Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Leg Day for Lefties
73 Plays3 years ago
How do we build working class power? How do we make the rich and powerful afraid of us instead of the other way around? We talk with Q. Anthony (formerly known as Andray Domise) a contributing editor with Maclean's and Brandon Love, co-secretary of the Toronto Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World to talk about this important question.
Recommended
Transcript
Support Appeal for Progress Report
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey folks, you're listening to The Progress Report on the Harbinger Media Network, and I just got a quick message before we get into what is a very good pod. We are at 440 some regular monthly donors to this independent little media project, and I would love to get it to 500 monthly donors by the end of the month.
00:00:16
Speaker
If you want to get us over the hump, get us to 500 monthly donors, it's very easy. Go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, pop in your credit card and give whatever you can, five, 10, $15 a month. We'd really appreciate it. And if you don't have the means, don't stress. But again, we're about 60 folks away from getting there. And it's really important to Jim and I that we become sustainable when it comes to funding.
00:00:40
Speaker
We're also one of several very good and excellent left-wing podcasts on the Harbinger Media Network, and a new episode that I want to recommend is the latest from Habib Tipliz, where Nashwa and Ryan welcome Amumalak Kakak to discuss her role as MP of Nunavut, the lingering impacts of colonialism on the north, and how that area of the country has been neglected.
00:01:00
Speaker
And that's the kind of content you'll get at Harbinger, where we're challenging right-wing and liberal corporate media dominance with a political point of view you won't find anywhere else. Get access to exclusive shows and other supporter-only content at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
Building Power Beyond Politics
00:01:44
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwetchibwiskigun, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory. And this podcast is a direct sequel to our last podcast, something we don't always do here. But our last podcast had lawyers, Avanish Nanda and Adam Saprowsky on. And in that pod, which you should go listen to, not that you have to, but you should just listen to our podcast as a rule if you're a regular listener, I made the case that
00:02:11
Speaker
expensive constitutional legal battles, especially when it comes to like labor law and unions are the big showy arm muscles when it comes to building power for the working class. That even if you win in court, the bosses or the rich and powerful can just ignore the laws or the rules and rewrite them to their own benefit. The left in general and labor unions in particular, I would argue have skipped leg day for too long. And that was the argument I was making in the pod. But what exactly
00:02:37
Speaker
is Leg Day. What does that mean? How does the working class build genuine power?
Discussion with Q. Anthony on Working-Class Power
00:02:43
Speaker
And joining me today to help answer that question is a man who never skips Leg Day. It is Q. Anthony, formerly known as Andre Demise, a contributing editor with McLean's Magazine, and a partner in the Black Indie Media Network resistance noir. Q, welcome. Welcome to the Bud. How you doing?
00:02:59
Speaker
I'm doing, you know, as good as can be expected, given the circumstances. Uh, man, I feel like, uh, you know, the, the standard, how you doing greeting is just, it's been a year and by now we should have learned to no longer use that. I asked that because I generally, I generally am interested in how people are doing.
00:03:17
Speaker
But yeah, COVID sucks. It sucks for me too. It sucks for everybody. I feel isolated as hell, like materially myself and the fam are doing okay. But I got to say this is like some bleak and depressing times if I'm being perfectly honest. And I know that it's coming out in my writing a little bit. But yeah, I hope that we can have honest conversations about how this shit is affecting everybody.
Brandon Love on Workplace Organization
00:03:40
Speaker
So that's how I'm doing.
00:03:41
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And also joining us is someone who I have no idea how he feels about leg day. But the person is Brandon Love, the co-secretary of the Toronto branch of the industrial workers of the world. Brandon spends his days looking for work in this capitalist hellscape and by night rants about politics to whoever will listen. Brandon, thank you for joining us on The Progress Report. Yeah, no problem. Thank you for having me.
00:04:05
Speaker
Okay. So let's, uh, let's kind of set up, we've set up the premise, but why don't we, uh, kind of like talk about when I say building power.
00:04:17
Speaker
and what that actually means. I think where a lot of people's brains go to is electoral politics and winning elections. Q, why don't you just walk us through the limits of liberal electoral politics and the conflicts that arise between that and building working class power?
Limitations of Electoral Politics
00:04:40
Speaker
Sure. So what happens with electoral politics? And it's something that in my past as a quote unquote progressive lib, I've fallen into that trap myself. But the idea is that in order to affect material change, the pathway to that and pretty much the only pathway to it is through electoral politics. So you often hear that when there are demands made of ruling class, when there's demands made of the elites and the people who create policy and so forth.
00:05:10
Speaker
you
00:05:11
Speaker
that the answer to their woes is to vote. Barack Obama was like the absolute master at this. He would raise something that gets people's energy up. He would talk about the Bush presidency. He would talk about Hillary Clinton's campaign tactics being divisive. He would talk about race and racism and economic inequality and the lack of healthcare and all this stuff. And people would boo, because obviously their frustrations were with the system.
00:05:41
Speaker
And then he would turn around and say, don't boo, vote. And I wonder if people now understand how pernicious that was, because when you tell people that the answer to their personal situation, their material conditions, their economic malaise and so forth, if the answer to that
00:05:59
Speaker
is via electoral politics. What it leaves out is that electoral politics is not by any stretch uncompromised. We know for a fact that politicians will, and they admit this, answer to the people that are lobbying them. They will answer it to special interest groups, even though they love to position themselves as though they aren't. But when Mitt Romney says something like, corporations are people, my friend, when people will automatically say that money and donations are free speech,
00:06:28
Speaker
then we know that the power rests with the class of people that have the money and that are able to incorporate and that do have the ability to hire lobbyists to advocate in their interests and that the average person hardly has any effect on political outcomes.
Mutual Aid and Local Organizing
00:06:47
Speaker
We know this, for example,
00:06:49
Speaker
when the Fight for 15 campaign has been going on for nigh on like 20 years now. I don't know that Joe Biden actually promised this. He talked about campaigning for it, but I will go so far as to say it was a campaign promise that a $15 an hour minimum wage was going to happen
00:07:11
Speaker
in a democratic presidency, that people were talking about what we're going to pull him left and make sure that this happens. They talked about a $2,000 stimulus paycheck. They talked about eliminating student loans. Now, again, it wasn't necessarily Biden's policy, but he did talk about being able to cancel up to $50,000 in student debt as long as it goes through the Congress and Senate first.
00:07:29
Speaker
And none of these things happened. There is a $1.9 trillion stimulus that's running down the pipeline in the US, but where's most of that money going? It's not necessarily going towards the people. So the people dump all of this time, energy, dump all of this money
00:07:43
Speaker
That is with their small donations and so forth into electoral politics. And that's viewed as the only pipeline to change. I actually got into it with singer John Legend and billionaire Mark Cuban one time on social media because Mark Cuban was talking about the importance of donating to food banks because in this pandemic era, food banks are stretched tight.
