Author: Slingshot robot #1

By Steve Brady

“As ugly as a teenage millionaire, pretending it’s a whiz kid world …”

-David Bowie, “Teenage Wildlife”

Trying to be a palatable dude, I was reading bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. I came across this fascinating bit:

“While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist, patriarchal men do not. It was adult, wealthy white males in this country who first read and fell in love with the Harry Potter books … J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are clever modern reworkings of the English schoolboy novel. Harry as our modern day hero is the super smart, gifted, blessed white boy genius (a mini patriarch) … the Harry Potter movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others … “

From someone who writes a lot about love, that’s some beautiful hate! I never found the franchise that interesting: I read a chapter or two of the first book then it wandered off into the recesses of the punk house, and someone took me to the first movie but I don’t remember the story. All too bland to even dislike. But in 2004, long before Rowling became notorious for public transphobia, bell hooks saw the looming patriarchal potential there. She continues:

“Of course American children were bombarded with an advertising blitz telling them they should read these books. Harry Potter began as national news sanctioned by mass media. Books that do not re-inscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the Harry Potter books have received … The phenomenal financial success of Harry Potter means that boys will henceforth have an array of literary clones to choose from.” 

At this I realized two other very successful books I hate, Ready Player One and The Road, convey the same brand of isn’t-that-cute patriarchy—why do people I respect see visions of a better, more beautiful world in these things? Something strange is going on.

Marketing a game novel myself, I heard I should cite Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One as a comparable title. There’s some superficial similarities—find an artifact in a game to control the real world—and the movie was tolerable by Hollywood standards. So I got Ready Player One from the local library … and I was like OMG, it just replaced The Road as the most overrated book in English. 

Disturbingly and offensively bad, it’s a sorta Game-Lit Fifty Shades of Grey, but while the latter was a guilty pleasure, people actually claim this blockbuster debut novel is good. I looked up some articles by people who hated it, and none of them touched on what was horrible to me: 

It starts with fifty pages of sheer backstory tell. Common advice to beginners: your world isn’t as original as you think, and you need an actual story. Or at least throw in an active sentence every page or so. It’s already risky to depend on pure world-building, but Cline doesn’t have a particularly good world. Nor protagonist: it takes me fifty pages to even dislike the guy. 

Yet what most offends me is that the boy supposedly lost his useless parents young, has maybe one friend and no early positive attachment, and while a damaged person can have a good heart, this guy is eager, chipper and industrious. Research since the Vietnam War has shown that trauma resilience comes from human connection. Instead he’s pulling himself up by his bootstraps in the style of Horatio Alger—oh, that’s why those other critics attack him on class, gender and race stuff. Did y’all ever have to write an autobiographical essay in high school? This reads like a privileged twit turning in a hastily written Prank essay. 

Yet as bell hooks might predict: 

“Ernest Cline, a self proclaimed Star Wars fan, writer of the film Fanboys, has nabbed a six-figure upfront deal for his first novel Ready Player One. Warner Bros. in conjunction with De Line Pictures won the bidding war for rights to the sci-fi adventure book shortly after Cline just secured publishing rights with Random House.” (fusedfilm.com)

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The Road isn’t a whiz kid novel, but some of the same issues continue. Cormac McCarthy, from movie adaptations I’ve seen, writes Modern Westerns. Let’s just say he centers the experience of white people. The Road is a bit different: a father leads his male child through a post-cataclysmic wasteland where the only other people are bands of unfriendly cannibals. Kinda a white-male-individualist version of the second half of Parable of the Sower.

The first thing I noticed was that not only was the book fairly thin, there was a severe excess of white space on the pages. At 59K words, he’s marketed a novella as a novel, which he can do because of his previous successes. Add the non-use of quotation marks and other annoyances. 

In a world of total evil and chaos, one relationship is the only source of goodness and meaning: a father protecting his son. Isn’t that adorable? From a more thoughtful writer perhaps it could be, but here, we remember that “patriarchy” comes from “patri”: it means that government, religion and business should be modeled on an authoritarian fatherhood. Thus this shining surviving example of fatherhood is the grain of sand from which proper reality can be restored. 

Although the text does not explicitly mention climate change, The Guardian listed it as one of the five best climate change novels[20] and George Monbiot has called it “the most important environmental book ever written” for depicting a world without a biosphere. (Wikipedia)

Well Cline’s sure pulled off something clever here. He repackaged the most tired cliches of the post-apocalyptic genre for the literary fiction crown, and they’ve eaten it up, even while they still claim science fiction is shallow pulp (see Kurt Vonnegut’s essay “Science Fiction”). And no it doesn’t mention or relate to climate change: the cause of the disaster is unspecified to cowardly attempt to avoid “politics,” not realizing that patriarchy is political. 

#

Hey, I’m not that woke. I’ve enjoyed Hemingway, Robert E. Howard, and Heinlein; I appreciate a well-written thoughtful book written by someone with very different values than me. These don’t make the cut. Why are they ultra-successful? Was bell hooks not far off the mark when she stopped just short of claiming a conspiracy to shove this stuff down our kids’ throats?

We want fantasy and sci-fi to inspire us with visions of a better world. One way to co-opt that is to pull the same liberal trick: not only a privileged elite living in a fantasy world, but the rest us aspiring to be like them, thinking that’s what it is to be “truly human.”

So the running theme is that, to the surprise of many of us, the epitome of toxic masculinity isn’t James Bond or Rambo, it’s a smug and annoying male child or teenage boy. Is it that old idea that traditional boys don’t have to grow up? Some boys: you may have noted how the media portrays a Black boy as a criminal adult and a white teen as a confused and misguided child. Something like that, but even with men who manage themselves well, every empire, whether military or corporate, is built around protecting a damaged boy from reality and intimacy.

They’ll spend a lot of money getting us to adore that cute boy. But when we expose him as the Man Behind the Curtain, we can bring anarchy to Oz. 

Compiled by Jesse D. Palmer

The 2022 Slingshot organizer Radical Contact List was printed in June, 2021, and since then we’ve uncovered the following additions and corrections.  Community spaces and the radical social networks they represent are some of the only threads pushing back against a suicidal system bend on gobbling up the world’s resources and sucking our lives dry with its soulless jobs.  The apocalypse is not yet inevitable, but we’re running out of time to organize and fight back. 

