think we don't even maybe always know we're emotionally doing, where we're just like, oh, a little piece of good news over here, a little piece of good news over there. And part of what also led me to write this was that I have tried to talk to a lot of my beloved friends who are all political radicals, and a lot of people are just like, I don't want to talk about this, Dean. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You're the person who's like my whole life been like forcing people to talk about political conditions that they don't want to hear about, right?
That's what it was -- one of the things that our movements do, is like, look, look what's happening in our prisons, look what's -- you know, it's like we're -- we are -- refuse to be, to have conditions of violence that are urgent matters in our lives silenced, and I see people be -- like literally telling me, like don't talk to me about this. Of course because I'm wanting to talk to my friends about this because I'm like, how do we -- how do I emotionally navigate this? What does this mean for our immediate strategies? Are we going down the wrong paths in any of the movement work we're doing together, because if we think about this, how does it change things? And so, seeing that, and I don't feel judgment towards those people, I just felt like loneliness and a desire to connect about this, and a concern, like, wow, that's so unlike you. And it just -- it told me something about what this denialism is like and how it's moving amongst us. And it's the kind of thing where like, if you believe in climate change at all, you're ahead of the right wing or something. And so then that's -- that's enough non denialism.
And I'm like, oh, no, no, we need like a lot, lot, lot more examination of our denialism because it has consequences in our lives. Like we need to prepare, I mean, not that there's any like easy, simple way to do that. But I definitely think, as with all things, the more we look at what's happening, and try to comprehend what is quite incomprehensible, but try to, the more we might make different immediate decisions about what the right actions are to support, you know, hopefully, it's like some reduction in suffering, or some loving care of our communities, or our people of the earth. And so, so all of that generated this piece and, you know, especially though, as you were sort of hinting at that, the feeling that this is an area where people are like, this is so big and overwhelming, it could only be solved by governments and tech. And so it really has kind of nothing to do with me, or I can't do anything about it.
That message is so immensely harmful, and it is pervasive. And I think a lot of people believe in it. Like I've even had conversations with people over the years, after a big hurricane happens, or a fire, where people are like, yeah, this is evidence that we need a state. And that, you know, like this is the only people who could respond to this. And I'm just like, but wait, like they don't respond to these disasters at all. They bring in militaries, they shoot people, they show up too little too late. FEMA offers people loans, not like actual things that they need, like houses. And also the state and the arrangements of racial capitalism that it cultivates are what are causing all these problems, like nobody would be living in flood zones, there wouldn't be this level of pollution. It's like the idea that that system will be what regulates us out of it, or what saves us, when it is literally the exact thing producing and that has produced the harm, feels like a wild contradiction.
But I think it's -- there's a big emotional piece underlying this, of just like, oh my God, somebody save us. I'm so overwhelmed. I know I personally can't stop what's happening, and a kind of -- you know, and we live in times where social movements are immensely, immensely suppressed, and have been for many, many, many decades. So it's hard for people to believe, I think, in a deep way, that collective action could get us out of anything, because we live in severe anti-revolutionary times in which people, you know, are -- that kind of action is very, very, very underdeveloped, and quite criminalized and suppressed for a long time. And so it's just like rough, you know, it's like a really, really rough formula.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:51
Absolutely. And so well put. I mean, I think, to speak to why I felt like this was such an important thing to talk about, I mean, this is like a very -- like a very clear analogy here, right, is COVID, or Palestine, right? If we simply proceed pretending like COVID is not happening, the political reality that we're going to be sort of planning for and organizing for in our movements is going to be insufficient, right. And this is what the argument that so many people who are organizing around COVID right now are really trying to desperately make, like even just within the left, trying to push the left to just consider these things in planning gatherings, getting groups of people together, right, the impact that COVID can have on not just your health, but putting you into financial and housing precarity, missed work, things like that, the ways that sickness is sort of punished in society. And then if we're sort of speaking to these larger "international relations" issues, right, where it's like the "situation" is so big, right, that this is something that is designated at the level of heads of state, right, at the state apparatus.
It's something that people are basically encouraged to not recognize their own sort of expertise and opinions about these things, right, to sort of trust in the state as this larger decision making body that is the appropriate realm for these kinds of big problems, right. And I think what you're really kind of getting at at this piece is that, you know, to use the words of Klee Benally, I'm thinking of his book, No Spiritual Surrender, that we had read together and have been discussing recently but you know, he talks about in his chapter called Toward the Colonial Nothing: Settler Destruction and Ceremony, he talks about the pathologization of "antisocial behavior," right, as being a kind of lack of motivation or social factors or something, a lack of desire for success, but he says it's more a reaction to the frantically transparent and absolutely farcical, illusory promise of change at the level that we're told it's supposed to happen, right? Like that the idea, you know, he says, the saying goes, the system isn't broken, it was made this way, so why bother, "It's painfully apparent when someone is selling you a brand of hope that is a lie. They tell themselves to maintain the appearances of social order, of a job they hate, of a life filled with a collection of regrets." And it's from this really powerful section where he's talking about what really is nihilism, and what really is apathy, right, in a sort of broader colonial and settler state, like how can these concepts exist relative to the kinds of normative behaviors that are demanded of citizenship, right, of being a member of the body politic, which Klee's arguing is essentially being conscripted into the process of reproducing the state, right.
And you're kind of getting at something similar here, which is that the kind of realm of solution, right, the arena in which we are told these problems that we care about, right, are meant to be solved in, in and of itself is productive of these bad feelings. It's not the circumstances, it's not facing reality that makes people sad or depressed or apathetic to action or, you know, move towards denial, it's the kind of political landscape that it's all happening on, right? Like, it's this much broader context than just simply like that the information itself is depressing. And that's part of what you're getting at is that that kind of desire to look away is the kind of thing that is really important in terms of to sort of work against that desire to look away from things that essentially are sort of showing us these obvious points, you know, we can really learn from, right? Like if, for example, if it feels really bad to suppress the awareness that you're sort of up against systems that are creating something that you're trying to change, and the only option that you're given is to tinker at the system, which is producing the problem itself, right, that is disempowering. It's overwhelming. That, in and of itself, not the problem, is the thing that makes you fucking feel bad and that makes it feel pointless and worthless, right?
