The Counterpublic Papers vol. 4 no. 18

So because I lost my cellphone in Toronto I culled my podcast list. I’m now down to four, of which I listen to two, New Dawn (Michael Dawson’s Race and Capitalism podcast) and The Dig (Daniel Denvir’s podcast co-supported by Jacobin Magazine).

I’ve written here about the wave of teacher’s strikes. In fact I wrote about the first major modern teacher’s strike in Knocking the Hustle. Political elites in Illinois (and note I don’t write “Republicans” here because it wasn’t as if Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan and the like wanted a strong Chicago teachers’ union, in fact they wanted the opposite) couldn’t kill unions through a Right to Work law, but they could reduce their ability to strike. They did this by creating a supermajority member strike rule—legal strikes now required a supermajority of all dues paying members, an incredibly high hurdle to bear for a union that had tens of thousands of members. I’m sure elites thought that this would pretty much reduce the odds of teacher strikes to zero.

It did not.

Anyway.

Daniel Denvir interviewed Jane McAlevey about the rise of teacher strikes across the country. McAlevey is a union organizer and comes from a family of union organizers. She’s got an incredibly keen eye for what labor (and by extension progressive forces in general) need in this moment, and it really boils down to two things. The first is radical political education—people need to be taught and in a lot of instances retaught about the relationship between politics, economics, and I’d add culture, in order to understand the causes and consequences of increased economic and political inequality. The second is, that in as much as any change we want is going to have to involve majority support and any potential loss makes the possibility of garnering majority support that much harder, we need to engage in struggles that we can actually win.

Now here’s where she talks about something I’d thought about but never heard articulated.

A structure test.

To create life-changing contracts, life-changing change, you need 90% of the workers ready to walk out. How do you know? You basically have to figure out the relationships between workers and each other, and workers and the shop they work in. And you have to be scientific about figuring out how many people they can actively count on. Supermajorities in the US context are required for durable change. How do you know you have one? This isn’t an art, but is fairly scientific—not saying that it isn’t creative, not to say that it can’t be elegant, or beautiful. You have to know whether you’ve got the structure you need to make the political move you want to make.

I also appreciated the relationship McAlevey established between strikes and formal, traditional politics.   

Best quote of the year: “they go together like peanut butter and jelly for fuck’s sake.”

Anyway listen here.

This idea of a structure test can and should be applied to actually existing black politics, as well as to progressive politics outside of the workplace more broadly. Let’s take the most pressing issue, or one of them, state violence in the form of police. We know that in black communities, in concrete blocks with black people living on them, we have three populations of black people. Black people who are the primary victims of police violence, direct victims. These people are young and male, or depending on how prevalent sex work is in the neighborhood, young and male/female. There are black people who are the primary “beneficiaries” of police violence in the neighborhood. These people are old and female. They’re the ones who are often scared for their grandchildren as they send them off to school, they are the ones who can’t go outside because they’re scared to shoo kids off of their stoops. Then there are people in the middle. The police are the equivalent of smog, something to drive through, something they breathe like bad air.

In order to get that block, that neighborhood, to create life-changing reforms (non-reformist reforms), the people on that block, all of them, have to be politically educated, made aware of their relationship to each other, and then their relationship to the neighborhood and city they live in. They then have to be able to work towards super-majority for the types of actions that will then lead create the type of political-economic crisis required to generate the change they want to see.

This is not actually existing black politics at all. But it conceivably could be.

A reader told me that Baltimore City Schools are basically going through another round of cuts at ‘failing schools’, even as they’ve been promised a significant infusion of resources by the state. He asked what it would take to take the same approach to the police department, a failing unit if ever there was one.

It would take something like this approach. A block by block base building approach designed to re-educate and develop self-directed leadership in Baltimore residents and then one designed to point them towards the type of radical action that can cause cause a system-changing crisis. As we’re just a few weeks away from the five year anniversary of the uprising it bears remembering that the uprising was far smaller in every way (except perhaps media impact, given technological change) than its 1968 predecessor…what would happen if a larger slice of the city were organized?

(Now some might suggest that in as much as McAlevey is talking about worker strikes that the idea only really applies to the workplace. I’d argue that it primarily applies to the workplace but does not have to stay there. In fact I’d argue that if something like a “black politics” is to garner a radical emancipatory core…hell if something like a “labor politics” is to garner a radical emancipatory core it can’t just stay there.)

….

Relatedly. Turns out that not only did Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh get a few hundred thousand dollars from her place on the board of the University of Maryland Medical System, not only did she get a loan from a couple of UMMS directors to help her defeat Sheila Dixon (herself no stranger to corruption), she bought a house in cash in my old neighborhood of Ashburton (probably the oldest middle-upper income black community in Baltimore) for far below market value….from a family close to Joan Pratt, an elected official she owns a business with. The Baltimore Brew has been doing real work in uncovering this.

(As an aside my doctoral dissertation was on gender in black politics, focusing on Detroit. It would’ve positively sucked if I changed it into a book right during my first tenure track job…but I think it’s worth taking up now. As a result of shifts in political economy black women now wield a great deal of explicit political power in black communities. While it is true that we don’t have black lives matter without black women, it’s also true that much of the corruption in a city like Baltimore happens through black women as well. We’re swiftly moving towards a black politics run behind and in front of the scenes by black women.)

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More to say, but it’ll keep. I’ll be in Chicago from Friday to Sunday for the Midwest Political Science Association (incidentally holding the first of what will likely be several “50 is the new 50” parties). And will likely be at the Critical GIS conference this week at Red Emma’s. Perhaps I’ll see some of you around? If not, next week. Remember the “being” in human being is a verb as well as a noun.