RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 282 Alex Han on Labor Present and Future, Campus Activism, and Media Aims
In Episode 282 of RevolutionZ, Alex Han, of In These Times, addresses the current surge, aims, and prospects of both labor and student activism and their possible intersection, as well as media responses and prospects. We discuss union bargaining strategies including and going beyond contract issues, campus organization and tactics, and urge the need to break down barriers between independent media outlets to forge a more strategically unified left media ecosystem.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I'm the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. Our guest this week is Alex Hahn. Alex is Executive Director of In these Times. He is organized with unions in the community and in progressive politics more broadly for two decades. So, Alex, welcome to Revolution Z.
Speaker 2:Thanks, michael, I'm really happy to be here.
Speaker 1:It's working, maybe not. I'm recording. Fine, say a little more so I can check if you are.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks again, michael, I'm very happy to be here with you.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'd like to talk to you about alternative media, something we share in common, but perhaps we ought to start with the surge in labor and union activism and organizing, which ITT has been so helpfully and very effectively covering in detail during the recent period. I'm not sure it's a fair question, but can you perhaps tell us broadly about recent events, what's happening and what's at stake?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll say you know this is a really interesting week to be having this conversation, michael, workers at Mercedes in Alabama are voting right now on whether to join the United Automobile Workers. We also last night in the same union, in the UAW, had the conclusion of a multi-day vote in their large local of graduate workers, researchers and a whole lot of other jobs in the University of California system a strike vote on whether to authorize their leadership to call fundamentally a strike against the university's response to the pro-Palestine encampments and protests on campuses across the state. Obviously that's been happening across the country and across the world. I think both of these votes really point toward some of the real energy that exists broadly with workers, kind of in the working class. I should also say in the last few weeks we've seen the first national bargaining commence at Starbucks, with Starbucks workers from across the country joining together to finally begin bargaining, you know, for a potential collective agreement there.
Speaker 2:So there are a lot of forces at play right now. I think we are seeing a shift, at least in parts of the institutional labor movement, to both kind of engage with that energy that's out there, that's really been out there for years, and see if it can lead to, you know, real structural growth and change. So it's an exciting moment. You know, all of these things, you know, come with different levels of risk, both institutionally and for workers, you know. But I think there are real signs of hope in our ability to grow working class power more broadly.
Speaker 1:I wonder what you think of Sean Fain, in particular his plans for now and for seeing into the future. I guess it's 2028. How much of what's going on do you think owes to the UAW in particular? I mean, what do you make of this?
Speaker 2:You know I want to put into context, I think, what's happened inside the UAW and I think it's, I think, a lot of times we think of, you know, union reform movements.
Speaker 2:We think of contract campaigns and strikes. We think of these as moments in time and place and I think that's a valid and logical and natural way to assess them. I do think we've got to think of these things as a part of a bigger process that's in motion and happening. You know Sean Fain's leadership of the United Auto Workers comes from, you know, from a caucus Auto Workers comes from, you know, from a caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy. That's relatively new, I think, really just formed in the last four or five years inside the United Auto Workers. That's had support, you know, broadly from members across the union but that's built on decades of work.
Speaker 2:Union reform movements you know, over the last 30 or 40 years, whether it's inside the United Auto Workers, fights that have been led. You know things like the revolutionary union movements of the late 60s and early 70s. You know Jerry Tucker and the New Directions movement. You know there have been continuous efforts to shift that union. I think those also exist in a larger context, both in the labor movement in the broader economy and society at large. And so you know, I think of these as points that we can measure. I think that's one of the most helpful things that the UAW is doing. They're not being prescriptive about the path toward joining more fights together, but they are saying we're lining up our contracts for May 1st 2028. And we invite the rest of the labor movement to do the same and to join us in creating a strategy that can potentially have the leverage to be more transformational than any of these fights on their own.
Speaker 2:You know we ran in our last print issue, in our May issue, an editorial from President Fain articulating some of the reasons why we're moving toward May 1st. I'll say in the week before that, before that came out, you know we were. He was on a panel at the Labor Notes Conference talking with other labor leaders who have been, for instance, in Minnesota, where a coalition of almost a dozen unions and worker centers and community groups worked together to build toward common contract expirations this past March and are looking to work together, you know, toward 2028. I hear a lot of talk in other parts of the labor movement about how to utilize that as a goal and a target. But I think that the biggest shift is that they are not saying here is exactly what our strategy is, here is what the plan is, and we want you to join us. They're saying join us in figuring this out together as we walk toward possibility in the future.
Speaker 1:I think both parts of that are probably big. That is, join us and we do it together. So that's one part, but join us, forget itself a big part, yeah, of also growing. And clearly you opened up by describing the gathering that was talking about striking where the strike is really in support of the students and in support of Palestine. I mean, that's a big deal and do you see more of that? Do you feel like that's in the air? You know, to create those kinds of ties? And what about reaching out to non-union workers?
