It Could Happen Here - Common Humanity Collective and the Politics of Mutual Aid, Part 1

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Genean and Abrar from Common Humanity Collective join us to discuss the history of their mutual aid work, building communities through organizing, and how studying the history of struggles in the Spanish Civil War and beyond helped expand and transform their work. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about, well, mostly it's about how things are bad, but it is also sometimes about what you can do about it. And today we have two people who are in fact doing things about it. So with me, we have Abrar and Janine, who are part of the Common Humanity Collective,

which is a mutual aid group out of California. Hello, Janine. Hello, Abrar. How are you two doing today? Doing well. Thank you. Doing pretty good. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Doing pretty good. Thank you. So, yeah, we wanted to have you two on to talk about basically your mutual aid work and then also the sort of political aspect of that, because I know that's something you two have been wanting to talk about that I've read the media coverage of it and it does not ever make it into the interviews.

So, yeah, and I guess I guess to start. So yeah, and I guess to start, so you two started doing mutual aid stuff with this group specifically around the beginning of the pandemic, as I understand it. Can you walk us through how it started and what you guys were up to? Absolutely.

And I think it's interesting to trace out the different stages of this work because it's very much been a kind of evolution. So let me go back to the very, very early days. And this is really the first day of lockdown in the Bay Area where we live. I'm a PhD student at UC Berkeley. And as COVID was spreading from the East Coast to the West, we knew that things would quickly get shut down in California. And there was someone in my lab, a good friend named Yvonne, and she and I just quickly realized that this pandemic was going to hit, given the sort of crumbling public health infrastructure, the poorest among us, the elderly, the dispossessed, these people would be vulnerable.

And as PPE just completely disappeared from store shelves, these people, especially those living in cramped housing conditions, those with essential work, those in nursing homes just would not have access to the tools they needed to protect themselves from this disease. And in the very early days when we thought that this stuff was transmitted via surfaces, all of the attention was focused on hand washing, hand sanitizer. The problem was you couldn't even find hand sanitizer anywhere. So here we were in our labs and, you know, our fumes weren't being used and everyone was getting sent home.

And we realized that we could pull ethanol from the scientific reagent supply chains and stir up some hand sanitizer ourselves in lab and distribute it just to homeless shelters, to people who needed it in the city, etc. So this began as a very sort of low-key, quiet, under-the-cover effort. And, you know, we didn't have a name. We didn't even know what mutual aid was. I think we were just following our basic instincts. And fast forward a week or two, and suddenly a whole lot of people got involved. We had this elaborate distribution infrastructure, which started sort of self-assembling. Lots of people came to find ways of getting the sanitizer to everyone who needed it. In the meantime, we realized that as the demand was enormous, we needed to come up with ways of procuring the supplies and mixing it at scale so that we didn't have to turn anyone down.

So we called upon lots of different labs on campus and asked them if they could do this, if they could shift some of their discretionary funds towards getting these chemicals. And, you know, again, within a few weeks after that, uh, we were mixing hundreds of gallons of hand sanitizer and delivering it to absolutely everyone who needed it. My phone was just getting, uh, called nonstop from the moment I woke up to when I went to sleep, I was forgetting to eat. I was barely sleeping, um, just responding to these cries for help from all over the Bay Area. And in that time, we met so many people and we figured out how to do this work efficiently and effectively. But also, as the attention shifted from surface transmission to

aerosol transmission, everyone started realizing that, in fact, masks were probably the primary way in which we protect ourselves from the coronavirus. And that's when a good friend of ours, Chris, who was a PhD student, and he's now a postdoc, brilliant, brilliant, creative guy, came up with ways of actually making sub-micron masks out of just supply chains that weren't getting tapped. So initially, these were shop towels, and then he started looking at nanofiber material. And he found ways of for around 60 cents, making a mask that was basically the quality of an N95 mask that could be made in just a few minutes at home. And so we suddenly just integrated that whole effort into our own and started just recruiting volunteers, sharing all of our resources and this large

