The Ex-Worker

Welcome back to the Ex-worker! We're eschewing our typical format once again to bring you our second audio zine, a production of Crimethinc.'s new text From Democracy to Freedom . This release coincides with the announcement of an online platform for participating in decentralized reading groups and online discussions on this text as well as the others in the series exploring questions around demo...

Is Democracy what we’re fighting for, as anarchists? In episode 47 of the Ex-Worker Podcast , a contentious debate between Clara and Alanis on this topic sets the stage for an upcoming, in-depth engagement with the topic of Democracy. In addition, we clean out our backlog of listener feedback, clarifying our trash-talking of both the Bay Area and Adbusters in past episodes, as well as hearing from...

What do anarchists around the world think is in store for the new year? In Episode 45 , we began our 2015 year in review, focusing on the US. In this episode, we share reflections on developments in 2015 and from anarchists in Chile , Finland , Brazil , Korea , Colombia , Czech Republic , and Rojava . There are also discussions about developments in fascism and anti-fascism , with reports from the...

In our first episode of the new year, the Ex-Worker looks back over 2015 and its highlights, lowlights, and everything in between. We summarize some of the year’s key news developments, including tech developments and struggles around gender, anarchist publishing and media, a hilarious look at mass media coverage of anarchism, and our reflections on the last year of the podcast itself and our new...

In our 44th episode of the Ex-worker, and our final episode of 2015, we bring you a live audio recording from the last stop of the recently wrapped-up To Change Everything tour, an international panel discussion featuring stories and lessons from participants in some of the better and lesser known uprisings of the last few years. In two months and just over 50 stops, the featured speakers—hailing...

One of the major news stories of 2015 has been the flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria and beyond into Europe, and the social and political crises this has precipitated. In this episode, we'll take a look at Europe's so-called refugee crisis from an anarchist perspective. To do that, we adopt a "mix tape" format, pasting together excerpts from a variety of sources to offer an impr...

In this episode of the Ex-worker, we take another spin around the world, bringing you several short features focusing on various aspects of the global struggle against domination. We'll share an interview with a Finnish anarchist, who tells us about an anti-nuclear struggle, a university occupation in Helsinki, and the response to refugees in Finland, and how anarchists have taken part in all of t...

In this episode, the Ex-Worker explores connections between anarchism, repression and resistance across the world in countries that rarely appear in the radical limelight. We share an interview with an Anarchist Black Cross chapter in Belarus, discussing the president's recent release of anarchist political prisoners; interview a Czech anarchist about "Operation Fenix" and recent entrapment cases...

It's been a year since rage over Michael Brown's murder catalyzed an anti-racist and anti-police rebellion that spread from Ferguson around the country. How can anarchists interpret the trajectory of the struggles against white supremacy that have unfolded over the last year? In Episode 40, we discuss the current state of police violence and both institutional and autonomous white supremacy, along...

In the latest episode of the Ex-Worker, we continue our discussion of the unfolding social revolution in the autonomous Kurdish territories of Rojava. Building on our coverage in Episode 36, we share two interviews themed around international solidarity with the struggle for autonomy and the fight against ISIS. In the first, a member of Rojava Solidarity NYC, the group of American anarchists that...

How do anarchists organize outside of major cities? In Episode 38 of the Ex-Worker, we offer a profile of anarchism in Lake Worth, a small coastal town in southern Florida with a surprisingly active and vibrant culture of resistance. Participants in the Everglades Earth First!, the Earth First! Journal, the South Florida Prison Books Project, the former Night Heron Infoshop, and Prison Legal News...

In this episode, the Ex-Worker offers an in-depth profile of the struggle to defend the Hambacher Forest. In the Rhineland coal country of western Germany, a group of angry locals, environmentalists, anarchists and squatters have converged to challenge the destruction of one of the region's oldest forests by the energy giant RWE's brown coal mining. In these moving interviews recorded live in the...

