Balkans - Andre Grubacic

Interview Details

• Region: Balkans
• Language: English
• Interviewee: Andre Grubacic
• Interviewer: Lesley Wood
• Date: December 2021
• Bio: Andre Grubačić is the Founding Chair of the Anthropology and Social Change department at CIIS-San Francisco, an academic program with an exclusive focus on anarchist anthropology. He is the editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research and is an affiliated faculty member at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, UC Berkeley. He is the author of several books, including Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid (coauthored with Denis O’Hearn), Don’t Mourn, Balkanize!, and Wobblies and Zapatistas (with Staughtn Lynd).Following the collapse of Yugoslavia, Grubacic was based in Belgrade, before moving to the US. Grubacic is a founding member of the Global Balkans network of the Balkan anti-capitalist diaspora, the Yugoslav Initiative for Economic Democracy, Knotrapunkt magazine, and ZBalkans - a Balkan edition of Z Magazine on whose editorial board he also sits. He is or has been active as an organizer in networks such as the Planetary Alternatives Network, the post-Yugoslav coalition of anti-authritarian collectives DSM!, Peoples Global Action, the World Social Forum, Freedom Fight and most recently as a program director for the Global Commons.
• Audio File: https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2fd28scyq9k5mm/PGA%20Balkans%20-%20Andre.m4a.m4a?dl=0
• Transcript: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lcscfpfxq3pnii16xhu35/PGA-Balkans-Andre-Grubacic-1.docx?dl=0&rlkey=x5l8xq7721k8q72mer039pkty

Transcript

Andre Grubacic: The PGA was a phenomenal experience because it was so international. You could hear a rumor coming from India or Nepal, while based in Eastern Europe, where I was working from. Curiously, gossip was a weird way of keeping PGA alive. It had a useful, movement-building function. The politics was very intimate. And of course, gossip and rumor have their other side, a vicious or malicious rumor which would set people apart in ways that were; especially before our PGA conferences, which were this big meeting places of transnational encounter. It was exceedingly difficult to organize things because there was so much rumor and intrigue of both kinds. The Greeks use the term hora, meaning political space. PGA was a fascinating political space.

Lesley Wood: Hmm.

Andre Grubacic: People use the term network to describe it, you know, the buzzword of the 90s. But for me, it was this political space that in a certain sense did bring out the historical experience of network, of the anarchist organizing back in 19th century and in the early 20th century, organizing that brought Malatesta and his comrades in Italy to Argentina and Paraguay. And it was something beautiful, I think, for most of us who had time to think about it or write about it. It was reminiscent of that period of global revolutionary radicalism of 19th century. A paradigmatic set of assumptions, which is related in my case to state socialism and authoritarian forms of Marxism was disappearing. A new form of radicalism was emerging. I was part of the group that was identified as anarchists, so we were seeing the return of that libertarian form. The term anarchist is perhaps not quite accurate: a libertarian communist, libertarian socialist tendency within PGA. Between us, we have discussed the reinvention of certain practices that were very common in the 19th century and 20th century. Then, on the other side of the history/novelty argument, there were people who are seeing something completely new: a rupture, something unleashed by the Zapatistas, or the new zeitgeist. Was PGA representative of a complete break in activist culture? Were we living in a new age of radicalism? Were we rehearsing some familiar themes from anarchist history or libertarian socialist history? Immigrant radicalism, the end of great wars, regional networks… I had these remarkable, endless conversations with friends in India, with friends in Bulgaria, friends in France, about this topic.

Lesley Wood: The Eros effect.

Andre Grubacic: The Eros Effect, yes. Its funny that you mentioned it. George Katsiaficas has just moved in here with me, so we are spending a lot of time together.

Lesley Wood: Amazing.

Andre Grubacic: PGA as a political tool had brought us together in this intergenerational political space. George is now 72. He was able to bring that particular experience of his generation, as he was communicating both the specific Asian experience and the German experience, The German Autonomen and the Korean Gwangju commune, and the US American SDS. And it was just absolutely fascinating. All of those conversations in cafes, in different places, in the apartments, but especially before the actions, at “info points” and all of those incredible places were people would meet, have sex, drink, and discuss new ideas, where they would enjoy heated theoretical and ideological debates. There was Olivier from Switzerland and Ilan Shalif from Israel in the corner discussing the finer points of autonomous Marxism or anarcho-communism, in case of Ilan, and bringing very specific experiences from very specific local histories.

