RevolutionZ
RevolutionZ
Ep 318 Jeremy Brecher Offers Strategy for Fighting Maga Tyranny
Episode 318 of RevolutionZ has Jeremy Brecher as guest to discuss his recent exemplary pamphlet which explores strategies for winning against MAGA. The episode discusses Trumpian aims and both electoral and non-electoral forms of our own activism, emphasizing the power of strikes, public pressure, and unified resistance. Brecher describes successful initiatives like North Carolina's Forward Together and the Poor People's Campaign to show how grassroots movements can bring about significant social transformation. He provides insights into local actions inspired by the Green New Deal, and emphasies the importance of community-driven efforts to foster sustainable justice. We also consider Trump's political character-- is he moron or genius of both--and its implications, as well as our need for extensive solidarity and mutual support.
Hello, my name is Michael Albert and I am the host of the podcast that's titled Revolution Z. This is our 318th consecutive episode. Our guest for this episode is Jeremy Brecker. Jeremy is a co-founder and senior strategic advisor for the Labor Network for Sustainability. He's the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike, common, preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction and the Green New Deal from Below. He's been an activist in labor, climate, civil rights and many other social movements. He has recently written for Z-Net a multi-part essay I guess a pamphlet on defending society against MAGA tyranny.
Speaker 1:The work is intensely strategic. It is not about impending pain or about recounting blame. Word after word seeks to strategically help with the project that we now face, and it is that last work on defending society that has caused me to have Jeremy here as guest today. So, to start, I would like to ask first about your being moved to write at length like this. The question, I think, only makes sense after all, why not tackle the strategic questions what now and how?
Speaker 1:If I note that I think that what you have done is not only exceptional but also an exception. It is not only in-depth and smart and exemplary, because it is not mainly looking for who to blame and it is not mainly a catalog of onrushing pain, but because it instead looks forward to what to do and, to a degree, also how to do it and as well and perhaps at the moment most important to being heard to why we can act with reasoned hope of success. So I ask what was your plan, your hope for the effort that you expended First? What was the motivation that fueled your effort? And after that we can talk about the substance.
Speaker 2:Well, as the elections approached, it became progressively clear that there was unlikely to be a clear-cut progressive or even democratic victory, and that we were, at best, going to be faced with a long period of contestation over the results of the election, and that that would involve the same kinds of attempts to undermine basic democratic processes on the part of Trump and the MAGA movement that we've seen so often in the last more than a dozen years, and so I noticed that there was not a lot of conversation about what to do in that event. In the actual event, it turned out to be worse than that. In the Electoral College, trump won, although obviously in substantial part as a result of the corruption of the democratic process, the Electoral College system, gerrymandering, voter exclusion and all the other things that make our democracy be undemocratic. Voter exclusion and all the other things that make our democracy be undemocratic and without which there's no way that Trump could possibly have won in the electoral. In the popular vote, there was, I think, less than a 1% difference between Harris and Trump in the counted outcome. Given the fact that the reality is we live in an undemocratic democracy, we're clearly going to be faced with at least an effort by Trump to take power and, as it turned out, because the electoral college results, in fact, taking power through democratic procedures. Same way, hitler did it and a number of others that we could mention who were not strong advocates of democracy, at least as I understand it. So I was already kind of making notes and trying to figure out okay, what are we going to do, in hopes we'll have something ready for when we knew the results of the election.
Speaker 2:Then, of course, when Trump won the Electoral College, it became a much more pressing but also much more clear-cut situation, where we knew that Trump and the Project 2025 folks and the Musks and all the other forces that have gathered around Trump were going to be in control of the national government.
Speaker 2:We now know that that also includes both houses of Congress, although only by a sliver, and we know that it includes, for practical purposes, the Supreme Court, which is very unlikely to provide significant restraints.
