 Welcome everybody to the 18th year that we've been doing this event in memory of Will. It's hard to believe it's been 18 years since he passed, 18 years on Thursday. Anyway, I am not doing the introduction although it may appear like I am. I am just here because I want to look at all of you and see an audience and see so many wonderful people out there that I haven't seen in more than three years because we haven't met in this format for three years. We sort of did the last time, but we now actually have the speaker with us. So thank you everybody for coming. We invite you to the table at the back of the room where you came in. We have the book that Kali has co-edited on the table. We're selling it, I think for $10. Okay, yes, at a very reduced price. And all of the proceeds from the book are going to the organization that Kali works for and with, Cooperation Jackson, as well as the lecture series is giving a donation as well. So if people could turn their phones off or quiet them without further ado, Joy will do the introduction. Oh, wait a minute, one more thing, sorry. T-shirts, we have an abundance of these. They are actually 18 years old. They're almost antiques and we still have so many of them. We would just like to give them to you. So there's a bunch on the table back there and if you don't find one now, we'll have some more for you at the next lecture. And this one is for Kali. Hello, all. My name is Joy Mazahra and I am a second year English student at UVM, a master's student, and I'm a footballer scholar from Amman, Jordan. Welcome to the Spring Willmiller Social Justice Lecture Series. We are very happy that you are joining us today. This series is dedicated to Willmiller, Vermont's lifelong social justice activist and University of Vermont philosophy professor for 35 years. After a brave battle with cancer, Willmiller has passed in 2005. Ann Lipset, Will's partner, founded this series as a continuation of his legacy of speaking truth to power and his commitment to the struggle against injustice. Thank you, Ann, for keeping Will's voice alive. You can learn more about the Willmiller Association and the remembrance of his impactful change on willmiller.org. Like the logo says, he will always be remembered as a voice in a world of false words and disinformation. It is my honor and pleasure tonight to welcome Kali Akuna to Wellington, Vermont to speak on shifting focus, organizing for an eco-socialist future. Day by day, capitalism chokes life systems on our planet and threatens the existence of complex species, including the human race. Eco-socialism offers transformation from below, encloses an economy of solidarity and prioritizes voices and principles of decolonization, anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anti-heterosexism, and degrowth in the face of global health, economic, and climate crises. The development of an eco-economic democracy and the building of a solidarity economy are the core of Kali Akuna's life, work, and activism. Kali is an activist, organizer, educator, and writer. He is also the co-editor of Jackson Rising, the struggle for economic democracy and black self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi, and more recently, Jackson Rising Redux, lessons on building the future in the present. Although rooted in ideological conversations and frameworks, Kali insists on the dynamic nature of social justice and its efforts in addressing oppressive systems by aligning theory with practice. So Kali is also the co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, an emerging vehicle that aims to develop a cooperative network to achieve sustainable community development and ownership based in Jackson, Mississippi. When I first learned about Cooperation Jackson, I stared at their logo for a very long time. In my personal research and stance against injustice, I derived lessons from my grandmother's stories as I look back into the past in order to act in the present and see hope in the future. I found the same thing in Cooperation Jackson's logo. It features three wisdom symbols used by the Asante people in Ghana to recall virtues and values of traditional life. If you look at the logo, it incorporates three adinkra or wisdom symbols. At the center, bua, mina, mi, mua, wo, or help me and let me help you as a symbol of cooperation and interdependence. On the left, in konson, konson, in unity lies strength. And on the right, wo, sa, da, mua, meaning if your hands are in the dish, people do not eat everything and leave you nothing, which explains the importance of participation in self-government. I encourage you to visit CooperationJackson.org to learn more about Kali's work in his community. Special thanks to our sponsors and the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series board members, Lorna Beasley, Ron Jacobs, Isaac Kreezman, Fred Magdoff, and Peter Mann, Helen Scott, and Ann Lipset. Please help me welcome Kali Akruna on stage. Thank you. Can folks hear me? Okay, let me put this away. First, I really want to honor the t-shirt and a little anecdotal story that I just learned on the car ride over here that makes me feel that me and Will are kindred spirits. I don't buy t-shirts. I don't buy that many clothes to begin with, and I kind of wear them until they literally just fall apart. But I have, I would argue, an amazing t-shirt collection, right, from social struggles and movements from all over the world. And it's my understanding, Will did too, right, and that he, like every protest and everything, that he had a t-shirt collection. And when Fred was telling me this on the car, I just started laughing because, you know, my mom and partner recently in the middle of the pandemic co-inspired to take two of my drawers of t-shirts without my permission, cut them up, and they've been trying to make a quilt, right? They're like, of all these different things. So I'm waiting to see what the quilt looks like. I'm mad that I'm like a little bit more shirtless, but I have like hundreds of them. So it