The Final Straw Radio

This week on the show, you'll hear our conversation with Mwalimu Shakur, a politicized, New Afrikan revolutionary prison organizer incarcerated at Corcoran prison in California. Mwalimu has been involved in organizing, including the cessations of hostilities among gangs and participation in the California and then wider hunger strikes against unending solitary confinement when he was at Pelican Ba...

This week on the show, William and Scott are presenting an interview with Alice and Dolly, who are two people working toward Disability Justice and Mad Activism (among other things), about the prevalence of movement misogyny in antifascist currents, world building as antifascist and as community defense, ways to rethink harmful patterns in movements, and some things we can do to make each other sa...

The city of Asheville likes to make headlines. The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority, or TDA, has been working alongside other tourism industry groups, to make an impression in the minds of people worldwide and entice you to visit this little mountain city with it's big fuck-off estate, the Biltmore, the beautiful mountains for hiking, waterfalls for swimming, artsy and craftsy culture...

This week, we're excited to (re-)present a 2015 conversation with Saralee Stafford and Neal Shirley, editors and authors of their book out from AK Press entitled "Dixie Be Damned: 300 years of Insurrection in the American South" . The book is a study of Maroon, Indigenous, White, Black, worker, farmer, slave, indentured, women and men wrestling against institutions of power for autonomy and self-d...

This week we re-air an interview done with Aishah Shahidah Simmons , who is a writer, community organizer, prison abolitionist, and cultural worker who has done just an immense amount of work over the years to help disrupt and end the patterns of sexual abuse and assault within marginalized communities. In this interview we talk about a lot of things, her background and how she came to be doing th...

The collective we spoke to for this episode began as a series of remotely-hosted blogs and communication methods among Iranian anarchists at home and abroad. By 2015 anarchists from Afghanistan had started to join and in 2018 the comrades from within Iran and Afghanistan and those living internationally founded Anarchist Union of Afghanistan and Iran. Since, more individuals and groups have joined...

Joshua Clover is the author of seven books including Riot. Strike. Riot (Verso, 2016), which has been translated into six languages. Scott and Joshua talk about proletarian resistance to the capitalist economy through struggles against circulation of commodities and to fix their prices (riots) and struggles against exploitation and to set the price of wages in the workplace (strikes), how these me...

This week, we're featuring two main portions of the show. You'll hear updates from Greek comrades at 1431 AM free social radio in Thessaloniki and Radiozones Of Subversive Expression , 93.8 FM pirate radio in Athens. Both of these were featured on the latest episode of Bad News: Angry Voices from Around The World, available the middle of each month at A-Radio-Network.org . Prior to that, you'll he...

This week, we air a conversation between Scott and anarchist, author and organizer Cindy Milstein . The conversation is framed around the most recent compilation that Milstein has edited and contributed to, " There Is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart: Mending The World As Jewish Anarchists " ( AK Press , 2021). During the conversation, they speak about walking through the world as queer, non-bin...

One thing that sets anarchism aside from other radical, egalitarian critiques of Power developed in the modern West is the conception of the State as an enemy. But what is the State, how does it work, why and how do we as anti-authoritarians and anarchists oppose it? These questions and more are the focus of the recent book, The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State ( AK Press...

June 11th is the international day of solidarity with Marius Mason and all long-term anarchist prisoners. This year we want to explore the connections between long-term prisoner support and anti-repression efforts around recent uprisings, a sharp reminder to us that the difference between a status of imprisoned or not is often tenuous and temporary. With thousands of arrests for protesting, riotin...

First, you'll hear from Koby Bluitt talking about her father, Leon Benson and his struggle for release after 23 years in prison, 10 of which was in solitary confinement, for a murder charge in 1998 that he has consistently claimed to have not committed. More on Leon at freeleonbenson.org or leonbenson-freeleonbenson on facebook. The Mass Release & Clemency for Leon rally in Indianapolis is July 25...

This week on the show we are pleased to present an interview with Mar í a Kamila, who is a teacher and a popular journalist who works with the anarchist Colombian journalism and counter-information collective in Bogot á called Subversión . We originally reached out to talk about the current wave of protests and riots in Colombia, and this interview covers many topics, ranging from a historical con...

