Episode 101 – Beat Back Better: Organizing in 2021 with Emma Caterine

The whole point of going over this is to say that the Biden administration is not only ideologically committed to the finance industry, but Biden is so committed to the finance industry that he will actually do things that hurt the economy overall, not just working people, but the economy overall, just to make short term profits for his friends in the industry. 

The model is all nice and beautiful in its abstract vacuum world that is nothing like the real world that we actually live in. And that’s a really important point, because these austerity politics, they’re not pragmatic. They’re not some kind of cost-cutting realism. It’s an ideological belief that when times get tough, the worst off people should be the ones to shoulder the burden. It’s not a mistake. It’s not a hard reality. It is class warfare. It’s an element of class war. 

Macro N Cheese – Episode 101
Beat Back Better: Organizing in 2021 with Emma Caterine
January 2, 2021

[00:00:03.790] – Emma Caterine [intro/music]

New York City is one of the few places in the United States where there is a right to shelter, and that’s not the case in the majority of this country. We let people die from exposure, which the rest of the world rightly sees as incredibly barbaric and incredibly odd for a country as wealthy as ours to do.

[00:00:26.270] – Emma Caterine [intro/music]

When someone tells you, oh, I voted for Trump because I hate the Democrats, you don’t immediately go in and start cudgeling that person over the head for voting for a white nationalist. But you want to lead them to the point where they realize that they voted for a white nationalist, and that they shouldn’t have done that.

[00:00:48.370] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43.070] – Steve Grumbine

And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, I’m bringing on Emma Caterine. You’ve heard Emma on here before with me. We’ve spoken previously about private debt and we’ve also had her on as our national outreach call VIP. And without further ado, I’m going to just introduce her one more time because Emma is just an exceptional thought leader and it’s just so wonderful to actually have her rejoin us.

Emma is a partner at the consumer protection civil litigation firm, The Law Office of Ahmad Keshavarz in Brooklyn, New York. Emma became interested in issues of economic justice during the foreclosure crisis and the resulting Occupy Wall Street protests.  Emma’s also been actively involved in socialist and social justice politics since high school. She’s a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Modern Money Network.

She has advocated for financial regulations like a 15 percent interest rate cap in both the halls of Congress and through publications like Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy blog. She believes that only a government by and for the working class implementing programs like a Green New Deal and job guarantee can ever fully secure the equity that she fights for in the courts every day. And with that, Emma, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us again today.

[00:03:11.130] – Emma Caterine

Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be on.

[00:03:14.540] – Grumbine

Absolutely. This whole season here, I just recently got tested for covid-19, and it’s a very scary time for a lot of us. Seeing the world around us deteriorating, watching a farce of an election and all kinds of shenanigans going on with the Trump administration and now the Biden Harris administration getting ready to take over, it’s left a lot of us leftists feeling wanting and not very hopeful and quite frankly, looking at the world through very jaded eyes.

I’m curious – what looks to be like a debt tsunami coming crashing down in the next month or two – what is your assessment of where we are today in America as a society and with the coming change of administration?

[00:04:06.850] – Caterine

Yeah, so I want to start off with being as real with your listeners as I can be, because I always try to keep things positive and action-oriented. And doing that in this moment when you said things are pretty grim, could be misinterpreted as naive. And I may be a fool to remain positive right now. But I’m not naive.

And I can tell you right now that the most pessimistic I have ever been about politics was when I was in the streets about a month ago with everyone in New York City celebrating that Trump had lost the election. I was so sour despite all this joy around me, because I knew this celebration was a finale for some people. And the reality is that no matter who was elected president in November, things would and will continue in about the same way as they have.

I’m not denying that Trump was an especially bad person. The guy just pardoned some of the most contemptible war criminals imaginable, which really sort of showcases just how bad of a person he is. But the reality is that the president doesn’t really run this country. The president has a lot of power, but for the most part, that power is not actually used, at least within the United States. When it comes to our relationship with other countries, it’s a little bit different.

But for the most part, our country is run by corporations and those corporations are currently not subject to the democratic will of the public. Even people as purportedly progressive as Elizabeth Warren are not against this general dynamic of so-called market rule. What I would call a form of corporate authoritarianism. We have a lot of work to do when there are so many people thinking that Joe Biden replacing Trump is reason to flood the streets, to dance and have this great finale celebration.

Don’t get me wrong, I love dancing. I will take any excuse to dance. I was out there dancing and specifically dancing and also canvassing for Medicare for All. Because we aren’t going to change this by lecturing or shaming people, and I think it can be a really difficult impulse to resist when things are so grim and it feels like people are just in denial about it or they’ve just given up, it can be easy to give in to the temptation of trying to shame people into action, but that doesn’t work.

