Factually! with Adam Conover - How to Organize a Movement with Mie Inouye

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

How do we fight back against those who are trying to take away Americans’ civil rights? Scholar and organizer Mie Inouye joins Adam to explain how American civil rights movements built political power, and how we can do the same by following their example. She gives practical tips for organizing in our daily lives, and explains how each of us can be part of the movement to restore rights in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello everyone and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm talking to you today from Los Angeles. I'm finally back for a couple days after a wonderful week in New York City. Thanks to everyone who came out to see my new stand-up show at the Bell House. We blew the roof off of the place. My friend Max ZT, the Hammer Dulcimer

player, opened us up with some beautiful music. This incredible comic I met just while I was in New York named Benny Feldman did some incredible one-liners. This guy is great. Look him up if you've never seen him. His name's Benny Feldman. And I got to meet so many of you who listen to the podcast, who watch my TV shows. It was awesome. If you live in San Diego, I'm going to be there this weekend. And if you live in Portland, I'm going to be there later in September. Please come see me live. I would love to meet you. And by the way, if you love the podcast and you love what I do, please lend me some support on Patreon. You can find me at patreon.com slash adamconover. Just five bucks gets you access to every episode of this show ad-free.

That's right, no ads, plus occasional bonus podcast episodes. And you can join our community Discord, chat with like-minded folks. We have a live book club. It's a blast. Head to patreon.com slash adamconover to support the show. So look, America has some big problems, to say the least. As we discussed with Chris Hayes on the show a couple weeks ago, we are now facing an anti-civil rights movement. A movement that

is present and growing and powerful in America right now to take rights away from women, black people, queer people, immigrants, and more. This anti-civil rights movement has its own media. It has power in the courts. It has power on school boards, in sheriff's departments, state houses, and every other office of government up to the

United States Senate. And as much as we would rather it not be so, this movement is not fringe. It's one of the most powerful political movements in America today. And worst of all, one of its primary goals, a goal it has had massive success at, is anti-democratic. It aims and has succeeded in taking the vote away from Americans across the country and in tilting our entire democratic system towards policies that it supports and against policies that are supported by the majority of Americans. And that makes it very hard to fight because, you know, democracy is how we exercise power in this country.

So if you don't have access to democracy, well, you can't get anything done. I mean, how are we supposed to address climate change, labor rights, freedom of speech, or anything else when the right to vote is under threat this way? The challenges in front of us often seem simply impossible, right? I mean, what are we gonna do about an unaccountable Supreme Court devoted to taking away long-earned rights? What are we gonna do about an electoral

college that can readily thwart the popular will, or a Senate that tilts power away from people and towards giant masses of land? What are we gonna do about the fact that there seems to be an endless supply of money flowing from reactionary billionaires who support the project of taking rights away from everyday Americans? And what do we do about the fact that our politicians seem unable or unwilling to address these threats head on? Well, over the next month on Factually, we're doing a special series that's going to attempt to answer those questions.

A series that's going to bring on incredible experts who are going to be able to tell me and you and all of us what we can do to fight back against all of these threats. Not just what we can do as a country, as a society, but what you can do individually. but what you can do individually. It's my hope that in this series, you will get some tools that you can use to make change in your own community and change for all of us nationally, and that together, we can chart a course towards fixing some of this shit, okay?

I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope you are too, and this episode is the first episode in that series. So, again, returning to the question of this anti-civil rights movement, what do we do about it when it is successfully taking the levers of democratic power away from us? Well, I think what we need is a new civil rights movement to counteract it. See, the movements of the past, the civil rights movement of the 60s, the labor movement of the 1890s through the 1930s, the disability rights movement of the 70s, the disability rights movement of the 70s,

the gay rights movement of recent history. All of these movements accomplished an incredible amount. They transformed America in ways where, you know, the job isn't done, but they made a better world for all of us, and they did it in the face of even greater opposition than we face today. I mean, just to take the case of the civil rights movement for black American rights in the 60s, this movement faced a country that never even attempted to be a full democracy, that had systematically deprived black Americans of any democratic institutions or vote whatsoever for centuries. Profound racism and inequality was the law, and it was enforced with violence,

with state violence from, you know, not just mobs, but the actual government itself. And yet, they fought and won. Likewise, American workers, despite the fact that they never had any power over how the companies or the bosses treated them, started organizing in the late 19th century in the face of massive violence from their own government, and they did so with such success that they transformed the American workplace. So how do we repeat those successes? I mean, we've been trying, right?

The largest protest movement in American history erupted after the murder of George Floyd, but as we discussed with James Forman Jr. a few months ago, that movement in many ways seemed to fall short of its aims. So how can we make real, durable change for civil rights in America? What did those earlier movements know? What did they do that was so successful? What did they know about how to make change that we can draw from today? know about how to make change that we can draw from today? Well, to answer our guest today is both a scholar of civil rights movements and an organizer herself. She's a professor at Bard College, and her writings about the U.S. labor and civil rights movements have been published in Jacobin Magazine and The Forge, and she's the co-founder of an organization called Reclaim

Rhode Island. I am so thrilled to have her on the show, and I hope you are too. Please welcome Mie Inouye. Mie, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to talk to you because you're a scholar of social movements. Is that correct? Tell me a little bit about your work. Correct. Yes. I'm a political theorist, but I write about organizers and social movements as political theorists and sources of political theory. And my book that I'm working on looks specifically at theories of social change that developed through the labor movement of the 1930s and through the long civil rights movement from the 30s to the 70s in the U.S. So when you say theories of social change, these are theories on the part of the people in these social movements? Are these their own

theories? They're saying, this is how we think we're going to make change in America. theories they're saying this is how we think we're going to make change in America sometimes um so they are the theories of the actors themselves but they're not always explicitly stated in that way right um so this is like one of the challenges of writing about organizers as political theorists usually like political theorists read books um and you know we study like people treat like monographs and treaties about human nature or democracy or whatever. But the people that I study, like, you know, Ella Baker, for example, a civil rights organizer, wrote very little. Organizers tend not to have a lot of time to write. And the writing that they do do doesn't look like this.