Speaker 2:And we know that we're facing a regime that has no compunctions about explicit use of violence, suppression of protest, obviously attacking all kinds of particular groups, threatening to jail women who get abortions or people who help women get abortions, and I could go, of course, on and on with the litany that, as you said, is easy to spend a lot of time obsessing about and crying with alarm, but what struck me as the most important thing is that the Trump regime, the MAGA regime that we're about to face, is not just an attack on one or another group, it's not just an attack on women, it's not just an attack on immigrants, not just an attack on people of color, not just on people who support the human rights of Palestinians, but it's really an attack on all the things that make us be a society and make it possible for us to live together in a society in a way that isn't nasty, brutish and short, as was described a few centuries ago, and so it was inevitable that people were going to be discouraged, that people were going to be intimidated about standing up to the Trump juggernaut, that people were going to feel helpless, but a large part of that was the result of deliberate intimidation, deliberate inculcation of a feeling of helplessness on the part of.
Speaker 2:That was the result of deliberate intimidation, deliberate inculcation of a feeling of helplessness on the part of Trump and his supporters.
Speaker 2:It was not based on a realistic assessment of what the actual power configurations were, and so it seemed to me very, very important to try to do an assessment of what the real power configurations were and what powers the ordinary folks in general and specifically, all the people who are going to be hurt by the Trump regime, which is surely I'm not going to say it's 99%, but it's getting close to 99% it's really the overwhelming majority of people. What is the power that they have if they can join together and if they can find the means to resist? It was very important to lay that out and have that available to people, whether they're ready to jump into the fray today, whether they've already jumped into the fray, or whether they're going to jump in tomorrow or next week or even six months from now. It's very important to help them do that and to figure out how and where to jump to provide a good analysis of what are the real power configurations.
Speaker 1:Another minute on motivation, please, if we can. My impression is that many people I actually think many millions of people acknowledge that MAGA is a horror and even admit that they fear fascism. And yet they can sit at dinner and say such things and feel such things, yet so far it doesn't seem to have much or even any implication for their life choices beyond their going on record as being horrified. Some say roughly Trump is in the saddle and we're fucked. I face facts, so I will hunker down to survive Years off, perhaps things will be better. Others don't even say progress is now impossible so that I have to turn my other cheek. They just do so. They seem to not feel any impetus to do other than to go back to school, back to work, back to Netflix or whatever. Do you see these two forms of resignation and if so, what do you think will arouse enough people to action, for resistance to succeed?
Speaker 2:Well, let me start by paying respect to people who have both of those responses, because I don't think they're stupid responses and I don't think that they are motivated by evil intents. I think they primarily represent a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, and the reason that I wrote the piece that we're discussing really is to give people some realistic sense of why there are effective strategies for addressing what's coming at us in terms of the MAGA juggernaut. And I think that point, at which people will become activated to participate in challenging the mega-juggernaut and participate in what I've referred to as social self-defense, is the point at which they are experiencing at least the beginnings of the pain that you talk about, and that's not going to be very long. It's going to be the first day of the new Trump administration and it's going to affect a huge proportion of people. Just taking a couple of examples if you think about all the people who are going to be affected if they shut down Medicare and force people into Medicare Advantage plans, which is what they're planning to do in any case. If you think about what's going to happen as food programs are cut and I could go on and on and on, because they have a 900-page plan for what to do and those are just a few random examples as people become affected or as it moves beyond the stage of oh, they'll never do that, which I think is part of what people have in their mind. You know, that's a lot of political talk, but it's never really going to happen.
Speaker 2:I can't believe how many people say that and it's just going to be like the first Trump administration.
Speaker 2:It's going to be, you know, and it's not like it was utopia here in America under Biden things, that there were really horrible things going on, and it's just going to be a little more of that.
Speaker 2:That, I think, is a approach that people will very quickly be disabused of when they see the reality of what's what's coming down here. And so I quote a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright who went into exile to escape the Nazis, and the poem basically says when all of the radicals and all of the critics of society are in jail, who's going to point out the moral to the people? And the answer is just as always, cold and hunger will point out the moral, and I think that the starting point for understanding how this is going to turn around is what are the actual effects, or believably threatening effects, that Trump and his crew is going to have, and that's going to come very fast. How fast the reaction will be what it will be. As you know, the actual development of the popular mind and of mass movements is not something that can be predicted or controlled, but I think that the trigger for it is likely to be the actual impacts of what Trump and MAGA do to people.
