"DO YOUR HOMEWORK KIDS!" - Professor Jun

From Kate Sharpley Library
July 2025

‘Decades in the Struggle’ is a project interviewing anarchist and anarchist-adjacent thinkers, writers, and activists (aged 60 and older, who are fluent in spoken English) in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and beyond. It’s being coordinated by Nathan Jun of John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. The edited video interviews (a few audio-only) can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/@NathanJJun. They range from about twenty minutes to an hour long.

One of the interviewees, Mike Harris, has discussed the project on libcom https://libcom.org/discussion/decades-struggle-interview-mike-harris. I’ve only listened to a handful of the 50+ currently available. They’ve been very interesting (how people came to anarchism being as interesting as what they got up to as anarchists, to me). Some of the names, like Nick Heath, Iain McKay, Julie Herrada or Anthony Rayson, are familiar but otherwise you need to listen to the interviews to learn who people are or what they’re discussing. Still, doing the interviews is a big job and adding descriptions could maybe wait. It means should you listen out for unexpected insights and stories and connections you didn’t know about.

Apparently, there’s still time to join in if you meet the criteria (and want to be on you tube). The project is also willing to accept written responses to the interview questions. Professor Jun can be contacted via https://www.jcu.edu/profile/nathan-

Comments

a/s/l (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 07:21

Here are some recommendations:
1.) change name of series to "OKAY BOOMER"
2.) create series as YouTube Shorts and/or TikTok
3.) profit
4.) delete Facebook, hire a lawyer, and go to gym

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 07:49

What is for anarchists to benefit from more academic recuperation of "anarchism"? More like it's the other way around.

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 08:12

Oh so I get that Professor Jun is likely an ex-RASH warrior from the hood now dressing up in horrible beige tweed suits that looks like my suburban aunt's sofa, but humanities academic chairs aren't exactly the most empowering sector for a dual power to grow. Decades of liberal leftie academic entryism has proven this. Might provide with some good prisoner support funds, alright, but that's about it.

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 08:32

whoever talks to him will be a self-selecting group, inherently biased in that lens, among others. i know one 60+ year old long-term anarchist who will not be talking to him for reasons of academia, political differences, rejection of being part of jun's CV.

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 11:49

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Y'all are so fucking stupid. He's not even the one conducting the interviews. It's an undergraduate research project. A 60+ year-old who won't speak to a 19 year-old student because (a) it's a student and (b) said student hasn't been alive long enough to have well-developed politics (but is curious enough about anarchism to want to talk to veteran aanarchists about it) is a fucking loser who's not worth interviewing anyway. Also, for all the hate for "academics" around here, y'all seem to have no idea how academia works. Contingent faculty aren't expected to do research, and even then, shit like this doesn't count as research because it's outside dude's discipline (philosophy). Seriously, just stfu and stop pretending to be smart. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 12:04

In reply to by anon (not verified)

yeah, i didn't pay enough attention to know that it's a student of jun's and nto jun himself, but the point mostly remains. academia has been creating cadavers out of radical politics for decades, at least. 

and i'm not criticizing the politics of the student (how could i when i know nothing of them), but it doesn't matter. 

having conversations with young people who want to know more about stuff that happened bfore their time is great. doing it so that they can get credit/feed the knowledge base of our enemies (well, my enemies, maybe nto yours) is not fine. 

clearlly we disagree, not sure why you need to be a asshole about it

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 12:24

In reply to by anon (not verified)

I'm the asshole? I'm not the one preemptively savaging a project I know nothing about. Also, it's just beyond idiotic to suggest (or even imply) that every self-identified anarchist who happens to teach college for a living and does research on anarchism is an "entryist" who's simply looking to pad their CV by peddling information to the enemy. I know nothing about this particular guy except that he's a philosophy teacher who was subject to violence and targeted harassment and driven out of his job for dissing the police. That's not a typical trajectory for bullshit "left-liberal" posers but, sure, let's make fun of his appearance. Also, how the fuck does writing books on anarchist philosophy constitute feeding vital information to the enemy. I mean, do y'all even hear yourselves? Jesus fucking Christ.

lumpy (not verified) Fri, 08/01/2025 - 13:51

In reply to by anon (not verified)

no coherency... no actual values... often not sure what point is being made by who ...or what the purpose of critique is, beyond a deeply unhealthy dopamine loop

performative "rock", angry circle talk!

