April 2025

* Including an ongoing screening of Jonas Staal’s video 94 Million Years of Collectivism, 2022

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.

T. J. Demos: Many thanks, Jonas, for joining me for this discussion. You organized the recent Climate Propagandas Congregation at BAK in Utrecht last December 2024, which I participated in, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of the pressing issues it addressed. The event featured panels, performances, and talks, and was particularly significant as BAK’s final gathering following its recent defunding by the Utrecht municipality and the Dutch Council for Culture—part of a broader trend affecting arts institutions and universities in the Netherlands and, to some extent, globally. The event marked a transition as Jeanne van Heeswijk was announced as the new head of the hollowed-out institution, and beginning in January 2025, BAK will launch “Basecamp for Tactical Imaginaries: Building Cultural Infrastructure Anew,” a program seeking new organizational models amid overlapping crises—political, social, economic, and ecological. In your view, how can assemblies serve as a counterforce to this movement of defunding?

JS: Assemblies counter these trends by redefining and regrounding the shared values that ground emancipatory struggles. The challenge of navigating between warmongering neoliberal normativity on one side and blatant neo-fascism on the other is that we often find ourselves forced into defensive positions—protecting the remnants or ruins of institutions we never truly consented to in the first place. Suddenly, we’re mobilizing to defend liberal institutions or state constitutions simply because, despite their flaws, they appear less bad than the alternatives we’re facing. But our real challenge is to rewrite the social contracts of our societies entirely for a transformative institutionality to be created. The primary role of assemblies, then, is to critically reassess and reestablish our values, translating them into concrete action and organizing efforts. They allow us to shed the normative structures imposed on us and instead work toward those we collectively choose.

TjD: How can our fragile, experimental institutions—built on radical possibility and care—stand as critical refuges against the bureaucratic machinery of commercialized education, when they themselves are funded by neoliberal normativity? How can they persist, even as they face relentless waves of repression, their voices pressured under the weight of anti-radical censorship? When pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide speech is cast into shadow, how do these spaces remain luminous, offering not just resistance, but a reimagining of what learning, dissent, and solidarity can become?

JS: That’s exactly the question we need to be asking: which remnants, which ruins of public institutions can still hold ground? Germany stands as one of the most brutal examples, where genocidalism has essentially become enshrined as state doctrine, dictating cultural policy with chilling outcome in civil society and the arts. But let’s be clear—this isn’t just the work of the far right. In Germany, Social Democrats, Greens, and liberal parties alike have all played their part in propagating genocide-denial in Palestine, and in normalizing the horrifying antisemitic narrative that equates Jewish life with the brutal Israeli occupation. And the defunding of BAK wasn’t wielded by the hard right, but by a Green party-led municipality. If we’re talking about the real enemy within, then let’s name them: the neoliberal ruling class that operates under the guise of progressive politics, systematically dismantling or threatening any funding that enables critical, transformative practice and grassroots organizing.

And now, we find ourselves in an unfamiliar landscape. Strange new constellations are forming—private funds and sources we once ignored, money that operates outside government oversight, beyond state policing, has already proven critical to withstand the neofascist overtaking of the state apparatus. In this moment, we must be tactical, seizing, hijacking, and repurposing critical infrastructure wherever we can. Because in the end, we need institutions. Our fight has never been about their destruction, but about forging infrastructures that enable true redistribution, collective knowledge, and radical intimacy. Egalitarian politics requires an apparatus—and it’s up to us to reclaim what we can and build what we must.

