Left Melancholy: A Minneapolis Retrospective w/ mags and Ed (E228)

Early this year, ⁠I had Nicole Bedera, Aydin and Ed on⁠ to talk about the resistance against ICE that was happening in their town of Minneapolis and that was making headlines all around the world. Since then, enough time has passed for today’s guest, mags, to have written a powerful piece called “⁠Will Minneapolis Choose Melancholy?⁠” I wanted to have them on, alongside a returning Ed, to talk about the trappings of melancholy that leftwing and progressive movements, but also just people-who-take-part-in-protests more generally, have been dealing with for a very long time. We also borrowed from my own experience from Lebanon, as well as that of Hong Kong.

Recs:

⁠The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice⁠ by Dilar Dirik
⁠Hope Without Hope – Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment⁠ by Matt Broomfield
⁠Days of Love and Rage⁠ by Anand Gopal
⁠Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund⁠ by Molly Crabapple

Also: ⁠A Summer Reading List for Minneapolis 2026⁠

Elia also brought up ⁠We, Traitors: Bundist Writings on Zionism, Palestine, and Socialism⁠ by Nathan Tankus and Eyshe Beirich, both of whom are upcoming guests of TFTT.

Elia’s Links

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Social Media: TFTT is on Bluesky and Instagram.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠

Transcription: You can help ⁠Antidote Zine⁠ transcribe TFTT episodes here.

Credits:

Elia Ayoub (host, sound editor, episode design), israa’ (host), the rosa artist (TFTT theme design, 2026-), Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design),⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design),⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics) and ⁠⁠⁠Antidote Zine⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Transcriptions).

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

If we could be building out networks of collectives that are grounded in values and also able to change, I think that would feel like a huge step forward. One of the things in this left melancholy framework is that we’re not only getting sucked back into activities that have failed us, but into infrastructure and institutions that are counterrevolutionary.

mags: Hi, my name is mags, I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am a long time organizer out of the anarchist tradition—that has mostly looked like fights against borders, as well as a lot of mutual aid work and community organizing. I am also known mostly because I am a street medic and I train street medics; that’s really informative of a lot of the work that I do.

After being in movement here in the United States for twenty-five years or so, I feel committed to putting some things down in writing, which is how I ended up here.

Ed: Hello, I’m Ed, I’m also a Minneapolis anarchist. I am Minneapolis born and raised, but spent a lot of my adult life in other parts of the world. I met mags in 2018 when we were hosting an event for Mutual Aid Disaster Relief’s speaking tour—they were going around doing some political education for mutual aid activists at the time.

I am a member of the From The Periphery media collective and part of the collective that edits and publishes the Antidote Zine website, which was founded in Switzerland but now is based in Minneapolis.

Elia J. Ayoub: Before we start, I’d like to remind listeners I did an episode on Minneapolis in February of this year, called “Organizing Against ICE,” with Nicole Bedera, a mutual friend Aydın, and Ed who is rejoining today. You can think of this episode we’re doing today as a companion piece to that. I like doing episodes that feel like follow-ups to something big that happened; I’ve done this a number of times, usually Lebanon- or Europe-related.

We’ll be primarily talking about a piece mags wrote called “Will Minneapolis Choose Melancholy?” As good a place as any to start is if I just ask you a broad question: why this piece? What was the intention behind it?

m: As I mentioned, I’ve been re-committing to writing more, and one of the reasons this felt like an initial thing to focus on was that not only have I been in movement organizing for a long time, I’ve been in Minneapolis for over a decade; I was here through the uprisings that followed the murder of George Floyd, as well as several smaller uprisings that the world outside of Minneapolis might not know much about, and then I was here throughout the response to Operation Metro Surge.

For me, looking at that entire span of my adult life as a radical organizer, as well as specifically here in Minneapolis, I have been through the cycle enough times to watch what happens when there is a rupture and then what happens afterwards—I often speak of it as two steps forward, one step back. All of those experiences have been really important to me, and I’ve never seen anything like what happened here in the response to Operation Metro Surge.

That is as someone who has spent the vast majority of my life in the United States; I realize there are things that have happened outside of here, and in the United States historically—I want to say it is both unique and also it is not the only thing like this that’s ever happened.

