Rev Left Radio - Union Organizing, Islamic Faith, and the Collective Vision of Socialism

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

In this episode, Breht speaks with Aminah Sheikh -- Vice President of the Canadian Freelance Union, member of the Twin Cities DSA Steering Committee, and longtime labor organizer -- about the intersection of Islamic faith, union organizing, and the collective vision of socialism. Aminah shares her journey from growing up in a devout religious household to discovering belonging and political consciousness through the labor movement. She reflects on how organizing gave her safety and solidarity as a Muslim born in the West, and how faith, class struggle, and proletarian internationalism can coexist and reinforce one another. Together, they discuss her work organizing in rural and Indigenous communities, her experiences with the Che Guevara Brigade in Cuba, and her ongoing solidarity with Palestine. The conversation explores how spiritual and socialist traditions both point toward a shared horizon: a world rooted in justice, dignity, and collective liberation. Follow Aminah on X @AminahSheikh Here are some articles written by Aminah as well:   On Rosa Luxemburg HERE   On The Canadian Right HERE   On Militant Trade Unions and Anti-Communist Reaction HERE   On Palestine HERE ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Amina Sheikh, who is the vice president of the Canadian freelance union, long-time union organizer, has organized across the continent, has visited Cuba and multiple occasions, has organized in and around rural areas and reservations, and has just a wonderful way of speaking about the importance of organized labor and brings to bear all the talents of a really high-quality union organizer, the experience, the knowledge, the wisdom, the hope. We have a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation that I really, really enjoyed. So I'm really excited to share that with all of you today.

As always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, we are 100% listener-funded. Always have been, always will be. There are no corporate ads. There are no big, dark, billionaire money coming into Rev. Left Radio. We are what we are, which is of by and for the people. And you can support us directly and keep this show going at patreon.com forward slash ref left radio. In exchange for only $5 a month, you get bonus monthly episodes. You get access to our Buddhist meditation group.

You get access to our Rev. Left situation room where we come into a big Zoom call together as a community and talk through big political issues when they erupt. We're going to have one. By the time you hear this, we already had had it about Venezuela. and Iran and the ceasefire, etc. It's a really great, great way to interact in real time with community around issues and make sense of it together as a community and much more. So we really appreciate it. It helps support our families and it keeps this show going.

If you don't like to do the subscription model, you just want to show us some love. You can make a one-time donation and buy me a coffee.com forward slash rev left radio. Both of those links will be in the show notes. We appreciate everybody who supports the show in any way. And if you can't support us financially, leave a positive review. You can share these episodes with friends and family. You can use them in your organizing contexts. All those things help spread the show as well. All right, without further ado,

here's my wonderful conversation with Amina on union organizing, Islam, the collective vision of socialist internationalism, and so much more. Hi, everyone. My name is Amna, and I'm a union organizer. I am currently serving as the vice president of the Canadian prelantees. Union. And I also am participating in the DSA and happy to be part of the Twin Cities DSA chapter. And thank you for having me. Absolutely. It's an absolute honor to have you on the show. I think we met over Instagram, right? Was I following you? Were you following me? How did that exactly come to pass? Yeah, I think it was, you know what I think it was? I think we were all following the energy

of the Italian dock workers and the Italian workers and student movements all on strike and striking for Palestine and striking against austerity. And I think that's how I started seeing your work. But I always listen to Rev Left Radio. Wow, that's awesome. That's really cool. But yeah, then after I discovered you, we connected pretty quickly. But yeah, it's really cool to have you on it.

And pretty timely, as you noted before we started working. recording, I've recently got into, you know, a trade union and have gotten, for the first time of my life, you know, the experience of being in a union, the sort of brotherhood and sisterhood that comes with it. And it's been, it's been fascinating. It's been really edifying, uplifting in a lot of ways. So I think this is a well-timed episode. I have a lot of this stuff already on my mind. And I'm really also interested to hear about, you know, your history and your experiences in the union as well. Yeah. And I think I listened to a lot, lot of your work in the pandemic, by the way. And then these recent episodes of you saying that,

like, you went and started working at a union union job. And like, it was really, like, I saw the connections with my own experience as being part of a union. Yeah. Well, wonderful. We discussed a little bit beforehand about what we want to talk about. So we'll get into a lot of this. And let's start with this first question. Because in our correspondence, you said that the union kind of pulled you in and made you feel safe for the first time as a, you know, a Muslim born here in the United States and the West. Can you talk about that experience and kind of how organizing gave you both belonging and helped develop your political consciousness? Yeah. So I was born in Toronto and my community is Pakistani and a lot of them immigrated there during Trudeau's father, so Pierre Trudeau.

And a lot of waves of Chinese and Pakistanis and Indians came to that city. And so I have a huge community. And growing up, like, I obviously grew up in a diverse multiracial community. And, you know, I started working from a really young age. And obviously, being a Muslim, and I was raised in a religious home. So that meant, like, like a lot of Muslims and some Muslims don't adhere to this. but my family did. Like I would have to eat halal.

Nobody drank. You know, we didn't celebrate Christmas. I went to Sunday schools. I went to Arabic schools. You know, so I grew up in a very kind of traditional community in Toronto. And when I started working, I think that's when things started shifting for me as a young worker, where I was not only dealing with like alienation like most, workers, but I was also dealing with like confusion on as to what to do with my life,

like a lot of workers, but I was also facing racism and, you know, Islamophobia. At that time, I didn't really see it as Islamophobia. I think I just thought as racism. And I was working at the university at the time when I realized I was in a temp worker, like classified as a temp worker at the university. So while I was studying, I would work these casual jobs where I'd fill in for full-time workers. And I was part of a temp agency that employed temps across the university. And I'm sure many universities have this sort of like body. But then I also realized one day, because I was sitting and I was already struggling to pay rent. And I had just moved out of my house and it was a really challenging time. And I know a lot of young workers go through this. I left

my home. I was struggling at home, like living in certain conflicts with my mom and dad. And then I moved out, but I couldn't even really meet rent. And one day while I was like at work, I opened a check that came through the internal mail. And it said that I received back pay. And I read the entire letter. And I remember sitting there kind of like shaking because it was like a large amount of money. And I started to cry. And like the full-time admin came up to me and said, oh, you won that pay equity. And I was like, what? And they were like all the casuals. So I was a casual. The full-time union, so the full-time workers union, which was not my union, were fighting for the temp workers to receive pay equity and a pay equity evaluation. And what that means is that they look through all the years that we worked where I was working casually in a full-timers, position doing the exact same job duties. So pay equity means if you're doing the same job duties, you're doing the same like job, then you were entitled to that pay rate. And so I won retro pay. And that moment really made me realize, wow, like the union's this powerful body. And like they're

really important. They did this for us. And I remember after that happened, it not, only like helped me with like making payments to my rent, but it also kind of pushed me into connecting with the union. And I connected with the president at that time of the temp workers union, temp agency and like thanked him. And I said, oh, I would love to do your guys Instagram. This is when Instagram just came along. I was like, I'd love to do something. And he like invited me to the office to meet with the other staff. And I started to talk. And I started to do. to realize like I could be like active, like socially active to and do social justice through the union. But I think that was really what made me understand the union at that moment.

