Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 10: Better Not Call Saul (w/ special guest: Aaron Petcoff)

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

In Episode 10, we interview Aaron Petcoff about his recent Jacobin article, 'The Problem with Saul Alinsky,' and how it applies to leftist organizing in Appalachia and beyond.

All right, we're good. This should work, right? Yeah. Aaron, can you hear us now? Hey, yeah. We're in good shape. But I can't see you all. You can only see the space between us you could just see uh willie nelson there he's like uh someone once described willie nelson as like the uh like the bob dylan for people who

like aren't shitty hippies. I forget the description, but it seemed to work. Oh, yeah. That sounds about right. I'm a native Texan. Well, sort of. It depends on what company I'm in either. Sometimes I'll rep New Mexico and sometimes I rep Texas.

He's a code switcher. Yeah. No, I'm a total turncoat. But when the topic of discussion is Willie Nelson, I always rep Texas. Nice. I'm wearing my – I hope you can't see. I'm wearing like an OU shirt. Actually, an Oklahoma University shirt.

It's all right. Did you go to OU? Yeah. No, no. I just had like – I just saw it in a thrift store, and I thought it looked kind of like an old NES cartridge. I don't know if you can see it. Yeah. It reminded me of like a – I don know just like that's cool i'll wear that

all the time i don't know anything about college football and especially college football in like oklahoma and texas but then all of a sudden all my texan friends are like dude what the fuck are you wearing that my house for or like i'll be at a bar and someone's throwing their parents around like you know the big apple or whatever and they'll be like they'll see me and go like woo sooners and i'm like i don't know what the fuck you're talking about you should just play along yeah no i'm just like i'm like all right like yeah my dad is a sooners fan and i went to texas so i'm not really much of a texas uh school spirit person though so i know i don't have a whole lot of school pride so don't worry yeah i just found out what like uh what is it like a mom like a mummer or whatever like the

a mom a mom a mom like like the flower yeah it's like a texas mum. A mum. Like the flower? Yeah, it's like a Texas, what is it? Maybe I'm getting it wrong. Like the Texas homecoming dance thing with the crazy quinceanera looking thing. Yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like quinceanera. Yeah, but it's just like an in general Texan thing. Yeah, now i'm showing that i'm not actually from texas okay i'm revealing it is like deeply specific to texas and i was like when someone described it to me i'm like dude you are you are just lying to me

and seeing how long i'll go away i'll go along with this like crazy shit and then he's like i googled it and it's like it's like great it's like um like high school like texas teenagers wearing a dress made out of like ribbon and like teddy bears yes i know what you're talking about yeah i know exactly what you're talking about that it was wild it's kind of like yeah it's kind of like a corsage but like a but a very decorative one right very ostentatious oh yeah it's like way over the top right it made me it's actually one of the first things it's actually yeah it might be the only reason i ever want to visit texas is to see one of those actual things it's just just like i guess to austin or something i don't know right

right well austin sounds lit i guess it's a cool place yeah it's pretty lit it's hot as fuck uh i was talking to tanya who's not on our show or today she's the third member of our show but she's not here today and uh i was talking to her and i was like yeah i kind of feel like the reason i left texas is because it was so fucking hot which is totally it was like a petty reason to move somewhere and she was like actually that's like in the top three reasons that people generally migrate over millennia like economics economics environment or they're forced to move or something so that's so funny yeah in the in the grand course of like human development like the weather sucks is like the main reason that

people have moved yeah right right probably why people populated north america they're just gotta get the fuck out of central asia it's like something about like how much we've naturalized like the shittiness of our world is that we're like, it just historically specific to the last 200 years or something. Yeah. You cut out there for a second, Aaron. I think we missed some of what you were saying.

Oh, it was really good, but it's never the moment's gone. God damn it. We may have that happen over the course of the conversation. We're stuck with this really shitty East Kentucky internet. Yeah, we live in a very remote rural part of not just the state, but the United States. And our internet here is notoriously bad. Oh, my God.

It's kind of funny. It's like we're really bridging a divide here. I'm a software engineer, so that's where I am right now. Hell yeah. It's insane. I don't know if you can see that. That's so good. If we weren't in a studio, I could show you outside.

It would just be a bunch of hills and uh a few houses here and there but oh my god a dairy queen a dairy queen you might you know it's this the struggle brings us together that's right that's so right all right oh yeah dudes hell yeah well uh so Aaron, thanks for joining us today. I guess I'm going to start this like a professional podcast, which it's not really. Our podcast isn't really that professional, but to formally introduce ourselves, I'm Terrence. I'm Tom. This is Tom.

I still feel like I can only see the divide between you guys. And that's Willie. Let's see if we can't get it that's Willie that's Willie I was going to give my interview to Willie hell yeah no better person really

so really the reason I wanted to have you on the show is because I really enjoyed your I mean you read it too we both really enjoyed your article tell us a little bit about it tell us a little bit about where it came from. It's in Jacobin. It was recently published in Jacobin, and it's called...

