This is a conversation with Martin Parker and Thomas Swann, co-editors of the book “Anarchism, Organization and Management: Critical Perspectives for Students“.

Now I know what you must be thinking: anarchism and management? Aren’t they contradictory?  Often, yes, but not necessarily, and this conversation will try and argue that they can work very well together, outside of a capitalist logic. In fact, my guests and I argued that engaging with both anarchism and management in a critical way may just be what we need today.

So if you’re a business or management student or know someone who is one, I’d be curious to hear from you. You don’t have to be one though (I’m not one either). 

“This book turns ideas [about how business should be done] on their head, asking awkward questions about authority, technology and markets and demanding that its readers think hard about whether they want to reproduce those ideas too.”

As always, music by Tarabeat.

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Transcript prepared by Yusra Bitar and Antidote Zine:

Business school is a really important site for those on the left to intervene in. We can’t afford to ignore it. It’s sculpting the understandings of a generation of students.

Joey Ayoub: This is quite an odd conversation. My guests, Martin Parker and Thomas Swann, and I discuss the book they co-edited, which was released recently, called Anarchism, Organization, and Management. Now, I’m sure you must be thinking there might be some mistake, that this is a confusing title—and indeed the title was crafted to attract attention. But we often think of these two worlds—the world of management and the world of anarchism—as being completely separate and indeed contradictory. After all, anarchism is largely anti-capitalistic, whereas management, especially the modern form we find in business schools, tends to produce capitalist thinking.

This is where I think you might be wrong. This conversation will try and convince you there’s more to it than that. My guests and I agree that we are facing unique crises in our world today, especially the climate crisis. But how we are going to deal with the climate crisis is very difficult to think about. One radical notion is to look at what management has to offer, and look at what anarchism has to offer, and try and find where they can work together.

This is going to confuse a lot of people. But I hope this conversation proves to be an interesting one, and I hope it gives you some ideas. I’ll be very curious to hear if that’s the case.

Thomas Swann: My name is Thomas Swann, I’m a lecturer in political theory at Loughborough University in the UK. My work is mainly focused on anarchist political theory, and connections between anarchist political theory and organizational theory. That’s where my interest in critical management studies and critical approaches to organization comes from. I’ve recently published a book called Anarchist Cybernetics, which looks at the potential practical relationship between anarchism (and anarchist approaches to organization) and cybernetics, particularly the work of a cybernetician called Stafford Beer. It looks at different approaches to self-organization, how that can be realized through things like consensus decisionmaking, problems of autonomy in organizations, and also links up with communication infrastructures and social media, and how that can be part of an approach to radical organization.

Martin Parker: My name is Martin Parker, I’m a professor of organization studies at the management school at the University of Bristol, and I’ve had a long interest in alternative organizing, both in terms of thinking about different kinds of organizations, like the circus or the zoo or whatever else, but also thinking about alternative economics. I’m really interested in coops, communes, local money, and things like that. I’m the lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative at the University of Bristol, which is linking academics with a whole bunch of activists across the city and the region in order to think about questions of low-carbon economy, inclusion, and workplace democracy.

I’ve had a pretty long interest in anarchism, which I see as being the ultimate theory of organizing.

JA: I’ve read quite a bit of the book; I haven’t finished all of it. One thing I quite enjoy, in addition to it being obviously well-researched and well-written, is how random it seems. It’s one of those things—and you touch on this in the introduction: why would you even talk about anarchist theory and management theory in the same sentence? Can we get into that as a start to this conversation?

MP: I can start off by saying something about the history of business schools in the UK, and to a certain extent in northwest Europe more generally. Because remember: even though some of the very first business schools were European ones, the institution grows in North America with places like Wharton and Harvard and so on, from the 1870s onward. That established the conditions for business schools being quite distinctive places within universities. But they don’t grow in northwest Europe very much until the 1980s and 1990s. Effectively, that meant a whole bunch of people who had prior training in disciplines like sociology and politics and other areas drifted into parts of the business school because that’s where the jobs were.

