Class composition theory, which analyzes how working-class power emerges through both technical labor divisions and political self-organization, provides a framework for understanding how working-class resistance against fascism requires connecting workplace struggles with street movements and social reproduction, as demonstrated by the Minneapolis ICE resistance where rapid response networks, mass strikes, and community organizing created a unified front against state violence.
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Hey everybody, welcome to Red May, your one month vacation from capitalism. We believe in two things. One, riff on red, the color or the political orientation, and two, don't pretend that the market is the solution to the problems that the market creates. Uh we have a month's worth of events. Uh so I want to clue you in as to the other events that are taking place uh in the near future. Uh some of them online and some of them uh live in Seattle. Uh on Monday, tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific, uh the mask comes off the patch of the Trump doctrine. Uh that has Rodrigo Nunes, Ashley Bali, and Aziz Rana. Uh on Sunday, May 24th at 11:00 a.m., also online, uh Phil Neil is going to discuss his wild new book, which is coming out in paperback uh from Hey Market, Hellworld.
Uh Phil wrote the wonderful geography of uh the uh the Hinterlands called Hinterlands.
Uh he's going to be talking with Nick Chavez uh on Wednesday, May 27th at 11:00 a.m. Also online, Paulo Verno, Material Philosophy in Counterrevolutionary Times with Alberto Tusano, Jason Reed, Electra Stimile, and Ariana Bo. Uh and Thursday, May 28th at 2 PM. Uh, also online, Carl Marx in America with Andrew Hartman, Cedric Johnson, Lee Clare Lab Burge, and William Clare Roberts. So, a lot of good stuff coming up. Uh, if you like what we have done and would uh like to help us break even on it since we have no funding sources other than you, go to our website www. redmay seattle.org and press the donate button and there are instructions about what to do. Uh but now I'd like to uh uh get us going with today's uh discussion class composition in a time of fascism and introduce you to Kevin vaner who is the author of gorillas of desire who will be the ring master of this particular discussion uh with Charmaine Schwah Sarah Jaffy Kieran Nudson Peter Linbell uh so Kevin welcome back to Red Hey, uh you are have to turn on your microphone here if you want people to hear. There you go.
>> Do that. Of course. Uh right. Zoom and online platform profile. Uh thank you, Phil. I really appreciate you being here. I've either attended or been online for Red for the last 10 years and really excited to be here for the last season uh to celebrate that with you and bring you the comrades here where I'm based on the East Coast. those out there on the west coast and of course those around the planet class compositions in a time of fascism. So we have a great group of speakers today. I'm really excited to take you through some introductory remarks, talk about some projects out there folks may be interested in. Then of course uh introduce our speakers, hear from them and we'll get some questions from the YouTube channel and appreciate the tech support from Common Oceans and Red May and providing those questions to myself and the rest of the speakers. and I have a number of questions if if time allows and of course the speakers themselves should feel free to ask questions of each other. Uh my name is Kevin Van Meter. I use he and him pronouns. I'm an author, a labor educator, and a union organizer. Um I'm also the series editor for a new project at Common Notions, appropriately titled Class Compositions.
Just want to tell you a little bit about that since it directly relates to uh topic we're talking about today. Um, class compositions is a new common notions book and event series. It's dedicated to circulating the best militant research and theoretical interventions from dynamic historical reproductions to cutting edge dispatches from new worlds just beginning to emerge. Our programming will draw on the rich autonomous tradition to militants and working-class intellectuals, political collectives and study groups using workers inquiry and class composition to identify the invading socialist society. take on the planetary work machine. Further working-class self-activity in a refused imposition of work as is still the central issue we confront in our everyday lives. Our first two titles are super exciting. Uh the first is reading the planetary class struggle the collective works of George Census which is going to be edited by Sylvia Federici and George. And then the second one and I'll ask a question later from this book is points of departure the refusal of work and the crisis of capitalism the writings of Harry Clever.
This is a long overdue uh collection of Harry Clever's work and that's edited by my comrade Robert Oetsz and myself. Then we'll be doing a bunch of things at Labor Notes in June. So hope to see lots of folks out there uh as well. Um and uh finally we're organizing an online series on workers inquiry various views from around the world and would be super excited for comrades to join us for that. Uh let me take you through uh our agenda today. The first speaker we're going to have is Kieran Kenudson. He's based in Minnesota and since I joined Anti-Racist Action as a young punk kid, he's been a guiding light as an anti-fascist and certainly excited that he's joining us and to hear more about the class struggle and struggle against ICE in Minneapolis. Our second speaker is going to be Sarah Jaffy. Uh needs no introduction of course to the fine folks uh here at Red May. Um, for those who saw an earlier post about today's event, originally Sylvia Federici was going to join us and speak about social reproduction and care work and related matters of course that she's been working on for many, many years. She's currently traveling in Greece and wasn't able to make it. Um, I thought to myself, who is the best person we could possibly come up with to uh get to replace Sylvia? And I thought Sarah Joffy would be it. I figured she was busy, she was traveling, she was um writing her new book. I know they're doing all those things and super excited that they're here with us. Um then Charmaine Shua is going to speak about international class struggle. I'm really excited to read their forthcoming book which we'll hear about later. Uh I know Charmaine from graduate school. It's fantastic to see you 10 years later and participate in events like this. And then finally, Peter Limebal uh will close out before we move on to questions. And I've been reading Peter's work for a good 30 years, drawing on uh his concepts and ideas and history from below. I think every other year I return to many headed hydra by him and Arcus Ricer as a guiding light. So appreciate his work. Just a few opening remarks to kind of set some tone and then of course we have numerous uh speakers from different theoretical traditions that are drawing on uh important concepts, ideas to the themes that we'll be talking about for the rest of our time today.
Capitalism in the state engaged in class combat for nearly 150 years. They tried to whittle union density down to under 10%. They spent a hundred years to undo New Deal programs. 75 to unravel the social contract and various productivity deals with sectors of the class. The ruling class fought for decades to undermine the gains of black liberation, indigenous, peasant, feminist, youth and student, environmental and anti-nuke, queer, and allied social movements. Most recently, massive cuts to social services are pushing the work of social reproduction and care onto those already performing that work without a wage.
Meanwhile, a whole set of practices from worker insubordination and everyday resistance to unionization challenge capitalism's command of work, our dominant life activity.
In fact, we are a product of 500 years of struggle. Even in this moment, we convey class information and class struggle just reemerging, even though history does not bend in one direction nor.
Autoworker, historian, and organic intellectual Marty Glabberman along with Seymour Faber wrote, "In working for wages, the roots of insurgency, quote, "The working class struggles against capitalism because it objective conditions of life force it to, not because it is educated to some higher consciousness by some outside force such as a political party. It would seem also that the struggle against capitalism includes all forms and levels of struggle, from the individual to the collective, from the local to the national and international, from economic to political. In fact, it would be hard to conceive how more general or radical forms of struggle such as general strikes, factory occupations, or workers councils could occur without the pre-existence of more limited forms of struggle. sabotage, local strikes, the organization of unions, and the like."
Fascism today is a response to working-class power as well as an extension of the impulses present in American society and western civilization as part of capitalism's violent systemic subjugation of oppressed and exploited peoples. But we are not here to tell a story of defeat.
No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA. You are now entering free Minneapolis.
Woman, life, freedom. From the anti-fascist slogans of Black Lives Matter to the celebration of power in the streets of Minneapolis to international feminist watchwords, these struggles are circulating and amplifying working-class agency, autonomy, and a life in rehearsal. The fascist turn in the United States is a response to the resilience of working-class power. We can see this by looking at formal and informal practices and ways of organizing life and innumerable places where workingclass resistance endures including industries with high union density such as meds and eds and the public sector. We also see this in neighborhoods and municipalities such as Minneapolis with remaining working-class institutions.
What are our most precient tasks in a time of fascism? How can working-class struggles of the past and power in the present inform the next steps we are going to take? And we are here to begin to answer those questions.
Let me formally introduce our speakers.
