This week on the show Cayden is joined by fellow Convergence editorial board members Max Elbaum and Jon Liss. We recently published a collective editorial statement called Block & Build 2.0. The piece lays out the many ways the Block & Build strategy has to re-orient to the seismic shifts in the political landscape that are happening as we enter a 2nd Trump term this coming week. Max and Jon walk us through some of our most important strategic adjustments as well as wrestle with some of the areas we still face questions and uncertainty.
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[00:00:00] Cayden Mak: Welcome to Block and Build, a podcast from Convergence magazine. I’m your host and the publisher of Convergence, Cayden Mak. On this show, we’re building a roadmap for the movement that’s working to block the impacts of rising authoritarianism while building the strength and resilience of the broad front that we need to win.
Before we get started, I want to invite you to join our subscriber program. We’ll Convergence Magazine is an independent publication that relies on the generosity of our readers and listeners to create the rigorous thoughtful picks that you’ve come to expect from us week in and week out. You can become a subscriber at convergencemag.
com slash donate. One more quick announcement. And you might already be aware of this because last week was the first week we did this. We’re making some slight adjustments to our publishing schedule here in the new year. The audio podcast will publish to your feed first thing Monday morning but you also may not be aware that we live stream this show on YouTube almost every single Friday at 2 p.
m. Eastern, 11 a. m. Pacific. If you go to Convergence is YouTube and click the notification bell to subscribe. You can join in this conversation live every week. We will put that link to subscribe in the show notes for those of you who are audio listeners and might be interested in the YouTube version of the show.
This week on the show, I am joined by Convergence editorial board chair Max Elbaum and editorial board member John Liss. We recently published a collective editorial statement called Block and Build 2. 0. The piece lays out many of the ways that block and build strategy has to reorient to the seismic shifts in the political landscape that are happening as we enter a second Trump term this coming week.
Max and John will walk us through some of our most important strategic adjustments, as well as wrestle with some of the areas where there are really still a lot of questions and uncertainty, because there’s a lot that we don’t know yet. But first, these headlines. To start us off, while the Los Angeles wildfires are fading from national headlines in favor of Inauguration Day, those fires are far from over.
At least 25 people are now confirmed dead, and the Palisades fire is only 31 percent contained. We’ve collected some additional resources for mutual aid, and if you’re looking to chip in and support the survivors, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of places you can do that. We will link to those resources in the show notes.
Thank you to our production assistant. Kimi David for putting that together for us. It also seems that a six week ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas will hold and be signed today in spite of Benjamin Netanyahu’s best efforts to continue to dog walk the Biden administration by claiming he might withdraw from the agreement due to some last minute complications from Hamas, a claim For which he, once again, can provide no evidence.
While there were celebrations and a real sigh of relief at this announcement, the ceasefire agreement is coming 467 days too late for the nearly 80 percent of Gazans who are displaced and the tens of thousands who have been slaughtered. And, though Gazans will be allowed to return to the northern part of the Gaza Strip, what are they going to return to?
This deal is part of a potential phased peace plan that starts a six week clock. Prisoners will be released as part of this deal, and conditions need to be met to initiate the next phase. There is, of course, still a lot to be done here for U. S. based movements. Ceasefire is, of course, the bare minimum, and the incoming administration doesn’t hold any promises of actually changing course, given Trump’s As well as a concern, pre disposition to kleptocracy and his explicit alignment with the evangelical right.
The influence of AIPAC and the military industrial complex also hasn’t substantially shifted. These are challenges that the movement for Palestinian liberation will face for years to come. In his farewell address this week, Joe Biden also warned of the threat of an oligarchy of tech billionaires creeping in to overtake American democracy, which you just figured this one out, Joe?
This has been a concrete threat since at least the first Obama administration, which solidified the kind of revolving door between Silicon Valley, the White House, and Capitol Hill that the military industrial complex enjoys. There’s nothing more American than pretending you do not see it. When corporate power works for you.
But the moment we’re in right now has a bit of a different tenor. There’s popular discontent with how the big tech overlords are running the show. The emperor has never had any clothes, but more and more people are seeing it. Let’s start with TikTok. It seems the proposed ban on the app will go into effect on Sunday since the Supreme Court upheld the law this week.