TjD: But the crisis isn’t just that institutions are failing us—it’s that they’ve willingly, in many cases, become agents of repression, even willing accomplices of neo-fascism, enacting censorship before the state even asks, and policing themselves into irrelevance. In the arts, in universities, in so-called liberal spaces, we’ve watched them suffocate dissent—in acts of preemptive repression—paralyzing the very movements that might have resisted. This began during the Gaza genocide, which is ongoing, where liberal institutions shut down all critique of Israel and established all sorts of repressive policies. Maybe they think they were responding to the “Palestinian exception”, but now, under the new far-right state in the US, those very institutional policies are preventing or debilitating people from forming assemblies against fascism more broadly at the very time it’s becoming more explicit and overt (for instance, banning Students for Justice in Palestine on many college campuses). Liberal anti-radicalism has contributed to those institution’s vulnerability under the far-right state. The challenge these days is how to form social movements to transform institutions that are ever precarious, isn’t it?

JS: Absolutely. We’re entering a moment where many organizers are forced to navigate a double existence—a public face that might sometimes seem to conform to the constraints of the system and a hidden face that fuels underground resistance, subversion, and sabotage. Of course, throughout history revolutions and resistance movements have rarely functioned entirely outside of institutional structures. Instead, they sought to always have conspirators and infiltrators on the inside, either to sabotage and dismantle, or to repurpose institutional means—like information streams or money—for the benefits of the resistance. For the benefits of revolutionary institutions in the making.

There’s this famous Dutch story about Walraven van Hall, also known as the “Banker of the Resistance,” who funded large parts of the resistance work during WWII—so famous they even made a movie about it. Of course, after the war, suddenly everyone was a “Banker of the Resistance,” trying to claim they were sabotaging on the inside all along! Except that Van Hall really did it and was executed by the Nazis just before the end of the war when he was found out.

Of course, you do need “Bankers of the Resistance.” Just as much as you need the underground networks—communists, Christian-led resistance, and all those who sabotaged infrastructure, planted bombs, took out Nazi officials, and risked everything to hide Jews, queers, communists, Sinti, and Roma people from genocide. Resistance isn’t just one thing—it’s a web of actions, some loud, some silent, but all necessary.

You need those who keep one foot inside the machine, not to serve it, but to twist its gears, to make it devour itself from within. It’s a dangerous game—most would rather stay embedded, hedging their bets, always leaving themselves the option to later claim they were resisting all along or to simply keep feeding the system as it stands. But resistance requires infiltration, deception, and alliances that stretch across uneasy fault lines. Not all battles can be fought in plain sight.

TjD: The infiltration of institutions—transforming them into a kind of undercommons—remains a crucial strategy. I found it particularly fascinating how the Climate Propagandas Congregation enacted this infiltration historically, or historiographically. The event was held in a large theater at BAK, its stage populated with symbolic representations of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutionaries like Ho Chi Minh, Eleanor Marx, Thomas Sankara, and Alexandra Kollontai, to name a few. But its iconography also ventured into deep ecological time, connecting the present to a 96-million-year-long geologic stretch, including the “Ediacaran” period from the Proterozoic era, roughly 600 million years ago, with monumental sculptures of creatures from that time. The resulting mis-en-scène proposed a revolutionary geological framing. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you view the value of history in relation to institutional interventions and assemblies—how does thinking across deep time inform and enable these acts of resistance and transformation?

JS: Fascism operates through the construction of historical myths. Many nationalist and neo-fascist narratives, like the “Make America Great Again” slogan (or similar movements in Brazil, Germany, etc.), look to a mythical past that never actually existed and project it as informing a shared future. This past-future projection, though imaginary, becomes material through the power of nostalgia and myth-making.

The obsession with myth by the fascists always made me hesitant to focus on anything but the future in emancipatory propaganda work. And of course, we can only truly understand what it means to be an emancipated people through the process of revolution. In our current state of oppression, it’s impossible to fully grasp what it means to live in an emancipated society. But simultaneously, asking people to fight for a future in which they will become something impossible to grasp in the present is challenging. In a way, we need our own mythologies as well, which carry the possibility of a future achieved through an actually lived past: we did it then, we can do it again now.