We have to meet people where they are at. And where a lot of people are at right now is thinking the battle is over because Trump is gone, or in some cases that the battle will be over when the Georgia special election is over in a few days. Now, we are in the midst of the most heightened state of class war since the Great Depression. We have to wake people up to that reality.

People experience it in a visceral way. They’ve lost their jobs or lost income. Their family and their friends have lost jobs, they have all this accumulating debt from rent, from auto loans, from credit cards. They experience that viscerally, but they experience it in a very sort of individual way. A lot of people feel very isolated. They may understand in a sort of rational way that they are not the only one going through this.

But in terms of what they feel, they feel like they’re the only ones going through this. And the task of organizing politically is really about letting people know that they’re not alone. That’s, I think, why the Bernie Sanders campaign resonated with so many people because of that slogan, not me us. It was about looking around you, looking at all these people who are in so many ways different from you, but at the same time all have the shared day to day struggles.

I do have some good news to share today. It’s not all going to be grim, but I do just want to say that I realize that the good news is a single ray of hope in an abyss. I’m not denying that the abyss is there, and we have to confront that. I think a lot of people are resigned as much as they are in denial and denial is often caused by resignation, not to use a super corny illusion, but I’m going to use a super corny illusion.

The character Cypher, The Matrix, the guy who is eating the steak. And he’s like, I know the steak isn’t real, but it tastes so good. [laughter] And we live in a society where that’s a very real phenomenon. We have a lot of things that really sort of pique just our senses, our most sort of visceral senses, this 24/7 media, all these streaming services. It’s very easy to numb ourselves if we want to numb ourselves, so we have to figure out how to convince people to not numb themselves and instead to join us in the struggle to make a better world.

[00:10:02.820] – Grumbine

The struggle is not a new struggle. You look through history and there’s been struggle across generations, across continents, across seas. Struggle is pretty much everywhere. Where do you see us in terms of that class struggle in the United States? Do you see people aware even of the struggle? Are they aloof or are they completely not in touch with the fact that this struggle is happening?

[00:10:28.930] – Caterine

So I think the overall dynamic? That is, I would say, the case, but there’s much more people attuned to the reality of class struggle than there has been in my lifetime. It’s the highest it’s been in my lifetime. And I think for me, I always feel pretty good about where we are at, having first become political during the George W. Bush years, which were frankly the worst years for the left in the US ever, ever – the worst, worst, worst years, years of very brutal repression.

People forget how many people were imprisoned just for protesting. I have friends who got year-long sentences for protesting and there was no anti-war movement, really, despite the fact that the United States was engaging in some of the most brutal wars in its history. And to have come up in those years compared to our current state, there’s a lot to be thankful for. Particularly that we have great independent left media like this podcast, it allows people to sort of penetrate through the corporate news. I mean, that was such a huge thing during the Bush years, was just that the corporate media was just literally reprinting Pentagon press releases, word for word.

[00:12:08.530] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:12:09.670] – Caterine

It was farcical. And we also have mass organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, like Make the Road in New York and New Jersey. Lots of really great mass immigrant groups. The Black Lives Matter protests, obviously, which are arguably the largest social movement in our country’s history, and we have a renewed interest in labor organizing. We have the highest union density, I think, since the 1970s.

[00:12:48.090] – Grumbine

Hey, you know something? It’s funny you say that. In talking with Sara Nelson and Joe Burns, both said you got six percent unionization in the private sector. And I think it was something in the neighborhood of 30 some percent in the public sector. It’s still not great. I mean, it’s definitely better. It’s not great now.

[00:13:10.070] – Caterine

That’s right. Yeah. We should be realistic about it at this point. It’s more renewed interest than a renewed base of power. There’s a lot of reasons for that. I’m sure Sarah touched on a lot of them, and she knows a lot more than I do about this subject, so I won’t retread that too much. And, you know, there is the big issue, and I’m biased, obviously, because it’s an issue I work on. But there is a lack of class-conscious politics around the issues of debt.

There are some exceptions. There’s the wonderful group, the Debt Collective, all the great work they do, including the student loan strikes, which are a historic, successful attempt to inject class politics into the world of finance and debt. And we’ve also seen a lot of efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic to cancel rent, so not just these eviction moratoriums which were enacted in many places; but to say, “No! We shouldn’t keep accumulating all of this debt, but we’re free from eviction temporarily, we need to cancel the rent.”

And you know, sadly, while there has been a lot of movement, a lot of very interesting and hopeful movement with a few interesting outliers, we haven’t been able to cancel the rent for residents in many places. And the problem for that is the usual suspects. It’s budgetary restrictions and means-testing for what little relief is made available. And it’s because a lot of this stuff is going through state governments. State governments, of course, cannot print currency. So they’re spending powers are much more limited than a monetary sovereign like the federal government.

