This week, Ian talks with cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky about her new book, Simplicity, out July 29 from Pantheon Graphic Library. The conversation touches on Mattie’s work as Associate Editor for The Nib, her history with comics, and her ambitions beyond the printed page, but mostly focuses on the role of art in organizing and living our politics amid all the compromises required of life in the Real World.
This week, we’re sharing this a chat with my friend, Dani Burlson on her recent book, Red Flag Warning: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country! We speak about fire ecology, housing pressures and mutual aid in the wake of natural (and human caused) disaster. Check the show notes for links to a few projects mentioned. You can find more of Dani’s writings at DaniBurlison.com/, books listed here, and more by Caw at CawShinyThings.com
This week, we’re sharing a recent interview with Kennedy Block and Josh MacPhee, editors of Strike While The Needle Is Hot: A Discography of Workers Revolt from Common Notions. We speak about audio strike records, their role, what they tell us about the struggles they cover or were produced to amplify, and a bit about where music and popular resistance stand today.
Free Jack, Free The Airwaves zine can be found here
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Featured Tracks:
Sciopero Interno by Fausto Amodei from Sciopero Interno, 1968, Italy [ 00:17:04 ]
More Percent by Kirk Thorne from Songs from the NCU Strike, 1987, UK [ 00:36:11 ]
A Year and a Bit by The Hindle Strikers with TBE from Part of the Union!, 1984 , UK[ 00:58:04 ]
Viva La Huelga! by Polibio Mayorga from La Huelga, 1982, Ecuador [ 01:18:12 ]
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Transcription
TFSR: We’re joined by the authors of Strike While the Needle is Hot: A Discography of Workers’ Revolt. Kennedy Block and Josh MacPhee, I wonder if you could introduce yourselves to the audience, sharing your names, pronouns, and any other information you’d like to share about yourselves?
Kennedy Block: Kennedy, it’s great to be here. Drop the [Stop Cop City] RICO prosecution!
Josh MacPhee: Hi, this is Josh MacPhee. I use he/him pronouns. This book is part of an ongoing process of about a decade of trying to dig into and explore political music. People can find some of that process in my last music-related book, An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels, which is a materialist analysis of the production of records for political and social movements. In a way, Strike While the Needle is Hot is a deep dive into one of those platforms.
TFSR: When you say “a materialist approach,” could you go a little bit deeper, break that down a little bit?
Josh MacPhee: Kennedy is much more trained in school and in music than I am. I’m on the border of tone deaf…
Kennedy Block: This is true.
Josh MacPhee: So I am anything but an ethno-musicologist. I’m really looking at music as agitprop. The material structure around the music. I love vinyl records not just because they’re what I grew up listening to, and the thing that got me into punk and all these other things in the 80s, but because they come in a giant sleeve that is packed with all this extra information, and is like an oversized canvas for artwork. The material objectness of the sleeve, the material in it, where the record was pressed, how it was distributed, all of those things can tell us an immense amount about the people who are doing that, whether that’s a National Liberation Organization in Africa, or workers who are on a wildcat strike.
Kennedy Block: Yeah, I feel like it’s in the title, too. It’s like an encyclopedia of political record labels, of political songs, or musical styles. It’s this very specific piece…
Josh MacPhee: The discography of workers’ revolt. We’re really interested in how workers, in unions, but a lot of them relatively autonomously, were using this form of the vinyl record as a pretty powerful form of agitprop that wasn’t just about the songs. It was about using the songs beyond the picket line, because no one’s playing a record on the picket line. They’re just singing the songs, getting that out further. And the ways and tools that people do that, and what the benefits are of doing that.
TFSR: As you mentioned, you had this encyclopedia that you had worked on, Josh, and this new book, Strike While the Needle is Hot, talks about one of the aspects that you covered or touched on in the other one. I wonder if you both could talk a little bit about the archival work that you’ve engaged with, pulling together the book, and how you made the choices of what to include.
Kennedy Block: Yeah. I feel like I was thinking about this question. The best way to answer is on the top level, this book comes out of the shared archival principle that the best and perhaps only way to truly preserve something is to use it, to facilitate and to spread its use in one way or another. And so the book, in its presentation and what we focused on, is focused on recirculating as much of this material as possible. So a lot of that is [including] as many photos and stuff as we can, putting together the mixtape. But also tailoring the writing to pull out the bits and the anecdotes that all together help to open up our contemporary imagination of what is possible, and has invited us into continuing this as a style. I think the book tries to show it as part of a repertoire, and what’s being archived is this sense of what you can do and the possibilities there.
The top line that this comes out of it, the principle is that use is preserving something. I’m so dedicated that to Josh’s chagrin, I was circulating bootleg copies of our own book before it was out, on a printed out Google Doc. Just trying to get it instant ideas to as many people, particularly the kind of musicians I know, because they don’t know a lot of factory workers.
Josh MacPhee: I think that in the ideal world, the book would have come with a record, or a set of seven inches tucked into the sleeves. But unfortunately, we live under a capitalist copyright regime, and so there’s a funny thing where we can talk and write about these records, but we actually can’t reproduce the songs without clearing the rights. And the rights of most of this music are in a nether world, because the record label that put them out was ad hoc. The musicians are unlisted, so there’s no way to get the rights to most of this material. It sets up this funny thing where there’s an archival project about music in which there’s no actual music. Although, Kennedy mentioned it, we just finished a mixtape that we’re duping onto cassette, because that generally flies under the radar, and we’ll have a digital download too, so people can listen to a lot of the music. I don’t know if almost any of it is on platforms like Spotify, and very little of it is on YouTube. So it is hard to hear, because these are literally the records that fell through the cracks.
TFSR: You were kind enough to point me to some of the tracks. So hopefully listeners will hear a little bit of that interspersed in this conversation. I was just listening to it beforehand, and going back through the book, finding this is on page 122, and this one’s on whatever.
Have these things come across your awareness because of the work on the encyclopedia? Or have you requested these records from friends in the archiving community or the radical art community, ‘Hey, have you heard of any of these sorts of albums? Could you send them our way?’ How did you find the material that’s in the book?
Josh MacPhee: It was a mix. I had passively absorbed some of these records while I was collecting, just kind of hoovering up political records. And then my friend Chris, who was one of the founders of 56A – one of the last anarchist info shops in London, sadly, he out-of-the-blue mailed me this seven-inch record of Ford workers in the early 80s on strike in London. It’s an incredible record for several reasons. I’m pretty sure I sent you one of the tracks, “Johnny Striker,” and at the time, there was no evidence of this record online. It wasn’t on Discogs, which is the go-to site that catalogs music recordings. It wasn’t on eBay. It just didn’t exist. And so I was like, “Huh, this is really interesting. These workers who created their own autonomous workers’ organization outside of the Union, and then used some of that power during a strike to produce a record of all things.”
That had me digging through my existing collection and finding other examples that I hadn’t really correlated together yet, and made me think this is something worth digging deeper into and exploring. That started the hunt, sending notes out to friends who were in Scandinavia or other places, saying, “Hey, do you know any of these records that came out of strikes?” And then just digging. Digging online, digging in record stores, trying to find anything that looked like it could be one of these records. And then sometimes it was a flop.
A lot of times, there are interesting records, and a lot of them are interesting politically, sonically not so much. Some of them are really cool, but some of them… You know, how many times can you listen to the Internationale being sung by a chorus of people that aren’t trained singers? They’re not highly prized, so they’re not records that are expensive to get; they’re just hard to find because people aren’t promoting them. So they’ve just kind of fallen by the wayside.
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TFSR: Did you create the idea of a “strike record” in the putting together of this book? Or was this a pre-existing phenomenon where people were going into a labor struggle, and they were like, “Who’s going to make the strike record?” And what sort of materials were going into some of the records that you found here? You listed off a few different types of content, like speeches or workers’ choirs.
Kennedy Block: I could say a little bit to this. Correct me, if you feel this is wrong, Josh. It feels like these different concepts of what is a strike record, on one hand, it seems to exist as a practice. It’s a thing that, through the given ecosystem of leftist focus on culture that is maybe going 70 to 80 years after the salt on it, unions had record labels, these political organizations had record labels, as you documented in the encyclopedia.
But at the same time, we also make a distinction by only focusing on vinyl records. This is another slice that pushes us in the organizational and infrastructural direction. Because a vinyl record, as opposed to a cassette tape, for example, requires so much more coordination and organization to get off the ground, and commitment to a kind of scale that you don’t need to have with a small run of personally produced cassettes and things like this. That ends up getting reflected in the content of the records.
And I feel to me at least, what emerges after having worked on all these is the idea that a strike record is, at base, a form of active participation in a struggle like others, but it tends to focus on popularization, clarification of political stakes, and circulation. So it’s a form of agitprop. But at base, what we see in these records is people eschewing the distinction between protagonist and musician supporter and either just getting into the thick of it, playing on the picket lines, or producing different musical styles that attempt to fuse it and try to build these different kinds of music, sometimes a little harshly, like smash Welsh choir with industrial music or something.
Strike records end up being, on one hand, a technique of struggle, like others, that focuses on a particular range, but that is also not reducible to the music contained on the record. A strike record is not a certain kind, like diddy or an already known song like “the Internationale”. It’s also the collectives that produce it, the artist, the label that press the record, and the Community Studio that recorded it. And it’s the working class history and initiative of workers and musicians who are actually making the music.
Josh MacPhee: We catalog 80 records in the book, and we tried to focus on and set some boundaries. The vast majority of these records are records that were produced in part with workers’ input or on their behalf, during or directly after a strike. So they’re records of strikes, not records about strikes. There are some exceptions to that that we included, for different reasons, it doesn’t really maybe matter here, but largely we were trying to say that these are records that are of the strike. It’s not a record that’s like, “Let’s write a song about a strike that happened 100 years ago and have a pop hit about it,” however unlikely that would be. In our organizational system, that wouldn’t be a strike record.
What’s interesting is that you do see the development of a self-consciousness in some ways, about these records, but only in certain contexts. For instance, Belgium is a relatively small country in Europe that, at least in the United States, often gets forgotten about. And yet they’re heavily over-represented in this book, in part because of the group of musicians who call themselves GAM, Groupe d’Action Musicale (excuse my pronunciation of all languages, including English). They started in the early 70s, coming out of the left, coming out of social movements, working with workers to produce records out of strikes, and that sets the template. I think we include three of the records that they produced, and I’m pretty sure there are probably two or three more that we couldn’t get our hands on. We even had someone in Belgium who was hunting for us and found evidence of these other records, but just couldn’t get them. So they set this template.
And then we see that there are all of these other records that follow in the wake of that, and groups that style themselves in some ways, like GAM. There’s a group called Expression that produces a couple of records with striking workers. So you see that the strike record, at least in Belgium, becomes a thing that people are conscious of and seems desirous to produce, as opposed to Germany, which is a significantly larger country with a lot more workers, where there are a couple of records, but there’s not a lineage of them in the same way.
In Italy, you have a lot of strike records, but they don’t seem to be consciously thought of as separate from the records that come out of other social struggles. Italy, from the hot autumn of ’69 throughout the 1970s, is this roiling bed of struggle, and so you have hundreds of political records that are coming out of Italy. Some of them are about strikes, some of them are about housing occupations, and some of them are about militants who have been imprisoned, and there doesn’t seem to be any distinction between them. So there are a lot of strike records, but they’re not seen as being elevated above other militant records.
I think that the place of the strike record is really contingent on the locale. In the English-speaking world, the place where we get a self-consciousness around strike records is in England in ’84-’85 with the miners’ strike, where dozens of records come out. We’ve collected, I don’t know how many, 20 in the book, and my guess is there’s another dozen that slip through the cracks. There is a real consciousness in the UK, from that point forward, around the record as a tool within labor struggles.
TFSR: I wonder how much that relates to the conception of labor and organizing labor in a distinct organism, distinct trade union structure, versus the autonomous movement that was about breaking those boundaries. So the record in this case is just a reflection of the general social struggle. I’m basically just saying the same thing that you just said, maybe. That’s interesting, though. The autonomous movements–I see what you’re getting at.
You talked about GAM as a sort of house band for the trade union movement. Could you talk a bit about the performers? Your introduction mentions Joe Glaser appearing on numerous records that you came across. I wonder if you have thoughts about who participated in these albums, how many were professionals, who took up the task for a specific strike, how many were the workers themselves, and what sort of motivations you were able to uncover?
Josh MacPhee: Joe Glaser is interesting because he’s not actually on any of the strike records. He’s kind of this mercenary that, I’m assuming, was in the CP, the Communist Party in the 40s and 50s, and emerges in the 50s as the sort of troubadour for the labor movement. So he records upwards of a dozen records for different unions, where he writes the theme song for the UAW, United Auto Workers, and then the theme song for the longshoremen. And then he records these records that are a mixture of songs that he writes new lyrics to, classic labor songs that are fairly corny, and specific to the union. So these aren’t struggle records. These are the kind of records that you would get handed out at the National Conference of the Steel Workers, like “The Glorious History of the Steel Workers in Song.” And these are not autonomous records at all.
Interestingly, he’s this figure that’s associated with labor so profoundly within the music world. He doesn’t touch these strike records. It’s just not his world. And that’s where the strike records are really interesting, because they show this tension between the unions, particularly the unions that have developed intense and tacit negotiation agreements with management to smooth over industrial militancy versus the more insurgent unions and the wildcat workers that produce a lot more of the records. The unions are producing these hagiographic records. The workers are producing these “F**k the bosses” records, and they’re very different.
Kennedy Block: In terms of literal performers, the stuff that’s collected in the book is oftentimes just the workers themselves singing. Sometimes it’s the workers performing–like on one of my favorite tracks–with the local high school band. Sometimes it’s these relatively avant-garde musicians mixing it all up. And sometimes it’s also established musicians from a kind of pop-ish mold lending their name.
Josh, you have this story about the guy who gets blacklisted after making his 70s funk record about coal mining. It’s not like you have to give something up to make a record like this into a more legitimate thing, but I think the ones that we were attracted to, yeah, definitely. And you can hear it in the music, oftentimes, it comes from a pretty strong impulse or clarity or just life. So, despite the corniness, they can still be very beautiful.
Josh MacPhee: You can see that who the performer is in these records, evolves over time. It’s not like something on your path; it sort of bounces around. If, just for the sake of argument, we would split into pre-1980 and post-1980. Pre-1980, you’re much more likely to put a record on and find that it’s the workers themselves, or a union choir, or the music comes out of, is embedded in the community that the workers come out of. And what it says is, one: that workers recording and hearing themselves is meaningful to them, and two: that that community is large enough to support the production of 500 or 1000 of these little black discs that then have to get distributed in the world.
