We have an hour-long conversation with organizers of the June 26th antifascist resistance in Sacramento, CA, that routed the attempted organizing on the Capitol Steps by white nationalist groups, the Traditionalist Workers Party and the Golden State Skinheads (among other groups).
The TWP & GSS rally was an attempt to take symbolic space and inspire further and more public demonstrations by these and affiliated groups however the 40 members who showed up were quickly routed by the diverse antifa numbering 400 or so. In the ensuing fracas, 9 antifa were hospitalized, most serious among them for stab wounds. During the hour long podcast, hear 3 organizers talk about medic preparation, what the event looked like, media responses, post-confrontation security for those hospitalized and more. It’s well worth noting that money is still being raised to help cover medical costs of those injured on June 26th. To help, you can visit https://rally.org/June26th .
The first segment is a short conversation with members of NYC Antifa, an antifascist group in New York City. In this conversation we talk a bit about the history of this day of solidarity plus the state of fascism in the US and abroad. This conversation was transcribed and re-recorded to protect the folks’ identities. To learn more about this, you can visit https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/, and to donate to the international defense fund you can visit https://intlantifadefence.wordpress.com/about-2/
A large portion of this episode is a conversation with a member of Keep Hoods Yours. Keep Hoods Yours, or KHY, is a radical graffiti crew based in the SF Bay Area that organizes against gentrification, against sexual predators in the scene, against racism and more. During the conversation, we’ll hear about the rebel cultural car events called Sideshows, the police killing of Richard
Perkins during one of these Sideshows, KHY participation in uprisings against the Ferguson verdict, resistance to Fast Agent and poning of Kenny Truong and the shutdown of racist, gentrifying business “Locals Corner” in the Mission District. You can find KHY on Instagram or in the
streets. This interview was formatted into a zine by 1312 Distro and is available for printing thanks to IGD.
On July 25th at 9 am Luke O’Donovan will walk out of Washington State Prison after serving two years there. We are thrilled to see our friend free from behind prison walls. He is in high spirits and very excited to be released. As many of you who have been in touch with him know, he has occupied his time with a rigorous workout routine, lots of reading, and correspondence with all those who took the time to communicate with him.
Unfortunately he will not be allowed to return to his home and life in Atlanta. Due to the judge adding a banishment condition to his probation, Luke will have to move all the way to the West Coast for the next eight years, or until the conditions of his probation are changed. Moving forward, here are some ways to continue to support Luke as he starts life on strict probation.
Money– Luke will need money in order to cover his living expenses while he gets on his feet and moves his belongings and life to the West Coast. He will also need money to cover the probation and drug testing fees that he will be subject too. You can donate or set up recurring donations by visiting their paypal site.
Care Packages– Luke will need lots of little things, like clothes to rebuild his wardrobe, delicious vegan food, and other items that you are not allowed to have in prison. If you would like to send a care package please email letlukego@gmail.com to work out details on where and what to send.
Solidarity and Support- Throughout Luke’s case and subsequent imprisonment the support and solidarity he has gotten has been overwhelming. From the solidarity marches and actions to the mountain of mail and the hundreds of postcards sent to the judge we have been thrilled by all those who have taken action for him. Once things are more clear we will begin trying to get his banishment condition appealed, check back for updates. For now any and all actions are appreciated. As Luke’s new living situation isn’t worked out yet we can’t provide contact info at this time, but email us at letlukego@gmail.com if you want to get in touch.
Luke is set to be free from prison, but there is still a lot to do. Thanks everyone for your past and future support.
What follows is the transcript from an interview with Keep Hoods Yours (KHY) that appeared on The Final Straw Radio (TFSR). KHY is an anti-authoritarian, anti-gentrification, anti-sexist, anti-racist and so forth, graffiti crew based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This interview talks about organizing in youth culture, radical potentials in graffiti, some of the struggles that KHY has been involved in and more. The Final Straw is a radical radio program out of Asheville, N.C. and their episodes can be found here: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/. This interview was transcribed in an effort to broaden conversations around radical organizing and antagonism within vibrant subcultures that anarchists and other radicals find themselves involved in. Ultimately, it also serves as a proposal and a challenge to punks, graffiti writers, skateboarders, dancers, musicians and artists of many forms to never pass up on an opportunity to strategically target our enemies and fire at will, and to explore the creative cultures we find ourselves enmeshed with for spaces to attack from. Or, in the words of the KHY interviewee, to “develop an antagonistic, decentralized, popular culture of resistance that can hopefully develop our capacity to identify and attack the various forces which exploit poor and working class spaces, including gentrifi cation, police violence, rape culture and local white supremacist and fascist efforts.”
TFSR: Well first off let’s talk about, what is a graffiti crew? For those people listening who may know nothing about graffiti culture, what is it and how does it operate?
KHY: Well they vary from crew to crew, but for the most part a graffiti crew is a semi-formal grouping of graffiti writers that have similar styles, aesthetic choices and a philosophy towards the craft. They group up and collaborate in order to do graffiti, to exchange styles, knowledge, strategies, and supplies and generally have each other’s backs. Since it’s a culture that’s rooted in the streets, anything can happen. And it being illegal, we can’t really rely on mainstream institutions to solve conflicts. But it varies. For some crews, they’re just drinking buddies. For others, they are very serious, formal, tight-knit and organized. It definitely varies.
TFSR: I guess the first thing people would think of when they think graffiti-crew; they think it’s automatically connected with a gang.
KHY: It’s actually not, it’s often the other way around actually. Especially in working-class neighborhoods, some youth do graffiti instead of falling in the gang trap. In some cities, gangs and graffiti crews get along or just don’t beef, while in other cities it’s much different. In some crews there’s overlap in gang affiliations and graffiti crews. But for the most part they’re two very separate worlds that sometimes conflict.
TFSR: So sense of place seems pretty central to the idea of KHY. Could you tell some of our listeners about, generally speaking, the upbringing of many of the people involved? What do you think drew them to become involved in KHY? And, what kind of drives people to be engaged in this activity that could potentially be legally dangerous for them?
KHY: All of the people involved in this project at this time were born and raised in the Bay Area. Part of what’s driven folks to become involved in KHY is just been seeing the blatant gentrification, police violence and other problems in our neighborhoods. And also seeing how liberal non-profit efforts at changing things fail completely. These efforts usually end up alienating folks in the hoods that are probably attracted to things like KHY, because they see it as a way to engage with the oppressive things happening in their neighborhoods without committing themselves to reformist or legal means. It’s potentially dangerous, but the reality for folks is that the problems they’re dealing with are already dangerous. They face a larger danger from losing people in their community to police violence, to gentrification, to having families split apart, to the erasure of their culture and the loss of dignity that comes with it, that kind of thing. So really, the risk of catching a misdemeanor case for writing on a wall, it doesn’t feel all that dangerous compared to our daily reality.
TFSR: And let’s talk specifically now about KHY and how, when did it form, and overall what are it’s goals? And also, as both a radical project and a graffiti crew, how did it evolve over time since it first started?
KHY: KHY formed at about 2008-2009 with just a couple of us, and it’s grown over time. It’s grown at a much faster rate in the last three years or so. It’s really just a graffiti crew that’s rooted in radical ideas, including anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial thought. KHY aims to highlight the anti-property values of graffiti culture by exploring how targeted graffiti application could be used as a form of direct action. Also using culture, like active youth culture and radical organizing, to help develop an antagonistic, decentralized, popular culture of resistance that can hopefully develop our capacity to identify and attack the various forces which exploit poor and working class spaces, including gentrification, police violence, rape culture and local white supremacist and fascist efforts.
TFSR: Great, thanks for sharing that. And let’s talk about what kind of campaigns you all have been involved in. To me, the first thing that pops up in my mind is Local’s Corner, which obviously wasn’t something that was started by you guys but is something you were involved in. If you could talk about that, and just what happened (Local’s Corner is closed now, it was a restaurant in the Mission District). Also, you’re involved in a campaign around Fast Agent, so if you could just talk to us about what both of those were, and why you chose those as targets.
KHY: The Local’s Corner campaign, it was a very obvious example of the blatant colonial white supremacist mentality behind some of the gentrifiers in the mission district. For folks who don’t really know the story behind it, it involves the owner refusing to seat people of color. There’s one specific incident where they denied a Latina mother and her kids a table, claiming that there weren’t enough seats, and then sat down a group of customers of the same size right after. There’s another incident where some local students carried out a test, where they had a group of white students come in, and they were given seating, and then they had a group of students of color come in, and they weren’t given seating. There was already a lot of local anger at that business, but the mainstream liberal attempts to hold them accountable were failing. Folks had a petition floating around, they had some protests, but none of that really put enough pressure alone on Local’s Corner to really do anything. KHY targeting Local’s Corner was the tipping point for their business. The bad publicity along with the mainstream legal pressure, then on top of that the repeated vandalism, which became popularized as other folks not involved with KHY in any way began replicating the strategy themselves, it was just the final straw. And they closed, they called it. We did that to show that direct action can be accessible to folks who don’t feel as familiar with it, ya know? It doesn’t necessarily need to involve a high-risk action, like burning something down. It can be creative, accessible, less of a risk than folks assume. And it can be effective, it can shut things down. You can make a gentrifying business get the fuck out of your town.
TFSR: I would assume for younger people that would be like a big tipping point, like “Oh we actually shut this thing down.”
KHY: Yeah, and I think that a lot of people saw that, even some of the liberal people gave us credit, they said that KHY had a lot to do with it, that they wouldn’t have closed without our efforts. And I think that legitimized direct action and more militant, illegal tactics n the eyes of the community, because it was effective. It was a small victory, but people were glad to see them leave. It also engaged a lot of folks who had never been involved in direct action before. Once other graffiti writers began vandalizing it, writing messages, their names, just scribbling over it, whatever, they became engaged in that process. They were able to build their confidence in attacking what essentially attacks them.
TFSR: Yeah, and I also think that’s interesting with the Fast Agent thing, which basically are a bunch of ads that are on bus stop benches, I see it as you are targeting things that are in the social landscape, like “Hey, get this!”
KHY: Definitely. It’s essentially what graffiti’s always been about. It’s been a battle for the public visual landscape. There’s something inherently very antagonistic, anti-property, and anti-capitalist about graffiti. So Fast Agent is an advertising campaign for the real estate agent who has the highest record for flipping properties in the neighborhoods being targeted by gentrification, the number one real estate agent in the East Bay. His name is Kenny Trong, and he, like Local’s Corner, already faced a lot of resentment from the locals. He wasn’t very strategic about it either. He did a lot of talking shit to people online and instigating and being condescending to folks. And part of that entitlement was blasting West Oakland and parts of East Oakland with these Fast Agent ads to take up space and show his presence, to assert his economic power.
So we started targeting him, and encouraging other folks to do so. At this point it’s been our campaign that’s had the widest participation than any other. I mean there’s been hundreds of other people from all walks of life who’ve tagged on them, vandalized them, ripped them out, far more than we ever did. It’s normalized, decentralized, has a life of it’s own, has little to do with us. And again, it goes to show that you don’t necessarily have to be a part of a group or organization. You don’t have to go through legal means or follow the law. You don’t have to ask for anything, you can just take resistance into your own hands, at your own pace, even if you’re isolated and even if you don’t want to be a part of anything formal. And at this point it’s been going on for over a year.
TFSR: Let’s talk a little bit about; if people are going to look at KHY stuff, primarily they do that through instagram. So how do you find, through engaging in social media, have you been able to build relationships with other projects through this? And also, what is it like using social media as a means to show people what the crew has been doing, but at the same time obviously the police use that as a means for surveillance?
KHY: So far, social media has been a means to highlight some of our ideas of resistance to folks who aren’t already involved in radical circles. Folks that are already radicalized, that are already involved in radical movements, don’t need social media to get informed. So the social media thing was really meant as a way to engage folks in the hood who were on social media anyways. So far, it has helped build some solidarity. We’ve reached out to folks in other cities across the west coast, the U.S., even in other countries. Just as far as exchanging some inspiration, news, strategy, ideas, just making those connections between similar struggles in different cities. There’s been a lot of sharing too, folks will send us photos of them doing politicized graffiti in their cities, things that are going on in other places. We’ve had folks use politically targeted graffiti in application and send us reports about it, stuff like that. Now that we’ve got a strong social media presence, we focus more on highlighting other struggles that might be isolated. It’s also helped to build some relationships that have materialized from real life, outside of social media. There’s definitely limitations to using a medium like social media that’s always surveilled. But, in reality, only very specific things are communicated through instagram. The photos that we post about Fast Agent for example, 90% of them come from folks that have absolutely nothing to do with KHY. At this point it’s more about documenting recent and ongoing struggles. At most, there’s just pictures of KHY graffiti, unfortunately social media became part of graffiti culture. There’s hella accounts documenting graffiti, and it’s just not as hot as other forms of direct action.
TFS: ‘Cause you hear all the time these horror stories of how someone goes and steals a bunch of paint, and then their next picture is of their job, and then police go to their job and arrest them.
KHY: Yeah but, in the Bay Area graffiti is just so widespread and so ingrained out here that it’s so easy to get away with it, that they’re not really prosecuting graffiti in the same way that they would in some small town. And if you’re not prepared to deal with the potential consequences, you shouldn’t even be doing it.
TFSR: Is that something you all think about too? ‘Cause it’s not just some instances, but it’s everywhere, it’s integrated into the landscape, like it’s murals, it’s advertisement, graffiti is part of not only working class communities but also capitalism itself. I guess, what does it mean to be a graffiti artist but also to make that radical connection?
KHY: Well most of the time, graffiti isn’t even that radical or political, but it is inherently, and that’s what we’re trying to highlight. We’re trying to highlight that this culture that a lot of youth from all walks of life participate in, is already inherently radical. It already has revolutionary potential, and folks that participate in this culture already have the tools necessary to carry out resistance. People do graffiti every day, and people do graffiti on everything, anything, all it takes is strategic placement, and if desired some messaging, and then it becomes a form of direct action.