Right. It's in the form of like field notes or memos or pamphlets. And so part of what I try to do is tease out the kind of implicit theories based on people's writings, but also based on decisions that they made. Yeah. Well, the reason I'm so excited to talk to you is because, you know, we're in this moment of I don't want to say unprecedented, but it certainly feels to me very large challenges in American and world history, that there's a whole lot of forces bearing down on us that seem very difficult to change. And look, I was brought up, as maybe you were too, being given this history of these social movements, that like, hey, they did it, you know, between the 30s and the 60s or 70s, roughly. They did it. People rose up. They changed America. The end. Right. And now and now we're done and we can keep sort of moving forwards. And the thought that I keep returning to is that it kind of seems like we need some social movements on that scale. Again,

we need a new labor movement. We need a new civil rights movement to fight back against the anti civil rights movement that is currently taking rights away. And I've been very deeply invested in figuring out, okay, I mean, who were these people? How did they do it? The challenges ahead of us seem so massive. People are walking around going, what the hell do we do? Let's just give up because what possible step can I take? possible step can I take? And yet folks like Ella Baker, who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement in the, you know, in the South from the 40s to the 60s or in America at large, well, they faced even greater challenges. And yet they somehow put this movement together. And so I've been trying to figure out what the hell is the recipe for it. I've been doing my own reading. Is there any

connecting thread that you see in these social movements that we could use as a starting point to figure out what they knew that we can learn? Yeah, definitely. I agree with your kind of the picture that you've laid out of the conjuncture that we're at. I think people are increasingly coming around to the view, especially with Dobbs, the overturning of Roe versus Wade recently, that, you know, we don't live in a democracy, right? That it's hard for us to plausibly say that this is like a democratic society. And we face huge obstacles to actually making the will of the majority like the law, right? And so it is a time, I think, to look. And then I think, like you said,

also a lot of people feel kind of hopeless and like there isn't a clear path from here to there, right, to the kind of scale of social change that we need to see. But I think the reason, one of the reasons that it's important and valuable to look to the past is that there's never, when you read, you know, the history of social movements, you learn that there's never been a clear path to any of the significant moves towards further democratization of our society that have happened. And nonetheless, those moves, people have made those changes. would be most excited to talk about today is the role of both of two forms of political action in creating the kind of changes that we saw in the 30s and that we saw in the 50s and 60s. And those are, on the one hand, mass action, and on the other hand, organizing. I can quickly give you my definition of those terms. Yes, please. Yeah. Okay, great. So mass action

is a term that comes up a lot when you read labor history and also when you read the history of the civil rights movement. Sometimes it's actually called mass direct action. And that gives you kind of a sense of what it means. So direct action is political action, action that's taken outside of the established mechanisms for making change, right? And that causes disruption at a scale that like, you know, it's meant to force concessions, right? And so mass direct action or mass action is that kind of action outside of the established mechanisms, but at a scale, you know, with the participation of so many people that it actually can incapacitate the institution in question, right, and force concessions from elites. Do you have an example of either of those that would be familiar to people?

Yeah, so for mass action, you know, we can look at, we could talk about the strike wave of 1934. We can talk, you know, we can think of lots of other, you know, strikes that we've seen since then. We can talk, you know, the civil rights movement is exemplary for the mass forms of mass action that it innovated. We can think about the Montgomery bus boycott. We can think about the march from Selma to Montgomery. We can think about the march on Washington. And in our recent memory, in our lives, we can think about the summer of 2020, which was a, you know, a form of mass action in which many of us participated. Yeah. Okay, great. And I, and so many of those, whether you're talking about a strike, or you're talking about the Montgomery bus boycott, those are actions where it wasn't,

hey, we're not, we're not electing someone who is going to pull a lever that is, you know, sort of sticking out of the political apparatus and make a change. It's like, hey, we're not electing someone who is going to pull a lever that is sort of sticking out of the political apparatus and make a change. It's saying, no, we're going to marshal our own power to fuck up the system enough that we force a change to happen, even though the system itself is unwilling, by depriving the bus system of money, by depriving an employer of the labor that they need to make money. I mean, I think the strike is, to me, a very canonical example of this. Is that right? Exactly. It is. And the term really comes out of the radical labor movement, right, of the early 20th century. A lot of people associate, a lot of people sort of trace the origins of the term direct action to the international workers of the world. So yeah, it is like a labor, you know, a labor idea. And I was really interested when I did research on Ella Baker to realize that although nobody thinks of her and nobody writes about her as like a practitioner of mass action,

she uses that term constantly. The theory of change, you know, implicit in the practice of mass action is that for ordinary people, right, for poor people, for working people, for people who are not elites, we've never had, as we said at the outset, clear paths to implementing our will, right? Because the electoral system is in many ways stacked against us, right? Which doesn't mean that we can't do anything through the electoral system. It's also a useful vehicle for change. But we don't have clear paths to like, you know, a Green New Deal or to universal healthcare or to even gun control, right? Like through the electoral system. But we do still have a source of leverage. We have multiple sources of leverage. And that is

basically our cooperation, right, with the institutions that govern our lives. So we cooperate when we go to work, we cooperate when we obey the laws, you know, we cooperate in all of these ways and society depends on our cooperation. And so here I'm drawing a lot on a very famous and kind of amazing book called Poor People's Movements by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Clower. You know, if your listeners are interested in this idea of mass action and disruption as the source of ordinary people's power, they really lay out this case that the way that we've, you know, achieved things as the working class in the past is, you know, not principally by electing the right people to office or by lobbying elites through established channels,

but by being disobedient. Yeah. Well, there's some degree to which it requires both, right? I mean, the labor movement was a century almost of extremely disruptive, direct actions, you know, strikers being killed by law enforcement, you know, workers, you know, really throwing a wrench in the gears of capitalism. But also the labor movement only persisted because eventually laws were passed that guaranteed, you know, Americans' right to form a union. Exactly. Same is true of the civil rights movement that, you know, the Kennedy administration,

the Johnson administration were like, they played a role. They were responsive to those direct actions, but there is an electoral piece of it, right? Yeah, you put it right. It does. Social change does require both. When you kind of realize that, you know, the main source of leverage that ordinary people have is in, you know, collective action at scale, right? And that is disruptive. You know, that doesn't, that shouldn't lead us to like abandon electoral action at scale, right, and that is disruptive, you know, that doesn't, that shouldn't lead us to like abandon electoralism at all, but rather to think a little bit differently about it, right, to think about the ways that worker militancy in the 1930s not

only kind of created a context where a lot of the policies that we know as the New Deal were passed, but also that they were enforced, right? That there was actually political will to enforce them, right? Because workers were in the streets, right? And similarly, you know, with every crucial piece of legislation that we associate with the classical phase of the civil rights movement, it was preceded by mass action, right? By disruption across the country that created a situation where it was necessary for Johnson and even for like Northern Republicans to do something, right? So mass action is the first pillar you want to tell us about. The second was organizing. Tell us about that.