00:08:04
Speaker
And John Legend chimed in to say, well, we shouldn't be donating to food banks. And the logic of this is that if you simply try to repair the patches in the social safety, or try to patch the holes in the social safety net by donating to charities individually, you essentially let the ruling class off the hook, which is kind of true, kind of true in the sense that if we make charities the stopgap for social policy,
00:08:30
Speaker
It does let the class of people with the most power and the most money off the hook. That is entirely true. But to say that donating to food banks is a bad thing, that's absolute horseshit. And I said that, I said as much to him, you know, because you're saying that rather than donating to food banks, we ought to donate money to the campaigns of John Mossoff and Raphael Warnock in Georgia.
00:08:54
Speaker
That way the Democrats can win control of the Senate and with the control of the Senate and the House and the executive, then American progressives can get the kind of policies passed that need to be passed so that food banks become obsolete. And look how that fucking worked out. So you can see that there's a definite limit.
00:09:12
Speaker
uh, electoral politics there. And you know, what, what the political class will do is try to convince you that all your frustrations and all the energy that you've built up because of being able to look around you and seeing that your situation is garbage. The only avenue for expressing that is through electoral politics.
IWW's Unionizing Approach
00:09:30
Speaker
And that's the limit that I'm talking about. Yeah. Like Joe Biden is going to abolish, uh,
00:09:38
Speaker
food banks through some type of supply booklet, Cuban food program or something. You want to know what absolutely mind boggling thing about food banks is that they are new. I was born in 1983. The very first food bank in Canada opened its door in 1981, actually right here where I'm recording this in Edmonton.
00:09:59
Speaker
They are a very new development when it comes to actually feeding the hungry. And just a fun little food bank factoid for the audience out there. Okay, so you've set up the case that electoral politics clearly has its limits as a meaningful avenue for the working class to build power. So what is your broad kind of prescription and what should people be doing?
00:10:27
Speaker
make them afraid of you. That's in the history of, in the history of struggles, you know, the only, the only way to win any sort of concessions from the ruling class. And that's assuming that what you want, like the outcome that you want is to get those concessions. Keep in mind that these are the halfway measures. Any, any type of reform whatsoever is a concession to, you know, to, to regular people. You know, we call them the working class, the proletariat, whatever you want to call them.
00:10:50
Speaker
But the only way to even win reform is to make the ruling class afraid of you. And I'm not talking about losing their jobs in an election. I mean, actually afraid. Like, I may not be able to show my face in the streets afraid. So that's my prescription. And the form for that is direct action. The other form for that is, and people are going to argue about this, but I believe heavily in mutual aid.
00:11:14
Speaker
While people will, I think, overstate the importance of, for example, the Black Panthers Mutual Aid Program, not that it wasn't important, it absolutely was, but people will say things like, well, the state assassinated Trent Hampton and dismantled the Black Panthers and infiltrated them because of mutual aid programs. It's like, no, there was a lot more to it than that. But I will say that mutual aid programs do pose a significant threat
Challenges in Remote Work Organizing
00:11:37
Speaker
because, especially in an age,
00:11:39
Speaker
where we are becoming more and more and more isolated in our workplaces. We no longer have the quote-unquote shop floor. We aren't all working in factories. We don't have the ability to block off, cordon off every workplace that violates worker rights, that violates labor standards and so forth. We're living in an era where labor standards are more of a guideline than hard and fast rules.
00:12:01
Speaker
And that's because there are so many of us that are working remotely, so many of us that are working in cubicles and non-unionized environments. There are so many of us that are working in the gig economy and so forth. And a lot of that, when we talk about outsourcing work, the only danger here isn't the mere outsourcing of work to other countries. There's also the fact that the ability to engage in class power has also been exported to countries that are handling our manufacturing work. And now that we've
00:12:28
Speaker
essentially transformed ourselves into a post-industrial and highly service-based form of economic production. What that means is that we are very much isolated from each other. So the way to repair that or one way to repair that is to engage in local organizing. And the quickest way to engage in local organizing, especially around being able to meet people's needs,
00:12:49
Speaker
is mutual aid. And I think that there is a definite fear of that, engaging in forms of self-determination. You're seeing a wave of, when I say black nationalism, I'm not talking about, you know, like,
00:13:03
Speaker
a separatism or whatever it is that people like to misconstrue it as. When I say nationalism, I'm talking about things like pan-Africanism, understanding the ability of the diaspora to organize and empower each other, empower ourselves to engage in solidarity with other groups. All of these are various answers to a fairly simple problem. Who should hold the power? Should it be the people that accumulate the labor value of people
00:13:30
Speaker
Are there people that are working for them? Should it be the class of people that are able to hire other people's labor? Should it be the ones who control the levers of government, who are unelected and unaccountable and control the mechanisms of essentially this technocratic regime that we found ourselves within? Should it be them that hold the power? Or should it be the people that hold the power?
00:13:50
Speaker
My answer is pretty simple. There should be the people that hold the power. So we have to engage in modes of politics that don't simply reward the ones that say nice things. And then once they get elected, stop listening to us.
00:14:04
Speaker
Yeah. And I feel like this is a good opportunity to bring Brandon in now. And so the IWW, the Wobblies, I mean, they have a program to make the boss afraid of you. Why don't you kind of walk us through what the Wobblies, how the Wobblies are a part of that type of program?
00:14:24
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think as Q is kind of talking about, mutual aid is a hugely important thing to radicalize people and make them realize, to kind of help people meet their material needs so they can actually start to realize the power that they have. And I think within the workplace specifically,
00:14:45
Speaker
People don't realize that they have a huge amount of power to kind of affect society at large, or at the very least like improve the conditions kind of within their own workplace through kind of concerted organized action. You know, like oftentimes people will be in shitty like isolating jobs.
00:15:03
Speaker
And I think currently they're often their best response, at least what they think currently is that, you know, we'll just find another job. But this often just means like going to another job with a different shitty boss with many of the same kind of conditions. And I think the workplace kind of gives radicals a place to kind of talk to working people, let them know that the issues that they're facing in this particular workplace are shared by many other kind of workers.
00:15:27
Speaker
Essentially, it's a class issue, which allows you to bring up issues around class consciousness and elevate that idea in people's minds that you can't just escape this by going to a different job. You're going to have the same shitty capitalist boss there. I think that's where the workplace can be a really good starting point to elevate class consciousness in people.
00:15:52
Speaker
Yeah, Q, and I know you talked about mutual aid, but why don't we just focus on the workplace for a minute? Like, why is the workplace such an important place for folks who believe what we believe that the people should have the power of why is the workplace important as a place to organize?