Lesley Wood: Mm hmm.

Andre Grubacic: So my role in all this, at least the way that I’ve seen it at the time, was to bring out the experience of the Balkans. I was never very fond of the term Eastern Europe because it speaks to a particular experience of socialist countries in a certain part of the Soviet dominated world. That term could not capture the experience of Yugoslavia and Greece, for example. But even Eastern Europe, with the partial exception of Russia, was neglected in a sense that we never had enough people to develop the “Eastern European” parts of PGA. So our contribution coming from the Balkans and coming from the Eastern European was somewhat muted, not because of anything intentional; I mean, if I would to go there, perhaps I could be slightly critical and say that there was a certain struggle with Eurocentricism even within a global network. I remember one of those one of those big disputes. My country, Yugoslavia, was emerging out of the last part of the Yugoslav wars. I remember writing a really angry essay against “samba activism.”

And basically, what I meant by this was that there is just such an incredible focus on, and exoticization of certain parts of South America, Latin America. And almost complete neglect of the struggles of Roma, refugees, migrants, people who are occupying factories at that time in Eastern Europe, people who have a certain experience of certain socialism. So much militant potential untapped. And I remember receiving a super angry response from what was then a very important part of PGA which was the networks’ samba band. Tthey confronted me in a social center in London, perplexed and angry, and asked “Why do you hate Samba?” I said, I don’t hate samba, I was trying to–perhaps clumsily –make a point by coining a term samba activism, that we do not invest enough energy in places that were not sexy, or not cool, or not tropical enough. They thought that I was criticizing a musical genre! Samba… that kind of performative politics was very much part of PGA and definitelya very beautiful thing about PGA. Lot of fun, a situationist element of bringing pleasure, disruptive pleasure and festivity. But there were, at the same time, many miscommunications and translation problems in the global network. And it’s really interesting to dwell on this after 30 years.

Lesley Wood: Can we go back to where you first got connected and how PGA came to former Yugoslavia? Because I don’t know that story at all.

Andre Grubacic: Honestly, I can’t remember. I think it happened before, and there was a conference in Leiden organized by EuroDusnie. Well, they were a network at the time. Many people, Marco, for example, I’m sure you talked to him or somebody talked to him already. People who were conveners, that was the term that we used, European conveners. And I think the group that Jeff Juris was associated with, which was called Movimiento Resistencia Global, I think mostly Catalan outfit. Yeah, they were co-convenors with the Dutch anarchist group that Marco and others were involved with.

Some of our Yugoslav friends ended up as refugees, ended up as part of the Ya Basta in Milan and other places in Italy. And I think through them, that was my first encounter, sometime in the 90s. PGA was already founded, I believe, somewhere in 1998, Sergio or Olivier will remember the exact date. But the Balkans arrived a bit later to the party. Our idea was also to put Balkan struggles back on the map, and to unlock that militant potential revisit mostly unknown histories of Eastern Europe, of socialist Europe, of the Balkans.

Andre Grubacic: And that wasn’t easy. I remember distinctly an experience in Berlin, again a social center or a squat. There was a very good friend and a good person from England speaking. And he said something like, If the brain, the mind of new radicalism is in Western Europe, the heart is in the Balkans or in Eastern Europe. I was was absolutely shocked. I had a conversation with this person later on, and it was one of those patient, yet heated conversations in which you try to learn and educate and exchange experiences. But sometimes those conversations were profoundly unsettling because the other person would not understand that even though he was genuinely well meaning, he was nonetheless rehearsing the old colonialist trope. It’s all too well known to people who are from the wrong side of Europe that we will end up as a muscle or some other limb, never the mind: we are not where the knowledge comes from. And we were saying, or we wanted to say, that this is absolutely not true. The militant knowledge of this part of the world is immense, and it’s in a complicated way hidden by this conspiracy of ignorance and good will. We wanted to inject it into PGA and, at the same time, to use PGA to help reinvigorate these local structures.