I recall a preface by David Graeber for a collection of Abdullah Öcalan’s prison writings [Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, 2015], where Graeber explores the role of myth in the emancipatory propaganda of the Kurdish revolutionary movement. Öcalan’s vision of what he calls “democratic confederalism,” or “stateless democracy”—a non-state paradigm based on local self-governance, gender equality, communal economy and far-reaching capabilities of self-defense—is actually based on a narration of pre-Mesopotamian city-state matriarchal societies. Essentially, Öcalan argues that a world confederalist model of self-governing interconnected “soviets” (or assemblies, governing councils) without the state, needs to be achieved again. He argues that the Kurdish model of a feminist-led, armed, self-governing, communal economy isn’t new or unprecedented—it’s an inherited vision, a legacy of past practices rather than something entirely of the present or future. This is where Graeber, I think, rightfully recognizes an emancipatory form of mythmaking: inherited stories that make this or that future more possible.

TjD: So the materialist, performative, or prefigurative role of history is key.

JS: Yes. Graeber’s latest work with David Wengrow equally draws on history via archaeological discoveries, blending them with mythmaking in the most empowering way possible. It’s much like when I first came across the Ediacaran geological era—an epoch of complex underwater life forms, neither plant nor animal, that seems to have operated like a collectivist ecosystem in which nutrients were shared across and between inhabitants, completely bypassing predatory relationships. Geologists are at odds over this. Some argue that the Ediacaran was merely a precursor to the Cambrian, laying the groundwork for “true” predatory evolutionary development. Others contend that it was a completely isolated geological era, one that can never be replicated, as it depended on unique oxygen levels in the oceans that enabled symbiotic relationships to flourish, free from any form of predation.

I argue that the Ediacaran provides us with a fundamentally different origin story than the Cambrian, namely that the emergence of complex life was the result, first and foremost, of collectivist relationships and mutual support systems. This fundamentally opposes the idea that evolution is inherently linked to predation—as if only predation and extraction could lead to life’s “progress.” The Cambrian story of the origin of life is embraced by the neo-Darwinists, which is really just an attempt to turn capitalism into a geology of its own: as if extraction and exploitation were a “natural” state of being. It was from the Ediacaran origins that the Climate Propagandas Congregation emerged. If the Ediacaran beings are our “proletarian ancestors,” coming to us as “pre-socialist socialists” across time and space, could they have been the historical version of the Russian Revolution but in reverse? A deep historical rearguard seeking to prevent the Cambrian “pre-capitalist capitalist” explosion before it even happened, striving to preserve the conditions where collective life and redistribution remained possible?

In this light, we might challenge the Marxist notion that history truly begins when the proletariat seize the means of production. When we struggle for collectivist life in the face of fascist oligarchy, we struggle with the Ediacaran, with rearguards as much as avantgardes. We, the eco-socialists, are the Ediacaran Dream made manifest, whereas the fascist oligarchy of Musk and Trump are the predatory inheritors of the Cambrian.

Jonas Staal, 94 Million Years of Collectivism: Video Study, 2024

TjD: Of course, diving so deep into history, geologizing politics and politicizing geology, involves a fair bit of speculation, but I can’t help but be drawn to the way you construct the future historically, and history politically—it’s not just political, but conceptually generative. It’s not about accepting history as some finished product or allowing its uncontested naturalization; it’s about choosing the stories we tell. And that act of storytelling—really, an emancipatory game of storytelling as class struggle—can have some serious implications for shaping both the present and the future.

JS: It really matters whether, for example, we grow up playing Monopoly, which was originally designed as a satirical critique of capitalism, or if we play “Co-opoly,” a game by the Tesa Collective! Co-opoly is an amazing board game about depleting banks to spark a world of cooperatives. These opposing games engrain in us very different logics that those that govern our lives—different norms of behavior. Do I enjoy a game because I have crushed all my opponents, often friends and family? Or do we enjoy a game because we share skills and aim to crush a common oppressor?