00:16:10
Speaker
I mean, where do you spend most of your time throughout the day? People would like to spend eight hours a day sleeping, but that's just absolutely untrue. So once you factor in your commute and your time prepping to get ready for work and everything else,
00:16:27
Speaker
Like you are spending the majority of your day, at least like you're waking hours around the workplace. And for people that are working more than one job, you're spending all of your time in the workplace and then wherever you end up moonlighting. So whether you're doing DoorDash or
00:16:41
Speaker
Uber slash Uber Eats or whether you have a night job at, you know, a restaurant or whatever it is, you are spending a great deal of your time around other people that have the same interests that you do. And the interest is they want to be able to make enough to eat, to live, to put a roof over their heads, to be able to like, you know, if a sudden act of disaster comes into their lives that they're able to handle this without going into debt and to poverty.
00:17:07
Speaker
So given that you're spending a great deal of your time around other people that have the exact same interests that you do, then yes, the workplace is an incredibly important place for you to begin your organizing work. Your neighborhood is also a very important place for you to begin your organizing work, but
00:17:25
Speaker
Depending on where you live, some people may have your interest at heart, some may not. You may live next to a manager. You may live next to somebody who's an entrepreneur or working for themselves and so forth. So the interests don't necessarily align, but in the workplace, there are fairly solid class lines. There are people that work and are managed, and there are people that are managers. There are people that are executives. So there's nowhere that the lines are drawn in such a distinct fashion as inside the workplace.
Impact of Workplace Organizing
00:17:52
Speaker
To me, it's just common sense that that's where you start.
00:17:56
Speaker
And I'd also make the argument that not only is it a place where we spend a huge chunk of our lives, uh, and, um, and you know, that these are the people that you're going to see on a regular basis, sometimes more than your family, but the work organizing the workplace is also the place that can inflict the most like actual economic harm on, you know, on capitalism. You know what I mean? Like, yeah, like that's, that's, that's where you actually heard him. Remember at the beginning of the pandemic last year,
00:18:26
Speaker
that the Weston family decided that they were going to offer workers a temporary $2 an hour wage increase because the heroes who are on the front lines are taking all the risks and making sure
00:18:40
Speaker
that folks are still able to go and get their groceries. Essentially what they're doing is they're the end of the supply chain. And without those frontline workers, it doesn't matter if you have, whether it's the agricultural workers, whether it's the grocery pickers in the warehouses, whether it's the truck drivers and so forth, nothing actually moves until it hits the retail end.
00:18:59
Speaker
And because they know that they're underpaying retail workers and especially because retail workers are taking on the additional risk of being in a place exposed to many people that could possibly be exhaling pathogens at the onset of a pandemic.
00:19:16
Speaker
they placate people, they placate union demands for $2 an hour, which is, as far as I know, this has been years in the making. It's three to four years that UFCW has been asking for a wage increase. So they make that concession and call the workers heroes. And then after everything has died down and normalcy has sort of crept into the sort of like the milieu in which you find ourselves into the pandemic, like we've essentially normalized all of this.
00:19:46
Speaker
They quietly rescind that $2 an hour wage increase, and people are back to where they were in the first place. Now, have the conditions changed? No, they've actually gotten worse. We went from a couple dozen cases to 100 or so cases to hundreds of cases. Now we're on a normal basis, over 1,000 cases diagnosed per day, so things have gone worse. You're not in Ontario, you're talking about. Yeah, in Ontario, sorry. I'm in Toronto, so you know that I'm going to end up
00:20:15
Speaker
focusing on the center of the universe. You're very sorry about that, but you get the idea. But the same thing has happened in Alberta, that between the first and the second wave, there has been a steady uptick in cases. Exactly. The third wave is starting here, and superstar workers are negotiating in negotiations right now with Sobi or not Sobi's Loblaws. Loblaws, yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker
And they are, anecdotally, I don't think those negotiations are real. I think that those $2 raises are off the table. It is bad, right? And the line from the Solidarity Forever song is still true, right? Without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel can turn. The economy doesn't work unless hundreds of thousands of people actually go and stock shelves at a superstore or man the
00:21:06
Speaker
the doors there or work the cash register or whatever job you can think of. Literally, the economy and the flow of money stops. Keep in mind that a lot of this is, to me, to draw away from the question,
00:21:23
Speaker
Why do we pay for food? No, seriously. I need this to live. I need this to live. I have to pay how much to get this thing I need to live? Yeah. Yeah. And of, uh, you know, thoughts about this with a lot of different people as to why it, I mean, first of all, Canada doesn't have a quote unquote food stamp program. Like we don't have a food subsidy program.
00:21:43
Speaker
nationally or provincially. And even that distracts from the question, why is food something that we pay for? And that's, I mean, that probably is going to throw some people for a loop and why wouldn't we pay for food? But we do know that a human necessity is something that we've essentially relegated all of the responsibility and the profit taking to large companies. Essentially, we've gotten oligarchy on food production and food distribution in this country.
00:22:09
Speaker
And it's a very uneven mode of food production. People who are living in northern communities are paying absolutely unreal, I mean, obviously it's real for them, but to me, it's just inconceivable that people will pay $20 for a watermelon or something to that effect, right? So because the way that we've set up our distribution channels for food,
00:22:28
Speaker
causes people in northern communities to have to pay so much more for food. And this has obviously like deleterious health effects. The question is, why do we even pay for it in the first place? And a lot of this gets subsumed behind the conversation about whether or not retail workers ought to be given hazard pay for working in what is obviously at this point, a very hazardous environment. And we've essentially normalized that, that yeah, you know, everyone's going to take one for the team and you are too. So while white collar workers, and I include myself in this, like I don't
00:22:56
Speaker
I work remotely, but people who can, who aren't those essential frontline workers can work remotely and essentially remove themselves from the worst effects of this pandemic. And people who are much more precarious, oftentimes have fewer, there's a much more labor precarity, I'm going to say, around them, even if you are unionized. There's still the ability for these stores to be closed down or for people to be laid off, et cetera.
00:23:22
Speaker
You know, they're taking the brunt of this work and we can't even find it in our hearts to put terror into the minds of anybody that would take away their pay. And that's what's necessary right now.
00:23:37
Speaker
Okay. We've established that electoral politics is not necessarily the best place for this. We've talked about the importance of the workplace. People come to me and they're like, what do I do? I want to get involved. I want to make a difference. One of the things that I will tell people is to get involved in your union.
00:23:56
Speaker
doesn't necessarily feel like it's enough. But Brandon, why don't we talk about the state of the labor movement as it currently exists and why unions are this much diminished force than they are now compared to what they were, say, 80 some years ago when they were making the boss.
Historical Shift in Union Influence
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there's like a really good article called Rancuffed by Aliyah Ahmed that kind of discusses the history of unions and how they used to be like a militant organization that was rooted kind of in the rank and file.
00:24:30
Speaker
But kind of since I think 1945 with the Ford-Windsor plant strike, that was settled by Justice Ivan Rand in posing a labor piece on the Wildcats striking workers, like thousands of them. Unions since 1945 have been kind of hamstrung by this legislation and kind of bureaucratization and the legal framework that kind of exists now because of this decision.
