We’ve spoken in the past about Co-operation Jackson as a Black-led economic and political project within movements for dual power and economic democracy. You also visited the UK at this time last year to lead a residential training course with Stir to Action. Since then, what’s been happening in your work in Jackson and beyond? 

Until February, it had been a good year. Freedom Farms, our co-operative, has continued to grow and add new members to the team. We’ve just completed a rigorous course of education, with members now certified in permaculture and permaculture design. These are primarily young folks, particularly young men, who are between their teens and early twenties. They’ve been learning critical life and design skills, which is much more about the ecological approach to organising both your life and the environment. 

In the autumn we partnered with a sister organisation, Community Movement Builders, who are based in Atlanta, Georgia. They’ve worked with us to develop a kale chip process, where we grow the kale and they distribute and market it. Our Green Team is the first team to fully pay back their internal loans and development support, so they are really taking off. We can also see this in the Community Production Cooperative, our digital fabrication lab. 

We’re about to move from developing several designs in partnership with a New York based designer and architect, where we can lay out schematics and designs around future housing in Jackson. In February we planned to start a 12-month community dialogue process to design a plaza on the Community Land Trust. We had a fairly successful meeting on 27th February and then by 1st March we shut down, taking COVID-19 seriously. I’d just returned from Canada, where I think I may have been exposed to COVID-19, which I do not say lightly. I was in bed for a whole week, which I believed was flu, and I just remember my lungs, as I recovered, were just hurting, it was so sore. 

That’s when I started to learn more about the virus and thought, “Oh, luckily I’ve had a mild case of it.” What made us take it seriously is that one of my best friends died of H1N1, so I was encouraging folks to take it seriously. Many called me and my organisation alarmists, claiming it’s just a bad flu. Then there were crazy rumours from Black folks I’d met in the UK, claiming that African people would be unaffected by COVID-19. These conspiracy theories were in online forums in February and were growing wildly, unfortunately. So the Cooperation Jackson team made the decision to shut everything down – initially for a month – to make sure everyone is shielded and we’re stable enough as an organisation. We had enough money in the bank at the beginning of lockdown, so we’ll just pay everybody for up to three or four months, no problem, no sweat, take time off, relax, study, read.

One part of the organisation that has continued to operate is Freedom Farms. We started to analyse the potential impacts of food supply chains in the US, and much of the research has turned out right. As we try to ensure our community has a certain level of security we decided, after figuring out how to work safely and practice appropriate physical distancing, to continue our farm operation. The Green Team, who couldn’t work, switched over and started working at Freedom Farms, which has now tripled its capacity. By the end of March we were able to extend our acreage and this is the largest crop we’ve ever harvested at one time. We’re still planting and by the summer the farm will be expanded further and we’ll be able to give tonnes, and I mean literally tonnes, of fresh produce to the community for free, subsidised through a public fundraising campaign. So it’s a good time, we’ve just had to adjust. In a weird way, our organisation was built to survive the serious impacts of the crisis from the get-go. And while we were stretched in terms of food security, many of us remembered Katrina, and our learnings from the 2005 hurricane. It was deeply acknowledged in the design of the Jackson-Kush Plan theory, orientation, and programmatic work, so we’ve been able to really step into that in a tremendous way.

I think we were probably more mentally and physically prepared than most organisations, I would argue, in the US. As a co-operative, you can quickly pivot: we need to do that, we need to do this, and switch gears. So in a weird way, even though we were technically shut down, it’s been our most productive period in the last six years. The whole team is really rising to the occasion, and we were able to ask: if we can’t continue our normal operations, what can we do with our tools? Initially, for a week, we were involved in local mutual aid, but after contact with Italian comrades, they advised us to only continue if we had adequate protection. This sucker is really virile, don’t do it unless you’ve got PPE. 

