Podcasts about Cooperation Jackson

This week on Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff examines a major labor strike unfolding in California, where 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health workers are fighting for better conditions. Next, we break down how tariffs function as an economic weapon, undermining the living standards of U.S. workers. Finally, Professor Wolff sits down with Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, to discuss Trump's controversial "restoration" agenda and the growing resistance against it. Kali Akuno is the co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, a network of worker cooperatives and community-led programs that sustain and grow a democratic, just, and sustainable economy in Jackson, MS. Among these programs is the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust, which enables community members to collectively steward the land and creates opportunities for affordable property ownership.   The d@w Team Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff is a DemocracyatWork.info Inc. production. We make it a point to provide the show free of ads and rely on viewer support to continue doing so. You can support our work by joining our Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/democracyatwork Or you can go to our website: https://www.democracyatwork.info/donate   Every donation counts and helps us provide a larger audience with the information they need to better understand the events around the world they can't get anywhere else. We want to thank our devoted community of supporters who help make this show and others we produce possible each week.1:01 We kindly ask you to also support the work we do by encouraging others to subscribe to our YouTube channel and website: www.democracyatwork.info

Grounding Our Purpose https://www.blackagendareport.com/grounding-our-purpose-second-national-black-radical-organizing-conference  INDIANAPOLIS, IN – April 7, 2025 – The Second National Black Radical Organizing Conference (NBROC) will convene approximately 500 Black/African/New Afrikan organizers from Friday, May 30th to Sunday, June 1st, 2025, at Butler University in Indianapolis, IN. This crucial gathering aims to build collective political power, advance revolutionary strategies, and craft a liberated future beyond capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Inspired by the historic 1972 National Black Political Convention, this year's conference, themed “Base-Building for Collective Power,” will focus on skill-building, political clarity, and fostering a movement rooted in self-determination, solidarity, and transformative change in the fight against fascism. A significant component of the conference will be a call to action regarding the Pendleton 2. What: Second National Black Radical Organizing Conference (NBROC) - Action for Pendleton 2 When: May 30 - June 1st, 2025 Where: Butler University, Indianapolis 1000 W 42nd St, Indianapolis, IN 46208 Indianapolis, IN Who: Featuring representatives from: the Black Alliance for Peace, Community Movement Builders, National Black Liberation Movement, Black Men Build, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Cooperation Jackson, and more to be announced. Why: To build collective political power, advance revolutionary strategies, and craft a liberated future beyond systems of oppression. The conference aims to address critical issues facing Black communities and strategize for transformative change. A specific action will be called for in regards to the Pendleton 2.

Comrade Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson speaking live at Leftblocs annual Féile, Scoil Chois Claí 2024 on the beautiful island of Lusty Beg.

This is an (almost) unedited version of our livestream with Kali Akuno from this morning (11/10/24) Here Kali Akuno offers thoughts on where we go from here after the re-election of Trump. Our previous video discussion with Kali Akuno provides more of the nuts and bolts of the type of organizing he's callling for, but this conversation underscores the urgency of this program now that we are in the reality (at least in terms of electoral politics and control of government) that he predicted would come to pass.  Kali Akuno is a cofounder and codirector of Cooperation Jackson. He was the director of special projects and external funding in the mayoral administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus in this role was supporting cooperative development, the introduction of eco-friendly and carbon reduction methods of operation, and the promotion of human rights and international relations for the city. Akuno has also served as the codirector of the U.S. Human Rights Network, and the executive director of the Peoples' Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) based in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina. He was a cofounder of the School of Social Justice and Community Development (SSJCD), a public school serving the academic needs of low-income African American and Latino communities in Oakland. Previous episodes with Kali Akuno: Shifting Focus: Organizing for Revolution, Not Crisis Avoidance  "And Another Phase of Struggle Begins" - Kali Akuno and Kamau Franklin on Strategy and Liberation To support our work, become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism To join our discord

Today we venture into the heart of Hull, where the seeds of change are being sown by the hands of ordinary people. Gully Bujak, our guest this week, is a force of nature who, since her awakening to the climate crisis in 2018, has channeled her energy into the creation of Cooperation Hull, a beacon of participatory democracy and local empowerment.Drawing inspiration from the groundbreaking work of Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, Gully and her team have set their sights on the city of Hull, a place where political disengagement and socioeconomic challenges have forged a community ripe for change. With the lowest voter turnout in the UK and facing threats from climate change, Hull's residents are finding their voice through the innovative approach of neighborhood assemblies.Gully shares the powerful story of how these assemblies are not just meetings but crucibles of collective wisdom, where residents from all walks of life come together to listen, to speak, and to find common ground. From the facilitation of respectful dialogue to the co-creation of community-driven initiatives, these gatherings are rekindling the art of conversation and the flame of active citizenship.As we listen to Gully's journey from Extinction Rebellion activist to a catalyst for grassroots transformation, we are reminded that the future is not a distant dream but a living reality being woven by the hands of those who dare to act. Cooperation Hull is more than an organization; it's a movement, a call to action for communities everywhere to reclaim their power and shape the world from the ground up.For listeners who feel the pull to be part of this unfolding story, who yearn to see their own neighborhoods awaken to their potential, this episode is an invitation to step into the arena of change. Be inspired by the vision of Cooperation Hull, and consider what it would mean to ignite a similar spark in your corner of the world.Gully's Bio: Gully Bujak is an activist and community organizer who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of a just and sustainable future. From her early days with Extinction Rebellion to her current role at the helm of Cooperation Hull, Gully embodies the spirit of resilience and hope. Her commitment to direct democracy and local empowerment is not only changing the landscape of Hull but also serving as a model for others to follow.For those eager to learn more and to connect with the movement, visit the show notes for links to Cooperation Hull, upcoming assemblies, and resources to fuel your journey into community-led revolution. Tune in, be inspired, and join the wave of change that starts right at your doorstep.Cooperation Hull https://www.cooperationhull.co.uk/Cooperation Jackson https://cooperationjackson.org/Jackson Rising Redux - NEW Book https://cooperationjackson.org/announcementsblog/2023/3/2/jackson-rising-redux-out-nowGuardian Article re the HSBC Action and Acquittal https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/20/windows-major-bank-jury-climate-crisisGiroscope https://giroscope.org.uk/Accidental Gods Gatherings https://accidentalgods.life/gatherings-2024/

This week's guest is one of those who understands the nuts and bolts - the iniquities - of the current system - and has ideas of how we can shape something better from the hot mess of corruption and greed in which we're mired. Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune Magazine and author of several books, including 'Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom' in which she  peels back the layers of our economic system, exposing the stark realities hidden beneath the veneer of 'free markets' and 'democratic' institutions.Grace's journey from the New Statesman to the frontlines of political commentary has equipped her with a unique vantage point to critique the fusion of state and corporate power, illuminating the dark corners of corporate greed and government complicity. With a narrative as gripping as a thriller, she exposes the corruption that led to tragedies like the Boeing 737 MAX crashes and the grim theatre of financial crises.In our conversation, Grace challenges the notion that some are born to rule while others to be ruled, advocating for a new democratic settlement that truly empowers people. She shares inspiring examples from Blaenau Ffestiniog to Cooperation Jackson, highlighting communities that are redefining resilience and self-governance. Her call to action is clear: it's time to question, to demand, and to actively participate in shaping a future that is just, equitable, and truly democratic.As we navigate the most critical moment in human history, Grace's insights are not a roadmap toward a world where the many, not the few, hold the power. For anyone feeling the weight of our current system's failures, this episode is a clarion call to join hands, make your voice heard, and be part of the collective effort to weave a future we can all be proud of.For those ready to dive into the mechanics of Grace's analysis and to explore the potential of a society reimagined, visit her website for links to her other books and to upcoming events. Grace's Bio: Grace Blakeley is a staff writer at Tribune magazine, author, and a prominent voice in economic and political commentary. Her work has taken her from the New Statesman to BBC Question Time, and now to the forefront of the movement challenging the entrenched powers of capitalism. With a sharp wit and a clear vision, Grace is not only dissecting the present but also sowing the seeds for a future where democracy and economic justice are not just ideals but realities.https://graceblakeley.co.uk/

February 1, 2024 In honor of the 2024 Black History Month theme of African Americans and the Arts, Vernon interviews Kali Akuno, co-founder and Director and Cooperation Jackson. Vernon and Kali discuss new initiatives of Cooperation Jackson, and how the organization has used "the Arts" to inform and promote co-ops. Kali Akuno is an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice. He is also a co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson, which is an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions. Cooperation Jackson is fighting to create economic democracy by creating a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, MS that will help transform Mississippi and the South. Previously, Kali served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus was supporting cooperative development, sustainability, human rights and international relations. Kali is also the co-editor of "Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present" and "Jackson Rising: the Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, MS". He is the author of numerous articles and pamphlets including "the Jackson-Kush Plan: the Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy", "Until We Win: Black Labor and Liberation in the Disposable Era", "Operation Ghetto Storm: Every 28 Hours report" and "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense". You can find more information about Cooperation Jackson at www.CooperationJackson.org

Episode 244 of RevolutionZ has as our guest, Kali Akuno - the co-founder and director of Cooperation Jackson. He shares with us the  story of their network, a web of worker cooperatives and solidarity economy support institutions working together to make economic democracy a reality in Jackson, Mississippi and beyond.Support the show