And the federal government so far has been stingy with giving money to the states. And under a Biden administration, we can expect them to continue to be stingy. That’s not a thing that’s going to fundamentally change. There are certain things I think we can expect a Biden administration to do in ways that will be better than what happened under Trump. Immigration is a good example.

I’m not saying great things are going to happen in immigration and for our immigrant friends, but it will definitely be better than the outright racist white nationalism of Trump and his cronies. But it’s counterbalanced by the fact that Trump was a fucking bumbling idiot. I’m sorry for my language,

[00:16:09.390] – Grumbine

That’s alright. [laughs]

[00:16:09.390] – Caterine

But there is a sort of a silver lining to his entire administration that the competent people like Stephen Miller were really focused on the issue of immigration. And Trump appointed the usual suspects in all the other areas. He appointed people like John Bolton and James Mattis and all of these sort of typical conservative economic guys, despite his whole B.S. messaging of economic populism.

But those people all had to work with Trump and Trump just hated working. He was just a lazy, lazy guy, and that stopped a lot of things from getting done besides the tax bill, which was a huge blow to working-class people, a huge redistribution of wealth upwards. But one of the scary things about the Biden administration is that he has had a lifelong political commitment to the finance industry. And it’s not a cynical commitment.

And it’s not just, oh, they’re helping me, so I’m going to help them. He’s a true believer in financial capital. His political career really lifted off in the 70s and 80s. And it was a great time for Democrats who embraced neoliberalism wholeheartedly. And he was one of the foremost people who did so. And he infamously co-authored the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which President Bush signed into law in 2005, which, among other things, created a general prohibition from discharging private student loans in bankruptcy.

That provision, in particular, really highlights his ideological commitment because that prohibition was unprecedented. The logic behind generally prohibiting federal student loans from being discharged in bankruptcy is an old one. It’s borrowed from similar exemptions for tax arrears and bankruptcy. Basically, if you owe the government money, the government is not going to get rid of that debt that you owe because it’s their money. They want it. It’s a public obligation rather than a private agreement.

But what Biden and the Republicans did with the 2005 bankruptcy bill was create this whole new and backwards logic of prohibiting private student loans generally from being discharged in bankruptcy. And those were just loans from banks and other lenders, like any other kind of debt, like credit cards or auto loans or whatever. They’re not public obligations. They’re private agreements. That’s not just a disgusting attack against poor people and middle class people in this country, but it’s also just a terrible proposal economically.

I wrote a whole law review article going into depth about why, which you can find on SSRN, but in short, bankruptcy was created by the finance industry itself because people in a lot of debt don’t take out new loans and they don’t buy stuff. And if you want to keep the economy running, if you want to keep the cycle creating and selling goods to generate a profit, you need bankruptcy.

And so the whole point of going over this is to say that the Biden administration is not only ideologically committed to the finance industry, but Biden is so committed to the finance industry that he will actually do things that hurt the economy overall, not just working people, but the economy overall, just to make short term profits for his friends in the industry. And that’s incredibly concerning.

[00:20:34.300] – Grumbine

What a victory for America, huh? [laughter] What a victory. It just makes me get all warm and fuzzy thinking about what a great administration this is going to be.

[00:20:43.910] – Caterine

Yeah. And returning to the situation with rents. The state governments have been saying because of their budgetary limitations, “our hands are tied, we can’t do anything.” And that’s not true. What funding they have been able to get from the federal government and from their own revenues hasn’t gone to relief for renters. They continue to implement means-testing, which is actually a very budget intensive way of providing relief.

And to see why it is, you just need to look at the tentative distribution of the second stimulus checks, which they’re predicting will be done in a few weeks after the bill is passed. Because aside from not going to immigrants, it’s a very straightforward thing. Everyone gets one of these checks. And the sort of crazy means-testing around the relief that has been made available — you know, in New York, for example, they include unemployment income in the income means-testing for rent relief. That’s insane.

[00:21:55.610] – Grumbine

That’s absolutely insane.

[00:21:57.260] – Caterine

Unemployment is not a job. Unemployment is not a guaranteed form of income because in New York and in pretty much the rest of the country, your unemployment is seriously limited and can easily be withdrawn for the most ridiculous reasons.

[00:22:18.240] – Grumbine

The moral hazards they’re fighting against are just like phantoms, aren’t they? Every time they do this stuff, they claim moral hazard. All I can think of every time a person that I know of has been unemployed, they don’t just lose what they lost from not having the income, it’s all the fines, fees and penalties that come with it that make being poor even more expensive. It’s insane.

[00:22:39.270] – Caterine

That’s right. And, you know, I’m trying to remember – a friend of mine, he’s also a lawyer in consumer protection. He said a really funny thing to me one time about moral hazards. I’m going to butcher it. So, I’m sorry, Sparky. If you ever listen . . . Something along the lines of if another person tells me that something is a moral hazard, I’m going to have to make their life very hazardous. [laughter] 

It’s a very silly term. And it’s really one that is overused and even in a limited way, where it could make a certain amount of rational sense, it’s almost always in these models that neoclassical economics loves to use, where the model is all nice and beautiful in its abstract vacuum world that is nothing like the real world that we actually live in.

