India Walton: “This is organizing”

India Walton just won the Democratic Party primary for the mayoral race in Buffalo, NY. She’s a socialist, and has centered the working class in her campaign thus far. It’s also likely that, given the voting record of her city, Walton will win her election in November, though obviously nothing is guaranteed.

The line from the speech that I quoted in this post’s title is one I want to dwell on for a moment.

“This is organizing.”

Organizing is key to any of the changes we want. Any progress towards justice, equality, or even a future for humanity goes against the systems that gave our ruling class their power. Not only will they pour their billions into opposing candidates like Walton during elections, they will also do everything they can to corrupt, co-opt, and disempower such politicians once in office. Organizing is our best tool for fighting back against that – specifically organizing that’s focused on the results we want, not on any particular individual.

Organization that outlasts electoral campaigns is how we can hold leaders of all sorts accountable. It’s how the working class (which includes the “middle class”, by the way) can keep their power ready to use. Organization is the most important maintenance of any system with a pretense at democracy. It’s equivalent to ensuring the brakes work on your car – they’re no good if you don’t think about function and maintenance until you’re in a crisis and need to stop fast.

There will never be a time when we will be safe from people seeking to accumulate power over others. Organization is our best tool to prevent that, or to take that power away. It’s not just about knocking on doors to get votes, it’s about knocking on doors during a power outage to make sure those in your community are OK. It’s about making sure nobody in your community is going to starve if they go on strike. It’s about working together to ensure our would-be rulers cannot achieve their ends by threatening our lives through starvation, exposure, lack of medicine, or any other means. It’s how we defend ourselves, and how we replace leaders when the need arises.

It’s also our best bet at surviving climate change.

The more work we do to organize now, the more likely we are to be prepared for the future, no matter what it throws at us. Collective action is humanity’s greatest strength, and always has been. It’s how we can achieve things that are laughably impossible for any one person alone.

It’s also how the concentrated power of the ruling class can be dismantled – because the left, at its best, is all about using humanity’s greatest strengths for the benefit of all humanity.

When wealth makes it legal to steal: “Crime” is a social construct in dire need of reimagining.

“Law and order” is a central theme of US politics. Part of the reason that a simple reformist approach to the problems of police brutality and abuse, and of racial injustice, is that after generations of Cold War and Drug War propaganda, centuries of white supremacist propaganda, there are a lot of people who feel a fierce loyalty to the police. This support of the US system of law enforcement seems to take the place of an actual consideration of the laws whose enforcement they so love.

Even as politicians and pundits work overtime to convince the people that their problems are caused by the most powerless, the largest single form of theft isn’t even a crime:

The thread contains useful resources and discussion further down, so I recommend that you go check it out if you have time.

This same pattern of things being legal for those with more wealth or power can be seen many other places. It’s been mentioned many times that while murder is supposedly illegal, it’s unlikely that anyone involved in the Flint water crisis will see the kind of prison time that they would if they had been involve in killing and inflicting brain damage on so many people in a more direct manner. Governor Snyder was charged in January of this year, but even if he is convicted, there will be little punishment, and no real justice for the victims.

That’s another thing that McKenna gets at – The solution to this problem is not necessarily to inflict harsher punishments on perpetrators of wage theft, or even on the perpetrators of an atrocity like the Flint water crisis. We want to prevent the crime from being repeated, if possible, but I think it’s fair to say that in a lot of cases our resources are better spent ensuring the victim of the crime gets back what was stolen, gets treatment for injuries or trauma, and so on. Restitution matters more than retribution.

Like I said, it’s a good thread and you should go read the whole thing if you can. A big part of the reason this blog ended up spreading out to cover so many topics beyond climate change is that all of our problems are intertwined – they’re part of the same system. I don’t think there’s a way we can solve any of these problems if we’re not solving all of them at once. We need everyone working together, and that’s not going to happen unless we are, at minimum, addressing the root causes and the symptoms of things like racial oppression. None of us is personally responsible for solving everything, but we are responsible for aiding those who specialize on issues outside our own areas of focus.

The current social construction of crime is, and always has been, a source of endless injustice and misery, and we need to put an end to that as part of our effort to pull together to deal with climate change.

Guest post: Planning a pantry, chapter one of…?

Guest post by Tegan
Note: This is the beginning of our effort to build up advice on the kind of pro-social prepping mentioned in the direct action post

When thinking of creating a pantry, there are of course two immediate questions that need answering: (1) what is the pantry for? and (2) how do you utilize those foodstuffs to ensure that money spent on it isn’t wasted?