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn is joined by author and activist, Michael Novick. They talk about just how horrible fascism really is. Thankfully, there's a simple solution, antifascism. Michael talks about their work with Anti-Racist Action Network, the Turning The Tide newspaper, and his newest book with Oso Blanco, The Blue Agave Revolution. Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Guest Info Michael (he/they) and The Blue Agave Revolution can be found at www.antiracist.org If you want to take over the Turning The Tide newspaper, find Michael at antiracistaction_ la@yahoo.com Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Michael Novick on Antifascism Inmn 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host Inmn Neruin and I use they/them pronouns. This week we are talking about something that is very scary and, in terms of things we think about being prepared for, something that is far more likely to impact our lives than say, a zombie apocalypse. Or I mean, we're already being impacted by this. It is actively killing us. But, if I had to choose between preparing for this and preparing for living in a bunker for 10 years, I would choose this. Oh, golly, I really hope preparing for this doesn't involve living in a bunker for 10 years, though. But the monster of this week is fascism. However, there's a really great solution to fascism...antifascism. And we have a guest today who has spent a lot of their life thinking about and participating in antifascism. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And so here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [Singing the words like a cheesy melody] Inmn 02:00 And we're back. And I have with me today writer and organizer Michael Novick, co founder of the John Brown Anti Klan Committee, People Against Racist Terror, Anti-racist Action Network, the TORCH Antifa network and White People For Black Lives. Michael, would you like to introduce yourself with your name, pronouns and kind of...I guess like your history in anti-racist, antifascist struggles and a little bit about what you want to tell us about today? Michael 02:34 Sure. Thanks, Inmn. So yeah, Michael Novick. Pronouns he or they. I've been doing anti-racist and antifascist organizing and educating and work for many many decades at this point. I'm in my 70s. I got involved in political activism in kind of anti-war, civil rights, student rights work in the 60s. I was an SDS at Brooklyn College. And I've been doing that work from an anti white supremacist, anticapitalist, anti-imperialist perspective. And I think that particularly trying to understand fascism in the US context, you have to look at questions of settler colonialism. And, you know, people sometimes use the term racial capitalism. I think that land theft, genocide, enslavement of people of African descent, especially is central to understanding the social formation of this country. I was struck by the name of the podcast in terms of "live like the world is ending," because for a long time, I had an analysis that said that the fear of the end of the world had to do with the projection of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie feels that its rule is coming to an end and therefore thinks the world is coming to an end, but the world will get on fire without the bourgeoisie and the rulers and the imperialists. Except that because of the lease on life that this empire has gotten repeatedly by the setbacks caused by white and male supremacy and the way it undermines people's movements, the bourgeoisie is actually in a position to bring the world to an end. I think that's what we're facing is a global crisis of the Earth's system based on imperialism, based on settler colonialism, and exploitation of the Earth itself. And so I think it's not just preparing for individual survival in those circumstances. We have to think about really how we can put an end to a system that's destroying the basis for life on the planet. And so I think that those are critical understandings. And the turn towards fascism that we're seeing across the...you know, Anti-Racist Action's analysis has always been that fascism is built from above and below and that there are forces within society. I think particularly because settler colonialism is a mass base for fascism in this country, as well as an elite preference for it under the kind of circumstances that we're looking at, in which, you know, as I said the basis for life itself has been damaged by imperialism, capitalism, and its manifestations. And so the need for extreme repressive measures, and for genocidal approaches, and exterminationist approaches are at hand. So, I think that, again, I think that the question of preparation is preparation for those kinds of circumstances. I think we're living in a kind of low intensity civil war situation already, in which you see the use of violence by the State, obviously, but also by non state forces that people have to deal with. So I think that that's the overall approach that I think we need to think about. And that comes out of, as I said, decades of doing work. I think that there are a few key things that we have to understand about this system, which is that it's not just issues that we face, but there is an enemy, there is a system that is trying to propagate and sustain itself that is inimical to life and inimical to freedom. And that if we want to protect our lives and the lives of other species and if we want to protect people's freedom going forward, we have to recognize that there's an irreconcilable contradiction between those things and between the system that we live in. So that's kind of a sobering perspective. But, I think it's an important one. Inmn 06:20 Yeah, yeah, no, it is. And it's funny, something that you said, kind of made a gear turn in my head. So, you know, normally, yeah, we do talk about in preparing to live like the world is dying, we do usually come at it from this context of that being a bad thing that we need to prepare for bad things to happen. But, the way you were talking about like fascism and empire and stuff, I suddenly thought, "Wait, maybe we should live like that world is dying and like there is something better ahead." Because, you know, we do like to approach the show from...I feel like we like to talk about the bad things that are happening and could happen but also the hopefulness and like the brighter futures that we can imagine. Michael 07:15 I think that's right. And I think it's really important to have both of those understandings. I think that, you know, people do not actually get well organized out of despair. I think they do, you know, you want to have...You know, there used to be a group called Love and Rage. And you have to have both those aspects. You have to have the rage against the machine and the rage against the system that's destroying people, but you have to have the love, you have to have that sense of solidarity and the idea of a culture of not just resistance but a culture of liberation and a culture of solidarity. And I think that, you know, there's a dialectic between the power of the State and the power of these oppressive forces and the power of the people and to the extent that the people can exert their power and to the extent that we can free ourselves from the, you know, the chains of mental slavery is...[Sings a sort of tune] you hear in reggae, you know, that actually weakens the power of the State and the power of the corporations. And they [the State] understand that sometimes better than we do. So there is, you know, there's some lessons I feel like I've learned and one of them is that every time there is a liberatory movement based out of people's experiences and the contradictions that are experienced in their lives, whether it's the gay liberation movement, women's liberation movement, or Black liberation and freedom struggle, there's always an attempt by the rulers to take that over and to reintegrate it into, you know, bourgeois ways of thinking. And, you know, people talk about hegemony and the idea that ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, and I think that, you know, I've seen it happen over and over again with different movements. And so, you know, I was involved with the Bay Area gay liberation in the 80s and, you know, one of the things that happened there is that you saw very quickly a different language coming up and different issues coming up. And so suddenly the question of gays in the military was put forward, or we have to be concerned about the fact that gay people have to hide when they're in the military, and the question of normalizing gay relationships in the contract form of marriage came forward. And those were basically efforts to circumscribe and contain the struggle for gay liberation and to break down gender binaries and stuff within the confines of bourgeois conceptions of rights and bourgeois integration into militarism and contractual economic relationships. And you saw that over and over again in terms of the Women's Liberation Movement, and then all of a sudden you've got bourgeois feminism and white white feminism. And I think that that's really important to understand because it means that there's a struggle inside every movement to grasp the contradiction that...and to maintain a kind of self determined analysis and strategy for how that movement is going to carry itself forward in opposition to what the rulers of this society--who rely heavily on, as I say, white supremacy, male supremacy, settler colonialism, and its manifestations--to try to contain and suppress insurrectionary...And you see the same thing within the preparedness movement. There's the dominant politics of the preparedness movement I think that I've seen over many years are actually white supremacist. They're maintaining the homestead of settler colonial land theft. So you have to understand that that's a contradiction in that movement that has to be faced and overcome and struggled with. I think having an understanding is critical to really trying to chart a path forward that will kind of break...create wedge issues on our side of the of the ledger, so to speak, and begin to break people away from identification with the Empire, identification with whiteness, identification with privilege. And, you know, one of the issues I've had over a long time, for example, what I struggle for is people's understanding about the question of privilege. You know, I come out of the...as I said, there were struggles in the 60s and early 70s about what we called white skin privilege. And I think that it's critical to understand that privilege functions throughout the system all the time. It's not a burden of guilt, it's a mechanism of social control. And anything you have as privilege can be taken away. Privilege is a mechanism of actually obtaining consent and adherence to...You know, parents use privileges with their kids to try to get their kids to do what they want. Teachers use privilege with students to get the students to do what they want, Prison guards use privileges with prisoners to get the prisoners to follow the rules and stay incarcerated. And so, you know, that's a mechanism of Imperial domination, of settler colonialism, and certainly within that context. So, it's not an illness or a...It's not something to be guilty about. It's something to contend with and deal with and understand that if there are things you have as privileges that you think are used by right or by merit, you're deluding yourself and you can't actually function facing reality. So when you understand that they are privileges, you understand that they're there to obtain your consent and your adherence, and your compliance, your complicity, your complacency, and then you have to actually resist those privileges or turn those privileges into weapons that you can use to actually weaken the powers that be. And I think that that approach is important to understand that, you know...I used to do a lot of work with people in the Philippines struggle, and they talked about the fact that, you know, on some of the...outside the US Army bases that were imposed in the Philippines, there was a rank order of privilege, like where people could dig in the garbage dumps of the US military to get better quality stuff that was being thrown out by the military. And so that kind of hierarchy and sense of organizing people by by hierarchy, by privilege, is how the system functions at every level. In the workplace they find different privileges that people have to try to divide workers from each other and get people to struggle for privilege as opposed to actually struggle for solidarity and resistance and a different world. And I think that having that understanding begins to free people. Steven Biko was the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa that really helped propel it moving forward. One of the things he said is that, "The greatest weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the minds of the oppressed." And, you know, I think to the extent that we can start to free our minds of these structures, we can actually begin to weaken the oppressor and strengthen the struggling and creative powers and energies of people to really build a different world. Inmn 14:00 Yeah, yeah. Sorry, this is gonna seem like a silly question because it feels very basic. But, I love to kind of break things down into their base levels. But, what is fascism? Michael 14:11 Yeah, good question. I think that an important analysis of fascism that I came across is from Cesare Amè. And what he said is that, "Fascism is the application in the metropole (of the colonizing power) of the methods of rule that have been used in the colonies." I think that that has a critical understanding because, as I said, the US is a separate colonial system, so elements of fascism have always been present within the political, economic, and social structure of the United States because they're internally colonized people and stolen land. So, if you're looking at elements of fascism, there's hyper masculinity, there's hyper nationalism, there's obviously slave labor, there's incorporation of a mass base into kind of a visceral identification with a leader. And all of those things really have manifest themselves in US history before we used the term, "fascism." And so, the US is based on land theft, on genocide, on exterminationist policies towards the indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, and also on the incorporation of a mass base based on settler colonialism and the offering of privileges to a sector of the population to say, "Okay, you know, we're going to participate along with the rulers in this system." And so I think that it's important to get that understanding because people often think that fascism is an aberration or it's a particularly extreme form of dictatorial rule or something like that. But I think that it's really a way of trying to reorganize people's personalities around their role within an empire and within, you know, it's trying to control the way people think, and control the way people see themselves in relation to other people. And so, you know, that's why I think that idea that fascism is built from above and below is important because we do see fascist elements that have some contradictions with the state. And we've seen, for example, in January 6th. You know, the government has gone after certain of these elements because they have moved too quickly. Or, the same way that there were premature antifascists during the World War II period and they went after the people in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Sometimes there are sort of premature proto-fascist in this society that have contradictions with the State, and they're operating somewhat independently. So, you know, I think that it's important to understand that and that there are elements in the State and within the different sections of the State that have their own operative plan. So, you know, when you look at the question of police abuse and police brutality, there's one approach to it that certain elements in the State take, which is about command and control. They want to make sure that they control the police forces and that individual officers are not acting independently but are carrying out cohesive state strategies. At the same time, there are elements within law enforcement that are trying to organize individual cops for organized white supremacy. And, it's the same thing in the military. And so there are contradictions there that we have to be aware of, but at the same time, they're operating within a framework of settler colonialism, of organized white supremacy, So, one of the things that's come up recently, for example, is this idea that there...how can there be non-white white supremacists? And, you know, I think it has to do with the fact that it's not just your identity, or your racial identity that's there but who do you...What's your identification? Are you identifying with the Empire? Are you identifying with the bourgeois? Are you identifying with the settler colonial project that has shaped, really, the whole globe over the course of half a millennium? Or, are you identifying with the indigenous? Are you identifying with the struggling people? And it's less a...It's not a question of your particular skin color but which side of the line are you on? Inmn 18:12 How does attempts by the State or by society to kind of like assimilate various oppressed people into the Empire? Like, how does that kind of factor factor into this? Michael 18:24 Well, if you look at the history of, let's say, Central America is one case in point, that there were fascist forces in Central America and their base was not really within their own society. Their base was within the Empire. And so, you had death squads operating, you had mercenaries operating, you had contras [counter revolutionaries] operating in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, carrying out genocidal policies, in many cases, against indigenous people and people of African descent within their own societies. And so, you know, that's not exactly fascism in the same way, but it certainly is aspects of police state and death squad activity that has to be resisted. So I think that, you know, when you see Enrique Tarrio and some of these people that are, quote unquote, "Hispanic," operating as proto-fascists with the Proud Boys or these other formations in the United States that's a manifestation of the same thing, that there are people who have identified themselves with a system of white supremacy and a system of domination, a system of exploitation, and they're trying to make their own individual piece with it and they have collective mechanisms that reinforce that. And they see...So, you know, I think that the fascism has presented itself at times as a decolonizing element in Latin America and Asia and other places where...For example, when the Japanese Empire was trying to strengthen itself and formed an alliance with Italian fascism and German Nazism, they also presented themselves in Asia as liberators of Asia from European colonialism. And, you know, then they carried out atrocities of their own in China, Indochina, and Korea. So, I think that nobody is exempt from this. It's not a genetic factor. It is what ideology...What's the organizing principle that people are operating under to form their society and generate their power? If that's militaristic, if it's hierarchical, if it's exploitative, then regardless of what the skin tone of somebody carrying that out is, it can be fascistic in its nature. Inmn 20:44 Yeah, I like something that you said earlier, which I think is an interesting frame. So, I feel like people in the United States, you might hear people like, talk about the rise of fascism, or the like, emergence of fascism, as if it's this new thing, you know? And I like how you read it, in the formation of the United States as a nationalistic identity with this idea that fascism has always been here, fascism has always been a part of the settler colonial project of the United States. Michael 21:27 Well, I was gonna follow up that is if you look at the countries in which fascism came to power in Europe, they were mainly countries where they felt they were not adequate empires in their own right. In other words, Spain, even Portugal, France, England, you know, had empires. Germany came late to imperialism. And even to the formation of a German state, the German bourgeoisie was not able to really unify all the Germans into a single nation. Same thing with Italy. Italy was, you know, a bunch of kind of mini states and city states and came late to the formation of a national sense of Italy. And so I think that fascism presented itself as a overarching ideology that could galvanize a nation and launch it into an imperial mode where it could compete with other empires. So the US context is a little different because, as I say, from the very beginning it had that element of settler colonialism and cross-class alliance in which not only the bourgeoisie but even working people could be induced to participate in that project of land theft and genocide. There's a famous book called "How the Irish Became White" by Noel Ignatiev who talked about, you know, how white supremacy affected Irish workers. And what he didn't really look at was that there was some Irish involved right from the very beginning and trying to overturn the land relationships between settlers. They wanted, you know, there was a land theft and a land hunger that they had, and so, for example, even before the question of relation between Irish workers and Black workers came up, there were Irish in the United States that wanted to overturn the agreements that had been reached in Pennsylvania between the Quakers and the indigenous people in Pennsylvania. The Irish wanted land and they wanted to participate in taking that land from the native people. And then that had repercussions back in Ireland itself because that the US Empire and those land thefts then affected the consciousness of the Irish within Ireland itself and weaken the Irish struggle for independence from British colonialism because there was a safety valve of the US Empire. And so I think that it's critical to look at these things because it gives us a sense of what is at stake at different times and what's at issue. And I think that looking at the question of decolonization, looking at the question of solidarity and unity, is the flip sides to this. If we only look at the power of the bourgeois, if we look at the power of the fascists, it can be intimidating or overwhelming or depressing. And I think that that's the...You know, when you talk about preparedness and some of these things, you're talking about what are the generative powers of the people themselves because Imperialism and Capitalism are based on a kind of parasitical relationship. They're extracting wealth from the Earth itself and from the labor of people and turning it into a power over the Earth and over the people. And I think that understanding that actually all that wealth that the system has, all the power that the system has is actually coming out of the people who are oppressed and exploited in the land gives us a sense of what our own powers are and what our own capacity to be creative and generative are. To the extent we exercise those, it weakens them. And I think that that's a critical understanding. Inmn 25:16 Yeah. Are there ways that fascism is currently manifesting that feel different from say, I don't know, like 40 years ago? Michael 25:29 Well, I think the whole phenomenon of social media and the way in which they very effectively organized these Neofascist forces through the gaming...hypermasculine gaming stuff and, you know, I think...We talked a little bit about the..I think the reason that people approached me to do this podcast had to do with my essay in "¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis." And so that's a piece where I talked about, you know, some of this history of different struggles and how they...what lessons to extract from them. But the other book I've been working on and put out recently, is called "The Blue Agave Revolution: Poetry of the Blind Rebel." This was a book...I was approached by Oso Blanco, an indigenous political prisoner here in the United States who was involved with actually robbing banks to support the Zapatistas in Mexico, and he was getting "Turning the Tide," the newspaper I've been working on for many years that we send free to prisoners, and he approached me. He wanted to work on a book and he said he wanted me to work on the book with him. And he had..."The Poetry of the Blind Rebel" is a story arc and poetry arc of his work that is a story about the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, the 1910s-1920. It's kind of magical realism. But, he asked me to write some fiction. And so I wrote kind of a short story cycle of a three way fight between vampires, zombies, and humans. And the vampires are basically--I mean, it's Dracula--but, you know, there's one point where there's a woman who has been trying to grapple with this and she forms a cross with two wooden tent stakes and he kind of laughs and says, "Oh, you bought that old wive's tale. We totally integrated into the church and into the State," you know. Basically, the vampires represent the bourgeoisie because they [the bourgeoisie] are vampiric and parasitic and they have powers. The zombies in this story are a group of incels that have captured a vampire and they think that they can create a potion from vampire blood that will give them power over women and make them...you know...And instead, they turn themselves into zombies. And so then there's a sort of three way fight between the bourgeoisie on the one hand, these vampires, the fascists from below, these sort of incel zombies that have to eat brains, and then the humans who are trying to deal with both of them. And I think that that's an important understanding that, you know, there are contradictions between the vampires and zombies but they're both our enemy. And so, I think that that's an approach that we have to understand that they're....You know, it's not a simple linear equation that's going on. There's a lot of things happening. I think that the fascists from below have contradictions with the fascists above, and we can take advantage of that. And then...but, we have to understand that their, you know, it's not...I think there are weaknesses...[Trails off] Let me go back to this. You know, historically, people have talked about antifascism and anti-imperialism, and there's been an element in both of those of class collaboration. A lot of people in the anti-imperialist movement think, "Oh, well, there's a sort of a national bourgeoisie that also doesn't like the Empire and wants to exert itself. And we have to ally with them. And a lot of people in antifascist movements have thought, "Oh, well, there's, you know, bourgeois Democrats who also hate fascism," and I think that those have been weaknesses historically. And also the contradiction between people who concentrate mostly antifascism, the people who concentrate mostly on anti-imperialism has weakened people's movements. I think having a kind of overarching understanding that fascism is rooted in Empire, particularly in settler colonialism, and that there isn't a contradiction. We have to find the forces of popular resistance that will overturn both fascism and imperialism...and capitalism. And, that we have to, you know, have a self determined struggle for decolonization and recognize people's self determination in their own struggles and their own capacity to live in a different way and to begin to create, you know, the solidarity forever, we say, you know, "Build a new world from the ashes of the old." And, I think that in terms of my own work, I've tried to--although, you might think I'm aging out at this point, but I've been involved at every point that there's an upsurge in struggle. I've tried to participate in that as part of Occupy LA. And more recently, I've been involved with some of the dual power organizing that's going on. And I don't know how much your people are familiar with that, but it is a conception related to, let's say, Cooperation Jackson, in Mississippi, where they're trying to figure out ways of organizing themselves economically and also resisting the power of the State. And so I was at the Dual Power Gathering that took place in Indiana last summer and there's one on the West Coast that's coming up in the Portland area. Inmn 31:06 Yeah, could you explain what--for our listeners--what is dual power? Michael 31:11 Yeah, so dual power is the concept that we have a power and we can exercise that power, and within the framework of this contemporary society, which is so destructive, we can begin to generate and exercise that power, and that there's, as I said, a kind of dialectic between the power of the people and the power of the State, and the corporations, and the power of the fascist, and that the different prefigurative elements of the kind of society we want to live in in the future can be created now. And, that as we exercise that power, it weakens the power of the State. It weakens the power of the bourgeoisie and the power of the imperialists. I went to that Dual Power Gathering in Indiana--I mean, it's not my bio region, but I did used to live in Chicago--and I felt some affinities with it. You know, they were...To talk about the idea of, you know, what's the relationship between dual power and our three-way fight, with a different conception with what the three-way fight is, that we are having to contend with two different enemies, you know, these fascists from below and the fascist from above, the State, and corporate power, and then also right-wing elements. And I think that in terms of both of those, we have to understand what are the powers that we have to organize ourselves to, as they say, to apply the generative and regenerative powers to...So that people have a sense of what they're fighting for. It's not just anti-this and anti-that. So for example, the newspaper I've worked in for many years, "Turning the Tide," originally, we called it the "Journal of Anti-Racist Action," or "Anti-Racist Action Edcuation & Research," and then we changed the subtitle a few years ago to, "The Journal of Intercommunal Solidarity," in the sense that you have to say what you're fighting for? What are we trying to build? What are we trying to create? What are we creating? And how does that give us the capacity to continue to resist and continue to shape the future, not just react always to what they're doing but actually have a proactive, generative stance. And so, you know, people's creative cultural expressions, people's capacity to do permaculture in urban environments or many other things like that, that say, that we want to restore the biological diversity, you know. We want to restore the capacity of the soil. We want to restore the clarity of the water and the air in the process of struggling for our own liberation. And that, you know, those are things that can happen and must happen now. We can't wait for some revolution that will happen in the future in which you know, we'll create a better world. We have to start in the context and the interstices of the system in the place that people are being pulverized. And so, you know, in Los Angeles, people are involved in various kinds of mutual aid work and working with the homeless, working with people being evicted to take over homes and restore them. And I think all those manifestations, that's the question of dual power there. We're looking at the incapacity of the people ruling this society to actually meet basic human needs and we're trying to figure out how to meet them. So, I think that's where it coincides with this question of preparedness is that I think that is a sense that people have to rely on their own resources, their own energies, and understanding that there's a contradiction between the system, the way it functions, and its implications and impact on us. And it's incapacity, its powerlessness, to really protect people from the kinds of calamities it's creating, whether it's flooding, or firestorms, or, you know, all the other manifestations of this global crisis of the Earth's system that is growing out of Capitalism. We have to deal with that now. We can't wait, you know, till sometime in the future when we have, you know, "power," quote unquote, you know? We have the power to start to deal with it. Inmn 35:17 Yeah, and, I feel like there have been different ways that people have tried to do exactly that in the past. And I don't know, like, I'm thinking of a lot of the stuff that the Black Panthers were doing, like creating communities that they...like, declaring that they had power and that they had the power to build the communities that they wanted and to preserve those communities. And then they faced an incredible amount of repression, like, as much for arming themselves as for giving kids lunch and breakfast. And I'm wondering, in what ways does the State try to like...or in what ways has the State tried to destabilize dual power movements in the past? And what can we kind of expect them to do now? Or what are they doing now? Does that make sense? Michael 36:35 Yeah, I think there's always a two-pronged approach by the state. And, sometimes it's referred to as, "The carrot and the stick." You know, it's co-optation ad coercion. And so they always attempt both to control as they modify people's thinking and try to create bourgeois alternatives to liberatory thinking and liberatory organizing. And then simultaneously, they have the repressive aspects, the criminalization of those efforts. And so in relation to the Black Panther Party, for example, they were simultaneously pushing what they called Black Capitalism, and saying, "Oh, yes, you know, we'll give you, you know, we'll find the sector of Black community that can integrate into the system." And then, along with that, they were carrying out COINTELPRO, which was a war strategy of creating contradictions inside Black Liberation organizations, setting one against the other, trying to execute and/or incarcerate people who were not willing to compromise their principles. So I think we have to be aware that you're seeing the same thing go on around policing issues. You know, they constantly want to put forward different reforms and accountability measures and ways that people can participate in civilian oversight mechanisms that really don't do anything. And at the same time, they're, you know, attacking people who are doing Copwatch or groups like the Stop LAPD Spying Network, which has exposed a lot of stuff about this constantly being targeted. So, I think that those, that the two-pronged approach by the State is something we have to be very aware of. It's not only coercion and criminalization and repression, but it's also co-optation and, you know, giving people individual solutions and mechanisms that are...they call it the nonprofit industrial complex, you know, this whole mechanism of structures that are set up to get people involved in grant writing and looking to philanthropists to somehow support them in their work. And I think that trying..You know, one of the things the Black Panther Party did was it had its own self generated funding by going to the base community they were trying to organize in, talking to small shopkeepers, and talking to churches, and trying to integrate that into these Liberatory efforts. So, I think that, you know, looking at that model, when I started doing, for example, People Against Racist Terror, there were a lot of small anti-racist groups around the country and a lot of them ended up going the route of looking for grants and looking for nonprofit organizations that they could fold themselves into, and I think that that kind of denatured them. They became, you know...As opposed to being grassroots, they became board and staff organizations, and individuals would create careers out of it. And I think that that mechanism of transforming popular movements into nonprofit organizations or nongovernmental organizations that accommodate themselves to existing power structures, existing economic realities, is one of the things that we need to try to avoid happening in this current period. Inmn 40:18 That makes that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's, it's funny, because I feel like I'm seeing a lot of groups involved in mutual aid, who are, I think, taking that lesson of the nonprofit industrial complex but are also trying to access larger swaths of money than the communities that they're part of can provide, like this model of, it's important to involve your community base in those things and to generate those things ourselves, but there is this problem sometimes of like, you're passing the hat and the same 20 people are kicking into the bail fund. And I don't know, I think maybe this is just me being hopeful, but I'm seeing a lot of mutual aid groups kind of dip into grant writing or dip into utilizing nonprofit statuses more so than structures in order to access funding and things like that. But what I'm seeing is people coming at it from like, hopefully, what is a different perspective of taking these lessons of the past and being like, "Well, we don't want to become some horrifying, large nonprofit, but we do want the State to give us 10 grand so that we can build infrastructure. Like I guess my question is, are there ways to responsibly interact with that? Or is this a trap? Michael 41:57 I guess I'd have hear more details. I think it's imperative that it has to come from below and from the grassroots. I think that, you know, I've been involved with the opposite, for example, Pacifica Radio, and Pacifica is listener sponsored radio and is a constant struggle about how much can we accept cooperation of broadcasting funding. They cut us off some years ago and we're trying to get it back Or, there's struggles about trying to get some underwriting. It depends who you're accountable to for the money that you're getting. Are you accountable primarily to the funder? Are you accountable primarily to the people who are using that money and the people who are self organizing for community power and community sustainability, and, you know, some of the things we're talking about of self determined strategies. And, you know, I do think that what happened to a lot of the 60s movements is that there was an ebb in the mass movement. And then people made their separate peace. People were like flotsam and jetsam as the tide of people's power movements were negatively impacted because of white supremacy, male supremacy, COINTELPRO, and an inadequate response to deal with it. Then, you know, people ended up in labor unions where they were doing some good work, but basically they became part of a labor bureaucracy where they ended up in government social services/ They were doing some good work, but they became part of that mechanism. So, I think the critical thing is trying to keep control of what's going on in the hands of the people who are actually organizing themselves and their communities. Inmn 43:55 Yeah. No, that makes sense. What are strategies that we should be embracing for countering this current current escalation in fascist tendencies? Michael 44:10 Well, you know, I've done a lot of work over the years, and as I say, "Turning the Tide" is a newspaper, we send a couple of thousand copies almost every issue into the prisons and we're in touch with a lot of stuff that's going on in the prisons. And I think that that's a critical place to look for some understanding about how to deal with this because we do see under what are essentially very naked fascist conditions of domination inside the prisons, which are very hierarchical. There's a lot of negative activity within the prisons themselves. There's the power of the guards and the wardens in the system and yet you find struggles going on against racism, against sexism, for solidarity against the solitary confinement of people who have been victims of torture are organizing themselves. And I think that understanding of that capacity and looking at that, those are some of the leading struggles in the United States. There have been hunger strikes, there have been labor strikes, the Alabama Prisoners Movement [Free Alabama Movement] here in California and elsewhere. And I think that sense that people under the most severe repression are actually capable of making human connections among themselves and beginning to actually, in a self critical way, look at how they incorporated toxic masculinity and racism into their own approach to reality, and by beginning to purge themselves of those things, they can begin to create multiracial solidarity among all prisoners to actually resist the conditions of incarceration and resist enslavement. So I think that that's very important to look at. I think that here in Los Angeles, there are, as they say, organizations like LACAN, that are working among homeless people and with homeless people to organize themselves to have street watches. They have a community garden on the roof of a building. They have cultural expression. They have theatrical groups...coral...You know, it's like all those things connect people's love and rage, as I say, people's ability to generate creative cultural expression and to use that to strengthen their solidarity and their unity and their ability to resist the coercive power of the State or the police sweeps or to expose what's going on and begin to put out a challenge to the way that society is organized. So I think that those are some critical things. I think that having the capacity to defend ourselves, both physically and also legally is very very important. I think that if you look at stuff like the Stop Cop City struggle that the escalation of repression and the use of charges of terrorism on people that are obviously not terrorists is indicates that the State sees this as a very, very serious threat and is trying to eradicate it and is trying to intimidate people. And I think to the extent that we can turn that around and use it to say to people, you know, "Is this the kind of State you want to live in? Is this the kind of society you want to have?" is a way to begin to change minds and hearts of people who have been going along with the system. I lived through a whole period where we freed many many political prisoners. We freed Bobby. We freed Huey. We freed Angela. And, you know, even the Panther 21 in New York, you know, it's like the jury met for about 30 minutes and acquitted them all because the power of those organized forces affected the consciousness of the jurors. And I think that understanding that we actually have the power to begin to shape not just own consciousness, to ways that struggle with people, to, "Which side are you on?" and to give people a sense that there is a side that they can identify with and become part of, and transform their own lives, and transform society in the process of doing that. So, I think, you know, for example, the stuff around preparedness is vital that, you know, we're living in a world in which there are incredibly destructive wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and it's very clear that the state is incapable of even dealing with it after the fact, let alone preventing it. And so I think that gives us an opening to talk to very wide sectors of the population in cities and in rural areas as well. I think that, you know, for example, Anti-Racist Action Network in its heyday had hundreds of chapters around the country in small towns because young people were, in their own high schools and music scenes, were suddenly faced with this threat of fascism and said, "Hey, we have to get organized." And so I think that, you know, we need to see these things as opportunities to really very massively begin to engage with people and begin to offer an alternative way of thinking about the world that gives some hope and some prospect of dealing not just with the crises and the repression but a way forward for people. Inmn 49:48 Yeah, yeah. And that kind of ties into--I love that you use this phrase. We've had this phrase come up lot with Cindy Milstein, who we've interviewed on the podcast before and who we've published their newest book last year, "Try Anarchism For Life," and they talk a lot about prefigurative organizing and prefigurative spaces. And I think this kind of ties into what you're talking about, but I was wondering if you could kind of give us your take on the importance of building prefigurative spaces? Michael 50:31 Yeah, I think that we have to find ways to bring people together and to give people a sense, as I say, of our own power and our own creative and generative capacity. So I think that that says that whether it's free schools, or it's breakfast for children, or any of the things that the Black Panther Party did and that many other people of color movements did in a certain period are here at our disposal. I know that, for example, there's a crisis in childcare and child rearing that's going on and so organizing people into childcare collectives and people jointly taking responsibility for each other's children and creating trust relationships that make people feel comfortable with that would be one example of that. In food deserts, organizing people to break up some sidewalks and grow some food and I think they're...One of the things that I've come to understand from doing this work for a long time is we live in a kind of fractal or holographic world in which the same contradictions are shot all the way through the system. It's at any level of magnification in fractals. If you look at the coast of Norway, something in the fjords, you know, it's the same pattern is reproduced at every level. And, you know, in a holographic image, any piece of the hologram has the whole hologram in it. So, I think that any area that people want to choose to struggle in, I think as long as they understand that they're struggling against the entirety of the system in that area and that there's an enmity built into that relationship between the system and we see what they're trying to do, I think that's the critical understanding. So if people are engaged in, you know, community gardens, as long as they understand that that's a piece of a larger struggle to create a world in which nature has, has space to reassert itself, and that people can eat different food and better food. And any area that you know, whether it's the struggle over transgender, nonbinary, or anything else, once people see that it's the same system throughout that they're struggling with, it lays a basis for solidarity, for unity, and for a struggle on many fronts simultaneously that says, you know, sort of the "War of the Flea," [A book on guerrilla warfare] the system is vulnerable in a million places because the system is in all those places simultaneously and, you know, they have a lot of money, a lot of power to deal with that, and they're organized in these systems of command and control and artificial intelligence and all the rest of it to keep track of everything, but we're in all those places simultaneously as well because we're everywhere. And trying to coordinate those things, I think, is very important. Inmn 53:51 This is a little bit of a backup that I remembered that I wanted to ask you about it. So, like, we're currently seeing like a pretty horrific and intense wave of legislation against against trans people and against queer people, and nonbinary people. And, yeah, I'm wondering what your take on that is as a kind of indicator, if we have to imagine like fascism as a spectrum of where we could be going, like what is that kind of legislation and repression an indicator of? Michael 54:38 Yeah, you know, I think that obviously fascism always tries to target the people they think are the most vulnerable. And also, as I say, I think they want to create what they see as wedge issues that they can use to divide people and segment people off. And so I think, to the extent that we can reverse that and we can try to unite people around a different conception. You know, one of the things that struck me is that you saw that they sort of had this victory with controlling the courts and overturning Roe v. Wade, for example. And, what that revealed was actually how narrow that really was, the forces that were pushing for that. Because then, you know, Nebraska and Kansas and these various states suddenly had electoral reinforcement of abortion rights happening. And I think the same thing can happen here. I think that there's so many families that they're concerned about their own kids or...and the parental rights. It reveals that these fault lines go through the whole system. That's what I'm trying to say is all of their power is based on repression and exploitation, and to the extent that people begin to see that and how it impacts on them, it opens up the vistas of possibility to say, you know, if you're concerned about your child's right to get the medical assistance they need, why is the State coming in to prevent you from doing that? And what are the interests that are trying to pick this as a threat to the stability of society? Inmn 56:46 And, yeah. Michael 56:48 So, you know, I think that since every crisis is an opportunity, I think the other thing I did want to talk about a little bit was the whole Covid pandemic, you know, going back to the prepper thing. I think you saw, again, you know, a lot of right-wing exploitation of that issue. And I think that the extent that we can get out ahead of that and look at...Okay, for example, in a society like Cuba, which had a completely different relationship to this because they're organized in a different way and, you know, they actually have a public health system and they actually created their own vaccines, not the ones from big pharma here in this country, and begin to get people to think about that and why Cuba is stigmatized by this society? Why are they embargoing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, all these countries? You know, the connection to a global sense of what are the possibilities in the world? What are the prefigurative formations that are happening inside imperialism by countries that are actually resisting it? And so, if you look at, you know, the medical care system in Cuba, for example, you know, they have...Every neighborhood has a doctor that lives in the neighborhood--and nursing staff and other people--and [the doctor] works door to door with the people in that neighborhood to be concerned about their health and their well being not just, you know, responding to a particular medical crisis, and they have that systematized and they...So in that context, they were able to vaccinate people, not through coercive measures but through trusted people that were part of their community that could reassure them about the fact that they developed the vaccines themselves and that the Cuban pharmaceutical industry came out of their effort to deal with chemical and biological warfare by the United States. The US was like putting in swine fever as a way to destroy pigs that every family in Cuba had their own little pig to raise and, you know, supplement their food. And so they developed animal vaccines first to protect those animals and then they work their way up from there. So I think that that sense of, you know...I had a good friend recently who passed away from complications of diabetes and the Cubans have developed treatments for diabetes and to prevent amputation of limbs and other stuff. And all of that is unavailable to us because of the US imperialist embargo on Cuba and blockade. And giving people a sense that, you know, there actually are people living in the world in much better conditions. The United States is number one in incarceration, number one in many social ills, number one in overdose deaths, and, you know, on and on and on...number one in evictions. And we can begin to, you know, really give a sense to people that this system has nothing to offer them but destruction and that we have the capacity to create something different. Inmn 1:00:13 Yeah. Thanks. I have only to say that...yes. Yes to all of that. We are nearing the end...of the recording, not of the world. [Said as a dry joke] And, yeah, is there any any kind of last things that you want to say before--I'll ask you to plug anything that you want to plug at the end--I mean, that was such a beautiful wrap up, I feel like. But, if there's anything else you want to talk about, that we haven't talked about? Michael 1:00:45 Well, you know, years ago, I was part of a group in Berkeley that took over the California College of Arts and Crafts to create an anti-war poster making facility during the Vietnam War. And out of that group, there was a singing group called the Red Star Singers, and they had a song called "The Power of the People's the Force of Life." And I think we really have to have that sense. It's, you know, it is a dialectic. That's what I think the main thing I want to try to convey is that, you know, to the extent that we can build the people's power, it actually weakens that system. And, you know, just that sense that all the power that they have is actually derived from their exploitation and oppression of people. And that's our power, you know, manifest that against us. And if we take our power back, it actually does weaken them and increases our possibilities of struggling to for a different world. So, I will do the plugs. I, for 35 years, I've been working and I actually wanted to sort of break the story here. I'm looking for a collective that will take over "Turning the Tide." I've been putting it out for a long, long time. Volume 35 # 2 is just about to come out. It's up on antiracist.org. You can reach me at antiracistaction_ la@yahoo.com. But, you know, like I say, I'm 76. I'm currently the interim general manager of KPFK radio in Los Angeles and it's a huge time commitment. And I want I want to see the paper, you know, become, in some way or shape, institutionalized, to continue to meet, you know, send out the 1700-1800 copies to prisoners. And so, if anybody's interested in taking over that project and fulfilling that commitment, I'd love to hear from them. And then, as I say, I have a chapter in "¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis" edited by Shane Burley from AK Press. And I contributed a lot of material archival stuff and was interviewed extensively for "We Go Where They Go: The Story of Anti-Racist Action" from PM press. Two really, really important books and well worth reading. And then I did, self published and co-authored "The Blue Agave Revolution: The Poetry of the Blind Rebel" with Oso Blanco, Byron Shane Chubbuck. And you can get that again from Anti-Racist Action. So it's PO Box 1055, Culver City, California 90232. And online, just Antiracist.org. Inmn 1:03:27 Wonderful, in "The Blue Agave Revolution," is that Is that where we can find your short story about the three-way fight between vampires, zombies and humans? Michael 1:03:37 It's a kind of a novella. There's about seven chapters of a longer thing. And there's also a shorter one about a group of teenage mutants called Black Bloc, that they have these kind of minor powers. One of them can, you know, it's Jackpot and Crackpot. Crackpot can kind of break out of anything and Jackpot can just affect the odds slightly in their favor and a bunch of other young people, nonbinary and so on. But they're also some different essays of mine in there and a lot of poetry and, yeah...Just the mathematics of the enormity of social economic inequality. People don't understand exactly what it is, but essentially, about 45% of the US population has the equivalent of 50 cents in assets. You know, people don't understand exactly what the class divide and the contradictions inside the society are, you know. We're we're duped into thinking that this is the richest country on the face of the Earth and the most powerful, you know. There's an enormous, hidden social cost and pain behind that and we have to figure out how to galvanize that into the power that actually those people possess and the creativity that they have. Inmn 1:05:03 Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, of course. And I'll we'll drop links to all the things that you mentioned in the show notes for people to find. And yeah, thank you. Michael 1:05:23 Okay. Take care. Have a great day. Inmn 1:05:25 You too. Inmn 1:05:26 Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then go out and live like the Empire is dying. And then tell us about it. And if you'd like to support this podcast, you can do so by telling people about it. You can support this podcast by talking about it on social media, rating, and reviewing, and doing whatever the nameless algorithm calls for. But, if you'd like to support us in other sillier ways, you can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness, which is our publisher. Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness is a radical media publishing collective that puts out this podcast as well as a few other podcasts. Our Patreon helps pay for things like transcriptions or our lovely audio editor, Bursts, who is the host of The Final Straw, as well as going on to support Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness and a few of the other podcasts we put out like our monthly anarchist literature podcast Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, as well as the Anarcho Geek Power Hour, which is a podcast for people who love movies and hate cops. And we would like to give a very special shout out to a few of our Patreon subscribers, Princess Miranda, BenBen, Anonymous, Funder, Jans, Oxalis, Janice & O'dell, Paigek Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, Shawn, SJ, Paige, Mikki, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Cat J., Staro, Jenipher, Eleanor, Kirk, Sam, Chris, Michaiah, and the infamous Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much. We could not do this without you. And I hope that everyone out there is doing as well as they can right now with everything that's going on. And we'll see you soon. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