The Problem with Saul Alinsky. Right, right. And it's essentially criticizing Alinsky from the left. There was a bit of a debate over the title, over whether or not it should be called Don't Call Saul. I think it was Better Not Call Saul. Sorry, Better Not Call Saul. But then I think it's somewhere along the editorial process

That got scratched I think that would have been a totally Valid title but You know those editors Actually yeah So the article I guess yeah Someone around Jacobin Had asked me

The main editor around Jacobin had asked me, Bhaskar, the main editor for Jacobin, had asked me to do this piece on Alinsky, like, I mean, forever ago. And it just, I'm like the slowest writer in the world. And I had a bunch of, you know, things had come in and gotten in the way of it. But maybe it must have been like maybe a year and a half ago. He was like, you should write this thing for Jacobin. And then, you know, a year and a half ago he was like you should write this thing for jacobin and then you know a year and a half later i turned out maybe 20 paragraphs i don't know like not even but um but the the main argument that i make is basically if the left is interested in rebuilding the social power that we once had where the left was actually like

a strong political force in this country, we're able to put forward demands to, you know, the ruling class of the 1% or whatever you want to call them, then Saul Alinsky should not be our guide for that. Based on, I would say there are two main points of criticism that I really focus in on, although I think that you could broaden that criticism out much wider. But the main arguments I make is that Saul Alinsky's aversion to political ideology, I don't think is helpful for the left. I think that we need a political guide. I think that politics need to guide our principles and our actions and that we need to be inspired by a political vision of social change. And that related to that, that it leads to undemocratic organizations generally

that provide mainly the example of the United Farm Workers, the experience of the Farm Workers Union to kind of as a case study of how Alinskyism leads to a lack of democratic organization. Although I think that in many people's experiences

you guys just lost that whole great thing I know it was fucking good Aaron it was really fucking good I was I'm so mad right now no worries man I could do this all day where we broadcast from, we run...

I might grab a beer, though. Oh, yeah, please do. If you're here, I'd offer you one. Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me good? Sweet, yes. It works.

All right, Aaron. Do you want to try to pick it up where you're heading? You're saying something profound. You're saying something good. Yeah, no, that's fine i can just uh start from describing the piece in jacobin again yeah here here's um so what i was doing when i was thinking uh i was reading your article i get i'm gonna give your article to errol morris treatment like pretend you're robert mcnamara and i'm'm Errol Morris and this is fog of war I came I came up I came up with five tips for um how to throw left to center of the bus and gain nothing in

the process and we'll just call this Alinskyism oh wow yeah no I'm reading some of my own biases into this the first tip though is pragmatism or always be pragmatic. So do you have anything to add to that? Or what did Saul Alinsky, what was his thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's something about Alinsky's sort of emphasis on pragmatism that is so uniquely American. I mean, this is a kind of a form of thinking about organization and organizing that is so particularly American. In fact, there's a quote that I read that I read from. Is it from Trotsky? Yeah, the Trotsky quote I posted on Twitter.

Yeah. Yeah. Where he says, pragmatism is the greatest curse of the American of American thought. says pragmatism is the greatest curse of the American, of American thought. And it's like, so I was watching, I was listening to this interview today to kind of prepare for this between Alinsky and Studs Terkel. And Studs Terkel, you know, is, is, is, is incredible. But he's just, but Alinsky is just like so i think studs says um uh something like maybe uh you know saul like you really it's something like you really like pragmatism you really you really you know you're a big believer in it and olinsky doubles down and says i'm not just a big believer

in it it's everything that there is and it's like and it's like so yeah it's like so it's like to me it's i don't know i don't understand to me how one can call themselves both i mean look i i accept the the the sort of the fact that there are that we have to have a sense of the world around us and that there are limitations to what we're able to do. But the idea that a radical, someone who self-describes as a radical, should be limited to this narrow realm of being realistic just seems completely foreign and useless to me.

If we're not informed by a uh a sense of like of uh of the world that we that we want that is like maybe appears unrealistic because of like how shitty the world is but we're not informed of like a world that's like not shitty anymore i don't understand how that's like useful to for a radical and then and then more than that i think olinsky's pragmatism, his own sense of pragmatism, I think, really, really go like lean on that and end up insisting upon this sort of this notion of this. This monolithic sort of organizer, right? monolithic sort of organizer right yeah i thought that was um i thought that so that actually brings me to the next point which is a really good uh segue uh always think your rank and file organizing base is always way more conservative than it truly is yes yep um and i think that that goes hand in hand with the third one, which is revolutionary ideas unnecessarily limit an organizer, which is, yeah, you're right.

Like he's not very informed. It seems like to me he's not very informed by like a sort of socialist worldview, which is that, you know, humans always respond to oppression. They always that seems to me to be a part of human nature. that's a part that seems to me a be to be a part of human nature we respond to exploitation and oppression and you have to you know when we're not just like non-ideological creatures like we have to put that oppression into some sort of like you know framework or whatever and alinsky it seems like was um was pretty uh anti that like to put it I mean, Alinsky's heavily informed by his experience in the CIO bureaucracy, which I kind of give a brief survey of. There's an excellent article that kind of spells out that history a little bit more by a friend of mine, Joe Richard, that's also in Jacobin,

called I think The Hunter and the Dog. I've seen that yeah yeah but olinsky you know i mean his sort of um greatest uh the main source of his sort of inspiration where he really comes up as an organizer after sort of like a brief stint as a criminology student and actually i think briefly I think conservatives really love this but like that he worked briefly for like the Chicago mafia as one does I'm not going to go too deep into that because then I'm I'm worried about the territory I'm entering but I think um but it is an interesting sort of bit of bit of biographical history but you know after after that, he works for John L. Lewis and the CIO. And I think at that period, the CIO was, I mean, there was a significant, a serious battle for the leadership

of the labor movement between sort of the conservative bureaucracy represented by John L. Lewis and sort of rank and file workers that are, you know, inspired and active either as organized or unorganized, but sympathetic sort of communists, socialists, anarchists, who are competing for leadership in the labor movement. And John Lewis sees this, the way he sort of manages this moment is says, you know, okay, well, these people are serious organizers, they're very committed. And a lot of people believe in what they say. I don't, but we shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't let this energy go to waste. Let's take advantage of this. Let's let them organize. And then the second that it becomes too much of a problem, you know, we'll just

fucking get rid of them. And that's, that's exactly what he did. And I think at this period, really, this period, I think, in the the in late in the history of the labor movement really informs olinsky in terms of like how olinsky is both able to kind of speak this sort of radical rhetoric and yet still represent this very top-down bureaucratic style of organizing that relies that that really puts all the initiative into the hands of staff. Right. Yeah, that is one of the interesting things about it. And I didn't really realize this, about how Alinsky thought that one of the biggest sort thought that one of the biggest sort of mistakes of unions and union organizing was sort of imbuing it with this sort of political project or like sort of like revolutionary project, right? Like

