Rev Left Radio - WHOA: Serving the People and Applying the Mass Line

Episode Date: May 11, 2020

Cam, Billy, and Luis from WHOA-GSO join Breht to discuss their organizing efforts and the current crisis.  Find, learn about, and support GSO WHOA here: https://linktr.ee/whoagso   Follow Cameron Crowder @birthmarxist Follow Billy @billcbolshevik Follow Luis Medina @mal_praxis   Outro music 'Reading Mao' by Sendai Era ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, I'm talking with Cam, Billy, and Lewis about their organizing efforts for Woe, Working Class and Houseless Organizing Alliance. We talk a lot about how they implement the mass line, some of their organizing strategies, stuff they've learned along the way. So this is a particularly interesting episode for those who are new to organizing. or just getting started, or maybe going through some of the first year or two of organizing where you come up against a lot of common pitfalls and obstacles that a lot of organizations come up across, but you might not know it. And so whether you're a veteran organizer, not an organizer at all, or new to organizing,

there'll be something in this conversation that you pull out of it. So I really love what Woe's doing down there in Greensboro, and I hope other organizations learn from them and can develop along the lines they're developing along. So without further ado, let's get into this conversation with members from Woe to talk about their organizing efforts in Greensboro, North Carolina. Enjoy. Cameron Crowder, you might know me as Earth Marxist on Twitter, and I'm with GSO Woe. My name is Louis Medina, and you might know me as

Mal underscore Praxis on Twitter, and I'm with GSO Woe too. I'm Billy Belcher. I'm with Woe Greensboro, Hugo Chavez baseball on Twitter. I don't tweet much anymore, though. Beautiful. Well, thank you all so much for coming on the show. We've

really been focused, especially in the last month or so with highlighting organizing efforts because it's something we always want to do on our show but also because of the crisis that we're in organizing is becoming more important than ever so i've been following you all on twitter for a while seeing some of the work that you've done and i've really you know excited to to have you on to talk about it hopefully to give other organizers uh tips and ideas and inspiration to do similar things in their cities so the first question i want to start with is just basically some background on your organization so how How did Woe get started?

And maybe you could even talk about what Woe stands for for people that might not know. Woe is the working class and houseless organizing alliance, what the acronym stands for. It began the problems of the houseless here in Greensboro. It was two years ago in the summer of 2018. Woe was formed as a surrogate organization for several different groups that had wanted to oppose. an anti-panhandling ordinance the city was trying to pass that would allow the police to push people out of the downtown area and so what some folks tried to do was to boycott businesses that had asked for this ordinance and so woe was formed to conduct that boycott which didn't keep everybody involved the boycott was a lot of work and it ended up being kind of just me and lewis and his partner jess who were doing the grunt work and the petitioning going door to door, telling people about the boycott and the ordinance and all that. So as the ordinance fight wound down and people began walking away from the issue,

we were stuck with this organization, as it were. There was something that wasn't there before. There was no organization that a communist would want to join that a Marxist-Leninist would be interested in in Greensboro. And so we had this thing that was interested in the, the homeless struggle that was already known for that. And we thought we could build it maybe into that kind of an organization that could pull in people. Because there was a big space here.

There was just an empty space organizing wise. Work just wasn't being done. We thought this organization has been abandoned. Why not let it be that revolutionary thing that people need? Can you talk more about what turned woe into a revolutionary organization? maybe some of the first struggles you engaged in as you transitioned from this sort of single issue original organization into a broader communist revolutionary org?

Well, we developed into a revolutionary organization when we were in the midst of a struggle and that's when we saw our revolutionary bin. We saw revolutionaries the only viable options. Specifically, the struggle I'm referring to was the murder of Marcus Dionne Smith, a houseless black man. That's when we really dug our feet in. Maybe some of y'all are familiar with the Antonio Gramsci episode that Brett did a while back

with two other guests, I think horror vanguard, was it? Uh-huh, yeah. Yes, where part of my speech to city council was played. But for those who did not hear that episode, Marcus Dionne Smith was a houseless black man. He was hogtied by a rip-hopple device deployed by Greensboro's police department, and he died suffocating death, you know, positional affixiation. you know, at the hands of the boys in blue. This is a houseless black man who was asking desperately for help during a mental health crisis,

and that was how the police responded by murdering him. By this time, as the surrogate organization, we had developed enough political capital from our anti-panhandling fight to be invited into a coalition with the local so-called radical community to organize a response to the total lack of accountability from the neoliberal political establishment regarding Marcus' murder after then police chief Wayne Scott lied to the public. Okay, so we learned a lot from that struggle, but first and foremost, we learned that alliances with liberals do not work. Although we concluded that revolution was necessary, it was only the threat of revolution

for the neoliberal establishment to grant even the smallest concessions that liberals ask for. So if we're presenting revolution as an option, then why not make that the default? Why not start a revolution? Why not Hardline Revolution? That's what we're looking for, right? Why not make that our calling car? Like, yeah, we're the revolutionary organization. What we're looking for is revolution.