We use the word organizing a lot. It can mean a lot of different things, but I think, you know, the most basic definition is that organizing is getting together with other people to form a collective to pursue shared goals, right, in a sustained way. And that could be a labor union. That could be a political party. That could be a community organization. That could be a mutual aid association. These are all different forms of organizing. And I think that a really important question for scholars of social movements and really for like all of us in this moment is what is the relationship between these two forms of political action, right, between mass action and between organizing. And I think that's important for us right now because we've just, I think part of why this feels like a demobilizing and kind of, you know, dark time is because we all just lived through the biggest protest movement in American history.

And now, you know, the political winds are not at our back, right? Yeah. So we are feeling like, wow, if we like, wow, we did that much mass action, and this is all we have to show for it? I think it can be disheartening. And also, we all felt the difference. We all felt the difference between a historical moment when a mass movement is possible and a historical moment like we're living in now where it isn't or it doesn't feel like there's that energy in the streets. Right.

Yeah. So we're kind of keenly aware of the degree to which mass action is not entirely in our control. Right. That it depends a lot on historical contingency. And that, I think, can be sobering. Yeah. Let's talk more about the current moment and how you view that.

And I assume you're talking about the moment post-George Floyd's murder that's the moment you're speaking of. Let's get into that, but we have to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Mie Inouye. Okay, we're back with Mie. So we were just speaking about the social movement post George Floyd's murder, which you described as the largest social or largest mass movement in

American history. That is a, that's actually a strong statement. I'm kind of surprised by it. Why do you characterize it? Is it just raw numbers of people in the streets? Yeah, just numbers of people in the streets and number of like protests, right? I think there were like over like 10,000, you know, protests like across the country that summer, which, you know, like that's really unprecedented. You know, basically every major American city, but also like minor cities, you know, had a protest. Yeah, we lived through something really unprecedented. But as you say, so it felt like a historic moment. You know, I, I will go back through my journal at the time and I was just

like, oh my God, I'm living through history right now. Every day you don't know what's going to happen. And sometimes you were shocked by the brutality of it, you know, living in Los Angeles, watching in, you know, what was happening downtown at the protests, some of which I joined, but some of which I watched from afar. And, you know, but also the changes that you started to see sweep across the country, the ways people started speaking differently, the consciousness that seemed to arise in everybody simultaneously. It felt like a spark really caught,

and, you know, a flame started burning, but then a year later it felt like there was a rainstorm it felt like the moment passed it i'm going to mix metaphors but it felt like a mirage that dissipated you know that yeah i i look back go oh yeah there was this moment of possibility and now i don't feel it anymore what what happened um and in fact you started to see the i've talked about this on the show before, but, you know, seeing the seeing the difference from Joe Biden's first State of the Union, where he said he just said we need to do something about police violence in his own words. But he did make that statement the next year. He made no statement about that.

He said we need to refund the police, which is like forget policy. It's just the politics of which direction he feels the wind is blowing at that time that he needs to speak to is that's a that's an immense reversal. And it feels like the pressure has dissipated as well. The pressure on people like Biden. We're not in the streets anymore. So why do you feel having looked at the history of these movements, is there a reason that you feel that that happened? Yeah, so let's start with why that movement was possible in the first place. We all know that the trigger for the uprising of the summer of 2020 was the video of George Floyd's murder, right? But there had been many previous such videos, right? You can say there are things that were distinctive about that one, but it doesn't seem different enough to have warranted such a different response, right? And so I think it's clear that the protest had a lot to do with

the fact that we were living through a global pandemic, that the state was massively mishandling. State legitimacy was, the legitimacy of the state was at an incredibly low point, right? And other people have made this point, but I think that that experience of the state's indifference, like seeming indifference to a mass death event, along with the economic precarity that so many Americans were experiencing, created an ability for people to empathize in a way that they perhaps had not with the vulnerability to premature death that George Floyd experienced and that Black Americans have always experienced in this country, right? Yeah.

And on top of that, right, a lot of people were home, either because they were unemployed or because they were working remotely. People's lives were really disrupted, right? And that created, I think, among other things, an opportunity for people to think, right? Which is one of the main things that we usually don't have that, you know, depoliticizes us. So, you know, all of these, like, extraordinary historical factors were at play and made it possible for this incredible event to happen and for this incredible display of solidarity to happen. As you say, it felt like it dissipated quickly. And then there has been a

kind of like intense political backlash. And I can't, you know, fully account for that. But I do think that, you know, as someone who participated in the movement, and, you know, I assume like most of your listeners probably were part of it, right? So I think we can all reflect on, you know, what we think we could have done differently or better. You know, there are a few things that come to mind to me, right? So first of all, I think that we were in the streets for a number of different reasons. We were in the streets because of our feelings of empathy and solidarity with George Floyd and with other Black Americans who regularly experience brutal police repression. But we were also in the streets because we were all suffering, right, in different ways. And I'm not sure that we really figured out

as a movement how to connect those different, you know, plights, right? And how to kind of forge a durable coalition coming out of that moment. And I think that's important because I think that people are capable of doing extraordinary things, you know, as in solidarity with other people's plights. But I also think that self-interest is like a, or shared material interest is a powerful motivator. And I think that we need, you know, work that lies ahead of us is figuring out how to connect the dots between the different kinds of struggles that we all face in this society and how to kind of cohere those into demands that can reemerge, right, the next time we have a moment

of mass action, of which there will certainly be more, right? So that's one thing that comes, that I've been thinking about a lot. Yeah. It's funny what you're describing. Sounds like a lot of the conversations that I have in union circles when we're talking about how to build solidarity within a union. While everybody actually has their own job with their own needs, often a union covers different people with different occupations or slightly different occupations in the same workplace. Or in the case of the guilds that I'm a member of,

the same occupation in different workplaces. But you need to find the thing that connects everybody's experience that is both their self-interest and also the self-interest of everybody else so that so that you know i guess it's not just having solidarity yeah we were out there in solidarity with with george floyd to say well your struggle is my struggle but also finding a way to literally connect my struggle to to your struggle so that i i see it as literally the same i'm not just having empathy. We are part of the same struggle.