Karen Kudson is a longtime anarchist and anti-fascist militant. After working at UPS for a decade, Kieran has worked in a telecom call center for over 20 years, which is about as miserable as it sounds. Kieran was elected president of C.WA local 7250 in 2020 and 2023 on a radical class struggle platform after building a stewards council and organizing grievance strikes with his co-workers. Kieran is a member of the Black Hack Workers Collective, which is an affiliate of the Worker Solidarity Circle. Kieran has been a militant participant in many struggles, big and small, in the workplace and streets over the past four decades. Most recently, the resistance to the ICE occupation and terror campaign in Mininnesota this past winter.
Take us away, Kieran.
>> Uh, hey everybody. Um, thanks to Kevin and all the organizers for this opportunity to talk with you. It's a um, honor to be on this panel with Charmaine and all the other um, notable and smart people uh, that'll be talking today. Uh, I guess I'm just going to say a little bit about my understanding of what's happened here in Minnesota in the last several months and you know out of that some lessons that we've drawn.
The first thing and I think the most important thing is that you know we're up against a vicious and deadly enemy and I think the last few months have really brought that home to tens of thousands of people here. Uh to see masked agents of the state execute people in broad daylight uh in the street is um remarkable and something that uh we're still absorbing. But what happened the last several months was that Trump and his regime decided on this uh largest ever ICE operation against the working-class communities, especially the immigrant communities of Minnesota.
And they put 4,000 agents in Minnesota um to carry out this attack. Just for a frame of reference, Minneapolis and St. Paul, the two twin cities each have around 600 cops each. So, you can imagine what an influx of 4,000 agents into the metro area feels like. Um, everybody would see them. They were uh frequently around. Um, there was uh their presence was was sort of omniresent.
And the campaign they carried out was truly one uh of terror. They were tackling and abducting workers carrying out the garbage at fast food restaurants. Moms who were dropping off their kids at daycare. Dads who were picking up their kids from public schools. Um people just pumping gas at the gas station uh abducted while their car was left um running uh in the cold.
And this created this huge culture uh or climate of of fear and terror such that you know thousands and thousands especially of of the Latino working class just stayed home, just stopped going to work, stopped going to school, were unable to do the sort of everyday you know errands and um and fun things that that people do. So, you know, you couldn't go grocery shopping, you couldn't go to the movies, you couldn't go to the bar, you couldn't work on your car, um you couldn't um you know, just do all the things that that people like to do. And instead, people had to bunker down. Um and and it was this climate um that, you know, we all had to exist under. And thank God that people didn't just take it. There was a lot of self-organization that happened uh immediately. And some of this was from experiences in Chicago and LA and other places. And also from immigrant rights organizations that have been organizing over many years or decades even. And then also probably most importantly in my mind was the experience of the George Floyd uprising in 2020 in which the people of the Twin Cities had stood up against the lynching of George Floyd and created a you know a dynamic and fierce uprising that pushed the police off the streets for for weeks. And so all of that experience helped galvan galvanize a movement in the streets um particularly around rapid response networks. That's like people that were joined signal loops uh and were willing to come out and confront ICE if they were in their neighborhood or close proximity. And just in the neighborhood where my wife and I live, there were uh 800 people in our neighborhood text loop and there were some 80 such loops across the Twin Cities. Um so that just gives you sort of a a flavor for the breadth of the resistance.
Um there were people that were committed to organizing direct action protests at the Whipple Federal Building which was the headquarters where ICE was staging from and that led to another kind of violence that that was happening which was that directed against the movement itself. So there was a campaign of terror that was aimed at immigrant workers and then there was this you know additional layer of it which was an incredible amount of violence directed against the resistance to ISIS campaign.
So that when you were interacting with ICE, for instance, just going out to protest, uh, you know, they you could just notice small things that would be different in terms of them pointing guns at people. Um, in terms of them shooting tear gas, rubber bullets, uh, flashbang grenades, and uh, their use, liberal use of pepper spray constantly. So just even like say yelling at the ICE agents might get you uh, macaed or or pepper- sprayed. Um, and then of course we know that they uh executed Renee Good um a a mom uh queer woman poet uh who was confronting ICE uh during one of their abductions on her block.
And um and then there was a another couple of shootings that are notable. um a nicer I'm sorry, a Venezuelan immigrant uh who was working Door Dash uh was in his car and was followed by ICE agents and he did not know who they were and fled from them and turned out they were looking for somebody that had owned the car previously. So, he wasn't even on any of their lists. Um and he he uh ran home and the cops followed him and uh or ICE followed him and one of his neighbors um helped confront him before retreating into the apartment and the ICE agent shot his neighbor through the door in the leg. His family was terrified. You know, actually called the police because they didn't weren't sure who these these people were. They were chasing them with masks.
Uh he did survive which is good. Uh unlike Victor Manuel Diaz who was a Nicaraguan worker who um had been working in dairy farms in outstate Minnesota before getting a job in a suburban Korean restaurant uh that was just randomly raided by ICE and he was abducted and then 10 days later he was dead in a detention center in Texas.
And then uh finally, Alex Prey, who was a union brother, a nurse at the VA hospital, who was a member of these rapid response networks who'd gone out um to observe and confront an ICE operation in South Minneapolis. And when he tried to help a woman that they were accosting, he was uh executed as well.
So that's kind of the level of violence and terror that was happening against the people of the Twin Cities. There was a great response as I mentioned um in terms of uh you know my role or how you know how I interacted with it generally besides being part of the rapid response networks we were also trying to do stuff within our union and the first thing that we did kind of to try and educate members about what was going on with ICE and trying to help reframe it was that two le oceanian men who were in a sister CWA local at a bus manufacturing factory in St. Cloud, Minnesota had been abducted. They had both been in the this country since they were preschoolers and they had worked in this factory for 20 years. Earlier in their adult lives, they'd gotten in trouble and served their time. Uh but this is the kind of people that Trump is trying to paint as the worst of the worst. Um you know, basically people with any kind of record, even if they'd served their time and had been part of the community and working in workplaces for decades. Um and so we did some education with our members about that as a way of kind of trying to actually say this is who you know this is the kind of people they're attacking you know grandfathers devout Buddhists um you know factory workers and through that process we learned that many of our members had already been pulled into the movement you know because of the momentum in society. So like two different um women showed me their whistles that they had from their neighborhood rapid response and we kind of had this idea that things were starting to to grow and and spread and infect the workplaces from the streets.
And then over time several unions have been in discussions about how do we move forward to be able to do uh political strikes to be blunt about it. You know not to just fight when our contracts expire but how to back each other up so that each union isn't just fighting alone. And then also how do we go beyond just the contractual battles to actually talking about class issues um you know beyond the contract and um you know there had been some discussions about this aligning contracts in 2028. The UAW had sort of raised that as a as a strategy and the Chicago teachers union had begun coordinating with different unions to think about that and then I think when Trump was elected people thought well we may not be able to wait till 2028 started thinking about Mayday in this year and then when the operation metro surge started our local unions started talking and thinking we may have to be ready to do something sooner than Mayday and then when Renee Good was murdered we decided to you know push the envelope and go all in on a day without work without school without shopping.
Um, and RU Local was the second union to sign on to that. Uh, there ended up being about a dozen unions, including all of the, uh, labor councils across Minnesota and the state. Minnesota AFL CIO ultimately signed on to it. It turned into a mass day of, you know, protest and defiance. There were 100,000 people that marched in the Twin Cities, I'm sorry, in downtown Minneapolis in -20 below zero weather. um in our workplaces, we were able to um document that over 80% of our membership across seven different workplace or work title silos um participated by by staying out of work that day. And we know that tens of thousands of other people across the state stayed home from work and school.
And since the uh since that January 23rd strike, we've been approached by five different groups of workers and workplaces that wanted to unionize who had either shut down their workplace or organized to try and do that on January 23rd. So just in terms of what kind of um you know what was sort of spreading out throughout the class in terms of wanting to get organized and to fight and then I think I'll just say that um you know I think one point that I try and make you know when speaking with people around the country is that uh the politicians were absolutely no help. I think you know important slogan that came out of the Twin Cities was that nobody's coming to save us. And I think that that was, you know, not just sort of a theoretical concept, but it was just something that was self-evident that, you know, pe even people that were saying, you know, clever things on uh national TV like the mayor and the governor in practice were actually aiding ICE. So while they might go on TV and denounce ICE, ask Trump to pull ICE out on the day-to-day level, their police forces that they controlled were supporting and supplementing ICE. Um, you know, for instance, when Alex Prey was murdered, executed on the street, you know, the community rushed to confront, you know, the agents that had murdered him. And the Minneapolis Police Department, Henipin County Sheriff's, and the state police all played crucial roles in uh defending and supporting ICE as they shot, you know, hundreds and hundreds of tear gas canisters, rubber bullets, and flashbang grenades at the community and then ultimately open up a corridor to help ICE escape. And that's just sort of a more dramatic example of the day-to-day level that the the state was cooperating with the ICE. Even though, you know, there were tensions between the local government and the federal government, ultimately they, you know, it was it was about the question wasn't about the resistance and supporting the resistance. It was about how to do how to maintain stability, how to maintain capitalist stability. Uh so I think that's a clear lesson that that people need to draw from it. And the other thing I think is important is about the way that the street and the workplace intersected with each other.