We're not just going to, like, present this as, oh, a revolution is an option if you don't set yourself straight. No, that's what we want anyway. So it was the lack of support from, of any kind, from the so-called radical community. It was the treatment of Marcus Dionne Smith and Marcus' family, whom we have come to know pretty well after his death, unfortunately, that led us to accept Huey P. Newton,

intercommunalist analysis, and that's the analysis wherein the lump and proletariat, society's outcasts, are a revolutionary class, if not the revolutionary class, and our task is to revolutionize a community, a community that has many reactionary elements in, obviously, around the lump and proletariat struggle. The effect the Smith family's had on us as an organization is something that we should, I'd like to highlight, because they don't live in Greensboro. Marcus Smith's family is in South Carolina. They're several hours away.

And they keep in close touch with us. I mean, Barry Smith, his mother, calls me a couple times a month to say hi and to find out what's going on in Greensboro. Every time the city council meets, she's watching from South Carolina pushing us to go and to keep raising the issue of her son's death over and over, Lewis calls that our superhero origin story.

So as you make the transition into a revolution, organization as you agitate and organize around police brutality. How has the city of Greensboro responded to your organization's agitation and organizing? What has been some of the confrontations you faced with some of the local government structures there? City Council's preferred tactic is to not address it at all. Since the family, several months after the homicide, they finally sued the city because nothing is being done. And after doing nothing for months, they began to say that,

well, they can't say or do anything because now there's a lawsuit. And we go to every meeting. We raise the issue. If there's not an opportunity to speak and we'll stand up and shout from our seats until they'll send the security guards over to escort us out of the chambers.

That's fine. That's happened multiple times. The mayor did change the speaking rules at the council meeting so that currently employed public city officials, like the police chief, can't be individually criticized from the podium and that objects of lawsuits can't even be discussed. When she read those rules out the first time, Mayor Nancy Vaughn, I just looked at the speech that I had written. I'm like, that was it. She's told me I can't speak about the Marcus Smith case, the Zrod Jones case, another. ongoing police brutality lawsuit in Greensboro where four young black men were beaten by the police

just for being downtown on a Saturday night. It was last September where Woe held a justice for Marcus Smith rally during the Greensboro Folk Festival when downtown park was full of people while we were giving speeches and while we were handing out flyers at least a dozen cops gathered to watch us. It felt like they were having a counter rally. And there, When we were having a vigil for Marcus Dionne Smith, along with his family, along with a lot of his supporters, along with a lot of his houseless peers, we couldn't help but notice there was a police drone that was flying around just to surveil all the people who were gathered there. So this is what we've had to deal with just by doing our basic due diligence around police brutality in this city. Yeah, absolutely. And that's a common intimidation tactic.

We here in Omaha have dealt with similar police presence, even like extremely overdone police presence, even on simple family get-togethers, like on May Day celebrations. We would have like a dozen police show up just to watch us from a parking lot across the street. So it's just kind of fascinating that these cities put so much energy and resources into just intimidating and harassing grassroots organizers. But that's America for you, I guess. They don't have the same energy for the proud boys. Oh, never. Yeah, never. Nope.

Absolutely not. So talking about your organization a little bit more, could you maybe describe Woe's program, woe's guiding ideology, and then the question I always like to ask as well is maybe talk about some historical radicals or movements that your organization and you as individuals specifically draw inspiration from.

So we follow Hew P. Newton's intercommunalism, which we take to be the most advanced analysis, material analysis of our situation here. In short, Q.P. Newton says that basically there are nations anymore. There aren't nation states, actually, that nation states are a figment insofar as that borders aren't actually developed from the sovereignty of the people, the relation to the empire. So basically, you know, I mean, if you're a Marxist-Leninist, you're recognized that every border has a relationship to the U.S. It's either there because they were invaded, colonized, or, you know, they're defending against colonialism, right? So he says that that unites the world under a situation that he calls reactionary intercommunalism.

So the world's a series of communities that are forced to serve the interests of the U.S. Empire. He believes that because of that, we have to radicalize within our own communities, right? prioritize, you know, the people around us and take control of the productive technologies of that community. And that's a state of what he calls revolutionary intercommunalism. So it's like, I don't know

if people are familiar with the term liberated zone. So like Q.P. Newton said that China was a liberated zone, the non was a liberated zone, and that the oppressed people and working class of the America within the empire

I need to start establishing liberated zones I see so and I mean we take you know we take inspiration

from other people too in the same sense that Huey P. Newton did right our method is based that's our analysis we tend to think that's a mess

advanced analysis but our methods are based in Leninism in malism so we practice a mass line tactic I'm going to give a synopsis of

mass line. Basically, mass line is where you tend to think that the people, within the people, the correct ideas, the correct political line exists. And all you, the revolutionaries job is to extract those ideas, right? Um, by consulting the people. Right. Now, just thinking about it from that perspective, that could lead a revolutionary to be lost unless you narrow your scope. Um, by picking a revolutionary class. For my, Marks, the revolutionary class in 18th century, Europe was the proletariat because the relationship to the means of production. They could strike, they could seize up the factories, right? They could, you know, they could enter into class struggle.