Radical spaces offer another option – a creative place where we can hatch plans and nurture each other. The pandemic has been hard on counter-cultural projects grounded in un-mediated human contact. A lot of the projects in the Radical Contact List depend on a trickle of new folks constantly joining up — and this pipe has run dry the last 2 years. So if you’re near one of these projects, by all means introduce yourself, volunteer for a shift, drop off some cash and schedule an event. (Hint hint – if you’re in the East Bay, Long Haul and Omni Commons want to meet you.) 

If you know of a new space opening up or you catch an error in the contact list, email slignshotcollective@protonmail.com  The most updated Radical Contact List information is at slingshotcollective.org/contacts. 

Sperryville ARTist Cooperative – Sperryville, VA 

An artist gallery coop that hosts events and resident driven community art projects and causes. 3 River Lane, Studio 1a, Sperryville, VA 22740 540-987-9288 livingsky.org 

Radical Mental Health Collective – Rhode Island

Mental health providers & educators “who radically believe in a free world & alternative space to the oppressive healthcare system.” They have a post-demo arrest, jail and court mental health support line. 1155 Westminster St Ste 205 Providence, RI 02909 401-484-7885 rmhrci.org

Lions Tooth – Milwaukee, WI

Bookstore / cafe that hosts events. Features small press books and graphic novels.  Open Mon-Sat 11-7 Sun 11-5 2421 S Kinnickinnic Ave. Milwaukee, WI 53207 414-455.3498 lionstoothmke.com

F12 Infoshop – Charlottesville, VA

Self-described leftist, anarchist, antifascist shop selling books, zines, records, stickers and other sources of radical information. 1740 Broadway St. Studio West, Suite 12 Charlottesville, VA 22902 f12infoshop@ gmail.com

Thatsocialcentre collective – Dublin, Ireland

A library / infoshop space: “We have occupied an empty corner … houses, warehouses, caravans and wide open space. What more could you want? Its time once again to take a space that has been left to rot by profiteers and turn it into a place of energy, community and resistance!” They seek to host events and resist eviction. 57 Aughrim St, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7, Ireland Thatsocialcentre @protonmail.com.

Grassroots Al-Quds – Jerusalem, Palestine

A non-profit that supports Palestinian sumoud (steadfastness and resilience) in Al-Quds (Jerusalem) that makes maps, sponsors tours and creates educational media. 9 Harun Al-Rashid St. Jerusalem, Palestine +972-2-966-5655 grassrootsalquds.net

BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights – Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine

An independent, human rights non-profit organization committed to protect and promote the rights of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons. Karkafa St. (down from Bethlehem Hotel) Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine badil.org

A.M. Qattan Foundation – Ramallah, Palestine

An independent, not-for-profit developmental organization with a social center working in the fields of culture and education, with a particular focus on children, teachers and young artists. 27 An-Nahda Women Association St. Al-Tira- Ramallah, Palestine qattanfoundation.org

Okupa El Banco – Mexico City

A squatted bank that hosts tons of events. Av. Lourdes 176 55130 Ecatapec de Morelos CDMX el.banco.sanagus@gmail.com

Corrections to the 2022 Organizer

• Oops – the Las Vegas Zine Library was left out of organizer – The address is 4505 S Maryland Pkwy Las Vegas, Nevada 89119.

• Little Read Book lost their space – their new mailing address is PO Box 18997 Denver, CO 80218. They can mail free books to prisoners and ask that inmates tell them: 1.) type of books allowed at your facility (new/used, hardcover/softcover), 2.) how many they can send at once in a package, 3.) what authors or genres you like, 4.) if you are interested in books on radical politics.

• Revolutionary Grounds Books and Coffee is now at 4675 E Speedway Blvd, Tucson, AZ 85712 520-838-0533. 

• We left out South Bend Commons at 1799 Lakewood Terrace SE, Atlanta, GA 30315. 

• Backspace in Fayetteville, AR has closed. 

• The correct phone number for Old Capitol Books in Monterey, CA is 831-747-1322.

• The Matchbox in Minneapolis was left off the contact list by mistake. They are at 1306 2ns St. NE. Minneapolis, MN. 

• Mutiny Info Cafe has opened a second location in Trinidad, Colorado – on I-25 near the border with New Mexico. The space is a coffee shop / book & comic shop / record store and event space.  135 E. Main St Trinidad, CO 

• Rincon Zapatista in Mexico city is no longer a cafe you can go to. It is just a place you can go on Sundays to buy Zapatista products. 

NOTE TO INMATES: The addresses listed are not necessarily able to send you materials unless otherwise noted. 

By Jesse D. Palmer

Perhaps during scary times like these, our best hope is to focus on love and caring to give us the superpowers we need to avert apocalypse. Corporations, computers and oppressive power structures cannot experience or comprehend love — and therefore it is one of the last things we still have that is beyond their control. Love is the basis for solidarity and community — kryptonite against capitalism’s mindless expansion that threatens to kill us unless we can rise up and stop it in time.

A better world starts with giving a shit — which is really an expression of love for yourself, those around you, and the earth itself. Love isn’t weak or passive or boring — it is fierce, it’s active and requires constant effort, and it’s full of risk and yet exhilaration when it works out. 

All our efforts to defend the earth from climate suicide and to struggle for justice and a better world ultimately start not with a focus on what we’re against — problems and complaints — but rather what we’re for. Life and the world are filled with pleasure, beauty and wonder when they aren’t spoiled by greed, power and inhumane systems. 

I’m writing this not because I’m super optimistic and fired up. No — the last few months I’ve been deeply discouraged and beaten down by so much bad news that it’s hard to see any alternative to doom. I could barely write this article, really. I feel like I’ve been writing the same things for 30 years, and the world keeps getting worse. It seems like we’re all stunned and stuck — incapable of creating a massive uprising at precisely the moment we need it the most. How can we flip the mood so that dread and desperation make us fearless, wild and unburdened — with nothing to lose but our chains?

