WFHB

The public school exists to make automatons and to reproduce class hierarchies and authoritarian power dynamics. How different is 2019 from 1906 when Emma Goldman was writing in "The Child and Its Enemies" that schools drive children to become foreign to themselves and to each other, arranged into files, classified, and numbered with quality giving way to quantity. And we are living the consequences. There are better ways to learn.

It should be obvious that any learning done in a hierarchical system will first be about that system, about the structure of power, and how the “learner,” the student, is a receptacle for instructions about her place in the social order regardless of the content of a particular lesson or discipline of study. McLuhan’s pithy formulation that the medium is the message rings very true here. But it also indicates a way out...create other spaces of learning, spaces outside the institutions of state power where learning can occur because it is freely sought and because it gives pleasure.

It probably won’t surprise you that our guest today began to be critical of the systems of state and corporate power via the lens of punk music. As a ten year old he was transfixed by a poster in his older brother’s room of the album cover to the 1979 album Feeding the 5000 by the anarcho-punk band Crass, featuring the face of Ronald Reagan on a muscle flexing bodybuilder and Margaret Thatcher expelling hot dogs and human skulls out her backside. A taste for subversion seemed only natural. To honor that experience, the music of Crass accompanies us throughout (though none of the songs off that album, sorry, Rob). We open with “I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick” off of Stations of the Crass.

GUEST

Today’s guest is Robert Haworth, editor of two recent compilations published by PM Press: Anarchist Pedagogies and Out of the Ruins: Radical Informal Learning Spaces and co-editor with Mark Bray of a Francisco Ferrer Reader called Anarchist Education and the Modern School. Haworth is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Foundations & Policy Studies at West Chester University. He teaches courses focusing on the social foundations of education, anarchism, and critical pedagogies.

RELATED

"The Child and Its Enemies" by Emma Goldman

Anarchy Is Intersectional: Learning From Emma Goldman (Interchange)

Dynamite Has No Politics: The Anarchism of Lucy Parsons (Interchange)

Punk Rock 101 (Interchange)

MUSIC by Crass

"I Ain’t Thick, It’s Just a Trick" (Stations of the Crass)

"I Know There Is Love" (Christ-The Album)

"Where Next Columbus" (Penis Envy)

"You Can Be Who?" (Christ-The Album)

"Systematic Death" (Penis Envy)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Today Interchange and WFHB mourn the passing of our friend and colleague, Rob Schoon. Rob was an assistant producer and editor for Interchange from May 2016 through August 2018. Rob’s favorite work was mixing the program–cutting music into the interview for breaks in particular. You may never notice it but Rob was always mindful of …

Today Interchange and WFHB mourn the passing of our friend and colleague, Rob Schoon. Rob was an assistant producer and editor for Interchange from May 2016 through August 2018.

Rob's favorite work was mixing the program--cutting music into the interview for breaks in particular. You may never notice it but Rob was always mindful of how a song can punctuate an assertion in the introductory remarks or draw one’s attention to an incisive comment made by a guest. In this way the program becomes a kind of orchestration. [His least favorite thing was when I would share an 85 minute conversations needing to be cut down to 44 minutes! You’d think that losing 41 minutes might do real damage to an interview--not in a Rob Schoon edit.]

Rob was a kind of Interchange conductor for just over two years. We’ve missed his talents here since August; and now we are faced with always missing our friend.

Our opening song is one of Rob’s all time favorites. This is “Ceora” a “jazz bossa” composition by trumpeter Lee Morgan which first appeared on Morgan’s album Cornbread. The lineup includes pianist Herbie Hancock, drummer Billy Higgins, saxophonists Jackie McLean and Hank Mobley, and bassist Larry Ridley. And we’ll close with the Charles Mingus Sextet’s "Take the A-Train" from a 1964 concert in Norway--a favorite of Rob’s for Jaki Byard’s great stride piano break.

