Locust Review #8, “The Utopia Principle” (forthcoming)
After the opening reading, a sketch based on an excerpt from the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer, Tish and Adam interview Ken LeBlanc, a rank-and-file member of the Main Street Carbondale, Illinois Starbucks union organizing committee.
The Starbucks Workers United organizing effort went public in Carbondale in late May. LeBlanc discusses organizing, how to start a union, the grievances of her co-workers, making food for folks as an art, the Restaurant Organizing Project, how uncontested corporate power breeds unethical behavior, the grassroots organizing in Southern Illinois around abortion rights and reproductive justice, and speculates — at our request — on her idea of utopia.
Following the interview, Laura, Adam, and Tish discuss the idea of utopia as it relates to the class struggle and ongoing capitalist-born disaster. Laura reports back from the Labor Notes conference. We also discuss the hauntological quality of “in real life” organizing and creative expression, the need to abolish capitalist time vs. the false timelessness of capitalist culture, the importance of a mutually reinforcing dynamic between left organization and the daily class struggle, the rabid far-right political and terroristic assault on public education and what is left of the commons, how the (re)creation of utopian imagination is necessarily collective, what it means to organize for Paradise in Hell, and socialist art as flats for the theater of the class struggle.
Works, comrades, and projects discussed or touched on in this episode: Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming; “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon” - Locust Review editorial #6, “The Utopia Principle” - Locust Review editorial #8 (forthcoming); Born Again Labor Museum; Dysmorph series by Laura Fair Schulz (ongoing); Carbondale Tool Library; Debt Collective; Southern Illinois Reproductive Justice Network; Tish and Adam Turl’s Stink Ape Resurrection Primer (ongoing in Locust Review); Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (2018) by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz; Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014); Vladimir Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917); Karl Max and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto (1848); Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History” (1940); Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011) by Evan Calder Williams; Buenaventura Durruti’s famous quote on ruins from the Spanish Civil War; the Utopian socialists (Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Robert Owen); Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880) by Friedrich Engels; Herbert Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969); Leon Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours (1938)
Tish and Adam interviewed Ken LeBlanc on July 9th, 2022. Laura, Tish, and Adam recorded the rest of episode 15 (part 1) the following day. The discussion in the second half does not necessarily represent the ideas or positions of the Carbondale Starbucks organizing workers committee or SWU, but rather the ideas and positions of the hosts. This episode’s musical interlude is brain(wash) by Omnia Sol.
Locust Radio is produced by Omnia Sol and Alexander Billet. It is hosted by Tish Turl, Adam Turl and Laura Fair-Schulz. Music by Omnia Sol.
Mural dedicated to Mark Fisher at Goldsmiths.
Aimé Césaire
Southern Illinois Reproductive Justice Network (SIRJN)
Laura Fair-Schulz, Dysmorph Becoming Aware (2021)
Locust Review editorial #6, “Cyborgs! Shoot the Moon!”
Carbondale Starbucks workers at BALM (May 2022)
SIRJN open-mic event (July 9th, 2022)
SIU YDSA comrades making protest signs at BALM (February 2022)
SIRJN open-mic event (July 9th, 2022)
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