Interview with Philadelphia Organizer Jax

By Nora

Jax is a principled and uncompromising Wobbly and Marxist–Leninist organizer deeply rooted in Philadelphia’s labor and tenant struggles. A scientist turned aspiring housing civil rights lawyer, they cut their teeth in this city by successfully organizing the Philadelphia Legal Assistance Workers Union—building worker power through direct action and political education. Jax applies the solidarity unionism model of labor organizing with the I.W.W. to tenant organizing, understanding that these fights (and all fights we engage in against capitalism and empire) are connected. In their advocacy, Jax pushes past the false promises of reformism and instead sees collective action and militant solidarity as our strongest weapons in the fight against capitalist oppression. Jax believes that as revolutionaries, we must organize where we engage with capitalism the most. For them, organizing begins at home – if you believe in establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, you can start today by organizing your job or block. To Jax, organizing is a cultural battle rooted in deep care for our neighbors and fellow workers, and understands that it is our challenge to shift people from apathy to action through agitation, political education, relationship building and mentorship. In their struggle for a better world, Jax spends their time mentoring fellow organizers, building unions and eviction defense networks, leading rallies – mobilizing the people around them to fight for their own liberation one win at a time – and sharpening their analysis through critical Marxist study. Off the picket line, they make art and propaganda, and serve as the proud guardian of a very handsome cat, Malcolm.

This interview was recorded in April, 2025.

Nora: Could you speak a bit about your organizing history in Philly?

Jax: When I first got to Philly was around when the UC Townhomes fight was getting really heated. They were an affordable housing complex on 40th and Market that was basically sold out to developers. There ended up being an encampment there, and there was a big effort to try to get them to negotiate with residents. I’m sure there’s information online about what they specifically won. It was a really important community hub, a really amazing fight. It was a community-led, Black-led, really beautiful example of resistance, but also an example of how far developers are willing to go to bulldoze a place that people had known to be their home for decades.

Then I started working at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, for the city’s eviction diversion program. It’s a reform that the city introduced after the eviction moratorium was up—during the pandemic they had a moratorium, so eviction courts were shut down. But basically Philly has extremely high eviction rates; even now with this diversion program, there are 1200 eviction filed every month. And so, my job was to work on a hotline people would call if they were at risk of being evicted.

During my time there, I probably helped 10,000 different cases. I got extremely granular knowledge on how evictions work in practice, not just how they work on paper, because I’d be talking directly to people who are trying to navigate the system, figuring out what advice actually works, what strategies work, what doesn’t work. From that experience, I learned a lot of information about how the city functions—but more so about how the city doesn‘t function, and just lets people get evicted for completely illegal and illegitimate reasons. There are a lot of protections on paper for tenants, but the main issue is that none of them are enforced and judges don’t care because a lot of times they’re slum lords too.

Nora: So basically the issue is that those who are supposed to be enforcing the law are the ones who could benefit from not enforcing it.

Jax: And also that landlords have a lot of social power. The landlords’ lawyers are at court every day, so they’re friends with the clerks, they’re friends with the judges. So the bias shows up pretty easily.

From an earlier experience with my own landlord, I already knew that collective action is really needed to win anything. Working in legal aid—because we were funded by the Legal Services Corporation,  the federal fund of a lot of legal aid organizations—we weren’t really allowed to push people to organize. We weren’t allowed to give advice that would push people to organize, picket, strike, do anything direct action related. They’re a publicly-funded but private, non-profit organization, too—America is just a conglomerate of corporations. The purpose of the government is to protect private interests and private property, and it always has been, so it’s not a surprise when law is working in their favor. When I was working on the hotline, I would try to insert class consciousness into it because a lot of people would be like “This isn’t fair.” And it’s not fair—that conclusion is totally correct! People would want answers about why things functioned like that, why we couldn’t do anything about it. The law is so ineffective that sometimes I would even be accused of helping to evict people, because people don’t like to hear that the law doesn’t work—there’s a lot of false confidence in legal systems that were never built to be effective.