Influencers are dispersing onto other sites, trying to figure out what will be next. Hilariously to me, a lot of people are leaving for Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, which is another Chinese owned company, just evidence that attempts to ban or control specific apps is basically playing legislative whack a mole.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump will be welcoming all of our favorite tech overlords to his inaugural dais on Monday, including the CEO of TikTok. Many of these companies have made donations of a million dollars or more to the ceremony, which is a pittance of their own financial holdings. This performative garbage is a way for big tech to signal their willingness to be collaborators with this administration, which relies deeply on the misinformation spread on their platforms for its power.
This all happens on the heels of Mark Zuckerberg going full chud, torching the fig leaf of decency that Meta had before and ditching the cynical adoption of socially conscious policies while claiming that people quitting their platforms are the ones who are virtue signaling. No, Mark, I think it’s you who claims that calling trans people mentally ill is somehow quote mainstream discourse in 2025 who are the real virtue signaler here.
And the virtue is bootlicking. Bye. This is all to say nothing of the continuing and shitification of online content, thanks to the AI slop and algorithmic curation that has completely corrupted our information ecosystem. But what this is I think perhaps a big setup for a shift in how Americans are spending their time online.
Many are posting about these shifts with reactive fear, blindly defending whichever platform has served their material or social needs the best. This form of cope is nothing more than an evolution of the manufactured consent Noam Chomsky warned us about decades ago. But for the social media era. On the other hand, I’m not ready to endorse just ditching en masse.
The world has changed and there’s no going back to a time before social media. We’ve got to figure out how to grapple with this in rigorous ways. And one thing that we can do to be able. To be rigorous about this is to be real about the emotional effect all of this has on us. We did a whole episode about grief on this show just a few weeks ago.
I really recommend you go back and check it out. The fear and anxiety that you might be feeling about the shifting digital ground on which you stand and have perhaps become dependent on, I know that’s true for myself, is a normal response to change. Grief is, in part, the process of working through and accepting the emotions that come up when change is forced upon us against our will, so we might be better prepared to face the world as it is.
So I think it’s a good time to take a breath and step forward into the unknown of organizing towards liberation in this rapidly changing world. Let’s add liberation from our dependence on tech platforms owned by oligarchs who currently control what we see, what we hear, and what we think about for our education, entertainment, and community building to the list of our highest aspirations.
This seems like a good weekend to maybe put your phone down for a little while and give your full attention to a film. Maybe one by the late, great David Lynch. Also don’t forget to like and subscribe.
[00:07:41] Sound on Tape: Now, if you’re playing the movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film you’ll be experiencing weakness and extreme purification.
of a potential experience in another world. So don’t let your friends or some television advertisement trick you into accepting weakness. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone.
[00:08:41] Cayden Mak: So now to our main conversation today. Earlier this week at Convergence, we posted a joint editorial statement that’s titled Block and Build 2.0. The piece lays out a lot of the strategic avenues that we think are important to focus on to both block and protect ourselves and our communities from the harmful authoritarian policies that are going to be played by the incoming Trump administration and of course, it also covers the areas that we can focus our efforts to build our power and towards an inclusive multiracial democracy in spite of those threats of our increasingly authoritarian government.
Joining me to discuss the substance of the statement as well as how and why we put this together are Convergence Editorial Board members Max Elbaum and John Liss. Max, thank you so much for joining me today. Sure, and john thank you for making the time
[00:09:30] Jon Liss: great. Thanks for having me
[00:09:32] Cayden Mak: Let’s start with talking go back to basics a little bit and let’s start with talking about block and build as a framework we put out this seven part syllabus last year to help people grok what it means Like what we mean when we say block and build.
But max is the Driving force behind that maybe you could frame up our conversation a little bit by summarizing what’s in that syllabus and why? Okay We think it’s so important to this political moment.
[00:09:57] Max Elbaum: Thanks, Caden. Block and build is a strategic perspective that’s been developed over the last seven or eight years to try to meet the moment that we’re in.
We’re at the most intense phase of a 60 year backlash against the gains that were made in the 1960s, driven especially by the black led civil rights movement. And that backlash has gone through a bunch of stages, from Nixon’s Southern strategy, through Reaganism, which now we call neoliberalism, to the Tea Party reaction to the election of the first black president.
And an authoritarian bloc with a white Christian nationalist agenda has been driving for power and it’s reached its highest and most intense phase when Donald Trump, who was the product of that backlash, not the cause of it, the product of it did play a role in unleashing and making more Mainstream its most radical, extreme, and most racist and sexist elements.