Though we ceased involvement in mutual aid efforts, we relaunched by producing protective masks. We’ve got people who know how to sew, we’ve got sewing machines, we can buy cloth, which was enough for us to start a production centre. Now we’re one of the biggest mask producers in the state of Mississippi. It took us maybe around two weeks to really figure out a system, but once it got cranking it’s been cranking. So we’ve been distributing hundreds of masks, we’ve been starting to do a full distribution, we’ve been figuring out how to do that safely, with the distancing, and how to package it and doing some other stuff to get our routine down, so we’ve been able to make some critical pivots.

Have you got any local government contracts, from the local municipality to deliver food parcels, or is it entirely self-organised and fundraised? 

We’re entirely self-organised. We’ve utilised the city government and its resources to identify some of the most in-need places and collaborated with other organisations to allocate these resources. The city government, though, is at war with the state government, as the Republican governor and legislator are doing everything they can to strip the municipalities of their various powers to make responsive policy. This state is one of those places where the worst in the politics of the age has really expressed itself. All of the major cities in Mississippi, with the exception of Oxford, are led by black mayors and have black majorities. Oxford, home of Ole Miss (University of Mississippi), a relatively liberal, white-majority city, is not a Republican stronghold, and so they are even feeling the brunt of this political conflict. 

Almost every day Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba has put in place new programmes following scientific reasoning, such as recommendations from the Centre for Disease Control, and the governor just blocks it, or constrains it, or tries to challenge it to send mixed messages from the jump. This will sound crazy, but I would like readership to know the situation. It is getting a little bit better, but it’s still crazy. Initially, Mississippi refused to lockdown, under the new governor who’d just been in office since February. He had a state-wide position before, so he’s not new to government, he’s been around for a while so he knows how this works. He was giving daily updates until the beginning of April. He’s very deliberately and intentionally been one of the political actors to challenge New York City’s Mayor Cuomo approach, because it was very clear fairly quickly that the Republicans were trying to counter the leadership that was being exerted by democratic governors in New York and California. They were getting national airtime, particularly on NBC and CNN, and were running the President’s little taskforce and then Cuomo’s taskforce. Then quickly Cuomo became the shining light, providing clear, honest assessment, in a calm, demure way, but bringing people in, making people feel assured. 

So they were trying, very clearly, to encourage a few Republican states to counter that message, and our governor was one. He kept saying it’s just like the flu, we don’t need to take this more seriously, only instructing a “you’re safer in place” order. It wasn’t until the end of April, when the death toll in Florida and Mississippi reached a critical point, that the governors finally shut the states down. He was on TV for two to three hours every day in April – and he’s a governor with all the work he had to do in the midst of a pandemic – reading biblical scripture as the remedy to fighting the covid-19. I remember torturing myself, sitting in my living room, watching this man read the bible for five hours and giving an one-hour update on the situation in Mississippi.

In direct response to the pandemic, there have been months of strikes in the US, with walkouts from Amazon and Instacart workers, protesting poor conditions, health & safety, and demanding hazard pay. Building on these ‘wildcat strikes’, you’ve been organising as part of the People’s Strike that launched on May Day. Could you explain what’s happened in the last few months, who’s involved in the coalition, and your plans for these monthly strikes? 

For us, having experienced COVID-19 and losing dear comrades, we took it seriously very early on. And then being involved both on a local, national, and international level in debates particularly on the Black Left and in Pan-African circles, we were disputing this notion that it wasn’t that serious and that it was overblown. Within our own community, several houseless members, several of whom have lived in squat-like conditions on vacant land, started dying at the end of February, all exhibiting COVID-19-like conditions. As they were houseless, they didn’t have access to medical treatment and never got tested, so we won’t know for certain. However, this is a population that lives with the flu seasonally, and they regularly survive it. 