Uh we have to understand I think sometimes there's some orthodox ideas that um you know that workers resistance only emanates from the workplace but I think it's also important to understand that the streets and the workplace are constantly uh in conversation with each other as as y'all academics might say.
And uh that's important and a good thing because it means that stuff that's happening in the community does does come into the workplaces and it gives us an opportunity to talk about it in the workplace. And I think you know ultimately one of the most important things about Minnesota was that then we took that and tried to use our labor power as a way of uh fighting back and of asking people to to withdraw our labor collectively as a protest against what was happening. And I and I'm I think and I'm hopeful even though there's been quite a bit of uh effort by the authorities and by the union establishment to try and put the genie back in the bottle that those um those methods of struggle will become more commonplace in this country. And so I'm happy to answer questions and and talk more with everybody later. But um I appreciate this opportunity and uh thanks for everybody who supported the resistance here.
Thanks so much, Kieran. Next up, we have Sarah Joffy. They are a writer, reporter, and researcher living in London and on the road. She is author of From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a Time of Fire, Work Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, and Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt. All from Bold Type Books. Her next book, het heterosexuality is broken, is forthcoming from one signal. Her journalism covers the politics of power from the work to place to the streets and her writing has been published in the nation, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets.
She's a columnist at the Progressive.
She also co-hosts the Bel Labor podcast with Michelle Chen covering today's labor movement and heart reacts with Greg Kent and a vice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Thanks for being here Sarah myself. Hello. Now I'm not muted, right?
Cool. Um, so I did wear my wages for housework shirt despite not being Sylvia Federici because I'm I've been asked to come here and talk about social reproduction. Um, which is great. I asked specifically to go after Kieran because I wanted to know what he was going to say before I talk a little bit about the way that I think social reproduction has been central to this resistance to ICE. And I need you all to be slightly patient with me as I have had a long week all over the place talking about a bunch of different things and I'm a little more scattered than usual. Um, but I think one of the things that has been really fascinating to me has been the way that um, as Kieran was saying, right, the streets and the workplaces are in struggle with each other, but also that the sort of confrontational aspect of their resistance to ICE and the mutual aid, social reproduction part of making sure that those people who, as he said, weren't leaving the house were getting fed are able to stay in their homes. um that the kids could do school from home.
The way that a lot of networks and um technologies that we used during the pandemic lockdowns are being repurposed in these moments. So, you know, the WhatsApp groups are also activated to make sure that people are bringing people groceries. Um they're activated to make sure that somebody's picking up the kids from school if the kids are still going to school. and they, you know, you probably saw the pictures of the um people who were doing, you know, forming a perimeter around the school and then facing down with, you know, Greg Bovino and his goons when they show up with tear gas. So, I think it's always um I pulled this book off my shelf the other day. There's a line in a wonderful piece by the wonderful Bethany Morton and Pamela Vocal where they talk about the movement is social reproduction. And I think that's really really um been sticking with me as I watch the resistance to ICE in places like Minneapolis, also in the city that I was living in until I moved to London, which is New Orleans. Um and watched friends of mine, you know, get very active again in doing this kind of mutual aid, food deliveries. Um that basic life sustaining work. And that one of the things that's been going on in Minneapolis since the draw down has been an attempt to get um an eviction moratorum has been rent relief for people who weren't going to work. Um this is part of you know it connects up to the much broader housing struggle that I will return to again in a few minutes. But um yeah the broader thing that I've been thinking about a lot these days as Kevin said I'm I'm working on a book about how heterosexuality is broken. So, I am normally a labor reporter, but now I'm working on something that is presumed to be the opposite of work, although of course it's not, and that is, of course, our personal romantic relationships. And I'm stuck on this because of the transformation in the family that has come alongside de-industrialization.
Uh the research that I'm doing here in England has me trying to map out the decline in industrial jobs and the decline in traditional quote unquote marriage and they both fall off a cliff on the little line graph at exactly the same time which is about 1972 and uh this is roughly the same in the US. So what's happening in part is that the the crisis of social reproduction, our abil our inability to make enough money to pay the bills and all of the other things that we need to do is becoming a crisis of actual reproduction. Um there's a tension that we always sort of struggle with in the movement. I've got my picture just behind me over here of Stuart Hall doing child care at the um women's conference at Ruskin College in 1970. And it says, you know, the revolution begins with care. But at the same time, in my wages for housework t-shirt, I, you know, realize that we're also resisting in many ways the way that care is extracted from us. So the movement is social reproduction. The movement is also sometimes pushing back against the way that social reproduction is forced upon us. So these are tensions that I think we we live with all the time. Um, another line when I was making my notes here from Sylvia Federici was that um, contraceptives may be the only true laborsaving device that women have been able to use in the last however many years. All the gadgets in the home just end up doubling down on the amount of housework we have to do. So, on that front, um, the panic that you've all probably been hearing about about the birth rate crisis, right?
um that's been top of mind for our friendly neighborhood fascists and also many friendly neighborhood liberals. I guess um part of what's happening here, right, is that marriage has been classed for a while. The upper middle class broadly still gets married. They get married to each other. They get divorced less often. Uh they raise children in upper middle class homes, send them to fancy universities, and thus consolidate that class structure. While the working classes are less and less likely to get married if they have children, less likely to do so in partnership. And I'm not particularly attached to needing to do these things in a nuclear family. But what's actually happening here again is is class divisions are being firmed up in this way. So when trying to think about a class composition analysis, I think it's worth noting the way that this thing that used to be presumed to be universal is now becoming a marker of class status.
This is going along handinhand with this housing crisis. Uh there's an article in the Guardian in 2023 that I return to all the time because it said that we could soon see a Jane Austin style marriage market as millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with millennials who stand to inherit a house. This was specifically in the UK, but it is also again broadly true across um the US, across Western Europe, across a lot of the world. Housing prices have exploded. Salaries have not, rents are impossible. Um, and yeah, this has a huge effect on personal relationships.
Again, from the same Guardian article, a 2022 survey found that nearly a quarter of respondents would consider moving in with a partner earlier than planned to save money. And it's trapping an estimated one in 10 people in relationships they aren't happy in because they can't afford to move out.
So again, crisis of social reproduction becomes crisis of actual reproduction.
um surveys find a happiness gap between parents and non-parents, not the one that JD Vance and company um seem to expect, which is that non-parents are significantly happier. I don't have any kids. I'm not again trying to impose this on anybody, but um these are the facts and it's largely because we live in a world that does not support people having children, right? It is we the US is particularly bad on this front, but it's bad everywhere. And so what we get when from you know the Donald Trump's of this world, the Elon Musks of this world, JD Vance and all the rest of them with their birth rate panic is either you know ideological blackmail or just straight up, you know, policy change that are going to try to force people into having families by cutting off even more of the supports that we might have for having a decent life. So, you know, JD Vance um and his childless cat lady obsession.
Um sorry, like I said, more scattered than usual. Um this version of pronatalism is obviously also raced, right? It's the right kind of women that they want to be having children. Birthright citizenship status at the same time that they want to uh revoke, right?
um mass deportations on the one hand and pushing white women to have more babies on the other. So this is again this is also true here in Britain where I'm currently living. Um in the recent bi-election this guy Matthew Goodwin who's basically um gone from being an academic to being a you know right-wing talking head has been hammering on about this and the reform party is suggesting that it would rescend no fault divorce um return to household taxation. This guy Danny Krueger, who maybe some of you have heard of, says, "We are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy. Goodwin wants childless women to be taxed more with a negative child benefit tax." And um also wants fewer women in higher education. So, you know, there's that. In the US, obviously, we have the most important thing, which is the uh overturning of Roie Wade, which means that in places, including the one that I used to live, you can't get a safe and legal abortion anymore. And now of course they're trying to crack down on getting abortion pills through the mail.