TFSR: Well that kinda brings us to my next question, but has the politics of KHY affected other street organizations or graffiti crews that are in this general area? And has the stance that you all have taken pushed people that are in the graffiti scene in a more political direction? Or has it already just been going that way because of the gentrification and police violence in San Francisco and Bay Area?
KHY: As far as other street organizations and other crews, there’s been a lot of mutual respect. Our goals have kept us out of the usual and petty conflicts that exist in graffiti, and that’s given us a lot of room to focus on what we’re doing. We’re not engaged in the usual beef dynamics in graffiti politics, even though some of us might have been involved in before. We’re more interested in exploring potentials for unity, collaboration, and focusing on common enemies. And for the most part, other writers see this and respect it, or just leave it alone. We’re also not pushovers, and have our own histories out here that some people aren’t aware of. Graffiti was beginning to take a slightly more political direction in the Bay Area, but it was very minor. Graffiti is full of problematic people and oppressive behaviors, and so we’ve helped to push local graffiti in a more political direction as far as people becoming more involved, as far as people becoming strategic with what they do graffiti on, about what they paint, and also about bringing up dynamics in the culture, of how to carry themselves, solidarity, things like that. Calling out rape culture and misogyny, highlighting different issues that affect writers. There’s a drug addiction epidemic in graffiti that’s hard to talk about that has cost a lot of heavy hitters and good people. We’re definitely trying to radicalize graffiti writers, while using graffiti to radicalize folks that don’t do graffiti.
TFSR: When you are all engaged in that, do you feel like there’s some push-back? Because I would imagine that that kind of political stance almost seems like a cliché, to bring that stuff up in any sort of youth culture. I imagine people would just respond with “Oh I don’t care about that. For me it’s just about destroying shit and that’s what it is.”
KHY: The only push-back we’ve really felt is a few misogynistic individuals feel threatened by us highlighting a lot of predators in the Bay Area, calling out rape culture and being really explicit about that. It’s almost unheard of for a graffiti crew, for a project that mostly consists of males in a culture that’s male dominated, to explicitly call for fighting patriarchy and pushing rapists out of their scenes and spaces in a militant way.
TFSR: That it is pretty crazy, because historically graffiti has been so male dominated.
KHY: Yeah, so really that’s been most of the push-back. So far as our broader politics in this project, there hasn’t been much push-back because we’re actually graffiti writers in the first place. We’re not people who aren’t a part of graffiti and aren’t just using graffiti to try to reach out to youth or whatever. We’re already graffiti vandals, we have styles, we have history, we have legitimacy, we have these relationships already. And now we’re choosing to use our momentum to try to radicalize the culture and folks that have access to it. All of our campaigns have been about things that are blatantly a problem locally and that most people relate to regardless. People are already mad about them, we don’t really deal with abstract political concepts. We’re not out here putting out academic rants and things like that. We’re acknowledging what people are already well aware of; police murdering people, gentrification, and the recent rise in white supremacy organizing in the Bay Area. These are problems that people are already pissed about.
TFSR: We’re gonna talk a little bit about of the rebellion in the Bay Area against police violence in late 2014 in a second, but I just wanted to ask, you know we’re talking about social media, do you see any interest to create a KHY magazine, or something basically that’s off the internet? Obviously there’s this presence that’s online, I don’t know what you think about this, but how do you feel about graffi ti zines, magazines, publications, basically anything else that’s outside social media?
KHY: Even though social media has helped reach a broader audience, we understand that it’s pretty limited and temporary. We’re working on a zine project which should hopefully be coming out soon.
TFSR: Well that’s awesome to hear. I know there’s a lot of graffiti nerds out there that are rubbing their ears. So let’s talk a little bit about, in fall of 2014 and in the wake of Darren Wilson basically being let off for the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, M.O. There were a series of riots that erupted in the Bay Area, and graffiti writers in my opinion played a huge role in that rebellion. Can you talk about the experience you thought of overall of the members of KHY in that revolt? How did it affect the crew in general? And how do you feel like the revolt changed people, especially those that were kind of like new to either “political action” or anything like that?
KHY: There were some folks involved in this project that were out in the streets. These demonstrations had a positive, energizing affect on most of the youth that came out. The revolt was very empowering for most people, for a lot of newly radicalized folks to feel that power, and to be able to hold space in the streets, to be able to push back cops, to be able to target things that they disagree with or don’t want in their neighborhoods, within the protection of a larger crowd. I think it also helped to establish radical politics within local youth cultures. You saw a lot of cultures being represented, you saw a lot of graffiti writers painting while there were riots in the background, you saw musicians, skateboarders, dancers, etc. A lot of the revolt was very youth-led, very youth involved. I think it was successful in bringing a lot of people out into the streets, being radical and having fun.
TFSR: I was telling people from out of town, I said that I felt that the graffiti writers were kind of like the Bay Area version of the soccer hooligans in Egypt, they kind of played a central role. It seems like a lot of the media, even radical media, overlooked that. It was really interesting to see people writing everywhere, a lot of different things.
KHY: Yeah, graffiti writers were definitely out during the revolt. And so many people do graffiti now; it’s just so widespread. A lot of graffiti crews were out during that. Your comparison of graffiti writers to soccer hooligans as an antagonistic cultural force is a good one, it’s interesting that that dynamic isn’t highlighted much.
TFSR: To our next question, could you talk about the recent sideshows that have taken part in East Oakland, and you might want to talk about “What is a sideshow?” for people listening who have no idea what that is. And KHY’s reaction to the police killing of Richard Perkins, who was killed outside of the sideshow in East Oakland, C.A., and more over what is your view of sideshows in general?
KHY: Well sideshows are a long-standing tradition in Oakland, and they’re essentially car-shows in the street where folks who space in the street and perform stunts with their cars. They do donuts, things like that. It’s like an outdoor, moving car-sport-party. They are a rebellious, self-organized activity of the working class and have a lot of valuable dynamics. In East Oakland, there’s not a lot for the youth to do, and we all know that there’s violence, all that, and these shows alleviate some of the anxiety, depression, and alienation that come with living through all that shit. Sideshows are empowering because they give the youth something to do in the streets collectively, and they give ownership over the streets that they live in while having fun and being rebellious. They’re unique because they’re decentralized, they’re organized without any permits or any formal hierarchy or leaders, and they easily and quickly gather a lot of people. They’re militant and very anti-police. When police come by, they don’t get taken seriously or they’re literally attacked. And often sideshows don’t end until the participants want them to; bottles get thrown at them (the cops). If they catch a lone cop; windows are getting smashed, hoods are getting stomped. Sideshows are usually so big that police can’t get to the center of the sideshow because of all the cars that are taking up the streets for a few blocks. I mean, some of them have hundreds and hundreds of participants, there’s a strong solidarity and a sense of unity when cops show up. Folks don’t snitch on each other and try to avoid internal violence. Sideshows have an insurrectionary potential. They’re often accompanied by graffiti, general public rebellion and sometimes riots. People are militant and often armed. These shows are very fluid and flexible at being able to move from hood to hood, from city to city, very efficiently. Some folks involved in this project are a part of sideshow and car culture in the Bay. Some of us were around, just keepin’ it lit, kickin’ it, when Richard Perkins was murdered. Everyone saw the murder of Richard Perkins as police retaliation for a nonstop weekend of huge sideshows that the police could not control, and for attacks on a couple of police cars also. Everyone saw that as a way for them to try to assert their dominance over Oakland and to scare folks into going back home. The police lied as always, they always do, they claim that he randomly drove up to them and pulled out a gun on them, a fake gun at that. Everyone knows that’s not true. He was at a sideshow having fun, he was not gonna randomly run up to cops and pull out a fake gun on them. This is not the first time this has happened in Oakland, where the pigs say that somebody pulled out a fake gun on them so they had to shoot them. Some are thinking that it may be easier for the State to frame people in Oakland with fake guns that you can’t trace. People were at the scene where the cops show him, they said that he wasn’t doing anything and that once he was shot down, they saw the cops kicking him, moving his body around carelessly. It’s just blatant white supremacist state violence. It was in response to the lawlessness of the sideshows and how they made the police look like they didn’t have any control. Especially with an increasingly gentrified Oakland, the police are really trying to kill that culture and oppress it. It’s really just repression.
TFSR: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Can you talk about the kind of support that KHY’s gotten? Specifically from the Mission District, but also the Bay Area in general. I’ve seen a lot of different articles and stuff being written, kids handing out KHY stickers and stuff like that. Cause it is kind of impressive that KHY has gotten sort of the notoriety within the Bay Area and the Mission District specifically for kind of a taboo activity so to speak. And can you talk about this positive feedback, but also the negative receptions as well?
KHY: I think the support really comes from the fact that again, our campaign and the issues that we’ve been addressing have been things that a lot of people in our hoods already care about. And this moment is kind of a downtime for radical struggles in the Bay Area, so a lot of responses to police murders, gentrification, etc. have mostly been dominated by liberal ideology and pacified nonsense, which folks are alienated from and can see that it usually brings no kind of results. It feels like a slap in the face when the only response to someone in your hood being executed by a racist pig is a so-called “peaceful protest” in which every detail is so micro-managed that the lame ass protest security in yellow vest is staring at you because the message on the sign you’re holding is “too-militant.” The fact that we’ve been engaged in struggles that people are feeling hopeless about in a refreshing, creative way while bringing a militant radical ideology to the forefront definitely has to do with the support we have, despite using a taboo activity. We haven’t really had any negative reactions aside from folks who obviously wouldn’t be down with our project, like yuppies and cop apologists and occasional whining, delusional liberals but who cares about them. At first we thought that we’d be accused of being a gang, but that hasn’t happened much. Most folks are just actually excited to see graffiti writers use creative application to inspire the community and educate folks by discussing revolutionary ideas. They usually are highlighted by the existing liberal left, while also creatively targeting things in the community that everyone hates, whether it be banks, gentrifier businesses, corporations, cop cars, crossing out white supremacist graffiti, the sort of things within the public landscape for all to see, showing that they aren’t untouchable.
TFSR: You mentioned that a couple times, could you just touch on that? White power graffiti in the Bay Area…
KHY: Historically there hasn’t been, aside from the obviously established white supremacy that it’s inherent in a settler state, an open-public-white-supremacist movement in the Bay Area for various reasons. Possibly in relation to gentrification and all these new-comers from new places , there’s been an obvious rise in white-supremacist graffiti. Whether it be swastikas, “white power,” anti-Black messages, anti-Mexican messages, etc. So we decided that was a very easy thing to gather support for targeting, and it’s something that can bring folks together around a common enemy. Despite differences in the community in conflict and divisions, everyone can agree that we don’t want Nazis, we don’t want white supremacists, and by us taking the initiative to start crossing out those messages, we’ve inspired other folks to do so. So now all kinds of people, even those that don’t do graffiti, are buying markers and crossing out these markers where they see ‘em. It’s empowering people to take matters into their own hands, instead of waiting on the liberals or police to do something. They’re engaging with that on their own, because they should, because these are their streets and their struggles.
TFSR: Well let’s talk a little bit about, you mentioned the Bay Area’s kind of been in a down-tide, you’ve all really continued to push since the revolt of late 2014, can you talk a little bit about the kind of different organizing things you guys have done, different community outreach events, and just talk a little more about as you were saying the need to build in these down moments?
KHY: That’s another main focus of this project, to use culture and community organizing to help those ideas actually materialize in our neighborhoods. We can’t just wait for the next uprising or the next series of riots, we can’t just wait for the next police murder and hope this will be the one that will trigger an uprising. In the meantime, between these peak points in struggle, we need to be doing a culture of resistance and building collective capacity. We need to be establishing and normalizing radical thinking within the cultures that make up our communities. We need to be educating and learning from each other. We need to be building relationships, meeting each other, strengthening those relationships, building trust so that when there are peak points in the struggle again, when folks are in the streets, they’ll already have stronger relationships, they’ll trust and recognize each other. And do this cultural work, this grassroots work; we’re also able to bring in new folks and branch out of these closed circles of radicals. We don’t need to wait for peak points in struggles; oppression is always there, exploitation is always there, alienation is always there. So even if there’s nothing going on, or if you’re isolated, or if the city you live in doesn’t have a very established radical movement of any kind, anyone can grab a marker or a spray can and go target and challenge things in their neighborhood that are problematic, spread ideas and creatively take back public space.
TFS: Well I’m really curious, what do you think the possibilities for bringing radical politics into, as you said cultural things. I’m thinking specifically youth culture, from hip-hop to graffiti, to punk, to motorcycle crews, to sports, to anything. What kind of advice would you give to anybody that’s looking to do this style of activity? It doesn’t even have to be graffi ti, but something culturally oriented that doesn’t really kind of have the auspices of political activity.
KHY: I think it’s very possible to bring radical politics into more traditional forms of youth culture. Most of these cultures already have inherently antagonistic aspects, but it needs to be done in a way that carries legitimacy. It needs to be done by folks that are already participants in these cultures. It’s hella see-through when folks who aren’t apart of the culture haven’t put in the work, time, risk, energy, etc. pop their heads up in said culture and try to use it to make politics cool or something. It comes off as corny, opportunistic and insincere. I think it’s really up to those who are already a part of these cultures to bring radical perspectives into them. We’re actually graffi ti writers in the fi rst place, and we’re able to maneuver in a way that allows us to reach a lot of people while remaining authentic and rooted in real graffiti.
TFSR: So for anybody that’s listening to this that is involved in graffiti specifically, and they are like ‘Wow this is great, I have these political ideas and am into graffi ti…’ Is there any advice you’d give them to form something like KHY in their own towns or cities?
KHY: Just do it. Do it. You already have the tools, skills and desires to do graffi ti, and you’re already pulling it off. Just think about placement, strategy, what’s important to you, and see if anyone else is down. That’s our point, that it’s really that easy.
TFSR: ‘Cause I think that’s a really key point that you hinted on, fi nding targets that people already know are like this huge bone of contention, that kind of thinking and strategy is something that’s often missing. Do you wanna just tell people how they can get a hold of KHY stuff, online? Or they can go on instagram and other places?
KHY: Yeah, folks can check us out at keephoodsyours on instagram, or just run into us in the streets. Shout out to all of our Bay Area people in the struggle and all the vandals putting paint where it ain’t, keepin’ it rooted in the streets.
