Hello Friends and Comrades,
When I say “US” I’m talking about all of the people who aren’t billionaires and have very little to no power individually. As a sign I recently found from the Occupy Era said, "We are the 99%!” While we may not have much power individually as the slogan indicates, we do represent the majority of people. Together, we can absolutely build a better world — if we commit ourselves to this task.
Following our regular July episode, we started out with an interview of Andrea Johnson called F_ck Period Poverty. Johnson was starting a mutual aid project in the Twin Cities because she believes “hygiene is a human right — all kinds of hygiene.” When she realized the struggles people were going through without access to period products, such as tampons and pads, she decided to do something about it. It started when she was taking a class at Minneapolis College and someone didn’t have the pad they needed when they started their period. She lead a campaign on campus to make sure they were stocking needed hygiene items like these in “half the bathrooms on campus.” Johnson also began leaving tampons in bathrooms at one of her workplaces, and has started donating period products, “which are just as important as toilet paper,” to food shelves, which often don’t have all people’s preferred items for menstrual hygiene.
Andrea Johnson is still looking for folks to be involved in this ongoing project, which she hopes to turn into a non-profit. Period poverty is an international issue that “a 2021 report published in partnership with Days for Girls shared that at least 500 million women and girls across the world lacked adequate access to period supplies.” Johnson is currently focused on building community to tackle this issue in the Twin Cities. You can find out more about her mutual aid project on the F_ck Period Poverty Instagram.
For our second Special Interview of the last month, we spoke with Bjorn Johnson who is a Paraprofessional in Special Education in the Inver Grove Heights Schools. In SNV Special Interview: Children Are The Kindest Demographic On Earth, he speaks about his experience as a Paraprofessional. He describes it as reembracing his childhood and spoke with us about the positives of the job, but also lack of resources in the school system and lack of care for children in general. Bjorn Johnson says “we need to throw a lot more money into education” because we need to hire more staff. Schools are understaffed and underfunded, which leads to larger class sizes than are appropriate. While Inver Grove Heights pays better than most districts, staff are still underpaid for what they do.
Even given the demands of the job, and the significant need for reform within the education system to meet the needs of the children, Johnson says it “is so much fun and so rewarding.” This is a reminder that not only do working people do all the real work in a capitalist economy, but they actually put all the emotion and care into the most important jobs in society, like raising and educating children.
Johnson says he doesn’t know why people call folks like Trump “childish” when children are nothing like Trump, as they are usually very kind and adults are the people that do most of the bad things in the world. “I’ve never known a kid to start a war, I’ve never known a kid to take away people’s healthcare.” He says “people need to respect kids!” Every one of “US” deserves respect at every age.
One place where people have been taking on the powers that be in a real way to demand the support they need is in Nigeria, where we spoke with Dimeji Macaulay for another Special called, Crisis In Nigeria - Let The Poor Breathe. When we are again and again seeing all the short comings of our current systems, whether it be in the workplace or education and schooling, it is important to look to other working people across the globe for support and solidarity, but even more importantly, for ideas. How can we win the things we need?
Dimeji Macaulay is a socialist, trade union activist and member of the Workers and Youth Solidarity Network (WYST) in Abuja, Nigeria. We talked about a very successful recent protest by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and National Labor Congress (NLC), who mobilized workers to the street in Nigeria to protest the federal government. These protests are in response to devaluation of the currency (naira) and removal of fuel subsidies, causing hyperinflation. While the Tinubu regime said that there would be no protests and not to go out on the streets and even set up blockades in working class areas, Macaulay says “about a hundred thousand people” came out to protest across Nigeria including “Nigerian Union of Journalists, Nigerian Union of Teachers, Oil Workers,” as well as medical workers and civil servants. Workers and youth removed the gates of the National Assembly, sent security forces scattering, and thousands of demonstrators rushed in “to call the National Assemblies’ attention to the suffering of the people.” The workers continued to protest inside the gates for 2-3 hours before ending the protest.
In the coming period, Macaulay says the government has made many promises “but the government is not our friends,” and their capitalist profiteering is done in their own interest. He says the people must continue to call on the government to fund social programs and end corruption, even in the current situation which he describes as “volatile,” and in which he says “people are not happy.” He says that the future holds many “battles and struggles” because the ruling class is ultimately unable to meet our needs. The ruling class cannot solve our problems. We must solve our problems ourselves without depending on the corruption and self-serving nature of our systems current leaders.
Since the drive to undermine hierarchies and build the basis for a new culture starts at home, our regular episode for August, called The People's Family, examines this. We speak with Mary Gachie, and her children Cameron Phillips and Grace Wanza, for the main segment in the episode. Gachie says, “family in this place and time is kind of like a loaded buzz word.” She said sharing her experiences with others through this interview was done “in the spirit of sharing home and truth and the understanding that our lives are truly better when we act together…with a collective spirit of dismantling oppressive systems and caring for each other.” Our work to build the world we want to see must extend out into the community, but it starts with those closest to us and those who we share living space with.
In the discussion, Gachie, Phillips, and Wanza discuss the experience they have had across different times and places. As a young mother who had a child before the age of 18, Mary Gachie decided that she should “be able to participate in things that were important” to her, but the systems of support to do so did not exist. Her first experience of collectively making change came when she organized with other parents at UMD to form a child care cooperative that “took over the student lounge.” This momentum was the beginning of the creation of childcare on campus. She found “a collective struggle was the best way and the most supportive way to create the opportunity to participate” while being a mother. Gachie says she believed she had the right to participate, even if she “was a poor single mother and had the responsibility of a child.”
For Gachie, creating community and extended family came out of seeing how effective collective action could be. This lead to a family group, as Cameron Phillips and Grace Wanza said, that was open and non-judgmental. Even when people they had close connections with were experiencing situations of mental health or substance abuse crises, Phillips said they remained “our people” because, he noted, “we all gotta live and work together because we’ve all got to function.” Wanza added, “we are a very non-judgmental family,” and “we’ve seen a lot of different situations, and we’re not scared of anybody.” They all said they never supported rigid family roles, or gender roles, which made them “almost immune” to the disappointments of not living up to expectations, which some folks are really effected by.
Ultimately, one person’s experience may not be translatable to others, but it is absolutely true that “we all gotta live and work together.” The 99% of people, who don’t have huge amounts of generational or corporate wealth, have to get organized in their homes and their workplaces to take on the “THEM” at the financial top of our society. No one person, or one organization, in my view, has all the answers. That is why we have to listen to, and learn about, each other to find the best way forward to building the kind of society and world that we desperately need.
To borrow another slogan from the Occupy era — Another World Is Possible!
Solidarity,
Nick Shillingford - Host - Socialist News and Views
PS a poem for “US” from the diary of Frida Kahlo: