Spadework

You are listening to the second episode of our second season. It is an episode I, Antje, was particularly looking forward to, since it focuses on many questions that are central to my personal work in the labor movement: How can we move from digital outreach to offline engagement? How do we get someone from the WhatsApp group into a meeting? These are questions, we need to answer if we want to use the full potential of our movements.  

Over the years, I have seen very good campaigns that wasted parts of this potential. There are these campaigns that have very well developed digital outreach strategies, with specific target groups, and easy to access tools for first contact, but then they fail to move people beyond the digital spaces and down the conversion funnel of engagement. 

At the same time, I’ve encountered other campaigns that have well developed connections into their community, well developed slogans and demands but lack connection to the  digital spaces that their respective bases of concern are actually at - a bummer, one can say.

So, in this episode, we are talking with Bianka Nora, deputy director at the Online-to-Offline Strategy Group (O2O) about their work. The organization formed in 2017 as a project of United for Respect –  a retail worker organization in the US, particularly known for their Walmart Campaign, fighting for better payment and working conditions in one of the biggest retail chains in the US. 

O2O began as a project to train organizers at United for Respect, who were confronted with strong anti-union legislations and a hostile employer. In this context, O2O taught innovative methods and tools to strengthen the important work organizers were doing on the ground - and helped them to some remarkable wins. 

Over the years O2O has worked with dozens of labor unions, workers centers, and other social justice groups to develop high–impact campaigns to improve working conditions, pass legislation, and more, all by focusing on crafting digital outreach strategies to amplify the engagement strategies of organizers. For us, it's particularly important to look at digital organizing as a tool, rather than a model, that can dramatically expand our collective potentials when used as part of a broader organizing and empowerment strategy.

This is a special crossover between Spadework and European Alternatives. Earlier this year, our co-host Daniel Gutiérrez, had been a fellow at European Alternatives’ Academy of Migrant Organizing – a structure dedicated to bringing together migrant organizers and activists across Germany in order to talk about shared organizational and movement-building problems in the hope that we can develop a lasting forum of collective co-research and co-learning. 

As part of this forum, fellows were asked to collectively forge a toolbox addressing shared problems they highlighted and uncovered over the course of the fellowship. This episode functions as a contribution to that toolbox that you can find on Instagram and in the episode notes. In this episode, Daniel talks to Academy of Migrant Organizing fellow Berena Yogarajah about the difficulties of working across difference, allyship, comradeship, and problems that often surface through identity-based politics.

Berena has been involved in grassroots political organization for almost a decade. She is currently based in Cologne, Germany, and is a member of Interventionistische Linke – an extra-parliamentary, emancipatory left-organization. 

She was most recently involved with Tatort Porz, a campaign aimed at securing the conviction of a right-wing politician who attempted to murder youth for racist reasons in Cologne, Germany – in a scenario not unlike that of the Treyvon Martin murder in the United States. She is mostly involved in anti-racist struggles and generally concerns herself with strategies of identity politics and grappling with the tension of universality and difference.

Over the course of the episode, Daniel and Berena reflect on the tensions produced when politics begin and end with identity, rather than the destinations we’d like to reach from different starting points. While acknowledging the importance of having safe spaces within the ecology of the left, Berena emphasizes that spaces of struggle are those spaces where discomfort is produced by the differences we encounter and struggle with, towards common horizons of emancipation. Drawing from personal experiences and encounters, she cautions that too much of an emphasis on self-distinction can lead to self-referential navel gazing, rather than the cross-movement development of power we desperately need. 

It is this underscoring of contingency that Daniel appreciates throughout the discussion. For him – and those of us at Spadework – it is critical to understand that the ways in which discourses (in this case, those about and around identity) connected to practices are always contingent and politically negotiated.That is to say, what practices are generated through discourses of identity in Berkeley, California might be very different from those connections in Barrio Logan, San Diego or Neukölln, Berlin. In the same way that the practices articulated to Marxism looked different from context to context in, say the 1960s, so too must post-Marxist discourses like those around identity. 

Such an understanding of the contingent relation between discourse and practice allow the two to agree that the politics developed out of discourses of identity are not immune to authoritarian, moralistic, or dogmatic practices. And it is such connections that make power impossible to build.

Welcome back to Spadework podcast! Yes, we're still alive and still kicking! 

