Under the Tree: A Seminar on Freedom with Bill Ayers

The brutality of capitalism is apparent in every direction: war, invasion, and occupation throughout the world; militarized police forces at home; super-exploitation at the point of production; the looming catastrophic climate collapse; the banality of evil in the increasingly pervasive carceral state. Capitalism willfully and skillfully nurtures our vilest qualities—selfishness, greed, murderous competition, corruption—and deliberately degrades other qualities: mutual care, human kindness, the beloved community. The rage to accumulate is the beating heart of capitalism; injustice and predation follow as surely as day follows night. We’re joined today in conversation with Premilla Nadasen, professor of history at Barnard College, Columbia University and author most recently of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Professor Nadasen interrogates the plundering, profit-driven care system in the US, and illuminates the transformative power of collective resistance.

As Israel’s crimes against humanity multiply and mass death and indiscriminate destruction escalates, as the world unites around a near-universal call to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people and militant resistance to US complicity deepens here at home, we are fortunate to be joined by Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch. Omar Shakir has authored several major investigative reports, including a 2021 account that  comprehensively documents Israel’s apartheid apparatus and its systematic persecution of millions of Palestinians. As a result of his advocacy, the Israeli government deported Omar in November 2019. 

As Israel continues to execute its pre-announced genocide of the Palestinian people, ethnically cleanses Gaza, and attempts to liquidate an enclosure that they themselves created, everyone of goodwill around the world is calling for a ceasefire. As of now 22,000 Palestinians have been murdered, close to 2,000,000 displaced in Gaza, countless hospitals, school, and clinics destroyed, and vital supplies of food and water stopped at checkpoints. The US media says that Gaza is starving, and it’s true that famine is imminent, but the passive voice is an obscenity. The truth is that Israel is starving Palestinians deliberately. The US stands alone in blocking a ceasefire. This Special Episode is curated from Episodes 23, 41, 77, and 81—episodes recorded over the past two years. We hope these conversations are enlightening and illuminating, and that they deepen your sense of the urgency to act against war in these terrible times.

In this episode we’ll be heading over to the dazzling Pilsen Community Books, a regular stop on our freedom tour, for a conversation with Janie Paul, Professor Emerita at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and curator and co-founder with her late husband, Buzz Alexander, of the Exhibitions of Artists in Michigan Prisons, a project of the legendary Prison Creative Arts Project. Her beautiful new book, Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance, is filled with extraordinary images of the dazzling creations of people caged inside Michigan prisons—it’s a stunning achievement. But before we go to the bookstore, we pause for a moment for an update, because the genocide in Gaza is on-going, and Palestine is still front-of-mind for us, and we hope for you too.

Images from Gaza crowd into the available space, disrupting sleep, shattering the calm, demanding to be taken into account.Dead children and babies piled upon one another, body parts littering a hell-scape of demolished homes and apartment buildings, collapsed bridges and towers, refugee centers burned to the ground, hospitals in utter ruin.This is not justice; this is the face of fury, of vengeance unleashed. This is the face of genocide.

Charles Dickens would recognize our predicament at once: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom; Darkness in combat with Light. Life is never one thing isolated from every other thing; a lot of things can be—and are—happening at once. Contradiction—the dynamic, noisy, frenetic magnificence of life as it’s actually lived—is the universal experience of humanity.We’re fortunate to be joined by the smart and inspiring organizer/activist/artist Astra Taylor, someone willing to dive into rather than run away from contradiction as she illuminates both our problems and our possibilities in new ways. Taylor is a founding member of the Debt Collective and author, most recently, of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Taylor’s work—and this conversation—is an antidote to despair and a call to action.

A group of Chicago writers brought together by the worker/owners of Pilsen Community Books gathered to support and raise resources for our comrades in Atlanta fighting to Stop Cop City. But events ran ahead of us, as they often do, and by the time we gathered, the preannounced genocide against the Palestinian people was in full swing. The connections were clear: militarism and violence abroad, out-of-control militarized police forces at home; land seizures and occupation everywhere; repression and the violent suppression of dissent. We stood up and spoke out—for an immediate ceasefire, for an end to the genocide in Gaza and the murderous violence in the West Bank, for an end to Cop City in Atlanta, for self-determination for the Palestinian people and for an end to US aid to Israel.Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years War Against PalestineNathan Thrall, One Day in the Life of Abed SalamaThe One Democratic State Initiative Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israeli ApartheidOn Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism and Dangerous Conflations from Jewish Voice for Peace, and antisemitismcurriculum.org/ 

A favorite political poster hangs on a wall in my office: “Homeland Security” it proclaims in bold letters above a photo of a group of Indigenous elders holding rifles; below it reads, “Fighting Terrorism Since 1492.”It’s a reminder of the centuries of settler colonial policy and genocidal terror carried out by the US government against Indigenous peoples and nations and lineages, as well as the natural environment, the trees, the bison, and more. And it’s a reminder that resistance goes back to the beginning and continues to this day.This episode of Under the Tree—a conversation with Mneesha Gellman, author of Indigenous Language Politics in the Schoolroom: Cultural Survival in Mexico and the United States  which explores the contemporary fight for Indigenous language in the classroom as a site of struggle and resistance against erasure and genocide—was recorded at the courageous, worker-owned bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, a familiar and friendly stop on our Chicago freedom tour.

Listeners of Under the Tree are well aware of the fact that the US is a Prison Nation, with over 2,000,000 people locked inside cages every day, aware, as well,  that we are abolitionists involved in the movement-making and world-building work that will one day make prisons obsolete. But the carceral state is a many-legged monster with dangerous tentacles stretching out in every direction—there are now over 4,000,000 people under state supervision, on parole or probation. It’s an enormously expensive enterprise that does nothing to reduce risk to society while creating enormous hazards for anyone coming home or caught in its web. One in four people caged today is locked up for a violation (curfew, association, failure to report, and more). This episode—a conversation with Vinnie Schiraldi, author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom, and friend-of the-pod Renaldo Hudson—was recorded at the intrepid, worker-owned bookstore, Pilsen Community Books, a familiar and favorite haunt of ours.

These are terrible times—escalating wars, racialized police violence, environmental collapse on full display, democratic institutions on life support, bodily integrity under assault. On the other hand—26 million people poured into the streets in response to the police murder of George Floyd, women across a wide political spectrum have refused to accept a medieval definition of their rights, and broad forces are on the march world-wide to resist plunder and extraction, and to preserve life on earth. Charles Dickens would recognize the contradiction: the winter of despair and the spring of hope; an age of foolishness and an age of wisdom. Life is never one thing in isolation of every other thing. Yes, there is oppression, but there is also resistance. And, yes, the predatory heart of capitalism is incorrigibly avaricious, aching to transform everything within reach into a profit-generating commodity: teaching and learning are turned into the education business, human health morphs into the healthcare industry, art is transfigured into the art market. But our imaginations, nourished and unleashed, have the capacity to “light the slow fuse of possibility.” And our resistance fuels our imaginations.I met up at the Socialism 2023 Conference with Anthony Arnove and Haley Pessin, the editors of Voices of a People’s History of the United States in the 21st Century. It’s the latest in the series initiated and inspired by Howard Zinn’s ground-breaking work. Their subtitle, “Documents of Hope and Resistance” perfectly captures the tone, the feel, and the content of this great book—hope is a discipline, resistance is a necessity.BONUS: A short conversation with two of the Tampa Five, students arrested and on trial for fighting back against the reactionary attacks on schools, colleges, and universities in Florida.