Mainstream electoral political action, individual lifestyle changes and protest-as-usual feel ridiculous compared to the task of averting climate/ecological collapse and the descent into white supremacist fascism. Climate chaos, economic inequality, racism, disinformation, fascism — each make the other worse and all require dramatic social shifts, not just tinkering. 

A lot of people are ready to do something — but what will work? The problem isn’t mostly political — its social-psychological. We need magic and miracles for a broad-based popular uprising that shifts the structures holding back change. 

While popular movements have been stalled, capitalism is dynamic — every year chewing up more land, emitting more CO2, displacing more people, concentrating more wealth, and placing greater power into fewer hands. The system’s status quo doesn’t mean there’s no change in our lives. Rather, allowing the status quo to remain guarantees rapid harmful change that are out of our hands. 

I find it terrifying and infuriating. The billionaires and their corporations are toying with the future of millions of species — life in the ocean — great cities that will go underwater — a future where we cannot grow enough food. They are playing like a few billions of dollars in shareholder pockets are worth more than redwood trees and whales and bears.

But beyond all these emotions tearing me this way and that way, I sometimes come to a quiet place of determination and certainty. It is up to us. Relying on the system or trying to ignore what is going on is suicide for ourselves and negligent homicide for the species with whom we share this planet. Birds and plants have no way to stop human emissions, but each of us human beings does — in small ways and larger ways. 

We’re in an emergency, which means we have to stop worrying so much about whether our contributions will make a difference and focus on doing anything and everything we can, in every realm, all that the same time. Specifically, this means reversing economic systems and technologies that pollute the earth locally, globally, personally — corporations, plastics, CO2 — all of it. It’s time to stop hoping someone else will do something or blaming this on someone else as an excuse to do nothing. Saving ourselves will require seizing and sharing concentrated wealth and power and addressing historical injustice — lest dictators harness racism and nationalism to turn powerless people against each other. 

We need to aim for solutions that scale and play to win. Putting our energy into projects that are just nibbling at the corners of the system’s power is an admission that we’ve already lost. Those in power don’t play that way – they exaggerate their skills and capacity and then turn in disappointing results. Our side — maybe we think we’re being realistic — too frequently assumes we cannot do anything that matters very much.

The economic and political system has proved that it cannot stop climate change.  More than half of the emissions since 1791 have been over the last 30 years, despite all the climate studies and international meetings during the last 3 decades.

We need to stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. We know that capitalism and hierarchy are the problem, but that isn’t an excuse to sit off to the side keeping our consciences and hands clean praying it will all collapse and refusing to participate until it does. Systems don’t topple on their own — they need our help — and it takes persistent work that may not bear fruit right away or be very sexy. 

While capitalism still exists, we have to be pragmatic and do whatever we can within it — while still articulating and promoting a totally different post-capitalist world. We don’t have to choose — we can do both. We no longer have the time or luxury to live in a fantasy theoretical world that only exists in books. Life’s very messy — mostly shades of grey, not black and white — and so if we can cut emissions and fight wealth consolidation by acting now within today’s fundamentally corrupt systems, we have to hold our nose and do what we can.  In some situations it may be possible to promote non-reformist reforms.

About a quarter of US and global emissions are from electrical generation — more than any other single sector globally and second only to transportation in the US. Solar and wind power are finally cheaper than fossil fueled electricity, so a transition is technically and economically feasible, but it’s happening too slowly to avert climate catastrophe. Public pressure and mobilization to support solar and wind and oppose natural gas and coal power plants can make a meaningful difference and are a good place to focus energy. This is especially because power infrastructure is located close to every city and town — these are local struggles. 

As important as opposing pipelines, mines, coal terminals, and fracking is supporting wind and solar installations — and even better to organize with the workers who build them. There is a lot of opposition to anything new — it’s human nature to dislike change and giant industrial developments are often harmful. But we can no longer afford the intellectual laziness of being knee-jerk against every new thing. We have to be open to change when the harms caused by the new technology are clearly less than the harms of existing systems. One needs to carefully study technology to separate greenwashing and false solutions — nuclear power, blue hydrogen, clean coal, carbon capture, natural gas as a bridge fuel — from better technologies like solar and wind. 

A tangible example of a technology with promise is offshore wind. The US currently only has 42 megawatts of installed offshore wind. Meanwhile, the UK has 10,206 megawatts. To decarbonize US electricity, offshore wind has big advantages over land-based windmills since the wind is stronger and blows more consistently at sea. Offshore wind is closer to major population centers on the coasts. It is now possible to install windmills on floating platforms so they can be farther out to sea and located in deeper water, such as off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington. 

It is easy to imagine a lot of people saying “Aw let’s keep the coasts wild, let’s put those windmills somewhere else” but the problem is that if everyone says not in my backyard everywhere, how are we going to ditch fossil fuels? Should windmills only be built near more politically powerless people? Fossil fuel installations mess up the oceans, too — an oil spill is worse than any windmill’s impacts. It’s only fair to compare the real local ecological impacts windmills will have against the global, long-term damage CO2 emissions have on the oceans and all other ecosystems on earth. 

While working on this article I looked at plans under consideration to install floating windmills off the California coast near San Luis Obispo. They would feed power ashore to the current site of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, which is scheduled to close in 2025.  Many power lines converge at Diablo Canyon, so putting windmills offshore nearby would avoid the need to build new transmission lines. The floating windmills can be located 17-40 miles offshore, so although they would be visible from shore, they’ll be hard to see. During construction the project would require new port facilities in Morro Bay, and once operational, the windmills will kill some birds and can impact marine life. There’s a good 2021 article from EcoWatch about how offshore wind construction and operation can be done moreecologically that points out that climate change threatens 2/3 of bird species — far away from windmill sites — if windmills are not built. 

This may sound boring, reformist or actually worse than doing nothing — not Slingshot-ty or revolutionary — but I’m tired of limiting myself to symbolism, generalities and always saying “no” to everything. We need to be specific about what we want and realistic that nothing in the real world is going to be perfect. Humans have ecological impacts — no one who has electricity is willing to give it up and those who don’t have it yet want it. There are better and worse choices, and doing nothing is certain doom. 