For example: if a landlord has an open L&I violation, the landlord isn’t legally supposed to be able to evict you, but that’s one of the least enforced laws. It doesn’t really matter if there’s any open L&I violations. A tenant called me after her landlord had filed in court even though they had open L&I violations, and she was basically like, “How did you let this get to court?” And I replied, “I didn’t let it get to court, your landlord filed it in court.” She had someone from L&I on the phone being like “A landlord can’t do that.” And L&I workers can’t give legal advice, they can’t give legal information, they just do like licensing inspections. They’re inspectors. So they aren’t lawyers, they’re not supervised by lawyers. And so this L&I worker was saying “Yeah, that’s what’s in writing, a landlord can’t do that.” Because I couldn’t stop a landlord from doing that, they felt like it was my fault that it was happening. At the same time, it was two different government organizations that both couldn’t enforce their rules arguing with each other at that point.

It was so disappointing and I could tell how disappointing it was for the tenant themselves, who got a court filing when they were told that that couldn’t happen. A lot of these legal reforms give people false hope and false indications of safety when we need to have a realistic understanding of legal systems and where change actually happens, which is through collective action. L&I often doesn’t even know that their own rules aren’t enforced.

Nora: Is there any organization aside from L&I that’s supposed to be taking on this action?

Jax: No. And also, if the landlord has violations, the only way L&I can really enforce fines is by the city’s legal department suing the landlord, which rarely happens, and the legal department doesn’t really have the capacity to do that. It’s impossible to enforce, basically, unless a lot of tenants from the same location submit complaints and they follow up very aggressively. That’s pretty much the only way.

It’s a bad look for the city to ignore a bunch of people, but if it’s just one person, they’re like, “Well, a lot of people are complaining and we have to prioritize,” blah blah, so you have to organize so as to not give them any excuses.

Nora: What kind of organizing tactics tend to work?

Jax: You have to have a variety of tactics. Everything starts with door-knocking and talking to your neighbors. What I would end up doing because none of the legal systems were effective enough is I would ask people if I could put them in contact with other groups like Philly Eviction Defense—which was me and a couple of other people—to go assist them directly. That came out of the Occupy PHA (Public Housing Authority), which I can talk about later.

Nora: How did you first get into organizing and activism?

Jax: I identified as a communist from very young age, but started doing work my senior year of college after a lot of sexual assault stuff happened. But nothing super organized, until I tried to organize my workplace after college and I joined the IWW in New York, which taught me everything I know about workplace organizing.

I started in the IWW, tried to organize my workplace in New York, originally around racial tensions, especially during the George Floyd uprisings, because there’s just a lot of unaddressed racism in the workplace and I wanted to get workers organized and on the same page about that and about other demands. Not just about culture, but also economics, because we were not paid enough. So I tried to organize the workplace and I did a really bad job, but with your first time you make a lot of mistakes.

Nora: Can we pick that apart?

Jax: Yeah, I think that’s valuable! I got that job [at a stem cell research lab] because I had family connections, and so I felt untouchable, like they couldn’t fire me. I had a lot of social power in the workplace. I was an extremely good worker and useful and I moved around different teams a lot because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I was trying everything out, and they let me.

When we first started organizing we had grievances around racial discrimination, microaggressions, macroaggressions—I had a couple of friends who were just treated wrong. There were three Black girls in the lab, and some scientists would just use their names interchangeably; once like one of them wore her hair natural and they were like, “Why does your hair look like a mop?” One of my friends worked in a back room and she really, really wanted to be a scientist, and had a degree in the sciences. The person who worked in that room before her was a white girl who didn’t have a degree in science and also wanted to be a scientist, and they promoted her basically without question—but when my friend wanted to get promoted as well, they told her that she needed to apply like everybody else. She ended up leaving and becoming an associate scientist at a different place where they actually valued her.

