Volume 1 - Issue 1
Welcome to Collective Notes, a biweekly newsletter aimed at offering our readers a critical and frank perspective on the global capitalist empire. Everywhere we turn, our people are suffering. Our governments and leaders continue to exploit us. We came together while volunteering for the Bernie campaign, which demanded us to fight for somebody we do not know. While the campaign is over, the movement continues onward. We refuse to live in a racist, imperialist and exploitative world. So we’re here to hold power accountable. We’re here to teach one another how we can wield our collective strength to create the world we deserve — loving and just!
Join us in our fight. And don’t forget to subscribe.
We don't have a staff. Our criteria is our editorial guidelines (we will provide them upon request). Reach us at CollectiveNotes2020@gmail.com to learn more.
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What we can learn from Minneapolis' fight and vision for a police-free future
Bettina Johnson
The astounding wins and prospective wins in the week after George Lloyd's killing at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department come after years of community intervention and conversation on the history of the MPD, the futile cycle of reform, and collective visioning of what police-free futures could actually look like for Minneapolis. A container for this work is MPD150.
MPD150 was convened for the purpose of honing in on 150th anniversary of the Minneapolis Police Department. The participatory, horizontally-organized effort by local organizers, researchers, artists and activists worked hard to deliver "Enough is Enough: A 150 Year Performance Review of the Minneapolis Police Department". This report released in 2017 was then used by activists and organizers to foster conversations in community to "take the idea of police-free communities out of the realm of fantasy and place it firmly in the public agenda as a practical necessity."
It would not be an exaggeration to then look at what's going on in Minneapolis and see the fruits of MPD150 and on-the-ground organizations' labor and what a city could reap from many communities thinking and talking through police-free futures and what would be needed to get there.
The demands that are needed in this moment are not more futile reformist reforms but abolitionists reforms (reforms that actually limit the scope, power and ability to harm of police and the legal-criminal system). A very clear example of an abolitionist reform is the demand to defund the police and to use those funds to build police-free communities as imagined by the community. Minneapolis-based organizations Black Visions Collective and Reclaim The Block have a petition circulating right now to the Minneapolis City Council to Defund MPD--you can sign the petition here, donate to all three of the orgs mentioned in this article, and then find local prison and abolitionist efforts wherever you live.
Clapping
Every night at 7pm, we clap. We don’t remember why this tradition began, but we clap. Some bang pots and pans out their windows. Most just reluctantly clap. Despite our memory lapses, we have no choice in the matter. We must clap.
I rarely wear a watch anymore nor do I look at the time on my phone. I head to the park in the afternoon for either exercise, to read or just to watch people with their loved ones, doing all they can do — sit in the park. Typically, I head home just as a clock somewhere must strike 7. Bells swing back and forth as they dangle from strangers’ hands. The applause for the unknown begins, and I walk through it. I clap so that the NYPD doesn’t stop me. I’ve heard stories of a time when clapping was not enforced, and Brooklynites knew why they clapped. It must have started during the Pandemic.
The Pandemic happened so long ago that we only know of it through what feels like folktales, but it was essentially a genocide against the World’s poor. A small handful of those poor, the most vulnerable--the frontline workers, could not take the sickness and the death, and they rose up against the World’s powers. They revolted and fought, and were crushed. Most of the World did not rise up with them. They were small and few up against the Powers. They were defeated by the strong, cunning force of Greed. The clapping began sometime around then, although we don’t remember why.
Initially, apparently before the resistance was squashed, clapping was a choice for some unknown reason or the other, but after the Elite won and its power strengthened, it became mandatory. The police could jail you, could publicly beat you and fine you, all depending on their mood, for failure to comply.
My callous palms slowly push together, as if weighted, and I increase the volume on my earbuds to block out the monotonous applause. The clapping ceases when I make it to Eastern Parkway. Tall trees line the sidewalk, and each bench is occupied by a person who is homeless. The apartments, with intricate and crumbling detail on their facades, must have at one point been luxurious and expensive. Nowadays, they are mostly vacant or used by clever squatters, although squatting is a crime punishable by death. If you are not able to pay, why should you be able to live?
I turn onto Nostrand Avenue, which at one point housed white people from various suburbs across America. Now, they have either returned home or moved to Manhattan where the Elite now reside. If you are not a part of the Elite caste, you are not allowed to enter Manhattan. You can cross the bridges only for work, with proof that you are actually going to work, and you must return back to your outer-borough before curfew.