In watching that happen—it’s really hard to explain, especially for anyone in the United States (I can’t speak to other experiences), to have literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of people responding with their bodies in the streets and doing that in a way that felt like no one told them what to do. There’s no leader. This is what I get at in the piece: there was no one in charge, there were ideas and people who took on roles that you could consider leadership, but not in a directorial way. People were like, Things need to get done—I’m going to do them. I’m going to take responsibility for this.

That does feel like a shift. It’s not a shift that doesn’t have a background to it, especially here. But it is something that feels important. To put that in the context of these cycles of upheaval, and then we go back into the same old same-old, felt like something to call attention to if we are going to get out of those cycles—or at least try to think of them as steps moving forward, and not exceptions and then back-to-normal.

EA: I appreciate you saying you come from a certain positionality; all our experiences will not be limited by that alone, but it is one of our limitations. But in the piece you reference older thinkers—Walter Benjamin, Stuart Hall, Wendy Brown, and others—because it’s been an observable phenomenon for a while. I’ve observed it in Lebanon; it’s not even necessarily just in the West.

Can I ask you to read the first couple paragraphs from the text? I think it sets the tone pretty well.

m: Of course.

For the second time in a decade, I look back at the last year and it feels like a lifetime has passed. What our city looked like before Operation Metro Surge feels like a distant memory. I walk, bike, drive, bus these same streets but they’ll never be the same. ICE OUT NOW signs on telephone polls still dot the landscape, impromptu memorials still in place from where someone was abducted, memorials to Renée Good and Alex Pretti sprawl out from the sidewalks into the streets where their murders took place.

It has become cliche to say that things will never be the same. But, when it comes to our political movement, is that really true? Will we chart a new path based on what we did, what we learned? Or will we revert yet again to the tired political activity that has been failing the Left for decades? I believe that Minneapolis has a chance to do something else; to change course and continue to embrace our role as a leader in a new way forward for liberatory change within the belly of the beast. But, this will not be easy and there are many forces that will pull us back into the mire of ineffective and lackluster strategies.

EA: You speak about an observable phenomenon that’s been described a number of times, of certain tactics, slogans—I don’t want to sound too harsh, but here in the UK any time there’s a call for a big protest, it’s not inherently a bad thing, but it does feel like it has become a bit of a routine. It has been de-fanged.

In anticipation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, over two decades ago now, there was this movement that ended up being called the Stop the War movement—it’s problematic; I don’t want to get into it too much, it’s not the topic of this conversation, but it has contributed to defining what a lot of the protest tactics tend to be. And by and large, it’s marching with chants, slogans, flags, banners. The banners are more or less the same; what changes is maybe the focus. You have a number of speakers, and they say what they have to say.

I was invited to one of them once; I couldn’t make it but I would have made a speech. To be honest, I would have said yes, sure, but I don’t know what impact that would have had. Yet it feels like, in the context of the UK, for most people who would participate in something, this is the most readily available format. I’m sure people feel good that they’re participating in something, and it is genuine, it doesn’t come from a point of hypocrisy or anything. And yet the impact, as an observable phenomenon, is pretty limited.

m: I appreciate you bringing in how this looks in other places. I’ll speak to Minneapolis specifically, and especially the last ten years. This is what we saw after George Floyd, which was the culmination of a series of murders of Black folks, not only across the United States but specifically in the Twin Cities metro area, combined with the height of the pandemic happening. There was a massive outpouring that led to a police precinct being burned down. While there are differences, there was a moment here in 2020 where for a while, there was massive mutual aid already happening because of the pandemic, and then there was a massive push around abolitionist politics.

I will say, there was so much groundwork that happened here. That didn’t just happen because someone was murdered. There was years of organizing and groundwork that made abolition a kitchen table conversation in a lot of parts of this city.

But then what happens is, there starts to be three marches a week being called on Facebook, by a handful of groups here that have connections to campist organizations, and they call march after march after march. And there also was this shift—this is another piece of this that has really taken hold now—where there are lots of marches, and then the nonprofits try to grab people as much as possible and divert their energy into electoral politics, into electing people or passing legislation.

When we look at the response to Metro Surge, I will say, yeah, there weren’t three marches a week—I really appreciate that! Again, I don’t think every march is a bad thing, but there’s a point at which it’s just not the organizing. But what we have now is an intense pull towards: The way we will deal with the rise of fascism is through electoral politics, and through “defending our democracy,” and defending our elections.