A lot of the grievances were coming from that. People were making various side remarks about the uprisings—a lot of us were participating in the protests, getting beat up by police, tear gassed, then going to work the next day and hearing jokes about us being looters. And so we formed a group chat around those issues. I very brashly called a meeting of everyone in the  company and told the C-suite people that they weren’t allowed to speak. Then we just aired out all of our grievances.

Nora: Badass. 

Jax: Thank you! But from an organizing perspective, that’s not how it’s done. We didn’t have a plan of what we wanted our demands to look like, and it was kind of chaotic and directionless. I just said “This is your time to be quiet and let other people speak.” During the pandemic, there was a divide in the office between people who were in the lab and forced to go to work and those who weren’t. We weren’t doing anything essential or COVID-related, but because the organization was initially funded by Bloomberg, we basically got an order from the city to say we were essential workers, so I had to work throughout the whole pandemic. All of the office-side workers got to stay home. So, there was a big divide. And it was dangerous! We were not yet vaccinated, we were in New York City, commuting to work through an empty Times Square—when has Times Square ever been empty?

Nora: So that meeting focused mostly on the racial tensions at the company?

Jax: I don’t remember specifics beyond saying that we needed some type of diversity initiative and that we needed more support. It was really hard to organize because it was during the pandemic, and people would not necessarily be in the office every day.

Nora: What were the repercussions?

Jax: For the meeting, nothing except for the phone call from HR. It was a liberal organization, I had ties with board members, I had enough social capital that if anything happened to me, I think that people would have been activated by it. The next step was that I called a meeting of like all of the people like in our group chat. We met up and I asked “What do you think about forming a union?”

A lot of people were like “I don’t think we necessarily need that” because in science people are obsessed with getting their name on a paper. This is the kind of job people have before going to get their PhDs. Everyone was working 12-hour days, people would regularly be crying in the lab because of how much stress we were under. But people were like “Science is overall toxic, this is a good enough place, so many labs are worse.” Ultimately, like no one wanted to organize. That’s kind of what happens when you call a group meeting like that—the way you’re supposed to organize is to have one-on-one conversations to address people’s fears. Then you can talk about the stakes and get into the details of what organizing looks like, so people don’t just  react to the word “union.” So, that was my second mistake.

I got pulled into a lot of weird meetings, but nothing really bad ever happened to me. Eventually, they decided to form these worker affinity groups, because I think they suspected that I was trying to organize. That’s often a union-busting tactic: to give a little bit of a win so that workers will grab on to that as a form of organization instead. The affinity groups were under layers of supervision, so someone from the C-suite was supervising the whole thing. 

That space turned into an educational space around anti-racism. Every month I would basically lecture on the subject, which is not organizing at all. One thing we did was discuss that all of the people of color at the company were at the absolute bottom of the ladder in terms of their positions. But the company would take our photos and use them for promotional materials, and they talked about diversity a lot, even though they didn’t really mean it.

The retaliation started once I started talking about Palestine. This was during the invasion of Sheikh Jarrah in 2021. I was starting to get involved with Within Our Lifetime, which is a Palestinian organization in New York. And at the company, the affinity group had a session where the topic was “How can we uplift globally oppressed scientists?” And I was like, “I don’t know, like maybe don’t bomb them?” Immediately, I was called into a meeting with my supervisor, and she told me that I had to step down from leadership because of what I said.The workplace as a whole was somewhat pro-Palestine, but not in a tangible way, because people didn’t really know what was going on. A lot of our donors were trying to protect their financial interests more than anything.

The whole time my boss told us that she really wanted to support scientists of color and raise up their voices, whatever. As soon as my voice said something she didn’t like, (and I think she was told from higher-ups to do this) there was retaliation—then I gave my two weeks notice and moved to Philly. […] It was very chaotic time, but it was extremely activating, and I think a lot of people were going through similar transformations.

