Left Coast Media
Left Coast Media
Wherein The Collective Grows
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Guys are comedic style, choice, social comfortable. It's blight and ghettos. There's transcend blacks going off course.
Speaker 2All right, comrades. Welcome to the left coast podcast with your host today. Tiberius Caracas. Call me all sauce. This is earned. So, um, I think first of all, uh, introductions are in order for earn. Go ahead and uh, give us a little bit of a bio. So I've lived in the North Bay for a couple of years and I work in the restaurant industry and it's a wonderful place to live. I think there's a few issues that are particular to the region and a few that are definitely generalized throughout the states. Um, as far as the bay area goes, it seems to me we sort of meet urban and rural depending on where you live in the counties and it provides more of a, I think, demographic variance. Um, yeah, I was,
Speaker 3I was saying to Tiberius in, I'm not sure if it's in an interview that we lost because of audio sound, but just the incredibly quick change that you get once you head north on one oh one or up on 80, as soon as you are out of East Bay area or out of San Francisco, it's, I mean Morin, but then once you're out of Marin, it's still different enough.
Speaker 2Yeah. Because, um, you know, I've, I've lived here for 30 years now. One of the things that I hear from other people and that, uh, you know, myself and my family has said about the place, this is border country between like super high end and,
Speaker 4um, like people who came over during the dust bowl redneck, you know, there's, there's a real mix and it's, it's, you know, a very strange kind of,
Speaker 2um, like mill you between like hippies
Speaker 4and rednecks and super progressive liberals and like Hillary for prison bumper stickers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I have a, um, uh, a picture on my phone that I took a, at a gas station just up north a little bit. That was, um, Hillary for prison, a Trump sticker on this old, like tiny little Toyota or Datsun pickup truck with these two giant semi smoke stacks coming out through the bed. It's like, yeah, cause that, that's the kind of place that this is just right. It's odd. It is.
Speaker 3I kind of refer to things like that as the, as the liminal spaces. And um, in metaphysical terms, that's where, where you get the most magic. Where, I mean I'm a technically scientist, but it's still eight feels like you're getting two very two, three, four very different things. Meeting and the, the whole ends up being completely unlike what you would have expected to happen.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. And in my experience, you have a lot of the older hippies that are culturally sort of Newark Timesi liberal and they consider themselves like the vanguard of progressivism. And then you have a lot of the blue color. Um, in my experience, people that work jobs like construction, um, electricians and they sort of Info war z in their media landscape. But Dude, you drilled who, you know, a lot of those same like, um, New York Times hippies would, would call white trash. Right, right. And it's funny because you drill down and just without putting any cultural signifiers in the conversation and you ask about how they feel about policy and there they tend to be a lot of people I've talked to a lot more left leaning as far as what they would prefer. Whereas with conversations with some of the older liberals, too expensive who is going to pay for it. And I think we really get to test the thesis or the practice of appealing to material conditions of people whose other views you might find objectionable and building a political movement based on appeal to raising the standard of living. Right. So, so you're, um, you're, you're from here, right? I'm from the peninsula, but I mean it's more or less, yeah, there's,
Speaker 5there's a lot of similarities there, but so, um, so your uh, growing up and, and you know, coming out in this sort of the same kind of, uh, culture, uh, what made you, uh, what, what woke you essentially like how did you, how did you go from just being a, you know, your, your standard middle of the road liberal too, like being a part of the DSA northbay chapters, organizing committee. Like, like what, what, what was that path like? Well, there was always a discontent and
Speaker 2I've been trying to figure out if it was me or if more and more people within our more or less generation had that same discontent. And it was the consensus that,
Speaker 5yeah,
Speaker 2the people who are are, are our folks, the political leaders are doing their best and they're fighting the battle against the inhibitory Republicans. And political progress is slow. And you know, that's just the way it is. And really just getting context, learning history helped me. Yes.
Speaker 5Two
Speaker 2sort of see that the shift in policy from I'd say the late seventies to now, and I mean, honestly it was learning that this is not how it's always been. This isn't how it is in other places and things are weird. Um, Adam Curtis, the documentarian talks about in hypernormalization that there's this feeling and it was in the eighties Soviet Russia before the collapse, that something is wrong, but we don't really know an alternative. So we just have this weird feeling and, um, ism is right there to offer, to sell you something that will make that feeling go away. Exactly.
Speaker 5Well, yeah, and exactly. But, and it wasn't even just the, the Soviet Union in the 80s. I mean, you, you look at, um, uh, Tina, there is no alternative and you know, coming out of the Reagan Thatcherite era, and it was the same thing. It was basically sold to us that there is no alternative to the hedge [inaudible] system of the day. Um, you know, and, and a lot of people really bought that because that was the propaganda that was fed to everybody from birth. That there is no alternative. So, so now people can conceive of the utter annihilation of everything before they will even think about the end of capitalism. Exactly. And sort of finding the language. And part of that was
Speaker 2branching out in my media diet and also meeting people, um,
Speaker 5to really describe the discontents and, and
Speaker 2deliberating act of naming the problem, which is capitalism and finding comrades to sort of reify that idea that it rules the world and it's going to be, uh, honestly like a hundred year battle or blogger, who knows. But that's the objective. Having a goal to work towards, no matter how lofty and a lot of liberalism just really does not have that. It's twisting a gear or a pressing a button and twisting lover here and you just going to magically find this formula that makes, uh, this hyper late capitalism, consumerism, neoliberal austerity world, just work for everyone. And you see that rationalize these logical, you know, backflips that you see in, you know, the pundit class that yeah, we're almost at the point where you know, everything's going to work out and the economy was going to get better and no, it's definitely not. Yeah. So because both Siberia and I are disciples of book Chin or not disciples. But you know what I mean? I do have to chime in here and, and quote from the meaning of confederal ism that the assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist. It's the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking. So as you were saying this assumption that,
Speaker 6hmm,
Speaker 2the system that we have currently is the only system that we can have and all we have to do is just tweak it, right it for people that say where Utopians I think the real utopians are the people who really, really believe that this somehow without changing any vast structural portion, is going to suddenly work and improve people's lives. I mean, you look at just the metrics and a lot of the problems that were almost gone by the 70s are getting progressively worse. Um, systematically all of the new deal, you know, Keynesian policies were undone and honestly our job is socialist. Communist anarchist are as sad as as it is to fight the long battle just to get back those Keynesian policies. I mean, getting one of them back will be a huge win, like a lifetime defining when exactly. And it's like, you know, a lot of people look back on that era from the, the, you know, late forties to the mid seventies as, um, what capitalism truly is without realizing that it was, you know, fundamentally about capitalism, finding these vast, vast markets and enormous quantities of untapped
Speaker 5oil reserves or energy reserves. And, you know, um, uh, having swept away the last vestiges of the indigenous people in North America and having tapped into foreign markets of, uh, uh, reserves like Colton and lithium, like all of these sort of natural events and processes came together with the massive UN capitalistic if he wanted to take it as the capitalist, um, or as the, as libertarian notion of capitalism, um, massive collectivized government expenditure into basic sciences and all of these things, you know, created this confluence of massive, massive growth. Yeah. And, and there was, there was so much growth that even the capitalist had to admit that, um, other people deserve some of it, right. Because
Speaker 2there was in the Great Depression, the real potential for an uprising. Right. So, I mean, we all know the story. FDR went to the ruling class, the billionaires or millionaires and said, you know, we gotta do something. And, um, yeah, so it was very, the policies were, were pretty redistributive at the time. Um, but you're right about those access to foreign markets and always coupled with insane violence, death squads, torture, um, the Cold War. You know, I just had this thought today, we called it a war against capitalism, right? And ideological struggle. But it was really us doing whatever we could to make these various markets amenable to us. And there's very few that are left to now and you look at who's on our right, the axis of evil, right? Like lists of countries and they're all the ones that we haven't completely just right cause everybody else, every, everybody else has a client state to the corporations that ruled the Western world. There was all these I Pan Arab Ism and the Non Aligned Movement. There was all these various nations trying and all throughout Latin America trying to, you know, be sovereign and self govern. And we called that communism. And I mean the most insane torture and just awfulness is what propped up that sort of golden age of capitalism appear. So thank you for connecting the two things because I haven't really, I know both, but I haven't really realized they're so interdependent.
Speaker 3So one of the things that you mentioned was you, you mentioned kind of revolution and the fact that right now what we're pushing the four as socialists and left this, some anarchists is not so much full now or revolution, but we're just fighting the battles just to reinstate social democracy even
Speaker 4just, just to make capitalism a little bit less shit.
Speaker 3I personally, I, I want to go further in that, but you know, we start with what we can when we start with, but that brings me to, um, something that came up on Twitter related to the Portland protests. Uh, Portland, ISO, the international socialist organization was there and their standpoint was that nobody should be covering their faces and that they will not explicitly anti-cop which for ISO is kind of surprising,
Speaker 4right? Right. At Iso as the, sort of like the vanguard revolutionary socialist organization that still exists. I mean, what are they doing saying that cops aren't necessarily bad? I mean, as they are institutionally there to protect, defend and uphold capitalist private property. Like what are they talking about?
Speaker 3Yeah. I, many of us here in this room have ISO comrades or friends who are ISO members and do not necessarily, you know, they are good people. Uh, I myself could not be a member of ISO because I'm just too damn unique. But the fact that ISO is a revolutionary socialist organization versus DSA, which previously has been kind of the left wing of the Democratic Party. Yes. And it's interesting to see the difference between the two as they grow with Dsa, I believe is growing faster than ISO.
Speaker 4Oh, way faster. DSA is the basically the largest growing political organization in America right now. Just like it went from like, what was it, like a thousand member or something like that, a couple of hundred members to now they're well over 20,000.
Speaker 3Yeah. And I wonder if some of that is in part because we don't push revolution.
