Recorded January 25, 2061 at the Dutch Neck Manufactory in Newark.

M. E. O’Brien: Hello, I am here with, excuse me—Claudio Vitório Sule Bashir. We are at an assembly plant in Newark. This interview is part of a preliminary research project on the post-revolutionary changes in the NYC subway system. Claudio, thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. Could you begin by introducing yourself, perhaps telling us where you are from.

Claudio Vitório Sule Bashir: Hello, Ms. O’Brien. I am a resident of the Taubaté Commune, outside of São Paulo, Brazil. I was born there in 2020. I am visiting the Mid-Atlantic as a representative of the workers’ council of Taubaté, and our plant that manufactures light rail cars.

O’Brien: Is that where you grew up? What was your family of origin like?

Bashir: For the first part of my childhood my family lived in a section of Algodoal, a fairly stable working class neighborhood in Piracicaba. My parents were Muslim. We were part of a small Muslim community in the city that was almost all Syrian-Brazilian—my mother was Syrian—but my father was Afro-Brazilian. His family believed they were descendants of leaders in the slave revolts. My parents were both autoworkers for Hyundai at a plant in Piracicaba, about ninety kilometers from the city; my mother worked as a clerical worker and my dad was an engineer on the assembly line. When I was sixteen, as the political situation in Brazil was deteriorating, HMB [Hyundai Motors Brazil] switched to a compound housing model, worker barracks, and I started in a company school.

O’Brien: Any siblings?

Bashir: Two brothers, both younger.

O’Brien: Were you close with your family?

Bashir: Not particularly. I—[pause.] My father was a hard-working man, and intelligent, and I admired him. But he had his own world with a social club he was part of, and wasn’t around us very much. My mother raised us. My brothers were close to my mother, but I fought with her a lot when I was young. Mostly I hung out with other boys I knew.

O’Brien: What would you do?

Bashir: Usually one guy in our group had a car, so we would drive around, listen to music, drink, and go to football games together. I wasn’t that much trouble, not compared to some of the boys who got into fights or started stealing. I still wanted my father to be proud of me. Mostly, I hated being at home, I think I wanted some distance from my mother and brothers.

O’Brien: Did you work at the plant?

Bashir: When we moved into HMB housing, my school had already effectively closed with the worsening government crisis. HMB put me to work as an administrative assistant and structured my education. The young people at HMB were tracked into company-specific training paths. For two three-month periods each year I was sent to a regional SENAI [Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Industrial; the National Service for Industrial Apprenticeship], a training program for industrial workers. I initially trained as a machinist, then on robot repair, which involved a fair amount of assembly line design and engineering. I wasn’t considered an indentured worker, unlike many of the kids growing up in other corporate compounds. 

O’Brien: Was the industry unionized?

Bashir: Yeah, at first with the Metalworkers Union. Most HMB employees had ties with the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores; Workers’ Party]. There was one strike when I was maybe nine or ten, but the union was mostly fine with the status quo. My parents were members, though never in active leadership. Labor relations blew up in the forties. HMB switched to a company-run union. But there was a lot of unrest in heavy industry, mostly driven by these independent workers’ councils that spread across Brazil in resistance to the dictatorship. When I was in school at the plant, there were lots of work stoppages, and fights between company security and line workers. It didn’t really blow up completely until much later, during the Transição. I moved out in 2040, and went to work at the Alstom plant in Taubaté. 

O’Brien: Making NYC subway cars!

Bashir: Yes, that’s right. Subway and light-rail cars for the world.

O’Brien: What was the situation at Alstom?

Bashir: The plant had grown a lot through the 2030s and 2040s. By then cars had become increasingly not viable. Cities and regions that had it together at all kept up and expanded their train systems. Alstom was a major world supplier. The plant went from maybe a thousand people when I was a kid to over thirty thousand workers. The political situation was intense. There was a very militant workers’ council. They’d stop production anytime there were serious safety issues, or if company security got violent. At night there’d be these big political and study meetings, and they’d be attacked by the military police every once in a while. All the workers’ had guns whenever they weren’t on the job, and sometimes on the floor too. 

O’Brien: What was the political situation like in Brazil at that moment?