If God calls us to seek the common good of our communities—what does that mean in real life? The commons, a shared community place or resource, is a critical idea in this conversation. Even better: it's not just an idea; it's been practiced around the globe in many times and places. David Frank talks with friend and fellow housemate Brendan Johnson about the ways we could start thinking differently—really differently—about our public, private, and shared resources. Our goal is to inspire you to imagine new ways of flourishing and to open the conversation further. Shoot us a message with any comments, questions, or critiques. There's so much around this topic left to discuss! __________ Timestamps (1:21) What is “the commons”? (5:47) Commons vs., say, a public park (14:24) Seeking the common good in common life (18:59) Rights to common air, water vs. privatization (24:50) Who are “the commoners”? (30:22) Example of 3M and the (failure of) water commons (35:53) The tragedy of the commons (39:17) “Beating the bounds” (42:47) Healthcare and the mental commons (45:23) Joy and the desire to contribute (50:15) What it means to be human (53:06) The commons of communion (57:23) What we can do now __________ Links and References Our Guest Today is D. Brendan Johnson: https://linktr.ee/dbrendanjohnson "A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (The Land, 2009; link to publisher) Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher (1973, link to publisher) Christ and the Common Life by Luke Bretherton (2019, link to publisher) “The Tragedy of the Commons” by Garrett Hardin (Science, 1968; link to JStor) Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (1990, link to publisher) Podcast: "Frontiers of Commoning with David Bollier" https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/ Free, Fair, and Alive by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich https://freefairandalive.org/ Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi https://cooperationjackson.org/ Mondragon Corporation in Spain https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/en/ __________ If you like this podcast, please consider… →Sharing feedback or questions! www.podpage.com/communion-shalom/contact →Supporting us on Patreon! patreon.com/communionandshalom →Following us on Instagram! @communionandshalom — Credits Creators and Hosts: David Frank, TJ Espinoza Audio Engineer: Carl Swenson (www.carlswensonmusic.com) Podcast Manager: Elena