Speaker 2:involved in a grouping of labor organizers and activists and leaders who were really trying to think about how to focus on the possibility of a Trump re-election and what labor's response could be. Not about how labor would engage in kind of resistance I think that was something you know the die had been cast in whatever way but part of that was to say how do we think about the industrial power of existing organized workers, for instance, in that election if Trump had fully refused to honor the results? We saw that happen on January 6, 2021. Fortunately, that was relatively shortly lived as an insurrectionary challenge to the election results, but we continue to see that play out and we'll see a play out in this election as well. And we were at a point of. You know, there was some talk in some places which I think is frankly strategically misplaced about calls for a general strike, potentially.
Speaker 1:Sorry about what.
Speaker 2:Calls for a general strike, you know, in the event of Trump attempting to stay in office even if he'd lost the election.
Speaker 2:But we saw some interesting developments in a set of unions to say, how are we going to actually have this conversation with our members about what is at stake and what are the ways in which we could move toward collective, concerted action, up to and including potential strikes, around questions that are not around our contract bargaining, around political questions?
Speaker 2:And I would say that what we see the UAW members in the University of California system voting by an overwhelming margin for is a desire to really be fighting for the common good and to see their worker organization as a vehicle for a larger fight and as their point of leverage and power is in withholding their work. And so I think we see a kind of an evolution and I think over the next four years, regardless of how this November turns out, I'm hopeful that we'll continue to see that evolve in ways that might not actually be imaginable right now. And you point to one of the key questions, right, whatever the you know, quote unquote upsurge in labor is, the numbers don't fully bear that out and it's something that takes time to take root, but we have many, many more unorganized workers than organized workers in this country right now.
Speaker 2:And so part of that question, you know, is going to be where are the regions and locations and industries where workers can take advantage of moments of upsurge to actually shift the balance of power with capital, shift the balance of power, you know, with elected leaders in government, hopefully with allies, you know, at elected levels of government.
Speaker 2:So it's a really broad set of possibilities and I think that you know actions like what the UAW has done open up space for workers to imagine what they could do. You know, I started my kind of career as a union organizer in the year 2001, which was, you know, I think, of the kind of 90s and the early aughts, as the nadir of the American labor movement. I learned a lot of methods of organizing and strategies for how do you act in your weakest moment? How do you act when the entire apparatus of the federal government is against workers? How do you act, you know, when privatization and neoliberalism is at its peak? We're in a different historical moment now, and so I think there is a much wider array of possibilities and strategies that are available to workers in this moment, and I think we're seeing that kind of take root workers in this moment and I think we're seeing that kind of take root.
Speaker 1:I wonder if you think I mean the UAW strike was obviously inspiring and effective and had a big impact. I'm wondering if it had a larger impact maybe than people are acting on, that is, among all those unorganized workers. I can't but think that watching that, they sort of felt to themselves whoa, there's something going on here and maybe we should be part of it. And then you know, sean Fain, who was terrific in all sorts of ways, comes up with this 2028 date and you get the feeling that it's too big of a gap. Maybe you couldn't have a general strike in two years, but there has to be a continuation of that incredible momentum. I also people are going to feel like, you know, okay, they did it for a minute, but yeah, I well.
Speaker 2:I think that with the ongoing organizing in the South right, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee won their union a couple weeks ago. Mercedes workers are voting right now. There are active campaigns in dozens of other plants across the South and the Midwest.
Speaker 1:Let me just interject for a second. Do you think the unorganized workers throughout the country see all that?
Speaker 2:Well, here's what I. I actually want to go back in time a little bit, and I was. I was having a conversation earlier today about strikes and fights in one industry inspiring action in others, and part of this was around.
Speaker 2:You know this is over a decade ago now, but you know the kind of like last big upsurge in union, visible union activity and fight was really kicked off in a lot of ways by the Chicago teacher strike of 2012. It was the first strike of that union in 25 plus years. It was at a moment when kind of you know, the privatization of schools, the charterization you know we had Hollywood movies boosting privatization of schools and charterization. But the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike was really a strike that broadened the horizon of possibility. It was a strike that was centered around the schools that Chicago students need. The reason I bring that up is because a week after that strike, I was at the time working with groups of workers in downtown Chicago in part, who were gathering together and trying to talk about strategies to build organization across workplaces in industries like fast food, restaurants, retail, where it was hard to imagine how you could, you know, build to a union election and win something meaningful in one shop. And six weeks after the Chicago teachers' strike is when a group of 150 workers in Chicago launched the Fight for 15, which became a huge movement across the country but I will say was directly inspired by the Chicago teachers' fight. It was directly inspiring to a group of workers, largely young people, many of them who had been recent graduates of Chicago public schools, seeing their teachers go on strike not just to fight for their own wages and working conditions but to fight for their communities and their neighborhoods.
Speaker 2:I see some of that same possibility across the South where the UAW is organizing, I'll say in a state like Alabama and Tennessee are different than a lot of other Southern states in that they have a deeper and union tradition and probably higher rates of unionization than many people would imagine.