And in that context, those of us who are for transformative change, who see the need for deep structural changes to meet the needs of the majority of people, the working class communities of color, women, L-G-B-T-Q community and to save the planet from climate change. Need to figure out a way to both defeat the right wing drive for power.
And at the same time, accumulate enough strength to drive forward and initiate a new progressive cycle in U. S. politics with a comprehensive agenda on economic issues, social issues, racial justice and gender justice, climate, fighting climate change, and especially important the need for peace and global cooperation and international law against might make right.
So block and build tries to combine those two elements. The block and build framework says we need to fight the right building the broadest possible coalition opposed to the mega agenda. And within that coalition, we need to build a progressive trend based upon a comprehensive political agenda and a fighting spirit that’s willing to contend with the elements who are opposed to MAGA, but who don’t share a progressive agenda.
including the mainstream of the Democratic Party. And we need to build our own strength and that those two elements, the elements of blocking MAGA and building independent progressive power, have to be intertwined, playing offense and defense at the same time. The block and build syllabus written during the Biden administration lays out the different elements, the arenas of struggle in the electoral arena, in the labor movement, in other social movements.
And now we have to adapt that strategy to a different balance of forces given the results of the 2024 election.
[00:13:19] Cayden Mak: Thanks, Max. Let’s turn to some of those changes now. Most of our listeners are going to be hearing this. The very week that Donald Trump is inaugurated again and moves back into the White House.
This editorial statement takes aim specifically at how the 2024 election has shifted the terrain that we’re all working on. And I’m interested to hear from each of you also a little bit from your specific perspectives. That you bring to Convergence from your various work about what you think this election revealed about our assumptions about our politics.
And let’s start with you, John. Talk a little bit about what we’ve learned through this past this past cycle.
[00:14:00] Jon Liss: It’s a difficult to block, blocking and building is point one and now 2. 0. Critically important and also in this case, inadequate that we’re limited by the candidates and the issues and what’s put out there. And I think I want to focus a little bit on the word and Because it’s often difficult block, which means, work with the broadest grouping of folks, in this case, electorally supporting the Democratic candidate Harris and trying to push that through and how do we push for our agenda was in there?
How do we push for our politics was in there to create real excitement? And I just saw some polling this week that among the millions of voters who didn’t show up. two big, broad things, foreign policy and domestic policy specifically the genocide in Gaza and the democratic party and Joe Biden’s unwillingness to do anything about that.
And then domestic policy, the second biggest area was inflation. And it’s yeah that a party that hasn’t had a consistent working class agenda for decades. Um,
It’s hard to galvanize and move folks around what in many cases are class issues, inflation, take home income, which is basically stagnant for or even stagnant for 50 years, access to health care, a range of issues, and people are feeling it and hurting and this was not a party calling for the dramatic change that I think people want.
So I guess the question is on the block side, how do we assert more of our politics? And how can we, to some extent without our hand fooling on the steering wheel, how can we at least help influence how it’s going? And then on the build side, I think, Again, it really wasn’t so much in play, I think, during the last election cycle, but those are the questions.
How can we get our candidates out there? How can we support some and punish others?
[00:15:58] Cayden Mak: Yeah, what about you, Max? What are the, your takeaways from this cycle?
[00:16:03] Max Elbaum: I think we it’s interesting to look at the contrast between 2020 and 2024. And I think that tells us a lot about what was missing this time around.
The 2020 election First thing to say about it is it came on the heels of very broad social movements, very militant movements, a lot of action in the street, the women’s march kicking off the resistance to the first Trump administration, the airport occupations opposing the Muslim and of course, the George Floyd uprising, putting the issue of racial justice front and center and those movements created a certain climate, a certain mood in the country and they also served along with other work to highlight the danger and the degree to which Trump and his MAGA bloc were an obstacle to racial equality to social justice in general and it created a certain movement.
Energy then got harnessed largely in Bernie’s 2020 campaign which brought a lot of that into the electoral arena and built a political force. And that created the conditions for what became a more unified and a more excited campaign against MAGA in 2020. Bernie had enough strength behind him.
And the momentum of those movements to, there was a deal forged between Bernie and Biden, those unity commissions and certain planks that came from the progressive movement became integrated into the national campaign. So there was a vision of some substantive change, which actually influence the initial proposals, legislative proposals for bail back better and others that came out of the first year or so of the Biden administration.
So that combination of electoral strength because of a progressive presidential campaign, as well as Election of the squad and other people at all different levels, combined with the vital social movements highlighted the fact that there was grave danger in mega and at the same time that there was some real substantive change for the majority if we defeated mega and went on to implement the agenda that was supposed to those ingredients were lacking in 2024.
2024, we did not have the kind of militant social movements moving things. We did have an unprecedented movement against the Gaza genocide, but it wasn’t on the scale of the George Floyd movement, and it was in direct opposition, not just to MAGA and their baiting of the Palestinians in an attempt to smear anybody who protested genocide as anti Semitic, it was directly opposed to the Democratic administration, because the Gaas the Biden administration had a morally and politically bankrupt approach to what was going on there.
There weren’t those other comparable movements. Then, on the anti MAGA, the danger of MAGA was pushed in the background, despite January 6th, and despite everything that they had done. That started to fade in the popular memory and the Supreme Court in preventing, basically shielding Trump from legal accountability plays an important role in normalizing the right wing authoritarians and play, the media.
If it’s Democrats versus Republicans, rather than a block with a anti democracy agenda that’s outside of even the limited democracy norms that we have in the country. In the absence of a more vivid sense of the threat by MAGA. And in the absence of a progressive agenda that’s influencing the general election campaign, we basically lost the anti MAGA majority to the couch.
Trump increased his support a little bit Biden and Harris and ultimately Harris, the nominee, got six million less votes than Biden did in 2020, most of which were people who stayed home. There wasn’t a presidential campaign. There was no open primary. The handoff to to Harris came late. Biden who had promised, all of that.
So in the absence of a forceful expression of progressive politics at the national level via a presidential campaign, in the absence of those social movements and in the status quo, being so much discontent with the status quo, you could, we lost. And the fact that we only lost the popular vote by 1.
5 percent on one level country is more divided. Trump is claiming a mandate. He doesn’t really have a mandate. But we lost. We didn’t have those elements. And I think there’s a lot of lessons, some of which are laid out in the editorial, about building social movements and about what we have.
To do in 2028, especially taking advantage of the initiative that Sean Fain and the UAW has put out there about the general strike in May 2028. Both on the block side and the build side, we weren’t nearly as well prepared and didn’t have the same conditions in 2024 that we had in 2020.
[00:22:02] Cayden Mak: Yeah I really want to pull out this piece about I think one of the things that we did some coverage of in this past cycle was also the work that folks working on things like progressive ballot initiatives were able to move in this cycle and then also election outcomes at the state level where A lot of times local or state candidates outperformed the top of the ticket and one of the things that we write about in this editorial statement is can we listen to that?
Can we use that as a way to identify values and visions that ring true across different parts of our social base? And I’m wondering from both of you if there are examples again to dig a little deep. And John, I know that you do work. Like in specific geographies, if there are examples of this from this election cycle that you’ve been thinking about as things that we might pull forward as, as a guiding light into the future.
[00:22:56] Jon Liss: Yeah, thanks, Katie. Yeah, yes, definitely. I think there were like a number of the progressive ballot initiatives. One. I don’t have them in front of me. I can’t enumerate them. And I would say like local races in North Carolina, which Trump won the state presidentially local races for governor, local race, statewide race for governor Supreme Court seats, a number of races were one and it showed, I think a certain dynamism at the lower level there.
I would say in particular, what I can talk most about is what’s coming at us, which is 2025 in Virginia is one of the handful of states. That has statewide elections this coming year, every 100 house seats of our House of Delegates, all those seats and the governor are all up for race, all up.
What’s interesting I think in the House, I think block and bill will be interesting within that. For example, who do we support and how do we build a poll in Virginia, in the Virginia General Assembly that will actually fight for union rights, will fight for access to healthcare, will fight for automatic voter, right to vote and automatic restoration of voting rights after folks have been locked up.
Those kinds of issues need are the build side of the democratic party And I think the challenge that we have when we’re trying to build this broad front and win like at the governor’s race right now The only announced candidate for governor from the Democratic Party is a candidate who made her claim to fame was going after AOC when they were both Congresswomen.
And just as recently as this week said she wouldn’t take a position or wouldn’t say something publicly on supporting getting rid of right to work. My point being, we have a moderate to conservative Candidate we have someone just out of I think mainstream democratic party central casting a candidate who Was in the cia was a prosecutor.
I mean you all heard this story before And then there’s an expectation That we the progressive sort of poll is either taken for granted or is just going to rally at the end And say vote for the democratic candidate I don’t know if that’s the best way forward. I’m tormented by that.