was fitting to get another one in his honor, right? So I want to deeply appreciate that in honor of his memory. Now the other thing before getting started, I want to give a shout out to, you know, the workers who are on strike, a little bit up the road, or what, no, east of here, I guess, east and up the road, over at Goddard College. And hopefully everybody, you know, is in some active and constructive solidarity with them in their efforts, since it's not that far from you all. We need more workers' power. And to that vein, as someone who is pushing for workers' ownership in any and all forms, you know, maybe be some dialogue about shifting the college into a more of a collective worker-owned space, right? So just a little, yes, just a little something to drop on you and to interject. That's something for the workers to decide themselves, but, you know, just trying to plant a few seeds here or there. Now for this, for tonight, I'm going to do something I don't normally do. Like, I'm a kind of speaker, I hate PowerPoints, and I kind of hate prescripted stuff, and I'm usually the kind of person who, you know, with my social analytical skills, however right or wrong they may be, I try to read, you know, who's in the audience and what they're there for, and speak directly to you to the greatest extent that I can and learn as much from you as what I have to share. I'm still going to try to do that a little bit, but in a more scripted format. So if it's a little bit more boring than usual, just bear with me. That is not my style. And what I want to do with that is really make an argument, right? A particular type of argument. Because there's two things that I really want to accomplish. Number one is the title here, Shifting Focus. So there's an argument about that title is an argument with us, with the left, right? And the creatures of the left, of which I'm assuming most of you are. And there's an argument that I think there's some things that we both, on the one hand, don't analyze enough. B, that we take for granted. And C, that we accept the terms too often that our enemies lay out for us and fight on their terrain. So that is the first set of things is just to lay an argument out and start an argument and dialogue. Hopefully that's generative, right, that we can have. The second piece is to kind of lay out, we are calling it a formula because we don't think it's fully articulated yet enough to be kind of a coherent program. But it's aiming in that direction. And the argument about that we want to elicit is to generate enough thought and common collective that we can start developing a broader program together. Right? So we feel much more comfortable this way being co-operation Jackson and calling it a little bit of a formula than a program so that there's something we want to articulate. And I want to lay out those two things, like in short order. I'm not going to try to take too long so we can actually have conversation. And if I try, it would actually probably take a couple of days to really lay out. No joke. But the first part of this, all right, so the shifting focus part of this. Now there's an essay myself and two other comrades wrote that has this title, came out 2001. And we've been struggling with part two since that time. It's coming for those of you who might be interested. And the article itself, I think if you really carefully, you see that we're not all in agreement on every particular point. Like the three of us who wrote that, we have a lot of internal debates, particularly on how we are interpreting history. And some of that's because we come from familiar influences, but also profoundly different influences. So these two comrades in particular were most heavily influenced, you know, come out of the Maoist movements, you know, of the late 60s and 70s and 80s. I come from a much more revolutionary nationalist, but socialist in form and content, kind of orientation from the cadre organization and things that I was a part of. And you see some of those differences reflective, but I think they're generative enough that I think we're asking some of the right questions and one to taking certain positions. So one of the things that we are really challenging, we want to offer to folks is number one, first piece. We, and this is the broad left and by the left, let me be very clear for the record what I mean, you may mean something different, but you know, the set out terms. The left to me means anarchists, socialists, communists, revolutionary nationalists and certain forms of indigenous articulations around self determination or sovereignty. And that's a broad scope. It doesn't include everybody or everyone, but it also doesn't exclude. And so within that I'm very specifically not talking about liberals per se or certain types of progressives just to be very clear. And why, right, because there's certain fundamental challenges that I think the left has to uphold. Number one, it has to be very clear on the stance relative to capitalism and imperialism without fundamental challenge. And if you're not about the abolishment of those two things, I'm not quite sure what you are really about talking about you on the left. Now, there's other things that, you know, we, and we are split amongst those things amongst ourselves as we clear what they mean, what they articulated. But for us coming from our position, we also like like the more revolutionary nationalist position as it relates to the United States is getting some broad agreement or at least trying to understand that the project that you are living on called the United States government is a settler colonial project, right, and that it fundamentally has no legitimacy. Now, what you derive from that is what this shifting focus particular the first argument is about. Like, we have too much of a reliance on the frameworks, the ideologically I'm talking about the left, around bourgeois democracy. So I'm asking you to shift focus on how you relate to bourgeois democracy. Right. And why? The why is perhaps most