The Ex-Worker is back! We may have taken a break, but social struggles and resistance across the world have not. In this episode, we focus on the unfolding social revolution in Rojava or western Kurdistan, where an ambitious set of political, economic, and military experiments are transforming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. In the borderlands of Turkey and Syria, self-organized mili...

Welcome back to the Ex-Worker! In celebration of the second anniversary of the podcast, and the resistance unfolding around the world from Baltimore to Milan and beyond, we’re releasing our first audio zine! CrimethInc.’s ambitious new anarchist outreach project To Change Everything is “a primer for the curious, a polemic for the entrenched, a point of departure for everyone who longs for another...

In our 34th episode, we follow themes of repression, security, and resistance through several different short features. In celebration of former Green Scare prisoner Eric McDavid's release after nine years inside, we reflect on the lessons of his case for our efforts to resist today. We share part of a recent CrimethInc. essay that assesses the possibilities and limits of whistleblowing, as well a...

From the Ukrainian revolution and war with Russia to the Bosnian uprisings, ISIS/Rojava/Kobane conflicts, the Brazilian World Cup protests, anti-police riots in Ferguson and beyond … 2014 was one hell of a depressing, inspiring, roller coaster of a year! For our year in review, we wrote to anarchists around the world to ask them what they thought were the most significant events of the last year a...

Rebellion has erupted around the country in the aftermath of grand jury decisions to allow the murderers of Mike Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York to go free without legal charges. Why did this happen, when authorities knew that this would spark furious protests and international condemnation? To try to understand the persistence of racist police violence, Clara and Alanis delve into t...

Clara and Alanis attended the Carrboro Anarchist Book Fair on November 22nd, 2014, and decided to try an experiment: recording an episode of the Ex-Worker in front of a live anarchist audience! We started off with our usual Hot Wire news, and then interviewed a wide range of participants from the book fair about workshops or presentations they did or projects they represented. Interviewees spoke a...

The Ex-Worker keeps our eyes to the south as we continue our in-depth exploration of anarchism in Chile. While our last episode sought to provide context and history, this episode delves into two recent cases of repression by the Chilean State against anarchists and discusses the important of prisoner support in the anarchist movement. We interview Victor Montoya, an anarchist who was framed up an...

On September 11th, while patriotic Americans waved flags and listened to speeches, a few thousand miles south, Chileans massed in the streets and clashed with police on the anniversary of the 1973 military coup. Our 29th episode begins a two-episode series on anarchism in Chile: From popular power and militant resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship to today's clashes between encapuchados and Cara...

In Episode 26, we shared a panorama of dramatic stories from the lives and struggles of 19th and early 20th century anarchist women... but we didn't focus much on their ideas. In the second episode of our three-part series on anarcha-feminism, the Ex-Worker returns to the first generations of rebels who brought together anarchist and feminist currents, this time to explore their distinctive revolu...

Since the murder of Mike Brown by police on August 9th, Ferguson, Missouri has been the site of intense riots, looting, and clashes with police. In this episode, we share accounts from participants and reflections on the rebellion, as well as an analysis which unpacks the designation of "outside agitators." Two texts discussing other recent anti-police uprisings appear on the Chopping Block, while...

What is anarcha-feminism, and what contribution has it made to both feminism and anarchism? In this episode we kick off a series exploring anarcha-feminism in the past and present. After framing the issue and dealing with some thorny questions around definitions of feminism and gender, we take a whirlwind tour through the history--or herstory, if you like--of anarchist women from the barricades of...

The recent World Cup prompted widespread protests across Brazil. In our 25th episode, we discuss why these protests took place, who participated, and how they connected to the uprisings of the last year. We share an audio collage of protest voices, an interview with Brazilian anarchists, and a Situationist-inspired critique of mass sports spectacles. The new green anarchist journal Black Seed appe...

From the incendiary writings of The Invisible Committee prompting arrests on charges of rail line sabotage in France, to the calculated analysis of Theorie Communiste and Aufheben, we may have skipped a few things in our previous two episodes about communism. The current known as communization emerged out of the struggles of May '68 in France, and to this day the question remains: can we enact com...