How Do We Live Now with Vicky Osterweil at the New York Anarchist Bookfair

Today's episode features a recording of the talk that Vicky Osterweil and I gave at the 2025 New York Anarchist Bookfair, called "How Do We Live Now?", where we discussed our CAW project and the way that anarchists can participate in the culture war. As Vicky reminds us in the talk, politics are downstream from culture. The seriousness of the left often leaves out the importance of culture—of making beautiful things that inspire and touch us, or that make life worth living—in favor of militating for a revolution. Like everything else, we need to wait until after the rev to attend to these things—or perhaps there will be no artistic pursuits at all. But the history of anarchism shows that culture is often a starting point for anarchists, and it provides a source of feeling that can create a whole world of pleasure and connection around us right now. If it wasn't important, the right wing and fascists would not have mounted decades of attack against these things we produce and that shape us—the so-called culture war that aims to destroy a source of radicalization. As we can often learn, there is usually truth in their attack against us, and rather than deny its importance, we can lean into the source of their fear as part of our refusal to reproduce us world, to turn the culture war into a social war.

It is always a pleasure and inspiration to talk with Vicky, so I, for one, enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you all do too. At the head, I just want to note that the sound quality is not at the normal level, you can also hear the room while we talk. This also means that my edits are a little rougher because there is no silence between our sentences. All this to say, there may be some difficulty in making out some phrases, but I still felt it was worth sharing. But apologies in advance for the lower quality.

I also want to note that I included our responses to audience questions, but cut out the questions themselves. I still think there is a coherence that you can follow in our responses. I'll mark the transition to questions, so that it doesn't seem to come from nowhere.

Here is the description we wrote for the workshop:

The right wing is correct: this is a culture war—and we cannot cede ground or meet them on their territory, unless we are ready to give in. In this CAW Writer Collective workshop, Vicky Osterweil and Shuli Branson will lead a conversation about the role of anarchist culture in fighting the current political forces using both their framework of culture war, or as we prefer to name it, social war. The question we pose—how do we live now?—aims to turn our attention towards the beauty we make every day in refusal, relationship, dreaming, and making life both individually and together. We will provide anarchist analysis of the obstacles and possibilities we face for collective action, emphasizing the creation of a wide and robust anarchist culture to create possibilities together against society. Art and analysis go hand in hand, and an often overlooked part of the anarchist project is a replacement of this social world of capital, the state, and empire with a culture of autonomy and collectivity: our bread and our roses. We have to destroy this world in order to truly sense the other worlds we have right in our hands.

Before we get into the conversation, I'll do my usual rundown of ways you can support this project.

If you like this podcast, please rate it and follow it on the different apps where you listen to it. That does help boost the potential audience. Also, tell your friends too! I love hearing from people about their thoughts—but as always any questions you might want us to tackle on the show. You can leave us a message at (917) 426-6548 or using the form https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories. Or find me on Instagram @thebreakuptheory and DM me.

If you want to access more of my work, as well as the work of the wonderful carla joy bergman, Dani Burlison, and Vicky Osterweil, you can sign up for our newsletter at https://cawshinythings.com. If you subscribe, you will also get access to all of our articles, our discord server where we have discussion, movie nights, writing workshops, and book clubs, and more. Our podcasts, advice column, and zine and sticker library are always free. I am proud of the thing that we are building together, creating a support system for the lonely and often impoverished work of writing—and also finding new ways to engage with new people committed to collective thinking and writing.

If you want to reach any of us there, you can email Caw.Shinythings@proton.me

Also, Vicky has a new book coming out with Haymarket called The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World. You can preorder it from the Haymarket website, or bookshop.org or wherever else you order books!

The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, which pulls together a wide variety of shows taking an anarchist perspective on culture, politics, actions, and more. Check them out at channelzeronetwork.com