Grief has five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — and we’re going through that now about the need to change how we’re living. When you suggest specific ways of decarbonizing, you hear a lot of denial and bargaining. “The US uses twice as much electricity as other countries — people should conserve first.” “The windmills will be built by corporations — they should be owned publicly.” Fine points —but not valid excuses for delaying construction of windmills and solar to replace fossil fueled electricity. 

It is time to focus on struggles close to home. If you go to a climate protest in San Francisco, you’ll see a lot of signs about Line 3 far away in the midwest — but there’s pipelines and fracking and struggles right here in California. We need to stop protesting just for symbolic value and yet avoid getting too bogged down in the specifics of any particular project — losing sight of the big picture.  Stopping a single pipeline isn’t enough. The fossil fools have figured out they can throw us a few crumbs by stopping a particular pipeline to dissipate public pressure so they can keep their overall system going. 

When I was a teenage radical we protested apartheid in South Africa but couldn’t grapple so well with the racism right in our midst.  A particularly strong part of the Occupy movement 10 years ago was that every town had its own occupation — we didn’t all have to go to Wall Street. That local focus allowed our movement to be much more broad-based, diverse, and at least potentially related to local conditions. Where Occupy stumbled was that we weren’t able to turn popular momentum into tangible economic or political improvements. 

It’s time to ditch protest rituals that depend on shaming and pressuring leaders. If we’ve learned anything, it’s that those in charge have no shame. 

We’re in an emergency — so it’s appropriate to bring up climate, fascism and inequality in all our conversations and social contexts. My friends and I carried climate change protest signs while trick-or-treating with our kids. William Shatner — by far the least socially aware Star Trek actor — made a powerful appeal after going into space on the Amazon space penis: “[We’re] ruining this planet … we’re at the tipping point. We haven’t got time to wait 30 years and argue about a few billion dollars.” We all know this — it’s time to say it out loud and build an uprising stronger than oil companies and inertia. I want every B-grade celebrity to say this stuff. When will climate change be on the front page every day rather than on page A14 just during global summit meetings? 

The seemingly impossible can and must happen now — we’ve gotta get together and overthrow the 1%, share the wealth in fair and lovely ways, and build a new sustainable world. The illogic of endless growth is a cancer that will kill us — but our collective shared passion for life can save us if we can summon the courage.

By Yvonne Su

While the pandemic and algorithms force organizers to get more creative, there are some tools that don’t go out of style. Organizing begins with talking to people one on one. That hasn’t changed. Electoral campaigns (for candidates and issues) still spend huge amounts of money and people power to knock on doors and make calls. While these campaign goals are mainstream, the conversations from canvassing apply to organizers working toward liberation. My experience calling voters about the California Governor recall gave me a broader perspective on where people are at and how we might move them to join us in the good fight.

Before I began phone banking, I questioned how effective calls would be when so few people now pick up their phones, let alone talk to a stranger. As discouraging as the experience sometimes was, it affirmed the tedious work of making progress. Hearing hundreds of refusals from real people does change you. It also really drives home the idea that moving the needle happens one person, one supporter at a time — tough, but definitely doable.

Between August and September, I made thousands of dials that resulted in hangups and refusals, and talked to about 600 voters. There is nothing at all radical about keeping Governor Gavin Newsom in office, but seeing the amount of work, people and money it takes to keep an elected Democrat in office opened my eyes to how difficult making actual change in this state and country is. The kind of sea change we’d like to see is unlikely to happen electorally, but that doesn’t mean we give up and cede ground to conservatives.

Here are some of my findings from talking to voters:

• The idea of the next generation being more engaged is appealing, but the truth is they are no less capitalist and selfish than previous generations. Youth still need to be organized, and they can’t be counted as automatic allies. 
• Your most enthusiastic allies may not be in the constituencies you expect. I found really enthusiastic Asian, Latinx, and older white voters voting NO on the recall, and in some cases, getting their whole family to vote no. This is really the beauty of canvassing: talking to individuals and breaking through the narratives about who your supporters and opponents are. 
• Even in such an unradical campaign like Stop the Recall, there is still a lot of organizing muscle to exercise, like asking for commitment, staying upbeat and being personable as best as you can.
• People express their pain points in many different ways. For example, claiming to “do [their] own research” is an expression of distrust in the media. Voting YES on the recall is a way to voice displeasure at how life has been during COVID. Seeing people’s choices as an expression of what hurts them makes the refusals a little easier to take.
• For a large number of voters, not wanting a Republican governor is a valid reason to vote. What does all this mean for us as organizers? How can we leverage this in our struggle for liberation?

It’s sobering to find out that even within the realm of your supporters, people are lukewarm. My success rate with making volunteer recruitment calls is similar to that with voters, which is that having two or three solid, affirmative conversations per shift is a win. The best thing about recruitment calls is finding out what other supporters are working on. It makes you feel less alone in the change that you are trying to make. On the other hand, trying to get people to make calls can be a hard ask for that exact reason: It’s hard to feel hugely successful as a canvasser. Nonetheless, contact is best made one person at a time, and being honest and direct about what you are asking people to do is best.

Do not sugarcoat the canvassing experience for volunteers! The right people will join you. Even if we are small in numbers, we can build winning margins by ones, tens and hundreds at a time. 

For people who are invested and have the kind of temperament (aka thick skin and short memories) for canvassing, deep canvassing is a great option. Deep canvassing is a technique that grew out of the fight for marriage equality. In the aftermath of Prop 8 in 2008, the Los Angeles LGBT Center talked to voters who were against same sex marriage. They began by asking the voter an open-ended question, then connecting the voter’s story to the cause. It’s the most involved kind of canvassing, but also the most effective at shifting people, because the organizer’s job is to meet people where they are at. 

One of the deep canvassing campaigns I worked on was for the charter amendment in Minneapolis to replace the Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. I talked to two social workers who shared their uncertainty about the amendment and stories of working with the police. 

