Call Zone Media.
It's it could Happen here, the podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I'm your host vo Long.
So for people who listened to yesterday's episode, which I'm hoping is like most of you, Yeah, So yesterday it was a very kind of downer episode on hurricane misinformation and the way that these sort of people construct these reality tunnels and you know, have become active participants in
their own sort of propagandizement. And I think we kind of we left on a kind of note of of what you can do for sort of individual people, right, which is the same mechanisms you usually get someone out of a cult, which is you you stay with them, you maintain enough personal connection that you can pull them out if they ever want.
To come out. But that's also not a large scale solution to this problem.
And in order to talk about a large scale solution to both our present social crisis and the ecolog logical crisis that this social crisis is being aimed to sort of cover up. Right now, I'm talking to Rosewater, who's the hub coordinator for the Sunrise Movement's DC Hub and delegate to Sunrise's Delicate Body and also a solo punk organized at Rosewater.
Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me on.
Yeah, hi everybody, my name is Rosewater and yeah, longtime fan of cool Zone Media. Y'all were my introduction to my current democratic confederalist politics.
Oh that's awesome. So it feels like.
A really fun, like full circle moment to have a chance to be on the pod.
Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you. So specific thing where we're talking about is in terms of there being an actual plan for what people are doing like past the next three weeks, like after the election. The biggest thing that has been happening is it's just something we've talked about a little bit on this show, is the proposed twenty twenty eight general strike. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that is before we get into Sunrises involvements and yeah, the sort of broader story.
Yeah.
Yeah, So I feel like most people who follow leftist politics were following the UAW strike against the Big three automaker's last fall, and people found that they found their strike really inspiring and they had like really strong gains that were the sort of straightforward like increase pay like better benefits type stuff, and people were celebrating that. But I would say the two actual most important changes were
not reported on nearly as much. One was they eroded their labor piece clause and they made it possible to go on strike if any of their facilities were closed, which labor Piece has in my opinion, been sort of strangling the US left for eighty years.
Yeah, can you explain what that is for people?
I think we've usually were broadly talked about as no strike clauses, But yeah, can you explain what that is?
Yeah, So, labor Piece is essentially a truce that was established between the labor movement, capitalists, and the US government where the labor movement gets generalized rights and the US government is like a quote fair mediator between capitalists and the labor movement, and capitalists get a consistent workforce and
peace like peace from disruptions. And this essentially was established between the beginning of World War Two and the end of the Red Scare, when all of the socialists and markets and communists were expelled from the labor movement, and it felt like a good deal to a lot of liberals at the time, and a lot of normal rank and file workers at the time, but on reflection, it
has really strangled the US labor movement. And so the fact that the UAW eroded they're no strike clause at all is a huge precedent, right.
Yeah, And this is something I mean, I mean, I remember I don't remember if this actually got into the Labor Does episode that I did, but I remember at Labor Notes, so I was listening to people talk about this, and this is stuff that I think the global impact of it has also been really underplayed. Like I mean, obviously there was a lot of times you paid this in Mexico, right, because there's a lot of like, you know, the structure of the of the auto industry is such that.
It's so obvious to me. I didn't even think about that until just now. Yeah.
So one of the things that NAFTA did is that sort of right across the border, right, a whole sort of range of factories that are right across the border that operate off Mexican labor, that do some of the auto industry stuff. And so there's always been sort of connections between the more independent unions there and sort of
American unions. But like you know, but this is also struck as being watched really, really heavily in China, Yeah, which is interesting because like Chenese state unions are a fucking joke, basically not real unions at all. And the extent to which you know, the China's version of the labor piece was also the deal was less like you get rights and we get like labor piece and more
like we're going to just stamp out all working class organization. Yeah, completely, and in a way that like was more even more thorough than what happened here where most of it got
wiped out. I think like the breaking of the labor piece and the demonstration that there is another way is something that has reverberated massively across a lot of different places that I don't think both the people organizing the strike or the sort of like press coverage of it has really gotten into sort of how wide the reverberations of this have been.
Right. I think if it were just eroding that clause alone, it wouldn't be such a signal.
But yeah, definitely. The real thing.
