AI Summary
5 min read“The capitalists have been allowed to rule the world.” That is the opening claim of this episode of It Could Happen Here, which sets out to answer a single question: how did the international workers’ movement, once so confident of its inevitable victory, come to be so totally destroyed? Host Mia Wong offers a diagnosis, drawing heavily on the journal Endnotes and the work of David Graeber. The argument is not that the ruling class simply crushed the movement from the outside. Instead, the movement was undone from within, by its own choices about how to organize production and by its failure to build an identity capacious enough to hold the real complexity of working people’s lives.
The Two Questions That Split the Movement
The workers’ movement faced two fundamental questions, and its failure on the second one proved fatal. The first was the “social question”: who should own the means of production? The second, more neglected question was: how should production actually be organized? Who makes the decisions on the shop floor? On this second question, the major factions of the movement—social democrats, Bolsheviks, and even liberal capitalists—converged on the same answer: one-man rule in the factory. The boss tells you what to do, and you obey.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:25) **Compilation Episode Introduction** - Robert Evans explains this is a compilation of the week's episodes, with slightly fewer ads.
- 2 (02:50) **The Decline and Fall of the International Workers' Movement (Part 1)** - Host Mia Wong begins her analysis of how the capitalist class achieved near-total victory by destroying the workers' movement.
- 3 (12:55) **One-Man Rule in the Factory** - The episode details how socialist and social democratic parties imposed top-down management, mirroring capitalist hierarchy.
- 4 (15:24) **The Mythical Collective Worker and Its Contradictions** - The episode explores the identity of the "collective worker" and the internal contradictions that undermined it.
- 5 (27:33) **The Shattering of the Working Class** - The episode explains how globalized supply chains and the shift to a service economy destroyed the material basis for a collective worker identity.
- 6 (32:58) **How to Print Your Own Money: The Case for Local Currencies** - Guest host Zaren Burnett introduces the concept of local currencies, beginning with the failed example of "Davis Dollars" from his hometown.
- 7 (44:15) **The Berkshares Model: Mechanism and Purpose** - Peter La Rochelle explains how Berkshares work as a place-based currency designed to build a sustainable local economy, contrasting it with speculative cryptocurrencies.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file:
- The Decline and Fall of the International Workers Movement
- How To Print Your Own Money: The Case for Local Currencies
- How the ‘Delivery Protection Act’ Takes on Amazon
- Attacking Palestinian Health
- Executive Disorder: French Student Protests, Flavio Bolsonaro, ‘Third Country’ Deportations
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Sources/Links:
The Decline and Fall of the International Workers Movement
- https://www.endnotes.org.uk/issues/issue-4/endnotes-a-history-of-separation-preface
- https://libcom.org/article/utopia-rules-technology-stupidity-and-secret-joys-bureaucracy-david-graeber
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/maurice-brinton-the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs
- https://www.marxists.org/portugues/hughes/1946/mes/90.htm
How To Print Your Own Money: The Case for Local Currencies
- BerkShares Program https://berkshares.org/
- Bob Dunning's Newsletter: https://www.thewaryone.com/
- https://centerforneweconomics.org/people/peter-larochelle/
- https://centerforneweconomics.org
- https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/local-currencies-in-the-21st-century-understanding-money-building-local-economies-renewing-community/
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/econo
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