July 14, 2025

The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

Building Radical Democracy

Critical of CapitalismEducation

Solidarity In The Workplace: Resources for Unionizing

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. 

Why Capitalism and Human Rights Don’t Mix: A Recommended Reading List

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.

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left – Episode 6 Out Now!

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. 

The Housing Crisis is Getting Worse – Especially in the Inland Empire

This is an overhead shot of the Inland Empire in California

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. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left – Episode 5 Out Now!

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. 

What is Disaster Capitalism? Looking Towards Naomi Klein.

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. 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left: Episode 4 – What Is Mutual Aid?

The fourth 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 focuses on defining what mutual aid is, why it boomed during the COVID crisis, and how it differs from things like charity. While it touches on some similar themes as our article, What Is Mutual Aid?, the podcast goes into much more detail on the formation of Riverside Food Not Bombs and the experiences I’ve personally had in organizing mutual aid in the Inland Empire/Riverside. 

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. 

What Is Mutual Aid?

For the past year in Riverside, CA, there’s been a huge resurgence of mutual aid groups in response to the city, county, and state falling short in its support of people during the COVID-19 crises. While I have the most experience organizing, cooking, and distributing food as part of Riverside Food Not Bombs, I and my other comrades in the area have also worked with multiple mutual aid groups and organizations in putting on a large free market, called the Riverside People’s Free Market. Together, for two or more weekends a month (depending on the organization), we’ve fed, clothed, given out sanitation goods, handed out sleeping bags and tents, wagons, water, first aid, and more to over 100 people per weekend we get together. 

As of right now, there’s two free markets taking place:

The first is in Riverside at Fairmont Park (by the tennis courts – we have it marked on Google Maps) on the second Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. which includes the following organizations: Riverside Food Not Bombs, Riverside Mutual Aid, CAT-911 (Riverside), Communit(IE), Punks in the Park, SJH Mutual Aid, and the Concerned UUS of Riverside. 

The second is in San Bernardino called the San Bernardino Free Market which takes place the fourth Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Seccombe Lake Recreation Area (106 E. 5th St., San Bernardino, CA). Many of the same organizations that support the Riverside People’s Free Market also contribute to the SB Free Market and they receive additional help from the HygIEne Project. 

For those that aren’t aware of what mutual aid is and what Food Not Bombs does specifically, here’s the mission statement for Riverside Food Not Bombs:

When a billion people go hungry each day, how can we spend another dollar on cops? Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer movement that recovers food that would otherwise be discarded, and shares free vegan and vegetarian meals with the hungry in over 1,000 cities in 65 countries in protest to war, poverty, and destruction of the environment. We are not a charity but dedicated to taking nonviolent direct action. Our movement has no headquarters or positions of leadership and we use the process of consensus to make decisions. We also provide food and supplies to the survivors of natural disasters, and people participating in occupations, strikes, marches and other protests.

Delving a little further into how we started our chapter, Food Not Bombs is an international mutual aid organization where anyone, as long as they follow some pretty loose guidelines and health protocols (e.g. vegan and vegetarian food, no dumpster diving, try to avoid capitalism as much as possible when obtaining goods, etc.), can start their own chapter. We’ve personally also taken extra precautions with COVID and have added a layer of prep where everything is made with gloves and a mask in a sanitized kitchen and all the food is individually packaged for distribution.

There is a national website for Food Not Bombs, but honestly, it doesn’t seem to be getting updated with new chapters all that quickly. Riverside Food Not Bombs was revived by community members who have previous experience organizing – IEDSA, the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) Protests at UCR, and other anarchists in the area. To get started, we made an Instagram and instantly we were getting support from the community and people were hitting us up to give us donations. We started meeting regularly over Zoom and asked people that we knew from other organizations like Riverside Mutual Aid, IE Community Fridges, IEDSA, and the Universalist Unitarian Church in Riverside to help us with donations and events to get started. We were lucky to have so many connections, but those are just how we grew so fast – connections aren’t necessary to get started.

