Nafis Hasan on constraints, building power, and the cancer-industrial complex

"Where are these openings where the Left can flex?"

Nafis Hasan (@cannafis_) received his PhD in Cell, Molecular and Developmental Biology from Tufts University in 2019 and worked as a Postdoctoral Scholar (2019–2021) in David Kaplan’s lab at Tufts’ Department of Biomedical Engineering. He currently works as a Staff Representative at PASNAP, and is an Associate Faculty member at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. His research interests range from cancer biology to climate politics and eco-Marxism; his writings have appeared in Jacobin, Science for the People, The Trouble, and more. He serves as an editor for Science for the People magazine and Jamhoor, a critical left media organization focused on South Asia, and organizes with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

He is teaching an online course focused on the political economy behind cancer research and treatment that starts on July 12th (register here).

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

M: How did you get interested in climate politics and organizing?

N: So I grew up in Bangladesh, and my origin story is I was born in a flood. It was one of the worst floods in the history of the country and my mom had to be taken to the hospital on a boat. Dhaka city at that time didn't have as many levees or embankments as it does now. This was in 1988. And fast forward, I'm growing up there. Every monsoon, every street gets waterlogged. One of the big problems in Dhaka city is water getting into your car's exhaust because there's so much water on the road. Another problem is rickshaws falling into open drain holes; because of the water, you can't see anything. It’s hot, then there’s like three months of rain, you grew up with it and you don’t really have a context for it; this is just the reality that you live with. And then you read the newspaper, there's more and more land erosion, and you hear stories about crops getting messed up because of flooding. Because in a delta, after a monsoon after the water recedes, it leaves a lot of really rich soil, and that's where you plant your crops. In my teenage years, I didn't really pay attention to a lot of that stuff, especially climate stuff, because that's just the reality that we were living in.

Then I came to the United States. In college, I was sort of reading politics here and there, but it was very liberal politics. I started putting the connections together in grad school. Around 2015 to 2016, I started learning more about what the climate crisis is. That's when I started to put the connections together. I had been going back to Bangladesh and noticing that it's getting hotter in the summers, it's getting hotter earlier, the seasons are kind of blurring. So that started congealing in my mind.

And I joined DSA. I went to Boston DSA’s Ecosocialism Working Group back in 2017. It randomly popped up on my Facebook. Until then I had done political stuff in the sense that I did liberal stuff in college, then I went to Occupy Philly for a while, and that had a really lasting effect on me. Then I just didn't really have a home; I would show up for protests. But when I entered DSA, there was so much more information out there. When I joined the Ecosocialism Working Group, I was like, What are these people talking about? I have no idea. They were very kind and they taught me a lot of things. So since then I have been very much engaged in climate politics and the more I learned, the more the connections grew. I still don't understand a lot of parts to it, but in general, I think I have a definite understanding of it to know what's going on and how bad it is. Now when I think back about Bangladesh, my years back there or what's happening now there, it’s just so much easier to understand why this is happening.

You're really good at thinking dialectically, and sitting with all these contradictions. We don't know how it's going to play out, and we have to think through this theory and practice and do it as we go. Do you feel that the way that you approach organizing is related to the way you approach your research? 

One thing I think a lot about is constraints. What are the constraints that we are operating under? What is possible, but also what could be made possible? And what I think about in terms of theory sometimes is very limited by what we can do within the constraints of our organizing power. It really eats me from the inside. I want power. We need to build power, there is no other way. But it's not as easy as just saying that I want to do everything to get whatever the power I need. I feel that way, we should do everything we can to get our power, whatever it is, even a modicum of it. But it's not that easy. One thing I've learned in my last year of working in the union is that building power is one of the hardest things.

To go back to your question, there are a couple of things when I think about organizing as a dialectical way. We need to put in testable strategies on the ground, see what works, see what doesn't work, bring it back, and then synthesize. So thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But to even get there, we need to understand: what are the conditions we are operating under? And what are our goals? There is a lot of analysis that might go into it. For example, are we at a conjuncture? Are we at a crisis that can be leveraged? Are these points of conjuncture where we should be able to flex our power? But then the question is: do we have it?