important. A lot of our arguments particularly of late since the left has been so out of position and so unorganized for a good minute now. We get trapped in these notions around and arguments around we need to preserve democracy. And we need to fight for democracy by which people mean bourgeois democracy without necessarily recognizing or taking into account. I would argue the history of oppressed people, the history of subaltern subjects, the history of folks who've been colonized and exploited the world over that the argument that we kind of articulate about with this position is we act as if bourgeois democracy has been the global norm. Now I want you to think about that we act as if bourgeois democracy has been the global norm. Has it been? That's a question. No. Most folks on the planet have never experienced bourgeois democracy. None of the last 200 years. A the good chunk of that most of us were colonial subjects or direct slaves property of Europeans. And so we're only incorporated into that that this game or this this framework as a press subject to this or press subjects. Not something that we directly had access to. And we spent a good deal of the late 19th century in the 20th century. Right with the national liberation movements fighting to be incorporated into the bourgeois world. Right. So if you look at all the Ghana to, you know, Algeria to Vietnam, you know, I can go on and on. Trying to construct national entities, these nation states as part of a decolonial version of a decolonial program. But the piece was to be incorporated into the world system that the bourgeois order had created. But the reality of the situation was if we look back, the underscore that is this argument that bourgeois democracy and capitalism kind of go hand in hand. Right. At least I was presented to me and you and that they need each other. That's a complete farce. A complete farce. Right. Capitalism has never need bourgeois democracy to function. Didn't start with bourgeois democracy. And clearly it's probably not going in with any, you know, self-respectful bourgeois democracy. And why that's critical is because we'd wind up getting trapped in certain arguments around like defending this project and defending democracy, which winds up leading to a kind of a lesser than evil politics in pursuit. Right. And so we kind of like forestall actually fighting for revolutionary objectives for incremental things to like save as much space and protect as much democratic space that we possibly can. Not that that's not necessary, but does it leave room in our imaginations to think of ourselves as like the democratic subjects. I think, you know, I'll just use like Marx in particular was thinking, like the pursuit of democracy in the left being the champions of democracy as we argue in the paper does not mean we need to accept bourgeois democracy or bourgeois order or any of its institutions. Right. We have the ability to create our own and we have the ability to engage and subvert those that exist. And we need to do both at the same time. Like that is our argument. OK, so that's the shifting focus part. There's much more to say on that, but that's the shifting focus part. The other part of this is kind of the argument like the formula kind of aspects of it. If I accept your position, then what do I do? You know, what do I do? I'm one who argues the left being out of position does not mean that it's actually out of power. It just requires us to shift focus and to think in some profoundly different ways. And I would argue that we do have a crisis of democracy. Not a crisis of bourgeois democracy. We have a crisis of small D democracy amongst ourselves. Right. And I would argue that if you actually look the comprehensive sense of all the different potentially left leaning projects and things that we are involved in, just within this country, it is profound. We are doing a lot of work, but it's not connected. Right. It's not united. Right. We don't talk to each other enough. We don't plan with each other enough. We don't coordinate with each other enough. And we're definitely not organized. But I bet you, and I don't know Burlington in this particular way, but I bet you there's probably more than 15 community organizing projects around agriculture right here in this city. Am I wrong? Are there different kind of community gardens and things of that nature? There's probably more than 15 of them, right? Do y'all really plan and coordinate with each other? Huh? Oh, that's, that's, that's an issue. I'm sure there's some problems there. But I see a bunch of, which means no. Right. Like there's some dialogue. There may be some, you know, interchange of knowledge, but you're not planting in accordance with each other. You're not thinking about how do we meet the actual caloric needs of the people in Burlington, right? And it's more kind of a side activity than it is. Can this be a central activity that actually meets the social needs? And if it was more of a central activity that met the social needs, but you can probably create new relations of production based upon that, which then remove people from having to do so much extraneous wage labor. Not completely eliminated, not by itself, but it changes the dynamic, I would argue, if that was coordinated. Now just multiply that amongst all the other different things that we're doing. And how many people are actually involved in all these projects? It's a lot. But we're not organized. That's why we're out of position. We're not organized. But the practices that we are engaged in in a broad particular way, if they could be organized, could be potentially transformative. Not necessarily in themselves. You're going to have to have other kind of inputs, but our argument is, and this is something that we drew in particular from, like, our analysis of what happened in COVID. And let me just back up a little bit to say what I mean. I would argue that in real time, you know, all of us were alive three years ago. And I think we witnessed some profound shifts