To friends we’ve met, and to those we have yet to meet, I’d like to wish everyone a happy May Day. As we’ll hear in the following hour, this day has a long celebrated history. From its many European pagan roots as a celebration of fertility as the fruits of the spring planting season began to… uh, spring forth. Then on to the repressive winter that fell early on May 3rd and 4th of 1886 in Illinois with, first, the killing of workers striking for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Works and then the repression of anarchist and socialist workers and organizers following the bombing at Haymarket Square in Chicago of that same year. From there to the taking up of May 1st as International Workers Day by struggling groups around the world and the U.S. adoption of a sanctioned Labor Day in September of the year.
To divide an international working class, The U.S. government, oppressors of that May Day 1886 sanctioned a Labor Day to be celebrated in September, declared the first of May both Law Day (an obvious testament to Irony in respect to the Haymarket 8, all jailed and 4 executed) and, for some, it’s celebration as Americanism Day. Whatever that means. In 2006 & 2007, immigrants rights marches were seen on and around May Days that, for many, re-sparked the importance of this day. The protests and festivals swelled to numbers nearly unmatched in the history of protest on Turtle Island, and were accompanied by school and work walkouts and boycott days.
This hour we’ll be hearing Peter Linebaugh, author of the recently printed book “The Incomplete, True, Authentic & Wonderful History of May Day” to present some of his meditations from the last 30 years but covering ancient times, through the first May Pole on Turtle Island, through to today.
The rest of the hour will feature songs that made myself and William, cohost of The Final Straw, feel a bit in the spirit of the day. Whether you’re out there today taking direct action, in repose from the horrors of wage slavery, resisting the carceral state, gardening, dancing around a May Pole or otherwise celebrating the possibilities of this year to come when, hell, we might as well end this system of exclusion and extraction: We wish you a fire on your tongue, love in your heart and free land beneath you.
TFSR: I’m speaking with Peter Linebaugh. Mr. Linebaugh is a Marxist, a historian, and an author. His most recent book is a compilation of essays called The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, out from PM Press. Peter, thanks for taking the time for this chat.
Peter Linebaugh: You’re welcome.
TFSR: So May Day is this coming Sunday, when we’ll be airing this episode of the show. For listeners that are out there who may not know can you sketch some of the history of this great and widely celebrated day?
PL: Yes! I like the way you say that it’s great and widely celebrated because for so many American years, it was never celebrated. The ruling class just hated that day. Because it was a day of no work. It was a day to enjoy the springtime. It was a day to go outside. Hooray, hooray! The first of May! Outdoor loving begins today. That’s the spirit of the day. It goes back to the first agricultural civilizations around the great rivers, the Neolithic Revolution. It’s springtime. It’s a time for fertility. I’m speaking from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the whole world is budding and flowering right now. I imagine that’s somewhat past in North Carolina.
TFSR: It’s a very sexy place here in North Carolina. There’s there’s pollen in the air and a lot of people are suffering from it, but…
PL: So anyways, it was a major pagan festival and survived through years of dominant religions. The State of England, under the Tudors, they forbade it. They made it criminal to hoist a maypole because people would dance around the maypole as part of community celebration and fertility, as you say.
For us in North America, the date to remember is 1627 when Thomas Morton set up a maypole in Quincy, MA, and Native American people and runaway servants and former slaves and antinomians from England, they danced around that maypole. The first poem ever made in the USA was there. I’ll quote it “with the proclamation that the first of May, at Marymount shall be kept a holy day.”
So that’s 1627. The Puritans from Boston came down and shut it down with force of arms. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a wonderful story about it, thinking it was the crossroads of American history. We could have gone one way and been happy with the maypole and the spirit that it represented among different kinds of people. Multicultural we’d say today. Or it could have gone the other way, the way of domination, hierarchy, endless war, and endless work.
That brings us to the second major aspect of the day, which we need to celebrate with a different kind of seriousness, and that’s the struggle for the eight-hour day and the massacre of socialists, anarchists, white, indigenous and African Americans in Chicago, back in 1886 at the famous scene at Haymarket. That came as a direct result of a police shooting of workers at the McCormick works. McCormick made the mechanical reaper that brought industry and machines to the earth, to the plains, to cutting grass, cutting grain. Those workers had gone on strike for an eight-hour day, and the police shot them and killed one. In response, the people of Chicago called for a meeting to discuss the issue at Haymarket, where farmers brought in hay for the horses. At that meeting, just a few days after May Day, 1886, a stick of dynamite was thrown. To this day, no one knows whether it was a police provocateur or a misguided anarchist or what. But anyway, there was casualties, including demonstrators, as well as the policemen.
As a result, tremendous repression came down all across the US, not just in Chicago. Seven people were found guilty after a kangaroo trial, and four of them were actually hanged on the 11th of November 1887. We should remember their names: Albert Parsons, we know him especially because of his wife, Lucy, who went on living and carrying the message of the eight-hour day and a workers struggle right into the 1930s. August Spies, before he hanged, he said, “There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangled today.” That’s been the case. Their silence is powerful, and all of us around the world celebrate and remember those workers, those martyrs, as they’re called in Mexico.
The ruling class of the United States tried to put an end to the celebration right away. They made made an into Law Day. Eisenhower did that. Then they made the workers’ holiday, Labor Day, in September to get it far away from May Day, when workers all over the world celebrated. They wanted to divide US workers from world workers.
I have to admit that they succeeded. People forgot May Day except for a few anarchists in the 1920s. Then in the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Communist Party kept up the tradition of May Day. But the Communist Party, worldwide anyway, associated the day with militarism, and it became something in the Cold War. This gives another reason why, in the United States, we’ve tended to forget that day. Until 2006, when tens of thousands of undocumented workers, most Spanish speaking, flooded the streets of Chicago again, and of Los Angeles and other towns, calling for justice for this new underclass of people denied basic rights as workers or citizens.
While I should also say, my book is called incomplete, because the hope of May Day has not been realized. We still are fighting not only for the eight hour day, but for equality, not equality of opportunity, but equality of economic conditions. I think we should fight this year to own the whole economy, not leave it just to the 1%. It should belong to us all, and we need to reconstitutionalize ourselves, reconstitute ourselves. But now I’m going off on my own views. I hope that gives your listeners some idea of the importance of May Day in the past, especially as it concerns North America.
TFSR: That was a really lovely outline that you just offered. I love the way that in the book you connect themes such as the displacement of indigenous people prior to the period, the Gilded Age of the Haymarket, when the Haymarket affair occurred, the clearing of the pastures, the killing off of buffalo and other residents of the great grasslands of the Midwest, then the connection to the McCormick works creating the reaper that just decimated the grasslands themselves.
PL: Yeah, just produced a buzz cut, didn’t it? Then as a result, we had the Dust Bowl because it was so bad for the soil: monoculture.
TFSR: The essays in the book range from 100 years after the Haymarket, basically 1986 to 2015. From the oldest to the newest, you make the claim a few times that May Day has both a green and a red side. What do you mean by this, and why do you think it’s important to remind people of that?
PL: Well, the green side now, as we’re talking in 2016, with the melting of the ice caps, the pollution of the Pacific Ocean, the destruction of species has a greater meaning, I think, than it did when I first conceived of the idea in the ‘80s. The notion of the green is the notion of photosynthesis, now that I think about it, the relationship of the sun to vegetation. Of course, vegetation is the basis of animal life, so really, all of life depends on… Well, I’m not a biologist, but a great deal of life depends on the green, depends on photosynthesis and chlorophyll. So there’s a literal meaning of green, but there’s also a symbolic meaning of green, which is the joy of living, the joy of life. In contrast to the red. Red I used signify blood and to signify struggle, especially class struggle, and thinking of the red flag of battle.
May Day is a holiday that spans both these notions. It can be both a family day of picnicking, outdoors preferably, and of dancing, and it can be a day of marching and a day of militants, a day of taking back the world that has been dis-commoned and dis-greened (if I can use that phrase), turned into asphalt, turned into concrete. So it’s had both the green and the red. I mean, the green has led to the Anthropocene. It’s led to geological changes of the planet. I think we can restore it, not to the way it was, but to the way it could be, only by a red struggle, only by a mass struggle. I believe people are are interested in that and see the necessity of it all over the world.
Anyway, so that’s kind of the red and the green, but I think it’s up to your readers and listeners to give to these symbols their own meanings from their own experience.
TFSR: Yeah, definitely you leave it with a lot of space for interpretation but draw out some lovely conclusions of your own.
How have you seen the celebration of the day change throughout your lifetime? You mentioned that the through the ‘20s it was remembered by a number of anarchists activists, and through the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s communists in the United States… Just to interject right here, my first May Day that I celebrated was in San Francisco in 2000 during the anti-globalization era, as people call it. There was a giant maypole that was raised and a number of speaker and at the same time a big open-ended pagan celebration and picnic that led to a march eventually. It was really beautiful tying together what you seem to describe as the green and the red. And the marches of 2005 and 2006, as you mentioned.
Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve seen May Day in the popular imagination during your life?
PL: Yeah, I just know my own part of it. I love to hear about that San Francisco May Day. That sounds grand and beautiful. And I love to hear about the immigrant ones, the undocumented worker ones in 2005 and 2006. For me, May Day, an important day is always May 2nd because then I tune into the radio or read the newspaper, or now I guess we have the internet, to see who else in the world has turned out. May Day was so important in bringing down apartheid in South Africa and is still a major day of struggle in South Africa. It’s that way in so many parts of the world. On May 2nd it’s just a good time to check in and see what’s going on.
But for me, it began as a historian in Rochester. We thought let’s try to have a picnic and make it a family day and have some speeches and then sing songs. That’s the way it worked there. Then later, I moved to Boston, and we had different forms of May Day. I remember in Jamaica Plain on May Day we joined a festival called Wake Up The Earth. So on all these occasions I would meet people, old timers who had participated in Union Square in New York, for instance, and in May Day celebrations of the ‘40s. Then here in Washtenaw County, in Southeast Michigan, ever since I’ve lived here, we try to have a picnic, or we have a commons, or we teach children how to dance around the maypole. This year, I think, folks for Black Lives Matter and folks from other social change outfits will probably go to Detroit to join a picnic and march in so called Motor City, which now I guess is known, not as a rust belt, but as a place of urban gardening.
It’s important to do that because the powers that be have been poisoning the waters, as you perhaps have heard of, up in Flint, MI. It’s just a crime what the rulers of our country are doing. We need to bring them to justice to pay for their crimes. Not by long prison sentences. I’m certainly not in favor of that because we need to open the prisons, if anything. But we need to find other ways of making them pay. That is, we need reparations. The main reparations that must come must restore equality. So the riches, the ill gotten gains of the 1%, either they must voluntarily turn them over, or they must be made to do it. That can only be done I think with justice and mass mobilization.
At the moment our mobilizations can’t be that great, but it’s growing. It’s growing bursts. People are wondering, “What is anarchism? What is socialism? What is the political revolution?” These are questions raised by Bernie Sanders, and not to support him, but the questions are important. The discussion that results from them is important, and May Day should be a day to have those discussions. May Day is a day when we need to think deeply about this and to do it with our neighbors. To do it with all kinds of folks, everybody, all workers, all working people who belong to our class of the precariat, students, servers need to be involved in this discussion, as well as farmworkers and undocumented workers. Undocumented workers are so important because they bring the experience of other countries, and they bring also revolutionary experience from other countries. So we have a lot to learn from them.
Anyway, so I’m hoping to learn something myself by meeting some new friends this coming Sunday in Detroit. By the way, I was asking you about the lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina. I asked you that for a purpose because I think there was an earlier lunch counter sit-in for the same goal of integrated lunch counters here in Ann Arbor, MI, in the 1920s led by Lenore Smith from Mississippi. We learned this by studying May Day in our own locality. I urge all your listeners to study May Day in your locality, to talk to old timers, to search out the old records, even to consult the occasional historian and see what they know and what they remember to bring this back to life.
One way of doing this is a wonderful book by Dave Roediger called the Haymarket Scrapbook, which I recommend. James Green wrote a very good book too called Death in the Haymarket. These are essential readings for those who want to go back to that, those crimes at Haymarket, when the police and the state came down so heavily on the workers, their press, their leaders, and their families, and jailed and hanged so many. In some ways, it’s a sad day.
TFSR: In the Ann Arbor experience that you’re talking about, in the second to last essay you wrote between 1923 and 1928, the Negro Caucasian Club was involved in some of these strikes, right? If listeners want to pursue further.
PL: Right, just get a friendly competition going between your state and Michigan.
TFSR: Competing for who gets the title of first lunch counter sit-ins?
PL: Yes, against segregation. Because of course, the North is so full of Jim Crow, even worse in many ways.
TFSR: Yeah, just kind of a different accent…
PL: They’re not poisoning the waters down in North Carolina, as far as I can see.
TFSR: Well, I don’t know, when you get coal ash ponds that are overflowing into the rivers, or the leaking of chemicals from coal production. Or in Louisiana with cancer alley. I mean, they’re doing it to us everywhere.
PL: Yes, thank you.
TFSR: As a historian, much of your written work has focused on the idea and the history of the commons, or at least that’s an idea that you seem to have played with a lot and documented, from which we draw May Day is a pagan holiday in the European context. Can you talk a bit about what the commons were and the enclosure of that and what you think May Day opens up in terms of the opportunity of the commons?
PL: Yeah, the basic thing about what May Day opens up is that the earth belongs to all. I talked about skipping and dancing on May Day, but the Earth as our sacred habitat, the Earth as Turtle Island, the earth as a place of abundance and joy to share with all kinds of creatures. The way to celebrate that is to climb over the fence, or to go under it or around it or through it, because the enclosures, the privatization of the earth, to produce the incredibly weird fiction that a person can own the earth, or part of it, this needs to change. It’s only in the United States, really, that private property is like this and is enforced with weapons. “Keep Off” and “No Trespassing” signs. Anyone who’s flown, you look down from the air, you see that the whole land is turned into squares or rectangular grids. This is what the founding fathers did. They privatized the common, they privatized the free land where people had lived, hunted, farmed, and gathered for for centuries.