When I mention mythology, I don’t mean it as something imaginary or nonexistent. I’m talking about a broader imaginary that not only shapes and sustains our struggles today but also makes us realize we are truly not alone. The story of the Ediacaran doesn’t simply reject the competitive extractivist logic as if it were a natural order. It doesn’t just prevent capitalism from claiming itself as nature. It deconstructs that mythology altogether. It reveals how the Ediacaran didn’t end but continues to echo through countless struggles for collective forms of life today. This is crucial, embedded in the profound intimate texture of time. It holds immense value.

My earlier ideas of emancipation as being about a people-in-the-making who would only come to know themselves in the process of liberation may have lacked the sensitivity to how different timelines continue to intertwine and influence one another. We’re far less alone if we carry a future that was once actually someone else’s past.

TjD: It also offers a vital counter to the histories that neofascist political regimes seek to present as inevitable, framing our current moment as the unavoidable result of some Hobbesian political system—a war of all against all, the ultimate expression of competitive individualism under naturalized capitalism. There’s something profoundly important in rejecting that sense of inevitability and demanding the speculative creation of alternative histories. But it’s also not just a product of imagination; it’s rooted in historical materialism, geological deep time, and the intersection of science and politics.

On a related note, let’s talk about time in the context of the congregation itself, which lasted only a few days. Yet, it draws from longer histories of organizing and social relationships that have been in the making long before the event at BAK. There are multiple layers of time at play, both preceding and following that two-day gathering. How does your work with “assemblism” connect to and help generate more enduring forms of assembly in the future?

JS: My fellow organizers of the Climate Propagandas Congregation and I, along with the participants, are deeply connected to social movements, political organizations, and unions, many of which were represented on stage during the gathering. These relationships, forged through years of organizing, political work, and recurring meetings, trainings, and assemblies, were at the core of the congregation. Some of these connections stem from organizational artworks I initiated, like New World Summit (2012-ongoing), New Unions (2016-19), and the Interplanetary Species Society (2019-ongoing), which aim to sustain these connections and active collaborations through ongoing gatherings.

TjD: I see it as a mode of durational organizing, which differs from the event-driven spectacle often seen in artistic programs and protest cultures. Here, after the two-day event wraps up, the work doesn’t stop; participants go back to continue the ongoing, long-term organizing that remains crucial.

JS: Absolutely. Yet it’s also crucial that we still create those short-term moments, as even two days can be enough to form a temporary biosphere where we reconnect with our intergenerational, trans-geographic agenda. In those moments, we affirm that politically and culturally, we are a community.

But yes, at the Climate Propagandas Congregation, we moved from the multi-decade revolutionary movement in the Philippines to our Kurdish and Palestinian comrades’ stories, and back to our local union, housing work, and ecological justice struggles. That’s quite a diverse family! This broadness expanded further with our Ediacaran ancestors merged with the faces of 19th and 20th-century revolutionaries. Within this expanded family—human and non-human alike—we may not all agree on the importance of every revolutionary figure or approach, but that doesn’t diminish the place of each in the collective imaginary we continue to nurture. It doesn’t mean we can’t be fiercely critical or have profound disagreements. What matters is acknowledging that, whether they succeeded or failed, we are carried by a collective mythology and share a common struggle.

TjD: How do you view the balance between critique and construction in the congregation? The first day (“Propagating Necrospheres”) was focused on deconstructing various forms of climate propaganda—liberal, libertarian, conspiracist, and fascist—while the second day (“Propagating Biospheres”) was about assembling practices that foster justice, solidarity, and ways of flourishing. How do you see these two forces operating both separately and in synergy?

JS: No one was there merely to propose critiques or define categories and terminology without simultaneously laying the groundwork for a different kind of propagation. Deconstructing and disentangling ourselves from the language we’ve been conditioned to accept as “normal”—which might be complicit in the emerging norm of genocidal ideologies—forms part of our liberation.