That caught my attention at for was immediately afterwards they changed the end of their contract date to International Workers Day twenty twenty eight and they called on every union in the country and later every union in the world to align with that contract and go on strike with them on May first, twenty twenty eight, and that was the first time, Like, correct me if I'm wrong, that was the first time that a major labor union in America has called for a planned general strike since nineteen
forty eight.
Yeah.
I think that's true, and I think there being an actual plan and they're being a way to do it that's legal is a big deal because part of the problem with this is that there's you know, unlike unlike a country like France, American labor law is specifically designed so that you don't have this happen. There's a bunch of legal mechanisms for this, but it's very very specifically designed to make sure that people are not alledged to solidarity strikes. People are not allowed to coordinate the entire
power of their action. Yeah, and this is a pretty promising way around that.
Yeah, this may be better for later in the episode.
But one of the things that we're doing is where in collaboration with the Institute for Social Ecology, doing a teach in on labor peace and the history of general strikes in the US about a week after the election in order to orient ourselves in whatever new political contexts exists there.
But yeah, so yeah, I think that's a jumping off point to get into. I think Sunriise is kind of an unlikely organization that people would think to be getting excited and trying to get involved in a labor struggle. But yeah, let's talk about how Summery's got involved. And I guess first, also, I don't know how many people listening to this know what Sunrise is. And if you do know what Sunrise is, that might also make you war surprise you're getting involved in labor.
But yeah, let's about that.
Yeah, so Sunrise is a youth climate movement that has been one of the main advocates for the idea of a Green New Deal. When AOC first came into office and she did that like sit in at Nancy Pelosi's office, like that was a Sunrise action, And we historically have been an org that sort of like tries to bridge the divide between people who are sort of a politically liberal and more radical politics, which is a hard place to be.
Yeah, someone's got to do it, But we've.
Really focused on trying to like connect environmentalism with labor. Actually, our main slogans, the main intervention that we've succeeded at has been associating the idea of environmental action with jobs, like green jobs and stuff like that. The problem with that has been one it has been primarily rhetorical, especially after Burnley's loss in twenty twenty. Yeah, and stories matter,
but material conditions matter more. And the reason that we didn't we weren't more materially involved in connecting labor and environmentalism, and by that I mean like connected with the unions, is that unions leadership was often very far to our right, you know, especially in the United States, so it didn't feel like it made sense. But as a result, the sort of Biden years have been a time where there's been a lot of internal discussion about like who we are.
Are we a radical movement that sort of positions itself rhetorically as more normy in order to bring in like young people who whose parents won't let them, you know, join a fight to end all unjust hierarchies, or like sees the means of production, etc. Like are we a radical movement that poses normy or are we a like liberal progressive movement that sometimes asks for radical things, and that's been a really big conflict within the ORG these
last few years, because the path to any climate action, the only path that a lot of people have seen, has been electoral stuff, pushing politicians and things like that.
In a lot of ways, the Inflation Production Act was a direct result of Sunrise's organizing and our work to try and force through the Build Back Better program, but it aligned us with Biden, and from the point of view of a lot of our organizers, like even if it was a victory, it didn't feel like one, and it's certainly not nearly large enough to actually handle the
scale of the crisis. And so essentially the more radical wing of the movement has been winning that fight over the last year two fights, a strong word, has been winning that debate over the last year or two, and specifically this last summer when the American Federation of Teachers joined the general strike, which almost no one has heard about, but the AFT and their one point seven million members have already decided that they're going to try and join the twenty twenty eight general strike.
So it's not just the UAW anymore.
Yeah, But unfortunately we need to take an ad break and we come back. You're going to get to that because that I think will be looked back as one of the pivotal moments of this whole thing that everyone kind of just missed when it happened.
I completely agree, it's going to be amazing. Yeah, okay, as unfortunately, and then we'll do it by Gold. We're back. I don't fight Gold.
At some point I'm going to write the dope by Gold episode.
Do you think this is a joke.
There is a dope by Gold app I it's big worked on in the in the Meal laboratory that the goldscamera add thing. Okay, back back back to the presence or I guess back to the future. I don't know time. Time is falling apart here. But let's talk about the AFT. The American Federation of Teachers, right, and I don't know what they've announced in terms.