What really encouraged us was the response to the governor’s decision to not shut down the economy, as he’s one of the leading champions of a right-wing push to reopen the economy by Easter. We initially jumped into the frame based on the work that we were doing, some things that we were hearing, domestically and internationally, and we argued that if the country is opened up by Easter, it will result in hundreds of millions of deaths if we do not intervene. So we hit up all of our allies to see what they were doing, put out some initial feelers, and while folks were considering it we knew that the clock was running, so we put out a Cooperation Jackson statement to start moving towards organising a process towards a general strike. We put that out March 31st/April 1st and within the time-frame of that, Donald Trump backed off on account of protests, which needs to be remembered in the historical record. 800,000 doctors then signed a petition claiming an early reopening would just be catastrophic. Trump bowed to that pressure and reset the date of reopening on 1st May. And that is why initially, so people understand, we were responding to the actual science and health needs. It just so happened that it fell on May Day – International Workers Day – which I think was very intentional on Trump’s part. I think it was a symbolic marker to counter the historical meaning of May Day. So that’s the primary reason we jumped into it – it was really to save lives. 

By the time we put out the statement for a general strike at the end of March, we had anecdotal evidence of the impact of failing to close down the economy, particularly on black and Latino workers, especially those in frontline and ‘essential’ workplaces. This was happening in both medical and care settings and sanitation, trucking, and the service industries. So we wanted to really raise the bar and challenge this notion, which sadly has come true, that if this got pegged as just being a black disease or only impacting black, Latino, and indigenous workers, it would trigger this particular political administration, and many state governors, to dismiss it and back off. History has proven absolutely correct in that vein. So much so you have a judge in Wisconsin, a judge in Oklahoma, which are using coded language to state that it’s okay to reopen our economy because the Coronavirus isn’t impacting ‘regular people’. That’s literally the language that they’ve used – ‘regular people’ – with all of its racial and class associations. So that was another reason why we were trying to sound the alarm. We’ve got to defend ourselves where there is corrupt intention in the government, where they are mismanaging a public health response, or really just being derelict of their duties. 

The other thing that inspired our work was the workplace walk-outs that you mentioned earlier, particularly one in Memphis. It was truly spontaneous, workers were frustrated and, in defence of their own lives, while their companies were not offering any protection. They were like, ‘Look man, people are sick, you’re not telling us they’re sick, we are liable to get sick and bring it back to our families and workers, the Instacart workers, that wasn’t as public, but as we started getting clued in we realised how advanced they were in thinking through their actions and organising; and they had to be because they were being blatantly lied to by the company about the number of infection cases. Particularly Amazon, workers were uncovering cases from their fellow workers just telling them or people just not showing up to work, and being sick. So they just had to step in in defence of their lives. Amazonians United was an organising process ... they had some trade union support but largely independent, largely internal to Amazon; so they had been organising for years. They had a certain infrastructure in place, and they put that in here, and it really just took off astronomically inside of Amazon. Amazon is the one, while most businesses in this country and around the world have contracted, Amazon has been growing – massively – throughout this whole period. There’s more people who were forced to because of the circumstances of businesses closing down, but also for what people thought were more protective reasons, doing online shopping, you know, so the role for their company and its kind of pivotal role in the economy, has only grown. So they’ve been hiring workers at a torrential pace, but not providing people with any clear information about covid-19, how to protect themselves on the assembly line, and just saying, here’s some hand sanitiser, here’s one mask. 

Remember, many folks were like, “Look, I need work, I want to work because if I don’t, I’ll get laid off somewhere else.” This is now where most of the workers have come, there’s no guarantee their landlords are not going to not kick them out, or collect rent. By force of circumstance, under the capitalist economy, people have a decision between literally starving and becoming homeless or working and potentially dying. It’s the same choice for millions of people in the United States and around the world. So we’ve tried to step in and intervene in that situation and say, look, “No, most of these companies have reserves that they could pay folks to stay at home. They don’t have to cut payroll, particularly large corporations such as Target, Amazon, Walmart, who would definitely survive being out of operation for a month, or two months, or three months, or even longer, so it’s unfair they’re demanding their staff to work.