that maybe not lasted that long, but we witnessed some things that if you step back and you look at the arguments we've been living with the last 25, 30 years, some of them even longer than that. And what we've been told consistently by the nation-states, by all of modern-day institutions, the global economy is too large, too profound, too complex for there to be immediate shifts to eliminate poverty or to reduce poverty emissions and all these other kind of dangerous emissions. Right? So it's not even worth asking for, like, a hard radical stop. You're not going to get it. That's what they told us. And been telling us since 1992. What did we all live through in February, March, April, May of 2020? They stopped you. Right? They grounded to a halt. We're not doing a whole bunch of training. You know, ships was out in the ocean, you know, for months on end, right? Wouldn't allow them into ports. There was a period, you know, that wasn't, you know, totally associated with COVID, but at the same time, y'all remember oil was so cheap that they were giving it away. The oil companies were paying people to take oil from them off their hands because there was so much of a glut in the price that dropped. And so that was just one of these living moments where they were going to stop and step back like, wait a minute, y'all been completely lying the whole time. I mean, we already know, but to see it in real time is something else. When you start to think about it, it's like, wait a minute, if there's political will, we can actually move on some of this pretty quickly and pretty profoundly. We just witnessed it, right? And other things that they said, like, oh, you know, it's too complex, it's too big, it's too, you know, unwielded to try to do it. We all witnessed a type of not everywhere, not uniform, but we lived through a kind of a mini universal basic income experiment for a year and a half, right? And the U.S. economy didn't collapse, right? It probably actually saved it for at least four while, right? And it was so threatening to a certain degree that, you know, what the Republicans or some of the Democrats started losing their minds after about six months is like, look, no, we got to stop this because us giving these, you know, benefits out is undermining people returning to work because they're making, they're giving more money off of these benefits than they were from actually working. Right? Which they said, the weight of the solo and the condition that people will come back. And then what was the after effect of that? Part of it, the consciousness that happened. Someone spontaneously, people just stopped going to work, right? Or at least stopped working for wages, you know, that was so far. And the thing I like to say is, you know, being part of the Fight for 15 campaign in Jacksonville for a long, long time, the pandemic that in six months where we couldn't do it in 10 years. Like quickly, I remember going to one of the local stores and seeing it in the window, we'll pay $20 an hour. And with benefits, this is in Mississippi where there basically is no real wage control or, you know, what do we call it? What's the minimum wage? Minimum wage. There really is no minimum wage. And they don't offer no benefits to nobody. Right? This is a tap heartly state regime to the fullest. And, you know, right to work literally means a right to like work to death. And it's such a dramatic to see how uneven it is if you just look at certain migration patterns and give you a sense of the level of super exploitation that still exists in Mississippi. Mississippi does not have a large Latino or immigrant migrant population in it. And it's mainly agricultural state. Now ask yourself why. The primary reason they can steal that super export citizen-based black labor at such a cheap rate that they don't need to bring another one. Like we got the cheap labor force we need right here why bringing somebody else? And we can do to them basically the same thing we do to people who don't have papers. If they get out of line I can put the action deal and I can since they depend upon me I can get them off their farms. That's still the case in Mississippi. And if you've been following some of the news you'll see some of that still at play like how they're basically as I was telling somebody else I want y'all to understand before I leave here why I'm going on this. So by the end of this legislative session which happens in a week and a half at least in Jackson structurally we will be back in 1954. And I'm not joking with you I'm not being hyperbolic like apartheid is really being legislated back into existence in Jackson, Mississippi. There'll be a black Bantu style which will have no resources and there will be the white majority errors will have control over a city within a city that's not elected it's totally controlled by the governor that will have all the resources that they can directly control and then institute an occupying police force that controls the whole city. That is basically what we are going to have so folks be clear about that that's what's being instituted and that's a precursor basically what's coming up. So drawing from those lessons this was the point. Drawing from those lessons of seeing these profound shifts one of the things that made us really we were and for us we tried to do it during the pandemic to make it clear luckily we were internationally connected to some good folks and so if y'all remember first it was China then it was Italy and Iran those were the first two that got hit at least that they were talking about and comrades in Italy initially were saying oh it's just a bad flu then a week later they would say no it's worse we were wrong because we were trying to learn from them like how are you guys dealing with providing mutual aid we were trying to get ourselves here and they called a stop if you don't have the personal protective equipment if you don't have the PPE people are dying stop what you're doing so we were trying to figure out what can we do we figured