Um there's also Donald Trump's you know first executive order which was that uh or first executive order on his second term we should say that it is is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes male and female. And this is coming alongside again um proposed like baby bonds which is a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the amount of money that it actually costs to raise a child. Um the Heritage Foundation recent report with all sorts of plans to do things like again roll back no fault divorce, make it harder to exist on your own. Um and you know they're trying to make it harder for married women to vote. So what we're getting right is no promise at all for them to make for the state to make it easier for people to do the labor of social reproduction and indeed actual reproduction but instead just try to bully us back into the the home. Um, so my wages for housework shirt and we're seeing all of this, right?
We're six years on from the first COVID lockdown where we started to hear about essential work, which was and is, I think, still a framework worth poking at and thinking with. And now we've also got generative AI, which I have more questions than answers to think about.
Um, we've already had a gigafied economy. Now the robots are coming for that gig work. I do not think at all that it was an accident that or just a coincidence or just a convenience that people in Los Angeles were setting Whimo automated taxis on fire while they were protesting ICE raiding the city, right?
Um people are aware that the tech companies want to replace us or just you know break down and tailorize work further.
So how do we resist all of this? um the challenge for thinking in terms of class composition when I'm thinking about things that are not happening in the workplace and again I really loved also what Kieran said about the you know the workplace and the streets being in conversation but we also need the home to be part of that conversation right um there is paid social reproduction work happening in the home and around it right a lot of the gig economy is uh what some Harvard Business School academics once called the the internet of stuff your mom won't do for you anymore. It's getting food delivery, right? It's getting a task rabbit to maybe come clean your house. Um, so there is paid social reproduction work happening in and around the home. There is unpaid social reproduction work happening in and around the home. That has to be part of our consideration of what is class struggle in the age of this particular fascism. Um the I think we need to be much more aware of the way that this birth rate panic again is raced that the goal is to, you know, deport everybody who's quote unquote deportable, criminalize everybody else, um force white women back into the home, and then maybe there will be some decent jobs for white men, but probably not.
Um, so with that said, the gender part does not get enough discussion for my liking, but some of the forms of reproduct of um, excuse me, some of the forms of resistance that I'm really interested in right now, as noted, the social reproduction part of the broader resistance to ICE when we're seeing less dramatic incursions than what happened in Minneapolis now, but they've certainly not given up on the desire to deport as many people as possible. Um, tenant organizing I think is a huge huge huge huge part of what's happening right now.
Watching the work that's going on again in places like Minneapolis. Uh, the growth of the tenant union federation across the country and its bases in places like Bosezeman, Montana, not where people usually think of as hot beds of leftwing organizing. Um, I am obsessed with data center opposition in part because this cuts across partisan lines. Basically, nobody wants a data center in their backyard. And I do think that perhaps more than people are given credit for. Part of the opposition to these things is also the fact that, you know, they know that these things mean us no good. And us, I mean the workers, the working class, the working classes, however we want to put that. Um, coming down the pipe a little maybe sooner than we might think, the Iran war and all of the constant opening and closing of the straight of Hummus is going to have massive consequences for the global food supply. Kind of a big deal. Um, and so within all of this, and this is a question that I've been wrestling with since at least the days of Occupy Sandy back in New York, is how do we avoid mutual aid being simply a band-aid on the capitalist crisis, right? How do we actually think of this as as survival pending revolution, as the Black Panthers used to say? Um, I don't have an answer to that. If I had an answer to that, I would have written it a long time ago. Um, but again, with a lot of these things, I have more questions than answers, and I'm really excited to be on this panel with these brilliant people who hopefully have more answers than I do. So, I will hand it over with that.
>> Thank you, Sarah. Very much appreciated.
So, next up is Charmaine Shua, who is a Singaporean scholar, organizer, and writer, and a professor a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research is at the intersection of Marxian political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change with a specific interest on how the rise of logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. Her first book, The Logistics Counterrevolution, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press next year in 2027. She is also at work on a second book, How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class, co-authored with Spencer Cox. Her work has been published in Society in Space, The Review of International Studies, The Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Boston Review, The Nation, Jacabin, among other venues. She co-directs the Marxist Institute of Research, serves as the current chair of campus organizing with the Council of UFC faculty associations, and is a research fellow at the Transition Security Project. In 2023, she was named a Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participated in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements. And taking us away into international social movements, Charmaine Hi everyone. Thank you so much Kevin. Uh that was an embarrassingly long uh biography. I wish that I had just given you one line. Charmaine is a communist and taken away the rest of it. So apologies for that. Um but it's good to see everyone here. A huge huge appreciation for Kevin, my former grad school comrade. To Kieran Nutson, who is one of my all-time heroes who trained me to do battle in the streets of Minneapolis when I lived there. and to Sarah Jaffy and Peter Linaba, two scholars and thinkers whose work I frequently turn to for a grounded commitment to working-class militancy.
So, it's a real honor to be here. Um, what I thought I would do today is do a little bit more of a kind of um zoom out to offer a kind of framework for thinking about what um I think has become one of the biggest dilemmas of our time. How to build an effective anti-imperialist working-class internationalism. Um, the genocide on Palestine after October 7th has made it patently clear that we need and all want an effective anti-imperialist labor internationalism. But it has also, I think, made it clear that constructing it effectively is one of the greatest challenges of our times. We stand in a moment in which um loss after loss, decimation after decimation of Palestinian workers and comrades and brothers and sisters in Palestine has confronted us with um the weakness of a left in the US that has um in many ways tried but ultimately not been able to make much of a dent um partly because of the kind of broader context of fascism.
But I want to speak more broadly to this dilemma. how do we actually build an internationalist anti-imperial working-class movement? Um, and to draw from my experience as a scholar of supply chains and as a militant researcher who's tracked weapon supply chains in service of anti-imperialist Palestine organizing since uh 2014. Um, and and I should say that this is what I'm talking about today is the final chapter of a book um that I'm that I've just finished called the logistics kind of revolution that Kevin mentioned. So I want to work through this question, how do we build internationalist working-class movements today by thinking through three dilemmas and then proposing three kind of concrete orientations to them. And the three dilemmas are what is internationalism?
How do we connect the here and there?
The second is what are the tactics of internationalism? How should we think about the construction of internationalist movements? And the third is who are internationalism's actors? So how do we bridge um I love the connection here. How do we bridge the workplace and the streets and the home? Um and then I want to propose three orientations in response uh concretization, composition and cadrification as three kinds of ways of thinking about um a kind of provisional solution to these dilemmas.
So dilemma one, what is internationalism and how does it connect our here in the imperialist core to a decimated there that we are responsible for producing?
Um, I think one of the kinds of dilemmas that I've encountered time and time again, and this I'm sure is familiar to many of you, is that as we sort of sit in a moment in which we're reckoning with our imper our role in the imperial corps, many of the ways that we've found um, you know, the the way of gesturing towards internationalism has been to make relatively symbolic gestures to the international through marches in the street, through political education, where the main impulse has been to kind of raise awareness um, through political education.
tools that take the form of running social media campaigns or teachings, wearing kofias to show and demonstrate our public solidarity or using public pressure such as in campaigns, teachings, marches and encampments that call attention to genocide. But often these kinds of um ways of doing work and I don't want to say I don't want to use the word symbolic as a kind of um uh derogatory term, right? symbolic performances are really important for making a stand and taking taking a clear position on internationalism. But what I what I think many of us have found is that it's unable to build a kind of longlasting and durable power that can extract concessions and demands in a way that it feels like actually meaningfully advances solidarity with others far away in ways that have durability. Um and so one of the kinds of questions that I think is worth asking is how do we think about that internationalism um in concrete forms. The second dilemma I think is a question of how internationalism should be carried out.