To me, building a pantry always seemed like the easy and logical step. My mother and grandmother both always had pantries filled with options for food. In regards to my grandmother’s pantry, which included her kitchen fridge and freezer, the downstairs full-sized freezer, the freezer in the building next door, and a root cellar, my grandmother seemed prepared for an apocalypse – or simply grandchildren visiting, as she would usually pull bags of potato chips and cookies out of the bedroom closet as well as the ice cream from the basement freezer. My mother, not having the space my grandmother did as well as having to move several times in her adult life, had fewer options. I grew up with only a single extra three-quarter size standalone freezer as well as the requisite amount of cupboard and pantry goods. This meant that when I was first developing my household management skills after I moved into my first of many apartments, I naturally knew that I had to buy food for pantries. This meant that my initial answer to the first question, asked implicitly almost two decades ago, was ‘the pantry is to have a pantry.’

In the intervening two decades I have moved households dozens of times. I have had any number of roommates with differing or similar approaches to food. I have learned to cook a wider variety of foods as well as learned a large number of general-use techniques in the kitchen. I have gone in and out of doomerism concerning peak oil and into concern about late-stage capitalism and climate change that Abe discusses so eloquently. I have moved internationally twice. And throughout most of this, I have been very poor. Answering that first question now, my response would be: ‘the pantry is to protect against lean times, to buy in bulk for savings if possible, to ensure that my household will always have something to eat even if it is boring.’

All well and good. We now have a more coherent and well thought out answer to the first question. The task gets harder as we move into the second question.

How to use the foodstuffs in your pantry to ensure that it isn’t wasted money and effort? My mother and grandmother have never fully known the answer to this question. For both of them, they use what they remember having in stock, and purchase duplicates of what they don’t remember. By the time I knew her, my grandmother was not in the habit of rotating through her stock and when she first entered a nursing home a few years ago, there was a great purge of old food. Meat expired over a decade previously. Frosting from the Clinton era. Home-canned vegetables that were both unlabeled and unrecognizable. My mother rotates her pantry semi-annually, but still has to throw out a fair amount of food. Usually vegetables that lurked in the back of the fridge, or the occasional item that was equally hidden in a freezer. Who actually gets to the back of their freezer often? Unless it is specifically a planned event, it can be difficult to remember to check the storage corners of the household. All this is to say that any ideas regarding pantry management I have, I have learned at the expense of good food gone to waste, and not from any training while growing up. Most of this advice can be summed up into one single sentence: Know What You Cook.

Almost every pantry article I have ever read – and I have read many! – has been written by a chef. Unsurprisingly, their ideas of what are kitchen Must-Have ingredients have been very different from my own. From lists stating that every household needs a quart of buttermilk at all times, to needing preserved lemons, or flatly stating that the author cannot live without at least three types of cheese in the house – these lists are each designed for one household in particular. And that’s ok! I don’t need a chef to put a stamp of approval on the type of cooking that my household does. We just need to eat the food that we buy as efficiently and effectively as possible. So what decisions do Abe and I make when purchasing food?

Firstly, we buy pasta. As cheap as we can find it, and several different kinds. Classic Italian pastas like spaghetti or rotini; the food of broke people everywhere, ramen; and if I wind up at an Asian grocer or the like I’ll buy rice pasta or egg noodle nests. But I want each purchase to at least offer me two packages per unit of currency, preferably three. Other households eat bread or rice or potatoes as the primary carb of their diet. We eat mostly pasta.

Secondly, we have lots of flavor options. Bouillon, tomato sauce, bbq sauce, sweet chili sauce, and hoisin sauce, when we have the resources. Even if you are eating the same food every single day, it won’t taste the same if you change up the flavor profile.

Thirdly, we always have the ability to bake. If I can’t figure out how to bake a cake with the ingredients that we have, we do not have enough food in the house. One of the first things I did after I arrived in Dublin was to bake a cake. I threw together canned coconut milk (we were out of milk), canned pumpkin, an egg, sugar, spices, and GF Halal flour intended for fasting meals (which was the only flour in the house). Was it the world’s best cake? No. But it filled that urge to have a warm sweet treat and did not require me to break quarantine.

Fourthly, we make sure that we have food other than carbs. Abe cares about vegetables so he ensures our freezer stays stocked with frozen veg. I care about protein so I make sure that we have eggs, and canned fish, and frozen meat, and deli meats that were on clearance that I also freeze.

Outside of these strong guidelines, we shop for deals. If something is cheap this week, we buy extra to have it in the house. We try to keep track of what we go through swiftly and adjust our shopping accordingly. But just as it’s important to know what to buy for yourself, it’s also important to track the failures. We don’t purchase a wide variety of grains. In the past we have done so, and we had a LOT of fancy or specialty grains to get rid of with the first international move. We don’t purchase a large amount of dried beans. We go through beans regularly enough, but not so swiftly as to require a significant portion of our storage space dedicated to them. We don’t buy items that we don’t know how to use. A friend had gifted me homemade pomegranate syrup. That stayed in my fridge through three moves and then it molded and I threw it out, unused. A package of boba survived ten years of moves before finally being eaten. In short, we don’t purchase food aspirationally.

So there it is! My two main tips for building a pantry can be summed up into two pithy and almost unhelpfully brief sentences: Know What You Cook, and Don’t Purchase Aspirationally.

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