On the Stop the Recall campaign, I talked to a young voter who identified as apolitical and whose partner was undocumented. Helping him make a plan to vote and talking about what’s at stake for his family was very rewarding — the kind of one-in-hundreds conversations that justifies why we call at all. 

That said, phone banking is not for everyone. Getting refusals and aggression on the phone is hard. People tend to not see callers as real human beings because there’s no face to attach to the voice. It takes a kind of stamina to phonebank because you don’t get the kind of regenerative energy from an in-person action with a group of people.

As much as it can feel like pulling teeth, I will continue to make calls to the extent that I can. The fact is, politicians and elections are not going away anytime soon. And politicians are going to do the rewarding thing instead of the risky and right thing. To enact the change we want to see, we need to move people before or at the same time as we move politicians. 

From talking to people, I found that most are not nearly as radical as we would like them to be. This presents an opportunity for radical organizers to practice speaking plainly about the world we envision and what it would mean for people. For example, many people can’t picture what it would look like to take away power from the police, but they can describe the times they feel safe in their communities. A canvasser can start the conversation from there and plant a seed for abolition, even if it takes thirty conversations to get the person on our side. (Each canvasser is warming up a person for the next canvasser, who might then have more success.)

Once I got over my initial discomfort of cold-calling people, the applications of phone banking became vast. We don’t all have the funds for auto-dialing software or contact lists, but we do have phones and our voices. In a more radical version of the world, I would love to make calls to invite people to pop-up clinics and groceries in our neighborhoods, turn out people for a vigil, or talk to people who’ve been isolated. The most powerful thing about phone banking is cutting through mass media and helping people see that a real, living and breathing person supports this outcome and is investing time and risking rejection to talk to them about it. Most people respect that dedication, whether they are on board with us or not. 

In conclusion, phone banking is hard. It’s also a practice in persistence and invitation. It’s a great way to practice agitating and gently bugging people, one at a time, to join us.

By Rosebud Van People

It’s official: People’s Park in Berkeley is condemned land. The University of California (UC) regents have approved destruction of the park to build high-rise dormitories. Or, that’s what it says on paper anyway! For 50 years now, every time they’ve put up fences, people have torn them down. (The university and the city council last ordered in the bulldozers in 1992. How’s that going?) All this latest decision means is UC has committed to stick their fingers into the hornets’ nest. Maybe we should send them a good luck charm, because as the phrase goes: “They try it, we riot!” And we win. Why would this coming year be any different?

People’s Park, located between Haste and Dwight Streets east of Telegraph Avenue, was constructed without permission in 1969 to create a beautiful community on vacant UC land.  UC’s first attempt to seize back and destroy the park led to rioting, police shootings that left bystander James Rector dead and dozens wounded, and a week-long National Guard occupation of Berkeley. UC has always claimed to own the park, but since 1969 they have never been able to control it. Over the years, park users have practiced “user development” by building and tending gardens, trees and landscaping as determined by users, not government managers. It is a rare place in the city open to everyone, hosting a free speech stage and daily free food servings.

There will be a mass mobilization to defend the Park in Berkeley, probably in 2022. Get ready! People’s Park isn’t going anywhere. 

There are several groups working on various fronts to save the park. Each is doing important work, and each has flaws. Organizing at the park has been pretty toxic this year. Be wary of cult-like thinking (the park is considered the last bastion of the 60s, after all). Bring visions of what land and community could be without state interference. The university has a lot of money, so we have to be out in numbers in order to fend them off.

Get all the info at DefendThePark.org Bookmark it! And you can text “SAVETHEPARK” to 74121 to get notified when shit hits the fan. See you there! 

Have comments? Send them to:

• UC Chancellor Carol Christ (510) 642-7464 chancellor@berkeley.edu

• Mayor Jesse Arreguín (510) 981-7100 mayor@CityofBerkeley.info

• Rigel Robinson, City Council, District 7: (510) 981-7170 rrobinson@CityofBerkeley.info

• Housing developer Resources for Community Development: (510)841-4410 rcdhousing.org

By Tia Mo

I was a union kid — on the picket line at 9 years old for my step-mom’s teaching contract. We talked about how working conditions affected the quality of education. I saw their solidarity win a new contract, and even in the 2007 recession, being union protected their pensions. Now, with US union participation at a century’s low but back in the public dialogue, we have a chance to create broader solidarity and counterbalance the insatiable demands of corporate management. Labor organizing within capitalism doesn’t free us from the machine, but we are responsible for improving conditions now even as we struggle against industrial exploitation more generally.

Corporate media has been in an uproar over working class people failing to submit to the minimum wage demands of multinational corporations. “For Hire” signs have been turned into memes, either to show the pittance bosses are offering or suggest that regular people should get a job. Perhaps current low unemployment numbers have been affected by folks saving their COVID unemployment benefits (only considered generous in the US); perhaps it was facing a global emergency that forced people to scoff at crumbs; perhaps it was the utter lack of social support for families when schools closed. I’m dreaming that enough Americans are dreaming of life out from under the yoke that the labor movement can be reborn.

In the 1950s, more than 30% of US workers were protected as union members, and this influenced everyone’s terms of employment. Job security, regular pay increases, and pensions were on the table for blue and white collar workers. Today, about 10% are union members, and corporations would like you to forget about the unions and their benefits. 

Why the change? Capitalists don’t like unions, because employees are the largest expense to a business, and unions negotiate for better pay, benefits, and conditions. Any veneer of protective paternalism has faded from corporate culture, and at-will employment — meaning workers can quit or be fired for no reason without notice — is the national standard that gives businesses the upper hand in setting terms of employment. The rise of globalization meant that companies could pay pennies for wages in countries without safety or discrimination protection and still ship goods cheaply to a US market desperate for distraction from the suffering of capitalism. All the while, US workers can’t even get a weekly schedule, let alone a reliable, fair contract.

