Laborwave Radio

Laborwave Radio speaks with Shannon Ikebe and Tara Phillips, two striking workers at the University of California, on the power of wildcat strikes, importance of deep internal union democracy, and organizing worker insurgencies. They are the authors of the piece, The Grassroots Wildcat Strike for a COLA and the Fight for a Democratic, Militant Union. Shannon Ikebe is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. They study social democracy and labor movements in Europe. Tara Phillips is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley where she studies US and Latin American Literature in the twentieth century from a food studies perspective. She is a also an academic worker and rank and file labor organizer at UAW 2865. Our conversation provides an update on the wildcat strike at the UC system, and largely focuses on the strategies behind the strike and rebuttals to criticisms from certain detractors. Ikebe and Phillips reject the view that a wildcat strike must conform to pseudo-scientific claims about the "physics of strikes," and largely take their inspiration for worker insurgencies from the likes of Rosa Luxemburg and her writings on the "mass strike." "You can't calculate everything and predict the outcome in advance. You have to experiment and see what's possible for workers. In the process our movement has grown organically and exponentially, and workers expectations have been raised. The key point is that we now have a movement that formerly we have not had. We have not won a COLA yet, but I don't think it's a defeat as some people may like to call it. I think it's an inconclusive ending for now, but the difference being that we have a movement. Also, the way in which people have a real lived experience of doing a wildcat strike, and the wildcat strike as a repertoire of tactics has become normalized as part of the things we can do. I think that was completely unimaginable in November, 2019." Other show references: Maximillian Alvarez, Antifascism and the Left's Fear of Taking Power, Baffler Magazine Strike University, https://strikeuniversity.org/ Music: Damaged Bug, Lovely Gold

Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution. ​ After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society. Our third episode is Waste After the Revolution featuring Andrea Haverkamp, president of the Coalition of Graduate Employees labor union, a Phd candidate in Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University, and frequent guest host on Laborwave Radio. "We will, after the revolution, use our current landfills as the new goldmines. We put so much plastic and metals in landfills that will not go away for thousands of years and we can get them back out. We will no longer have our lives dominated by single use items. The rulers are beholden to the cups. The cups are actually not beholden to them. Under consumer capitalism we've created this runaway train and there's no single figure head that we can shut down like we can shut down a factory that will have the effect that we need."

Bill Fletcher Jr is a long-time labor leader and author of multiple books, including Solidarity Divided: The Crisis In Organized Labor And A New Path Toward Social Justice (co-author Dr. Fernando Gapasin) and a new mystery thriller The Man Who Fell From The Sky. We speak on the emerging demands on the AFL-CIO to sever ties with police unions, which Bill Fletcher Jr cautions could have the consequence of providing the right-wing with scripts to claim police are being victimized by the left, and enable Trumpists to more easily stoke reactionary fires. Fletcher suggests that our focus should be more on police repression, and having a reckoning with our own past within the labor movement that has a complicated record on racial justice. We also speak on the paradoxical quality of online technologies confining workers to more hours on the job rather than liberation from work, and the need for organized labor to go deeper and further in demanding emancipation. Two graduate employee unions in Oregon have joined the growing number of union locals to publish statements pressuring the AFL-CIO to disaffiliate with the IUPA (International Union of Police Associations). For transparency, the host of Laborwave Radio was involved and supportive in the process of one of these statements being produced. The statements can be read at this link:

Full audio and transcript will be available at laborwaveradio.com/rentstrikes Two part episode on Laborwave, we speak with tenant organizers from Tenants United Corvallis (TUC), a committee of the Mid-Valley IWW, about their efforts to scale up a rent strike in the Mid-Willamette Valley. We follow that segment by speaking with Liza Featherstone, a journalist featured in The Nation and Jacobin, about rent strike activities in New York as well as a broader conversation about relations of power between the tenant and landlord classes. Tenants United Corvallis (TUC) can be reached via their website at midvalleyiww.org Liza Featherstone penned the piece, On Strike- No Rent, for Jacobin which served as the baseline for our conversation. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/rent-strike-may-coronavirus-new-york-city-nyc-tenants-housing

Full audio & transcript at laborwaveradio.com/natashalennard Laborwave speaks with Natasha Lennard, author of Being Numerous: Essays on Non-fascist Life from Verso Books and contributing contributing writer at The Intercept. Her work covers politics and power and has appeared in Esquire, The Nation, and the New York Times opinion section. Lennard discusses non-fascist life during the crisis of capitalism, intensified by a pandemic, and helps analyze this moment in terms of "accidents" and full surrogacy for each other. Preface: "What would it look like if we were all surrogates for each other in all kinds of different ways. If we ushered ourselves through the world and held each other in our porousness, our wateriness, our undeniable and often conflictual interdependency. So I think this is the moment of undeniable interdependency becoming clear. What would it look like to live well by it?"