Speaker 4Uh, no, I, I would probably say that it's more related to the fact that Bernie Sanders called himself a democratic socialist. And even if he's not, I love you grandpa Bernie Bait. You want not a democratic socialist. You're a social democrat. Yeah. I mean he used to like back when he was getting arrested. Yeah, getting arrested, arguing book chain up in Vermont. That's when he was a democratic socialist and then he became part of the, you know, the ruling institutions and he basically dropped all of his anti capitalist rhetoric and he just wants to make capitalism a little nicer, which thank you grandpa Bernie. But you know, you're old,
Speaker 5your not sufficiently, you're, you're not sufficiently calling for what we, as you know, the young left are calling for you served your purpose and what you know, it's time to find other people who are going to take up the mantle with us. Exactly. The friendship with Bernie ended now Jezza is my best friend.
Speaker 2It's funny because a lot of sort of the centrist liberals, when you argue they go tell Bernie this or you know like we go after Hillary or whoever Schumer and then they go off to burning. It's like we don't really care about Bernie. He wasn't like weed. He wasn't our leader. He, he probably let a lot of people to be rack radicalize obviously. But yeah, we're not attached to him because it's all the current mode of politics is getting your masthead person and appealing to them to do the things you want to do. Right? Like getting your great man theory please. Like give a socialized medicine. Oh, I promise. I'm trying and they don't understand or it, it's hard to conceive of another sort of avenue of politics, which brings the masks Obama. Right. So I want to touch on the idea of revolution. You know, that word, we should just pick a different word because it just doesn't really mean anything anymore because, you know, this is the largest police state, um, military apparatus in human history. And so violent revolution would not really a few, you know, um,
Speaker 5we're, we're too small for it. It's, it's, it's what, it's what's needed, but we're, we're not, we're, the left isn't in a place where that is a thing that is going to happen because if, if the, if, uh, essentially the, the workers who are the base of any revolution, it is a revolution doesn't come from an elite vanguard, right. Pushes the workers to know it's, it's, you know, um, I, I, I'm with marks on this one. It is a materialist condition where the workers are no longer, um, satisfied that they can get even the semblance of a good deal and they refuse and pull their labor out. And the ruling classes basically try to force them with violence and they, the working class reacts with their own violence. And that is revolution. The character of the revolution is determined by other forces, you know, intellectual, ideological forces. And honestly, right now the right is kind of winning that.
Speaker 2I, it, I saw a tweet maybe three, four weeks ago and I can no longer remember who said it, which is a continual refrain in my life. But they were saying, I'm talking to all my comrades
Speaker 3in DSA and we're all saying, well, you know, I'm not going to start a revolution, but if one happens,
Speaker 2yeah. So just sheer numbers. A lot of the people that speak that language, I mean the very like militant ISO like language and they don't want to call them out because I don't know enough about ISO to really, you know, drop some bombs. But, um, it feels like the really militant people calling for revelation don't know how to speak to the average working class person if they met. Right. What the working class, this abstract concept to a lot of these people because they live in these urban environments where everyone agrees with them. If they met the average person that works in a Walmart and it's the largest employer in the country, and maybe, you know, rural Nevada, they would fucking hate these people. They would be like, you're disgusting. Right. Disdain for them.
Speaker 4Yeah. I mean, they, they draw from a Lennon this tradition, right? Which is sort of the tradition of Lennon that worked in Russia because of the cultural context of Russia. Um, that tradition doesn't work in the American context because the, the American mythos is so fundamentally opposed to that kind of, uh, it's, it's not just even like that kind of actual movement. It's, they're so fundamentally opposed to that kind of over politics. Right? Right. Like even, even when you talk about, you know, the, you know, like the,
Speaker 3Oh,
Speaker 4the three percenters, two to pick a random, the fascist example, uh, three percenters, they're entire mythos is about liberty and freedom and protection against a government that has gone bad. I mean, they, they call themselves the 3%. They would rise up to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and emphasis domestic.
Speaker 3So instead of necessarily going for revolution, this, this loops back a little bit to one thing that I've consistently said. Whenever we, I hear the refrain of, well, why do our chapter's not have POC? Why do our chapters not have women? That instead of going and telling women, you should join our organization, our organization nation is great, or you should join our revolution, or evolution will be great. Instead of that, you go to what women POC, marginalized people are already doing and you help, yes, you give material assistance, you become a part of their struggle. You join with them. So that combined your forces can, you know, build each other up. Absolutely. And I've seen a little bit of that from Iso Comrades Butts. Their approach is I think fundamentally at odds with, with that kind of praxis.