Mississippi is the poorest state in the US, with the highest percentage of Black people and a history of heinous racial terror. But in the heart of the state capitol, Cooperation Jackson develops Black self-determination by building solidarity economies and cooperatives, developing land into community land trusts, and an eco-socialist framework that has inspired partnership and emulation across the globe. On today's show, we explore the model that Cooperation Jackson has been building in Jackson, Mississippi, with Kali Akuno, Matt Meyer, and Saki Hall, editors of the new book Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present. Check out Cooperation Jackson's website: https://cooperationjackson.org/ —- Subscribe to this podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1637968343?to=page Get in touch: lawanddisorder@kpfa.org Follow us on socials @LawAndDis: https://twitter.com/LawAndDis; https://www.instagram.com/lawanddis/ The post Self-Determination, Solidarity Economies and Eco-Socialism in Jackson, MS appeared first on KPFA.

This is part 2 of our 2-part conversation with Felicia Denaud. In this part of the discussion Denaud talks about what the category of political prisoner might do politically, in thinking about movement building through a lens of movement defense in this moment. We also continue our conversation on her work on the Master-State Complex and thinking about the state capacity for violence and the private outsourcing of that "sovereign" power that comes about with the slave trade, plantation economy and settler colonialism. It's worth saying that this conversation happened a week before Jordan Neely was murdered, but that case also relates deeply to these dynamics described in this conversation. Denaud talks about the use of light and darkness in Fanon's work and talks about his concept of social treason as a potentially more robust language to deal with those who leverage political struggles for their own personal, political and monetary gain on the backs or at odds with the social movements that propel them to levels of power and accumulation. This is our 4th episode of the month of May. We are behind on our goal for the month and looking to add 26 more patrons this month to hit our goal. If you're able to kick in at least a $1 a month or $10.80 per year you can become a patron of the show and join the amazing community of folks who make this show possible at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism Links: Lawrence Jenkins Campaign to Free the Pendleton 2 // Our episode on this struggle “Into The Clear, Unreal, Idyllic Light of the Beginning | A Will of the Night" ­­­­­­­"we've barely begun to speak/scream/sing: on frankétienne's dézafi" Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History  Cooperation Jackson's Kali Akuno on the lessons of and the ongoing struggle in Jackson MS More on political prisoners: The Jericho Movement (political prisoners) uprisingsupport.org/ atlsolidarity.org/

This time Eric welcomes Kali Akuno back to CounterPunch to discuss the roots of Cooperation Jackson, the nature of political struggle in Mississippi, and the need to organize against the neo-confederate far right fascist movement. Kali Akuno is a co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson and author of the new book "Jackson Rising Redux: Lessons on Building the Future in the Present." More The post Kali Akuno appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

The Tom Ficklin Show Gandhi Peace Award Ceremony For Kali Akuno, Co - Founder Of Cooperation Jackson by WNHH Community Radio

It's the economy, stupid! This week, Kaleb and Terrell discuss the economy, and how the Fed's actions to raise interest rates affect the U.S. and the world. They also discuss the protests in Iran and NASA's asteroid experiment. To support the people of Jackson, check out Cooperation Jackson. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol | (house.gov). Here's how you can help the people of Ukraine: NPR Weekly episodes every Thursday. Have any questions or comments? Email us at dangerouslylikely@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram (@Dangerously_Likely) and on Twitter (@DngerouslyLikly). Please leave a review if you enjoy the show! Music produced by Rebbel. News articles sourced by: NASA DART Craft Rams Distant Asteroid in Test of Earth Defense - Bloomberg https://apnews.com/article/edward-snowden-russian-citizenship-441ab3c037b91145d17f2de2237f834d https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-elections-migration-economy-866fe6cb6a35cc96aaff064a832acaf6 https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-putin-georgia-estonia-5f0e250b65430b5f2ea9e066f3ccc44c White House Student Loan Forgiveness Could Cost About $400 Billion - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Strong Dollar Is Good for the US but Bad for the World - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Risk of Global Recession in 2023 Rises Amid Simultaneous Rate Hikes, World Bank S&P 500 Hits Lowest Level of 2022 as Global Sell-off Continues - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

This week, Torence and Terrell discuss the Queen of England and the vile stunt that Florida Governor Ron Desantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott pulled by transporting immigrants to different places across the US, like Martha's Vineyard and VP Kamala Harris' Residence in Washington, DC. Stay tuned for more takes on student loan debt relief! To support the people of Jackson, check out Cooperation Jackson. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol | (house.gov). Here's how you can help the people of Ukraine: NPR Weekly episodes every Thursday. Have any questions or comments? Email us at dangerouslylikely@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram (@Dangerously_Likely) and on Twitter (@DngerouslyLikly). Please leave a review if you enjoy the show! Music produced by Rebbel. News articles sourced by: Yeshiva (Jewish University) Suspends ALL Student Groups Reuters Reuters Associated Press Queen Elizabeth II mourned by Britain and world at funeral - Associated Press GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott send migrants to Martha's Vineyard and vice president's residence - CBS News New York City considers legal action against Texas over migrant buses - Politico Texas sends migrants to New York. They get a warm welcome, but life there is tough - NPR Texas Gov. Abbott sends 50 migrants to VP Harris' home - ABC News White House says Republican governors shipping migrants to other states is ‘reckless,' ‘shameful' - Politico Flying migrants to Massachusetts was political, critics say. But was it legal? - NPR

This week, Kaleb and Terrell discuss the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, and why something like this is still happening in America. To support the people of Jackson, check out Cooperation Jackson. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol | (house.gov). Here's how you can help the people of Ukraine: NPR Weekly episodes every Thursday. Have any questions or comments? Email us at dangerouslylikely@gmail.com. Follow us on Instagram (@Dangerously_Likely) and on Twitter (@DngerouslyLikly). Please leave a review if you enjoy the show! Music produced by Rebbel. News articles sourced by: Strike Threat on Freight Railroads Is New Supply Chain Worry - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Jackson, Mississippi, water: The water crisis has gotten so bad, the city temporarily ran out of water to give to residents - CNN The EPA is investigating the Jackson, Mississippi, water crisis as residents remain under a boil-water advisory. Here's what it would take to end it (msn.com) Water pressure restored in Jackson, Mississippi, governor and city officials say (msn.com) https://youtu.be/b-ngjHkoLT4 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna45444

Residents of West Jackson are in the midst of a severe water crisis due to the failure of a water treatment facility and don't know when they will have clean water in their homes again. The state is failing to get water to everyone, so many local groups are organizing mutual aid efforts. The governor refuses to access federal funds to fully repair the city's water infrastructure, which has been failing for decades. Clearing the FOG speaks with Kali Akuno, a co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, about the current crisis, including how the wealthy residents were spared, how it fits into the bigger picture of systemic racism and the drive to privatize, and what you can do to support efforts to build water sovereignty. For more information, visit PopularResistance.org.

Jackson, Mississippi, remains gripped in an ongoing water crisis. The task of distributing water to local residents has been largely taken up by community organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Operation Good. Organizer, writer, and educator Kali Akuno joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the current crisis is a reflection of capitalism's failures and decades of institutional racism. Though Jackson today is more than 80% Black, this is a recent demographic development created by white flight and capital flight from the city. The state's prolonged neglect of Jackson's infrastructure is a consequence of an entrenched far-right politics in Mississippi's public institutions. And what's happening currently in Jackson is a sign of things to come around the country. To fight back, Akuno emphasizes the need to build mass movements and grassroots networks capable of exercising real political power.Post-Production: Stephen FrankHelp us continue producing The Marc Steiner Show by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-mssSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-stGet The Marc Steiner Show updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-stLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

Jackson, Mississippi, remains gripped in an ongoing water crisis. The task of distributing water to local residents has been largely taken up by community organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Operation Good. Organizer, writer, and educator Kali Akuno joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the current crisis is a reflection of capitalism's failures and decades of institutional racism. Though Jackson today is more than 80% Black, this is a recent demographic development created by white flight and capital flight from the city. The state's prolonged neglect of Jackson's infrastructure is a consequence of an entrenched far-right politics in Mississippi's public institutions. And what's happening currently in Jackson is a sign of things to come around the country. To fight back, Akuno emphasizes the need to build mass movements and grassroots networks capable of exercising real political power.Post-Production: Stephen FrankHelp us continue producing The Marc Steiner Show by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-mssSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-stGet The Marc Steiner Show updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-stLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

This week: The cost of electrification The end of free COVID tests The water crisis in Jackson Minimizing cancer treatment side effects The companies selling your location data to the police Action Steps https://www.rewiringamerica.org/electrify-home-guide (Read) Rewiring America's home electrification guide, and then share it with your apartment/HOA/city council https://biobot.io/get-started/ (Use BioBot) to get your county's wastewater treatment plant access to free COVID-10 wastewater and variant testing https://cooperationjackson.org/donate (Donate) to Cooperation Jackson, a local cooperative ensuring water access for the homeless, elderly, and those with limited access to transportation https://www.alexslemonade.org/mypage/3055729 (Join) INI's Team in the "10th Annual Million Mile" from Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation https://www.wired.com/story/the-ftc-may-finally-protect-americans-from-data-brokers/ (Read) the WIRED coverage of data brokers (5m) and then https://www.eff.org/ (donate) to the EFF Get more: Get more news, analysis, and Action Steps at https://www.importantnotimportant.com/newsletter (importantnotimportant.com/newsletter) Got feedback? Email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/importantnotimp (@importantnotimp) Get fun merch at https://www.importantnotimportant.com/store (importantnotimportant.com/store) Take a nap you deserve it

Producer Dan presents an October 2017 interview with Ajamu Nangwaya and Kali Akuno from Cooperation Jackson, talking about retaking democracy for the people and how to build functional, bottom-up cooperation. Jeff Dorchen presents this week's Moment of (SUPER!)Truth, and Dan declares a winning answer to this week's Question from Hell!