Speaker 2:But a state like South Carolina, the least unionized state in the country one or two auto plants organizing in South Carolina will double the number of union members in that state. One or two auto plants organizing has the possibility if other workers are in motion already and if other organizations not just unions but worker centers and non-union organizations are ready to take advantage of that excitement and inspiration. In a lot of ways that's how the that's. It's one of the lessons we can draw from the organizing of the CIO in the 30s and 40s. Right, how do you take energy that comes out of the auto plants and sit down strikes and it inspires sit downs at Woolworths and it'ss and it inspires kind of workers who are all around it to organize. So I see potential transformation as long as we have groupings of workers and organizations that are ready to take advantage of that inspiration in the moment.
Speaker 1:Maybe sticking with the current activism but shifting a little over, because ITT isn't only about labor struggles. But do you think the workers' efforts this past year and you partly answered this already, or two have contributed to students being ready to rebel? And do you think the students' incredible efforts for Palestine will link with and propel labor efforts and, for that matter, vice versa, going forward? It seems like there's a lot of potential here in both directions. What do you think?
Speaker 2:I think that in the few years before the UAW's stand-up strikes of last year, we saw an enormous surge in unionization in higher education and particularly of graduate student workers. But I think across the board, whether it's of tenured faculty, whether it is of adjunct faculty, whether it's student workers, whether it's other workers on campuses, and I don't think it's an accident that in many of the campuses where protests have kind of had the broadest character are campuses where elements of the leadership have really come out of some of those graduate worker organizing drives. We've seen tens of thousands of graduate workers on campuses across the country form and join unions over the last four years, and so I think it points toward the ability of you know, we can think about movements as separate issues and we can think about them as separate questions. But we know that workers in their day-to-day lives do not make those distinctions right. If I am a nursing home worker who has to drive 25 miles to get to my job, you know the issues of kind of racial profiling and kind of lack of transit of, you know, terrible housing are very linked to the poor treatment that I get at work For a graduate student worker.
Speaker 2:You know, for a lot of the workers who've been organizing, you know, I would say that I think that that organizing boom has really helped to contribute to a broader consciousness, particularly at a lot of, you know, these kind of elite university campuses, although that's not the only place where that activism has happened. So I think these things feed each other. I think they feed each other in really constructive ways and I would love for us to see, you know, I think, the arc of the last four or five years, with the uprising in 2020 around George Floyd's murder, with the pandemic and the response to the pandemic, with the kind of defensive democracy and the defeat of Trump in 2020, you know, with this upsurge in organizing and with the really sharp things that have been laid bare and very obvious and clear, you know, from Israel's siege of Gaza, I think all of these things work together to create a bigger consciousness among a group of workers and I think I'm excited to see where that leads going forward.
Speaker 1:On the flip side of all this, we can't deny much, as it would be nice if it wasn't the case that lots and lots of workers support Trump and think that there's some validity to supporting Trump. And I wonder how you, for your own thinking, relate to that and also, in your experience, whether inside these struggles and these union struggles it is addressed in some fashion or just sort of put to the side like an elephant in the room or something like that. Let me just tell you one story A friend of mine was. This is back during the UAW strike. They went for a day and walking on the line all day and the line was basically the picket line was pretty much around the clock and they're talking to various workers and on issue after issue they're seeing eye to eye issues and then Trump comes up and it turns out they've been talking to somebody who's supporting Trump and they sort of flabbergasted a little bit that you're embodying in the same mind these two different things. So they asked and they were genuinely asking they weren't.
Speaker 1:You know what, for you, are the issues that caused you to feel that way? Now, if I can remember this properly, it was immigration, and I can't even remember what the other one? It might have been the state of the economy, but I don't, you know. But in any event, you had this strange contradiction staring you in the face Somebody who you liked, appreciated and were admiring, who you hated, didn't appreciate and weren't admiring. Very weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So how do people who are organizing and right in the midst of it feel about all this?
Speaker 2:Well, I do think it's important to keep in mind on the question, like there are two things at top of mind for me. One of them is that most people are not like you and me, michael, and not like the listeners of this podcast, michael, and not like the listeners of this podcast, most people's politics, most people are not searching for coherence in their own politics and opinions. Most people are trying to make it through the day, take care of their family, do the things they need to do, and we can see in public polling, we can see there's not necessarily logic that runs through. If you believe this thing on this issue, it means you believe this thing on that issue. That's something that is for you know, the 10% of the population that is thinking about this, you know, on a constant basis. That's one thing to keep in mind. The other thing to remember is the role that unions and organized workers have played historically in shifting and changing political views among their membership. Think you know, historically it's been true that the population and I'll just say of you know, for instance, middle income, white males the only thing that pushes that segment of the electorate into supporting Democrats is whether they're a member of a union or not. That's the biggest indicator historically. Now that's been shifted and changed a little bit over the last couple of election cycles, but I think we're like reminded of kind of the fundamental, like the political logic that those of us who pay constant attention to what's happening is not the political logic that people more broadly take in, and so I think there's both like an immediate response.
