Mia Wong
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities. Yeah. is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff. Things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you. In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes.
Behind the Bastards
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When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
Behind the Bastards
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And childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space.
Behind the Bastards
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You bring them like coloring stuff. You bring them toys. You bring them games and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Yeah. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter. Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Yeah. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done. And it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay. Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this, again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it. But until you've been in a room where people...
Behind the Bastards
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have not realized they need to do this. You don't understand how important this stuff is. Yeah, the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper and when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time.
Behind the Bastards
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And when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
Behind the Bastards
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But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like... who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. There's a very common... Sometimes this is one person. Sometimes this is two people.
Behind the Bastards
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A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forwards and make sure everyone's involved. And also, another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.
Behind the Bastards
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Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of... If you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of...
Behind the Bastards
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You know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. Yeah. And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time.
Behind the Bastards
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And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,
Behind the Bastards
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You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans.
Behind the Bastards
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And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was at a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was... Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer.
Behind the Bastards
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I was like a tiny baby, right? This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how much of a fiasco, like, little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know.
Behind the Bastards
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And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing, and we, like, went to a cafe.
Behind the Bastards
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And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions. and think politically about their actions. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that was something that was very useful to us, and we started making a plan.
Behind the Bastards
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And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers, and then we went out, and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets, and we put them on light posts or whatever, and then we put them... Like, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants. Because you can just, like, walk up the stairs, right? And you just put them on the walls. And, you know, we had this flyer.
Behind the Bastards
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This flyer had information. This flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like, come here at this time. We had an email. You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. You know, and so, okay. And so, parallel to this, we, like... I forget if it was a church or if it was some building...
Behind the Bastards
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some center or something. We, we booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice. Who we sort of knew.
Behind the Bastards
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And this is another useful, like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're, we're finding, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place. Right. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed with, when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah. But people still came. Like, people still came in the blizzard. Like, a lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also, like, you know, we just started talking to people, right?
Behind the Bastards
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We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just, you know, we talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. You know, and this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer, right?
Behind the Bastards
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in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And I guess everything is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. You know, we were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to, you know, get people to understand what we were doing, how they can start organizing.
Behind the Bastards
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And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But like, you know, but like all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of organizing
Behind the Bastards
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You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking? I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in. WordArt. WordArt.
Behind the Bastards
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There's like an actual program and I forgot what it is. Used to use it to make Christmas cards. But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made an email. You know, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do. And then we did it. Yeah. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right?
Behind the Bastards
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But, like, we had started a thing. And you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this has been It Could Happen Here.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I, your host, Mia Wong, talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it is once again time to return to it as we head into a world where concerns about inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for one Donald Trump.
Behind the Bastards
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But unlike our other, oh God, so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to be a bit different. It's going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for a while.
Behind the Bastards
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And then I'm going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation, and more importantly of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on, you know, anything that's sort of going on.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 160
So let's begin with what is going on with inflation. Now, as we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out,
Behind the Bastards
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Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said, quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve Governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on with inflation.
Behind the Bastards
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Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes towards the theory of inflation, which is a strange manners article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Steve on the show talk about this before.
Behind the Bastards
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So there are a lot of theories about inflation and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down. But on a pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, the most common theory of inflation is, you know, inflation is based on there being too much money in the economy.
Behind the Bastards
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And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years.
Behind the Bastards
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So instead of talking about that shit anymore, Mann and the Strange Matters crew developed what they call the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist J.W. Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation.
Behind the Bastards
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If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the J.W. Mason quote, If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are set at the micro level.
Behind the Bastards
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Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and external shocks to it which can cause price rises, revealed. Mann's price theory is fairly simple, right?
Behind the Bastards
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It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something, you know, abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers, right? There's a bunch of guys, they sit in offices and they develop a strategy about what prices are going to be.
Behind the Bastards
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And that's, you know, how they're set. And what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is to say not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets, which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just cost plus markup.
Behind the Bastards
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And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as Mann points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and asked them how they set prices, and the answer is cost plus markup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices?
Behind the Bastards
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Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very, very broad global supply chain and a very complicated global supply chain.
Behind the Bastards
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This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those cost increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price plus markup as something that covers their costs, right?
Behind the Bastards
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This is what set off the giant inflation spike in the US and the Biden administration. You know, the cost side of cost plus markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices increased for our purposes. And our purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election. What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases.
Behind the Bastards
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It was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the economy at a moral level. And for that, we're going to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation, so-called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup. And you can raise prices because of cost. But you can also do this because you want to increase your markup.