And that that ultimately is sort of part of the state's power in and of itself, and part of how, through controlling where change is supposed to happen, where politics are supposed to happen, and who's supposed to be at the table, right, that's a very powerful way of sort of controlling what political reality can be. That's much more powerful than any kind of like policy, law, speech, or single election. It's really, truly where power comes from, is in setting what's appropriate and possible to be put on the agenda.
Dean Spade 17:41
Yeah. I mean, what you said too, where you started with COVID, it's like, it's been so, so, so awful, people experienced extreme forms of isolation, loss of community. Like, you know, I have a -- I think people I know who are really using what they've learned during the COVID experience to try to prepare, like I have a friend who is in a group of sick and disabled people who are like, we've all become so extremely isolated as people stop masking and stopped in any way caring for one another around COVID. And so they are like, do we want to try to live all in the same place so that we get to have a community, so the chance of not being alone? And a lot of people I talk to are just like totally unwilling to entertain the possibility that another pandemic is coming. And it's like, of course we should, even while we mourn and deal with all the ways COVID is affecting us now and has affected us over the last years, not put aside the possibility that another pandemic is coming, because it might help us prepare, you know what I mean, right? I feel like that's -- it's instead just like, oh my God, everyone -- like we're just trying to deal with COVID, or people who believe COVID's over -- which I do not believe, obviously -- you know, oh, just trying to be like, well, we got through that, for those who think so, you know. It's like, no, obviously, the right thing to do would be to be like, what did we learn about what we need to have in place, and what we need in our lives, or what we wish we'd known before, you know? Like what does it mean to use all of the current tragedies to prepare instead of just denying, but people feel like, don't even say that to me, like, let me plug my ears. And I understand that emotionally, but I think that that's really hard.
And also COVID showed us how fragile, for example, the supply chain is. Things are very collapse-y. The systems we live under, which we entirely depend on, very few people can say they don't, for building supplies, for food, for medicines, those systems that are literally keeping me alive, are more globalized than they ever were in my life, you know? So like prior people who've lived -- you know, when you read, there's lots of books about prior collapses and stuff, prior empires that have crumbled, none of them hung their livelihoods, in the ways we do, on this wildly patched together, incredibly exploitative of the planet and people system, that just is really, really teetering, you know, and has been for quite a while, and COVID gave people images of that.
And of course, there are much worse pandemics that could come or other disasters related to ecological crisis. And so, the fear to look at it -- really, it's like, you know, there's this kind of humility, I think, in facing this stuff, where you're like, oh, okay, it's not the fantasy that like something is going to fix it all, like there's going to be some tech that's going to come fix it all, or there's going to be some legislation that's gonna fix it all. None of that is going to happen. Like there's -- like all of the tech stuff is actually making things worse. The tech solution's not coming. The governmental solution, like why would governments that have organized to sharpen, sharpen, and sharpen wealth maldistribution, and have in every way supported polluting industry, supported wars and genocidal tactics that destroy the planet and poison us all, why would they turn on a dime?
Like, it's not like they don't have evidence of what it's doing. Like, there's no -- and I don't know, I think I maybe mentioned this to you in a different conversation we had, I really, really admire and love the work of Naomi Klein and Molly Crabapple both, but I recently rewatched the two movies, these two animated movies that they made several years back, because I had heard a speech from Naomi where she mentioned them, and I was like, you know, curious what they were. And I think they like evidence this kind of typical problem from people who I love and admire and think have a lot of wonderful political contributions and from whom I learn, where they show a story, they're both -- I'll try to remember the names of them. But they both show a story of like kind of a good future. Like one of them is like AOC is riding a bullet train, maybe she's president or something, I can't remember. You know, but's riding a bullet train between DC and New York and like we're kind of living in a future in which some tech solutions have happened, and the Green New Deal has happened. The second one shows more of like the years of repair, and it's like people are being released from prisons, and there's all these big protests happening about rent and this leads to basically a new world in which everybody gets to have jobs repairing the Earth. And it just -- there's no political analysis about why that would lead to that, like people have been in the streets against capitalism for hundreds of years, like in huge numbers.
People have risked everything to fight back, using every tactic you could imagine, insider and outsider. And just the idea that that will just like lead to governments like getting the right idea, that it's a matter of moral persuasion maybe, is like the kind of implied -- implied thing under these messages. And I just -- I feel like people on some level like know, wow, that's really not working. Like even with the Green New Deal, while really inadequate and really something that preserves capitalism, even that, which wouldn't help us enough, is nowhere near passing. Like, it's very humbling, it's like, oh, actually, what I have in front of me is that some of these systems are just going to actually fall apart, the governments are going to respond with militarism, because that's what they do, they're gonna police people, they're going to like hurt climate refugees more, just what they already do. That's what the US border does now. You know, they're not going to be aimed towards care, because that's not what they are aimed towards. And what we have will be what we do and what we build. And so anything that tells us to like wait on them, is not in our interest. And like this is very hard, we have to have so much grief about this, like people are already dying of this all the time, and more -- many, many more will. And like cannot inspire us to immediate actions that are not based in illusion of tech solutions, or governments solving it for us. And this is just like, in some ways, it's like an old story, right?
Like, we all know, like people go to City Hall again and again, and they realize, oh my god, it's never going to happen there. We have to just physically stop the bulldozers from destroying the forest or whatever, you know, like people -- this is a common story across all social movements. But it also seems like liberalism is so durable, like it makes us all do that rigmarole again and again. And you always want to just say to the people who are currently doing it, like, hey, a million people have already proven that won't work. And then still, you know, moral persuasion is not the way to transform these systems. Like it's not that the people in power don't know they're hurting us, you know, or if they don't know, and they find out, there'll be fired from those jobs of being people in power, and they'll replace them with somebody who doesn't mind continuing the thing.
