Resisting Fascism & Ecological Collapse with Writer-Organizer-Activist CHRIS CARLSSON

But these apartment buildings, anyway, belong to Biogenmo.

So then there's this movement called the Urban Peasants Alliance, the UPA.

And that's one of the sort of social movement characters that I invent out of whole cloths.

And I found myself having to do that because I've been so dismayed at the absence

of the proper social movements in our

era.

There are obviously the work you've been doing around Gaza and the uprising that's going on across the world to really try to put a halt to the genocide as soon as possible is a good example of how it's always there.

It's just below the surface, the possibility of major social movements emerging and really altering the course of events sometimes.

Sometimes they emerge and don't alter the course of events very much at all.

So that's part of the frustration is we don't know how to gain the leverage we need to really...

Exactly.

So I tend to, for a long time, back in the early days of my life, I was involved with Processed World Magazine.

I was one of the founders.

And that magazine was founded on the notion that what we do, our work, produces this world.

And most of the work we do is a waste of time.

We should just stop tomorrow and we'd be better off for it, not just individually, but by changing my job, but actually socially, we need to change the aggregate division of labor.

And how would you do that? The only possibility of that is for people who actually go to work every day to stop doing it and do something

else.

And so I've been advocating for that since I was 23 or even earlier.

And now I'm 67, and it hasn't gained a lot of traction, to say the least.

So in my novel, then, I try to find people who are in motion at the workplace, in places of employment where they are beginning to challenge the direction of events.

And yeah, we see some incipient versions of that with...

the tech workers' coalitions and alliances and the Google workers protesting some of the military production.

I find that hopeful, for sure.

But in the novel, the urban peasants' lines are the people that have been thrown out.