It’s about shedding the myths, stories, and histories imposed upon us that hinder our ability to envision a meaningful survival against the fascist death cult. As Radha D’Souza said in her presentation, we must “wash our brains” anew to free ourselves from the ideas that largely serve our enemies, and this is a fundamental aspect of constructing a different world. Critique and construction are distinct, but they cannot be separated.

TjD: Yeah, they’re mutually implicated and ultimately not oppositional, but parts of a complexly generating force. When it comes to construction, one of the biggest challenges today is how to build solidarity across difference, especially in the face of the social divisiveness that comes with identitarianism. This pressure often feels essentialist and demands what Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls “epistemic deference,” where we’re expected to defer to someone’s perspective based solely on identity—whoever seems the most visibly oppressed—and set aside our own political positions in the process. But here too maybe we need to be more critical and constructive.

I’m thinking about the panel on “Counter-Power Project Propagating Climate Justice from the Netherlands,” which brought together incredible groups like True Counterpower (emerging from activist gatherings at Van Abbemuseum), the Sudanese Refugee Collective (supporting relief efforts in Sudan and asylum seekers), the Colored Qollective (by and for the racialized queer community confronting housing injustice), and XR Justice Now (fighting for climate justice against global oppression). That convergence was remarkable—it showed how distinct collectives can come together, united by the pressing need for solidarity, even when their struggles aren’t the same struggles. How do you see the role of solidarity across difference in our current political landscape?

JS: These groups come from different paths, using distinct terminology and representing varied embodied experiences of oppression that may not always feel safe to share, even in the most intimate forms of organization. But the recognition of specificity goes hand in hand with the recognition of common causes across different organizations and movements, as a popular front kind of logic. Again, one should not deny the complexity: we need safe and brave spaces specific to different people’s struggles, and we need coordination across these struggles to secure material democracy for all of us: meaning access to education, housing, mobility, cooperative economy, energy independence, means of self-governance, etc.

TjD: The art and politics collective Decolonize This Place, based in New York, has emphasized that we don’t live single-issue lives, so why should our politics be limited to single-issue thinking? Politics, after all, is about world-building, and worlds are complex, infinite, and inherently intersectional. Similarly, we are all made up of multiple identities, even while we each have unique perspectives and embodied experiences. If so, the promise—and the challenge—of any practice of assembly is to create political forms of solidarity that support all of us in this shared world, across our differences. This seems like it should be one of the key objectives of any congregation or assembly.

JS: Very true, and I would add, despite and with all our differences. To achieve this, trust is absolutely crucial to any meaningful congregation, assembly, or revolutionary organizing effort. It’s a foundational element that I’ve been reflecting on a lot, but honestly, it’s something I still can’t fully grasp. I could point to several organizations I’ve led or assemblies I’ve co-organized that ended up as total failures, often due to infighting, factionalism, or through visual and spatial mistakes entirely my own, by “over-designing” the assembly for example. Some of it has to do with forces beyond our control, like the urgency added to our organizing efforts due to the neofascist powers that are emerging around us. Sometimes, even very concrete factors—like the amount of sunlight or how deep into winter we are, in a Cosmist sense—can influence whether an assembly succeeds or falters. But at the core of it all is trust, a term that’s difficult to unpack.

What made this congregation work, despite the wide range of disciplines and backgrounds represented, was a genuine belief that we are all part of the world we’re striving to create together. It’s connected to durationality, as you mentioned earlier, and how we’ve shown up for each other when it truly mattered. Have we seen each other willing to make sacrifices, take risks, or be vulnerable in confronting the system? Not just in words, but through our actions? Did we divest when it was needed? Did we set red lines when necessary, and hold them strategically when it counted? Saying yes to all these things constitutes that immeasurable and essential thing that is trust.

Almost every guerrilla movement has faced betrayal. It’s one of the classic tactics used by existing regimes to break resistance—destroy the one thing that holds everything together: trust. If one comrade is a plant, then anyone could be, and suddenly, paranoia spreads. This is one of the most effective ways to dismantle unity—through sewing distrust.

