Hello Friends and Comrades,
The past month’s podcasts include:
SNV Special Interview: Significant Wins For Seward Co-op Workers
SNV Special Interview: Thoughts And Impressions From Socialism 2023
SNV Special Interview: International Centenary Conference On Lenin In Abuja Nigeria
Making Politics + Art At The End Of The World: Socialist News And Views Episode # 53
(Sticker pictured from The Born Again Labor Museum (B.A.L.M.))
"It's like the really boring mundane stuff that doesn't get talked about and for good reason; its not fun! Tireless, boring stuff." That’s how Anthony, a rank-and-file worker at Seward Co-op with United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) local 663, described the primary organizing that went into a successful contract campaign at their workplace. In May, Anthony says, they didn’t even know if they could get the numbers to take a strike vote in August or September but, “when it came down to it, we had an overwhelming majority passed to ratify a strike vote authorization.” Anthony says, when they started the contract campaign, “we just knew that we had to get ourselves organized,” and the only way to get a “feel for where people are at” is ultimately to “talk to the people that you work with on a daily basis, even if they are not your friends.” Anthony said workers met in a group every couple of weeks in the run up to the contract campaign.
Organizing is not always exciting and sexy work. As Anthony mentioned, a lot of what goes into organizing is regularly-occurring, boring meetings with others. These types of meetings involve logistical discussions, and often discussing the same issues again and again. They also involve educating working people on how the systems that already exist work, and how they can be changed. It isn’t a one-way street, but involves fully understanding how each part of the system works - this involves leaders learning about people’s lives inside and outside the workplace. We can connect with people in our communities, and work to build a better world, but we must learn what motivates others. Even if the solution may be the same - or similar - people’s perceived needs, motives, and goals must be taken into account.
Conferences can also play a significant role in organizing - both for union campaigns, as well as broader political campaigns. Conferences can cover a number of areas of interest in politics and organizing, or be very specific. We discussed two conferences this month on our podcast, including Socialism 2023, which took place in Chicago in September, and an upcoming conference on Lenin taking place in Abuja, Nigeria. The International Centenary Conference on “Lenin, Leninism, Africa & the World” will take place in January to commemorate 100 years since his death. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov died January 21, 1924.
Michael Hughes, Chairperson for Twin Cities chapter of Socialist Party USA (SP USA), who I spoke with to get thoughts on Socialism 2023 for the podcast, said this is his second time attending and, “it is always positive.” He said, for him, it is “a very great place to network - you get to meet a lot of great people and a lot of great authors.” Hughes says it is also reinvigorating to see so many young people are involved in the movement. It is this type of networking, learning, and organizing among people from across the country, and around the world, that is absolutely necessary to build a strong socialist movement, and ultimately, create a world that puts human dignity before money and power.
In speaking with Owei Lakemfa for the upcoming International Lenin conference in Abuja, Nigeria, we heard about another conference with an international character focusing on one individual of significance to the socialist movement. Lakemfa, a trade unionist, journalist, and human rights activist, said that “Lenin is one of the most intellectual human beings…that the world has ever known.” Lakemfa says it is important to take a look at Lenin’s ideas again, now that “the world is in such turbulence with wars all over the place,” and see if there are aspects of his ideas that we “can keep and others that we can leave out.” As one of the architects of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, that subsequently lead to revolutions all over the world, we must take a look at these ideas.
(Picture: Lenin in a wheelchair shortly after his third stroke in March 1923 by Maria Ulyanova - from The State Museum of Russian Political History)
The ideas, and the conversations, are so important to real organizing. Without this, we have what Adam Turl calls, in his audio essay Making Politics + Art At The End Of The World for Episode # 53, a “contemporary left…trained in theory without practice, political declarations without organizing, and vice versa, in a meme culture semi-separate from the actuality and authenticity of ‘in real life’ (IRL) organizing.” Turl says the reason for this is the neo-liberal individuation of Jodi Dean’s Communicative Capitalism. Dean says in Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle:
Communicative capitalism subsumes everything we do. It turns not just our mediated interactions, but all our interactions, into raw material for capital. Financial transactions, GPS location data, RFID tags, interactions that are filmed or photographed, and soon, the data generated by the small ubiquitous sensors in what is called the internet of things, enclose every aspect of our life into the data form. A few years ago we might have understood this as a communicative commons. Now, with the absorption of a wide array of forms of unstructured data into massive data pools, it is clear that we are dealing with something even more all-encompassing. Big data is the capitalists’ name for this material that Marx understood as the social substance.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is a mass terror that pervades every element of Episode # 53 from the local news, to the international news, to Turl’s audio essay. If we want to gain some level of power and control over the situation that we see confronting us on the world stage, it will not be enough to fill our online feeds with doom and horror. We must construct or reconstruct the collective and the commons that we have lost in real life. We can reclaim our “social substance” IRL. The time is now, before the authoritarian, and often fascist, structures of social media and social technology fully ooze into the world of our real lives. While it seems, as Jodi Dean says, that “Communicative capitalism subsumes everything we do,” technologies on the horizon, such as AI, could portend the possibility of things getting much worse. The movement of people rising up, especially around the issue of the genocide of the Palestinian people, and “noticing their chains” as the great Rosa Luxemburg said, are providing a glimpse of how things could become much better!
Educate! Agitate! Organize! Make Art! We can build a new culture that counters the dismal horrors of capitalism!
Onward! Solidarity!
Nick Shillingford - Host - Socialist News and Views
PLEASE ALSO LISTEN TO THIS IMPORTANT STATEMENT → Statement On Palestine from Jehad Adwan