Speaker 2Right. And, and like, like I said earlier, you know, being able to just connect with the average American, that culturally you might just find repellent because they believe this or that or they're not, you know, I mean, I'm being blunt here, I'm not talking about any of us in this room, but that personality type. And, um, so revolution will happen when we're able to make a case for why it needs to happen and how it's going to benefit everyone. And
Speaker 5maybe as Rosa Luxemburg would say, maybe it will just start happening and we'll just have to jump on. Right? I mean, you know, uh, I think about Rosa Luxemburg did a lot to, you know, put some of the finer points on sort of Marxist philosophy about what is going to happen after capitalism. Right. And, and you know, and, and what are the things that she, you know, paraphrasing her. But one of her main themes was, um, revolution where you can reform where you must because it is through that process of reform that you, um, build organizations, you hone ideology, you, um, allow the working and laboring classes to have a little bit of a self determination and a little bit of stability so that they can go out and do other things and learn about other things and feel okay about, um, organizing and being a part of movements and then that that would itself or the or that would lend itself to a revolutionary situation. Who should that ever arise? So now we've comprehensively shit on ISO despite indicating at all times that we weren't going to join us next week for our interview with multiple ISO members. It will be coming, it will be coming from the gas station down the street and be sure to bring your knuckle raps. Well, I don't,
Speaker 2I want to be clear. I'm not poo pooing the idea of revolution. I'm more illustrating the work that needs to be done. No,
Speaker 5I don't, it's not, it's not a revolution in and of itself. It is the [inaudible]
Speaker 2a politics of how you approach it, right? Yeah. And the not the amount of people that we're going to have to not, we're not going to be able to turn them all into completely enlightened people, but if we're able to make the case as to why they should join the movement, that's going to happen,
Speaker 3I do have to call you in here instead of saying we can enlighten them, that they can enlighten, that we can assist them in enlightening themselves. Much better said that that's a global tick. That I'm trying to overcome myself, this avoiding us versus them. Especially because that's a turnoff for a lot of people. Is you
Speaker 5one of someone telling them how they should think and, and why they're wrong. And it's also, it's also inherently authoritarian. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it is. Um, but it's extremely understandable given the cultural context that we grew up in. Because when you think about the standard model of education, the standard Prussian model that was, you know, conceived and designed with the explicit purpose of creating discipline and obedience to authority. And so this is part of, this is part of our struggle, you know, um, uh, as, as leftists and as radicals to um, you know, not just a work on changing the world outside, but at first we had to train, change our internal world.
Speaker 3So I have two things. First, comrades, the post those in the room and anyone listening, if I start to do that them versus we please politely call me in and let me know about it. And it's up at, uh, at Northbay, DSA at left-pad, at communal sauce and at [inaudible],
Speaker 5R R, r, n. Yes, three Rs in and then at our, our, our n thank you.
Speaker 3But the second thing getting, you were saying, uh, this Prussian education system and like the way that our political system is set up, it's, you know, it's us versus them. I wonder if that in itself has anything tying into the way that those who we may call Tankinis have this support of, uh, any regime that is not America. So support for the land Assad, because he is not the imperialist Americans.
Speaker 5W, which I think goes back to something that you shared on the DSA Facebook group. Right. Um, well that, that thing you just mentioned is a, it's kind of like American exceptionalism in, in reverse. It's like we're the most bad ones and all the other countries, they aren't capable of being as evil as us. It's um, but yeah, I speaking to a British person, so that's very much not the case. I mean, you learned it from watching us. Right, right. Thank you daddy. England. Um, God, yeah, I mean
Speaker 2going into the, the whole issue of conflicts abroad and foreign policies is a long conversation. Um, but suffice it to say, I think a lot of us, and I probably do this myself on the left, use the various struggles as sort of like psychological proxies, maybe not psychological, but like we support, um, aside that symbolically represents something that we value. So I guess ISO is
Speaker 4right and anybody opposing American imperialism is inherently anti imperialist. That's, that's the, the idea. Yeah.
Speaker 2Well, which is great, which is what I, but yeah, an antiwar is kind of like where I come from. Um, but being able to be honest about and, and looking in like, like you, like you said, um, sauce, um, looking at what comrades in these parts of the world are saying, um, which is hard to find, especially in like the Syrian conflict. But, um,
Speaker 3yeah, and also shout out to the people in Arizona who, if anybody is listening from rezone is probably rolling their eyes and writing out a very, very long angry email about how I am an imperialist, a traitor and running dog. But, uh, those, it's a, an internet forum that split off from a something awful sub forum that got shut down because of threats against the president. And it's quite tanky tanky here being a colloquial term for people who believe that the USSR was in the right when it sent in tanks to try and crushed the Hungarian revolution of 1950 something 56, seven, something like that. Uh, so not necessarily ISO ISO or not necessarily tankinis tank is on, right? Necessarily Iso, but you may find some overlap there, especially if you are looking on Twitter or on Tumbler.