he thought that like they shouldn't be political, essentially, that, you know, I guess, am I reading that? Is that too simplistic of a sort of read on it? no no not at all i think that's absolutely right i mean i think that he sees i think what he ends up actually seeing mostly and i i don't really go into this in the article but it's something i kind of took away from some things i was looking at today um as i was kind of like getting ready for for this conversation or whatever, you know, he was talking to both, you know, his sort of sense of the purpose of organizing is actually, I think, kind of apolitical. And there's a certain sense where I think his vision of society is more or less exactly what we have. It's just like, like everyone is organized to such a degree where they're able to

like exert their own i mean it's this kind of quintessentially liberal pluralist view of what a democratic society is it's like everyone has common and equal interests and they're able to sort of like negotiate this and leverage for um you know it's like sort of like he he believes in the discourse basically and the discourse is you know represented through people being organized as their you know as interests that are that are equal and they just influence each other so you have you know business interest you have labor interest right you have i guess uh you know white community chicago like polish interests and you have like black interest or something and everyone's organized and they're able to figure out their their conflicts this way and it's like it's and and and to that degree there's no real need for him as far as he sees it to to have politics There's just interests. And of course, like this is,

he would not admit this, but this is political. This is, you know, this is both, I mean, that is basically just the vision of, that's like the textbook sort of vision of liberalism. And then his own sort of view of how these things are organized is essentially the politics of the bureaucracy, right, of the labor bureaucracy.

Right. Yeah, yeah. No, that is a really good way. It's the melting pot, really. I mean, I don't know. American liberalism is just so boring. so boring um it is true you know he was um one of the things i was watching today it's so funny to me is um you know people have this sort of i mean i think i i don't know i as far as i see it i think that there are people out there who really see olinsky as like like a real badass like it's like really like smart up guy and i was watching his um god fucking shoot me but i was watching his interview with uh with william f buckley on the fight ring i've never seen this this is interesting i mean you know uh like it really sucks but like buckley just drags him because

ultimately olinsky has like nothing very serious to say mean, like, you know, there's this one part where, I mean, Buckley's just, like, I mean, it's fucked up, because, I mean, he's, like, a goddamn monster, but, I mean, he ends up, you know, and he kind of, like, catches Alinsky in this sort of, like, trap of being, like, so you don't believe that anyone like can you know sort of like act out of a genuine belief and like a like a doing the right thing or something like that and then olinsky's basically like no i don't it's all just like it's this like this sort of cold pragmatism and there's like this part of like it's like i don't know it was just like really fucked up to watch but it's like so goddamn boring. But like also on top of that, like,

it's like, yeah, he's this like top, you know, I think there are certain kinds of people out there that want to think that maybe Alinsky is like, yeah, this like bad-ass tough guy, but he's just like trying to ingratiate himself to this ghoul fucking Buckley. Yeah. You know, just like, he's like, uh, yeah. Buckley's like, so do you think that, uh, in the fight, so if we're going to fight for Medicare, you think that uh in the fight so we're if we're gonna fight for medicare you think it's okay if we just you know crack a few eggs to make an omelet like you know

to like shoot a doctor or something and then you know which is a fucking stupid question but then olinsky's like oh come on bill like come on will you know better than that if he like smokes the cigarette it's like why are you trying to be nice this guy he was like bill oh my olinsky would like let himself get dragged to like a fucking like labor camp or something like that and say it's like pragmatic or something in the end and it's so obnoxious yeah no i mean um that is one of the huge uh missteps of I mean honestly right there isn't that one of the big missteps of the Clinton campaign like which was

going right like going towards the middle because like liberals think that they have this very bizarre fucking like idea that humans aren't they're motivated by logical assertions and you know what I mean like pragmatism and stuff it's like no like the vast majority of people out here we're all ideology

baby you know what i mean like yeah and and the right wing is you know what i mean and especially i have this one quote pulled up from your article but it was from a labor organizer um mckevely yeah said uh lindsey's attempt to strip the organizing model of ideology manifests in various concrete practices like insisting that groups should only wage winnable fights and that the organizer should refrain from bringing her political views into the organization's discourse the ramifications render the alinsky model impotent relative to many contemporary challenges because ideology is a central front of the right wing, and therefore the left must contend in that arena. I mean, that is fucking spot on,

and that's why a guy like Alinsky can't have any sort of real, like any kind of sparring with a guy like Buckley, because it's just not, yeah, it's just like that just really sums it up. It was really clear in this interview, and I do suggest, it's just, like, that just really sums it up. It was really clear in this interview, and I do suggest... It is...

I mean, it is actually maybe worth watching if people are interested in this. I'm not, like, suggesting people go watch the fucking firing line, but... I went down that rabbit hole a few times. I think I've watched the Sammy Davis Jr. episode, and Walker Percy on there one time. Yeah.

What do you have to say to sammy davis jr i forget the best though i think was when he had truman capote oh speaking of just real quick speaking of buckley the best the best fucking shit ever was ross duthat today on twitter who is like who was like uh talking about the good days of concern you know like uh the halcyon yeah the halcyon days of conservatives when he's talking about buckley days of you know like the halcyon days of conservatism when he's talking about Buckley it's just like someone had the perfect tweet it's just like this guy fucking endorsed Jim Crow in his paper dude he like literally

said that like HIV like people with HIV should be sterilized it's like the fucking lunatic you know he was a goddamn monster and it's like you know yeah I guess like crypto fascism was a lot better for ross when it was like trying to spoon him naked on a yacht you know doesn't ross does have that story in his in his yeah that happened that they had a weird he was one of bill's boys. It's thoroughly documented by Ross.