In the late 70s and early 80s, you see this transition happen, where increasingly, although never explicit, there is a question about, “Do we need to start producing songs in a more pop idiom to get a broader audience?” That’s when you start to see more external musicians come in. You start to see this breaking down, or breaking up of the community that would all share a song. And as that starts to disappear because of encroachments of capitalist entertainment industry in part, as well as just assaults on labor in general, you get more and more records where you basically have pop songs that are either often relatively poorly done by the workers, or by hired out people that are supporting the workers that do these songs, that are rock songs, or electro, pop rap.
A real change happens, and I think that the reasons for that are not entirely readable from the records themselves. I think we can infer that there is this kind of combination of the breaking down of the ties that hold the working class community together, so that the sort of folk idiom and working class song culture in which people teach their kids songs, and then they teach their kids songs, and so when you put those on a record everyone knows the songs, and it validates you, that starts to have less meaning because kids don’t want to learn those songs. They wanna learn the Beatles or whatever. And so then you start to get these songs that sound more like the Beatles, to varying effects.
Then there is this interesting period, and you really see it in Belgium, like we mentioned, where you have these militant musicians who really align themselves with the workers, and they record with the workers. They write the songs with the workers. They’re not writing songs about the strike. They’re really embedding themselves in the culture of the strike.
In some of the records, they actually write and talk about that, which is really interesting. The sort of affective sense of what it means to be a musician and part of this movement, and the need to involve workers, the need for workers to be able to be musicians as well. This real attempt to recognize that social struggle is about the transformation of both the individual and the community. So they really get to this transition point where it’s the strongest, this real interrogation of who is the performer. This is the most interesting moment: when that’s a question, not an answer.
TFSR: Thank you. That was a very good answer. I really appreciate that. I’ve been thinking a lot myself over the last few years about political folk music and its reproducibility. I’ve been learning acoustic guitar, for instance, just because I’ve been inspired throughout my life by political folk music and the idea that someone can just know the general tune, and might go and perform it with some friends in a slightly different way than how it’s recorded somewhere. But that moment where people share that song, share those lyrics, share the sentiments that are there, and make it their own, in that moment, it’s not the same as turning on Spotify and putting on a Beatles song. It’s not calling back to you out of history as this frozen moment of art. It’s mutable and alive in the moment. And, yeah, that’s a really cool insight about that shift towards pop culture.
Kennedy Block: One more aspect of that that comes through in the records is something that you’ve talked about before, Josh, that a lot of what we’re seeing involves, in some way, an invitation. It could be as simple as the fact that with many these records, the lyrics and the lead sheet, the chords to the songs are included, such that it’s being circulated within an audience that is also not being asked or trained to think of themselves as a passive, consuming audience.
TFSR: I guess you’ve kind of already gone into this a bit, but I’m curious about who the record was produced for. You’ve already talked about this in a few ways, but if we could just talk a little more specifically. How were the albums distributed? How much fundraising would come from these for the movement, for the strike? Did they get played on the radio during the struggles, or were they more souvenirs and “records of the moment and the struggle”?
Josh MacPhee: Some of that is not knowable by the records themselves, although some of the records give accounting of how many records were pressed and the expectation of the income that they’ll make. “We’ve prepaid this much into the strike fund,” so we have a little bit of information, but some of it is relatively unknowable. We do know that it’s unlikely any of these records were pressed in a volume less than 500 copies, because, as Kennedy was saying, unlike cassettes or CDs, you couldn’t at the time self-press a record. They had to be industrially produced. So there had to be a level of investment to make that happen.
I would say 75% of the records in the book are seven inches, as opposed to LPs. And I think that the reason for that and it makes a lot of sense–is that strikes are often quite short. There are limited resources, so it’s much easier to not only have the capital to put out a seven-inch but to record the 12 minutes that you can fit on a seven-inch versus the 40 minutes that you can fit on a 45 LP. The LPs are actually often quite extraordinary, because they speak to a much higher level of investment.
Kennedy Block: It’s easy to forget that the strikes are lasting a month, three months. To put together all of that in a couple of months, even just for a seven-inch, is incredible in the pace that people are working at. And it’s probably evidence of the familiarity and sort of see that.
Josh MacPhee: It shows how one of the unintended side effects of being on strike is that you have a lot more time.
Josh MacPhee: In the UK, the Ford record that we mentioned before says in really small type on the edge of the sleeve: “Will John Peel play this?” At least a couple of other records make this reference. John Peel was famous as one of the only DJs who played popular music on the BBC, and was sort of a make-or-break DJ for popular music acts in the UK. So there is a kind of consciousness around the possibility of getting radio play, I do think. Particularly when we’re talking about places like the UK, where there’s a really robust independent music scene, and you get records coming out in the 80s in support of things like the miners’ strike, like Billy Bragg or Test Department, one of these industrial bands, the Redskins. You have these bands whose songs were probably played on the radio.
But then you also have evidence on the record that Kennedy mentioned, which is from the early 70s. It’s like the first British miners’ strike record that we could find by John and City Lights, where John is this guy, John Paul Jones, who had a handful of hit pop records and was largely a stand-up musician, who’s a comedian, but he felt very strongly about the miners’ strike in 1972. He recorded the seven-inch that his label, Polydor, was going to put out, but they refused to put it out, and then it got banned from the radio. He sort of disappeared after that. His career was tanked. His backing band, City Lights, went on to become the relatively popular kind of blues-rock band, 10cc, so it didn’t hurt their career, but they also weren’t listed.
So you get different relationships to popularity. In Scandinavia, there were a number of quite popular groups that fell under the umbrella term called Prog, prog rock. The origin of the term is similar, in a way, but “progressive” in the Scandinavian context didn’t just mean progressive musically, but explicitly meant progressive politically. So you had folk bands that were playing much more complex progressive music increasingly, that also were explicitly leftists. Some of these bands ended up being extremely popular, and they would record strike records in support of workers, and those more than likely got played on the radio, because some of these bands were the equivalent of platinum-selling if they had been Western Anglophone bands.
Kennedy Block: Another aspect of the popularization that is aimed at by some of these records, not just in terms of popularization, in terms of audience cultivating, but also [effort] to popularize a struggle amongst the working class, to go and off through face to face interaction, create the sense that your fight is my fight, my fight is your fight.
For example, another, I think Belgium record, the Capsuleries Vivra! which is again an instance of a record that’s supported by another kind of leftist institution, thisradical magazine (POUR). That’s the recording of a band that comes out of the factory, but they’re really tight. They play extremely well together, and they have some great songs. What’s documented on the sleeve is their travels to different factories to perform directly, acting as a cultural unit that can bridge struggles to other places. You know, in the same way that bands can do this, other kinds of political cultural units can do this, like soccer teams, maybe.
TFSR: Can you talk about how the tradition continues despite changes in the technology of sharing music? For instance, I’ve seen benefit compilations for social and ecological struggles like Stop Cop City, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, Anti Fascist Action, or prisoner support movements over the years. How has it changed since the days that you were recording in this book?
Josh MacPhee: The book goes up to about 1990, and part of the reason why we stopped there is because that’s the point at which cassettes and CDs start to outsell vinyl records. You don’t get strike records after that, because the whole point of the strike record is, on some level, to popularize a struggle. And so if people are listening to cassettes and CDs, then why would you put a vinyl record out? There isn’t the kind of nostalgia within the workers for the vinyl record, like there is in the punk scene, for instance.
First, you see a shift to cassettes and then to CDs. And both are much easier to produce. You can make 10 cassettes and just give them to workers on the picket line as a kind of morale booster. We didn’t dig that deep into these further technical iterations, because they’re much harder to track, and because of their potential boutiqueness. It’s hard to know whether one cassette was made or 10,000, and therefore it just didn’t seem worth tracking down and documenting a cassette that five copies were made just for the workers themselves, because that wasn’t what the project was about. Then that holds over to CDs.
Then we move into a lot of what you’re talking about, these compilations that show up on Bandcamp that you can pay a sliding scale of $10 to $30 to get this massive download of songs that people donated in support of these struggles. I think that those things are very cool, but one of the things that they often don’t have is any of this architecture around them to educate anyone about those struggles. Because it’s just ones and zeros, it’s just data that you pull down on your computer or your phone, and then it gets sucked up into algorithmic playlists that you have on whatever device, it kind of gets de-tethered from the struggle.
A lot of times, the songs aren’t about the struggle. They’re just donated to try to get people to buy, which is good. It’s important that people have ways and reasons to support these struggles, but there’s less of that kind of sense of a whole package. We can’t go backwards, but I look forward to people trying to go forwards and think of new ways to create music and sounds to support struggles that have context embedded in them, in ways that. When you listen, they have an it-ness that connects you to the politics, rather than just this ethereal relationship.
Kennedy Block: I think for me, when I try to look at contemporary iterations of this book, I think of the struggle against Cop City, mainly because it’s a struggle in which there was a sort of mastery of autonomous crews that were working to push the struggle forward. What seems the most interesting part, and what the struggle offered, was that these people took on the political responsibility of communicating the struggle and of creating. We did an exhibition of interference, and something that came out is the vast amount of, in this instance, writing. The vast number of attempts to popularize and to communicate the meaning and the needs of this struggle, and to take responsibility for that in zines and writing.
Also, treating the mainstream media as a terrain that you can make operations on, not making an ethical judgment about it, being for or against it, but treating it as part of this field that, as someone legitimately trying to form narratives and bring people in, it’s a terrain that you do things on. Things like we see in this book popped up. You have independent organs for the struggle, like Atlantic Community Press Collective, that start doing research that supports other kinds of efforts.
It’s a situation in which there’s the free giving away of authority to anyone interested in participating in the struggle, mainly through the technique of just non-condemnation. There’s this active tone of “you are a political actor, you have the authority to organize in your zone towards this.” And it helps create this ecosystem that feels, to me, the most akin to what we see in the book, what we’re interested in the book, that allows for all these kinds of experiments to happen. Part of the kernel, what I would take from the book and keep moving forward, and how I want to think about music moving forward, is this investment of agency and authority for anyone involved to start working on it. So there’s stuff like that.
But also within the Cop City struggle, there have been organized attempts to use music as a tool to get people involved. The most famous example was the series of raves and then music festivals inside the occupation as part of a place-making strategy. A strategy of building participation in the movement that had, I think, severe limitations that I don’t really know how to speak to properly. A lot of my thinking about this is influenced by a variety of things, but also, if you go into freejack.co, this is the support website for Jack Mazurek, who’s facing some charges after a series of home raids.
There’s a zine there you can download called “Free Jack, free the airways,” that works through this idea of what it is to be a militant musician. They’re not just defining music as something you do to support a struggle, but if we understand our struggles contemporarily as paradigmatic struggles between a world of death and a world of life your ability to freely develop your expression, and even just to literally make noise in public is attacked and impeached upon through a variety of legal [measures] and forcibly. And so they’re like, ‘”ou already have a stake in the struggle.” There’s good writing on that.
We include in full a flyer from the fifth Week of Action in the forest that was circulated during this music festival that I’m talking about. I kind of want to, if possible, just read it and then maybe Josh or Bursts, if you have thoughts about how this sketches something that’s actually pretty different than what we’re talking about, or whatever. It’ll probably take a minute or two. Is that okay?
“This is not a music festival because we are not here as consumers or as near spectators. This is not another photo op, another networking opportunity. We are here because our need for a free forest, culture, and existence can’t be crushed by the police, nor can it be sold back to us as an image in an uninspired Hollywood rip-off.
In a cave called Divje Babe, located in present-day Slovenia, archaeologists have recently discovered a 60,000-year-old flute. The human need for music has been with us since the very beginning. We are here to affirm that this deep and timeless desire, which has survived an ice age, the rise of empires and states, the advent of borders, slavery, war, famine, and holocausts, is an important part of the current struggle.
This movement is not just about a piece of land. It is not being fought between the police and their goons on one hand and some activists and their friends on the other. We are witnessing the collision of two competing ideas of life and the future. If they win, they will pollute all the rivers, destroy all the forests, pave over everything beautiful, and they will use the police to assure unlimited profits as our civilization chokes out its dying breaths. If we win, human needs will be measured against the imagination, against our collective ambitions and dreams, not held hostage by a system of artificial scarcity and waste. Our communities will not be held together by their ability to kill and maim enemies or heretics. They will be held together by music and the ability to generate common luxuries.
So let’s not say, ‘Oh, they don’t really care about the struggle. They are only here for the party’ or ‘This is not about music and festivals and all of this crap. This is about serious politics and organizing.’ Instead, let’s say the truth. This is only a glimpse of what we could give one another if we managed to outlive the oil-based economies of the current world system, the emancipation of the senses, the free development of the imagination, and the passions. This is precisely what we are fighting for.”
TFSR: Then the “No-Cop City, No Hollywood Dystopia.” It’s interesting. I sometimes forget that they were also planning a movie studio on the spot, in addition to the Cop City facility. Josh, I’m not sure if you’d like to reflect on that.
Josh MacPhee Let me go back a second. I grew up and was politicized through punk, like a lot of my peers. Within that paradigm, punk was presented as the inverse of, or the antagonis to to folk music, and so I had no experience listening to, understanding, or even really knowing what folk music was until relatively recently. It wasn’t until I started working on the encyclopedia, and in particular, had movement elders give me records and listen to them, that I realized that folk music means people’s music. Folk is not Joan Baez, there are folk traditions all over the world. They sound extremely diverse. They’re not all the same, although they can overlap. That has sent me down this rabbit hole of being extremely interested in folk music, this idea of how it feels to be in a community in which music is just part of that community. It’s just part of who you are and what you do. You all know songs, and you sing them together. We’ve fundamentally lost that for the most part.
What’s nice about the political angle within the Stop Cop-City struggle is this attempt to figure out how to reclaim that. That’s going to be harder to do than we would think. We’re so polluted/enamored by pop music. It’s also interesting because when you were reading that flyer, Kennedy, I was thinking about Glastonbury. How Glastonbury–he huge Music Festival in the UK–which started as a free festival that was made by people who just traveled around and squatted the land and then played these massive concerts with Hawkwind and all of these jammy, space rock bands. They were hyper political and now they are super corporate. Yet you have these people like Kneecap or Bob Vylan, who in some ways embody the very thing that flyer is against. Again just them speaking up about Palestine has led to them being banned from countries and facing criminal charges.
