It's working
a show on labour struggles, pig-time, alright
this month i made my radio show about work, workers, and strikes i have loved and been inspired by, and the cultural and sonic milieu around labour struggle
"In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold; Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. For the Union makes us strong."
have some orgreave poems to make you weep, hear from fired baristas, deranged listener submish, about the green bans and the secret beauty of australian union militancy, the bangles, the roots of my abiding distrust of billy bragg, hamburg dockers on strike, german unions abandoning their palestinian workers, a petition you can sign, chumbawamba, i do not dream of labour, and yet, and yet…
In 2020 was part of a secretive attempt to create and gain recognition for a union at the rape crisis where I worked. a pandemic began then us freelance workers many of whom had ourselves experienced sexual violence and were being told our interest in perhaps not being paid poverty wages or even just getting a contract and some holiday pay was a concerning indicator we were selfishly putting ourselves over survivors in crisis. endless back and forth wounded language from our top tax bracket CEO and a cynicism that permanently removed any vestage of the illusion of gender as an automatic vector of solidarity. when they eventually fired me (we settled the case and i got a paltry sum i’m still not legally allowed to talk about lmao) it was with a letter that said, I shit you not, ‘we feel its time for you stop holding space for the organisation.’ this puts me in the mind of one lesson I have learnt over and over again, both then and in recent times, is that while you will sadly often find enemies where you’d expect comrades, and your heart will keep breaking, among presumed foes you might just find the most solid ones of all. Remember the bigger picture and who is laughing hardest when we fight over scraps, when we narç over our small differences. If we eat ourselves for breakfast they will eat us for dinner. Eyes to the horizon eyes to the sky solidarity forever
i worked intuitively on this one and drew on whatever was laying around inside of my own head in a way that felt good in the end. i am glad it came through me and i hope you enjoy listening. in the weeks before hitting the studio i experienced for the first time, a hard heavy block on my desire to make a radio programme, to say anything at all. normally i work with whatever’s on my mind that month. at present there is only one thing. the blood fills up the screen. and as for berlin, well there is nothing in this moment that feels radio-sayable about the repression and its contours. the depth of disgust loathing and a desire to wreak havoc has outpaced what i can realistically broadcast without being reckless. sometimes expression is overrated in an environment like this. i indulge for a second to a fantasy of broadcasting a two hour scream, sure, or the names and addresses of people who i think should be fired from a cannon or better yet paraded through the streets with their heads shaved like they did to the Nazi journalists after the red army rather graciously liberated these people’s grandparents.
i have contended with bereftness and let it pass. got sick with a cold and denied myself rest which resulted in a paralysing vertigo spin taking hold every time i lie down which seems fitting weak and tired not able to lift weights the only thing keeping me sane i found myself crying at the telephone. usually when i feel a strong reaction to an atrocity image i jump to describing it controlling it analysing it of course but then i saw the big blue inside the dead baby and so did you
didn’t you
and then in the morning they come and i reply to their question in confident but grammatically incorrect german and when i close the door i stare at my face in the bathroom mirror for a long time and eventually smile a little boy has no left arm just a hole just a hole days later i realise i am still glugging on the cough syrup at night even though i’m not unwell anymore and maybe that’s not healthy but this country is sick in the night i go to an event listen to a movement lawyer quote lenin with a grin at an event and it feels like an long warm exhale he jokes even we have a signal group now he says this week there had been six trials in Berlin courts that week for ‘using the chant of a proscribed organisation’ all six resulting in acquittals from the judge either on the basis that the individual had not known of the states mad fantasy that this is the slogan that the branding agency came up with for the Ḥarakat al-Muqawamah or even if it was, it is protected speech. the next morning i meet S and their friends and we coo at the pigeon who is warming eggs under a thick vine that wraps around the outside of their house. we eat frozen grapes and spend longer than i ever have asking each other what we need if one of us is attacked or beaten and i can feel myself resisting basic care because i’m brittle and strange about it always have been might snap you know and noticing and giggling at the grim calm of not pretending this one will magically be different because we’re all in a good mood and it’s pride. we swap a paper with our names and dates of birth and S has put a leather strap around a huge zucchini (pride.) i think about how affinity and how easy it is to multiply. like a scoby.
we amble over to the start of the demo and i feel like i’m floating because of the vertigo the caffiene and maybe the trust. almost immediately an organiser from the Queer Arab Bloc, who are holding signs for murdered trans girls is made to relate the following message “They are saying if we use the forbidden chant we will attack you and disperse the demonstration.” this is nothing new but the sharp knowledge of the judgements that week still makes my ears ring.
later, after the beatings, 58 arrests and dispersal the press release says we attacked them with flag poles. i only hope someone took notes. this of course is the foolishness in emphasising peaceful demonstration. you don’t even get to stick the boot in and you still end up in hospital several years in and i naively still occasionally find myself awed to the lack of even a pretense of ‘policing by consent’ here, which a joke everywhere of course, and I remember Clapham Common, but it is still one that hangs over the british approach to policing demonstrations. no german cop i’ve seen will endure a question about which law is being broken, and you’re likely to be arrested or at least thrown to the floor for obstructing police work for asking. not worse (more on that another time, I just landed in Britain) but certainly different. on the street here in berlin for palestine the pigs make the rules and the punishment which is corporal always comes before a trial. this effective delinking of police and judiciary creates a strange sort of rupture in space-time. jackboot and judge of course are one piece in theory but the clock of the street (tick, tock, they are putting on their helmets, tick tock their quartz-filled gloves) the clock of the notoriously unreliable postage system (yellow letter, white letter, one year later) the clock of the court (appeal, appeal, appeal) take their own beat. Volksverhetzung means incitement of popular hatred. turned inside out, we make it a promise.
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ps. forgive typos i’m trying not to try as hard and just say what’s up