We're THRILLED to return with a new season of STORIES FROM HOME: Moving the Just Transition, that grounds us in the history of environmental justice, climate justice organizing and present day Just Transitions. Each episode deep dives into different dimensions of the movement – from the importance of community-led solutions to the climate crisis, to what is a false “solution”, to how we relate to one another in just relationship– with our host Keenan Rhodes, and the climate justice leaders who serve as our guides and teachers. In this episode, we travel from Indianapolis, to Puerto Rico, North Carolina to Mississippi, California and beyond, walking through the formation of climate justice - from slavery to environmental racism and environmental justice, to economic freedom and energy democracy - with our guides Elizabeth Yeampierre, Kali Akuno, and Inkza Angeles who show us the ways in which they live and embody a relationship with land and with community that sets an example for the rest of us. Music by Monica Atkins, co-executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance. The track is titled “Love, Black, Warrior,” by Surreal. Find more of her work on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-361229213 Clips from the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit Video were provided by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice 1992 and used with permission. Learn more about UCC and watch the full video here: https://www.ucc.org/30th-anniversary-the-first-national-people-of-color-environmental-leadership-summit/ Learn more about the three CJA member organizations featured in this episode: Cooperation Jackson: https://cooperationjackson.org/ PODER: https://www.podersf.org/ UPROSE: https://www.uprose.org/

In this episode we were honored to host Kali Akuno, co-director and co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and Kamau Franklin is the founder of Community Movement Builders and a co-host at Black Power Media's Remix Morning Show.  We brought Kali and Kamau into conversation under a banner of discussing strategy. Strategy is something that Josh and I feel is both essential and often lacking within a lot of formations in the US left.  The conversation is wide-ranging and touches on a number of topics that may prompt folks to need greater context. In the show notes we will include some links to other readings and discussions with Kali and Kamau on what the Jackson plan is, why they left the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and what their current work entails.  Beyond strategy, in this episode we get into discussion of political education, neoliberal socialization, burnout, fickle organizers, reflection and criticism, Democratic Centralism, cadre and mass organizing, climate change, ecological collapse, food sovereignty, self-defense, revolutionary violence, and the capture of social movements through the nonprofit industrial complex and Democratic Party electoral politics. It is our greatest hope that conversations like this one provide folks with tools, insights and provocations that they can bring with them into their organizing efforts so that we can build more effectively going forward for the alternatives are clearly bleak and dystopian.  Both Community Movement Builders and Cooperation Jackson do accept donations. So we will also provide links to both organizations in our show notes if people would like to give them a donation. And please support Black Power Media as well.  And of course, we need your support to continue to bring you these conversations freely, and in non-commoditized form. All of our work is available ad-free and none of our episodes are behind a paywall and we hope that we can always keep it that way so that all of these conversations are freely available to organizers, activists, students, workers, the poor, and the oppressed. To support our ability to do that you can contribute to our patreon for as little as $1 a month or for a yearly contribution of just $11 a year. For more context: Cooperation Jackson's Kali Akuno on the lessons of and the ongoing struggle in Jackson MS Community Movement Builders and Liberated Zones Theory with Kamau Franklin The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle For Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi  

Since the rise of Trump in 2016 debate has increased in liberal and left political spaces pertaining to the rise of a fascist moment in America. With the election of Joe Biden in 2020, some believed the Trump threat had abated. Then on January 6, 2021, the Trump insurrection at the US Capitol building took place, alarming many Americans. With Biden's agenda not generating enthusiastic support as his poll numbers drop, the reactionary right is on the march again as recent electoral victories have served as an unfavorable referendum on Biden. Considering these current political realities, what direction should those on the left take? Should there be a popular front union with the Democratic party to challenge the reactionary right? Or is there a more radical and effective strategy?   Kali Akuno Kali Akuno is a co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson. Kali served as the Director of Special Projects and External Funding in the Mayoral Administration of the late Chokwe Lumumba of Jackson, MS. His focus in this role was supporting cooperative development, the introduction of eco-friendly and carbon reduction methods of operation, and the promotion of human rights and international relations for the city. https://cooperationjackson.org/   About TIR Thank you, guys, again for taking the time to check this out. We appreciate each and every one of you. If you have the means, and you feel so inclined, BECOME A PATRON! We're creating patron-only programming, you'll get bonus content from many of the episodes, and you get MERCH!   Become a patron now: https://www.patreon.com/join/BitterLakePresents   Please also like, subscribe, and follow us on these platforms as well, especially YouTube!   THANKS Y'ALL   YouTube: www.youtube.com/thisisrevolutionpodcast   Twitch: www.twitch.tv/thisisrevolutionpodcast & www.twitch.tv/leftflankvets   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thisisrevolutionpodcast/   Twitter: @TIRShowOakland Instagram: @thisisrevolutionoakland   Pascal Robert in Black Agenda Report: https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/PascalRobert   Read Jason's Grifters' Piece here: https://jasonmyles.medium.com/left-influencers-this-is-not-a-grift-5630ee792c25   Get THIS IS REVOLUTION Merch here: www.thisisrevolutionpodcast.com   Get the music from the show here: https://bitterlakeoakland.bandcamp.com/   Follow Djene Bajalan @djenebajalan Follow Kuba Wrzesniewski @DrKuba2

Amadou Hampâté Bâ, quoting his teacher Tierno Bokar, suggest that “writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photograph of knowledge but is not knowledge itself” [A. Hampâté Bâ, The Living Tradition, General History of Africa Vol. 1: 166]. According to Hampâté Bâ, “the world's earliest archives or libraires were the brains of men [and I must add women] … The written word is not without thought. The written word without being refined through action and interaction which is articulated through nommo is without power. Without nommo – the African conceptualization of the energy within the spoken word, the power that carries an energy that produces all life and influences everything is the principle upon which the world of meaning is built – power is debased [Nommo, Encyclopedia of African Religion, 2009]. According to Hampâté Bâ, “In African traditions … the spoken word had, beyond its fundamental moral value, a sacred character associated with its divine origin ... an exceptional conductor of magic, grand vector of 'ethereal' forces, it was not to be treated lightly. Contrary to what some may think, African oral tradition is not limited to stories and legends or even to mythological and historical tales, and the ‘griot' – what Bâ calls a wandering minstrel/poet as conceptualized by the French – is far from being its one and only qualified guardian and transmitter. What does all of this point to … for what purpose … and to what ends does this introductory exploration provide our current engagement that you will hear next … how does it connect? The simplicity of the answer is found in understanding its complexity. The simple answer is that it provides a frame within which we can identify and extract the multiple points where spirit and Black resistance converge, whether it is evident as the spark of the Haitian Revolution or found interwoven in the vibrations of John Coltrane's Love Supreme … deeper levels of spirit and Black resistance all always converging. While the complexity is found in our willingness to map its evolution and stand in its genealogy as it is sparked across space and time, evolving itself as it propels African/a peoples to intrinsically seek liberation … It is this space in between space, it is of spirit and Black liberation … one of the many places we can explore and utilize this ancient the praxis of nommo. AWNP's Tasneem Siddiqui recently sat down with Youssef Carter to discuss the interconnectedness of West African Sufi Islam and Black resistance … the embodiment of ancient ways of being articulated in forms of knowledge that 1st make sense of the conditions within which African/a peoples find themselves; and 2nd to struggle against the those conditions when moved out of balance. Dr. Youssef Carter is an Assistant Professor and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. Dr. Youssef Carter holds BS from North Carolina A&T, an MA from North Carolina Central University and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley and is an expert in Sufism and Islam in West Africa and the United States. His book in progress, “The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path,” examines the discourses and practices of a transatlantic Sufi spiritual network through detailed ethnographic work. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen Intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program. Image: M-Eating, Sufi - Artist: https://marianeibrahim.com/artists/36-maimouna-guerresi/biography/

October is observed as Youth Justice month. Since 2008, youth justice advocates around the country have come together each October for YJAM to organize events and online activities to raise awareness and inspire action on behalf of young people impacted by our criminal justice system. It is time for real action. The youth criminal legal system is far from just. Despite lowering crime rates and a global pandemic putting everyone's health at risk, youth remain over policed, over incarcerated, and over criminalized, pushing predominately Black and Brown children into a system that causes irreparable harm. We can do better-- for youth, families, communities, and public safety. This year, we are focused on Acting to End Racism: Pursuing Equity through Policy. In alignment with MS Votes' principles, we value youth, equity and are strong supporters of fully funded education. We sit down to talk to Monica Atkins -- an advocate for social justice. Monica does much of her activism through a political and artistic lens. Atkins has organized social, cultural events and actions including Art, Poetry, and Justice Slam, Freedom Summer March, and March on Mississippi Workers March with artists and activists, such as Common and Danny Glover. Monica has worked for several labor organizations including United Auto Workers, American Federation of Teachers, and Communication Workers of America. Monica is a Chicago native and graduate of Jackson State University where she completed a Bachelor's degree in English with an emphasis in Journalism. A poet, activist, and member of Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, MS, Monica's passion for the arts has led her to organizing workers and communities through cultural organizing and base-building for the past 10+ years.

The history of the geographical region now called, Eritrea is deep and rich. Eritrea has been occupied in turn by Ottoman Turks, Egyptians, Italians (from 1886 until 1941), the British until 1952 (who defeated Italy in Eritrea during the second world war) and the Ethiopians ever since [Pateman 1990:51]. In 1 952, the British and the United Nations determined on a federation of Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the first 10 years after the federation was formed Ethiopia's direct rule over Eritrea was imposed. Towards the end of 1952 La Voce de' Eritrea, a newspaper critical of the federation, was banned. In 1956, following the suppression of the opposition waged by workers and the peasantry, the Eritrean General Union of Labor Syndicates was banned. In 1960, the Eritrea flag was lowered, and separate courts were established. In 1962 Eritrea was forcibly annexed by Ethiopia [Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994; Pateman, 1990: 6]. The national struggle for national liberation began in 1961 with the formation of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) which split from the ELF in 1970 gained control over many towns in the country, but as the Soviet Union intervened on the Ethiopian behalf, independence could not be achieved in the late 1970s. The Soviet intervention forced withdrawal from the towns that were controlled by the EPLF to the northern part of the country. The EPLF continued fighting against the Ethiopian occupation until it liberated the whole of Eritrea in May 1991. Eritrea became an independent country officially in May 1993. Many have highlighted that "although women in many countries have struggled together with men for national liberation, at the end of that revolutionary struggle their position in society as women improves little as the era dawns" (Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle: Case of Eritrea, 1994). While this view is correct in one sense, it forgets the objective reality of the stages of the socio-economic and political development of formerly colonized nations. There are many contradictions embedded in the structures, systems and institutions between the people and the colonisers, between the different liberation movements that led the national liberation front, between the different classes in the society. As a consequence, national liberation does not mean that all contradictions are going to be solved at one go. It is here that Fanon and Cabral adds sharp clarity the pitfalls of national consciousness without the implantation of class suicide. Women's struggle for freedom cannot be seen in isolation from the larger struggle for liberation. Today, we will hear a talk that was given by Seble Tsehaye, Secretary of the National Union of Eritrean Women, USA, member of the Central Committee and member National Public Diplomacy Taskforce. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Sources: Worku Zerai, Organising Women within a National Liberation Struggle Case of Eritrea, 1994; Victoria Bernal, Equality to Die For?: Women Guerrilla Fighters and Eritrea's Cultural Revolution, 2000; National Union of Eritrean Women: http://www.nuew.org/ Image: EPLF freedom fighters. There is no independent Eritrea without Eritrean women. available here: http://www.madote.com/2017/03/nuew-national-union-of-eritrean-women.html

Saladin Muhammad argues in an article titled Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-year of Struggle, in Against the Current that: “The national oppression of African Americans in the U.S. South makes Black workers in the South the most exploited section of the U.S. industrial working class. Black Workers for Justice [BWFJ] thus bases its trade union and political perspectives on the principle of the centrality of the Black working class.” “The struggle against racism, for political power and self-determination for African descendant people are key aspects of this principle in forging the unity of the Southern and U.S. working class. BWFJ has tried to create an identity, confidence and political presence of the Black worker and trade union organization in the U.S. South.” BWFJ believes that the struggle against African American national oppression must take on sharper Black working-class and internationalist features. It must put forward a perspective for, and be active in building, a strong rank-and-file democratic and radical labor movement in the U.S. South” [Saladin Muhammad, Black Workers for Justice, Twenty-years of Struggle, Against the Current, No. 101, November/December 2002]. With this, Saladin Muhammad, firmly situates Black Workers for Justice in the continuity and long arc of Black liberation movements that center the Black working class/workers, such as, but not limited to: Ad Hoc. Committee of Concerned Black Steel Workers; the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement; League of Revolutionary Black Workers, to name a few. What you will hear next is Pt. II of our conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad. Be sure to tap into Pt. I to pick up the flow of our conversation! Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism. Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW]. His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades. The idea is not to replicate, but I understand there is a path. To see that there is a way. A way – a genealogy... Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Enjoy the program!

