The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights is proud to announce that our Mimi Soltysik Memorial Scholarship is open for applications. This is the second year for the memorial scholarship.

Mimi Soltysik was the former educator for The Maggie Phair Institute and a former presidential candidate in 2016 for the Socialist Party USA. He was a known organizer, a socialist, and an activist who fought for human rights and democracy during his lifetime. In 2020, at the age of 45, we lost our comrade to cancer. The intension of this scholarship is to help his legacy live on.

This scholarship is designed to honor the memory of Mimi Soltysik, a community activist and presidential candidate. It hopes to help students combine an interest in democracy and human rights with their college studies.

There will be two winners of this scholarship and each winner will be awarded $500 to go towards their education. The application deadline is June 1st, 2022 by 8:59 p.m. PST. 

The ninth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

In this episode, I kind of go off about my love for Lucille Ball and her groundbreaking work on I Love Lucy in addition to the groundbreaking work her production company, Desilu Productions, did with the show Star Trek. It’s similar, but not perfectly paired up with the blog post on the MPI site also titled Leftists Should Love Lucy. 

In this episode, we also talk about:

• The congressional questioning of Justice Jackson
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 
• White Reconstruction by Dylan Rodriguez
• Booking a guest speaker through the Maggie Phair Institute
• And why I hate Elon Musk so much

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

The eighth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

We continue with our new format for this episode and have a special guest – Nina from Riverside Food Not Bombs. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll find in this episode:

• Human Rights in the U.S. News – Supreme Court discriminating against LGBTQIA+ will probably continue, NFTs and crypto currency are environmentally harmful and scams, and U.S. truckers are planning their own “freedom convoy” to replicate the trucker anti-mask protests in Canada. 
• Good News – Elon Musk is being sued. Please sue Elon Musk. I will sue him with you. Email us at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com if you want me in your Elon Musk lawsuit. 
• Rent is actually kind of radical even if the music is kind of outdated. 
• An interview with Nina from Riverside Food Not Bombs (@riverside_food_not_bombs on IG) on radical kindness.
• New sharable quotes from past articles and podcasts are up on the MPI’s downloads page.
• Listener question: what do I think of the phrase “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism?”

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

The seventh episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

The seventh episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left follows a new format and features an interview with a former Starbucks employee. Within this interview, he speaks of problematic working conditions within the company, the disconnect between corporate Starbucks and the stores themselves, and he gives his opinion on the rise of unionizations taking place at Starbucks across the nation.

The format of the podcast has officially been updated! Now we not only have intro and outro music, but we have five fixed segments which are as follows:

1a. Human Rights News in the U.S.

This segment is where we’ll take a look at what’s happening within the U.S. news this month. Generally, this will cover two to three major stories related to human rights.

1b. Good News/Victories to Hold Onto

Inspired by Mimi Soltysik who said we always had to hold onto our victories, no matter how small, this segment looks at a victory in the struggle for human rights and democracy.

2. Recommended Reading

My degrees are in English and I teach literature and writing courses outside of my work at the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, so this segment is really me sharing my day job and my training as an academic directly with the listeners through a book recommendation.

3. The Main Topic/Interview

What used to be the bulk of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left will now take place as the third segment of the podcast. This is where interviews or main topics will be explored. 

4. MPI Resources 

Since this podcast is sponsored and hosted by the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, I figured it’d be good to include a small segment that highlights a resource the MPI has that relates to the main topic of the podcast for that month. 

5. Ask Me

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left now has an email address for readers to send in questions, comments, concerns, or topics you’d like me to address. If you have something big or small and you’d like it talked about on the show, please reach out: ExitCapitalismStageLeft@gmail.com. 

Unions, throughout their history here in the U.S., have brought us things like the 8-hour workday, safer workplaces, family leave, and protections against discriminations based on race and sex. But those victories are not enough; there’s still a vast divide between the American worker and their boss in terms of power and earnings. With the so-called labor shortage, which is really a workers-standing-up-for-themselves uprising mixed with the consequences of the COVID-19 death and maiming toll, now is a time where workers can ban together and form unions in their workplace and fight for new protections for themselves and their fellow worker. Together we are stronger. Together we can take down the bosses.

Starbucks stores across the nation have started to unionize – and you can too. Here are a few resources to help you in that mission.

Why organize?

This video from the UC Berkeley Labor Center highlights the positive changes unionization and union jobs have had on the state of California:

How do I get started?

Here’s a useful inforgraph created by the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. You can find this, and other resources, on our downloadables page.

Are there other resources to help me organize?

Yes! If you need help organizing your workspace, there are two avenues we can recommend; the first is reaching out to someone at the Emergency Workplace Organizing site hosted by DSA and the UE Union. Another org to reach out to for help unionizing or to join a large workers union would be the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. 

Outside of internet resources, there are two books from Jane McAlevey that can help you learn to organize your workplace; the first is Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement and the second recommendation is her recently released book A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. 

The history of capitalism is the history of exploitation – and exploitation and human rights cannot and do not coexist; they are inherently at odds with one another. That means that capitalism is a system in which human rights are constantly under threat by a system that exploits. You don’t have to take my word for it – there are a plethora of media sources like music, movies, articles, and books that cover the topic.

For those interested in learning more about how capitalism and human rights don’t mix, here are some book recommendations:

Caliban and The Witch by Silvia Federici
Here is a description of the book from AK Press:

Caliban and the Witch is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages to the witch-hunts and the rise of mechanical philosophy, Federici investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. She shows how the battle against the rebel body and mind are essential conditions for the development of labor power and self-ownership, two central principles of modern social organization.

“In the neoliberal era of postmodernism, the proletariat is whited-out from the pages of history. Federici recovers its historical substance by telling its story starting at the beginning, with the throes of its birth. This is a book of remembrance, of a trauma burned into the body of women, which left a scar on humanity’s memory as deep and painful as those caused by famine, slaughter, and enslavement.” —Peter Linebaugh

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Here’s a description of the book from Melville House: 

The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its head—from the “brilliant, deeply original political thinker” David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me)

Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors—which lives on in full force to this day.

So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. 

We are still fighting these battles today.

Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts by Max Haiven

Here is a description of the book from Pluto Press:

Capitalism is in a profound state of crisis. Beyond the mere dispassionate cruelty of ‘ordinary’ structural violence, it appears today as a global system bent on reckless economic revenge; its expression found in mass incarceration, climate chaos, unpayable debt, pharmaceutical violence and the relentless degradation of common life.

In Revenge Capitalism, Max Haiven argues that this economic vengeance helps us explain the culture and politics of revenge we see in society more broadly. Moving from the history of colonialism and its continuing effects today, he examines the opioid crisis in the US, the growth of ‘surplus populations’ worldwide and unpacks the central paradigm of unpayable debts – both as reparations owed, and as a methodology of oppression.

Revenge Capitalism offers no easy answers, but is a powerful call to the radical imagination.

The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and ‘The Enemies of All Mankind’ by Mark Neoclous

Here is a description of the book from Routledge:

The history of bourgeois modernity is a history of the Enemy. This book is a radical exploration of an Enemy that has recently emerged from within security documents released by the US security state: the Universal Adversary. The Universal Adversary is now central to emergency planning in general and, more specifically, to security preparations for future attacks. But an attack from who, or what? This book – the first to appear on the topic – shows　how　the concept of the Universal Adversary　draws on　several key　figures　in the history of ideas, said to pose　a threat　to state power and capital accumulation. Within the Universal Adversary there lies the problem　not just　of　the ‘terrorist’ but, more generally, of　the　‘subversive’, and what the emergency planning documents refer to as the ‘disgruntled worker’. This　reference　reveals the conjoined power of the contemporary mobilization of security and the defense of capital. But it also reveals much more. Taking the figure of the disgruntled worker as its starting point,　the book　introduces some of this worker’s close cousins　–　figures often regarded not simply as a threat to security and capital but as nothing less than the Enemy of all Mankind: the Zombie, the Devil and the Pirate. In situating these figures of enmity within　debates about security and capital, the book　engages an extraordinary　variety of　issues　that now comprise a　contemporary politics of security. From crowd control to contagion, from the witch-hunt to the apocalypse, from pigs to intellectual property, this book provides a compelling analysis of the ways in which security and capital are organized against nothing less than the ‘Enemies of all Mankind’.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

Here’s a description from Harvard University Press:

The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century: at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

Our economy, Piketty observes, is not a natural fact. Markets, profits, and capital are all historical constructs that depend on choices. Piketty explores the material and ideological interactions of conflicting social groups that have given us slavery, serfdom, colonialism, communism, and hypercapitalism, shaping the lives of billions. He concludes that the great driver of human progress over the centuries has been the struggle for equality and education and not, as often argued, the assertion of property rights or the pursuit of stability. The new era of extreme inequality that has derailed that progress since the 1980s, he shows, is partly a reaction against communism, but it is also the fruit of ignorance, intellectual specialization, and our drift toward the dead-end politics of identity.

Once we understand this, we can begin to envision a more balanced approach to economics and politics. Piketty argues for a new “participatory” socialism, a system founded on an ideology of equality, social property, education, and the sharing of knowledge and power. Capital and Ideology is destined to be one of the indispensable books of our time, a work that will not only help us understand the world, but that will change it.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Radical Black Tradition by Cedric J. Robinson

Here’s a description of the book from The University of North Carolina Press:

In this ambitious work, first published in 1983, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.