Wow. That honestly, I kind of, you know, brought a tear to my eye here in that because, you know, those those full-time union members didn't necessarily have to fight for those outside the unions. And in a lot of cases, we'll get into this later, some of the limitations of unions are the unions that are just kind of more or less focused just on getting their members the best, you know, the best slice of the pie, which is understandable on some level. But the fact that they went out of their way to try to help others and that you had no clue this was even happening and then you just had that gift. And anybody who has struggled financially, which I certainly have and in many times still do,

but certainly when I was younger as a, you know, a young father, any time that you got any sort of break at all, it could be a life-impacting moment. Like it could change the next several months of your financial existence, sometimes years of your financial existence. And I'm not talking about lottery winnings or anything like that. I'm talking like just a few thousand dollars that got kicked up from somewhere. It can make a huge difference. So the fact that it brought you to tears in that moment,

it certainly speaks to the fact that, you know, it really was a huge sort of moment financially for you to have a lifeline like that. Yeah. And I think even at that time, time too. I remember I was dealing with like racism in the workplace too. Like I said, and I think having the union leader there, just like taking time to meet with me. And when I felt really isolated alone, I was like, oh, I put in my head, the union's a good thing. And I felt safe connecting with the union. And then I felt too, this is a place that I can be involved.

Yeah. That makes sense. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And it is, it is all those things. And the union ethos, you know, it does, it does, it is inclusive organically, you know, not in this performative way that is sometimes, you know, done, and especially in the last several years where it's something that people take on as like an online persona. But this is there is that the solidarity that is the glue of a union in the best versions of unions give rise to that natural inclusiveness, which is, which is just solidarity in the final instance, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I want to talk about the racism you face and I want to talk about Islamophobia, but I think I want to do it at the tail end of this next question.

We get a little more context because you said that you grew up religious and even identified with Islamic nationalism at one point. I'm really curious about this. How did your political evolution from that worldview to more socialist-oriented organizing unfold? And what tensions or reconciliations did you experience between faith and revolutionary politics? politics, or is that something you still struggle with today? Or, you know, I love your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think it's important sometimes when I'm speaking to more spaces that have more time for thoughts around theory and rather than being in the field where I spend most of my time with

field organizing is that I like to like talk about this because it's from my own experience that I relate to like a lot of Muslims who grow up in the West, who in our undergraduate years, or if you're going to school or if you're living under capitalism, you know, we're very alienated. And I see it now with the younger generation. I can relate to it why they're moving towards more. I used to refer to it more as like religious elitism because I think it's for the elite and it's for exclusion and it's based on exclusion. And those ideologies are more prevalent in like university spaces and college spaces. Like during my time at undergraduate at university, there were organizations coming to our school to proselycise.

And a lot of the scholarship was from the Gulf. So for example, a lot of the scholars were maybe Western or Americans, but they were all taught from Saudi Arabia when I'm speaking about the Gulf. And so a lot of those thoughts and ideology, and I'm trying not to call it like Wahhabism because I sometimes think it simplifies it. But and I don't want to also like, like, and this is where I would say I'm still believe in Islamism, but I don't believe in in this sort of proselycizing of exclusive, exclusionary Islamist nationalism or like Wahhabism. that is still really dominant in a lot of the spaces in North America and around the world. And I think also if it's not lobbyism, it's like, you know, fascist iterations of Islam, which is like, you know, the Andrew Tates of the world, right? And or like these people who are basically very rich people who are telling us, like, how to practice our faith.

And I think I used to, when I was really young, I was gravitate. Okay, why I was gravitating towards it because at our universities, they were coming there, actually. They hold big programs. They come in the winter. They run large conferences. And these scholars, you know, teach, we are teaching and continued to teach, you know, sort of sectarianism, you know, exclusionary politics. And like, I would say anti-socialist politics, right? So it was like the opposite of what the union or like studying more or like being with Muslims in unionized workplaces.

And that came later. So I think my undergraduate experience and as being young and like I was getting more of that indoctrination. And it's kind of what led to me studying abroad too. I went to Syria and studied Arabic and I lived in Damascus before the civil war, before the proxy war, sorry. And yeah, but even that changed me. And then I came back and I think going back into, again, going back and being a worker is what like made me confront with, oh, I'm a worker amongst like the working class.

And like not only do I need to like, you know, pay my bills, move out, like grow up. and I have to be a Muslim, but how do I do all of that, if that makes sense? And did you find, I mean, do you find a reconciliation between your Muslim faith and socialist politics? Because one thing that I've always argued is that every single religion has a political spectrum within it. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, they all have revolutionary liberation-oriented iterations of their religions. They all have status quo maintaining moderate or centrist instantiations of their religions, and they do all have reactionary fascist, fundamentalist versions of their religions. And so I don't think that, you know, social,

and put my cards in the table, I don't think socialism is inherently in conflict with religion as such. I think it needs to dialectically interact with the most liberatory-minded part of the spectrum within each religion, right? Yeah. I'm interested in your thoughts. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And that's when I came back, and just being in Syria too, like leaving my own community, honestly, like living in Syria, like, showed me a lot. Like, I saw like a plural society and like I saw different sects of Islam, Christianity under like a secular state, you know. And then coming back to Canada, to my own community, I realized like, oh, like, you know, there's something about Muslims living in diaspora, you know, like, we're, you're, you're, we're, we're, we're,

We were gravitating towards reactionary, you know, like you said, it's a spectrum, right? But being back at work and working at the university and being a temp worker, working in restaurants, forced me as a worker to, and then getting politically conscious through the union. And then that forced me and pushed me into a union job. And so I landed my first job at Justice for Janitors, my union job. and it's part of SEIU International. And how I'm looking back to Islam is like, I'll get there. Because that's when I started seeing, okay, so I started to understand socialism and Islam.