I’m an example of that: my PhD was in sociology, with a bit of cultural studies and a bit of anthropology before that, and I worked in a sociology department, but eventually was hired by a management department to teach the people-and-organizations aspect of management. That’s a common story in terms of the way that a bunch of social scientists from varied social science disciplines brought a lot of intellectual currents into northwest European business schools, including various forms of Marxism, feminism, different kinds of environmental commitments, and sometimes a little bit of anarchism too.

Although anarchism isn’t a very big or dominant current, it’s been notable over the last couple of years that a number of people within northwest European business schools have been circling these sorts of ideas and using them in order to understand what they’re doing and what a different kind of economy might do.

TS: To add to what Martin said: for me, coming into business schools, my background was in political philosophy, and then I was looking to do a PhD and got in touch with people at the school of management at the University of Leicester in the UK, which at that time (and still to an extent) was one of the centers of critical approaches to management organization, which Martin touched on. It’s a quite a strange thing going from studying political philosophy to being at a business school. It’s something which, before that, I had never imagined doing. I always had quite a low opinion of business schools and people who taught in business schools and studied in business schools—I was probably quite prejudiced in that sense, which is terrible.

But then I went there and started to meet people like Martin and a lot of other academics and fellow PhD students in that business school (this was particular to Leicester; all business schools definitely didn’t have this), and there was a strong interest in radical left and libertarian left approaches to organization. There were people touching on things to do with Marxism quite a lot, particularly more radical and libertarian approaches to Marxism. People were drawing on things like queer theory; there was a lot of work in intersectionality theory and stuff like that.

That was really interesting, and (as Martin has hinted at) there was a nod to anarchism in some of this literature, acknowledging that there are different radical traditions we can draw on in critical management studies, such as feminism, post-colonial studies, Marxism—and anarchism was sometimes mentioned, but there was never any extensive or concerted effort to draw explicitly on anarchist literature or the anarchist political tradition, or anarchist studies as an academic discipline, to bring that into critical management studies. Konstantin Stoborod, who’s one of the other editors of the volume, was interested in it from a political philosophy perspective, interested in people like Bakunin and Kropotkin.

That got us to thinking, and we edited a special issue of the journal Ephemera which was published at the end of 2014, and that was the first thing that brought together a lot of people in critical management studies and some people working in anarchist studies and related disciplines, trying to explicitly apply anarchist thinking and anarchist politics to a lot of the questions that people were discussing in the critical management studies side of the business school but weren’t bringing anarchism into the picture. That was the first attempt at trying to bring anarchism more explicitly into discussions in critical management studies.

MP: It’s worth adding as well that the northwest European business school has been particularly omnivorous in the way it’s gobbled up lots of forms of intellectual projects from a whole variety of different areas across the social sciences and humanities. It’s been a gigantic, ravening mouth which has tried to excavate things from a lot of places, sometimes just to decorate academic arguments, to drop a bit of Deleuze in here and there, that kind of stuff, but also in terms of thinking about different metaphors and ideas from popular culture and film and things like that in order to engage students or do research. So it’s been a real net importer of ideas, I think, something of a black hole, and I guess anarchism—I’m doing this a bit glibly, I suppose—is one of the things that the business school has been gobbling up.

There is something of a paradox here; the idea that management (which is very often imagined to be one of the modern sciences of control, and business schools as being the place where control is taught—where the policemen are handed their truncheons, for those on the left) should be interested in anarchism sounds like a very paradoxical one, since anarchists are committed to freedom and the absence of rules.

That relies on two different sorts of parody. One is a parody of the business school as being a place that is only about certain kinds of instrumental, normative forms of control. Business schools are much more sophisticated than that, and have been engaging with a wide variety of forms of organization theory for quite a long time, thinking about the different ways organization structures and cultures and behavior inducements can produce different kinds of employees or managers. And the other parody is the idea that anarchists aren’t interested in management in general. It seems to me that anarchism (there might be lots of anarchists who listen to this and disagree) is really an extended mediation on what it might mean to be organized. It’s a long series of thoughts about what forms of organization are appropriate on what levels, and what sort of theories of the human are required in order to understand the different forms of control, relation, and association that exist.

For me, anarchism is actually a very pure organization theory. It’s an organization theory without guarantees, and unlike lots of the organization theory that’s taught within business schools, it doesn’t make necessary assumptions about the need for hierarchy or the need for particular kinds of expertise, or about monetary inducements, whatever it might be. It’s a much purer organization theory because it assumes less, in a sense. That makes it of particular interest to me.

