Author: Slingshot robot #1

By Michelle Everette 

After years of working racist, spirit killing jobs, I’ve finally settled into a work environment that’s not perfect but is purposefully collaborative, a place where the excessive energy I’ve been anxiously compelled to give each task is not expected or demanded of me, and now I’m actually starting to like myself again. Still, It’s been difficult to let go of the complicated feeling that I don’t deserve some grace, or even ease, unless I overextend myself in every possible way for zero personal gain. Yesterday I stayed late to finish some things I hadn’t been able to get to during the week and ran into one of my co-workers, who could sense I was on edge. After asking me why I felt the need to stay late, since I was definitely not getting paid for it, she told me something I deeply needed to hear from another oppressed woman: “you are valuable to the team not solely because of the work you do, but because of the person you are.” 

What a wild concept. Up until the fall of 2022, my working life had been marked by a relentless feeling of alienation. Deeper than loneliness, alienation is feeling the wet, heavy and biased boot of exploitation penetrate your skin and saturate your entire sense of self. The ingenuity of individual workers, as well as any cooperative worker effort under this system, particularly in the service industry, gets manipulated, erased and or undermined purposefully, as it serves many companies well for bosses to be divisive and take sole credit for each day to day success. Work in retail or food service for long enough and you’ll start to measure your value in this world not by how effectively you’re helping the members of your community, but only by how efficiently you can perform the most mundane of tasks, how accurately you’re able to follow arbitrary directions and how small you can shrink your emotions. 

While I was accumulating massive debt during college, I also worked in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s dining hall as a temp, regularly washing dishes alongside an older Black woman named Miss W. Dishwashing in any large cafeteria is a brutal way to earn survival: there’s the consecutive minutes of tiny but quick and intense movements it takes to get a crusty pan clean enough to rinse, there’s a lot of bending and the involuntarily smelling of soaked sponges tinged with unyielding spaghetti-like sauces. Yet dishwashing jobs tend to be low paying in the South compared to other service jobs, and the majority of workers in the dish pit at the restaurants and cafeterias I’ve worked at were Black like me or Brown, and severely overworked. 

The situations that our employers constantly put Miss W in truly pissed me off; when she was assigned to the dish pit in the University’s catering kitchen, they would often schedule her to come in at three or four o’clock and expect her to do the dishes that had piled up from the morning rush by herself. Some co-workers and I believed they screwed her over with that particularly cruel act simply because they didn’t want to pay another worker for the day. Miss W stayed late a lot, and regularly walked home because she would miss the last bus of the night. 

Why stay employed at a place where the management doesn’t respect your time? Why not demand more from your employers, why choose to suffer? My sister, half Black and relatively poor, felt the need to rapidly fire a variation of these concerns when I told her about a particularly long day in Miss W’s life. I’m still ashamed of the fact that I never asked Miss W how she felt about the way she was treated, though I tried to help lighten her workload when I was available to do so. Mostly I was her selfishly unaware coworker who’d been imprinted by fear. 

What if this is how to gauge how thoroughly you’ve been poisoned by late stage capitalism: can you understand the connection between this exploitative system and your identity? Can you feel your inner freedom, or easily identify it? Assuming that to be free involves being able “to surpass the given towards an open future” as my sort-of ally Simone de Beauvoir insists, then maybe low wages and unreasonable employer expectations — among many other structural oppressions — have severely stunted the Black worker’s perception of what’s possible in this country, and maybe being a woman on top of all of that means few will automatically remember to deem you worthy of a free existence. 

The last stanza of the Black, lesbian poet Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival” reads: “So it is better to speak/ remembering/ we were never meant to survive.” Lorde’s sentiment echoes an overlooked reality for Black and Brown women in service positions, and maybe all unnurtured members of the proletariat class navigating America — this place was designed to antagonize us, to obstruct our open futures by demonizing our empathy and exploiting any instinct we have to transcend individual interests. Of course, this place actually kills us too, because it is threatened by us, because it doesn’t want us to seize the wealth we’ve created and carefully maintained.

Though it may be better for our souls to speak out against this country’s constant injustices, since we’re currently so oppressed that we have nothing to lose according to Lordian logic, it’s certainly not easy for us to fully believe that we are worthy of liberation. Another memorable coworker of mine called M from another low paying service job, a young woman of color with a Bachelor’s degree in studio art, once told me that she’d intentionally asked for less money in her hiring interview because she was afraid she wouldn’t get the job if she asked for more. M’s confession sparks a connection: deserve as a communal feeling, as a collective responsibility. 