We can fight and win a great legislature and then still have things stopped by someone who’s so conservative at the top from either party. In this case, we do have an extraordinary bad Republican all to be taken into account. And so I think one, I’d make a longer term push, what is our inside outside strategy? How do we start putting our own candidates that are going to be coming up there or candidates that reflect the values of the really the working class majority in Virginia or any state? What would that look like? And how would we develop those folks? How would we move up through the ranks and have candidates that can really, I think, ignite the support that’s like latent and is sitting there and waiting?
That’s I think the challenge to all of us in many ways, we as a large state power building organization Virginia new Virginia majority. In many ways, we turn out, we, we ended up being a turnout machine for Democrats, frankly, at a national level. In many ways, the working family party ends up being a turnout machine for Democrats.
And yes, to win and to have majorities and move certain things, we need democratic Party members and candidates to win, but how do we do this in a way that also, it’s the ones that are aligned with us that are winning and that we are involved in the selection of who the candidates are.
Not some upper level party elite, so how do we get candidates that reflect, race, class, gender and the perspectives of, I think a latent majority.
[00:26:35] Cayden Mak: Yeah. What I hear you saying also in not so many words is also that there are multiple, institutions of power that we need to be thinking about inside and outside strategies for, right? That it is both the government itself, right? And governing that is part of what’s at issue here. But part of governing are also these ossified institutions like the Democratic Party that require both pressure from the outside and folks willing to do, frankly, politically.
The dirty work of being on the inside and shifting them from within. Is that, does that seem like a fairest summary of your thinking about like how we need to be thinking about inside versus outside strategy going forward?
[00:27:14] Jon Liss: Yeah. And I think we need strategy. Yeah. A hundred percent, Caden, exactly.
And I think, and it’s, we need to go beyond and I’m not saying it’s convergence’s responsibility, but at different state levels, we need to go beyond the generic and have really a specific plan. Which candidates are we developing and which geographies for which races? What’s our sort of pipeline?
Like I say, in many cases in Virginia, it’s someone who’s a lawyer who worked for the CIA, was a prosecutor. Those are the candidates, anointed by party leadership and then foisted on us. How do we, what’s our pipeline look like? And really having detailed plans around that, I think is important.
Are there places when, places and times and conditions, maybe not our state, maybe a state that has fusion voting, are there places where the working families party in conjunction with other entities could challenge incumbent Democrats or even run outside the Democratic party? I don’t know, but I think that level of specificity.
Is going to be needed to get us beyond a generic sort of understanding to blocking and building.
[00:28:16] Cayden Mak: Yeah, no that tracks to me and I also am thinking as you’re saying this back to conversations that I was in at the Working Families Party’s convention last fall, where like the Colorado Working Families Party, for instance, was putting out a vision of in the next, I think eight or so years winning a putting a Working Families Party candidate in the governor’s office in that state that those kinds of specific plans have become more they feel more relevant and urgent to, to me right now.
Knowing the kind of power that we lack, frankly, at the federal level. Which I think is, maybe a good segue into, like one of the, one of the big observations that felt important to me in Block and Build 2. 0, this statement, is that, And that I hear you saying to John is that we do need to be especially alert to these specifics of geography.
We write our forces are weaker nationally than at the state and local level. States and municipalities will take on heightened importance as sites for building political power and fending off attacks. And I think I, I hear you saying a lot of this stuff to Max and I’m wondering for both of you, and maybe we can start with Max on this one is what do you think this is going to look like in this next cycle?
And where is where is organizing already happening against MAGA policy? Where are we seeing the state and local levels already moving to protect people?
[00:29:44] Max Elbaum: Well, there’s two or three components of that. One is we need to look at the right wing maggot takeover of the Republican party. It was 60 years in the making. And at a certain point in in the 70s, the beginning seeds of the new right Developed a strategic orientation, which was their version of block and build which was they abandoned third party strategies They decided they set their sights on a long term struggle to take over the republican party Which meant voting for republicans over democrats, but it meant grooming their own candidates and building their own agenda through think tanks campaigns organizing the federalist society grooming judges and the different right wing organizations, grooming candidates, moving up from school boards and local city councils and so on into Congress and building mass organizations along the way, politicizing the white evangelical church.