But there's this, but yeah, I mean, as far as like sort of getting, getting back to the sort of this point of like ideology, I think, you know, there's this, there's this quote from, from this attempt from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, where he says that, oh, like all people are, all people are philosophers, all people are intellectuals, insofar as, or rather, he says all people are intellectuals. And what he means by that, I think, is that, insofar as everyone goes about their daily activity, that daily activity is informed by, by a worldview that they have. People reason, in other words, about the world and how it works and their place in it and how they should operate and um and and to that degree then you know we we all

we're not like just uh empty vessels just like moving about the world informed by like biological sort of like impulses and instinct right like we have an idea of how the way of the way the world works. And I think it never occurs to Alinsky that people are able to like think critically about this, you know, and that I'm not saying that like it does us a lot of good as sort of like left organizers to go out. I'm not saying like let's go beat people over the head with copies of Capital or something like that. But I do think that what we have to recognize is the possibility that organizing and that confronting power changes people. And it never seems to occur to me that Alinsky believes that. Alinsky seems to think that, you know, people go out and they win a demand and then they just keep doing this and that they never change themselves.

But to me, I think one of the key things that organizers on the left need to actually think of and not and not just like it's actually to me, it's like part of like what part it's a central part of like what we do when we go out and do political activity, I is it's not just to go out and like win the demand say to win an increase in wages for someone or to win better public housing conditions or to you know say like get like a killer like you know get like some lunatic killer cop off the streets or something like that but it's actually like through the process of organizing and activism it's actually like through the process of organizing and activism to actually like give through that experience, allow people to develop a more critical sense of the way the world works and to see themselves as a as an integral part of changing it. Right. And to create a compelling vision of the of the future or something that people actually want to to fight for to to like, I don't know. uh to fight for to to like i don't know um yeah like if if if if political if activism is like you said yeah just running around like trying to put out various fires or trying to build uh or just trying to create just various uh single issue wins then yeah you're not creating a sort of vision

of the future that anybody is going to want to um to buy into and i i don't know it's like we talked a little bit about this on on one of our previous episodes about how um christianity actually like modern there are elements of modern christianity that actually um works in that way for a lot of people i mean it it gives people a vision of the future and people bring that you know for better for, they bring that into their sort of like engagement with the system. And a lot of the left doesn't really have. I mean, I don't know. But, yeah, it just seems like a lot of the left doesn't really have that sort of, yeah, ideological sort of robustness to it. I'm not really sure how to put it. To them, I mean, there really is, I mean, in a certain sense, there's a degree to which maybe you could say that Alinsky is the sort of the progenitor of the American alt-center or something like that. The sort of like militant belief in the sort of like the politics of like realism or something like that is so fucking boring.

But, you know, you think about like what like, you know, Clinton's campaign message was and then how surprised people are that you know that that people refuse to fucking vote for her but she literally went out and said like single payers never never gonna happen you know she i mean what her her message literally was um if it's too good to be true it probably is i mean that's the message that she sent to people and then somehow people think that she's like amazing at politics and that she deserves to fucking win i mean she technically like most votes but i mean people they lost something like two million votes since between between 2008 and in 2016 um you know the same thing is kind of is is happening sort of everywhere is that the alt center just insists on like doubling down on being realistic and on being um and i'm being

like pragmatic and not actually offering a vision of what's actually going to like cure people's uh like to make people's lives better and the left does need to do a better job of that i agree i think that we i mean the the set the we're starting to insofar as people are becoming more attracted to left politics and socialist politics precisely because socialists do offer that vision where the alt-center doesn't right yeah and i think that the best example well i think that the the best example of that is uh states like kentucky where we live which was you know one of the last sort of, like, Democratic strongholds in the South,

pretty much up until about two years ago, two or three years ago. And it's, yeah, it's because the center, the bottom fell out. I mean, like, there's no, they have no vision of the future that is compelling. Are you going to say something? No, no, I was just going to chime in. Well, like, you know, you see all these headlines

talking about Trump country, but Appalachia, particularly West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, was this very strong blue wall until maybe George Bush's second election. And remained that way at the local level and the state level until maybe a year or two ago. And it's just, I don't know, it's just a little disingenuous to... Yeah. Well, it's, I think that...

Totally. I think that people like i don't know i've just been sort of like when i was reading your article i noticed like strains of things that he olinsky has said and i've just seen that in sort of some of the messaging and organizing of groups in our state and um and i guess what i mean by that is like thinking that the masses are conservative, just this irrational, conservative, hate-mongering mass of individuals. And I just like if you look at how many people actually voted for Bernie in West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, I mean, like I think that says a lot in and of itself.

But also, I think the even bigger number there is the fact that, statistically speaking, the vast majority of people who live in our county didn't vote at all. You know what I mean? No, they didn't. Only 4,000 people out of 30,00 people in our county voted for Trump. That's a pretty small. I mean, that's a pretty small fraction of the people that live here. And so anyways, point being is that there is a base for leftist politics in a lot of these communities.