But for Hugh P. Newton, we live in a different material environment. He believed the revolutionary conditions would be, would come from the lump in proletariat, the outcasts of society, who we identify as the houseless. the migrant, and the incarcerated. And we believe that in the same way that Hugh believed it because capitalism inevitably pushes people into houselessness, right? Pushes people into prisons. And we can see it today. We're an epidemic of houselessness. Well, you know, prisons have mushroom cloud clouded since like the 70s, right?

They're huge now. They're privatized. So, you know, the ideas that go to them, figure out their needs, and adapt that tool. through our political line, and that's what we've done. Yeah, no, I like that a lot. And in fact, we just released an episode on Maoist movement in the Philippines, the CPP, the Communist Party of the Philippines,

and we included a clip in that episode of them talking about how they engage in the mass line and how that is really the backbone of their organizing efforts. And so it's wonderful to see anytime any organization uses that, you can really use that to amazing effect. And then the whole idea of shifting the focus of the revolutionary class to the lump in proletariat and the colonized specifically. I think I'm not for sure on this, but Huey P. Newton would almost certainly have engaged

with France Fanon's Wretched of the Earth, and there's a really robust argument for that sort of analysis in that wonderful text as well. So you're really pulling from a lot of the best of the communist and Marxist tradition, for sure, and I love it for sure. Let's go on to the next question, because Woe recently helped to bring attention to

and ultimately halted a Justice Department grant that if Greensboro City Council had accepted it, would have allowed cooperation with ICE. So can you tell us about that entire sort of situation and how your organization handled it? Sure. It was an ongoing grant. Greensboro has been accepting this for a couple of years.

I believe since 2017 is when the Justice Department fixed the terms so that to get this money, it's called the Edward Byrne Memorial Grant, get that money, you have to agree to provisions that allow exchange of information with ICE and hold detainees and extra up to, I believe, six days in order for them to be picked up by ICE and potentially deported. So in this past December, 2019, our city council tentatively approved the continued acceptance of that grant. And so, I went to the council and I gave a public speech announcing the grant and compared ICE to a Gestapo and I talked about the concentration camps and all the fascist things that ICE does, which provoked natural discussion for the city council members.

Some of them decided that they maybe didn't want to support this and change the way that business as usual gets done because this had never been an issue. before. They had never thought about not accepting the money. We sent people to a rally the night of the vote itself. Cameron Lewis moved to that. I had to work that night. They can tell you how that went. Yeah, I could add to that. As a comrade Billy said, me and Cameron went. And basically, as soon as that hit, Billy called it out. I mean, he was on point. I don't think anybody was at city council that day with billing. from woe and so we had learned to operate these types of like quick actions i think turtle

what turtle there turtles there turtles are turtles are uh little i'm at this part of uh shout out to comrade turtle but yeah so we we we got together and we you know we've only networked a group of leftists who are either interested in joining or you know support the work people that we actually believe are revolutionary um and we knew we could get out there uh but We got there, we made a lot of noise, and we narrowly got the vote, right, on our side. Nice. I would like to say that after we shamed city council into rejecting the grant, after we went on the floor and gave our speeches, castigating them for their incompetence, we found our, we were happy that we participated in this struggle that ended up, you know, helping out the lives of many migrants. and refugees who are in Greensboro, but we also found ourselves highly frustrated with our

reception from some organizations from the so-called radical community. And this isn't me like dumping, but I do have to say this. I'm not going to name any names. But there's one organization in particular that considers itself leftists posted on Facebook a link to the one mainstream news article that left out Woe's involvement and left out the members of Woe and how we actually played into like putting pressure on city council because we were the only communist organization that was coming out to these city council meetings to put pressure on city council again like lewis said not because we thought that we could get a concession from city council but because we want to show their inadequacy and what political interests they were actually behold into but on facebook they posted

the one mainstream news article that didn't mention us that erased us and the title of their post on Facebook said it's good to see city council do something nice for once wow now why Why would an organization that positions itself as revolutionary credit the neoliberal political establishment for fighting for Greensboro's migrants and refugees link people to the mainstream news article that erases woes involvement in the struggle when we were the first and the only organization pressuring city council? And I say this because sometimes maybe I'm a little bit idealistic, but I would hope there would be like some sort of solidarity because of the fact that we're the only communist

organizations in Greensboro. we shouldn't be doing things competitively. We should be doing things cooperatively because that's how it's supposed to work. So it was very disappointing and infuriating that the organization that should have been our ally in that moment was undercutting us in the public eye. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And last thing I'll say about that the radical, the so-called radical community in Greensboro, there is another so-called radical, very prominent in Greensboro who credited the press for breaking the story. yeah but it's hard to not see those snubs as intentional so but the thing is we don't do these