The left had an effort along those lines in the eighties with the Rainbow Coalition, but for a lot of complicated reasons, including What happened in global politics, the rainbow declined at the end of the 1980s. And from the 90s and into the 2000s, the left concentrated on building protest movements.
And it’s only in the last 8 or 10 years since Bernie’s campaign in 2016 the beginnings of the Squad, some of these new organizations, have we started working from this. power building strategy of synergizing non electoral and electrical work, electoral work and shooting for governing power. And then that’s where these different components come in.
We need to work up from school boards, city councils, build a base at that level, communities and states, and I think John has a lot more to say about this but we’ve seen that start happening in different localities to a certain degree and Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, and Bernie have all put out in the last two months that a top priority is recruiting working class people to run for office.
And Justice Dems is on a major campaign now to recruit Progressives and they’ve emphasized the anti genocide work. They’re been a main supporter of Palestinian rights, supporting all the ceasefire Congress people and those who are for an arms embargo. So they’re into training and grooming candidates.
The Working Families Party has turned to making that a top. priority and Bernie’s put out the call for that. So that kind of work, but it’s not going to start at the congressional level. We can succeed at the congressional level in certain areas and the importance of having the importance of having an ALC, a Summer Lee Greg Cesar, who’s now the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
We need to defend those footholds that we have at the national level. But we are gonna make more breakthroughs at the city level and the state level. And a lot of that in the next few years is gonna be concentrated on convincing those state governments, legislatures, and governors not to cooperate with the Trump administration and building the kind of opposition.
The editorial talks about we need to go back and think about the pre Civil War period, where state governments in the North refused to honor the Fugitive Slave Act. And we have to have that same kind of resistance in the next phase, where we’re not letting federal ICE agents come in and round people up.
In California, in Minnesota, in Wisconsin in states where there’s blue administrations. That’s going to require putting a lot of pressure and a lot of heat on those Democratic governors and legislators. Um. I also think just to, just builds on John’s point, one of the four bill priorities flagged in the editorial was taking the offensive against the corporate Democrats.
We have to be we have to stress more developing our own brand. We have to stress more the contention. It was extremely sharp in the Democratic primaries. The fights over Jamal Bowman, over Summer Lee, Rashida Tlaib we lost Cori Bush and Jamal. We have to come right back at that. Getting AIPAC out of the Democratic Party, major campaign has launched around that.
Getting dark money out. Those kinds of things.
[00:34:35] Cayden Mak: There’s , it’s like one of those things where I’m like, oh man, there’s so much work to do. One of the things I’m thinking about too is I, the, one of the things that we’ve emphasized in the build section of the statement is the priority that took place on labor and the work of labor.
in this next period. And I know Max, you alluded to Sean Fain’s call for a 2028 general strike, but I’m curious to hear from both of you and John, especially coming from the sort of state power building world, thinking about what is the way that other formations, labor included, and perhaps labor, most of all fit into.
These like ambitious plans where there’s so much work to do. Yeah, I don’t know, John, you want to start us off on that?
[00:35:22] Jon Liss: There’s, and there’s a lot of meat here or vegetable protein or something. I want to start with a, the bigger, a conceptual thing. And it’s, and to some extent we’re being driven by the way polling is done about working class, college educated, working class, non college educated.
It may be a stand in for manual labor and intellectual labor, though, not necessarily. In many cases, there isn’t necessarily a difference in income. So I think a political project that I think is in part of developing an alternative and a working redeveloping a working class base for the Democratic Party and for our social movements in particular, is can we bring together sets of demands around both pieces of the class?
Who has access to healthcare, who can pay for their kids going to college or is in college debt access to abortion and public health. Go through the list. And I think that is a sort of, those are class questions and we need to figure out how to articulate it in a way that works for all the pieces of the class.
’cause it takes all that, those votes coming together. That’s one. Secondly, the south in particular, the southeast and southwest distinct as they are. Um, there’s certain lessons there. Again, in a number of states, because of the sort of mix of immigration and new populations moving in as well as an historic sort of black or Chicano population in depending on what your state is in the geography, their political geography.
And I know in Virginia, it’s worked this way when our people of color population is 36, 39 percent in that range. It puts you within striking distance if you can. And particularly if you have a layer of class over top of that. And you’re organizing white people too, is you can actually win elections and carry the politics of the day.
There’s a number of states. mostly with modernizing economy, which tends to fuel immigration, North Carolina, Georgia, again, I already mentioned Virginia, plus a number of the states in the Southwest where that potentiality is there. But as a friend often says demographics is not dense destiny, right?