00:24:55
Speaker
that favors the bosses and capital over workers. And before 1945, before that point, unions weren't a legalized, institutionalized entity. They were just groups of workers on the shop floor, acting together in solidarity. They could go on wild-hat strikes. There was no contract saying that they couldn't do this, couldn't do that during the life of their contract like we have now.
00:25:19
Speaker
And basically, you know, workers have the ability to withhold their labor at any time to disrupt production and halt capital accumulation, which I think as Q has been talking about, like, how do we strike fear into the minds of the ruling elite? And generally, it's by stopping capital accumulation. That scares the shit out of them quite a bit. And I guess the decision from that 1945 that Justin, that Justice
00:25:44
Speaker
I've been ran made kind of led to the ran formula, which led to like mandatory dues check off, where employers must kind of deduct dues from all employees in a unionized workplace and then remit those to the workers union. And then in return, the unions had to abide by the understanding that strikes during the life of those collective agreements are illegal, and thereby kind of
00:26:05
Speaker
instituting what I've been saying, the labor piece, where you have these legal frameworks for dealing with issues, you can go with the grievance process, but you can't disrupt production, you can't hold capital accumulation. That is always going to happen, regardless of what union that you have in place.
00:26:24
Speaker
And I guess, you know, at the time, many people thought that this was like a win for the labor movement. But there were also many people who were concerned that it would result in the bosses, and eventually the unions themselves kind of undermine worker militancy. It had the effect of kind of creating a division between rank and file workers, and then now they just professionalized and highly paid kind of union leaders and staffers. And
00:26:48
Speaker
I don't want to shit all over these people. Some of them are still doing great work today. I've worked with some of these union leaders that we have now, and I don't want to say that it's all entirely their fault. They're just hamstrung by this framework that exists. But it does result in conditions where these professionalized class of union leaders don't have to personally endure the concessions that their workers do, and then it can lead to them wanting their members to settle for less.
00:27:15
Speaker
So I think the labor piece is kind of the main thing that it hamstrungs workers today within their workplace. It's a de-radicalizing force and it removes workers like trusts and unions to make their lives better when it doesn't really need to be that way.
00:27:32
Speaker
And I think, you know, knowing this kind of history of how unions used to be more radical, we need to go to a point where like disrupting the point of production and I called in capital accumulation through direct action is how we should be trying to achieve our demands, not through grievance processes, which are highly limited and all these other kind of methods that labor unions are kind of forced not to take part in today.
00:27:54
Speaker
So that seems to be a big difference. So Q, what would you say the biggest difference is between a union like the IWW and a current mainstream business union? I don't want to denigrate Bash. Yeah, I don't want you to bash the existing. There are some hard limits that exist, right? And all of the stuff Brandon just talked about is real.
00:28:20
Speaker
Well, one of the issues with some of the larger mainstream unions is that they have a present and a past that doesn't necessarily comport with what's necessary right now. To give an example, like there's a reason that the, okay, I can say something about the AFL-CIO because they're not here and what are they going to do, fight me? But there's a reason that it's called the AFL-CIA, for example, right?
00:28:41
Speaker
that there has been collusion with some, you know, some labor groups towards the state and the execution of imperialism. Also that, you know, many mainstream unions recognize, for example, police associations as unions also. And in any picketing situation, you know, where do you normally find the police and where do you find the workers? There are oftentimes on opposite sides.
IWW vs Mainstream Unions
00:29:05
Speaker
So the state's ability to exercise violence on the worker is
00:29:08
Speaker
conducted through the police and to be, to recognize the police as workers is to me, it's, it's, it just doesn't make sense. It's an antagonistic kind of contradiction. There's also the fact that
00:29:22
Speaker
And I'm going to be very careful about how I say this. There has been a history of racism in unions that has in some ways worked itself out, but in many ways still perpetuates itself. So, you know, to be able to find, you know, labor feeders, manager, ergot, stewards and so forth.
00:29:42
Speaker
that are people of color is still an issue that unions are working through. Whereas with the Wobblies, not to say that there hasn't been histories of racism, bigotry, antagonism, and so forth, but these are things that the IWW is constantly self-criticizing and working on in the meantime.
00:30:03
Speaker
Um, the IWW also does not recognize police associations as unions. They understand that, you know, police are essentially the enemies of the workers at their class traders and so on. So, uh, their, their method isn't simply to, you know, uh, figure out what, uh, what is legal, what is prescribed through the labor laws that we've been able to hammer out and, uh, you know, agreements that, uh, the workers have come to with, uh, with their,
00:30:31
Speaker
that is the management structure. The IWW will simply engage in wildcat strikes.
00:30:37
Speaker
The IWW believes that an injury to one is an injury to all. So, any action taken against a single worker is an action taken against workers as a whole. And I believe that the IWW's tacit approval of wildcat strikes, but also their inherent approval of forms of mutual aid, just to make sure that not only are like comrades in the workplace taken care of, what people in communities are taken care of,
00:31:01
Speaker
To me, it gets outside of what we find to be the limits of labor aristocracy, if that makes sense. Yeah, and I'd pose the same question to you, Brandon. What do the Wobblies do that are different from the current business unions that exist as they are right now?
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think even just the way we approach unionizing in a workplace is entirely different. I guess, for instance, right now, if you want to form a mainstream union, a typical union building campaign involves a card signing campaign.
00:31:37
Speaker
You get 40% of the workers to sign cards. You submit that to, in our case, the Ontario Labor Relations Board. If you meet that threshold, then it goes to a vote where then 50% of the workers who turn out to vote have to vote in favor of forming the union.
00:31:54
Speaker
Once that union's built, or once that vote happens, let's say it's approved, then that results in the union. And now all workers within that workplace, whether or not they voted yes or no, or whether they just voted at all, now have to start paying dues. So that kind of dues check off process that I was talking about.
00:32:12
Speaker
And I generally support these efforts when they happen. I'm not saying I'm against them, obviously, but the IWW approach is generally one built on building a strong internal workplace committee where you get more or less most of the consensus of the workers in that workplace to be on board with the idea of a union. There's not necessarily a card signing campaign or anything.
00:32:34
Speaker
like that. It's about building that strong workplace committee that kind of actually does the hard work of convincing all the workers in that workplace that they should be a part of a union. And I think there's kind of good benefits to that as well as the IWW relies on voluntary dues still. So we don't, there's no dues check off as an IWW union. It's voluntary. So if the union starts doing stuff you don't like, you have the option to not pay your dues.
00:33:03
Speaker
And then I think Q talked about this already, but we rely on direct action and solidarity. And we have as well an industrial union focus, which I think is quite a difference as well. It's one of the most probably important distinctions.