But that process is, is so painful. And you know, in this essay, I'm talking a bit about these books I read, that even though they have pretty deep critiques of the reasons why governments and industry got us where we are today, they still both at their endings, have governments turn on a dime and do the right thing, one worse than the other one. And I'm just -- and I see this a lot in this realm of like people trying to speculate about the future, just like it must be that at some point, the governments will save us from ecological crisis and collapse. And why would we think that?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 24:33
Mhm. Just again to bring it back to COVID, I think that there's a very important point embedded in what you've just been saying, which is that one of the biggest sort of causes for despair and dismay about the refusal to acknowledge the reality of the impact that COVID as an ongoing phenomenon has, but also in how it's been made worse by its invisibilization, right, by the kind of suppression of it as something that matters, that affects life, that's important, right? Like in that, right, it has produced additional knock-on effects. And you sort of talk about how these -- the coming disaster is like an intensification of the familiar, in the essay, and this is a great example of that, right, where it's like COVID, as we understood it, March 2020 through let's say, like, February 2021, existed with one level of sort of understanding, one sort of understanding of site of struggle, right?
We had the kind of horizon that we were being told to expect was vaccines are coming, right, that we're putting all this technology into the vaccines. And then what we saw is that the US government really sold the message of a vaccine only strategy without the data to back that up, let it rip, and what we've seen is, you know, nearly 2 million people killed in the span of four years, proportionally deaths have been concentrated in people who are older, people of color, in disabled people, right. And you also now have like, as we move forward, this intense effort to suppress anyone who is still taking COVID precautions from a social, political and economic angle, right?
You have people who are losing their entire friend groups, who are the only one in their life still masking, who are losing their job, who are forced to unmask in order to retain their job, right? Who are in living situations where the people they live with have completely different frameworks of dealing with COVID, right. And so it's really important to sort of understand why there's such a reaction right now towards shutting down actually wrestling with COVID, right. And part of that is the possibility of the oncoming, layered, additional health crises, whether that's from something that is a "natural disaster," like the fire last summer that produced heavy air quality conditions, smoke for weeks, right, or, you know, an actual additional other pandemic, right, or a worsening of an epidemic, or any of the kind of things that has happened as a result of supply chain disruptions with medication or disruptions in access to care, right? And so you have this kind of reaction, especially from conservatives of like, okay, well, we have to shut this down now, foreclose on political possibility, we have to atomize and distribute these sites of struggle, and we have to also discourage solidarity, because all of these things, right, would presuppose reacting to whatever comes next.
And not reacting to that is the goal, not only of shutting down COVID, and no longer reacting to COVID, but as a sort of preemptive shutting down against, as you're saying, sort of like what could be coming, right, and trying to actually anticipate from that. And that makes sense, because if you think about the kind of think pieces and the op-eds that started coming as the vaccine got closer, particularly in fall of 2020, when you saw the Great Barrington Declaration emerge, right, in October of 2020, that comes after a couple of weeks of, you know, starting in August 2020, people start writing think pieces about how COVID's going to prepare us for the next pandemic and already started talking about COVID being over before the vaccines were even releasing interim data, right. And so you have this kind of clear reaction and, you know, I hate the term backlash, because I think it naturalizes this kind of reaction as like an emotional one or a psychological one, and sort of takes it out of the realm of political economy.
But it is like a rubber band snapping back, right, and you have an overcorrection. And what you had was, you know, suppression, and oppression and subjection as a result of the possibility that COVID could create any lasting disruption to balances of power in society, particularly when it came to workers, right, and what we saw really quickly was who was an essential worker changed, what essential workers were expected to put up with changed, right, and the sort of framework ultimately that we're up against now is not just one that denies COVID, but that denies the possibility of anything else also, right, of really just sort of tries to shut down COVID in a way that preemptively shuts down against sort of other things.
And so, you know, it's not surprising that when you have so much of the elite realms of knowledge production, and people in government, and government policies, when all of these things sort of coalesce to apply as much pressure as possible to reset these pathways of extraction, it becomes really clear that in many ways, the systems that were expected to push on and poke at in order to achieve change, right, so to speak, that those are the very systems that not only created the crisis, but that also are really kind of there to facilitate extraction, to facilitate markets, to manage markets, right, to surveil, to police, to suppress, not to facilitate change, right, not to facilitate democratic influence on policy and on the actions of government.
But that is the story we tell ourselves, and that is the story we are told is how you're a good member of society and sort of engaged in good respectable politics, right? It's like the kind of constant refrain of, you know, don't protest outside of people's houses, you don't bother people, nonviolence, right? That there's this kind of like prescribed way of engaging with these things, right. And in that prescription, it becomes really clear just sort of how futile it can be, right? And ultimately, what you're asking people to consider is really not just this landscape of sort of crisis and collapse that we're talking about, right, and the many sort of biopolitical angles to that, but also really kind of like why it's worth really kind of considering different arenas of struggle, right? What's the difference between working within the state or working against it? And how does each of those sort of positions relate to the sort of scale and scope of crisis and collapse that we're really talking about, which is something that, again, is a kind of open question for so many people as to why it continues, that even just like the sort of obviousness of extraction and brutality, why calling attention to that, or raising awareness about that, or sort of pushing people in power over those points doesn't actually result in anything ceasing, right? Why it continues, despite the analysis, investigation, the measuring, the study, right?
Why will -- you know, there's that great Essex Hemphill poem [ “For My Own Protection” (1992) ], and Essex, who died of AIDS, is writing, I don't want to wait for like a Heritage Foundation study that says Black men are extinct, like we have to fucking act, right. And I think that that is really the kind of thing that you're trying to push people towards here, is really sitting with that question, sitting with everyone's embodied expertise, and to really kind of think deeply about what you're being asked to do in terms of your resistance, and does complying with the state's requested sort of framework of resistance, right, produce the results that you want? Why or why not?
