Latest / Mechonomist Podcast / Traumatized and the Politics of Care and Repair
Transcript
- 0:01SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
- 0:04SPEAKER_00: Captain Lou's book came out yesterday.
- 0:06SPEAKER_00: I've read about half of it.
- 0:07SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna review it because you need to read the damn thing for yourself.
- 0:13SPEAKER_00: The basic argument is that the politics of trauma have been a destructive force
- 0:21SPEAKER_00: to institutions over the past 30 odd years.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: And I basically agree with that.
- 0:27SPEAKER_00: You can't build anything on what you don't have.
- 0:30SPEAKER_00: You got to build with what you do have.
- 0:33SPEAKER_00: Say something in racing,
- 0:34SPEAKER_00: it's called you got to run with what you brought to the track,
- 0:37SPEAKER_00: which means you can't complain about equipment if you ain't got it.
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: You got to go with what you got.
- 0:44SPEAKER_00: So fight the battle with the army you have instead of fighting the battle with
- 0:50SPEAKER_00: the army you wish you had.
- 0:51SPEAKER_00: So I'm not going to review the book.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: What I am going to say is that I kind of softly critique Dr.
- 0:59SPEAKER_00: Liu about there's no plan for the future in the book.
- 1:05SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's a critique.
- 1:06SPEAKER_00: I think what I was really trying to do is saying what we should do next is that Dr.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: Liu has opened up space for us to imagine a new type of politics.
- 1:16SPEAKER_00: And I spent the last day thinking about, well, what's the next?
- 1:20SPEAKER_00: And maybe what's next is something we've already been doing,
- 1:22SPEAKER_00: which is the politics of care and repair.
- 1:27SPEAKER_00: As some of you know,
- 1:29SPEAKER_00: I founded the Automotive Free Clinic in 2020, right after the pandemic started.
- 1:34SPEAKER_00: And we did that for five years and repaired 700 vehicles.
- 1:39SPEAKER_00: There are problems with it.
- 1:40SPEAKER_00: It wasn't perfect.
- 1:41SPEAKER_00: There's a documentary on it called The Mutual Aid Garage.
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: It's on Means TV.
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: I'll link it under here after a while.
- 1:51SPEAKER_00: What we did was we built an institution based on what we had
- 1:57SPEAKER_00: and what we could do instead of what we lacked.
- 2:00SPEAKER_00: Because you can't build institutions based on what you lack.
- 2:02SPEAKER_00: You're always going to be asking for somebody else to give it to you.
- 2:06SPEAKER_00: So we had some people who could fix cars.
- 2:10SPEAKER_00: We had some people who could do some administrative work.
- 2:13SPEAKER_00: We had some people that could organize the community.
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: We had some people that could write.
- 2:16SPEAKER_00: We had some people that could fundraise.
- 2:18SPEAKER_00: So we got everybody together and we built a small working class institution
- 2:25SPEAKER_00: that repaired vehicles.
- 2:27SPEAKER_00: And that's the new politics.
- 2:29SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing about that kind of politics is it's based on what you do,
- 2:34SPEAKER_00: not who you are.
- 2:37SPEAKER_00: Because we had all kinds of different people in our little institution.
- 2:42SPEAKER_00: We had conservatives, we had liberals, we had revolutionaries, we had apolitical people.
- 2:48SPEAKER_00: We had all kinds of people and it wasn't about what your politics were,
- 2:52SPEAKER_00: if you had the right politics or if your trauma allowed you to leverage your way to
- 2:57SPEAKER_00: the top.
- 2:58SPEAKER_00: None of that really mattered.
- 3:00SPEAKER_00: And a lot of us did have trauma.
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: Me and the other mechanic talked about having rough dads and being alcoholics
- 3:07SPEAKER_00: and recovered alcoholics and how we dealt with that.
- 3:11SPEAKER_00: And one of the ways we deal with that was by serving the community,
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: by doing something good for others.
- 3:18SPEAKER_00: That was just the crux of it,
- 3:19SPEAKER_00: was that instead of living in the past and what happened to us and what was bad
- 3:24SPEAKER_00: about what happened to us and how that affected our future,
- 3:27SPEAKER_00: we just focused on what we could do in the future,
- 3:30SPEAKER_00: which was to help people in very bad situations.