00:33:18
Speaker
So just to give an example, if a union at a university generally would just try to organize the teaching assistants or the grad assistants and the professors, well, an industrial union approach would look to unionize that whole industry of education and everything that makes that industry run. So the janitors, the food service workers, even the students, if you could get a more organized student union.
00:33:43
Speaker
The advantage of this is that it gives you way more leverage and power over the bosses and administrators. And it also kind of builds class-wide solidarity that breaks down barriers between so-called middle-class professionals and working-class laborers, making people realize that they do, in fact, have shared interests and goals in common.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's a super, I think both of you have really kind of laid out the case for one, like a labor militancy that doesn't exist anymore, and that we need to bring back and that like, you know, an organization that is currently doing that is the IWW.
00:34:24
Speaker
Q, I brought up the fact that you were a member of the IWW. One thing that you've also recently did is you very recently publicly joined the Communist Party of Canada. We were just talking about the limits of electoral politics, but why don't you tell the audience about why you joined
00:34:42
Speaker
you know, the CPC and like, you know, how are they different from the other political parties that are out there?
Q. Anthony on Joining Communist Party
00:34:49
Speaker
Well, I mean, you would figure that there's a contradiction than being part of the IWW and the Communist Party of Canada. I mean, uh, typically, you know, the two organizations that is not the organization, so I should say like the two tendencies, uh, that is communism and anarcho-syndicalism have been antagonistic towards each other. And obviously there are some contradictions there, but in, in my, um,
00:35:12
Speaker
in my politics, like the way that I arrived where I am politically was through Pan-Africanism. So to me,
00:35:19
Speaker
The historical, like, tendential differences don't really mean a heck of a lot. And it's entirely about what are the conditions for people right now and where could there be improvements in those conditions. And I think that the IWW has it absolutely correct when it comes to training people and how to organize inside of the workplace and training people and how to organize in their lives generally. I think one thing that the Communist Party does extremely well
00:35:49
Speaker
is develop a theory of change. That is, what are the conditions? What history do conditions like the ones that we face have? What do they have in common with other points throughout recorded human history? And then what do we do about that?
00:36:07
Speaker
And I do firmly believe that what's necessary is a political alternative, but we can't simply develop a political alternative, like a socialist alternative to a bourgeois electoral system. Even if we're talking about going as far left as the NDP, the NDP is still fundamentally a capitalist party. I mean, they removed socialism from their charter, I believe it was in 2013.
00:36:29
Speaker
and has essentially run as a centrist to left of centrist party ever since Alaska McDonough was leader. So we don't have a socialist alternative in this country, but the way that you build a socialist alternative, that sort of a cadre, isn't by simply creating a party and saying, hey, everyone join. You have to build a very strong core of people with fundamental beliefs in the constitution to develop democratic centralism.
00:36:54
Speaker
And before you begin the very hard work of creating a mass movement, you have to do the even harder work of creating a firm and ideologically rooted cadre. And that to me is what's necessary. That's why I joined the Communist Party of Canada. But I saw
00:37:15
Speaker
especially being a black person myself and knowing that I had to, I discovered communism like later on in my life and sort of put two and two together. Like how do we end imperialism? How do we end white supremacy? Like what do all of these things have in common? You know, what they have in common are class interests, which is, some people may call that class reductionism. Like it's really just a matter of, you know, dialectical materialism and historical materialism.
00:37:42
Speaker
that it is in the interest of the capitalist class to keep us divided from one another. I still do believe in pan-Africanism and the necessity of having the African diaspora come together as multiple nations against the forces of Eurocentric imperialism. In order for that to happen within the imperial core, we have to do the very difficult work of overturning the imperial core. And that has to be done
00:38:11
Speaker
with the support of a broad working class movement. And if we're going to engage in electoral politics as an alternative, I don't see any right now viable alternative other than developing that through the Communist Party of Canada.
00:38:27
Speaker
I'm a little ignorant about what the CPC is up to, especially in my neck of the woods. I know Communist parties in other countries have engaged in mutual aid work and feeding the hungry and doing a variety of things of that nature. Is the CPC up to that sort of thing in Canada? There are different CPC clubs. I'm not going to speak for all the CPC clubs, but I did see that as a shortcoming in the club that I'm a part of. I'm in the Toronto East Club.
00:38:55
Speaker
And my brother Kenny is part of the Toronto Parkdale Club. And we joined not very far apart from one another, but we joined with the same intention in mind, which was to push the CPC towards a model that
00:39:13
Speaker
I don't want to say mimics, but more closely approximates what other communist parties in other countries are doing, which is to engage in that community work and to engage in that mutual aid work. We can't live in the world of theory. We can't live in the world of could or should await maybes.
00:39:32
Speaker
One of the criticisms that I get from a friend of mine, Matthew Green, who gives me a little nudge of the rib every now and then, is that the Communist Party of Canada is one of the world's greatest book clubs. You also call him the Communist Book Club of Canada, which is fine, it's whatever. I got some hard disses for him in the NDP as well, but it does get to a bit of a truth, which is that
00:39:55
Speaker
People do perceive the party as living entirely within the realm of theory, and there's simply not enough material action taking place. And look, if people in the neighborhood where I come from haven't seen communist party of Canada members, if they don't know who the leaders are, if they don't know party members by name, then obviously there's a problem. So it's something that has been a shortcoming and there has been a history of things like, you know,
00:40:20
Speaker
anti-black racism that has happened within the party in years past, or not necessarily in the club that I'm part of, but has happened in clubs in Canada, which does reflect badly on the party, unfortunately. But from my point of view, you can't wait around for an organization to be perfect before you join in. I think if you have the time, the capacity
00:40:41
Speaker
and the ability, then it's incumbent on people with those abilities to join revolutionary parties and to push them towards what's going to be necessary for it to become a mass movement.
00:40:54
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, is it a book club or is it improving the material conditions of the people as a fundamental tension, right? Yeah. And it's an interesting one. And we do come back to this mutual aid question. And the people doing mutual aid here in Edmonton, where I am, there's mostly anarchists. It's Treaty 6 outreach.
00:41:21
Speaker
or it's folks who are organized around Bear Clan, so it's an indigenous-led organization that does street outreach. Those are the ones that are currently in my world. Not to say that the Communist Party of Canada shouldn't, I believe they should, but I don't see them doing that right now.
00:41:43
Speaker
It's funny to think about how, and being a political party has real advantages. It's funny to think about it. Just to give you an example of how, I am currently in the process of getting my shit together in order to run to be a Senate candidate in Alberta. Alberta has these wacky things called Senate elections that aren't actually real.
00:42:06
Speaker
No, the person who wins the election doesn't get to become a Senator. But what it does, when you win, what happens is the Premier writes a nice letter to the Prime Minister saying, will you please appoint this person to the Senate? They want an election. But hilariously, the Senate candidates are allowed to write tax receipts.
00:42:31
Speaker
If someone gives a $400 donation worth of food and say we feed a bunch of unhoused people, that person gets a tax receipt for $300.