So all of these people who were in a place where they were like, I will take care of my neighbor, I will make sure my neighbor is fed, I will keep my neighbor from being taken by the state, now are working on some way of saying, What we really need is to make sure we can still elect people. It’s complex, but it’s not the same as, I will do what needs to be done to take care of my community.

EA: I haven’t been an organizer for a while now; that’s owing to me being in the diaspora and lost as fuck, and changing countries every other year. But when I was in Lebanon, I was part of an organizing structure in 2015, when we had an uprising (which had a lot of flaws). One of the things it is credited with achieving is shifting the Overton window towards a new kind of politics—but in an electoral context only.

Then in 2019, there was a much bigger uprising, more decentralized, more radical in many ways. It was very good and refreshing, and nice to see a good chunk, maybe twenty percent, of the entire country on the streets mobilizing and talking and imagining together what this could feel like if we weren’t caught in political sectarianism constantly. The entire thing was only a few months, because it was October 2019 and then COVID happened four months later, and that shut everything down. But I was there every single day, and at some point, let’s say day twenty, I didn’t know what we were doing.

There was so much effort—understandably; this doesn’t come from a place of judgment—to maintain the momentum that the momentum itself was like the end goal. Lots of things were happening, there were lots of challenges, it’s not the topic of this conversation specifically, but it still felt like there is this tried and tested method: protesting, taking to the streets, which in the case of Lebanon was mostly marching, and there was some occupation of squares, which was more interesting. But for the most part, the confrontation with the police or the army was limited, and in the specific context of Lebanon there’s also Hezbollah as the third, fourth, fifth component to this, which complicates things.

But still, I could tell you, even more seasoned activists than myself, at some point we didn’t know what the goal would be of continuing, other than it just felt like, Well, we’re not going to go home now, we’re going to stay, and maybe someone will figure it out. I’m not saying everyone thought like that, but those are thoughts that crossed my mind, and people that I knew.

The topic of left melancholy was the link that I needed. When Ed sent your piece on the chat group we’re in, it clicked that that’s what was happening. Not everywhere, and not in every context, but certainly among people who would call themselves leftwing and would identify with the broader project of the left—and I do mean virtually everyone I can think of—will have felt this in one way or another. It is difficult to know what to do about it.

You identify something specific, which is that at some point, after a certain period of time has passed, there is an increased pull or pressure towards “toning it down,” or going into electoralism or whatever it might be. And my issue with that happening is not necessarily that nothing can be done at the level of the electoral; it’s more that the radical work needs enough people to be doing that as well. That’s what ends up happening—it’s a combination of fatigue and exhaustion and I need to go home now. But the question you ask, and it’s not an easy one is: with that in mind, how do we still do the work?

m: That makes a lot of sense. I’ll respond, and I think it’ll set Ed up well to take the baton at some point. I want to be really clear—I want to acknowledge, and I don’t think anyone here would tell you any differently, that people are tired. Not only was it that every day, people were out dealing with tear gas and pepper spray and beatings from ICE agents, it was also five degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. It was so cold. So people are really tired, and I want to acknowledge that.

And I really want to be clear that as I see this push-and-pull of where people are going after this moment, this surge in energy, I don’t feel—something that comes up for me that I get frustrated with is, I’ve brought this up to so many people and talked to so many people here about it, and there’s sometimes a [feeling of], Yeah, well, shitlibs. And I’m like, no. This isn’t helpful. People went through something radicalizing, and that’s amazing—and also it doesn’t mean that people know what to do next. I don’t have all the answers for what to do next.

In some ways, that’s why with the piece I wanted to look back to things I had read that people had shared with me, or that I had found, to say, This isn’t a new phenomenon. It feels arrogant to be like, Hey, I noticed this thing—Okay, yeah, a lot of people have noticed this thing. And also, something that felt really special in this moment is where the history and the context for Minneapolis are really important.

There was so much structure built, but not hierarchical structure. This felt like a moment where maybe we can have a break, because yes we don’t know what to do next, but we actually just built an immense amount of radical infrastructure that is for the purpose of resisting the state and taking care of each other. So when I get frustrated with the ways that the nonprofits, campist organizations, and the liberal party are trying to divert and co-opt us, it’s that we are here because Minnesota is one of the nicest places to live in the United States. This is not an example, despite how hard ICE came down, of how “the worse things get, the more likely people are to fight.” People have had the space to resist in this place.