And I started to see workers. And like all these workers were religious, you know, like a lot of workers are religious. You know, they go to church, they go to mosque. a lot of them with Justice for Jenners. A lot of them are night workers. And I started to see and make the connection because you're right. I think that it is a spectrum. And I started to lean more on the side that I kind of grew up with was like learning

how much Islam is actually, you know, the opposite of capitalism, right? It's like it's like a belt wealth distribution. and like I started to understand everything that I kind of grew up with in the mosque, you know, or that my father had taught me about like, you know, mandatory, like, it's not really charity, but like mandatory, like, giving. It's part of like a tenant of Islam. And it's not considered charity, right? It's, it's like obligatory that everybody gives this money. It's about wealth distribution or like growing up with books on Islamic finance or like our elders talking about Islamic finance and talking about how this system like capitalism and mortgages and interest is like

the antithesis of Islam because Islam believes in a moral economy and like not only is this like in the foundation of its teachings but if you actually take time and study like Sharia law or if you read about it, it's all about like, you know, fairness and equality. And I mean, a lot of religions are. But I would say that, like, if you really delve into Islamic scholarship, you do see it. And I think that, like growing up also in the West, you know, I, like many Muslims, whether you're South Asian, whether you're Arab, like our parents or our fathers were, you know, during the 60s and 70s or Malcolm X and all these, you know, revolutionary, like leaders,

like did have an impact on how we see Islam, right? Like, Islam is internationalist, and I grew up with that in my house, you know, that I would go to the mosque and like everyone's from a different culture. Like, you shouldn't be racist. You know, the Prophet's last sermon was about like an Arab is not better than a non-Arab. So these are like the core of our teachings. And I think it was always there with me. But I think that coming back,

and going back into the workforce and being a worker, I was about to move away from that ideology. But I think really being a worker and then being picked up by the unions and seeing the unions really shaped how the next decade of my life in organizing, if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes total sense. And it's incredibly fascinating. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that, you know, Islam does have a uniquely sort of anti-capitalist core to it because it is, And other religions do have this as well. I would argue that pretty much all religions have some version of this, which is communal values.

And anything that is a communal value about, you talked about charity or giving to others or the redistribution of wealth or, you know, prohibitions against usury and exploitation is built on the idea that we are all one in God, that we are all a community of believers living for and because of something bigger than ourselves. and that core value, which is articulated beautifully and uniquely in Islam, does exist in many other religions. I mean, Christianity for damn sure, right? Jesus chasing out the money lenders, flipping over the tables, you know, telling the rich to sell all their possessions and give to the poor, saying it's harder for rich man to get to heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Like these are deeply communal values.

I come from a tradition where I learn a lot and I have a lot of engagement with Buddhism. And I think from a different angle, there is a radical liberatory and just fundamentally implicit anti-capitalist sort of structure in the way that Buddhism deals with desire and the very mechanism that promotes consumerism in the first place. So I think that is wonderful that you kind of were, because of your class position, because of your material conditions, were sort of pulled towards that liberatory part of the, the spectrum of Islam and we're not wholly one over to, you know, the more reactionary elements. But I think to your point, if you are an immigrant, part of the diaspora in the West, you face racism, you face alienation and isolation from the larger society, it's hard to integrate into it when you are met with such hostility that you understand why people would in that context. context, gravitate, especially if it's the only thing on offer, to these more reactionary aspects of their, you know, more or less native culture that is, that is at least giving them a sense of like belonging and community in a context where you feel stripped of that.

Yeah, definitely. And I like that you brought up Buddhism because there's also reactionary groups of Buddhists, too, or Israelis that are Buddhist or, you know, and yeah, I definitely think it's a spectrum. And like you said, it was my material situation and conditions that sort of catapulted me into the union, but also like consciousness about being a worker. Yeah. I wanted to circle back around to Islamophobia. You know, so I wish there was a phrase that it wasn't based on fear, but was more based in hate. Like, you know, homophobia, Islamophobia, all these things.

It's sort of a semantic point. But like, you know, I think the. fear of the thing is not really doesn't really get to the heart of it you know it's it's it's it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a hostility that is more than mere fear it's so i don't know that's just a side point but um islamophobia i've realized in the last two years since the genocide in israel i mean the genocide has been going on since the knockaba but since this acute phase of outright you know fascistic genocidal mass mass massacres have been occurring i've come to see with more and more clarity how Islamophobia in the West is an ideological pillar of Zionism

and the support for Zionism across the West. Anywhere and everywhere that they can stoke Islamophobia, they can also gin up support for Israel. And if you look at somebody like the people over the Daily Wire, like Matt Walsh, you know, Ben Shapiro's company, they'll explicitly say, because there's this fight going on in the right right now about Zionism and Israel. and there's a huge split occurring. And one of the ways that they try to cover up that contradiction on the right is by downplaying Israel, they'll say, I don't really care about that issue. It's for them to decide.

Anyway, let me tell you how bad Muslims are. Let me tell you how Europe is being overrun by Islam. Let me tell you about this random, you know, Muslim person in the U.S. that did this thing that we can hyperfixate on. And it's become very clear to me that that Islamophobia is just this core pillar of Zionism. and without it, they really are lacking one of their main weapons. Does that resonate at all with you and your experience, especially having connected with me over a lot of this stuff revolving around Palestine?

Like, what are your thoughts on the role that Islamophobia plays in the West in manufacturing ideological consent for Zionism? That's a deep question. And I think like even thinking through like my relationship to Islam through all of this and through organizing for like 12 years inside unions. What's interesting is in this moment, and this is maybe I'm like surprising you, it's like when I do member organizing and when I've been doing work on Palestine, so for example, we just passed an arms embargo resolution at our union.

and our union is like 300,000 members. It's called Unifor, the union, and it's in Canada. The freelancers are part of that, and a lot of those members, you know, are in auto, weapons facilities. And the arms embargo resolution people were really pushed back. I'm talking like people in the left or socialists were like, don't try to pass this motion. It's not going to pass. And then the Zionists are going to fight you, fight back. And like I'm one of the people who co-drafted the resolution and we actually succeeded and we passed it this summer at our convention.

And you know how I teach it? I teach it in this way. Again, this is what the union has taught me is like when I talk about Zionism and when I talk about Israel, I don't lean into Islamophobia about it because I have been. trying to teach workers and members that the Israeli lobby and like these Zionist definitions of anti-femitism that came into the workplace before October 7th, right? Like the IHRA and all these definitions that literally if you say Palestine, they're going to call you an anti-Semite, right? And it's criminalizing workers. It's criminalizing ordinary people. tons of ordinary people have faced repercussions.