And that’s a really important point, because these austerity politics, they’re not pragmatic, they’re not some kind of cost-cutting realism. It’s an ideological belief that when times get tough, the worst off people should be the ones to shoulder the burden. It’s not a mistake. It’s not a hard reality. It is class warfare. It’s an element of class war.

[00:24:12.500] – Grumbine

Gross, gross! Bernie never really came out with the whole MMT angle. But the one thing he did say was that we got to stop trying to balance the economy on the backs of the poor. So at least he was tipping it in the right direction. We do see this non-stop intent of punching down and literally blaming the poors, if you will, even in the pandemic. I’m watching people talking about making bad choices. Even now! I’m like, are you kidding me? Who even thinks like that?

[00:24:46.640] – Caterine

And that can actually be an opportunity for us. It can be a very radicalizing thing to be presented with a situation where it seems so starkly that people are suffering through no fault of their own, and they’re still being blamed, they’re still being made to shoulder the burdens of everything. And if we can reach people and say it doesn’t have to be this way, it really doesn’t.

That’s the other thing this pandemic has shown is how much worse the United States is for working class people than so many other places in the world, including countries that we’ve categorized as developing countries, places where people are so poor that they live in hovels. And at least they have those hovels. Whereas in the United States, we don’t even house people, we don’t even give people the basic shelter.

New York City is one of the few places in the United States where there is a right to shelter. And that’s not the case in the majority of this country. We let people die from exposure which the rest of the world rightly sees as incredibly barbaric and just incredibly odd for a country as wealthy as ours to do, to just let people die of exposure. It’s a Dickensian nightmare.

And when you look at other countries, just the way they’re prioritizing how their resources are used, you know, China builds hospitals in 10 days – new hospitals fully staffed in 10 days. And what do we do? We have jets fly over hospitals to honor the people who are working and dying. It’s disgraceful. It’s a disgraceful thing. And it’s a two edged sword, though, this opportunity, because, again, this can lead people to resignation.

It can be like even in these most extreme circumstances, the government isn’t going to do the right thing. So, why should we even try to get them to do the right thing? And that’s why we have to show people that there is a way to win. We can look to history to see examples of victories for working class people, especially for the United States. That’s really the civil war and reconstruction in its early days and the New Deal, FDR s New Deal and the nationalization of large parts of the industry for World War II.

We can do so many of these things if we can win them politically. And there are so many of us. There’s so many more of us than there are of them. And there are ways to build the coalitions that we need to win. So, for example, with student loan debt, I was outlining how bleak the circumstances are with Biden as president. But he’s something of a puppet president-elect, right? Probably couldn’t get away with saying this like on CNN or something. But on this podcast, we can . . .

[00:28:23.250] – Grumbine

The S word, yes!

[00:28:24.870] – Caterine

We can all acknowledge that he’s a demented fool. He is not mentally well, nor are a lot of his colleagues, a lot of the people who came up in the neoliberal years like he did. So there’s a lot of possibility for the issue of student loan debt in particular, because a lot of the new and younger people in politics, the people who actually do all of the work, you know, Biden doesn’t do work. I mean, people in his position don’t actually do work. They just tell other people to do work.

And those people who are doing the work are people who oftentimes have lots of student loan debt. They have a vested interest in this kind of policy that their respective ideologies might not cohere with normally. So we can kind of build a loose coalition of these people on the inside who wouldn’t normally support policies like this because they work for someone like Biden.

And combine that with the grassroots movements that we have been creating over the past few years, the harms of student loan debt predominantly harm people of color. It’s a great issue for building a multiracial coalition of working class people, and we could get something done. Now I don’t think it’s going to happen in 2021, but in the next two to three years, I think it could happen. And I’m also happy to be proven wrong if you all want to go ahead and make this happen in 2021! Let’s do it!

And regardless, you know, the action plan is the same, right. We got to take advantage of these contradictions within the system, these younger people in politics who are doing the grunt work and use it for a student loan debt cancellation. We did a sort of similar thing with our big push this year to get more federal funding for state and local governments. It was very easy to get state and local governments to sign on to our campaign because they were like, well, yeah, that’s my paycheck. I’ll sign on to this. [laughs]

It’s the same thing with these legislative staffers. They have a very real material interest, and that is so important and unfortunately so missing from even a lot of progressive politics – in the world of organizing we call it power mapping. And unfortunately, what a lot of power mapping has become for some of the big non-profits and liberal think tanks and so on is just focusing on the targets. But power mapping is about more than just the targets for our advocacy.