The steps on the Food Not Bombs website are pretty solid in starting up your own chapter; first and foremost, get a group of core volunteers you know will be down to do the work. We have that plus people who come and go and it’s worked well so far. Next, create some social media profiles and start doing community outreach and have a meeting to find some community support and additional members. After that, finding food (calling grocery stores and letting them know you’re a “gleaner” looking for goods for donation before they’re put out, reaching out to food banks, connecting with workers in restaurants and getting end of the day food that they can’t reuse, and in an area like ours with a lot of farms, reaching out directly to farms like Overflow Farms.) and set a date and location (parks are always a good place to start) to start distributing it. Pretty soon you have supply lines, a bunch of volunteers, and an org with no official leadership where everyone does their part to support their community.

Our mission statement is very much our own creation that goes off of the national Food Not Bombs anti-war and pro-community model, and we specifically address the issues we have in our community with police and policing when we say not a single dime of city, county, state, or national funds should go to police and policing.  From what we’ve been told, the previous Riverside Food Not Bombs used to do service in White Park until the Riverside PD shut them down for having “bomb” in their name and being a “terrorist organization” because of it. Apparently, the Riverside Police don’t know what the word “not” means.

We haven’t directly been targeted by police yet, but when we do service at the Riverside People’s Free Market in Fairmount Park police always show up, drive by slowly, and we’re pretty sure are collecting information on our license plates. We wear masks (because of COVID but also it’s standard anarchist practice because of police identification), but the police try to size us up too. We’re just sitting there giving out food and clothes in a public space so, so far, they haven’t been able to say anything to us.

The city, strangely enough, has reached out to us multiple times about providing food and aid to the unhoused in shelters and at various events. We’re an all-volunteer org made up mostly students, be it graduate, recently graduated, or undergrads at both UCR and RCC, and have absolutely no fiscal support for what we do outside of donations from people wanting to feed or shelter their unhoused community members. We’re baffled the city is reaching out to us rather than using public funds to help people. We do what we can, but we should not be a principal provider for the city’s unhoused programs; that’s on the city and how they choose to fund a violent police force over helping the unhoused and other people in need. The city shouldn’t be using us as a charity or approaching us like we are a charity because that’s not what mutual aid is. We do support the city when they do endeavors like the Free Little Pantry program and we actively help stock pantries in the area with excess donations, but our goal first and foremost is to feed people in need and our secondary goal is to avoid doing so through capitalist measures and to instead rely on the community and volunteer labor to provide what the city does not.

Mutual aid is the community taking care of the community unconditionally. If we give you a meal, we don’t care what your background is, where you are from, what your record is, what your income level is, what your housing status is, etc. That’s not true with charity and with city resources. Often, these things come with conditions – you have to have a certain income level to qualify as needing aid, you can’t have a criminal history, you can’t be addicted to anything or must give up what you have in order to get help, you have to be a citizen, etc. We don’t judge. We don’t restrict. We give freely and want nothing in return. What we do is for the community we’re apart of because we see that the community is in need. We’re not paid. We often, those of us that are fiscally more stable and work or have a regular stipend from being graduate students, spend money out of pocket to make aid happen. Charity workers do have volunteers but often their boards are paid and their workers are paid. Money given to charities and labor given to charities does not go directly to the people in need of help.

Without capitalism, charity wouldn’t need to exist but the same cannot be said for mutual aid. Charity is often a tax write off or addresses specific gaps in the capitalist system that exist due to exploitation. Mutual aid, on the other hand, is not about filling in gaps caused by exploitation. The community will always need to take care of each other – that’s the social contract we sign as being part of that community. If your neighbor is in need, you come together and you help. If your community is hurting, you do what you can to make it better. Our motto is step up when you’re able and trust your comrades to step up when you aren’t able. We believe in solidarity, not charity. That should be how all aspects of community function, in our eyes.

 

Exit Capitalism, Stage Left: Episode 3 Out Now

The third 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 explore the concepts of mourning within a capitalist state. While this podcast covers similar topics as covered in this post, “Mourning in a Capitalist, COVID, and Necropolitical World,” the podcast goes a bit further with examples both from my own experiences and from the sources cited within the post. 