This week on the show, we're airing a portion of our 2018 interview with filmmaker and activist Yousef Natsha about his film about his hometown, Hebron, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. We invite you to check out our full interview with him from March 25, 2018 , linked in our show notes and we're choosing to air this right now because of the flare up in violent evictions, home destruction...

This week, we present a conversation with Shane Burley, author of the new AK Press book, " Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse ". For the hour, we speak about the contents of the book, anti-fascism, toxic masculinity, pushing racists and fascists out of cultural space, antisemitism (including in the left), conspiricism, right wing publishing and other topics....

This week, you'll hear Scott's chat with Max Fox, editor of the late Christopher Chitty's book, " Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy and Capital in the Rise of the World System ", published by Duke University Press in 2020. Max Fox is an editor of Pinko Magazine , a former editor of New Inquiry Magazine and translator of Guy Hocquinguem's novel " The Ampitheatre of the Dead ". You can find Max on...

This week we are very happy to present an interview with Pranav Jeevan P, who is a student, a writer, an anti-caste activist, and an Indian anarchist living in the state of Kerala. You are listening to the full extended audio from this conversation, where you'll hear Pranav explaining how he got into anarchism, how anarchistic praxis unfolds in India, some about the origins of and worldwide implic...

Veronza Bowers, Jr: 47 Years of Justice Denied This week, we're airing a conversation recorded by Eda Levinson on September 12 th , 2002, with political prisoner Veronza Bowers, Jr. It originally aired on Youth Speaks Out on KZYX in Modesto County, California, and we re-air this with permission of Veronza and the current producer of the Youth Speaks Out. The show continues to produce youth focused...

This is a conversation with Geoff Aung ( @Rg nhardliner on twitter), a Burmese American Marxist anthropology Phd candidate at Columbia University living abroad, about the current uprising, repression and revolutionary potentials in Myanmar. We discuss the evolution of tactics on the ground as revolutionaries adapt to the brutal murders of protesters by the state. Geoff also talks about the ways in...

This week on the show, we bring you the audio of an activist panel from the recent Queer Conference held online by University of North Carolina, Asheville, in March of 2021. Transcript PDF (Unimposed) Zine (Imposed PDF) The conference was titled Fitting In and Sticking Out – Queer [In]Visibilities and the Perils of Inclusion . From the panel's description for the conference: This panel brings toge...

This week on the show, I spoke with Comrade Chux, a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak. JLS is an autonomous network of incarcerated activists from across the so-called US. They have been engaged in organizing and calling for the 2016 & 2018 Nationwide Prison Strike activities. Chux and I chat about the call for this year for folks on the outside to engage for Abolition on August 21 and September 9...

It's been nearly half a decade since thousands of indigenous water and land defenders and their accomplices and allies weathered a difficult winter and attacks by law enforcement and private security attempting to push through the Dakota Access Pipeline through so-called North Dakota. The DAPL was eventually built and has already, unsurprisingly damaged the lands, waters and sacred sites of the St...

This week, we spoke with Anner, an Ethiopian member of Horn Anarchists, an anarchist group based in east Africa, particularly in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diaspora. The group has been around for about a year and hopes to organize and spread anarchist ideas and organizing in the horn of Africa. Horn anarchists is a newer group planning to do work with refugees and introduce anarchist ideas to east...

This week we are re-airing a conversation that Bursts had last year with Aric McBay, who is an anarchist, organizer, farmer, and author about his most recent book called Full Spectrum Resistance published by Seven Stories Press in May 2019. This book is divided into 2 volumes, and from the books website [fullspectrumresistance.org]: " Volume 1: Building movements and fighting to win , explores how...

In Defense of Looting with Vicky Osterweil This week we are getting the chance to air a conversation that we had with writer, anarchist, and agitator Vicky Osterweil about her recently published book In Defense of Looting, a Riotous History of Uncivil Action published  (Bold Type Press, August 2020). We get to talk about a lot of different topics in this interview, how the book emerged from a zine...