some things out but the thing that was most the speaking person that was most illuminating to me was to see the explosion of mutual aid work that actually did take place throughout the country during that period and that said to me that neoliberalism which I think neoliberalism in my view it's most successful piece has been it's cultural penetration and it's cultural acceptance not just all the things that's privatized and dismantled but as a cultural project it has been highly successful and that was the piece that's most concerned that I think will live well beyond whatever a little welfare oriented tweaks they might want to try to do which is what Biden was elected to do and what he said he was going to try to do but that demonstrated it hasn't been as far reaching or as penetrating as I thought but what it revealed was a number of different like challenges I think that we've been trying to search for like our old problems of the old kind of 20th century variants of state socialism that have tremendous problems right particularly trying to assess demand and actually do any kind of development from below because they didn't do what they didn't do well let's just be real about that and so like this was an instance of people responding to real need and real time in their communities right and meeting a certain level of need and fulfilling right through just totally decentralized planning totally decentralized planning but planning to a certain extent at least on a community level you know well and we saw at a certain point I think was like in particularly in the Midwest you know there were a lot of farmers who were just stop selling you know shifting to the market A in part because it was cut off but like they were just taking stuff directly to food centers and food banks and then setting up distribution centers and meeting kind of aggravated need and doing a certain level of planning and a couple of them based upon what people need so that kind of need and demand of distribution was being met in a very decentralized way and for me we were trying already with people then we helped to form this coalition called People Strike you know try to deal with the pandemic and this lesson just seemed to be kind of being missed by a lot of people that we were in in relationship with and part of it we were trying to talk to a lot of angry means because I remember there was a little strike wave that was happening at that particular point in time right some of it before the pandemic the pandemic kind of really kicked off but then a lot of the like some of the chicken workers in Alabama and Georgia they started picking up very early on and then kind of picked up so you know it's like look we have two sets of responses going on that if they were coordinated to be very powerful and we were saying it could move us in the direction not necessarily immediately but move us in the direction of a general strike and that the potential and capacity was there and we were saying this and arguments and people striking articulated people want to go back and look at some of that before the George Forber value even took off you know so it brings us back to that central point like if we were really organizing connected we could be extremely powerful but that's not how we look at ourselves right that's not how we look at ourselves like we look at all these things as like little fragmented disruptions that we're not connected to no connected dots so we're saying with this formula let's connect the dots and the first piece that we said we wanted you know really articulate and lift up and then there's a piece that you see that's on our website there's a little this formula that's kind of written on there and I'm only going to talk about four or five of them very quickly the first one is mutual aid right and we start with that one primarily because that is what a great many of us are actually going and doing on a sustaining basis throughout and this is from like this is from a materials orientation and what we're first trying to look at is where and how are people already organized right it's different and like let me convince you to do something I'm like no where are people already organized what are people already doing like and the question is how do we then build the democratic practices to connect and we have to deal with like just be real we got to deal with a crisis of trust thus trusting each other on the left which we don't do that well we got to deal with a crisis of imagination we got to deal with a crisis of confidence and we got to deal with a crisis of vision so that's what these type of things of what we're trying to articulate so the piece we're talking about with mutual aid imagine connecting that because it has weaknesses like one of the weaknesses of a lot of our mutual aid work that we articulate like I'll just put it this way the problems are being quick a lot of our mutual aid is dependent upon gifts right or minor appropriations one or the other neither of which is sustainable right but let's say the cupboard runs out then we can't distribute anything so what is it missing it's missing connection to the productive capacity of the working class and that is what one of the next pieces really tries to address so the next piece in that formula is food silence and trying to be very clear for mindful of connecting these two things and trying to get folks who are involved in the mutual aid work to take food production a little bit more seriously and divert some time and energy into that on a local level starting in both urban, suburban and rural pieces and then try to think of it within the bio region to develop some capacity within that region first and foremost to be able to develop a real program of food sovereignty that's directly connected to the demand and oriented responses coming out of all the information that's being gathered by the folks who are doing the mutual aid work like how do we determine what people actually need the mutual aid is a part that can if articulated