I had thought to make a compilation of selections from Rob's favorite shows - programs where his mix particularly pleased him. One of his favorites was "Lynchings on Loop" with guest Courtney Baker. The sound quality of the interview is lamentable because the mix is wonderful. But I wanted to hear Rob's voice and for you to hear him smile. And there was only one way to do that.

Rob was never comfortable in front of a live microphone but he did step into the role of host for one episode we called “It Takes a Democrat.” Rob interviewed Historian and bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank, when Frank came to Bloomington in March of 2017 to promote his latest book, Listen Liberal. It’s an attempt at diagnosing a decades-long liberal malaise and ineptitude in the Democratic Party.

This ineptitude was only full display as, to quote Rob Schoon, the most qualified presidential candidate in history lost to the least qualified presidential candidate in history. Donald Trump became president...and continues as such. In consequence Rob begins the interview with the question, “Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?” -- a party once dedicated to the working class and the commonwealth turned into a political operation dedicated to professional class interests and obsessed with Ivy League expertise.

For this hour, in honor of him, Interchange is once more conducted by Rob Schoon. We’ll miss you, Rob.

It Takes a Democrat (original edit)

MUSIC

"Ceora" by Lee Morgan

“Working Class Hero” John Lennon

“Aquarius” The Fifth Dimension

“You Think You’re So Smart” Aaron Neville

"Take the A-Train" performed by the Charles Mingus Sextet

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer and Episode Host: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

With Covington Catholic High School students offering a fresh examples of the embodied ideologies of Capitalism like racism, patriarchy and ecological destruction – we turn to theories of working class solidarity. If we want a social system that is not alienating—with meaningful labor, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive democracy, with …

With Covington Catholic High School students offering a fresh examples of the embodied ideologies of Capitalism like racism, patriarchy and ecological destruction - we turn to theories of working class solidarity. If we want a social system that is not alienating—with meaningful labor, with equality in all spheres of life, with true, substantive democracy, with poisons removed for our soil, air, and water, with as much protection as possible from life’ slings and arrows—then capitalism and its interconnected processes and institutions, its embedded ideologies, must be destroyed.

My guest via Skype is Michael Yates, the newly retired editorial director for the Monthly Review Press from 2006 to 2018. Yates has just published a new book, Can the Working Class Change the World?, published by Monthly Review Press.

His other books include Why Unions Matter and A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today, co-authored with Paul Le Blanc.

In his new book, Yates condenses decades of activism, organizing and teaching into a kind of primer on the working class and capitalism, and more powerfully offers practical actions the working class needs to commit to in order to change the world.

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.

Antonio Berni | La gran ilusión (The Grand Illusion), 1962, mixed media, approx. 8 x 8 feet, MALBA, Buenos Aires.

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"

Today’s show seeks to strike through the mask of the normative history of so-called progress as it’s been written and taught to children. A tale told in which the struggles of the workers of the USA are nearly disappeared. The working class not only toils for the profit of the owning class, it has to …

Today’s show seeks to strike through the mask of the normative history of so-called progress as it’s been written and taught to children. A tale told in which the struggles of the workers of the USA are nearly disappeared. The working class not only toils for the profit of the owning class, it has to overcome continual depredation and great violence at the hands of those capitalist owners who often unleash state police power against them.

Our opening song is the unofficial anthem of Labor, “Solidarity Forever,” sung by Leonard Cohen at a sound check in Birmingham in the UK in 1979. If the chorus, meant to be triumphant, seems wistful, perhaps that’s appropriate as this was recorded on the cusp of US President Ronald Reagan’s firing of nearly 12,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 all but destroying the power of unions in the US.

"Solidarity Forever" was written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin. In an essay from 1968 titled “Why I Wrote Solidarity Forever,” Chaplin says that

What hung precariously in the balance at the time “Solidarity Forever” was written was first a choice between political action at the ballot box and direct action at the point of production for the attainment of immediate objectives, and secondly a choice between armed insurrection and the general strike as a means of putting “the parasite and outmoded capitalist system in its place”. It was as simple as that.