Lesley Wood: Do you feel that you were able to get those stories out and to achieve that goal within the network?

Andre Grubacic: Perhaps the most difficult and most rewarding experience relates to my activity in organizing of a specific event. In 2000 my political collective became the European convener. We have organized a huge meeting, or a conference as we called it, in Belgrade. And we brought people from all over the place. It was a lot of work, an insane amount of work really, that basically destroyed the group that I was in. Destroyed the collectives because it was too much work in a place that was completely insane, which is former Yugoslavia and Belgrade. But this was our project: to create a context of translation of struggles that would be nested in the local history of struggle.We have organized a conference in a partisan monument park, to mark the anti-fascist resistance of Yugoslav people, and to pronounce a return to the anti-fascist struggle that would assist in building a new kind of political resistance, and a new kind of political identity, that would bring all the Yugoslavs together. There was an elementary school and we lied to the principal, saying that we are doing an academic symposium or something. Right next to this partisan park in Jajinci was a refuge center, or motel for asylum seekers: a surrealist socialist motel called One Hundred Roses or something like this. And next to it was a Roma favela. To top it off, there were plenty of workers going on strike, some of them were occupying factories and factories [] in northern Serbia, in Zrenjanin.

Andre Grubacic: Jugoremedija was the first occupation anywhere in former Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So, we were going from one striking factory to another, inviting them to the conference. There was a total media blackout. They didn’t know that another factory was on strike. We wanted to introduce them to each other, and also to the global people, people who are representative of global activism. And in addition to this, we also brought workers from Belgium, from a factory that was on strike at that time. As you can see, it was all carefully choreographed, and the idea was to expose both Europeans to the locals, and striking locals to each other and to and to the Europeans. It was wildly ambitious, but it worked.

This might be actually the first time that I’m talking about this. It’s really interesting, and you might find it an interesting story. Serbian workers were together in the same room and we said, Listen, what we wanted to do is to bring you together. You will figure out what you want to do. We are just going to excuse ourselves. That was our role. We were the facilitators of the encounter. Not a revolutionary vanguard. And out of that encounter, a very important coordination of “workers coordination against privatization” came out. So, it was a whole network that was formed by Serbian workers in strikes, and during the PGA conference, using its framework. And they were talking to Belgian workers. They were exchanging ideas and tactics. It was quite a scene: Serbian workers arrived in several busses, and, upon seeing dreadlocked Spaniard activists, demanded to go back. OK. We have seen enough. Let’s just go back. I said, wait, what are you doing? They didn’t want to exit the bus. They were so terrified of all of these dreadlocked people dressed in these weird, festive colors. An activist rom Spain, started handing over condoms to the workers, who were roughly 50 percent male, 50 percent female. The male workers were completely shocked. They didn’t know what condoms were, and the women workers begin to explain to them what the condoms were for. I remember some bananas were involved in terms of direct demonstration of application.

Andre Grubacic: And it was an absolute clash of civilizations, sensibilities, cultures. And eventually, the workers did leave the bus and they loved the activists. In the end it was just a love fest. Every year since then, when I would come to Yugoslavia, the workers would ask when we are going to do it again? This European meeting was important for me because it had brought many of the PGA storied dilemmas into plain view, in a very concentrated period of time. One of the most grueling political debates was between group of people from a Western European country that I’m not going to name, who insisted that the most important thing is the kind of food we are going to eat. Not the meeting between Roma, Erased from Slovenia, Striking workers, and Asylum seekers.

Andre Grubacic: So we were in the process of hiring the self-managed food making collective. Now, Yugoslavia used to be a self managed socialist country. When Yugoslavia fell apart, many of these huge self-managed collectives, some of them cooking collectives, food making collectives, were left without any work. So our idea was to give them this job of feeding the people in the conference and paying them for it. Hmm. On the face of it, we never thought that this is going to be a problem, let alone political tension that almost destroyed the conference. However, as we soon discovered, many of our friends from this Western European country were vegans and the workers, as we were told, had blood on their hands. Now I was endlessly entertained and annoyed by this. The barbaric workers agreed that they’re going to make vegan food. But to no avail, as they had blood on their hands (they handled eat before in their food making life). So this led to a counter kitchen organizing and to an autonomous kitchen. That took a ridiculous amount of time, that was just one insane conversation after another.