assembly network of these little pods situated all across the Bay Area, each of them with a team lead with a little army, a battalion of assembly volunteers and dedicated drivers, were just making thousands of these masks every week, which we were then distributing through the distribution infrastructure that we had sort of put together earlier on in the pandemic. And so we found ourselves, and this was still very much at a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks in shops, we found ourselves, and this was still very much at a time when you couldn't even find cloth masks or surgical masks in shops. We found ourselves astonishingly being the primary source of this essential PPE for tens and tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area. And as we recovered in the early days by the Chronicle and the LA Times, loads of people started joining the volunteer network.

in the LA Times, loads of people started joining the volunteer network. We started getting donations and that was the earlier stage of what we did. And I'll pass it on to Janine to talk about what we did next. Yeah. So kind of as Common Humanity Collective was working on this project, Abrar, myself, and a couple other folks started adopting kind of a Democratic Socialist of America or East Bay DSA side of what was happening. And through this project, our intent was to have a little bit more political education and think really critically about how we could make this true mutual aid, which Abrar and I have learned is really, really difficult to do, especially under capitalism. and I have learned is really, really difficult to do, especially under capitalism. And so because we started this project around December, so kind of the height of the pandemic, we wanted to make it accessible for people who were really COVID cautious. And so we would assemble kits of masks in a park with a couple folks outside. And then we would drive these kits to people's homes and get on Zoom. And we would have a breakout room for people to learn how to make masks.

People, oftentimes people who had only come to the build a couple times, started teaching new folks how to build these masks. And in the other room, we were doing readings. We were reading, you know, Panna Cook and Jane McAlevey side by side, talking about, you know, trade unions and solidarity unionism. We were reading about tenant organizing. Abrar, do you want to talk about Rosa Luxemburg a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing thing. We were trying to sort of expand our own political consciousness. And we did things like host a three-part series, just discussing, examining, analyzing the political theory of Rosa Luxemburg. And we had huge participation. And this was at a time where in our DSA chapter and many of the different committees, people were panicking because no one was showing up.

up. And yet we found an enormous number of people joining our effort in these discussions were so energetic and so enthusiastic. And, you know, this was a lonely time. It was a difficult time. And people seem to find something in what we were doing. What do you think about that, Janine? Yeah. And I think, you know, not only were people coming and participating, right, we had high school students, we had people who had dedicated the pandemic to reading political theory, right. And so you have this huge breadth of knowledge, we have more liberal people joining, we have like, anarchists and communists, right, like all in this space that are actually talking together. And what was so empowering to me was everyone felt like they could speak, we had people that were really introverted, that in the beginning didn't talk at all, slowly start to open up. We had high schoolers asking really incredible questions, right? Like, is revolution even possible right now? And kind of getting into some of this. And I think one of the most impactful things was that we had these calls from seven to nine at night. And after that, we had what we called late night where folks would stay on till like 12 at night and talk to each other. And in this time of like isolation and depression, I don't

think anyone that I know at least was having a good time in December, January, February, right? People were coming together on Zoom and actually staying on Zoom after what we were doing to feel some type of camaraderie, to feel like they were part of a community. And we were able to actually create that space. And I think that that was something that to me was really incredible. And I think, you know, framing this also from the George Floyd protests that happened over the summer and thinking, you know, more about abolition, right, thinking more about community building, I don't think you can truly, or I can't imagine a future without the prison industrial complex that doesn't involve communities of care, that doesn't involve giving people both the