00:42:41
Speaker
You know, like it's an insane tax receipt that political candidates get in this province. And so currently contemplating like, you know, how to do things like this with the team that I'm building for this kind of joke, not a joke Senate campaign, but like not to say just to give an example of how the Communist Party of Canada could be doing something.
00:43:09
Speaker
Another big thing that I think is worth bringing up is the question of protests.
Effectiveness of Protests
00:43:17
Speaker
I think protests, we saw a lot of them over the past year in Canada, in Edmonton where I am, we saw 15,000 people in the streets for BLM. We saw 12,000 people in the streets for Greta Thunberg. I'm sure in Toronto there was similarly massive amounts
00:43:34
Speaker
of numbers of folks in the streets and even Montreal, I know as a pretty kind of like militant street protest scene with their kind of like annual fuck the cops thing. But like, what are the value of protests? What are their limits? And what is the fundamental difference in the kind of mobilizing versus organizing kind of question there?
00:43:58
Speaker
Oh, this is one of my favorite topics. Okay. And I have to preface this by saying that please do not take anything that I'm about to say as a knock against protesting because protesting is absolutely necessary.
00:44:11
Speaker
What I find, though, is that people often forget that there are steps beyond protesting. And unfortunately, they end up getting diverted into heat sinks that are designed to take the energy out of what the protests were there to do in the first place. So we saw a series of uprisings last year. But I think you might have noticed, especially after this Blackout Tuesday event, where corporate people and celebrities got involved in the whole mix,
00:44:38
Speaker
You would see events, and one of them happened right here in Toronto, where people would organize protests and be out marching with police and kneeling with police. Politicians would come out and put their fists in the air. And there was a gradual co-option of the energy of the protests that ended up getting diverted into electoral politics to the point where politicians and political parties were comfortable saying things like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor are on the ballot.
00:45:07
Speaker
If these people had any shame and if they were made to be afraid of those protesters and what the purpose of the protest was, they would never feel comfortable saying these things. And that is the process of co-option and co-option is itself a form of organization on the part of the ruling class.
00:45:26
Speaker
So at all times, the ruling class is in the process of organizing. The ability to take the energy of protest movements, of revolutionary movements, and then subsume it into capitalism, and subsume it into electoral politics, and then sell it right back to the people as, well, this is what your choice is. It's us or them.
00:45:42
Speaker
and these are your only choices. Not that there's a problem with the system and I am the threat. The threat is actually these people that I also happen to dislike or that whose politics I happen to oppose. And not even really fundamentally in principle, I just happen to like my aesthetics better and I'm part of a different political party. The other part is that
00:45:59
Speaker
You saw companies like Amazon and Spotify and Netflix start talking about Black Lives Matter in a very, what seemed like a self reflective way, but this was almost entirely aesthetic. So on Amazon's front page, for example, you'd say you would see like a Black Lives Matter message or on Netflix, they create the category. Probably existed before this, but it became highlighted during the course of the protest that there's like a black voices.
00:46:25
Speaker
uh, section in their, their catalog. Disney has the exact same thing. I was actually scrolling through Disney plus. I got kids. I got this new plus. I can't make any apologies for that. But there's a black voices section with like black Panther, which is pro CIA propaganda in there. So.
00:46:40
Speaker
It's like with protesting comes the danger of if you are highly mobilized, you will have an effective protest. But if you are highly mobilized and not highly enough organized, then your protest movement can and will be subsumed into the dominant class narrative.
00:46:56
Speaker
Now I'm not saying this as somebody who is like an expert organizer myself. I'm not by any stretch, but I have the ability to observe things. I have done plenty of studying in this area and I'm actually writing a book on the subject, which is how it is.
00:47:11
Speaker
that the energy of these movements simply get co-opted into the broader ruling class narrative. And again, it's repackaged and resold back to people. I think we saw a really good example of this at the Grammys where the artist Lil Baby did a song performance and the aesthetics of the performance where people, like actors, you have to remember that in music videos and on stage, these people are all actors, dressed up as police officers. And he's rapping, he's getting in the officer's face and then he
00:47:39
Speaker
you know, jumps up on top of a police car, which is not a police car, but a prop designed to look like a police car or painted up to look like a police car. You know, he's dancing on top of it and he's singing. And it's like, as I'm watching this, I'm thinking this is what the cul-de-sac of culture is designed to do. It's designed to divert radical action and revolutionary power into
00:48:00
Speaker
cultural aesthetics and then calling that the victory that having a song and dance performance in front of an audience of millions is somehow going to cut like spark revolutionary change when in fact revolutionary change was already happening on the ground. It's not like police were simply
00:48:16
Speaker
dancing on police cars, people were destroying police cars. They weren't just getting an officer's faces. They were being beaten down and arrested and tear gassed and shot in the face with hardened rubber bullets by these police officers. So as a matter of fact, the circumstances of real life were much more dire than what you were seeing in that performance. That performance, if anything, was a step back to say, well, hang on a second, let's just go back to this form of peaceful protest where
00:48:40
Speaker
We felt like they couldn't do anything to us. That's just simply not what happens in real life. The unfortunate side effect of under-organizing is that people who either out of ignorance or out of deliberate malice have the ability to out-organize you, to take away the power of your movement and essentially to put you right back where you were in the first place, which is where we find ourselves right now.
00:49:05
Speaker
And Brandon, I put the same question to you. Where do you come down on the kind of mobilizing versus organizing question?
00:49:13
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like I largely agree with Q and everything that he just said. It totally is true that these movements just get subsumed. And I think by the dominant culture and these cultural wins are now somehow a victory. But I guess it could also be like, I want to say maybe it's a failure of the left to make any kind of viable political alternative and reality kind of seem real.
00:49:40
Speaker
that it's so easy for the dominant forces in our society just to take these movements, because there is no identifiable left that really exists out there. There's no party that you can point to, or organization that's large. AOC is as left as you get in the US, or the NDP is a left-wing party to a lot of people here. But to us, as socialists and communists here, we're like, no, those people aren't fucking left.
00:50:11
Speaker
So, yeah, I think having Q said all that, I think we have to, as leftists, have to be able to not let that happen, to kind of take that energy from protests and put it into something that actually will build a real organization, whether it be a political party or
00:50:28
Speaker
labor unions or whatever, but an actual organized left alternative that can fill that void that people have. Otherwise, I think as capitalism starts to decay, the populist far right will fill in that void and will bring people to far right ideologies instead of to the left.
00:50:52
Speaker
Interesting. It's an interesting question, the mobilizing version, the organizing one. And it's much like the question of courts versus organizing. You don't say none, no courts. You don't say no mobilizing. But the work of organizing is hard. It's not sexy.