Dean Spade 32:18
Yeah. I mean, so many things you just said. I'm thinking about how, for me, living through the beginning of the war in Iraq, was a sharpening, a next level sharpening for me in my experience of like, oh, the government does not care at all what we think. They're going to make this war, even if more people are out protesting it than have ever protested anything in the history of the planet.
This war -- like I don't live in a democracy, we, this is not -- you know, and I think a lot of people are having that experience for the first time right now about genocide in Gaza. Like, it doesn't matter if the entire world knows what this is, and it doesn't matter that people in the United States don't want this, the United States is going to make this happen, and is going to stay committed, and just -- and that's true in a million ways in our own localities. We don't want cops, but all the money goes to the cops.
We want, you know, all the things people want and need for their lives. It's just that realization, I think, is like actually incredibly profound. And it can be -- people, I think, have brief awakening moments around it, but then also, you know, fall back into hoping that there's a legal system that will deal with this, or a legislative system, when it's like, it's a war, they are going to take as absolutely fucking much as they can from everybody, for as long as they can. And like when it gets hard, like at the height of a certain moment of COVID, they'll kick down like two tiny checks, you know what I mean?
Like they will give as little as possible to sustain, to regulate and sustain the extractive systems. And it's a war. I was thinking, when you were talking too, about this guy, Francis Weller, he wrote a book called Wild Edge of Sorrow about grief and how grief is so taboo in our culture. And he says that we live in a culture of amnesia and anesthesia. And I think about that all the time, because it's like, it's so hard to know what we know. And I see that with like the way that like -- that like climate based disasters are covered. It's like, there's this outrageous fire happening in Hawaii, and then you never hear about it again, even though people there are dealing with the effects of that for years and decades to come. Or each hurricane, right.
Like, it's like whole areas are destroyed, but it's only in the news for like a week, you know, and like how we just forget it even happened. And that both helps us fail to understand the connections between all those things, and that I really feel how that prevents people from getting chances to ask each other like, what is the immediate, humble, practical action we want to take together here right now? And I think we've talked about this together, but I think this is why, over the years, even though this isn't kind of how I started thinking it myself, I've increasingly been drawn to anarchist thought and anarchist writing about -- and ideas about direct action and mutual aid, like those tactics weren't new to me, I learned those in other struggles.
But to me, what thinking about it as anarchism or thinking about it as an anti-state politics brings together is it's like, we're moving from what I think a lot of people are holding, consciously or unconsciously, is like a utopic fantasy, that there will be a system wide change, and that our people, somebody good will take over the whole system and run it in a better way. As opposed to that, you know, I would say like the systems are, as you mentioned, like working exactly as designed. And so there isn't a way to like use a system that has militaries and borders and police in a way that is for the life of Earth instead of like anti that.
But that fantasy, that's like deeply not humble, right? It's a fantasy of total takeover, total control, the rolling out of a new utopia. And a lot of what you and I and other friends have been talking about is like, if we move away from that utopia, and instead start, like, what is happening right now in people's lives right around us, and what can we reasonably anticipate?
You know, this thing about the collapse and the disaster isn't like the zombie apocalypse we see in movies. It is just an intensification of exactly what's happening right now. Like, it's just, there's just more and more surveillance technology, there's more and more political repression. Well, yeah, it certainly feels like that's happening. And there's more and more danger to the food system as climate changes. And there's more and more, you know, smoke and fire and hurricane disasters, and there's like -- it's just, we're in the water, and the water is getting hotter and hotter. And so, what do we do immediately here, instead of imagining like a sudden total about face, which I just don't -- that doesn't -- I see no evidence that that's about to happen.
And even, you know, and that's really hard, like even the uprising of 2020, which was like really -- you know, you can't know that those moments are gonna happen, and it was like, wow, so many people are taking bold risks together, and sharing credible analysis and attacking the infrastructure of carceral violence. And, you know, our opponents like got on their feet pretty fast afterwards, like they didn't do any defunding of the police. Like they got rid of the local politicians who were questioning it, and they -- you know, in most places, the carceral system is alive and well. And in places like where I live in Seattle, we have like a more carceral city government now than we had at that time. And they're like launching new elements of the drug war. Like, it's like wildly retrograde, you know, and so, the back -- we're living in the backlash, or you know, the counterinsurgency full force, and we didn't get as much mileage of like transformative change, as we might have hoped, out of that moment, even though people took such beautiful, beautiful, bold risks. It's like, it's not gonna like be revolutionary moment where everything suddenly changes. The best things that came out of that time are that people met each other and did a bunch of mutual aid work together and are doing a lot of very like humble, intense, local support to one another, and the people in the jails and prisons around them.
And, you know, like that kind of work is the best stuff that came out of that, not some new thing in which we had like a million elections of abolitionists to high office, and they took over their states. I think that's some people's fantasy, and I think it's more and more obvious to me that the system is designed to make sure that doesn't happen. And that it's -- you know, it's the 11th hour, like we have to turn to what is actually happening now, and be like, can we help our neighbors store water, you know, can we -- like just what's real down here on the ground, and not kind of in a fantasy of a total revolution that's just like -- in which suddenly we make the state apparatus do what it has never done and was not designed to do.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 38:29
Right. And I think one of the things that's important to just say is like, the point is for like a proliferation of things to be happening too, you know, it's -- sometimes I think when we get into the discussion of the state and what it is and what it could be or should be or shouldn't be, right, people tend to sort of like gravitate towards like a who's right and who's wrong moment. And in particular, you know, we walk a kind of fine line around that debate on this show, because we're not interested in having that fucking conversation. We're interested in what can we do in a sort of grand total way, right? Like, what are all the different ways that we can sort of be thinking about this instead of siloing ourselves into one particular, proper kind of approved method?