We have the same literal interest. Yeah, you understand that you have something at stake, right? That you also have something at stake and you feel that viscerally, right? I think that's really important. I also think that, you know, if we look to the labor movement of the 1930s, to the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s, there's an interesting interplay between organization and disruption and mass action. And I think that organization, right, organizing can't create those moments. Like nobody organized

the summer of 2020 into existence. You know, it can lay the groundwork and it can produce leaders who can kind of help to direct and magnify the impact of mass action. So, for example, like in the 1930s, there were a number of general strikes, right, like across the country in 1934. There was a Longshoremen's strike on the West Coast. There was the Teamsters strike in Ohio and Toledo and Minneapolis. There was an autoworker strike, right? And in each of these cases, there were radicals, right, like communists, socialists, Trotskyists, like, you know, fellow travelers who had a presence in that city and who led the strike, right? Like they couldn't have done it on their own. They were like small cadre organizations, but they, you know, like Harry Bridges, for example, in San Francisco is like a communist,

you know, longshoreman. And he led that strike, right? And he made it as militant as it was, right? So that it actually became like a general strike, right? And he made it as militant as it was, right? So that it actually became like a general strike, right, across the entire city and really shut down the entire city. So I noticed, I mean, there were so many different protests, and I don't know what they were all like. I was in Rhode Island, which was like, you know, a very obscure place to be, you know, that summer. But even where I was, like, I did feel a kind of, not that there weren't organizations and leaders in the fray, but I did feel like there could have been a little bit more leadership to make the moment even more impactful. Yeah. Well, it struck me that the movement was

high on mass action, low on organization, that people were coming out in spontaneous displays, and there's an immense amount of power to that. Hey, on social media, hey, we're all going down. We're all headed downtown. Show up. Here's where we're all going. And that's something that everybody can say. Everyone can blast that out to their friends. But once you want to make a strategic decision, there's no organizing apparatus to make a collective decision that represents the movement and that everyone in the movement, everyone on the street feels has credibility. There's no organizing to do that. other half is well when you want to turn people out not just via twitter but on a tuesday because there's something in particular you want to do um you don't have the apparatus to do so and i'm reminded of again just you know reading about the civil rights movement like the you know the uh all

these different levels of organization that there were there were the small you know small group meetings among leaders who were respected there were mass meetings in which you know people would debate what to do next and in which information would be distributed. There was a real a lot of importance put on distributing the message about what to do next to the

community. That's something that often exists within the labor movement, for instance, when taking a strike. A strike is highly organized the way we do it today. But this was the opposite of that. And it seems to me that that was maybe one of the reasons that that follow-up action couldn't be taken. Because when you say, hey, all right, we were all out on the street last week, but now we want to go do something very specific. Well, where is everybody? You don't know how to get in touch with them again, because they

all just showed up because of social media. Yeah, exactly. And, again, you can't organize something, like, at that scale, right? And organizations, so Piven and Cloward, who I mentioned earlier, you know, they make this really provocative argument that organization stifles movements, right? Like, that it's the wrong impulse to be like, oh, guys, like, we just need to all go to meetings, right, when people are rioting in the streets, right, because what you're doing then is actually taming the kind of unbridled energy of the movement, which is actually a source of power, right? I think they go a little far with that argument, though, and I think that, you know, what, it does matter that you have the kind of knowledge and relationships and, like, kind of infrastructure in place to be able to, like, interact with history in those moments, right? Yeah. And that is one, I think, big difference between our moment and the 1930s or the 1950s and

60s. We, as a society, are very disorganized, right? We have lived through decades of neoliberalism that has, you know, decimated the labor movement, right? It's been on a 60-year decline. There's this amazing book called Diminished Democracy by Theda Skocpol, where she shows that like from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, there were like, you know, all of these giant civic organizations. Like at one point, like 58 civic organizations like the American Legion, the Knights of Labor, et cetera, that each had like like one one percent or more of the American population. Right. Wow. each have like, like one, 1% or more of the American population. Right. Wow. Can you imagine if like we have, like, we're like, you know, 330 million people in the U S like if there were like 3 million people in democratic socialists of America and like 3 million in like the American

Legion and like more than half of the country was in an organization. I mean, we have no organizations of that size. I mean, like, look, something I've just noticed around Los Angeles, this is a very silly example of this, but like in Los Angeles, when we're filming in the entertainment industry, one of the big sets that we use are Masonic Lodges and Elks Lodges, which are these big fraternal organizations that existed for a century or more, had membership everywhere. And all of these organizations own their buildings, but none of them have memberships anymore. You go in and there's like two old dudes

drinking whiskey at the bar, and so what do they do? They rent out the space to film crews, but it's really, to me, physical evidence of, oh, these used to be vibrant. Now, those are not really political organizations to the degree that you're talking about, but look at stuff like...

But they are. Okay. Like, that's part of Theta Scotchpole's argument is that they served really important political functions. Like, they often did actually, you know, like, organize to get legislation passed at the federal level. They often helped to implement legislation. You know, the American Legion was famously, like, really important in the passage of the GI Bill. Some of them were labor federations, like the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But even when they were not political explicitly, they are a structure, right, within which people have intimate relationships, right, with many other people,

and people develop habits of like cooperation, right? And discipline. And I think that we are extremely alienated and undisciplined, right? As a population. William C. Foster was a labor organizer from the 30s who I also study, right? Like he very intentionally strategized, you know, he was a communist. He's a member of the Communist Party, but he was also a labor leader in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. And he really intentionally strategized about using churches, using neighborhood associations, tapping into all of those networks when trying to organize a strike. And similarly, the Black church was an incredible asset, right? A crucial site of political organizing for the civil rights movement. And so I think that's one way in which we are really challenged today,

is that, you know, we're not, we're not used to, you know, being organized. Yeah. And membership and all these organizations have gone down. I even think about like the Boy Scouts of America has fallen apart. You know what I mean? And this is just kids going whitewater rafting. Like membership organizations of all kinds have fallen. Young people are like leaving churches in droves, even if whether you want to see churches as a good or bad organizing force.

And I think it depends on the church, but like we're less members of churches. And then it strikes me, and obviously union membership is vastly down, but then it strikes me that the organizations that do exist tend to run top down. Like one of the biggest organizations is AARP, right? It's a huge membership organization, hugely politically powerful.

But it's not like you can show up to an AARP meeting and like be the head of your local chapter of the AARP and have some political power. You get the magazine in the mail and you pay them your $10 a month or whatever and you get the discount. And then whoever runs the AARP goes and talks to Congress. And guess what? Unfortunately, the majority of our unions now operate that way. And so do our churches because we have mega churches now instead of, you know, deacons are not powerful anymore. Now it's just the person at the top.