So how I train people is to say that it's about, it's a human issue, it's about all of us. It's not uniquely like, like I don't need, sometimes when I talk about it, I don't speak through, I'm a Muslim and this is why I care about Palestine. I say that I'm, I'm a trade unionist, I'm a worker, and this is why these laws that our government, are putting through that attack all of us,

and it doesn't matter your race or your religion. But I know, yeah, I know how Zionism and how imperialism distinctly impacts Muslims. Yeah, I do know. Like, we can't even talk about the resistance, right? Even though everyone around the world is watching and, like, admiring the resistance. And the resistance has taught us how to resist.

But you can't even really say that in a lot of these spaces. So I do think, yeah, it is Islamophobia because they can't understand, like this society is so sick. It's so like void of like morality because of capitalism and how vulgar it is and the collapse of this society. But also over the years, like watching everything that's happened with the pandemic, everything that's happening with this like televised genocide. I'm like and being a union organizer in the field, like visiting all sorts of work. I'm like, people don't even know mutual aid here. Like, like, literally if you see how Palestinian people resist and are resilient, is because, like, mutual aid is not a concept, right?

Like, mutual aid, right? Or, like, if you go to other sides of the world, like, it's like, or indigenous societies or, like, all these societies that are so communal, like, you said, right? Like pre-capitalist or socialist ideas, right? But this here, where we're living, it's, like, so long. only people don't even have any idea of how to even do mutual aid or be communal. So, so I went a little off tangent, but that's why I don't always focus on Islamophobia

because I get afraid sometimes, like when we're doing worker training and stuff, when we're always defining something as we're so separate. Like if me and you are so, so different, do you get what I mean? Oh, yeah, yeah. You're exactly right in your approach. And I think what you're emphasizing is the inherently universal vision of socialism. Like we believe that we are human beings first and foremost. And while we absolutely make room for, study, accept and let flourish the particularities, right, this person is Islamic.

This person is Christian. This person is Buddhist. This person is indigenous. Like, that's beautiful. There's no way in which we want to wrinkle out those differences. as we want to celebrate them, but ultimately we are united across identities first as a class, but then at a higher level as human beings on a shared planet. And so when you're emphasizing this strategy you take, it's exactly the right one.

And what I was emphasizing is the reactionary attempt to separate into particularities and destroy that universal vision, right, using the Muslim as this fear figure that they can stoke fear and hatred towards and then leveraging that in service of Zionism. But when you're trying to combat that, you've got to go the opposite way and stress the universality of our struggle and our humanity. And I think you're exactly right in that. And congratulations on passing that resolution. I mean, that is that is a that is a huge win. And that's a really remarkable accomplishment. Yeah. And I want to emphasize too, like at our convention, this president who got up, Like I spoke at the mic, but another president got up, former president, and he came out of Windsor, which is close to Detroit, and it's an auto city as well.

He's from manufacturing. He got up, and like, his speech moved to me. And, like, he is, like, people would call him an old white conservative, but he got up and, like, he gave this beautiful intervention. He talked about how the union, he was a grade 10 dropout. Like, he was a dropout. And a lot of our members are like not educated, you know, formally educated. And he spoke how the union was a place of education. The union was his home.

And he talked about Palestine. And he started to cry. And he said he thought about his grandchildren. And he spoke right before I spoke. And I said, even though he like, you know, people, the liberals think like, oh, he didn't check all the boxes on saying, I'm this and I'm that, and I'm this identity group, and therefore I should speak on this. He spoke as a human being, and he moved his group, like whether they're auto, you know, people at a Windsor, and they all voted. We passed it unanimously,

and I would say we were successful because we did not lean into our differences. We didn't lean into identity politics. And I've been over the years since the pandemic and really been pushing back against a lot of it because I would say that the Islamophobia and this is where I would say the liberals do Islamophobia because the liberals want us to do different categories. They're like, you should do Muslim people. And it's just for Muslim and you should cover you and your brown people should cover only these issues, right? And that's why I always go to the union stuff, because I'm like, actually,

and I always challenge and go, workers look like me. Like we know large segments of the workforce, auto, transit, education, people are, you know, brown and black, right? Asian of non-white, indigenous, if you go to rural communities, indigenous. So like, we have to push back on the idea that these spaces are just for the white worker. And we need to take up that space and be in those spaces as well. Yeah. Alongside all different types of workers, including white workers, right? Which is the thing that is anti-liberal. And I really do believe that the biggest innovation of the last 10 to 15 years has been liberal identity politics wherein we all understand how the old racist and even the modern racist and the future racists will attempt to divide us along identity

lines to, among other things, distract from our shared class interests. That is the move of fascists. That's the move of oligarchs. I mean, Elon Musk's talking about immigration being our biggest problem is just two on the nose. It is an exact version of what we mean when we say that the right, you know, does this reactionary identity thing to separate people so that the capitalist elite can continue to exploit and prey upon us, but the big innovation was liberal identity politics wherein, and this is manifest in Hillary's campaign and we've been dealing with it ever since, wherein it's the exact same attack on universality is launched, but from a seemingly progressive direction where people are once again broken down into irreconcilable identity

categories, where there is just an epistemological and ontological separation between people based on inborn characteristics that replicates what the racists and reactionaries do, but does it with the sheen of progressiveness in service of, you know, an attack on class politics and an attack on internationalism and an attack on anti-imperialism. You know, Bernie Sanders is not a huge, amazing Marxist-type perfect communes. but he ran a democratic socialist campaign pushing a class-based identity sort of thing. And I don't, not even identity, it's the universality of our shared class struggle and was met with this disingenuous accusation of misogyny in an attempt to use liberal identity politics

to undermine the formation of a class politic. And I think that is what we are living in the immediate wake of, particularly here in North America, but probably to some extent across the Western world. Do you agree with me on that? Yeah, I couldn't. And it's incredibly frustrating because, and this is part of like a lot of the core teachings that I do when I talk about one-on-one conversations or working with communities. Like people will ask me when I'm like working in rural communities and when I'm working with like predominantly male workforce. I'm working with like a predominantly white workforce. or whatever, like any difference that, right?

I'll be like a surface difference, right? And then I'll be like, honestly, like, they're all talking about the same issues, first of all, right? Like the fact, like Italy's workforce that went on a general strike, like they're talking about the same issues that are in Canada. They're in the United States, like pensions being stolen, you know, wages being stolen, like, you know, all these type of things are global. And it's like they're not talking about,

their identity. And I've had to sometimes scold people who don't do organizing. Because I'm like, what you're doing is you're being classist and racist. I'm like, you're coming out to a place you don't know. And you're telling them that if they don't say their pronoun, that they're dumb, essentially. And you don't know. Their kids may be trans. They may be trans.

You don't know. And it's like it makes me. live it because it's so classist and it's so elitist and they can't understand why people have gravitated towards again reactionary whatever Christian evangelical Islamist whatever they've gravitated towards this sort of right-wing ideologies because the other side has spent so much so much time being anti-poor anti-working class and and identity politics that are so hollow. Yeah.