resources and the love that they need to be able to not be pushed into situations where they have to commit crimes and also having accountability amongst each other. Not to mention, right, this work is really, really hard. People burn out. Like we're exhausted to be able to create a space where everyone cares for each other, where we're checking in with each other, where, you know, in the beginning of this virtual mask builds, I think, you know, a bra myself and a couple other folks were doing the majority of the work. And by the end, we were doing none of it. We had like been able to reallocate those tasks. We had been able to develop leaders and we had essentially organized ourselves out of a job, which to me is like the organizer's dream, right? Like that's what you really want to see happen. And so that's kind of what was happening on the production side of the mask builds. On the distribution side, again, we're thinking, how can we actually make this true mutual aid? And so we started to partner with Tank, Tenant and Neighborhood Councils, which is one of the main tenant groups in the Bay Area, and working with them to go to food banks, right, places where people are generally low income, where they might not be able to have

the resources to get masks. And we're distributing masks, asking them, are you having trouble with your rent or your landlord, right? The goal in this is to give people the tools to organize around issues that are deeply pertinent and urgent to them, especially with an impending eviction moratorium, right? And so we learned a lot through this. We went to a lot of different food banks. We found, you know, some of them were places where people primarily spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. And so we, you know, used our networks, again, that we'd created through this project, these relationships of trust to find people that spoke Mandarin and were willing to come out and talk with folks. We found people that spoke Spanish that were willing to come out and talk with folks. And we started to develop relationships at these food banks where we were able to distribute masks to people, talk to them, understand what issues

they were having, and invite them to come to meetings where they could actually get the resources to try and tackle some of these issues that they're facing. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Now, won't you join me at the fire and dare enter... Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters... to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors

that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Abra, do you have more to add on the Mass Project? Yeah, I think it's worth saying that we're all very busy. I'm a PhD student. While we were doing this work in DSA, I was teaching a class and I was doing research. And Janine is an extremely busy union organizer.

And normally, we'd come home after work and be absolutely exhausted. And this was very tiring, but we felt somehow energized. We felt driven to do this. And we found that lots of the other people who participated were also busy with their jobs and yet would make time to do this. And in terms of our actual practice, in terms of trying to develop the political dimension of the distribution aspect of our mutual aid, there was a constant interplay between what we were reading and what we were practicing. whose aim is to give tenants the tools to form tenant councils and tenant unions in order to use tools such as rent strikes to rebalance power between themselves and the landlords of real estate companies, et cetera. During that time, during our mask builds, we would then go and read articles and newspaper clippings from early 20th century when there were examples of 20-year-old factory girls in lower Manhattan organizing groups of apartment buildings

to go on rent strike, 10,000 families in one case to go on rent strike. These incredible, deeply inspiring stories where people suddenly became subjects of history and not merely objects. And I think part of what sustained our own work in this group was some similar feeling. And at the same time, when we were trying to imagine a future beyond capitalism, we were looking at moments when that future seemed within reach. And so we were studying, for example, Paris in 1968, which is a moment within many people's living memory, although not our own, and studying how it was that these protests began with the student movement

and then spilled out into these massive strikes and all the sort of self-activity that emerged from that. And there was such a wide breadth of people who came to these builds. There were people as young as high schoolers. There were also much older people in their 70s and 80s. And when we were having this discussion, someone who lived through the 60s and witnessed these things very up close

came to talk about Paris in 1968 and shared the wealth of his own experience. And again, all of this was driving what we were actually doing with our hands, what we were doing on the streets, what we were doing at these food bank lines. And so it was very critical that everything we were reading was somehow feeding into our practice. Yeah. And I think, you know, we had over 100 people participate in these mask builds. And I think one of the things that I really took away from this is, again, people were craving that community, they were craving relationships, and people came back because they felt that in this group. And that translated also, as we transitioned, right? We had built a

culture of friendship and of caring for each other that people wanted to continue working on this. They wanted to continue to be a part of this project as we transitioned to building air purifiers, right? As the, you know, vaccines became more prevalent, masks were still being worn, but to a lesser degree. And we started turning to fire season as these disasters, right, continued to strike, especially with climate change only getting worse and worse. One of the things that I think is really powerful about mutual aid and is really powerful about communities is that these disasters have been happening and continue to happen at a greater and greater frequency. And I think what I've learned from looking at, you know, the heat waves that recently