Speaker 1:One theme I guess we could call it that I think a subset of listeners to us today and of your prospective readers may have some qualms about is your inclusion of electoral activism as well as non-electoral strikes, sanctuaries and the like as part of resistance, and the importance of resistance against MAGA including sectors beyond let's call it anti-capitalist, well-studied leftists to also include liberals, independents and even disenchanted Trump voters. How would you make the case to someone who says that path is co-optation, that path is a road to defeat that. Instead, it is a necessary path and part of what it means to move forward positively.
Speaker 2:Well, first thing is, if it was a policy, a strategy of participating in elections and electoral politics and nothing else, I would agree 100% that it's a path to co-optation at best, and possibly a path to in fact supporting all kinds of things that we would consider to be not only reactionary but anti-human. The strategy that's laid out in the pamphlet is anything but a electoral-only politics. Its strategy is actually designed to pressure and affect the electoral arena both from within and very, very much from without, and in fact, a major section of it is called the non-electoral opposition, and it now approaches the question of how not by trying to elect officials that are anti-Trump in some direct way, but rather by pressure from the outside on those officials, on the Democratic Party, on the population and on people who may be on the fence and need to be persuaded or pressured to become part of social self-defense. How do we do that? It absolutely has to include pressure from the outside, organization of the outside and direct action from the outside.
Speaker 1:I wonder. Imagine if you will. Somebody like what you're describing, somebody who has been, you know, reacting to what's going on, might have voted for Trump or voted strongly against Trump, voted strongly against Trump. But the situation unfolds as you envision which I agree with, and the situation becomes so disturbing to that person that they want to do something. Now, what, that is to say, most of those people won't have clear feelings about how to get involved.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, I think that, of course, this kind of micro level political action is obviously always dependent on the situation, the details of what's unfolding, what is possible at that time, what resources you have. So it's very difficult to give a general answer to a question like that. But I think that the starting point is to look at the places that people are in fact being impacted. The reaction, the way in which the question of people being denied medical benefits has suddenly leapt into the public view and concern it was a private concern for millions and millions of people before and it's a resolve and action that I don't endorse but that fits the old-time anarchist description of propaganda of the deed suddenly brought this issue to public attention in a way that has a huge impact. I would certainly say that at this particular juncture reaching out to the people who are worried about their health care and angry about their health care, and saying here, sign this petition, come to this meeting, come to this rally. We're going to demand that people in your situation have health care that's not going to be denied, because some corporation has some algorithm that says they'll make more money if they deny. You corporation has some algorithm that says they'll make more money if they deny you, and that's just one example.
Speaker 2:If you take that for all the different ways, same for food programs or housing programs and same go through the 900 pages of the Project 2025 and all the way that that's going to be hurting particular people 2025 and all the way that that's going to be hurting particular people groups, large groups of people and find ways of and create pathways that those people can connect both to activities within the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2:In other words, pressure politicians, democrats, office holders and other party leaders that they have to take a stand, for example, for universal health care, and pressure them from within the party and also organize as part of a non-electoral opposition to demand that and give people pathways to participating in that. To demand that and give people pathways to participating in that along the lines that I was saying demonstrate become just sign can start with signing a petition. We don't think that people in our day, in our, the members of our parent teachers association, do not think that food programs for children should be eliminated. And then, after the petition, is all the next steps that are what you do to mobilize against policies threatening ordinary folks.
Speaker 1:Another theme of Defending Society, the pamphlet that we're talking about. That struck me was that it didn't just investigate and motivate the need for wide, diverse and energetic resistance of many types, but you made a case that the different types should lend their power each to the rest to escape isolation, to get beyond being siloed and to attain multi-issue, multi-tactic solidarity. Can you outline the case you made for that and perhaps summarize the North Carolina example that you offered to display it?
Speaker 2:Sure, the case is almost self-evident.