It’s also about what resources we have. It’s about taking an account of the people that we have, the stories that they can tell, and about the material interests of everybody involved. It’s not just, oh, we’re going to target this person because they can get something done that we need to get done. It’s also well, what is it that makes them tick? What is it we can leverage against them or with them to use? We need to think about these things more strategically.

[00:32:10.300] – Intermission

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[00:32:59.420] – Grumbine

Just rolling it back for a minute. I spoke with Steve Keen a few weeks back and a few months back, I had spoken to Michael Hudson. Both of them are on the record for saying we need a debt jubilee. Period. Outright. Steve Keen more targeted, but in general, a debt jubilee. Student loans seems like a no brainer. Number one, the government holds the debt.

Number two, it is a public service that helps the country in general. Every ounce of this looks good. The problem I see out there is the moralizations of the people that have already paid their student debt that say, hey, it’s not fair that I paid mine. I can imagine a former slave looking back, saying, well, hey, I don’t think it’s fair that you get away with this. After all, I did 20 years of slavery. Why should you only do one?

This is the kind of thinking that I see and that moral hazard, that moral bullshit argument is the bigger of the ones, less so an economic one, and more so a hating your neighbor a little bit more than you should. What do you think about that?

[00:34:08.040] – Caterine

I completely agree with you. I was actually saying something similar. I was talking to one of my former law professors and he does a lot of this work – Professor Alan White, if you’re into legal stuff around these kind of issues, I recommend looking him up because he’s written lots of interesting stuff about this and he teaches classes on law and political economy as well as contract law and so on.

When we were talking about it, I said that the positive side of this, the thing that makes me hopeful about the future of student debt cancellation is a lot of the economic arguments aren’t holding as much weight as they used to. Not to overemphasize Twitter because Twitter is a very particular subset of people, but a lot of policy people are on Twitter.

People may recall a recent incident where a certain unnamed someone argued on Twitter that student debt cancellation would be bad because the holders of the debt would be taxed for the cancellation. And that’s just false. It’s just wrong. [laughter] It’s not true for like 10 different reasons. And it was funny for me to see because as a consumer rights attorney, I have to deal with taxation of canceled debts all the time.

But there are ways to get around it for all sorts of debts. And there are particular rules for student loan debt that prevent its taxation. And most importantly, if you pass either a law through Congress or you do an executive order, you can just say we’re not going to tax it. There’s no reason that like, oh, there’s some sort of natural law of taxation. And, you know, people were laughing at it. I mean, people thought it was funny. It was so bizarre and obviously wrong.

And it was great to see that because those are the sort of arguments that just even five years ago, people would somberly nod their heads and be like, oh, yes, yes, the taxation. And now people have realized, no, that’s garbage nonsense. That doesn’t make any sense. So a lot of the economic arguments we’ve won, we’ve made some substantial gains in that realm. But then again, you’re talking about the moral arguments and that is a fundamental part of the ideology of people like Joe Biden.

The bankruptcy law I keep coming back to it’s called The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention that’s part of the title of the law and what they were actually talking about when they said bankruptcy abuse was people filing for bankruptcy who either made a little too much money or didn’t have, and I’m using the real terms they use in the law, who weren’t living in accordance with their lifestyles.

So you literally have cases where judges allow people to get tens of thousands of dollars discharged in debt because they are the vice president of a company. And as a vice president of a company, it’s totally within their lifestyle to buy expensive clothes from a boutique store using a credit card. But then when you have a working class woman who makes $35,000 dollars a year, her debt of a thousand or two thousand dollars accumulated in a very similar way cannot be discharged.

They say, no, no, no, no, no, you’re a poor person. You shouldn’t be shopping like this. And that’s the sort of logic – it already existed in the system to a certain extent – but the 2005 bankruptcy law really made it explicit and presumed. Now, when you file for Chapter seven bankruptcy, you’re going to immediately have to prove that you are not, quote/unquote, “abusing the system.” And it’s led to many more people filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

ProPublica has done a lot of really great work on this, particularly how racist it has been, how so many people of color have been steered to Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which is essentially a glorified payment plan. You are expected to pay back most, if not all, of the debt that you have accumulated, no matter how big it is, and it’s a ridiculous system, that, again, doesn’t even make economic sense.

But because there is this sort of moral idea that being poor is morally wrong in this ideological framework, and that’s a hard thing to get around because that ideology runs deeper within just people like Biden. We see it all the time. I’m sure we all have family and friends who talk that kind of bullshit. And I don’t want to go too much into my own personal business. But I have family members who voted for Trump and I’m just like, man, how could you? You know, it’s hard to reckon with that.

But we have to. We can’t afford to give up on people like that. We’re going to need everyone we can get in order to win and something that you can see consistently, both from history and from a lot of political science, is that people’s views are actually pretty malleable at the end of the day. And people in the United States generally want to help other people.