- 3:35SPEAKER_00: Some of these folks came in and they would tell us stories about,
- 3:39SPEAKER_00: oh, I got this car from my son who passed away from a drug overdose.
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: You know,
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: if I don't get this car fixed,
- 3:49SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to be able to go to work tomorrow and I'm going to lose my job and,
- 3:53SPEAKER_00: you know, all of these sorts of difficult situations.
- 3:56SPEAKER_00: And we helped out a little bit.
- 3:57SPEAKER_00: Now it doesn't solve the problem.
- 3:59SPEAKER_00: The problem is automobiles themselves.
- 4:01SPEAKER_00: Automobiles are stupid way to organize society,
- 4:04SPEAKER_00: but this sort of mutual aid and not the bullshit mutual aid that means tested and
- 4:09SPEAKER_00: that sort of stuff.
- 4:10SPEAKER_00: We didn't means test anybody,
- 4:11SPEAKER_00: everybody that walked in the door,
- 4:13SPEAKER_00: if they followed our rules,
- 4:15SPEAKER_00: which we did have rules,
- 4:17SPEAKER_00: If they followed our rules,
- 4:18SPEAKER_00: they got service,
- 4:19SPEAKER_00: which means our rules were you got to show up on time for your appointment,
- 4:23SPEAKER_00: relatively on time for your appointment,
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: and you got to give us time to fix your vehicle.
- 4:27SPEAKER_00: And if they didn't follow our rules, they didn't get it.
- 4:31SPEAKER_00: But as long as they followed our rules and treated us with dignity,
- 4:34SPEAKER_00: we would fix people's cars at cost.
- 4:37SPEAKER_00: And there are other people doing this type of work in the South.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: Western North Carolina,
- 4:44SPEAKER_00: Repair Cafe,
- 4:46SPEAKER_00: Garage Goblins,
- 4:46SPEAKER_00: which is an AFC-type organization,
- 4:48SPEAKER_00: Working Wheels,
- 4:49SPEAKER_00: which is another AFC-type organization in Western North Carolina,
- 4:55SPEAKER_00: Asheville Tool Library.
- 4:58SPEAKER_00: After the hurricane hit a couple years ago,
- 5:01SPEAKER_00: I drove some equipment up to Asheville,
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: North Carolina and delivered it to the Asheville tool libraries and air movers
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: and dryers and stuff like that.
- 5:11SPEAKER_00: And they got it going on up there, man.
- 5:13SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you, they got a big compound with all sorts of care and repair type stuff.
- 5:20SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the new politics, man.
- 5:23SPEAKER_00: I think that's the politics of the future,
- 5:25SPEAKER_00: which is the politics of building institutions based on care and repair.
- 5:30SPEAKER_00: And I hope that Dr.
- 5:32SPEAKER_00: Liu understands that she has opened up space for us to be able
- 5:37SPEAKER_00: to push these new politics forward.
- 5:43SPEAKER_00: And that's a very important task, which I'm grateful for.
- 5:49SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow,
- 5:51SPEAKER_00: I'm going to do a live podcast with Dan Hettinger,
- 5:54SPEAKER_00: who's the leader of Western North Carolina Repair Cafe.
- 5:57SPEAKER_00: So we're going to talk some more about Care and repair and get more in depth
- 6:01SPEAKER_00: about it with somebody who's actually doing it on the ground.
- 6:03SPEAKER_00: I'm not doing it anymore.
- 6:04SPEAKER_00: I got a two and a half year old.
- 6:06SPEAKER_00: I'm doing for profit stuff.
- 6:07SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to make money for my son.
- 6:09SPEAKER_00: I'm not really doing very well at it,
- 6:11SPEAKER_00: but trying to anyway,
- 6:14SPEAKER_00: trying to build something for my son,
- 6:15SPEAKER_00: maybe not building something necessarily just for the community anymore.
- 6:19SPEAKER_00: So anyway, stay tuned tomorrow and we'll see y'all next time.
- 6:23SPEAKER_00: Peace y'all.