Dump Truck Elegy

manual labor, good reads, and a vital fundraiser against police violence

Yesterday, my first shift on a new job, I went around in a dump truck for 12 hours, forking out about ten tons of mulch, carting it around by wheelbarrow to the various spots in this gross subdivision where the homeowners’ association decided it was needed, aesthetically, and then spreading it out two inches thick.

If you don’t have time to read a newsletter, please scroll down and support a family that is trying to live through another racist police murder.

The mulch was wet, which meant it was at least twice as heavy and also sticky: we couldn’t just tip it out using the dump truck’s eponymous feature, but had to get it all out manually with pitchfork and shovel. Now, my chemo-addled body is stretched out on the couch after an achy morning walk, and I’m figuring I’m not going to be able to publish one of the newsletters I was looking forward to today, that I have all outlined and researched and ready to write.

• One about the strategies of the Right and the dangers they pose.

• Another about the state of the Left.

• Another about sickness and disability.

• Another about Emma Goldman and the Spanish and Russian anarchists that will follow up on my May Day piece about propaganda by the deed, the beginning of a series of articles on Death Ethics.

(check it out here!)

I’ll get to all those when I have the energy and focus. Just not today.

It’s also frustrating that I can’t take CBD to help me sleep and ease my muscle pains. That got me through several nights during the worst months of chemo, but the other new job I’m starting has random drug tests and several legal substances that are even prescribed or recommended by doctors can get you in big trouble—and out of a job—if they show up in your piss. In the case of CBD it’s especially maddening, because it’s made from hemp, so it might contain trace amounts of THC that will show up on a drug test, but it won’t get you high in a million years. As for the drug that far and away causes the most traffic fatalities, that’s alcohol, and that’s not showing up on any test unless you show up to work drunk at 7 in the morning.

And that’s the government, keeping us safe.

So anyways, my body’s aching, blah blah blah, but I’m actually pretty happy about this job. I mean, insofar as one can enjoy wage labor. It gets me outside in the sun and the rain, it’s a lot of physical labor, I get to speak Spanish a lot, which I missed, and I was pretty broke for a while but now life might be a little less precarious. Knocking on wood. It’s a tiny company and the boss seems kind and capable, and if I have to live under capitalism I prefer things to be clear: I get orders, I follow them, I get paid.

That’s enough to make it substantially better than the agricultural cooperative where I was working before – bosses who pretended we were using consensus but went unilateral when they didn’t want to face the music; a refusal to actually deal with problems everyone could see; tolerance for a liberal-racist work environment and a racist mission as a white-owned company taking advantage of real estate prices and a close relationship with the Mayor in a red-lined, historically Black neighborhood; and a refusal to decide: is this a cooperative only in the sense of its legal structure, and aside from that it’s going to be completely corporate in its culture, immerse itself in greenwashing, and focus on profit? Or is it going to be a cooperative in the truest sense (and the historical sense),¹ cognizant of the contradictions of life under capitalism thus determined to stay in business so we can make a living, but also transformative, doing away with management culture, helping us all learn to make decisions, deal with conflict, and develop diversified skillsets combining manual and intellectual labor? The bosses wanted to have it both ways without dealing with the disadvantages of either approach, and they seemed pretty comfortable with hypocrisy, which made it a hellishly stressful workplace.

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Here’s some shitty but typical news, and an important fundraiser. Rodney Hinton Jr. was sent to prison without bail in Cincinnati last week, awaiting trial for killing a white sheriff’s deputy. Hinton’s son Ryan, a teenager, was murdered by pigs on May 1, shot in the back as he ran away. Cops claim he was armed and threatened them, but there is no evidence and body cam footage disputes that claim. Since almost every time we dig or documents are leaked or we are able to compare the words of cops to indisputable evidence, we’re able to see that cops routinely lie and plant evidence, so reasonable people should never trust cop testimony or evidence cops have had the opportunity to tamper with or plant. Corporate media, also complicit in police murders and racism, report that police body cam footage was blurry and inconclusive, as to whether it showed Ryan Hinton pointing a gun at cops, when in reality it pretty conclusively shows him running away and getting gunned down by pigs from behind.

Shortly after seeing video of his child’s murder, Rodney Hinton Jr. ran offer the sheriff’s deputy. Police subsequently packed the courtroom to intimidate Hinton at the hearing where the judge Tyrone Yates—a Black Democrat also complicit in police murders and racism—denied him bail.

Cops showing up to support their right to commit racist murders with impunity. All love and support to Rodney Hinton.

Ryan’s grandmother was quoted as saying: “We are a very close, very close family. This is killing us,” Lark said. She added, “We as Black people, we don’t deserve to be killed just because we’re running away from the police. We’re scared just as much as anybody – whether we did something right or wrong. This is everyday life for us, being scared of the police.”

The cops have killed one member of this family and they’re currently trying to kill another. Please send some money to support them.

https://gofund.me/0916517e

Other good reads and projects to support

This morning I read an article about how a huge construction project in Boston (well, Cambridge actually), required by law to include a high number of affordable, below market price homes, is going nowhere because investors are essentially boycotting it. Cambridge has some of the more progressive affordable housing rules in the country, but nonetheless the greater Boston area is one of the strongest housing markets in the world, so if it were just a question of economics, those condominiums would be in the final stages of construction. But in the real world, it hasn’t even started. For one, it’s another reminder that state reforms and regulations often fail to help us. It should also be a reminder that capitalists frequently pass up opportunities for profit if they would alter the unwritten rules of the game – social war: they are the masters of the Universe, and it is their God-given right to force people into conditions of houselessness, starvation, disease, genocide, and anyone or anything who threatens that is a threat to “business.”

Finally, a few reading recommendations and other projects to support that I want to send out again from my newsletter two weeks ago.

Here are some helpful suggestions from another good newsletter to subscribe to, Workshops4Gaza: “consider making a donation to the Sameer Project! Also, check out this resource (link) from Workers in Palestine: a helpful map of every major weapons manufacturer producing the bombs being dropped on Gaza.”

Here’s a fundraiser for people targeted by the FBI in recent raids in Michigan as the ongoing criminalization of anyone speaking out against the ongoing Israeli genocide against Palestinians

Some friends helped make this important documentary on the 2019-2020 “Estallido Social” in Chile, a major uprising that was finally pacified by leftists and the false promise of constitutional reform: Fell in Love with Fire

And this just dropped: Episode 1 of InterRebellium, a new series by those wizards at SubMedia, this one also on the Estallido Social in Chile

1. Mutualism of the working class in France and Spain in the 19^th century, the English tradition encouraged by Robert Owen, and then both workers- and consumer-cooperatives as an important part of the revolutionary, working-class anarchist movement in the Spanish state. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything good about this in English. Hopefully, someone will translate something soon from Spanish or Catalan. I’ve linked one article that is at least adjacent to this topic. Dolgoff is solid, though people should take Bookchin with a big grain of salt.