Behind the Bastards
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And this is something that happened during the inflation surge. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher prices without the usual goodwill hit because they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening.
Behind the Bastards
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And because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not try to shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And this really, really pissed people off. It still does. And this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum, right? People were very, very angry about this sort of re-inflation thing.
Behind the Bastards
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And that rage is more important than the technical details of why inflation happened. Because the way we understand inflation is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the moral economy.
Behind the Bastards
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And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. And we are so back. All right, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E.P.
Behind the Bastards
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Thompson in the early 1970s. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here.
Behind the Bastards
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It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc.
Behind the Bastards
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This, in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action."
Behind the Bastards
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Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold.
Behind the Bastards
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Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how it should not be sold.
Behind the Bastards
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And because of this and, you know, because of their experience in sort of previous systems that before the sort of imposition of the free market system or quote unquote free market system, they have a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen. They hate grain hoarders. They hate all of the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that impose additional costs and burdens on them.
Behind the Bastards
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And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and, you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases. And they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots.
Behind the Bastards
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But the actual contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again, quote, the central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and grain or flour, but the action of, quote, setting the price.
Behind the Bastards
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from a few lines later, they might then order the farmer to send, quote, convenient quantities to market to be sold, quote, and at a, quote, reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to, quote, set down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind of grain. So if you follow this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just
Behind the Bastards
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about there, you know, being a price to grain, it's that people have a very, very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be. And they take direct actions that are designed to set the price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period, right?
Behind the Bastards
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It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this, right, in this sort of rage over price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy.
Behind the Bastards
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You have, you know, staggering outrage as price increases seen as unjust, which is re-inflation, or just inflation in general, because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests in sort of hatred of Joe Biden and the Democrats for being the people who presided over these price increases.
Behind the Bastards
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We also have our own rage about price gouging. In immediate market terms, and this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out, there's nothing actually wrong by market economics about, say, Martin Shkreli jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore.
Behind the Bastards
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Or, you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled water during hurricanes. We are all outraged. So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy, baby!
Behind the Bastards
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This is something that, you know, these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right? And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in some senses, older than that kind of economics.
Behind the Bastards
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But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice, right? This rage is not a measure of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
Behind the Bastards
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And Scott argues that, you know, and E.B. Thompson also argues this, that it's the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of exploitation. You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really lose it.
Behind the Bastards
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But it also means, right, the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to to the exploitation level, it means that rich people can be bad about inflation, even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lula, the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was, you know, you had 20% year-on-year inflation, right?
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But also you had 40% yearly wage increases. And so everyone was like kind of fine with it because because the amount of money you were making was going up every year, so nobody really cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it.
Behind the Bastards
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But then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series of protests that would send Lula into his political career, and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because the level of exploitation people were living under hadn't changed
Behind the Bastards
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But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with with the military government of like, we won't do anything. Our wages will continue to go up and inflation will continue to be work at a certain level such that we're still getting paid.
Behind the Bastards
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That deal was violated and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart an extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart the fall of a dictatorship.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his cohort, and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grain crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born.
Behind the Bastards
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Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right? It was part of that discipline. But, you know, Smith and his people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad?
Behind the Bastards
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And, you know, I could get into here a bunch of arguments about whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm going to return to my sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, OK, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great for cis people like I'm trans for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like 1936 U.S. Great Depression.
Behind the Bastards
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So, you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good. People for whom, you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters because the statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down are not operating in the inside of the moral economy.
Behind the Bastards
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They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy. And the people they're interacting with are in the moral economy. But why is it like this, right? Why do we have a moral economy that functions this way?
Behind the Bastards
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In the case of the peasants and, you know, the working people of the 1700s across Europe, and, you know, this goes on through the 1800s too, right? We can trace the moral economy to a very, very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bought bread. But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?
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To understand that, we need to turn to the concept of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably should not say the word guarantee. That is probably staggeringly illegal. You know what probably has low prices? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We are back. So let us now turn to price.
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The political economists Shimshong Bickler and Jonathan Neitzan argue that price is the unit of what orders capitalist society. You know, price is like the fundamental unit of political economy. It's the thing that orders and structures the entire society. If you want to know more about this, read their book Capitalist Power. It's quite good.
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I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and Nietzsche that price is the unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price as what's called a social hieroglyphic.
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Now, social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one-off term that Marx used once to talk about how price mystifies the nature of value, whatever. I don't care about that. I care about it because price. there's something very interesting about price itself. And there's something interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph.