Speaker 2:It should be obvious, namely that individually, in isolation, the various groups that you mentioned and practically any others we can mention, are limited in the amount of power that they have, and that the way they're going to get power is to become part of a broader movement that will pull the power of many different groups and sectors and simultaneously withdraw, to the extent that they can, the power that's supporting Trump, or at least tolerating Trump, and so undermine the pillars of support for the MAGA offensive. And those are the primary reasons. There's a secondary set of reasons, which is I guess you could call them humanistic reasons that when people are being abused and oppressed, all of us have an interest in seeing that there's this basic human rights and rights of individuals and groups not to be oppressed are established and protected, because you know, today it's them but tomorrow it'll be us. So that's sort of a broader fundamental principle of just living together in society, but in this case it's also specifically a question of how do you get the power to oppose the Magan juggernaut.
Speaker 2:And the thing that I would point out before I talk about North Carolina was that there are many, many instances, and many instances in the first Trump resistance, in the first Trump regime, where people in fact supported each other in a very broad way. Supported each other in a very broad way, I suppose, the women's marches, which had millions of people in them and very diverse not just women, also men, also strong emphasis on rights of gay, lesbian, trans and other groups but also supported by many, many unions. Actually, it was supported by the Democratic. The first one was supported by the Democratic National Committee, and I could go on and on with the list. The high school students who fought for gun control again were supported by an extremely wide swath of organizations and groups that didn't have any particular orientation toward that issue but felt that this was part of building an opposition to what was already a sort of nascent proto-fascist movement. So there's and there's lots in this paper that I think is evidence that it really is possible. It's not a fantasy that these groups can join together and support each other. I think it could have gone farther. In the first Trump resistance, these groups supported each other a lot and in a lot of different ways, but they didn't really create a unified opposition. That doesn't mean they have to merge or give up their own issues and concerns, but making a concerted opposition, what I call a non-electoral opposition that can project the issues that are going to be the mobilizing issues against MAGA into the public arena.
Speaker 2:But there's a case that you asked me about that is quite an amazing example of that a statewide conference convention and took what they called the 13 freedom tribes of North Carolina so this was African Americans, this was immigrants, this was women, this was various gender-related groups and unions, and so on, gender-related groups and unions, and so on and invited them all to come and bring their concerns and their programs to this convention, and they created a common platform that incorporated the demands and concerns of each of them and all agreed to support them. Then the next thing they did was to pick one struggle, and it was the struggle of packing house workers at the Smithfield Corporation who had been trying to get a union and had been prevented by their employer from getting a union for an extended period of time. And they said we're all going to support this because this is not just a question of these workers, this is a question of the standards that need to be created for all workers in North Carolina, and so we're going to fight to establish those standards for them, and then that will become the benchmark for what's needed for all workers in the state. And they did that. And, for example, black ministers went and called for boycotts and other tactics of that kind and eventually Smithfield gave up and recognized the union. So that was kind of where they started, where they became most famous and many of your listeners will remember this to go to use the bathroom in a school or any library or any public place of your biological gender.
Speaker 2:This is, of course, a veiled but a very overt attack on trans people and intended as such. And their idea was, by making this be the big issue, they could get the more conservative parts of this coalition, which came to be called Forward Together, split them off and get some of them to say, oh, this is terrible, all this gender confusion, and we have to support legislation to destroy it, or at least we don't want to be associated with those people anymore. And the bill also had all kinds of anti-union and racist stuff in it, but they didn't really press that. They pressed the parts that were the anti-trans parts. So the Forward Together Coalition first of all began educating people on how obviously this was a divide and conquer strategy and they said it's basically a question of human rights, that these people should not be discriminated against and it's just. Black people should not support this and should in fact stand up against it, because it's a form of discrimination and if they can discriminate against trans people, they're going to discriminate against you, and same for immigrants and same for trade unions. And it ended up with the Black ministers of North Carolina, who were in this coalition and very much key leaders of this coalition, preaching sermons, getting educated about all the anti-human, anti-worker and anti-everybody things that were in the program of this sort of right-wing cabal. So that's the story.