May Day Amid A Plague with Sarah Jaffe Full Audio & Transcript at laborwaveradio.com/sarahjaffe [edited for clarity, May 1, 2020] Laborwave Radio in conversation with Sarah Jaffe, author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, which Robin D.G. Kelley called “The most compelling social and political portrait of our age.” She is a Type Media Center reporting fellow and an independent journalist covering labor, economic justice, social movements, politics, gender, and pop culture. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic, and many other publications. She is the co-host, with Michelle Chen, of Dissent magazine’s Belabored podcast, as well as a columnist at The Progressive and New Labor Forum. She discusses labor organizing and worker militancy amid a plague on this troubled day of celebration, May Day. Preface “We already know, because of the climate catastrophe that is breathing down on us, that we need to radically reshape the economy and do it quickly. Well now we've seen that we can. It turns out that we can survive on the work of so-called essential workers. I think what we’re seeing is the things that are staying open right now, the things that we need, are jobs doing the work of social reproduction. Nurses are working, and members of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are picking tomatoes in Florida working. The people who deliver things to you, the logistics chain, Amazon warehouse workers who have been showing us all how to be militant lately, are working. That is social reproduction work. So much of the rest of the economy doesn't actually need to exist.”

Transcript Forthcoming at laborwaveradio.com/gianpaolo Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution.  After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society. Our second episode is The Political Party After the Revolution featuring Gianpaolo Baiocchi, professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU and director of the Urban Democracy Lab. He is author of We, The Sovereign which explores the possibilities of bringing about a radical utopia of popular self-rule.  “When we look at the history of political parties in the United States they are pretty consistent with their founding mission of representing political elites. Who do we want this party to be autonomous from and who do we want it to be responsive to? We have to be very clear that it's people's struggles, movements, and unions that we want it to be responsive to and that we want it to be autonomous from elite interests and existing bureaucratic formations within movements and non-profits. Everybody feels like we can't have Trump again, but having this kind of life and death thing continues to lead us to greater and greater compromises all the time. What I like about your question about the party after the revolution is might we have the freedom to rethink our structures of political representation in a way that doesn't feel like if we don't sort it out exactly this minute the world will end or the right-wing will win."

Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/micahuetricht We spoke with Micah Uetricht, managing editor at Jacobin Magazine and co-author of the recent Verso title, Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go From The Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. "Bernie's campaign, and the campaigns that have followed his, should show that there is also a way to do electoral politics that is actually spurring more class struggle, not tamping it down. Marxism is about both the objective conditions that you face, as well as the subjective efforts you can make to change the world. Good Marxism, in my opinion, always focuses on doing both of those things. What opportunities the objective conditions present to you, but also what you as an individual can do swimming outside the tides of history." In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making “political revolution” more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives. Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.

Transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/hollylewis Join our online book club @ laborwaveradio.com! We speak with Holly Lewis, assistant professor at Texas State University and author of The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection published by Zed Books. The Politics of Everybody examines the production and maintenance of the terms 'man', 'woman', and 'other' within the current political moment; the contradictions of these categories and the prospects of a Marxist approach to praxis for queer bodies. Few thinkers have attempted to reconcile queer and Marxist analysis. Those who have propose the key contested site to be that of desire/sexual expression. This emphasis on desire, Lewis argues, is symptomatic of the neoliberal project and has led to a continued fascination with the politics of identity. By arguing that Marxist analysis is in fact most beneficial to gender politics within the arena of body production, categorization and exclusion Lewis develops a theory of gender and the sexed body that is wedded to the realities of a capitalist political economy. Boldly calling for a new, materialist queer theory, Lewis defines a politics of liberation that is both intersectional, transnational, and grounded in lived experience.

Laborwave Radio and Opening Space for the Radical Imagination present a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution. Full audio and transcript available at laborwaveradio.com/rajpatel After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of considering one particular feature of society, then imagining what it might look like after the revolution, and finally offering some ideas on how we get to this revolutionary society. Our first episode is The Dinner Table After the Revolution featuring Raj Patel, writer, activist, and academic who has authored the books Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food Sytem; The Value of Nothing; and The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with co-author Jason W. Moore.