But if you operate from the assumption that we're all just, you know, against gay marriage and just a cesspool of hatred, then, yeah, you will continue to fail. There's one organization in particular that's probably the most venerated in the state, and they're considering dropping abortion or supporting reproductive rights from their platform. Right. dropping abortion or supporting reproductive rights from their platform as a way to sort of push to the center, I guess, or just sort of like meet these coal-smudged reprobates where they're at. And a big part of that is sort of what you talked about in the article, which is that a lot of this sort of style of organizing is um it takes up a lot of media space and it takes up a lot of the attention and um it takes up a lot of money like they're all not you know they're non-profit organizations they're 501c3s they can

apply for grants i mean like both of us work for non-profits so we're not like throwing stones from outside like we're fully embedded in this world of the sort of non-profit liberal industrial complex in this highly impoverished region and um there is it's it's almost impossible to critique that from the left here because a lot of those these organizations uh dominate the. They dominate the media stories that come out of here. Yeah, no. I mean, the only alternative, the only way forward is through

leftist labor or grassroots organizing, but it's really hard to do when there's not a whole lot of funding for it. The SCIU, for example, I think honestly could do a, they could come in, they could open up a local,

and I think they could organize plenty of local service workers. But I haven't really seen that thrown out. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's this sort of, I mean, there's definitely a reluctance on the part of sort of um i mean there's definitely a reluctance on the part of uh of sort of like labor and and and you know um well okay i guess there's a couple of ways to kind of pick there's a couple things to pick up there um yeah i mean you use the term like non-profit industrial complex

and i think that really does speak to sort of like uh one element of i think the tradition of olinskyism right where you know what he what he was talking about with uh in this interview that i listened to earlier today with studs turkle i mean he's talking about like organizers throughout history and he also speaks to the fact that i think olinsky just doesn't actually have an operative definition of what organizing is because he's like um he talks about like jesus as being like one of the weird sort of like a lot of people put a lot of stuff on jesus about about it but he's like yeah you know like some i think he's literally says something like this is actually kind of funny

it's he's like i think he says j he's like uh uh but then he's like they didn't really have the ford foundation back then or something like he's like he didn't really have a lot of resources and it's like you see what he talked what he kind of means as he talks more about like organizing is like a big part of this sort of model of organizing depends upon like the the charity of like large corporate foundations to just like heap loads of money on you as if that doesn't come with you know um like you know i mean as if that doesn't come with patches right exactly and condition um and it's sort of one of which is the continuing of having a job. foundations, they operate, you know, they can, whatever their rhetoric or whatever their, you know, whatever their rhetoric or whatever it is that they're doing at the end of the day,

like, I mean, someone's holding the purse strings, you know, and it's not like, you know, the Ford Foundation is going to be, you know, thrilled if you're going out telling rank and file workers, especially, you know, workers associated with, you know, you know, large manufacturers and things like that, to, you know, go and, you know, workers associated with, you know, you know, large manufacturers and things like that, to, you know, go and, you know, start demanding, you know, Medicare for all and, you know, like, you know, open, you know, open and available and freely available access to abortion and, you know, disarming, you know, local police units of their like tanks and AR-15s or whatever. you know local police units of their like tanks and ar-15s or whatever um and then there's this whole other element to the sort of the model that i you know i touched on this in the article when i talk about the united farm workers which is the way that they start operating right like i mean

nalinski really looks at organizing as unassociated whatsoever with any sort of particular group right he doesn't see in other words any sort of particular um, right? He doesn't see, in other words, any sort of particular role for the working class itself to actually play, right? Which to me, I mean, I come at this from a socialist perspective, but the working class are the, like, the working class organized as workers are, you know, where we actually build our social power from, right?

Because we have the ability to shut down production. Right. You know, in addition to being the majority, and all in all the rest of it. But Alinsky, and, you know, with the sort of the UFW, the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, kind of like took away from Alinsky, is that the sort of the power in their campaigns to organize against the growers in California didn't depend so much on, you know, shutting down production in the fields, but really depended upon building sympathy for the farm worker. And so you guys are liking this. Oh, it's so spot on.

We haven't been able to figure out like really to articulate the situation. And this this just spoke to us. This is great. Carry on. I'm sorry. You know, no, no, it's fine. I mean, just to close it out. What this ends up meaning is rather than sort of being beholden to the workers in the field and collecting and, you know, and collecting dues from within those sort of organization amongst the farm workers themselves, what happens, you know, what ends up happening is they end up sort of redirecting all their resources to college campuses, to the cities, to, you know, and going completely outside of California and the growing fields and, you

know, going to, you know, going to Chicago, going to New York, going to, you know, San Francisco or Seattle or whatever, and talking to students and churches and things like that, which ends up turning it in the end into like, you know, basically a large fundraising operation instead of a labor union. Right. Yeah. This isn't my, this isn't my analysis. This is something that I'm kind of like taking away from, Right. Yeah. You can get the title there. But he has a great series of interviews, not just in, you know, also in the nation and in other places as well where that I took a lot of sort of that history from. Yes. I don't even know where to begin. Really sort of going in on that.

things that i've noticed is that yes it's all about sort of like raising awareness and like building sympathy for um i don't know people on the ground and people being impacted by the you know all this um and it doesn't have actually have to do with right what you said building um any sort of social power building any kind of economic power like in in the article you say that olinsky's framework was essentially they have the power we have the people and so therefore it's just sort of like pitted people versus power when to me a much more uh it seems like a much more uh effective formulation would be um power versus the economy like because they got nukes and the only thing we've got is the fucking economy. And we can shut down the economy, and we can say,

we're not going to build your fucking nukes anymore. We're not going to build your goddamn jets or missiles or all the other things. You know what I mean? That's the only real point of leverage we have at this point. Hell yeah. We can't wait for them all to die like Roger Ailes, I guess. Just caught lightning in a bottle with that one.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. It's like the working class, right? I mean, ultimately this is informed by – I mean, Alinsky's sort of worldview is informed by his role as sort of an administrator of social movement organizations and labor, you know, coming out of like the CIO bureaucracy and the bureaucracy of the labor movement. So he approaches problems from that perspective, right? And for him, the sort of point of organizing isn't necessarily to build the self and like the self-active sort of power of the working working class right to to allow workers to kind of organize to develop a sort of critical understanding of the world through their

