The Final Straw Radio

Asheville Survival Program is an autonomous mutual aid network formed in early 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in so-called Asheville, NC. They are building mutual aid with oppressed communities, promoting solidarity and sharing outside the bounds of State structure through their street-side camping gear, food and solidarity distro and their "Until We're All Free" Store, holding a distr...

On March 21 st , 2021, thousands entered the streets of Bristol in the UK to vent their anger at deaths in police custody, police violence on the streets, as well as a slate of repressive laws including the SpyCops Bill , increasing impunity for government officials breaking their own laws, as well as the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill , or simply The Bill, targeting Roma people, Travel...

This week I am very excited to present an interview with Autumn (she/her/hers), who is an anarchist and scholar-activist, on Fat Liberation in all its many nuances, the pervasive, classist, racist, and colonial nature of fatphobia both in mainstream society and in far left spaces and thought, and the roots of Fat Liberation as a structure which originates and lives with Black, Indigenous, and brow...

This week we're sharing a chat that Scott Branson had about Transgender Marxism (2021, Pluto Press) with Jules Gleeson (co-Editor, Contributor) and M.E. O'Brien (contributor). Transgender Marxism brings together Transgender Studies and Marxist theory, exploring Transgender lives and movements and surviving as Trans under Capitalism. In the end, the claim of the book is that for Trans Liberation, C...

This week on The Final Straw, we spoke with Vasili and Maria, two Belarusian anarchists living abroad about the aftermath of the 2020 Uprising in their country of birth, lessons learned, the current political prisoners and the Lukashenko regime's attempts to attack dissidents abroad. Maria is also a member of Belarus Anarchist Black Cross , which does anti-repression education and prisoner and leg...

The Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP is planned to be a 300 + mile pipeline 42 inches in diameter being built to transport compressed so-called Natural Gas from the Marcellus formation in the Appalachian Basin, from northern West Virginia to southern Virginia for export. The pipeline started being built in 2018 and is slated to cross over 1,000 waterways, posing a danger to countless human and non...

This week on the show, we spoke with folks involved with Comrade Center, a leftist project focused on accessible education around armed self-defense in so-called New Hampshire. They were formerly known as Southern New England Socialist Rifle Association and while they're no longer a chapter of the SRA, they are working with groups like that and individuals to purchase and maintaining a space for a...

On February 12th, 1994, Ernest Lee Johnson and his ex-girlfriends two sons participated in the botched robbery of Casey's General Store that took three victims' lives: Mable Scruggs, Mary Bratcher and Fred Jones. Mr Johnson has no recollection of the murders, was in despair and had been drinking and smoking crack in the hours after his ex-girlfriend broke up with him. A Black man with intellectual...

This is the second segment of a series of political discussions focused on building support for Jalihouse Lawyers Speak 2021 National call to action #ShutEmDown2021 along with support for the 2022 National Prisoner' Strike & Boycott. In this segment " Interpreting Realities: Aligning Fragments Within the Prison Resistance Movement " moderated by Brooke Terpstra – a longtime resident of Oakland and...

Resisting state repression and surveillance is one of the cornerstones of The Final Straw and has been since the beginning of this project. Over the years we've featured interviews with support committees, political prisoners, defendants in ongoing cases, incarcerated organizers, radical legal workers and lawyers and others to talk about how power strikes at those who it fears constitute a threat....

This week on the show, we share an interview with Sonja, an antifascist activist and researcher based in the state of Hessen, Germany, and involved in the network known as NSU-Watch. For the hour, we talk about the case of the National Socialist Underground terror group which killed 9 immigrants of Turkish, Greek and Kurdish immigrants between 2000 and 2006 and were only discovered in 2011. Sonja...

On this special midweek release, you'll hear Swift Justice, incarcerated Abolitionist in Alabama affiliated with the Alabama Resistance Movement and Unheard Voices OTCJ . Swift talks about some current situations in the Alabama Department of Corrections, legislation ongoing around prison slavery due to the exception clauses at the state and federal level (specifically the 13 th Ammendment), covid-...

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...