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Now, Marx is using hieroglyph in the term of like, it's something you have to be decoded, right? Because he's writing in the 1800s. This is, you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs. I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method of encoding complex information into a single character, right? Price as a social hieroglyph
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is important because price is the mechanism through which we understand and often through which we fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire lives are captured in a single number. Everything you do at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet.
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The entirety of the labor process of producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tear, every broken body and shattered city and trade union is lined up in front of a firing squad, appears in the end as a simple number. Price. To express it another way, here's Daniel Cahn and the Painted Bird from their song, The Butcher's Share.
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Let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has traveled far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this horror story and its price. A story of the power people wield. A story about factories and fields. A story of what you'll never have to be aware just as long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number, is how we understand the world.
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And it causes us to treat price, and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality. Because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understand the world. But price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society.
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Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage at the moral economics of price increases are similar but not identical to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you've ever need and have been unable to get is, when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you.
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But between you and it is a number and a man with a gun. And the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price, and the entire economic system behind it, is organized very specifically so you don't do this. E.P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre-political.
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The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In 2020, we, for a brief moment, saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed. In its place, we saw the emergence of pre-political concerns about price, right? We saw, once again, a massive panic about inflation.
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And this is not to say that inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was, in large extent, a fiasco. But look at the politics for a moment that this has produced, right? What the media understands is economic anxiety.
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And what I think we can now better understand as the moral economy that is a result of the fact that our entire economic system is structured by price and that we encode all of the information in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for and that we in turn are sold things for. those prices going up, the product of it was Trump, right?
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And there's, I think, a reason why these sort of pre-economic explanations are preferred to the answers and, you know, to the actions that people saw in 2020. Four years later, Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store at the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system.
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They're there because for a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price?
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It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah.
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And, you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing?
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And, you know, the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
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Yep, and that's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them. It'll be good.
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But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah.
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But something I realized, the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling. You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing?
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Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning... I mean, organizing that, like... I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. And I was like, what? Like...
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People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
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Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
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And that's just not true. This brings us to something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right, That's something all of you know how to do.
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If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right?
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You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but, you know, you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right?
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You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff.
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Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go do something.
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And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower.
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I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people.
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Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here, too, which is that... You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common exception.
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I mean, this is I literally had this conversation with with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world.
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Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly you're
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Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?
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And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
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One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Yeah. Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you.
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Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this.
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There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about... Here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. So much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car.
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I know someone who's a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made... all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah.
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It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.
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Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope?
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I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party.
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And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's... You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing.
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I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills.
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And this is where you really get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.
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And part of the way that successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works, is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, or just you're gone, or you cycle on to a next thing, or any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you.
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And you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's organizing the thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing.
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And a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds, and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one.
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We'll get to in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of, like, the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.
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So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because, again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships.
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And, you know, one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of – they call it power mapping. But when you're figuring out –
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How you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have the relationships already. And also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. Mm hmm.
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And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships.
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That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right?
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And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard also. I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right?
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That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses.
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And you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works?
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Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around, like, running them out, keeping people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But, I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people.
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It's useful for, like, politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for banks.
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bosses in union campaigns unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff but the thing is also and this is something i don't think people understand those guys they're like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you but they got a job being a researcher for a union They have the same skills as you.
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They know how to Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's dating profiles and look through their Facebooks and their Instagrams. A big one, a big one that rich people especially do not think about is Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App. Because, yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there.
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Like, that's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... McGate. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah.
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And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his Cash App history and they found all of these money transfers to people.
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This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do. Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang.
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They'd be pinning. You know, if you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is... is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right?
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It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh, yeah. Huge.
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Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
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There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like... being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. Yeah.
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And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right?
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That is a thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right?
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And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything free.
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That is what literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?
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So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that.
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Or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome.
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And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is, I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at keeping groups together.
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Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable.
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And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can, that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely. There's also something I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops.
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Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And...
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Yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. And along this line, there's things like making music. And there's a bunch of different ways this can go.
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This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs. And this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah.
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This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
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No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale...
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It's it's this massive if you want to get want to go into technical language is a massive force multiplier right it makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves the better they feel about situation they're in and things like music things like art I mean things like pulling pranks.
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if you were a good practical jokester this is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms of you know you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org but like you know if you know how to just like pull pranks this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns in tenants organizing there are a lot of people who you can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale
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And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important.
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And on sort of this note, one of the things that, as you've assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
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There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
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And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of Hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them.
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But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and, you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's that's all organizing is.
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It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it.
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And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done.
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But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
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If you're a baker, you know, you can bake for people. It's a wonderful thing to share. Oh, my God.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people.
Behind the Bastards
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And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You, you have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
Behind the Bastards
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We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.