This is one of the critical reasons we stepped in to intervene and tried to raise worker’s demands, not just for temporary respite, but an actual implementation of Universal Basic Income, a programme to deal with the overall structural issues implicit in the economy. This approach has received a relatively good reception, with a number of organisations demanding things that we thought were completely impossible in February, such as universal healthcare. Even the polls were showing that the vast majority of people in the United States desire universal healthcare, and politicians blocked it, particularly in the Democratic Party. By April, every poll in the US shows overwhelmingly why we need it now and that it needs to be high on the agenda. 

Even the social movements are in a totally different place now than they were just three months ago, but amassing the political force to move that agenda is still going to take time to be honest. So that’s not only why we called for actions on May Day, because we knew in this country May Day has been historically repressed and because there are historical associations with the Left. We knew that what we called for, even if there were millions of people out in the streets or taking actions by striking, then it would rise to the level of a general strike. Between 1st April and 1st May, we knew it wasn’t going to be enough time, so that’s what we explicitly said: we are calling for action towards a general strike, we put that conditionality on it, and really trying to make a clear statement that even if the pandemic flattens out in May or June, we need to get prepared for the long haul. 

It’s going to take years, maybe even some decades, to fully recover from, following the existing pattern. Why we’d want to return back to that is beyond me, but what most people have in their heads is that things are going to go back to kind of the way they were. Even if that is the case and even if that’s the bare minimum of what people want, that’s going to take years to get to, and that we need to be taking action to build our strength to make sure that the forces of capital in government are responsive to the actual needs of the people. And that is going to have to be extracted because we know that they’re not going to get there willingly, we’re going to have to fight for it.

So that’s why very early on we put out a call, following one of our partners who had the idea – an organisation called Corona Strike, which joined a People’s Strike motion – that we need to strike every month, because we know that this is going to be long-term. Striking each month, no matter how many people do it – it is not going to rise to the level of general strike, we just don’t have enough time to reach that many people, given we don’t control the CNNs and the NBCs and Fox to reach hundreds of millions of people. We’ve still got to work basically one-on-one to reach up to that mast, so we knew it was going to take time. So that’s what we’ve been calling for, what we’re calling these first strike actions, on the first of every month, asking people to either strike in place if you’re still working from home, for some corporation, or if you’re a teacher and you’re working from home, take that day off and make a clear political statement to your employers, that you’re either standing in solidarity or you’re redirecting things towards your own needs, and to build that up. We’ve started doing car share bans so we can practice the appropriate physical distancing. We’ve picked up that tactic, it’s one of the broadest things used on 1 May, we’ve been encouraging folks to do that. But with the housing strikes and rent strikes, I think it’s really going to be this next period, June, July, August at least, that is really going to be the tip of the spear, as we say, of this action because we now have forty-plus million newly unemployed folks; and I say newly unemployed, as structurally, permanently unemployed folks exist in this country, who are not going to have any income coming in for months, if not years. There’s already been some estimate that upwards of forty to fifty percent of the jobs that existed prior to COVID-19 are not coming back in any form or fashion. So we’re trying to take just the basic steps of doing education, putting the organising in place, to be able to wage a long-term struggle, to win what we need, in effect. Now the other side of this that I do want to mention, I think it’s critical, I do think it speaks to a new society potentially reborn, and that is I think the mutual aid response that’s been happening in the United States – that has been tremendous, man. One thing I think that gives me hope is how spontaneously that emerged, in how many places that emerged, how many new organisations, new collectives, and new forces stepped out. So that, more than anything, I think demonstrates, if you got the Republicans and all those wingnuts painting a negative picture, the human response of mutual aid has shown a much more compassionate and humane response. And people who don’t know each other are taken back to just basic principles of care. And organising it with their own resources, not waiting for some government response, or just people-to-people action; that’s been tremendous, it’s been growing. I think a lot of operations are starting to become fairly sophisticated and deeply political in their response, and so I think another key part of our work going forward that we’re talking about with People Strike is starting to do the work to link the different mutual aid networks with each other. One of the things that’s been missing in the United States relative to the social and solidarity economy, and it being able to grow and build some real strength in the United States, which we talked a little bit about last year when I was [with Stir to Action], is we don’t have the supply chains and value chains yet anywhere near the scale of say what Mondragon has, or what exists in Emilia Romagna, just citing those that people in Europe might be more familiar with. We don’t have a set-up like that to any degree in the United States, but this I think is planting the seeds, I really do. And we’re going to try to cultivate that myth as much as possible going forward, because I do think that for a long-term struggle, that’s the pivot towards realising a new set of social relationships out of this crisis that can be built from the ground up.

