Brief: Graeber vs Bannon, Anarchism vs Leninism (Part 1)
In this first of a two-part series, Matthew digs into a century-long debate within revolutionary politics—one that now shapes the fault lines between MAGA authoritarianism and the fragmented resistance against it.
How did the American far right end up using Leninist strategy more effectively than the American left? And what does that say about our own movements—our blind spots, our strengths, and inherited illusions?
In 2013, Steve Bannon called himself a Leninist. In 2016, he openly called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In Trump 2.0, he’s been an ideological whip for the vanguardism of Project 2025. If Bannon has a foil, it was the late anthropologist David Graeber—Occupy organizer, anarchist, and author of The Dawn of Everything—who championed prefigurative politics and rejected the idea that the state could ever be an instrument of liberation.
Drawing from Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn, I explore why a decade of globally interconnected mass movements failed to build lasting power—and how the right learned from their mistakes. We revisit January 6 through the lens of conspirituality influencers, we go to São Paulo to watch anarchist punk collectives lose the narrative to organized right-wing actors, and we return to Occupy to understand the spiritual hopes and organizational gaps that still shape protest culture today.
Part 2 will dig deeper into Graeber’s legacy, the theological undertow of spontaneity vs. structure, and what younger activists may inherit if we don’t learn from the last half-century of revolt and repression.
Show Notes
Mass protest decade
Bevins, Vincent. If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.
Project 2025 / organizational turn on the U.S. right
The Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Washington, DC: The Heritage Foundation, 2023–24.
MacGillis, Alec. “The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans.” ProPublica, August 1, 2024.
PBS NewsHour. “A Look at the Project 2025 Plan to Reshape Government—and Trump’s Links to Its Authors,” July 9, 2024.
Occupy, prefigurative politics, and critiques
Graeber, David. The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement. New York: Spiegel & Grau/Random House, 2013.
Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004. (Open access PDF via UChicago link.)
Skoczylas, Marie Bernadette. “Anarchism and Prefigurative Politics in the Occupy Movement.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2016.
Binh, Pham. “Lenin and Occupy.” Socialist Project, April 13, 2012.
Paris Commune; Marx vs. Bakunin; spontaneity vs. organization
Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. 1871.
Bakunin, Mikhail. Statism and Anarchy. 1873. Translated and edited by Marshall S. Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Shatz, Marshall S., ed. Bakunin: Statism and Anarchy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Ross, Kristin. Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. London: Verso, 2015.
Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune 1871. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
Lenin, V. I. What Is to Be Done?. 1902.
Graeber—assessments and critiques
Seymour, Richard. “Baseline Communism: David Graeber’s Innovations.” London Review of Books, August 14, 2025.
Kliman, Andrew. “The Make-Believe World of David Graeber: Reflections on the Ideology Underlying the Failed Occupation of Zuccotti Park.” With Sober Senses (Marxist-Humanist Initiative), May 1, 2012.
Bassett, Jane. “Not the Dawn of Everything.” International Socialism, April 17, 2023.
Anarchism / Marxism dialogues
van der Walt, Lucien. “Anarchism and Marxism.” In The Brill Companion to Anarchist Philosophy, 2017.
Hirsch, Steven, and Lucien van der Walt, eds. Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010.
Bannon, media strategy, and the “flood the zone” doctrine
Newsweek. “Steve Bannon’s ‘Flood the Zone’ Strategy Explained,” February 6, 2025.
Grynbaum, Michael M. “Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’.” The New York Times, January 26, 2017.
Illing, Sean. “‘Flood the Zone with Shit’: How Misinformation Overwhelmed Our Democracy.” Vox, January 16, 2020.
Bannon’s aborted cadre academy at Trisulti
Munster, Ben. “The Last Stand at Steve Bannon’s ‘Gladiator School’.” The New Yorker, May 31, 2021.
Scherer, Crispian Balmer. “Steve Bannon Loses Bid to Start Right-Wing Political Academy in Italy.” Reuters, March 15, 2021.
The Art Newspaper. “Italy Evicts Steve Bannon’s Right-Wing Group from Medieval Monastery,” September 8, 2021.