This is our intermission episode. We never expected to need an intermission, but this podcast, like everything else, exists in relation to a world defined by turbulence and crisis. Here's us taking the time to reintroduce ourselves after a pause induced by new jobs, finishing grad school, getting corona. and the generally crumbling texture and substance of every life in late-stage neoliberalism. 

Welcome back!

In this toolbox episode, we talk to Steve Hughes of the European Community Organizing Network and union scholar and organizer Jane McAlevey about “the one-on-one” – a keystone technique that has informed the craft of professional organizing for decades. 

Despite the ubiquity of this technique, however, the question of how to properly deploy it is the subject of debate : in what order should one structure the conversation? What elements must the one-on-one have? What should it reveal? When? 

Over the course of this first input then, we uncover multiple functions of having “structured” one-on-one conversations with the people around us that we want to organize with. While often we think of it as a technique that, if applied correctly, can guarantee commitment from others, our conversations here reveal that one-on-ones have a variety of other functions. 

They serve as a means to identify issues within a particular community or social base. They help us uncover the range of discourses and frames through which people come to understand issues and the demands circulating around them. What’s more, they also operate as foundational feedback loops through which an initiative comes to understand itself, the issue, and the demand through the eyes of the very social bases they wish to empower and transform. 

Over the course of these conversations, we hope to provide insights into structured one-on-one conversations so that our listeners can incorporate these into their own toolbox. This input will form the beginning of a long series of toolbox episodes that will be specifically dedicated to having one-on-one conversations.

For more from Steve Hughes, please see his Medium page. For more on Jane McAlevey's proposals for organizing, please see this presentation. For more on the European Community Organizing Network, please see their website. For more on the one-on-one, please see Alex Riccio's article at The Forge.

In this episode, we consider the role of organized labor in the crisis of neoliberalism with labor organizer, campaigner, trainer, and migrant rights activist, Valery Alzaga. Drawing on decades of experiences within the global world of organized labor, this episode takes us through Valery's journey in order to elaborate the difficulty trade unions have had in adapting to a world no longer defined by the post-war settlement between capital and organized labor. 

In walking us through this journey, Valery sketches a long vision towards a new combat unionism no longer concerned with petty legalisms, but focused on developing and expanding infrastructural eco-systems that make radical and transformative potentials possible. Rather than espouse an "either/or" vision of politics, Valery doubles down on a praxis of creative connection, cross- and inter-organizational alignment, and perpetual adaptation – a kind of multidirectional kung fu, as she calls it.  

While this vision focuses on unions and the need to realign these towards offensive positions, that focus is deeply attuned to and considerate of the broader ecology of actors that define the field, and is concerned with how to act and work together towards winning – even when winning means failing forward.

For more information on Bargaining for the Common Good, please see incredible reading list put together by the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization and the Bargaining for the Common Good Network for The Forge. 

Here, you can read about Harmony Goldberg's and Valery Alzaga's reflection on the deployment of Strike Schools and the importance of popular education in the United Teachers Los Angeles struggle of 2019. 

Who draws the boundaries of the “self” in self-organization? Isn’t a spontaneous event organized? From where does the suspicion of being organized spring? How can organizations combine the resources and move beyond competition in political processes? Why is translating specific organizational forms from one context to another so difficult?

In this episode, Spadework talks with Rodrigo Nunes about the new grammar of organization he’s developed in his just released book, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization.

While typically Spadework focuses on highlighting organizational practices, this episode draws our attention to the conceptual realm of organization. This is because organization is always mediated through ideas, concepts, and discourses about organization. The ways we think and talk about organization frames our actions and conditions our practices, which can either be conducive to greater organizational capacities, or inhibitive. 

This is an important terrain of struggle precisely because of the incredible organizational task facing humanity today: the less than 10 years we have to bring carbon emissions down 45% according to 2010 levels in order to stay the hand of existential catastrophe. 

Rodrigo draws on two decades of political experience spanning back to the alter-globalization movement and across continents and political projects in order to provide us with a renewed vocabulary to help us break through the conceptual barriers that have restrained social movements for so long. What is proposed here is a framework that at onces deprives us of the certainties we once enjoyed but provides us with a sobriety capable of meeting the task at hand.