Why wouldn’t somebody interested in organizing also be interested in anarchism? Of course they would.

TS: It’s also a question of why, when radical left approaches have been brought into discussions around management organization, anarchism wasn’t there already. It was there in part, but there wasn’t a cohesive school within those discussions. I think that’s partly to do with the opinion a lot of people have of anarchism. On the radical left, anarchism has a bit of a bad name; people see it as quite a messy political tradition. There is not the same rigorous, coherent development of anarchist analysis that we see with things like Marxism, feminism, and antiracist politics. But there is that in anarchism, if you look at classics, particularly by people like Kropotkin and Emma Goldman—we do find that analysis there. But there’s a sense in which it wasn’t developed and worked out to the same extent as other approaches.

Perhaps this is just something that takes time. The resurgence in anarchism, both in terms of politics and in terms of academic study, only really happened from the late nineties and early 2000s onward, with the alter-globalization movement that put anarchism back center stage in radical politics. Then there was academic work: people like David Graeber (perhaps most prominently), Uri Gordon, Cindy Milstein, Marianne Maecklebergh’s work on alter-globalization movement to an extent as well. Also some of my colleagues in the Anarchism Research Group at Loughborough University, Ruth Kinna in particular. These authors started making a mark, and started publishing quite important works that developed anarchist thought from the early 2000s onward. It was maybe only the last ten-fifteen years we’ve been seeing these developments gathering speed. So perhaps it’s just something that would always have taken until now or until the last five years to have a strong impact in these discussions in critical management studies.

MP: I said that thing about business schools being gaping mouths—quite often they are late on the scene. Questions that might be raised in arts, humanities, and some of the more radical elements of the social sciences around queer theory or post-colonialism or whatever may hit interesting bits of critical management studies and business schools about ten years after they’ve been fashionable elsewhere. We’re used to playing catch-up; maybe that’s the case with anarchism too. Ten-fifteen years after other people have been talking about it, finally people in business schools work out, Ah, might be something here as well.

JA: Coming as someone who is outside the management world and the business world, kind of like you I think, I’ve always had a very low opinion of it. This goes back to my undergrad years—I did them at the American University of Beirut, and there was definitely the sense that more money was being put into the business school than the health sciences, for example, and other schools as well. That was definitely a theme; their building is the fancier one, with lounges and stuff like that, while we had one couch at health sciences. It’s true! We had a very tiny room for something as “minor” as epidemiology (which is quite ironic given the pandemic we’re dealing with right now).

You mentioned in the introduction the thirteen thousand schools of business and the students who are targeted with this—what do you hope that they can get out of it? And why are you trying to target them?

MP: There are some very straightforward reasons for using the business school as a site for intervention, and that’s partly to do with its scale. There are at least thirteen thousand business schools across the planet. Something like one in seven students in the UK are studying variants of business and management at the moment, so this is a big place for social reproduction. Every single university in the country has some kind of school of economics, management, finance, accounting, whatever it might be, and they are producing a particular kind of knowledge that reproduces global capitalism in its often most naked versions, particularly in the political economy and finance that they’re teaching.

It’s a really important site for those on the left to intervene in. We can’t afford to ignore it. It’s sculpting the understandings of a generation of students. That being said, it seems to me that it’s far too easy to homogenize those students. I’ve been teaching in schools of management and business for two decades now, and I come across all sorts of different students with all sorts of different beliefs and motivations and ideas. One of the things I can safely say about most of those students is that they’re pretty smart, and they understand that global capitalism doesn’t work that well for everybody, and they understand that there’s a climate crisis, and they understand the dangers of populism.

What they don’t understand is what kinds of alternatives we might be putting forward. So my sense (I don’t know whether Thomas would echo this as well) is that very often when I’m talking to students, it’s not like they’re denying the world has plenty of problems; it’s more that they don’t understand what alternatives we’ve got. They are overwhelmed by this massive and complex system, and don’t understand how they might change it. My sense is that what we really need to be providing—I’m doing this in both the writing as well as the work I’m trying to do with a bunch of activists in Bristol—is alternative ways of thinking about how the world might be constructed differently.

And organization structure is one of the ways of thinking about this, in terms of ideas about leadership and authority and responsibility and reward—all this stuff can be rethought. That’s what the book tries to do.

TS: I’ll just echo what Martin said. One of the interesting things I find when teaching seminars for first-year students in business school—we always start with icebreaker questions in the first seminar: Tell us who you are, where you’re from, why you decided to study business here. And we have this impression of people studying in a business school as ruthless capitalists trying to make money at all costs, but the vast majority—ninety-five percent of students I ask—don’t have that as part of their reasoning for being in a business school. For most of them, it’s because it’s considered a safe choice; they felt they had to go to university for something, and studying business seems like a safe choice. It seems like a ticket to some kind of stable employment, and there are other expectations that pointed them in that direction—but they’re definitely not firmly on the side of capitalism in a strongly ideological sense.

Definitely, as Martin said, there is that receptiveness; there is that openness. It’s just up to us to put the resources in front of them and let them discover this, and let them read through and experience alternatives, and hopefully then take that on into the work they do once they graduate. Hopefully if they get a job in some business-type organization, they’re trying to do good things and they’re trying to change things, trying to run things in different ways. They might even choose to work in a cooperative movement or something like that, more directly trying to affect some kind of social change.

MP: To give an example I often use in my teaching—it’s the same kind of icebreaker, in a sense. Take reward. As soon as you start talking in a business school context, you’re usually talking about very asymmetrical forms of reward, where people with MBAs in charge of big organizations get paid many multiples more than somebody who cleans the floors. So I say something along the lines of, What if everybody in an organization is paid the same? And students would respond by saying something like, That’s just stupid! It’s a disaster! What kind of motivation would people have for working if that was the case? Then I tell them about Suma, a worker coop in the Yorkshire area of England, where everybody is paid the same and everybody is reasonably multi-skilled, and the organization has been going since 1976 and has been growing all through that time, and is commercially successful, and currently pays everybody about ten thousand pounds more than the national average wage as a result. And that works.

It becomes impossible to deny that it works. It’s impossible for them to say it can’t work, because I’ve just said, It can, and here’s an example of how. Presenting people with those kinds of ideas is a way of breaking some of the often rather unreflective assumptions they might have about the way the world must be, which might be based in human nature or economics or whatever it might be.

JA: When you show this is possible, what are the sorts of conversations that can follow after that?

MP: We’ve got a two-stage process here. One of the things that I’m doing in the classroom is undoing some of the assumptions that they have about what they think common sense is: the idea that we have to be managed by managers, that we have to have hierarchies in organizations, that those hierarchies have to be reflected in status and reward, that organizations need to grow—those things are the “common sense” of management theory. But that’s only part of it. Because doing that kind of work in the classroom doesn’t necessarily propel people into any particular form of action.

One of the things we’ve been trying to do quite a lot at the University of Bristol now is to get students working with a whole variety of voluntary activist groups, to see some of these problems in action, and also to experience what it’s like to do practical forms of organizing. That’s the necessary corollary of thinking of anarchism as a formal theory. And plenty of anarchists would argue that anarchism isn’t just a theory; it’s a practice—or a praxis—that involves engaging with the world and other people in particular kinds of ways.

It seems to me that in order to do that second thing, in order to get students engaged in the world, we need to rethink what the university is, and how it relates to the world it’s in, to get out of the seminar room and think about ways in which we practically experience organizing.

JA: If someone is listening right now, and they probably know some things about management theory without necessarily studying it (just because it’s so omnipresent), but they wouldn’t know quite as much about anarchism, what would you say are some of the main differences between the two? And even if someone doesn’t identify as an anarchist, let’s say, what are some of the things they might find useful?

MP: There’s an awful lot in the business school that’s useful to anarchists, and an awful lot of anarchism that’s useful in the business school, and for slightly different reasons in each direction. In terms of what anarchists can learn from the business school, there are lots of things about organizing that are about practical forms of skill, and particular kinds of techniques. Think about double-entry bookkeeping, for example, the idea that you’ve got to be counting the cash you get in and the cash you get out. That’s not the same as the kind of accounting that’s taught in business schools, which very often rests on asymmetries of information between workers and managers, which assumes particular privilege for certain kinds of surplus value, and all the rest of it. But nonetheless, any organization that’s going to be remotely successful in a cash-based economy needs to make sure it’s counting the cash; otherwise you’re going to run out of money and you won’t be able to pay your rent.