JGF: We all know that the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified existing public health inequalities, from it disportionately affecting those with underlying medical conditions to the fact that many essential businesses have an over-representation of migrants and Black workers. Can you explain the social, economic, and health intersections with race during this pandemic?

There is a caveat: the mainstream media, they’ve done a decent job at highlighting this reality – the liberal media, or the neoliberal media in particular, I should say (like CNN, NBC) have have worked to come to grips with this. Of course they put their own spin on this, but they’ve been pretty good, there’s been coverage around a disproportionality. In almost all the statements you hear from the constant coverage, particularly on those two networks, which are the two biggest kinds of liberal ones in the United States, there’s not a day that goes by when that’s not mentioned, or there’s not some feature on that now. So if you use that as a matrix, then yeah, it’s getting out there, it’s getting coverage.

There’s awareness of it, that this is f-ed up: [along the lines of] “look how terrible this is, we need to be aware of it”. But the best that they can offer, and the best that they are willing to offer at this point, in light of demands and actions, is “we need more health resources”, without defining what that is, and “we need more health resources in black, Latino, Native American communities”. OK, the US doesn’t have the capacity of, say, China, of building hundreds of hospitals in a month, nor does it have the political commitment to do so. And the way that Trump and the neoliberals – let’s not just blame this on the right, the current right, the far right – it’s not like they are offering in any major way to redirect resources to build more health facilities that can be a permanent fixture in these communities. So it’s lip service to a problem, it’s recognition but without a prescription of how to change anything and no commitment in any fundamental way to change anything.

We recognise that fact, and so much is blatant about it, we don’t mind what’s killing others; and I would say the dominant thing is just OK, whatever, how they shield and how they orient their politics is on the order of the economy and the American way of life. Those are their two talking points: preserving the economy and the American way of life are more important than the number of deaths. And the right is sticking to that. But let’s be honest that in truth, the neoliberals have their own version of that as well, because if you listen particularly, I would say, to CNN, it’s always, “we need to be careful”, or “we need to open up the economy”, and “we need to get back…” So there is no inkling amongst them, on both of those sides of that equation, there’s no real inkling around changing anything. Everything is just a short-term measure; well, we have short-term stimulants. It’s lasting a little bit longer, we need to offer you a bit more protection, we should be granting hazard pay, we should be extending benefits, like that’s the best they have to offer. But rather than responding to the health crisis, and changing the economy to meet the needs of the people, Trump has made it clear that we need to be warriors – that is literally what he said – and get back out there. So now, going to work is a gladiatorial endeavour. We’re living in that mentality.

I know over seventy people who’ve died globally from this thing. About forty-five from here in the United States, mainly New Orleans and Detroit, but spread throughout the country. So I go through phases where I’m thinking, I’m not keeping up, I don’t want to keep up. And then I come back and I think that’s just disrespectful to my friends and comrades, so I come back and find out what’s going on, what’s happened to their friends and families, but I go back and forth on that, it’s not day by day, being honest. It’s anger management for me, to be honest, because I feel like we just need to be storming the damn barricades wherever they might be, we just need to be tearing this damn thing up. In Italy, people just didn’t know, it got ahead of them and there wasn’t enough time to prepare, but at least the damn government there, once they had someone understanding who took serious measures to shut the country down, they jumped on it, they took it seriously. Here, it was just denial, ignoring, and it’s been allowed to grow and fester. This could have been avoided. There’s 40-plus people who I know who died needlessly. And there’s no compensation for their families – most of the folks I know were in their 50s and 60s, but these were still working people, still “bread-winners” in their family: where’s that now going to come from? They were still parents and grandparents so that that level of care, nurturing, rearing, is gone, that knowledge that they possessed – gone, and not easy to be replaced. And all this just for profit and a lot of personal and political gain. That’s what I mean, it’s like there’s information out there but we have to translate that into something. And that’s what People’s Strike is trying to build to, we have to translate that into something that’s clearly the political agenda of those in power now, you know, the malfeasances that they have. With black and brown folks – once that became clear, you can see a clear difference of OK, it’s not going to affect regular people, it’s not going to affect us, and if they get sick and die, so what, we can replace them. That’s what makes this situation extremely dangerous.