For an excerpt of Rodrigo’s work and the climate conundrum, please see this article available at Viewpoint Magazine. Rodrigo provides further focus on the organizational problem posed by climate catastrophe here with Camille Barbagallo, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Richard Seymour here.

Here, Rodrigo highlights the untenable binary between spontaneity and organization, in order to propose spontaneity as the emergence of organization. And here, Rodrigo provides an analysis of the emergence of parties within the context of the emergent 15M social movement in Spain.

In a conversation with militant researchers Manuela Zechner and Bue Rübner Hansen, we discuss experiments in workers’ self-organization that have taken shape in Europe over and against the process of neoliberalization and the resulting condition of precaritzation. Throughout the conversation, we talk about the constantly changing composition of the working class and what this technical composition entails in terms of the class’s political organization and the practices and strategies it requires.

We come to understand inquiry and co-research to be central to this process of organization. Where the former regards the specific practices of asking workers about their conditions and the relations that maintain them, the latter regards the broader organizational process of political experimentation to transform those relations. In this regard, our conversation homes in feminist practices developed in Spain over the past decades – particularly the “drift” and the “log-in” techniques – that women have developed to untangle the relations their labor maintains and ways to upend or disrupt these relations. This makes clear the ways in which feminist practices of consciousness raising developed in the 70s share no small similarity with practices of inquiry developed in the post-war. 

The question of political effect – or power – becomes central in our discussion, as it becomes revealed to be something conjunctural, situated, dependent on specific factors that are not always given but contingent – a constant hypothesis that must be tested through the fulcrum of practice or political experimentation. Something that depends once again on innovation, something that Manu points to across the unfolding wave of feminist and climate struggles the world over.

In this way, we arrive at the necessity of abandoning the notion of “centrality versus marginality,” in order to turn to an ecologically interdependent and entangled conception of working-class self-organization that is fundamentally a project of inventing new modes and possibilities of care and interdependence, without capitalist relations of exploitation. 

Manu is a researcher, facilitator, and situated organizer working across feminism, ecology and migration related struggles. Her research deals with collective care, micropolitics, processes of organization, and subjectivity formation in social movements, currently working with Bue in a research project on translocal social movements across agroecology, climate and feminist struggles. 

Bue is a reseacher and theorist working on ideas and practices of social reproduction, class composition, and political ecology. He is an editor at Viewpoint Magazine.

Both have been involved politically in student, migrant, feminist, municiaplist and ecological struggles, as their lives and search for work have taken them from city to city across Europe.

To join a workshop on building power in pandemic times facilitated by Bue and Manu, please click here. It’s based on Bue and Manu’s ROAR article available here. 

Follow these links for  more on the “log in” technique developed in Madrid (available only in Spanish), the “drift” technique by Precarias de la Deriva, or on Manu’s reflections on care and organization, click here.

Spadework is excited to present to our listeners our first themed “toolbox” episode, called “Getting Started.” Toolboxes are special content where experienced organizers from different contexts provide our listeners with “tools” to help them work through a particular organizational problem. 

In this “toolbox,” we provide our listeners with different tools around the problem of getting your organizing initiative started. There’s a lot of different routes and points of departure, depending on what you’re working with and where you're going. The tools dropped into the toolbox aren’t meant at all to provide definitive and timeless organizational answers. They’re there to be tinkered with, disassembled, and reassembled according to your organizational conditions and environment.

To this end, we’ve brought a number of organizers with experiences that range across terrains and contexts that fought in feminist, anti-racist, environmental, migration, workplace, electoral and community struggles.

Our guests include:

Manuela Zechner is a researcher, facilitator, and situated organizer working across feminism, ecology- and migration-related struggles. Her research focuses on collective care, micropolitics, and processes of organization and subjectivity formation in social movements. You can follow her on Twitter @zanubar

Amrah Salomon J. (she/ella) is a poet, activist, and Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is also an anti-oppression and community organizing consultant, a co-founder of Rez beats and a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice and the O’odham AntiBorder Collective.

Daniel Gutiérrez is a member of Die Linke and co-founder of Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung. A doctoral candidate at FU Berlin, his research generally focuses on worker organization, power, and strategy in the current conjuncture.