in a particular way begin to answer some of those questions and it's a way also of trying to of from largely you know be real a defensive piece down the road it's a way of trying to deal with some of the major urban and rural divides that exists within the United States political project at present right and what do I mean by that go look at the 2016 and 2020 electoral maps right you know it's just a point of evidence right so the Democrats basically can only count on urban areas for any basis of sustainability but the rest of the map is red and that's the red of the good kind I guess it's you know the landmass of what the republic can control is pretty overwhelming and as an organized strategy I think one of the only ways the left is going to overcome that is by building our own you know urban to rural strategies that's linked in these particular ways right so that's a component of what we're looking at now food sovereignty not enough not nearly enough so the other piece that's central to this if you look into the version that we got to redo it we initially said cooperative economics this normal we got that wrong we got that wrong it's a short change of what we actually want to say which is work yourself organization work yourself organization is a major third component and this is where in particular yes we have to be doing broader work to create more cooperatives particularly working cooperatives anywhere and everywhere to cover all different kind of areas but there's another piece where I would say work yourself organization look union density in this country is declining rapidly and union power declining and their model I would dare say is somewhat fundamentally obsolete and I'm just going to make that argument somewhat fundamentally obsolete in the sense that you know it's oriented by the bounds and what people have accepted is going back to the first part of what we have learned to kind of accept within the framework of the national liberation act a national labor liberation act but accepting those terms about what we can fight for the workers right and what we can like how we can't be in solidarity with other workers we can't be involved in the strikes that's one of those things that's shifting crap all that believing in it is a limitation it's a complete limitation that we bought into right and it worked for about 25 30 years that period is wrong get rid of that right and move out of that because now we're only 10% of what's considered like the working class anyway I hold on to it you know most people tell you because of the resources and instructions I don't want to get rid of that but I know it's not sufficient either to do what we need to do so the one of the pieces that we've been pushing for is we need to be encouraging all the different forms of work or self-organization that we particularly can with a very class-centered project orientation including what we have kind of developed in trying to articulate is like we need to be building that co-ops with co-ops safe but class struggle or class conscious oriented you know co-ops which is different how most co-ops are articulated most co-ops are articulated within a very entrepreneurial kind of framework which leaves them kind of isolated to only dealing with their members and the benefits of their members and not being in solidarity with other workers so much so that a lot of literature was to say well co-ops will survive economic crisis because they can shift their own wages so the fact that we can explore ourselves greater than what the market will bear should not be something that should be praised right and the time of crisis we need to be figuring how do we organize more people right not how do we retreat more inward to deal with but that's part of this orientation even about co-ops that has to change like if they're going to be any way or any form of instruments that enable us to do any kind of revolution in activity but on the corresponding end right hopefully you know I was just in UMass and did a presentation with Chris Smalls and one of the reasons why I really wanted to get up when I saw that and kind of do this weird schedule that I'm on now was to make a particular intervention and say okay look what y'all doing in Amazon and what folks are doing at all the coffee shops and that's cool but if it's just about better wages better working conditions in the contract I would argue that's not what we need right I'm not telling you not to do that but I want to encourage y'all particularly at the Amazon like can y'all think about actually taking over Amazon given the behemoth that it is like interject that until you're thinking you start planning for it now and let's figure out those of us who are like the consumers or not of Amazon how to be acting solidarity with them to totally take this over and make it you know a social and collective each other it's going to be hard to tell the beauty don't get me wrong but if we don't think about it it definitely won't ever come to pass it's not going to just organize itself in that particular way so to interject in that particular way that's why this component is about we have to do a certain level of just promote working class self-organization for all these things to be tied together with the pursuit of democratizing socializing and democratizing the means of production that has to be the goal not just like better working conditions than wages but without that goal it doesn't mean anything the goal is how do we do that in a weird period where there's kind of two dimensions that what really three dimensions have to happen at once one in a community like mine I can scream about seizing the old mantra of seizing the means of production and I mean that, plan on that in every form or fashion but there ain't that many core means for me to seize the jacks like the productive capacity that is just not there so part of what we're doing is we're actually building up the productive forces right so that's the other part but the piece is like how do we do that within