things for our glory we don't do these things because oh we want woe to be a shining a shining organization on a heel or that sort of thing but we do these things because we want to help people but at the same time if you guys aren't showing up to help us with the work at the very least you can congratulate us on doing it absolutely yeah no that's something that especially people that are new to organizing should really be aware of is that you'll enter into a lot of this organizing and you'll see a bunch of other organizations from the liberal left to the to the so-called radical left, who you would assume will have your back and be, you know, next to you and support you and everything like that. And it's a rude awakening when you find out that that's not always true. We had a confrontation with police in our organization's early days that resulted in six or seven of our members, getting pepper sprayed and arrested, and some of the other radical. groups, quote unquote, at that time, immediately set out on Facebook to say that we did it

wrong, why we shouldn't have done it instead of showing any solidarity, while other organizations were there trying to bail us out and organize our release and bring us food and water. There were organizations that were shitting on us and taking that as an opportunity to denigrate us in our organizing. So it's sad, but it does happen in people who are organizing, especially new to organizing, should be aware of that and navigate that as best they can. It was a learning experience. I'll say that.

Absolutely. So much of this is. And learning and then sharing what we've learned with others is a way for all of our organizations and our movement to grow. So that's why we do shows like this. But let's go ahead and move on to the next question. Woe has a houselessness program, a program specifically focused on that called Roar or the Red Wagon Action and Relief. So could you tell me more about that, about that program and how it relates to your organization? Is it sort of something you do under the, broader umbrella of woe or how exactly is that structured so i think it's a good example of applying mass line right and how we have applied it in our material conditions basically you know as billy said there wasn't a lot of mutual aid happening right not consistently you know people get together some liberals would get together and distribute this one month or they'd be a disaster and they distribute something for that disaster but no one was taking things out or even consulting the house list where they are, right?

So we made a decision to do that, right, and try to start forming a political line past, you know, just, you know, we believe in intercommunalism. So, you know, we basically, I mean, we had already petitioned the houseless and they're sick of petitions. So we just went out there and asked them what they wanted, right? What they thought they needed. And this is really important theoretically because, you know,

they live in those material environments, right? So that's now's whole point. is that they know what they need. You know, we live in a society that wants to tell houseless people what they need, right? Decides what they need. But just consult and they'll tell you. For instance, one of the basic needs they asked for was water, you know, just drinking water. Amongst other things like houses.

So we took that, you know, we took that list, right? And we distributed into two groups, ones that we could directly start providing, right? and ones that we couldn't necessarily start providing. So like houses are things we couldn't provide. We started putting those demands and we started going to city council on advocating monthly, sometimes twice a month, and so that we can get rid by the establishment, but take an opportunity to challenge them, right,

to highlight those inadequacies. And then water, something simple. And we, you know, took that list, we call requests, basically, right, the request list and said, can we do this? Can we start providing these things? right and we conclude that we can like you know it's not really that hard to provide water so we got a wagon and we put some snacks and water in it and we took we started taking it to the house list every Saturday and we've done it ever since haven't missed a single Saturday nice houseless know who we are at this point and we that's not the only thing we provided that's the thing we provide every Saturday we've also provided jackets uh sleeping bags um um am i missing anything

We've had all kinds of stuff We've had all kinds of stuff right now So, you know And that's the power of the application Is the idea is that We're trying to demonstrate The capability of the people To the people, right?

You know, if a small group Can come out here and they've seen us grow Can come out here every Saturday And provide and we're not affiliated with a church Or we're not affiliated with some sort of campaign Right, we're doing this because we're telling them And when they ask us that we believe in revolution and that they can do this too right yeah they start seeing that so that's beautiful

that's how you do it uh wonderful to hear that what are some other struggles that woe finds itself involved and you talk about police brutality you talked around organizing around homelessness what are some other struggles that that you engage in as an organization or that you're even looking to engage in in in the near to long term future some of our comrades from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, most notably our comrades, Chris and Destiny, started a prisoner outreach program in Winston-Salem based on a similar program that's in Durham, Durham, North Carolina. It started off with letter writing, our first contact with a portion of our local lumping proletariat, but then it developed to include a vast line strategy to generate advocacy work and mutual aid

that eventually developed into a bi-monthly speakout in front of the Guilford County Jail. So based on the letters that we've written back and forth with incarcerated, folks, and based on the letters we've read that they've sent us, we were able to cobble together a list of demands to propagandize about on their behalf. So we'll go outside with a megaphone passing out flyers to the families of incarcerated people who are going inside the jail to talk to people so we can let them know about our program. And also, we will talk to them to consult like, hey, what type of advocacy would you rather us do? Are you guys being put on lockdown every single time we go outside? And is that like something that's inconvenient for you? Or do

you want us to keep on going strong because you like the support that we're giving you. And it's important that you ask people these type of questions because once again, this is this is mass line. You can't just think that you're going to do these things for people without ever consulting the people you're trying to do things for because then you're acting pretty liberal. Right. Am I missing, would you guys like to add anything? Yeah, I think just talking about the actual struggle within the Guilford County, Joe. I mean, they're being price gouged through their canteens.