I went through that battlefield, then came to Philly, and a lot of that history informed how I approached organizing. My new goal was to join a workplace to organize it, to kind of have a redemption arc. On basically my first day at Philadelphia Legal Assistance I asked “Y’all organized?” to try to gauge if they were starting that process—without using the word union, because that didn’t work out last time. Then I got connected with Amanda of Philly Socialists, who was also working there, and she was the first person I talked to about the workplace, and they had already started a unionizing campaign.

So it was kind of perfect, perfect timing. I wanted to do tenant stuff, but I also wanted to organize wherever I worked, so it was perfect timing, perfect place, perfect job for all of that to happen. We ended up organizing a union at Philadelphia Legal Assistance. The attorneys were already unionized, but the paralegals and other staff were excluded from the union. So were like “Fuck it, we want our own!” By that time I had a lot more trainings, I understood the unionization process a lot better. I learned a lot from my mistakes. I think it’s really important to make mistakes and not be afraid of making mistakes, because that’s where you learn. If I hadn’t fucked up at my last workplace, I probably wouldn’t have been as effective at my next one.

Nora: So what did you differently and do right the second time around? 

Jax: The attorneys had a union, but everyone else didn’t. We were trying to make one for everyone else. I saw some of the organizers making the same mistakes as me, and just said “No, we’re not gonna do this again.” The first meeting I went to was like 20-something workers, and the now president of the union, Lina, was leading the meeting, and she asked “Are y’all willing to sign a union card?” And at the same time asked, “Why do you want a union?” From my training and my experience,you don’t ask people things like this all at once at the same meeting early on, because a lot of people won’t tell you how they really feel if they’re in a group.

Lena and I are very close friends now, and this is a story we laugh about a lot, because I basically said “You all are doing everything wrong. We need to slow down, have conversations with each other, and understand what we’re actually fighting for, and then figure out what our tactic is to win those things, because signing a union card doesn’t mean anything.” You could sign a union card then not win anything from that.

Nora: So, in this case, the solution was to slow down, talk to people, see why they wanted to get in a union.

Jax: Yeah, you have to understand people’s motivations, what they care about, what feels degrading to them about the way they’re treated at work. People can agree with things on paper, but actions reflect what emotionally drives people more than anything else. So if you don’t understand people’s emotional reasons for doing stuff, you don’t actually understand why somebody is really with you.

One trick is having one-on-ones, which is a specific type of conversation where you ask questions with a specific ask in mind. You start the conversation with agitational questions to get people’s emotional reactions, then ask how things are going, how they feel about certain things. Then you go into questions that get them to think about collective action: “What would it take for things to change?” People often understand that collective action works without having that concrete phrase in their head. If they say “Well, I could bring this up in a meeting with HR,” you ask questions like “Do you want to go to that alone, or do you want support?” to try to get people thinking about collective action, and then you talk about the potential consequences of doing those things. You give people a chance to have their fears addressed and then, if you know what people are scared of, you know how to take care of them and support them to do things that are scary, because taking collective action against any form of power has risks. If you just pretend those risks aren’t there, people won’t trust you, and you’ll also burn people out and get people hurt. That’s what you want to avoid.

From there, you ask them to do something tangible, depending on what the person wants to do and what their capacity is. It’s important to ask people to do something so that they have ownership over the process. Whether or not they do it indicates to you how committed they are to the process. It’s like an assessment.

Ultimately, power takes a lot of people—people are the power. If you just let someone’s excuse to not organize stop them, you’re doing them a disservice. Part of the job of an organizer is to push people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do. Because if people were doing the stuff necessary to overthrow capitalism, it would be overthrown, right? It’s a very people-centered approach to organizing, rather than being like, “Let’s sign a card and get this business to come and fix everything for us,” because that’s just a fantasy.