That is the commons in terms of North America, in terms of Europe, and especially England, which which I studied carefully because, well, I grew up in England, and thats what I studied and taught. The enclosure of the village commons, the enclosure of common field agriculture, became the basis of the capitalist mode of production, as we say. It began under Henry the Eighth, who everybody knows because he killed his wives. But he’s the one who took a fifth of English land and sold it off, privatize it, just the way George Washington and them did several hundred years later in the 1790s to North America. They surveyed it with a theodolite and the tools of the surveyor, laid down their lines, and said, “This is mine,” and threw off everyone else who had lived on it. Thus creating the proletariat, as well as agribusiness.
But the commons are a basis of community. People long for community, they long for useful work, so they long for the commons, to share the earth and to share the means of subsistence, the means of production. This is what I meant earlier, when I said, “We demand the whole economy.” Because we really need to rest, to stop being quite so busy, to stop driving for profit, stop driving for “development,” to stop driving for “progress.” Progress for whom? Progress for the 1%. The rest of us need to rest. This is why Sunday and May Day is so important. There used to be hundreds of holidays every year, but the capitalist enterprise and puritanical beliefs shut down those holidays. We’re lucky to have… I was gonna say one a weeK——Sunday, but that’s not even true anymore.
So, community, time of work, is all tied to the commons. It’s not an accident that Henry the Eighth was a wife beater, wife killer. According to documents of his own age, he killed 78,000 people on the gallows. This isn’t the demonize him particularly, but it’s to show at the birth of the modern British state, its project was misogynist, it was enclosing, and then it became slaving. These are the basis of capitalism as we know it. Misogyny, or patriarchy, enclosure, or destruction of the commons, and privatization and slavery. I hope everyone has a great May Day.
TFSR: I really hope so too. Well, thanks for the inspiring conversation. I guess we should maybe get out there and start commoning, right?
PL: Well, people are doing it all over. We have to do it just to survive. Whether we like it or not, whether it’s ideological or not. Poverty requires us to. Either that or suicide. On that happy note… [laughs]
TFSR: Well, Peter, thanks a lot for talking. I enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more of your stuff. Have a great time up in Michigan.
Over the hour, Hilary talks about her 7 years of living in Chiapas and recording the stories and experiences of women there, collecting stories on their behalf. The book covers the Zapatistas experiences before the EZLN uprising of 1994, during that period and after. Discussion address what gender, indigeneity and class looked like and how that’s changed in the Zapatista communities, the state of Chiapas and in Mexico. William and Hilary also explore the effects that the EZLN & La Otra Compaña have had on radicals and anarchists abroad, the origins of the EZLN, some parallels and distinctions between anarchism and Zapatismo and much more.
TFSR: Will you first introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?
Hillary Klein: Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me to share this time with you and your listeners. My name is Hillary and I currently work at an organization called the Center for Popular Democracy, which is a national network of community based organizations working for racial justice, economic justice, and immigrant rights. I’ve been doing social justice work for a long time, but that included several years that I spent in Chiapas, Mexico, working with Zapatista communities in indigenous villages, and specifically with women’s projects. So I feel like it’s all connected, because whether it’s here in the US or whether it’s abroad, I feel like it’s all one vision of a world of greater justice and greater dignity. The book that I wrote came out of that experience working with women’s cooperatives and women’s projects in the Zapatista communities.
TFSR: So you went to Chiapas through your work?
HK: Not in the sense of for a job. I went to Chiapas was actually in 1997 thinking that I was just going to stay for a couple of weeks or maybe a couple months. So, I was there originally as a human rights observer and as a volunteer on solidarity projects, but it was such a compelling movement and such a fascinating time. I felt like history was kind of unfolding before my eyes. How could I not say and witnessed it or be part of it in some way? So I ended up staying, and I stayed on, and I ended up staying about six years. Much longer than I had expected. So, I was there from 1997 till about 2003. So I’ve been back in the US for a little more than 10 years doing what I consider to be the same work, but it’s not actually like I was working for the same organization or anything.
TFSR: I do want to talk to you more about your time in Chiapas in a later question. But just to lay some solid groundwork for any listeners who are unfamiliar, would you be willing to talk us through some historical bullet points of the Zapatista movement?
HK: Yeah, of course. So the Zapatista movement is also called the EZLN, which is a Spanish acronym for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. It’s primarily a social movement, a very broad grassroots radical social movement in southern Mexico, fighting for indigenous rights for land, but for also for a whole kind of host of broader demands that I think are very universal in the sense of: for dignity, for justice, for equality, for democracy, and has really resonated with people around the world.
So, in addition to being a social movement, it also has a rebel army. They did choose the path of armed struggle. After many years of fighting for change in their own context, out of a sense of desperation, seeing children die from preventable diseases, for example, they chose the path of armed struggle, feeling like they had no option left but to stand up for themselves and force the government to listen. The communities and Chiapas are historically extremely poor, extremely marginalized. That’s really a legacy from colonialism. The history of racism, the history of economic exploitation, all that goes back, more than 500 years. Those legacies are still things that those communities are facing today.
The Zapatista movement comes out of that history of 500 + years of indigenous resistance, it also comes out of the legacy of the Mexican Revolution. So the name Zapatista comes from Zapata. Emiliano Zapata was a hero of the Mexican Revolution who fought for ‘Tierra y Libertad,’ land and freedom. So they very much carried on that banner. But they also recognize that neoliberalism or global capitalism, whichever you want to call it, is kind of the current political and economic system, which reproduces many of those same legacies of inequality, of injustice, and exploitation that began with colonialism.
So, they actually rose up in arms on January 1 1994. That was the same day that NAFTA, which is the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect. They chose that day to highlight that relationship with global capitalism, with neoliberalism. So that’s where many of us around the world first heard of the Zapatistas. For myself, speaking personally, it was really an important moment. It came kind of at the tail end of the Cold War. So there was this question in the air for people of my generation, I was 19 at the time in 1994, of what the next wave of social movements would look like after the end of the Cold War. The capitalists were claiming victory, free trade – the market won. So it was really inspiring to see this model of this example of what a new social movement might look like. It’s really inspired people ever since then. So that was 20 + years ago.
After that very brief armed uprising, the Zapatistas have not used their weapons ever since then. They do still have an insurgent army. That’s, I think, an important thing to know about them in terms of their character as a very militant movement. But it’s also in reality, it’s much more of a broad social movement, in terms of its actions, and has become much more known for peaceful mobilizations, for political marches and other actions, for convening civil society. Mexican as well as international civil society, to come together and talk about the different problems that we face different strategies of how we can find solutions collectively and build a world of of greater dignity and justice.
It’s also become very known for its project of indigenous autonomy. So in its own territory, in eastern Chiapas, they’ve developed autonomous governments, their own health care and education systems. They have a whole system of economic cooperatives, which have developed an economy that’s based on cooperation and solidarity, rather than one that’s based on on profit.
TFSR: I was really struck by… because there’s lots of parts in your book, and a lot of its interview based, but I remember reading that the Zapatistas would come down from the mountains posing as teachers, or whoever, and just start talking to people. And it has so much an emphasis on people talking to each other and being like, “why are you so poor? Why don’t you have as much to eat as you need? Why do you need to do all this work?” Trying to get people’s wheels turning.
HK: Definitely. I think that that same concept that you’re pointing out, of dialogue, I think has been really important within the Zapatista movement. But also, when I mentioned convening civil society at the national or international level, I think that same concept of dialogue that you’re describing has really been important in terms of how the Zapatistas have engaged with people around Mexico and around the world. Using that same process of listening to each other, of asking questions that really makes each other think, “Why is this injustice the case? What can we do about it?” And so I think that that’s been one of the ways it’s been so effective for them to spark people responding by organizing in their own contexts around the world.
TFSR: And it seems like those conversations were extremely non coercive, meaning that people were like, “Oh, there’s this meeting where people are talking about it, come to it if you want.”
HK: I think that’s right. So, when I mentioned that 1994 was the Zapatista uprising, the very brief uprising, they had actually been organized in clandestine way for 10 years before that, from 1983 to 1994. 1983 is when the EZLN was formed in the mountains of the jungles of Chiapas. So for the next 10 years, they were doing exactly what you’re describing, talking to people in the villages, asking them questions, encouraging them to organize. There was very strong movements in Chiapas like I mentioned. People turn to armed struggle, because they had already been, many people who became Zapatistas, had been engaged for years and years in campesino movements, for example, or indigenous rights movements, asking for land reform from the government, for example, and really seeing no response.
The Zapatistas often referred to themselves, and have been called, ‘the voice of the voiceless.’ So it’s really the sense of very, very marginalized, kind of forgotten corner of Mexico and people making this decision to take their own destiny into their own hands. So I think when the original core guerrilla nucleus that formed in 1983, began to really reach out for people in the villages. It just was a very fertile moment for people to say, “Yes, it’s time. We need to take this to a whole other level and demand our rights and do that in a determined and courageous way.”
TFSR: I’d love to talk a little bit about your book, which is called ‘*Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories,*’ and it is heavily interview based, drawn from interviews, many of which you conducted yourself, with people who directly experienced working with the EZLN and you mentioned that you lived in Chiapas itself from 1997 to 2003. Would you talk a little bit about more about your time living in Zapatista communities in Chiapas?
HK: Like I mentioned, when I went down there I wasn’t planning to stay for so long. But one of the reasons that I felt like history was kind of unfolding before my eyes… The Zapatistas movement in itself was incredibly inspiring to me at that time. I was so struck by it. But in particular, the role of women has always been crucial. I think this is true for many social movements. This had been my experience, personally, as well as something I had studied was the experience of women within many social movements, where on the one hand, there’s this opportunity, and you are engaged in this whole new way, and at the same time, even within that social movement, women have had to fight for their own rights within that to defend themselves.
So, I have had this kind of long standing interest in women’s participation in radical and revolutionary social movements. So when I got to Chiapas, it was that particular aspect of history, that was unfolding before my eyes were, on the one hand, women have played a critical role in the Zapatista movement from the very beginning, and at the same time, had to push for a lot of changes internally. There was a lot that was still evolving and unfolding. I was very struck by that combination of these amazing, strong, courageous, inspiring women leaders. And also the participation of women within the Zapatista movement was continuing to evolve. That was what compelled me to stay for so much longer.
I got involved with the women’s cooperatives in particular, because it’s an economic space for women to generate resources collectively and invest those resources back into their communities. But because it’s an all-women’s space. There are all women’s collectives, and all men’s collective, that really stems from, because gendered division of labor still exists to a large degree. So women’s collectives tend to be artisan collectives, or vegetable gardens, or chicken raising collectives.
Because they are all-women’s spaces, they’re also really an area where women oftentimes come to voice and come to their own sense of power for the first time. It’s the first time they might be participating outside of the home or learning to speak up. So it’s kind of like a springboard for women’s involvement in other ways in the Zapatista movement.
So that was the kind of work that I was drawn to. This coworker and I developed a project kind of hand in hand with the Zapatista women leaders, their kind of regional representative. So we had sort of an ongoing conversation with them about what might be useful, and what would be helpful for us to do as outsiders, and develop this project of supporting women’s cooperatives and women’s regional organizing in general. So that was what I did for most of the time that I was there in Chiapas.
TFSR: Apart from artisanal stuff and vegetable gardening, and what were some of the projects that the women’s collective did?
HK: They were each organized around whatever different economic activity they decide. This is just one way that women are organized. But in particular, in economic cooperatives, women often talk about how the first step is to get together as a women’s meeting or women’s assembly and decide to form a cooperative, and then decide what type of cooperatives they want to form. So, they might decide, for example, to start a vegetable garden or to start a chicken raising collective and they’ll each contribute something like one peso each to buy seeds and start the vegetable garden, or they each contribute one hen, and then that’s how they start to chicken raising collective.
Some of the ones that are most common… Those ones that we mentioned, the artisan cooperatives, tend to be for outside consumption, so they sell more to an external market. A lot of the other ones are really more geared towards internal consumption. So even as they’re generating resources, with vegetable gardens for example, they’re addressing nourishment in their communities. That’s a big source of health problems, because people have historically had a pretty limited diet. In addition to generating those resources, they’re also producing for local consumption.
Another example of that is sometimes the women open collective stores. Because some of these villages are very isolated, it also allows people in the villages to buy from a local store, instead of having to travel just for basic goods. So, individuals don’t have to travel two or four or six hours to the closest city. The cooperative store does that buying and selling. So it’s making a little bit of money, but it’s also providing that service to the local community. And then the women collectively decide how they want to spend those resources. So they might be responding to emergencies, like if one woman is very sick, they can help her out, or if there’s a political mobilization, or they might decide to invest in the autonomous school.
So, there’s a lot of different ways, but that decision making process also is very important. It’s another way that is very empowering for the women who are involved to be engaged in, “Okay, we’ve generated these resources. Now, what do we want to do with the resources that we’ve generated?”
TFSR: The issue of food is so important, because it seems that so many of the women that you interviewed are indigenous women, and who were born into what I might call, a kind of indentured servitude. Is that completely inaccurate? Food was a very, very restricted resource for people who were subsistence farming to sustain themselves, but they were given for the most part infertile land or lands that just nothing would grow on.
HK: Yeah, absolutely. Some of what we were talking about earlier in terms of the legacies of colonialism have to do exactly with what you’re talking about, where the land that historically had belonged to indigenous peasants, was basically stolen from them. And ever since colonialism has existed, it has been really concentrated in the hands of a very few wealthy families in Chiapas that are basically European descended. Even though there have been some stages of land reform in Mexican history. Some of the biggest fincas, in a lot of parts of Latin America they’re called haciendas, in Chiapas are called fincas, they’re basically large plantations. When we think about the South in the United States, for example, the plantations, that historic cotton picking plantations.That type of economy. Where in Chiapas, they weren’t literally slaves, but like you said, they were basically indentured servants.