It’s interesting that we live in an ecosystem in which music is a powerful terrain of struggle, and there are lots of ways to struggle on that terrain. I really like this idea of trying to create these autonomous, very DIY music projects. But I also don’t want to stop the Kneecaps of the world from using a platform that they have to say things. I don’t think that’s the world we want to live in, where there are famous people, and we listen to them, and what they say makes it more important than if someone else says it. But whether we want to live in that world or not, it is the world we live in. It’s interesting if there’s a way to somehow do that and undo it at the same time.
I think that in the records around the miners’ strike in the mid-80s in the UK, you see that tension. You see people like Paul Weller from the Jam and Style Council. He created this super group called the Council Collective to record this record, to raise money for striking miners. And it’s a dance record. It’s made to be played on the radio and in the club. You can see this long-format apologia on the back. These musicians want to support the struggle, but they function at a level in which there’s so many people that need to sign off on what they do to get a record to come out, that when this record finally comes out, on the back there’s this longform apology about the fact that some striking miners dropped a cinder block off an overpass and hit a cab that was carrying scabs to the workplace, and people were injured. It’s almost embarrassing, this wanting to support struggle, but not the way that workers are actually struggling. They want to support some idealized version of how workers are going to struggle, in which everything is clean and simple and no one gets hurt.
We need to figure out ways to start to unpack that, to encourage the Kneecaps, but also hold accountability to it. It is not the musician’s role to decide how workers are going to struggle, or how Palestinians are going to struggle, or how people organizing against Cop City are going to struggle, and like that flyer says, invite as many people in as possible. If some massive pop star wants to support Cop City, then that’s great, but they don’t get to decide what that struggle looks like. It’s great because these records embody some of that tension, these early attempts at trying to hash that out and figure out how to do that.
Kennedy Block: One thing that seems to help in all these instances, the priority here is that there is action happening, that people are struggling and doing things. That, with all these strike records, the basis is that there is a strike going on, like in Cop City,
Josh MacPhee: There’s something at stake, something very real,
Kennedy Block: We learn that in the development of these cultural and political ecosystems, some of the values that one can take are that leading with bold action is one of your strongest friends. The struggle against Cop City started simultaneously with an info night. It was a public preempting of the city’s narrative of how this facility was going to be constructed. It was in the park and had most people, and then that night, the construction of equipment was burned.
Or in the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, within the first week, extremely soon, a police precinct was burned to the ground. Strong action, bond action, experiments create ecosystems around them. Action begets organization, almost more so sometimes than organization begets action. So we have that, and then a basic principle of not approaching struggle as a primarily ethical problem, as a place in which one should find and police bounds of purity, whether that’s your ideology or the mode of struggle. This one’s perhaps the sloppiest and the one the most about non-condemnation, everybody’s just going for it. That one is really hard in practice, but as a set of principles of unity and stuff like this, this is the direction that is supporting the most dynamic ecosystems of militant struggle that we’ve seen in the past five years, at least, probably more. And music, I don’t know. I’ve already spoken a lot about it.
TFSR: Getting back to the book and the way that you curated it. Obviously, you had a bigger volume of records to pick through, I’m sure, than you put in here because it was curated. Were there any records in particular that struck you as notable, the performers, the art, or the content of the album, or the inserts that you were able to find?
Josh MacPhee: One of the big ones which Kennedy mentioned in passing is this record by the Hindle Pickets in TBE, which was produced in the Midlands in the UK, just before the miners’ strike. Hindle Pickets are pickets from the Hindle Gear factory. It’s a workers’ choir that is a tradition in the UK, they work at this gear factory, I believe it’s in Bradford. TBE was, from what we can tell, a high school band; some of them may be the kids of the workers. They never released anything else, and there’s nothing specific about the band other than the musicians’ names in the record. But it’s this incredible mash-up of these young kids that are listening to a lot of Wire, Gang of Four, and the Buzzcocks. It’s this very post-punk kind of sound. And then these guys, who are just a workers’ choir, put out this song, ?Year and a Bit,” which is a droney post punk backbeat, with the workers narrating effectively, what it feels like to be on strike. And it’s extremely arresting.
It’s a pretty incredible record, both politically and as a pop record. That one is really a standout. In addition, it’s one of those records that’s just jam-packed with little pieces of paper. It’s got a whole sheet about how they produce the record. And then it’s got a letter from Neil Kinnock who’s the head of the National Union of Miners at the time, or he’s maybe the Labour Party liaison with the unions in support of the strike. Then there’s a history of the strike and why they went out on strike, and ways to support, and it’s really chock full of information. It’s one of these great things where you’re not just listening to this great record, but learning in almost minutia about the history of this struggle, and that’s a real standout. In a way, it is very similar to the Ford record that we mentioned, which is another record that is embedded with all this paratextual information so that you can really learn about the strike. Those are two really good examples. I don’t know if you want to throw a couple more in.
Kennedy Block: We’ve been sitting with them for a while now. In making the mix-tape, I was particularly surprised by how much some of the picket line ditties stuck in my head. So this is just the women’s choir of the Keresley Pit, just in most block-headed English tone: vocalizing “You won’t find us at the kitchen sink. You won’t find us at home. Come on over to the picket line, we’ll be picketing there.” I can’t get it out now. It’s effective for what it was attempting to do, being a means of hanging out together. I know that also, just doing this book, has made other elements of my life stick out to me more.
Recently, I had the pleasure of being involved in what they were calling a Morale. Some comrades had come back from Rojava with all these intense ideas about culture and development of struggle, and things like that. They helped to facilitate this night of revolutionary music, which is nothing I’ve ever experienced before, but that was immediately so easy to do. In a barn, with some straw on the ground, some twinkle lights, and people singing sort of IRA songs, everybody starts stamping to them and hooting and hollering. I don’t think I would have had as much of a way to get into, ingest, and care about it and to feel wrapped up in this music. It’s a kind of reinforcement. I found myself having more and more fun coming back to the records.
Josh MacPhee: Yeah. Maybe it’s worth mentioning that there’s this really interesting record we found. It’s the last record in the book. It’s from 1990 and it was put out by a union called Sitek, which is from Curaçao. It’s a country that I don’t know a ton about but Curaçao has a very complex linguistic mix because of a history of colonization, and it’s a full LP that is documenting a 1990 Union gathering. Also, there’s a big strike that happens at the same time, and it’s unclear whether they just go on strike every year, so maybe this is one of many records documenting their strikes. The record, although it lists tracks, is not tracked. So, people who are familiar with vinyl records: it’s just one long song, one long audio track that completely seamlessly intersperses field recordings out on the street, meetings, people giving speeches. And then, there’s this amazing moment in the record where this call and response starts up, where someone breaks from a speech into this chant that is the most incredible, poly-rhythmic calling response.
Kennedy Block: It’s not like “Free, Free Palestine, Free Palestine.” It’s like, “da-dah da-da-dah-da-ha.”
Josh MacPhee: Within it’s all a cappella. It’s incredible. That record is a real standout, even though we’re still trying to parse exactly what’s going on on it, because it switches from multiple languages without any contextual clues. That’s a really interesting and fascinating record.
Another great record is one of a couple that came out of the struggle in the Lip factory. Lip was a watch company. The watches were built on the border between France and Switzerland, classic watch territory, with a long history of anarchist watchmakers. In part, in response to May ’68, the culture of the workers really changed in the late 60s and early 1970s. In the early 1970s, the workers not only went on strike, but also occupied the factory and kidnapped some of the bosses. And there’s this record that they self-produce where they have this militant chanson singer Claire Martin Michone, who on the record is just listed as Claire, who is present for and listens to and takes notes during all their meetings and writes songs based on their meeting notes.
This record, these songs are maybe the only record ever that has songs about meetings interspersed with workers talking. Then she takes this show on the road and travels around France, giving concerts and selling watches from the occupied watch factory to support the workers. This is pretty incredible. It’s not just a piece of plastic. It’s a document of a very dense social process and struggle. The record is a seven-inch, but it’s in this oversize sleeve that unfolds and has cartoons in it, and all the information about the strike. It’s pretty great.
Kennedy Block: The slogan of a lot of this stuff could be: “It just keeps going.” It just keeps going, it just keeps folding into new activity. That’s the ethos of it. I was thinking of another conversation recently, that the ethos of an organization should not be to preserve itself, but to go for broke, and in the process, probably dissolve itself and become new things. And that feels like it happens over and over again in the process of these records. Going for broke. What that means is to preserve an underlying activity and culture, perhaps more so even than just this or that band.
Josh MacPhee: Many of the records are about a specific strike, but they document a sediment of struggle. It’s about a specific set of demands or a strike, but you can see that all these other people and struggles participated in the construction of that. There’s this another incredible record that was put out by the strikers at Chausson, which is a French bus manufacturer. They work with this group Germinale, which is a youthful seeming jazz rock act that actually writes a manifesto in the seven inch about what it means as musicians to participate in the struggle. They record a song that’s specifically about this strike, and that’s on one side of the record, but the other side of the record is a field recording of the picket line. The Chausson factory workers, in part, go out on strike for a set of reasons and conditions. The thing that pushes them or breaks the camel’s back, so to speak, is that the bosses lock them out. So they create this massive picket to stop the bosses from allowing the chassis of the buses to leave the factory; they’re basically blocking the bosses from running the factory without them, and they can’t do that themselves because there are not enough workers.
There’s another strike going on in Lyon at the time: the cable makers, who are mostly Moroccan, and they come to support the strikers. So there are these French-born lorry chassis makers, and then you have the Moroccan workers who come. The French strikers have a big band, a classic workers band, and then the Moroccan musicians come with all these North African instruments. The record is the six and a half, seven minute jam on the picket line of them playing together, and it’s incredible. It just shows the levels of solidarity that get embedded in these struggles that you wouldn’t know about if this record that shows and documents that struggle wasn’t still there to be picked up. The cover of the record is a screen-printed, rainbow-rolled, very graphic image. There’s no way it would exist if there hadn’t been the student and worker strikes in 1968, so it’s clearly drawing on that struggle as well. You can see how these histories of struggles intertwine to make these moments of militancy. These records are the objects that are windows into that.
Kennedy Block: The bit that you were referencing was written on the sleeve. They describe what you described in the last paragraph: “The party will last all day, referencing the face-off with the riot police. The first side of the disc recorded on site captures one of the most enthusiastic moments. Thanks to the contact established during the strike. In particular, with comments from the strike committee, we created a song which tells the story on the B-side: ‘Long live the Chausson strike!’ As for us and as much as possible, in liaison with other cultural groups, we intend to continue this type of work, minus errors and inadequacies, where the people live, work, struggle and express themselves, so that a culture will be created which belongs to them and bears witness to their multiple battles against the economic, political and cultural pressures…”
TFSR: That’s beautiful. Long live the strike. That’s really fascinating. When you were talking about that, that dug it a little deeper into me of how these aren’t just documentations of the moment or agitprop of the individual struggle that they’re documenting, or whatever. You can see the seeping in of what people are bringing, the culture, the demands, the desires that situate those specific struggles, too. That’s really interesting. That’s really cool.
Josh MacPhee: You see this interesting tension in the writing, and even in some of the music, where there’s people who are coming out of the communist traditions that have very didactic ways of articulating, communicating struggle, who are in these moments of profound social transformation, where the strike isn’t just about a higher wage, but it becomes about a new way of life. Where your dad’s didactic Communist Party way of communicating can’t contain the energies of the struggle in the community. That is interesting and exciting to see that stuff continually break down, that history being important, and people are drawing from it. They’re really trying to build something new and figuring it out by doing.
TFSR: You’ve already pointed to a few of the interesting labor struggles, like the watchmaking factory, for instance, or this cross-industry, cross-cultural solidarity that was being shown at the chassis-making factory. Were there any other labor struggles that you hadn’t heard about which piqued your interest, that you came across when you were researching for the book?
Kennedy Block: There is a lot. The only thing that’s just picking into my mind right now is this anecdote from the Gainer’s meat packing strike in Alberta, somewhere on Canada’s West Coast, that was very small, but with many different techniques. One of the techniques of their strike was also an organized boycott of Gainer’s meat, and that didn’t just mean “don’t buy it.” Workers and their families would go into grocery stores, put little stickers on the Gainer’s, meat in the store, saying ‘this is scab meat’, and then they would poke little holes in it. What does it actually mean to run a boycott? When you’re serious about it, and when you have an organized base that is actually in relationship to the product, not just saying: “Don’t buy it at the Home Depot.”
Josh MacPhee: It’s worth mentioning that there are several records that are not just about labor strikes, but clearly about feminist struggles. Particularly because we’re looking at the stuff in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, there’s a lot of miner struggles and these traditional conceptions of blue collar masculinity, but there’s a surprising number of records that came out of many more factories run by women.
There’s this great record from the Obsession factory in the mid-70s, which is a lingerie factory. All women’s garment workers went on strike, and they promoted the strike and the record by calling it the story of O’s. Obsession with the O being really big playing off of at the time, the soft porn story of O. It was a big movie that was in all the box offices across Europe, like a blockbuster film. So they’re playing off this question of sexuality and making lingerie to popularize their strike. There are a number of examples of these women’s struggles where there’s a real consciousness around feminist intervention into the realm of workers’ struggles.
Kennedy Block: There’s another one. When we looked at the punk record DOA, their seven-inch “General Strike,” is referencing something I had no idea happened, which was the development and near-pulling off of a General Strike in Canada in the early 80s. It urprised me with its breadth.
Josh MacPhee: It’s actually the only punk record in here that is being conceptualized as this paradigmatic political musical form. I think there’s something about the individualism rooted in it that probably made it difficult for punk bands to figure out a way to embed themselves in or to be close enough to strikes to really be able to participate in a meaningful way. It was surprising that this DOA record is literally the only punk record in the book, and that this record is also the only record that self-consciously advertises itself as a limited edition.
Kennedy Block: It came out afterwards that one of the main leaders of the solidarity coalition, who was tying up all these different sectors and pushing for political demands for this general strike, was on the picket so much that he got pneumonia. Then the person who replaced him sold everyone out in background deals essentially. That means that the strike basically ended as soon as this record came out. Also, the production timelines are pretty difficult, but it is funny that there’s this sense of trying to capitalize on it.
