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Unbreakable Solidarity

Course Participant Page

 

Welcome! This page is for registrants in our 2022 Unbreakable Solidarity course. Please do not share this page with anyone who is not registered for the course. You are welcome to share specific homework materials, but not the link to the page – which will include links to recordings as they become available.

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Homework:

Important Information

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Homework: Homework materials for all sessions will be posted below. Please allow 2-3 hours for homework per session. We ask that everyone engage with the study materials and activities prior to each session. 

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Recordings: Recordings of each live session will be available 2-3 days after it takes place. Links to these recordings will be posted at the top of the homework assignment for the corresponding session. Recordings, along with the participant page as a whole, will remain accessible through September 5, 2022 (three months after our final live session). After this, study materials will be mailed to you as a PDF and session recordings will no longer be available.

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Have you visited the Logistics Page for the Course? Please allow 20 minutes to review this page and take the action steps outlined within it prior to the course. Applications for your personal zoom login must be submitted by the end of the day Saturday, April 30, in order to participate in the first live session (applications are approved manually, not instantly).

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Join Our Mighty Network: Mighty Networks is a versatile forum for participant connection and sharing. It has similar functionality to Facebook, but more privacy. White Awake uses it as a forum for course participants to make connections with one another and exchange information, ideas, and experiences related to course curriculum. Read the full invitation, including the link to join, here! Once you have signed up, you can re-access the network at this link: white-awake.mn.co. From there, click "Groups" on the sidebar to access the course-specific group. 

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Course Survey: Our team has put together this short survey that allows you to give us feedback on learning goals, facilitation and your overall experience with the course. We want to hear from you! How was your experience with the 2022 Unbreakable Solidarity course? Please take a few minutes to let us know by clicking on the link here and filling out the survey. Participant surveys give us important insights that help us refine and build our programming over time. We appreciate your help!

Session One

Session One: Understanding White Supremacy & Capitalism

Session Recording (5/1): View Here 

Watch on Youtube to view with closed captions

Note on the recording: Due to technical issues (which we are working out with Zoom), the second half of this session did not record. Fortunately, the session content was almost identical to that of last year's course, and we were able to substitute Chris's presentation from 2021 for the recorded material that we lost. We apologize for any inconvenience, and do not expect this to happen again!

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Chat Log: View Here

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Study Materials

 

 

  • A Liberal vs Radical Analysis of Racism – David Dean (13 min watch) Though most of this presentation applies to our work in this course, it was given in our winter ancestral recovery course and some content relates more specifically to that curriculum.

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Note #1: “Keeping Ukraine,” an episode of Congressional Dish, intersperses clips from an earlier episode of the show (performed in 2018 before a live audience) with material created this year. We’ve cued the video here to begin with one of these older clips. It then switches to Briney talking about the build up of tension this year, in late January. Please listen to about 16 minutes of the episode after clicking the cued link, stopping at the 19:30 mark.

 

Note #2: We believe that this clip offers a very helpful orientation to the international dynamics of capitalism today, with a focus on the US, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. Later in the course we will also touch on the authoritarian approach that the Russian and Chinese governments take to their engagement in global capitalism. ​

 

Working Class Victories!

 

We’ll be sharing an example of current working class victories in each of your homework assignments for the course. For this session’s homework we are highlighting the historic vote to unionize the JFK8 Amazon warehouse on Staten Island - a vote that was just finalized this month, and which was organized entirely by Amazon workers. Feel free to select one or more of the following resources to read and/or watch about this remarkable win:

 

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Check out more media on the Amazon Labor Union site here. In your activities for this session, you’ll be encouraged to support the ALU in whatever way you can. 

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Optional/Deeper Study

 

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Activities: View Full Assignment

 

Throughout this course, we will assign simple activities designed to help you internalize, in ways that go beyond the intellect, the concepts, strategies and stories (or histories) we are working with in the study materials and live sessions.

 

To kick off the course, we have started with a solidarity altar activity, which we will build upon as the course progresses. Please feel free to change, adapt, or otherwise personalize any activity we suggest for the course. You can find the full activity description for session one here.

Session 2

Session Two: Identity in Context (Developing a Healthy, Intersectional Analysis & Avoiding Distortions)

Session Recording (5/15): View Here

Watch on Youtube to view with closed captions

Chat Log: View Here

 

Study Materials

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Considering Identity Within the Context of Movement & Activist Spaces

  

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Considering Identity within Politics, Persuasion, Propaganda & Policy

  

    

The following are examples of the themes of Gray’s article in the immediate context:

  

Raytheon Honored As Best Place To Work For LGBTQ People - Rising (6 min watch)

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Krystal Ball: New Data Proves Universal Programs Are Best Way To Close Racial Wage Gap - Rising (7 min watch, starting at the point in the video that the link takes you to). Note: Rising consists of a left-leaning progressive host (Krystal Ball) and a right-leaning populist host (Saagar Enjeti) who share a common concern for everyday American people. Since the making of these two videos, Krystal and Saagar have left The Hill and have their own, independent show called Breaking Points.

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Working Class Victories! 

 

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Activities: View Full Assignment

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Assignment Summary: For your Session Two homework, we have outlined two types of activities for you to engage in at home: a meditation (which you may want to do near or next to your altar) and a set of action-oriented activities meant to further your engagement with a social change organization. We trust you will respect your own values, time commitments, and personal capacity to do the actions and activities that are best suited for you at this time.

