This week William talks with Peter Werbe, a long time editor of Fifth Estate magazine based in Detroit, MI for now. Fifth Estate is an “anarchist, anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-profit project” which is published cooperatively three times a year, and this year marks its 50th year of publication. The magazine tackles current events, issues, theory, and praxis which would be of interest to an anarchist audience. To find out more about this project, and to subscribe, you can visit http://www.fifthestate.org
Peter and William talk about the magazine’s historical trajectory, from its inception in 1965 as a weekly, less political periodical, to its takeover by anarchists in 1975, to what it is today. They talk about the Eat The Rich Gang and its associations with Fifth Estate magazine, as well as directions the project could take. For more on Peter Werbe’s radio work, you can visit http://www.peterwerbe.com
This entire episode’s music is from The Layabouts, which is a Detroit based anarchist ska punk project (not to be confused with the London based techno-house project of the same name). Many of its members did or do work on Fifth Estate. For more on them you can visit http://www.thelayabouts.com
This week: Sean Swain announces that he’s escalating his hunger strike and will begin denying his hypertension medication this evening. This could put him in dire danger, he could die within a few days. This protest is in response to the administration at OSP & ODRC selectively denying his access to communicate with his supporters, in particular with Ben Turk via the jpay video chat. From his support page:
“Sean needs support right now. Rick Kerger, his lawyer is filing a restraining order preventing the ODRC from cancelling future video visits. There are three things you can do.
1. Call OSP Warden Forshay and demand that he meet with Sean in good faith and negotiate a reversal of the ODRC policy of f**king with Sean on flimsy pretexts. 330-743-0700. Ext. 2006.
2. Write Sean a letter, or even better, request a video visit yourself. The first step is getting approved as a visitor, using this form. The more communication we send Sean’s way, the more of their time they’ll have to waste f**king with him. Sean often says “they’ll get tired of killing me before I get tired of dying.” Let’s make sure he’s right.
3. Call ODRC Investigator Paul Schumacher, who cancelled Sean’s video visits, and say whatever you want to his voicemail. 614-728-1152”
Script suggestions for the conversation can be found at http://seanswain.org
Then, we hear from Andrew Hoyt about the upcoming North American Anarchist Studies Conference in San Francisco during the 20th through the 22nd of March, 2015. He talks about the network, which was created to link researchers with activists and assist dialogue to spread anarchism in society. If you’re interested in putting on a workshop, the deadline is coming up on February 14th, so hurry up! Info on the network, the upcoming (free) conference, past conferences, how to join the email list and more can be found at http://naasn.org
Finally, we get an update from a comrade in Barcelona about Operacion Pandora, the Spanish government’s series of raids and arrests on December 16th, 2014, of anarchists around the country. The Spanish government, according to the guest, is trying to link those 7 remaining with charges of connection to the GAC (Coordinated Anarchist Groups) which published a rather dry book criticizing Democracy and it’s uses by existing governments to justify VERY undemocratic actions. The Spanish government is then proposing that GAC is aligned with the Informal Anarchist Federation Tendency (FAI/IAF). The text, which will be distributed for free on February 14th in protest around Spain, can be found here in Spanish and portions have been translated into English. The guest speaks about La Ley Mordaza (Gag Law) recently passed in Spain and how this operation appears to be a first step of illegalizing effective protest tactics (such as protesting at religious institutions or setting up barricades) and branding them as terroristic in order to choke off resistance within Spain.
More on the case and shows of resistance against it can be found at http://efectivopandora.wordpress.com
Prior to the main portion of this week’s episode, we hear a Sean Swain segment and also Ben Turk comes on to talk about difficulties Sean’s currently facing (for instance beginning a hunger strike on Monday due to shenanigans by officials at OSP, where Sean is being held, and possibly JPAY (the company that contracts communication with Ohio’s DRC) that have limited his communications again.
The majority of this week’s episode is a conversation with incarcerated members of the Free Alabama & Mississippi Movements. The FAMMC (now including inmates in California as well) is an inmate-drive non-violent, civil disobedience movement with the goal of bettering the situations of prisoners, challenging the profits of prison corporations and departments of correction, ending the impunity of wardens and guards and abolishing the “new slavery” of mass incarceration in the U.S.
Due to the poor connection with the guests, some of the audio is difficult to hear, so a transcript should be posted in a few days at ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw where this post can be found and later at thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org (oh yeah? where is that, now?)
Melvin Ray (aka Bennu Hannibal Ra(y)-Sun) at St. Clair Correctional Facility/SCCF and R.EARL (aka Kinetic Justice Amun) at Holman/HCF near Atmore, AL, two founders of the Free Alabama Movement along with a member of the Free Mississippi Movement break down mass incarceration, the forms of struggle they’re taking, the economic underpinning to prison labor and prison privatization, issue of sanitation, diet, cost to inmates and family of incarceration, assault and rape in Women facilities, networking across state borders… M & Kinetic also talk about the recent lock-downs at their facilities.
An upcoming way for folks around the country to get involved in this movement is to share the information of the FAMMC with folks on the inside and try to help them to get involved in the movement. Keep up on the upcoming pushes to protest at and outside of prisons around Alabama, Mississippi and more by checking out their facebook and twitter pages. These groups are planning to focus demonstrations and campaigns against McDonalds Restaurants (which use prison labor to make it’s burger patties, uniforms and more) and other businesses that are all around us that contract prisoner labor to make a profit.
These folks run a weekly (often up to 3 times a week) podcast-radio show called The People’s Platform that can be listened to and called into when live or found as archives. More on this show can be found at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/freealabamamovement
A recent report about the violence (sexual and otherwise) perpetrated by officials against the prisoners at the Juliet Tutwiler Women’s Facility in Alabama (at which the current warden of St. Clair, Curtis Davenport, who’s overseen this rise of violence was once an official), check out this US DOJ report from January of last year: http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/spl/documents/tutwiler_findings_1-17-14.pdf
This week’s episode features a conversation with Candace Falk, founder and main editor at the Emma Goldman Papers Project in Berkeley, CA.
A quick introduction. Emma Goldman was born in what is today Lithuania in 1869, moving to the U.S. at the age of 16. As a Jewish woman immigrating from Eastern Europe to New York city, she was not alone in the struggles she would face in terms of racism, patriarchy, nativism capitalism and so more. But Emma became involved in the Anarchist movement after the Haymarket Massacre and subsequent show trials of the next year and would grow to become known for a time as the most dangerous woman in America (J. Edgar Hoover). Her agitation and writing in support of free love, athiesm, the abolition of state and capitalism, contraception, beauty, literature, gender parity and more made tidal waves in her day and have continued to inspire people since she died in 1940. She aided would-be assassins, was jailed for agitating against World War I, was exiled to Russia, preached against the corruption of the Soviet Government, did propaganda work on behalf of the Spanish Anarchists in their Revolution, loved, lived and lost.
For the hour we talk about how Candace came to love Emma Goldman, the creation of the EGPP archives, what they provide, their relationship with the University of California at Berkeley and what the future may hold for the project. Candace also shares stories of how curating a history of Emma has bled into including bits of related and overlapping history and the rewards of this sort of seeking.