And I think one of the things that is really important and interesting to think about, and I really want to credit Rasha Abdulhadi here, who, they and I were talking October 16th, you know, people I think in many ways were like not really ready almost to comprehend what Rasha was bringing to them and offering in that conversation, and it's been really awesome to watch like the impact of that grow, right, and really shift the way that some people are thinking and talking about Gaza and Palestine. But one of the things that Rasha says in that, in a really, not in a critical way, like in a very I think supportive and again, like compassionate way, Rasha's like, don't just repeat political slogans, right? Like, people sometimes repeat things like health care is a human right, right, without necessarily like fully engaging with like, what are you saying, right, when you're when sort of advocating for these things. And part of that is, again, just sort of that there is a mode, right, of sort of prescribed and preferred political speech and engagement. Part of what's kind of deceptive, right, is that the state itself, conceptually speaking, is something that's actually pretty amorphous and intentionally goes unstated, right? And so there's this kind of assumption that everyone is on the same page.
But there are actually many, many different ways to think about what a state is, or explain what the state is, or what the state does, or what the state could be that are often conflicting or, you know, completely in disagreement. There's like the liberal theory of the state where the state is the collective will of the people. You have the idea of the benevolent state, or the state as a monopoly on direct violence, right. But I think a really helpful read on what the state is that I wanted to bring in, in case it's helpful to anyone, but I do think it is helpful to sit down and sort of talk about like, well, what are we even talking about working within or against, right?
And I think a really helpful read on this comes from political science, actually, from Phil's field. And there's an article, a really important journal article in the early 1990s, by a guy named Timothy Mitchell that talks about the difficulty in defining the state as its kind of key conceptual point of entry. And rather than trying to pin down exactly what the state is with a kind of sharper and sharper definition, Mitchell basically says that like the difficulty in nailing down one definition of the state is a clue as to the state's true nature. And Mitchell is in some ways like building on Foucault here, thinking about the state's disciplinary function and power from an anti-state perspective, though he's also engaging directly with statist arguments about what the state is. And he builds on these statist claims as to what the state is, pointing to the fact that many liberal conceptualizations of the state rely essentially on conflation, abstraction, a misrepresentation of scientific accuracy.
And Mitchell talks about how the kind of vague and complex thing that we're analyzing called the state gets boiled down to this thing called policy by its supporters. They say basically, you know, that policy refers to what state officials want, certain state officials want. And suddenly the state becomes this sort of abstract concept portrayed as a national interest, right, as a kind of repository for national interest. And it's looked at not just as a kind of rhetorical trick, but as something that liberals genuinely sort of believe in and follow as a dogma, and the conflation of state with policy, and with state officials, and with theories and styles and tactics of governance, is a kind of classic magic trick that basically helps to prop up and project the mirage of so-called national interest, right. And Mitchell wrote,
The elusiveness of the state-society boundary needs to be taken seriously,not as a problem of conceptual precision, but as a clue to the nature of the phenomenon. Rather than searching for a definition that will fix the boundary, we need to examine the detailed political processes through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced. The distinction must be taken not as the boundary between two discrete entities but as a line drawn internally within the network of institutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained. The ability to have an internal distinction appear as though it were an external boundary between the separate objects is the distinctive technique of the modern political order.
And you know, what's really -- what he's saying is like what's really crucial in modern society, right, is that even though the state isn't a fixed entity with a kind of inherent essence, it still comes across as if it is, is a material object, right. And this perception affects various governmental practices that reference, invoke and legitimize themselves in relation to it. And the state, whether seen as like an actual object or not, has very tangible real world effects, because it's referred to, invoked, fought over and struggled against, right?
And so through these struggles, practices and discourses, the state is shaped into an entity that has really real, material impacts, and concrete actions make the state a tangible concept, just as the state remains like the lens through which we perceive and comprehend and challenge political power, you know, that in and of itself is sort of how the state is made. But at the same time, the state isn't just made up of talk, plans and logic. It's also made through real actions, various routines, right, laws, routine, and even though we understand that the state itself isn't a tangible thing, we rely on references to it and to its authority in nearly every aspect of our daily lives, right? We depend on roads and infrastructure. We need state approved certifications for various professions, whether that's teaching, medicine, law, being a dentist, being disabled, you know, there's these official sort of regimes of biocertification also in terms of identity. But you know, so many aspects of our lives basically require the state's approval, or its lack of explicit disapproval, which is an important way to think about state level attacks on trans life, which leverage the law to sort of make a narrowly held implicit disapproval, explicit and official.
But in our day to day activities, you know, we behave as though the state is an unquestionable entity, capable of granting permission and ensuring things like safety, law enforcement. And every time that we act like the state is this kind of unified entity, we essentially affirm the existence of the state and its power. We maintain, we create, we reinforce the notion of the state, as if it were a given sort of solid reality, even though it might not technically exist, right.
And so even if it's intangible, what matters is that it still has tangible effects. And even if the state lacks a kind of concrete definition that everyone can agree on, its metaphysical existence is still really important for enforcing functional power of government actors and for legitimizing governmental actions of any kind. So it's essentially not free standing from society or the economy, but it's not separate either. And part of what it relies on is this kind of like separation and enforcing and sort of managing the boundaries between what we perceive of as state and what we perceive of as society, right. And so that's why Mitchell basically says, you know, perhaps the state is actually best explained as a structural effect. He says,
The state should be addressed as an effect of detailed processes of spatial organization, temporal arrangement, functional specification and supervision and surveillance which create the appearance of a world fundamentally divided into state and society. The essence of modern politics is not policies formed on one side of this division being applied or shaped by the other, but the producing and reproducing of this line of difference. These processes create the effect of the state not only as an entity set apart from society, but as a distinct dimension of structure, framework, codification, planning and intentionality. The state appears as an abstraction in relation to the concreteness of the social and as a subjective ideality in relation to the objectness of the material world. The distinctions between abstract and concrete, ideal and material, subjective and objective, which most political theorizing is built upon, are themselves partially constructed in those mundane social processes that we recognize and name as the state.
Right. So in simpler terms, the idea is that when we talk about the state, we're not just talking about a specific group of people in power, or certain laws or policies themselves. We're talking about how society is organized, how time is managed, what priorities are, how things are structured, how they're watched over, how they're controlled, right? And all of these things make it seem like there's this clear separation between the state and society.