Josh MacPhee: At the exact same time that that record comes out, or maybe just a little bit before, there’s a general strike in Ecuador, and one of the most popular musicians in Ecuador, this guy, Polibio Mayorga who’s put out hundreds of records, produces a record called “La Huelga, Viva la Huelga.” It is an incredible cumbia song that supports the general strike, and it actually is so much more effective than the DOA. It is another thing in hindsight of looking back to my 16-year-old self, who was thinking that punk is the only politically real music, and how the sonic qualities of music are only as politically relevant as the way the music is used. It feels like the Huelga record is something that people all across Ecuador could bump and be super into, and the DOA record, a pretty small audience.
TFSR: Have you all seen the more recent documentary on Chumbawamba that came out recently? If you watch some of the documentaries that have come out about Chumbawamba’s early history, my understanding is that one of Chumbawamba’s early iterations was this project called Chimp Eats Banana. They were just putting together a benefit for the miners’ strike, and they were short on bands, so they’re asking themselves, what should they name the band? They picked up instruments, but didn’t play very well. They did eventually put out an album that’s pretty entertaining. If you can see footage of the punk bands performing at strike events, and you just see punks and Goths thrashing out on the stage, and the rest of the people are just wandering away during it. You can see that it absolutely is not speaking to the people that are actually participating in the labor element of it. Sorry to cut you off, Kennedy.
Kennedy Block: No, no, no. It’s funny. It reminds me of something. We watched one of the records, which seems to be from 1984 in the UK.
Josh MacPhee: It’s the same thing that Chumbawamba talked about, going onto the picket line and trying to figure out how to engage.
Kennedy Block: We were watching a documentary by Ken Loach called Which Side Are You On? And the cover looks exactly like the cover of a record that has “Which side are you on.”
Josh MacPhee: It’s essentially a soundtrack.
Kennedy Block: Again, it’s not phrased as a question. It is just, “Which side are you on”. That’s it. No question mark, no period, just like you already know. And there’s a recording in there of
Josh MacPhee: Charlie Livingston.
Kennedy Block: Charlie Livingston goes vocalizing: “Get off your knees, stand up and fight like our fathers did before.” It was within the aim presumably, it’s a room full of the most stone-faced people, but then it continues. One of those people in the audience gets up and performs a poem that they wrote, and they are more into it. I think one of our recordings also comes from that moment on the mixtape, that’s extremely raucous with fiddle sing-along that just keeps evolving into new songs.
Josh MacPhee: It acts like a striking hootenanny.
Kennedy Block: Yes, exactly. Seriously, for a minute and a half, they’re just going vocalizing: “Here we go, here we go, here we go.”
Josh MacPhee: Football chanting.
TFSR: Everyone loves to sing along.
Kennedy Block: Yeah.
Josh MacPhee: All there is to say is that the miners’ audience in ’84 was a tough audience for any musician, not just the floppy punk bands.
Kennedy Block: Yeah. But also, as you were saying, Josh, you have that anecdote about it, but if we’re taking it seriously, it is not necessarily the content of the music that creates its political impact. There’s the example of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”, which, in our context, is perhaps a mostly fine, onboarding point to think about how stuff’s lbeig thought. But that in South Africa is banned, you can go to jail if you play that song.
Josh MacPhee: It became banned in South Africa because students who were going on strike were singing, “We don’t need your education, teacher.” They took the chorus as a chant, and so it led to being banned, which was, of course, not Pink Floyd’s intention. And so there’s that interesting thing in which, on some level, it’s the struggle that defines the meaning of the music, rather than the musician.
Kennedy Block: As something you think about as a designer within political spaces, too. You don’t get to just pick any old symbol, invest with all the meaning autonomously as an artist, and then, poof, there it is. We’re always working with a given language, and it’s defined by how it is used and the power that it accrues. The real effectiveness of political symbolism or music is what it can enforce as its meaning. Not just what you want it to be. This is kind of related, but do you know the Bible verse that said “And they put blood upon the lintel and upon the mantle, and God passed over them”, or whatever. I remember in 2020, in New York City, restaurants treated a handmade Black Lives Matter sign as blood on the lintel. So there was an enforcement of that slogan. It’s through action.
TFSR: As it should be. So you’ve already mentioned the mix tape idea. Should we talk about that if you’re worried about flying under the radar?
Josh MacPhee: No, that’s fine. We’re producing a small number of mixtapes, a couple hundred that have 24 tracks, 12 on each side that are mixed together, with edited versions of songs from the book. The actual physical cassette will be available soon. We are also going to link a digital download of that on the book page, on our publisher’s website, commonnotions.org, and we’ll also probably be on the justseeds.org website for the page for the book. So, if you’re an object fetishist, like I am, you’ll be able to get an actual cassette, and if you just want to hear the songs, you’ll be able to download the mixtape. And that’ll be if you go to commonnotions.org and search for “Strike While the Needle is Hot,” you can find it all on justseeds.org.
TFSR: I’ll link that for sure in the show notes for this. So any listeners, when this comes out, check that out. You were also mentioning a coupon code.
Josh MacPhee: Yes, for at least probably a week or two after this broadcast, so in the summer of 2025. If you go to commonnotions.org, buy the book and use the code at checkout, STRIKE15, you get 15% off the book.
TFSR: Josh and Kennedy, thanks so much for this conversation. Is there anything we didn’t touch on that comes to mind right now? Lingering albums?
Josh MacPhee: We went all over the place. If anyone listening knows of or has another strike record, get in touch. We’d love to hear about more. It’s always great to get feedback. So let us know what you think of the book, and let us know any ideas that you have. Both of us are really interested in trying to help facilitate ways that music and culture can be more impactful within our movements.
Kennedy Block: How can people best reach out? Instagram or email?
Josh MacPhee: Good question. I’m on Instagram. It’s @JMacphee, or email is josh@justseeds.org, and you can reach Kennedy through me, because he’s much more stealth in his communications than I am.
Kennedy Block: If you go to the corner of…
TFSR: At 2 o’clock in the morning,
Josh MacPhee: Bring a falafel.
Kennedy Block: The only other thing is that the RICO cases are starting up in Atlanta. Ayla King’s speedy trial just had its first meeting, and then was immediately delayed. It looks like the first set of trial groupings for our friends will begin. We’ve been given a gift. This is a point of concrete continuation and participation in one of the fiercest struggles of our era, and we owe it to our friends and to ourselves to shape the terrain that we will fight on in the next 20 years by fighting these cases. So make a plan to go to Atlanta. Organize your band to go to Atlanta, and organize your soccer group to go to Atlanta. Organize your queer line dancing group to go to Atlanta, make a carnival out of the cases and build connections. And also bring a tape recorder, because there are already punk bands playing outside of the courthouse. So let’s start putting it together.
Josh MacPhee: Similarly, we just saw the sanitation and city workers in Philadelphia forced to go back to work after being on strike for a number of weeks. I think we’re headed for a couple of hot years of labor unrest, and so support workers on strike in any way: go to the picket line and offer to help out. Get involved; if you’re in a union, start to mobilize your fellow workers to support other workers and use music. Get people coming out. Get that boom box out on the line.
Kennedy Block: If the city you’re in has another sanitation strike, be like Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, and pick up all that trash and bring it straight to the City Hall, or a rich neighborhood, and dump it there.
TFSR: It has to go somewhere, for sure.
Josh MacPhee: Build barricades.
TFSR: We are not promoting any illegal activity. That’s awesome. It’s just trash.
Kennedy Block: Recently in New York, people have thrown a bunch of trash in front of immigration vans, and trash alone is not enough to stop a speeding van from trying to ruin people’s lives.
Josh MacPhee: But in LA, we learned that burnt-out self-driving cars are enough to stop ICE vehicles.
Kennedy Block: It was the lesson from the Waymo blockade. That’s funny.
TFSR: Nail strips are a little more effective, but if they’re thrown in with your trash, then it’s the best of both worlds. Thank you so much, both of you, for being in conversation and for sharing this book. I really appreciate it.
Josh MacPhee: Thanks for having us.
TFSR: Yeah, go get a book, and I’ll be sure to link again to the Interference Archive podcast featuring some of those communiques from Cop City.
This week, we spoke with Richard Amm, a member of the Disability Action Research Kollective, or DARK, which they describe as a disabled-led group working to make disability perspectives, history, and research more accessible to a general audience. Amar and Richard speak about disability, eugenics, radical history the Corona virus and other topics. You can learn more about the project at linktr.ee/disabilityark
First up, A-Radio Berlin shared a conversation about the political motivated arrests and harassment of members of the Labor Desk Confederation of Trade Unions in Azerbaijan, which is calling for international solidarity.
The Labor Desk Confederation of Trade Unions in Azerbaijan is calling for international solidarity following the politically motivated arrests of its chairman Afiaddin Mammadov and fellow unionists Aykhan Israfilov, Elvin Mustafayev, and Mohyaddin Orujov. These arrests are part of a systematic crackdown on independent labor organizing in Azerbaijan..
Next, Črna Luknja from Ljubljana conducted an interview with OLTA (Open Leftist Assembly of Antifascist, Carinthia) from south-west of austria.They are mobilizing against the so-called “Burschentag” of the Austrian Pennaler Ring ,which is the association of the conservative fraternities.The austrian Pennaler Ring is connected with the ruling, fascist party FPÖ and extra-parliamentary extreme right.
This week, we’re sharing an interview with Garret Felber, author of the book A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre, which is due out May 5 from AK Press. Garret speaks about the life of Martin Soster, famed jailhouse lawyer who successfully won cases related to the constitutional rights of prisoners, was politicized in prison by the Nation of Islam in the 1950’s, ran radical Afro-centric bookstores in Buffalo NY to radicalize the youth, embracing anarchism during his time imprisoned on a frame up during which he was a celebrated political prisoner resisting cavity searches through the courts, went on to organize after his release for tenants rights and rehabilitating disused buildings for community centers and helping run a childcare. Sostre was a mentor to Lorenzo Komb’oa-Ervin and Ashanti Alston and laid important foundations for modern Black Anarchism in the US.
There’s a lot in here and we hope you enjoy the book and that the story inspires complex, creative and combative resistance to all forms of domination. The transcript for this chat is currently on the post and soon we’ll have a zine and pdf up on our zines page.
Rashid was “compacted” on May 1 to the Perry Correctional Institution in South Carolina, 430 Oaklawn Rd., Pelzer, SC 29669. His ID number in South Carolina is 397279.
In the transit van, he was severely injured – probably a broken bone – in his left leg. He has not been given any treatment for it.
He is in solitary confinement, with only a concrete slab to sleep on. He can make only one phone call per week. A comrade is helping him get onto the “GTL Getting Out” app so that he can communicate with everyone.
Meanwhile, he has been on hunger strike since he got there. He lost 17 pounds during the first week.
He appeals for maximum publicity and pressure.
The phone numbers listed for the prison are: 864-243-4700 and 803-737-1752.
Make calls and spread the word. Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, ID number 397279, must be treated humanely, given good medical care and a decent place to sleep and allowed full access to communicate with his lawyers and supporters. Tell the authorities to meet his demands so he can end his hunger strike.
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Featured Track
Standing At The Crossroad by Eddie and Ernie from Lost Friends
This week you’ll hear our chat with the author of Countering Dispossession: Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, the political ecologist David E Gilbert (not to be confused with the former Weather Underground prisoner in the US). For this episode, David and I speak about the book, the small community in south Sumatra, Indonesia known as Casiavera, the legacy of colonial land grabs, the people who live there and the agro-ecology of the rainforest at the base of the Arin volcano. You can find more of David’s work at https://DavidEGilbert.Com
Happy upcoming May Day, comrades known and unknown! I hope that wherever you are and whatever you do, you’re surrounded by siblings in love and struggle, you can take pleasure in the beauty of the world around you, take strength from our predecessors who share our vision of a life unencumbered by state / capital & the other anchors foisted upon our shoulders, and with the energy to create a path towards our desires
Ángel Espinosa Villegas
We had an interview scheduled with Ángel Espinosa Villegas, a trans masc butch dyke, formerly a 2020 uprising prisoner who was transferred to ICE detention for deportation, however the screws seem to have decided to escalate the deportation to Chile rather than let hir continue to speak to the media. Keep an eye out for upcoming interviews with Ángel, and consider checking out hir GoFundMe. At the end of this post there are some statements from Angel…
Supporting The Show
Hey listeners… we’ve had a string of early releases with more on the way coming out through our patreon for supporters at $3 or more a month, alongside other thank-you gifts. If you can kick in and help, the funds go to our online hosting, and creation of promotional materials like shirts and stickers, but MOSTLY to funding our transcription efforts. We hate to ask for money, but if you have the capacity to kick us a few bucks a month, either through the patreon or via venmo, paypal or librepay or by buying some merch from us (we have a few 3x, 4x & 5x sized tshirts in kelly green coming soon), we’d very much appreciate the support. We’re hoping to make a big sticker order in the near future.
If you need another motivator, the 15th anniversary of The Final Straw Radio is coming up on May 9th, 2025 and we are not above accepting birthday presents. That’s 15 years of weekly audio (albeit at the beginning it was more music than talk), including 8 of which 7 of which aren’t in our podcast stream (you can find some early show examples in this link _by skipping to the last page of posts on our blog).
Other ways to support us include rating and reviewing us on google, apple, amazon and the other podcasting platforms, printing out and mailing our interviews into prisoners, using our audio or text as the basis for a discussion of an ongoing movement, contacting your local radio station to get us on the airwaves, and talking about us to others in person or on social media.
Alright, capping this shameless plug!
Angel statements:
These are press statements and direct quotes that Ángel Espinosa-Villegas has provided from inside Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, TX, where she was held from April 1 to April 25, 2025. Ángel is currently in transfer to an undisclosed location, but has not been able to contact loved ones yet. These messages were received by loved ones on the outside throughout the past 3 weeks and she has given explicit permission to publicize these statements.
“We dance a lot, draw our hopes and homes on the walls of this place any way we can. We tell stories of home, hold each other past language barriers because we all know all too well what it’s like to be torn away from our families, hold onto hope, only for it to be crushed cruelly by these heartless fascist traitors. To remain utterly powerless at the mercy of the abusers of gluttonous power. People
are quite literally dragged out, hogtied, by these pirates that speak of protecting democracy yet dehumanize and humiliate us without so much as a look in our eyes before ripping us apart from our newfound friends, and, more distantly, our families we have here. They rob us of the little money we have and have no paths of recovery. They tell us clean water is a privilege and not a right. That
speaking to our families is a privilege. That seeing the sun is a privilege. That if we get too loud of this constant mistreatment, then we should get ready to eat mace.”