Speaker 4Right. Well, and it was, I believe, um, tanky was something that was specifically the Communist Party of Great Britain. Mm. Um, and then sort of, uh, because it is a such a, um, a universal within leftists circles that you find these kinds of people that it is sort of generalized out to anybody who, um, basically anybody who has, uh, a, a deep support of anybody who is seen by the West as being communists, whether or not they are, whether or not they are someone worthy of support, like Gaddafi did nothing wrong or, or, or you know, good old and he with his
Speaker 5a DPR K is a democratic wonderland. I mean. Yeah. Right, right, right. Wonderland when you are going on the guided tour. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2Um, and so I think that maybe puts a bow on the point I'm making, which is looking at these conflicts and seeing if they can fit into whatever our professed politics are. So I guess the Syrian opposition, the, you know, Nusrat and auto are all sham, whatever the calling of cells now is seen as a revolutionary vanguard by some. And then others support Assad because the bath party in its infancy was socialists, STI. But, um, I guess the weird thing to me is like using this Soviet Union like history as the framing of all of our political engagement. Like why do we still do like, so we're trying to radicalize people and bring them into the left, right? And you go to a meeting of a bunch of leftists and they say, you say something they don't like and they say, well you're a Stalinist or you know, it's like to the average person who is trying to get into who's seeing like, oh my God, capitalism is a problem. And Yeah, I think I'm a socialist and they come in, this doesn't really mean anything to most people. Like if we want it to be more illustrative, we might as well use like game of Thrones or something as like, you know, you're a Lannister or it would mean more to people. And it's just, it's a bizarre tick. And I think of the insular sort of left sectarian circles and how isolated they've been and, and what they haven't really, you know, affected the outside world very much in the last however many years. And I wonder,
Speaker 5right. But, um, you know, for the better part of a century, you had the two biggest, most powerful propaganda machines in the world saying the USSR is the paragon of communism, you know, so, um, it was useful for the USSR to um, Eh, basically sponge off of the goodwill that the communists had built up being pro worker's rights being for liberty, for being pro, the, um, collective worker ownership of the productive forces of society on, on their side. And this, this was something that they used basically to justify the, um, the what turned out to be the oppressive nature of their government and un, you know, on this side of the pond we had the American government saying, um, the USSR is the paragon of communism because communism is this inherently authoritarian dictatorial ideology. And so, so, you know, for their own internal political reasons, both of them were saying the USSR is communism. Right? So, so I mean, I think we're, we are where we're at today with the leftist resurgence and you know, so many people joining like the DSA, Socialist Party of America, Iso, what have you calling themselves socialists because we are now, I'm living with a generation that hasn't lived under that. Exactly. So, so, so now we are, we still have a hangover of that intense, intense propaganda war we hold as tropes in our heads or all those personae personas in our heads right there. It's, it's recent enough to be there, but it's long enough away that it is losing ground to a resurgence of what it really means to be socialist. Exactly. And so, um, perhaps new languages and new ideas are, are good because there is really no left wing government that is exists. Well, okay, there's a few, but what I mean is the experiments of the 20th century, what happened, happened and we need to conceive of a new vision that does not look at while we're going to be like Lennon or what, you know what I mean? We need to start and speaking a new language. And a lot of this old language is like a holdover from these groups that had their own sort of a jargon and it's fine. I mean, I think everyone who becomes a leftist should learn about the October Revolution and Lenin and Trotsky and, um, and I'm going to, you know, I've, I've said it before and I will say it again, but I think every comrade needs to read state and revolution, right? Right. I think that is, is one of the foundational texts of what it means to live in a revolutionary time. And uh, what, what seizing power means for law, the left, the way that we think about our struggles toward a less authoritarian future, a more socialist future. And you know, regardless of, regardless of what happened afterwards, this text on its own is, is an incredibly important document. I do need to chime in on behalf of myself and other, um, not book good people reading this available in the form off some memes or perhaps pastiches of drill tweets because that's really, that's, that's my level of dialectic. We're making such profound point in your job. That's also how I got into anarchism was fire.
Speaker 4Right. And, and you know, sometimes I have to remember that not everybody is as giant a nerd as I am. Right. So, I mean, uh, you know, uh, for me personally, I really do think that there are, there are a couple of things that pretty much every leftist we'll, we'll get a lot out of reading the communist manifesto now that exactly. I couldn't read his manifesto being, you know, the, the early example of the thing that every leftist should read, you know, or the, the conquest of bread or the next, the um, book Chins, the Google results for when you Google Marie. Hey, exactly. You know, just, just Google Murray book, Shin. It's okay. These, I think these things are necessary. And um, maybe if you don't actually read them, uh, I is still, I think good to maybe listen to people who have read them and talk with them about it. You know, join a join a reading group and even if you don't actually read the text, it's okay. You can get a lot out of the conversation that happens after that person who comes to class and not having read the text. Right. Because you know, and, and I'm, I want to defend that person because a lot of times what will happen is that person will show up to class not having read the book and have a, a question that might on the face of it seem kind of dumb. Like you know, you would know that if you read the book. Right. But trying to explain the answer to that question. Maybe something new comes out of that for you that you wouldn't have thought about because you didn't have to explain it to other people who read it.
Speaker 7I myself, especially at this stage of late capitalism, whether the, all of the problems that it is giving brain problems, it is giving me, cannot sit down and physically read a book. But I definitely can listen to a calm ready to telling me about a book. Yeah. Or somehing something up as succinctly as they can. Whether that be in some tweets or memes or even just like yelling something at me on the street, please don't yell at me on the street. Yeah. I have like 20% into about 20 bucks. Um, so, and it's hard. Um, but perhaps with that metaphor of answering the question, that should be the work, what we see our work, um, in front of us, but we need to do. Right.
Speaker 4All right. I mean, that's, I think, um, I, I really do think of that as my work. I mean, that's, you know, that's one of the reasons why, um, you know, I, I went to, uh, my, my friend and the Socialist Party Antonio to say that here's a, here's a thing that we need. We need more left as content that does this kind of thing.