There are techniques and tools within schools of management that are helpful for many ways of thinking about organizing. Where they differ from anarchist ideas is that usually they’re then elaborated into a particular theory of human nature and markets that assumes a capitalist form of exchange. When I’m talking about this sometimes, the easiest way to express what business schools do is to say that they teach capitalism. They teach us how to reproduce a particular form of political economy, an economy of organization—and that means that very often the functional stuff about how you count the money, or how you let your customers know that you’ve got some nice pizzas for sale, whatever it might be, is obscured by a whole range of assumptions about what organization should be like, what people should be like, what employees should be like, and so on. It’s a kind of philosophical anthropology of human beings that says they’re basically competitive and selfish and motivated by money, and in terms of the contemporary version of neoliberal individualism, the idea that we should be motivated by getting ahead and advancement and particular sorts of status and consumption, and all those sorts of things.

What interests me most is stripping away the ideological superstructure from what the business school is doing and getting down to some of the very practical ways in which it is necessary to think about organizing. And anarchism can help us with that, because, as I suggested previously, what we see in anarchism is two hundred years of thought on what it means to organize.

TS: Martin mentioned that often the way these different activities are inflected within the business school is due to the fact that they are built into a capitalist economy, and part of that is thinking about competition and how people relate to one another. I think it’s interesting to look at the anarchist traditions, particularly the work of Peter Kropotkin. Part of what he did was to challenge the social Darwinist view of human nature, of saying that people are naturally competitive, that people will always strive for mastery over one another—it’s a very pessimistic corruption of Darwin’s view of survival of the fittest, where “fittest” didn’t mean “best fit for a particular environment,” but “strongest.” Kropotkin was arguing against that.

One of the ways he did that was to introduce and develop the idea of mutual aid. He was saying that actually if we look at not just human society but a lot of animal species and how they develop, communities are at their most effective, and strongest in terms of the survival of the community, when people cooperate, and there’s actually a natural inclination towards cooperation in human and any kind of non-human animal society.

Part of the task is trying to link a lot of the activities that we can learn about through studying management organization, and seeing how they can operate within a mutual aid-focused account of political economy. That’s just Kropotkin’s view on mutual aid, but it definitely does run through the anarchist tradition, the idea of cooperation rather than competition being at the heart of it. One interesting example of how this works out is in the response to the coronavirus crisis. All over the world we’ve seen mutual aid-type organizing take place—often explicitly called mutual aid. Not always explicitly drawing on the anarchist tradition of mutual aid or Peter Kropotkin, but often still using a lot of the same frameworks, people in communities cooperating to try and help each other survive the coronavirus epidemic, but also the social-economic results of it.

From the work that I was involved in around that, because it was operating on a much larger scale than we’re normally used to in anarchist organization—normally anarchist organizations are a handful of people in a small collective doing very specific focused tasks; suddenly it was working with huge groups of volunteers, a wide range of skills, a wide range of different political and practical commitments. A lot of very focused organizational thinking had to be done in those networks, and it worked best when it was done in non-hierarchical, collaborative ways, but it did require quite serious thinking about how to organize; we’re no longer trying to just promote anarchist projects happening—we’re suddenly trying to make sure that everyone in the community knows they can contact this particular hub to get food. It’s much more serious and much more focused.

It’s really interesting to see how with a lot of the activities there, the organizational aspect had to be taken incredibly seriously. But it was happening in a more mutual-aid, collaborative framework, which was really interesting in thinking about how those alternatives can operate in relation to anarchism.

JA: One of the most interesting things to me about mutual aid as a framework, as a philosophy, is how it’s so obvious to most people when you break it down and just say what it is about—you don’t even have to say the word anarchism; you don’t have to say any ism for that matter, you just say what it is about, and it just feels so obvious. It’s how many people would treat their friends, would treat their family members, their neighbors sometimes.