“Most people here don’t have the means to speak out against these human rights’ violations we face every day. But I will take any and every chance to fight, to expose the way they treat us that these human traitors have normalized.”
“This was supposed to never happen again. But here it is again. We need everyone demanding our freedom, to expose all the vultures robbing these vulnerable people of everything from money to merely see our families and small children. We’re not even allowed to say goodbye, to hug our children goodbye.
What madness is this? How is this STILL happening to us, I ask myself when I wake up. Is this country for the free? For those yearning for a safe, happy life? If this country and its people care about freedom and safety, then people should
refuse to let this government and administration work a second longer until they free us ALL.”
“A lot of women here are fighting their cases because they’ve been following protocol to obtain legal papers or asylum or were just rounded up randomly from racial profiling. One woman here lost her purse with all her money on a train and went to church to seek help. The church called ICE on her because she couldn’t speak English! Another woman here was late to her job and her boss called ICE
on her. Few of us have criminal records. Most were just following advice from their lawyers and continuing their appointments with ICE and USCIS to get their visa or temporary protected status or whatever it was they were doing. But because of Trump’s administration they’re all rounded up by ICE and deported.”
“I’m feeling alright, mostly numb since being locked up is so abusive and heart wrenching. Here… It’s a rollercoaster. I witness, every single day, cries of agony and anger and despair. I see people hogtied and dragged out. People being yelled at to gather their things and go into the unknown, being threatened with PREA for hugging as we say our goodbyes and well wishes. This place is much worse than prison in many ways. I hear guttural wails and sobs so many times a
day. It’s like being at a perpetual funeral; laying to rest this person’s life, that one’s dreams, the other’s hope. Knowing they’ll be inevitably harmed, kidnapped, sometimes disappeared or even killed when they go and we can do absolutely nothing.”
“We’re just hostages. Being one for so long now… I’m so hollow on the inside. I haven’t dropped any tears the last year and a half. I just can’t. Not even when I was sentenced. I don’t know how I’ll even begin to heal, but I sure as fuck ain’t ever gonna stop fighting. My hope and ambition to fight… I’ve just been refueling his entire time being down.”
“Fighting brings me solace. Helping others brings me solace, some
meaningfulness, a melting of stone in my petrified heart. I spend most of my time going around and helping people as much as I can; working the tablets, giving phone calls, cooking food, doing little chores and tasks for the older, sick, or disabled ladies.“
With love & solidarity,
Free All Dykes
. … . ..
Featured Track:
Judas Goat by Filastine from Burn It (a benefit for Green Scare defendants)
. … . ..
Transcription<
David E Gilbert: I’m David Gilbert, and I’m a political ecologist from California. I’ve worked for a long time in Southern America and Indonesia, and now I live and work in Barcelona, Spain. I’m most interested in threading this line of what is an anarchist political ecology, what does an anarchist praxis look like, both in terms of theorizing, strategy, tactics, and politics, really broadly construed?
TFSR: Thanks a lot for taking the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it.
DEG: Of course.
TFSR: I’m excited to speak to you about Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography, which you published through UC Press. Would you talk a bit about your academic work, the ethical framework or methodology that you work from, and what brought you to Casiavera?
DEG: Yeah. I first went to Indonesia about 15 years ago, working for a local NGO, where I learned really quickly how much I had to learn still about things like the importance of forests, biodiversity conservation, and how those things are connected to some really surprising geopolitical parts of our world. I ended up working in a place that had experienced 30 years of real civil war, Aceh, Indonesia, and I came right after a peace treaty had finally been called where Aceh became what’s called a special autonomous region. I learned really quickly that biodiversity conservation, these incredible more than human beings, orangutans that are highly endangered, rhinos, Sumatran tigers, these things are intimately connected to the geopolitics of oil and the trade of commerce through the Malacca Strait, one of the most important shipping fleets for the world’s commodities, where Aceh is right there, controlling these areas.
I started to realize really quickly that in the North and America, especially where I’m from, California, so much of what we think of as food, as industrial products, all of this stuff is actually coming from out there. Indonesia in particular is a huge supplier to all the world’s commodities. And all of them are coming through this shipping channel, this area, this broader economy of Asia, the Pacific Rim, China, and Japan. I became really fascinated in trying to understand, how we can disrupt some of those connections.
After I first lived in Indonesia, I ended up moving back to the US and working as an activist, campaigner, and researcher on a campaign against industrial food. Some of the biggest US agricultural companies, like this company Cargill. People call it the biggest company you may have never heard of. They control a huge amount of the food system, just how we get our food in the US, all types of things from corn to palm oil, specifically in Indonesia, to all sorts of commodities we never really think about, the stuff that makes up your lipstick, or the stuff that we use when we need to take a pharmaceutical medication. A lot of these feedstocks, these commodities, are coming from Indonesia, and other places in Asia as well. I worked hard on trying to figure out how to disrupt some of these systems, because, of course, this is capitalism, and it’s the problems of environmental and ecological crises, and the ways we’re consuming. We’ve become a consumer society.
That led me really deep for years to start riding with some organizers around land and peasants and the people that are trying to control these areas of Indonesia. There are hundreds of millions of people that live on the land out there producing all these commodities, rubber, palm oil, tobacco, avocados, cinnamon, and the pepper that Kentucky Fried Chicken buys by the metric ton. All of this stuff was coming from these areas, and these people were trying to figure out ways to do things differently rather than these giant industrial food systems.
A friend, an organizer, and more an environmentalist, working with a group in Indonesia that’s a lot like a Greenpeace type of group. They’re called Walhi, but they’re real organizers in a way that I don’t think Greenpeace really is. Greenpeace does actions and media. But Walhi is organizing communities and factions within these communities against all the plantations, the big extractive mining projects, and others in Indonesia.
This guy from Walhi told me to go check out Casiavera, this incredible town in Sumatra on the Aren volcano. It had become famous for what they’ve been able to accomplish in terms of overthrowing the domination of one of these big industrial agricultural plantations. A plantation that had really deep roots, an almost 100-year-old plantation that started during Dutch colonialism and then became reformulated and became even more terrible, actually, during the New Order—Indonesia’s long dictatorship, one of the most murderous regimes of the 20th century, and one of the most long-running dictatorships under General Suharto.
Actually, I went there for the first time with this huge, huge delegation. There were representatives from over 30 countries that came organized through Via Campesina, the largest peasant union in the world. It’s a type of organization that’s working campaigning, but also organizing, activating, and getting people into protest, getting people really deep into cooperative forms of production across the world. They have over 200 million members. They chose Casiavera as a source of inspiration, not necessarily a blueprint, but ideas that we can think about, that can resonate with other movements. That was the first time I went there. I stayed there a few days, and I was really intrigued by what I saw there. So I ended up going back for my graduate studies in environmental anthropology, and I’ve spent now almost two years there. That was first in 2013, so it’s been more than a decade in my engagement and collaboration there.
This is a long-winded response to thinking about what ethnography means and my frameworks and how can it be both a practice and a scholarly endeavor that’s really trying to orient social movements in a way from within, or just give feedback to them, or even just create a history of certain movements. I think, my book is almost like a history of this specific place and the social movement that has unfolded there. But you know a lot about it was finding one of these stories that people really wanted to tell. I spent a lot of time in the worst plantations with the most land conflict, where private security was patrolling the plantation with attack dogs. And these are Muslim people who hate dogs, you know. Armed people with weapons, special forces, and police have killed people in these types of struggles. I have documented some of that stuff in my work, a fair amount. I have a piece of work about paramilitary forms and their connections with the police state in Indonesia, how they enforce plantation lands violence, and also the disruption of social movements, this idea of direct repression directly.
But for my book, I found a place where people really did want to talk about their history. It’s a long, troubled, difficult history, but people wanted others to know what they had accomplished. When I started living there, I quickly realized this area that was once just basically a messed up, exposed soil, really damaged ecologically plantation, had been turned into what looked like a beautiful natural rainforest. It was actually all planted by the people that occupied this plantation and were able to eventually reclaim it and start doing this amazing form of what we call agroecology, or tree farming, or food forests on this land. By the time I came to visit almost 20 years into their occupation or reclamation, it was full of over 40 different types of very important fruits and spices. These are commodities that they sell locally, but also into the world market. But they’re doing it in a way that was not capitalist at all.
That was really inspiring for me when I thought that social movements require protest and direct action, and this movement required a blockade to protect themselves from the police that came to kick them off the land that they had reclaimed without the legal right to do so, even though most of them have ancestral ties to that place, and almost all of them had worked as plantation laborers, as coolies, as they called them on this plantation. They did all these brave things, they called themselves reckless at times, carrying lightweight weapons, kind of how the black block is armed these days sometimes. They carried machetes, and they did all these things, men and women. But they also did this incredible building of this world, of this forest, of this ecology. They made over 15 cooperatives to sell different things. For example, they have a lot of banana palms. They have a banana cooperative. They have a cattle cooperative, and a dairy operation that’s also a collective.
The incredible building up of their economy that allowed them to sustain this reclamation and this type of activism, and recognizing that we need to understand people like ourselves engaged in struggles can’t always be doing just one or the other. There has to be some type of flow. There has to be some type of change in people’s lives. And yeah, all of those things I found incredibly informative to think about what different types of struggles could mean, especially for the Land Back. In the book, I try to be really careful and cautious and show how difficult that was for people, and that over half the families that tried to cultivate a plot on this reclamation failed. And there’s still capitalism, there’s still predatory lenders there, there’s still really bad ways of getting stuck with bosses and loans and miscommunications.
It’s far from perfect, but it really helped me think through what are the connections to Bay Area reclaiming land. Recognizing that Land Back is nothing less than the full Indigenous control of Turtle Island, for example, where the movement is strongest, I think we can say that at least It’s where this language of “Land Back” originated. Of course, Land Back movements are more broadly these streams of indigenous sovereignty and anti-colonial struggle that have existed all over the world for hundreds of years. But recognizing that that’s the goal and objective of Land Back, and the fact that a lot of the forms of community and collective organization that’s required to have a full-blown modern polity that can be a truly anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, indigenous-led polity, all of those forms in California have been lost. Not just lost, but destroyed and shattered by white settler colonialism.
Here in Casiavera, a lot of these forms are in place, and some of them have been maintained throughout this colonial domination. There was and still is a customary council with a lot of power there. Also, the peasant union created a new structure that was very powerful and very present there. They also were engaged with the state in interesting ways. They were very anti-state, but their ultimate claim wasn’t actually to destroy or smash the state, it was to get their land back. And that’s what they did in a very smart and aggressive way. I think thinking strategically many different movements can think and build a lot from this more general concept I lay out, which is that we need to integrate and be smart about when we deploy direct action and these real economic mutual aid solidarity economies that we have to build as well.
It’s been really satisfying to have conversations with Indonesian activists, feminists, and plantation scholars in Indonesia. There’s been some great conversations about what Casiavera means for the movement now, and how we think about getting land back here. Here as in Barcelona, here as in California, here as in Indonesia. There are a lot of differences, but I think these are the conversations we need to have now more than ever. Especially under Trump, where it seems no matter what you think about the state or your level of engagement with it, everywhere from city, to county, to state governments are trying to defy, evade, and disrupt in a way, and social movements that are about struggle. Everyone needs to be thinking about these things now in a way, Yeah, we needed to for a long time, but it’s just become hyper-clear in the last few months. Hopefully, we can continue to talk about some of the finer points of that kind of broad introduction.
I’ve been really inspired by the work that you guys have been doing on your show, and I’m happy to take it in any direction. But I’d love to try to leave some room at some point in the next few minutes to think about some of these different sites of struggle, and how they might relate. We could have a relational comparison discussion. I’ve been thinking a lot about Stop Cop City, also Standing Rock again. I know it’s been so long, but I’ve gone back and I read a new book about Standing Rock that was interesting. It’s called The Black Snake, and it’s by a journalist. I forgot her name right now, but she reminded me about the importance of the protest camp itself. Not so much that Standing Rock was a blockade, but it was more a camp. In Casiavera I talk about two acts of blockading that were pivotal to protecting this new reclamation or occupation, but it’s a lot more about the land itself and what’s happening on the land. I think that’s what the point of the book about Standing Rock was, that the greatest, maybe less revolutionary, but emancipatory potential of Standing Rock was everything that was happening in the camp.
The protest camp is kind of a weird term. Some of us, like myself, associate the camp with a negative thing sometimes. But I think in a Land Back sense, for Turtle Island and the people that were at Standing Rock (I didn’t go, there’s kind of a long story there), the camp is one of the most beautiful, central, positive parts of life, moving across the landscape, breaking camp, opening camp, having ceremony. So, yeah, that part really resonates with me with my experience in what I saw and learned in Casiavera. The blockade part of the struggle can only be a few moments even of just what people are trying to sustain. As an activist, I think it took me having to write this book to learn that lesson in a fundamental way.
I’ve always been down to protest and ride and get involved in actions, but I’ve never truly turned myself to this one place, one plot of land, or like the Rosebud protest camp and all the dynamics that are happening within just a few family groups as in Casiavera, or just a few hundred people that are getting to know each other at Rosebud. This is the thing that must be sustained by any means, and it’s such a tiny little micro-world. But Casiavera has impacted the lives of now thousands of families. It’s still small. It’s not even a big city worth of people. But I think that these human-scale, really foundational changes to the way things operate are going to be the way that we can enact some sort of hopefully at least semi-peaceful change. Thinking on the scales of changes of millions right now brings us so into the eye of the imperial, geopolitical war machine, that it’s hard for me to see what huge rapturous, revolutionary change would happen right now without it being unfortunately a highly militarized, repressed struggle. That’s why I’ve been really inspired by Casiavera.
In the book I talk about how thousands of other places bring together hundreds of thousands of families in struggle, impacting millions of hectares of land, which is the size of half of Northern California, or something. So what Serikat Petani Indonesia, the specific peasant union, which is just one of many in Indonesia, but the one that was most active in Casiavera, what they’ve done on that kind of scale is world-changing, you know? I think it’s unfortunately suffering all these rising authoritarians right now, in the last decade or two across the world. Unfortunately, Indonesia has been caught up in that now, in the last year or two or three. So it’s yet to be seen how much they could continue to grow their movements.