the ecological limits that exist that's the real trick so it's not production for production it has to be articulated from the top around how do we create things based upon the actual needs within our community right so a use based form of production not that commodity based form of production right critical shift that we've been talking about that all of us have studied in kind of parks you know what I'm talking about but how there are certain things that enable us to kind of move to that one in particular when that gets to the fourth component on that theme which is community production and this is something that we picked up primarily from an organization called Insight Focus I'm going to look at it based out of right now primary out of Idaho but also based on Detroit and this is taking some of y'all might be familiar with the old CNC Computer Numeric what was called Computer Numeric program whatever it was but now they call it like digital fabrication and the digital fabrication that kind of revolution Blair I would argue and I believe you know it's kind of like this 1.5 version but it's growing exponentially and we have an article in the book you know which is called Eliminating the Fabrication Divide being very conscious about black hopes kind of got excluded from the first kind of digital divide then being clear we want the interest now so that we can develop appropriate technology because we're not technology folks I'm not for sure right and I was very reluctant at first around even kind of thinking in a particular way because one of the questions I was sitting down with Blair I was like look when I see with all this kind of formal automation there's more and more need to eliminate black labor that's a direct threat to me with that sort of revolution I need my folks to have jobs and this is a particular way to eliminate jobs he's like I understand why you're thinking about that way but think about it this way instead right now we community owners in places where we go appealing you know under developing their jobs are not returning to Detroit in the same way that they were for the beginning of the 60s I know that you know that this is a space that we can occupy that builds our productive capacity in a way that's not based upon commodity production also particularly after seeing what they're doing we need that we brought it and I would say that this is a component that we need to add fundamentally to all our work so all this has to come together democratically and be involved and the way in which there's two things that didn't have to be described and so we call these practices I'm outlining within the building fight formula that they're there this is borrowed from Gromsche there's the practices of positioning and then the practices of what I'm describing are like the practices and methodologies of position like putting ourselves in a position to be able to fight back but there's another component of this which we know is real if the far right was not on the advantage it was still underneath this because if you get to a point where workers are taking over factories one way or another buying them, taking them, occupying whatever the situation if you get to that particular point as we are now experiencing Jackson the empires won't strike back they're not going to sit there and just let us move how we want to move because it all sounds nice and pretty they're going to fight back and they're going to move back so at some point you have to be prepared to do the level of democratic work with a clear sense of community self-defense and those are the last two practices within this formula that we really want to articulate and what this is asking for again if you look at most of this there's millions of people already bullying this that's the key point it's not like we're asking people in many respects to adopt something particularly new both everybody here works for a wage if you're not entirely new you do work for a wage so you are already involved there's already a sign of struggle that you are involved in that just needs to be chicken organized in a profoundly different way right so that's convincing of your co-workers to move in this particular way but it's not like you asking them to move to Mars like no we need to do what we're doing to find different outcomes so we start with a material basis and then have to figure out how do we connect all this so we have collective power in aggregate right and for that we need like people's assemblies on a broad level that are not just like knowledge let's get together and you know just talk politics whatever the situation is like no how do we start actually making decisions if we're engaged in all of these practices how do we start making decisions around what do we produce you know who needs it the most how do we deal with the real housing questions you know if there's like a shortage but there's some extra capacity in some place else do we feel like we can organize ourselves to basically maybe occupy that in a particular way so you start really dealing with concrete material political questions and the other piece of which I'll end on I'm trying to incorporate this in such a manner that the ideological diversity that we have doesn't have to be surrendered like that's the core piece of what we're trying to articulate with this and why we're saying this more as a formula like I'm not trying to convince the anarchists not the anarchists no more that can be agree upon doing some things together for some concrete political objectives and I actually need some of the tools from your tradition to correct some of the mistakes from mine right and if we're doing enough things collectively together we wind up creating you know a set of practices that deal with our current material reality that enabled us to move forward and create some new thought and new practices and this is based upon this notion that basically it's easier to act our way into new ways than it is to think our way into new ways of acting so I'm in here thank you