Andre Grubacic: It was so exhausting. And it ended with this kind of PGA solution when you have the autonomous space for each one of these. There was another tension which was very painful, which concerns the Roma people. We wanted to involve them. We wanted to have them visit the space. We wanted to do politics together. We have spent many months organizing with them and we told them it’s totally fine for them to come and sell things. You know, they can sell trinkets including Pepsi and Coke. Corporate-hating French activists chased the Roma out of our camp. And now you have to appreciate the irony. People who were exposed to all sorts of indignities have been chased around by wealthy French professors because they were bringing the corporate culture into the pristine, anti-capitalist camp. And it was absolutely fascinating to watch this.

Andre Grubacic: And of course, this led to many problems, many interesting and less interesting conversations. Similar stories were with people who were from the “Erased” movement of Slovenia. So Erased movements, which is the movement of people who were based in Slovenia and several thousand people who woke up one day without passports, without any real documents: simply erased from any state documents. Some of them were deported to Bosnia—even though they were born in Slovenia—and later killed. They were able to organize politically, as a trans-ethnic collective. And then they had to watch French people from Longo Mai insult the Roma and the local cooks. It was just fascinating to watch this comedy of errors in communication, and this imperial colonial arrogance in plain view. However, the Erased, just like the striking workers, loved the meeting.

Andre Grubacic: There was an old PGA hand from France, I believe, who were talking to one of our main organizers who showed up a Nike T-shirt. And this guy who was a Professor, started to scream at my friend, shouting at him in a kind of obscene language. My friend couldn’t speak English well, couldn’t really respond. So a few of us intervened and said that his whole family was slaughtered in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He came to Serbia as a refugee, taking care of his younger brother. He worked at the Chinese market. The market sold cheap knock offs like Nike tshirts. So, it was a really painful scene, still one of the most painful political experiences I had. I still remember the embarrassed look of my friends face, who felt that he did something terribly wrong.

Andre Grubacic: And I’m looking at this guy who is a French professor and I’m looking at my friend who is this orphan refugee and that just like… That also was PGA. There was an exhibit of some photographs of Palestinian children who were killed or injured during one of the many attacks on Gaza. And there were many Germans in PGA who were fans or members or affiliated with what is known as Anti-Deutsch. These anti Germans think that their main idea and political responsibility is to protect Israel. And they’ve started to remove those pictures of dead children, and it was just a really tough thing to watch and see. But it’s also exposed us, for the first time, to this particular interesting conflict with the German political space.

Lesley Wood: Then we had a more humorous incident. I remember one of the things that we all recited and knew by heart were the famed PGA hallmarks. So we all knew the PGA hallmarks by heart, and few situationist friends from London thought that this is sacralizing the political, so they proceeded to to wipe their ass with the PGA hallmarks. This was in the middle of one of the spokes councils. Many people have put a lot of work, a lot of work into making those hallmarks crafted. It was a very potent forms of mobilizing, but people were becoming too attached to those hallmarks, which was exactly the point that the situationist group from London was trying to make.

Andre Grubacic: There was a very interesting critique of activism going around in those days, give up activism essay for instance, written by some Situationist Collective. It was an interesting intervention. It basically suggested that we are becoming professionals of social change and that we are assuming somewhat corporate roles. We are professionals of social change. Should we be? What does it mean to be an activist? Not a revolutionary, but an ambivalent, amorphous figure that could be a humanitarian or a liberal, or a social change bureaucrat. So that part of PGA was very, very critical of anything that would become sclerotic or routinized. And there were people, if I remember correctly, mostly from Longo Mai in France who were viciously critical—that is, critical to the point of being plain obnoxious– of any leadership situation that might emerge. Now, PGA had informal structures. Weak spot, controversial spot, perhaps politically least defined spot, was called “the support group”, and people who are a member of the support group were often, I think mistakenly, identified as the leaders. There was always this libertarian, anarchist or anti-authoritarian disposition to identify the leaders. But there was also this western/northern European propensity to shame the leaders, to expose the leaders, or even, according to the famous poster from Geneva, to kill your leaders. This is how some euro-minded, occi-centric folks greeted unionists from India, people who have a very different leadership culture. So you could see a kind of stubborn occidental way of thinking about authoritarianism and leadership, not in the least willing to engage with other contexts of political authority and political subjectivity. This criticism was applied to me as well during the Belgrade conference.