Speaker 7I as well as that, of course, we
Speaker 3also have the material assistance, the mutual aid, that kind of project. Um, one thing I do want to highlight, I don't know if this will be out before it happens, but that the community action coalition is getting involved in the tiny house movement in Santa Rosa. Oh, awesome. So I, I did have that pulled up, but then chrome crashed because that's what he does. But, uh,
Speaker 4Google is a capitalist organization and they don't want us to know about these things. They don't want us to oppose them because they know that we will conquest. They're bred, they're creating a false scarcity in browser openness.
Speaker 3So yes, it's not going to, this podcast is not going to come out before it happens because tomorrow the community action coalition of Sonoma County is holding an action about how housing is a human right. And that is in conjunction with, or coalition with tiny houses for humanity. Um, tiny houses for humanity are working for a housing first solution to homelessness, which is something that I think is cool and good. And the Community Action Coalition of Snow Sonoma County clearly also thank for that is cool and good.
Speaker 4Well, um, I, you know, one of the things that earn and I have talked about offline, uh, is our desire to build, um, you know, local organizations that, that support universal free access to housing and food. So, um, you are involved with the CAC. Um, why don't you tell us a little bit about, you know, what, what uh, what, what tiny houses are, you know, what, what they mean for the community and that kind of thing.
Speaker 3You just love putting me on the spot. I really, really do. Instead of talking about what tiny houses for humanity, I'm going to talk about what housing first is because I think that that's a bigger issue and more important if you don't mind. No, go ahead. Yeah. So housing first is, so it's a, it's a methodology for putting people who are experiencing homelessness into housing without any restrictions, without any, uh, you know, you must have been sober for 90 days before you can move into this housing because part of the theory is that, you know, this a diathesis stress method model that perhaps the stress of being homeless is contributing to your mental illness or your substance abuse. And when you have some stable housing that can assist you to work on it, rather than saying, all right, so you have no idea why knew where you're going to be sleeping. You have no idea where you're going to be getting food. The only thing that you have in your life is escapism via alcohol or drugs. But we need you to give that up so we can give you a house, which I,
Speaker 7I just realized that rolling my eyes doesn't actually translate onto a podcast. But yeah, insert verbal. I role here, well, you know, I'm going to confess, just like we live in a racist society, so we all have racism living in our heads. We live in a inherently capitalist and right wing society and so highly classes, right? Classic. Exactly. And so one thing that I've heard my whole life and so I had lurking in my brain was a lot of people, if you give them a house, they're not going to like, you know, they want to be uninsured or they choose this lifestyle, whatever it is, right? They want to be on the streets using drugs or hitchhiking up to Mendocino or Humboldt or whatever. And, um, whether or not that's true for certain people, like it was really just, you know, one day I was like, holy fuck, just give them a house anyway. Yeah, I know. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 4Yeah. And, and I, I actually just had a debate with, uh, my father and a friend of mine over this exact issue. And you know what it really comes like, so a lot of people when they really fully adopt internally this, the, the ideology of capitalism, the worth of a human then becomes the value that they can produce for, uh, a company. Yes. That is their measure as a person. So even if you have more housing, more empty housing stock, then you have homeless
Speaker 7people, which is the case is the case. Exactly
Speaker 4what you, um, what you get are people saying, well, they don't have a job and they don't have money because they don't have a job and they don't, they don't have a job because they don't want to work, therefore they don't deserve housing. So they choose to, they choose to uphold a system that says, if you can't pay for it, you don't deserve it. And in a, uh, in a country like ours with this vast amount of wealth and waste, what that means is they want to have a system that is designed to kill you. If you don't make money for someone or if you don't already have money, the system will kill you by preventing your access to shelter or healthcare or food
Speaker 7because capital and capitalism doesn't require that an individual laborer or member of the proletariat survive. It just requires that that class of people survive. Exactly. Right. Um, I, it was, sorry, Donna, I brought this quote up one time and I sounded like an asshole because I didn't really clarify, I think was like one
Speaker 2of Adorno or something. He said, capitalism, like as far as freedom goes, you know, it's the freedom of the stupid to starve. And that was so brutal. And I was like, wow. You know, like if you don't work, then you can't buy food and then you starve and who would do that? Only, you know? And that's kind of the, the, you know, without the, you know, makeup and pretty face. That's sort of the system. Like, yeah. Like you can, you are freely able to back out of any labor contract. Um, and what that freedom means is that you are free to starve if you don't rent your body right too