JGF: I think you talked about the phrase ‘black disposability’ when you came last year, it kind of feels like a good way of describing this.

This is it on full display, for the world to see. The issue now is what we’ve been trying to push back on some of the trade unions. I can understand from many of them, in fairness to them, that in many states there’s legal language which prohibits unions from endorsing or declaring a strike outside for work conditions, things that got set up decades ago. The Taft-Hartley act here set up a kind of ‘right to work’ regime and limited it so that unions couldn’t act in solidarity with each other, and could only do a limited number of things to strike, so many of them were afraid that to use that language would put them at odds with the government and a legal process. But my fightback to that, patiently and deliberately, is that these are not like normal times and it’s not like the right isn’t determined on wiping you off the face of the earth. They’ve been coming for unions for a while, and now you have to deal with the reality that that’s forty million who are unemployed, millions are desperate and will take anything that is offered to them to keep food on the table, because no alternative and no relief is being provided by the government, or by corporations who could deal with this and have the resources to deal with this. What we haven’t touched on: 90% of the relief packages went to the corporations directly, and then if you look at the trillions of dollars that the federal reserve have been pumping into the economy and giving directly to banks, to prop up the economy, that hasn’t gone directly to the people. So it’s not like there’s a lack of resources. That’s the other thing that they’ve been telling people. The federal reserve is literally printing Monopoly money now, you know, so the United States, unlike many countries, it can dictate terms; it’s not like inflation is going to go so wild here in the United States, like what’s happened in say Zimbabwe and other places historically, because of the unique position of the United States. It’s at the heart of the international system in the world, and it can kind of dictate terms, and does – so they don’t have to worry about that, they can do the Universal Basic Income, they could pay for the healthcare. It’s not a lack of resources, it’s a lack of political will.

That’s where the organiser work is going to have to come in, to change the political dynamics and shift things. I think that’s the critical stage of where we are at going forward with this, because the reality of it is, there’s another wave of this coming. We’re already seeing it here in Mississippi, Texas, Wisconsin; all the states that have opened up early are really starting to see the basic elements of a second wave. Another wave of this is coming, because the total irresponsibility is just enabling it. If they stay true to what they’ve said so far – Trump has made it clear that no matter how many people die from this point forward, they’re not going to shut down again. So we’re in for a conflict, there’s no way around it. I think June there’s going to be a little less on our side than it was in May, but I think June is going to be when that second wave hits and come 1 July, I think we’re going to see some major action here in the United States.

JGF: Lastly, from your perspective, how can we use this temporary breakdown to resist a return to ‘normal conditions’ and build on existing and create new democratic organisations in our workplaces and communities?