But it has served the donor classes of the Democratic Party well because neoliberalism has continued unabated and inequality is continuing to go up and the rich are continuing to get richer. So as long as people are needlessly divided. But yeah, you're exactly correct. It's this condescension. It's this holier than thou. It's not that you want to connect with people or unite people or have difficult conversations.

It's that you want to be morally superior and let them know. And that feels good for the self-righteous person engaging in that behavior, but it leads nowhere. And I really do think that more and more people are waking up to that and that period of time is slowly coming to an end. And it's increasingly seen as just cringe if you behave that way. Whereas if you were behaving that way, five years ago, it would have been seen as completely normal and mainstream liberal politics to do so. Yeah, I would agree with you on that too. I think it's like becoming more cringe. I think because we're in a state of emergency now because of fascism,

people, sorry, I'm laughing because people realize, oh, my God, I was being cringe, you know, but like, but like now we're in such a, like, we're in like the belly, like they're like closing all social media. Like, who knows? Maybe they'll turn off the internet, right? Like, I just think now they're like, we better get back to organizing and talking to people. I think it's like really bad. So I think people want to learn how to not.

do that and I think that's hopeful. Absolutely. Yeah, the real contradictions are becoming too stark and obvious that you can't wrinkle over them any longer with that sort of nonsense. So, yes, people are realizing. So I want to touch on this because you've mentioned a few times working in rural areas and in our in our conversations, you've talked about doing union work, not only in rural areas, but around reservations. What lessons have you learned specifically from organizing in these communities and how does class struggle sort of intersect with indigenous sovereignty and, you know, rural life. Yeah, I, I'm so proud of this work that I got to do through the union.

So as a union staff organizing, what I actually do is bring in new members. I organize. So I file applications with the appropriate labor body in a region. And I try to certify members. So I've worked in different parts of the, country. I've worked in rural areas and areas that are directly linked to or on reserves. A recent campaign I was doing, but I wasn't able to complete just because of familial obligations, was in Mohawk territory, Aqua Sasne, which is like right above like over New York and Montreal and

Ontario. So that was an amazing experience. I've also worked in like Treaty 3, which is like Northern Ontario, Canora, Rainey River, all of this is close to Minnesota. Many people drive from Minnesota up there. So I've worked in different communities where I've had the privilege, honor, to meet indigenous members, Native members. You can call them First Nations in Canada and in America, American Indian, or by their band or tribe. So the opportunity to work with rule and remote communities

or communities with reservations showed me that again, what we sometimes see with liberal identity politics more is that and you see it in unions too where they reinforce the white worker, the white worker, the white working class. The white working class not ready for this. white or you see articles in jack of them the white wearing class is not ready for this right but they like erase large segments of the workforce so if you go anywhere in the country you're going to indigenous people are members of like longshore workers

ua w um if you go mining electrical teachers so i had that opportunity to work with the teachers educators um federal workers large parts of federal workers are um indigenous you know, so I think that first we should we should stop erasing them from the economy because I think there's something deeply genocidal and racist about that that has only come to light for me personally, again, with the genocide that's happening with Palestinian people, but both have illustrated to me how the settler colonial state, like erase them as a workforce, make them anachronistic or a historical. and have removed them from the history of the trade union movement as well in many cases.

Unless you go, you know, do research locally. Like if you went to like, let's say, British Columbia and you looked into more research about the longshore workers there and their history of militant indigenous people, you don't really get that history. So I think that all the other movements, like the environmental movement and all these movements try to, and because they're so liberal, They try to erase the native or indigenous worker. And I would really push back on that.

And I would push back that they're not active. They're very active in the union, you know, stewards and their strike captains, their leaders. Like I met an amazing steward, I think a transit operator professional with the ATU. I won't say his name, but like he's written a lot of. the indigenous policy for the union. And he's he's he's a bus driver, ordinary person, you know. And so members really not only inform political education of unions, they like, you know, shape the union itself.

And being out in rural communities also taught me a lot about how violent different industries are and that they're not only extractive, exploitative, and violent towards native people, but they're also white workers have taught me how they're violent jobs to them as well, if that makes sense. And like, I think in this moment, too, with thinking about the genocide and everything that's happening, I think, like, I don't know if you've ever read the man who hated work and love labor, the life in times of Tony Mazoki. Maybe your audience has, but he was a worker and a president who was from the chemical workers union. And like he pushed back about a lot of these jobs as good jobs.

You know, and I think it forced me to think about like industries or jobs. Like we shouldn't we shouldn't accept what the bosses or industry people have told us and we should push back. And we not only are they are they bad for the environment. simultaneously bad for us. And, you know, they're bad for health and safety. And so sometimes when I talk about it, instead of hitting it again, good jobs versus bad jobs, you know, like these are the only jobs we can have. I try to like in political education make us think about like, okay, well, is working in like

a hazardous dumpster, like nuclear waste facility? Is this the only jobs like this beautiful place can have? know, and pushing workers to think about it. And that's really what I've learned. I've also really learned that the last thing I would say is there's a lot of history. And I know you're in the planes or you're in like, well, I won't say where you are. But like, you can say Omaha, Nebraska. There's a lot of history in a lot of places that are rural or communist history.

There's a lot of socialist history. There's a peace movement history and militant, militant organizing history that I've learned from members, you know, and smaller communities that are able to talk about like, like, you know, their community understand, like, how things have shifted under neoliberalism. And like, you can learn a lot of militant organizing came from these areas, but we tend to focus on the cities a lot more than rural and remote communities. absolutely yeah no i think that that is so on point and one of the the big tragedies and perhaps failures of you know modern politics is that there's this seemingly deep divide between anything like left-wing class oriented anti-imperialist internationalist progressive politics and the rural areas who in so many instances are you know preyed upon by the forces of international capitalism in many ways

ways, even more than some people living in cities. Rural areas are often neglected. They have lack of health care. They don't have clean drinking water. They're dump sites for big corporations. We see the construction of these data centers going up all over the country that just soak up water and electricity and that have lots of other downstream consequences like unbearable noise. And they are often put in rural communities where there's a lack of ability to fight back. And because there is very little attention or respect paid to those communities or concerned paid to those communities. The only thing left for them in many instances is to desperately look to reactionary forms of authoritarian populism as any hope at all because they feel abandoned by structural forces of

what our society calls left, which are really just Democratic Party liberal, you know, things. But I think the goal for union organizers and for the, the broader socialist left should be doing everything we can to make, you know, forays into rural areas and make connections there and appeal to their material interest because in many ways they, they too do get the short end of the stick and this conversation around progressive, forward-looking cities and backward-looking white reactionary rural areas. While there's a kernel of truth there, I think it is hyper simplistic and really we do, we do rural communities a disservice by thinking in those terms.

Totally. And I want to say, too, like, whether it's white people or not white people, native people, every time I go to rural community, I'm, like, treated with so much hospitality, you know, people invite you in their homes. Like, it's so communal. And it's, like, so generous, the time that people make for you. And it's like everybody has more bandwidth and, like, Like there, everybody like shares resources.

And it's just like I've learned so much from those communities. And I've also just learned that when they've really run, like I've been assigned to electoral politics sometimes through the union in areas. Like a lot of the candidates for social Democrats or whatever are very progressive in a lot of these areas because the communities are very progressive. Because they believe in, you know, socialist principles and like they believe in infrastructure development. Like you said, they understand that they don't have clean drinking water. That internet is like inaccessible sometimes. They rely on a lot of that in like large, vast, like remote communities. They really rely on affordable internet.

So they believe in public infrastructure. And that's a unifying idea for both whatever race you are there. Like they believe in it. And I find, and they know this that when they've, vote, a lot of these communities vote left. I don't want to say democracy in Canada, but like they vote very left, not liberal. So I think that we're missing when we're organizing, whether it's unions or whether people are doing election stuff, like people are really missing rule and reservations and remote communities. Yeah. Absolutely. I've lived in and spent a lot of time in rural

community specifically in Nebraska, Iowa, and Montana. And in my time in Montana, I lived on the edge of the Crow Reservation and the small, small rural town that I lived in and worked in. It was about 50-50, you know, indigenous Crow Nation people as well as like white rural, sort of stereotypical cowboy type people. And it was a radical experience of learning. And I have a lot of very positive feelings and memories and I learned a lot about the world by spending time in that community. And I look back on it fondly. But yeah, I completely resonate and agree with everything you're saying. I know we're a little crunch for time. We're not going to be able to get to all these questions. I would, of course, love to have you back on any time to talk about this and so much more.

But I do want to hit a few more questions here. Sure. I believe that in our conversation, you talked about traveling to Cuba. if I'm right about that, I would love to hear you talk about what you learned there, what was the context in which you went to Cuba and kind of your understanding of Cuban forms of class struggle, internationalism, solidarity, etc. Yeah. Well, Cuba also, like a lot of after I graduated and like again went into the workforce, became a union organizer, it was really like a lot of trade unionists. They like love going to Cuba. But also, you know, being in Canada, millions of people go to Canada.

Cuba. Before the pandemic, like if you read online about two million workers, people would go a year to Cuba from Canada. Cuba, Canada's relationship has been long. And I think it's one of the relationships that Canada has been able to, you know, keep maintain. And not saying that Canada's altruistic and benevolent more than the United States and its crippling sanctions. We know that. on the Cuban people. But like, and I think that Canada continues to aid and help support like the U.S. is like political geopolitical interests and maintaining those sanctions on Cuba. But living in Canada, we did, we do benefit from that sort of tourist relationship that Cuba, Canada, Cuba and Canada have maintained. And so I kind of got involved in going to Cuba through another trade unionist in 2016. So that was my first trip.

She just said, like, we should get out of here in winter. And, you know, in Canada, a lot of, they've made flights really accessible to even very rural areas all over Canada to go to Cuba. So, like, lots of people go to Cuba. You know, it's very affordable, meaning a lot of, like, people who are low-wage, like, you could be a nail technician, a lot of nail technician. a lot of nail technicians will go to Cuba. A lot of unorganized non-union workers go to Cuba. So that's one of the benefits of living in Canada. But I joined the Canada-Cuba Friendship Association in 2022.

And then subsequently I was elected to the executive. And I heard about a brigade. And the brigade was called a Che Guevara Brigade. And I went on the brigade in 2023. And it was really awesome to go on a brigade versus going alone. And I know that there's a lot of brigades that go from the United States. And in 2023, I was able to meet, like, I mean, they were saying about 1,000 people were there during May Day. And I met so many people, different brigades from the UK from, like, all over the world.

but specifically I met people from the UK and like America. They were quite large. And yeah, I think it really these brigades or delegations. So there are union delegations too that go to Cuba for a very long time. Like for example, QP, which is a large public sector union or BCGEU, which is a large public sector union, or unions in the UK or all over the world, honestly, even in America. Sometimes they're international and solidarity committees or even locals send people. So I would really encourage people to go.

And sometimes you can inquire, like if you're in a local, if they have a solidarity committee or an international committee, you can see if they have funds or if there's a brigade going or if they can connect you to a brigade. And so going to Cuba, my first trip was really good because it was just like tourism, but the second trip was like eye-opening for me because a lot of the people on the brigade were socialist,

some of them in the Communist Party chapters, the Young Communist League in Canada. And it was very disciplined. And like we got to hear from the Cuban workers associations, art collectives, women's councils, community organizations, just about different ways that they participate in building, maintaining their project, the socialist project, you know, the revolution that like continues till this day. And I think that so many people around the world have benefited from hearing from these worker to worker conversations or people to people conversations. And I was a benefactor of that. And it just opened my eyes as a tribunionist about two things I would say to the audience. Like there's two major misconceptions that the U.S. empire wants to like,

continue to perpetuate. A, that Cuba doesn't have free trade unions, like democratic trade unions. That is simply false. People at every level can be elected, deelected. They participate in voting. And every level of their government is worker led. And you can go meet people. You can, you can hear about their, even like ordinary people will also criticize, like, like, you know, what their issues are or where they need to make more gains. But you also, the other big misconception is there's no religious freedom. That's what I wanted to say. And going there in 2016 and then going there in 2023 only like opened my eyes.

And this might be sad. Like living in the West as a Muslim, like how like, how, how do I say this? like how alienating it is here and like going to another society that is more egalitarian and seeing how how they see Islam so like in Cuba Cuba has had a history of teaching, training, educating doctors from all around the world, including where I'm where I'm originally from, which is Pakistan, India actually. But like, so the Cuban government around the world has sent doctors and trained doctors in third world countries like Pakistan and learning about this like really like not only made me see how generous and how solidarity and internationalism is like still living through their revolution that like there's nowhere else to learn it but in places like Cuba. and a place like Cuba has been so generous to a place like Pakistan.

Like from in 2006, Pakistan was hit with like this earthquake. Fidel Castro sent like doctors to train, teach and take care of the victims of that catastrophe. And inside Cuba, there are Muslims from all over the world who have been studying, training, and living and have families. And the one thing that stood out to me is when we were being led on one of our tours, like the tour guide from the Cuban friendship associations, ICAP said, oh, in passing and very like calmly, oh, and we have like one of the largest growing Muslim populations in Cuba. We're building another mosque.

We have like 2,000 new converts. And he said it in this way. And I was like, never in my entire life. Have I heard somebody proudly say, like, we have Muslims, you know? And we're so, we're building another mosque and we try to take care of them. And like, we have converts. Like, so it's like, in Cuban people who are Muslim, you know. And I just felt like they are so educated there.

And even the way they like engage with you about like your faith and your culture. They're just like so open to learning. And I really encourage everybody to go learn and visit. And you'll learn also so much about like how progressive a lot of their union laws are. Their family code just changed as well and expands rates for all sorts of types of, like, different types of diverse families. And like it really makes you think how we don't even have these laws in North America. and if we're so democratic, which we're not,

that's like me just saying, then like why is it so hard to form a union? Like, why can't you rightly participate in your reunion? And why do they put so much red tape and why are you need big corporations spending millions and millions of dollars to like fight workers?

And but you don't have that in Cuba. Mm-hmm. I mean, absolutely. And that isn't incredibly moving. And you hit on many important points. One of them is we call ourselves democracies. Of course, you and I and all of our listeners will scoff at the very idea knowing that this is a facade. But, you know, even the people that are ostensibly genuinely in favor of the political form known as democracy under liberalism,

when we talk about extending democracy into the economic realm, when we talk about extending democracy into the workplace, you know, a liberal says, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't mean that much democracy. That's too much democracy. No, no, no. Your workplace is a, is a tyranny. It's a dictatorship. The CEO and the owner of that company gets to decide when you go to the bathroom, what clothes you have to wear, when you have to be there, and when you get fired or hired.

We don't believe in democracy in that sense. And then you talk about democratically controlling the economy, that the people would have a say in where to invest, collective capital and what to invest our resources and our labor into. Like that is anathema to the liberal mind and certainly to the conservative and reactionary mind. But that actually is the full blossoming of democracy, a thing many people claim to believe in. But when put under any sort of real interrogation on this front, you find out very quickly they

don't actually believe in it at all. And I think the other point you made about feeling so, and in, like a new way feeling welcomed as a Muslim in Cuba. I think that gets back to our conversation earlier about collectivity and universality because it's precisely in our universal and our universality and in our collectivity that we find a love and appreciation and curiosity in our particularities, right? Like religions and different religious formations can flourish beautifully in a socialist

context where everybody is trying to be liberated together as human beings and it's in capitalist unequal, alienated, reactionary societies where you being of a different religion is all a sudden a real problem for me or for you or whatever and where the particularities are sites of hostility, not sites of actual universality. And that kind of seems counterintuitive that our particularities could be the source of our of our, of our commonplace. of our coming together. But I think I think socialism, internationalism,

humanism in this broader sense, kind of solves that contradiction and brings that, brings those two seemingly opposite poles of particularity and universality together in dialectical union. And it's a beautiful thing. And I think you discovered that. I put a lot of stupid jargony words on top of it. But your basic human experience is the proof of my point.

And it's just, it's just so sad what is happening in Cuba. Trump administration is now labeled Cuba as a as like a foreign, you know, funder of terrorism, which is just fucking stupid and insane, as ratcheted up the already suffocating embargo. And these wonderful people who have been under the boot for so long, who are so generous, who are so, you know, self-determined and who do want to just build a better world and who do export doctors and love and health instead of death and bombs and murder, you know, these are the very people that the U.S.

Empire puts its, you know, the boot upon their neck. And if they can topple Venezuela like Trump is trying, I think it is very clear to me that the U.S. would be very open to going after Cuba next, especially with somebody like Marco Rubio, Secretary of State. So, you know, the resistance of Venezuela is not separate from the fate of Cuba, right? Mm-hmm. I agree. So, yeah, let's, a couple more questions here.

It sucks because I want to hit a bunch of them. But do you have a preference in which one of these questions you would like to tackle, the ones that are remaining? No, whatever you think. Okay. Well, you're running an inside organizer school in the Twin Cities, I believe, currently. And I'm just kind of curious about what's the mission behind that and sort of your approach to it and how you're training the next generation of organizers to build power in their workplaces? Yeah. And being involved in different organizations, civil society organizations and the union has taught me that a lot of people, well, the pandemic taught me this, that people are super, like the whole world of work has changed, right?

Like even under the current, like, right now, Trump is like erasing all these federal jobs. Like so many people are working at remote since the pandemic. AI, you know, all of the stuff that we're, we might not necessarily get back. I thought that we would in the pandemic, but the pandemic really shifted things. And it gave them a reason to create more of a crisis. And that crisis led to more alienation. And what I mean by that is a lot of people in America and Canada or around the world are organizing, quote, I'll put in quote, but a lot of it's online.

And a lot of it's on all these different chats, digital tools, and they're like hyper-obsessed and vigilant. Like, I think there's also liberal obsession with like security culture online. But like you can't possibly like secure all of it. Like I mean, I always say to workers like before like the advent of the internet, I mean they were surveilling people, right? you're putting like mice in people's houses, okay? Like Martin Luther King, okay?

Like, I don't think they need to look in your signal chat, you know? And if they do, what if you don't write anything in your signal chat? And they still accuse you, right? Being a terrorist just for wearing a pin, right? Which is what they're doing to workers, like a Delta worker wore a Palestine pin and still got disciplined, right? So we can't just be so obsessed with all these. online tools. And I think it's really failing a lot of organizing or mobilizing,

because it's hyper-focused on like communication through these avenues. And, you know, this summer I had the privilege of going with my chapter to the DSA convention. And I know that you wanted to discuss that a little bit too. And I think that like what I saw was a lot of people in their phones and like it's it's kind of scary that we're entering this world where like people walk into traffic with their phone and like and people don't even understand each other and then when an idea comes they're like screaming at each other like why don't you understand what we mean by one state solution and it's like well he and then as a union organizer that's where I like intervene I'm like because they literally don't know what you're saying.

like have you ever imagine they don't know what you mean when you say ABCD like the words you use whether you're talking about collective bargaining whether you're talking about like um i don't know like people are always using so much jargon and the lack of political education like millions of people don't even have financial literacy lots of workers can't even write their address on their on something you know this is the reality they're saying it's in decline like reading rates and like children's ability to read. So like when you're talking about ideas, they don't even understand it. And so, and it's not that they don't believe in an arms embargo. And this is another thing I talked about with Paul. I'm like, they believe in it. They just don't understand what you're saying.