And yet, at the same time, as soon as you expand that conversation to If it’s working so well for us, maybe it should work well for society, for the world, it’s immediately when we go directly to the superstructures, to the questions about human nature: This is not realistic, this is not possible; there will always be evil people in the world. It’s like the same instinct: we find the answers to the questions that we don’t want to ask in advance, so we don’t have to ask them.

I’m curious, if we can transition: one thing that COVID-19 has done (other than wreak havoc throughout the world, obviously—I lost a few people I know in my community, it’s extremely difficult to think of) is to show that for the most part people feel that in a time of crisis, we should come together; there should be some solidarity; healthcare workers should be supported; all of these things we might call progressive politics writ large become more obvious, because it’s no longer coated in the polarization we sometimes see.

So I’m very curious: how have your thoughts changed or adapted? What kinds of additional thoughts do you have regarding the context of the COVID crisis? And I think it’s inevitable to also mention the climate crisis as well.

MP: That’s perfectly expressed; I can’t agree more, Joey. Just to pick up on both of those things: there’s a curious sense I have that when people are talking about some of the things they’re most passionate about, that they care about—their friends and their family and their kids and their communities and their ethnicity and their sexuality and all sorts of stuff like that—they talk about it in a different register than they do about economic life. That’s a really odd phenomenon that various people have written about, the idea of the disembedding of economic life from everyday life.

For many years I’ve been teaching courses in business ethics, and one of the places I start with is to talk about everyday ethics and the ways we might make judgments of other people in terms of the good things they do and the bad things they do and all that. And then I ask the question: Why do we have something called business ethics? Is it some different form of ethics than the ethics you might apply in your everyday life? That in itself is another example of the sequestration, the separation of those logics.

Spinning that to the climate crisis: both the COVID crisis and the climate crisis are extraordinary openings for those on the greenish left to think about ways of reiterating a message about various forms of collectivism against ideas of individualism. This does present some problems in terms of very libertarian forms of anarchism which are committed to notions of individual freedom above all else. But for the mainstream of anarchism, ways of thinking about collective organization are absolutely central. There are all sorts of questions about what we might mean by that organization, what scale it might be, what kind of coercive effects we might accept on us, the balance between different conceptions of freedom from, freedom to, that kind of stuff. But the idea that we’re a collective species that requires each other and the rest of the natural world in order to thrive is absolutely the case.

It’s much easier to talk to students about that right now. As soon as you start talking about what’s happened as a result of COVID, and particularly how it might be a dress rehearsal for what we’ve got to do in terms of the climate crisis, then it’s very clear, particularly in terms of the climate crisis, that we need to stop doing what we’re doing right now. The forms of global pro-growth capitalism that we are currently experiencing are producing the problem. And to be brutal about it: this is about businesses. It’s businesses that are emitting carbon, whether those are businesses that are building cars or flying airplanes or anything else. So business needs to change.

Now, apart from the most ludicrous forms of Trumpian climate denialism, there can be nobody in my classroom who simply denies that’s the case anymore. It’s not possible for them to take that position. There are a variety of other ways they might think that capitalism can reform itself, and those kinds of arguments, but they can’t anymore argue that things don’t need to change. And that in itself is a really important opening for people interested in anarchism and other forms of radical theory and education to step into.

TS: Another side of this—Martin’s outlined the problem very well—is to think about what the appropriate anarchist response can be, and how we can ensure that runs through the political activities we’re trying to undertake. One of the big challenges we’re facing—if we look back at the alter-globalization movement, there was still a sense of optimism there. What they were dealing with, the way they framed the problem, was the global capitalist hegemonic reality that had to be resisted, but ultimately there was an optimism that We can go local, we can go back to small-scale types of organization and types of economics. They can link together in different ways, but ultimately we can go back to some more immediate form of economic organization.

We’re in a different situation now, because the scale of the climate crisis is so so vast. We know, if we believe the science, that there has to be an incredibly huge economic shift within a very short space of time to even mitigate the catastrophe. We’re beyond the point of thinking we can avoid the catastrophe; how can we mitigate it and survive it? One of the figures that’s most bandied around is that we need to do something like the fall of the Soviet Union in terms of the drop in economic production—something much more than that—across the whole world, within a very short space of time. We can talk about how realistic that is, but for anarchism, the challenge is how to achieve something at that scale.

