Ep 399 - Resistance and Resilience with Pieter de Beer

** Come to Macro ‘n Chill, our community-building online gathering & discussion group. Tuesday, October 6, at 8pm ET / 5pm PT. Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/6VRb9hKDRB2_oCLzzEVquQ

If we reject electoral politics as a path to fundamental change, the inevitable question becomes: “So what’s the plan?” In this episode, Steve, a Leninist, is joined by Pieter de Beer, an anarchist, community organizer, and author of the Anarcasper Substack, to talk about dual power and building parallel, horizontal systems to aid working people in taking action.

Despite approaching the question from different traditions, Steve and Pieter find considerable common ground in the need for dual power, mutual aid, community resilience, and collective self-provisioning.

Pieter argues that cooperatives, tenant unions, mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and other alternatives already exist. The problem is that they remain isolated islands. The task is to connect them, coordinating resources and building the trust that an atomized capitalist society systematically erodes. Rather than waiting for political institutions to deliver change, communities can begin constructing networks capable of providing food, housing, healthcare, tools, and other necessities, strengthening their ability to struggle.

Steve and Pieter also discuss:

• why strikes collapse when workers have no material backstop
• "permeable selfhood" and participation as its own reward
• tool libraries and mutual credit
• how “awakening” without community can curdle into conspiracism

For Pieter, the starting point is clear: show up, help people, build trust, connect organizations, and turn isolated acts of solidarity into durable social power.

Pieter de Beer, known online as Anarcasper, is a community organizer in the Middle East. He is currently part of several mutual aid and direct-action anarchist affinity groups, and has been doing mutual aid for 28 years, across a multitude of countries.

Find Pieter at https://substack.com/@anarcasper