Speaker 3duration. So bouncing back to tiny houses for humanity because we went off on the housing first tangent and then railed against capitalism for awhile because we're just to kind of rat bastards to go down that rat hole. So tiny houses for humanity is an endeavor to build and gift five fully functioning efficient homes for those in need. Clustered in a village as a prototype for affordable and socially sustainable communities. So they are looking to do this in Sonoma county because Santa Rosa Housing is so unaffordable and homelessness is in the area as an all time high. I'm an estimate was that there are nearly 4,000 Sonoma county restaurants sleeping on the streets or in their cars on any given night. And that includes children and elderly people, which is really a conservative estimate. Yeah. So we need more homes, tiny houses. While I personally would not want to live in a tiny house because I have too much crap because capitalism has told me that if I'm unhappy I need to buy something. I got to spend so much money today for no reason. Probably because you, you felt bad and capitalism said, I know and hang out with. That's it. Yeah. So this is a, a movement or an aim to build these houses. Right now they are looking for funding and um, selling autographed books, housing plans. Artisans are donating their talents. Um, the, the main people working on this r j Shaffer from the full lights, tiny house company and river king who does a housing rights advocacy work and give us a link and so I can put that on the show notes. I will, I will give you a link, but it is on Facebook. If you search for tiny houses for humanity, you will find them on Facebook. If you are listening to this through a podcast app that doesn't give you access to the show notes,
Speaker 2good point. That that does a good job of bringing us back to the local. And the issues that we are choosing to focus on, if not using our tiny amount of human bodies to do at least the, that we would like to address
Speaker 7as we grow. And housing is a big one. And because of my personal position within I guess society, I'm sort of poised between the two worlds. Um, my family is definitely very bourgeoisie and I interact with a lot of people that are not. And the biggest problem that I hear by far is housing. And then I go and I, and I, like I had just asked my dad because he, you know, he's familiar with real estate, he was like a broker and stuff and I said, you know, we need to like, can you think of a solution like to making housing affordable? Like what would you do if that was like your tasked with that? And he, he, you know, had trouble believing that it was such an issue. He's like, well isn't there affordable housing? You know, and like, you know what I mean? Like, so it's a lot of people that don't have the, these issues, homelessness, right. We think of the person that's under the bridge, but for that person, there's 20 more, 30 more that we don't see that are suffering just as much into homelessness act, which in part defined homelessness. If you are couch surfing, you are homeless. If you are sleeping in an area that's not intended to be slapped in. So if you are sleeping on a sofa or if you are sleeping in a room that is not explicitly a bedroom, for example, if you are in Oakland in that, um, rent, that listing that just came up over the weekend where somebody literally built a bunk above the bath tub in a bathroom and is trying to rent that out, ghost ship. I, that's what that was technically for federally funded programs that deal with homelessness, like you would count as homeless for those.
Speaker 4Also also, um, access to affordable housing doesn't just mean that people who might otherwise be homeless have a place to live. It also means that the people who otherwise would only have the, the slimmest, uh, have leftover money available after rent can buy food. Right? We have a huge, huge issue with food insecurity. Absolutely. In this country. And in this, uh, in California, one of the major agricultural regions in the entire world. And we have millions of people every single year. Every day millions of people go to bed hungry because they couldn't afford to eat that day. And we're no longer calling that issues of malnutrition or issues of not being able to afford food. We are using the euphemistic term food insecurity because if we sterilize something and remove the, the visceral centrality of it and
Speaker 7just put a euphemism in place, we will feel somehow disconnected from it in here, their food.
Speaker 4Right. And, and do you know what, what's the, what's the thing that, um, people keep throwing out? Bernie. Bernie breadline Sanders because he said it is better for people to have bread lines and starve and it's like, okay, you know, fine. It's breadlines are a good thing. They're only a better thing than literally starving. But what is nutrition assistance programs in this country? It is, it is indirect bread lines. And we have millions and millions of people on food who without these nutrition assistance programs would literally be starving. And not only that, they work 40 or more hours a week
Speaker 7to do it. Ask me later how bullshit t, TNF n f [inaudible] is and just how deep my anger is for Bill Clinton. Right?
Speaker 4Oh, I don't think you need to exclude anybody sitting at this table or listening to this podcast, the, the, the primal scream whenever someone mentions Clinton because liberals love him. But you have to realize that the reason why he was able to consolidate power over the Democratic Party was because he basically went to the Republican playbook. Yup. And, and gussied it up with progressive rhetoric and basically sold the left in this country down the shitter.
Speaker 7Not that there was much off the left at that point to be true. So, yeah, when I talked about disillusionment with the liberal sort of political imagination and why it was so liberating for me to find another language, it that, that thing that you just mentioned that whatever we stood, whatever the Democrats stood for in the past, well that's all gone and it is basically a daughtering, you know, aimless group of he just wheel out Nancy Pelosi. Anytime somebody needs to talk about how Medicare for all will never happen. Right Greg.
Speaker 4Exactly. Because, because she was out there with her signs before any of us were born like all right, but you're not out there with the signs anymore.