And so all those organizations have been hollowed out of their membership power. Do you agree with that? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And even organizations that kind of present themselves as social movement organizations or like community organizations often are, you know, effectively like nonprofits with a small professional staff, you know, and then members who make donations or who, you know, phone bank occasionally or whatever. But it is rare to have a truly mass organization. Yeah. Okay, well, we've really done a good job

of outlining the problem of our present moment, right? But the folks who we are talking about, we keep referring to, did so much in the face of, I would say, greater challenges in many cases. So after our next break, let's get into that and talk about how they did it and what

we can learn from them we'll be right back with more mia in a way okay so mia we talked about how uh the you know right now we're at this period where we're alienated from each other where you know we have low institutional organization um as result, it's very difficult for us to organize and have mass action in ways that will actually help fight back against the about the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century, these are people who faced maybe bigger problems. I mean, we're talking about black Americans in the deep south. Obviously, the black church was a really important institution, and we lack institutions that are that powerful today,

but we're talking about people who, the weight of, for hundreds of years, the U.S. state and federal government worked to alienate them from each other and from any possible institution to disrupt their social bonds, to disrupt the black family, to disrupt any kind of black political organization. Hundreds of years of that. The labor movement fought back against, you know, the federal government sending troops to kill strikers, right? And, you know, a sort of direct violence that, I mean, we can talk about what happened in the wake of George Floyd's murder,

but, you know, it was, the amount of death was greater then. And so, and by the way, they didn't have communications technology, they didn't have the internet, they didn't even have cell, they didn't even have cell phones, right? So, how did the the i know that seems silly but but but truly like you know when you again you read histories the civil rights movement and they're like what mimeographing pamphlets and handing them out um and so the amount of uh the amount of physical labor that it took to to do that sort of communication organizing was huge. So how did these movements do it? What was the special sauce that they had?

Hmm. Great question. Well, so let's think about the 1930s and the kind of labor militancy that helps to produce the New Deal. In part, we have to say that there were also a lot of historical conditions that created a situation where millions of workers were able to recognize not only that they were suffering the effects of the Great Depression, but also that their suffering was widespread and therefore pointed to kind of bigger social problems and was not just the product of their individual failing. And so we saw kind of the low point of the Great Depression in 1933, followed by in 1934, this year-long kind of strike, right, across industries and across the country that helped to produce

the Wagner Act, among other things, right, which actually kind of for the first time guaranteed workers the right to unionize, but also with like at least some kind of federal enforcement, as well as the kind of social safety net that came out of the Social Security Act and the GI Bill, et cetera, and that was expanded by subsequent Democratic administrations. So what happened? How did they do that? Yeah. So, I mean, I think that, you know, they didn't have favorable conditions, right? They had, you know, they had some signals from the federal government that it was like it was OK to unionize, right, that were helpful, that gave them kind of some hope and caused a lot of people to flood into unions and to try to mobilize. Workers were still fighting cops in the streets, right, and being killed, right? You know, I think what they had, you know, which we, which is the

challenge that we, that we face, right? But they had, you know, a vibrant left, right? They had, you know, the, they had organizations like the, the Communist Party that William C. Foster was, was a member of. And they had, you know, many other kind of like radical organizations that intentionally embedded themselves within the labor movement, right, both as union staff and also as rank and file workers, in order to radicalize workers, in order to bring them a sense of history, a sense of like what the labor movement could accomplish, you know, an analysis of the injustice that they were experiencing and what they could do about it, and who were also, because of their ideological commitments, willing to put themselves on the line

and, you know, take a lot of hits in order to kind of inspire other workers to take up the struggle, right? in order to kind of inspire other workers to take up the struggle, right? So that is one thing that I think they had going for them that was really important and that did have kind of a big effect. That can be a source of hope for us, actually, because we are in a moment of what feels like, and we hope that it actually is a kind of resurgence in the labor movement. what feels like, and we hope that it actually is a kind of resurgence in the labor movement. We've seen, you know, petitions for new unions increase 57% just in the first six months of this fiscal year. We've seen all these young people, you know, trying to unionize their workplaces, whether that's Starbucks or Amazon or now like Trader Joe's. And among those people are a lot of really politicized, you know, college grads and people who are just like kind of, you know, have lived through

Trump's election. They lived through before that the financial crisis. They've lived through Occupy. Or at least it's in their recent memory. They lived through kind of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the hope and then disappointment of that, right? And they lived through the George Floyd protests. And I think that they have a kind of really sharp analysis of the forms of political and economic domination that, you know, we are all experiencing. And so, you know, we are all experiencing. And, and so, you know, I think the reason that I think that you can see in the 1930s, that it actually didn't take that many people like that, you know, in each of these industries, or in each of these cities, to kind of help get things going, right, and to kind of raise the stakes. That's something that I think, you know, we can all do is we can try to participate in in like rebuilding the labor movement and in rebuilding the U.S. left.

Yeah. Well, and that's what you're describing sounds very similar to there's this concept I've heard of the Brahmin left. That is the highly educated, you know, folks like you're describing who are involved in these movements. But in the 30s, you talk about how folks like William Foster were helping lead a really broad based like workers rights movement where the actual movement was, you know, a mass movement of working class people. Yeah. And Foster himself was an industrial worker, right? And he was not college educated. He was not high school educated, right? Okay.

He was a radical, but that doesn't mean that he was like, you know, an intellectual or like. Yeah. And in fact, he was extremely dismissive of like professionals and intellectuals throughout his career. like professionals and intellectuals, um, uh, throughout his, his career. So I don't mean to suggest that this, um, that this layer of like radicals and militants within the labor movement, um, has been historically or should be, you know, a layer of intellectuals or people who are highly educated. No, but you're, but you are describing that like highly educated intellectuals can also like participate in this layer um it sounds like what you're saying um but i guess the question i have is that uh you know a thing people

often ask about the labor movement in america is why is not why is the working class not angrier why is the working class not uh you know engaging in mass. We saw a mass movement after George Floyd's murder across a racial dimension. And certainly, I would say there's more working class people in the street than not. But we don't have a large period of labor unrest right now is what it doesn't feel like. And is that a missing ingredient or is that something that we can cultivate somewhat if we're trying to build a new labor movement that can fight back against the capitalist forces that face us in the same way that happened in the 30s? you know, I don't know, like I do some, you know, canvassing, um, and, you know, talk to people about, um, the economic situation in this country or whatever, like people are plenty angry. Um, but they are also very disaffected. And I think they are also for good reasons. Um, you know,

uh, like often don't feel that, you know, they're becoming politically active is going to have any effect. Yeah, they're cynical with good reason. Yeah. And also, right, the labor movement is at an all time low, right? We, you know, there are lots of workers who are working under, you know, difficult conditions and who understand that they're being exploited. But we don't have the kind of like organizational infrastructure that can make it easy for people to imagine, right, being powerful and being able to actually change something. So, but I do think that we can change that. Right. And I think that it's hopeful that we're seeing such an increase in a kind of like desire to form unions. And I think that like one of the things that is available for us to do at this time is to really try to foment that kind of latent like frustration and energy.