Speaker 2:They continued a number of years with these kinds of programs. I haven't checked on them. Late as of a couple of years ago it was still continuing, but it's inspired similar efforts in about 15 different states and that is the base for what we now know nationally as the Poor People's Campaign, which is trying to do a similar kind of movement nationally. It's hard to do it nationally and they're doing it partially by building a base in a dozen or 15 different states, the. I don't think that there's any one organization or movement that can be the umbrella for the non-electoral opposition, but we can all talk about ourselves as part of it and we can all create vehicles, like the Forward Together vehicle in North Carolina, for actually bringing people together, supporting each other, endorsing each other's programs and creating a common and public non-electoral coalition, non-electoral opposition that works side by side with, but also pressures what people are doing inside the electoral arena and inside the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1:I didn't know the history that you presented of the North Carolina efforts and I was very impressed with the account that you gave in the pamphlet. But I was also, I have to admit, a little bit troubled as I read about the efforts and I was moved by the model that the efforts displayed. I had in my mind as well that I knew that years later Trump won North Carolina. So I want to ask you about what may be another dimension of the struggle that we face. What steps might we take to ensure that our resistance doesn't stop MAGA but nonetheless leave back to pre-Trump business as usual and then sorrowfully lead cyclically around again to fascist extremes? How do we cause our resistance to not only block fascism but then continue to win new social relations way beyond what earlier bred fascism? What needed to be added, say in the North Carolina case, for Trump to have been easily beaten there later?
Speaker 2:and for the movement to have continued growing ever stronger and richer and focused there too. Well, the first thing I can say is that there are no guarantees in life and certainly no guarantees in politics. And as an ancient Greek saying had it, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and we have to incorporate in our way of thinking that you don't win a battle and then forever after everything's going to be groovy. So that is one piece of it. For the North Carolina details and what happened in the last election, I know it was bitterly, bitterly contested and I don't know the details well enough to be able to give a political analysis of it. North Carolina is still a southern state. It has the same legacy of racism and reaction that has dominated in the south for longer perhaps than the life of our country. Even so, the fact that it ever breaks out of that mold, I think, is the news, not the fact that it has slid back to that, but what the details are, I don't know. As for your broader question, I'm very glad you asked it.
Speaker 2:This pamphlet on defending society against MAGA tyranny actually has a whole section that is based that, as part of the resistance to the MAGA onslaught, people can create their own bastions of decency, of pro-people public policy and of community and worker self-organization. And I just published a book called the Green New Deal from Below how Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy, where I looked at actually over 100 examples in more than 40 states of ways that people are creating Green New Deals in their communities, in their cities, in their states. Some of them are run tribes, some of them are by unions and some of them call themselves Green New Deals. There's a Boston Green New Deal, there's a California Green New Deal. Some of them don't use the term but have very much the same kinds of strategies and policies and approach, and these have been until my book. I don't think there's been any broad description of them or account of them, but in fact they've been extremely successful in I've got 100 examples, but there's certainly many, many, many more in bringing together different consistencies around positive programs.
Speaker 2:And the core idea of the Green New Deal, as well as these Green New Deals from below, is we have to fight climate change. We have to therefore transition from fossil fuels to a fossil-free economy, but we can do that in ways that provide good jobs for workers and that provide great strides toward justice in terms of race, in terms of gender, in terms of all the inequalities that mark our society, and so protecting the climate can become a means also to expanding social and economic justice and viable economic livelihoods for working people. So, um, the chapter or section in the paper that discusses that lays out a lot of examples of how that's actually going on and then also talks explicitly about how that can connect with and be part of the social self-defense. Of course, the book the Green New Deal from Below has many, many, many, many more examples.
Speaker 1:All right, I want to recommend people to pay attention to, or give a look at, or read and think about. To talk about the pamphlet that Jeremy has done and it's featured on znetworkorg, so it's easy to find it's going up there, I think, a chapter at a time, right, but the whole thing is also up there At once.
Speaker 2:The whole thing is they're posting it daily sections for a week, but each section has a link to the posting of the whole thing on the website Okay, I hadn't even seen that myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's there, okay. Of the whole thing on the website Okay, I hadn't even seen that myself. Yeah, yeah, okay, if you want to. I have a couple of questions that are sort of outside the pamphlet, but if you want to say anything more about it, go ahead or we can move on.