Speaker 2:How do we actually talk about issues? And immigration, I think, is one you know. In my experience as a union organizer and as an elected officer, you know that was an issue that we dove into headfirst, and part of that was to actually like hear out what people's concerns were about immigration, both in a one-on-one and in a broader collective setting, and to talk about how those issues can connect, how we can actually understand ourselves reflected in those issues and how we can think about collectively what's actually going to be for the benefit of us and our coworkers at large. And so a union is the vehicle in which that can actually happen. Now, has that happened across the board? You know?
Speaker 2:I think over the last few decades, I mean, you know there's a lot of education, work and political education that needs to be done internally and that's not necessarily you know about a very surface level.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of the kind of corporate style efforts around diversity, equity, inclusion, things like that. A lot of this is about educating people around identifying common interests and common enemies, and if Trump has done that more effectively in some places, then that's, you know. That's, I think, a thing that we have to grapple with and think structurally and programmatically about how to combat. I do think one of the most effective politicizing, one of the most effective politicizing moments for people is the act of going on strike, is the act of collectively joining together with people who have a lot of things that are not in common, but at least you have in common your employer and your working conditions and your wages, and taking action together. And so I think a lot of this is not about how do we create argumentation that can convince people, but how do we actually create organizations in which people can see collective action together with people who might not share the same opinions as them, as a path toward winning.
Speaker 1:So there really aren't shortcuts there to be made in the short term possibility that a very large factor isn't policies, isn't program, but is almost personality, that is, there is something. Trump knows what he's doing, I think, and is actually pretty good at it. Crazy as it seems, and if you go way back, there have been others who, spiro Agnew, sort of understood this dynamic of displeasure with hatred toward what we might call professionals I call it the coordinator class, but anyway, people who have a firm grip on much better conditions than you have and have an attitude toward you that is generally paternalistic or totally dismissive and that feels to people like the Democratic Party, whereas the Republican Party feels like some guy I can go have a beer with and who is not going to treat me like dirt, even though his policies treat me like dirt. And somehow it seems to me, because when I look at the positions of the people who are voting for Trump and I hear them talk, they're not crazy, they haven't lost track of reality by any means. Their cities are falling apart, they've got relatives who are dying of oxycodone, they've got, you know, you go through a long list of stuff. And then they look around and they say are the Democrats going to deal with all this?
Speaker 1:No evidence, I don't you know? No, that's where it came from. Is Trump going to deal with all this? No evidence? I don't you know. No, that's where it came from. Is trump going to? No, but he might strike up everything, so fucking much that something falls into our lap. I think that's more where the support is than his policies. You know which they're oblivious to. Um does that?
Speaker 2:make any sense. It does make a lot of sense and you know, I spent some time in 2020 trying to elect a young man named Bernie Sanders to the presidency. I worked on his national political team, in part for specifically this reason. We don't need the correct policy platform list. We do.
Speaker 1:We need it, but we need to pair that.
Speaker 2:We need to pair that with somebody who can actually speak to people's fears and speak to people's hopes. It's also important to keep in mind that we've got. It is easier to organize people around a dislike of an other, especially when it's something where we can construct. You know the thread of what do immigrants mean for your jobs? What does you know? What does somebody else having rights mean for the security of yourself and your family, as false as those choices might be, than it is to construct a multiracial democracy, you know.
Speaker 2:And so I also think like we need to be in some ways on the left, a little bit easier on ourselves, that that's a coalition that has the ability to come together and that we don can come to give space to build that multiracial democracy. That is much more challenging. That is like very unfinished business, but demagoguery can only go so far, and so I do. You know this isn't necessarily a direct answer to your question, michael, but I do think you know, I think we can. The die is cast right now. You know for what this election is going to be in November. It's going to be two candidates that, by and large, voters don't like that much.
Speaker 2:It's going to be two people you know who represent in some, you know, in some ways, very divergent. You know points of view and opinions and then, in some ways, like, represent a continual consensus of a system that has, like, immiserated people and taken away their agency and power. What are the? You know, setting aside who those candidates are at the top of the ticket, how are we developing and building voices that people can look to Like?
Speaker 2:Trump does speak very effectively to the id of a pretty big segment. Really. There is a percentage of the electorate and it's alarmingly high that you know shares those views. But I think we've got to think about what can block the worst of what's going to happen, what's possible in November and beyond, and how do we point toward a future in which we can. There's no reason why progressives and the left more broadly can't elevate leaders that can speak to those kind of fears and hopes too, and I think we see some of them I mean Sean Fain represents one of those Some of the congressional members of the squad. We do have ways in which people are appearing and asserting themselves into the public stage that can play that role.
Speaker 1:Of course, there's a sector of the left that, the minute something like that arrives, they pull out the knives to try and criticize it to death. Yeah, yeah, that's a problem also that will never not be a problem.
Speaker 2:No-transcript.
Speaker 1:You know all the comparisons that are going on between 68 and now, which most of them I don't like, because the people looking back on 68 are saying weren't we great? Which, if anybody believes we were really great, that's a reason to go to the beach, because you're not genetically better than we were in 68. We were wrong, we did things wrong. Right, we made mistakes, and that should be the lessons.