Worthiness, wherever it truly springs from, is a feeling that’s either nurtured or damaged by the conditions of our lives, by the systems we work under and the people we grow with. I, you, we, don’t exist in a bubble; our individual lives are defined by our relationships to the earth and other individuals. Capitalism will continue to exploit this natural interdependence in a way that ultimately leaves us landless, cultureless and isolated, wondering how in the hell we work so intimately with other people everyday to create and maintain things that end up inculcating our children with fear and hatred — soulless shit that grants maybe a few people a ridiculous amount of money and power. 

I don’t have a foolproof solution or a replacement for this system that’s both swaddled and stunted me. What I will suggest is radical unity: a total reorientation toward each other. As of January 2023, there are 272 unionized Starbucks locations, and as the globe keeps warming and the price of everything continues to go up, I suspect there will be a lot more unionized workplaces. Americans are getting scared and want to start shaping these inevitable changes, and our intuition is telling us that we are stronger together. 

In the fall of 1968, when nearly all of the University of North Carolina’s non academic workers were Black according to the University’s archives, food service workers in Lenoir Dining Hall sent a memo to their employers with a list of 21 suggestions for a better work environment, including but not limited to higher wages. After the suggestions weren’t taken seriously and administrators refused to meet with employees, the food service workers asked the majority white students frequenting the Dining Hall for help, and a walk-out of 100 workers was organized and led by seven main Black women workers. The initial strike evolved and went on for over a year, and then another strike happened after the agreements of the first strike weren’t upheld, but eventually the Dining Hall workers and helpful students won, inspiring many different movements across the state. 

All of that is to say I believe in us, and I’m tired of wanting to die. I think I’ll try wanting freedom now. Freedom is a feeling that deserves flexibility in our hearts — it’s communal. “The function of freedom,” said Toni Morrison, “is to free someone else.” I like that, need to believe it. Miss W does not deserve our pity, she deserves freedom, she deserves a community dedicated to freeing her. Will clocking in again ever thoroughly save her, though?

By Seedling

I remember the first time I set foot in a forest that had been clear-cut, in so-called Canada. We were walking through a quiet and moist forest, when suddenly the trees just ended. An entire mountainside had been killed; the green canopy was replaced by gray sky. Only stumps and stray branches were left. The dead trees were loaded onto barges and floated down the coast, probably to be processed into lumber.

We hear a lot of stuff about “save a tree — go paperless!” But the digital era is hardly green. The already-out-of-date design of modern devices creates rushes of toxic mining, soon followed by dumps of toxic waste, for the global South. 

It’s true that commercial printing isn’t so green either. The push for profits and automation has led us towards destructive and short-sighted ways of putting pigment on paper. I want to live in a different kind of world, where we can create together and meet our needs in meaningful ways – without participating in forms of destruction sometimes marketed as ‘progress.’ Communicating with somebody shouldn’t mean gigabytes bouncing around silicon in a company’s data center, or forests being chopped far away. In order to get there, we need infrastructure to support ourselves outside the profits-over-life system.

That’s why last year I put a lot of energy into starting an independent printing space here at the Long Haul! It’s been operating on a pay-what-you-can basis, with me and others volunteering our time to print zines, posters, and flyers. I bought a used Risograph duplicator which had previously been used by a church. With some technical help – and a harrowing ride clutching the machine in the back of a box truck! – we set up shop in one of the Long Haul’s tiny little closets we call an office.

Risograph printing is kind of an old-school method of duplication. It involves making a stencil for each original, kind of like a silkscreen, which gets wrapped around a drum. Then, the stencil is flooded with ink and rolled over each page.

Unlike a digital copy machine, which can print every page with unique content, the Riso can only work with one original at a time. So if you have multiple pages in your document, you’ll get a stack of each which need to be put in order with a mechanical collator or by hand.

The reason is because digital copiers have a nasty secret, which is euphemistically called ‘toner.’ Toner is a bunch of pigmented microplastic particles in a tube. Essentially, the petroleum dust is electrostatically attracted onto a roller and transferred to the page. The plastic is then ‘fused’ to the paper under intense heat. There is no ink, just tiny pieces of plastic which get melted into the paper.

Working in the copy industry for years will expose you to the negative effects of toner. The plastic particles are so small they can cross biological membranes, and studies show prolonged exposure can cause lung problems. When the particles don’t properly fuse, or need to be rinsed off hands, clothes, or floors, they can enter the water supply. We should be composting many of our paper products, but if they’re printed with toner, I worry about the microplastics entering the soil.