So, even though those exact same structures didn’t exist anymore, it looked very similar in terms of the indigenous peasants having either to live and work full time on the fincas, or they have these very small plots of land up kind of on the rocky mountainside where basically nothing grew. So land and the food that they produced was just a huge source of inequity, or manifestation of that inequity, the injustice that people were living with. People actually talk about the hunger months, ‘el tiempo de hambre’, when their corn had run out from one season and they hadn’t harvested the corn from the next season and there’s this kind of gap in between where they just literally didn’t have enough to eat.
So, that’s kind of historically what people were dealing with. It was just so very core to people’s lives and people’s experiences.
TFSR: You mentioned that you came over to Chiapas. Could you speak about writing on this topic from the perspective of a relative outsider? Could you talk about how that influenced your approach?
HK: So at the tail end of the time that I was there, one of the projects that I worked on before I left was an internal document where the women wanted to record their own stories. I think Zapatista women recognize that they’ve been part of something pretty historic, and they wanted to record that for themselves. But they also really wanted to use it as a tool for education for organizing with other women. So I did that project, which was really amazing. You mentioned earlier, that a lot of the books is heavily based on interviews that I did with different women. And so a lot of the interviews were kind of throughout the time that I was there. But a lot of them were particularly from this time period, when I was doing this project with the women that was initially just for themselves. But once we finished it, and they have this product, which was like a popular education manual. It was really geared towards them not only having their own stories documented, but being able to kind of use it to educate and organize other women. They themselves said, “You know what? We actually really want to share these stories with an outside world as well. And how do you feel about doing something like this book, but for an outside audience?”
I tell that whole story, because I feel like your question is coming from this really important place of what is the role of an outsider in writing a book like this. I had spent several years at that point, working very closely with the Zapatistas very much always as an outsider, right? It’s not my community. It’s not my context. But I was very close with the communities at that point. I would not have felt like it was appropriate for me to go and publish this book or share their stories if it hadn’t been specifically a request or a suggestion that came originally from them.
I felt like it was important personally, because in this country so much has been written about the Zapatistas, but very little about women and even less in their own words. So even though it is my book, I felt like my role was much more as a cultural bridge to create a vehicle for women to share their own stories. So the book contains a lot of my own writing, where I introduce the women or I share historical background or some context, but my intention was always to do that as a foundation for an outside audience to be able to then engage with the women’s stories from having the necessary background, but then to hear really directly from them.
So, like you said, the book is very heavily based on these interviews. And that was really the most important thing to me. And so just going back more concretely, to your question, I think that I, as an outsider, did have the ability to kind of create that bridge, especially in an audience in this country, but like I said, very much coming from a commitment to create the space for the women to kind of tell their own stories and people to hear as directly as possible. Because I had been so incredibly touched, and moved, and inspired by all these women that I had worked with over the years. Their stories of transformation, their stories of struggle, their stories of courage had been so meaningful to me, that when they were the ones that suggested that to me, it was such an honor to think of me creating that vehicle for them to share the stories with a broader audience.
TFSR: Yeah, for sure. And speaking as another outsider, it was really amazing to be able to read their experiences in their own words. So I’ve strongly benefited from that. It’s a pretty incredible experience to be able to do that.
HK: I mean, the fact that you have that experience of it makes me feel like I accomplished what I set out to do.
TFSR: It’s amazing that because Zapatismo has, like you said, so many visible female leaders like Comandanta Ramona comes to mind, but there hasn’t been much written about Zapatista women.
HK: Yeah, there has been some stuff written for sure. There is stuff out there, but relative to how much has been written overall about the Zapatista movement, I feel like there was a real gap. What’s been written about Zapatista women I feel like hasn’t been thorough. So, I really felt like it was important to me.
TFSR: Will you speak to the political roots of Zapatismo. It seems to me that there were some strongly Maoist communist and militaristic currents in there. Since this is an anarchist radio show, I feel like I should ask that question to clarify that for the listening audience?
HK: One thing I think that is very fascinating, I think specifically from an anarchist perspective is that Zapatismo is a blend of many different political traditions. Political and also historical and cultural traditions that didn’t come out specifically of an anarchist trajectory, but ends up having a lot in common with anarchism. I think anarchists around the world have really related to the Zapatistas because of some of these core principles that the Zapatistas have come to represent, including not trying to take State power, that they instead believe in kind of creating power from below, creating alternative institutions to the State and having a lot of very horizontal structures. And then all the stuff that we’re talking about, about indigenous autonomy, and having a critique not only of the State, but of the whole political system, and they’ve been very clear that they’re not going to turn into a political party. Which was a path that many Central American guerrilla movements too and eventually converted into political parties.
But in terms of the roots, which you were asking about. So that’s all to say that the end product of Zapatismo has a lot in common with anarchism, but it came from all these very different places and political historical roots. One of the things that I think is so unique, and to the Zapatistas credit, has been their ability to draw the best of different political traditions. We were talking a little bit earlier about the history of the Zapatista movement, there was this core nucleus of Marxist guerrillas that came out of the student movement in the 60’s in the 70’s throughout Mexico. They went down and formed that initial guerrilla nucleus that we were talking about in 1983. But they really began to interact with the Campesino movements, the Indigenous movements in Chiapas at the time, with the Catholic Church, which was very heavily influenced by Liberation Theology, like you said, there was Maoist groups down there at the time. I think what the Zapatistas were able to do, was to blend all that into something that was kind of new and unique, that I would now call Zapatismo that came from these very different political threads.
I think a lot of the more horizontal aspects came from the history of the indigenous communities themselves. The original core of Zapatistas who were not from Chiapas, which we’re only a handful of people really. I mean, numerically speaking, the Zapatista movement is pretty much all indigenous peasants from Chiapas, but there was this original group that came from elsewhere to kind of start, at that time, their vision was much more like the the vision of the Cuban revolution.
In some of the really poetic writing about the Zapatistas themselves and how they’ve described themselves, Marcos, for example, who is a male non-indigenous leader that was the spokesperson for the Zapatista movement for many years. He talks eloquently about that process of indigenization of the Zapatista Army in some ways. So if people are interested, I definitely encourage them to look up some of those writings or descriptions of that process. They are very fascinating.
TFSR: Apparently, I heard that Subcomandante Marcos, who was like the leader of the Zapatista movement, abolished himself as a Subcomandante. Did you hear about that? And is that true?
HK: It is true. It’s funny because he… I don’t mean this to sound dismissive. I feel like everything he does, he sort of has to do with a flourish. So even the way that you describe it as like, “He abolished himself.” He basically, in practical terms, what he was doing was kind of passing off the reins to other, indigenous leaders. Which I think is great. It was time for that to happen.
The indigenous communities had chosen Marcos as their spokesperson, I think they legitimately recognized that he would be able to play the role of reaching out to the world, and he’s a very poetic, very philosophical, charismatic, kind of articulate leader. And at the same time, it feels right that it was time to kind of pass on those reins to the local, indigenous leadership. So it was about a year ago, he said that Marcus had died and reemerged as Galeano. Galeano was the name of a man who was killed about a year ago in an attack against one of the Zapatista communities. And so, he renamed himself Galeano, in honor of the person who had been killed. And at the same time, said that it was time for him to kind of pass this on to other leadership.
So there’s a new Subcomandante, who now has that role. It’s kind of an interesting dual role of military leader and spokesperson. The Subcomandante is not actually the political leader of the EZLN, there’s a political body of leaders, which is kind of chosen by all the different communities. There’s different layers, each community has an assembly, and then each region has an assembly, and they kind of choose their representatives at each of those levels. So, at the highest level is the political comandantes, which is a collective body of leadership, the political leadership of the EZLN. Actually the subcomandante is called subcomandante, because he is under their direct command. So the military leadership is underneath the command of the political leadership.
But because he’s also the spokesperson, it’s the person that people most often kind of associate with the Zapatista movement. Then what we were speaking about earlier, in terms of not hearing from women, part of that is because there has been this one person who has been kind of the most well known leader of the Zapatista movement who also happens to be a man. It’s just that’s like the one, if people have generally heard of one Zapatista, it’s usually Subcomandante Marcos.
TFSR: You write in chapter one of your book that the injustices that people faced were the roots of the Zapatista revolutionary movement. To that end, would you describe general conditions that the women you spoke to faced before the influence of the Zapatistas?
HK: Yeah, definitely. So Comandanta Esther, who was another one of the powerful women Zapatista leaders, she one time spoke before the Mexican Congress in 2001. It was the first time an indigenous woman had ever spoken to the Mexican Congress, which itself is startling. So, she spoke to the Mexican Congress, and she talked about women Chiapas being exploited or oppressed three times over, she said, “first, because we’re poor, second, because we’re indigenous, and third, because we’re women.” I think that really gets at the heart, we were already talking about some of the legacies of colonialism. Indigenous women deal with all of that. They deal with the racism, they deal with the poverty, they deal with economic exploitation, but then they also deal with gender discrimination.
The way you framed it, before the influence of the Zapatista movement, just as sort of an extraordinary level of lack of rights in the sense that they were pretty much confined to their home, couldn’t leave their home without the permission from their husband or their father. From the very time they were girls they were basically told they didn’t have rights, they didn’t have a voice, their role was just to work in the home and to take care of kids. That’s obviously very important, dignified work, raising children and taking care of the home, but it’s not something that I believe women should be limited to.
Then in terms of the family life, women were married very young, oftentimes, against their will. When they were maybe 13 or 14 years old, their father would arrange a marriage for them, basically. Then women oftentimes had 10, 12, sometimes 15 kids, and so had very little control over their own lives, their own bodies, the decisions that impacted their lives. And the realm of public decision making was really dominated by men.
So, the Zapatista women, the older women, this is what their lives were. They oftentimes talk about, the first chapter of the book is called something like ‘stories of our mothers or grandmothers,’ because they oftentimes refer to these as the stories that our mothers, our grandmothers had told us, including the Zapatista women who were still around today. This is what they grew up with, just this really intense level of discrimination and marginalization.
TFSR: I had a thought, because I remember reading an interview with one person, I don’t remember what her name was, but she basically described the difference between societal men’s work and women’s work. She said that, “the men’s work is hard, yes, but people get to take breaks, and we never really get to take breaks. We have our, like you said, our 13 children, two babies on our hip, grinding flour for tortillas, and getting water and cleaning the house and doing all sorts of odd jobs, and also caring for many, many children, and not ever getting to take a break. People often were just ill a lot be from overwork and malnourishment and all that stuff.” So I found that really striking.
HK: Yeah, it’s kind of extraordinary. And, like you said, in terms of the women’s workday, they talk about the kind of double workday that I think women in this country still experience. The expectation that after a day’s work, you come home and women are still largely expected to be the ones doing primary childcare and taking care of the home. But it was to such an extreme degree, like you said, women were basically working nonstop from the moment that they woke up to the moment that they went to bed. Oftentimes would go out to the field and work side by side with the men. So that was, “men’s work” was working in the fields. But then once men were done with that day of work, they would kind of come home and rest, whereas the women would come home and then continue to do all the other work that they were doing, the domestic work and everything else that you were describing.
TFSR: So we’re talking about a lot of like, positive aspects of the EZLN. And there are many, many, many of them. But since it’s an organization that’s run by people, and people are flawed, and all of this stuff, I wanted to bring up a quote that I was struck by on page 95, which goes, “women’s right to own or inherit land has not been staunchly defended by Zapatista authorities in the ways that their equal right to political participation has.” Will you speak about the cultural and social aspects of this dispute?
HK: Yeah, so, when we were talking earlier about how important land is, it’s important to the indigenous communities of Chiapas economically, because it is the source of food and of income. Also as indigenous people, it’s really important to them, culturally, spiritually, this concept of Mother Earth. They don’t think of land as private property. So, the Zapatistas carried out a bunch of land takeovers in 1994 in the same context of the uprising, one of the other actions that they took was these land occupations, and then they redistributed these fincas that we were talking about before, to indigenous peasants, Zapatistas, throughout the state of Chiapas. That made a huge difference in people’s lives. When we were talking earlier, also about the ‘hunger month,’ when people didn’t have enough crops to literally feed themselves throughout the year, people living on this retaken land, this land was much more fertile, they had more access access to more land. That means just a huge difference in people’s lives in terms of their kind of economic livelihood, in terms of their food security, and again, in terms of their identities as indigenous people, it’s culturally, spiritually, just having a territorial base has been super important and to the Zapatista movement in terms of having an area of land where they are experimenting with all these other aspects of society. The society that they’re building. All of that has been very important.
Like I said that they don’t think of land as private property, but it is still divided. So, individuals will work on a particular parcel of land, so they don’t own that land, but that’s their kind of parcel of land to farm on. And the Zapatistas… I think it’s one of the few areas where, like you said in that quote is compared to women’s political participation, the EZLN as an organization has very staunchly defended women’s right to be involved in the movement at all levels, but with the access to land, it hasn’t been. It’s actually one of the few areas that stood out to me, where the EZLN, I believe, could have been more proactive, and hasn’t been. So, they’ve kind of reproduced some of the gendered assumptions that women don’t need access to land in the same way. When they have divided up, for example, the land that they took over, they divided up those individual parcels primarily to men. Then it was up to, it’s mostly individual families to decide, as they pass land on to the next generation, if they would pass it on kind of equally to the sons and daughters, or just to the son.
When we were talking earlier about women fighting for their rights within different social movements. They’ve continued to push and it is kind of an internal debate. I think there’s been a lot of movement around it. A shift has definitely taken place. But I think we haven’t seen as big as a shift there in terms of access to land for women are equally between women and men as we have seen some really pretty incredible shifts and other types of transformations that women have experienced.
I think it’s just a fascinating example that no movement is perfect, none of us as individuals are perfect, and our social movements aren’t perfect either. For me personally, it’s one of the few areas that I think the EZLN could have taken a more proactive stand in terms of the women’s agrarian rights.
TFSR: Yeah, I mean, these kinds of social societal changes happen so slowly and revolutionizing the way that we overthrow misogyny in ourselves and in our communities, I think will be a thing that will last the entirety of humans lasting. However long that may be.
On the on the note of some of the more positive social changes that the EZLN brought about, one of the more striking changes of the organization was a women’s revolutionary law, which was shared publicly after 1994. Will you speak about this law and about its role in Zapatista history.