I have never been to Manhattan. I am just a teacher. Teachers are only allowed to teach to their own caste. Our children simply require different sets of knowledge. There is no possible way that a poor child could even comprehend instruction from an Elite. At the same time, there is no way that a poor teacher would be equipped to teach an Elite child —the Elite are mostly white, monied, and don’t know anything about us. They know that we are darker skinned and our language is different, even when we speak English. Knowing that we are different doesn’t interest them. Instead, they are interested most solely, in our labor and our obedience.
I walk down Nostrand. I pass boarded up buildings covered up in graffiti tags from taggers across the outer boroughs. There is a faded mural of a woman with a shotgun draped across her back. I remember learning her name was Harriet Tubman, but it is now forbidden for us to talk about her and what our ancestors called “freedom struggles” and “resistance.” What I once knew I now had forgotten. That happens when you stop talking about something and when you stop sharing and you stop hearing stories. My students do not know who the faded woman was.
I walk up the slanted, cracked stairs into my apartment. It is hot and humid, but they took away our air conditioners years ago because they said our wasteful consumption of electricity had caused a climate catastrophe. It was 90 degrees in March, and it would only get hotter. I was used to coming home from my night walks and sitting as still as possible in my balmy apartment. The stiller I sat, the cooler I could keep my body now covered in glistening drops of sweat.
I turn on the nightly news and watch the President’s nightly address--it’s the only thing on television. He is introducing a new initiative to keep us more accountable, “Teachers, tomorrow when you log onto your computers to teach, there will be a government official logged on to ensure you are doing exactly as you are supposed to be doing. It is what’s best for children. We know you want what’s best for children.”
I eat a can of green beans. I can taste the tin from the can. Fresh food is for the Elite. There is a food shortage and our palates were already accustomed to shelf-stable foods. We were even told we preferred them.
I will sleep when the sun goes down, but before I do, I toss and turn thinking about the stories of those who I know resisted. They were small and few. They were always going to be defeated by the Elite. They organized actions against the State when they were working closely together. I can not imagine this, as we have only ever worked behind screens, only seen each other pixelated from the waist up. Surveilled. Resisting seems like nonsense. Resistance. The word is drivel. I fall asleep.
In the morning, I will wake up. I will teach what they have told me to teach through a screen. I will go outside and walk around my block — a world away from the Elites—and at 7pm, I will clap. I don’t know why. But I will clap.
Cartoon by Jason Adam Katzenstein
‘What are we going to do to fix it, and make sure it never happens again?’
Andy Simpson
This is an excerpt from a recent Facebook post published by Andy on the racism and hypocrisy of white liberals. To read the rest, please click here.
Central Park dog lady Amy Cooper was a respectable Manhattan liberal. She gave thousands of dollars to Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and the DCCC. I recognized her instantly—I have met dozens of Amy Coopers.
Jacob Frey, the mayor who presided over George Floyd's police execution and the disastrous response, is the latest in forty straight years of Democratic mayors of Minneapolis. He has a winning smile, all around a nice young man.
The Minneapolis City Council is twelve Democrats, one Green, and zero Republicans. It too has been something like this for decades.
Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County Attorney who has fucked up so badly the last 72 hours, is Minnesota's Andrew Cuomo: as Governor, his dad put JFK's name up for nomination at the 1960 Democratic Convention.
Now that at least one city is on fire, we're gonna hear something like a funeral service. A lot of useless center-left officials and cultural figures like these are going to discover words that sound right. I watched the first Great Awokening at a fancy school in 2014-2015, and what I learned is this: only a very few people mean any part of those words, and many powerful people want those words to be as cathartic as possible precisely so that they don't have to do anything else that might be difficult or risky.
Anger is Power (Thoughts on Minneapolis)
H. O.A.
Photo credit: From Gülsüm Kavuncu Eryılmaz, November 13, 2016
In late 2016, a friend tagged me on Facebook in a photo of New York’s Union Square station whose walls were plastered with thousands of post-it notes expressing their horror at a soon-to-be Trump presidency.
The photo zeroed in on one distinct note, which read: “anger can be power if you know how to use it.”
Nowhere is this more true than in the many protests taking place across the United States at the indignation and injustice of the murder of Mr. George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Hundreds of thousands came together to show their rage at the police who so freely and easily kill innocent black people every day. But some protestors went further, and hit the cops and their complicit political and corporate backers where it hurts by taking and destroying the physical embodiment of everything they value: property.
Many protesters did not participate in these forms of redistribution and retribution, but those who did, took what should have always been theirs had we lived in a real society; they burned down precincts and former slave markets that represent the twisted evil symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and capitalism that always preyed on the most vulnerable; they took from corporations that denied them access to essential goods even when they had the means to purchase them; and they took care of each other when cops were eager to arrest them despite their constitutional right to protest.
Some will inevitably bring up the alleged significance of non-violent demonstrations. Democratic mayors of liberal progressive cities across America have asked us to protest in peace, then scolded us for not taking their advice despite their insistence ‘they hear us.’ Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms went so far as to insult us with her revisionist misinterpretations of Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy on riots.
But what do you do when we’ve been doing that and still suffer from homicidal violence at the hands of law enforcement, scream ‘Black Lives Matter’ to anyone who will hear us after the killing of Michael Brown since 2013, #SayHerName to remember the countless deaths of black women and girls at the hands of the police and ‘I Can’t Breathe’ after the murder of Eric Garner since 2015, write op-eds ad nauseam demanding police reform, give our money to support nonprofits ‘fighting’ for justice, hire the best defense lawyers money can buy with our donations and support, risk our jobs to fight for each other, only to end with murderous cops still found not guilty?
We tried it their way and it didn’t work. So as that post-it note said, yes; anger is power and using it against the state that uses violence against its own people is certainly a good thing.
But what is next?
The past week’s mass demonstrations are a tipping point in our country. The media pundits and careerists lack the depth and critical thinking skills to report on anything in an ethical way, much less the news. Celebrities are confused that the public is losing interest in them, showing their true deranged and narcissistic selves. Academics with too many degrees working at useless think tanks are writing about problems that will never be solved (and in many cases, manufacturing problems). Politicians are more beholden to corporate interests than their voters, all of whom appear to spend more time tweeting than passing bills to improve our livelihoods. None of these people have what it takes to be our leaders.
Leadership must come from those who have done the real work and who have taken massive material and personal risks for the greater good. What last week showed me is that we must seek leadership in ourselves and from each other.
But lead ourselves to what? What new world do we want to live in if the one we live in now violates as much as it does?
To find the answers, we need to ask the tough, but necessary questions:
What exactly do we want?
What kind of society do we want to be a part of?
Do we want to live rather than merely survive? If we want to live — safely, healthily, securely, and with respect in every aspect of our waking lives — how do we achieve that?
We must answer these questions in order to move forward because the cycle of pseudo-reform has not and will not save us. We must not only righteously react, but collectively create the world that serves the people. I don't know what that world could be, I’ve imagined it and you may have, too, but together, we need to begin developing the required steps to achieving our liberation.
COLLECTIVE Recommendations
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee
Abby Horton: “Min Jin Lee” Pachinko is a beautiful novel about four generations of the Baek family who migrated from Korea to Japan before World War II and find success in unlikely Pachinko. It’s a page-turning, intimate and epic account of a family, and the oppression and racism that they endured under Japanese colonialism. I was not very familiar with Korean history and it was a good entry point into understanding more about their experience in the 20th century. It muses on the notion of nations, identity, and family. It’s so good!”
At Home Yoga
Katyayani: : “A friend sent me this guided yoga routine from her local gym in Wichita, Kansas with the statement: ‘I felt completely different afterwards.’ Periods of increased or ongoing stress can bring out different things for different people; some find themselves slowing down, feeling tired and withdrawn from the present, while others go into hyperdrive, possibly struggling with insomnia or racing thoughts. And some of us might be experiencing a mix of both tendencies. (yay!) This well-conceived yoga flow does a good job of meeting people where they're at: it might help awaken something in you, or help calm something down. Slow, deep movements that add up to more than the sum of their parts. It's accessible to beginners and adaptable for various bodies, while still calling on you to engage. Like my friend, I felt different afterwards.”
Grassroots Organizations
James Burke: “For those interested in supporting grassroots organizations working to defeat Trump in key battleground states who are also committed to movement work beyond November 2020, here’s a short, but by no means, exhaustive list. As a former Bernie volunteer, I can’t put my energy into Biden/DNC electoral work, but these groups provide opportunities to stay engaged with the upcoming elections.”