And the coronavirus epidemic pointed towards similar things. The responses that are needed seem to be necessarily of a massive scale, so the question is: How do we do that if we don’t have an organization in the state, if we don’t have organizations like huge corporations? How do we make sure that the organizations we have—that we know can be more democratic, can be more responsive to the needs of people—can link together, be federated together, to be able to tackle things on such a massive scale? That’s a big question for anarchist politics. How can we be relevant to the scale of the problems we are facing? That’s the big challenge now.

I don’t particularly have answers to that. A colleague of ours from the school of management at the University of Leicester, Keir Milburn, has written a lot about trying to work in and against the state, trying to develop forms of cooperative ownership and cooperative control of public resources that still operate within the function of local or national governments, or are maybe bit more realistic in terms of achievability but draw a lot on ways of thinking about democratic control and cooperative control of industry that we need to be having. Perhaps these are some of the avenues open, but I think we need to be doing it now, and we need to be developing these things as fast as possible.

MP: I’d also like to say something about that—I have no idea if whether Thomas would agree with me on this. For me, the question is having forms of organization that are adequate to the problems that face us. And though I’m very interested in anarchism, I am not an anarchist; I do think there are large-scale organizational forms that might be necessary to deal with the scale of the problems that we are going to have to address. That means I’m interested in any form of organizing at any scale that can achieve particular kinds of things.

Now, anarchism is an incredibly rich resource to start thinking about this kind of stuff, but so too is socialism, so too is feminism, so too is radical environmental thought, and so on. The proper job of a business school right now (I’d rather call them schools for organizing) should be thinking about what kind of intellectual resources we might need in order to understand how to organize differently for different sorts of problems. Because it is fair to say that anarchism has tended to focus on the proximate, on the close, on the small. That’s been its home turf. Even though there are accounts of large-scale federalism and all the rest of it, it’s a proximate form of politics in many ways.

And I think there are other traditions that might also be pretty useful right now, and they tend to be traditions that are more invested in notions of large-scale organization, of state ownership, state socialism, that kind of stuff. I’m not hostile to those things. It’s a question, for me, of using the right tools to address them. In the same way I wouldn’t say I’m a “fan of hammers” or that I’m “terribly keen on saws.” It depends on what you want to do.

TS: I think this is why we saw so many anarchists, including myself and some others—not all anarchists but quite a lot—get behind some of the leftwing populist movements we’ve seen recently, like Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of the Labour Party, or Bernie Sanders in the US, because there has to be some sort of coalition that moves us forward. We know it’s not anarchist; we know these people aren’t anarchists; the type of politics they’re engaging in isn’t going to result in an anarchist utopia, but it seems to be moving in the right direction, and it seems to be the point we’re at in our civilization (if you want to call it that) that there needs to be progress in that direction. Even if it’s not the exact thing we’d want, we probably need to contribute to it in some way if we’re going to at all survive the next fifty to a hundred years.

JA: I mentioned I have a background in the health sciences, and environmentalism in general is something that I focus on quite a lot. The climate crisis is the crisis that has shifted my way of thinking the most in the shortest amount of time. I was always on the green left, supporting all the kinds of things one would support, but the urgency of it is really something that has forced me to simply accept that we may have to think about things that we didn’t want to think about before.

I don’t know if I define myself as an anarchist either. It is something that I revolve around a lot—always have, as long as I can remember. But I don’t care, essentially. It doesn’t matter to me if this particular solution would be called an “anarchist” solution or something else, because the crisis and the urgency of it simply requires us to get out of our comfort zone, and this includes ideologically speaking.

I have a lot of issues with Jeremy Corbyn, and a lot of issues with Bernie Sanders, and they would still be there if they won, but at some point I needed to adopt a “lesser-evilism” perspective. We can’t be fighting off the Tories and the Republicans and also at the same time be dealing with something so existential as to make any of these divides meaningless at the end of it. That was my focus and still is: I start with the climate crisis, and then I ask myself, What can we do to deal with that and what happens in the meantime? And I try to get ideas in as many places as I can. Anarchism is definitely a huge resource in that.