00:51:13
Speaker
It means talking to people who you don't always like or agree with or wouldn't naturally or regularly speak to if you weren't trying to do something to change the world for the better. But it is something you got to do. And one second to last thing that I think is worth talking about is we had a lot of chatter here in Alberta after Kenny took power about a general strike. And
00:51:41
Speaker
A general strike is a big fucking deal. I think it's important to be clear what you're talking about when you're talking about a general strike. Because the unions, I mean, in this province, I assume in Ontario as well, aren't even on the level where they're able to just have successful strikes of their own, like at their own workplaces, let alone spreading that to dozens of other workplaces into the general population.
00:52:10
Speaker
And when you're talking about a general strike, you're talking about a legitimate five to 10 year organizing project.
00:52:19
Speaker
And, and the work simply just hasn't been done here in Alberta. And, and, you know, the last time labor even attempted something like this, the, the, the days of action during the Harris days, um, you know, like there were some wins and there were some losses, but those weren't even general strikes and those, and those were still huge fucking efforts and huge deals. They would go town to town and shut down a town. So I'm curious where you come up on the, uh, on the, the kind of like general strike as a tactic as well as the kind of like work necessary to even pull it off.
00:52:49
Speaker
I mean, one has to keep in mind that the general strike doesn't simply materialize out of, out of thin air. The general strike general, like it often, and this is whether we're referring to like Winnipeg, Montreal for referring to the UK labor strike, the, uh, the labor strikes and the Caribbean, et cetera. These often begin as strikes, uh, within one industry or one trade sector that spread out like wildfire to others that others are willing, ready and willing to act in solidarity.
00:53:15
Speaker
But like I said, the conditions are different now because essentially the shop floor has been exported elsewhere and workers are heavily isolated and alienated. So that would mean that the entire percariate class or the frontline workers, as we call them, would have to be mobilized in order for a general strike to happen. Without the strength of labor unions backing that percariate class, what are we going to do to make sure that they're covered in the meantime? Do we have strike funds available for DoorDash drivers?
00:53:43
Speaker
Do we have strike funds available for sex workers? Do we have strike funds available for people that are working in all kinds of... How many of you put this? Like politely but succinctly.
00:53:59
Speaker
We haven't actually done the fucking work to make sure that people can put food on their tables in the first place. I was tailing off into this point about various people in precarious work situations, but I don't think that's really strident enough. What I'm trying to say is, are we actually making sure that people's needs are taken care of? No, we aren't. In the absence of strong unionized environments, in the absence of strong labor policy and labor solidarity,
00:54:28
Speaker
What we have instead is like an everybody out for themselves mentality. So if we were to go engage in a general strike, for example, how can I make sure that my next door neighbor and how can I make sure that a friend of mine online is going to have everything that they need? We can't. And that is the sort of like the material difference between general strikes that happened back then and the proposal for
Complexities of Organizing a General Strike
00:54:50
Speaker
a general strike. Now, we simply haven't done the work necessary to make
00:54:53
Speaker
a general strike happened in the first place. The way that strikes end up getting broken up isn't simply due to state violence. Strikes also get broken up when people feel the need to like cover their material needs that they just, they need to eat. They need to keep the lights on. They need to make sure that their children are able to sleep in a warm bed at nighttime. You know, like real life actually gets to you. And unfortunately, real life has already gotten to people to the point where we have like 10 cities in every major city right now. Are we making sure that everyone's needs in 10 cities are taken care of?
00:55:23
Speaker
We're not. So I don't see a general strike as a realistic possibility for the time being until we get our shit together where it comes to mutual aid. Yeah, you said it, man. I mean, it's, it's important. I think, you know, I don't, I'm not a member of the Communist Party of Canada. I'm not a wobbly, but I think fundamentally.
00:55:42
Speaker
We do have to come together, and when we talk about left unity, which is a pretty fraught fucking subject for a variety of... Oh, God. This is the other thing too, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you is that I don't think we all have to be on the same Wi-Fi signal. I don't think that we all necessarily have to get along. I do think, though, that there are some general principles of unity required.
00:56:07
Speaker
I know that the online space often times amplifies a whole lot of weird stuff that doesn't play out in real life. Like I've never, for example, had a single conversation either within the Communist Party of Canada or really anywhere in my life about Stalin. Never happened. Not once. You know, I've never had a conversation about the
00:56:27
Speaker
IWW, trying to, through the African Blood Brotherhood, poach members out of the UNIA. Hasn't happened. It's just stuff that regular people do not talk about and generally do not care about. So online stuff amplifies a whole lot of, I think people just generally read books and they want to show off how much they know and want to argue over that. But where I do see some of these tendential splits is in ideology. And ideology itself taking precedent over what
00:56:57
Speaker
conditions actually look like for people. So am I going to have an argument with any of, you know, friends and family from the IWW over anti-communist tactics in the past? No, I do not. I just don't care. I care about what's happening right now. I care about people right now. I don't care about all this stuff from previous. We have the ability to make our own history. And I think that
00:57:22
Speaker
what a lot of like what bogs a lot of people down in this sort of like quest for left unity is like ideas and principles that for the most part don't really have anything to do with them whatsoever I think it is possible to for example and other party members may not agree with me I'm just saying this as Q I'm not saying this as you know a representative for any party or whatever
00:57:44
Speaker
I think it is possible to work with and alongside, for example, the NDP. I think it is entirely possible, especially when the CPC is ready to run people federally. I don't know that we're there yet, but when we are ready to have a mass run in every writing, that if communist members were elected
00:58:04
Speaker
to elected to parliament, what would very likely happen is an understanding and possibly even coalitioning with NDP people. Now, maybe that's just a wishful thing on my part. That's just what my outlook is. They are the people with the closest tendency to ours, even if they're not necessarily socialist in nature. So I think that all of these
00:58:25
Speaker
Like these weird ideas from that, not even necessarily from the past, but that we bring in with our own egos and lead with them are kind of what gets in the way. And if we were able to drop that for a second and have like principled and fruitful conversations about those differences, that would help a hell of a lot.
00:58:49
Speaker
Look at what's happening, for example, with China, right? You have people on the so-called left, but are generally like, you know, left of center progressive.
00:58:59
Speaker
that agree that China is a threat. You have people on the far right that agree that China is a threat. There's a neoliberal consensus that something has to be done about China. And what do you see as a result of that? There is a wave of sinophobic hate crimes, which culminated yesterday in a mass shooting at massage parlors in Atlanta, like a multitude of them. And I believe it was eight women that were killed by a white mass shooter.
00:59:21
Speaker
Now, how can you immerse yourself in a media environment that has been trumpeting for years, that China is a rising threat, that Chinese people are somehow a threat, that play into these more than a century old yellow peril narratives?