Personally, I don't think theoretical analysis should limit praxis, because you should be always thinking about what's happening. And where are these openings where the Left can flex? Everywhere, we have to go in and push as much as we can. But we also have to see what's working and what's not. What's unclear to me is the timeline: how many times do we try the same thing? Do we take in some criticism from others to build a bigger base? Based on what results or feedback we're getting, we should be able to manage our strategy.

And also in biology, feedback is a very important process. So are constraints. So I see the overlap between those things. Organizing is as dynamic as development of an organism to me. The interactions between us and the political ecosystem will determine what our organizing is. There has to be agency on our side—agency as in our intent, our goals, what constraints we're operating under—and then also the political ecosystem that allows us to do these things. So you have the political ecosystem, which is our environment, and then we have us as organizers building our organization, which is the organism living in that ecosystem, and they interact with each other. So there's this constant dialogue or constant reciprocal interactions between our organization, which is the organism, and then the environment, which is the political ecosystem that we operate within.

Why did you quit academia to become a labor organizer, and how do you feel about that so far?

My anniversary is coming up in two weeks, so that's a really good question to ask. I left academia because of disillusionment. That's what it really boils down to. But also the culture of exploitation that exists. I went to get a PhD because I fucking love biology and I was just so fascinated by it. And after my PhD, that was still there. 

But I was also increasingly feeling like whatever I'm doing just feels so extraneous to whatever else is going on in the world. And when I started seriously organizing with DSA, I was getting a lot of this positive feedback or fulfillment from organizing, fighting for a greater cause, that I once thought I would get from academia but I didn't because of its internal structures of how it operates. I was considering getting out of it when my friend called me and said, “Hey, I work for PASNAP, which is one of the more militant nursing unions in Pennsylvania, and there's an opening.” I had done some serious organizing with DSA in Boston and I just thought, Okay, I'll give it a shot. My interview went well enough that they hired me, or their need was great enough that they would hire me [laughs]. Honestly, a few months into the job I basically had to throw out all my previous ideas about what organizing is, what labor means, how unions operate and stuff. I think this was a very necessary experience for me because when I was doing ecosocialism work in Boston, there's the big idea like, “Oh my God, decades of liberal environmentalism has driven this wedge between labor and climate, and we need to get to the unions.” But with that there's sort of a fetishism around these unions. This fetishism in unions is the first thing that breaks.

The second thing you understand is that people love to talk about workers, but when you start talking to them on a regular basis—especially nurses—their lives are so under pressure, they don't even think about the big stuff. It’s literally, “Am I going to pick up another shift? When am I going to get my bonus? My kids need to go to school.” In general, there's just so much disconnect between climate stuff and unions or everyday workers’ stuff. This is something that also a lot of academics love to talk about, how disconnected climate work is from unions. But that's not the issue here, because they are suffering those things. But just because they're in a union doesn't mean they also have the class consciousness. Right now an IBEW electrician makes so much more money than a person who's flipping burgers at McDonald's. They're not the same; this is the fragmentation of the working class. 

A lot of the stuff that you read either becomes clearer every day at work when you start talking to workers on a regular basis, or it just seems laughable. Why would people even think that? It happened to me months ago. I was like, Oh my God, this is not what I had expected, what is going on? Why aren't people up in arms and marching to management's office? But even in the militant unions, there's a lot of work that needs to be done internally to then turn people out. And they're constantly under threat. The whole labor movement in America has been on the back foot for decades now. The Reagan administration and Taft-Hartley and stuff like that, all of which I learned in the last year or so. You read about labor union density at its lowest, blah blah blah, but what does it actually mean in the workplace? You don't get it until you start working with people who are every day facing this issue. The boss can literally do that? They can just fire you on the spot and then you have to fight back for six months to get your job back? That's where the labor laws are! That's insane! So when you see that in practice, it really changes your conception of what actually organizing is, and how we can better formulate stuff. 