From there, you get people together in a room to figure out what needs to get done. We formed an organizing committee, and you have to meet very regularly. We became really close—some of the people on that organizing committee are the people I’d trust with my life. You get to know people in such a different and more intimate way when you’re fighting power, which is something that I love about organizing: how deeply I’m connected with the people around me compared to when I wasn’t organizing, where you have more superficial relationships with people.

Then we mapped out the whole workplace. We figured out who was in each department and we tried to get one person from each department on the organizing committee, so that we would have someone able to report back from across the entire workplace. Then we started forming our demands: writing out what we would want to win. After that, we did a march on the boss, which is when workers bring a list of demands to management together.

Nora: About how many people was this?

Jax: There were about fifty of us in our bargaining unit. There were paralegals, admin staff, some social workers. For the march on the boss, we ended up sending a delegation, because it was a hybrid workplace.We had people representative of different ages, different departments, and different gender and race compositions. We tried to be as representative as possible to deliver the demands. Management saw us as we taped the notice to the door, and right after this we changed all of our Slack photos to the union logo.

It took about a year from that point to win the union. We had everybody on board. The only person whose signature we didn’t get was someone on medical leave. So we had 99% of union cards signed. We had all of our demands ready to go. We were extremely unified. I’d tried to correct everything that I did wrong the first time, and it worked and the outcome is really beautiful.

Nora: What were the fruits of your labors?

Jax: They’re still negotiating a contract right now [as of this interview] and getting stonewalled by management. It’s been a year of negotiating with them. The workplace’s executive director died, so that was an issue. In addition, I come from the IWW school of organizing where we don’t negotiate contracts, we just use direct action to win demands. But the workers there weren’t quite as militant, so they ended up wanting to sign on with a business union—the UAW, the same union representing the attorneys.

The IWW is a solidarity unionism organization. It functions a little bit differently than business unions do, like UAW and other ones most folks know. So within UAW is the National Organization of Legal Services Workers. The attorneys had a union within that, and then we were another union within that. We were two separate unions under the same umbrella with separate contracts to be negotiated.

I started at this job in 2022, and our march on the boss was in spring 2023. [As of this interview] they’re still negotiating for a contract. That’s part of the issue with contract fights—they’re defanging, you’re basically surrendering to a negotiation process on your boss’s terms. When you negotiate a contract with bosses, there’s always going to be like a management rights section where they get to write down what their rights are. So if you negotiate a contract, you’re solidifying some wins but you’re also solidifying your losses. Neither myself nor Amanda are at that workplace anymore, but a lot of people from the original organizing committee have stayed and are committed to stay until we get a contract—and I think they’re pretty close.

We were organized to a point that when October 7 happened we were immediately able to call a meeting of workers. I got someone from the IWW who went to Palestine as part of like a labor contingent and I got someone from Jewish Voice for Peace to come and talk to the workers. We had a very pro-Palestine workplace from the get-go because the organizing committee established that this was our character, we are a pro-Palestinian union, and that’s not up for debate, really. It was really, really good to be organized to the point where we could have those conversations as a workplace without bosses saying anything about our conversation. At that point we were meeting regularly and always in communication. 

But back to the difference between a contract and direct action fight—there’s a very big tactical difference between using legal systems to get wins versus using solidarity and direct action to get wins. I wish we were more organized to the point where we could just use direct action and not negotiate with them, because then that union wouldn’t still be negotiating with them two years later, you know? 

A union busting tactic is to draw out the process so that people get burnt out. There’s a really good article called “Practice Involuntary Recognition” that kind of explains what I’m talking about. The idea is that your union exists when you win stuff. The way I organize is like I organize to take over—I wanted the workplace. I want the workplace to be run by workers. If you want workers to run the world, they have to start by running their own workplaces.You learn a lot about democracy and you learn a lot about decision-making when you engage in these types of struggles in the workplace. In this case, the workers are legal aid workers, so we didn’t really want to strike because if I’m not answering the phone, then someone’s not getting help with their eviction. So, we were strategizing around slowdowns—for example, people who worked on the hotline stopped working on the hotline 10 or 15 minutes before our shift ended to just show that we were organized enough to strike if we wanted. Direct action is also a kind of threat to them. If they think that you’re organized enough to strike, it helps you win. 