I’m not saying there isn’t anything to some of the more electoral or legislatively-oriented work. But it just takes—it’s like, Nope, this is the only thing you can do now. So when you still have structures in neighborhoods that are trying to figure out how to never have the police hurt their neighbors, but they’re six people instead of sixty people—that’s where I want us to find a better balance, and be really critical of how strategic we’re being in throwing all of our weight into petitions and marches.

Most of that is because we actually showed that we could do something. Yes, it was a break, yes it was an uprising, yes it was resistance. It was also incredibly well-structured and organized, in an incredibly anarchistic way.

Ed, I’ll kick it to you.

Ed: Everything that each of you are saying is resonating with me of course. I think what we’re slowly moving towards describing is a segment of this cycle we’ve identified: the comedown, the unraveling, the dis-integration of a peak in resistance energy and collective mobilization (which, as you identified, mags, is never spontaneous, it’s based on infrastructure that has been painstakingly built over decades in most cases). The exhaustion sets in, there’s infighting, and there’s attempts to white-knuckle-hang-on to this energy that was there and that was working for people for so long, that then start to resemble a formalization or institutionalization of what had been autonomous, voluntary; individuals and groups of people organizing together to resist, directly, the oppressive and repressive forces of the state, and take care of each other, in a massive effort.

As those ad hoc organizations start to unwind, and people start to drop off, there are going to be (and we’ve seen it over and over again, it’s part of the cycle) attempts by nonprofits, by authoritarian socialist organizations, and by the state itself, to try and recuperate that energy and use it to serve their own interests, redirecting ad hoc, improvised and improvisational structures from operating on a basis of self-organization to serving an organization (as you put it in the piece).

It shows up at a point in the cycle when people have the least energy to resist these efforts at what you’ve been calling co-optation (I think that’s correct), and also at a time when there’s this energy and impulse towards How can we keep going? How can we keep doing this? And the answer to that is, Well, this is in fact an option for how we could just live from now on, but that’s too big and too scary an alternative. So the easier thing to do is to go back to your job, donate to this or that charity, and pivot towards what you’re used to pivoting towards.

In Minneapolis, because of municipal elections being offset by a year, three out of four years have election cycles in Minnesota and all of our energy is typically diverted towards electoral politics anyway. And now we have the national midterm elections coming up. The odd contrast between this year and previous experiences of this redirection of popular resistance energy towards the electoral realm is: instead of a simple operation of moving movement activists into a candidate’s campaign infrastructure, it’s been moving activists into a space of “defending democracy” more broadly.

It’s clear in a lot of ways, to everybody who’s paying any attention at all, what the threat to democracy is, but as far as what these people are mobilizing to do is unclear. It’s that much more surprising to me that people are tempted into those operations instead of the ones that we were doing already. Because it’s so formless compared to the very direct, very concrete activities that we’ve all been engaged in for the last eight months (and some of us for the last eight years).

There doesn’t seem to be any reason why we couldn’t just keep doing that, actually, and especially since Operation Metro Surge did such damage to the local economy, it would make a lot of sense for us to keep doing those things, just as a matter of survival. But instead we’re learning how to…defend polling stations or something? I’m not really sure what that’s about.

m: I’ll give Matt Broomfield credit for this, because his book Hope Without Hope does this fairly well (though I don’t fall in exactly the same place as his critique). I think that the answer to the question Ed put out there—I don’t know if you noticed, but when I introduced myself I said I’m an organizer who comes out of the anarchist tradition, and the reason I state it like that is: I feel like to say I’m an anarchist, there needs to be a bunch of asterisks, because that word doesn’t mean the same thing to people. And it’s not just how the state has done that, but the way that most current anarchists function is not my same anarchism.

This is a whole other thing; maybe I’ll write about this some day. But for me, when I think about the answer to what Ed just posed, it’s that there has been such a disintegration of real radical-left autonomous organizing and politics in the United States in the last decade (if not longer), that one of the things I have to put out there is not just that I’m frustrated with XYZ that we’re talking about, but I’m also frustrated with the trajectory and lineage of radical leftism that I come from. Because we haven’t out-organized.