experience to debate to democratically decide where they want things to go and how to demand you know what they should be demanding um and rather you know uh concludes for him that the point of all this is to simply get a seat at the table, right? For him, and I think this is part of the sort of like model of thinking about organizing, is that it's not, I mean, to me, right, I think that, I think there's a quote from Rosa Luxemburg, where she says something along the lines of describing the process of revolution or whatever. She goes, you lose, you lose, you lose, you win. Meaning each successive kind of confrontation, maybe you lose this demand or you only gain it partially. For the working

class, what we believe in is the working class gaining power and these things. Right. Like each successive kind of confrontation doesn't lead to that. But what it does lead to is people becoming more confident in their power, understanding their sort of role as as agents of history with each successive confrontation, even if even if we don't win. history with each successive confrontation, even if we don't win. In other words, I think there's this sort of, but for Alinsky, it's like, if we don't end up, if it doesn't end up getting me a seat at the table where I can look at the CEO of Eastman Kodak or General Motors or whatever, then it's a loss. But for us, I think, so, but, but for us, I think, on the on the left, people who are committed to sort of radical vision of social change, I think what we need to understand is that even if we don't end up getting this policy victory, or whatever,

if people come out in the end with a greater sense of, I'm not saying we don't need to win, we do need to win, we shouldn't be comfortable with losing, you know, or not being able to win our demands and things like that. But even if we we don't get that if people come out of it feeling stronger and more confident having a more critical a stronger sort of critical understanding of the way the world works like that's a good thing occupy for instance one relatively i mean it didn't win fucking anything but what we did get out of it was like i think a whole new layer of sort of organized activists who are now able to play a, who were able to play like a role, maybe in the Bernie Sanders campaign or in Black Lives Matter, able to organize counter protests against, you know, bigoted, bigoted pro-lifers trying to, you know, shame women away from going to Planned Parenthood clinics, you know. Right. That's important for our side is building that leadership and that confidence and that

experience. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's spot on. And but yeah, if you've sort of built your entire sort of worldview and all the organizations around you on this idea that like organizers know best, it's very elitist sort of model, then yeah, I don't know, you probably aren't going to trust people very much. Yeah. No, totally. I mean, you know, it just, it seems

very clear to me that it never occurred to Alinsky that people might organize and then decide themselves what they best want, but they might best know what to do. Right. For him, it's just a matter of, you know, I think he said, yeah. So I,

I quote this in the article, but he says something like, yeah, organizers are the architect basically, which I mean, if I mean the implication there then is that the rank and file are just like bricks and raw materials. Yeah.

And so, yeah, there's, like I said, there's the whole nonprofit industrial capital part to all this. There's also a little something. And I don't know. We don't actually have to pursue this route. But I think I do. I think we're pursuing it. Let's go for it. Let's do it. I think. And maybe there is used to this or i don't know it depends on what day of the week you

ask me because i think that it is a part i think we spend a lot of time on trying to get media wins and i think that that kind of uh that kind of goes hand in hand with the sort of like like one of the things you said about the ufw or and um not just, but the author you quoted, was how they're sort of, right, how they're developed this sort of, like, cult of personality around Cesar Chavez and a lot of the sort of other startups. And so, like, I think that, yeah, that sort of, like, can kind of go hand in hand with this constant pursuit for, like, media wins and, like, media hits,

and that they don't, like, if you're not building any actual, I don't know maybe maybe this doesn't apply to what you've had experience with but to me if you're not building any actual like i don't know long-term relationships and institutions then those are fleeting there's diminishing returns on that but it seems yeah it just seems to me like a lot of these organizations that operate under this sort of like philosophy are very concerned with doing this. Yeah, Jane McAlevey talks about this. I believe I quoted her in the article about sort of the model of the corporate campaign. to that sort of model of organizing where,

I mean, the sort of idea, right, is that the sort of the goal is to win your demand, whatever the demand is, whether it's, you know, adhering to regulations about pollution or to pay workers a better wage or improve conditions in some sort of way um the the the aim is to leverage power against the sort of the corporate target by um through a process of like media shaming them right but the sort of function is i don't know is that these people feel like is that as if that's actually power like one i don't know i i'm

i find it questionable if if corporate executives feel any shame like yeah yeah like i'm pretty skeptical of that possibility but then it's completely dismissing the sort of the the pot like what what i think a whole tradition of radical and uh organizing had already known for so long which is that look if you want to leverage power against the bosses what you have to do is stop production right you know i mean people knew this this is a i mean that's the labor movement was built on that i mean a huge element of the the civil rights movement was you know had a significant working class component to it. I mean, Martin Luther King was assassinated while organizing striking workers in Memphis. Right, right.

And you had Philip Randolph and, yeah. Absolutely. working class organizing, being able to address different issues through that organizing, through, you know, through organizing the working class, that I think that Alinsky says, we just don't need to do that anymore, and then has completely passed on to the rest of the nonprofit, sort of social movement world, and even to the labor world, you know, in a lot of ways. Yeah. Where, you know, mobilizing workers is seen as more or less equal to being able to organize students and getting what you call media wins and things like that. Yeah, it makes me wonder if, so you don't get into this in the article, but it really

makes me wonder sort of what you have to say about like that, its relationship to sort of neoliberal ideology. And also just the sort of like active identity politics in general, where like I will literally talk to people and they will treat organizing working class people, workers, like it's the same thing as organizing any other sort of like i don't know it's just a very strange thing it's just like it's i don't know i don't know and it seems to me that that kind of comes out of the sort of olinsky um worldview i don't know i could be totally no no no no i think that that i I think that that makes some degree of sense. I don't know about how it relates to – I don't know about the connection to neoliberalism are instead of being instead workers being viewed as sort of the primary agent of like how you're going to win this campaign through their sort of unique position to be able to shut down production by striking by slowing down you know and these things are instead seen primarily as what they call in the sort of the organizing