Bashir: Things were coming apart all over the country. The dictatorship was trying to fight several wars at the same time. The Andean Commune gave a lot of military aid and support to the Pindorama Commune, led by ribeirinhos, seringueiros, and indigenous forces. They managed to pull the Brazilian military into a guerrilla war across Amazonas. Bahia was in full rebellion, and early in the formation of the Canudos Commune. In the south, the military was driven out of Porto Alegre and trying to retake the city. They didn’t have the troops to really control the heavy industries. By this point, workers across São Paulo were well-armed, and the military knew they’d have another front of their war if they moved against us. There was some understanding that if the workers of Alstom would keep the plant operating and keep the train car shells shipped out, we could effectively control the surrounding town. It seemed almost inevitable the workers would take complete control of the factory the moment the dictatorship fell, and maybe well before then. Everything was very potent.

O’Brien: Earlier you mentioned political and study meetings?

Bashir: Yes, the scene there was very influential for me. I remember the first time I was invited to a study. This older engineer in my unit became my mentor. I called him Senhor Gaspar; he was from Argentina and he’d been in these factory takeovers around the turn of the century when he was young. He reminded me a bit of my grandfather. The group met late in the evening twice a week in this shack in Taubaté they had fixed up as a library. Everyone was so passionate about whatever they were debating. They would read these old dense polemics and theoretical texts and speak about them with intense urgency and immediacy. It made the ideas come alive. The first night I went, everyone was eating churrasco and arguing about these letters between Lenin and a workers’ committee in Germany. I had no idea who Lenin was. I was caught by their passion. They weren’t the only study group at the factory; there were mergers and splits and big debates and panels between all the various study circles. But I remained with Senhor Gaspar throughout it. He taught me so much. He would drink these batida de cafés all night, and loved explaining ideas and was so encouraging of my own intellectual development.

O’Brien: What happened to him?

Bashir: He was killed during the Transição in a scuffle with a military unit. It was very sad. 

O’Brien: I’m sorry to hear that. Broadly, what were you studying? What would you debate?

Bashir: Many of the debates were focused on politics of course, trying to strategically understand the situation, and how to link the workplace militancy to the broader revolutionary movement in Latin America. Similar conversations were happening at the workers’ councils across the continent. But Alstom had this whole other thing going on, these intensive studies of quite abstract political and economic theory. There was this whole group of workers, dozens, maybe a hundred people, totally obsessed with Marx and trying to understand exactly what capitalism was, how it worked, what it would take to destroy it, and what would come after. Alstom had become an intellectual home to multiple currents of far-left political theory.

O’Brien: Were there women in your group?

Bashir: Gaspar’s initial group was all men. I liked that. Later there was a lot of struggle between the study groups about gender, and our group was broken up and integrated with mixed gender groups. I had a lot of work to do around my gender chauvinism. My wife and I were fighting all the time, and I was avoiding spending time at home. Honestly it was not until much later, after the Transição, that I worked through my difficulties with relating to women. Women were the leading edge of militancy at the plant in the 2040s, and they waged a forceful confrontation against the culture of male chauvinism. I learned how to temper my behavior and word in those years of debate in the study groups. But I had much more work to do to really take the gender question to heart.

O’Brien: You were married?

Bashir: It isn’t that central to my life, and I was never very good at it. As a young guy in my twenties and early thirties, most of the sex I had was with older men, casual sex with workers in the factory and in the surrounding neighborhoods. I still like to have casual, anonymous sex when I travel. Sometimes, when the struggle was especially intense, I’d end up in these hot flings with my comrades, but those never became relationships. 

But yes, I was married. Am married, I guess. My wife and I had one child before the Transição but I was never very present as a father or husband. I was not good to either of them, and not good for them. My wife kept saying I was self-absorbed and at one point she got two of my comrades to do this whole intervention. I changed for a bit, started showing up more, feeling ashamed for how I had behaved, but I couldn’t stick with it. Maybe I am self-absorbed, I don’t know. I probably am. I liked the connections that grew out of working together on the shop floor or in the struggle, but I found emotional intimacy to be tedious and exhausting. The moment anyone asks me to be vulnerable I just shut down inside and hate them a little for it. Later, after the revolution, that all worked much better, for me and for them. [Pause.] Could we talk about something else? You were asking about the study groups?

O’Brien: Yes, we can. What were the ideas the study group were coming up with?

Bashir: They saw capitalism as a chain, linking together financial wealth, global manufacturing, our work, the state, the police—as interconnected and in motion as one enormous intricate machine, running on a common logic. They called that logic value. 