HK: The women’s revolutionary law was written and passed by the EZLN in 1993 leading up to the Uprising. Then they shared it publicly, like you said, after the Uprising in 1994. It was a very important document, and I’ll talk in a second about some of what it contains. But I think it was very important, both in terms of all the work that went into it, and then all the work that has happened since then to implement it. So there’s this one point in time when it was passed, but also represents, like you were saying a second ago, that change takes time.
Iin the end of the late 80’s and early 90’s, like when we were talking earlier about the clandestine organizing that the EZLN was doing in the communities. One very important aspect of that was, and in particular, oftentimes, it was women insurgents who were talking to women in the different villages, and really sort of instigating that same sense of asking about injustice that we were talking about earlier, women were doing that specifically around women’s rights and around gender discrimination and asking women, “do you think life really has to be like this? How else could life look like?” And so all these women’s assemblies and talks and conversations went into creating the women’s revolutionary law. So, there were the political leaders as well as the military leaders, early women leaders in that time, really carried out the series of conversations. That was what became the women’s revolutionary law. So they drew up all of those proposals into this document that was passed by the political leadership, the comandantes, in 1993. It became a framing document regarding what women’s rights in Zapatista territory are.
So, in terms of what it actually says, it talks about women’s right to participate in the movement at all levels. That gets at their political participation, their leadership in their communities, their ability to be military leaders in the Zapatista rebel army. But it also talks about a very broad range of areas of life. And so it talks about women’s right to health care and education. It talks about women’s right to live free of violence. It talks about about women’s right to decide who to marry and how many children to have. So, it really addresses across both public and private spheres, family life, community life, political life. And in some ways, those rights are very basic, but putting each of them into practice is hugely transformative.
Then once the law was passed, the work that then came to implement it was work of consciousness raising, work of education, work of changing those family norms. I think if you look at each one of the points in the revolutionary women’s law, there has been huge transformation that’s taken place. I think it’s so important that you asked earlier about what were women’s lives like before the Zapatista movement, because that helps give us an understanding of just how extraordinary those transformations were. From that situation that the women describe themselves, their mothers, their grandmothers living in, to what Zapatista women have achieved in really an incredibly short period of time.
On the one hand, I totally agree with what you said a second ago about patriarchy, that it’s something that it takes a huge amount of time to uproot. I can’t really fault the Zapatistas for not having ended patriarchy in the 20 years that they’ve been at it, because I don’t think anywhere in the world, I don’t think there’s been anywhere that patriarchy has been completely uprooted.
TFSR: That’d be such a tall order.
HK: And if there is somewhere out there, and your listeners know of that place, please let me know,
TFSR: You’ll be the first to know, definitely,
HK: That’d be great. Maybe one of you listeners will call and let us know. “This is where patriarchy has been uprooted.”
But there was a huge amount of transformation that took place in this very short time period, in types of changes that I think in many contexts take sort of generations to unfold. The level of women’s political participation, the level of their leadership in the movement, the changes that have taken place in the home, I think those points of the revolutionary law have really, to a large degree been implemented by women choosing if they want to marry at all, and if they do, who they settle down with, how many children they have.
So, there’s a lot of work to be done. But there’s also just a tremendous amount that’s been accomplished. And that I think, is also really at the heart of why I wanted to publish this book, and why I wanted to create that vehicle for women to tell their own stories, because not only are those transformations so incredible, but I think there’s so many lessons to be learned. It is a very different context. What it can look like, what it can mean to accomplish those types of transformations in our own lives,
TFSR: Obviously, the EZLN has had a lot of international effects on people. Will you speak to some of the impacts that this movement has had on radical and anarchist societies and other countries, especially concerning the involvement of women? And to what extent do you see it still having an effect?
HK: Definitely. I do really believe that ever since 1994, the Zapatista movement has been one of the most impactful social movements around the world that has just had a tremendous ripple effect in terms of influencing and inspiring people around the world. And I think there’s some really concrete examples of that and at the same time, I think it’s really hard to measure, but just kind of undeniably out there.
So, one of those really concrete examples is the anti-globalization movement of the late 1990s. So if folks remember or have heard of the protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, or some of the other mobilizations that were taking place around the world. That really was something, the Zapatistas helped plant the seeds of that movement in some of those gatherings that I was talking about earlier that the Zapatistas have acted kind of as conveners of those conversations.
So they invited people to their territory, and people came throughout Mexico, but really from all over the world. And they really put this call out for anyone who’s been negatively impacted by global capitalism. So whether that’s because you are a student, or a worker, or a housewife, or transgender person, or whatever the case may be. When I was talking earlier about their demands being very universal, but I think it’s also been that type of call to anyone who has been exploited, oppressed, who’s faced injustice, and so many different people from so many different walks of life respond that call. So in the late 90’s, the focus of that was really in the context of neoliberalism and thinking about how can we address that. So the anti-globalization movement of the late 90’s. It wasn’t the only thing, but it was one of the things that really helped plant those seeds.
So, that’s, I think, you know, one concrete example. But besides that, there’s so many different collectives, organizations, groups around the world that have been influenced by the Zapatistas. It’s hard to name or measure that impact. But I do feel like it’s intangible, but undeniable. I think young people today continue to be inspired by the Zapatistas. They’re not in the spotlight in the same way they were kind of 10, 15, 20 years ago. But I continue to hear constantly about different examples of people who are really influenced by the Zapatistas, inspired by them, and then concretely influenced by them.
And in terms of women, I think it has been a really key example of not only having a movement that has strong women leadership, but a movement that’s also been able to evolve. When we were talking earlier about the roots of Zapatismo and I was saying that one of the things that makes the Zapatistas somewhat unique, I think, is their ability to draw from different political traditions and kind of be fluid and adapt. Their approach to gender is an example of that. So even though on the one hand, they were always committed to women’s participation, but there has also been a real evolution of their gender analysis. They would not use the word ‘feminist,’ it’s not the term they would use, but I think they have developed a much more nuanced analysis of gender and really taken on this question of, “What does it look like to uproot patriarchy?” So, yes, it will take time. But there’s been kind of a whole new series of strategies to address patriarchy to really uproot it. I think that that is so inspiring and is something that many of us in different social movements around the world can still really look to as a model that there’s a lot that we’ve won, but there’s a lot more to do.
I think the Zapatistas, and for me, personally, the Zapatista women in particular, but one of the aspects of the Zapatista movement that I think that really resonates is this combination of, on the one hand, being kind of humble enough to know that they don’t have all the answers. So, they have this philosophy of ‘making the road by walking’ and constructing the world of justice and dignity that they want to live in building that step by step, stone by stone. So, I think that humility is really important to know that we don’t have all the answers, nobody has all the answers. But at the same time, having kind of the the chutzpah, having the courage to say, “that’s not going to stop us” from dreaming big and from taking on global capitalism, or from declaring war on the Mexican government. And for women, it’s not going to stop them from you know, asking, “How do we address patriarchy? And how do we take all this stuff on?”
So I think that combination, that humility combined with the courage to dream big, and act on those dreams, is the one kind of thing that I would like to leave your listeners with. I think that message is true in general, but for me, as a woman, I would say, in particular, for women, women engaged in other struggles where it’s all connected, right? Women’s rights are connected to economic justice and social justice and racial justice. And as we fight for all those things in this interconnected way, that’s kind of the message that if there was one thing I would choose that I would like to share what I took away from those years that I spent in Chiapas, and what I kind of hoped to convey in the book, that would be it.
TFSR: Hilary Klein, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about your book Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories, which is available from Seven Stories Press and I highly, highly recommend it. It’s a really, really good read and I learned a lot from it. Thank you so much for talking with me today.
HK: Oh yeah, it was such a pleasure chatting with you.
This week, we’re excited to present a conversation with Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, editors and authors of a new book out from AK Press entitled “Dixie Be Damned: 300 years of Insurrection in the American South”. The book is a study of Maroon, Indigenous, White, Black, worker, farmer, slave, indentured, women and men wrestling against institutions of power for autonomy and self-determination. All of this in a region stereotyped to be backwards, slow, lazy, victimized and brutal. The editors do a smash-bang job of re-framing narratives of revolt by drawing on complex and erased examples of cross-subjectivity struggles and what they can teach us today about current uprisings in which we participate.
Throughout the hour we explore some of the examples that became chapters in the book, critiques of narrative histories and academia and what new ways forward might be towards an anarchist historiography. Keep an ear out for Saralee and Neal’s book tour, coming to a bookspace near you.
A chat with Eric McDavid on prison, post-incarceration, hope, ice cream and more
This week we’re speaking with Eric McDavid, a recently released eco-anarchist and vegan. Eric and his two co-defendants (Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson) were entrapped by an FBI agent provocateur who went by the name of “Anna” and arrested for allegedly planning to blow up cell-phone towers, small dams & a lab researeching genetically modifying trees. Eric was arrested in January of 2006 during an FBI raid on the cabin that “Anna” was providing for the four.
During the court case, the government prosecutors were able to turn Zachary and Lauren against their slightly older co-defendant, Eric, with threats of spending decades of their life behind bars. So, Zachary and Lauren posed Eric as their “leader” and threw him under the bus. As a result, Eric was given a 20 year sentence for what was effectively the charge of being guilty of Thought Crime.
After years of the appeal process, Eric’s support team finally recieved documents within a FOIA that pointed to evidence they should have had during trial; evidence that could have led to a not guilty verdict at trial. Finally on January 8th 2015, Eric was released into the arms of supporters, family and loved ones in Sacramento, CA. More on his case can be found at http://supporteric.org We spend the hour chatting about his incarceration, experiences of support as one of the two names central to the June 11th Day of Solidarity with longterm Anarchist Prisoners alongside Marius Mason, decarceration, hope, ice cream and more.
More about this year’s June 11th at http://june11.org, including their recent call-up
A quick note. Brent Betterly of the NATO3 is slated for release from prison on April 16th of 2015, just 3 days before his birthday on the 19th. You can send him a birthday present to support his post-release life while he gets on his feet by visiting youcaring.com and searching his name.
TFSR: I’m pleased to speak with Eric McDavid, a formerly incarcerated green anarchist and vegan. Eric and his two co-defendants, Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jensen, were entrapped by an FBI agent provocateur who went by the name of Anna, and arrested for allegedly planning to blow up cell phone towers, small dams, and a laboratory searching genetically modified trees. Eric was arrested in January of 2006 during an FBI raid on the cabin that Anna was providing for the four. During the court case, the government prosecutors were able to turn Zachary and Lauren against their slightly older co-defendant, Eric, with threats of spending decades of their lives behind bars. So Zachary and Lauren posed Eric as their ‘leader’, and threw him under the bus. As a result, Eric was given a 20-year sentence for what was effectively the charge of being guilty of a thought crime. After years of the appeal process, Eric’s support team finally received documents from a Freedom of Information Act request (or FOIA request) that pointed to evidence they should have had during the trial. Evidence that could have led to a not-guilty verdict at the trial. Finally, on January 8th, 2015 Eric was released into the arms of supporters, family, and loved ones in Sacramento, California. Thanks a lot for chatting, Eric.
Eric McDavid: It’s my pleasure to be here.
TFSR: You’ve been described as a green anarchist. Do you accept that moniker? And what does it mean to you?
Eric McDavid: I accept it just because I define it pretty much as the perception of the environment being the largest common denominator of whatever social critique I adhere to and utilize. So, it’s basically the environment as the primary concern and orientation towards social critique.
TFSR: So sort of an eco-anarchist perspective, or do you have a critique of agriculture or industrial civilization or technology?
Eric McDavid: My understanding of anarchy comes with a full critique of culture and society, and pretty much Western culture in total, which encompasses all the different nodes and aspects within it. Basically, a lot of this stuff right after folks moved towards domestication of themselves and everything around them.
TFSR: How did you and your supporters finally get you out, and what were the conditions of your release?
Eric McDavid: How I finally got out was through the habeas [corpus] appeal. Habeas [corpus] is kind of the last-ditch appeal that you can use in the federal courts after your direct appeal to the Circuit [Court] and then to the Supreme Court. Both of those have been denied in my case, and we were on the habeas appeal when my support team, Sacramento’s Prison Support, had acquired these documents from a FOIA request, which hadn’t existed prior, allegedly.
And the funny thing is that these are just documents that point to other documents that existed at the time of trial. They were able to show that in the habeas [corpus] appeal to the magistrate judge, who was a little bent out of shape about it. I suppose more so because at about the same time I went to trial, he used to work for the US Attorney’s Office. And so he was going to be shoving a whole lot of negative energy into this case from their perspective.
We ended up getting a call, I want to say the beginning of November, end of October. Mark Vermillion, who is one of my legal team along with Ben Rosenfield, got a call from the US Attorney’s Office, and they were like: ‘Yeah, what do you want to do? Do you want to do anything? Because you’re supposed to have those things that you’re pointing out in this appeal.’ And Mark was just: ‘No, what do you want to do?’ So they came back at them with: ‘How about we just do a cut and dry, drop everything, head out the door type deal.’ And then after a hearing on the 16th of December, that’s where it was all leading towards.
TFSR: Are there any stipulations that you can’t file lawsuits against the prosecutors for withholding evidence, or are you on any sort of house arrest or anything like that?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, they always include “you can’t sue us for anything that we might have done wrong” type of stuff. And of course, they say you’re always agreeing to this, not under any type of coercion or anything like that.
TFSR: Sure, because prison doesn’t count as coercion or anything? [sarcasm]
Eric McDavid: No, totally, yeah, definitely. So, I’ve just got pretty basic unsupervised release conditions. I just have to stay within the Eastern District of California. If I want to go out, I gotta give notice to my Parole Officer (PO). You got the basic: at least three piss tests throughout the whole supervised release. I got 24 months of the supervised release, but they say if I go squeaky clean, then they’ll probably drop it after 12. Let’s see, you got random checks by the PO of your residence. Oh, I got the computer monitoring on my laptop for school, where you have to pay for that. I have to pay for that.
TFSR: What?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, yeah.