Antje Dieterich is a member of Die Linke and co-founder of Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung. Drawing on a long history in student and anti-racist struggles, she is focused on developing strategies for supporting organizational learning and leadership development within and between left organizations. You can follow her on Twitter @_a_dieterich

Robert Maruschke: is a lifelong Berlin-based organizer and political researcher interested in the relation between community organizing and social movements. He is currently working at Die Linke’s party headquarters where he helps coordinate countrywide support of organizing projects for the party. 

Chris Dixon is an educator and organizer in Ottawa, the author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movement, and a member of the Punch Up Collective. You can find him on Twitter @withmovements.

Over the span of a few short years, the Deutsche Wohnen and Co. Enteignen campaign has fundamentally altered Berlin politics as it has been able to successfully mobilize tens of thousands of tenants around a very radical demand: it’s time to expropriate big landlords. To realize this they’ve been working tirelessly to get a referendum on this year's ballot to demand precisely this. The pressure put on by the campaign pushed the Berlin government to enforce a rent cap. But the comrades say that’s not enough and they’re in the process of pushing for 220,000 signatures within the next two months to get the referendum on the ballot. 

Meanwhile the comrades at CATU Ireland – a union that works as both a tenant union and community organizing project – started in November of 2019 with a scant 12 members only to then experience a bloom of growth as membership grew to 750 members by the end of last month. It marks an incredible growth in an incredibly short time, no doubt in relation to the added stress experienced by tenants and communities in the context of the coronavirus. Yet, despite the virus, the organization has been forced to pivot and adapt to a quickly shifting reality – one that they weren’t expecting or prepared for, but nonetheless seized.

On behalf of CATU Ireland we have Séamus Ferrel, a researcher by trade and educator and organizer by choice, living currently in Dublin. He has a long history of political activity in both the US and Ireland, as he worked for the Chicago Teachers Union in 2012 and 13, to then return and fight against austerity and privatization in Dublin . In 2015, he helped form the Irish Housing Network and the Dublin Central eHousing Network and was involved there until 2020. He is a trade unionist and a shop steward, and is the outgoing National Chair of CATU Ireland. 

On behalf of Deutsche Wohnen and Co. Enteignen campaign we have MIra here with us today. Within the campaign, MIra works in the Starthilfe (or “Jumpstart,” in English) working group, a special organ within the campaign apparatus dedicated to organizing and base-building. She lives in Berlin Neukölln and has been involved in tenant struggles since 2019. She was previously involved in different struggles around solidarity, anti-racism, and no border-movements. She is also a member of Interventionist Left, a fusion organization composed of radical left wing and undogmatic groups and persons across German speaking countries.

For those interested in Starthilfe’s organizing brochure (available only in German) please see this link.  

For additional materials about Deutsche Wohnen und Co. Enteignen, please see Daniel’s and MIchel Jungwirth’s interview of other Starthilfe comrades here and Daniel’s analysis here.

In this episode we will talk with two organizers from the German climate movement. We will focus on their struggle to save the planet and their fight against a pending doomsday clock. For those that don’t know, the Doomsday Clock was a cold war symbolic representation of the likelihood of human-made catastrophe, used to represent the state of affairs between Moscow and Washington D.C. Today, we want to talk about a Doomsday Clock that has developed to symbolize the relationship between capitalist society and nature.

We feel it’s an apt symbol to talk about the big problem facing the climate movement today. That is, on the one hand, developing popular force and organization takes on time. Spadework – the podcast’s name – refers to civil rights organizer Ella Baker’s conceptualization of organizing as the long and difficult preparatory agricultural labor of digging, seeding, irrigating, and mending that makes a harvest possible. 

And yet, we are actually running out of time. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have until 2030 – just 9 years – to diminish emissions by 45% and reach net zero by 2050 in order to avert utter ecological catastrophe. 

Kim Solievna, she is a climate activist from Berlin and a spokesperson for Ende Gelände, a climate justice alliance that fights against coal mining and for carbon emission decreases. Kim was most recently involved in a struggle against the opening of a coal energy plant earlier this year. 

Katharina Stierl a nurse and a union activist, who became a member of Fridays for Future during her studies and currently works for Verdi’s climate campaign, aiming to connect climate and union activists in a meaningful way. 

Fridays For Future on Twitter @Fridays4Future

Follow Ende Gelände on Twitter here @Ende_Gelaende 

For a helpful link on Ende Gelände’s organizing approach and practices, read here: https://interventionistische-linke.org/sites/default/files/il-klimabroschuere_english_print.pdf