How has that experience in your day job with organized labor changed how you view making the sorts of broad societal changes we need, or how to approach it?

It's not separate from stuff that I talk to my comrades about with the Green New Deal campaign, or the stuff that I read. It all comes together in some sort of coherent view. But my thinking is that it's still true that organized labor is one of the greatest threats to the status quo or capitalism in general. But how do we organize the labor force? I don't know what the chances are of a general strike, honestly, because there's a lot of fragmentation in the working class. The second thing is, historically, manufacturing workers or industrial workers had a lot of power. Those are the powerful unions, UAW, IBEW, stuff like that. IBEW is still going to be very relevant, but some of the unions are going to lose relevance. I think Gabe Winant has a really good analysis of this; the current average worker in America right now is probably a Black nurse who is making at least 50 to 60 grand. So when you look at that analysis, where is power? Where do we want to build power? Because manufacturing is on the decline, industrial economies are stagnating. But the service sector, that's growing, and healthcare is one of the largest sectors in America. So one of the reasons why I was very excited to join this union is because I feel like healthcare workers, especially nurses, and—given the conjuncture we're in—teachers, organized in a militant way can put some serious pressure in the capitalist machinery. 

So we need to be able to connect those things to broader climate issues. I think that's why the Green New Deal for Public Schools campaign was so amazing, because in the pandemic, what came out and is still true, is that the sights of social reproduction—for example, school—is at the same time a class struggle. Also it's a cultural struggle. So it's not a divide; it's not identity politics versus class struggle, it's literally the same thing. Because property taxes are tied to schools, there are parents who are super rich who are trying to enforce their cultural hegemony through school boards onto teachers’ unions. You have rich parents who have the time and the money to influence this, in a site of class struggle where teachers as a union are fighting against an administration who don't want to give them ventilation, don't want to give them higher pay, don't want to give them PPE. And on top of that, they're saying, “So sorry, you can't teach anything about race now because of parents.” Those things all come together on that same spot.

I understand why logistics is considered to be a big choke point, but I think that schools and healthcare facilities are also big choke points for fighting against capitalism. But what is the way to connect those to the larger climate thing, instead of just saying carbon emissions? In production, in manufacturing, everything is about emissions—which is very important, I understand that—but it has gotten to the point where it is an abstract. You wrote an excellent article about this.

We need to look at these sites because the service sector is so big in America right now. With Starbucks organizing, it has gained a lot more focus and spotlight. But also healthcare, teachers, these are also places for climate struggles; we shouldn't give them up. Chicago’s militant caucus, the working educator caucus in Philadelphia, LA has a rank-and-file caucus that is super militant, this bargaining for the common good which has been in practice in some places for a while. Those are vehicles that we need to start incorporating, and trying to talk to people about why this is important. Why is climate a problem when you go to work at this hospital? What does the climate crisis have to do with this? 

I have not had much success, because like I said, every day you go into the workplace and you're always on the back foot, you're always playing defense. Unless you go to bargaining. At the bargaining table, that's when the boss is forced to recognize you as an equal. I'll give you an example. There's this really shitty hospital that I work in. Their bosses are super anti-union. It's a small bargaining unit, like 100 people. And they are just the most nasty bosses you can imagine. They just fire people. But in bargaining last year, there were seven people on their side, and we had 25 people. They wouldn’t even have to say anything, because they knew: all these workers there, if they walk out, then their hospital is fucked, and they're going to have to spend thousands of dollars hiring scabs. That's really the flex, and imagine that but magnified. That's what I'm talking about, that's the power we need. To be able to feel that flex and say that yes, we are going to fuck shit up, but in a way that holds people accountable and makes good change. That's been my experience working for a nurses’ union, is that I have been able to feel—in a very small way—what it would mean to wield power.

That's cool. So you left academia, but you're kind of putting your toe back in. You’ve got this new course, you’re Associate Faculty at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Tell me about that.

