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Where once solidarity referred to a workers’ movement against authoritarian controls by the state and capitalist economies and the shared sense of identity that Labor gave in the struggle against class hierarchies, today’s movements against oppression require envisioning and committing to new ways to share the political strength to stand up and say NO. Today, …

Where once solidarity referred to a workers’ movement against authoritarian controls by the state and capitalist economies and the shared sense of identity that Labor gave in the struggle against class hierarchies, today’s movements against oppression require envisioning and committing to new ways to share the political strength to stand up and say NO.

Today, show producer Bradi Heaberlin speaks with Kristin Ross, Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, about her work defining those ways. One way is what Ross calls the “luxury” of the commune - a luxury of shared action and shared living, of shared becoming - in the Paris Commune of 1871, but she finds others in new movements that have formed in France like that of the gilets jaunes or yellow vests, and what was the occupational attempt to block the construction of an international airport in farmland in western France: the ZAD, or the Zone to Defend, outside of Notre-Dame-des-Landes.

We begin in the reactionary 1980s with what Ross calls the intentional “disappearance” of the revolutionary tradition in scholarship and her work in opposition to this.

GUEST

Kristin Ross is the author of several books, among them are, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune; The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune; and most recently, she’s translated and written a preface to The Zad and NoTav: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence published by Verso last year.

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The Meaning of the Paris Commune, an interview with Kristin Ross

Essential Paris Commune Reading List

ZAD: The State of Play by S.G. and G.K., translated from the French by Janet Koenig

French mayors ban glyphosate weedkiller, defying government

MUSIC - Matt Otto

"Forces and Relations"

"Transformations"

"Paris Commune"

"Work Day"

"Revolution (for John Zorn)"

CREDITS

Host: Doug Storm

Producer: Interchange Collective

Episode Producer: Bradi Heaberlin

Audio Engineer: Sean Milligan

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today’s show is a special 90-minute episode. Around the world, as governments tell people to cut back and pay more to cover basic needs, the people have responded with explosive refusal and chaos. Two weeks ago the Chilean people woke up, “chile despertó!” They are calling it a social explosion, which could equally be due …

View of the protest towards Plaza Baquedano, 10/25/19. Photo by Hugo Morales

Today’s show is a special 90-minute episode.

Around the world, as governments tell people to cut back and pay more to cover basic needs, the people have responded with explosive refusal and chaos.

Two weeks ago the Chilean people woke up, "chile despertó!" They are calling it a social explosion, which could equally be due to the speed of the conflict’s escalation, or the extensive property damage by fire.

Chile’s uprising started with groups of high school students who refused to pay a hiked fare for the subway. Evasión Masiva students shared memes about turnstile hopping, and within 24 hours, the stage was set. People across the capital took to the streets, banging pots and destroying city busses.The protests centered on the rising costs of living and the creation of the greatest wealth gap in the countries comprising The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)...a Marshall Plan organization supporting economic imperialism.

These are features of the Chicago-School neoliberalism behind Chile’s lauded but fictive political stability and economic success.

Photo by Nikola Garcia.

The government headed by the conservative media mogul billionaire president Sebastian Piñera has reacted to the uprising in ways that have drawn comparisons with the tactics of former dictator Augusto Pinochet. This past week Piñera has declared the first state of emergencies to control protests since the return to democracy in 1990.

In the eyes of many Chileans, today’s human rights violations, military tanks and helicopter patrols, police brutality, curfews, and state of emergency amount to dictatorship-era violence re-occurring now. The government’s lacking reform measures and militarized response have led many Chileans to believe the economic precarity and police brutality are simply highlight the illegitimacy of the current government, and just like that, flash, the entire constitutional system is in jeopardy.

Now, the protests have spread beyond Santiago and beyond the youth. Piñera was forced to cancel two major international summits, including the UN climate change conference, due to the insurrection.

Our opening song comes from Ana Tijoux, hip hop artist and social justice activist. Tijoux was born in France in 1977 to parents who were jailed and later fled Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Tijoux returned to Chile in 1993. This is No Mas, from the 2014 album Vengo. The song begins:

Edificios cancerosos se apilaron numerosos

En bloques de cementos altos y furiosos

Taparon la luz de nombres poderosos

Y nunca más se vio aquel sol que era luminoso

Lo llamaron desarrollo, crecimiento

Del barrio sólo quedaron los cimientos

Dejaron desechos, dejaron gente sin techo

El único hecho es que no tenemos ningún derecho...