And the main point here isn't that, you know, politics is just about policies made by one group and applied to another. It's about constantly creating and maintaining this divide between what we call the state and everything else, which means that the state is something that is not fixed, right, but it requires constant creation and recreation. And this makes the state seem like it's permanent, and again, is also how this kind of mythology of national interest is constructed. And so you both have the kind of like permanence and the pretend representation or participation, a feeling of being a part of the national interest, a part of the body politic, a part of the "We," right, that justifies and perpetuates techniques of power, like extractive governance, capitalist governance, racial capitalism, imperialist settler colonial governance, which then shapes the rules or guides by which all actors and institutions in that state operate by, naturalizing it as just the way our society is, right. And part of that is enforced through this kind of separation of there being something separate between the state and society, which ultimately is part of the state's power.
Dean Spade 49:15
I love how you put those together. I also -- I love looking at that article, I love the quotes you pulled out. I mean, one thing is I feel like also underlying this and that I want to just encourage listeners, if they haven't already dug into, you know, of course, that the state is like a totally new technology of organizing humans. And it's really been around very, very briefly, and also the one -- the versions that we live in now are like super new, like it's totally really new to have like militarized borders like this. And it's really, really new to keep this many people in cages.
And it's really new to have militaries of these sizes and to have this level of surveillance in our daily lives and so even like just studying like how it has expanded its creep and like -- and then learning about the fact that people didn't organize themselves like this for most of human history, and that when people look back on prior periods in human history, they statify them and that's why I've really been enjoying, and maybe other people have, the newish book Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Highly recommend this book because it's all about looking at like very old, ancient times and how archaeologists and anthropologists narrate finding important graves and important sites and settlements and how those have been misinterpreted to make it seem like people have always organized themselves in more hierarchical and fixed relations of domination than they actually have. And that it's like so cool to hear what the new evidence and research have shown about how mostly people have lived in like, not accepting people bossing them around, essentially, and instead have had like very shifting ideas about like, oh, like, during this season, we have this kind of leadership style, and in this season, we do this other thing. And like nobody has like a kind of permanent, unimpeachable, irrevocable power over others. So yeah, I want to recommend that. But what you were just saying made me think about, on a very simplistic level, I often am just like, the idea of the nation state is like a spell. It's just like a spell render. It's like an illusion.
And it's very similar to private property. It's like, why is this -- like, why does your landlord own this apartment you're standing in, like what does that mean? Like, what is -- like, it's just, it's a made up thing with some papers. And we know that like people constantly have been dispossessed of their lands, all the time, forever and ever, including people who had the exact same paper that your landlord currently has. But also, of course, like, you know, larger processes of dispossession that are happening all over the world right now and have happened all over the world. Like this is -- the idea of private property is silly. It's so similar, like, you know, people talk about this, anti-capitalist's talk about, like we're all standing around in the shoe factory making the shoes, and, you know, they pay us as little as possible, to make as much profit as possible to make these shoes.
And we look around at each other, we're like, wait, we're the one who make the shoes, like the owner isn't even here, like, this is our -- these are our shoes, we made these shoes, you know, like just this kind of like, it's just an illusion, that like -- that there are owners, that somebody out -- that we all have to do what they say. And then, you know, it's also not a total illusion, because it's enforced through policing and militaries. And so, but a lot of the enforcement we also do upon ourselves and one another, and the kind of complexity of that. And part of what this suggests, like we are told we live in a consensual system of domination, because we get to vote. And actually, consent is part of it, but it's not the part they want us to look at.
They want us to like practice our consent only by voting, and you know, doing the things that they have set out as the way to properly dissent if you don't like something that's happening. But when you have those moments, like for me, I remember the first moment where I really got it. I was at the inauguration, I was protesting the inauguration of George W. Bush the first time he was elected, and the cops started arresting people. And people ripped -- like tore the cops, we unarrested, right, we tore the cops off of the people who were being arrested. And I was like, oh my God, you can just --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 52:49
You can do that, right.
Dean Spade 52:50
Outnumber them and stop them. Like, oh my God. It was almost as if I -- they were mystified for you, once they start arresting you, they just arrest you, you know what I mean? And I was like this, there's no reason -- and this relates, I do think the idea of monopoly on violence is a -- has been useful, for me and for my students, for thinking about, it's like a monopoly on legitimate violence. Like the thing the state is is it's the thing that can kidnap you and put you in a car and put you in a cage, and that's not considered kidnapping and assault, you know, whereas if I do that to you, it is, right? Like it's this false legitimacy. And one of the ideas I've learned from some anarchists is like, how can we have an analysis of legitimate versus illegitimate authority? Like, I really think this is juicy, like illegitimate authorities, like they can just arrest me because they are the cops and they're wearing the outfit and whatever, and they can target me because of my identities or because of my poverty or whatever, that's illegitimate authority, and that's what we live under mostly, is just like, this person's older, or they're white, or they own something, and so they get to do this to you, or they've been appointed by some other illegitimate authority. Versus legitimate authority, it's like --
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 53:51
They have credentials, yeah.
Dean Spade 53:53
Right. Versus like the legitimate authority, like, you know, Bea knows how to bake really well, and I've never baked bread before, as Bea is teaching me how to bake bread, I should acknowledge this level of experience and follow along, instead of being like, no Bea, we're doing it my way that is based on nothing. That there are legitimate ways for people to cultivate skills and share them, and that's so different.
Anyway, that idea is really helpful to me, like the state is about congealing systems of illegitimate authority that are entirely about extraction. I mean, my fundamental belief is that the state is just like an extraction machine. It's like -- you can think about taxation in this way. It's like we're gonna tax you all, we're gonna keep our boot on your neck, we're gonna make sure that there's nowhere for you to live that's free, that there's no way to get your needs met that's free, so you must work these jobs and you must be taxed and then we can use that money to send, you know, so that more people in Gaza can be bombed, like that's that whole process of extraction, or so that more billionaires -- so that we can like, you know, pave roads and set things up so that billionaires can not pay taxes and have like the best possible place to do their terrible factory or their, you know, where they store their data or whatever.