There were a lot of different ideas flying around Brazil at the time about what a revolution would look like. Like a large portion of the population were children or grandchildren of rural workers, still remembering some form of peasant autonomy. Senhor Gaspar’s group was particularly adamantly opposed to the romanticization of subsistence agriculture. We were mostly from families that had been in the cities for many generations, and we fought against those whose families still had close ties to the land. I have since become less dogmatic about it, and come to recognize the need to, as it is said, to “abolish the distinction between the country and the city.” But I think we were correct that depopulating the cities and returning to peasant life was the wrong way forward for the struggle. My wife’s parents had a small plot in the country, and we sent them money every month. When the fighting heated up, she sent our child Isa to live with them. She had so much nostalgia for rural life, and she couldn’t really admit to it or intellectually defend it—a pattern with her.

The study groups of Alstom were also fighting against the surviving large parties from the old left, who argued we had to organize production through the state. They had been mostly discredited among the most radical sections of the class, but still had force, because they were the few who were actually organized. A lot of the left operated for decades in small factions that would pop up around particular struggles then disappear as we lost. The parties—no one had taken them seriously for a long time—but they had infrastructure. And when the state began to fall apart, that infrastructure counted for a lot. The workers at Alstom became a major poll in the workers’ opposition to state ownership. Unions, once radicalized, became a major counterweight to the statist parties.

We were in what had become the dominant current in the anti-dictatorship struggle, at least in heavy industry, these independent workers’ councils. Our main commitment was taking armed control of the factories, and through that liquidating the power of the military, the employers, and the state. The most common idea among the council tendency was that each plant would be run cooperatively, and freely exchange with each other. The workers at Alstom were developing this whole other next-level analysis, arguing that exchange would inevitably re-introduce the violence of capital. Instead, we needed to all operate from a common plan. This common plan would need to both maintain production on a world-scale but without exchange and money, and massively shift resources, people, and organization based on shared priorities. 

Their slogan—it is hard to translate—comes to “Freely associated workers for a common plan, for the freedom and well-being of all.” They had partnered up with these Marxist economists at the State University of Campinas, and were making these study pamphlets and videos that were circulated between the heavy manufacturing plants across the continent. 

O’Brien: That’s fascinating. How was the struggle in São Paulo influenced by what was happening in the rest of the world? 

Bashir: We followed global news closely, and understood that our struggles depended on openings made possible through movements globally. A few specific forces shaped what was possible here. At first the dictatorship consolidated power in Brazil with military support from the US, and extensive capital investment from China. The collapse of the US empire during their protracted loss in Iran meant the dictatorship was cut off from a steady flow of weapons. This later became important in creating the conditions for the Brazilian Soldier’s Revolt.

Similarly, things were blowing up in China. Chinese firms had built these industrial zones across Northeast Brazil. Our access to news from China was uneven; we heard about the major events like the factory uprisings in Hangzhou, the insurrection in Xinjiang, the hunger crisis, but it wasn’t much. As things got hot in China, Chinese capital largely abandoned the Brazilian industrial zones. Some capital continued coming in from Europe, but they had their own problems. Alstom was French-owned, and management stayed on until the dictatorship fell, but the Chinese-run factories had already been abandoned, followed by ad hoc and sloppy attempts by the military to  manage them. When the saneamentos came, we had the pleasure of purging the same managers we had been battling for years. The workers at the Chinese-owned plants only kicked out some young military lieutenants just out of the academy and assigned to their plant. The old empires were falling apart and their allies in Brazil were getting more and more isolated. The other major influence for us was the revolution in Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, with the formation of the Andean Commune.

O’Brien: Before we started recording, you were saying you went to Lima? 

Bashir: Yes, the workers at Alstom had been working closely with the communards in Lima. We were very inspired by councils that restarted production in the middle of the Andean insurrection. Workers’ councils there played a leading role in the communization process, and were figuring all this stuff out on the ground that we had been debating. 

Initially, most of the liberated council-run plants tried to set up some labor-money system of exchange—voucher and money-like credit systems—but it ran into many problems, and was totally inadequate for sustaining the armed struggle. The liberation army of the Andean insurrection consolidated out of multiple disparate guerrilla and gang factions, and had a strong tendency towards what we felt was over-centralization, trying to resurrect something like a state. The army leadership’s orientation was towards nationalizing the factories. But they couldn’t pull this off, because the independent workers’ councils were too strong and refused to give up that autonomy to become employees of the state. But the councils couldn’t really do an exchange-based system without centralized coordination, because the liberation army knew they’d be invaded by Brazil and by the mercenaries the exiled capitalists had gathered in Colombia. Something in the tension between the two produced something like an orientation to a shared plan. The plan had to have the full commitment and participation of both the workers’ councils and the liberation army. 