We did a lot of stuff: during the holiday party, we dropped a big banner and spoke about the union, which the bosses didn’t really like, but they had no choice. I took the microphone and they didn’t stop me. You cannot leave a microphone around! Someone might use it. We started wearing union pins to work, nothing super militant. We ended up winning a bunch of raises while this process was going on because I think they knew they were organizing even before we went public.

Nora: When did you all start paying dues?

Jax: Well, dues start happening when you get a contract. But even with dues, you would still be taking home more money than you would without a union. We had a lot of education around that so people knew what the situation would be. That’s a little bit different than in the IWW, where you start paying dues immediately, so then you have a pool of money to organize with. You can use that to buy pizza, fill an organizing space, buy pens, the things you need to do to be organized, which are really simple things! But with business unions, they get you to rely on them a lot, which takes some of the power away from the workers themselves. Business unions do profit off of workers needing unions. They’re more a part of the labor aristocracy—they profit off of the bad economy, whereas like unions like the IWW that are relying on solidarity, we’re trying to build our ownpower. So that’s why there are different tactics when it comes to organizing: what power do you surrender to who? The distinction between business unions and solidarity unions is one that is pretty unknown to people because of how business unions have been like to make themselves seem like the only solution that’s out there. The early AFL-CIO were very anti-communist and had a big role in criminalizing the IWW. That whole history is very interesting.

That said, a union is still a win, even if it’s in a business union! A win is a win, people are organized. I think it made all of the workers like better legal service providers too, because they feel more supported and they were able to voice what they needed to change in their departments to be more effective service workers. Our clients really benefited from that, I think. We became more tightly coordinated, because we were talking to each other about what our different demands were and what our different departments did. Because we knew what everyone did and we were close to each other, we were able to help our clients better, because often when people come to us, they have a myriad of different issues. So often if someone’s getting evicted, they also may have a family law issue and they also may have a tax issue. 

Organizing gives you power, but it also makes you more effective. When people make moralistic arguments about organizing, I think they often fail because like organizing is good for material reasons, not because of moral reasons. Autonomy for the sake of autonomy is garbage, but if you have autonomy for the sake of serving the people around you and supporting your coworkers, that’s reflected in what comes out of it. It’s a struggle for a better kind of production at the end of the day. Communism is a necessary step after capitalism because we need it in order to be a productive society that can take care of everyone. 

There’s a quote by one of my favorite authors, Maurice Cornforth, from his book Historical Materialism that says under capitalist production, the formation of unions is inevitable because the relationships between ownership and production are so fraught that it makes unions necessary. That’s the scientific approach to organizing: organizing happens because it’s necessary. The exact quote is: “Trade union organization is as inevitable in capitalist society as it is inevitable that water will seek its own level” (24). 

Nora: So, let’s get into your work with the Philadelphia Tenants Union (PTU). 

Jax: One of my coworkers in the eviction diversion department at my work had been involved in PTU. But when I first moved to Philly, PTU was largely defunct and not often meeting. I think the first meeting I went to was in April of 2023. At my job, I learned a lot but I wasn’t necessarily plugged in with any organizations around tenant stuff, I was mostly just with the IWW for labor organizing. But I wanted to do more tenant work because I felt eviction defense, which I mentioned earlier, was awesome—but it’s also like three anarchists in a trench coat. So that’s not really going to amount to much long-term.

After our union was kind of self-sustaining, I was looking for what to do next. I already knew that I was leaving the workplace to go to law school at some point. I wanted to get more plugged into the larger tenant organizing work. 

Nora: What kind of work did you do for the PTU around that time, up to the present?