Speaker 7Yeah. And if you have them, we can't have universal healthcare anymore. So sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. The argument that the Democrats have been fighting for universal health care for like 80 years, it's like, well you suck at it. So move aside because it should be here by now. Yeah. If you've been working at it for 80 years, you have been failing for 80 years. So it's time to kick you out and put in people who are actually going to get this shit dog cause we actually want it or alternatively time for us to realize that the state will not help us and we need to help ourselves on if that means having to learn how to sue chest so that you can help your friends through doing your own health care community health cooperatives, that might be what it takes until they shut us down. Because
Speaker 4erotically I, I think that if, if you can go out and do a first aid course, like there's, there's a tremendous amount that you can do for your comrades just by having some, some, some of these basic things like in, it's not even just being out there, uh, in a black block formation or you know, running with, with Antifa, um, you know, just, just being able to render some kind of assistance to, to a comrade in need. These are tremendous skills for everybody to have because again, it's about being, uh, standing in solidarity with your comrades and, and giving mutual aid whenever you can, because that is how we build our communities and that's how we have the power and the strength as a collective against hegemonic power.
Speaker 7And in a later episode, I would really like to get youtube talking about community farms and agriculture and food and Co op.
Speaker 4Well that is absolutely something that, that, that is a conversation that deserves at least its own episode as I agree.
Speaker 7The prospect of various groups of the left, having something to offer that you would otherwise have to wait in line and fill out paperwork for whether it's health, you know, basic healthcare or food or shelter. Right. And the idea of dual power filling potholes. It's like, right, exactly. And this is, I think a strategy that has worked time and time again is, um, providing assistance give, what do you need, how can I help, um, that is not really in our playbook currently. And it should be, um, I want to jump back to the idea of housing and, yeah.
Speaker 4Yeah. So, so why don't we, why don't we go back to housing, maybe get a little bit of a positivity going here and then we can wrap it up. So we don't, we don't leave on a, on an angry note perhaps.
Speaker 7Well, um, so like I said earlier, um, it's a problem that a lot of people aren't aware of. I speak to a lot of folks that like Tiberias mentioned, spend almost all of their paycheck on rent and have barely enough money to do anything else. And the few people that eat, well they do it because it's literally their hobby. They spend the tiny, tiny amount of disposable income on actually buying vegetables and, and quality food and, and then, and they make the time or how much they sacrifice other things so that they can take the time to do that cooking. Cause one of the things that I see trotted out is, well, you could buy Mcdonald's for a, or you could buy
Speaker 3red beans and rice. Like bitch, nobody has time to make red beans and rice. If we are working three jobs just to be able to
Speaker 2exactly. Oh, let me go back 24 hours a soak the beans, beans take with, if you don't soak them and takes like two and a half hours, I don't you just buy a crockpot. Right. Um, so I think making these issues, putting a human face on them will be good. Um, but yeah, it definitely is a big problem. Um, because as Sonoma county and Napa become more and more the playground of various monied persons, and as more and more of our productive land gets given over to commodity great production. Right. Exactly. We need to keep that in mind that I have people now that have grew up in Santa Rosa that I know, um, moved to Healdsburg, moved to Cloverdale, and now they're going to have to go up into Mendocino county because they keep getting priced out.
Speaker 3I have, I have colleagues who are driving to work in Napa all the way from Davis every day because they cannot afford to live
Speaker 2like Lysa. Yeah. And I know people who live in Vacaville Davis out even, you know, sacker Sacramento, you know, commuting into Oakland, g Berkeley, a couple of them actually work in San Francisco. They drive literally two, two and a half hours every single day. And then drive two, two and a half hours back home.
Speaker 3But once the Sonoma Marin area rapid transit, this going, they'll still have to drive to get to a smart station.
Speaker 2Yeah. Also fuck you. Maronites we need that cross bay connector. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah.
Speaker 3But I think that's also a topic for another time. Yes. So how about we end on something that I, that I think is awesome. It is the International Antifascist Defense Fund that's input at tiff antifer defense, wordpress.com which Tiberius we'll put in the show notes. They are a fund to which anybody can donate and then become, sometimes you can get swag from them like cool stickers and tee shirts and flags, but that, that money then goes into a fund from which, uh, is paid out to people who are in trouble as a direct result of that stand against hate. So they have donated money to hex. The fellow worker who was stabbed in Seattle, they have, um, they have a decision going through right now about donating to people involved with the Portland Max attack. Um, just in the last, let's see, it started in 2015 and in the last year, first year they donated 1,700 to 48 antifascists and since November, which was when I made my first donation, I think I've seen that much come through in just six months, um, over 15,000 in the second year. And it's just getting more and more. But if you have cash that you want to give, I believe they even take bitcoin. If that is your thing. I encourage anybody to join the decisions crew by donating some cash.
Speaker 4Cool. Um, so the other thing is that we really need feedback from you guys. Uh, we, we want to hear what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong. Tell us about things that, uh, we need to talk about. If you want to come on the show, we'll probably have you on. If you're interesting, hit us up on email through left coast podcast@gmail.com. Hit us up on Twitter. We are at left-pad. Um, we are on reddit at reddit.com/r/left coast and you can, if you don't already know about it, our soundcloud page is soundcloud.com/left coast podcast and on Reddit and soundcloud, you can get our show notes.
Speaker 3Any suggestions or comments about my vocal fry will be deleted without being read because fuck you. I talk how I talk.
Speaker 1All right, well, uh, go on peace and be in solidarity comments signing off job one day off. Bye. Bye. Well tell me what, hi. Okay. Okay. Melon.
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