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[...] Martin couldn't help but brag that each of those little shot glasses held $100 worth of liquor at pre-collapse prices. Who knew what it would fetch in the marketplaces of the new world when it emerged? [...]
haha this reminds me of the man in the high castle, Robert trying to get a piece of the statue of liberty
[...] the people there were willing to trade eggs and cheese for gemstones. Martin loved that: he had a lot of gemstones stockpiled, and in the wee hours of the night he wondered if he was kidding himself about whether anyone would want them. You can't eat gems, and converting them to useful goods required something like a functioning civilization. The fact that these stoic Latino farmers were willing to take a little bag of rubies and sapphires for five big wheels of cheese and a promise of four dozen eggs per week for the next month meant that they, too, thought that civilization would come back.
Civilizations had risen and fallen before. Humanity needed to work together, but hell was other people. When the best people were on top, things worked: they convinced the rational, cajoled the stubborn, and, frankly, forced the rest. It was for the greater good. Put one of the losers, the takers, at the top of the pile, and they'd lead the rest into catastrophe. [...]
isn't this tautological though? the "best" are the ones who are able to keep this system of hierarchy working, not the ones who are "the best" by a rational external metric
[...] Martin was glad that gemstones were still acceptable trade goods. He looked forward to the day when he could get his thumb drives out of his floor safe and start mobilizing his cryptocurrency assets again.
he's basically just Childan from High Castle lmao. brain so broken by capitalism
Once you have been organizing for enough years, and seen enough efforts succeed and fail, you realize that there are “movement moments.” These happen when large numbers of people are willing to drop what they are doing, forget that the utility bill won’t be paid on time or that they will miss their favorite TV shows or their daughter’s soccer games or their gym session or whatever, forget about how many hours of sleep they think they need every night, and go do some stuff they would never have imagined they could, like facing down cops or bosses or Aryan Republicans carrying The Christian Militant’s Bible, or talking to TV cameras, or approaching total strangers about their concerns, or rounding up their neighbors to go to an event with something real at stake instead of the weekly bridge game. People get in this unusual state either because they are truly pissed off and there is no other option, or because for some reason the horizon of what they think they are capable of achieving suddenly expands—or, most likely, a combination of both.
Raising Expectations. Who in the world would give such a name to a book? An organizer, that’s who. At its core, this is a book about organizing. And organizing, at its core, is about raising expectations: about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their union. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.
Of course, there is much more to organizing, but everything else flows from raising expectations. In the normal course of human events, workers don’t expect much from their jobs, government, or unions, because the reality is they don’t get much. The job of the organizer is to fundamentally change this.
Whole-worker organizing begins with the recognition that real people do not live two separate lives, one beginning when they arrive at work and punch the clock and another when they punch out at the end of their shift. The pressing concerns that bear down on them every day are not divided into two neat piles, only one of which is of concern to unions. At the end of each shift workers go home, through streets that are sometimes violent, past their kids’ crumbling schools, to their often substandard housing, where the tap water is likely unsafe.
Whole-worker organizing seeks to engage “whole workers” in the betterment of their lives. To keep them consistently acting in their self interest, while constantly expanding their vision of who that self interest includes, from their immediate peers in their unit, to their shift, their workplace, their street, their kids’ school, their community, their watershed, their nation and their world.
Many of the newly trained organizers were not committed to deep organizing. They were ordered to take shortcuts of all kinds, because organizing is too slow—a refrain they heard often from Tom Woodruff, the organizing czar at SEIU and, later, Change to Win. Often a national union would send a team of talented and trained young organizers to help a group of workers win the vote to form a union, then put them on planes to another election the next day. Meanwhile, the new union members, full of raised expectations about the changes their hard-won union would bring to their lives, would show up at their first meeting and ask, “Wow, where did everyone go?” This practice of “air dropping” organizers in for intense, time-limited campaigns is the very opposite of deep organizing.
An example might help illustrate the point. In a workplace organizing campaign, often the first workers an organizer meets are those who might be termed the “loudmouths.” They talk back to the boss—but they talk back to everyone else as well. Inexperienced organizers often mistakenly identify them as natural leaders, when in fact their coworkers rarely pay serious attention to anything they say. More experienced organizers know this, and also know that identifying the real leaders takes more time and a more subtle understanding of workplace dynamics. But when they’re organizing support in the community, they’ll go straight to the “loudmouth” priest who talks a radical line, without noticing that no one in town outside his tiny congregation pays any attention to what he says, and meanwhile they’ll overlook quieter clergy whose large congregations include many of the workers in the organizing campaign.
As time went on we learned just how nervous workers were about meeting with their religious leaders to ask them for support. They might stand up to their boss at work by putting on a union button, which union organizers invariably think is the scariest thing a worker can do, yet they struggle to muster the courage to ask their minister for a meeting. Note to labor: Workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss.
Giving themselves strength in numbers was the key. If they went as a group to meet their minister, their request for help was likely to be successful. The training sessions we were running for these meetings were crucial, and role-playing was the crucial component.