Jax: At the first training we had once I had joined, I talked about evictions and how the only way to really stop an eviction effectively is if you are organized as a community to support each other through the process. If someone’s getting evicted, it’s usually a problem that’s affected everybody.

There’s a gap in what people need and what legal aid is able to provide, so I was focusing on turning PTU into an organization that could pick up the slack of the city, basically, and advocate for ourselves in a meaningful way. Because my focus was evictions, that’s what our beginning trainings were about. I’ve done a lot of union organizing trainings up to this point too, so I was applying the IWW philosophy to tenant organizing and teaching people that method and then we kept building up from that. 

In March of 2023, Angel Davis was shot in the head by a landlord-tenant officer. This was a private, mercenary-like group hired by an attorney who was married to an eviction court judge and this like private mercenary group would basically violently evict people and landlords would hire them to fulfill court orders for eviction. Super corrupt, super dangerous. They shot Angel Davis in the head, they shot another woman, Latesa Bethea, in the leg, and they also tried to shoot a dog, all within the span of a couple of months. So people were really organized around this.

Philly’s been experiencing an eviction crisis for a long time, and I was noticing when working on the hotline that there was also a general lack of legal knowledge. So that’s why I was focusing a lot on know-your-rights trainings. I also was connected with an attorney at Drexel who could talk about repairs and habitability—because my expertise is evictions. So it was helpful to have a lawyer who could discuss those things and lend some credibility, because people are more likely to listen to a lawyer than, like, some guy. 

At our meetings people show up and talk about the issues they’re having with their landlord. It depends on the issues, but usually one or two people will follow up with the person directly to come up with a plan, help them doorknock and stuff. Just help people have the tools to solve their own problems. We’re not like a service model—I’m not going to go and negotiate with your landlord for you, but I will give you the tools you need to do it for yourself. It’s helpful even to help them with knocking on a door and talking to your neighbor and approaching them with humility—it’s more of a social skill. It’s important. The Philly Tenant site has a lot of know-your-rights information, anyone can look at that, but many people don’t know that it exists, so part of what we do is direct people to resources—they have templates or letters you can send to your land or that are legally compliant—there are like so many resources out there that people just don’t know exists. There are tons of resources that I don’t even know about—I don’t know shit about rent control, for example. Our knowledge increases with the more people we have, and that’s power. 

Nora: What of all your organizing work would you want to emphasize especially?

Jax: My work in the IWW is really important. That’s the only organization where I have an officer position. I’m the branch’s organizing department liaison, so I coordinate all of the organizing leads that we get and try to connect them to members who can help people organize. It’s a similar model to the PTU. We do trainings and we help people organize their own workplaces on their own terms, through direct action, not through contract fights. A lot of the things that I learned from organizing at work go into how I approach organizing leads who are trying to get support organizing workplaces now. 

It’s kind of like branching up and out to help other people in similar positions to those that I was in to reach their organizing potential. Amanda, who I met at my workplace, is part of the IWW and is a badass organizer too. So it’s cool to see how a conversation on my first day of work with someone has turned into us leading a labor organization that supports autonomous workplace unions that fight directly. The philosophy behind bringing that model to PTU is that a lot of people focus on organizing the workplace, but we need to be organizing workers, just like we need to be organizing tenants, because if you can organize as many people as you can, where you are, then people branch out even after they leave a job or an area. So many more opportunities come about when people are empowered to change their own conditions instead of begging for help from a politician or a lawyer or even a union boss. 

That’s what it takes to organize the working class: creating leaders, changing the way people approach challenging power, the way they approach facing issues. Once we build a culture of actively challenging using direct actions to win demand, then we get that much closer to revolution. Revolution happens when workers and tenants are organized enough to run where they work and live. And that’s what I’m working towards.