And here I think that that we have witnessed especially in Palestine solidarity movements the increasing fetishization of the disruption of the disruptive power of material choke points as a kind of ma magic bullet. So many of you will be familiar with this that there has been at least in the last um 12 to 15 years a kind of increasing realization of the centrality of physical choke points in supply chains that as supply chains have expanded and snaked around the world and spread the working class um offshore production to other places in the world, how they have sort of returned back to the US is in these massive choke points like at ports, at arms factories that become potential places for us to think about seizing. Um and so the kind of you know uh biggest example of this has been with the block the boat movement for Palestine that sort of started in 2014 um in the ports of LA and Oakland. Um as well as more immediate things that will be familiar to people like um the Houthi seizures of ships in the streets of um in the streets around Yemen.
So one of the things that I think has come about with the kind of realization that there is this special um disruptive power of material choke points is that there have been a lot of militant researchers who've put work into illustrating the political economy of supply chains and and yet lots of this research that builds a kind of or illustrates a kind of direct relationship between how they work, right? where we can track where weapons are going, how these parts are linked together um presents a really useful way of understanding where and how supply chains might allow us to grasp the kind of global production of capitalist systems. But there isn't always, I think, a direct relationship between knowing how supply chains work and bringing that to how the global working class might actually build projects that are capable of responding to the scale and scope of supply chains. So we can map for example how Boeing parts move from India to assembly plants in Virginia to Mediterranean ports and many people have done so. But the question of where and how do workers and arms workers are equipped to actually interrupt these flows is hugely un unevenly organized. And often sort of the reality of where you know the the kind of decimation of labor movements have gone is that many of the doc workers that are historically militant are actually no longer in the choke points that move the hugest amounts of um of of military and and and internationalist material. Um and in fact that some of the major choke points in the world economy are um uh riven with much more kind of bureaucratic business union um doc workers. So the invocation of internationalism then kind of has to be faces this challenge right of being scaled in response to the direct interests of workers often who are concerned with breadandbut needs to a kind of internationalist horizon that feels often very distant where the appeal between um asking workers in the here and now to let's say stop work or refuse to load supply chains and what it means for their immediate sacrifice of their own material needs isn't always sort of connected in a very instinctive way to that internationalist horizon. So that's dilemma two. And the third challenge I think finally is this question of who are internationalism's actors. Um and I think here we kind of encounter in this moment the catch22 of a labor movement that doesn't take organizing across the supply chain seriously on the one hand and a left that wants to disrupt supply chains without organizing labor on the other.
So with the first there's a kind of bureaucratic business unionism in the labor movement that's charged for example with stewarding dues monies in a way that are directly beneficial to members and so it reproduces the terrain of breadandbut fights over workers immediate concerns that in some ways are disconnected from the increasing ways that workers in one place and one union are stitched across a really massive global supply chain. we started to see different ways that unions have responded to this challenge right through social movement unionism and bargaining for the common good for example asking for colas um and around social reproductive needs like housing but really um there's a kind of large uh failure I think of the labor movement to really grapple with how supply chains have reshaped um the capacity of individual unions to be able to interrupt labor on the left on the other hand there's a kind of often chosen method or strategy of building disruptive struggle kind of on the outside of um labor movements. So through direct actions, through public protests, through disruption and revolts that are often and historically have been seen by those on the inside, so rank and file workers as um confrontations that often produce a kind of um conversation in which the working class on the inside of these supply chains are often seen as out of step with the concerns of those in mass struggle. So we've seen for example in the last two years a lot of banners that are sort of facing arms factories that say you have blood on your hands that assumes that it's the arm workers that are sort of in opposition to the the needs and interests of an internationalist working class. So these are some of the the dilemmas that I think we have to navigate again. Who are internationalism's actors? How do we actually do internationalism? And what internationalism actually is that um in the last five minutes I want to sort of propose three brief orientations that we can sort of think about. So the first is to respond to the question of what internationalism is by thinking through the language of concretization.
In other words, that we can concretize internationalism by linking the breadand butter needs of workers to the internationalist horizon in a way that doesn't see the two as opposing forms.
Internationalism's history has always in fact been grounded in concrete realities of of struggle where people meet. And Peter Linabau's work has um shown us this in really effective ways. But if we think for example about how popular imaginations of globalism first began to emerge in the 19th and 18th century both through transatlantic slave trade and migratory develop labor that developed with the migration of steam ships. It was in the international circulation of skilled workers that the first international working men's association otherwise known as the first international was founded in 1864 that really organized transnationally in order to bridge the struggles of craftsman guilds that could like aid the protection of workers that were moving in an increasingly circular um and international ways. And it was really in building the IWA that Marxist promotion of it later led to the first recorded usage of the word international. So in other words, international has internationalism has always had a kind of concrete political project. Right?
It's really always grappled with the role of the working class situated within a nation state in which the borders of the nation state are increasingly being eroded. And we can think also of Lenin's kind of con um horizon of the international socialist revolution as a way to think about this.
Um every struggle against imperialism Lenin once wrote at the time of the second international has to fight for liberation not only through the fight for its own people but of the entire world. And so for him, working through the question of internationalism necessarily required working through the scale of the nation as a place to develop a process of revolutionary struggle. And so this is why Lenin, you know, used a famous dictim, the only correct proletarian slogan he wrote is to transform the present imperialist war into a civil war. In other words, that internationalism can only be possible through concretizing struggles that rebalance class forces within your own geography before thinking about the internationalist horizon as something that's sort of out there. So to give you a really quick example, um I have organized with incredible Amazon workers for about six and seven years now. And Amazon workers at Ot Mesa in San Diego um in 2024 began to organize by concretizing class consciousness through the um composition of uh of of workers across the border. So they saw that Mexican workers who lived in Tuana were commuting across the work uh the border to work in these Amazon warehouses. and they started to organize a transnational formation to call attention to border imperialism and the injustice of housing costs that were too expensive to house workers on the US side and demanded from Amazon um the provision of uh faster uh transit passes across the border as well as uh as transportation needs to the warehouse. It's a really humble example of what it means to concretize internationalism. But part of what it did, right, was use the the immediate bread and better needs of workers who were spending three hours um commuting across the border at a time to link that to a kind of broader conversation about border imperialism that then folded into a broader kind of conversation about internationalism.
The second um com the second orientation I want to propose is composition and uh which is indeed the sort of title of this panel. Um so class composition I arose out of the Italian movements um such as in Roman Alquati's research on FIA and Alveti workers in the 1950s and this really emerged out of a commitment to workers self-management where workerists began to recognize that seemingly technical matters of the labor process right definitions of skills divisions of labor were operating as processes of domination. And so they came up with the term class composition to grasp two things at once. one to understand the kind of technical composition of class. How is labor divided, managed, exploited and two to understand the political composition of class. So how classes are autonomous from the dictates of capital and the scholar Salar Muandesi has really helpfully tried helped us to think about this class composition as a thing that has two meanings of composition at the same time. It traces how a class is composed. Uh so in other words, how classes are materially constituted and the manner in which classes compose themselves. So how classes actively combine and and build a class composition through their own struggle.
Right? In other words, classes don't exist prior to the point at which they actually emerge into collective self-determination.
So thinking through composition I think is a really helpful way to think about this bridging of the question of workplace struggles um and and um and and street struggles because one of the ways that I think we often think about blockades is that doc workers are the workplace and we as community organizers are the the the community activists who are not workers at these places of struggle. Instead, I think we it might be helpful for us to think about how workers and left communive activists are not two forms, right? One of the working class and one not, but actually as people who are all stitched into supply chains in different kinds of ways. some workers who are more situated at important points of disruptive power and others who are um decomposed into service jobs into jobs like Starbucks shops where the kind of connection to a supply chain is less illustrated but it nevertheless that we are all linked in some way. So we follow that way of thinking about how classes are composed decomposed and recomposed along the supply chain. One of the ways to think about where and how working classes have moved is um into thinking about how the the lens of class composition might might think about illustrating links between working classes at these choke points and working classes who are uh working classes nevertheless but not at these choke points. So, a really quick example, and I'll end here, is that um uh an arms blockade in Glasgow in 2025 was stitched together by um by activists who did a bunch of militant research and realized that actually a lot of the arms workers in the factory were immigrants from countries that had been decimated by US and British imperialism and so who understood in a very visceral sense what the imperialist violence in Palestine was about. And so they bridge the kind of connection to them by calling upon their own workingclass um sensibilities as long-term trade unionists and militants to um use the language of border imperialism to shape the the way that they connected to workers in the factory. So rather than accusing factory workers of having blood on their hands, they appealed to their shared and linked experiences of imperialism. And on the day of the action, as Palestinian solidarity uh solidarity activists began to run around the factory shutting down entrances, the workers walked out in solidarity because they shared this kind of um lens of understanding of anti-imperialism.