Abdul Alkalimat writes on a multimedia project that explores the work of Saladin Muhamad that “our movements for social transformation have often fallen victim to the tendency to oversimplify the struggle. Moreover, there is far too little self-criticism to learn from our “right” and “left” errors. This is particularly dangerous as we are at the beginning of a new generational awakening. We need to think about the past few decades of struggle by listening to those who have marched on and maintained a revolutionary perspective.” Labor, whether force or extracted through coercion has been a consistent cause of struggle for African/a peoples, globally. James Boggs, in a speech given at a Political Science Seminar in Atlanta University on February 17, 1974, argued that “we must be ready to recognize that as reality changes, our ideas have to change so that we can project new, more advanced aspirations worth striving for. This is the only way to avoid becoming prisoners of ideas which were once progressive but have become reactionary, i.e., have been turned into their opposite. The only struggles worth pursuing are those which advance the whole society and enable all human beings to evolve to a new and higher stage of their human potential”. Expanding this assertion, Boggs goes on to suggest that “knowledge must move from perception to conception; in other words, knowledge and struggle begin by perceiving your own reality. But it must have the aim of developing beyond what you yourself or your own group can perceive, to wider conceptions that are based upon the experiences of the whole history of Mankind. The only way that anyone can take this big step of moving beyond perception to conception is by recognizing and struggling against your own internal contradictions and weaknesses. Of these weaknesses, the most fundamental and most difficult to overcome, as a result of the specific history of United States society [and I will add the evolution of the global racial capitalist system], is the tendency not to think at all but simply to react in terms of individual or ethnic self-interest” [Boggs, 1974]. Reflecting more on the praxis of Saladin Muhammad, Abdul Alkalimat asserts that “there are many theoretical and practical issues involved in the experiences covered by the life of Saladin Muhammad and his experiences in struggle. Saladin is a proletarian cadre of the revolutionary movement. He served as chairperson of the Black Workers for Justice for over 20 years. While being retired from full time union organizing, he remains active on many battle fronts including the Southern Workers Assembly.” This is Part I of our recent conversation with Baba Saladin Muhammad. Saladin Muhammad is an organizer, theoretician, writer. He published a number of articles that explore issues ranging from exposing the structural and systemic racism in labor to ways to understand the interdependence of human rights and Black internationalism. Saladin Muhammad is the co-founder and national chair of Black Workers for Justice and until his retirement, he was an international representative for the United Electrical Workers [UEW]. His praxis has been forged in Black freedom work for than three decades. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly. Black Liberation and Social Revolution: The Life and Legacy of Saladin Muhammadhttp://theblm.net/saladin/

Labor has changed. Its production. Its definition. Its control. But one thing that has not changed are the parameters within which labor has been defined, value extracted and dehumanized – mechanized – automated – artificially intelligeized. What does "labor" mean in a settler imperial world fortified by racial capitalist sociopolitical structures that maintain a social order that places the African/a worker, beyond the periphery of benefiting from their labor? What about decolonizing labor and labor movements? What about a world without work----What are the ideological frameworks that ‘labor' is using to attempt to construct the material realities of our current world? What does (or will) this world look like in two-years…and what are its implications for the African/a world? What are the implications for the Earth and now more than ever, the heavens—space? Questions around black labor, usually pivot on the role of black education. However, most explorations are neither critical nor intellectually honest. Today, Dr. Kamau Rashid joins us in conversation where we meditate on black labor and 'the white architects of black education'. Our thoughts are centered on William H. Watkins work, the White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power, 1865-1954. In the White Architects of Black Education, Watkins “explores the body of ideas that undergird social, economic, racial, and educational beliefs about Black education in the U.S.: therefore, it is an ideological study. His stated objective is to "investigate the ideological construction of colonial Black education by examining the views, politics, and practices of the white architects that funded, created, and refined it” [1-2]. Therefore, “colonial education in the South must never be confused with the educational agenda of blacks in the south. In fact, these agenda conflicted” [2]. The central question asks: How far have we moved away from these foundational ideas and their ideological grounding? Dr. Kamau Rashid is currently Professor and Founding Director of the Urban Education, Ed.D. program at Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid earned his Ph.D. and BA from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Arts degree from Northeastern Illinois University. Dr. Rashid work focuses on African American history and culture, particularly on the inter-generational dynamics of African/a social critique, which includes an exploration and theorizing of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as contemporary African-Centered scholars and critical race theorists. He is co-developing an oral history and archival project focused on African American social movements in the Chicago area from the 1960s to1980s with Dr. Richard Benson of Spelman College. And is currently working on Finding our way through the desert: Jacob H. Carruthers and the restoration of an African worldview as well as the critical theory of W.E.B. Du Bois: The Struggle for Humanity. He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and received various grant awards to support his work. Lastly, likely most importantly, Dr. Rashid is active in a number of community organizations in the Chicago-area including the Kemetic Institute of Chicago, a research and educational organization focused on mapping, exploring and applying the ancient and contemporary contributions of ancient Nile Valley civilizations. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Image: Romare Bearden - Factory Workers - 1942

The range and scope of manifestations in the Black freedom struggle are varied yet connected by a common thread…it does not matter where you look, pick a point on the map of human geography, pick a geographical landmass or region -- the continent of Africa, the Caribbean or somewhere in Northern part of the Americas, you will find a common thread. And that thread is the radical imagination of young people. You will find a historical path that reaches into the present. You will find the beginnings of a road built with vibrancy of young folk who envisioned a world beyond struggle. SNYC We can see the materiality of this fact in the continuum of African/a resistance. In 1937, the Southern Negro Youth Congress [SNYC] was created [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949]. Assembled in Richmond, VA, for the first Southern Negro Youth Congress were some 534 delegates representing 250,000 young people in 23 states, and an estimated crowd of 2,000 observers. They represented "sharecroppers from Alabama and Mississippi; domestic workers from Georgia…and every other representative of Southern Negro life." [We demand Our Rights: Southern Negro Youth Congress, 1937-1949]. SNYC lasted for 12 years, 1937 to 1949. SNCC On February 1, 1960, Black students in Greensboro, North Carolina launched sit-ins challenging segregation in restaurants and other public accommodations. SNCC was founded just two and a half months later on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Ella Baker was the gathering's organizer. [SNCC Digital Gateway]. On SNCC's international dimensions, highlighted by Fanon Che Wilkins, in his article The Making of Black Internationalists: SNCC and Africa Before the Launching of Black Power, 1960-1965, were embryonic as “the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the delegates declared unequivocally: "We identify ourselves with the African struggle as a concern for all mankind" [468]. To add more clarity, Miss. Baker organized the conference which led to the formation of SNCC “just three weeks after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa” [Wilkins, 2007: 471]. I present this snapshot, paying attention to historical continuity in African/a student resistance to provide an impetus to engage in more intentionally and consciously mapping of the range and scope of the Black freedom movement. Today, we present a conversation with SNCC activist: Courtland Cox.While a Howard University student, Courtland Cox became a member of Nonviolent Action Group [NAG] and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He worked with SNCC in Mississippi and Lowndes County, Alabama, was the Program Secretary for SNCC in 1962, as well as the SNCC representative to the War Crimes Tribunal organized by Bertram Russell. In 1963 he served as the SNCC representative on the Steering Committee for the March on Washington. In 1973 he served as the Secretary General of the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania. Additionally, he co-owned and managed the Drum and Spear Bookstore and Drum and Spear Press in Washington DC. In our conversation we explored: Freedom Schools; CLR James; Jamil Al-Amin; Black internationalism; Sterling A. Brown; scholars w/o portfolio; independent political parties; Sékou Touré; Tanzania; Marion Berry; and the Sixth Pan African Congress. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Image: Courtland Cox (second from right), Marion Barry, and others sitting-in at Atlanta Toddle House, December 1963, [https://snccdigital.org/people/courtland-cox/]

Image: Female literacy volunteers return to Havana at the end of the literacy campaign in December 1961 On June 23, 2021, a total of 184 countries on voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel, being the only countries voting against resolution. Three countries - Colombia, Ukraine, and Brazil - abstained. Wednesday, July 7, of last week, the world received news of the assassination of then Haitian president in the midst of already tension conditions on the ground. On this same day, a historic press conference with the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, H.E. Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta presented a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines. On Saturday, July 10, reports via mainstream media outlets began proliferating images and a narrative that suggested that the Cuban people were protesting against the ineffectiveness of the government. However, more detailed and clear journalism shows this was not the case, as the mass majority of the protestors were clear in their disdain for the embargo which in turn has caused deleterious impact on the population. According to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, “the economic sanctions on Cuba were imposed by the United States of America in 1960 and were subsequently amended by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. These acts essentially ban all commercial ties between the United States and Cuba and severely impair the right of United States citizens to travel, to communicate with or carry out cultural exchanges with Cuba. Every year since 1992, the General Assembly has passed a resolution calling for an end to the embargo. The most recent resolution on this issue (A/67/4) was adopted on November 13 2012 by 188 votes against 3, with 2 abstentions. Since the United States is the major regional economic power and the main source of new medicines and technologies, Cuba is subject to deprivations that impinge on its citizens' human rights. Moreover, the US makes its own foreign trade policy extraterritorial, through a system of secondary sanctions which force third-party countries also into imposing an embargo on Cuba.” For your benefit, and in accordance to the central mission of Africa World Now Project which is to provide a platform that allows you to intentionally organize information toward understanding the root causes of issues that impact historically and ethnically marginalized peoples, paying specific attention to the African/a world, today we will play the recording of the historical press conference organized, in part, by yours truly having nominal input, under the leadership of Obi Egbuna, Jr and a collection of other concern communities and organizations. Next, you will hear the Cuban Permanent Representative to the UN, His Excellency Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta present a review and response of the recent vote against the blockade as well as the challenges and promises of the recent development of the Cuban COVID vaccines. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

The clear and intentionality in the processes of violence carried out upon African/a peoples as they are constituted around the world and its symmetry in form and function upon people who are categorized as native in the Americas is not without precedent. European modernity is responding to its disintegration and has been for over the past 500 years. A process that has its origins in the formation of the entity known as Europe, as it began to organize the loosely tied collection of tribes into nations all built upon continuities in a worldview that propel the interdependent logics that animates its systems, structures, and institutions: separation, intolerance, imperialism, colonialism, racialism, materialization, objectification, othering…dehumanizing, redefining human. But what must not be lost in this fact, its disintegration—the disintegration of a limited and flawed view of what it means to be human as promoted through the praxis of European modernity—is that at various times-specifically when people are most organized, this disintegration has been sped up by the forms of resistance that develop not simply as a reaction to the forces of violence that are used to maintain positions of authority [or limited notions of power], but are in fact responses birthed from deep ancestral duties and historical responsibilities toward humanity, nature and universe, that African/a people have demonstrated in thought and action across time and space. Of all the places we can look in the African/a world to see the conflict between the continued exertion and last gasps of legitimacy of a particularly limited understanding of what it means to be human and the ancestral and historical duty and responsibility to resist it, we look to Colombia. A battlefront, in all manifestations of the theoretical and practical application of the concept, between an imperial worldview and the continued resistance to the logics of this worldview. What we will hear next is a wide-ranging conversation that expands on the premise above, paying attention to the current state of Afro Colombian resistance. AWNP's Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with Charo Mina-Rojas and Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli where they explored the continuation of violence through the militarization of the police; the continued attacks on and killings of human rights defenders in indigenous and Afro-descendant communities; the historic role of the U.S. in arming the Colombian army; and much more. Charo Mina-Rojas is an Afro-Colombian human rights defender with more than two decades of experience in activism in national and international arenas. As the National Coordinator of Advocacy and Outreach for the Black Communities Process (PCN - Proceso de Communidades Negras) and a member of the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network, she works to empower Afro-Colombian women by educating them on their rights, increasing their access to justice and collecting accurate data on violence against Afro-Colombian women. Charo participated in Colombia's peace negotiations and has delivered talks and lectures across the world. Charo has addressed the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security and is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace. Gimena Sánchez-Garzoli is the leading Colombia human rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA). Ms. Sánchez is an expert on peace and illegal armed groups, internally displaced persons, human rights and ethnic minority rights. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana; Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think critically. Act accordingly.

According to 'Trane himself, as written in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, “The music herein is presented in four parts. The first is entitled "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT", the second, "RESOLUTION", the third, "PURSUANCE", and the fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, "A LOVE SUPREME" which is written in the context; it is entitled "PSALM".” It is also this Psalm, this meditation, part of which I read at the outset, that Coltrane would place on a stand and play as he performed, producing/reproducing what he said is a musical narration of the – Love Supreme. Alice Coltrane, a multi-instrumental genius and enlightened spiritual leader is not just Coltrane's wife. She started her journey before meeting Coltrane. And because of this set her path to cultivate rhythms that can heal the world just as John Coltrane discovered he could do. It could be surmised that her presence in John Coltrane life was divine. It was guided by universal law - a law that states everything is in rhythm, everything is in constant motion. Everything is vibrational. And as we move through life this constant hum, this vibrational hum is sure to attract its tonal partners. In the November 1967 issue of Ebony in an article titled: Requiem for ‘Trane, Archie Shepp suggests that “he [‘Trane] was a bridge…the most accomplished and comprehensive of the so-called post-bop musicians to make an extension into what is called the avant-garde…” (Shepp, 1967). Something else to consider, specifically in relation to John Coltrane being a bridge, standing in a deeper tradition, according to Youngquist in A Pure Solar World Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, “in the mid-fifties Sun Ra gave a broadsheet entitled “Solaristic Precepts” to John Coltrane. On the broadsheets Sun Ra wrote “Warning this treatise is only for Thinking Beings..." (238). A thinking Being, indeed… In an interview years later, Coltrane would state that, “I think music can make the world better and if I'm qualified, I want to do it. I'd like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcend words. I want to speak to their souls”. And it was with Alice Coltrane who not only accentuated and amplified Coltrane's ability to synthesis the rhythmic patterns he put together, as he listened to vibrations most of us are unable to, they both became eternal beings, thinking beings who were able to conceive of the Negative reminiscences of Space-Time, as is expressed in Is, Are, Be and reconcepted “AM”. Today...: uninterrupted conversations with our eégún: thinking about the Coltranes [John and Alice] w/ Dr. Anyabwile Love A Philadelphia native, Anyabwile Love completed his graduate studies in Africana Studies at Temple University, receiving his PhD in May 2014. Currently he serves as Associate Editor for the literary journal A Gathering Together and is an Assistant Professor of History + Black Studies at Community College of Philadelphia. Anyabwile is the founder of The John Coltrane Symposium-a community centered annual celebration of Coltrane's life and his musical legacy, its second annual iteration will be in session, September 22-25, 2021 with a possible extended day until the 26th. For more, follow the symposium's Instagram page and/or visit the website - https://www.thecoltranesymposium.com/ Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana, Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

Image: Original artwork by @ultravivre There are many attempts to explore and examine who Malcolm X, El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, was and is. there are books, documentaries [focused on his life and his assassination], movies, songs, poems, etc. They all explore and examine various aspects of El Shabazz, dissecting his very being. But no matter the complexity of or simplicity in the treatment of El Shabazz's life, mind, or work…they all lead back to one answer: El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is all of us. Many of us adhere to the idea that nothing ever dies, it only transforms. This is based on what many may call a universal principle, which says that: energy can neither be created nor destroyed. If the idea articulated by this universal principle can be tested…made knowable, then it requires a deeper look into various phenomena. The evolution of the human, its totality, is based on a few factors, which are related to geographical location, the groups understanding of their place, role and responsibilities in this geographical location and the range and scope of the group's ability to evolve its philosophical and cultural foundations. Important to note this is all based on the response to systemic implications caused by a balance/imbalance dialectic in the midst of this evolution. Ok, ok…what does all of this mean?…the conditions within which a people develop is based on their understanding of their relationship to each other, the environment and the universe. An interdependent process that directly impacts who they are in relationship to more than themselves. What is important to note about this process of becoming is, its ability to imagine. To create ways of being...ways of knowing that transcend the structures of the current or immediate conditions one finds themselves, whether voluntarily, through coercion, or by force. Key to any way of knowing is the ability to develop one's imagination. It was [and still is] the platform, upon which a people can adequately deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic. It is the most attacked part of the African ways of being. Why? Because we find that the Black imagination is the place best suited to find the most articulate expression of basic human capacities to create, maintain, evolve…to negate the negation. I present this all to say, this is what is meant when we say El Hajj Malik El Shabazz is us. He is the measuring scale upon which we deal with the balance/imbalance dialectic. He is the archetype and most articulate expression of a Black radical imagination. The most articulate expression Black possibilities. What you will hear next is a recent discussion centered around an exploration of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz as critical Africana human rights consciousness with Tasneem Siddiqui, Josh Myers, with reflections from: Dr. Kamau Rashid and Dr. Iyelli Ichile. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Thinking deeply. Act accordingly. Link to article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-020-09486-3

