Carla Joy Bergman

Big question. I mean, my work has always been about intervening around any kind of dominant narratives that things are just now bad or that people don't know what anything or pedagogically they're lacking. Like I've always tried to intervene around this idea that we've always been otherwise and we always are.

And there's always cracks everywhere and eruptions of radical ways of being and knowing and doing. And so it's like a deepening of that. And I think probably on a systemic, Thinking systemically is really about disrupting individualism or liberalism or empire, whatever you want to, colonialism, to really live it in the everyday. So that's partly that.

And then on just a super practical level, all of us don't have wealth. don't have generational wealth, are working all the time to try to meet ends meet. And some of us have housing insecurity and other real basic needs are insecure and health stuff. And so actually showing up for each of us is at the core of it for me.

It feels so good in my body to know that I'm not just showing up to think about what to do for Ka. For me, it's in the act of collectivism for each other. And so I'm just open to what sparks and emerges with our work. I don't have an agenda except for to disrupt things. and intervene belief systems that are ideologically driven by empire.

And I also came of age in the early eighties in the punk scene and had a venue space. And to me, punk is, and I would say hip hop as well. Hip underground hip hop stuff is like always the way to disrupt being captured by empire or from liberalism is to keep that punk ethos of doing it together and keeping it low to the ground. Yeah. Yeah.

Thanks Vicki.

Well, thanks for having us.

Yeah, same. And reach out to us, too, if you have ideas on what C.A.W. stands for. We love hearing from people. My favorite is, can anarchists write? That's what it stands for. I don't know who came up with that. I think that might have been Shulia or Vicky, but it's a good one.

So yeah, send in what you think. And we are going to have an advice column that's going to be launched soon. Yeah, so send us questions or individually or whatever. But, you know, disrupt individualism. Reach out to us.

Doing it together. Yeah.

Thanks for having us. Love your project. I also just wanted to give a shout out to our fourth member, Dani Burleson, who's not here today because she's working paid work, who just rounds us out so beautifully and wanted to say her name.

Yeah, I'm in Vancouver. Well, I was in Vancouver. I just stopped from there, but Pacific Northwest. And so it's Crow Highway, you know, thousands and thousands of crows. Oh, yeah, I get it.

Yep, yep. And that they're a collective and have meetings often throughout the day.

It's more assembly, yeah. Yeah, in Vancouver, it's called the Crow Highway.

Hell yeah. Because it's so massive and goes forever and ever and ever. Yeah. to their roost. Brief story on crows and resistance. A really incredible story in Vancouver when a park was, a colonial person created a park in the downtown, which was like displaced a lot of indigenous people in their homes. and designed this park that was filled with crows as well.

They also brought in animals from Europe as well to make it pretty. And the crows made it really hard for these animals. And so the city of Vancouver for 50 years, from 1900 to 1950, gave free range to the Vancouver gun people to go into the park and shoot crows every day.

And when I see the amount of crows that are still alive, it's just a metaphor for Indigenous resilience. It's just so powerful. So it's another reason why I'm interested in them in terms of where I was living.

Shiny things.

I'm sure. Thanks. That was a highlight, definitely, this year, was talking to Raul. Obviously, you know, a podcast ago, we talked for quite a bit longer than what was on the show. And I think, like, reading his newest book that was translated...

And then doing that show with him, it was completely connected to me, like reaching out to Shuley about doing Ka because there was a way that we, that he talked about this whole idea of disappearing symmetries that the Zapatistas are working on. Like this idea of really, truly looking at all the fault lines and,

within horizontality or autonomy that we don't actually enact in our day-to-day lives and so I really started to reflect on my own life that way and not so much Vicky at this point yet but like Julie and Danny both of them like we just were blurbing each other's books and like supporting each other connecting to publishers or trying to connect each other to publishers and just this

Trying to disrupt the competitive nature that's running underneath, even when we're all really committed to not being competitive. But it is. So all of this to say that, for me, collaboration is at the heart of what we're doing here in a deep, deep way. And for me, collaboration just means that

when something is created that wouldn't be created otherwise without this collaboration so I'm just really excited to see what sparks and comes up individually but also like with each other and even like through collaborations like the show with Raul and like how that spreads seeds and ideas um For myself, I'm going to definitely focus on collaboration in a deep way.

I don't think I'll write very much solo stuff for Ka. I think it will always be in conversation with others and just trying to double down on doing it together instead of individual pursuits.

Are you talking about like the late 90s?

Like Battle Seattle?

I mean, that was like the birth of anarchy again, right?

I was definitely around. I'm in my late 50s. But the same struggle was there, like that we're swimming in liberalism and like...

that socialist worker like capturing of the movement was just as powerful then and it was you saw it at all the rallies and stuff and you know immediately anarchism was marginalized and pushed off as irrelevant and not practical for the revolution and this is why it's splintered off in all these kind of sectarian movements in the that's my take anyway i think that's

I mean, I've hashed this out with so many older anarchists. I was part of Institute for Anarchist Studies. We talked about this a lot, this phenomenon with Scott Crowe. And you can just see the direct line of where it went into sectarianism from... this sort of rebirth. Sorry, I went off on a different thing instead of like journals and media.