took many lives across the Pacific Northwest, the really, really freezing temperatures that happened in Texas about a year ago, and especially COVID is that, you know, the government, local or federal is not stepping in to help people. Billionaires are not really stepping in to help people. It's really only communities and networks of relationships that are keeping people alive. And the only way, you know, that we're going to get through this is through having those relationships, through understanding where people need support. And we started to do this with the distribution of masks, right? It's build relationships with community members in, you know, Fruitvale

in Oakland, which is not a large, not a place that many people from DSA or from Tank are living currently, right, and starting to build relationships with people that do need these resources in times of crisis, so that we know where we can plug in and also build relationships amongst our fellow organizers so that we can support each other through these disasters. And so as we transitioned to the air purifiers, we started, you know, thinking about everything we have learned from the mask project and kind of making that even bigger and better. And how can we, you know, continue to take what we've learned and change it and turn it into something really, really incredible. And we, you know, Chris, who Abrar mentioned before, who came up with the masks, came up with a really

incredible way to make air purifiers that's like ridiculously efficient, is really, really useful, especially for wildfire smoke, but also for just people with asthma. There's a lot of environmental pollution in the Bay Area, right? These things can be used year round. And we began to build these air purifiers out of, you know, box fans and HEPA filters with a shroud with weather stripping, right, to make the air like only go through the fan to make it extremely efficient and started to think about how can we make this like community aspect even bigger at least this is what I was thinking of because I started to realize right I think the only thing that we can rely on is each other right now especially and so we started bringing in a bunch of different groups to come to these builds so we

have you know East Bay DSA We started working really closely with Sunrise and developed a level of trust and reciprocity in that relationship that has, you know, continued to be really beneficial to us and really helpful. We met amazing people that came out, you know, they've helped fundraise for us as our funding has gotten really, really low

because these air purifiers are not cheap, though they're much cheaper than commercially available, but we're, you know, giving them to folks for free because we want this to be mutual aid. And so working with Sunrise, we're working with Asians for Black Lives, Berkeley Mutual Aid, Mask Oakland, who both came out to our builds, but also helped us distribute air purifiers to Reno and to places that had, you know, AQIs of 500, right? When fire season was so bad, when the smoke there was just like unlivable, we were able to work with them to distribute these air purifiers where people really needed them most. We were able to, you know, continue to work with Tank. Some folks from the IWW came out. We were able to distribute these air purifiers to the Segorite Land Trust, which is a land trust that is run by Indigenous women and is working on essentially giving Indigenous land back to Indigenous people. We were able to distribute with Critical Resistance, an amazing abolitionist

group started by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis in Oakland. We were able to distribute to SRO, a group that is working with low income Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who are generally living in single family homes, right, with really bad air quality, and work with, like, all of these different groups, you know, Berkeley Mutual Aid, we're pulling in people from just countless networks to come and build air purifiers together. And we had, you know, an ex-Black Panther talking to someone from Sunrise from San Francisco, right, like, these just wild connections that are happening at these builds of people who are deeply political and people who are barely understanding,

you know, what socialism means, but are wanting to come out and do something for their community. And through these like relationships and networks, again, like we're able to hang out after the builds. People are able to like enjoy themselves. Everyone said they were having a really fun time, even though we were like literally doing work on a Saturday.

People were still like, this is so fun. We had, you know, people baking bread and like fruit tarts and cheesecakes and bringing it. We had pizza, we had music. It was like a very fun atmosphere and environment. And despite the fact that, you know, it was physical labor and it was taxing. and a lot of times it was on hot days, people stayed for, you know, four hours to help do this and to do this work because they cared, because they wanted to see, you know, what they, started to build relationships. I know, you know, countless people talked to Abrar and I and had no idea, you know, we've known each other for less than a year now.