I think the other thing that what you were saying brought up is like the relationship between like policy and regulation. Like, I mean, I think we talked about this before, but like a big -- a big way that people have a fantasy that the state will care for us is that it will regulate pollution, or that it will regulate billionaires, or that it'll -- like there's a kind of fantasy that like wise, expert based regulation is what the state is for, and you know, oh, sometimes it makes mistakes.
And the reality is like, the ways we are governed permit maximum poisoning of us, like the idea that it is to facilitate and protect us is one of a -- it's a liberal fantasy. I teach administrative law, in these classes, you know, we're studying the administrative state, it's all about regulation. And it's like students come in, and if they're Republicans, they think they're anti-regulation, and if they're Democrats, they think they're pro-regulation, that's like the fantasy in our culture. And it's like, oh, no, no, no, no, you guys [laughing], like, you know, first of all, all of you just want to like regulate the fuck out of poor people and immigrants, and you all want to like, you know, facilitate the growth of wealth for believers of imperialism, for the wealthy. That's those -- both of those genders are the same, but also the idea that like that -- that misunderstanding.
A final thing I'll say about this is like, one of the things I think is really useful about what you were reading and that I got a lot from Foucault, is that stateness is also regimes of practices. Like it's both like that there is this border, and they do have guns, and like that's really real, there's like violence backing up this illegitimate authority. And also, it's whole ways of being and thinking that we do participate in, and so that we could act like that even in our own meeting of our mutual aid project, we could be like, well, let's keep out drug users. Then we're inheriting a regime of practices from social welfare systems. And we're using the same kind of, who are the deserving and the undeserving of these unhoused people that we're supporting? Or we could also do it if we use majority rule in our meetings as our decision making process, right? Majority rule is this like very weird technology of domination, that I'm personally totally not into, right? I'm like, what if we made decisions in our mutual aid project where we were like, we want to make sure every single person is heard here. So even though there's only one person who has kids here, and there's only one person who uses a walker, and there's only one person who's hard of hearing, we're not going to make a decision that cuts those people out, and that doesn't care about what they said, even though they're the only ones, or there's less people with that experience, or only two Spanish speakers or whatever. We're not -- we are going to work together to find a solution to whatever problem, or a way to do our work, that nobody's gonna have to leave if we do it this way.
Like, that's our -- that's called consensus decision making. It's the idea that actually it matters that we bring us all along, as opposed to mimicking the state and taking on the methods of this false voting thing we live under, where it's like, well, sorry, if white people outnumber Black people in your state, then we're just gonna -- you know, like whatever the sort of narrative history of that has been, and the brutal reality. Also, it covers over, of course, that all of those actual electoral systems benefit like very small minorities of extremely wealthy people. And that's what they were designed to do. But that, you know, I think that's juicy for us, as people on the ground trying to think about immediate action, like how do we not use statist models as our model for how to interact with one another. And I think people do that a lot, being like oh, we need a chair of this group.
People just like set up a mini city government or whatever they're modeling it after, instead of being like, how do we want to actually act for making decisions together and sharing stuff and getting through crises and that, to me, a lot of also like women of color, feminist analysis is a lot about that, like being careful of institutionalization, and also anarchist analysis and other anti-state analysis about like, how do we be together in ways that don't mimic this model that is designed for domination and extraction?
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:50
Yeah, absolutely. And really, ultimately, it's not even mimicking, right, like because that kind of enforced abstract separation of like, this is the state and this is society, we are in society and the state supersedes us, right, is itself like fiction.
Ultimately the state and society are kind of the same. And when we enact these things, in our day to day lives, we are the state, right? We are enacting the state's preferred style of governance, and governance doesn't just apply to like describing the actions that a state officially takes or doesn't take, right. That's policy. That's what policy is. Then you have governance, which describes the strategies and techniques of power and implementation and organization and rule and domination that are disseminated not just by the state itself, but by actors with power within the state, who take it upon themselves and also take on these same modes of governance, because these are official, right?
These are the kind of best practices, terms of art, kind of ways of doing it, right? And that is one of the ways that you can kind of look at this false bordering between state and society which -- and also state and economy, right, which happens where you're like, we think, oh, if there's a problem in society or problem in economy, right, if we change and tweak the state as the state tells us to, right, then that will impact the economy and society, you know, to correct it or to make it worse or to ignore it and entrench that status quo, right.
And that's kind of like the realm of struggle that is sanctioned within our political economy officially. And that role, and that kind of mode of working relies on the idea that the state and society are separate, right, and that one must precede the other in terms of shift. And that again, it's a -- it's a mirage, but it's also -- it helps show sort of the real materiality of it, right, because this is -- one, it helps like create the kind of idea of permanence and the perception of permanence is really crucial, as you're talking about, you know, and history is a huge part of this. And that's why we talk about so much history on this show.
But you know, politics isn't just about like making rules and enforcing them. It's like how the power of enforcement or the capacity to enforce is created, right, and part of how that's done is through this, the separation of state and society. And ultimately, you know, this is why from an anarchist perspective, state power is irredeemable. And that its destruction must precede the creation of different modes of social and political relations, right? Because even though the state isn't like this fixed thing, even though we pretend like it's a fixed thing that's always in crisis, and we need to like retrench, you know, some social or political entitlement in order to like restore the state, right, whether that's like, we have to cut Medicare and Social Security, because the Medicare trust fund is gonna run out in 10 years, and then, you know, the national debt's gonna fuck over future generations, right? That's a claim that the state is static and fixed, and that we need to make actions in terms of like creating further insecurity and instability in order to restore the state to its original state, right, as if it had a fixed state to begin with that was good and that needs to be restored, right.