00:59:37
Speaker
And this is supported on the so-called left, at least as far as the political and media sphere is concerned. This is what passes for left. And on the right, they're able to develop consensus around neoliberal ideas. They also develop consensus around things like austerity, around debt hockery and these things like they differ in terms of aesthetics and they differ in terms of language. But in terms of policy and policy outcomes, there's not a heck of a lot of daylight between them. But where it comes to
01:00:06
Speaker
the actual principle of left, the smallest split causes a massive schism that becomes irreconcilable. I just don't think that some of these contradictions, I don't even like to call them tendencies, I call them perspectives and outlooks.
01:00:23
Speaker
I don't think that they are necessarily antagonistic. I don't think that they are irreconcilable. I think that the Communist Party and the IWW can work together on many fronts. We don't live in a post-revolution environment. Even if it does come down to a post-revolutionary environment,
01:00:42
Speaker
Ultimately, what communists want is kind of the same thing that the anarcho-syndicalists want, which is the dissolution of the state. We just disagree as to how to get there. So to answer that question, like what's the answer to the way of left unity? For the most part, it's ego. Yeah, nothing more than ourselves. I mean, it's not just the left. It's like that, you know, that old saw that, you know, the greatest enemy of the Scottish people is the Scottish people.
01:01:08
Speaker
I think I think it really just comes down to like ego and a bizarre sense of what kind of history that we have to carry with us. I'm sorry. I felt like I talked right over you there, Brandon. No, no, that's fine. I was totally agreeing. I think maybe one other thing I would say is like you're absolutely right. The left is just so goddamn dogmatic that we get caught up in these conversation that no one gives a fuck or even know about. And like I think, you know, if you want to have like a dialectical materialist perspective to this, then it needs to be about having
01:01:35
Speaker
discussions, learning from each other about what we each have to say and coming to a conclusion on how to actually advance the struggle forward. Not arguing about what's the best way to achieve a moneyless classless society or something so far fetched in the future. It needs to be about pragmatic steps that we can take right here and right now because we generally have shared goals. So yeah, I totally agree with everything you said there.
01:02:00
Speaker
Yeah. And the point I was trying to get to in regards to, you know, left unity, which isn't even where I wanted to go, but just go off King, which was, um, was the, uh, the fundamental and foundational thing that I am interested in organizing with people around is defeating capitalism.
Common Enemies in Organizing Efforts
01:02:22
Speaker
Like is, you know, I, again, I'm not a member of the communist party of Canada. I am not a member of the IWW, but I am interested.
01:02:30
Speaker
in organizing with people who realize who our common enemy is. And so, you know, that's a foundational one for me. I'm curious, why don't we close it out with like, you know, what is your kind of like foundational tenant of like, you know, who is the common enemy? What do you absolutely need to agree with someone on before you kind of are willing to work with them?
01:02:56
Speaker
I think for me, the enemy is white supremacy, the enemy is imperialism, the enemy is capitalism. As long as we can agree, and all of three of these are like the many heads of the Hydra. So as long as we can agree on the commonality of the enemy, that capitalism is itself the root cause of many of society's ills, that white supremacy is a tendency that arises out of the need for capital to propagate itself.
01:03:24
Speaker
in that imperialism is the determining force in what causes the split between the quote unquote developed world that is the world that has developed on the backs of the global South and the global South itself. As long as we can agree on these things, then you're a friend of mine and we can work together.
01:03:42
Speaker
And if you're somebody who believes that capitalism is a force for good, if you're somebody that believes that we have a right to accept, and when I say we, I'm talking about Canada as a state, not that this is something, a tendency or an ideology they identify with, but if, uh, you know, Imperial States have the ability, uh, to spread their hegemony through economic and military force, then unfortunately you're just on the other side of me. We, there's nothing that's reconcilable about that. We are, we're enemies and that's kind of how the struggle works.
01:04:13
Speaker
I don't think I can put that any better. I agree. And I've also, yeah, capitalism is the root cause of our issues. And yeah, I don't know. I can't really say any better. Well, let's end it there then. Thanks for coming on the show, Q and Brandon. I really do appreciate it. Now is that time of the show where you get to plug your pluggables and your various social media accounts. How can people follow along and support your work? Brandon, why don't you go first?
01:04:41
Speaker
I don't even do you even have a Twitter account? I don't even know.
01:04:44
Speaker
Uh, I personally don't really tweet very much. Uh, I get, I can plug my own account though. I guess if you really want to follow me, you can plug an organization. It's really, I'll start with the branch because I think they're a bit more active than me. So yeah, if you're interested in joining, let's say you happen to be in Toronto, which you're probably not. That's okay. Uh, I w w dot Toronto, sorry. I w w Toronto.org is our website, uh, for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It's at I w w Toronto for all three of those. Um,
01:05:13
Speaker
The Edmonton, there's an Edmonton IWW branch as well. I think they're most active on their Facebook account. That's at edmonton.iww. And if you're somewhere else in Canada, you can go to iww.ca and check out a list of all the branches there.
01:05:28
Speaker
Yeah. So if you want to follow along with my work, you can, you know, follow me at McLean's magazine. I usually wait there about once a month. You can also follow me at Andre Demise, that is A-N-D-R-A-Y-D-O-M-I-S-E on Twitter. And you can also listen to the resistance noir podcasts. So resistance noir is an indie black media network and
01:05:53
Speaker
We get into everything from, you know, electoral politics to imperialism, to film art and culture and to black womanism. So you can check out our podcasts online.
01:06:04
Speaker
Yes, they're excellent. I just started subscribing to, uh, what's the one that you're on? There's, I mean, there's like four or five, but the one you're on. And we are consolidating them into a single stream, which is the resistance podcast, but I'm with the, uh, the crew that I'm with is the drop squad. So generally we, uh, we analyze, uh, politics, uh, and culture and oftentimes get into, uh, you know, American imperialism and other aspects of, of, you know, the dread disease of capitalism.
01:06:30
Speaker
But yeah, it's an excellent group of people that I work with, smart and sharp as hell. And I learned so much from them just by having conversations on the podcast every week.
01:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I learned a lot. I learned a lot from listening to you and following on your accounts. Follow Andre, Andre Demise on Twitter. He is a force, and I don't know how you do it, to be honest. I can't keep those hours. What it is is it's real riddle in hours.
01:07:02
Speaker
I also happen to work remotely. So I'm in front of a computer for like many hours in the day. Um, except for, you know, when I've, I've got like family to just take care of and schoolwork to finish and whatnot. But, uh, because a lot of my work is performed in front of a screen. Um, unfortunately folks like to try me and I bring the citations. So there you go. And folks, if you like this podcast, if you want to join the 440, some others who help keep this little independent media project going,
01:07:29
Speaker
It's very easy. You go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card, contribute. If you've got something out of this organization, if you follow along with the work that we do, the investigative journalism that we do, and you want to see us continue to do it, your contribution is really important. And we really do appreciate all the donors that we already do.
01:07:46
Speaker
Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, I'm really easy to find. You can find me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks again to Q and Brandon for coming on the show. Thanks again to Cosmic Famicominist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.