whatever they purchase, they have to purchase, you know, with money, right? And they're extremely high. I mean, people are saying that basically that they're, you know, they'll buy soup to use as drinking cups. They'll buy soup cups. And after eating their soup, they try to use them as drinking cups, but they'll be confiscated so they're not being provided cups to drink out of. I'm hearing that people, and this is like, you know, consistently people are being pressed

into guilty sentences. Some people have said that their males being censored. they're not allowed to read certain books there's a banned book list which includes you know probably George Jackson and any other black revolutionary turns out it's usually black

writers which in the South isn't surprising right so we've been to add in that that's part of our demands list those are things we advocate for at city council or wherever we get an opportunity you know to shout out

the struggles of the incarcerated nice yeah I think it's one thing to talk about communism in theory. But I always think about Chairman Mao going into a peasant village and just asking people what they want. A peasant woman said, I want to marry who I want. All the women said, yeah, we want to marry who we want. And Mao said, okay, communism is when you can marry who you want.

Which in the West was a bourgeois freedom, right? women's liberation struggle was born and advanced on bourgeois revolutions but for now that was communism communism is what the people need that's what communism is at the end of the day absolutely and i it's a recurring thing that i say on this show all the time but i like to reiterate it as much as possible which is it's one thing to have ideas and arguments and debate people online and try to convince people through words about your ideas about how things should be but that only wins over a very tiny slice of people, most of which are active online people or whatever. But the real way that you win people over, the mass is over, is by meeting their material conditions,

engaging in struggle alongside them. And, you know, one day's work out meeting the masses, engaging with them, implementing the mass line is worth more than a lifetime's debates and posts online. So it's beautiful that you guys are doing that. Thank you. Thank you. For sure. So one more question before we wrap up and let listeners know where they can find you. But I just want to ask what you're doing specifically during this COVID-19 pandemic. And maybe you can even talk about how you've had to change the way that you go about organizing, given the strangeness of the conditions that COVID causes. Okay. Well, I can talk about like what we're doing. And I'm pretty sure that Lewis and Billy can talk about how we've had to change things. And boy, we have to change a lot

of things. Well, I will say that COVID-19, we are currently working with SRA, Triad, North Carolina's SRA, with their SRA program. Folks who are in the SRA are probably already familiar with that. But we've been working with them to provide snack and sanitation kits to the houses during this pandemic. We're also organizing a popular front to engage members of the broader Greensboro community in a mutual aid effort to deliver groceries, medicine, and other necessities for folks who are shut in or they can't travel. We're trying to help houseless people who need medical care get to the hospital, maybe using our own cars,

and advocate for them to get quality treatment when we drop them off at the hospital. And we're trying to get folks to get properly signed up so they can get their pandemic stimulus checks. And hopefully, hopefully, fingers crossed, we can help the houseless seize vacant homes so that they can be sheltered during this crisis. And we will like this broader fund

with the community and its services to continue after the pandemic. We don't want just a COVID-19 pandemic and then it just shrivel up after the vaccine comes out. But we want to keep this going because we need to have some permanent infrastructure so that we can push closer and closer to revolution. Anything y'all would like to add? Yeah, I believe there's some things I can add. Just an explanation in the popular front. The popular front tactic is not popular amongst Western records because, you know, because, you know,

because it's kind of anti-sectarian, right? And somebody, I'm pretty sectarian myself. But it was, you know, the material conditions are reaching a point where, you know, I mean, we're just going to have to, you know, put our hand out and see who grabs it, right? Yeah. You know, things have changed. I've seen things have changed, it leaps and bounds in the two years that we've organized. I saw a houseless person talking about communism in a positive way, right?

Like, that's never, I've never experienced that before anybody, really. So, a popular part is just basically combining all leftists around a common struggle, right? COVID-19 seems like a common struggle. And we're hoping that, I mean, pandemics just don't go away. The establishment keeps debating this and people think of like a post-pandemic world, right? But a lot of these problems with virus or not already existed, right? The problems that we're experiencing isn't just the infection, right? that's, you know, risking being evicted, right, losing your job, having to make the decision

to go to work sick, you know, things that are common, like common struggles under capitalism and the establishment's just naturally aggravated because it can't handle them. So this is an opportunity to start building a socialist infrastructure, right, that we'll start answering those problems. Yeah, well said. And even after the pandemic, quote unquote, ends, whatever that means and as you said it's not really it never really ends but the economic fallout will last for years and so organizing right now with the with the future vision of organizing around and meeting the needs of people that are suffering from the subsequent economic fallout is going

to become increasingly important and then i also just want to shout out the the chapter the sra chapter in north carolina that that cam mentioned because when i went to the last annual meetup I hung out with those exact comrades and they're wonderful people and we had a great time. So shout out to them as well. And I agree with the whole idea of, you know, you got to be principled. You got to have a line for your organization, but there are other organizations that you can work with at least around shared interests in a way that doesn't dilute what you believe in or make you compromise your line and your values.