Despite the ideological constraints we live in, we’re a pretty cooperative society person to person. So we just need to create the outlets for that and encourage it rather than what our economy and our institutions do, which is to encourage selfishness and greed and avarice against other working people when other working people aren’t the reasons why we are poor and why we are destitute.

[00:40:54.880] – Grumbine

It’s interesting. Ady Barkan went out there celebrating the fact that the Democratic Party had won – kicking the Green Party off ballots, and I was so dismayed. I read this… am I really reading this correctly? He’s literally celebrating that the Green Party got kicked off in Pennsylvania. So that leaves me literally – if I quote/unquote “vote my conscience” – it literally leaves me writing in someone, which I know is as good as wiping my tail end and throw it in the toilet, or I have to vote for one of these two people who are going to put policies, procedures, legislation, a whole way of thinking that I am literally diametrically opposed to.

For me, it broke my heart and I know a lot of people – I’m not making excuses for them, I’m simply going to explain – that went ahead and voted for Trump or said they were going to vote for Trump, not on some ideological thing, but out of a direct hatred – not dislike, hatred – for the Democratic Party for what they had done to Bernie Sanders, to a movement and watching the Neera Tandens of the world and others gloat and chuckle and laugh at our sadness.

And you see it now as the cabinet selections are going on, everything that anybody that raised their hand or had an objection and saw coming is happening. So you can understand why people say, you know what, I’m going to go the extra mile. Forget just writing someone in, I’m going to vote for Trump. And again, not the politics I would have chosen. But at the same time, I understand it when you feel like you’ve been boxed in and all your options removed.

[00:42:33.360] – Caterine

Absolutely. If you live in a place like New York City or Chicago or any other place, that is essentially a place where Democrats ARE the political game, where the Republicans don’t even have a presence or vice versa, it’s even worse. You don’t even have a choice between the lesser of two evils. And that’s why the work of DSA is so important. And I think this might be a good point to transition to the major goals I think we should all have for 2021.  The first of which is we got to up our numbers drastically.

What happened with the Bernie campaign, but then on the converse side, the amazing things that happened with the Black Lives Matter movement this year shows that we need to up our numbers drastically. But if we do so, that’s going to get us so much power. So in DSA, we had this campaign to get to a hundred thousand members. And what it did differently is a lot of DSA’s growth in membership, especially the recent headline-grabbing stuff, was always in reaction to something.

It was, oh, AOC got elected – boost in membership. Oh, Bernie Sanders has said he’s going to run for president in 2020 – boost in membership. And instead of waiting for these events to happen or for these wins to happen, we intentionally used our membership, just a basic growth strategy of, hey, if every one of our members recruits 10 people, we’re going to expand our numbers exponentially. And we haven’t gotten to 100,000 yet. We’re at 85,000, I believe. But that’s a huge increase for us.

And frankly, it’s much better than most of the other organizations like us in the United States. And if you have your own organization and you’re not in DSA, that’s fine. I want everyone to be thinking about recruitment very intentionally and about drawing on other people very intentionally and specifically increasing our presence outside of places with liberal political establishments. DSA has had some success with that in Texas and Montana, among some other places, Arkansas.

And that’s going to require alternative messaging and specifically accounting for meeting people where they’re at and moving the people to where they should be. It means when someone tells you, “Oh, I voted for Trump because I hate the Democrats so much,” you don’t immediately go in and start cudjeling that person over the head for voting for a white nationalist. But you want to lead them to the point where they realize that they voted for a white nationalist and shouldn’t have done that. And that’s tricky.

I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. I’ve seen it happen. I’m going to continue seeing it happen. And it’s tricky because at the same time, we obviously really care about each other. We’re all in this together. We want to stop other people from getting their feelings hurt. And that’s a real harm. I don’t want to pretend like that isn’t a real harm. And of course, a lot of the fear of, quote-unquote “identity politics” is kind of modern hysteria that is as antithetical to class struggle as someone like Neera Tanden is.

But with all that being said, we need to be really vigorous and I’ll say courageous about confronting people who push politics that divide us and then individualize us in our own spaces. We don’t have time for that. We don’t. Every time that we have a member turned away just because they had to deal with some bullshit for some flippant remark that they made, maybe it was stupid for them to say, but we should be a movement where people can say stupid things and not be immediately expelled and ostracized.

[00:47:19.860] – Grumbine

Cancel culture has really kicked our ass, hasn’t it?

[00:47:23.330] – Caterine

It’s one of those things where, like, I hate to say that because I don’t want to sound like a Prager University type guy . . . “oh the cancel culture.” But at the same time, like, I think it really comes from an internalized sense of our own disposability, that we’re treated as disposable by this economic system and then we project that onto each other and to ourselves. Then we treat each other as disposable.