Speaker 1:But one thing that's interesting is, among I don't think I knew anybody certainly not me and none of the people who I knew then who are still involved, but almost nobody who was involved in the activities, so to speak not just leaders, but people who were involved took 30 seconds, probably even five seconds, considering whether or not Humphrey needed to win instead of Nixon. It wasn't something that even crossed your mind. Right, Fuck them all. That was the, you know, and, and of course that exists now and the fucking part is right, but the but there's a difference, you know, and uh, but the fact that the students are open to not everybody, but a lot of them are open to simultaneously being really radical and militant, hating what's going on, but taking into account consequences and trying to be a little strategic is different.
Speaker 2:It really is different and that gives me hope. Yeah, I think we see, hopefully, a growing number of kind of activists, people who are engaged in this and people who are just thinking, who aren't necessarily directly engaged but are really thinking about what's happening in Gaza, what's happening for the future of this country, that we have to be able to hold some real tensions and contradictions in our head, just as we all have to do in our day-to-day everyday lives, you know, and think about the ways in which we're going to be able to build a bigger coalition that can actually move forward. You know, and I would argue that one of the challenges and one of the great dangers, regardless of the outcome of the November election, one of the greatest dangers is, you know, if a segment, whether you know, win or lose in November, whether a segment of that kind of right or center of the Democratic Party decides it doesn't need the progressive wing to move forward Now, whether you're a person who believes, you know we need to reform the Democratic Party or replace it. I think that, you know, a path forward is about leadership from a progressive left axis, whether that is in the form of a different party, whether that's in the form of internal Democratic Party reform. I would also say that that's kind of a project that I think has its clearest purchase right now in the city of Chicago, where I'm sitting, where we have, I mentioned, the Chicago teacher strike of 2012. And one of the organizers of that strike is sitting in the mayor's office right now and living with all of the day-to-day contradictions and tensions that go with that. But we've got, you know, a kind of electoral and governing coalition in Chicago that was led by the progressive left axis and is being challenged from all sides and attacked really from all sides. But I think the path forward is to think about how do we project out leadership in ways that can actually win majorities, and so Chicago is kind of an experiment in that, and an important one, I would add, as we think about the Democratic National Convention, I think 68, there's obvious allusions to that.
Speaker 2:I've been thinking a lot about 1964. And I've been thinking about the role of the civil rights movement in opening up a clear space, the role of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in, at the end of the day, losing beautifully in 1964 to open up the possibility for the future. And while 68, I think, complicated and scrambled that a bit, you can see in the success and building of Black politics that had a lot of different ideological characters reflected in it through the 70s and into the 80s, in the 1980s, which was one of the last moments in American politics where you had again a progressive left-led coalition, a black-led coalition that was able to take power. So if we can think about this year as a melding of 64 and 68, I think we'll be better off for that than just thinking to some of the parallels with 68.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess I wanted to and I still want to try and talk a little about alternative media, also, one of the things you mentioned earlier. It was sort of like, you know, people get upset about how the left is siloed, we're all in our separate thing, and there's some motion now coming, I think, largely from the labor movement, but other also toward thinking about well, okay, that's just stupid, we can't all be in separate silos and get much, much less get a new world, and so there's a beginning of attention to that, and I sort of wonder the same thing about media. So I think you are still reasonably new, lee, the executive director of ITT, but I'm honestly not sure what that means. So could you I mean, what's that? So could you perhaps give us an idea of your responsibilities there I guess it is and then of your hopes for ITT, and then maybe we can talk about alternative media more broadly, looking into the future.
Speaker 2:Well, after our longtime editor and publisher, joel Blyfus, left in these times. The reason, you know, I do think of my title as being executive director, that's not. That doesn't illuminate a whole lot about the specific role, how it relates in the publishing and media world a media world, but it is. You know, it's kind of like running the organization and it ends up playing a similar role. Although I'm not kind of day to day managing, you know, our editorial process in any way, and I think it's kind of an articulation of a desire to think organizationally more broadly. You know, for the magazine, for the publication in itself, I've been in the job for a little more than a year now.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I don't come from it from like a broad experience in media, but I do come to the job with a lot of experience in kind of organizational dynamic and a lot of experience in organizing across issues and across space. And so, you know, for me I actually would take issue, michael, with the term alternative media and I'd like for us to move in a different direction. I see in this last, you know, decade plus, you know many years of kind of corporate consolidation, you know constant restructuring and constant shifting of. You know where is media headed. We're going to pivot to video. We're going to, you know, get rid of this. Everything's going to have a paywall. Nothing's going to have a paywall. You know we're going to print magazines. We're going to stop printing magazines and newspapers. We're going to print them again.
Speaker 2:The constant in all of that is really, in a lot of ways, an abdication of the information space in favor of financial capital, squeezing as much money as it can out of media. And so I think what that has created is potential opportunity for us to not think of ourselves as alternative media. But is there space that we can take in movement, connected in left and progressive and kind of like sharply political media. I think in some ways, you know, there are some similarities and parallels to how Fox News you know it's. There are some similarities and parallels to how Fox News, you know, engaged in kind of taking over a segment of media that was really there for the taking, with an ideological clarity that they had at the time New media- better media.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be new. You know, I just don't want to be, I think, thinking of the term alternative is.