kind of latent, like, frustration and energy, right? Yeah. So let's make this really concrete. If we want to start fomenting that, how do we go about doing it, like, in our daily lives, you know? If folks listening are interested in doing so, what is the first step for them? Yeah. So the first thing is to join an organization, right? Or maybe to join multiple organizations, right? Because you as we as individuals are not really capable of doing that much in the face of the kind of scale of problems that we that we that we face right now. But you can join a political organization in your community. You can join kind of some of the few sort of like mass organizations that do exist you can get involved in your own union you can try to start a union right of your own and you

can also do you know there's there are other ways that you can you know play a support role in the labor movement. Even if you are not part of a union right now, it's not possible for you to start one. So there's, for example, something called the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee that is part of DSA. of a, an organization, a committee of like volunteers, some of, a lot of whom are like, kind of have some expertise related to labor and who are kind of available for people who are interested in starting unions to call and, you know, to ask them to do some research or to ask for advice on how they get started. Folks also will like phone bank, you know, for labor campaigns through Ewok. So there are organizations like that, that you can be, that you can be part of. Right. Um, and so, yeah, I think that that's kind of,

um, the, the first step, right. Is to, to join some organizations, join some, join some organizations, reform an organization. If you're part of one that is, if you're, if you're part of a, uh, an old sclerotic topdown union, you know, you can try to get new leadership elected to that union. There's some unions that have had success with that. But there's also just at your own workplace talking to the people that you work with and saying, like, hey, I'm pissed off. Are you pissed off? Are you pissed off? Do you maybe want to get organized?

Oh, how do we do that? And then reach out to one of those one of those groups that you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. There are also I also think that it's a good you know, we don't have the kinds of mass organizations that they had in the early 20th century, but there still are like organizations that whether it's, you know, at the very local level, like a neighborhood organization or even like a church, right, or other community organizations, right. And I feel like it's an important time actually for like it's an important time actually for like for Millennials, for Zoomers, for like young people to try to root themselves in organizations that even aren't necessarily explicitly political so that they can like know the place

where they are and build relationships that can be activated and that can be used right for political purposes, in certain moments. And one way that, you know, you can do that, that I've written about a little bit recently is, you know, like it's kind of a, it might seem like a dramatic move, but to take, to become a salt, right, to take a job in a particular industry with the intention of forming a union, right, in your workplace, right? And so, you know, there are, I think, you know, there are a lot of folks doing that right now. There's organizations like Amazonians United that are trying to recruit people into those kinds of roles. So I think if you're, you know, if you're,

especially if you're a young person and you're thinking about like, what am I going to do with my life? If you have a theory of social change that involves, right, like the labor movement as a potential vehicle for radical social transformation, then I think like one of the most kind of impactful things you can do is actually try to take a job in a strategic industry. And by that, I mean, an industry that actually is really central to the functioning of our society, like the logistics industry, but also like the healthcare industry, right. And to try to, or the education industry, and to try to either form a union, democratize your union, right, like you're talking about, to make it more militant and more democratic to or like as a rank and file worker to create a union and to build worker power. Oh, you're talking about some real radical stuff now, Mia, that you

would take a job. Oh, I'm going to go. Oh, there's an Amazon warehouse near me. There's a Starbucks. I don't have anything to do. Yeah, I can work for minimum wage for a little while, but while I'm there, I'll spread dissent through the ranks and I'll start whispering and saying, hey, do you guys want to maybe talk to a union? Do you want to get organized? You're a sleeper agent. Well, a lot of people are doing this, right? So there are, Right. So there are you know, you you've like you've heard about this, like all these Starbucks that are unionizing. And, you know, some of the leaders of that of that drive are themselves salts. Right. There are people who who took those jobs, like with the intention of forming a union. Same thing at the same thing at the Amazon Labor Union. Right. Like about a third of a core organizing committee were salts.

They were people who heard what was going on. They saw Chris Smalls in the news. Some of them moved across the country to take a job at the Staten Island warehouse because they thought that that was where they could be, you know, make the biggest impact. And it might sound like a, you know, like, you know, this huge heroic move. And I think it is. It's a really, like, you know, courageous and like important thing to do. But also, you know, for a lot of young people, these are not necessarily like this is not, you know, necessarily a huge sacrifice, right? If you think about the kind of difficulty that young people face, like sort of trying to like make it securely into the, you know, quote unquote,

like professional class or to like, you know, get a stable, like sort of white collar job, right? I think people actually, I think young people do face these tradeoffs between having like meaningful work. Right. And having work that's actually kind of like well compensated. And if you really believe that, like the most important thing that you could be doing right now is building up the labor movement, then, you know, taking a job at Amazon or taking a job at Starbucks. Right. That's a good job. Right? That's a job that comes with a sense of purpose that puts, you know, your political capacity to use in a way that is really valuable. Yeah, that is so cool. I also, though, love, just want to return to something

you said a moment ago about joining maybe nonpolitical organizations. That, you know, joining, if you are a member of a church, getting involved in the actual leadership of the church such that you know the other folks in leadership and you know the parishioners. And you can, you know, if something happens in your community that you want to support and you think your membership would support, you can, you know, you have an email list that you can reach out to or you're trusting your community that you want to support and you think your membership would support you can you know you have an email list that you can reach out to or you're trusting your community um or i mean this is something i've done myself over the past couple years i joined a neighborhood homelessness coalition i became really involved in my union um and sometimes i think wait what am i doing like i'm a comedian i should be on tour why am i spending so much effort on like just a neighborhood organization and then i I realized, wait, no, when something happens, when I want to fundraise for a pro-labor candidate, when I want to, you know, get people to turn out for an event that I think is important, oh, I can do it now. can also sort of very slowly bend the organization to support the sort of things that I care about.