TFSR: Wow, just jabbing in the needles.
Eric McDavid: You know, they try.
TFSR: Your release by the state was basically saying: “We conducted ourselves in a poor manner during the case and withheld evidence.” Not: “This whole thing was BS, and you shouldn’t have been in there in the first place”, right?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, totally. They couldn’t even go as far as that first part that you stated, because if they had said that they would have done something wrong during the case, if they had stated that in front of the court, the court would have had to drop the charges due to the Brady infractions. Basically, the whole twist of it was around the Brady violations, where they’ve got a precedent that says everything that the US Attorney’s Office, the government has they have to turn over to the defense to be able to use as evidence, either for or against the case.
From transcript that I’m pretty sure is on the website of that January 8th hearing, it’s really self-evident how they try to jump around that and it kind of added to the whole drama of it all. But we had no idea until that last instance, what was going to happen. It was quite the roller coaster ride of just still keeping that awareness around [the fact that] I’m still gonna be [in prison] for another eight and a half years. I mean that part was always there. And you know, what do you do with that? You just keep moving from day to day, and try and keep your body healthy, keep your mind sharp and keep your mind healthy, and keep soaking in all the support that kept on coming in nonstop throughout the whole process. But still being open to the possibility and probability of walking out the door.
I actually had a friend in [FCI] Victorville who would help keep that aspect alive in me, even though there were just the showboating probabilities that came from the appeals process they had to go through. I knew they were gonna get denied, but he helped me. Every few weeks he’d hit me up. He’d be like: “Hey, if you had to leave tomorrow, would you have everything all lined up? Are you ready to go? Okay, now the situation changes. Here’s a different situation. You’re getting out, how would you have to change your mindset and what your process would be to get out, and what would you have to handle on the outside? And how would you do that?” That person really, really helped build a good foundation to help keep my brain sharp, my mind sharp and my heart open to other options and different probabilities.
TFSR: Sounds like a really good friend.
Eric McDavid: Definitely.
TFSR: For people in the audience who haven’t experienced prison or jail or what have you, can you talk a little bit about what was your experience of relationships with other prisoners while on the inside? Did you have to deal with gangs and sectarianism and such a lot?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, definitely. I mean, for me, it was part and parcel throughout the whole run. And the thing is that in the federal prison system, it’s not nearly as intense and heavy as it is in the state systems. So those folks that are going through that part of the prison industrial complex, they’ve got to deal with a lot heavier stuff than I do or I did. There was definitely dealing with gangs and everything. Starting at Victorville, which was a medium-security prison. If you mess up at some other medium or a low [security prison] really bad, you get in a real big fight, they send people to Victorville for extra punishment.
TFSR: Just because it was so much harder to keep your head down at Victorville? Or just get by, sort of like: ”Well, you screwed up. Let’s set you up to fail” type of thing? Or was it that the guards were more harsh? Or what?
Eric McDavid: The whole system at Victorville was a little bit more harsh than other medium yards. That’s what it was. It was a disciplinary yard. It’s out in the middle of the desert, on top of everything, and it was a part of a complex. So there are two medium yards, the penitentiary, which is one of the highest security [prisons] in the system. And then there was a camp for female folks.
The intensity at Victorville was a little bit higher than the usual medium yard. For one, because they had a bunch of folks coming down from the pen that was right next door, so they had a high population of folks that had been dealing with that intensity for 5-10 years on the yard. And then just a lot of folks that are there for what they call disciplinary action. So there are less resources, he cops are more assholes, the administration is worse. There’s just not that much to do there for folks so far as resources or whatnot. And so with all of that as a foundation, it creates a lot of stressful environment for everybody within.
I think a couple of weeks after I got there, there was a lockdown for a week after two groups, two gangs got into it. And then six months after I got there, there was a 45-minute riot in the yard, after which we were locked down for a month and a half to two months. So it was a pretty active yard, and there was definitely that type of politics going on with gangs.
For me personally, the way that I danced with it all, I found that so long as I did my program, so long as I kept my own program, my own routine, and just did the same thing pretty much every day, that creates a structure for other people to go off of. So as far as they can see and know what you’re doing throughout the day, and they know that you’re not going to mess with their routine and their program, that creates a bit of security for them, because they get so dependent upon those types of patterns. Just to make the days roll into weeks, into months, into years, because that’s what they have left to do.
That type of relationship to your own routine and pattern is really highly respected because they know that you’re not just some random cannon that might go off in their face and fuck up their program, and then they have to go to the shoe, or they might have to stab you because you’re fucking up in their situation and bringing heat onto them, or any number of things. And so I saw how just having my daily routine and keeping to myself, and even hooking up with some other folks on similar routines, no matter who or what kind of groups there were, they just respected me being independent and doing stuff on my own.
TFSR: It seems like a lot of what you’re talking about is obviously very stressful. I would call prisons a very stressful situation, from what I understand. Some prison reformists and prison abolitionists have pointed to the high percentages of mental health issues of people going in and also exacerbation of mental health issues of people that are inside because of the conditions that are there and the lack of treatment. Is that something that you can comment on, from what you’ve experienced inside?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, that is prolific throughout my entire experience. Especially at the last place I was at, which was a medical yard, it was definitely prolific, and there’s no two ways about it there. They had a whole bunch of folks that were so traumatized by the experience of prison on top of their prior traumas experienced throughout life that there was no question that the added stressors and structure of prison did nothing but further debilitate [them]. I mean, regardless of whatever type of help they said that they were trying to do via groups or therapy, most of the time it was just over medication and the therapist trying to just get people through their program so that they could get recognition for fulfilling program requirements and keep numbers high in their classes to keep on getting paid for their job that they weren’t doing. Basically, classic bureaucracy.
TFSR: Can you talk about what your experience of support coming from the outside has been and if and how it changed with the resurrection of June 11th as the Day of Solidarity with Long-term Anarchist Prisoners, including you and Marius Mason?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, the resurrection. Where does that come from? Did it go away for a while? Was I gone during that?
TFSR: I mean, I feel like after Jeffrey Lures was released, because [solidarity with him] was the original point of that [day], and then he said: ‘Okay, let’s reassign it to long-term eco and anarchist prisoners.’ And you and Marius were the top two names for that. So I guess maybe the re-emergence or rebirth, or Phoenix rising from the flames, I don’t know.
Eric McDavid: [laughs wholeheartedly] Okay.
TFSR: [in funny voice] Easter egg!
Eric McDavid: For real, for real, I don’t know if it’s just my memories faded up for so long, but it feels like every June 11th I’d get this huge batch of letters, and that would only trail off maybe come August, or September, would it start to dissipate. And pretty darn sure, when I’d gotten to prison, that was when I definitely remember that for certain. And I know you could talk to folks at SPS [Sacramento Prisoner Support] about this, and they’d have a better relationship to it all, because they had more of a hands-on so far as fundraising and direct interaction with other groups, especially around J11. I mean, every June 11th, I remember Jenny from SPS talking about how those funds that were generated on June 11th were what….. [Sorry, the dog is just whining at the door right now.]
TFSR: [Oh, I can hear that, poor dog]
Eric McDavid: [Sasha, come here, come, come.] So whenever June 11th came around, those funds that were generated and given at that time were pretty much what paid for her to be able to come and see me throughout the whole year. They weaned off about June, and then the next June 11th will come, and then those funds would fill right back up. So, yeah, the support that came from that was phenomenal and continuous from my experience of the whole bit.
TFSR: Good. Petey, Jenny and the other folks involved in Sacramento Prisoner Support, SPS, do a phenomenal job of organizing, from my experience at least. I guess maybe you don’t have any views or critiques of how prisoner support goes in the US, from your experience, because you’ve had a good crew working on your side.
Eric McDavid: Are you posing a question? [laughs]
TFSR: Yes, or maybe you do. You can’t see me winking at you.
Eric McDavid: [laughs harder] Darn it, the video link, is not working.
TFSR: Do you, in fact, have a critique?
Eric McDavid: [laughs some more] The most basic stuff is the most important so far as prisoner support goes, from what I experienced of it. If there are differences of opinion within the support group, they would always contact me directly and have a conversation about it. And then it’d be like: ‘Okay, so this is where we’re at with it. How do you feel about it? We see these two different things, or four different things, or eight different things. Can you respond about this right now? Or would you like to take time to think about it and then come back and hit me up?’ I mean, for real for real, it was all just the basis of healthy communication patterns being utilized within the group, including me as well. So as long as that stuff was happening throughout the whole experience, that’s how I felt like, especially with SPS. That was one of the main things that held everything together, and the most effective and efficient way of just making sure everything was covered, because we talked about everything in an open way. And so after you get that covered, then everything else just kind of falls into place. It’s like a Tetris game that you don’t have to turn the pieces on because you have the right foundation already set up.
TFSR: Prefigurative anarchist praxis. [in funny voice] What! Weeee! Cool, good to hear.
How do you feel about the term political prisoner?
Eric McDavid: There are a couple of things on that. I mean, for real for real, when you’ve got the long indictment with 15 uses of the word ‘anarchy’, or ‘anarchism’ in it, and it’s not a terribly long indictment, actually, so that word is used at least every other page, then you have to think that there’s a little bit of a political influence, happenstance, maybe something happening in the indictment. And so there’s that.
TFSR: I detect sarcasm.
Eric McDavid: [laughs] No, no, no. I said a very true statement. There’s nothing sarcastic whatsoever. And then there’s also the utilization of “how is that different from folks that are politically influenced from a second-hand aspect?”. Where they’re brought up in such economically deprived and neglected (or not neglected, because that actually means something else), so definitely economically consciously deprived areas and regions, where their option is to move outside of the legal system, which is politically in place as well… And so when those folks are put in prison, how is that not… how can that be differentiated from a political frame of reference as well?
I guess it just all depends on your definition of “political prisoner”, so far as what type of framing we’re trying to use to discuss. So how do I feel about the “political prisoner” term? I mean, I don’t have any problem with it. It feels valid from a basic sense. And then you can kind of go for “prisoner of war” too because it’s just internal [logic]; there’s that easy translation between the two. Yeah, it’s kind of there. I don’t really trip on it.
TFSR: While on the inside already, having been convicted, how did your beliefs and your desire to live in a certain way, for instance, like your political beliefs around veganism or your anarchism, how did those things affect the way that you were treated by your jailers and also by the folks around you?
Eric McDavid: By the folks around me. I mean, for most of the time, it was just like: ‘What do you eat? How do you eat? If you don’t eat meat, what do you eat?’ And it’s just like: “Well, I don’t know, I eat beans and legumes and rice and fruit and nuts and vegetables,” and [I would] go off with that whole array of things. And they just go: “Man, I don’t know how you do that.” Because, I mean, I’d have to eat the soy during chow [mealtime], and everybody’s just like: “Uuuggghhh, soy… yadda yadda yadda”. Actually, I helped out the cooks to make the stuff taste pretty good at the last spot I was at. But every time they came at me with: “Oh, what do you eat? How do you eat that? Uughh, that stuff’s nasty.” I was just kind of like: “Man, I didn’t come here for the food.”
TFSR: Good point
Eric McDavid: ‘I did not come to prison for the food. So, you know what? For real, for real. I have to look at it like this right now. I’m just feeding a machine, and I need these certain things, these certain aspects covered to keep my body going, what are you gonna do?
And then you also had folks with perspectives on anarchism, having no clue or idea of anything other than just “total random chaos” and stuff like that. And so [I was] trying to sit down with folks sometimes, and just being able to iterate some very basic concepts and ideas in ways that folks could receive it. And every time I did that, I mean, folks would just kind of go ahead: “Well, yeah, I can’t really argue with that.” There were people there that are interested in conversation, and that’s always there. And the cops, most of the time, you just go: “You know what? You got access to my file. Go and read my file. I’m not going to talk to you. I don’t need to talk to you. You don’t need to talk to me. I don’t care how bored you are. If you’re really bored, go and talk to the file.”
TFSR: I seem to recall a few times of you going on hunger strike because you were being denied vegan food. Was that just based on the facilities that you were in? I understand state facilities, for instance, where I think you may have been held initially. I may be totally wrong, and call me out on it, please. I’ve heard that folks that are in state prisons and especially county jails, usually have a lot of difficulty getting hold of vegan food and getting hold of supplements and let alone being able to pay for stuff through commissary if you have to buy it separately. But can you talk about the difficulties that you’ve faced on the inside and what came of those in terms of getting a hold of a more healthful vegan diet?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, the county was the worst, definitely. That was where I had to do those two hunger strikes. Once I got to federal prison, actually one of the first spots that I got to at Victorville, they had a tray of vegetables and peanut butter sitting there waiting for me, before I’d even gotten off the bus. That was nice that I didn’t have to deal with that once I got into the federal prison. But yeah, in counties they’re so focused on the money tunnel that they’ve got going that any deviation from this script is fought tooth and nail.
TFSR: Just another stop on the road towards dehumanization, I guess.
Eric McDavid: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, you got dehumanization on so many levels in this culture, it’s amazing. It just manifests itself in the militarization of the police as well, and even with the way folks interact with the jailers. All of the folks that were in prison with me or in the county jail with me were always [shouting]: “Hey CO, hey CO”, calling them CO – correctional officer. I don’t know if this is universal across America, but in Sacramento County, the sheriff’s office runs the county jail. The deputies have to do two years of work in the county jail before they can go out on the street. And so that’s part of their process of ensuring the dehumanization of ‘the other’ from within the indoctrination of the people that become no longer people, but deputies.
And all the folks that are there in the cells, people that have been within the system for a while when interacting with cops [shout]: “Ay, CO, ay, CO, ay, CO!”. And so I was like: “You know what: Hey, deputy. You’re not a correctional officer, you’re a deputy. I’m gonna call you a deputy.” And some of them got pissed about it. Some of them got livid about me calling them a deputy. I mean, it was just something to knock them off of their center. Maybe it was just so that I wasn’t going to play into that dehumanization, just to get them out of that frame of reference of just being that screw. So if you’re constantly referred to as a screw and somebody calls you a nut, you’re going to react differently.