MP: And if you think of that in terms of your original question about business schools, Joey, then that makes a lot of sense. We can think about how business schools might be repurposed to be useful in terms of thinking about low-carbon, low-growth alternatives for earning money and doing stuff together. So rather than being on the problematic side of history, let’s try and make them on the right side of history—and that means that their power and reach and sheer number of students could be an important political lever. It’s not an obvious place to begin the revolution, from the atrium of a glassy business school, but nonetheless it might be a peculiarly important one.

JA: If I can add to that as well: the way I approach the US Democratic Party, for example, is: I have a lot of issues with what you might call the mainstream Democrats—the Bidens, the Clintons—and I definitely agree with the vast majority of criticism that is thrown towards them, but at the same time I see the sort of stuff that happens around them. I see the Sunrise Movement; Black Lives Matter. These are not necessarily pro-DNC movements, obviously, but they have more room to breathe under the Democratic Party than they would under Trump. Under Trump, we would be having quite a different conversation in terms of emergency measures and what to do, and people simply giving up within four years or something like that. That, for me, is something we really cannot afford with the climate crisis. It’s not something we can even entertain.

And it’s with that in mind that I approached your book. Most things I read these days—non-fiction but sometimes even fiction—I try and think how this can be useful. How can I show someone I may meet, who is in business school and is having these doubts and questions in the back of their mind, and is not finding answers in the usual textbooks—what can I show them? It’s that hyper-pragmatic approach that I am starting to take, and your book does that quite a lot for me, personally. This is something that listeners, whether they are in management schools or not, can get out of it.

I was wondering if I can get your final thoughts and reflections on what you think people can do with your book, as a closing note.

MP: One of the things we need to understand first is how paralyzed people in universities are right now. Universities across the Global North, particularly those that exist in highly marketized systems like North America and the UK, are now engaged in a strange kind of competition for status and resources in which academics are increasingly commodities who are traded, who are publishing particular articles in particular journals, the journals themselves are owned by large multinational knowledge corporations, and all the rest of it. So in a sense, all the dice are stacked against the idea of universities being kind of places that we imagined them to be for a bit in the 1960s and 1970s: lighthouses of radicalism and enlightenment.

But nonetheless, those are the institutions we have right now, so it seems to me that it is incumbent on anybody who has green-left beliefs that they should try and use these institutions in as productive a way as possible in order to push towards the kind of climate goals and social goals that the three of us probably believe to be desirable. And that does require a kind of entryist politics, doesn’t it? It means understanding where you sit and what you can do with it.

One of the things I keep coming back to—an ex-colleague of mine, Stefano Harney, together with Fred Moten, wrote a book on the “undercommons” and the idea of the university being a place where you can burrow around the basement, stealing stuff for other people. I like that idea. Let’s use this place, with its resources and its sandwiches and its rooms and all the rest of it, and try and turn it towards holding hands with our allies, to try to make it useful for them, rather than it being a status machine which teaches people how to be capitalists.

TS: I definitely agree with that. We need to try, as much as possible, to channel whatever resources we have access to in universities—and not just in business schools and management schools but across universities—towards things that we think are going to have some sort of positive change in the world. I think a lot of academics are trying to do that; universities make it incredibly difficult for us to do that, but it is something a lot of people have as an aspiration. We just need to work out how we can do that.

In terms of what people can do with the book itself, we’ve talked a lot about what impact it can have for students of business and management, and the kind of thinking we can hopefully kickstart in them—or for those already thinking along those lines, just give them some sort of resources or support for that. But one thing the book doesn’t necessarily do, but we’d be interested in following up with, is how we can “turn the book around,” in a sense. This is a book introducing anarchism to business students; what resources do we need to have in place so that anarchists and other radicals can learn from what’s happening in the business schools? How do we channel knowledge that way as well?

Because, as we’ve discussed already, there’s a lot to be learned from there. We have to think about what’s the most effective way of having that direction of traffic for that knowledge. It’s probably not in the form of a book like this, because this book is particularly designed as something that could be bought by university libraries and then provided as secondary reading on certain modules in a business school. A book like that is not going to work their way, so what kind of format, what kind of resources could provide the support for not just anarchists but other forms of radical organizations that there might be the seeds for in what’s happening in business schools?

JA: Martin and Thomas, thanks a lot for your time. This has been very fun and very interesting, too.

TS: Thank you very much.

MP: Thanks for asking, Joey.