Of this, right.
So, the American Federation of Teachers, sort of led by the Chicago Teachers Union, the Baltimore Teachers Union, and to a smaller extent, the DC Teachers Union, managed to get through a resolution at their convention that when you read the title, it's very boring.
It's like on aligning with the UAW.
But when you actually click on the document and you read it, it is like class struggle fire. Like reading it from beginning to end, I felt exhilaration, Like I felt like a fire explode in my heart.
It was so amazing.
And I heard about this the same weekend that we were actually having a climate disaster training in DC. Right, we had about one hundred leaders from across our movement, about half of our staff there. And at the beginning, people were really excited for climate disaster actions responding to
moments like this. Actually, but when we talked about victory, when we talked about and we're going to have like mass mobilization against the climate crisis where the whole of our society like pitches in to do this, the federal government like does a World War two style mobilization against this destruction, and stuff like that, you could tell that people didn't see a path. You could tell.
Yeah.
And so like this news dropping that the teachers were joining a general strike, we're joining mass disruption in some meaningful way. It hit us like a bomb. It was the perfect moment for it to hit us, because it was like, yeah, if the auto workers are going on strike, and the academic workers are going on strike and the teachers are going on strike, then why can't the students go on strike? And not only why can't they, but like,
the students must go on strike. And that was sort of the moment that really got our movement from yes, we would like to figure out some sort of different way to get to the mass disruption needed in order to win serious action on the climate crisis to like, oh, there's a path. Yeah, like we see, we see a path. It's it's core memory, like if you know, like inside out, like core memory formed that weekend.
It was it was beautiful. Yeah, And I think, what's you know?
I mean, there's a couple of things that are important here, right, but I think it's being underplayed exactly how important it is to have teachers unions being into this because the thing about teachers unions is that they're an extremely important lever on labor movement because the way the capitalist society is structured, right, is such that most childcare is just sort of like all of that labor is basically has
been pushed on the teachers, right. And the moment that childcare collapses, right, a bunch of people suddenly also who are not normally on strike suddenly are not able to do their drags because they have they have to find
some way to take care of their kids. And so this is this is sort of a massive leverage point and in the same way that like sort of dock worker strikes, or I mean not in the same way, but like in a sense that a strike by these people can shut down way way more labor than just theirs directly, right, this is something that's very important.
Yeah, yeah, I never really thought about that.
I've thought about them in the context of like their sort of community pillars, so like when teachers go on strike, they often bring way more community support.
With them than other types of workers.
But yeah, you're totally right, like outside of like the community going with them. Also, that is the primary form of childcare that exists in this country.
Yeah, and there's something that like teachers organizers, like she's just you, organizers are very big onsot emphasizing because they have an enormous amount of social power and it's kind of, to a large extent, hasn't been tapped for for the kinds of sort of mass political action that we're seeing here. Like it's one of those things It's one of those sort of leverage points that's always existed, but there hasn't really been the kind of like political will or momentum
more sort of organizing capacity to fully mobilize it. And yeah, so I guess I want to move from Peter talking about Sunrise's involvement in the strike, because I think this part is really interesting both in terms of there being like both of the times of strike support and student strikes. You can you talk, I guess about the sort of politics of student strikes and how you see this fitting into the broader thing that's happening.
Yeah. Yeah, so the climate movement sort of had the height of its power in twenty nineteen. I would say, when you had Fridays for Future and like Gretitenberg, climate strikes.
All across Europe and America. But I would use the word strike in quotes because sometimes you had full walkouts, sometimes you had like those sorts of huge things, but most of the time it was students asking permission from authority figures to participate in a rally and things like that, Whereas in a class struggle context, like a strike is people going to the authority figure and saying this is not occurring because we're not going to be here, you know,
Like this has been a critique that's existed inside of Sunrise like from that period for years now, which was one of the reasons why we haven't focused on those sort of tactics as much. But with this sort of moment, especially if we can bring the teachers along, right, being able to have students see their authority figures doing this sort of thing, especially in more conservative areas, while also.