So the subjective part is how do we organize that? And then I’ll just close it back by saying, and again, there’s an opportunity and a threat there in terms of Southeast and Southwest. But it’s to what extent can community organizing, state power organizing, and labor organizing work really block, really come together?
That, in a number of the states where new battery plants and electric car plants, all that stuff’s being built. How do we link that union movement with the state power building that’s going on in that same state? With the black and Latinx Liberation movements in those states. How do we bring those pieces together?
Can we at convergence and elsewhere help to fuse that because I think coming together we can actually win If they’re distinct struggles that don’t cross over Yeah, you end up with chunks of people not voting you end up with chunks of people not supporting the union movement, Etc. And I my last point is and I agree with max 99 percent of the time i’m all right with 20 28 2028 But I’m not very patient, not just because of we’re in one of those moments where, lots is happening fast.
I know that I’m already hearing. We’ve got like reliable rumors from a number of sources that on Monday here in northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, D. C. We’re anticipating raids in a number of apartment complexes. Where we’re organizing immigrants and these, I’m assuming they’ll go in looking for one person and try and come out with many.
So we’re in a period where things are gonna be moving fast. And the backdrop, yes, line up those contracts. Let’s go out on May 1st, 2028. But we got a hell of a lot to do in the next four years to even get there.
[00:39:10] Max Elbaum: Another point on the labor, I was at a session at the uc Labor. Earlier this week 11 of the unions, teachers, unions, faculty, unions in California have a Nash, have an agreement, a statewide coalition contracts coming up in 2025 and they’re connected through the bargaining for a common good network in terms of linking.
Public school teachers now are demanding bargaining not just about wages and working hours, but about curricula, about defense of students from ICE, about all kinds of issues that start to spill over into the community issues and have built very powerful labor community alliances. In the first Trump administration, we shouldn’t forget, that’s when the Red for Ed strikes came out.
And they were not limited to blue states. Oklahoma North Carolina, I think a number of other states, there were walkouts by teachers. Many of whom vote Republican, but they were militant on the teacher issues, and it’s an excellent entryway into those broader community issues, and linking racial and gender justice, defense of immigrants and defense of the education system.
We’re in a period. Basic facts science need, history, need defense against this administration. So these fights are going to break out this year. We’re not waiting for 2028 on those. So the labor movement can’t go into a bunker. There’s another piece on convergence. From the former president of the LA Teachers Union that goes through some of that history from the Chicago Teachers Union getting taken over by a rank and file caucus against the old administration back in 2010 or 2011.
And the whole history of teacher militancy. One other point this whole college, non-college thing, this is a. campaign from the right wing to imply that educational attainment is the definition of class, which is connected to their effort to point to so called cultural elites and take the attention off the economic elites that run this country.
Class is determined by your relationship to the economy, your role in the relation to the production, who controls the means of production, and who owns the banks. It’s not related to whether you went to college or not, only indirectly. connected to. There’s been a long campaign by the right wing to eliminate the actual way you define class and substitute this educational thing, which is connected to the attempt to demonize higher education, Hollywood and cover up for the corporations and banks and Wall Street.
And we’re going to have to take that on as well, because that seeped well into the, too much of the left. Accepts the idea that college, non college is the big way you decide who’s in the working class. That’s not, that’s a dead end for us.
[00:42:32] Cayden Mak: I feel like this is actually a really good place to also point to some of the polling that the Working Families Party was doing last year, trying to redefine how we poll on who is in the working class and how the working class defines itself.
Cause I do think, John, you mentioned this earlier, that so much of the way that we poll people to try and understand political opinion in this country is just it’s not functional. It’s it’s the, so many of the conclusions are foregone in the way that people design polls. I’m a big methodology nerd.
I think about it a lot. I think about the way that, when you design questions a certain way you are predetermining some outcomes, right? And trying to square some of these questions about Who has power in a workplace? Who has managerial duties? Who’s in an enormous amount of debt?
There’s a lot of other pieces at play. And I think, one of the things that I think about our role at Convergence too, is that and this is true, I think of you of truly democratic unions is these are places where people can come together to really struggle through.
The sort of deep challenges of our time in terms of what should our priorities be? Where do we find common cause with one another? Where do we build solidarity? And can we struggle together to find those places? Because I think that for me, a lot of the upshot here is that, um, the right has developed a program, that they have developed a program that that.
even if it is not what they say it is resonating with people and that we have some work cut out for us in the build department to find our our unity to find our common values and our vision. I wonder as we wrap up here for today if there’s two, two looking forward at that project of building those cop towards those common values and vision.