GUEST

Nikola Garcia, a political anthropologist at Emory University, who researches peri-urban politics in Santiago, Chile. Garcia is currently in Santiago conducting fieldwork and has been in the midst of the uprising from its beginning. (Recorded on October 29th.)

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Support Chilean Protestors (GoFundMe)

Directorio de Ollas Comunes en Chile

Amid Chilean Protests, Musicians Rally to Support Economic Justice

MUSIC

"No Mas" by Ana Tijoux

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central and influential essay “Self-Reliance” (a document that might be said to lie at the heart of liberalism the United States of American) he writes: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?” No, …

In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s central and influential essay "Self-Reliance" (a document that might be said to lie at the heart of liberalism the United States of American) he writes: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor?”

No, perhaps they are not specifically “my” poor (or Emerson’s) but isn’t this OUR economic system that makes poverty a foundational reality supporting the narrative of just desserts for rich and poor? Poverty serves a moral purpose for those deemed economic winners.

Emerson, it seems, is addressing Jesus who, in the Gospel of Mark says, “For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them.”

But we should point out what this overlooks: Why does there need to be poverty, and why do we support, even praise, a system that necessitates it.

The lack of affordable housing is a serious issue in most cities around the US. While owning a home was once thought of as a foundation of success for American families it now serves the singular purpose of chaining one to a lifetime of debt; that is if you’re actually lucky enough to be allowed that burden. But housing isn’t just about ownership, it’s about any kind of roof and walls to protect people from the elements.

There is not one U.S. state, county, or metropolitan area where a minimum wage earner working full-time can afford a two-bedroom apartment. The National Low Income Housing Coalition’s annual Out of Reach report details that "a worker earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour would need to work nearly 127 hours a week – equivalent to more than three full-time jobs – to afford a modest two-bedroom rental without spending more than 30% of their salary on housing costs. To afford a modest one-bed rental, they would need to work 103 hours a week."

Today producer Nejla Routsong investigates the possible effects on Bloomington, Indiana of an addition to a local Unified Development Ordinance (or "UDO") that would make duplexes and triplexes legal for single-family neighborhoods by right. The UDO is the document that governs zoning policies and guides city development. The plexes-by-right measure has already attracted outspoken criticism and equally passionate supporters at city council meetings.

Our show is in two parts.

Part One

Deborah Myerson from South Central Indiana Housing Opportunities (SCIHO) joins us to dig into some of the legal realities of the UDO as well as the way race and class exclusions have played a part in real estate development.

Part Two

We're joined by Kelly Toto, a neighborhood association founder of Trail View, a Bloomington neighborhood recently developed by Habitat for Humanity which blends both single family and duplex housing. Her story illustrates how affordable housing usually means living on the outskirts of a municipality where even getting to work can be a challenge and being an involved parent is nearly impossible.

MUSIC

Archie Shepp - Things Have Got to Change (1971)

"Things Have Got to Change"

"Money Blues"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Nejla Routsong

Editing: Sean Milligan and Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Jar Turner

Today’s show is a discussion of how seven million ordinary people are standing against the most powerful surveillance state on planet earth. Episode producer Sean Milligan talks to two activists who spent time in Hong Kong during the height of the protests in the summer of 2019. Facing eventual reunification with mainland China, the citizens …

Today's show is a discussion of how seven million ordinary people are standing against the most powerful surveillance state on planet earth. Episode producer Sean Milligan talks to two activists who spent time in Hong Kong during the height of the protests in the summer of 2019. Facing eventual reunification with mainland China, the citizens of Hong Kong took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to assert their legal and political rights against encroachment by the Chinese Communist Party. A story that would have been the realm of science fiction only a decade ago - as technology and human ingenuity merge in ever more complicated ways in Hong Kong, we see the future tactics of both governments and resistance movements evolving before our eyes.