And one of the organizers reflected to me that in that moment, she wrote, "Workers were laughing about management being desperate as we shut down entrance after entrance. Something transformative was happening in watching their manager lose control. solidarity was found in our shared feeling of frustration with imperialism and with the shared feeling of fucking with the bosses. So there's I think a way that we can think about those shared solidarities not by thinking about you know workplaces and non-workplaces as sort of separate forms but really as um much more integrated than we believe and Minneapolis's use of the general strike is a really wonderful example of this. I had a third point on cadrification which I'll save because we've run out of time. But the last is just to say that um one of the ways that we can best do this work is to figure out how we ourselves are grounded in long-term commitments to our own shop floor struggles and to figure out how we can do international solidarity where we are best positioned to do it in the places where we have long-term commitments. Okay, sorry for going on.
Thank you very much.
>> That was incredible.
Thank you, Charmaine. So, we've zoomed out to the international. Now, we're going to zoom out historically. Um, I remember many, many years as a many, many years ago as a young activist and militant, Peter said to me, and I quote, "Dig until you find a commoner. Just continue to dig." And I have followed that advice as a union organizer, as a labor educator, as an author. And really is my pleasure to introduce Peter. Peter Limebau is an historian and author of the London Hanged, the Magna Carta Manifesto, The Incomplete, True, authentic, and wonderful uh history of Mayday, and Stop Thief. And he's the co-author with Marcus Riker of the ManyHeaded Hydra. His articles have appeared in publications that include Counter Punch, The New Left Review, Radical History, and most importantly for me, Zero Work, and Midnight Notes.
Take us away, Peter.
>> I would. Can you hear me?
>> We hear you wonderfully. Go on ahead.
>> Okay. Um because I've had trouble. I have to close off, get out, and then return in order to hear people.
Uh the first thing to say is gratitude to the to you Kevin uh to Kieran uh Sarah and Charmaine uh for uh bringing us together and I'm trying to get my head around Glasgow, London, and Minneapolis.
Charmaine referred to um class composition and its origins with uh in Italy over the Alfetti typewriter factory. I guess in the 1950s from that same explosion of ideas that we associate with Italian um autonomous Marxism is the notion of the social factory.
And I think that that might also help me it helps me think about internationalism.
It helps me think about the home and it helps me think about the street and the stationary workplace.
So I want to uh recover this notion of the social factory and it's just so useful to think of the street. I think of the blockades in Oakland and in Seattle at the ports where street people, dockers, warehouse people will meet. Um, yeah. So I'm a big one for the the street for for the right of chimage to go back to the middle ages and the charters of the forest and Magna Carta.
Chimage is the freedom to Rome, the freedom to travel from one place to another. And it's a place that capital the in its history is going to want to dominate and control uh as it links not just between factories in the division of labor but cities and of course countries and oceans.
Yeah. So, um I want to put the social factory back into our our discussion and of course uh yeah, it's just I learned so much uh Kieran from and I think the whole world is and where I'm I'm speaking to you from Ann Arbor, Michigan and we are I think 12 hours or so from Minneapolis by road.
Nevertheless, the techniques of rapid response have come here too as we try to resist uh the incursions and terrorisms of the police state or the Yeah. So, you know, 100,000 people mobilizing on the 23rd in 20°ree Fahrenheit freezing uh is really made a mark I think in our hearts and across the world and we are still recover not recovering but learning from it and building from it.
So I really uh and for me personally it's directly related to the indigenous struggle uh and to and to Mayday that is the claiming of the mother earth of the great black earth of the northern plains similar in the earth geology only to Ukraine and the origins of Mayday at hey ET was to originated in the strikes against the McCormack factory which was using uh to go into the labor process.
Charmaine using the mechanical reaper to uh shave the planes and to give the great plains a buzzcut and in so doing uh loss to the bison, loss to Native Americans and then the struggle between the Ojiway and Lakota people and the mass hangings of Manto in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln had 32 or 36 people hanged at once on Christmas Day.
Yeah. So, so that's a little bit of u rethinking the great plains which also I think is really important. that sign above Kevin, you know, if we look at his image again there above above his head is a picture a poster that has the word bread and after Hey Market of course it was the great plains that entered into the worldwide provision of carbohydrates you know of bread for the world. Uh so I just wanted to put that in as a way of underlining the importance of uh Charmaine's comment about the world food supply and its uh and its history.
And then uh I was so you know happy to learn from Sarah to hear that panther slogan survival pending revolution. Um, and she it's like a histo, you know, the word pending. It's like a combination of money talk and and history talk. It has to do with time and it has to do with debt. Um, so there's there's some humor in it because we we want survival.
We are fighting for survival. And I guess this is the most exciting thing happening in the world is we're doing this not just with mutual aid but in forms of uh of commoning forms of forming different reforming communities around resources and around uh a commons.
I mentioned this uh and I think it's something that we all want to return to you know because when we say pending revolution we think well what is revolution and what comes after revolution and how do we get there boy those those questions have me stop for a minute uh oh yeah I do want to get back to something that Kieran spoke about I mean I think and it's related to choke points. I'm I really want to learn more about Somali, the Somali and Ethiopian populations in the Twin Cities in relationship to this the political discussions in Ethiopia and Somali Somalia um and ISIS direct attack.
And in in light of that, I also want to mention an article that I read yesterday by Robin Kelly, the great uh the historian of African-American Freedom Struggle and his most recent book called uh Making a Killing, which combines both thecratic project that the we live in a dominion of death um with propheteering, making a killing has both meanings. The assassination of people in the streets uh with its long history back through capital punishment, through lynching, through public hangings, you know, to informal assassination.
So this regime of of death this is meaning it's opposite uh in our in our struggle when he used the expression of they serve their time.
Oh that is to me again another you know profound comment about citizenship about society about uh and about of course time you know serving their time.
I mean we are all serving time in this death dealing system you know and I think of the people in their 20s their teenagers or young people in their precarious life of what kind of future uh do do we have what kind of horizon can we build and I think it's incumbent on us and on our class to to describe and to elevate to uh that future in contrast a future of life and of mutuality of cooperation and of uh so I I think what we also desperately need is a moral and cultural uh revolution.
So uh I mean there are many ways of approaching that but I think it is uh deeply serious and our our art imaginations our our love in the streets with one another. love and the struggle. It's out of that that this uh that our imagination achieves its vitalities.
Yeah, that's that's true enough.
Yeah, I'm still I'm still thinking. I'm I'm really so happy to hear you know Sarah's quotation that the movement is social reproduction because the dominion of death is uh directly against this and her one thing that I'm would very interested in is the relationship between the home the natal policies and the immigrant workers in the Glasgow factories.
So let's just I just want to return to basics Charmaine and to add you know to your notion of class composition is largely within the working class and I think you're quite correct to see the divisions there through the labor process but let's remember the labor process has two elements to it the constant element and the variable element in its production of value and the the constant element we think of so-called natural resources, machines and tools.
So there's a conflict between the owners of machines, tools, and natural resources and the variable part of of us of you know of workers.
So what I'm thinking now is what is the relationship between the organic composition also has to do with that with class struggle. In fact, it's another way I would argue of describing class struggle through, as you are so good at saying, the details of the labor process in Elquati and as you yourself show with the internationalism of choke points.
But now I'm thinking sitting here in Ann Arbor, we're just I'm just a few miles away from a huge battle over a new data center at uh in Seline Township.
And it's so it's the AI is the AI like playing a role similar to what the steam engine played uh you know several centuries ago as a uh fetish organizing object that that will deeply recompose the labor process.
uh first of all by by as they say in England creating massive redundancies or as we say in the United States you know unemployment um and an answer to that is going to be in the carceral state you know the the development in the of prisons detention centers these vast places that are on a scale similar to the AI operations, you know, from a standpoint of architecture are also um appearing all over Turtle Island here.
And it there's a history to that as well, you know, to the plantation, to the uh reservation. Uh so it's these two sides that I think I'm trying to think together that the incarceration of the working class through and when I say working class I'm speaking of the world working class. I'm speaking of the people with fantastic experience who come to us as Kieran was saying from Nicaragua, from Guatemala, from as uh as Charmaine referred from Laos. people from all over the world who have been expropriated, who have that memory, who have that knowledge of expropriation of the loss of relationship to the earth, a loss of relationship to the the quote natural resources, the communities, the villages, uh the different forms of the commune.
um that loss is an aspect that drives people, you know, into the refugee camps. So that they're in between the the AI and the incarceration is a mobile world of boat people of the refugee and of the where the border is the means of control and that border is where the state steps in. This is uh what I'm thinking recently. This how the state is trying to control this relationship between or this between the class and this uh and its recomposition on this vast scale through AI.
Yeah.
So that's about as as far as I got in my thinking beforehand. But then, you know, when I hear the the three of you, I am so encouraged.
I am so encouraged by by the rigor of your thought, by its truthfulness.
um and by the tasks you know that we are facing and I think so I should just end my comment by praising common notions because such notions are being produced here as as we're interacting and I did want to come in with one word do I have a minute I see Something happened on my screen.
Oh, don't drag it out too long. Okay, I'll I'll be quiet then.
Yeah. Okay. I didn't mean to go over time.
>> You're fine. Peter, do you want to finish your last comment? Then we'll move to some quick questions.
>> Yeah. is Charmaine.
I'm going to have to get out.
Thanks all. And Chris and our comrades at Red May, if you don't mind bringing all of our speakers back, that'd be fantastic.
>> This is wonderful. I think I'm seeing everyone besides Peter. Is Peter back with us?
Chris, if you could just give me a shout in the chat.
Peter dropped. Okay, I'll ask the question. And there we go. Peter's rejoined. Fantastic.
>> Here we go. Challenge.
>> I don't know. Can you hear me?
>> We hear you. Great. Thanks, Peter.
>> I misread something on my screen saying that I was dragging on too much.
>> Oh, no. I think it was the question answers because of course I >> I'm getting too much information all at once and I don't know what to pay attention to. Um I I wanted to uh with due respect I did I go over time >> go ahead Peter finish your thought that'd be fantastic.
>> My thought was just to thank you and to thank common oceans.
>> Yeah.
>> Wonderful. and and Peter as always ever so generous in both your comments and the fact that I've learned from you and everyone else on this call has as well and many of the comrades watching and you're still learning from our efforts and still learning from the world is is really something that um that gives me hope. Um we have a couple of questions.
We have a question of course from the YouTube channel. So I'll ask that one uh as well. But I think I want to start here with some of the comments that were raised. And also, it's hard to think about this moment without talking about grief and revolution. And of course, this is the subject of Sarah's most recent book. It's hard to think about this moment without thinking about the extrajudicial murders of Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Prey this winter. the cruel homicide of No Amid Shaha Alam, a nearly blind non-English-speaking Rohinda refugee from Malamar, as well as those who have been stolen from our communities with over 14 deaths last time I checked in ICE custody since the first of the year. So, I want to ask the panelists, how do we grieve while not allowing our grief from preventing us surviving ending revolution? And I'll just open it up.
Feel free anyone to jump in.
>> Anyone? Anyone? Okay. Um, since I wrote the book on grief, I can um jump in if you want because I just spent the week the reason I was in Italy was doing some more book talks and um yeah, I the way I was ending every single one of those was actually talking about what's been going on in Minneapolis this year. So again, Kieran, thank you for giving us all some hope in this benited misery that everything is.
Um, and you know, I I wrote a weird book about grief. Um, one of the things, one of the inspirations actually for it was was Peter's writing in the London Hanged about uh capital punishment and the punishments of capital. And I think there are so many ways that like the movement is grieving, right? the fact that so many more people came out into the streets after Renee Good was killed, after Alex Pretty was killed, um that rather than looking at that and going, "Oh my god, I'm staying home because I might get shot." The answer, the response was to come out stronger, I think is really incredible. Um, and I don't want to step on Minneapolis too much, but one of the people that I I profile in that book is actually a Somali worker from Minneapolis who used to work at Amazon and was part of the incredible organizing that the Uwood Center did at the Amazon warehouse and then now drives for Uber. So, he's at the sort of tip of the spear of uh tech gigation and all of that stuff. And, you know, we had had this fascinating conversation about all sorts of things to do with his work and his life in Minneapolis. And then he just told me like he was just back from Somalia and his wife and kids had actually moved back there and he was back in Minneapolis driving for Uber to make enough money to put his kids in private school in Somalia so that they could stay and grew up there. And I thought that was such a like an important part of the story because you know American language is like these are people from shit hole countries who can't wait to come to the US and blah blah blah whatever and have such a great life. And actually he was working in the US so that his family could go back to the country that, you know, Donald Trump repeatedly describes as a shit hole because he wanted his family to be able to grow up where they were from and to experience a culture that he found actually much more pleasant, welcoming, and homelike than the one we have. Um, and that was sort of the story I wanted to tell about immigration and grief is like in the US, in the UK, and in the sort of receiving countries, the story is often like these people just really want to come here because it's so great here. And the story is actually as as Charmaine was saying that people are coming here because we are fucking up their countries at home.
>> Maybe I'll kick it to Kieran for some comments. I mean, clearly uh your work as an anti-fascist and union organizer over the last few decades in Minneapolis has really led the way on this. How are you all thinking about this post some of those uprisings?
>> Turn to Peter and Charmaine for comments and then we'll move on to another question.
>> I'm sorry, Kevin. Uh I missed part of the question there. Sorry.
>> No worries. That's the uh realities of of this tech, right? um would love to hear your thoughts as a lifelong anti-fascist and union organizer and you know Minneapolis has really led the way for those of us in the United States and internationally and interested in how you're thinking about this question of survival um surviving and building uh our movements um after Minneapolis.
Um yeah, I you know I was hesitant to raise my hand to answer the question because I don't I feel like me personally and like a lot of us haven't really um been able to give ourselves time to figure out, you know, and I'm probably resting on all kinds of, you know, ways I was raised and stuff too that aren't necessarily all that helpful towards navigating this kind of stuff and also feeling sort of like, you you know, when there's when there's when the moment is on, like I'm all for self-care, but I also feel like sometimes that's not my priority, and I don't have any problem saying that, you know. Um but yeah, I mean I think there's like a lot of uh a lot of um a lot of people that are, you know, not you know, have been impacted by this psychologically, socially, relationships. You know, a friend of mine was telling me about how many relationships they know that have split up, you know, during during the wake of the ice stuff. And I think there's just like an incredible amount of tension and uh stress and also, you know, like happened during the uprising, I think it's a moment too where people feel ready to call out injustices in their own personal relationships as well and and and maybe be ready to move on.
And um so it's it's it's something uh I'm still learning, I guess. Uh but it isn't it is I think maybe what is useful for me to take from it is that that we're entering this period of like mass struggle and mass um repression that we're going to have to learn. We're going to have to get better at at doing this just to be able to, you know, maintain our sanity and our health and also our ability to fight back. And um I think there's lots of ways that have been really good. Like I mean we wouldn't have survived if people hadn't figured out how to do, you know, mutual aid and been so giving of their time.
You know, I'm really proud of my my son and his partner. were really, you know, tight with some immigrant families on their block and and um, you know, helped get people through and uh and that that happened like among thousands and thousands of people. So, but it's it's, you know, kind of like learning as we go too much too. I think that's how you have to learn, right?
That's but um but we we should hopefully not have to repeat some of the same things and uh yeah I think I'm just kind of caught now.
>> Appreciate that. Karen Peter and Charmaine, would you like to jump in before we move to another question?
>> Move on.
>> Wonderful. Okay, so this comes from our comrades on YouTube who've posted for us. Curious to hear more of Sarah's thoughts on tenant struggles and the intersection with labor organizing. More specifically, how might labor unions better support tenants? How might tenants move towards consciousness of themselves as a class within the working class? And what are the tensions you see between tenant and worker class compositions and underexploited opportunities? And then in addition to that uh to Charmaine's comments, how do we think about solidarities and collective power across international frag fragmented working class whose social production is segmented and pitted against each other? And maybe Charmaine will will begin with you and then we'll open it up.