Teaching them how to do it, because in.
Really meaningful ways, schools are.
Practice work yep.
Like they were directly modeled after factories in the eighteen hundreds, so schools are modeled after work. So if schools are practice work, then student strikes can be practice labor organizing, Yeah, I mean, and turning schools from sort of laboratories for the reproduction of the class system into laboratories for learning class struggle.
It's something that's very very important, both in the immediate
term and in the longer term. Yeah, we've talked a bit about this on other episodes, but like there hasn't been the kind of like generational passed down of organizing skills that we've seen in sort of previous generations and the way honestly, we've talked this, we talk about the center sort of EUAW staff union episode, right that the way that a lot of these unions are running their staff systems also aren't designed to build up like continuous
momentum for people who learn how to organizing and keep doing it. And this is a way because it restart that treadmill to create a generation of organizers both in this and for the future.
Yes, exactly.
And I have had many critiques of my organization, many critiques of my movement, but the thing that has always made me want to like stick around has been seeing the young organizers who like find themselves here. Like the primary person who does our press stuff in the movement is turning eighteen in like three days.
Wow, they're one of the best organizers. I know. It's it's wow, it's inspiring.
But it's something that we I want our movement to do at scale as opposed to like having something like that every once in a while, Like you said, the idea of creating an entire generation, and I'd love to talk about a sort of thought process and plan around that.
After the ad break, woo.
Here's some ads when we come back will do things that aren't ads question mark ooh we are back, Say what better add transitions?
They should raise my salary, Davin back. Awesome.
So one of the things that I think is really in terms of a like for us, a stable niche in the movement ecology, is to be sort of a feeder for radical labor in a sort of way, like because one of the things is even if you are radical and you go into the labor movement, oftentimes you are going to be taught practices that rely.
On labor piece in meaningful ways.
Yeah, practices that are going to be going to be really disrupted if labor law weren't a thing and stuff like that, and it's something that holds back our ability to create a strongly organized working class.
But in the context of schools, right, there is no labor law. There is no labor piece in a high school.
Right, So as a place to practice the sort of radical class struggle organizing that we're talking about, it's sort of the perfect place because it's a simplified version of the workplace of like adult reality. There are obviously many other like blockages, like students and like young people. Miners have far far less power and far fewer rights than you do once you become an adult, and their family has far more power over them. There are huge barriers.
But in terms of like grounding people in class struggle labor organizing tactics, I'm thinking of things that you can learn about in Jane mclavy's book No Shortcuts and stuff like that. They can learn how to use structure.
Tests and.
Use hard organizing conversations in order to build their power in a specific context and things like that, and whether or not they actually managed the strike. Right at the end of it, you have an eighteen year old entering the workforce who is a skilled, trained class struggle organizer who has gained their politics completely outside of the context of labor peace.
Yeah, and I think that that's one of the important aspects of this. And I think that the second one is something you were talking about earlier, which is sort of bridging the sort of labor ecological divide. And I think that's been happening more, which is encouraging because there's been an enormous effort to make sure this doesn't happen.
I mean, I think we've talked about this on this show at some point.
I know Margarets talked about it on Copleeople this cool stuff. But I mean one of the most famous science people tried to do this is a IWWT organized a name Jody Berry, and she so legally speaking, we don't know who killed her. What I will say is that she was killed by a car bomb that was virtually identical to a car bomb that was built by the FBI that was edated by the FBI in their bomb like training things like a couple of weeks before. So right,
we Gennie widely don't know who killed her. However, Kamba someone someone built a car bomb and blew her up in order to stop this from happening. So it is something that is right, very very obviously seen by the powers that be.
Is extremely dangerous.
Yeah, in the same way that we know exactly the singular one person who on his own completely killed Martin Luther King with no support from.
The US government.
Yeah yeah, And like you know, I think this is this is an important moment to strip do this because one of the things that the right is trying to do to like capture this sort of like moments of radical labor has been like oh yeah, all the problems to the u adow are because the government wasn't fortunate to make electric cars. It's like, didn't you know there's very much like an anti ecological angle to definitely to the way that sort of like Republican co option is happening.
