Labourwave Revolution Radio

We spoke with members of the Angry Workers, a political collective, about the insights from their recent PM Press title, "Class Power on Zero Hours." The Angry Workers spent the last six years working in a London backyard mostly among food and manufacturing workers, and they've chronicled their experiences as well as their efforts to organize alongside these workers in an expansive book. We speak about these experiences as well as the lessons learned from the ground, and the need to develop revolutionary forms of organization internationally. You can contact the Angry Workers at angryworkersworld@gmail.com or on their Twitter @angryworkers or Facebook @angryworkersworld https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1164 Music on this episode is provided thanks to In The Red Records! Ty Segall & Mikal Cronin- Drop Dead Baby https://intheredrecords.com/collections/the-ty-segall-band/products/ty-segall-mikal-cronin-reverse-shark-attack Support our show by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave

On Election Night comrades of the show got together to play games, talk politics, and ease election anxiety (as much as that was possible). Here's a short clip of our four-hour hangout where we discussed Emma Goldman's position on women's suffrage and state politics, the Black Rose Anarchist Federation article on Voting or Abstention, and a recent Contrapoints video discussing the subject of voting for the lesser of two evils. Comrades heard here include Andrea, Kali, and Tali. Laborwave will continue putting videos and hangouts such as these on our YouTube, and you can access all of our content and help sustain our show at patreon.com/laborwave Links to the articles we discuss: Emma Goldman- Woman Suffrage https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/goldman/works/1911/woman-suffrage.htm Black Rose Anarchist Federation- Vote- Or Don't: On Abstentionism https://blackrosefed.org/vote-or-dont/ Contrapoints- Voting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Vah8sUFgI

David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He passed on September 2, 2020. We discuss his ideas and celebrate his memory in this conversation with comrades Tony Vogt, member of the IWW and co-founder of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures, and Shane Capra, an organizer and participant in the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking and member of the IWW. Our discussion covers topics of leadership and charisma, the tension between play and games, and falling in love with a ghost you cannot capture. Support Laborwave by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave Links: Anarres Project for Alternative Futures anarresproject.org Institute for Advanced Troublemaking https://advancedtroublemaking.wordpress

We discussed the legacy and experiences of Occupy Wall Street with two movement participants Marina Sitrin and Vanessa Zettlers, contributors to the recent title Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis published by Pluto Press. Our conversation touched on the ways to recover the real history of OWS and overcome "historical forgetting," the mechanics of OWS through forms of direct democracy such as assemblies and working groups, and the lessons learned from this movement including the need to better anticipate "the fist of the state." In The Red Records, an independent music label based in Los Angeles, has provided Laborwave permission to use music from their artists on the show! This episode featured the following In The Red artists: Tyvek- Real Estate and Finance, off their 2016 album "Origin of What" Osees-Don't Blow Your Experiment, from their upcoming album "Panther Rotate" from Castle Face Records. Links: Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During Covid-19 Crisis published by Pluto

We spoke with Amir Fleischmann of the Graduate Employee Organization, a union at the University of Michigan, about their latest strike leveraged to fight the university's reckless reopening plans amid a pandemic. Amir provides a play-by-play of the strike, the events leading up to it and the larger context in which it occurred, and how their union was able to raise expectations and demonstrate the organic links between worker justice and social justice. We discuss the demands of the strike, including demands to disarm and defund campus police, and take a look at the strike's mechanics and how workers were able to make their presence felt even during measures of social distancing as well as the power they were able to build among their own membership and in coalition with campus and community organizations. Laborwave Radio is an independent podcast sustained exclusively through our patrons at patreon.com/laborwave If you enjoy the show, please share our content across social media, like and comment, and j

Join in on the fun Discord conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, joins Laborwave to discuss chapters 5 & 6 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey; "If We Can Change the White House, We Can Change the Hog House!" Our conversation highlights the importance of connecting our movement histories to fight against the consistent bracketing of social movements as self-contained and insular phenomenons, making the role of staff transparent and accountable for developing the leadership of the rank-and-file, and also pose some hard questions for the IWW asking why is it so prone to the "one-man organizing show" written about in Organizing Work and what prevents its own policies and structures from being consistently implemented? Chapter 5 analyzes the strategies of UFCW's multiple union campaigns at Smithfield Foods, where in their third round after 10+ years they finally won a union through a deep organizi

Joining Laborwave is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his piece on Identity Politics and Elite Capture published by the Boston Review. "If elite capture boils down to the way power and resources tend to be distributed within groups, and not simply across groups, then it is a fully general problem of politics in a world that distributes power and resources unjustly and unequally. Elites get outsize control over the ideas in circulation about identities by, more or less, the same methods and for the same reasons that they get control over everything else." We discuss how elite capture is on display in the op-eds of Andrew Yang and calls for better representation within mainstream media, its manifestations in current discourse around "cancel culture," and the prospects for revamped social movements, especially in organized labor, to elevate politics to a level that transcends the capture of elites. http://bostonreview.net/race/olufemi-o-taiwo-identity-po

Join in on the fun conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave Ellen Kress, former president of GTFF 3544 and current AFT-Oregon officer, and Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, join Laborwave for a comradely discussion on chapters 3 & 4 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. These chapters are full of exercises and advice for rookie organizers, which we discuss in detail, and talks STRIKES!!! We're introduced to another villain of the working class in the form of Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, and shown the bravery and heroism of teachers that battled him down and won in a massive strike during 2012. These chapters also present us with arguments about the possibility of reforming unions through challenging existing leadership and bargaining for the common good. Join us in discussion and some reading sessions on our Discord server! You can get in on the fun by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave and joining as a

Join the conversations around this book in our Laborwave Discord by becoming any type of patron of the show at patreon.com/laborwave !!! This is our second episode of Comrades Read Together where we're discussing, chapter by chapter, the book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. We follow up our conversation tackling the introduction and chapter 2 with a review of the book by Nick Dreidger, contributing writer to Organizing Work! Dreidger asks the tough questions about the political horizons achievable under a labor relations framework, and whether it's possible for "business unions" to break out of such constricting frameworks. He also argues that McAlevey's ultimate aims in labor organizing leads us down the path of left electoral politics, where the power that has been built by workers through these deep organizing methods are undercut by the top-down system of politics available within the electoral realm. We also talked about the IWW approach, why it succeeds and why it fails,

Become a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave Andrea Haverkamp, President of CGE 6069; Sarah Pishioneri, labor organizer based in Oregon; and Alex Riccio, labor organizer based in Philadelphia; have a comradely discussion about the first two chapters of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey. Join us in discussion and some reading sessions on our Discord server! You can get in on the fun by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave and joining as a Rank-and-Filer, or Committee Member, or Strike Captain. Once joined, you'll receive an invitation to our Discord where we have a pdf of the book, multiple channels for discussions, and voice channels for periodic reading and chat sessions together! We cover the main arguments put forward in the introduction and chapter two concerning theories of power, the difference between advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing strategies, and whole-worker organizing. We also hiss and boo at the villains taken on by McAlevey na

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

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 longe

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

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

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 t

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 some

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

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.