If there are things that each of you are thinking about as where are you putting your energy in this next period, what are the things that you feel like are setting us up well, and that we are starting to do now that make you think that there’s a road ahead for us?
I don’t know, John, if you want to start?
[00:44:45] Jon Liss: Sure. Thanks, Katie. Um, I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about Virginia again. 2025 is really many ways where at least a piece, a major piece of the fight back against MAGA and Trumpism takes off that winning and securing majorities in both houses, hopefully winning the governorship and having a trifecta in Virginia, hopefully doing it with progressive leadership and progressive core in who gets elected will create conditions where we can go from, really moving nothing at all at the state level and little at the nothing good at the federal level to winning what we can at the state level, some greater access to health care, a housing program, rent control of some sort.
Access to abortion. Oh, yeah. And voting rights, where we still have several hundred thousand folks, disproportionately black and brown, who aren’t allowed to vote because they’ve been incarcerated. So those are all things that are really on the ballot. Historically, in 2009 and other years, that’s when the Tea Party and others start up and they use Virginia as like a trial balloon practice round.
For us, we think it’s really important, and anybody listening or watching or wants to come out to Virginia and put in a few months or a few weeks on the on the doors and talking to people, we can definitely use your help.
[00:46:00] Cayden Mak: Amazing. Matt?
[00:46:01] Max Elbaum: There’s was a difficulty in linking the day to day work that’s the foundation for historical change. With a big picture of what where you are in the global history and in the history of the country. And being able to go back and forth between those two levels and keep your bearings.
Which is important for a movement not to either get lost in the details and miss. Thanks. The political trends that are shaping the country, or on the other hand, you get lost in abstraction. On my project over the next while, personally, since it’s been many years since I’ve been a direct organizer.
Organization. I’ve mainly worked in journalism and publications. It’s to try to bridge, help bridge those two levels. I think we Whether we survive the Trump administration 2. 0 is going to depend on a lot of what have Ordinary people do every day in those suburbs, outside of washington dc when those raids happen when people, come and try to arrest Students who’ve been protesting genocide Those kinds of things that day to day work but it is connected to a bigger picture, which is that the Post Cold War global arrangement of U.
S. hegemony through its economic strength and its soft power strength and the neoliberal model of capitalism, that period is ending. And we’re gonna go we’re gonna exit from it. And it’s a big question about whether we’re gonna exit from it to the right to a world full of authoritarian regimes and a more naked form of repression globally.
Thank you. With the use of military force by United States and other powers that believe in might makes right, or whether we’re going to move toward a transition toward a more equal and just world. And that’s going to be the stakes, but it’s going to be decided in a million little fights in very specific communities, workplaces, and schools.
And we have to keep both of those in our field of vision and understand that we, our work will be informed by understanding where we are in history, but it’s where the rubber meets the road in those lots and lots of fights. The outcome gets determined.
[00:48:51] Cayden Mak: We got our work cut out for us. We’ve got a lot to do both, both in terms of like our feet on the ground, actually doing the spade work. And then also this very important sort of like intellectual, cultural, and, , I guess I would call it like an intellect, both an intellectual and cultural intervention on the way that we think about a lot of these questions.
And there are no people that I would rather be doing this work with than you all, Max, John, the editorial board. It really is it’s been a pleasure, one, talking to both of you today, and also is really a pleasure and a joy to be in struggle with you all as well. Of course listeners can also, and I encourage you to check out the full editorial statement on our website, convergencemag.
com. We are also inviting folks, if you have thoughts, responses, elaborations other things that you think, need deepening in that statement. We’re accepting submissions of responses and especially if you were rooted in place, if you’re rooted in a specific part of movements we want to hear how things hit for you and what you’re working on here in the new year.
This show is published by Convergence, a magazine for Radical Insights. I’m Cayden Mak. Our producer is Josh Stro. If you have something to say, you can drop me a line. Send us an email to [email protected] that we’ll consider running on an upcoming mailbag episode. And finally, if you would like to support the work that we do at Convergence, bringing our movements together to strategize, struggle, and win in this crucial historical moment, you can become a [email protected] slash donate.
Even a few bucks a month goes a long way to making sure our independent small team can continue to build a map for our movements. I hope this helps.