The workers at Alstom felt the Andean Commune was discovering what we had arrived at through study. And the Alstom workers were becoming increasingly excited about cross-industry exchange and collaboration. So they sent me to what they felt was the most theoretically advanced front: the original AstraZeneca pharmaceutical plant that first restarted production in 2043 in the middle of the insurrection to provide drugs to the liberated zones. I spent six months there studying the efforts towards creating a common plan for the Andean Commune, before returning to work at Alstom.

O’Brien: Why did the Alstom workers send you, specifically?

Bashir: My faction of the study groups had gained majority support among the factory’s workers. We had a particularly sharp clarity about the role of the state and the shape communization must take. Our faction also had very strong ties to Spanish-speaking comrades, in part because of Gaspar’s relationships in Argentina. We put a lot of effort into connecting with comrades where the struggle was more advanced. I think people also found me charismatic, I guess. Well-spoken? I don’t know how to say it. I gave a lot of speeches at the workers’ assemblies. And I was good with system design, engineering labor processes. I had many ideas about how the factory could work after the revolution, which was exactly what we were looking to the Andean Commune to understand.

O’Brien: What did you find when you went to Lima?

Bashir: Mostly arguments on the internet. 

O’Brien: I’m old enough to remember that was a bad thing!

Bashir: Putz, I am as well! But yes, the Andean Commune had communized the internet, and created these online deliberation spaces that complimented the popular assemblies that were constantly happening throughout the liberated territory, including the workplace councils. The Andean Commune were the first to develop two major online tools that became central to collective planning. First, they set up online deliberation platforms to work out social needs and address scarcity across regions. Second, they started innovating these data modeling tools that were used to map and plan around sourcing, resource allocation, and manufacturing priorities. Those digital platforms and tools became the basis for the planning forums that came to play such a huge role globally in replacing the state, monetary exchange, and the markets. Part of the problem was technical—figuring out quantities of supplies, machinery, finished goods that would likely be needed across social sectors and regions—and how to address that. 

But they understood early these questions were fundamentally political, that they couldn’t create technical tools that could substitute for the hard decisions about what to actually prioritize. They had to decide how to balance between poverty eradication, fighting a war, addressing the escalating climate crises, surviving LARS and the famines, or expanding the industrial base. In the bad years of the forties, the Andean Commune had to make some very hard calls, involving as much of the population as possible in the deliberations. 

O’Brien: I heard there were debates about ledgers? The “Accounting Debates,” if I remember right?

Bashir: Nossa, you have no idea. It was brutal. This was actually mostly coming from our end, in Taubaté, kind of the epicenter of the Accounting Debates, but they briefly spread amongst the most theory-obsessed factions of the workers’ councils across the continent. Sometimes I still cringe when I see memes from that era. One reading of the theory we were into was that because the core motor of capitalism—this gets a bit technical—because capitalism centered around value based on averages of socially necessary labor time, keeping track of labor time would reinstate capitalism. Like, if you kept track of your work that hourly ledger would then rule over you and control your work. There was a current of this debate in Lima, around how to compare different forms of work—like who would decide what work mattered and what didn’t?

But that kind of labor-time tracking is actually pretty essential for constructing a shared plan. So the communards in Lima turned to a system of open accounting, with extensive annotations. Like, all the resources and labor time of every factory were widely and easily available to everyone; the reasons one factory was well above or well below other similar factories was carefully investigated and documented, in order to enable things like sharing more effective work practices, or as explanations for decisions about refusing certain forms of work speed up. Those annotations would include a close analysis of regional and environmental variations, and many other complicating factors that may account for varying production efficiencies. In capitalism, these variations were regulated impersonally through competition in the market; those plants that were less efficient were driven out of business. The open ledger system moved decision-making about production processes into an open debate, that involves both the workers involved and others affected by what they do.