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. 

 

Mourning in a Capitalist, COVID, and Necropolitical World

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (the most English major source to cite, I know), mourning is (3.a.) “to feel or express sorrow, grief, or regret,” (4.a.) “to lament or grieve over a death,” and (4.b.) “to lament, grieve, or sorrow for (someone dead or someone’s death); to express grief for.” Going further, the OED notes a connection between mourning, the appearance of mourning, and a time for mourning in later definitions of the word; (3.c) notes mourning as “to exhibit the conventional signs of grief for a period following the death of a person” and (3.e.) contributes to this idea of time-specific mourning with its definition “to pass (time) in mourning.”

Since appearance of and a specific time frame have been included as part of the commonly understood definitions of mourning, I want to explore these questions within this post: what is the appropriate amount of time for mourning? And do we, as subjects under a capitalist system, have the space and time necessary for mourning?

Within our current economic system, grieving is limited to how much time off we’re able to take from work. There is bereavement leave, vacation time, and unpaid time we’re able to take off (if we can afford it, as workers), but beyond those measures, there’s little to no way to support ourselves if our period of grieving extends past those time allowances created within the work-for-pay and pay-to-live system we currently occupy.

Going further, part-time workers and non-traditional workspaces (self-employed, at a new start up without established norms or HR, or, like me, in upper academia), sometimes don’t have the same access to time off, resources, or are not clearly told when we’re able to take time off and when we’re still expected to work. Additionally, a lot of shift-workplaces, like Starbucks, require workers to find their own coverage for sick time or family leave, which puts an extra burden and barrier on workers who are already in a vulnerable state due to illness or loss.

Using myself as an example here, I lost a lot of people in 2020 and 2021 – none of which were directly related to COVID-19. In the summer of 2020, my longtime friend, comrade, fellow organizer, and past educator for the Maggie Phair Institute, Mimi Soltysik, passed from cancer. My paternal grandfather passed shortly after that in the late summer/early fall. Following that, a fellow campus activist passed away in November unexpectedly. In April, my maternal grandmother passed after battling cancer for a handful of months.

How many losses are too many losses to take bereavement leave? Additionally, as an academic worker, it was never made clear to me who to contact in the case of direct family members dying. I have a union and I have support from the department I research in and am getting my degree in, but none of that information transferred clearly into the program I teach for. I had no idea who to contact to have my classes covered, nor how to catch them up on what my class was doing since we have no direct supervisors – only a set of standards we must meet. I am lucky in that my committee members were understanding and let me work on my dissertation at my own pace, when I was able, and that I could push back my testing. But having space to mourn and grieve as workers (and doing graduate research is a form of labor and should be coded as paid work even though academia often doesn’t grant this as paid labor to its graduate students) shouldn’t depend upon the kindness of those in supervisory positions because that makes this not a right and not a guarantee but a gamble on those in positions of power feeling sympathetic.

While my family and comrades did not die of COVID, my ability to grieve, to mourn, and to come together with a shared community that loved and loss these people too was severely impacted by the pandemic. There were no funerals to physically attend save for my grandmother’s, but my sister and I lived too far away to attend the quiet, 6 a.m. service up in Oregon a few days after her passing. We also didn’t have the funds to get last-minute flights and transportation up to Shady Cove and neither of us could afford to or had the ability to take time off of work and drive up to say goodbye.

And I am not alone in facing an immense amount of loss during 2020 and 2021. I am just one of many who have faced these limitations to mourning and grieving under capitalism which have further been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from the Delta variant are spiking in the U.S. As I write this post, the U.S. alone has had 34.9M cases and 612K deaths (sources for those numbers come from Wikipedia, The New York Times, and Our World in Data). As noted in the World Socialist Web Site, or WSWS.Org:

“This fundamental socio-economic contradiction—i.e., the irreconcilable conflict between the capitalist class and the working class—finds its most obscene expression in the correlation between the number of dead, unemployed and impoverished, and, on the other side of the ledger, the explosive rise of share values on Wall Street.