To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.

The sixth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

This episode features special guest Matt Milholland who works as a union organizer in the Inland Empire. In this interview we go over the basics of a union, how to form a union in your workplace, and recent union victories from Starbucks to the University of California.

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of The Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

We now also have a phone background! You can check it out below and on our downloadables page. 

It all started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, apartments realized that studio or one bedroom apartments were a hot commodity – hotter than they had ever been before. Single people didn’t want to live with roommates and expose themselves to further risks during the pandemic (pre vaccine), so studio and one bedroom apartments, that were already overpriced, shot up to almost match the cost of two bedroom apartments in the Inland Empire. 

I know this because I was looking for housing during this period. I ended up in a one bedroom 400 square foot apartment facing a busy street and three freeway entrances for 1350 a month, plus my I paid all of my own utilities which meant living here ended up costing me close to 1500 a month. A two bedroom in this complex? 1550 with almost double the square footage. 

And it only got worse. When my lease was up for renewal, my rent shot up to 1550 a month and other one bedroom or studio apartments in the area were going for about 1750. Two bedrooms? 1800 at the lowest, if you could find it, but closer to 2000 on average. Plus, of course, all of your own utilities. Fellow TAs at UCR reached out this fall to say they couldn’t find any affordable housing in the area. Housing requires us to make three times the rent and we only make 2.6k a month (roughly) before taxes. That means TAs doubling up on studios or one bedrooms or tripling up on two bedrooms in order to qualify. Even then, there are limits on how many people can be in a housing unit and on a lease. With all the UCs reopening this fall, there was a huge push for us to find housing in the area of our universities with little to no assistance from the universities themselves and with such low pay that those of us that left during the work-from-home phase of the pandemic had little to no hope of finding housing in the area to come back to work.

TAs are not alone in their struggle to find housing in the Inland Empire. California News Times notes that:

HUD defines the 30% rule as a standard indicator of affordability for homes in a country. “Keeping housing costs below 30% (of total income) is aimed at ensuring that households have enough money to pay other non-discretionary costs.” Non-discretionary costs include Includes essentials such as food, utilities, transportation, medical care and clothing.

In Riverside County, the working hours required to purchase a one-bedroom unit are slightly less than the 56 and 61 hours in San Bernardino County.

As the country breaks out of the COVID-19 pandemic, the California homeless crisis continues to worsen, housing shortages continue, and currently available housing stock remains highly out of reach.

There is a shortage of affordable housing available to low-income households whose income is below the poverty guidelines or below 30% of the average income in the region.

The rental housing crisis in the Inland Empire is part of a larger trend of inflation rising in the area, moreso than any other part of the nation according to NBC Los Angeles. Due to the rise in rents and the rise in inflation, there has been a rush of investors coming into the Inland Empire to buy and flip houses for rent. What ABC 7 calls a “housing market boom” in the Inland Empire is a gentrification nightmare for those of us that used to live and work in this more (but not so much anymore) affordable part of California. 

Looking through Zillow at a few houses now for rent in the Inland Empire, in 2000 a house that would have sold at $78 per square foot now sells for $107 per square foot and rent has gone from $1650 for a four bedroom house in 2017 to $1750 in 2019 all the way up to $3200 on average for the listings I’m looking at. These are rough numbers of five houses I’m looking at that are currently listed for ret and have a rent “Zestimate” listed on Zillow, but it gives us a good idea on just how bad inflation and rental prices have gotten in the Inland Empire outside of my own experience as a renter. 

Housing is a human right and it should be considered such by whatever economic system we are occupying. Houselessness is on the rise in the Inland Empire – a county that 27,000 square miles, or roughly the size of 3.1 New Jerseys – and people living in California are being priced out of the state by housing investors and landlords. Until we have a system in place that recognizes that we all have the right to housing, what we can demand is better pay from our employers that match inflation in the area so we can afford to rent (or, if our stairs align, buy) housing, and we can form tenants unions or join those that exist to demand that the housing we do have is adequate for the price we pay. Low-income, or section-8 housing, should also be a priority of every city and people who are experiencing houslessness need to have a place to go to call home. Shelters are not just full, but also inadequate when it comes to meeting the needs of people without a home and they should not be offered up as a solution to the housing crisis currently underway. 

The fifth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights. 

This episode touches on the idea of disaster capitalism, as touched on in this previous article on the site, and applies that analysis to the Jurassic Park franchise – mainly focusing on the second movie, Jurassic Park II. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left can be found at the top of The Maggie Phair Institute’s website and is available for streaming and download. 

We now also have a phone background! You can check it out below and on our downloadables page. 

Since schools and workplaces have resumed regular operations, the stock market has been up and capitalism once again is saved.

Saved at the price of public health, welfare, and safety. 