On a local level, [we are] deeply prepared: our team has crystallised, its political understanding has grown, this has been the greatest political education for a lot of young folks that they probably will ever have – it’s like, all the things we’ve been reading, studying: I understand now, now it’s real, now it’s concrete. But in a larger sense, it’s hard to say. And let me say why: I think the future is wide open for some profound change here, but as the left is growing and the mutual aid groups, all of that is growing, the power of the fascists is also growing, and there’s no telling what they’re going to do. If we are to see clear proclivities to violence from them, on a day-to-day level – I mean, there was a shooting in Denver, I think yesterday or the day before. Somebody got into a confrontation about wearing a mask, and the guy came back and shot the cook. Other incidents like that, I’ve seen with my own eyes, people getting into fights in stores, for not wearing masks. And the violence is clearly one-sided, and there’s no messaging, there’s nothing to really conquer that, there’s some maybe legal cases; but they’re armed to the teeth, they have an agenda, and at this point they’re prepared to move it. How they will respond as more people get sick, which inevitably will happen, who knows, maybe they’ll slow down, maybe it’ll breed some rationality. Or it may just encourage them to see it more as a survival of the fittest thing.

If you compare a couple of cases where the FBI, if you believe them (there’s always some mixture of truth and some mixture of fabrication with them given our history with them) they’ve told the public that there’s two cases of folks, white supremecist groups, that were intentionally trying to spread Covid-19 in the black and Latino communities in the main. I suspect we’ll see more of that, it’ll be very reminiscent of the conquest of North America from the vicious European settlers a century and a half, two centuries ago, so it’s not without its historical precedent or knowledge.

But the future – that’s the bleak side, but there’s a rosy side to this too – you know, which I’ll go back and talk about the foundation that’s being laid by the mutual aid work, and I don’t want to exaggerate but the potential I think is unlimited. It’s the question of how it can link up with the fightback motion: I think when we get to a critical point where those two combine, where the housing struggles take on a character of occupation and those occupations lead to the construction of new community land trusts, new community housing options, and winning the political and legal battles to make those transitions so that there’s a securing of human need. We know that historically that’s been possible here in the United States and other places, all types of transitions in the times of crisis. That type of orientation is already picking up; I think there will be a similar dynamic we need to look at in terms of those factories and corporations which are not meeting which are not meeting social obligations, and the current system wants workers and the fortification of what we can provide, in terms of mutual aid, the backworkers who might occupy and take over factories. I think we could see waves of what happened in Argentina, in 2000-2001. In 2002, that phase where many factories were left idle, where workers took them over, repurposed and reused them, put them back in gear: I think some level of that is on the horizon here, and we need to be clear in preparing for it, clear in asking for it, as risky as that might be; but I think we have to speak to human need and take that risk, as something I know that we are willing to do, and have been doing in some ways. I think the potential is unlimited. And I think the bridge that we have to really start doing in this next phase is bringing back some old knowledge and some old learnings.

One of the critical things is going to be how well we are able to start to organise large councils and organisations of the unemployed. I think that will be the critical pivot. And I’m stating it very clearly in political terms, I’m writing a piece right now, trying to circulate it to all the different white progressive groups and organisations to say look, our opportunity to stop fascism dead in its tracks kind of rests on you, organising all the newly unemployed white people in communities, that’s on you, let us know how to help with resources, but if we don’t reach them the fascists will. And they need an alternative and we need to be there to be the alternative. The thing that we already see that’s similar in its dynamics to something that happened in Germany is there’s a campaign that’s been directed by the right, financed by the right, stimulated from the top within the corporations and the political leadership, encouraging folks to take action. But there is an objective side to this, and that is you have millions of small business owners, white business owners who are kind of the bedrock of Trump support. When people look at it, historically that’s been the class that’s broke with the fascists, that’s been the class that’s been out there animated and angry as hell, because they’re afraid of losing their small business. We have to recognise that that is a legitimate fear, and if we don’t take to organising folks towards some alternatives, they’re going to break in the wrong direction. So there’s opportunity ahead of us but I think how well we jump ahead of this will determine what the outcome will be for the next couple of years. You go one of two ways, there’s two main paths, and of course there’s all these wiggles and turns, twists and diversions that could happen, but there’s two ways: either the United States becomes a more human and transformed and democratic society, or it becomes an even worse version of itself than has existed to this point.

Kali Akuno is a co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson. He also served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus in this role was supporting co-operative development, the introduction of eco-friendly and carbon reduction methods of operation, and the promotion of human rights and international relations for the city.

‍