Lesley Wood: Well, congratulations.

Andre Grubacic: Thank you. I think that everyone who was a part of the convener group was a potential suspect, and people with more education and more social prominence were seen as emerging leaders—to be dealt with swiftly.

Lesley Wood: Was that throughout the period or was this? I mean, I know we started talking about the Belgrade conference,

Andre Grubacic: I’m using the Belgrade Conference as a sort of microcosm of all these illuminating conversations, debates, clash of political styles, cultures. It was, on the one hand, wildly successful conference that had put Eastern Europe, or at least my part of Eastern Europe, on the map of European political activism; On the other hand, this neglected space presented western activists with exotic local conversations between migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, Roma and workers from occupied, striking factories. However, this also was a place where you could see some of the more morbid symptoms; I wouldn’t call them pathologies, but you could observe some difficult tensions in 1990s “new” radicalism. This new politics did not remove old sectarian habits, and Eurocentric mindsets. However, with all these shortcomings, PGA was a global network that brought together people from Mexico in Chiapas with people from India (Karnataka State Farmers Union), people from Geneva squats and Roma from former Yugoslavia. Also laudable was emphasis on sexism, gender related tensions that existed within this political space. Of course, all of these countries had their own varied political styles when it comes to gender culture and gender relations.

Andre Grubacic: Where we failed is in our effort to teach each other and translate actively between various cultures of radicalism. I think this is one of the chief limits of political space that was of PGA. I have seen some of the best, most dedicated organizers chased out of PGA for mistakes that they made. The Kurds have this wonderful institution of “Tekmil”. “Tekmil” means a space where you come together in a collective effort of self-education. You come together to this space and you criticize, you educate, you create that space that will be space of de-personalized political critique that has a specific and shared political goal in mind. I think it’s clear we were not very good at doing that. We were too normatively (west) European in this regard.

Lesley Wood: Hmm. Why do you think

Andre Grubacic: I think we were extremely ambitious. PGA pretended that it doesn’t exist. PGA, as some people liked to say, was a ghost. PGA was often invoked as kind of ghost politics, a network that doesn’t dare speak its name. A network that exists (almost) everywhere: We Are Everywhere was one of the famous slogans. But to me, it kind of suggests a different connotation or interpretation: being everywhere and nowhere at the same time anticipated the split between community organizing and samba-internationalism. That anti-authoritarian impulse that was genuine and very laudable also led to many serious complications. I remember the breakup of the London Group, and many episodes of infighting that was very unpleasant. European activist sectarian habits were suffocating. We were behind the process-oriented Americans have very advanced meeting skills. Direct Action Network was great. I remember meeting Brad Will in Leiden.

Andre Grubacic: David Graber was very much involved, perhaps more as an ethnographer, than as a political activist. But he was there, Brooke, of course, Solnit, and so many others. They were not exactly PGA info points—that’s the term we used back then for these nodes of communication– but network partners from the United States. And they had these amazing ideas about process. And, you know, they were doing things like that [twinkles]

Lesley Wood: Lisa Fithian, Starhawk that whole crowd.