[00:47:52.950] – Grumbine

You are the reason I am a DSA member, I want you to know that. I signed up literally in the middle of your national outreach call when you were doing that for us. I literally joined DSA that moment, and that’s no joke. But one of the things that jumped out at me with what you were just saying right now – I think of identity politics. There are real live issues that each segment within our class struggle fight that have real legitimate oppression and real legitimate struggle within the struggle.

[00:48:29.070] – Caterine

Yeah.

[00:48:29.730] – Grumbine

That said, for as long as time has gone, the powers that be have played and flexed on those wedge issues that isolate people as individuals, turn them into libertarians inadvertently, and keep them away from joining in solidarity within the class-based struggle because of those idpol-type scenarios. And the balance there – I am curious. I want to not be Prager U about this. I want to be enlightened.

And as Lua Yuille, who has been on here said everybody’s kind of in their own journey to enlightenment. We’re not all a finished product. We’re not at the same spot. The spectrum of enlightenment of wokeness, as she said, we’re all at different phases. So condemning someone because they’re not at the stage of wokeness that allows them to see all these things is a real class diminishing exercise. But that’s what identity politics often does.

I am watching all these slang terms that the kids are using. Tradcath? What the heck? I don’t know what that is, right? [laughter] All these cool terms that are great in these little small niche sectors, but they’re wedge, they’re dividers. As I’m struggling through learning about the Russian Revolution and understanding forms of socialism, watching the tankies fight the this ones and the that ones, I’m saying to myself, oh goodness gracious, I guess I’m just too stupid to be cool enough to learn this stuff.

But it’s a divider, right? Because even in the small leftists’ circles, you watch them fighting and it’s kind of going back to Monty Python, the People’s Front of Judea, the Judean People’s Front. It really is ridiculous. We’re not even talking about a one percent slice. We’re talking about insane fractional slices of difference here in many cases. The right’s got it easy. They just drag their feet. The left is trying to make change and we’re a thousand slices. How do we do that? It’s got to be class, right?

[00:50:34.530] – Caterine

Yeah, that’s absolutely my position. And, you know, there’s two things I’ll say about this. One, I believe this comes from Katherine Cross, if I recall correctly, she’s a writer and LGBT advocate, and she had a general rule of thumb about any sort of organizing-type meetings, political organizing type meetings, that if it was a place where the language would not be able to be understood by her grandmother or would make her grandmother so uncomfortable that she would leave, then something is fundamentally wrong. And it’s the grandma test, essentially.

It’s not to say that we shouldn’t make people uncomfortable because we should. That’s, I think, one of the most difficult task for socialists, for the left, is how to put people into a necessary level of discomfort that moves them without alienating them from this sort of political organizing. And the second thing, my late grandfather, my mom’s father was a Teamster organizer and I was talking to him about it. And I love this man, but he had some pretty problematic politics. He once told me that I was too pretty to be involved in union organizing.

[00:52:04.350] – Grumbine

Interesting.

[00:52:05.220] – Caterine

Very nice, very nice. But he told me about how the companies that he worked for – he was a dispatcher as well as the union steward – were always trying to turn the white workers against the black workers. And this would be in Chicago for Chicago trucking companies. And that had to be a major focus of his organizing. And, you know, it sounds like too good to be true, too simple to be true.

But what it really just comes down to is just – I think this is something that Saul Alinsky pushed a lot as well. I do have to agree with this one, though I don’t agree with a lot of the things that he advocates – but, is having meetings in places as comfortable and inviting as possible so that when people are made uncomfortable by the sort of radical messages that we are giving them, that they are being made uncomfortable in a place that feels comfortable.

It just means everything from providing good nourishing food to people when they come to these sort of things. The test I always have for an organizing group is when a new person walks through the door and usually that new person is me. If they don’t try to talk to me in two minutes, I’ll leave. I’ll leave because if you don’t talk to a new interested person within two minutes of them coming to your meeting, you’re not doing it right.

You’re not organizing. You’ve got yourself a social club. You’ve got yourself a social club for people who all think the same way that you do. And you get to all pat each other on the back for having good politics. But that ain’t organizing. It really isn’t.

[00:53:51.430] – Grumbine

God, that’s good. The single most challenging thing that I have seen is people leaving their little bubbles and being able to do what you just said.  Watching groups fizzle because they don’t take that very sage advice that you just gave that sage benchmark and execute on it. Take a few minutes and expand on that, because I love what you just said.

[00:54:16.570] – Caterine

Sure, so I can give you some examples. One time I went to a screening of a cool movie by DSA – I forgot the title of the movie, but that doesn’t matter. And there was some new person there who I’d never seen before, and I went up to her and I introduced myself, and we got to talking and I asked her if this was her first meeting and she said yes. And I asked her why she came and she asked me some questions.