 

If you have time for nothing else, we encourage you to do the “Mapping Your Personal Connections” activity, as we will be working with the product of this activity as the course progresses. Click here to read the full assignment.

Session Three

Session Three: Theory, Analysis & Strategy

Session Recording (5/22): View Here

Watch on YouTube to view with closed captions

Chat Log: View Here

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Study Materials

 

This week's study materials offer deeper understandings about how capitalism functions, how it works in unison with various forms of social oppression, what an egalitarian, democratic socialist society might look like, and how we could construct a social movement capable of manifesting this different world. If you didn’t get a chance to read Vivek Chibber's "Why the Working Class?" when you did your session one homework, we encourage you to do so now, as it contains a central element of the analysis that your homework for session three develops further. 

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*Remember, in session four we will be focusing exclusively on how we as individuals can personally take social action and contribute to organizing. If you don’t “see yourself” in today’s homework, don’t despair! This session is focused on understanding the nuts and bolts, and specific levers of power within our current system of capitalism.

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It’s Time To Talk About Capitalism. The shooting in Buffalo spotlights the taboo topic we must discuss: the link between hypercapitalism and racism - Matthew Cunningham-Cook for The Lever (10-12 minute read)

 

Nothing More Powerful Than A Strike - Jane McAlevey (2 min watch)

 

Richard Wolff: Capitalism is holding "all of us hostage" - The Real News Network interview with Wolff (please watch 20 minutes after the point in the video that link brings you to, stopping at the 21:44 mark, when Wolff concludes his response to Alvarez’s first prompt)

 

Where We Stand - Bread and Roses Caucus of the DSA. Please read the first four sections: For Socialism, The Centrality of Class Struggle, Against Oppression, and Democratic Road to Socialism (5 min read)

 

Oakland has a school-to-prison pipeline. The teachers’ strike is our best hope to end it. - Shane Ruiz (15-20 min read)

 

Capitalism’s Crisis of Care - An Interview with Nancy Fraser (10-15 min read)

 

“Energy Reparations” – from Naomi Klein’s No is Not Enough (5 min read)

In sessions three and four we will be including writings from the early twentieth century that reflect the tradition of radical, visionary organizing we see our work as flowing from. While a few elements of these pieces may require a little effort to apply to our current context, and some of the language may feel cumbersome or different than the language we would use today, it is our hope that in reading these historical pieces you will experience a connection to a few “elders” of collective liberation and receive foundational elements of a cohesive social change strategy directly from them.


Selections from “Socialism Made Easy” - Written in 1909 by James Connolly (20-30 min read). We encourage you to read this document in its entirety. However if you're short on time focus on "Section II - Political Action of Labor". 

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Working Class Victories! 

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Activities: View Full Assignment

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Assignment Summary: This session's activities portion first includes time with your solidarity altar to do some imagining about what a just future would look and feel like to you. Second, you'll take time to build on the “Mapping Your Personal Connections” activity from last week and continue deepening your reflection on your own personal network. Click here to read the full assignment.

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Session Four

Session Four: Organizing & Application

Session Recording (6/5): View Here

Closed caption version coming soon

Chat Log: View Here

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Study Materials

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Race-Class Organizing Tools (35-40 min)

  

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Optional/Supplemental:

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Organizing Basics (30 min)

  

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Optional/Supplemental:

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​Bargaining for the Common Good (15-20 min)

 

  • “There Are So Many Things That We Can Learn From This Strike” - Jacobin interview with Alex Caputo-Pearl. Please read the first half of this interview, stopping at the end of Caputo-Pearl’s response to the question, “We’ve seen this wave of teachers’ strikes across the country. Did that have any influence on your strike?” (15-20 min read)

 

Optional/Supplemental:

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Getting Involved: We created the following resources to help participants conceptualize what their political lives could look like in more concrete ways. These documents will also be referenced in this week's activities assignment.

   

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Activities: View Full Assignment

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Assignment Summary: Your activities for session four include three sections. First, you will do the final part of the “Mapping Your Personal Connections” exercise. Second, you have the opportunity to do a solidarity meditation. Third, you will do a “personal assessment” reflecting on how you would like to shape your political life going forward. And lastly, we have a final altar activity for you. If you are short on time, we encourage you to prioritize the personal assessment as we will be asking folks to reflect on the content from this exercise in our next live session. Click here to read the full assignment.

​Working Class Victories (Optional/For Future Reading)

 

Amidst a large homework load leading up to our final session, we have made this week's working class victory selections are entirely optional. We have included a significant number of inspiring resources below that we encourage you to read at your leisure now or after the course ends. 

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Are Unions Making a Comeback? | New York Times (30 min listen, transcript available)

 

These 8 non-union worker organizations are quietly leading the new labor movement | Allana Akhtar

 

Mission Hospital nurses win largest hospital union victory in South since 1975 | National Nurses United

 

Burgerville, workers’ union reach historic contract agreement | Kate Davidson

 

Activision Union Gets Legal Recognition in Gaming First | Cecilia D'Anastasio and Jason Schreier

 

Indigenous Socialism in Bolivia: A Model For Us All – David Griscom (watch until 9:30 mark) 

Note: David Griscom & Matt Lech’s current work can now be found at their podcast, Left Reckoning; for more on Indigenous Socialism in Bolivia, you may want to subscribe to the Red Nation Podcast on Patreon and listen to parts 1 & 2 of Nick Estes’s interview with New Amauta on Indigenous Plurinationalism

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