And in all those organizations now, in the homelessness organization, when, you know, a new strain of the pandemic comes through, we talk about how to keep people safe. When, you know, the Dobbs decision came down in my union, we talk about what our response should be to that, even though we're just a union of, you know, writers. These are, you know, these can become locuses of political activity, even if they don't seem like it at first. I want to turn quickly before we end, once again, to the civil rights movement of the 60s. And you were talking about Ella Baker and all these incredible leaders. We spent some time on labor when we talk about how we make progress on race in America. what are the, you said the theory of

change. What was the theory of change that these folks had? Because they were clearly very successful. It's one of the most successful movements in American history, obviously. Much work still to be done, but the progress they made was unbelievable, and I'm sure seemed impossible before they embarked upon it that they were shocked at every turn at how successful they were so what what did they know that we can learn from Baker's theory of change right I think is really interesting so she as you said like you're reading this Taylor Branch history of the civil rights movement she is often kind of mentioned as this sort of background organizer figure and contrasted with King, who was kind of the more prophetic, like charismatic mobilizer, right? And it's true

that Baker really stressed organizing, right? She was really good at building the kind of like organizational machinery that could develop new leadership in people who hadn't previously been political and could endure over time. And one of the things that I write about in my article on Baker is that I think she learned those skills in large part through her experience as a missionary in the Black Baptist Church, right? So she grew up in the Women's Missionary Society of the Black Baptist Church in North Carolina. And so she had this kind of like organizational instinct that was really deeply rooted, right, from that. And also a kind of understanding that people change not because you give them the right argument, not because you tell them what

they ought to think or how they ought to act, but because you bring them into participation in an ongoing way in an organization that's oriented towards your goals, right? So she was good at building those kinds of organizations. She did that as the director, the branch director of the NAACP. She did that for a time, the kind of interim executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She did that as a mentor to SNCC. But she also, as I mentioned at the beginning, right, she also always talked about and focused on mass action, right? I think that she had a really ingenious and relevant today kind of understanding of the relationship between this kind of background organizing and leadership

development and these disruptive moments like the Montgomery bus boycott, like the student sit-ins of the 1960s, like the Selma March. She consistently tried to build organizations that had kind of like local chapters that were deeply rooted in particular communities, but that were also kind of part of a network that was regional or national, right? So that when things popped off in one place, there was like a way that that could be translated, right, to other places, right? So after the Montgomery bus boycott, you know, people associate the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King. And, you know, obviously he played a really crucial role, but it was Baker and her comrades,

Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, who actually organized that meeting, right? That founding meeting of the SCLC, because they said, no, we can't just let this momentum go after Montgomery, we have to create a South wide organization that will connect Montgomery with other potential centers of unrest across the South, right. So she built these kind of distributed organizations. She also really focused on, you know, identifying and recruiting people who were already leaders, like she called them indigenous leaders, right, within their own communities and in, you know, in a particular place, and recruiting them to the movement, right, so that they could bring their networks with them. But beyond that, she also, you know, labor organizers like Foster do that as well,

and really emphasize that. But Baker is kind of distinctive in that she also really always emphasized, you know, that everyone is a potential leader, right? That everyone has innate leadership capacities that can be developed through participation in organizing. And that was both an ethical commitment, you know, and part of her kind of vision of a participatory democratic society and a strategic commitment, because Baker understood that, like, the more kind of capacious individuals you had as part of a movement, the more capacity that movement has overall, right? And the more likely it is that an individual like E.D. Nixon or Rosa Parks in Montgomery will, like, make a crucial decision, like take a step that will, you know, reverberate, right, across the country. So that is kind of how,

you know, how Baker thought about this close relationship between organizing and mass action or mobilization. And it's something that I think, you know, it's exactly like what I think we need to be doing now in this moment where we are, you know, we are not in a moment of mass mobilization. We need to be thinking about, you know, what kinds of skills can we develop? What kinds of, you know, policies and demands can we generate? And what kinds of networks of relationships can we build that, you know, will help us prepare, right, for the next moment of mass action? about those things, we also need to do it, right? We need to actually build the networks. And that's the, that is the part that often seems to be a little bit lacking to me that we, we have the conversation about it. Like you and I are having the different, which is important. It's important to have the conversation support to spread the conversation. Um, but when it comes to, okay, let's actually build the regional networks of organizations. Like, let me tell you something,

organizing work is very, very difficult. I do a little bit of it myself now. Yeah, yeah. And I come home from a long day of doing stand-up comedy, and then I'm like, I've got to write 15 emails today because I have to try to get people to show up to the meeting, you know? Yeah, yeah. I spent a lot of my, you know, like, time in grad school organizing

like time in grad school organizing and found it to be like almost impossible to like do research and writing while also trying to organize because they're both all consuming, you know, organizing is an all consuming activity and it requires your attention. You have to be capable of responding to things as they arise. Right. It's very difficult. So, and, and especially difficult for us as people who have been socialized to be extremely focused on our own careers, like extremely focused on, you know, our own personal advancement in the world. Right. Um, and again, like not disciplined or habituated into like showing up to meetings when we say we're going to show up to a meeting, right? Or, you know, you know, going canvassing or doing whatever it is on the weekend instead of, you know, relaxing or catching up on work. So I think, you know, like you started, you know, by kind of talking about how we're in this moment where we might feel like there's nothing that we can do, you know, to make, like, to, you know, make sure that we have a livable future on this planet.

But I actually think that, you know, where we've arrived at is that it's not that we don't know what to do, right? We might not have a blueprint, but we do know that, you know, both organizing and, you know, engaging in mass action are ways that we can make change. And there are lots of different, you know, ways that we can go about that into the kind of people who can do and who do do the things that we know need to be done. Yeah. But the cool thing is, I'm stealing this from one of the wonderful staff members at the Writers Guild of America West, which is one of the unions of which I'm a member. But she put it to me once that wins lead to more wins, you know, and that when you have the experience of successfully organizing people one time, you know, you're not sure you're that type of person. I don't know. Am I an organizer? Am I someone who participates in this? I'm not so sure if that's me. But you go out on a limb and you do one thing. You take one action.