The protesters have enumerated five demands:

The movement cascaded onward, adopting the demands unfurled from the rooftop and reviving the major aim of 2014’s Umbrella Movement: universal suffrage. Adding the popular demand for police accountability, this consolidated the movement around five core points: 1) the complete, formal withdrawal of the extradition bill, 2) the retraction of the characterization of protests as “riots”, 3) the immediate release of all arrestees from the movement, 4) an independent investigation into the brutality committed by the Hong Kong Police Force, and 5) universal suffrage for Hong Kong.

Today's show is in two main parts.

A subway near Tai Po Market station, dubbed the "Lennon Tunnel" (Wikipedia)

Part One

The continual erosion of the "One Country, Two Systems" constitutional principle prompted this most recent and ongoing protest in June 2019. What are the circumstances on the ground as the protests have evolved throughout the Summer and into Fall. Protesters, noting the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement tactics of occupying space, shifted to a tactic of "instant" mobility which they call "Be Water."

Part Two

Where do we go from here? We begin with the Sesame Credit System which one of our guests calls an intense modulation of peoples’ consciousness and appears strikingly to resemble something from a Philip K. Dick novel. Through social media companies like TikTok the Chinese Communist Government deepens its capacity to apply facial recognition software to identify, track, and suppress, all aspects of human social activity.

We learn of technologies utilized on the street like lasers that disrupt police advances as well as those that destroy surveillance cameras. And we hear about apps used to share information to organize huge numbers of anonymous protesters who have never met each other but see themselves in one another.

A common expression among the protesters is "One day we’ll be able to meet each other face to face without our masks on.”

Interview recorded on 10/22/19.

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Pathways to Planetary Sovereignty (Interchange)

MUSIC

“Right Now!” Jackie McLean

“Be Water” Kendrick Scott

“Friends & Neighbors” Ornette Coleman

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Episode Producer: Sean Milligan

Executive Producer: Jar Turner

Let’s cut to the chase, in their book, Climate Leviathan, importantly subtitled A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright posit that it’s very likely that we face a future organized by a planetary sovereign which asserts the right to decide what parties, and what peoples, will have to sacrifice (or …

Let's cut to the chase, in their book, Climate Leviathan, importantly subtitled A Political Theory of Our Planetary Future, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright posit that it’s very likely that we face a future organized by a planetary sovereign which asserts the right to decide what parties, and what peoples, will have to sacrifice (or perhaps be sacrificed) in the face of looming ecological catastrophe and extinction events. That is, with the continuation of human life on Earth as justification, there will likely be a global regime forged of capitalist bonds between the US and China. What is to be done to subvert this already forming regime in the name of climate justice?

Mann and Wainwright accept first that the planet is likely headed for a worst case scenario as plans for mitigation continue as rhetoric and fail to materialize. But that is not what they’ve come to tell us. They write in their introduction:

It is difficult to contemplate the future calmly. Merely to confront our perils can paralyze us with fear. As Mike Davis says, “on the basis of the evidence before us, taking a ‘realist’ view of the human prospect, like seeing Medusa’s head, would simply turn us into stone.” We have done our best to suppress that dread and wrote Climate Leviathan to think through the political-economic futures that climate change seems to us most likely to induce. The mandate for that undertaking, for all its limitations and guesswork, stems from the looming political-economic formations that are no small part of our peril. Above all, we must not be afraid to ask hard questions.

What they seek to do is think about the likely politics of the human future, and to imagine ways to subvert what is the likely political and economic order so that the arc of this probably ending “history” bends toward justice.

And imagination is key.

But first, how did we get here politically and economically: why is this the order to which it’s claimed There Is No Alternative?

GUEST

Joel Wainwright is a professor in the Department of Geography at Ohio State University. Along with co-authoring Climate Leviathan, he is author of Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought and Decolonizing Development: Colonial Power and the Maya.

RELATED

Climate Justice and the Emergence of Planetary Sovereignty

Global Warming of 1.5 ºC (IPCC Special Report)

MUSIC

"Air Raid" Grachan Moncur III (Evolution, 1964)

"Metaphor" Yusef Lateef (Jazz Mood, 1957)

"Frankenstein" Archie Shepp (The Way Ahead, 1968)

"New Generation" Albert Ayler (New Grass, 1968)

"Desert Blood" Albert Ayler (The Last Album, 1969)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Jar Turner