But this is nothing new to capitalism – this is the way capitalism has operated in the modern world. This mode of capitalism is called disaster capitalism. Disaster capitalism is defined as “the practice (by a government, regime, etc.) of taking advantage of a major disaster to adopt neoliberal economic policies that the population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances” (Harper Collins). 

Capitalism has been revived and survived time and time again through a dependency upon disaster after disaster to turn what should be a humanitarian effort into a market for profit. Naomi Klein, author of many books include The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, states in her article on The Guardian (how power profits from disaster) that:

This strategy has been a silent partner to the imposition of neoliberalism for more than 40 years. Shock tactics follow a clear pattern: wait for a crisis (or even, in some instances, as in Chile or Russia, help foment one), declare a moment of what is sometimes called “extraordinary politics”, suspend some or all democratic norms – and then ram the corporate wishlist through as quickly as possible. The research showed that virtually any tumultuous situation, if framed with sufficient hysteria by political leaders, could serve this softening-up function. It could be an event as radical as a military coup, but the economic shock of a market or budget crisis would also do the trick. Amid hyperinflation or a banking collapse, for instance, the country’s governing elites were frequently able to sell a panicked population on the necessity for attacks on social protections, or enormous bailouts to prop up the financial private sector – because the alternative, they claimed, was outright economic apocalypse.

Considering what capitalism has cost us, is that threat of economic collapse really enough to continue this system of exploitation at a time when humankind needs to make major changes – changes in order to make this planet habitable and to battle an ongoing global pandemic – really a threat or something that direly needs to happen? 

But disaster is a booming business and capitalists are making billions of dollars, and subsequently reinvigorating the market, time and time again. In an article in The Nation, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Klein highlights the profitability of these reconstruction industries: 

And there is no doubt that there are profits to be made in the reconstruction business. There are massive engineering and supplies contracts ($10 billion to Halliburton in Iraq and Afghanistan alone); “democracy building” has exploded into a $2 billion industry; and times have never been better for public-sector consultants–the private firms that advise governments on selling off their assets, often running government services themselves as subcontractors. (Bearing Point, the favored of these firms in the United States, reported that the revenues for its “public services” division “had quadrupled in just five years,” and the profits are huge: $342 million in 2002–a profit margin of 35 percent.)

To be clear: the motivation of these industries that rebuild after disasters, and profit off of human suffering and need, are not there to make long term structures and changes that benefit the population in need and alleviate human suffering. Their primary and only drive for reconstruction is profit. In the same article as above, Klein elaborates: 

Three months after the tsunami hit Aceh, the New York Times ran a distressing story reporting that “almost nothing seems to have been done to begin repairs and rebuilding.” The dispatch could easily have come from Iraq, where, as the Los Angeles Times just reported, all of Bechtel’s allegedly rebuilt water plants have started to break down, one more in an endless litany of reconstruction screw-ups. It could also have come from Afghanistan, where President Hamid Karzai recently blasted “corrupt, wasteful and unaccountable” foreign contractors for “squandering the precious resources that Afghanistan received in aid.” Or from Sri Lanka, where 600,000 people who lost their homes in the tsunami are still languishing in temporary camps. One hundred days after the giant waves hit, Herman Kumara, head of the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement in Negombo, Sri Lanka, sent out a desperate e-mail to colleagues around the world. “The funds received for the benefit of the victims are directed to the benefit of the privileged few, not to the real victims,” he wrote. “Our voices are not heard and not allowed to be voiced.”

But if the reconstruction industry is stunningly inept at rebuilding, that may be because rebuilding is not its primary purpose. According to Guttal, “It’s not reconstruction at all–it’s about reshaping everything.” If anything, the stories of corruption and incompetence serve to mask this deeper scandal: the rise of a predatory form of disaster capitalism that uses the desperation and fear created by catastrophe to engage in radical social and economic engineering. And on this front, the reconstruction industry works so quickly and efficiently that the privatizations and land grabs are usually locked in before the local population knows what hit them. Kumara, in another e-mail, warns that Sri Lanka is now facing “a second tsunami of corporate globalization and militarization,” potentially even more devastating than the first. “We see this as a plan of action amidst the tsunami crisis to hand over the sea and the coast to foreign corporations and tourism, with military assistance from the US Marines.”

Capitalists and capitalism is concerned with one thing and one thing only: profit. When aid is sent to countries who have been struck by war (usually U.S. backed), famine, or natural disasters, capitalists put profit before people and reconstruct with the bourgeoisie in mind or western tourism, leaving natives still in need. 

Disaster capitalism is yet another mode of capitalism which exploits and alienates the masses while profiting and benefitting the few. No matter what label we put in front of capitalism, the end result is always the same: a system that is destroying us, destroying the habitability of the planet, and a system that has to end if we have any hope of surviving.