You send out one email and you schedule one meeting and you have it, then, uh, uh, you, you feel that and it makes you want to do it again. And when you can give that to other people, it makes them want to do it again too. That wins lead to more wins. Um, yeah. And I think also like it's, it's extremely, uh, rewarding to do things with other people, right. That you wouldn't be able to do on your own. Um, and also to be part of like, you know, in the organizing that I've, that I I've done, I've never been like a professional organizer, but, um, but in the organizing that I've done, um, I've made like some of the closest friendships that I have. And what makes them really special to me is that they're in some cases like friendships that I wouldn't have if I

didn't organize because they're with people who I would otherwise like not ever even interact with, right? Because we are so siloed, you know, into our own, you know, our own classes, like our own kind of neighborhoods, professions, workplaces, whatever. It's good to do both. It's good to do because like winning is good. And, you know, we need a lot more wins. But it's also, you know, good to do because like, you know, whether you know, the change that we need happens in our lifetimes or not, I think we'll live much more fulfilling and interesting and purposeful lives having done the things that we knew needed to be done. Yeah. Oh, I've experienced exactly the same thing. The friends that I've made in the homelessness work that I do or the union work that I do are like incredibly valuable to me and they like they compound upon each other you know that like the

the the union people I know are the same people I can get to show up to the fundraiser for the political candidate or for the homelessness event or the people I know you know because I do the union work people I know the entertainment industry will come to me and ask me questions about, you know, other topics that they feel like, OK, Adam knows about. Adam's the guy I go to go to talk about union stuff. Does he know who I should vote for for mayor? Right, right, right, right. Exactly. Yeah. And these things all compound. And it starts very simply, like literally the very first thing I did that made me think, oh, wait, I later realized, oh, wait, this is organizing. thing I did that made me think, oh, wait, I later realized, oh, wait, this is organizing, is when I just put together an email list of everybody I know who is a comedy writer because of something I was trying to get done in the Writers Guild. I wasn't even involved in leadership

in any way. I was just like, there's something that I want people to know about. And I just went through my entire email, my contacts list. And I was like, that person's a writer, that person's a writer, that person's a writer. And I sent them all an email and I said, hey, I want to let you know about XYZ. And I was like, wait, oh, I got like 20 people to do a thing. And oh, I could email them again next time. And then I realized

that that's all that anybody in the union is doing in order to get the word out. They're all just emailing each other. And I was like, oh, that's the fundamental step. And that's so much more powerful. We've been tricked. This is a little bit of a rant, but we've been tricked by the social media platforms into thinking that's how we get the word out about things that we tweet. And all that ends up happening when you tweet is it goes through the algorithm. Some people see it, some people don't. It's next to all this other shit

that people are angry or distressed about. They scroll past it. We're giving our power to these, you know, this very small number of corporations who are controlling the way that we speak to each other. Email is one of the last few direct pieces of communication we have. And if you say, forget social media, I'm angry about something, let me email 20 friends. Like, that's a very basic piece of organizing work that can lead to more. Yeah, and that, what you just said, is another thread that runs through

the labor and civil rights organizing tradition. So, you know, Foster, he wrote this really great manual called Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry that people have been kind of passing around again today. He published in like 1936 and it was kind of like a blueprint for radical organizers in the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But one of the techniques that he describes is what he calls like the chain system of organization where you identify, you know, specific workers who have like relation, you map like basically the relationships that each worker has. And, you know, you create a chain where like so-and-so

organizes so-and-so who organizes these 10 people who organize the, right. And when I tried to start a union while I was in graduate school, we did the exact same thing, right? Like we were like, okay, so-and-so knows the comparativists in the political science department. So he's going to, you know, like turn all of them out to the rally, whatever. Baker had the same kind of idea with her concept of indigenous leadership. If there are moments where everyone wants to, it wants to go out into the streets and protest, but there are also lots of moments where, you know, it's a big lift to get someone, you know, out to an action. And it's, it's the personal relationships that we each have by virtue of participating in institutions that we might not see, but that do exist, right? Like our workplaces,

like our, you know, professions, like our neighborhoods, right? Our families, right, that those relationships, you know, are politically very useful, right? Yeah. It means that, you know, each of us, even though we might think that we are kind of powerless, right, we actually do have influence, right? We have influence over some group of people. And we can figure out, right, we can figure out how to map our networks. And we can figure out how to like, make those relationships politically impactful yeah if you say to your friends or your co-workers there there are friends and co-workers of yours no matter who you are who respect you and who look to your opinion and if you say to them hey you know i think that uh i don't want to make it about political candidates

but if you hey i think that this is the candidate i support they'll go oh yeah i mean i know i know steve i know aaron and and if they if that's what they think that that's probably what i think too or if you say hey i'm a little bit pissed off about the workplace i'm putting together a meeting they say oh you're putting together the meeting yeah sure i'll go you know and and that sort of natural leadership is what you're talking about and that's something that we that we all have as as Ella Baker believed. Yeah. And ideally, I assume you think that if we all start doing this a lot more, we can actually build movements of the kind that in the 30s and the 50s and 60s did transform America. Can we do it again? Can we use this to transform our country in the ways that we need to?

Yes. We definitely can. I hope we to. Yes, we definitely can. I hope we can. We've done it before. We've done it before. We've done it, as you said, under conditions where people faced violent repression at a scale that is unfamiliar to us, right? So we certainly have the capacity. We may not build 3 million person large organizations.

But first of all, there are already structures that we participate in and that we can join wherever we live to build out those networks. And also, there are political organizations and labor organizations that we can join and that we can help to develop, right? And as we saw, right, like in the 30s, it doesn't necessarily take that many people who have kind of like a clear vision of, you know, how to run a strike, for example, or, you know, how to get people out in the streets for some form of direct action, right? It doesn't necessarily take that many people to make a big impact, right, given the right historical conditions. Thank you so much for coming on me. This has been really, really amazing. I love the way you're able to go look at the deep history and follow the thread to today and, you know, what we can do

now. I can't thank you enough for coming on. Where can people find out more about you and your work? Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun. I guess I'm on social media. I don't know. I'm in Kingston, New York. You can come and, you know, we can, we can hang out. We can go to the Elks Club or the American Legion. I'm working on my, my first book. But I have a recent article in the Boston Review about salting. And I have an article on Ella Baker in the American Political Science Review.

Thank you so much for coming on. It's been wonderful. Thank you for having me. Well, thank you once again to Mia for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Next week, we're going to bring you another incredible thinker who is going to share with us how we can make the change in our world that we so desperately need. I want to thank our producer, Sam Roudman, and our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everyone who supports us on Patreon at the $15 a month level. That's WhiskeyNerd88, Susan E. Fisher, Spencer Campbell, Sam Ogden,

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