Speaker 2:You know, we're don't want to be, I think, thinking of the term alternative is you know yeah, we're automatically putting this in kind of reaction to something else, and so I want to think of you know, do we have the ability for people-centered and people-powered media to actually take up a much bigger space? Because that space has been taken up by the tech platforms, that space is taken up by disinformation in a lot of ways, and so how do we combat? That is kind of one of the fundamental questions, I think, of the next few years.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, you're not going to get an argument from me on that. I mean, I agree, but there does come up a question. So there are a lot of, not a lot. There are a certain number of possible participants in what you're saying you'd like to see emerge. Right, they've been called alternative media. They exist, they, you know. Some of them are associated with radio, some are associated with et cetera, et cetera. So all that exists Historically, all that has been siloed, if we use the term that comes over from activism. Right, each one has typically had its eyes on itself and not on some kind, in other words, competition or partnership across all those. Historically, competition, everybody is too civil to say I'm out for your readers or something like that. But actually, when it's fundraising time and when it's, that's what's going on at some level. Nobody wants to own up to it or be, and I'm wondering if, a you agree with any of that and B you can see any path toward a better umbrella. Let's call it for all that new, emerging good media, some mutual aid, for example.
Speaker 2:I think that's actually a really good phrase to start from and I think about. You know, this is kind of I'm going to, I'm going to lapse into kind of nonprofit funders speak a little bit. But it's one particular word that I actually think is helpful and instructive, which is how do we develop an ecosystem? It's not about an ecosystem, so an ecosystem of media that allows. It's not about, you know, it's not about creating a new New York Times, right. It's not about you know, one dominant or a handful of dominant players. It's about how do we take what really are dozens of different projects that exist, maybe more than that, and how do all of them find a bigger audience in the broad universe. You know of kind of possibility and potential, and so I don't have a really good plan to do that, but I, you know, part of having these conversations is about how do we think about building the structure of that ecosystem. I think we've seen some of that done in the world of community organizing and nonprofits, which historically has been competitive in the same ways that you talk about, you know, independent media being competitive. But I think, particularly over the last 10 years, there have been some real experiments in thinking about how do we work collaboratively on funding a set of different projects, how do we think about sharing resources where it's appropriate, and I do think that that is kind of like a nascent project. I mean, I'll point out one thing that is relatively small and I don't think it's some bolt of genius, but I also think we can't be dependent on a genius idea. It's really just about figuring out ways to work together. This morning I saw a little note from N Plus One and Jewish Currents saying hey, subscribe to both of our magazines for a discounted rate. Also, if you're already a subscriber to one of them, you can subscribe to the other for a pretty deep discount for a year. Now, those are kind of, in a lot of ways, smart business decisions, but the more we can think about ways to visibly work together, to say, we have audiences that are overlapping, but there's ways to grow the collective audience and ways to grow individually, and I think that that's something that you know.
Speaker 2:I think there have been efforts to do that in different ways over the years. I think of experiments, like you know, the, I think the Independent Press Association, like the Media Consortium. There have been efforts like that over the years. But I again, as I talked about, like being trained as a labor organizer at the nadir of kind of the American left. In a lot of ways we have a possibility now.
Speaker 2:We have a growing number of people who identify in some way, whether it's as a socialist, whether it's as a progressive, whether it's on the left. Those numbers have been growing, and so we need to rethink the ways in which we work together now, because the context now is not the context of the 90s or the aughts. We have had a democratic socialist challenge in a real way for the presidency, for the nomination of one of the major parties. Twice in the last eight years we have open socialists in the United States Congress and in over 100 elected offices around the country States Congress and then over 100 elected offices around the country and so I do think there's opportunity right now for us to think about what's a media that can speak to the millions of people who identify in that way. We haven't gotten to it yet, but I think that there's real hope and possibility to do that.
Speaker 1:I certainly agree with you, but there's also a mindset that exists in lots of places that stands in the way, and it's a typically American mindset. It's this competitive, you know me, first mindset. I wonder whether I mean the areas where I could see that a change would percolate, you know, or might percolate and affect more areas are money, uh so fundraising, um, and sharing resources, like you said, but also editorial, um. Doesn't it make sense, or do you think it might make sense for a large gathering of these efforts to talk about and really try to initiate a mechanism for the whole affecting issues, as compared to each entry trying to get its perfect position on each narrow issue, but no repetition. In other words, there's no momentum behind each, the small in the large. There's an itt comes up with a brilliant article on something, but it isn't, it isn't spread throughout the whole media ecosystem, what you called it, and the same for any other yeah other such dynamic.
Speaker 1:It's hard, you know, I'll tell you what, what people used to say. I'll tell you what people used to say. It's not pleasant. They used to literally say what's in it for us. I mean literally. So they would say okay, we understand why the small fries want that, but why should we I won't name the organizations, but at the larger media want that? And there was the same thing around fundraising.