literature around this, the quote, authentic messenger, right? And so, and like in the UFW, for instance, instead of seeing the sort of the workers in the fields as being able to like organize other workers to be able to stop production and are taken out to be, and it's sort of kind of like flown out to various college campuses to be able to speak about the plight of the farm worker, you know, in a similar way to that, you know, you have sort of workers that retail stops, you know, shops or whatever are simply seen as like sort of like the messenger the the way in which to elicit sympathy for the cause in order to shame the the big corporate target so in some degree maybe there's a sort of relation to the role of identity but i think a lot of this just has to do with the sort of the

defeat of the left over the past 40 or 50 years where what we no longer had, what we used to have in the 30s and to some degree in the 60s and 70s were, you know, committed radicals who had deep roots within, you know, the labor movement who were able to offer an alternative sort of vision of what organizing and building power looks like. Right. And to some and to some degree, I think you can say maybe there's a connection to neoliberalism there insofar as,sofar as part of the process of neoliberalism has been decimating working class organization, decimating – kind of comes out of a significant period of defeat for the left and for the working class in the United States and around the world. Right. Which fucking sucks. Hell yeah. right which is which fucking sucks hell yeah hell yeah it sucks yeah it sucks um you did a really good job of sort of

encapsulating everything you wrote if people want to listen to this instead of going to read. Read. I would say maybe read the piece. I don't know. Yeah, definitely. Or maybe not. Don't watch the movie. Read the book. Yeah.

Anything more? I think it's kind of funny, though, that we are talking on the day that Roger Ailes passed. Do we know how did he die? I was going to ask you all that. Didn't he slip on the wet towel in the bathroom? Is that right? He slipped on a banana peel. Yeah, just the most cartoonish death.

Oh, yeah. He couldn't he couldn't live without Chris Cornell he was a huge audience member yes a big sound guard

but didn't want to be a part of a world without Chris Cornell yeah R.I.P. Chris Cornell go

fucking burn in eternal hellfire Roger Ailes. Yeah, I do like how bad people dying rallies the troops. You know, the left really comes together when an asshole passes out of the next side. We can all, you know, get together for for drinks and and revel in the in the depth of our class enemies i think it doesn't matter what our position on you know syria is or right you know we can all put that aside for a moment to to celebrate the uh the demise of our, of our progress. It really, it really sheds light onto why older revolutionaries were so into the guillotine. And I mean, it just, yeah, it rallied the base. It rallied the troops.

It's, it's fucking shocking to me and disappointing somehow that, know i don't know how many times fucking like you know the the amount of struggle his heart must have to go through every single moment to pump but like that rush that rush limbaugh still manages to like walk yeah the earth god damn all these guys man are just like a fucking, yeah. It's got one foot in the grave. It is. I mean, you know, I like to believe that the, what is it, like the universe bends towards justice or whatever,

but if that were true, I feel like these people would be like just fucking toast by now. There would be something about being like an evil goddamn scumbag that just like let these people just like live like how fucking old is henry kissinger yeah that's really how fucking old is this guy i know that's really mind-blowing and it really like if if you're looking at the american sort of political system and you're uh i don't know the fact that henry kissinger has basically been involved in some way with basically every administration going back since nixon like doesn't that kind of just like call it for what it is which is this like genocidal fucking war machine like i don't know it's just like that kind of seems to me to be a really obvious fucking

everyone just like everyone's just phoning him all the time like i have no idea what to do in this like country but people are acting up like what do i do i don't know maybe i should stop uh sending like you know axon mobile over there to like you know just destroy entire villages yeah right no no i mean i can't that's that's impossible i can't do that like what's uh hey what's's Hank have to say? Yeah. Yeah, Hank. Like cryogenic freezing chamber or whatever. Yeah. He rolls out and he's like, I don't know, you should bomb them, I guess.

Yeah. When Kissinger dies, he'll be the first person that they take his AI and put it onto a CD ROM, like a CD drive, and just fucking ask him questions every time they need some sort of, like, answer. That'll be the new technocracy of the American future. Yeah. He, like, he actually just, like, died, like, fucking 30 years ago and just, like, living on half. He's, like, just living in half-life, just, you know, just being, like, the last moment of his life is just suspended through time

and they're just like yeah fucking corpse right right it could be like just a show just a show on tv it's not like he ever talks on tv right right yeah no he very he very rarely does uh yeah you're right it could be like a linen thing where they like preserved his body really well and they will him out and they need to yeah if so that they need to fucking check that thing cause um a couple days ago when they brought him out to like cool

the Trump stuff uh he was not looking great god damn it's not looking too good oh man um yeah but I'm glad that we can uh you know uh i'm glad that we can all celebrate uh to the you know the the the the croaking of roger ailes and you know yeah yeah uh i think i i think it's hilarious um and perhaps perhaps people like Alinsky would have been the kind that would have been like, you respect that person, you know what I mean? Oh God, those fucking guys.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying. People who wish you— How dare you say anything bad about a dead person. Right, no ill of the dead. But I like—Amber Lee Frost wrote this really good essay in current affairs a few years ago about bringing back political vulgarity. And I think part of political vulgarity is, um, trashing, uh, people when like Roger else, when they pass. I remember that. Yeah, I like that piece a lot. And I think that, you know, it's it's true. Like, like, why shouldn't we like what ounce of humanity could someone possibly claim that they have? What ounce of belief in a better world could people possibly have if they aren't able to like, you know, I don't know, like recognize that people that cause like, like enormous suffering. enormous suffering but people i mean like roger ailes is literally responsible probably for i mean i don't even want to think about how many people just like spent you know whole parts of

their lives just like hating themselves because they believed that they were you know um you know like somehow like a lesser human you know just like all the suffering produced the idea that like we shouldn't be like good i'm glad that that fucker's dead. Yeah. That's something where like, what principle are we betraying? By recognizing that the world's probably a fucking better place if evil people aren't in it. Right. Yeah. Millions of people just like who have totally switched over to this politics of fear and, um, yes,

self-loathing and, uh, yeah. And that's on Roger Ailes and it's, it's pretty fucking terrifying. It's pretty, um, like his,

his, the scope of his influence cannot be overstated. So yeah. Fuck him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brah, brah! And that's young, boys.