Andre Grubacic: Some people thought they were half mad, but I was very impressed by it. Starhawk and her beautiful pagan events in the forests of Germany and again, Europe is endlessly complicated in its own way, of course. There were many there were many uncomfortable elements to doing pagan rituals in German forests, which many US people are not aware of. So again, problem of translation of a particular kind of activist culture. So, back to your question: What was missing in that sense, how to articulate what was the problem that prevented us from explicitly creating a more advanced, more translatable political space? In a certain sense, we were trying to not be explicit, to be and not to be a political organization. What I learned from some of the people who were, for me, extremely important in learning about the network, like Sergio or Olivier, or Ann Friday, is to think about PGA as a temporary political formation. PGA served a particular purpose at a particular point in time, it existed in a time/space that was specific, as an articulation of a different political sensibility. One such purpose was to keep the broader anti-globalization movement, with all the competing reformist elements, to the left as possible, as an anti-capitalist gravitational force. The end of PGA was probably Genoa, in Europe, and 9/11 in the United States. In Italy, the dcay started with ill advised decision to form Dissobedienti. It was a move from more anti-authoritarian, “new anarchist” culture, to a familiar political model. And that, I think, is the story of PGA, story of my experience in the PGA. One advantage of oral history is that I am sure you’re going to hear so many different perspectives on this story. But for me, the most important thing this confusing network did was to revive internationalism, or even planetary non-nationalism, a global political space that aspired to translate local and global. We were not always great at translation. But it was a formidable political experience that srved as a conduit for a circulation of struggles, allowing from our Balkan perspective, for new experiences, new language, and new concepts to enter our political vocabulary. And I think to a certain extent, it allowed us to “balkanize” the conversation and insert ourselves into this fabric.

Lesley Wood: Hmm.

Andre Grubacic: Also, many friendships were made in the network, lifelong friendships, love stories, books, artwork. PGA paved the way, or sown the seeds, later developed by people like David Graber, and others, who initiated Occupy or the movement of mass assemblies of 2011. I don’t think that one is able to understand Occupy without the history of PGA radicalism.

Lesley Wood: Yeah, you can see the various inheritances. What would you think the lessons would be for today’s activists?

Andre Grubacic: To go beyond the false choice between community activism and internationalism. Naomi Klein famously missed the point when she criticized laboratories of direct democracy as summit hopping. You cant have community organizing that is truly efficient outside of international solidarity work. And you cant have a true internationalism without local struggles to network. Without this perspective, we will retreat either to parochial localism, or to groundless internationalism. Another thing is the significance of state-free, horizontal, directly democratic political culture. The vultures of old socialism and worshipers of the state are circling once again around local struggles. We need to bury the illusion of state-centered social struggle once and for all.

Lesley Wood: It’s interesting because definitely some people have said something similar to what you’re saying and that there’s the real loss of internationalism these days.

Andre Grubacic: Yes.

Lesley Wood: It’s like but it’s it’s a funny thing to say because we are so connected, and yet we don’t have these intentional spaces of attempted translation and some translation.

Andre Grubacic: PGA was, in a certain sense, was more open to experiment than what we have today. I think we were more courageous in terms of being open to experimenting with political forms and different political sense. Social media was only emerging at the time we are talking about, if we don’t include our beloved listserves and incessant text messaging. No Twitter and no Facebook. Even if they were, I don’t think that anybody would even dream of using it. Technology made it possible for us to organize in a particular way. Many of us were traveling between different places in the world. Many people went to Argentina during the uprising. Many people went to Chiapas. Many Asians visited Europe. There was criticism, to be sure: one movement moralist uses to speak about activists with frequent flier miles. This kind of protestant mentality of guilt was a specialty of the opulent north activists. I remember thinking if anyone would say such a thing about Emma Goldman, Malatesta or Bakunin. Because of these frequent fliers we had connections between Asian, European, and Latin American movements. So, yeah, internationalism today is in retreat, and state socialists are making a most unfortunate comeback.

Lesley Wood: Well, it was an interesting moment, partly because of the fall of state socialism and this this question of what does it mean and the connection, the international communication possibilities that were emerging at that moment that maybe helped to create those conditions.

Andre Grubacic: Yeah. Another tension that is related to this was the tension between the old/new left and the PGA new left politics, which was really challenging. Many trade unions, many anarchist anarcho-syndicalist movements, many Leninist formations of all sorts were deeply suspicious of PGA; in different local settings that led to all sorts of sectarian bloodletting. And they were right to be suspicious. PGA was meant to disrupt the conventional Cold war politics. I remember that even in Belgrade there was a local anarcho something group of local clowns who thought of PGA as a postmodern phenomenon disrupting the stability of the class identified with male industrial proletariat.