And you never took the time to talk to them. Like, you literally are sitting on discord all day long. And like, nobody knows who you are, what you're talking about. And then you're not, you're not that you're that we're losing. And I want to say that. because I'm ideologically committed to that, right? Like I'm an anti-imperialist. I'm all these things. I'm a social. But what I find very frustrating is that people aren't having conversations in person.

And this organizing training is literally going back to the roots of real organizing. What organizing is, not organizing for NGO, not organizing for the CEO at a co-op, not organizing a like instapost or something. I don't know. It's organizing in the workplace. It's like a concept that came out of like militant work worker farmers. It came from like farm worker organizing in the south. Like it came from like conversations. And this training is what the inside organizer school is about having people see the workplace as a site of struggle, like an important site of struggle. So why I want to say that is because people are doing all these things and like I get all these messages, oh, I'm on a hunger strike for Palestine.

And I'm like, who has you to go on hunger strike for Palestine? Like, like, are you part of collective organization? And are you part of a group? Are you part of a socialist organization? Like we need in this moment for us to be part of a communal group because people aren't even part of. of that anymore. And like learning from other cultures, whether it's like immigrant communities, like Greeks and Portuguese I grew up with, everybody was part of like civic organizations or sports teams

or this stuff. Now you don't even see that. Like you see so much alienation, like people come home from work and like don't see people, don't see people. Yeah. So the school is really about a practice that came out of. you know, IWW, like wobbles. It came out of communists.

It came out of all sorts of spectrum of socialists who, in their workplace, whether it was working on farms, whether it was working in industrial workplace guilds or art artists, it was all about organizing and forming unions. And so the training is happening in the Twin Cities. And I really believe in it because it's also focusing on all the non-union workers. And we know that unions are in decline, like have been in decline. And we know that in the pandemic and before the pandemic, a lot of workers started organizing, whether it was tech workers, Google workers,

all these types of workers were organizing around different issues, whether it be sexual harassment or racism. And now, you know, the genocide that's happening pushed people into thinking about organizing too or like the attack from employers that at every, everywhere we go, there's like an attack on us, you know, whether it's pension, schools, everything. So I think that young workers know that they should be organizing. And I feel like whenever I bring up the school, which is called the Inside Organizer School, it's very unifying. And a lot of people know that we should get back to that in-person talking.

And I think being part of my DSA chapter who endorsed this as well, they've been really positive. And they know that we should be doing more in-person organizing in this time. So, yeah, the school is happening in November, and we're also trying to create more of a culture of unionism. So we're having some socials around it. And I really encourage people to start doing more union organizing and education in their area. I could not agree more with everything you said. I think it's so important. I think getting sucked into the phone and the internet, like we all do it.

We all spend way too much time on our phone. I get it. I'm not acting holier than now, but it really needs to be buttressed and balanced by real-world interactions. And if you can get involved in labor organizing, if you can get involved in tenant organizing, anything like this, building an organization in your own community, political education group, like me and comrades here in Omaha, I've put together Socialist Night School and we're trying to do a second run of it. the union that I'm in, they do have a political arm, a political education arm that I am, you know, as I get, I first want to sort of prove myself on the job site. I'm brand new, of course, so I don't want to get too uppity. But, you know, as I ease into the job and I kind of sort of prove myself on the job site, very quickly I want to start visiting those meetings and participating in that. And even on the job site, you know, the human to human interaction is nice. And I've worked in like office environments, like,

you know, HR, white collar, office environments many times in my life. And even the interaction you have between coworkers can be very stilted

and almost like you're using your customer voice on your coworkers. It still feels like there's a layer of artificiality sometimes that can exist in certain environments. I'm not trying to speak,

you know, too broadly here. But the one thing I do like about the trades is that that is gone. And it's just, it is real world on the, on the shop floor conversations that are edifying in so many ways.

And that's the essential skill that we are going to need. And in fact, organized labor is the essential piece missing for the left-wing puzzle, I think, in the United States as conditions deteriorate. It is the power, the main leverage we have for a capitalist class that only speaks in dollars is precisely to use our position in the labor force as, organized labor as our main leverage tool in class war because we've been losing the class war in the United States for a very, very long time. And during the Trump administration and these tech oligarchs, they're just looking to

spike the football in the end zone on us. Like, they're trying to automate us out of existence. So the struggle is intensifying. And I really urge people to take what you said incredibly seriously. So I know we're past time and you've been so generous with your time. I would love to have you back on. I would like to talk about your experiences in Canada, your Islamic faith more, limits perhaps, and failures of many labor unions in the Imperial Corps. I would love to talk with you about that.

We have many more questions on the outline. I would love to have you back. So we have our emails. We'll exchange emails and maybe we can schedule another conversation. So thank you so much for coming on. I would like to ask one more question as we wrap up here. And it's a question I'm trying to ask more of my guests at the end, especially in these seemingly dark times,

which is just kind of what gives you hope right now? As simple as that, I just want to ask that. When I see an image of workers, whether it was the Italian general strike that happened, fighting that fascist 2.0 Mussolini lady, you know, whether it's farmers in the pandemic, watching the farmers strike, one of the largest strikes in our history, against Modi, a fascist. You know, this tells me that we cannot simply see this moment of fascist violence as a state,

as the state leading it. It's like, no, the masses here have like fallen into, you know, this type of ideology. And like, in order for us to defeat it, we have to, we have to, we have to do more to free ourselves. And I think watching this genocide happening against Palestinians has taught me about resistance. And they are teaching us how to resist because people around the world are probably freer than us because they are pushing back and they're fighting. And we know that the strike is like a is a weapon that we should be using. But we don't know how to. And like I think that like watching strikes happen in all countries, all faiths.

And even when we read about the history of Palestinian resistance, it was it was coupled with general strikes. So we have to go back to direct action and we have to go back to this type of organizing. And so it really gives me hope and it and learning from all all these movements around the world. And I think that we should continue to be internation. nationalists in our perspective and continue to educate ourselves and take our time seriously and learn. And that's why I really encourage people to travel to Cuba and to continue to hear and do worker-to-worker solidarity. Amen. And you're really doing it. Huge salute to you. I admire all the work that you're doing. Thank you so much for everything you do and continue to do. Again,

would love to have you back on. Before I let you go, Can you just let listeners where they can find you and or your work, including perhaps the Insider or Inside Organizer School online? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. So I'm Amina Shake on Twitter. And then you can find the Inside Organizer School, which they also have a website. And they are going to many cities like Spokane and they've been in Virginia.

They've been traveling around. It's a collective. And you can find that online. And yeah, maybe if we get another socialist leisure, you'll see me around the country organizing. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Amina, for coming on and sharing your time. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you.