So when it doesn’t click for people that we could continue to figure out how to feed each other en masse and defend each other en masse, a lot of that is because there’s nothing to hold that, for people to be like, Oh, you know what? Actually… and that’s really on us. This is juxtaposed against all the work of the abolitionists before George Floyd was murdered, and how abolition comes in because of their organizing, and that moment really amplified that.

For me, I’m like, how are we out-organizing the nonprofits and the authoritarian left to have this feel like it’s actually a potential—that we are building out our own autonomous space here, at least in Minneapolis, even if it’s not the global answer to capitalism and colonialism? That’s what I’m interested in, and where a lot of my writing is going: what I’ve learned from longer-term, agile organizing projects that are able to make space for that. How can we be building that more broadly?

EA: Thank you both for those reflections. One thing that came to mind is how it feels to be in those spaces after a certain amount of time. Time is a factor here; it’s also got to do with fatigue and all of that, but also with more things happening. It’s not that big of a leap in terms of Resisting ICE and then ICE does a thing and then you have to resist that and then they do something else and you have to—and then energies get deployed differently in ways it’s difficult to always organize in advance, because it’s an ever-changing situation. There are things that could be done, with certain assumptions, but even with that you might still be responding to the ongoing crackdowns, ongoing repressions.

I say this because part of what’s happening—I saw this in the UK, and certainly saw it in Lebanon; I would imagine it’s similar enough in Minneapolis and the broader context of the US: at some point, I would go to the streets and I wouldn’t know what we were doing, or what the end goal is. Is there one, or multiple? Has that been identified?—it’s also a problem of storytelling.

I’ll use the example I’m most familiar with, although at this point it’s seven years old. The protest in Lebanon was very impressive in many ways. There were no leaders in 2019. You couldn’t identify any one person, there just wasn’t. In addition to that, it was multi-city at the same time. There were multiple cities, and smaller towns and villages also participating, to the point that it really felt like—Lina Mounzer is a friend of mine, a really good Lebanese-Canadian writer who was also there in 2019, and we spoke about it on the podcast very soon after, in May 2020. She described this almost like a feeling greater than love. There was such a unique feeling everywhere, in the subconscious. A large enough percentage of the population sort of knew what to do.

It’s weird, it’s good, it’s interesting, but it’s difficult to pinpoint what that is, at times. It’s a phenomenon that—for example, Beirut was occupied by protesters. And then, if something happens in Beirut, somehow Tripoli in the north takes over somehow. It’s not people from Beirut going there, it’s just people there taking over, or responding somehow. And then another city in the south does it as well, once Tripoli gets suppressed. We saw it with the Arab Spring as well, of course. Things were happening in this organic sense, very decentralized most of the time, and still somehow managing to last—long enough.

And then bad things happen. Not because of that, but because of the repression, all of these things. I guess what I’m saying is that this has happened enough times, in my own lifetime, even just as an adult, in the past fifteen years (I’m thirty-five), that there seems to be a pattern there. It doesn’t mean it’s all the same, it doesn’t mean that therefore we won’t have similar [pitfalls] the next time around. But it does seem like we have more of an opportunity now because we’ve seen so many uprisings in the past fucking five-six years. In 2019 there were like a dozen at the same time, around the world.

It feels like a unique opportunity, in our current world with the internet, that we didn’t have barely two decades ago, in terms of the infrastructure to learn from one another. Not that I necessarily think that one context will have all of the answers for the others, but it feels like maybe it would lessen the load for any individual context to figure it out on their own.

There was this piece, a conversation published on Lausan in [June 2020] that was me and Hong Kongers chatting. I don’t remember if I said this or they said this: it’s almost like there’s potential for the revolutionary momentum, as it decreases in one context, to be picked up in another context. It’s not like passing the baton, it’s more like, Okay, we don’t know what to do now, what do you got? It’s more of a conversation, and we can do something with that.

E: I appreciate you steering the conversation towards an internationalist frame, because that’s something that mags and I together, in our conversations over the course of the winter and spring, were observing was missing from the movement in Minneapolis. It’s part of why we then collaborated, alongside some other comrades, to put out this [Summer] Reading List for Minneapolis 2026, which is published both on mags’s website as well as mine. The first category of readings that we are proposing for folks who just experienced what we did in Minneapolis (and frankly for anybody who’s had similar or analagous experiences around the world) was on internationalism.