Speaker 2:I hope people will find it useful. It has a lot of examples of things people have done in the past, ways that we can learn lessons from those to do better or to do different, and might as well read it now, because you're going to need it. If you don't need it today, you're going to need it tomorrow. I hope that this will become a document that people actually not only read but have discussion groups around. If you have a few friends who are also worried, try to figure out how they should be responding to the coming Trump onslaught. Just take an evening and have a discussion about it.
Speaker 2:That's, you know, in the first Trump regime, a lot of the things that manifested themselves in demonstrations with millions of people and big conflict in the streets, and also massive mobilizations in the political arena, unprecedented voter registration and unprecedented voter turnout All those things had their roots, in part, in small local groups of people who just said OK, we're going to get together with our neighbors, our friends, the people that are associates and take measures to fight this, and I'm confident I can't say anything about the scale, but I'm confident that millions of people are going to feel that that's necessary and want to do it, and I hope this book will give them some idea about how to go about doing that when they get there.
Speaker 1:Can we maybe step back a step or aside a step? Can we maybe step back a step or aside a step? I think a lot of people are trying to understand Trump in some sense and for them the question is idiot or genius at what he does? And a lot of people call him an idiot and a very few people call him a genius, and I'm wondering how you sort of see him as a political character in that sense. Not all the bad that will come from him, but how do we regard him?
Speaker 2:A difficult question and not one that I have. I have observed the same contradictions and same puzzles as everyone else, without any special knowledge or wisdom about dealing with it.
Speaker 1:That's why I asked you and didn't give an answer myself.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of things I would point out. One is that the polls that were taken a week after the election said that 55 percent of the population opposed Trump, disapproved of Trump and only 41% approved of Trump. So Trump's political genius, if he has one, really has two. There's a couple of pieces to it. One is his brilliant ability to appeal to that 40%, not to the population as a whole, but to his own hardcore and followers. I think he is, if not a genius, very, very clever and astute about doing that, doing that. And the other thing is that he has shown, much more than anyone has done before, the extent to which pure bullying can dominate the American political system, and he has many, many followers and imitators in that regard. And his ability to inspire bullying at the municipal and county and state political levels, as well as in the congressional level and in every arena, is a big part of the power that he's been able to amass, and I think that that's a you don't want to call it a talent, but it's something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a practice, it's an effective practice and the difficulty of the official opposition, namely the Democratic Party, to stand up to it. The old saying you have to stand up to a bully is as true here as it ever was on a school playground, maybe more so. More so and I think that that is a crucial part of Trump's power has been his ability to utilize his capacity as a bully, and there's a demonstration effect which is that all kinds of other MAGA leaders at every level have learned oh, we'll just bully and bully, and bully and bully, and these people will be intimidated and will take power that way.
Speaker 1:I agree. He also seems to have an incredible capacity for deflection. You know, coming up with nonsense that he knows is nonsense, that the people around him know is nonsense that he knows is nonsense that the people around him know is nonsense, but which wipes everything that is accessible and judgeable off the table.
Speaker 2:It's remarkable. I saw an interesting analysis of that by someone from TPM Talking Points Memo TPM Talking Points Memo it's a political website who said what you're really seeing here is the professional wrestling model, where the protagonists stand up and beat their chest and shake their fist at the enemy and do a whole staged bravado, bullying act and then they do the wrestling, which is, of course, also staged and stage it is choreographed. But if it's being choreographed, well, it's great entertainment and it isn't really real. And the fact that policy has something going on here is really not part of the show is really not part of the show.