And they thought we'd known each other our whole lives. And I think that really speaks, right, I think that speaks so much to the relationships that we've been able to build through this. And, you know, I think Abrar and I have met countless people and have developed like an incredible community through this work that definitely helps me keep going. I would definitely not be able to continue to do this work if I couldn't, you know, call a bra up at 9pm and we talk for three hours and we complain, but we also talk through like, what are we doing and how can it be better? And how can we, you know, get through

this roadblock? And I saw that in countless places as we moved to our own distribution. So we were partnering with these organizations, but we're also doing our own distribution, which I think is like a huge experiment in how to actually do mutual aid, which is something that, you know, when we talked to the organizers in our circles, we weren't finding answers to. And so we kind of realized, like, we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions. And afterwards we kind of realized, like, we just have to kind of try and figure this out. But we would go out and do these distributions. And afterwards, you know,

have lunch with people and talk to each other. Like, what could we do better? What are we doing wrong? Is this mutual aid? Like, these are questions we're having right after we've been standing in the sun

talking to people for three hours. Like, the dedication of the people involved in this, like Abrar said, most of us are working 40, 50, 60 hour weeks, and yet we're dedicating constant time during the week and at least one day every weekend to either distribution or a build is incredible. I feel like incredibly honored to be able to work with the people that

we've been working with. But in our distribution, we started thinking about, you know, how can we invite some of these people to come to our builds? Maybe that's the reciprocity. I think true mutual aid is really about believing that the people that we're distributing to can also give back to us rather than seeing them as like helpless. And so we continue to do some of our distributions with Tank. And actually, we were able to do some of these distributions in a way that helped new buildings who are just starting to form tenant councils, you know, use the air purifiers as a way to open up conversation with some of these people and say, hey, your building

is being organized. Remember how bad the fire season was last year, right? Like, this is something that you can use. And let's talk more about other tools that we can use coming together to really fight for changes that we can't necessarily make on our own. So that was happening. And then we also decided to look at data around where in Oakland are asthma rates really high, where in Oakland is air pollution really bad, and where in Oakland is it primarily lower income folks, right? We want to be giving these air purifiers to people who can't generally afford $100 to $200 air purifier. And so East Oakland was one of those places. And again, through this network that we had built through the mask builds, we had a connection in East Oakland, someone that had that is part of East Bay DSA, right, that had done a lot of community

organizing, and someone that was actually able to, you know, send out an email to her neighborhood and say, hey, we have air purifiers. And so we had people posting up at her house. So, you know, we were coming into a neighborhood that was not our own, which in some ways, you know, there's a lot of complications to that. But we were also able to do it at someone's house that we knew. And our goal in this was to get people to come to our builds, to make air purifiers for themselves and for their family, their community, their friends, so that we then don't have to go into those neighborhoods, right, so that they can then start to own that distribution and own this project and like feel an autonomy over it. And so we also kind of door knocked

around the neighborhood, talking to people about the air purifiers, about wildfire smoke, about coming out to a build, you know, about why this is really important, why we need people to engage in this project. And we distributed almost 100 air purifiers that day, I think, to folks in that community. And after that, that week, so we distributed on Sunday, and then a week later on Saturday, we would have a build. So within that week, right, we're calling everyone that we distributed to saying, hey, how is your air purifier working? Can you come out to a build? It's really, really valuable that you come out to a build so that you can make sure that your community has clean air to breathe, especially during fire season. And through these calls, right, I talked to someone who lived in East Oakland for an hour.

And this person just started opening up and was so touched that we had done this and basically said, you know, no one has ever cared for my community like this. No one has ever even thought about us, and you see, like, there are nonprofits, right? California was giving out air purifiers to certain people. Like there's a semblance of the structure. And yet we were actually interfacing with these people who seem to have no idea that any of this was happening. Right. They're saying, you know, no one else has been able to do this. And we're starting to form relationships and develop connections in these neighborhoods and make people feel cared for and follow up. And despite all of this work, right, no one shows up to our build that week. And I think O'Brien and I both felt pretty defeated, right? Like, is mutual aid possible? What are we doing wrong? Clearly, like, class and racial barriers are

really hard to overcome in this. And, you know, we were talking to our ex Black Panther friend that has continued to be a huge part of this project. And he was like, you know, you have to keep trying. You're doing the right things. And so we went to West Oakland, again, where we had a connection from our mask project that helped us set up in front of this corner next to a vegan cafe that serves trans POC for free and has really wonderful food. We were able to talk with them, give them air purifiers. They allowed us to kind of set up shop in front of their store. And there's also like a liquor store on this corner.