So I heard about the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research from a friend of mine. She was taking these courses and she was like, “Yo, this is very cool. There's a bunch of lefty academics who are offering these courses, and they have very good analysis and it's a very interesting palette of courses.” They were looking for a natural sciences faculty, and I said, “Well this would help me out in both ways, because I would have a full time job and I wouldn't have to rely on academia for my day-to-day living or my health insurance.” I am so grateful for PASNAP to give me more than a living wage and health insurance that actually works. So this is the best of both worlds.

They were gracious enough to offer me a spot. The first thing, of course, that I wanted to teach was the cancer-industrial complex. In 2018, I wrote a series of short articles because I was having a lot of conversations with my cohort in grad school about cancer. I was also learning a lot more about the tissue organization field theory, about why the somatic mutation theory cannot explain a lot of the things in cancer biology, then tracking the history of how cancer research became this way. And just looking at cancer drug prices. My family has had cancer deaths, I know a lot of people who have known people who have died of cancer. But the big thing that stands out is it has gotten to the point where there's something called financial toxicity, where [because of] the price of cancer drugs, reducing the cancer treatment actually reduces your mortality rate. This is one of the most fucked up things that you can imagine, that in a healthcare system where the treatment that’s supposed to save your life actually is killing you faster. 

So I dove into that and I created a series of articles. That was sort of an amateur effort now that I look back on it, but it was more of a product of passion because I wanted to make a point. But I don't think I was wrong, it's just now I have read a lot more and constructed it in a more organized manner to be able to talk to people and point out all these inconsistencies and fallacies. Ultimately, it is capitalism, but when you tell people, they're always going to say, “Well, what's the other way? What's the alternative to this?” That's always an outstanding question, because there are interventions you can do. For example, there's Medicare for All, cheapening drug prices, exercising the precautionary principle for environmental toxins.

But fundamentally it's an intellectual problem, because the way you understand cancer also dictates the way you think of its solutions. If you think cancer is a genetic disease that puts the onus on the individual, that means you can blame the individual, create a drug that they might take for a long time, and then when they don't get cured, they're like, “Okay, it's not society's problem.” But if you think of cancer as a disease where the epithelium has lost connection to its stroma, then there is a bigger question there: why are things so fucked up to that point where we're having this problem? Then you have to start asking, why are we studying this wrong? Or what exactly is going on? How do we prevent it rather than thinking of a cure? Because a cure in a lot of senses becomes a source or opportunity for profitability. So we don't have to fix how things are, we're just going to make a cure and we have the best of both worlds: we don’t have to stop the chemicals from flowing or we don't have to stop our practices of exposing people to carcinogens. But to fundamentally transform society in a way where people are less likely to get cancer, that's a huge lift.

That's why the problem was a lot larger, but also there are interventions that you can take, and the idea of the course is to sort of build towards that. What is the problem with cancer, the industry? And then to break it down from the point where you take the drug to how the drugs were developed. So the problem, the cancer trials, the basic science, and then what is the intellectual issue at hand. That’s my promo. [laughs]

How are you thinking about the present moment and present political conditions? Which are challenging, to say the least, with a variety of escalating crises and a lack of power, as you alluded to. What do you think we should be doing right now to build the movements, to build power, to change all this stuff?

One, stay off Twitter. Two, talk to as many people as you can. For a long time, I was afraid of that. How do you even talk to a union person? They're just going to be like, “Oh, you're an organizer? Fuck you.” [laughs] That's not really how it happens. I think these are also very interesting times in the sense we're able to test strategies in a real way because there's an appetite for it. But it's also very difficult to not feel demoralized, and I think that's something that we run against in DSA every day. More and more, capacity is an issue, where people say, “We need to do all these things!” But people are just burned out. So what we really need to do is think about: how do we get people back in? What energizes them? What would it take for one person to say, “Yes, I'm going to fight for somebody that I don't know,” to quote the famous Bernie Sanders video, and what is that going to take? That's really what we need to ask. How can you bring people back into organizing and not just burn out having deep fights about “this is the strategy” or “that is the strategy.” If you have enough people committed to a particular goal, you can test different strategies. The goal is to have enough people to do those things. That’s really where it should be.