I’m glad to have gotten the chance to hear Kali Akuno speak a bit about what it’ll take to survive the future. I remember seeing some Jacobin articles about him and being inspired by his work, and at the 2019 Denver Zine Fest, there were people passing out newspapers with him as a feature. I’ve been excited about his work for a while. Here is a write-up of the class.
Kali Akuno is a co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, which is an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions. Cooperation Jackson is fighting to create economic democracy by creating a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, MS that will help transform Mississippi and the South.
He served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus was supporting cooperative development, sustainability, human rights and international relations.
Kali is also an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice, and the former Co-Director of the US Human Rights Network. Kali also served as the Executive Director of the Peoples' Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. And was a co-founder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland, California.
Kali co-edited Jackson Rising: the Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS and has authored numerous articles and pamphlets including "The Jackson-Kush Plan: the Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy", "Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation in the Disposable Era", "Operation Ghetto Storm: Every 28 Hours" and "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense".
Kali believes that coronavirus presents us with profound opportunities to do something different. To organize our social structures differently. People may be more willing to do something different because their lives have been uprooted by the pandemic and they may be more open to changes because of that. The changes will take time though, and foresight. The community land trust that Kali has established has taken at least 20 years. But in that time he has realized that a revolutionary imagination is critical.
He also cautions that we should not underestimate the political right in the U.S. especially in regards to mid-size and small cities which due to the way that political power is structured in our system, where a comparative minority of people has equal representation, has somewhat outweighed power. What if those small communities were able to be swayed towards more cooperative and egalitarian values?
Kali knows that there is nothing normal to go back to. Production will change. There will be more surveillance. The infrastructure overhead is gone because many people are working from home, and labor will undergo a profound change. He wonders if it will be emancipatory.
Kali’s theory for why the U.S. government, and really governments across the world, didn’t provide for their citizens is that offering what was needed couldn’t be offered even though it was possible. It would have shown without a doubt that something different is possible. It would have been a global mental shift in the people. Many people realized it anyway by observing that there were trillions of dollars pumped into the stock market and no money for us.
Another example of this was from earlier in the pandemic when people realized that they were making more money from unemployment than from full-time work.
There wasn’t going to be any change to the fundamental order. We already had a public health crisis in the U.S. We have gutted the public sector since the ’70s. We had the capacity to stop the pandemic in it’s tracks from the beginning, but there was no way to do it within the existing order. You can see this in the way the vaccine is framed. It is being made to get back to work. Not to end the pandemic. The state doesn’t support the public interest. It supports private interest.
Kali still sees a lot of beauty in the pandemic. From the outbreak of mutual aid efforts to the way that it beautifully demonstrates the neoliberal cultural failure. It’s proof that we can’t be reduced to individuals, and that we need each other, and that we will respond to each other’s needs regardless of whatever cultural order is being imposed on us. The recent freeze in the south is another example of this. He has seen his community come together over it. The trick is to figure out how to build on the networks that are already popping up.
A practice that Kali sees as being critical to our survival and thriving is increasing the skill capacities of everyone in our communities. We are going to continue to see extreme weather events like hurricanes, forest fires, droughts, hot weather, and even pandemics, and the state will continue to not be there to help. Events like the pandemic and things like the mutual aid networks that have popped up are the foundations of transforming our consciousness. It is easier to act your way into new thinking than to think your way into new acting.
One way Kali’s community is skilling up is with 3-D printing. They made a lot of masks for front-line workers at the start of the pandemic. Continuing to take control of our lives through acquiring skills like this will shift the balance of power from state actors into our hands.
We have to learn what it takes to meet our basic needs without any outside assistance (like the state, not people around us.) And this means we have to learn how to develop trust with our neighbors. This is one of the most challenging things we can do. Autonomous organizing is experimental and includes direct participation. It is the struggle for democracy from below. How will people buy in?
We have to encourage people to see their time as valuable. Time is our most valuable asset. Kali’s personal struggle is to figure out how to get people to spend an hour or two on the farm, and how to move that time up in incremental measures. It’s important to wear your politics on your sleeve as well. The idea of congruence. Being “real”, where you are able to live and interact with others as you fully are. David Fleming defines it like this:
Her feelings are available to her; she comes into direct encounter with the learner, meeting him on a person-to-person basis. She is herself. That doesn’t make her right, but it does mean that she believes what she is saying. And, in return, the learner will not feel he has to be strategic: he, too, can simply say what he believes: there is congruence.
This can be challenging. Vicious things happen. It’ll be hard. You will have to learn to live with contradictions. An example Kali gives is that there is a strict no drink or drug policy when you are on the farm. But of course, it happens. People are suffering. We have an opioid epidemic. But you deal with those things when they arise. Trust in people, have faith that they will see that their time and energy means productive yields for the community.
Kali receives very vocal opposition. People are often openly racist and misogynist around where he lives. He actually appreciates that openness though, because at least he knows where they stand. He knows where the Grand Wizard of the Klan lives, and the Grand Wizard knows where he lives.
The ultimate thing is unity with your community. People will grow and change, the struggle for unity is constant. Kali sees building self-reliance as one of the best ways to do this. A larger community self. He doesn’t want to dehumanize the people following orders, he wants to see if we can work on them to get each other to see our sides.
One of Kali’s goals is to be able to feed 20,000 people with the cooperative land as a means to food sovereignty. They are currently up to 5000. This is all in an effort to decommodify the land. When you decommodify the land, you decommodify the relations of the land. The housing, the food, the utilities, the health. The challenge is to build it up to scale. The path towards decommodified land has to take integrated steps. And the big question on Kali’s mind is how does every step lead to the next, bigger, step?
The freeze in Texas and the subsequent infrastructure failure has got me thinking a lot about what I would do if the power went off and never came back. If it happened right this moment? I’d be pretty unprepared. I haven’t known my neighbors for a while. I don’t have a way to collect water or purify it. I don’t know how I’d keep warm besides putting on a lot of clothes. What would I eat? All things to think about. What would you do?
Nice write up, Alex! Thanks for this. I missed Kali's presentation last week but will be sure to download the video recording.