It's like a very busy corner in West Oakland and kind of did the same thing. We're handing out air purifiers, talking to people about the build, talking to people about, you know, why this is important. And we're also door knocking in the neighborhood, talking to folks at their homes, asking people, you know, who needs an air purifier, right? Like these communities generally know each other really well. And we're able to talk to people who are like, oh, my gosh, you know, like my aunt lives over there and her kid has asthma. And like, you should go talk with her. And so we start to develop these connections and kind of map out the neighborhood. And, you know, again, we're following up, we're talking to these people on the phone, we're asking them to come out to the build. And we went out to this neighborhood again. So the second time we went out, I started to recognize people, right. And I started to be able to talk

with people. And through I was kind of like door knocking, while people were posted up by the liquor store in this vegan cafe. And there was like a church service going on. And I recognized one of the people there. And he recognized me and we're able to talk and he was really grateful for the work that we were doing. And he started calling his friends over and be like, Hey, you know, do you all need an air purifier? Remember how bad fire season was last year. And also like, we should all go to this build next time. You know, we should actually be showing up and helping out. And word spread so quickly, like communities are so deeply connected, at least from what I've like witnessed. And that

week, again, right, we called everyone, we said, like, you know, we really think it's valuable for you all to come out to a build, we want to give you like ownership and autonomy over this in a world where I think so often you feel so little autonomy and so little power when everything feels like it's crumbling, right, to have some semblance of ownership and autonomy to be able to do something that is immediately like visible and real feels really powerful, right? When sometimes, you know, talking to elected officials is moving too slowly because disasters are happening so quickly.

There is a need to balance immediate need and system change, right? And I think you have to constantly hold both. But, you know, we're talking to these folks, we're asking them to come to the build. And we actually had a couple people come out to our build from our distribution, people that had a really amazing time, people that, you know, said they enjoyed being there, and took air purifiers back and gave them out to their friends and family. And we're able to say, you know, I made this, right? Like Like this is something valuable, but also I understand how it works. And I talked to one of these people, our next build is actually on his birthday. And he was like, I really want to come out on my birthday.

I really want to come out and like help people and do this thing that has been enjoyable and is also like helping people. And that to me was wild. That's so cool. Right, like someone wants to come on their birthday to like build air purifiers on a Saturday when most of these people are, you know, working 40 to however many hours a week

that they're willing to continue to even work on a Saturday, I think is a huge feat. And it's something that's definitely felt really, really powerful in this. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Yeah, I think something that Janine brings out is really important, which is that at every stage we've been sort of interrogating and examining the work we're doing

and asking whether we are truly drawing out the full political potential of our work. So in the earlier days, when we were just stirring up vats of sanitizer and getting out these masks, you know, we did a lot. And, you know, this network of volunteers comprised well over 200 people. And it was sort of consuming all of our time. But eventually we realized that to a large degree, we were basically just acting as a stopgap measure for government austerity and for the big gaps left behind by this extremely problematic nonprofit industrial complex. And the work we were doing then, we realized, was sort of susceptible to cooptation. And it didn't necessarily represent too much of a threat to capitalist hegemony. And at that point, you know, we shifted into DSA and we started bringing in a very sort of explicit political education component and started associating with an organization like TANK, which

