Journalist and filmmaker Eleanor Goldfield joins me to discuss her documentary To the Trees, which documents humankind’s relationship to the sacred Redwoods and the tactics tree defenders use to protect old-growth forests from the clear-cutting practices of the lumber industry. In our discussion, Eleanor disputes the claims made by the industry of practicing sustainable harvesting practices in the Pacific Northwest, and how it is part and parcel of a larger global effort by extractive industries to greenwash ecologically destructive practices in the name of sustainability and the "green energy" transition.
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#337 | No Pasarán!: Inroads To Power & Antifascist Community Making w/ Shane Burley
Author and journalist Shane Burley returns to the podcast to discuss the anthology No Pasaran: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis, published this fall through AK Press. Burley is the editor and a contributor to this collection.
In catching up since our last interview, I ask Shane to clarify where the far-right stands in a "post-Trump" context. What inroads have far-right, and explicitly fascist, ideologues made in political discourse and policy in the United States over the past two years? How coherent is the far-right agenda, and who are their targets? What are the paths to power? And most importantly, how can various subcultural spaces, as well as rural and urban communities, each build effective resistances to this threat? No Pasaran, with its broad collection of voices, provides some of the most comprehensive answers to these questions.
Read More#330 | Ecological Revolution From Below: The Power Of Land-Based Resistance w/ Peter Gelderloos
Anarchist writer and activist Peter Gelderloos returns to the podcast to discuss ecological revolution from below, beautifully documented in his book The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below, published this year by Pluto Press.
Nothing short of revolution is required to address the global ecological crisis. The technocratic solutions presented to us by various capitalist nation-states are less than sufficient in mitigating the most dire consequences of biospheric collapse and runaway climate change. In fact, more than just merely insufficient, these top-down so-called “solutions” reimpose the dominant socioeconomic and political order producing the crisis to begin with. As Gelderloos describes and points to The Solutions are Already Here, numerous land-based movements around the world are rising to the occasion — actively protecting territories from extractive capitalist enterprises, reclaiming what has been taken and exploited for industry, and building resilient autonomous communities and networks, many of which that span the artificially imposed rural-urban divide. To really grasp the scale and scope of this ecological revolution from below, Gelderloos lets representatives of these movements speak for themselves, weaving them into a tapestry that enlivens a radical imagination of what a post-capitalist world may hold.
Read More#308 | Intersectional Class Struggle: To Walk & Chew Gum At The Same Time w/ Michael Beyea Reagan
Michael Beyea Reagan, historian and activist, joins me to discuss his book Intersectional Class Struggle: Theory and Practice, an "innovative study [that] explores the relevance of class as a theoretical category in our world today, arguing that leading traditions of class analysis have missed major elements of what class is and how it operates."
In our time of increasing wealth disparity and widespread socioeconomic precarity for the working class (dubbed the "Second Gilded Age"), how can intersectionality, as a theoretical framework and practice, help us more deeply understand and appreciate the liberatory struggles of racial, economic, and feminist movements? Reagan, through his excellent historical documentation in Intersectional Class Struggle, has provided a more nuanced, and richer, view of class consciousness that does not fit into crude boxes.
Read More#288 | Fool Me Once: The FBI's White Supremacy Problem & Big Tech OpSec w/ Akin Olla
Intro: 11:04
Political strategist and organizer Akin Olla joins me to discuss the history of the FBI’s assault on left-wing activists over the decades and the absolute necessity for organizers to have operational security in today’s political climate as Big Tech companies “depoliticize” their platforms in the wake of the Capitol siege last month. We address several of his recent articles published at The Guardian, including ‘The FBI can't investigate white extremism until it first investigates itself,’ ‘Facebook is banning leftwing users like me – and it's going largely unnoticed,’ and ‘The US Capitol riot risks supercharging a new age of political repression.’
In this interview, Akin dives into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's long and violent history of surveilling, attacking, and undermining leftist organizing in the United States since the agency’s inception in the early 20th century. Since the Capitol siege on January 6th, the FBI has turned its attention and resources toward identifying and detaining the participants in the riot, which has led liberals, and unfortunately many that would claim themselves to be on the left, to celebrate the agency's decision to pursue seditious white extremists for a change. But, considering the history of this agency, for those organizing movements of resistance to systems of white supremacy in the US, it's a bit difficult to trust the agency with this task.
The FBI has a long history of fulfilling the function of white supremacy in the United States. While the Tulsa Massacre was ongoing, the FBI’s predecessor was busy investigating Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. The FBI’s first director, J Edgar Hoover, waged war on the civil rights movement from its onset. The war was ramped up in the age of Cointelpro, an FBI program designed to surveil, dismantle and destroy any movement working to end racism or capitalist exploitation in the United States. The FBI occasionally investigated white supremacists during this era (1956 to 1971),but spent the vast majority of its resources fighting those committed to Black and Indigenous liberation. And many of the bureau’s investigations of white supremacists were disingenuous; the FBI knew for a fact that the Birmingham police Department had been infiltrated by the KKK, for example, but continued to feed the department information about civil rights activists. During Hoover’s half century as director, the FBI sent a blackmail letter to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide and was probably involved in the assassination of 21-year-old NAACP and Chicago Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton. (http://bit.ly/3b7FFmY)
Akin Olla is a Nigerian-American political strategist, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia, and is the host of This Is The Revolution podcast.
Episode Notes:
- Read Akin’s op-eds published at The Guardian: http://bit.ly/3b7FFmY / http://bit.ly/3ddDxwJ / http://bit.ly/2ZxZXRr
- Read ‘Facebook restricted a West Philly activist as it grappled with fallout from the Capitol riots’ at the Philadelphia Inquirer: http://bit.ly/3pq7o7F
- Follow and support his podcast This Is The Revolution: https://thisistherevolution.buzzsprout.com / https://twitter.com/ThisIsRevShow / https://ko-fi.com/thisistherevolution
- The song featured is “Tezeta (Nostalgia)” by Mulatu Astatke from the album Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale (1969-1974): https://youtu.be/Wy-v-FgiUD8