As we face a pandemic that has created a kind of general strike we need to think about organizing our lives differently. Today’s Interchange offers a class perspective to stand against the capitalism that offers only destruction for so many of us.

***

We begin with exploitation and expropriation: Capitalism’s twin pillars of abuse and theft–and how this frames and limits the ways humans can even conceive of alternative ways of organizing society. We then move quickly to the necessity of envisioning and propounding a very anti-capitalist set of essential positions through which we might begin to understand how the very American and very powerful myth of individualism keeps us separated from a much needed working class solidarity. Our lives depend on that solidarity.

GUEST

Michael D. Yates began a University teaching career in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh’s satellite campus at Johnstown in the mid-70s where he participated in union organizing activities, first with the maintenance and custodial workers on campus and then with the teachers. He traveled all over the state of Pennsylvania and into West Virginia and Ohio, educating workers about labor unions, their right to form a union, and economics. He taught for many years in the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where his students were union officers and members.

RELATED

Exploitation and Expropriation, or Why Capitalism Must be Attacked with Equal Force on Every Front by Michael Yates

Michael Yates on Labor Education (A 5-Part Series)

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About the Economy (Interchange)

Labor Strikes Are Essential History (Interchange)

Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW)

Richmond Progressive Alliance

MUSIC

All songs by The Redskins off of Neither Washington Nor Moscow (1986)

“Reds Strike the Blues”

“Go Get Organized”

“Turnin’ Loose”

“Keep On Keepin’ On”

“Lean On Me”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young