Wayne Price@ (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 10:54

So the first four comments say that they have nothing to learn from the lives and experiences of older anarchists (most of whom are not academics)--not from their achievements nor their failures. Of course, the commenters are under no obligation to look at any of the interviews. No doubt they feel the same about learning from Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta, Goldman, and so on. It must be nice to know everything already, I suppose.

alex (not verified) Fri, 08/01/2025 - 07:18

In reply to by Wayne Price@ (not verified)

i read those comments as more directed at the academic and maybe technological setting than the idea of listening to older people about anything. i dont personally see anything particularly objectionable about this project as laid out here (didnt watch any, might listen to some later if i get the time) but i would agree that the process of passing anarchism through the academy is one that will, generally and in the aggregate, produce a form of anarchism that is not just palatable but useful for "the enemy" to innoculate himself against, manage, or directly counter any anarchist practices that he encounters. and isnt that the tension in many things: a discretely justifiable or desirable or even morally compelling act is no longer justifiable or desirable or even morally defensible when considered as part of an aggregate process that it is--crucially, it must be true that it is, and not merely apparently so--part of. to speak to your point though, it's also a mistake to appreciate the aggregate problem and so dismiss or erase the real and individual people, choices, and actions that end up comprising it, such as in this case the fact that these people being interviewed are people and not merely youtube-ified component parts of someone's senior thesis or whatever, and presumably we are capable of appreciating what people do and say in their own right and by their own reason by participating in any such thing without thereby endorsing it as a whole, or losing sight of the broader critique.

lumpy (not verified) Fri, 08/01/2025 - 12:40

In reply to by anon (not verified)

taking sincere, combative, anti-authoritarian politics as practice and rendering them down, until any credible threat posed by applying those ideas has been safely recuperated

alex (not verified) Fri, 08/01/2025 - 14:41

In reply to by anon (not verified)

attempting to produce academic work that is anarchist in character or direction. when i've discussed this with the grad students i know we've generally distinguished between work that takes anarchism as its subject matter and work that is anarchist in character. for a fictional example, an ethnographic account of oogle society (i.e. the reportage of a narc to the national review board they work for), vs a teaching strategy and syllabus that increases the likelihood a student in it will break with Big Society and become an oogle themself (i.e. a cooperation workshop for the next generation of management consultants), and distinguishing between the relative merits or not of either approach. so a set of concrete limits against which any project within the context of academic work/production will have to define itself and/or in some way transcend. but i agree with lumpy that--with exceptions--the result seems to generally be well contained within the normal networking and credentializing functions of the increasingly automated contemporary university experience. at least, that is what ive seen, and what my friends doing it have seen and relayed to me.

anon (not verified) Thu, 07/31/2025 - 19:10

If you talk like an anarch, and you walk like an anarch, you're not necessarily an anarch. To be an anarch, one must have:-
1)Been expelled from school
2)Runaway from home.
3)Stolen a car
4) Done 2 or more years in a prison
5)Lived off grid for 10 or more years
6)Formerly had substance abuse problems
7)Had amoral relationships with capitalist's wives
8)Lived alone in the wilderness for 40 days and nights.
Now, these elderly academics just don't pass the litmus test, plain and simple.

anon (not verified) Fri, 08/01/2025 - 07:10

Tossing aside the childish reactions, this project of doing some kinds of biopics of old anarchists is a great idea. Inspiring for the younger people and with sociological value. This is removed from the usual stale essays on "movements" as well as placing contemporary anarchists in more relatable social contexts than "100 years ago".

Just look into the material before judging like idiots, m'kay?

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