Toner machines are energy-hungry, needing to constantly generate heat for the fusing process. And they are designed for short lifespans, often leased to the copy store bosses, constantly requiring replacements of cheaply made parts.

Unfortunately, this technology has been thoroughly greenwashed by the printing industry — mainly because it requires less water and generates less waste paper than certain types of offset printing. I work with these digital presses at one of my jobs. My co-workers are sometimes surprised to learn what that funky burning smell is. The technicians, many near retirement, grumble over the way these new machines burn through parts. Meanwhile, the bosses tell the customers our operation is as green as it gets.

Unlike digital copiers, Riso machines use real ink. The inks have three parts: oil, water, and pigment. The oil – made from rice bran – carries the pigment into the paper fibers, and the ink “dries” simply as the water evaporates from the page. Rather than using CMYK inks, you can pick from a series of brilliant ink colors – some of which are far brighter than those possible with color copiers.

You can probably create a radical print shop, if your neighborhood needs one. It takes some money to buy equipment and supplies. With creative sourcing, you might be able to pick up a free or cheap printing device locally — perhaps from a school or office that’s closing or upgrading. Purchase prices for a used machine tend to range from $500-5,000. Make sure the model is still supported by the company, so ink and other supplies will be readily available for years to come. You can get this information by contacting a local dealer as a prospective customer. If the Riso duplicators don’t meet your needs, maybe you’ll consider different printing technology, like an offset duplicator or inkjet.

The biggest hassle and expense by far is finding paper. Most of our printing paper now comes from re-use/junk stores, of which we have several in the Bay Area. We’ve also been lucky with getting many cases from a bankrupt print shop, government surplus auctions, and a truckload saved from the dump by clever scavenging. A recent visitor from the Unter/Druck print project in Germany says they have also had good success finding paper in bulk from defunct print shops.

Paper has become very expensive. In recent years, the paper industry has consolidated rapidly, much of it into the hands of an awful conglomerate called APP Sinar Mas, which is notorious for clear-cutting Indonesian land. Greenpeace recently revealed that Sinar Mas was secretly behind the purchase of Domtar, North America’s biggest paper manufacturer.

I wanted to check out a paper mill for this article, but all the mills that once made printing paper in the Bay Area have shut down. Of two defunct mills close by, one is now a police station and jail; the other is a parking lot for limousines.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer walks the polluted banks of the Mohawk River, which has been polluted by chemical waste — some of it from turning trees into paper.

Kimmerer writes, “A sheet of paper is a tree’s life, along with the water and energy and toxic byproducts that went into making it. And yet we use it as if it were nothing. The short path from mailbox to waste bin tells the story. But what would happen, I wonder, to the mountain of junk mail if we could see in it the trees it once had been?”

The situation is pretty dire. Forests around the world are being depleted. It’s important to understand that old forests usually aren’t getting cut to make printing paper. Deforestation usually happens to get lumber for building, or to open the land to other uses like agriculture, mining, suburbs and cities. Once the forest is gone, that land — once biodiverse and wild with life — sometimes gets converted into paper tree plantations where only a few trees are grown: pine, fir, poplar, birch.

At the mill, logs are converted into fiber and bleached. Many pounds of chlorine, ammonia, lead, and other toxins are released each year to create consistent, smooth, and white sheets by the pallet load. That’s because making good paper from trees is challenging. In other papermaking traditions, paper is made from rice, cotton, flax, and all sorts of other plants.

If buying new paper, I would encourage you to look for paper certified under a scheme called Forest Sustainability Council (FSC). It’s far from perfect, but it’s better than paper which is untraceable or certified by the logging industry’s knock-off (SFI). Recycled paper remains elusive (and expensive) in the formats we use.

Our collective fight for survival depends on overturning capitalism and reversing de-forestation. Print is one of the most powerful tools we have to reach people and make the case for change and a new type of society, outside the endless grids of social media. Billionaires and their corporations control the infrastructure of content delivery. There’s no way to graffiti over a newsfeed or throw stickers up on a banking app. But in the real world, we still have the ability wheat-paste any underpass or lonely ATM. I’ve enjoyed making quick posters for actions, events, or to get information out to algorithm-saddled college students. I’m still hopeful we can overthrow this bullshit system in my lifetime. I hope others will find ways to educate and organize against systems of hierarchy and control.