Image: Malcolm X in 1964, w/ leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dr. Ahmad Shukeiri. What we are witnessing, in this global moment, is not unprecedented, it is European modernity coming apart at its seams. The loosely tied myths that has kept it together are unraveling, delinking…but it intends to not go easily. The reverberating effect of it fits and fissures are being articulated in its violence. The contradictions are materialized through its human vessels, like a virus seeing its inevitable demise. It is with the unity of struggle, that we can inoculate the praxis of liberation, to ensure this time, as with times we struggled and continue to struggle collectively against imperialism and its attendant colonialism/s, chattel slavery, Apartheid, to follow in the tradition of resistance set before us. Today we look at a component of this unity of struggle…we pay attention to Black and Palestinian intersectional experiences with the violence of the colonial. When thinking about Black and Palestinian liberatory continuities we have plenty to explore, but a good place that we can find its most articulate expression is with Brother Malcolm [El Hajj Malik Shabazz]. As far back as the late 1950s Malcolm had been speaking out in international support of Palestinian liberation. According to Michael Fischbach, “several factors accounted for this. As a member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), Brother Malcolm felt a natural inclination to cultivate a kinship with other Muslims, including Arabs. Arabs had long been involved or in contact with the NOI, among them Jamil Shakir Diab, a Palestinian who immigrated to the United States in 1948 and taught Arabic at the NOI's University of Islam in Chicago. Of particular note in Malcolm's pro-Palestinian leanings were two visits he made to the Palestinians' homeland...He returned to Cairo and attended a press conference given by, Ahmad Shuqayri, the chair of the newly created Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), after which he published a scathing critique of Zionism titled “Zionist Logic” in Cairo's English language newspaper, the Egyptian Gazette” (Michael Fischbach, The New Left and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the United States; Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color. Today, we explore Black and Palestine...its history, challenges, and opportunities with Ajamu Dillahunt and Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui. Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is an assistant professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Social Justice at Winston-Salem State University. She has a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC). She is currently working on her manuscript; Freedom is a Place: Black Self-Determination and Land-Based Struggles in the Lowcountry and Sea Islands. Dr. Siddiqui is also a valued member of the Africa World Now Project collective where she is a senior researcher and associate producer. Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of History at Michigan State University. He is a member of Black Workers for Justice (BWFJ) and a board member with the Interreligious Foundation of Community Organizations (IFCO). He is also a former intern with the SNCC Digital Gateway Project at Duke University. In May of 2019, Ajamu graduated from North Carolina Central University with a B.A. in History and a B.A. in Political Science. Ajamu also participated in the historic Demilitarize! Durham2Palestine Coalition. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Listen intently. Think deeply. Act accordingly.

Ayiti, in the Black radical imagination, is more than an idea. It is the material representation of African/a freedom. It is the exemplar of the promises, failures & potentialities of African/a liberation. It is the colonial knot that the African/a world must untied. Just as Ayiti represented freedom in the past, it also represents the potentiality of collective freedom today. The question of Ayiti is intricately linked to the global African/a movement against oppression, as fortified by the colonial, in all of its forms. I assert, that it is with Haiti, then and now, along with Afro communities in Colombia, burgeoning movements across the continent of Africa; Afro Brazilian communities, Afro and African descendant communities in Europe; critical thinking African descendants here in the U.S., along with our historically and ethnically oppressed allies who stand in the long tradition of collective resistance to the dehumanizing nature of racial capitalism to create another future. Maurice Jackson in his article, “Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, the path is open to the sea”: remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People, writes: “As early as 1797, Prince Hall, an African American who had fought in the war against Great Britain, applauded events in Haiti and reflected on their implications for the United States. In a speech to the Boston African Masonic Lodge he declared, ‘‘My brethren, let us not be cast down under these and many other abuses we at present labour under: for the darkest is before the break of day…Let us remember what a dark day it was with our African brethren, six years ago, in the French West Indies. Nothing but the snap of the whip was heard, from morning to evening (60).'' Sixty years later and a few years before the first battles of the Civil War, in 1857, the Reverend James Theodore Holly, the missionary, emigrationist, and first African American bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church, preached that the Haitian Revolution ‘‘is one of the noblest, grandest, and most justifiable outbursts against tyrannical oppression that is recorded on the pages of the world's history (60).'' Taking note of Ayiti's interdependent impact on the sociopolitical conditions in the African/a world, specifically, Gabriel Prosser's revolutionary program, Douglas Egerton has written: “Saint Domingue served as an inspiration to Gabriel and completed his development…The distant figure of Toussaint…seemed to clarify the domestic situation and told him that if he dared, success might be within his reach.” At the trial of Rolla Bennett, one of Vesey closest friends and an enslaved African of Governor Thomas Bennett, another black identified as Witness No. 1 swore that Rolla had told him that white men ‘‘say that, Santo Domingo and Africa will assist us to get our liberty, if we will only make the motion first.” Indeed, the ideas and material reality of freedom represented through the series of resistance filtered through Ayiti is important to contextualize for many reasons, reasons I will let you determine. But a clear historical consciousness is a prerequisite for addressing the inequities that pass, unabated, through time and space. Where are we now? Today, Africa Now World Project's Mwiza Munthali recently caught up with our partners in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti to discuss what is happening on the ground. Today, we look at the People's Movement in Ayiti with Vélina Elysée Charlier, member of Nou Pap Domí movement in Port-au-Prince, Ayiti. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native/indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; Ghana and Ayiti; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people.

[originally produced & aired May 2018] What is meant by the term “Pan-Africanism?” What do we – can we - make of “pan Africanism”? There have been various attempts by scholars, activist, artist, musicians, to develop a clear definition of Pan Africanism. While a clear and solidified definition of Pan Africanism has been the preoccupation of these thinkers, others have hesitated due to the vast diversity of thought and activity found among self-identified Pan-Africanists across time and space. According to Hakim Adi in his work Pan Africanism: A History, Pan-Africanism is considered a composed of ideas and movements “concerned with the social, economic, cultural and political emancipation of the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora.” Broadly speaking, it stems from “belief in the unity, common history and common purpose of the people of Africa and the African diaspora” and their interwoven futures. Finally, historically Pan-African “thought and action” emerges within efforts to connect and reconnect those in the African diaspora created, in particularly, through the forced dispersal of enslaved people from continental Africa simultaneously with the solidification and emergence of global racial capitalism, “European colonial rule and anti-African racism” (2). While containing a multitude of diverse ideological, political, cultural, and organizational expression, Pan-African thought and action share a commitment to resist “the exploitation and oppression of all those of African heritage,” rejecting anti-African and African-descent racism and celebrating “African achievement, history, and the very notion of being human through a positive construction of an “African” identity (3). Today, AWNP's Josh Myers is in discussion with Dr. Hakim Adi on his new book, Pan Africanism: A History Professor Hakim Adi is Professor of History at the University of Chichester, focusing on the history of Africa and her diaspora. Author of a number of works, including West Africans in Britain (1998), Pan-African History: Political Figures from African and the Diaspora from 1787 (with Marika Sherwood) (2003), and Pan Africanism and Communism: The Communist International, Africa and the Diaspora, 1919-1939, Adi's scholarship is grounded in understanding the historiography of various struggles for African liberation. We interviewed him about his latest effort to engage with the histories of that struggle, in his recent book, Pan-Africanism: A History. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

The question of land as a fundamental aspect of African/a liberation movements is an often-neglected point of inquiry. Nevertheless, it is indeed, ever-present. Promisingly, there has been an uptick of more folk who are paying attention to the demands of Black radical thought and behavior that sought and seek to engage in understanding its role in material and nonmaterial ways. One such important treatment is Edward Onaci's, Free the Land: The Republic of New Afrika and the Pursuit of a Black Nation-State. In dominant discourse, however, the question around land as fundamental to liberation is often couched in a warped sense of capitalist ownership, which highlights the fundamental contradictions engrained in an imposition of a European modernism, and its attendant political philosophy of liberalism. All of which has produced, limited discourses around the idea and practice of rights, a discourse rooted fundamentally in what does it mean to be human as the development and maintenance of private property; all contradictions that radicals must, also, seriously engage when exploring questions around land and freedom. It cannot be lost nor taken for granted the totalizing nature of colonialism as a product of imperialist logics, as the neglect of internal critique often leads to the reinscription the very power dynamics that movements say they intend to disrupt. Ultimately, land, in the epistemic and ontological purview of African/a peoples is understood not in the limited capitalist sense of ownership but the transmission of communal practices of human stewardship as being primary caretakers of the planet. And when land as a fundamental component of Black liberation is centered, ideas around national identity, critical consciousness formation, human rights, citizenship…what it means to be human can be better mapped to understand the interconnectedness of the various manifestations of the global Africana (Black) struggle for freedom. a black internationalism becomes clearly defined. Today, we will hear a recent roundtable discussion, exploring the questions that Kurt Oderson presents in his documentary, We Rise for Our Land. Kurt Otabenga Orderson is an award-winning filmmaker from Cape Town, South Africa, whose work has been featured on Al Jazeera, SABC, ESPN, ZDF, and HULU. He has worked on six continents and has directed and produced over ten feature documentaries screened at international film festivals, universities, and colleges. Kurt Orderson is the founder of Azania Rizing Productions, a company that aims to inspire young people through creative storytelling about Africa and African Diasporas and is a member of the Africa World Now Project Collective. Others you will hear are: Savi Horne, Esq. Executive Director of the North Carolina Association of Black Lawyers Land Loss Prevention Project; Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui, member of the Africana World Now Project Collective and Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History, Political Science and Social Justice at WSSU; Dr. Yousef Al-Bulushi, Assistant Professor of Global & International Studies at the University of California, Irvine; Dr. Kamau Rashid, Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago. And yours truly…James Pope. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

After taking a much needed hiatus, we’re back! And the world clearly did not stop; between the deep freeze in the South that left cities without water [STILL], and mf’s still slow walking these checks [@Biden and @Kamala] we had a lot to talk about this go around. Although things are pretty terrible, we luckily have mutual aid groups who are doing the work that needs to be done. And as promised, here are some resources for Jackson, MS: Cooperation Jackson, The Alternate Roots Solidarity Fund, The Mississippi Rising Coalition, Shower Power Mississippi, The People’s Advocacy Institute, the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund #JXNNeedsWater

I normally provide a textured, multi-leveled, quite frankly intentionally thick introduction to our programs. But today, we present a conversation I recently had with Amir Mohamed el Khalifa [aka Oddisee], as the conversation is textured, multi-leveled and thick itself… The son of Sudanese and African descendant American parents, Oddisee was born and raised in Washington DC, spending summers in Khartoum learning Arabic and swimming in the Nile. Growing up amidst the sounds of New York hip hop, his father playing Oud, Go-Go, and gospel, Amir took his first steps as an MC producer in the analog basement studio of his legendary neighbor, Garry Shider (of Parliament Funkadelic). Known for his independence, Oddisee consistently debunks myths, stereotypes, and limited ideas of what an artist, creative, curator is, or can become. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, African, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. Enjoy the program! Linkshttps://oddisee.bandcamp.com/http://oddisee.co/https://www.mellomusicgroup.com/pages/oddisee-1

[Originally produced and aired in 2019] Vodun, Voodoo, racialization into Black Magic as currently understood is a distorted figment of a Western imagination. Voodoo is narrated as a sensationalized ‘pop-culture' caricature of voudon, which is an Afro-Caribbean spiritual system that was brought with enslaved Africans forced onto the plantations in Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. The fictitious associations with drinking blood sacrifices, voodoo dolls or zombies are directly a result of the same dehumanization processes innate in a system of chattel slavery, the lifeblood of racial capitalism. To be clear at the onset, Voudon is "an assortment of cultural elements: personal creeds and practices, including an elaborate system of folk medical practices; a system of ethics transmitted across generations [including] proverbs, stories, songs, and folklore... voudon is more than belief; it is a way of life," wrote Leslie Desmangles, a Haitian professor at Hartford's Trinity College in "The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal" (Prometheus Books, 1996). Voudon teaches belief in a supreme being called Bondye, an unknowable and uninvolved creator god. Voudon practitioners recognize many ancestral spirits (called loa), each one of whom is responsible for a specific domain or part of life. Followers of voudon see a universal energy and a soul that can leave the body during dreams and spirit possession. In Western Christian theology, spiritual possession is usually considered to be an act of evil, either Satan or some demonic entity trying to enter an unwilling human vessel, unless of course you go to black worship services. This is in contrast to the fact that in voudon, possession by loa is desired. In a ceremony guided by a priest or priestess, this possession is considered a valuable, first-hand spiritual experience and connection with the spirit world. In 1685, variations of a practice to forbid the practice of African religions and required all masters to Christianize their slaves within eight days of their arrival—which codified into various laws. Slavery was condoned by the Catholic Church as a tool for converting Africans to morally upright Christians. Furthermore, one Haitian scholar notes, "Many of the African spirits were adapted to their new environment in the New World. Ogun, for instance, the Nigerian spirit of iron-smiths, hunting and warfare took on a new persona... He became Ogou, the military leader who has led phalanxes into battle against oppression. In Haiti today, Ogou inspires many political revolutions that oust undesirable oppressive regimes." The practices of dehumanization and hiding Africans histories (it is a misunderstanding to say African histories are lost)…has contributed much to the survival of racist logics that promotes false notions and ideas of racial white supremacy. These practices were applied to Africana total existence. Nevertheless, the spiritual practices of the various peoples who were forced across the oceans have ancient origins. In fact, we can see ancient links between the Yoruba peoples and ancient Egypt…. Today, we are pleased to have filmmaker Onuora Anthony Abuah back with us to talk about another one his films, a two-part documentary that explores the Danhomé Kingdom. Part 1 is titled, Danhomé & Vodun and Part 2 is titled, Voodoo in Togo. As a filmmaker and under the banner of AEA Films UK, his projects include MONA, Catching a Thief, Woodfalls, Woolwhich Boys. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Film[s]: https://www.youtube.com/c/TalesFromtheMotherlandProductions/videos

Writer, multi-disciplinary artist, and friend of the show Alex White joins us again to talk societal collapse in light of the recent power crisis in Texas; Trevor also relates his experience in Austin.   References:   Hardcore History with Dan Carlin - https://www.dancarlin.com   ERCOT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_of_Texas   Kally Akuno, Cooperation Jackson - https://cooperationjackson.org/cop-delegation-bios/2015/9/16/kali-akuno   https://commoditycreature.substack.com/p/surviving-the-future   SAS Survival Handbook - https://thebwh.com/p/military-history-sas-survival-handbook-the-ultimate-guide-to-surviving-anywhere   Nomadland - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9770150/   Climate change, jet streams, and the Texas freeze - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/how-the-warming-arctic-helped-drive-a-deep-freeze-into-texas   Weakening ocean circulation - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/25/atlantic-ocean-circulation-at-weakest-in-a-millennium-say-scientists   Quelle Chris, Big Sen - Mirage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbG-6upal8U   Forests no longer absorbing CO2 - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/04/tropical-forests-losing-their-ability-to-absorb-carbon-study-finds   Music: Canon III by Glossolalia Online https://soundcloud.com/glossolalia-online/canon-iii  

Abbéy Odunlami sits down with "Cooperation Jackson" members to discuss sustainable community development, economic democracy, and community ownership. "Cooperation Jackson" is laying the foundation to establish a network of co-ops and initiatives, including housing, daycare, construction, Freedom Farms urban farming, and a community land trust right here in Jackson, Mississippi.