TFSR: Or both [laughs]. In relation to the increased dialog around the prison industrial complex in the mainstream, I have recently become aware that political support around prisoner issues has started engaging more actively and in the more mainstream with post-release support for the formerly incarcerated. Eric, in your experience, what sort of things should the audience members understand about the psychological effects of incarceration and post-incarceration? What sorts of things are we doing right, and what could we be doing better?
Eric McDavid: This is a really good question. So, for real, for real, right at the gate, the support that I’ve been getting is still breathtaking. I mean how it comes in, on a personal level and through different mediums, it seriously knocks me off my feet continuously. So for me personally, the types and the amount of support that I’ve been getting have just been phenomenal. Maybe after a while, I’ll be able to find a critique for it, but right now, it’s just so overwhelmingly beautiful that it’s hard to conceive of critiquing it. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just kind of like one of those things, when you’re in the box, it’s hard to see what’s on the outside of the box.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense.
Eric McDavid: Does that make sense? Maybe it’s just one of those things with that.
TFSR: You’re getting good support and you’re amazed about it. But what sort of things have you felt that you’ve needed support about? Especially those things that could be… not universalized, but you know, the same sort of things that people who are looking to support and folks who are getting out in general look for. For instance, Brent Betterly of the NATO 3 is scheduled for release coming up. (In any case, more information on that at freethenato3.wordpress.com.) Whether or not someone’s a political prisoner or in for political reasons, and getting support in that way, this is the most carceral state in the world. So many people go in or are in one stage [of imprisonment] or another, especially among marginalized and racialized communities and classes. What sort of things have you had to deal with that you think are kind of universal, that we should be thinking about with our community members, our comrades and our family members?
Eric McDavid: That’s a good way of putting that. The biggest thing is dealing with the bureaucracies right when you come out. Getting a driver’s license again, if you have to deal with getting a car, all the stuff that comes with that. Getting a job or getting back into school because for fed [federal] you have to either go to school full time, or you have to work full time, or do half and half. And, so, dealing with those types of bureaucracies and all that comes with it. Some people do not want to mess with that shit, and it’s really difficult for them. Especially with all the PTSD that comes with getting out and coming out of the shock of the different social realms, the transition between them.
So maybe checking in with people that just get out and say: “So what is it? Do you need any help with dealing with this bureaucracy or that bureaucracy, or getting food stamps, or getting into financial aid for school?” A lot of that stuff could be a great space to help folks out. Over the last nine years, I have just been dealing with bureaucracies so damn much that it’s like second nature for me now. So, I know how to deal with that in a healthy way for me, and it ends up being really efficient. Just really efficient, there’s nothing pleasurable about dealing with bureaucracies. That could be one of the huge stressors, a major stressor for folks just coming out.
The monetary stuff is always there too. Any type of buffer for folks just coming out is always monumental. I got that box of vegan sausages that I’ve only made a third of the way through. I got that a week and a half after I got out. Maybe it may be that long, it’s not the next week, so that’s okay. So now I don’t have to worry about purchasing protein for the next six months, and that is a huge load off in my mind. One less thing I have to worry about. And then folks sending me a letter that had two stamps in it, that’s just sweet. And now I have a stamp to write you back and say: ‘Thank you, and how are you doing, and what’s up, and what do you get going on?’ And I also have a stamp for someone else who sent me a letter, and that’s one less thing I have to worry about. A lot of this stuff may feel really small, but it ends up being monumental in the end. Even the incremental, small things that we support folks with.
TFSR: Are there any culture shocks that you care to share, good or bad, that you’ve had since your release? Not in terms of what you just referred to, like post-incarceration PTSD, but more like, for instance: have the vegan sausages gotten better?
Eric McDavid: [laughs] Yes, they’ve gotten better! The vegan sausages have become phenomenal. And there’s one thing that keeps hope in my heart for the human race. And I have a very contentious and very narrow definition of hope, by the way. There is still hope when humans can make vegan ice cream that tastes this good. What is impossible? Seriously. There’s nothing impossible after that.
TFSR: [laughs] Is it the nut-based ones?
Eric McDavid: It’s every single kind I’ve tried so far. They’re just phenomenal.
TFSR: Good. I mean, I’m glad, but I’ll bite since you said it’s contentious and such. Are there elements other than the vegan ice cream that you would like to talk about in terms of hope? What does hope mean to you? You can pass this if you want.
Eric McDavid: No, definitely. No, I love this one. And I have to give credit to it because the person that worded it the most beautiful way possible is the person that wrote the Doris magazines.
TFSR: Cindy Crabb, right?
Eric McDavid: Yes, thank you. And she talks about hope in this… oh-so-beautiful way! She words it so much better than I ever could. Saying that hope isn’t this thing for me where I place all my energy and just kind of allow that to do whatever it is I hope to do or to accomplish. It’s not anything near that. It’s more like the feeling of a crush, of having a crush on something. There’s this idea and there’s this outpouring that just comes from everything around me and within me all at the same time. Towards this idea and towards this beautiful thing that I’ve just so deeply fallen lustfully in love with, and just can almost touch it.
TFSR: And what happens without hope, do you think?
Eric McDavid: Without hope?
TFSR: When you lose hope?
Eric McDavid: Oh, yeah, no, don’t do that. You just don’t do that. That one’s not fun, because that’s a downward spiral that leads to a whole bunch of toxicity and trauma and self trauma especially.
TFSR: But I mean finding that there’s hope, and then just shifting the object of that hope from one to another seems kind of unhealthy, too. In terms of not allowing yourself to feel like a roller coaster and also be actively engaged in what the next taste sensation is, or whatever… You know what I mean?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, no, I hear that. I didn’t say that the crush was without heartbreak. Yeah, no, there’s definitely a balance there.
TFSR: But you’re just not cutting yourself off to it.
Eric McDavid: Exactly. There’s always the possibility of heartbreak, and that’s what always helps create that extra little dangerousness.
TFSR: It makes it worthwhile.
Eric McDavid: Definitely.
TFSR: Do you have any observations, just generally, on the anarchist scene upon release that are kind of a surprise? Where it’s at in North America or worldwide, or in your community? As far as what the discussions are, or levels of activity, or talking to people who are maybe going through the continued post-Occupy depression, or whatever?
Eric McDavid: [laughs frantically] Don’t put all your bags in one basket.
TFSR: I like that.
Eric McDavid: Don’t ever do that. Always leave an opening. Let go of that stuff. For real, for real. It’s done, in the past, and once we let go of something, we can open our hands once more, and find something else to play with. So why would you hold on to something that’s not there anymore, anyway? I know it’s sad, and we can grieve. But I mean, seriously: let it go, let it die, learn from it, and then we can put our hands on something else and something new and something now instead of what was in the past.
TFSR: I mean, I’m still burned from the anti-war movement, so…
Eric McDavid: You and me both [laughs]. That’s what opened my gates and so I’ve still got grief from that leftover, definitely. But it’s blossomed and developed into a new thing, and then it’s definitely not what it used to be for me any longer. But seeing stuff, for real, for real, I’ve been just galloping in a little bit and getting a little bit more and more into stuff, but not terribly fast. I’ve got school and everything. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco on the 25th. I’m sure that there will be more than something after that.
Oh, you know what, there was one little thing. There was one thing about drama within the milieu. And how it’s just [makes a funny voice]: ”Oh God, more drama about this, drama over here, about this.” And I kind of almost wanted to reframe the idea of drama. In so far as how I was hearing people talk about it and hearing the relationship to it. Especially, for real, for real, us humans are just full of drama. I mean there’s no way to escape it, there’s no way to get around it, and there’s no way to avoid it. We’re dramatic individuals and groups. I mean mostly because we have really dramatic ideas and really passionate ideas, and so that type of energy is bound to manifest within our relationships. And I just would really like to maybe put out there an idea, regardless of how much drama we create and inadvertently… that [we should be] trying to move with a consciousness about how we communicate to each other and ourselves, and how we relate to ourselves, with types of communication. I think for the drama part, which is never going to go away, I think we could actually just get better at being dramatic.
TFSR: Think of a community of dramaturges, you know. [makes exaggerated voice] Thespians everywhere! In the streets! Yeah.
Eric McDavid: Now, see, you can’t put a limitation on that type of potential.
TFSR: Okay, okay. [both laugh]
To that last question that I was going to ask: on a more personal note, on the tongues of many anarchists in the US since your case has begun, was the example of Anna. She’s been described in support literature as a college student, who, for a paper, infiltrated anarchist groups like Food Not Bombs and the black blocks during the FTAA protests in Miami in 2003. An FBI agent enrolled in the same community college course as her, heard about her activities and engaged her with the FBI, leading to her meeting you, Zachary, and Lauren after attending CrimethInc and other gatherings around the country and embedding herself into anarchist scenes. It’s assumed by many that she’s been placed into protective custody by the FBI and possibly furnished with a new identity. Do you have any observations you’d like to make about that or any words you’d like to broadcast to her or others who may take the same sort of path in their lives?
Eric McDavid: Not really, for real for real. I couldn’t see anybody who’d want to take that path really listening to your program, for real for real. So that part feels a little irrelevant. But words to her, definitely not. She gets to live her life however the devil she wants to, and so long as it’s away from me in as many ways as possible, there’s no problem on my end whatsoever.
TFSR: Was there anything that we didn’t talk about that you’d want to?
Eric McDavid: Good question.
TFSR: Snuck that one in.
Eric McDavid: One aspect of the use of entrapment within the legal system isn’t something that’s out of the norm or an oddity or just some random happenstance. Throughout my whole bid, there was nothing but that: “Damn you got just like I did! You got to hit just like I did!” Over and over and over again. “Oh, your sounds just like mine, but is a little bit different on this.” It’s prolific within the so-called legal system. My case is definitely not special in any type of way regarding that aspect. Entrapment is used prolifically throughout the whole system.
TFSR: Do you have any words for listeners, especially young folks coming up who may not have learned lessons that many of us have learned at least being around for a bunch of years? Folks are passionate and just how to be safe or how to be safer?
Eric McDavid: Yeah: read history. Now I know that that can be a hard thing to hear, but our history is really important for us to know on a very intimate level, because it’s not even our history, it’s our story. All of our different stories have a really profound, intimate impact on our lives that we live today. The greater understanding that I would have had back then of our stories, the more of a foundation I would have had to be able to look at what was going on around me at that time and to be able to orientate it and put it in a correct frame of reference. Instead of just being able to throw it off as: “Oh, yeah, it’s just that. That’s just that, that’s just whatever. I’m just tripping out.” If that makes sense.
TFSR: So since that question was posed the agency to younger people who are just coming up and learning stuff, or people who are new. What do you have to say to folks who have been around for a while in terms of fostering those relationships with younger folks and folks who are coming up, and who are asking them questions? What do we do? Do we point them to the history? Do we just sit down and have the long conversations and see what they want to know, and then do our best to say “Oh, yeah, I know a little bit about this. Here’s my thoughts.” How do we foster as… I know it’s gonna sound funny, and I’m not 40 yet.
Eric McDavid: [laughs hard] Were you going to use the word ‘elder’?
TFSR: Yes, I was! [both laugh frantically]
Eric McDavid: [with emphasis] Oh! I don’t know. I’m still debating on whether that’s an ageist term or not.
TFSR: Ageist as in negative to the people who are considered elders or agist to everyone else who’s not considered an elder?
Eric McDavid: [laughs some more] Yes.
TFSR: “Yes.” Good answer.
Eric McDavid: I like you, Bursts.
TFSR: I like you too, Eric.
Eric McDavid: Of course, there’s no rote way to do this, and it’s all going to be totally organic and created out of each individual situation. But maybe a basic orientation to the situations that may arise could be of course being aware of healthy communication and styles of communication. And not being in the mindset that someone who may appear younger or who wants to talk about this type of stuff is fragile in any way. So that you’re not going to scare them off if you’re talking about something heavy, and they’re not going to be ruined after you have this type of conversation with them.
TFSR: I’ve made the mistake of having conversations with folks… There was a conspiracy trial that happened in this town after May Day in 2010. And you know, parts of this community have been sort of shattered, and folks who have been around for a while, especially the folks that did support, or lived with the co-defendants of the actual 11, [were] just super paranoid about everything. “If we hear anything, we just shut it down. Don’t even talk about that. What are you doing? Are you insane? Are you a cop? Dadidadada.” Which is not helpful and not realistic either. It gives so much power or assumption of power to the state and omnipotence and stuff like that. But I guess just having real conversations and just listening to where people are at, I guess?
Eric McDavid: Yeah, and being honest with where you’re at, too, with everything. If you don’t feel comfortable talking about something with someone, then definitely don’t do that, but don’t shit on them in the process, because you’re not comfortable. Does that make sense?
TFSR: Yeah, totally.
Eric McDavid: Yeah. And I mean the more we become aware and familiar with all these COINTELPRO practices that have continued to this day and will continue for a while, the more we familiarize ourselves with it and how they’re used, the more comfortable we get with how to deal with it. And so, like you said, by not dealing with it and by totally shutting down, we definitely provide the state with exactly what they are trying to do and accomplish. There has to be some medium and some comfort zone within the conveyance of trying to articulate these types of ideas in healthy ways.
TFSR: Just to jump back a little bit to when I was talking about post-release: Brent Betterly is going to be released on April 16th, and his birthday is on the 19th. So…
This week we’re speaking with Dr. George Katsiaficas, author and contributor to over a dozen books on Peoples Movements and the elucidator of the Eros Effect. For over a decade, Dr. Katsiaficas has been studying the culture and history of South Korea and it’s culture and has just published the first volume of a two part series on People’s uprisings in Asia, entitled “Asia’s Unknown Uprisings: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century” from PM Press.
Today’s show features an interview with the Portland-based author and activist, Kristian Williams. Williams speaks on his first book, Our Enemies in Blue: A History of Policing in America), on recent articles about community policing and the counterinsurgency training shared between the U.S. military and domestic law enforcement agencies and the growing movement calling for the abolition of police in the United States, and the Pacific Northwest in particular). The show will air at 1pm EST at www.ashevillefm.org and be archived for a week at www.ashevillefm.org/the-final-straw .