>> Um yeah, well that is that is the question and I think it's an excellent one um that I think Peter's work has taught us a lot about that Kieran and Sarah have helped help helped us think about. I think that you know what I was trying to offer is that sometimes thinking across the scale of the supply chain can be um really daunting because you think about the Chinese worker far away who's making the goods that you will never see and meet and it can feel incredibly disempowering to understand that what supply chain capitalism does in moving things around the world in hyper mobile ways makes it feel as if any place-based solidarity feels useless given the kind of facial mobility of the supply chain. And I really think that thinking through what it means to concretize those forms of internationalism within the workplaces where we are is the only way through.
Um, we've seen it throughout the histories of workers movements all the way from enslaved people fighting for each other across massive links um in in you know transatlantic slavery um all the way till you know plantation marinage all the way to the ways in which refugees today are trying to build um solidarity within detention centers right and these are all I think moments for us to be I think um I I guess what I would say is that in my long experience both kind of like sketching the mass scales of these supply chains at an analytic level and then trying to do organizing at the grounded level is that often those two things don't come together easily. There's all the stuff.
We can say all the all we want in the world about the totality of the capitalist system. And then when it comes to recruiting salts to organize at Amazon, which many um many of my comrades have been working on for the last eight years, when it comes to actually building uh that salt recruitment into a strategy that looks like a formidable organizing committee that can actually take power in these factories um and warehouses, it's another question altogether. Right. So there is I think in a way uh I I have a very humble response to this question which is that unless we're actually learning how to do this in our own pla workplaces and asking where we are situated within points of knowledge production service production social reproduction together and trying to figure out where that hooks into the question um we're lost right because there's no way for us to begin at the scale of the international so just to give you a very quick example you know in my own workplace at the University of California. What we've been doing is to start a collective called researchers against war that is really about trying to think take seriously our place as knowledge researchers in a machine that is federally funded by the department of defense map the ways in which our own um you know reproduction of that war machine happens through the creation of basic science research that creates the preconditions for later defense of defense technologies and to ask how we can invite other workers to organize around pledging not to receive Department of Defense funding. So that's just one way, right? Feels humble, doesn't feel particularly exciting, but it is a way of hooking our where we are now to the question of what that internationalist horizon looks like in terms of where we have responsibility.
>> Thank you, Charmaine. additional thoughts on the importance of tenant union organizing of uh labor union organizing and of course building these solidarities and collective power both in the US and internationally.
>> I feel like it had my name on it, but I want to let other people talk first because I just talked a whole bunch.
Peter, would you like to jump in on this, especially with some of the work you're doing with shoemakers and commons and communism?
>> Yeah. Well, the shoe maker uh helps us keep our feet on the ground and the shoe and it's thanks to the labors of Vietnamese workers that we got those shoes how they um but I was thinking of the ground and I was thinking of tenency and I guess the tenant is usually contrasted with the Lord. word and I'd like to abolish that relationship.
Um, so that we are all tenants in our Yeah, you know, not to get too mortal about it, but uh but it's a good reminder to, you know, kick the ass of the ruling class and who claims they they own the world, you know, that they're the lords.
So it's yeah that call that a thought if you wish but >> I appreciate that Peter want to move to Sarah. Why don't you take us away?
>> Unless Kieran has anything you want to say about tenant organizing or anything.
I mean, I guess I I think um that that we need to think about, you know, working-class people in in all realms.
And I think that um you know, we need to think, you know, from my point of view, somebody who's heavily involved in our union, that we want, you know, our union to be a working-class defense organization. And I think that means not just in the workplace, but in all aspects of life. and uh you know obviously tenant relationship um and uh the oppression of of the landlord is a major part of workingass life especially for the poor sides of the working class and I think we need to be more involved in it. I would say that just like we need unions that are not bureaucratized and are actually controlled by the members, we also need tenant unions that aren't dominated by the nonprofit industrial complex and that are actually, you know, controlled and run by the tenants themselves. And um you know, I'm all for looking for opportunities for for the unions to play a positive role uh in that. Um and I think there is a potential for struggle.
there was a big push around tenant organizing around the ICE stuff here because of the situation of so many immigrant families um staying home from work and therefore not being able to pay rent. Um so I I'm looking, you know, I think those struggles are going to continue to to bubble up and and mature and we should look for opportunities to to make tenant unions, you know, kind of a feature of of workingclass life and struggle.
Yeah, I everybody has said wonderful things. Um the you know I wanted to bring in Red May's friend, my friend Charmaine's friend Joshua Clover, who we all really miss, who would always always remind me that the word proletariat does not mean the factory workers. It means those who have nothing to sell but their labor, those who have nothing that they own.
And so that covers tenants too, right?
And so if we're thinking, as Kieran was just saying about the working class in all facets of our lives, it's also that we're still renters, right? I'm 46 years old and I'm still renting a one-bedroom apartment. Um, this is a huge feature of life right now. And it's not like the tenants are opposed to the workers. Just as Charmaine was noting, it's not like the community and then the workers. Um, one of my, you know, frustrations with some of the way we talk about the workers on parts of the left is that like it's always the workers over there and actually we're all of us in these situations of unfreedom where somebody else owns supposedly owns thinks they own as Peter said everything in our lives. And so yeah, all of these struggles are deeply interconnected. the tenant unions that are doing good work are doing it in a sort of union format where the goal is to organize everybody in the building. And the thing I think tenant unions and labor unions have in common is that they're organizing the people that again to go back to class composition capital has organized for us. We don't get to choose our co-workers. We don't get to choose our neighbors. We have to organize with everyone who's there. And what Minnesota showed us is how to do that on a citywide level where you have to organize in your neighborhood and not just with your five best friends who all read a lot of marks. Um, and it's absolutely incredible to watch it happen. So I I you know I always want to end with just saying like I am so inspired by what's been going on in Minneapolis. So you know thank you all for doing this.
>> Thank you all. We're going to move to close uh especially here concluding with an expansive definition of the working class of really considering the richness of workingclass life and the richness of struggles in Minneapolis and those taking place across the planet. We all of course have plenty of militant research and workers inquiry and thinking and writing to do collectively.
Uh so we'll pass uh the the hat on to the next May uh RedMay event. And I just want to make sure to thank Common Notions and Red May for hosting us. Uh for all of our speakers for joining us today, and of course all those comrades here in the Northeast where I'm based, where Red May is on the West Coast, all those in between, and all those across the planet for joining and listening today. Phil, anything to close us off with?
Uh yes, but I have to put my mic on. Um thanks very much. uh you know um we do a lot of abstract things like Hegel uh but it's nice to be grounded in the real and the concrete u and I found it fascinating uh but also inspiring like Sarah said I mean these are uh you know Minneapolis of course uh the the scale of organization the creativity of it is uh is just an inspiration to sort keep thinking about ways to connect uh different different struggles in different places. Uh if if capital can reorganize labor in a chain that's totally new, we can certainly think about new ways to reorganize our connections as opposed to uh dealing with the notion of the proletariat is the factory worker as opposed to the person with everything to lose. So, uh, you are all doing great work and, uh, thank you very much for doing this. I wanted to, uh, close quickly by pitching, uh, tomorrow's event which is at 11:00 a.m. which is called the mask comes off the path to the trunk doctrine with Ashley Bali, Aziz Rana, and Rodrigo Nunes. Um, they've written articles for Boston Review. I want to really shout out to Boston Review which is doing some of the best uh intermediate sphere reporting between theory and uh and and and practice. Uh and there are two articles one that Rodrigo wrote uh where he discussed for example the uh uh we're not moving from a rules-based order to a non-ruules-based order. It was always built on force but in a sense we're moving from hypocrisy to cynicism. Uh and Ashley and Aziz Rana have written a wonderful article too. So we should have a very good discussion on uh foreign policy such as it is tomorrow. That's at 11:00 a.m. go to our website www.redmay seattle.org or uh to find out the rest of the schedule and uh hopefully to donate so we can pay for all this. Uh I want to thank Kevin and uh the invisible malvive for putting this all together.
Want to shout out to common notions which is publishing great stuff. Check out their website and uh to say goodbye to my friends here and uh we'll see you later somewhere. Thanks.
>> Thanks Phil. Thanks everyone so much.
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