Co-written by Fern Roush and Melisa Ferati
“If we wanted to dream, we would have to rest,” I say, turning the corner of my voice over my shoulder. My dog pulls a little on her leash, leading me forward, while one of my friends is a few feet behind me, whispering her desire for activist imagination, for vision – how little we pause to dream.
Dreams are complicated things in a society where we are often too exhausted for real sleep, let alone dreaming, and where constant work, advertising, and rituals of allegiance stonewall our dreamscapes. The over-culture has a myriad of ways to hijack what we think is possible, for ourselves and our communities.
Some dreams are illusory. They are based in some alternate reality, a forever hypothetical “somewhere”, rather than within the fabric of the here and now. The “great activists of yesterday” knit the labor movement so deeply into the fabric of our society, that it has become almost a footnote. Often at the cost of great sacrifice, workplace solidarity brought us things like the cap of the 8 hour workday and child labor protections. Despite this, we too often see the need for worker power as something owed to certain types of people in the workforce: those who share a specific skillset (like nurses and teachers), those with dangerous jobs, and those whose positions are tethered to greater extremes than the average Joe. Rarely do we come to speak of an economy that benefits us all without division – equitable standards.
Some dreams we act on, and drink in the evidence of them. Nationwide, Starbucks workers have been unionizing, including the Starbucks closest to Evergreen campus on Cooper Pt. road. In the very same plaza, workers at Indigo Urgent Care pushed to unionize, and doctors with greater professional weight acted in solidarity with their entire staff. In Fall 2022, academic workers to the south of us, within the University of California’s system, held the longest academic strike in history. In 2021, the International Association of Theater and Stagehands had their first strike authorization since the 1940’s, winning nearly all of their demands. Across Europe, renters, nurses, and university workers have been engaging in semi-coordinated general strikes. All of this occurs amidst the very real, very ongoing global capitalist nightmare. We drown in recurring announcements of anti-trans legislation, mass shootings, and police violence and corruption—including the recent revelation that the president of the San Jose Police Union has been importing large amounts of drugs – including Fentanyl, found laced in various substances across the U.S to the degree it’s become an epidemic of its own standing. Still, we dream. We reach out to our communities. We continue on.
The ongoing shock and awe of capitalism floods us to the degree we’ve become indoctrinated into seeing it as an inescapable reality. We numb ourselves to our needs and desires. Worn down, many of us lose the ability to be alarmed at how threatened bosses are when we ask for real healthcare, actual living wages, and livable communities. What is worse, we often can’t even hear ourselves asking for anything; the words “no” and “need” have been stripped from workers’ mouths; somehow painted as buzzwords. Many of us still panic about workplace solidarity, instead of feeling safe enough to cut straight to how forcibly commonplace inhumane work practices and the cost of living is. Our daily terrors push us to aggressively defend the status quo that exploits us; histories of violent worker repression have fueled the power of global capitalism. We would not fear our own power if this repression wasn’t baked into the core of our society.
Meanwhile, “the dream” warps into a tool to control us – we are stuck on an escalator increasing in speed. We move faster and faster to keep up, smiling our way through very real nightmares normalizing a thin margin of survival. Limiting language exists at every layer of our society. In the words of poet and Toronto labor organizer Daniel Sarah Karasik in their poem tough but fair:
”child abuse language is domestic abuse language is cop language is dad language is I’m warning you language is don’t make me tell you again is punishment language is the prison guard’s language and we learn it early is the torturer’s language don’t say I didn’t warn you is the seed of fascism already here”.
When we’re surrounded by these deeply rooted layers of intersectional oppression, made to feel stripped of the ability to turn to solidarity, lingering exhaustion is not only normalized but ever-expected; and our little sleep is dreamless. We withdraw, and alone, we cannot process the grief of our lost desires. We take being alone in our sadness as a western cultural norm, when in fact we cannot admit we are all completely beyond capacity. We feel blocked from any possibility of historical change – “[we] live [in] capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; [but] so did the divine right of kings… power can be resisted and changed by human beings…” (Ursula LeGuin). We must believe in the dream because only then do we have a shot at breaking out of the daily trap.
Finding a way to revive the dream, the hope, to reconstruct the cultural conditioning and beliefs that are steering our actions en masse, means finding ways to attack these narratives that we are alone, divided, and that have to settle for less: less than what we need, what is fair, and what we desire. To need is nature. And want is no dirty word. Worker solidarity means bringing back the village mindset, where we know we always have someone and something to turn to. Rather than trying to beseech the empathy of the bosses and politicians who already don’t care about us as living, breathing people, together, by at least initially turning each others’ ears and making clear a tangible vision of a better life, we can bear witness to, and seed, each others’ dreams. We can dream a new life into being, once where we cease to settle, and embrace what we deserve.
The truth is, our baseline should already be much, much higher. We should be taking our basic needs and workplace safety as givens, not as something magically bestowed upon us by somehow gracious, generous, powers. Being able to shamelessly name our desires – to say we want what we want, stand for what we need, and claim what we are owed – should feel so natural, because we should already have them. But we don’t. So how do we get there? When we talk outside earshot of our bosses, something magical happens. Amidst a chorus of whispers, together, we admit to each other our waking realities. Worker solidarity can reinstate the village mindset, where we can acknowledge the nuances of our workplace struggles; without feeling at risk, separated by the strata of the class system and divided by types of work. When we participate in workers’ “gossip” – un-regulated communication directly between workers, outside of workplace surveillance – a new kind of admission occurs. Take, for example, Seattle Solidarity Network’s recent wage recovery action, where a group calmly filled restaurants that had been withholding wages. Direct actions like these are not possible unless we talk to each other about where and how we are fed up at living end. We believe in each other, and our shared voices draw each other even nearer, becoming an unstoppable force. What is any workplace without its workers?
When we collectively acknowledge our need for food, housing, medical care, safety, and respect – for basic needs – we are able to make manifest strong living systems of mutual aid. Not only can we then begin to meet the needs of each other, but we can confront the individuals and systems robbing us of them. Workplace solidarity is a base ethical practice that will propel us into survivable, compassionate lives; returning us to our inherent nature. We also begin to recognize quickly and clearly that everything runs off the sweat of our backs and blood of our labor. We can pool our resources, not just as the sum of capitalism’s leftovers – what little we have after trading in our labor and passion to meet the cost of living – but as the sum of our power. We are already giving so much, and this creates a deep, transformative dream-vision, one that could transform the present and the future. As students – especially as undergraduates – we must dismantle this culture of qualification, and recognize we are not damaging to labor movements but a source of their strength. In fact, most of the people at the center of these movements are young folks coming together and doing this kind of work for the first time; no prior experience. If our bosses are so afraid of people talking, nonetheless organizing, it becomes clear we are a tangible threat to their inhumane practices. So – let’s talk, get together, and dream a new world into being.
You must be logged in to post a comment.