All of these these peasant movements in Indonesia, started around the year 2000 more or less. That was the first time they were able to operate at least legally, above ground, because of the New Order. 20 years is not that long to grow a non-violent movement. They’re not underground anymore, but that also means that they don’t have to operate only as criminals, right? We learned with the Zapatistas, they were underground for about two decades before their first uprising, their armed reclamation of their territory. And that was actually similar to SPI and Casiavera in particular. That’s actually almost the exact same time in the mid ’80s and late ’80s. It was underground, and then, in the late ’90s both movements went above ground. I find it interesting that there’s this convergence of time. Also with the MST [Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra] in Brazil, that was a really important time for them to consolidate and grow. And now all of these movements I feel are a bit like a wait and see what’s happening right now. I mean, Brazil is a little bit different, but the Zapatistas might be as weak as they’ve been in a long time, it seems… I don’t know.
TFSR: For folks who don’t know MST, that’s the the landless workers movement in Brazil, right?
DEG: Yeah. There’s a lot of interchange and overlap and building between MST and the group in Casiavera, across Indonesia in particular through Via Campesina. They’ve really been refining this land reclamation or occupation or squatting. There are so many different names for what these groups do. Brazil has the largest movement of reclaiming land from industrial corporations, or as in the case, more specifically in Brazil, often it’s really large, wealthy landowners, like individual families. But now more and more they’re incorporated as corporations, as they all are in Indonesia. They’re all corporations in Indonesia. So those two are the ones that I’m most familiar with in terms of what this strategy involves.
The MST has done more than the Indonesian unions have, in not only making it a matter of activism, occupying land, and economic collectives, and this idea of agroecology. The MST has gone even further with education, health clinics, all these things that come from Paulo Freire’s idea of pedagogy of liberation: you need the school, you need the health care, maybe you need the communal kitchen. I think that’s one thing that the Indonesian movements haven’t done as much of. Those types of movements just seem so important for the US right now. Like Cooperation Jackson. Build and fight, fight and build. Everywhere we look, we have places like that in the US, right? And they’ve been coming out in the last decade or two, maybe these very anarchist reconsolidations of the Third World Marxism of the ‘70s or Black Panther Party formulations but more anarchist now.
This is what happened in Indonesia just a few decades ago, where all these groups emerged. You know, Indonesia had the largest communist party outside of the USSR and China in the ‘60s, which was completely dismantled, destroyed, and killed by this New Order, this violent regime. Basically, after about a decade or two after this terrible pogrom against all the leftists, these more anarchist mutual aid groups started forming around the industrial plantations, which was the genesis of the movement in Casiavera. Then they federalized. Serikat Petani Indonesia was the coming together of 20-something smaller peasant unions that had reformulated.
I’m wondering if in the US this is the time to think about that type of strategy really strongly. The mutual aid solidarity groups that have been growing over the last few decades, is it time to federalize in terms of anarchist federations? It’s not about dissolving people’s autonomy, but to really solidify how much we can support each other. Then we think about some of the old-school white European anarchists and what they thought could come out of federalizing. Then add in indigenous ideas of federations that are some of the strongest in the world. In the US, with the Iroquois Federation at the moment of colonization, that was one of the strongest non-states or indigenous polities that ever existed. When the French and the British came up against that polity, they were stunned by its power, by its military power as well.
I’ve learned this history more now, and I wish I had a chance to get it in the book, but I’ve learned it more now living in Spain: Where did the actual military power come from with the revolutionary forces of Spain on the left during their civil war? It came from the federation of the workers’ unions that created their own self-defense units, guards. Because the unions were federalized, they were able to coordinate these truly anarchist self-defense units that were almost unstoppable for a while. I think these are the types of ramifications that could come out of looking really closely at Casiavera and what they’ve accomplished, in terms of where organizing could take all of us or where their organizing took them.
TFSR: Yeah. To address a couple of things that you said, I haven’t been paying as much attention since 2021 probably, to the struggles at Yintah and Wet’suwet’en land. There was a big long-lasting land occupation in so-called Alberta. I take inspiration from Indigenous organizing, mostly north of the border, with warrior societies creating some sort of federated framework and projects like Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson itself comes out of the Republic of New Africa framework and the folks that run it are very Leninist, but other projects that are affiliated with it will tend to have more communalist or libertarian municipalist perspectives, like the later writings of Murray Bookchin.
There’s a network that a bunch of the “Cooperations” like Tulsa and a bunch of similar whether it be Land Back or social, ecological, alternative economy, parallel economy, dual power projects have gotten together, that’s called Symbiosis Network. I don’t know how active they are right now, but at least in 2019 and 2020, they were pulling a lot of inspiration from what was happening in Rojava, and there was a lot of back and forth. So when people were talking about “Make Rojava Green Again” [the host meant to say “Demand Utopia” – Ed] a lot of the folks that were a part of that movement in the US were also clued into the Symbiosis Network, which I think is great.
With what you said about the communist movement in Indonesia, it’s also worth pointing to the fact that the Bandung Conference happened in that country as well. The conceptualization of the Third World as a positionality outside of the Soviet sphere or the US sphere, and communities, a lot of them indigenous and anti-capitalist, looking for another route outside of the industrial megaliths of those two empires, tried to go their own way with some sort of federative option that was outside of the First and Second World, which is probably one big reason that that was a target of US imperialism and those pogroms that you were talking about, right?
DEG: Yeah. I mean the fact that the power of the West, the arms the West was willing to send to Indonesia right at that moment, post World War Two, where the Cold War was forming, and they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to survive this really difficult transition as a new Indonesian Republic, as it was called. Their first president, President Sukarno, you could see he loved the West. He also loved Russia, and there was no propaganda like the Russian military planes for him. I mean, he was a true freedom fighter. He truly fought the Dutch for freedom in Java. He had a great appreciation for the independence of both forces.
It’s so easy to be judgmental and be like, “How could you ever support capitalists and imperialists?” But Sukarno and Indonesia had just been betrayed by the Japanese of all people, who at the time were the liberators of Asia. Japan and Indonesia called themselves comrades or brothers. But what happened was Japan ended up invading Indonesia during World War Two, and being as brutal and sadistic as the Dutch had been. It was this great betrayal for Sukarno and the other young revolutionary leftists. They were true socialists, but this betrayal made them much more pragmatic towards all these different blocs. And you know, the idea of being a non-aligned nation was where this young republic wanted to place itself, its leaders, as they were busily trying to attend to how to create a nation at all, from all these different Indigenous polities that were truly strong and all had their different ideas of where they wanted this nation to go.
But in the end, of course, US imperialism did predominate in Indonesia. These fires of revolution on the left were extinguished completely in Indonesia for a very long time. The formation of capitalism was this imperialist economic exploitation of plantations. Indonesia was one of the original places for this plantation model: the Dutch East Indies, the Caribbean, and Africa. This plantation model early on was known as the Java Model because it was perfected in Java by the Dutch and then exported across the world by many different colonial powers. And now the revolutionary thought is starting to rekindle, and the nation is a true plantation oligarchy to this day.
I think it’s important to understand that now there’s this vibrant, pretty underground scene of anarchists, of people that are digging up Tan Malaka’s thought. He was one of the early founders of the Indonesian anti-colonial struggle and one of the first founders of the Communist Party in Indonesia. These ideas are really strong again there, but it’s coming from this incredible history of the domination of the oligarchy. And of course it’s one that’s highly connected to the United States and Europe, through the flows of commodities, like we started talking about during the opening of our conversation. But it’s also highly connected to China and India through the flow of these same commodities. So we’re living in this very complex world now. I mean, it’s always been a complex world. But the north-south thing that we love to put into this conversation of how to destroy capitalism, it’s no longer north-south in that simple formulation. And we’re starting to learn that we’re in a moment of geopolitical realignment in the world right now, and what that means for all of these relationships is really hard to understand. I think we’ll never understand them without some history. We’ll never understand them without some perspective, and also without some time of letting them play out.
What we can return to in Casiavera is the importance of getting started. There are many things that I think are quite anarchist about Casiavera’s movement, including the fact that they call themselves “anarchos” and talk about Proudhon, but they also talk about themselves as socialists. I was really surprised that people were talking about Heidegger. It’s a place where people read a lot of books, they read a lot of political books, they read a lot of philosophy. It’s all been translated into Indonesian. But they certainly identify themselves as anarchists, believing that property, individual property, is theft. And people quoted that to me, which I think is straight up out of Proudhon. But when you start to think about, “Well, where did Proudhon get it from?” Maybe from the French experience in the New World? There are just so many different ways these ideas exist in the world. And who am I to say that in Indonesia, they’re learning from European anarchism or the other way around? I really don’t know, but yeah, “property is theft” was an important one.
Also just relentlessly trying to refuse hierarchy and rotating leadership throughout these councils was very important. On the flip side, though, Indonesian peasant union have had the same “leader and founder” for 20 years. And we see that also with the MST that they’re pretty much a Marxist-Leninist-inspired organizations that practice a lot of indigenous, anarcho-indigenous, ideas and practices up to a certain extent. And then we start to understand they could go a lot further, I think, and activate themselves a lot more if they had some more rotating hierarchy. Of course, that’s another big, long conversation about how to create mass movements, through what type of structuring, the party, and all that.
But I think Casiavera never got too hung up on those ideas and part of it was because it’s just a lot of work to occupy a plantation. In their context, they needed to make a living. They also needed to sneak around and avoid these little security forces and start planting things in the cracks of this plantation. Then they got really bold and blocked this road, and they eventually destroyed the workers’ barracks and offices in the middle of the plantation in active protests. After that, they had to get busy trying to figure out how to make this land productive, how to manage it together. They had all these different ideas about what forms that collectives would be, cooperatives, and in the end, they settled on this really simple solution. Individuals could have defined plots, but they couldn’t buy or sell the land. They only could use it as long as they were actually using it. They only have a right to it as long as they were actually using it.
So they figured out how to hold on to the land, and they also figured out how to start making a living from it. But there’s no commodification of the land. It’s not commodified for labor either, because they don’t pay each other to work it. They have work exchanges, or these collectives where people work together and then they receive a percentage of the profits back, if there are any. Often there’s not. They’re all doing other things too to make a living. Many people do construction. Many people have a government job. One of the main peasant union organizers was working within the state for a long time as an agricultural extension officer, you would call it, I guess, in the US. Like someone who works for the FDA. You see these pragmatic decisions, but also that guy was like a straight-up anarchist infiltrator. That guy is the real deal, and he worked for the New Order.
And of course, almost everyone did that’s a certain age. Maybe they did work for the government, but many people were alive, living their lives during that time. So many people have some really surprising, disturbing stories like, “Oh wow, you were the guy with the gun that was hunting communists, and now you want to be an Indonesian peasant union member.” And people know that guy’s history, but it’s also a way of healing some of those traumas and bringing people back in instead of just ostracizing and only creating more conflict in a community. Bringing someone in is an act of forgiveness, right? And so we learn about these things, about how to operate. Some people call it Realpolitik. That’s some crazy [German] word about why it’s excusable to execute someone if it’s going to accomplish the revolution. And so I don’t know if I love that word, but the actual ways of dealing with each other and working together, building and getting over trauma, all of these things movements are struggling with. And conversations are happening, and we need a lot more of them, for sure.
TFSR: One of the things that you’ve talked about is the continuation of the influence of Indigenous lifeways. This community lived through Dutch colonization, which attempted to change everyone’s life and turn people into laborers for export for the profit of the Dutch corporation that was running it, or running the government as a corporation, or also running smaller plantations. Then you’ve got the Japanese exploitation. Then you’ve got maybe a national independence period where there was some waviness about what was going to happen, and then the New Order. You had the imposition of modern nation-state frameworks and property ideas that are central to Western capitalism were being imposed over and over again. And one of the successes that you point to in the book is the fact that despite, whether calling Indigenous practices communist during the New Order period and hunting people in the mountains for collectivizing territory, or James C. Scott sort of idea of evading the awareness, visibility, legibility by the state, you had communities resisting throughout this time, carrying the knowledge somehow, even though a lot of the knowledge was also destroyed, of how to take care of the land and live with it. They still had matriarchal values. They still had indigenous councils based on lineage. Can you talk a little bit about some of these structures as you understand them that were able to survive, and what sort of stuff they’ve been able to relearn? Was that relearning through things like communication with MST and Via Campesina and learning from other indigenous communities elsewhere? Sorry, that’s a lot in there. I guess I’m wondering about the survival of indigenous practices through various colonizations that survived until today if you could talk about those.
DEG: In many ways, one of the most remarkable things about Indonesia is the fact that there are so many indigenous [communities], some of them matriarchal, some of them more patriarchal. Some of them are quite anti-hierarchical, others quite hierarchical and patronizing even. But all of these ideas have existed and changed and made up every piece of their culture throughout the period of domination by the Dutch and then by the Javanese and then this crazy military dictatorship of mostly Javanese people. The fact is that these institutions—most of them, I would say—remained, at least in Casiavera. Very clearly we can see the matrilineal control of land as a collective, that was governed by the councils of family lineage members that were elected by the families. There’s a women’s council, there’s a men’s council, there’s a mixed council. This is a really incredible, fantastic, interesting, and different way of thinking about property and governing it that still exists today. Of course, it’s changed a lot over the last 300 years, but when we start to think what a world of freedom or autonomy or well-being would it be…
Maybe it’s just because I was schooled in civics as an American when I was very young, but I think about the balance of powers. I think that this might be a fundamental idea, that this matrilineal council in Casiavera exists, it survived, it was changed, it was altered. It was probably diminished a bit, unfortunately, by the Dutch and the New Order as well. The Javanese patriarchal, very hierarchical dictatorship. It was anti what is called Minangkabau culture, in this case, in West Sumatra. But the Minangkabau survived, and It’s one of the balances of powers, with the peasant union, with the state, and also, I think, the church, or in this case, the mosque, formal Islamic state or religious powers.
There are almost four main powers that ended up pushing out the plantation company. The state didn’t really do much pushing, but it also didn’t ever bring to bear its worst forms of repression on Casiavera, and part of that is because of the Minangkabau matrilineal council, and the fact that the Minangkabau aren’t the people that are the most marginalized or made “other,” or the people that are the most subjected to racism in Indonesia. They’re kind of a mainstream indigenous society there. The state was a lot less willing to be like, “Look at these peasant Minangkabau people. We’re going to erase them off the map,” like they have done with some people, like the Dayak peoples in Kalimantan, for example, or in Sumatra with the Jambinese peoples, who are a much more racialized minority indigenous group than the Minangkabau.