My guest today, live via Skype, is historian Erik Loomis. Loomis has written A History of America in Ten Strikes, published by The New Press, challenging all of our contemporary assumptions around labor, unions, and American workers. From the Lowell Mill Girls strike in the 1830s to Justice for Janitors in 1990, these labor uprisings do not just reflect the times in which they occurred, but speak directly to the present moment.

Loomis focuses on the necessity of government supporting workers’ rights for there to be any Union movement. Literally, the state has to protect the worker and their rights - The right to strike, the right to sit down, the right to slow down, the right to have a voice in their very lives...it only happens in the US if the power of the State, that is the force of law, is utilized in the service of those workers’ rights.

Unionism is a shell of what it once was and eighty years after an historic labor victory via an illegal sit-down strike at the GM plant in Flint, Michigan, made possible by a New Deal Governor, we are faced with a Flint whose people have been poisoned and their lives destroyed by a right wing Oligarchical Governor in service to Big Business and White Supremacy.

What can be done? How can we be in Solidarity today? Erik Loomis points us to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) for an answer.

But we’ll begin with the most despicable aspect of US Labor History, slavery, to show how people, a working class, can, must, resist being defined as the means to an owner’s ends.

GUEST

Erik Loomis is an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on labor and environmental issues past and present. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Dissent, and The New Republic. The author of Out of Sight (The New Press) and Empire of Timber.

RELATED

"Why Strikes Matter" by Erik Loomis

"The Flint sit-down strike, 1936-1937" by Jeremy Brecher

Fli...

Barbara Hammer has been making films for over 40 years but it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever seen them and are now asking “Who”? Born in 1939 in Hollywood, California, a kind of cosmic irony, Barbara Hammer is an American feminist filmmaker known for being one of the pioneers of lesbian film. Hammer is …

Barbara Hammer has been making films for over 40 years but it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever seen them and are now asking "Who"?

Born in 1939 in Hollywood, California, a kind of cosmic irony, Barbara Hammer is an American feminist filmmaker known for being one of the pioneers of lesbian film. Hammer is known for creating experimental films that we might describe in a staid way as dealing with women's issues such as gender roles, lesbian relationships and coping with aging and family. But we also might be very specific...they’re about menstruation, multiple orgasm, and masturbation, about loving and being loved, about knowing and respecting the truths of the body, about living and dying, about the lies we tell ourselves in history, art, science and our very social organization. In short, Barbara Hammer makes films to Queer the world.

Bloomington Indiana is hosting a film series called Barbara Hammer: Boundless and it explores five decades of Hammer’s work, highlighting themes of desire, feminist community, health and wellness, historical and archival research, and self-representation: a pioneering filmography of queer experimentation.

Featuring newly restored prints from The Academy Film Archive, this program pays homage to a female filmmaker who has had a profound impact on queer filmmaking and art herstory. It begins tomorrow, January 16th, and runs through Friday, tracking Hammer’s work chronologically from The Beginning, 1968 to '78, the Middle, 1981 to '90, and the Never Ending...which shows two of her more recent films, including Evidentiary Bodies which confronts Hammer’s living with ovarian cancer. The Screening takes place in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive Screening Room in the Herman B Wells Library.

GUESTS

The co-curators of Barbara Hammer: Boundless:

Joan Hawkins is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the IU Media School and a member of The Writers Guild at Bloomington and The Burroughs Century. She has written extensively on experimental and avant-garde cultures.

Carmel Curtis is a Film Digitization Specialist at the Moving Image Archive of the Indiana University Library and is a board member of the non-profit Screen Slate, a daily resource for independent, repertory, and gallery screenings in New York City.

RELATED

Barbara Hammer's website

A More Daring Pleasure, on Hammer's "Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)" in Artforum

How We Talk About Our Dying: Susan Gubar On Living with Cancer (Interchange)

MUSIC

Songs by Alix Dobkin

"Lesbian Power Authority"

"Fantasy Girl"

"Hearts & Struggles"

Sleater Kinney

"No Cities to Love"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

We open with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta off of the 1959 album My Eyes Have Seen. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” is a lyric by the American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song “John Brown’s Body.” …