It's another thing that we can use a simultaneous tactic for our side and help defea a co option attempt.
In addition to this being a way to like take on the climate crisis in meaningful ways, the climate crisis is also a way where we can make more radical demands.
This is one of the reasons that I really love Sunrise and ecological like ecosocialist movements in general, because if you ask someone to seriously consider how do we address the climate crisis, and you're not paying them to have a specific answer, which is nonprofit industrial complex things like, if you ask someone to seriously consider what do we need to do in order to address the climate crisis in six months, you have a radical no matter what.
In my experience, no one who I've ever or like talk to who has thought about that question seriously for six months and not avoided it has not come out the other end being like, oh, we need a general strike, We need a revolution, you know. Yeah, And so like being able to bring that exact that exact analysis into the labor movement I think is one of the things.
That can bring back radical labor.
You talk to labor leaders who might feel comfortable with labor peace and they're like, we can do this, we have time, and you're like, how much time exactly do we have? Like really think about it.
Yeah, And this is something that we've seen. I think this is sort of a good place to wrap up.
This is something that we've also seen in the way that immediate short term disaster response is happening, where yeah, you know, all of these sort of you have like millions of people who are like would not show up to a mutual aid thing are suddenly like out there doing mutual aid and have at least temporarily completely restructured the way this is society works because they're confronted with the sort of immediacy of crisis and also the immediacy of the fact that the way that we have been
doing things simply is not actually a functional way to for example, respond to a hurricane.
Yeah. I think there's a bridge.
There between the sort of immediacy of this like mutual laid disaster response politics and the sort of long term goal of trying to actually like have sustained sensative action against the sort of climate devistation.
Yeah, I completely agree.
And this is quite a tangent from the specific topic that we're thinking about. But when I think about democratic confederalist politics, like Roseava was able to take power and have its revolution because the state retreated, and ideally, we don't have a civil war that causes the state to retreat.
Ideally, Yeah, one thing we do know will.
Happen and is happening right now, is that the state retreats during disasters. The state retreats during climate disasters. And so if we're prepared to take that temporary mutual aid structures and jump on them in order to create systems like what they have in Rosheva and create like build our labor movements, build our neighborhood power, build our direct democracy capabilities, and be able to be like, no, we want to keep these whenever the police come back, whenever
da da da da da. Yeah, Like, there's going to be devastation, but there's also a lot of opportunities for creating really really beautiful things.
Yeah, and I want to close on there's not a whole argument as to whether or not whether or not Buina venture A Derrudi, who is one of this very.
Prominent organizers in the Spanish Revolution.
Ever actually said this, but there was a quote attributed to him that goes roughly, we're not in the least afraid of ruins, Like we are the people who built this world and we'll fucking do it again.
Wow. That's beautiful. Yeah, And I.
Think that's in some sense the attitude that we have to be going into this here right of you know, like the path that we are on now. And this is true even if a movement takes power that is dedicated to actually sort of dealing with the climate crisis, right, the stuff that we have now is normal. This is just what the future is going to be. There's going to be disaster, there's going to be storm, it's going
to be destruction. But again, fundamentally, like we are the people who build this world, and we can build it again. We're going to have to build it again and we're going to build it better.
Yeah.
Actually that makes me think of this one song that we sing a lot in Sunrise, Like we have a really big cultural focus on movement song.
I would really love it if that could be the outro.
Yeah, there are more waters rising, the ie I know the sign I know there are more waters rising the side I know. It is a song called More Waters Rising by Sorrow Lynch, who is a movement musician actually from Asheville, North Carolina. It's not fully clear to me right now if they are safe, but we've been singing this song for many years.
There are more fires burning the signe I know there are more fires burning. They will find it.
It is a song that I think really resonates with the thing that me and Mia just finished talking about knowing what's on the horizon, knowing the ruin that we may face, but also knowing that we're not afraid of that and that we can get through it.
I will rebuild the mountains the sign I know. Yeah.
So I hope that you all find the strength with this song and with these plans to rebuild the mountains.
Thank you. Wade through the waters when they find their way to me. I will wade through the waters.
The sign o the sign you know, I will wade through the waters.
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