Union organizing has its problems, and the right is using those problems to further racist divisions in the country. We will need to address these tactics to wrest the future of workers from ongoing exploitation. US unions have historically been racially exclusive, as well as gender exclusive, and it never really works to only protect some people. White people chose (choose?) not to see that Black workers excluded from unions were sometimes forced to take work as scabs, and that the solution is to make labor organizing an inclusive endeavor. Not just to allow in BIPOC workers, but to center their concerns and experiences. The anti-racist platform is about fixing broken systems, not just dangling empty opportunities to compete with privileged white folks for work. Because unions often provide living wage, entry level work with real advancement, folks who haven’t had access to technical or academic training can still get in the door. When labor amplifies the needs of BIPOC workers, it will be part justice for old wrongs, and part raising the floor for all workers. The Amazon workers in New York who are trying to unionize will improve conditions for all workers if they win a union (still pending at publication). The routine practice of primarily hiring Black and Latinx workers for lower-wage warehouse work and treating them as expendable means that the work of securing union benefits for all has fallen on the shoulders of people treated most poorly by the system. History shows us that plantation wealth, agri-business wealth, and railroad wealth were all accrued disproportionately on the backs of BIPOC Americans. And here, once again, America is rebuilt disproportionately on BIPOC labor and subjugation.

The rich right still wants to control unions, to keep working and middle class white Americans separated from BIPOC Americans who share their class experience. Capitalism depends on this divide & conquer strategy. No matter how imaginary race might be, racism has real consequences in limiting solidarity work. We have to see color, see racism, and see solidarity.

If organizers can address these problems, I have hope that structural change is possible. Kinks in the supply chain also mean a kink in the global employment chain. Local production is more expensive because it’s harder to exploit a neighbor who knows their EEOC and OSHA rights — and that’s a good thing! Record numbers of strikes this fall and low unemployment signal that people are both valuing their time and demanding value for their labor. If childcare is more expensive than wages, why go back to work? (Okay — gendered home labor is another article in itself.) If we can make joyful lives with less throw-away stuff and focus on community, might that be a better life?

Capitalism wants this autumn to be only a short-term bottleneck in their plan to eat the planet, but we have each other and the right to concerted activity (ie, organizing). Solidarity is one of the few protections at-will workers can rely on. If you’re stuck in capitalism without a worker cooperative or a union job, you have the right to gather with co-workers, figure out your grievances and fight for better conditions. We’ve already been through this once, with the brutal repression of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizers during the pre-WW2 era. Luckily, the folks before us gave us some ground to stand on. It’s our job to grow an anti-racist populism that supports people and families with living wages, family leave, childcare, and adequate benefits to counter the hysteria of Trump’s caucus. We can dream of capitalism falling under its own decrepit weight, and we can also work to keep each other fed until that day comes. 

By Scott Culp #AY8092 California Institute for Men, PO Box 500 Chino, CA 91708

Pioneering cave explorers imagined that a prolonged stay in subterranean caves could permanently dismantle their psyches. In Somerset, England a 17^th Century writer described exploring a cave. “We began to be afraid to visit it,” he wrote. “Every time we returned we felt sad and pensive.” 

In the 1980s, in an expedition into a cave called Sarawak Chamber in the Mulu National Park in Borneo, a group of cavers succumbed to the enclosure and fell into a kind of paralytic shock and had to be guided out. The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca described silver miners who encountered phenomena from long-term mental distress, psychic pressure from claustrophobia. And the full tempest of panic as they imagined the ceilings and walls enclosing on them. Ask any chronobiologist who study the innate biological rhythms what the vacuum of solitary confinement does to the psyche. With no sunsets or sunrises, you pass time on a kind of primordial instinct. Like animals in zoos or cages, you pace. 

My cage is the downtown County Jail. It actually gets worse, because my charge is armed bank robbery. I’m viewed as an escape risk and leader / organizer by the Sheriff deputies and have been placed here in solitary. I find it difficult to organize my own thoughts, much less lead an uprising against eating bologna sandwiches everyday! 

Jails are the front lines of bad decisions and little hope. This system creates darkness where light is so desperately needed. There is an urban legend that you leave a piece of yourself in these places. Being isolated, you become adroit at communicating with your fellow condemned: reading lips, American Sign Language, passing lines, or speaking through a vent. 

Yesterday I spoke with a kid from Stockton, CA. For hours we shared our life experiences vis-a-vis the vent. He was in jail for a probation violation. Although he lived in Stockton, he worked at the Costco in Tracy, CA. After speaking with him for a while, something just wasn’t adding up. He said he was part-time but left for work at 4am and didn’t return home until the evening. Finally he admitted that he was embarrassed to tell me that he didn’t own a car. For those of you not familiar with Northern California, Stockton is about 18 miles from the outskirts of Tracy. Can you believe that he was embarrassed to walk 18 miles a day to a part-time job? There is always an uncanny mixture of bravado amongst a den of thieves, however, any prisoner worth his salt displaces these false veneers and finds within himself elements of authenticity. I’d personally rather befriend someone who walks 18 miles to work then someone who drives a Ferrari. A lot of us here have lost sight of the beauty in the struggle. His story emboldened me to look deeper within myself and focus and listen to that inward voice as opposed to the echo of my footsteps resounding in his concrete cave. 

By Kat

Gather round, gather round! Covid, overwork, and the state’s assault on the commons have been major barriers to people getting together in the past year. As capitalistic thinking dominates social media and the mainstream news, we urgently need alternative ways of getting the truth out and connecting people to radical projects and ways of life.

Universities, non-profits, and businesses regularly run big-budget “orientations,” to try to acclimate us to be eager cogs in the machinery of empire. Amazon shoved anti-union propaganda down workers’ throats in Bessemer, Alabama to stave off a unionization drive – putting posters in bathroom stalls and paying temp workers to walk around wearing “Vote No” t-shirts.

We can’t counter this assault only with tweets and TikTok videos, which often leave us more isolated than before. We urgently need ways to share new readings of the world and visions for the future. That’s where “Disorientation” zines come in!

Disorientation zines have a rich history as a cheap and effective way to communicate a lot of information with a lot of people. We’ve written up some advice on how to make a disorientation guide about whatever matters in your area! You can create one independently, but things will be much easier and more fun if you have small group working together from the start.

One of the most important (and hardest!) balances in making a Disorientation is being honest about the exploitation, extraction, and damage being done by most sectors of our society, while keeping things open-ended and hopeful.

Many of us are reaching out to the world through these zines because we feel burnt out from organizing – both because of internal conflict and a lack of public support. This fatigue can show, as we describe for the hundredth time why a beloved institution is actually part of the problem rather than the solution. We’re often asking people yet again not to call the cops on us, not to support that slimy non-profit, not to do the awful things that pass as normal.

But we cast these zines into the world as little lifeboats, in the hopes they will re-invigorate our movements and lead more people to re-imagine our world. At our best we write from this place of hope, so we’ll want to return to our zines – sparkling with possibilities of a revolutionary and abolitionist future – again and again.

How to make a disorientation zine

1. Discuss what you want to re-orient people away from, and towards. Do you want to take on a specific topic, like how corporate consultants are trying to take over your co-op? To build support and get more people out to your actions? To bring new people into a movement or group? The possibilities are pretty endless.

2. Start thinking about printing and distribution. (We’ve got strategies for both later.) You’ll want to know early how you’re going to print it, since this might determine how you put it together, how many pages it can be, etc. You’ll also want to have a plan for passing it out, so all those copies don’t sit in a basement somewhere.

3. Make a plan for creating your zine. Come up with a schedule, and make a cool flyer inviting people to come to some work sessions! You can share it just around your network, but it’s also fun to put it on bulletin boards and telephone poles around town to meet some new people. You can also invite people to email in content and ideas!

4. Have some work parties for writing and assembly! Bring food and spirits, or advertise it as a potluck. Put out a donations jar to collect money for printing – you’ll need it later. We recommend pasting zines together on paper if possible, so everyone has a chance to participate. With digital graphics, usually only one or a few people have the knowledge and software to make it. This can put a lot of pressure on them and leave everyone else with less say in the project. When you make zines by hand, everyone can contribute a doodle and can work simultaneously. (If you are using a computer, Scribus is a totally free alternative to Adobe InDesign.)

5. When the final zine is done, you’ll need to get it ready for printing! If you’re going to be folding the pages in half and stapling, you might need to do some extra prep work to make the spreads ready for the copy machine. You’ll need to assemble the individual pages into spreads for the copier. You can fold paper into a dummy copy, number each page, and unfold it. Or check out booklet.jaehnig.org and boooks.org for some helpful calculators!

6. Now you’re ready to print! The cheapest way to make a zine is to copy it yourself. Check all the independent copy places nearby, ask if they can give you volume or cool project discounts, and ask if they’ll price match what you “used to get ‘em for in [city nearby].” Look online for local offset or risograph print shops, which can be cheaper at high volume.

Other tried-and-true methods to get cheap copies include offering to do more labor yourself, fudging the copy count, befriending a copy store worker, or taking a job there. To save some trees and maybe some money, you can often find reams of unused but discarded paper (and staples!) at recycling/junk centers in your area.

7. A word about the internet: It’s probably tempting to promote your project on Twitter and other networks. We say it might not be worth it. Trying to “game” the algorithms and amass followers takes a lot of time and energy, and if you succeed, you’ll just be generating more value for the capitalists by keeping people scrolling on their website. The revolution will not be surrounded by promoted tweets. Distributing in the real world is the surest way to reach the most people and the broadest audiences. Still, putting a PDF online is always helpful and allows people in other areas to find your work. If you have the raw text, it’s important to put that online too so people who use screen readers can access it. This also allows future generations to pick up where you left off and easily build on your great work.

8. Time to distribute! For bonus points, have a launch party at a local community center, library, or bar. If the people you’re trying to reach frequent local bookstores, laundromats, coffee/donut shops, or other places where free newspapers live, ask if you can leave copies there. Take shifts passing out the zines where your audience gathers. (Long lines are always captive audiences!) It might be intimidating to pass out provocative words to total strangers, especially if your zine speaks against the place or institution you’re flyering at. But you’ll find many people are actually quite grateful to receive a hand-made booklet and appreciative of the interaction. Those who aren’t will probably just look the other way as they pass by.

9. Grab a stack and repeat! If you have a table, you can put out a donations jar to collect funds for your next print run. If you use Paypal or venmo, you can put the link right in your zine, or – as we prefer – just put an address where people can send well-concealed cash. 

By Adán Almeida

Its no secret that the character of San Diego has changed drastically in the last 10 years, and even the last 5. While there are so many factors for these urban transformations, there is one entity that I wish more people would think more critically about actively resisting. That is the constant influx of military personnel being stationed here and their expanding industrial installations around our low-income communities of color. The defense industry is growing, and it is almost effortless how easily these military contractors are transmuted into our communities, taking up our housing, transforming the economy and polluting the environment above all else. There is more to be done about how the military industry contributes to the city’s biggest social issues like gentrification, poverty and environmental racism. 

Many brown community members and organizers are vocal yet vague about how we can reclaim the varrios — through radical praxis. And otherwise, the pipeline from artist to business owner is too well known [see gente-fication] which surprisingly enough does little to support causes around poverty, policing, disease and displacement. 

Mayor Todd Gloria advocates for equality among us in a color-blind and classist way promoting equality for all our residents without addressing some very clear contradictions. For example, Gloria considers himself a friend of the Barrio Logan community while continuing to applaud the defense industry for whatever it is that they do here. In his own words he suggests that “the military community is intrinsic to the fabric of San Diego”, with an attitude of acceptance and normalization about its industrial encroachment. My question is then how can someone be an advocate for communities like Barrio Logan without addressing the realities of the growing military industry for local residents? Like what the Bay Area experiences in the face of a booming tech industry, the defense industry in San Diego is immune to much-needed regulations and limits of power as well.

The harbors that should belong to our communities in Central San Diego are well occupied and polluted by the defense industry. According to a SDMAC Impact Study; 60% of total US Navy fleets are in San Diego in areas that could have once been cultivated as small brown bayside communities in Barrio Logan and West National City. For generations, distinct neighborhoods in this area, comprised of mostly Latinx and linguistically isolated people, have encountered some of the worst effects of displacement and environmental racism in San Diego. Shipyards are stationed only blocks away from homes and schools, contributing to pollution in the air, water, soil and people’s bodies for decades. Among other things, residents in Barrio Logan experience asthma at twice the rate than the national average, according to the Environmental Health Coalition (EHC). EHC is one organization calling attention to specific instances of health and pollution disparities in low-income communities of color in central San Diego. 