And the event starts and one of the organizers comes up to me and says, hey, you’ve seen this movie. Would you mind giving a short introduction? And this new person was shocked that I was an important enough person, that I would be asked to do the introduction for this event and that I was talking to her. And that shouldn’t be shocking. I mean, I was almost embarrassed that it was shocking to her because that’s what we should cultivate.

And it’s one of the reasons why, for whatever disagreements I may have with her, I will always admire AOC so much because she just has that on almost 24/7. She is such a welcoming presence and just a thoughtful person who listens to other people. And that’s just such a basic component of good organizing that we should all be striving for. And I’m not saying be friends with everybody or that you can’t hate people who you organize with [laughs] because we all do, whether we admit it or not.

But you want to think about what you’re doing and think, “is the way that I’m acting towards other people going to get people to come back and continue organizing with us, or is it going to be off-putting to people?” And you need to constantly be reassessing that. And the other thing is you’ve got to also consciously be trying to up the ante for people. You know, in the organizing world, they often talk about layers like a bull’s eye type target model where you have the core organizers are the center of the target.

And then each ring that’s more outer is people who are less and less involved and harder to reach and get organized. And the goal is always to try to bring people closer to the center, more involved, more interested, more integral. And we’re all limited in what we can do. There are very few of us outside of some mega-organizers like Sara Nelson. Most of us are pretty limited. We have day jobs that are not organizing related.

What it can mean is just spending a lot of time one-on-one with some person and getting them to a point that they can start organizing other people themselves. That’s the thing I’m most proud of, all of the work that I’ve done, seeing other organizers carry on that work. It is the most fulfilling thing of any of the political work that I’ve done to see other people carrying on that work.

So do it because it’s the right thing and it’s the strategic thing. But also it’s going to make you feel great at the end of the day when years from now you see those people who you trained and who you helped to get to another level, you’ll feel really good about that.

[00:57:55.940] – Grumbine

We have a saying here, “each one teach one,” and the idea of trying to educate one another and lift each other up is just really powerful. But the other idea of succession planning, this goes back to business thinking even. You always want to train your replacement, so to speak. You always want to try to build new leaders, help them become fully self-sufficient so you can have a force multiplier.

That seems to be a very key, core concept within organizing to make sure that you’re not just creating followers, but you’re creating co-leaders, people that are interested in taking the cause further and pushing the envelope, expanding out to those outer rings that you were describing in the concentric circles process. So I really want to say that it sounds to me like the message from Emma Caterine is “organizing” is the word to start 2021.  Is that correct?

[00:58:52.140] – Caterine

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I can’t say too much, but I do have an announcement of sorts, which is that the folks at the Modern Money Network and at DSA, we’re all working on a groundbreaking job guarantee bill with members of the legendary “Squad” in Congress. And that’s going to be something that will be public soon. There will be more information on that soon. I can’t say anything yet, but that is something I’m very excited about.

[00:59:31.020] – Grumbine

Yeah!

[00:59:31.650] – Caterine

What I want folks to do is to start talking up the job guarantee now. We don’t need for the bill to be public to start talking about how important this is, and you don’t need to talk to your congresspeople about it. It’s best to wait for the bill to have those kind of conversations. I mean, talking with your family, your friends, any kind of community groups that you’re involved with. If you want talking points, if you want to learn more, there’s a great website called JobGuaranteeNow.org. It lists 10 principles of a job guarantee.

And if you’re not sure where to get started with organizing, check out DSA. We have a group called the Ecosocialists and they are really the ones who have taken on the job guarantee campaign. So check out DSA eco like ecological ecosocialists [@DSAecosocialism] They have the same sort of job guarantee principles as the Job Guarantee Now website and you can sign up with them to get involved in this organizing.

[01:00:43.230] – Grumbine

That’s fantastic, and as a card-carrying DSA member, I’m excited to get involved. So with that, Emma, thank you so much for helping us break in 2021. This is our first podcast. You’re the 101st podcast. Sara was our 100th. And I’m really grateful that you came on. And it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

[01:01:03.570] – Caterine

Well, thank you so much for having me. This is great.

[01:01:06.420] – Grumbine

Absolutely. Steve Grumbine, Emma Caterine, Macro N Cheese. We’re out of here, folks.

[01:01:17.580] – Ending credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/real progressives.

Emma’s Website

Find her work on Medium

Mentioned in the podcast:

The Law Office of Ahmad Keshavarz in Brooklyn, New York

Make The Road New York

Make The Road New Jersey

The State of the Unions 2020

Debt Collective

A Fresh Start for a Women’s Economy: Beyond Punitive Consumer Bankruptcy by Emma Caterine

DSA Eco

Katherine Cross

Job Guarantee Now!

…and just for fun…

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