Category Archives: Race

activism, Anarchist, Capitalism, Da Bay, General, History, Housing, Occupy, Race, Squatting

Foreclosure Defense Group: Brooke’s reflections on strategy + organizing around Occupy Oakland

2015/12/22 The Final Straw Radio

Foreclosure Defense Group

This week we feature an interview conducted by an Audio Cadre of ours on the West coast with Brooke, an anarchist who participated in the Foreclosure Defense Group that sprang from Occupy Oakland in March of 2012. During the hour, they speak about the history of that group, it’s strengths and weakness and lessons around cross-race and cross-class organizing around displacement in Oakland based on some of the models worked out by SolNet, the Seattle Solidarity Network. For an extended version of the conversation, check out the podcast version of the show.

If you’re in Asheville on Friday, December 18th, there will be a free event you can check out at Firestorm Books and Coffee at 8pm. From the description:

“The ZAD is a large scale land occupation near Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France. It was squatted in 2009 at the invitation of local citizen and farming associations, who had been resisting the imposition of an airport, highway, high speed train, and tram line since 1972. Since then, the anti-airport movement has depassed traditional limitations of “issue-based struggles” with a strong critique of capitalist and hierarchical systems (including and especially the State), and links and shared projects with a wide diversity of people, to the point where the divisions between squatter, farmer, local, have become blurred.

After a massive police operation in 2012, “Operation Cesar”, the zone of 8 miles square has been free of State intervention, and has become known as a “zone outside the law”. Zadistas have created our own infrastructures and are autonomous in many ways. Some things work less well, like conflict resolution, but overall the occupation is settled into the territory and is planning for the long term, together with the “locals” and “farmers” involved in the struggle and those living close by. At the moment, however, the French prime minister is threatening to evict the ZAD and begin work on the airport early 2016. Ironically, they are waiting until just after the COP 21 in Paris (while billing the airport as “good for the environment”).”

Playlist

Anarchist, Capitalism, communization, Environment, Feminism, gender, General, Health, Paul Z Simons, Race, Religion, Rojava

Ecology + Anti-Capitalism in Rojava: Paul Z. Simons part 3 of 3

2015/12/14 The Final Straw Radio

This week we start off with a dispatch from Sean Swain, read by William. Sean is an anarchist prisoner we’ve featured commentary from over the past 2 years. Sean Swain has been under media block for the past few months, so his commentary here has been sparse. In this segment he addresses his media silencing and his bid for presidency of the U.S. in 2016. More of Sean’s writings at seanswain.org

Paul Z. Simons on Rojava, pt3

For the meat of the episode, we feature part three of Bursts conversation with Paul Z. Simons about his experience of the Rojava Revolution going on in northern Syria. The Rojava Revolution began in 2012, as an outgrowth from the insurgency of the PKK and other Kurdish groups in Turkey that’s been locked in an off-and-on civil war for 30 years. Paul, a post-left anarchist from the U.S. talks about his experiences in Rojava in October of this year of their multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, feminism revolution.

The Rojava Revolution has been described as anti-state, anti-capitalist, feminist and ecological, however in the conversations Bursts has had on what’s gone on in Rojava with students of it, little has come out in terms of how the Rojava experiment has been ecological or anti-capitalist. So, in this conversation Paul and Bursts spoke about Paul’s understanding of economic models, property rights, modes of exchange in Rojava as well as discussions of it’s war-time and long-view approaches towards ecology in Rojava.

The first two parts of this interview can be found here.

Playlist can be found here

Anarchist, Capitalism, communization, Environment, Feminism, gender, Middle East, Paul Z Simons, Race, Religion, Rojava, Turkey

Paul Z. Simons on the Dispaches from Rojava; part 1 of 3

2015/11/23 The Final Straw Radio

Paul Z. Simons pt 1

In 2012, a power vacuum formed in parts of northern Syria as a result of the civil war. These areas, part of the lands inhabited by Kurdish peoples,soon became a testing ground for an implementation of an anti-state communalism influenced in part by an American former Anarchist turned Communalist named Murray Bookchin. Bookchin’s thought helped to shape the ideas of Abdullah Ocalan, ideological leader of the Kurdish Worker’s Party, PKK, in neighboring Turkey. The people participating in what’s been branded The Rojava Revolution are organizing administration and defense based from the neighborhood councils. Popular militias are attempting to fight external enemies like the Syrian military of Bashar Al-Asaad and ISIL/Daesh as well as the internal structures which hold in most societies such as patriarchy, class division and xenophobia. Anarchists, anti-capitalists of all stripes from around the world, feminists, ecologists… these peoples and more around the world are among those engaging with the 3-year-runnning experiment of Rojava.

This week’s episode features the first of three segments of conversation with Paul Z Simons,a post-left anarchist and co-editor of Modern Slavery Magazine. Paul, writing under the name El Errante, documented his recent tripto the Rojava region in Northern Syria. This first episode will not be followed up immediately by another episode on the subject, however we are making the second and third episodes content availablealongside of this one online. If you’re in a hurry to hear the complete conversation on his observations of institutions and organizing On The Ground in Rojava, follow this link for part II and this link for part III. These segments will make their way into radio versions in the near future.

Bursts and Paul talk about Democratic Confederalism, gender, ecology, international intervention, religion, ethnicity, anti-capitalism, competing tendencies, holding tensions, international fighters and much much more

To follow the links that our guest mentioned in this interview, just click these websites below!

http://kurdishquestion.com/
http://rojavaplan.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tev-Dem

To see more of Paul Z. Simon’s work, you can visit this website

Next week on The Final Straw, you’ll hear a conversation with an anarchist in Spain about recent and continued repressions of anarchists in that country. Updates on that situation can be found at https://efectopandora.wordpress.com/category/english/ and for past episodes of The Final Straw check here.

Announcement:

At Grand Valley Institute for Women (GVI), a federal prison in Kitchener, Ontario there has been a recent crackdown against LBTQ2+ prisoners and/or prisoners in relationships amongst themselves. Intimate relationships between prisoners are being attacked by a clique of guards acting without apparent direction or oversight from the Corrections Canada administration. We need your support with a call-in campaign to end these practices.

Harassment of prisoners includes throwing them in solitary as punishment for being in a relationship, threatening them with transfers to remote parts of the country, separating partners by placing them in different parts of the prison, and laying spurious institutional charges that can lead to being locked in the maximum security unit.

Most troublingly, guards have been using physical intimidation and invasions of personal space to harass prisoners who speak up against these practices.

The prisoners have been organizing in response to these attacks, but have faced increasing repression for their efforts.

Outside support right now can make a major difference in putting a check on the repression of prisoner relationships and dissent among prisoners.

To protest this treatment, it’s asked that people call Grand Valley Institute for Women at (519) 894-2011. For more guidance about how to conduct this phone call and for updates on this situation you can visit the website https://gviwatch.wordpress.com/