We had a series of titles in there, and the first one (of course) was The Peoples Want manifesto. Not to go on too long about it, but that’s one of the things I’m most excited about with The Peoples Want as an internationalist network, a network of revolutionary activists seeking internationalism from below: the idea that these things move in waves, move in cycles, and there’s enough similarities between the things we’re all trying to do that it obviously should be transcending violently-imposed national borders and so on.

That is an option, for not only a way to maintain that energy as it shifts around the globe from one location to another, from one movement to another, but also, as another FTP member Leila [al-Shami] has described, in past shows of her own as well as when she’s been on your podcast, as a survival strategy. We do all actually need each other, and that’s something I wanted to be sure to mention in this conversation about what was missing from the Minneapolis movement of this year.

For all the great work that we were doing in the streets and among our neighbors here, we were very much inwardly-looking that whole time, when there was other stuff happening around the world also, it turns out, and there were other revolutionary movements around the world declaring solidarity with us, and we almost didn’t even have the energy or attention, the bandwidth to respond in kind.

It’s really important that we see each other, is the main thing I’m trying to say, and that we pick each other up when the other is flagging. That is one way we can continue to sustain and stay strong in the face of escalating and unimaginable levels of violence and repression that we’re all facing now.

m: I appreciate that. Something I often say is that this work at the hyperlocal (that’s what we’re talking about, that’s the level that things happen in Minneapolis: block-by-block, neighborhood-by-neighborhood levels of structure) is two sides of the same coin with being in solidarity and relationship with folks across the globe.

Here, some of the tangible things that we’ve worked on are how we can bring that in for all these people who’ve just had this experience. How are we saying, Yes, it has been really important for us to literally take responsibility for all of our neighbors, block-by-block, but who else is out there in the world that we can learn from, and that we’re really building off of, even if we don’t know how to articulate that or haven’t identified it yet?

It is important to me, as someone who’s writing more and more, to have a critical eye on things, but not in an everybody-sucks kind of way. I’m really not interested in that. I’m much more interested in how we can be critical in ways that help us grow and expand and change, and hopefully the piece does that. A big piece for us here is not just to be critical, but—I am a longtime fan of David Graeber, may he rest in peace, and one of the most influential things that I learned from reading his work is that we’re not always good at recognizing our wins, because winning means like, Capitalism is over!

This was a big conversation after the anti-globalization movement was shifted and eventually co-opted into the anti-war movement (whole other subject): Well, we didn’t end capitalism, so we failed. And right now, here in Minneapolis, everything that we did was possible—and I’m sure that you could say the same thing about Lebanon, we could say this about places all over the world—was possible because of something that happened six years ago, which was possible because of something that happened ten years ago.

If we really want to avoid losing sight of what we have done, if we’re being critical and we’re trying to shift things, it’s with that in mind. I think about that a lot here, because if you told me ten years ago that Minneapolis would look the way it does today, I would not have believed you. We just shifted the new normal. I think Minneapolis is different than a lot of the United States. I’ve been in other places around the States since the surge ended, and things feel really differently here.

I’m not a socialist, I’m not a communist—there are a lot of reasons for that, but one of them is I don’t believe there’s a magical point of revolution upon which everything is okay. So in my deep abolitionist and anarchist politics, I feel like this is the movement we’re making, and if we keep setting new horizons, we’re always going to not be where we need to get to, but we have made huge strides.

A lot of that, people want to copy and paste. How do we copy-paste Chiapas? How do we copy-paste Rojava? How do we copy-paste Hong Kong? And here in the US, people are like, How did you do that? I can draw you a diagram of a rapid response network, but that’s not really what will inform how you can be shifting and building and growing, and it doesn’t really inform us here either. I can’t just say, Well, just keep being in rapid response networks! That’s not really where we need to be going.

This is why the left melancholy framework is helpful for me. I don’t have an answer; I think we explored some potential answers, but if we just keep getting stuck, we lose all of those things we were just talking about, that are actually really worthwhile in pushing our movements forward, and learning from each other and knowing each other, and looking outside of our little city here.