But also because in of Casiavera many members of leadership in the mosque began actually to abhor the plantation. This is not a common thing in Indonesia, but in this case, many of the religious leaders felt that it was an absolute affront to have a retired military police general run this plantation. They thought that the exploitation of the land and the people that were working there just wasn’t acceptable. Then, of course, you had the peasant union, so there was this balance of powers. They all formed to work in different ways to push out the plantation or to dismantle it from right within itself actually in an interesting way. Without that indigenous polity, without those structures of rule, the customary council, I’m not sure that it would happen.
I think that that’s where people get hung up when they start to think about these types of movements, especially here in Europe. People have so much learning to do about what indigenous means. And how everywhere in the world there’s an imperfect idea of indigenous politics. Many people here are just like, “Yeah, that’s an interesting story, but we don’t have anything like that here.” But Spain is full of these local assemblies or councils. They’re usually organized around very small communities or villages. Even Barcelona has a city council structure, or we call municipalism in the language of Bookchin, that you mentioned, or Rojava. Those councils, while not equivalent to Casiavera indigenous Minangkabau customary councils, they actually have a great potential to operate in the same way in terms of the balance of powers. It’s just that their power is much greater.
In the US system, you can think about what does a city council truly control. They certainly don’t control much to do with any of the apparatuses of violence of the state. In Indonesia, they don’t technically either, but they have created, in certain places, more room to operate, like a more forceful “no,” or a more forceful affirmative decision in a place can be made that really does conflict at times with what we in Indonesia call the republic law, but that would be like the federal law in the US. I’m also a little bit hesitant to allow that whole crazy box to open in the US because we think of a lot of localized rules as being tyrannical and scary and violent and white and racist, white nationalists and white supremacists in the US. So there’s a hesitancy to disparage the role of broader state structures that could help keep minorities safe in the US in a way that maybe is different in Indonesia.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, when you talk about constitutional sheriffs as a concept in the United States, it’s about the autonomy of the settler role. That’s maybe a thing that we’re talking about a still settler-majority country, and the model is around applying white supremacist expansionism throughout it as a shared content. But then again, in small communities sometimes when there is input from polities, lower levels of governance can be more directly democratic. I mean, in our city, the city council can be vetoed at any point by the City Manager, which is an appointed position, and they have control over the budget, the police department, and everything.
I thought it was interesting to hear you talk about, to use a term that Bookchin uses—it is not his term but one that he uses—for this dispersion of and use of the land, the concept of usufruct. I think you bring it up in the book, this idea of not ownership necessarily but right to something by use, but that that something exists past your use and can be used by someone else. That as a concept of exchange that Bookchin said in some of his writings is a fundamental of many indigenous communities. In a sense of, “We don’t own this. We live with this. And it can’t be distinctly ours.”
It’s cool how the council in Casiavera has worked to minimize the consolidation of ownership because they’re post-civ model that’s aware of problems that they’ve experienced along the way, and they’re trying to work through as they go, allowing for stuff to fall through the cracks, because people are human, and they don’t want to bring down a fist and alienate everyone in the community, like when they started telling people “no tree crops,” because that more permanently ties you to a land base, and then people started doing, and they’re like, “Well, ok, we’re not going to stop you from that.”
The term that’s used in the book, smallholder, is an interesting idea to me within a collective. The Soviet model was forced collectivization that was centralized under the State, and that was obviously a failure. People were not invested in the land that they were directly working on. They viewed it as a job. That forced collectivization in the standard of the state being the representative of the collective poisoned the well of that good will, if not, through bureaucracy, squashed the creative potential of the people involved. The Proudhonian reference that you make of smallholders, small business people, or whatever, doing a thing, living in community with each other, maybe trading, maybe hiring someone for a couple of days a week as a wage worker, but they get to go back to their plot, and that person who hires them is not in control of their means of survival directly—They’re just picking up a little money on the side That heterogeneity, I think, is pretty natural, and even would be probably considered an ideal model of how a community operates to a lot of conservative people in the US. A small town with a main street, you’ve got a teacher, a couple of doctors. You’ve got all these roles that are filled by people in the community. It’s relatively sustained by the community, and people make decisions collaboratively within that community about what happens to the community and to the resources or to the land that they’re living on.
And because it’s modeled in a place with certain sets of experiences and cultural frameworks, as you’ve said before, it’s not a blueprint. People shouldn’t read Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land as something to pick up and put down somewhere else and stamp into some other landscape with other people, because it’s not how it works. Maybe a part of the indigeneity, or the essence of it that’s in there, is that it’s of the place and of the time of the people that are in relation to the land. So not only are social structures that are developed out of that community and those relationships but also people’s communal relationship with the land, fostering diversity, bringing back space for other animals to come and live. Sorry, that was a big mouthful. I love the fact that the book is not a recipe that can just be picked up and plastered out somewhere else, but that it’s a general framework and an invitation to a set of practices that people would adapt to their own situation and learn with as it evolves and as people’s needs evolve.
DEG: Yeah, that is so inspiring. The point of overlap is fascinating to me. Not to romanticize the rural too much, but this idea that we could have ways of living that appeal to many people in this world. I don’t know if we could say that they’re fundamental to human experience, but there may be something to this idea that we can live in a way, as you said, in heterogeneity, and I say in the book like bricolage, or a mosaic, of types of work where we own our means of production. Maybe it’s the land, maybe it’s your 3d printer. You could think of any form of cottage industry.
TFSR: Your labor.
DEG: Yeah, exactly. That would allow us to have a more satisfying, more interesting life. Also having the ability to change our work over time over the course of our own lives, these are things that certainly are possible under neoliberal capitalism or late-stage modernist capitalist economies, but in a way, there’s something fundamentally opposed to that concept of work within the bricolage approach. It’s much more about maintaining autonomy and freedom in that family orientation around economic activity. When you go to a place like in Casiavera, where corporations don’t exist, you realize how rich everyone is. I don’t want to overstate the wealth of this place, but people are sending their kids to college there now. Many of them own family cars. Most people have motorbikes, not everyone. There is certainly some dire poverty in the place, but it’s a quite well-off place. You feel that in the quality of life, the quality of living, the material possessions, the sense of wealth.
Of course, the Minangkabau was famous for its wealth during the colonial encounter, as many of these places were. In fact, quite impoverished British white settlers were often astounded by the wealth, leisure, and quality of life that they encountered as they went off to destroy those ways of living. I’m locating a lot of the origins of that problem in the capture of rents, wealth, or money by corporations. It’s a simple message, but it’s a powerful one when you see how Casiavera has put that into practice in a way that’s far beyond most places I’ve visited in California. Although there are some kinda communes, eco-villages, and hippie spots that I’ve been to, where you start to get a sense of that. None of them are so comprehensively large or like a full-scale community or even a town. Casiavera I would call a town.
There’s a lot there to be inspired by, and there’s a lot to think through, like that idea of smallholder, being the owner of your own means of production, while at the same time being engaged with other different forms of production and making money and getting by that do satisfy a lot of people’s needs and how that overlaps with what we think about as conservative rural America and how strong it could be if we could somehow create a truly anti-racist rural bloc in America, how strong it could truly be. The latent potential that exists I think is huge.
Interestingly enough this idea of a libertarian that we so much associate with a certain type of Tea Party politics have maybe inspired MAGA. Maybe there still are libertarian strains of thought operating like Ayn Rand in MAGA, but it seems that recently it has shifted a little bit just to straight oligarchy. Anyway, those libertarians were important to this rise of the right recently, and of course that was from the original Communards of the Paris revolutionary commune, the libertaires, libertarians in a truly anarchist sense I would say. There is this fundamental overlap or interest in this form of life that spans the political spectrum in the US.
Also, the New Afrikan movements you mentioned earlier—I forget exactly how we got to New Afrikanism. Oh, yeah, Cooperation Jackson. That type of survivalist New Afrikan instinct also overlaps in an interesting way, of course, with indigenous ways as well. I think that’s really a fruitful ground for all of us to think about how to organize around this concept of the smallholder across the economies, landscapes, and territories, both urban and rural. That seems like a wonderful place for us to get to in this conversation, that commonality. Not to be silly about it and to say that one day we’re gonna activate the links between the right and the left and all this, but just to know that when we’re thinking about the bases and where to organize. There are a lot places we could look into.
TFSR: Yeah, and not to beat my drum, but this is a necessary part of every anarchist podcast when somebody says the word “libertarian”: The majority of the world uses the term “libertarian” to talk about anarchists—libertarian socialists, libertarian communists, libertarian municipalists. It’s just the jackasses in the United States that use it to mean theocracy, apparently, at this point. The theocracy of property and masculinity.
You mentioned the ecological damage that the monocropping and the industrial system translated to the soil and to the forests of the Aren area around Casiavera, the side of the volcano that people have made into a communalized and repossessed area. Can you talk a little bit about how the smallholder model of working with the landscape and growing this diverse forest has repaired the landscape and enriched the diversity of the landscape?
You’ve mentioned that the occupation is not technically legal, but they do have lawyers working with them. They made two claims, some of which are based on law in Indonesia, the anti-colonial perspective that they are uplifting the livelihoods of indigenous communities that live on the land by increasing the material wealth of people. That’s one argument that they made, and that’s based on a shared value, ostensibly, that they have with that document. And the other side is that they’re repairing the ecology of the area. I think it’s cool that they’re able to argue those things and stave off some of the worst attacks of the state, even while it’s still tenuous. Some of the shots from above, the satellite photos, seeing the comparison of what the soil looked like when it was going through the period of being a cattle ranch, and then when it transferred over to tobacco and whatever. Could you talk about that, please?
DEG: It’s remarkable. When we start to think about what our world, our planet, needs, how to heal and repair it from all the devastation, we start to think about the climate. In Casiavera, they took this land that had been completely degraded and made into basically barren soil by these mono-cropping systems. First it was just all cut down and logged by a Dutch logging company. Then tobacco was mostly planted and also ginger just a single line of one crop over and over with pesticides sprayed, exposed soils. And so the rains would come—In Indonesia, up in the mountains, it’s super hard rain—wash all the soil away. This went on for decades. They had some cattle up there that were just trampling everything. I found some early old-school NASA satellite photographs that showed how huge this was. The whole plantation was just basically bare soil in the ’90s. You can see this from space, on the whole flanks of this mountain, this giant area.
By the time I got there, it was often an emergent canopy rainforest of hundreds of species. Some of the tallest were trees like teak, meranti, and red cedar, these really valuable timbers. Those have been planted by the people. I learned that over 60 different plants and trees that were living in these forests were planted on purpose, and then there are many other follow-on species. So it looks like a rainforest, it smells like a rainforest. And it turns out, of course, that type of what we call land use change, or just changing the environment, actually sucks up all this carbon out of the atmosphere and stores it in the new soils that were created, and the trees themselves as they grow. So we’re actually talking about way to be a natural carbon cleanser of the atmosphere. Growing these types of agroforests on the many millions of hectares of degraded land that exist across the world can actually be a contributor to cleaning up our climate.
And then, it goes much beyond that there. These are living rainforests now. It’s supporting really important species, like these primates called gibbons that are not critically endangered but are an endangered species, I believe, in Sumatra. They live there, they make the most remarkable calls to each other in the morning. There are now Sumatran tigers in that area, of which there are only a few hundred left on the entire island. In that area, there are elephants, also critically endangered. And then beyond that, you have this watershed and water cycle effect. This is on a mountain, and it’s actually a watershed that is now sustaining the flows of rivers in a way that that bare huge flank of the landscape didn’t. In fact, that was just contributing to flooding downriver.
So these are all the cycles that are very important across the world. They make a threefold contribution just by reforesting. That’s one of the reasons reforestation has become so popular for people to talk about, but the people that are actually doing it in a way that has ecological value in this sense are most often indigenous people, as well as campesino people in Latin America who are doing it a bunch. We just have to remember that the best way to achieve those types of incredible ecological changes is… This word, empowerment, has become such a cheesy word, but what does empowering the campesinos of Latin America really mean, to let them do agroecology? It means a massive land reform. It means political struggle. It means, perhaps, at times, armed struggle. I think that that’s the point of disconnect. Often people have a really hard time making that jump. They will say: “Okay, forest, rainforest, tigers, orangutans… Hold on, revolution?”
But when you start to learn what political ecology means, and the history of Indonesia, and it’s not an accident that the sub-discipline of university research/activism that political ecology is originally came to exist was in Indonesia. Why? The teak forests of Indonesia were all cut down to create the Dutch and Portuguese colonial fleets that dominated the world. These things are just so intimately connected in a much more fundamental struggle kinda way. A lot of people come to learn about endangered species through WWF, and the whole board of WWF is corporate America, with banking or finance even. So of course, a lot of it does come down to how we learn about these issues and experience them.
That’s the beauty of Land Back, that in all of our neighborhoods and communities, there are movements. There are indigenous First Nations. There are the Ohlone people in the Bay Area where I’m from, (and I talk about this in the conclusion of the book) they have reclaimed a ton of land in the Bay Area, where land is so expensive, so policed, so enforced, that the minute you don’t pay your rent, you’re going to be evicted by armed sheriffs. Moms for Housing occupying one house had resulted in hundreds of riot police responding to their eviction. Even within that milieu, the Sogorea Te Land Trust, represented by a few Ohlone peoples, an Ohlone family basically, has been able to find a way to reclaim land in a place like the Bay. They now have six different land reclamations in the Bay of a number of acres each. They’ve pursued more of a legal, land trust model. Basically land being donated to them by philanthropists and state agencies. But, you know, I’m down for it. I think revolutionary struggles are needed, and I think Sogorea Te Land Trust is needed as well.
That’s how we think about the revolutionary connections with ecology and soils and just how critical that type of work, that type of guerilla gardening, is and how it can be in the cities. The Bay Area has shown that. Detroit has shown that with Feedom Freedom. Many places in the south with Planting Justice. These spots that are taking urban areas, restoring soils, and growing food, this is in fact a revolutionary practice that people have taken very seriously for a very long time. Anyone who wants to somehow convince you that growing your own food is not a political revolutionary practice… They might be right if that’s the only thing people do. But in the end, it’s also a politically activating activity, getting involved, reclaiming land, and planting food on it. You get activated in different ways. I think that those folks just aren’t really paying attention. I think it’s actually one of the most important places we can all put our efforts in on the day-to-day. We all need our own little patch of reclaimed land where we’re trying to grow a squash or something.