Since the passage of the multi-trillion-dollar bailout in late March, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen approximately 35 percent. The Nasdaq index is at its 2020 high. During the first 10 days of May, while the number of dead rose by approximately 15,000, the Dow gained more than 600 points.

The more terrible the reports of death and human suffering [during the COVID-19 pandemic], the more ecstatic the response of the capitalist markets. The contrast between “Wall Street” and “Main Street” is so extreme that it is now being commented on widely in the financial press.”

In other words, workers are the ones at risk and being asked to shoulder the risk posed by COVID to keep the economy, and the wealthy elite in the U.S., afloat while we drown in our fears and sorrows. This creates a perpetual state of danger and a perpetual state of loss in addition to the alienation the standard U.S. worker feels from being perpetually exploited at work.

David W. McIvor, Juliet Hooker, Ashley Atkins, Athena Athanasiou, and George Shulman recently published an article, “Mourning work: Death and democracy during a pandemic” in Contemporary Political Theory that highlights how this pandemic is not just further alienating and exploiting workers, but is also targeting communities of color who have already been placed in a perpetual state of mourning in the U.S.:

“The differential vulnerability to death and mourning during the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed enduring racial and class divides in the USA and clarified the impact of spreading inequality. For Hooker, in particular, the pandemic has clarified patterns of racialized precarity to which political theorists and social actors have not adequately responded. Disavowed precarity also calls into question the supposedly recent phenomenon of ‘democracy grief’ in the global north or what Hooker refers to here as the ‘civic sadness that has arisen with the recognition that the USA is a democracy in need of repair’. Such recognitions are belated – and, like the owl of Minerva, may have come too late – and they elide the experiences of black citizens who have been paying the ‘psychic tax’ of democracy grief for generations, and who are paying a steep price once again during the pandemic.”

This article also reaffirms that those without traditional workspaces are more vulnerable to exploitation during this pandemic and have an inability to take any time off for grieving:

“Hooker and Atkins also take up the relationship between democracy and sacrifice. Democratic theorists such as Danielle Allen and Anne Norton have argued for an inherent link between democracy and sacrifice, yet both Hooker and Atkins challenge the logic or the value of this link, albeit in different ways. For Hooker, calls for sacrifice often overlook the facts of who is being asked to sacrifice, or – more pointedly – who is being sacrificed for democracy. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the so-called essential workers – many of them, including grocery store workers, nursing assistants, farmworkers, and delivery drivers, lacking paid sick leave, a living wage, or health benefits that are not linked to their employment – are positioned as sacrifices to the relatively well off and protected.”

I would argue that these above manifestations of capitalism’s control over our ability to mourn, work, and survive all ties into what Achille Mbembe termed the necropolitical and the state’s real source of power being not in grating the means to live but in its ability to control and deny people access to things that grant life. Comrade Teen Vogue elaborates in their article, “What is Necropolitics? The Political Calculation of Life and Death:”

“Why does COVID-19 impact marginalized communities disproportionately? I think the answer is rooted in necropolitics. Marginalized communities face immense access barriers to healthcare, education, and opportunities for professional advancement. In his book Against the Terror of Neoliberalism, cultural critic Henry Giroux lays bare that the most vulnerable people in the United States are considered “disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

These disparities are exacerbated and compounded through the COVID-19 crisis. Take Dr. Susan Moore’s harrowing story. Moore, a physician, made a viral video while undergoing treatment for COVID-19. The video cast a spotlight on the way her white doctor handled her case. She posted that after she complained of pain, the doctor said he felt uncomfortable giving her more narcotics and suggested that she be discharged. “I was crushed,” Moore said. “He made me feel like I was a drug addict.” She added: “I maintain if I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that.” Just two weeks later, Moore died of coronavirus-related complications. (At the time, a spokesman for Indiana University Health, the hospital system where Moore was a patient, told the New York Times that privacy laws prevented them from commenting on her specific case, but added that the organization investigates any allegation of discrimination and is “committed to equity and reducing racial disparities in health care.”) Necropolitics renders stories like Moore’s all too common. Medical bias can be fatal for Black women.