The key to avoiding the problems that worried us in Taubaté is not turning around and making those ledgers into an automatic instrument of discipline. The ledgers of each plant could be compared, but then it has to be a political decision what to do with that. A plant could decide to adopt a new production technique, or suggest workers change their practices, or give people more time off, or not. The open ledgers were linked to databases where they posted all the available technical specs, work design process, and specialized knowledge they could easily document, which helped to facilitate what I do now: helping to circulate production processes cross-plant and cross-industry. The Andean Commune hadn’t developed major advances in material technologies—this was before the extensive incorporation of AI into planning, for example—but instead were new social practices of using already widely-available information technologies for collective deliberation and planning. 

O’Brien: I can see why you were good at giving speeches.

Bashir: [Laughs.] Yes, I took after Gaspar. I like explaining these ideas, and can go on for a long time. It gives me pleasure to explain concepts and how they fit together with the world.

O’Brien: You took Lima’s approach back to São Paulo.

Bashir: Yes. Brazilians had been learning a lot from the Andean Commune about guerrilla warfare, and had been resisting the dictatorship for years. But we understood our industrial capacity and technological know-how to be much more advanced than what was available to the revolution in the Andes. We knew their survival would ultimately depend on our own revolutionary transition, and contributing our industrial capacity to their revolution. So it hadn’t occurred to us that they had developed innovative approaches to planning and coordinating production. We hadn’t thought through the use of digital platform technologies as bases for cross-region and cross-sector deliberation and planning. It was a major revelation! We moved much of our study and education efforts into online spaces after that. We still had the big in-person assemblies and many study groups, but there was this whole bigger thing happening online we were a part of with workers across the continent. Then during the Transição—this was June 2048—we routed the local police and company security, and took full control of the factory. 

O’Brien: What did you all decide to do with the plant?

Bashir: Make subway cars for the liberated world! We had the strongest ties with the communes in the Andes, North Africa, and the Levant. But things were kicking off all over. We debated exchanging cars with the surviving capitalist territories. We needed manufacturing components and mined metals that were not yet communized. We—at this point it was the São Paulo commune making these decisions—made some headway in contacting liberation militias in those regions to directly procure the supplies we needed in their raids. Our plant ended up not shipping to the capitalist strongholds, but I know many other plants did for a time. It wasn’t an easy question. We tried to work it out together, as we would say, as “freely associated workers with a common plan, for the freedom and well-being of all.”

O’Brien: Would you tell us a bit more about the Transition in Brazil?

Bashir: It’s extensively documented elsewhere, so I don’t feel like I need to get into it here. The dictatorship couldn’t have fallen if we hadn’t seized control across all the major industries and key infrastructure. That’s also how we kept another capitalist force from seizing power. Along with the scale of the Soldiers’ Rebellion, the workers’ councils moved the process along and saved us from shedding too much blood. We had some mercenary forces to route, but that was over in a matter of months. The regime was already so hollowed out. Many of the country’s wealthiest had already fled to space or Australia, and life had been eroding for the middle classes for quite a while by then. The workers’ councils’ takeovers opened the space for all the popular forces to come together and make the new society. I actually wrote a short book about our experiences with the fall of the dictatorship and the Transição that has been translated into English. You could read that if it interests you.

O’Brien: I will! What happened with your parents at the Hyundai plant?

Bashir: The dictatorship in Brazil promoted car use long after it wasn’t tenable in most of the world, so their plant stayed open until 2050, but the auto market was shrinking fast throughout the forties. During the Transição company security was driven out, and they kept it running for two more years. But it was clear the world didn’t need that many cars anymore, and we had plenty of old ones to salvage. This is an example of the huge cross-sector restructuring that had to happen that specific factory or industry councils would have been inadequate to fully coordinate. We need to produce far less than under capitalism, and our shared priorities changed so much.

Their factory itself was retooled to make oceanic wind turbines. My dad retired to focus on religious observance. The second year after their plant retooled, he went on a Hajj to Mecca on one of the new solar barges coming in from the Jakarta Circuit. He spent some months in Mecca and the region. My mother stayed at the plant as they started building wind turbines, and became skilled at conflict mediation and facilitating planning deliberations within the plant. And she played a role in their coordination with other production councils. I think that she wasn’t ever much of a militant, but she became important to bridging with more conservative workers around some of the social divides within the factory. She and I are much closer these days than when I was young.

O’Brien: The former Alstom plant. Is it still running today? How has it changed?