Lesley Wood: Was the social forum like a competitor for that sort of. Competitive space in the Balkans at the time, or no?

Andre Grubacic: We tried to do both things. We tried to get engaged with social forum, but World Social Forum was an unruly place. They created a space for us and I was for a while even on the International Council. We were trying to again to do the same thing that we’re trying to do with PGA and make the Balkan politics visible. Here we were completely outmaneuvered by authoritarian leftists who were much better at making backroom deals and organizing bureaucratic meetings. Including people like MST.

Lesley Wood: Yeah, I think they I mean, they are kind of listed as a convener at one point. But from the interviews, the folks that I’ve talked to in Brazil, they say, Well, they weren’t really. It was more the anarchists that were the kind of people who are more committed to PGA, at least locally anyway.

Andre Grubacic: One of the Porto Alegre meetings, I can’t remember which one there was a group of anarchists who pied someone from PT There were tensions within locale between the Brazilian PGA people. So, yes, landless workers movement were cautiously supportive of PT, Lula’s party, many PGA radicals in Indymedia—movement’s media channel—were against this. There is a very interesting history of especifismo, specific anarchist organizing in this part of Brazil. These anarchist groups didn’t want to do anything with either Lula or the PGA.

Lesley Wood: Of course, it was trying to do something very, very ambitious.

Andre Grubacic: I think so. That’s why it was so funny when I spoke to one person who is now a very dear friend of mine, who called those of us with “grand visions” little Napoleons. Again, we were not able to resolve all those tensions. But my God, think about how how much tension was there to be resolved. And how little time.

Lesley Wood: 100 percent, 100 percent. I’m assuming sorry.

Andre Grubacic: No, all the valid and important (self) criticism aside, I think that we should congratulate ourselves, everyone who was involved at any point in organizing what was the PGA , everyone who tolerated those extraordinarily, excruciatingly long, terribly facilitated meetings in cold squats and social centers all around the world.

Lesley Wood: were you part of the support network, the support group?

Andre Grubacic: I had a very interesting conversation with Jose Bove at Yale of all places. He told me that PGA has to decide if it exists.

“You need to figure out if you exist or if you don’t exist. PGA needs to figure out what it is.” And I could sense that there was a certain impatience because people are looking for something solid, something different politically. And I remember thinking that our time, the time of PGA, might have been spent. But lets say, by the way of conclusion, that PGA is dead, and long live PGA. PGA had its purpose. It served it masterfully. It was beautiful. It was exhilarant and exhilarating. It was a transformative political experience. There is a need for a new kind of PGA that’s not going to be a PGA, but it’s going to be used as a tool to reinvent a new kind of international political organizing, one that’s more adequate for our moment today. Not PGA, but with the same creative, inquisitive, sparkling political curiosity that made PGA possible. This needs to be reinvented, a global formation that is going to bring us all together in some new way that we perhaps are not aware of right now.

Lesley Wood: You know, that is so going on the back cover. No, that was a great quote. It was great. There’s no there’s no book in this. This is I mean, this is intended to be a resource for movements, right? Thank you. Thank you. I’m going to I’m going to get it transcribed and send it back to you.

Andre Grubacic: With much for this show. I think this was probably the first time that I and I talked about any of this. It feels really good.

Lesley Wood: Well, it’s I think we got a fantastic set of stories and things that I don’t think that anyone else has said that have been part of this. So I really appreciate your time. And I feel like there’s like a million things that we should connect on.

Lesley Wood: Yes, please talk to your colleagues, please, about this, about this Federation of Misfits that we are trying to pull together of federating the cracks in the university system where we have and accomplished who would like to do?

Andre Grubacic: Absolutely. And if you have anything written down on it, send it to me, but I’ll be emailing you all this stuff anyway.

Lesley Wood: Wonderful. Awesome.

Andre Grubacic: Thank you so much. Have a good night.

Lesley Wood: Ok, you too.

Andre Grubacic: Bye bye.