While it would be hard to kick these long implemented naval installations out of our backyards, EHC does well at promoting practical solutions for social equity and public health in the region. Their most recent initiative seeks to minimize and ultimately eliminate diesel truck traffic in the residential neighborhoods of portside Logan. EHC has also been involved in getting residents to speak up on issues of discriminatory housing in the area. As newcomers are constantly making space for themselves in our neighborhoods, EHC has made some ongoing efforts with community members to defend accessible housing for long-standing residents and residents with the most need.

The issue of displacement is happening on many fronts in San Diego, the growing military presence is one, along with its huge industrial imprint. Then there is the subtly growing trend of gente-fication and branding of Chicano culture in our hoods too. Slowly our varrios are turning into shopping districts and cultural attractions in place of self-sustained neighborhoods of color. Barrio Logan is the epitome of this phenomenon, where property is constantly being passed through entrepreneurs to be reconstructed and refurbished for mainstream consumers. Regardless of what Latinx business owners believe about creating representation, they are giving into mass commercialization of Chicano history and Mexican American identity without noticing how they too are participating in class insulation and displacement of the surrounding poor. 

By romanticizing the culture, many outsiders have come closer in proximity to our varrios. Subsequently the new food, beer and clothing shops that pop up each year are not created to serve the needs of the surrounding community in any capacity. Through a critical lens, it’s obvious that there is a need for sites of change in our communities. There are youth and families of color that continue to be visibly impacted and traumatized by poverty, health problems, and street violence in this area; yet their struggles only ever seem to be tokenized and memorialized instead of actively tended to. Without class solidarity, racial solidarity is empty, and this is what a lot of people fail to understand. 

I could suggest many alternatives for investing in the urban public space, like creating free and diverse public health clinics, adult educational spaces, resource centers, and overnight shelters for homeless youth. And in place of all the liquor stores, there is the possibility of funding local community gardens, farmers markets and public food pantries. Less ongoing commercial development is needed to offset the pollution and heavy energy-use happening at the navy bases and shipyard. This includes the need for parks, urban trails and open green spaces for people and wildlife to thrive in. In an ideal situation, this is what our neighborhoods could be transformed into, if enough people believed it was necessary including the local gente themselves. 

Despite all the attention that surrounds the cultural narrative in central San Diego, there is little being done to defend and empower the generations of immigrant and working-class people against industrial and commercial oppression. My discomfort lies with how many of our people continue to be trapped in cycles of poverty and exploitation while waves of military personnel and upper middle-class transplants comfortably call San Diego home.

It is well worth problematizing the military-industrial complex in our urban space and resisting the nationalist fraternity that continues to make space for itself here easily. As for the entrepreneurs who claim to be Brown and down, they should begin by examining their own capitalist tendencies and recognize how their‘progressive’ and culturally inclusive businesses are still complicit in our oppression. 

*Praxis- putting theory into practice, or in this case, creating embodied resistance based on historical narratives and relevant tactics

*Varrio- another word for barrio, slang for vencidario (neighborhood) of predominantly latinx , low-income people in an urban context 

*Gente-fication – gentrification by ‘la gente’ Spanish word for ‘the people’. Upwardly mobile latinx people that commodify their culture and community through business owning. This phenomenon is openly supported by capitalists that seek cultural representation. 

Autonomous Tenant Councils: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

By AMMRA

We all know that the situation under capitalism is dreadful for tenants. Rent is theft. Landlords are parasites. Paying for a roof over our heads is an inhumane but long-standing practice. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation has only gotten worse. 

In the SF Bay Area, there is a long legacy of nonprofit organizations that deal with housing and tenant issues. Some have been forged out of specific struggles against particular landlords, some have emerged to offer legal counsel for those facing evictions and other unfriendly legal processes stacked against the poor. Other organizations have gone the ”poverty pimp” route, creating a raft of high salaried positions that enable the financing and construction of supposedly “affordable” housing which often, considering the high median income in a place like the Bay Area, is not actually affordable to most working people. While these diverse housing groups are more or less helpful to working class people, they most often do not focus on building power amongst those served. 

For this reason, Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) was formed in 2018. A tenant council is a group of tenants who work together to wield collective power against a shared landlord in order to improve their conditions. While in general councils may organize for more affordable, habitable, and safer housing, the issues that a council decides to organize around are ultimately dictated by its members. 

TANC helps organize councils and bring them together as a network. While councils interface directly with their landlord, they can find support from other councils who rent from different landlords. TANC researches landlords whose tenants would benefit from forming a council and compiles complaints that are common across councils. Councils can discuss and demand timely repairs and support tenants threatened with eviction. Ultimately, the point is to reconfigure power dynamics of landlords and tenants in the Bay Area.

One example from my own experience showed how this solidarity can work. Working with tenants in a San Francisco building that was being threatened with an eviction before the pandemic began, the local SF chapter of TANC launched a pressure campaign involving dozens of phone calls to the owners of the building and tabling / flyering in front of their workplace. Within weeks of these actions, involving friends and family of the tenants, as well as TANC’s networks of unpaid activist tenants throughout San Francisco and in the East Bay, the landlords had rescinded the eviction. Tenant councils are the base level of organization to make this all work.

TANC has been distributing information on tenants’ rights given the pandemic and hosting BBQs and events to network and strengthen our ties. TANC initially started out of the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it is now run completely autonomously from the DSA. 

Alongside many other similar organizations starting up around the country in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, an Autonomous Tenant Union Network / La Red de Sindicatos de Inquilinxs Autonomos (ATUN-RSIA) was formed to share resources, knowledge and experience in struggle and to politicize housing struggles towards more consciously revolutionary and intersectional analysis and lifestyles. All folks are invited to take part in these networks, as supporters or as members. Check out the websites for details: TANC Bay Area: baytanc.com. ATUN-RSIA: atun-rsia.org