Bashir: It is still running! And unlike many factories, still mostly making the same things we were making before. Outwardly, the changes might not be as dramatic as you’d expect. Our output is maybe four or five times what it was when I first started there. There is a lot of demand for nice trams in the world these days. The plant is much more automated. We decided to prioritize that, and everyone put a lot of work into thinking about how to automate their particular jobs. The actual organization of the work is very different, in order to accommodate more workers at a much more relaxed pace. We have maybe twice as many workers, but no one works more than a few hours a week. The work is much safer, and lower-demand. No one—or almost no one—works as hard as we were forced to back in the day. 

The workers of Tuabaté never got into the outlandish entertainment and performances some factories took up. We do have panels debating theory during the lunch break, and have readers on the sound system throughout the day reporting on global events and reading philosophy. At the moment, we are embroiled in a plant-wide Spinoza vs. Hegel vs. Akinyi debate. I think it's a bit ridiculous. The theory-obsessed culture never died.

The internal dynamic between workers is completely different than before. Foreman are elected and recallable roles. Everyone moves in and out of coordination and engineering jobs, and back to the line, to break up the divisions between different kinds of intellectual and manual work. We send people to other plants, suppliers and the communes using our cars, all in order to build relationships. We have team-based assemblies constantly, often daily, and then broad mass assemblies weekly. The delegates decide together on the future of the plant, and most workers keep close tabs on them through the planning forums.

We see our work as part of a much broader strategy for the future of this planet and our species. The questions about what a communist production process could be that used to concern a few workers on the extreme left are now considered in debates involving literally tens of millions of people. 

O’Brien: More arguing on the internet!

Bashir: Definitely a lot more arguing on the internet. And sooo many meetings!

O’Brien: How has your life changed outside of work?

Bashir: Things became much better for me and my wife after the transition. We all live in the Tuabaté Commune. As the communes took shape, my emotional and physical absence became less of a problem for my wife and child, as they had a much broader and stronger community. My wife found other parents to family with, and eventually other lovers. My kid never fully forgave me, but they are doing well. Today I family with five other adults, including my wife. We have four children between us all, two are now adults.

I am still . . . My wife still says I am emotionally remote. That I am not good at genuine connection. I impress people easily, move people, and work well together with others. But emotional vulnerability is still not my concern. Before the revolution, I thought I was broken in some way, that I was just a bad person. I would try not to think about it. For a time, I thought maybe the revolutionary transition would open my heart, or increase my capacity to be present with others. It didn’t do that. Instead, it helped in a different way. With the commune, I realize now that it is okay to be as I am. I do not particularly like open displays of emotion, and do not want to feel close to people in that way. It took the world changing for that to not be so harmful to others, particularly to my wife and child. The commune allows me to be as I am without that being so consequential and harmful for others.

I love to hang out with the youngest child when I’m home, and I am friends with the other children, with the exception of the one I was a bad father too. I think of myself as a kindly uncle who brings presents from distant continents. It’s a much better role for me than being a father ever was. I appreciate the commune makes this role possible in a way it wasn’t as much in the old world. I used to be very defensive about these questions, but now that it is less harmful for everyone it is easier to admit I don’t really care for the emotional demands of romance and parenthood.

O’Brien: Can you say a bit more about the role of the residential communes in the Transition? How does that compare to the workplace councils?

Bashir: The residential communes were very important for many survival questions during the Transição. For raising children, caring for old and sick people, figuring out food, housing and healthcare, basically coordinating consumption and many forms of social reproduction—the communes were central to figuring that all out together. It was also many people’s main experience of in-person collective deliberation, where we learned how to work through problems together. 

But the residential communes have never been central to the questions of industrial production, which has always always been my main concern. Gardens, crafting centers, or repair shops are on the commune level, but we need so much more than that for decent lives. Most of the goods we use are still manufactured in factories, drawing on supply lines that span continents. It’s structured very differently than before, of course. We’ve completely overhauled everything about how the factories are run and what it means to work in one, but they are still very helpful for making our digits, most clothes, medical supplies, spacecraft, trains and boats, and the whole physical and digital infrastructure that makes all that possible. 

Mostly workers at a factory also live in a nearby residential commune. At both places we argue, we are a part of trying to decide what to prioritize, and try to keep things moving. But they are really different, the site where you work, especially work like manufacturing, and the site where you live. When it comes to raising children or what to cook, everyone has opinions. But factory councils depend on a lot of very specialized technical knowledge. We teach that around, and try to break down the separations between different kinds of work, but there is no getting around the technical element.