Something I really want to bring into this, just as another last thought: one of the main ways that I’ve engaged in movement, especially in the last ten years (but it goes back further than that), is as a street medic, which is—I don’t know how street medics exist in other places in the world; I know the lineage within the United States and Turtle Island more broadly. And one of the things in that lineage that I think is really useful to learn from is that real street medics in the US are often made up of long-standing collectives that are both rooted in radical values but are also agile and have to change.

This has taught me more about organizing than almost anything else. Because we don’t change when it comes to consent and radical care and bodily autonomy. And we are on a side: we are there so people can keep fighting, and we take care of them so that’s possible. But we’ve had to change a lot over the last many decades of our existence, which you can trace to at least the 1970s.

And if there was a broader ability, in radical left movement and organizing, for folks to be able to say, Not every collective needs to last forever, and if we could be building out networks of collectives that are grounded in values and also able to change, I think that would feel like a huge step forward. One of the things in this left melancholy framework is that we’re not only getting sucked back into activities that have failed us, but into infrastructure and institutions that are counterrevolutionary.

So I’m really trying to dig at the question of: can we build infrastructure that is not counterrevolutionary, that is not an NGO, that is not a hierarchical, authoritarian socialist organization, or a party? That is the question I would love to see people figure out how to answer and take some responsibility for. Because it’s actual work, but it’s also what I see moving people forward.

And it also brings us into relationship with people. I just came from a convergence of street medics, and it was one of the highlights of my life. I met a compa from Chile who wanted to talk about 2019-2020 there and how it relates. These ways we can find to organize without replicating problematic structures—that, to me, is at the crux of how we start to challenge left melancholy.

EA: Perfect. If you have books, go for it. Sorry, I don’t want to put you on the spot.

m: I’ll just go off the cuff. I think Dilar Dirik’s Kurdish Women’s Movement is one of the best things I’ve ever [read]—I love that book.

Three books…I read too much. Ed, want to talk about the Gopal?

E: I’m going to sneak in two if that’s okay. One is Anand Gopal’s Days of Love and Rage, and the reasons therefore are described on our reading list.

But one thing we neglected to put on our reading list, and I still feel guilty about it, is Molly Crabapple’s book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

m: We’ll add it.

E: The reason I’m pairing these two is because of the things we can learn from each of them about a lot of the processes that we spent this conversation describing, and the ways that organizers and organizations made decisions, or had decisions foisted upon them, in high-stakes situations, that really led to devastating failures and defeats, and in some cases self-defeats. The stories of Manbij between 2011 and 2016 that Anand Gopal tells, as well as a lot of the stories from the Pale of Settlement between 1905 and 1917 (and after) that Molly Crabapple tells serve as a valuable warning about what can happen when self-interested actors take over entire movements.

m: I’ll come back to it: for all my very complex feelings about it, I think Hope Without Hope was a really useful text. It challenged me in ways I like to be challenged.

But go to the list. I write and read a lot about tech and AI stuff, so go check out the tech section, because that’s a whole other part of my life we could talk about another time.

EA: I’ll take the opportunity to mention Molly will be on the pod again. She’s been here twice; there will be a third time because now the book’s actually been published. The first two times we were talking about the upcoming book.

Also, Anand was on years ago talking about the Arab Spring. I have the book, I haven’t read it yet, but it would be a good opportunity to have him on again as well. It’s been so highly recommended; I definitely want to read it.

I also want to say, one of the other episodes before this one that’s going to be released [soon] was with Nathan Tankus and Eyshe Beirich, on a book that’s going to be published next summer: We, Traitors: Bundist Writings on Zionism, Palestine, and Socialism. It’s the first time there are this many texts translated from the original Yiddish that are explicitly on those topics.

I would argue it’s a very good companion book to Molly’s book, because it’s a lot of the original sources that she uses herself in her book, just in a compilation. It’s like 250 pages, and almost entirely people from the 1920s and 30s, talking very analytically about what their issues are with Zionism, talking about Palestine and all these things that are for the most part just not known. A very small number of people know the details of it. One of them is Eyshe, and he translated a shitload of texts for that book, and I’m really excited to see it in the wild.

All of that to say: good things are being done, good work is being done. There is a lot to learn from everything that’s being written. I’m really excited about that bit.

Thank you both for doing this, this was amazing.

m: Thank you, it was great to be on. Big fan.

E: Thank you Elia, this was fun.