TjD: Counterinsurgency has always been a persistent threat to organizing and resistance, with trust and solidarity being its ultimate targets. The tactic of isolating an individual, making them toxic to their comrades, and severing connections is a well-established counterinsurgency strategy. You mentioned vulnerability—the willingness of participants to recognize their vulnerability, which is how I think of solidarity: the collectivization of vulnerability, rather than its privatization, its individualization. Perhaps that’s the key to trust. The courageous act of embracing vulnerability seems essential to forming trusting relationships. In these times, we’re all at risk, and the only way to confront this is by acknowledging that our strength lies in coming together, getting each other’s back, which emerges from a shared sense of precarity and vulnerability.

JS: Yes, and counterinsurgency operates by targeting one individual within an oppositional organization, then systematically pursuing the second and third individuals directly linked to them. This establishes triggers designed to sever your connection to the movements you support or belong to. We must resist this at every turn, as it fosters self-censorship, encouraging people to cut ties and ultimately betray the trust that underpins our collective efforts.

TjD: One final question I have concerns two practices featured on the second day of the Congregation dedicated to “Propagating Biosphere.” First, Varsha Gandikota of the Progressive International delivered an inspiring and powerful account of the PI’s work, particularly in relation to the Make Amazon Pay campaign. This campaign has only grown in significance amid the rising dominance of oligarchs and billionaires like Elon Musk, now given an extraordinary platform in the US government. By disrupting its international supply lines, Make Amazon Pay underscores the critical role of trust and solidarity in labor militancy as a force against the imperial ambitions of this multinational corporation, which has evolved into a global marketplace and hegemonic power. The Progressive International, standing in opposition to the “reactionary international,” represents a key battleground in this struggle.

The second practice was presented by Steve Lyons of the Red Natural History Project of the organization Not an Alternative, alongside Indigenous scholar Andrew Curley. Lyons emphasized the necessity of “struggling over, adapting, and mobilizing the resources and institutions at our disposal as tools for emancipation.” With that in mind, what are your thoughts on the significance of labor militancy and Indigenous social movements as key forces in the emancipatory repurposing of resources and institutions?

JS: Varsha outlined how the Progressive International has played a crucial role in coordinating strikes to disrupt the Israeli occupation’s military supply chain. This is significant because it demonstrates a tangible and effective strategy for impact. Too often, those committed to emancipatory politics focus their energy on lobbying elected officials to pass resolutions—an important effort, but not always the most direct route to change. Varsha’s reflections—both on the Make Amazon Pay campaign and the coordinated anti-genocide strikes—remind us that labor is one of our most powerful and immediate tools to shift the balance of power, including influencing elected officials.

What you described in Andrew’s and Steve’s contributions, alongside Varsha’s, represents two key fronts of struggle: repurposing and mobilizing what remains of institutions at our disposal while building the movements and organizations we need. The Progressive International embodies this vision, actively demonstrating what a 21st-century international can look like. Through its approach—drawing together a diverse array of institutional and grassroots organizing spaces—it models a reimagined form of global coordination.

One aspect of the Progressive International that is not highlighted enough but which is crucial to its innovation is its commitment to decentralized internationalism. Vijay Prashad, in his book Red Star Over the Third World, discusses how Moscow’s centralized communism was just one strand in a much broader and more diverse history of communisms across the 19th and 20th centuries. Similarly, the Progressive International challenges conventional notions of what an organization can be. Its members span unions, Indigenous nations, progressive governments, political parties, social movements and media organizations. This expansive and fluid structure redefines our understanding of what constitutes an organization, freeing us from rigid frameworks and opening new possibilities for collective action and transformative change. I think here, you see a convergence with my and many of my comrades’ interest in organizational art: the shared work of imagining and building emancipatory institutionality for the possibility of meaningful common future survival.

TjD: Many thanks Jonas.

JS: As always, comrade.

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[*] This conversation occurred on zoom on March 3, 2025 and was subsequently edited for length and clarity.