Speaker 2:And another friend of mine pointed out, there really is a gap between the policy and its effects and people's understanding of what policy is and how it's going to affect them. A lot of people have trouble connecting their real daily life experience and conditions with what the policy of the government is. They know that they're unhappy about their conditions of life and so they don't like the politicians who are in and they give support to someone like Trump who says everything is terrible, your life is terrible and I'll fix it. But what this means in terms of actual policy is a much bigger reach for them in an area where, as a society, we've kind of become uneducated and we're going to have to re-educate ourselves to re-educate ourselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right. Well, years back I saw a commercial on TV. I was watching TV and a commercial for Sanders, when he was running, came on. And in this commercial I don't know how often it was available or how much people saw it, but I was moved by it he comes on and he says in essence I don't remember exactly, but he says in essence, we have to get to the point where we can care for the person across town and for the person across the country, the way we care for our neighbors and the way we care for our family and ourselves.
Speaker 1:And I was shocked to hear that coming out of my TV, on the one hand, and I was also moved by his willingness to say something like that, which probably sounds peculiar to a lot of Americans but is incredibly valid. And I wanted to add that maybe, or to have you add that, to the logic of the North Carolina model. It isn't just nothing wrong with porting, advancing, providing aid to the other silo, so to speak, the other program, not one's own, on grounds that it will help self. The other reason to do it is on grounds that it will help them and that we feel that the same way we feel the other, and it seems to me that that's another gain that emerges from that North Carolina model, from that, you know, it creates that level of solidarity or mutual aid and of mutual respect, and I think your pamphlet does reflect that, but I wanted to have it added to this session.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, the first thing that strikes me as I listen to the question is how bizarre it is, in a society where the overwhelmingly dominant religion is Christianity and the other main religions are Islam and Judaism, that this idea of I am my neighbor's keeper, I am responsible for my neighbor that this is somehow controversial or outside the mainstream of the cultural values of our society is totally strange and bizarre, is often much more what people cling to in what they think of it, what they present as religion.
Speaker 2:but it's actually not love thy neighbor as thyself, which is a pretty simple little formula for what you were saying, and one that is attributed to a guy who used to have a lot of respect, at least in principle, in our society. That fundamental idea needs to be revived absolutely as part of what a human politics involves.
Speaker 2:And, of course, who is my neighbor was the whole point of Jesus's question. It was the Samaritans who were hated by the particular group of Jews that he was speaking to. He was saying well, they're your neighbors. That's not. You know, it's not your kith and kin and the people who are, oh, this is our group and of course we support the people in our group. It's not your kith and kin and the people who are, oh, this is our group and of course we support the people in our group. It's the people who are in the other group who you need to learn to treat as your neighbors.
Speaker 2:I think that this is very much built into. I think we can draw on those religious and humanistic and it's a fundamental part of democratic beliefs that we're all in this together. I think we can draw on all of those traditions and we need to redraw them, and some people can redraw them from within their own traditions. I don't think we have to abolish the existing traditions of responsibility and caring beyond the immediate neighborhood to embrace humanity as a whole, about of people coming together partially on a transactional basis because they need each other is also a step toward first saying, well, that guy over there. He's been supporting me and I understand why he needs me to support him and I'm for that. And what's the big deal? Why don't we just go on supporting each other in the transactional necessity of? Well, if I try to fight the boss all by myself I'm not going to get anywhere. Quite the contrary, the only place I'm likely to get is fired. But if all the other people I work with cooperate, the boss is going to have a problem because, as that old talking blues talking union says, be mighty lonely if everyone decides to walk out on him.
Speaker 2:So that dynamic, that practical dynamic, but that actually has, in many situations and many locations and periods, developed into a broader kind of solidarity that's based on one for all and all for one. We have the same needs, we're all human. That is a core value. That solidarity is not just a pragmatic matter. But people come to say you know, this is how we should be living, pragmatic matter. But people come to say you know, this is how we should be living. So I'm not saying that this is inevitable or that it happens all the time, but I think you can see a process that starts with people supporting each other for practical reasons, recognizing that to do that, they have to get rid of some of the baggage that they have that leads them to be hostile or antagonistic to people because of their race, their gender, who they like to sleep with, whether they what their values are.
Speaker 1:Thank you, jeremy. I know we have to get off now, but I just want to remind people to take a look at znetworkorg and take a look at Jeremy's pamphlet. And that said this is Mike Albert signing off until next time for Revolution Z.