Guest: Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson.  He is also one of the initiators of the People's Strike and co-editor the book Jackson Rising. The post In Conversation with Kali Akuno: Organizing in Extreme Times appeared first on KPFA.

AP Andy comes across a fellow radical exile Blair Taylor washed ashore on a beach in Nayarit, Mexico. The two post-anarchists discuss the life and work of curmudgeonly communalist Murray Bookchin as they watch dolphins frolicking in the sunset. Topics include radical muncipalism, Bookchin's concepts of democracy and citizenship, Blair's Institute for Social Ecology and the formation of the Symbiosis network with DSA-LSC, Black Socialists, Cooperation Jackson, the PKK and Rojava, Bookchin's criticism of Bernie Sanders, and others, and what sort of kinky things the old man was getting up to in Vermont. Show Notes: ISE: http://social-ecology.org Symbiosis Network: https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org/ Demand Utopia: http://demandutopia.net Blair Taylor's three Bookchin starter texts: What is Communalism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-what-is-communalism Post Scarcity Anarchism: https://libcom.org/files/Post-Scarcity%20Anarchism%20-%20Murray%20Bookchin.pdf "The Next Revolution" by Blair Taylor and Debbie Bookchin: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1777-the-next-revolution Closing music: BearForce1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twQlpFrm5iM

Jeremiah and Joel interviewed Mason about his article, A Government From Below. They discussed dual power, worker coops, and what a world comprised of liberated municipalities would look like. If you've ever been curious about what libertarian socialism, libertarian municipalism, or organizing in a post-industrial context can be like, you won't want to miss this episode!  DSA Libertarian Socialist Caucus: dsa-lsc.org/ Cooperation Jackson: cooperationjackson.org/ Motor City Freedom Riders: motorcityfreedomriders.org/ Symbiosis: symbiosis-revolution.org/ Institute for Social Ecology: social-ecology.org/wp/ A Government From Below: socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2018/a-government-from-below/

Beyond Blade Runners and Replicants, there must be a place “Over the Rainbow” for us to exist in solidarity and equanimity. And certainly, the 21st Century hovering above us should be a cause for hope, not despair; yet even with this new century being no way near its quartermark, it's already given us a planet wheezing from ecological crisis-to-crisis, where an untenable economic system of neo-feudalism ravages plants and animals, as well as the rights of those we love (or should love). In the Terror & Twilight of Our Broken Age, what ideology best speaks and acts from a place made from compassion and love? Instead of passively looking at the new century that hangs in the sky, blinking obliquely above us, we should instead reorganize our motions to The North Star of Human Decency, namely that of Anarchy. For this 21st episode of The Future Is A Mixtape, Matt & Jesse will finally come out of the “political closet” and show some raw & real skin: they are both Anarchists Without Adjectives, and they believe that this ideology of love is the only practical solution to the world's byzantine disorders, fraught with confusion, warbling on without a just antidote. In their most personal and revealing podcast since the show's first episode, Jesse & Matt explore their disparate journeys to humanity's greatest romance, Anarchy; they will describe its origin story, its turbulent relationship with authoritarian communists and how this political philosophy is not only the most idealist of ideologies, but also why it's the only one which can ride inside us--whispering out “hope” for a utopian future. HELPFUL RESOURCE GUIDES ABOUT ANARCHY: The Most Popularly Cited and Shared Introduction to Anarchy: David Graeber's “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You?!” Thomas Giovanni in the Black Rose Anarchist Confederation: “Who Are the Anarchists and What Is Anarchism?” Have More Specific Questions? Go to An Anarchist FAQ from The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective. The Anarchist Library: A Deep Database and Archive of Out-of-Print & Hard-to-Find Articles, Books, Speeches and Interviews on Anarchy America's Legendary AK Press, Which Runs as a Worker-Cooperative Since 1990, and Publishes Important as well as Far Reaching Works of Political Theory, Journalism, Fiction and Non-Fiction Works. Freedom: The Oldest (& Once Longest Running) Anarchist Newspaper in Print (1886-2014) Get a ‘Memorial Copy' of Freedom's Last Print Issue for February/March 2014 KEY FIGURES & WORKS ON ANARCHISM: Lao Tzu (604 BC - 501 BC) → Most Important Work On Early Notions Anarchy: Tao Te Ching Chuang Tzu (370 BC - 287 BC) → Most Important Work On Early Notions Anarchy: The Book of Chuang TzuGerard Winstanley (1609-1676) → Most Important Work On Early (Western Notions of) Anarchy: The New Law of Righteousness (1649) William Godwin (1756-1836) → Most Important Work On Early (Western Notions of) Anarchy: Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Max Stirner (1806-1856) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority (1844) Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government (1840) Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: God and the State (1882) Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) → Most Important Works On Anarchy: The Conquest of Bread (1892) & Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) Emma Goldman (1869-1940) → Most Important Work On Anarchy: Living My Life (1931) David Graeber (1961 & Still Kicking) → Most Important Works On Anarchy: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) & The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (2013) MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Judy Garland's “Over the Rainbow” & Where to Watch the Legendary Film in All of Its Proto-Camp Glory The Legendary Theme Song for the Reading Rainbow & Where to Watch the Show in All of Its Kid-Camp Fury Anarchists and Molotov Cocktails! Why Do Black Lives Matter? Why Do Comrades Lives Matter? Because the Police Are Still Swinging Butcher-Batons and Gatling-Guns Against People's Heads: Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Lastly Sophia Wilansky--a Hero of the Dakota Pipeline Protest--Finally Speaks Out Here. The Rectum & The Shithole of the State Jesse Herring: “Anarchy is a dream . . . Anarchy is a beautiful dream. Anarchy is the North Star of Human Decency” Ursula K. Le Guin's Most Famous Quote: “What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.” What Is Anarcho-Primitivism? A Working Primer (However, if you want a popular conception of the idea, you can watch this popular piece of “ManArchy.” If you want the documentary version, you can watch this instead. Or--fuck all--if you just want a visual sight-gag of Anarcho-Primitivism, you can watch this ode to pre-millennium dread.) The Creators of Novara Radio, Aaron Bastani and James Butler, Discuss the Ideas of Anarchism in This Podcast: “What Is Libertarian Communism?” Ursula K. Le Guin's Official Website & Her Blog MusingsUrsula K. Le Guin's Career-Defining Magnum Opus: The Dispossessed (1974) The New Yorker: Julie Phillip's “The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin” Structo Magazine: Euan Monaghan's Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin: “Ursula K. Le Guin on Racism, Anarchy and Hearing Her Characters Speak” (2015) The Anarchist Library: “Anarchism and Taoism” A Working Biography of Paul Goodman: an American Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Psychotherapist and Anarchist Philosopher A History of Revolutionary Catalonia in Libcom: “1936-1939: The Spanish Civil War and Revolution” A Summary of The Dispossessed in Wikipedia Ursula K. Le Guin's Description of “The Wall” in in the opening paragraph of The Dispossessed:“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” An Online Interview with Ursula K. Le Guin, Generated from Questions by Readers of The Guardian: “Chronicles of Earthsea” The Rules of Being a Mormon in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (or Mormon Church) In Ask Gramps: “Do I Need to Confess Masturbation to My [LDS] Baptist?” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: “Why and What Do I Need to Confess to My Bishop?” {Which Basically Avoids Mentioning All the Sex and Dirty Parts in Case Readers Become Too Inspired} Catholic Online: “A Guide to Confession” Terry Eagleton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “In Praise of Marx” Karl Marx's Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Originally Published in 1867; This Was Translated & Reprinted in 1992) David Harvey: A Companion to Karl Marx's Capital (2010) Louis Menand in The New Yorker: “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today” Mary Gabriel's Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (2011) Rachel Holmes' Eleanor Marx: A Life (2015) Ralph Nader's Most Notable Works:   Breaking Through Power: It's Easier Than We Think (2016) The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future (2012) “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us”: A Novel (2011) A Fantastic Essay on Barack Obama's Patina-Presidency: “The Gap Between Rhetoric and Action: The Failed Foreign Policy of Barack Obama” Matthew Snyder's Ph.D. Dissertation: Welcome to the Suck: The Film and Media Phantasm's of The Gulf War (2008) Noam Chomsky's Most Notable Works on Politics & Anarchy: On Anarchism (2013) Who Rules the World? (2016) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (1988; 2002) Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration and Power (2017) On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibility and Reflections on Language in One Volume (1998) Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007) Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky (2002) The Anarchist Library: Workers' Solidarity Federation's “History of the Anarchist-Syndicalist Trade Union” The Anarchist Library: Rudolph Rocker on Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in “The Reproduction of Daily Life” Mikhail Bakunin, The Founder of Modern Anarchism: Mark Leier's Bakunin: The Creative Passion (2009) America's Most Famous Anarchist & Greatest Dissident; as Seen in Candace Falk's Love, Anarchy & Emma Goldman (1990), and Also in Kevin and Paul Avrich's Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (2012) Michael Albert, the co-founder of Participatory Economics (Parecon): as Seen in the Graphic Novel-ization Parecon: Sean Michael Wilson and Carl Thomspon's Parecomic: Michael Albert and the Story of Participatory Economics (2013) The Big Think: “Do Scientists Have a Special Responsibility to Engage in Political Advocacy?” Michael Albert's Parecon: Life After Capitalism (2003) & Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society (KAIROS) (2017) Andrew Anthony in The Guardian: “Ex-diplomat Carne Ross: The Case for Anarchism” IMDb: John Archer and Clara Glynn's The Accidental Anarchist (About Carne Ross' Epiphany Toward Anarchy After Becoming Disillusioned of Serving State Power) Biola Magazine: “What Are the Key Difference Between Mormonism and Christianity?” Jehovah's Witnesses (JW.org): “What Happens at a Kingdom Hall?” Reddit: “How to Make Molotov Cocktails”  (!!!) David Graeber's Most Famous Essay on Anarchism: “Are You an Anarchist? The Answer Might Surprise You?!” The Anarchist Library: “An Anarchist FAQ” Bakunin on Karl Marx's Idea of Socialism Within the State: “A dictatorship of the proletariat is still a dictatorship.” The Anarchist Library: Wayne Price's “In Defense of Bakunin and Anarchism” (Responses to Herb Gamberg's Attacks on Anarchism) The First International (AKA the International Workingmen's Association) The Socialist International David Harvey's Most Recent Work: Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2017) David Graeber's Idea of Baseline Communism Is Fully Explored in His Most Important Work: Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Lord of the Rings & Gandalf's Anxiety & Terror of the Rings Corrupting Powers: “Don't Tempt Me Frodo!” Jonathan Franzen About Those Facebook “likes” in The New York Times: “Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” Jim Dwyer's Article on Marina Abramovic's Art Project to Stare at People, Eye-to-Eye, Twenty Minutes Each for Hours and Hours; As Explored in The New York Times: “Confronting a Stranger, for Art” Buzzfeed: “Watch Six Pairs Stare Into Each Others' Eyes as a Love Experiment” The Guardian: “Literary Fiction Readers Understand Others' Emotions Better, Study Finds” Annie Murphy Paul in Time Magazine: “Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer” Adam Gopnik Explores the Paris Commune in The New Yorker: “The Fires of Paris” The Anarchist Library: Murray Bookchin's “To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936” Noted Correction: Matthew incorrectly stated that members of Congress receive lifetime pension after only being in office one term (two years); In actuality, members of congress receive pension after five years (but Senators do get pensions after just one term of six years). For more information on this, go to FactCheck.org's article on the subject. Margaret Atwood's Interview on Canada's Q TV Where She Discusses Her Creation of God's Gardeners in The Year of the Flood (2009) & How Environmental Activists Must Make Friends with the Religious for a Truly Big Tent Movement to Save the Planet; Also Talks About the Split Between Christian Fundamentalists & Environmental Christians Who View Humans as Stewards of the Earth. Jessica Alexander in The Atlantic: “America's Insensitive Children?” {How Schools in Denmark Teach Students Empathy From a Young Age} Kevin Carson in Center for a Stateless Society: “Libertarian-splaining to the Poor” Learning About Worker Cooperatives: A Working Definition from the Canadian Worker Co-Op Federation Alana Semuels in The Atlantic: “Worker-Owned Cooperatives: What Are They?” National Community Land Trust Network: An FAQ About Community Land Trusts Mikhail Bakunin: “To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.” {For More Quotes by Bakunin, Hit Up His Wikiquote} The Future Is A Mixtape's First Three Episodes Exploring The Poison Pyramid: What Jesse Calls An Unconsciously Inspired Anarchist Idea-Shape: Episode 001: The Desire For Certainty: On the Terrifying Costs of Religious Tyranny Upon Humanity Episode 002: The Invisible Hand: Explores the Death-Dealing Nature of Capitalism Episode 003: Star-Fuckers: Concerns Our Toxic Relationship to the Cult of Celebrity-Worship Mikhail Bakunin's Quote on God as a Bad Boss: "A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore If God did exist, he would have to be abolished.” Vivir la utopía: Juan A. Gamera's Documentary on the Anarchist Revolution in Catalonia: Living Utopia (1997) Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892: 2017 Edition Translated by Jonathan-David Jackson) Utopia As Seen George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia Where He Describes How Everyday Workers Were in the Saddle of the 1936 Revolution: "The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle." Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) Why is it that the German Air-Bombings during WWII (The Blitz) caused suicide rates to plummet so dramatically? British scientists discover the reason as seen in The Telegraph's article: “Terror Attacks Cause Drop in Suicide Rates as They Invoke Blitz Spirit” PBS NewsHour: “Sebastian Junger's Tribe Examines Loyalty, Belonging and the Quest for Meaning” How Spending $25 on Others (Instead of Keeping It for Yourself) Creates More Happiness; as Seen in The New Republic Interview with Scientists: “Want to Be Happy? Stop Being Cheap!” Time Magazine: “Do We Need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?” The US Military-Industrial-Complex: $700 Billion on Murder and Machinery: Alex Emmons in The Intercept: “The Senate's Military Spending Increase Alone Is Enough to Make Public College Free” Armistead Maupin: “There is your biological family and then your logical family.” As Seen in His Autobiography, Logical Family: A Memoir Is Kamala Harris America's Future President or Just Another Transactional Politician Buried in Corporate Money? Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Universal Basic Dividend (UBD)? Matthew Bruenig's Essay-Report: “How Norway's State Manages Its Ownership Of Companies” (From the People's Policy Project) Michael Zannettis in The People's Policy Project: “Why Americans Are Going to Love Single Payer” Alan Moore's Most Important Works, Both Past and Present: Watchman (Released in 1986-87; Reprinted 2014) V for Vendetta (Released in 1989; Reprinted in 2008 Jerusalem: A Novel (Hardback Release: 2016 & It's 1280 Pages!) From Hell (2004) When V for Vendetta was published it was seen as an SF allegory for Margaret Thatcher's World Gone Mad; As Seen in George Monbiot's Excellent Essay in The Guardian: “Neoliberalism -- the Ideology at the Root of All Our Problems” But There's A World We Can Have from the Anarchist Principles of Mutual Aid, Solidarity and Community Wealth: Marcin Jakubowski's Open Source Ecology Project & It's Philosophy The Making of “America's Most Radical City” as Explored with the Founding of Cooperation Jackson; Jackson's History of This Struggle Is Also Explored in Ajamu Nangwaya & Kali Akuno's Book  Jackson Rising (2017) Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: Email Us: thefutureisamixtape@gmail.com Find Us Via Our Website . . . The Future Is A Mixtape Or Lollygagging on Social Networks: Facebook Twitter Instagram