And insofar as organizations can work together around shared interests, they should. And that's something here in Omaha that we've been trying to expand as well. You know, there are some organizations that are antagonistic to us and don't want anything to do with us. That's fine. But there are plenty of organizations doing good work that we can link up with and do even more better work with them. So I see that your organization is doing the similar things, especially in the pandemic. And that's always good. Is there anything else that anybody wants to add before we wrap this episode up?

Yeah. We should probably talk about the precautions we took. to the organizing during the pandemic. That's something that's probably missed. Um, so it was a struggle. I mean, it started moving moving like molasses, right? It seemed like we weren't going to be organized, but we moved all meetings remote previously for security reasons and just, you know,

general, uh, display of commitment. We had, uh, in person meetings, right? We go out to see the house list, right? And our main priority at that point is just assume that we're infected and that we could infect our comrades or, we can affect the house list. So the idea, right, which the big shout out to Turtle here, again, was to, you know, behave in such a way that we can still organize, right, and do as much as possible.

So we try to stay six feet away. We're always wearing masks now. If anybody sees any pictures of us online, you know, we bring personal sanitizer for everybody, right? And we've made protocols in which we don't personally meet unless we have to, which has been tough on the comrades but um it's been necessary virtual meetings suck yeah virtual meeting it takes forever to have just the tiniest exchange they drag up for it now yeah and people drop internet breaks i'm you know absolutely that that's a problem i think a lot of us are

going through recently can i add a little something sure of course i think it's hilarious how this COVID-19 pandemic has sort of been like a, it feels like it's just been a dress rehearsal for how American capitalists or just capitalism broadly is going to respond to climate change or any other pandemic. I mean, let's think about it. When the pandemic was first kicking off, the American ruling class was talking about a whole suite of social democratic programs, eviction, suspensions, rent moratoriums, direct cash payments, basically. Some folks were even talking about a UBI. This is a perfect time to roll out of UBI. But ever since that profitability started slowing down, remember all the economics classes, the basic economics classes we took in college that said, like, capitalism is the most efficient way to distribute the most amount of resources to the most amount of people.

And remember how they told us, like, the labor theory of value has nothing to it. It's a subjective theory of value. But as soon as all the workers were at home, profitability slowed down for some odd reason. That was on a record climb. All of a sudden, took a nosedive. And now all of a sudden, you got economists from all over the. the ideological spectrum, all in consensus like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, this unemployment rate, it's going to make the, it's going to make the Great Depression look like small potatoes.

And all these proposals, they've sort of walked back, the American rural class has walked back. They've walked it back because they understand that it could boost American workers in a way that makes it harder for employers to discipline them with the implicit and the explicit threat of economic precarity via firing because a lot of the American population has already been firing receiving unemployment or in the case of North Carolina, you either receive unemployment or food stamps. You can't take both. So it's just like the remotest possibility of a power shift from the American ruling class

to the American working class would risk undoing decades of class-based domination. And it sort of had the capitalist class like shaking in his boots if we really look at how their messaging has shifted from everyone's self-quaranting. We must prevent the spread of this virus. let's flatten the curve to, well, you know, lower risk people can go to work, elderly and at risk people. They could stay at home. If not, why don't they just die for the economy? We can't let the economy collapse. And it's like seeing dinosaurs, it's like dinosaurs looking at a, I saw a meme, dinosaur looking at a meteor fly across the sky. And they say, oh, my God, what about the economy?

Exactly. This should be a situation where we should definitely be on Facebook, out in the communities, on Twitter, wherever else we go to our family, definitely stomping our foot stomping. This is what capitalism does. The American ruling class will no longer, when they no longer prioritize finding the vaccine, that isn't to say they won't find one. They'll just prioritize normalizing the virus through herd immunity, putting everyone in jeopardy of developing long-term lung damage that comes with this COVID-19 virus.

And it's just like an asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 is so very, common, that there's no way that even though a lot of these pundits on TV are saying, well, you know, you just go to work and try to send lower risk people to work. There's no way to isolate ill people from healthy people without extreme measures. And the ruling class understands this. That's why when China came out doing their little thing with everyone was all like, oh, wow, look at how aggressive they are. Look at how dystopian that is. Isn't that so dystopian? You're going to quarantine a city of 35 million people? But, of course, it was wise governance when Italy shut down the entire country.

But, you know, whatever. We're going to skip over that. But everyone was talking about how we need to have how China was lacking public trust and everyone's questioning China's numbers. And I'm like, how are you questioning China's numbers when they did the exact opposite of us? Do you not expect the exact opposite result? I don't know. It's just like the American ruling class wants to suck the profits from our labor.

The powerful interests in the public and private sectors are now conspiring to risk our well-being for the sake of continuing capitalism unabated. And they're trying to restore the status quo at the peak of the outbreak because it will mean smaller profit losses for the capitalist. And if any of this, if any of this doesn't prove that capitalism is this deadly destructive thing that is on the precipice of killing us all, well, I don't know. If none of this shows just how naked and evil capitalism is and how a lot of public officials and a lot of corporate interests will do whatever it takes to keep the great

Maybe train rolling? Well, I don't know what to tell anybody. And I know I'm speaking to the choir because anyone who's listening to Rev Left Radio already knows all these things. Anyone who follows any of our accounts already knows all these things. But I feel like I should preach to the choir just a little bit more. And that's all I got to say. No, absolutely. And just to reiterate that, you have this two-pronged approach by the American ruling class in both parties. One is to denigrate China, to not to call this tyrannical authoritarian thing to cover up the incompetence and inability for the US government to do anything and to focus anger and outrage towards a foreign enemy and, you know, boost up racism. Biden is doing it against Trump. Trump is doing it against Biden. It's a both party thing.

And then on the other front, it's much harder to take something away from people than it is to convince them they needed in the first place. And so what you were saying, Cam, about the UBI or expanding health care access or even expanding unemployment. They want to mix this as soon as they possibly can because once people start getting a taste of it, they're going to say, hey, it's possible that we can have this. And actually having this is really awesome. And it's going to be much harder to pull that back when the pandemic or at least the worst part of it passes.

And so you're right. They have to blame China. And then they have to say, get the fuck back to work because we're not going to be giving you this shit, you know? What would send me to the city council, right, to ask. for drinking water, ask for basic housing. And instead, the city built this $84,000, $84 million performing arts center that sits downtown now.

It was supposed to open in April, but nobody's ever set foot in it because of the social distancing requirements, right? And now there's an emergency running water station downtown and they're actually putting houseless people up in hotels now, right? And that giant performing arts center that we spent all our money on,

I might as well throwing that money in the ocean, as Marks once said, for all the good it does anybody. I mean, we were right. We were right the whole time. The things we said were essential six months ago, they have to admit now that these things are essential, and the things that they wanted to spend money on are fucking useless to us. Yeah, well, essentially doesn't pay the bills, though, unfortunately.

I don't get no hazard pay or I still have a landlord You know Houseless people in Greensboro There's like a thousand of them There's still 15,000 baking units Right like that they could be moved into They still have moved them into those

You know I think they were shoveling All the houseless people into I think 50 I had space for 50 out of a thousand Into a single shelter Right and that was their progressive move With a public $77 million police budget Yeah. So, like, they're not, they're not planning to curve anything at all. You know, they're not, if they, if they can avoid it, right, they'll avoid it.

Can I also mention that we were talking to some houses people, like maybe two, two roars ago. And they were telling, they were telling, they were telling us like, oh, well, you know, at the, at the, at the sports stadium, I think it was, they were giving away tents. But then when people, then when houses folks were set up tents, the police would come along and tell them they're trespassing. And when they were trespassing, the police would come along and say, well, you're violating the stay-at-home ordinance. Well, how can you stay at home if you don't have a house? And then there's so many folks who've been trying to, you know, churches and other nonprofit organizations sometimes on Saturdays because of just how much, how many resources they have, they would feed the houses, breakfast and things like that, like have breakfast

programs for them. But because of the stay-at-home ordinance, requires no more than 10 people gather in public. At least, they have to be at least six feet apart. A lot of these organizations that would do these breakfast programs that started to dry up because the city have been threatening them with $5,000 fines. So the police resources and the city's resources have gone into policing the houseless and policing the people who are helping the houseless, but very few of those resources have gone to helping either one of those entities the houses people and the people who try to help the houses into actually helping the houses.

And that just demonstrates to you once again who their interests really are. You can look at the campaign donations of a lot of these folks on city council, and you'll see most of their campaign donations are coming from the real estate lobby. So what's that tell you? Greensboro has the seventh highest eviction rate in the United States of America. And keep in mind, the eviction rate is only counting those that have been actually officially written down. It's not counting when the landlord changes your locks

or when they threatened you with eviction and you self-evict. No, we're talking about the kind that are actually on file. And Greensboro, North Carolina is number seven in the entire country in highest eviction rates. Jesus. But people don't know that. People don't know

that. But when you go to Greensboro and you see the way they treat the houseless folks, you say, okay, you know what? It makes sense. It just proves Huey P. Newton right. Yeah, the revolutionary conditions are happening. I don't know, you know, I thought that the COVID would have brought. And, you know, we left us get a little alarmist, right? You know, we're pretty infamous for thinking everything to the CIA plot.

And my neighbor just turned fascist, right? So I think, you know, I kind of got a pretty alarmist, but it's possible the fact, you know, like, we read George Jackson too regularly, and he says we live in a post-fascist world, really. The passion has already developed. And what fascism is is just capitalism reorganized. to deal with class consciousness, right? To defend itself. So, you know, I thought it was going to happen.

Like I thought, but maybe, you know, my comrade Billy said he was like, well, fascism just normalized those. Yeah. It was just regular, you know, shoveling houseless people into a single shelter and say that we saved them from the pandemic and getting, and getting applauds from the public, right? Like, really, they're doing something about the, you know, the household situation is, is fascism, right? It's just regular.

times more units than we have houses people let's let's think about that for a second 15 times yeah wow market allocation of resources you spoke about yeah sometimes when we do the work we do and people applaud us for it but sometimes we feel inadequate because we look at the gulf of need that is required and we think about like man we're a whole bunch of broke people trying to help broker people. Right. And it's only been very recently that folks have seen, like, the work we do and that, like, started donating to make our work easier. But it's just like we see the goal of need and we always feel like, man, what we're doing is inadequate and we'll, oh, man, we need to be doing more. This is what the houses people need. They need more than this. We need to provide more

than this. But then we realize, like, man, sometimes we just got to stop and smell the roses and realize we've only been an organization for, what, almost two years in July, right, guys? Yeah, can I think off of that from you? Yeah, yeah, because we're talking about all this stuff. I think, you know, we're talking to the leftists, right? Other people who might be interested in bengardeists and other methodologies of revolution, I hope, right? So, like, you know, one thing I'm going to say to people out there, you know, anybody that's listening who's trying to organize, you can do it. It was only three of us, right?

like um and and and our goal is is for you to three of us at the beginning three of us at the beginning it's not three of us anymore yeah the the you know um i think what the chinese communist party started with like 12 that was that was documented right you know the material conditions are there the people are there you just have to go out there you know i'm saying and the consciousness isn't something that just dies in a single generation you know like a houseless people we we saw two houseless people arguing with each other right but that's a sign of over you know communism and what we're doing and in the situation the U.S. are having these conversations and these people had been involved in activism previously, you know, around like things like the Greensboro

Massacre. Um, you know, so in the workers party that used to be here. So I mean, consciousness fluctuates, right? And people are waiting. You know what I'm saying? They're out there. You know, if you feel like you can organize, you know what I'm saying? If you feel like it doesn't be just doing a little bit, right? Starting off, you know, doing what is possible, right, and showing people what is possible, I think, you know, is enough and you'll see results. Absolutely. I always say here in Omaha, the Omaha Tenets United, one of the best organizations locally, they got started with just one or two, like I think maybe one to three people helping one tenant get his deposit back from a slum lord, and then they exploded, they grew from there, they formed their entire

tenant union. They have new, you know, they have new membership all the time and they're taking on a lot bigger fights. And so you can start small and it might seem to you that, you know, you're only doing a little bit and there's so much more to do. And of course, that's true. But for the person you're helping, it means the world to them. That can be the thing that changes their life, really. And so, you know, don't ever, for anybody listening to this, you know, get involved with what you can get involved with and help who you can help and you will grow organically if you're, if you're going about it the right way. So just to all of you, thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing your experiences, the stuff that you've learned. I really think a lot of organizers and people who

want to organize will get a lot out of this conversation. I really respect what you're doing. So solidarity from Omaha all the way to Greensboro. But before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find and possibly donate to your organization online? Yeah. You can follow our Twitter at GSO Wo. And you can also follow our Facebook account too. You just look up a working class and houses organizing alliance and you'll find us right there on Facebook. And if you want to donate, we got several posts that are pinned. You can either donate to the joint GoFundMe that SR Triad NCSR8 has with us. Or you can donate directly to the Venmo that you see on the GSO Woe's Twitter account. And you'll, you'll, you'll,

see a link tree and you can go there and you can see where to donate there wonderful and i'll make that as easy for possible by putting all of those links into the show notes of this episode so people who want to support woe can easily go to the show notes of this episode and do it and you mentioned a second ago the greensboro massacre i've been wanting to do an episode on that for a long time so maybe in the future on a few months or something we can reconnect and do a whole episode just covering that important historical event oh absolutely thank you all for coming on so much keep up the amazing work and Rev-Left is here if you ever want to come back on and do anything at all here. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I've been reading my own drinking water. I've been reading out loud to my daughter. The homies coming home from doing 90s biz. Tell me all the homies up at Cork and love my latest shit. We're going to get you right when you come home, Chachi. What's up, Chachie?

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Say I've been reading, I'm smoking less Reading baby girl to bed Yeah I've been reading now with drinking water I've been reading out loud to my daughter Thank you.