In this episode we were honored to host Kali Akuno, co-director and co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders and a co-host at Black Power Media’s Remix Morning Show. 

We brought Kali and Kamau into conversation under a banner of discussing strategy. Strategy is something that Josh and I feel is both essential and often lacking within a lot of formations in the US left. 

The conversation is wide-ranging and touches on a number of topics that may prompt folks to need greater context. In the show notes we will include some links to other readings and discussions with Kali and Kamau on what the Jackson plan is, why they left the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and what their current work entails. 

Beyond strategy, in this episode we get into discussion of political education, neoliberal socialization, burnout, fickle organizers, reflection and criticism, Democratic Centralism, cadre and mass organizing, climate change, ecological collapse, food sovereignty, self-defense, revolutionary violence, and the capture of social movements through the nonprofit industrial complex and Democratic Party electoral politics.

It is our greatest hope that conversations like this one provide folks with tools, insights and provocations that they can bring with them into their organizing efforts so that we can build more effectively going forward for the alternatives are clearly bleak and dystopian. 

Both Community Movement Builders and Cooperation Jackson do accept donations. So we will also provide links to both organizations in our show notes if people would like to give them a donation. And please support Black Power Media as well. 

And of course, we need your support to continue to bring you these conversations freely, and in non-commoditized form. All of our work is available ad-free and none of our episodes are behind a paywall and we hope that we can always keep it that way so that all of these conversations are freely available to organizers, activists, students, workers, the poor, and the oppressed. To support our ability to do that you can contribute to our patreon for as little as $1 a month or for a yearly contribution of just $11 a year.

For more context:

Cooperation Jackson's Kali Akuno on the lessons of and the ongoing struggle in Jackson MS

Community Movement Builders and Liberated Zones Theory with Kamau Franklin

The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle For Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy

Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi