ICE, resistance, and 'capitalism without humans' w/ Sarah Jaffe

·59 min·5 clips

Somali workers in Minnesota forced Amazon to bargain, winning concessions on prayer time and quotas during Ramadan.

The episode begins with host Alex Doherty introducing the killing of Renee Nicole Goode by an ICE officer in Minneapolis and the subsequent political tensions, including Trump's threat to invoke the Insurrection Act. Guest Sarah Jaffe, a reporter who has written extensively on Minnesota, outlines the broader political context. She explains the significance of the Somali community in the Twin Cities, highlighting their organizing through the Awood Center, which successfully pressured Amazon for workplace concessions related to Ramadan. Jaffe discusses how immigrant communities often lead labor movements, challenging stereotypes about their organizability. The conversation shifts to the motivations for worker struggle, with Jaffe emphasizing dignity as a key driver over purely economic issues. She critiques simplistic analyses of ICE and capitalism, noting the system's totalizing nature and the role of public funding. Jaffe describes the evolving, violent tactics of ICE, such as pretextual traffic stops and door-to-door raids, and the corresponding community resistance tactics like whistle signals and de-arresting. She traces the current movement's roots to earlier organizing waves, including Occupy Homes and Black Lives Matter, describing how organizations act as 'tide pools' to sustain momentum. The discussion then turns to the article 'Capitalism Without Humans?', analyzing the torching of Waymo taxis in Los Angeles as a protest against automation and its threat to immigrant jobs. Jaffe connects this to historical Luddism and explains how automation often involves de-skilling and hyper-exploitative remote labor rather than total human replacement. She relates these themes to her book on grief, arguing that capitalism produces unnecessary suffering and that resistance is based on the principle that 'an injury to one is an injury to all.' The episode concludes with a discussion on whether ICE could function as a paramilitary wing for a fascist movement, with Jaffe contextualizing it within the long history of militarized white supremacy in the U.S. and the potential chaotic decline of the American empire.

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