The geographic dimension is also radically different from residential communes. Most people live in a commune where they can comfortably walk to midday meals together, if not in the same building. But manufacturing relies on much larger global and regional scales. We are extensively integrated with upstream and downstream suppliers and end-users who span continents. Production of some goods, like food, is much more broadly decentralized, but many things are more centralized. Space craft and space habitations, for example, are all manufactured in the region around Quito, but draw on mines and suppliers across half the world. 

I feel like that side of it, the factory councils, is where I’ve always had the most to contribute, and so it’s where I directed most of my energy and focus.

O’Brien: Have you spent much time in other cities? 

Bashir: One of our priorities at Tuabaté has been exchange across continents; sending people to teach and to learn. We’ve sent many workers out to meet our distant collaborators. My life shows some how expansive and varied these exchanges can be, how connected we are across the world. I knew a bit of Arabic growing up, so I spent a year in the United Communes of the Levant as they established their regional train system. I studied innovations in the work process around advanced electronics manufacturing there. I also spent two years in Glasgow working with the metal refineries as the city commune was expanding their tram system, and there learned English. I’ve visited NYC and this region many times; the cruising scene here is frankly the best. This area has been a major focus for us. The NYC-New Brunswick-Stamford axis are the best subways in North America. I understand the system decayed a lot in the forties, and it took some struggle to get it really back up and running, but I’m proud to say the plant at Taubaté has supplied this area with an entirely new fleet over the last decade. The cars are assembled here at the Dutch Neck Manufactory. On this trip, I’m studying new low-carbon, recycled polymer construction techniques for our remaining plastic components. It has been such a blessing to be able to travel so much and participate in the world in these ways, in a way that was so rare for factory workers before the revolution.

My comrades accuse me of being a citizen of the world. Of course we all are, in many senses. But Brazil lost so much during the rule of capital and imperialism. We lost a kind of confidence in our own ways of being, our culture, our connections to each other. With the revolution, we are reconnecting to the immense and varied cultural legacies of the region, having confidence in our beauty and brilliance. I spend so much time learning from communes spread around the world, and taking that knowledge to the production councils back home. I appreciate that my comrades remind me that we don’t do this because we are lacking anything at home. My connection to Taubaté, to Pindorama, to Latin America, is still very important to my sense of my work, to who I am.

O’Brien: Thank you. Do you have any other closing reflections?

Bashir: I do. These debates we had at Alstom when I first started working there about the country and the city continue today. I know now the line we were arguing for was too one-sided, too non-dialectical. But there was a way I think we were making an important point, and one that is still controversial.

Someday perhaps we will have the technology where it is easy to make tram and train cars locally, but we aren’t anywhere close to that now. There are still some people obsessed with hyper-localism, with fantasies of deindustrialization. Of course many industries had to be dismantled or made local, and we do try to reduce transoceanic travel in our supply chains. But broadly, I think I still disagree with the hyperlocalist line.

Industrial production has a crucial role to play, and should not be abandoned. Maintaining factories and centralized, highly mechanized production systems must of course come along with overcoming the distinction between rural and urban life, rooted in a recognition of the deep interconnections for production and our shared survival. Rural life is important, and there is much to value in it. But the kind of work still done in factories is also an important part of our shared future.

Having production systems that span much of the world enables us to lead much richer and fuller lives. In part, this is based on the material benefits that industrial production makes possible: watching movies from Nigeria, visual diaries from cosmonauts in Quito, having your cancer treated at a well-equipped regional hospital, riding the tram to visit friends across regions, or taking a transoceanic barge for religious pilgrimage. These all require huge material infrastructures and complex systems of production.

But it’s also about a different way of relating to each other. In capitalism, these forms of material connections between people—ways we were actually dependent on each other—were impersonally managed through the market, and were often sources of domination and violence. The way out of that isn’t to destroy those connections, it is to make them collaborative, supportive relationships where we are trying to understand and work together. We are linked to each other across the world—through things like train cars and steel smelting and arguing on production forums. These connections, today, in this world, are also ways we care for each other, grow to understand each other, and think beyond ourselves and the narrow circles of our immediate commune. I think that is beautiful.

O’Brien: Thank you, Mr. Bashir. You are very good at your speeches. Let’s stop there.

Bashir: My pleasure.