Speaker 2:You know it's a tough nut to crack, but it it's an important one, I think I, I think so, and I think the only way to do it is by continuing to try and continuing to like, move these conversations um, and I, you know, it makes me kind of think a little bit about these kind of gatherings of the elite and ruling classes, whether it's at Aspen, whether it's at Davos, whether it's in other places. There's a way in which I think we've got to actually interrogate how those groupings work and function in order to learn some lessons.
Speaker 1:frankly, that's pretty sad, but probably true.
Speaker 2:It goes beyond the media too and it says how do we think about how the tech world thinks about these kind of gatherings and groupings and alignments? Really, that can work together in some way. I think that there is something there to really explore and unpack, to figure out how to do some of that, how to learn some of those lessons collectively, ideally. It's always going to be a messy process and it's always going to be. There are always going to be people and organizations that are, you know, thinking about how to look out for themselves. I do think in some of the coalitional organizing that I've done inside labor, between labor and other kind of movement actors. You know, one of the important things to think about is, you know, one of them I've learned is thinking about alignment and groups that are moving in the same direction, rather than coalition, which can become a lowest common denominator way of doing things, definitely problematic.
Speaker 2:And thinking about that alignment and clarity around what are the things that different people and organizations need. So if what I need is just a specific amount of money to be able to, you know, pay the printer and make payroll, you know, for a certain amount of time, being very clear and honest about those needs with those who we're working with, right, and there might be specific editorial goals and needs, you know.
Speaker 1:Do you mean not fundraising every two months, saying you're going to go under the next day if you don't get such and such amount? I mean it's just really incredible. Yeah, all right, I'm with you.
Speaker 2:I'm with you, michael, it's the start of a conversation, it's not the end of it, obviously. This is something I'd love to explore more deeply with Now maybe I can lose you.
Speaker 1:Next topic, Because there's another dimension of this, I think right. Which is certainly part of the problem for unions historically has been their structure.
Speaker 1:Historically has been their structure and it's lack of appeal let's call it for the participation of their members and sometimes the disdain with which it holds its members and the anger with which it's viewed by its members. I mean all those things. I wonder if there isn't something uh similar on left media or new media or better media, whatever you want, the ecosystem right? Um, if, oh, I don't know how else to say this. The structure of our organizations in the media domain is often replicates the structure of mainstream media organizations. We talk about worker self-management, we talk about generalized participation, we talk about all those things, but when somebody looks, they don't. More socialistic, more anti-racist, more feminist forms of organization shouldn't also be on the agenda of organizations like we're talking about?
Speaker 2:I think that's 100% true. I do want to say and it's always a real challenge there is no perfect end state that we can design and so to think about, you know, to think about organizational structures and kind of like a as a prefigurative politics, I think has some like there's something interesting about that, but I think it's more about talking about the process, like I would.
Speaker 2:I would more, more about talking about the, the process like the kind of ongoing process of democratization and of opening things up.
Speaker 2:I would actually generally push back on people.
Speaker 2:You know the labor movement, for all of its faults, is the most democratic space that exists in a large amount of American life.
Speaker 2:The least democratic trade union is more democratic than almost anything else that people interact with on a day-to-day basis by virtue of the requirement to represent whatever workers exist in a place, and obviously there's a whole host of other issues that can come up up, but at the core of it, it's not about those structures themselves necessarily. It's also important to always keep in mind and I don't think you're not doing this, but I just want to articulate this like the structures, the organizational structures that we exist in are, at best, negotiated surrender to capital in the case of labor unions and their structure, and at worst for nonprofit independent media. Like structures that are entirely based on what that economic and political system allows us to create, right. So, whether that is about kind of not tax exempt nonprofits and their lack of ability to engage in partisan politics or even issue advocacy to some degree, you know we are living in the world that capital created, and so all of our structures are going to be intermediary structures toward the victory.
Speaker 2:Compromise somewhat yeah yeah, and so I just think it's important to say that out loud. And I think something that's important to and I think this is true if we think about the scope of our conversation, whether it's in the labor movement, whether it's in other formations and movements for change and transformation and justice, I think we have to understand the process that we are continually moving through, how to take snapshots of that process, to digest it and explain it to people, but how to articulate that as like in the context of where it is Sean Fain and the existing UAW leadership. That is not the end state, but it's an important moment right now that can evolve and continue to create more democracy. It's also dependent on how things turn out. It can devolve in different ways, and so I think it's important to kind of you know, complexity is something that's hard to communicate. You know that as well as anybody of you know complexity is something that's hard to communicate. You know that as well as anybody. And the more complex we get, you know, generally, the smaller the audience becomes.