I actually missed something really important in the beginning: my mentor, Ramón. He’s dead now. After my first tenant organizing struggle in New York started, I started going with him to the NYCHA housing, which is the public housing in New York, to knock on doors and help people. This was during the pandemic and a lot of the people who lived in public housing didn’t have enough resources. They didn’t have masks, they were a lot of times out of work. So we would go there, show up with masks, talk to people, and just try to help them generate their own solutions. He’s honestly why I left my job in science and started pursuing a career in tenant organizing. 

Nora: How did you meet him? 

Jax: Through a communist party called the American Party of Labor. He was a cadre leader for the party and he was also a director of strategy for a New York state senator’s office. Everyone living in public housing most of the time doesn’t vote, and he kind of had an idea not to focus on people who are already politically engaged, because they’re already politically engaged in the way that they’ve chosen to be. But if you target people who are the most advanced actors of the working class who aren’t necessarily politically engaged, there’s like so much mass potential. That’s where revolutionary movements start: by tapping into the most neglected, the most advanced sectors of the working class and finding existing communities and radicalizing them, pushing them towards direct action, communism, whatever you’re trying to make happen. In that situation, you are just trying to get folks politically active—DSA would be around during election season and then they would disappear, but we were there the whole time, and when people would ask “Why are you helping us?” We’d be like, “We’re communists. That’s why we’re helping you.” 

That helps combat a lot of propaganda and stereotypes that paint communists as scary people, because if you know a nice, helpful person who is a communist and then the news paints communism in a certain way, you’re going to be way less likely to believe them. So like being consistent, by being supportive, you’re delegitimizing propaganda. I really do want Ramón to be mentioned in this article. 

Nora: What are some key themes you would emphasize?

Jax: I’d emphasize are autonomy over reliance, and the importance of mentorship and the importance of trusting yourself enough to make mistakes and know you’ll be fine, because I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am if I didn’t have people guiding me through things, the support of fellow IWW members, the support of my mentor Ramón especially, and all of the friends and people I’ve met along the way. It’s really important to make yourself replaceable. I joke that as an abolitionist, I want to live in a world where I don’t even need to exist, since my existence is a result of unfair systems existing. So replacing yourself is really important, so that the movement can stay alive. Autonomy over reliance more than anything, but autonomy with a purpose, are the things I would say.

Nora: Yeah, I’ve been able to tell you really love how the IWW does this, you really love the autonomy they value. You’re there to support, but really the strong push, the spearhead has to come from the people. 

Jax: There are reasons behind the way we do stuff. Organizing is a scientific process, we’re not just getting people to organize themselves into like fascist gangs. We’re talking about material conditions, how we can challenge power—our slogan is the abolition of the wage system. We recognize that the wage system, capitalism, is the root of suffering. We have a fire preamble that you should definitely quote in this. It starts with: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” 

So we’re very class conscious, but non-sectarian, because our goal is to organize one big union for all workers, that everyone feels welcome to, except for cops, landlords, and bosses. So, again, autonomy, but not just for the sake of autonomy, but autonomy for the sake of abolishing the wage system, abolishing rent.

Nora: So the goal is not getting one person to do this one thing for this group, it’s about generating lifelong confidence.

Jax: Like I said before, if workers want to run the world, they have to start by running their workplaces.

Nora: And where they live!

Jax: Yeah.

Nora: One last thing I want to hit: your advice for your young or younger self.

Jax: There are so many resources out there that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The most creative, complicated solution is usually not the solution. Solutions are actually really simple and the most important thing is to talk to each other. I wasted a lot of my time trying to come up with the most perfect way of thinking, assuming that things are the way they are because someone hasn’t thought the right stuff. But people have! It’s about putting those things into practice more than anything. It’s not rocket science. If you interact with someone more than once a week, that’s an organizing opportunity— grasp it! Because we need to be organized. The classic phrase is “we’re not outnumbered, we’re out-organized.”

Nora: There’s a great quote that goes something like “The people who love war are way more organized.” (“Those of us who love peace must organize as effectively as the warhawks.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.)