And so that's part of that myth, right, that's also perpetuated by this false border between state and society. And, you know, essentially, like any -- in any action we take, where we reproduce these modes of governance, as you're saying Dean, like we make the state right? The state is a product of what's made and what's destroyed, which is a Ruthie Gilmore quote, and that sounds maybe cool or edgy, or something, but it's actually like super literal, right, which is that like if we're gonna means test our mutual aid projects, right, we're no fucking better than a state Medicaid office. And we need to be really real about that, right?
Dean Spade 1:02:51
Or if we have a -- you know, I think we -- people talk about this a lot in our movements, like we reproduce policing and surveillance of each other, we reproduce the exile. I mean, I'm also thinking about how, when you're talking about how like, part of what's really profound about like anarchist, anti-state tactics is that it is the upending of authority.
I'm thinking about people like, you know, do tree sits to block pipelines, or when people -- or like indigenous people across especially in Canada being like, sorry, this is our land, you can't come do this extraction project here. We don't recognize your authority. Like when people choose to just be like, I'm not following this rule. We're not following this rule. This is actually not a rule. This is a fiction and we're popping it.
And you know, Peter Gelderloos' book, which I mentioned in my piece, The Solutions are Already Here, is really a book about those tactics, and how many of those are proliferating around the world, people don't narrate those as like a different approach to ecological crisis. Like he's like, connect the dots, like there's so much of this happening. And we're being told instead to like look over here at tech solutions and government solutions, but tons and tons and tons of people are resisting in these ways.
And this is like where it's at. And like any of us can join this right now. Whereas not all of us are going to join Congress or even become like, you know, people who are doing respectability politics and lobbying and all that, but this, these immediate stops to these extractive projects, like these immediate efforts to support one another to survive these coming and current disasters, like this we can all do, and that, for me, feels like a really big way around the fear that if we were to look seriously at what's happening with ecological collapse, we would stop acting, or we would be frozen up and not do anything, and it would just be doom and gloom.
And like, you know, the fear of apathy that I think people have when they're like, we shouldn't talk too much about how bad it is. And like, oh, no, we should talk more about how bad it is because it directs us very actively to the immediate work that is also already happening. But of course, it's not in the headlines in the same way that stuff governments do is.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:04:53
Absolutely. And honestly that, it's like that liminal space where I find fucking hope that feels really tangible, right, is in like, as Jules says, don't underestimate an accurate description of a problem as like a really important and sort of centralizing way of driving your politics and your resistance, right.
And I really appreciate your work, Dean, because, you know, one of the things that's so important is that what you're talking about here is sort of envisioning how we can sort of build our work and build our movements without this kind of reification of the state, one, but without the literal reproduction of the state in our own work, and why some of the conditions of extraction that we're under, right, you know, contrasting that with a liberal and neoliberal framework of change, who's really seeking to sort of endorse and preserve the state but advocate for its reform, right, tweaking, reimagining, in order to steer it differently, to bolster democracy or temper the excesses of capitalism, while leaving the state intact, or power relations intact, political economy intact, or making it worse, right, not smoothing out the rough edges, but making those rough edges more jagged, making the holes in the "welfare state" bigger, more glaring, right, and really, most mainstream politics is liberals and neoliberals arguing about reforming the state.
Conservatives and the alt right and fascists are also within the sense that they want to preserve the state and its existing power orientations with their preferred tweaks, of course. And what you're really calling for here is for folks to sort of step out and beyond that, and frankly, in that sort of like way of thinking and thinking about just the many different ways that we're able to resist when we move beyond the way that we're asked to resist politely and according to the kind of rules, right, and the ways that we can sort of see through this boundary enforcement between state and society that's really sort of false and perpetuates oppression, extraction, you know, this sort of coercive framework that points us away from a real kind of true target on the horizon, that's ours to set, right, and sort of pushes us instead towards national interest, public interest, you know, "compromise."
And so you kind of have the resistance to the kind of third way politics that we've really been raised in, especially in the United States, where you have people who have been in power for decades now, like Biden, right, and this kind of feeling of perpetual sameness and perpetuity of extraction, and brutal violence, and state repression, and surveillance, and the idea that it's only going to ever get worse.
And I really appreciate, you know, one, just your friendship and the work that you do, and the ways that you push people to sit with these realities, and really kind of like move in whatever ways feel best to resist, right? Because it's about sort of trusting the fact that it's not only the official channels that we need to rely on that I think produces hope for me and makes me feel like some sort of, I think, protection from the spell of the state as you framed it, you know?
Dean Spade 1:08:04
Yeah, thank you so much for the conversation. Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. And I feel like -- I hope that for people listening it's actually the opposite of disempowering to comprehend, you know, to spend more time, really, with how hard the conditions are around ecological crisis, like that it's actually like this is -- this gives us chances to take immediate action and make grounded decisions instead of waiting, you know, which we just really can't. It's way too late to wait anymore to prepare ourselves for what is already happening and it's coming.
And I think like, doing that, together, feeling the pleasure of doing that together, of trying to gather the pleasure of upending authority, of not following rules, like taking bold action, like kind of what we have now of like, what -- of care, like that's -- that's all that's left, you know.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:08:55
Absolutely. And, you know, I hope that folks go and read your whole piece. There's obviously like a whole bunch in there that we didn't even touch on today because I don't want to spoil your essay, Dean, but I appreciate you writing this and the jumping off point that it provided us today. And this has been such a wonderful conversation. Thank you for taking the time.
Dean Spade 1:09:13
Thank you so much, Bea.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:09:14
And I think that's the perfect place to leave it for today. Dean's piece, again, is called Climate Disaster is Here--And the State Will Never Save Us. That came out in November from In These Times. We'll link to that in the episode description. And patrons, again, we couldn't do any of this without you. Thank you so much for your support. If you'd like to also support the show and become a patron, you can do that at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. As a thank you, becoming a Patreon gets you access to our second weekly bonus episode and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up copies of Health Communism and A Short History of Trans Misogyny at your local bookstore, or request them at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. Patrons, we will catch you Monday in the Patreon feed. For everyone else, we will see you later next week. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.
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