We might get a Henry Kissinger and a Rupert Murdoch. We might get a twofer. Well. I think, um, yeah, you know, I mean, there's not much to really add here. It's like I said earlier, we can't wait for them to go.

I mean, we basically have to, I guess since this is a piece of media, you know, like a podcast, and I'm sure the FBI will listen to it at some point, it's probably not safe to say, like, it's, you know, we have to send them direction of Roger Ailes. But you kind of know what I'm saying. We have to strip them of their power of all of their power and influence are you cool I'll take the battery out of my cell phone right now but then I would lose the connection so no but I I think that you know it is funny to me that like there is this whole kind of school of liberalism that presumes that like if we you know like oh if we just like well yeah i don't know when they go like right when when they go low we go high yeah yeah us you know like i mean like you're you're

telling me that like these that like the right doesn't celebrate when you know i mean look at how they acted when like fidel castro died yeah yeah yeah you know it's like things like this like that just like show it's like there's no degree to which like we can be like decent and moral and you know on the rights like what is being decent and moral on the rights terms even fucking look like i mean being like a goddamn like ghoul who believes that gay people should you you know, you know, it's like disgusting the idea that we should play on that, on that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean, honestly, if you believe in, if you believe in a better future, if you believe in a future that's like democratic and like where people, you know, are able to like live their lives freely, then, you know, and everyone has

everything that they need to live a dignified life, then I don't see how you could believe in that genuinely and look at Henry Kissinger and not be like, dude, I just hope you fucking go. Why are you taking so long? Not that that's a win for us necessarily. It doesn't produce any better outcome on our side, but it does mean that like the world has one less shitty fucking ghoul in it you know right good yeah good yeah

maybe he'll slip banana peel too it's kind of funny it's like uh i just had the idea for like a final destination film but like every person that gets killed uh is like yeah it's just like um one of these kissinger alice type and they slip in the bathroom and get sort of strangled by the shower curtain or like a large log rolls off of a truck and let's pitch that like who's the most picturing like the i'm picturing like the glass jar that they put they put hen Henry Kissinger's brain in after he's like off the TV just like kicks over one day and breaks

yeah who's the most not like the janitor just like is sweeping and like knocks it over yeah oh boy shit oh man my bad that's fucking great oh god dude we need a man on the inside we need like we need

our our janitor on the inside of like the cryogenic fucking like room where they put all these people's brains yeah hell yeah just like not get knocked it over with like a mop like the stick on the mop or whatever fucking rules he's he's like our gorilla where he's our that guy is our che guevara yeah yeah yeah totally he would we would lift him up on our backs through the streets and dude we'll like write these amazing ballads about about the about the the janitor yeah like richard the janitor and like the secret like the secret nsa cryogenic breathing chamber right right right yeah just uh yeah the troubadour the leftist troubadours of the future will be singing about. Yeah, Richard. It's like some weird sort of like Black Mirror meets Ken Loach film or something like that.

This dystopian sort of this dystopian world, but in the end, it's like we still have our working class hero who delivers us. Right, right, right. Oh, shit. Well, if we dream it, surely we can make it into a Black Mirror episode. Oh, my God. All right, guys.

How are you guys feeling? Yeah, I think we've got enough audio. Thanks, Aaron, for talking to us. We really enjoyed it. We're really sorry for all the technical difficulties at the beginning. I was very self-conscious for the first 30 minutes of this interview. I was like, he's going to think we're total fucking – we're just total fucking – Yeah, I never recovered.

Yeah. Dude, I was, like, literally sitting in this, like, gilded tower and was worried you guys were gonna think i'm just a complete poser because of like yeah yeah for the listening audience that can't see the video it's just this hilarious just view of what's that whatever road uh that is just like manhattan somewhere i've only been in new york once i don't know anything about it um yeah i'm but uh i'm actually in the anthony cumia studios yeah um wow that's where you want to be really um so yeah that's how you know you yeah you've made it to the top yeah no so no. So we're sorry about that. Generally, we are more gregarious. But yeah, we get it in our own heads.

And then we're just like, oh, fuck, man. Everybody's going to think that we're just running out of a popsicle stand here, which we kind of are. No worries. I'm so happy to have done this. I'm really glad that this is a really great project that you guys are doing. I mean, it really speaks to also, you know, I mean, you're providing not only like a really important sort of resource for other people like you and on our side where you are but i mean you're also showing the rest of the world that like you know exactly what we were talking about earlier that like the south and appalachia is not just like

left to this sort of like this uh you know whatever it is that liberals want to say that it is right right right thanks really really happy to be on this and uh you know and i don't know um let's let's definitely please stay in touch and uh i hope that i don't sound dumb or that i don't get uh attacked by the fbi after no no no i can't guarantee that you won't get attacked by the fbi um they could be watching the windows that you like turn in there could be watching yeah right that's actually probably an fbi outfit right but you definitely don't sound dumb that's where the black ops get carried out this is how you know this is like a globalist operation or something yeah right um yeah no you definitely don't sound dumb i was very self-conscious the whole time i was just like man i'm too stupid for this like but um this is great i think we had a good thing i think we have a

some i think we got some good chemistry going on man i think we do too man you have to come back on the show. We'll have to do it again and we won't fuck it up. We won't fuck up all the different recording devices. I would absolutely love to. Awesome. Well, Aaron, thanks for speaking with us. Yeah, thanks, man.

Absolutely. All right. Well, have a great day. Be careful. Thanks, man. You all too. Be careful. Thanks, man. You all too. See ya. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. I'm out. Thank you. Outro Music you