At its core, I see necropolitics as a manifestation of capitalism and its related institutions of violence: white supremacy, the prison-industrial complex, cisheteropatriarchy, and colonialism. Capitalism bleeds us all. It quantifies our lives. It predestines our deaths. In the sinking-raft scenario that opened this article, I would argue that a capitalist will choose the CEOs life over yours or mine in every instance. Capitalism drives necropolitics through the scarcity myth — that, during a global pandemic, for example, there are simply insufficient resources for us all, so some of us have to die. But that doesn’t have to be true. If we prioritize redistributing wealth and taking care of each other, there might be enough for everyone.”

Loss, death, and mourning are all a part of life but within the confines of a capitalist system, we are given limited time off and even more limitations on how much time off we can take in order to grieve – an essential and inescapable part of living. But, as Teen Vogue suggests, when we address the root of the state’s power, necropolitics, we can redistribute what our society needs to live and ensure that all of us have core rights – the right to life, the right to housing, the right to food, the right to clean water, the right to healthcare, and the right to mourn, among others.

Whatever world we build after capitalism, we have to keep in mind that humans are social creatures and when our networks of friends, family, and community experiences a loss, we all need time to process. A day or week off from labor may not be enough – a lifetime may not be enough but forcing people to perform work in exchange for money, which is the mode of being able to survive under capitalism, must not continue if we are to take people’s mental health and ability to mourn and grieve seriously and as an inalienable human right.

One way to address this pitfall now is to advocate for a universal basic income where everyone’s needs are met without having to work in order to survive. With this system of support in place, people aren’t faced with double alienation (being alienated from the fruits of their labor in a capitalist, exploitative system and being alienated from their selves and their feelings of grief and loss) because they’d have the means to take as much time as needed to process their emotions and feel connected to themselves, their kinship networks, their friends, and their communities once again.

While I mentioned above the loss of my comrade and fellow MPI educator Mimi, The Maggie Phair institute has also recently loss its founder and namesake – Maggie Phair. Another member of the MPI, Kielan Hammans, wrote “The Life of an Essential Activist: Maggie Phair, 1930-2021” which was published in CounterPunch. During her memorial service, the same comrade noted three lessons he learned from Maggie that were an essential part of her activist philosophy and how she related to others.

The first was education – and not in an academic sense, but to be a lifelong learner, to use the Socratic method, to always be reading, and to engage with the central question when it came to a problem that arose, “what do you think we can do about this?”

The second was generosity, in every sense of the word. Maggie was generous with her time, with the spaces she had, and with the things she owned. One comrade noted her opening up her home and allowing people to stay over, others noted how generous she was with food and how she always made sure comrades were cared for.

The third was her humanity and her belief in humanity. Maggie was a firm believer in solidarity, in people power, and accepted people where they were at. She believed in people over politics and was a figure that could talk to anyone and guide them, gently, towards sharing her belief in people, community, and humanity.

As a way to end this post and discussion (that could really go on for much much longer) and to celebrate the life and work of our comrades Mimi and Maggie, here are some of their works centered on education available here for download and distribution.

This is Mimi Soltysik’s Activist Reading List

And here is Maggie Phair’s Guide to The Feminist Process

All of these and more can be found on our Education tab, which is constantly under expansion and development. This is a resource for both teachers and activists alike. There are lesson plans being developed for educators and handouts like reading lists and pamphlets being created for activists.

While we can all fight for time and space to grieve, we can also fight to keep our comrades and their works in the public consciousness. One thing Mimi taught me was that our fight is an intergenerational fight. We may not see results in our lifetime, but the work we do while we are here isn’t about us – it’s about our community and those who fight alongside us and who carry on organizing after we leave. As long as I’m here, I’ll remember, appreciate, and spread the lessons taught to me by comrades, past and present, and do my best to share that knowledge with my peers and future activists I engage with on every platform made available to me.