Speaker 2:And I think that's something that I think about for movement left progressive, people-powered, independent media is that we've got to figure out a way also to work together with outlets and organizations that are very specifically have a small targeted audience that they're trying to reach, and the broadest audience that's actually one of the fundamental questions is how do you take, you know, somebody who's trying to talk to a very specific, you know, set of just, for example, trying to talk to a very specific set of just, for example, 500 thinkers or academics or organizers who engaged in something, and how is that project in conversation with a magazine or a radio station or a podcast network that is trying to reach millions of people? And so that's one of the like how do you actually work together at scale in ways where which both of those kinds of media efforts are able to inform each other and be in communication? I think that's actually one of the bigger questions. It's one of the bigger questions for social movement and political formations as well social movement and political formations as well.
Speaker 1:You exhibit one of the additional facets that seems to me to be critical, which is you frequently say I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about Well, that's no small deal, that you're thinking strategically about what to do and how to do it, and what the problems are and what the solutions are. That should be commonplace, like in sports, in athletics, a competing team does that. That's what they, you know. They try and figure out what they've done wrong, what they can do better, and on and on and on. They do that. The left not so much. I don't know whether you see it in ITT or not, depending upon the stuff that comes in, but if I had to and it would be a guess right, it would be an impression of material that is written. So now we're on the editorial side of things. I guess the amount of material that's written that's about what's wrong and why what's wrong hurts um dwarfs the amount of material that's written about strategy, much less the amount of material that's written about what it is we want to win which is almost nothing.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's written about what it is we want to win, which is almost nothing, I mean, and I often try and figure out why that is, because it wouldn't be the case in many other things, right, if we had a group of people who were trying to build a new city, we would think about you know, or trying to, but on the left, it's prevalent. Another thing that's prevalent that, I think, is the same cause is eyes on my local little network and no thought of the whole population. To me, this seems to evidence a belief that you can't win. As soon as you think you can't win, it all makes sense, right? Because if you can't win, what's the point of thinking about what you want to win?
Speaker 1:What's the point of thinking about being strategic? You just want to look radical and get along with your friend. You know what I mean. I mean it's a sad formulation, but it really does seem that way to me, and I've enjoyed this conversation because you're the opposite of that, um, and I think that, while that ought to be commonplace, shouldn't get too much praise for that, because it ought to be all of us yeah you know what I mean, but but at least it's some of us Z Magazine for many years, you know, I think, of ways to identify, because I think it's there.
Speaker 2:You know there's a question of who wants to move their agenda and who's curious about thinking and whose agenda is really kind of curiosity about like a strategic way in which to advance something that's much bigger. And I think there are a lot of people I've found in kind of you know, the conversations I've been in, who really want to think more expansively. And so I again, you know I this is my orientation from my organizing life and it's something that I've always said. You know, if our plan is just around to win the next thing, whether it's the next contract, the next election, none of those victories can be sustained right, and so, at the very least, we have to cast our vision a little bit further down the road.
Speaker 2:But one of the ways I think about it is you're either looking above the horizon or you're looking below it, and so how are we pushing people a little bit to think above what's on the horizon, above what's immediately possible?
Speaker 2:It's one of the reasons I love again the May Day 2028, because it's not to say here's how we're going to win the Workers' Republic, but, it's to say, can everyone just look a little bit higher and a little bit farther than what they've been used to doing, because we have to take this one step at a time, too. You can't transform. There are moments of real upsurge where you shift people's view, but without structure things like the uprising of 2020, things like this moment around Gaza these can be very ephemeral if we're not thinking about building structures that can actually solidify what's there. So I'm really you know, I'm actually looking forward, michael, after this conversation, to continuing this and to thinking about ways, you know, that we can really think about raising that horizon. I think that's what I'm familiar with your work over the years, too, in doing, sometimes in very difficult times when the wind is entirely against you. We have moments right now where the wind is a little bit at our back, sometimes never directly.
Speaker 2:And so we've got to utilize that when it happens.
Speaker 1:Agreed. Okay, we're a little over an hour and so we should end soon, but I want to ask you if there's anything that you know we haven't covered that you'd sort of like to say something about before we bring at least this episode to an end. I'd certainly like to have you back in the future, so is there something? That you feel we haven't discussed that. You want to.
Speaker 2:I actually think this is related to some of what we discussed around media, but there's a project that we've been participating in called Media Against Apartheid and Displacement and the URL is themadorg, and it's, you know, a small set of publications that have been compiling and sharing their coverage, particularly of Gaza and what's happening there, and I think that's a little bit of a glimmer into the possibilities of partnership for moving forward.
Speaker 2:How are we ensuring that we are? You know, one of the things we can do without saying, oh, we're going to partner to raise this money together, we're going to do a group buy of health insurance is to say we can share each other's coverage in an open and honest way, and that that's a path toward thinking about how we coordinate more strategically going forward. And so that's something you know that I'm excited. You know it's at a relatively small scale to start out with, but it's something that I think has real potential to grow. And so that you know, I think there's there's a lot of different we have to do, you know, a thousand experiments and a million experiments, and we have to think about ways to give those some structure and life and make assessments of what's working and what's not. But I really appreciate this conversation, Michael.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for being on it really was a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, yeah.
Speaker 1:And all that said. This is Mike Albert signing off. Until next time for Revolution Z Don't go.