TFSR: Yeah, and when you’re directly getting your livelihood off of the land base that you’re on, you’re going to pay more attention to it. You’re going to be invested in defending it. It’s going to be a lot harder to cut off your supply lines for your community if you are building some independence because it’s directly underneath you.
I think that there’s also an element of the conservation ideology that things like the World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, and other organizations are very much based on, this concept of the separation between human beings and the natural world. An important part of this indigenous influence in the concept of being in a place that the book talks about is the fact that humans aren’t separate from nature. We are nature. We are part of nature. It’s a matter of if we are living in balance with what’s around us and who’s around us, or are we living in opposition, extracting, and then trying to move on to another place to extract from, that sort of disconnection from a land. I’m not trying to get all blood and soil on us, and I’m also not trying to claim that people identifying with the land base makes them Indigenous. But I think that there’s a close tie between that investment, understanding of and viewing the land base as a member of your family that you’re not going to screw it over. You’re going to worry about what’s going to grow back next year. You’re going to worry about what you’re leaving for the next generation or the next seven generations.
DEG: Absolutely.
TFSR: So how have your friends in Casiavera been doing these days since the writing of the book? There are a lot of people’s names that are dropped, whether made-up or pseudonyms. You’ve obviously built a lot of relationships with people, and that’s a valuable part of the story that you tell. Do you keep in contact with folks? How’s the organizing going?
DEG: Yeah, thanks for that question. It’s been really neat to know that the book’s been received well there. And yeah, I’m in touch with folks for sure. And I mean, these struggles are never done. That’s something I’ve been learning over the decades now, especially in these places that are trying to hold back these giant, mega projects. You may win a victory, and then 10 years later the project comes back in almost the same form, but maybe they’ve changed the legal structure around it, or the scope of it a little bit, and they’re gonna slide through. Or like Standing Rock, the Dakota Access Pipeline was built despite all that movement energy, and there have been some recent pipeline successes. So many of these places, we build from them, we learn from them, even if they might not exist anymore. I’m so, so glad to say that Casiavera still exists. You know, it’s there. The form is there, people seem to be doing good.
There are some interesting new threats to the land that actually speak a lot to the way that capitalism is changing in our world. One of them is local government authorities wanted to build a hotel on the land, and they wanted this kinda touristification of the place, because it was so nice and so beautiful now, with this forest and the cinnamon trees growing in there and the avocados. They’re like, “Let’s build a hotel on it. We’ll only kick off most of the people. We’ll keep most of the forest there.” And so then, they had to reactivate the network, especially the peasant union.
One of the most important people that I talk about in the book, the founder of the West Sumatran Peasant Union, which then became part of the Indonesian Peasant Union. His parents named him the name of the volcano, Aren, where he was born, which I think was such a powerful move at the start. You have to have certain feelings about that child to name your child the name of the place you that’s also a volcano. It panned out. He became an early pioneering lawyer and organizer for destroying the dictatorship. That was their first and main thing when they were young. Then he learned he needed to bite off that revolutionary goal on more concrete material factors, like land occupations and how effective they were to actually improve people’s material conditions before any broader revolution had happened. Aren told me, that they had to rejuvenate their form of organizing, and they defeated this hotel proposal.
That was no joke. There were a lot of people involved, a lot of money, and a lot of investors were interested. The State loved the idea. Of course, this kind of gentrification and touristification of the world is a serious issue now. To my younger self, I would have been like, “That’s nothing like building a mine in a place” or something. And it’s different, but it really threatens people and cultures across the world at this point, the touristification of the world. It’s not just the fact that tourists come. That’s not the main thing. It’s the fact that the capitalist economy finds a way to control the economy of that place, and everything can change through touristification.
So, yeah, they defeated that, in this really inspiring way. I wish I had had time to get this into the epilogue. There was a bit of a twist in that struggle, where after the fact, the peasant union and some of the collectives that have been operating there were like, “‘You know what? That was kind of a good idea.” They didn’t build a hotel, but they built a really simple coffee shop that now is run as a collective, where they’re serving coffee grown literally in the backyard. They have snacks that are all local produce, and it fits into their mission. Hopefully, it’ll be another way that they can gain economic sustenance and well-being from. I mean, it’s basically capitalist, I guess. I don’t know. They’re buying and selling. I don’t necessarily think that markets are bad, and I don’t think markets are at all the same as capitalism. That’s how I think about it in my own frameworks. They are commodifying the place a bit more, I think, with their tourist cafe stop. But I also think it’s kind of cool and a sign of how it’s growing and still sustained.
There’s been some tough things there, just those mundane parts of life, like people passing away, an new kids being born. For me, the big question is how are they going to manage this handing over of both power and also control of the land to the next generation? And this is an outstanding question, a question that is never answered in the book but that I pose. People talk about their children inheriting their plots of land, but that’s technically not allowed by the way that the council and even the peasant union set up this form of non-property use. As you said, usufruct, the right to use it is only as long as you’re actually using it, but then you’re not supposed to let it go on to your children. How are they going to reformulate for the next generation, make room for them, bring them in?
These inter-generational connections are really important for our movements, for all of our movements. I’m starting to feel that now, passing over 40. I’m like, “How many young activists am I building with?” There are some. I feel grateful to have some in my life. A lot of them are through the universities, though, which is cool. I mean, that’s one of the coolest parts of working at a university, that I do get to interact with a lot of young people. But I start to worry about the most anarchist, mutual aid, info shop vibe place organizing. Are there these institutional structures that are gonna allow the transfer of knowledge from everything we learned, from Occupy, to our veterans, to our people who have been incarcerated? Are we gonna pass it on? I don’t even know if any of our websites and blogs are gonna even last 5 years, let alone 15. Whereas, you know, in the ‘60s—I grew up in Berkeley—there were a lot of magazines and pamphlets and posters around in my parents’ house and their friend’s house, the Berkeley bar, radical newspapers. That’s how I learned about a lot of my own history.
I’m thinking about that for Casiavera a lot. And I think that there’s no doubt that these types of projects… I shouldn’t call them projects. But these types of movements are only going to be these liminal, not-forever type of movements until we get broader systemic change. We see that with the Zapatistas, I think. Right now people are worried about them being engulfed in drug violence and immigration problems. The tide is rising in many ways, I think, and it always will unless we have broader systemic changes that allow places like Casiavera to not just be these tiny little islands floating in this really exploitive sea. I think that’s the broader horizon, understanding that these places are going to inspire us, they’re going to give us some real tools and insight into how to organize, but that they need broader mobilization to survive, at least as long as 100 years or something. Nothing’s forever, nothing would be permanent, right? But let’s think about how to achieve permanence. It only really comes through, I think, broader revolutionary change.
TFSR: Yeah, it doesn’t mean the structures have to exist as they stand, but we do have as enemies, incorporated things that have power, that have institutional memory, that accumulate over time, whether it be states or corporations, our enemies that are trying to extract, centralize, pull profits and disinter us and don’t have a care because they aren’t living entities for the actual soil that we all live with and on. How do we not reproduce that, to talk about Freddie Perlman’s thoughts on wanting to have that longevity and becoming the thing that we are trying to defend against by adopting its ways and methods?
I think that networks of communication, reciprocity, mutualism, and respect can lead the way toward the possibility of intergenerational, federative resistance. And it’s not like we’ve got forever to work on this too. You know, between nuclear war or the climate, the global temperatures rising, the seas dying off. It’s dire, but I like the fact that this book is a good contribution to the general conversation that you find in like one of Peter Gelderloos’ more recent books, for instance, The Solutions Are Already Here. This tells a little bit of the story that I think Peter was trying to point to as possibilities and places that we can learn lessons from people doing it, making mistakes along the way, making imperfections, but putting themselves into it, investing, and creating the world that they want to live in.
DEG: Yeah. Big shout out to Peter, another Barcelona expat or immigrant or exile, we should say, maybe.
TFSR: So I guess the last question I have is, are you working on anything else these days? Would you suggest any interesting subjects, groups, movements, places, or struggles for further study around the topics that you’ve discussed today or are covered in your book? I made a list of some of the organizations, like Walhi, Via Campesina, or the landless movement, the MST. So I’ll have some of that stuff in the show notes with links to organizations, but any other shoutouts or stuff that you’re working on right now?
DEG: I’m really interested in trying to break down ways of how we understand the history of social movements in a way that can inform our present conjuncture, our moment right here, right now, around strategy and tactics more. I want to use those tools of humanistic inquiry and scholarship. I’ve been thinking a lot about tactics of anti-capitalist strategy and what those might mean for different places. And also trying to push forward my ability to draw comparisons or relations across Indonesia, California, Barcelona, and South America, like Amazonia. So yeah, I have another book that I’m working on that is very much about this idea of not so many places, but what are different tactics that are out there in the world? I have chapters I’ve started to write on. Some of them are inspired by my experience with Via Campesina, SPI, and MST, like the occupation, but also the blockade, of course.
Another great one is the ZADs or the Zone To Defend movements in France which are movements to stop big capitalist infrastructure projects, and they’ve been really effective with the protest camp, kind of like the Dakota Access Pipeline Standing Rock struggles. They employed basically the same type of thing, created big protest encampments in the way of some of these projects. So, yeah, I’ve been learning more about the ZADs in France now that I’ve been out here. And to set within this idea of like. “Ok, I don’t know what you think about the US state, but I don’t see it being the source of any actual well-being or potential for change right now.” So we need these tactics of direct action more than ever. But we need to know how they apply in a more broad sense, which pillar first against what.
I’m trying to learn more about different types of like workplace strikes. Mad respect for Amazon workers organizing wildcat strikes. I was part of the largest academic strike in US history a few years ago with the UC Berkeley system incorporated through the UFO. Mad respect for these people. But I just have to say it: The workplace strike seems dead to me. So what is the strike? The debt strike, or the rent strike? Those things also seem to lack a certain ability to actually do them in the US. I’m hoping to learn if some places are putting the strike into a new form that we can really use.
And the riot. There’s been some really interesting riots in the recent past that I think should inspire a lot of us. There’s also this group called Waging Nonviolence. They have some people that are trying to look into protest numbers right now, under Trump. They’re arguing that more people are protesting now than during the first Trump administration. It’s just that the press isn’t covering it this time. It almost sounds too hard to believe, but they’re being very diligent and counting protests and protest numbers. They’re being very rigorous and academic.
So yeah, that’s what I’m trying to work on right now. What does internationalism mean within all of this? The communists had their First International. There was even the First Anarchist International in the early 1900s, but where’s the role for internationalism today? Those are the things I’m trying to figure out how to research in a real experiential role as an activist-academic. There’s been some learning curves, but hopefully I’m going to have something out in another year.
TFSR: Cool. And your website is davidegilbert.com, is that right?
DEG: Yeah. Thanks.
TFSR: Cool. Yeah. That’s a place I’m sure you’ll be updating. And are you on social media that you want to shout out, or are you off of that stuff?
DEG: Yeah, you know, I jumped off of Twitter, although my account’s still up there, to Bluesky, but I’m not super active on it. But it’d be great to connect with you there, if I’m not connected yet, and I’m sure you have an awesome audience. I’d love to start using that platform a little bit more, if that’s the right one. It’s wild, Telegram is just huge in Europe, and I didn’t realize it. I’d heard about Telegram before I came out here, but now it’s so active, and it’s just not as public. But I don’t know, how do you share Telegram handles? Do I have to give out my phone number? I don’t want to do that.
TFSR: I can find you, but there are some suggestions on if you’re going to have a Telegram account to hide personal information. So you can make yourself non-searchable by your number or sign it up to Google number. Sometimes that works. Usually, if you’ve got a channel, just a broadcast-only channel, then you can get a short link that’s like t.me/whatever the name of it is.
Yeah. Telegram is an interesting platform. It should not be trusted for security. It’s a Russian-based corporation that has handed over information from radical groups and from attendees in different channels there to both the Russian Government and the Belarusian government, and I’m sure other governments beyond that. When people are organizing demonstrations, law enforcement has back access to it, so if security is a concern for either the attendees of a group or for communications, it’s not great.
I’m a fan of Mastodon, but it doesn’t have the same following, and it’s way, way more decentralized.
DEG: I like that one too. I need to just get a solid, small community of people I follow on Mastodon, on one of those servers. I think I’d be happy with that. I’m just so happy It’s Going Down back in my life, once I signed up for Bluesky, I didn’t realize they were on there. I was like, “Oh, this was worth it alone. Thank goodness.” I was so sad and pissed when they got kicked off of Twitter.
TFSR: And Facebook and Instagram. [laughs]
Thanks a lot for having this conversation and for writing this book. I’m stoked to be able to share this with the audience and looking forward to the next stuff that you come out with.
This week on the show, we’re sharing two interviews.
First up, Dulce, a member of Companeros Inmigrantes en las Montanas en Accion, or CIMA, a local organizing and advocacy group by and for immigrants in western NC about her experience working for dignity and solidarity in light of the current and past administrations. More on CIMA can be found at CIMAWNC.Org
A recent conversation we had with the Ben Lorber and Shane Burley, co-authors of the recently published book, Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism. For the hour we discuss the roots of antisemitism in the West, pushing back on Zionism in the midst of the genocidal war on Palestinians, a rebirth of Bundism and addressing antisemitism in left spaces. I definitely recommend this book to folks and hope you enjoy the chat! And as always, thanks for supporting this project.
If you’re a non-Pacifica station looking for this weeks 58 minute radio show, you can find it here. We’re hoping Archive.Org will be back online and allow us to upload files there soon.
In Ale Gasn = In Every Street / Hey, Hey, Daloy Politsey! = Hey, Hey Down With The Police! featuring Zalmen Mlotek, Adrienne Cooper, Dan Rous with The New Yiddish Chorale and The Workmen’s Circle Chorus from In Love and In Struggle: The Musical Legacy of the Jewish Labor Bund
This week, we’re sharing Ian’s talk with Samm Deighan, co-editor of Revolution in 35 MM: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to Grindhouse, 1960-1990, out 9/24/24 from PM Press. Among other things, they discuss the origins of the book, the benefits and limitations of genre storytelling, the forces that shape movie funding, and where to watch some of the films discussed. You can check out Twitch of the Dead Nerve podcast here.
First up, Dulce, a member of Companeros Inmigrantes en las Montanas en Accion, or CIMA, a local organizing and advocacy group by and for immigrants in western NC about her experience working for dignity and solidarity in light of the current and past administrations. More on CIMA can be found at 
