After the opening reading, a sketch based on an excerpt from the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer, Tish and Adam interview Ken LeBlanc, a rank-and-file member of the Main Street Carbondale, Illinois Starbucks union organizing committee.
The Starbucks Workers United organizing effort went public in Carbondale in late May. LeBlanc discusses organizing, how to start a union, the grievances of her co-workers, making food for folks as an art, the Restaurant Organizing Project, how uncontested corporate power breeds unethical behavior, the grassroots organizing in Southern Illinois around abortion rights and reproductive justice, and speculates — at our request — on her idea of utopia.
Following the interview, Laura, Adam, and Tish discuss the idea of utopia as it relates to the class struggle and ongoing capitalist-born disaster. Laura reports back from the Labor Notes conference. We also discuss the hauntological quality of “in real life” organizing and creative expression, the need to abolish capitalist time vs. the false timelessness of ca pitalist culture, the need for a a mutually reinforcing dynamic between left organization and the daily class struggle, the rabid far-right political and terroristic assault on public education and what is left of the commons, how the (re)creation of utopian imagination is necessarily collective, what it means to organize for Paradise in Hell, and socialist art as flats for the theater of the class struggle.