has already been doing really incredible radical organizing in the Bay Area, but eventually ran up against the limits of that as well. And, you know, DSA is an organization where a lot of us initially learned our politics, but, you know, in its current sort of stage, it's characterized by a strong degree in our chapter of sort of democratic centralism. And most of the effort is being put toward electoral work and reform work. And everything that we were reading about seemed to point towards the extreme limits of that form of organizing and how these forms of organizing, in fact, represented sometimes the more reactionary elements of the left in earlier moments in history. And we wanted to go beyond that. And so we realized that we were spending

a lot of time having to just sort of defend the work that we were doing. So eventually, we just decided to sort of reassert our autonomy. And as we shifted into the air purifier chapter of our work, that's what we were doing. And our inspirations are manifold. And as we were reading about these earlier moments in history, something which had an extraordinary effect on me was studying the example of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. And suddenly, I was reading about this moment in history that's been more or less erased from most of our textbooks or presented in a very kind of dishonest form. And what these workers and peasants had done in the midst of fascist takeover was create on an enormous scale perhaps the most egalitarian society that I've ever read about, which truly represented a sort of liberatory, radical, early form of

anti-authoritarian socialism that stands in tremendous contrast to the much uglier forms of so-called socialism that we've seen appear in the 20th century. And what I noticed was that this society in Spain in 1936 was absolutely replete with mutual aid. And these kind of anarchist tendencies had sort of penetrated the consciousness of many of the workers and peasants in Spain, you know, 60 years before the revolution, after Bakunin and the first international sent out an emissary to start spreading these ideas and they took hold like wildfire and spread across the country i think i think one of one of the most incredible things about that story is the the the guy the guy that gets sent from italy like from as as the representative yeah he doesn't

speak spanish right he He only speaks Italian. And he, yeah, he's just up to this place, right? And he's such a sort of brilliant orator and the sort of like, the power of the ideas that he has is so strong that, you know, it breaks through the language barrier. And it's this sort of, I think it's just this incredible moment that, you know, I think ties into a lot of what

you two are running into with, you know, I mean, we still live in a place that's, you know, incredibly defined by language barriers and just the ability to break through that becomes, it gives you this just incredible potential of power and organization. means to me to hear someone who's as familiar with this as you. Yeah, it's the time when I talk about just total blank faces, even among my friends and comrades on the left. And unfortunately, but yeah, I mean, reading about Finnelli, who didn't speak a word of Spanish, and he just went and with his wild gesticulations, and his passionate rhetoric was able to basically inspire people with the radical politics that he came there to represent. And it somehow then took on a life of its own as kind of an extraordinary thing. And what I would do to take a time machine back and just see what this guy, you know, who slept on trains and basically lived as a tramp as he went from village to village, spreading the word, what this looked like? What was he doing?

And yet these ideas took hold in a profoundly deep way. And these notions of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, free association existed by the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936. So these sort of dual power counter institutions were more or less in place. And these are the things which were the basis, the precondition for this sweeping egalitarian social revolution that then unfolded, which was unfortunately destroyed by force.

But this was the sort of society that I imagined I might actually want to live in. And what you see is that there is a deep element to a sort of shared consciousness that existed at that time. And it was quite an effort for people to bring that consciousness from sort of the countryside where it took hold more naturally into sort of the industrial centers, the metropolitan areas where people working in factories were, you know, found it a lot more difficult to sort of exercise these values because these things are effectively bled out of them as they work on the factory floor. And that brought a whole different meaning to the work that we were doing now. And we wondered, what can we do to inculcate,

to nurture this kind of consciousness among the people with whom we're interacting as we do our mutual aid, as we do our distributions, as we hold these builds that, you know, even though we had trouble getting initially a few of the people from our distributions to show up, there were still, you know, 60, 70 people showing up every other weekend. And now we finally started having the people that were distributing to show up. It was extraordinarily surprising and exciting. And yeah. This has been It Could Happen Here here join us tomorrow for part two of this interview where we'll go more in depth on the political side common humanity collectives work meanwhile you can find us on twitter at happened here pod and also on instagram

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