Write to Reprographixxx Print Room c/o Long Haul, 3124 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley CA 94705 or baygraphix@protonmail.com 

SOURCES FOR CLAIMS ABOUT TONER:

“Oxidative stress and inflammatory response to printer toner particles in human epithelial A549 lung cells” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23201440/

“Capture and characterisation of microplastics printed on paper via laser printer’s toners” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34020184/

“Toner can cause critical contamination once it enters the soil. Therefore, this focus is directed towards that how to control and deal with such a large amount of potential discarded toner particles”

“Controlling measures of micro-plastic and nano pollutants: A short review of disposing waste toners” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29859943/

“Chronic upper airway and systemic inflammation from copier emitted particles in healthy operators at six Singaporean workplaces”pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35559961/

Slingshot is an independent radical newspaper published in Berkeley since 1988 — March 9 will be 35 years! 

Slingshot is like a mirage. We’re publishing and mailing out tens of thousands of organizers and papers, but a lot of times the collective making this stuff is very tiny. Again we are pleading for your input.  If this publication inspires you, then bring us your fresh and shiny motivated energy. A collective without enthusiastic new members can’t help but bend its process to the preferences of those who stick around the longest, becoming accidental authorities because of familiarity with protocol / procedure — preventing others from exercising autonomy and accountability.

During the art party weekends there’s a lot of broad-based participation but between the frenzies of work sometimes the group is just 2 people. It seems like most voluntary, non-paid projects are always under-staffed.  It is why our loft is messy.  Yet when we’re together the collective spirit burns brightly. How do we convince more than 2 people to sit through the boring editing meetings — with a fuckin’ bull whip!?! Shall we serve the dumpster-dived chocolate earlier? 

There’s always so much we want to include in each issue but articles on some topics don’t arrive. Military escalation in Ukraine increasingly diverts scarce resources that should be available for disaster relief in Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria…and to transition to a sustainable way of life in the face of climate emergency. Only the arms merchants, imperialists and multinational corporations benefit. Meanwhile, each new police snuff video breaks our hearts with no real change or accountability. The system exploits fear of crime to divide us and obscure the scarcity and vulnerability most people face — while the rulers enjoy obscene wealth. The answer is to come together in love for ourselves, all of humanity and the Earth.

Slingshot author in the 1980s Natasha Kirsten Kraus died in December, 2022.  She was a fierce direct action radical as well as a brilliant academic radical feminist. She survived a decades-long struggle with multiple severe illnesses that left her increasingly disabled.  She also wrote A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America (Duke 2008). 

Slingshot is always looking for new writers, artists, editors, photographers and distributors.  Even if you feel you are not an essayist, illustrator or whistleblower you may know someone who is.  If you send an article, please be open to its editing. We’re a collective, but not all the articles reflect the opinions of all collective members. We welcome debate and constructive criticism.

Thanks to the people who made this: Andrew, Andy, Eytan, eggplant, Elke, Jack, Jesse, Ken, Lydia, Lola, Marilyn, Mateo, Rachelle, Robin, Ryan, Stella, Stone,Sylvia, Tal & all the authors and artists! 

Slingshot Article Submission Info

Slingshot has always published the deadline for the next issue in each issue because when Slingshot started coming out, there were no internet or email lists so other than publishing the deadline in the paper, there was no way to tell anyone the deadline. But now, Slingshot has a website, an email list, and also indybay, instagram and facebook to announce the next deadline. So this time we’re not going to set a deadline for the next issue. We encourage you to submit articles for the next Slingshot anytime you want. When we’re ready, we’ll announce a deadline and publicize it on-line, or send us an email if you want to be on our email list. Actually, just do that anyway.

Volume 1, Number 137, Circulation 23,000

Printed February 17, 2023

Slingshot Newspaper

A publication of Long Haul

Office: 3124 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94705

Mailing: PO Box 3051, Berkeley, CA 94703

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Circulation information

Subscriptions to Slingshot are free to prisoners, low income, or anyone in the USA with a Slingshot Organizer, or $1 per issue donation. International $3 per issue. Outside the Bay Area we’ll mail you a free stack of copies if you give them out for free. Say how many copies and how long you’ll be at your address. In the Bay Area pick up copies at Long Haul and Bound Together books, SF.

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We’ll send you a random assortment of back issues for the cost of postage. Send $4 for 2 lbs. Free if you’re an infoshop or library. slingshotcollective.org