In this conversation we welcome home Safear Ness. Safear is a formerly incarcerated organizer, a founder of In The Mix Prisoner Podcast, a writer, and a Revolutionary Abolitionist. 

In this conversation we discuss Safear’s recent piece “Phone Resistance” from the Study & Struggle blog. We also talk about a zine he adapted from Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier’s book Rethinking the American Prison Movement entitled Revolution: The Prison Rebellion Years, 1968-1972 (artwork by Paul Lacombe). We also get his reflections on organizing, social media, and the abolition movement as someone who became a prison abolitionist inside Pennsylvania prisons.

Safear also reflects on organizing inside, on Russell “Maroon” Shoatz concept of The Hydra, and other aspects of prison life including censorship 

There is a discussion of phone zaps as well and we get into Stevie Wilson’s current situation facing repression in PADOC. The phone campaign for that is currently taking a break, but may start-up again soon. Stay in touch by following Stevie’s twitter account operated by comrades outside the walls, and by following Dreaming Freedom, Practicing Abolition. 

For this month we will be sending copies of Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook for Sovereignty and Survival into our incarcerated readers. Thanks to PM Press for donating those copies and to Massive Bookshop and Prisons Kill for facilitating that project as always. You can support that project here.

We won’t be plugging our patreon this week. But definitely would encourage folks to support projects like In The Mix and In The Belly where incarcerated people are developing their own podcast and journal projects. 

Links: 

In The Mix Prisoner Podcast

In The Belly Journal

Imam Jamil Action Network

The Jericho Movement

Campaign Against Prison Censorship and Book Banning

Martin Sostre Institute

Study & Struggle

Dan Berger & Toussaint Losier on the American Prisoner Movement

For this discussion we welcome Manolo de los Santos to discuss the book Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez. 

Manolo de los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He co-edited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs Hybrid War and Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro. He is a co-coordinator of the People’s Summit for Democracy.

Our Own Path to Socialism: Selected Speeches of Hugo Chávez is the first book length English translation of a collection of speeches from Hugo Chávez. Chávez left behind thousands of hours of speeches, and this book collects seven of them, presenting his theories, perspectives, and his visions of 21st century socialism. An almost encyclopedic blend of songs, stories, and dreams of the Venezuelan people, his words are a tool for young people seeking to understand the ideas of Chavismo and the Venezuelan process of building socialism in South America.

This conversation is a combination of thinking with Chávez as a historian, as a student of socialist practice, a theorist, and as a revolutionary in his own right. We talk a bit along the way about the example of Cuba, Chávez’s relationship to Fidel Castro, the influence of Mao Tse-Tung on his thinking, Chávez’s thinking on urgency, socialism and the climate crisis, and on the critical importance of study to the revolutionary process.

The book is available from 1804 Books and we highly recommend it. We want to thank Manolo and the folks at 1804 Books for this book and conversation.

We also want to thank PM Press for donating 35 copies of the Mohawk Warrior Society for our incarcerated reading group (in partnership with Prisons Kill and Massive Bookshop). Thanks to their donation and contributions from listeners last month we do have enough to cover that book and the postage to send it in this month.

And if you like what we do bringing you conversations like this every week then please become a patron of the show. Our show is 100% funded by our patrons and you can become one for as little as $1 a month and find out about things like our Wretched of the Earth study group which is going to start later this month.

Some of our other conversations on Venezuela and Chávez:

"Venezuela The Present As Struggle" with Gilbert & Marquina

"Chávez Has A Present In Venezuela" with Gilbert & Marquina

Geo Maher On Revolutionary Solidarity with Venezuela

"Commune or Nothing" with Chris Gilbert

This is the second episode in our two part discussion on Socialist Yugoslavia with our guests Gal Kirn and Dubravka Sekulić.

Gal Kirn is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Ljubljana. Kirn's research has focused on the theme of transition in (post)socialist context, in particular in the fields of art, politics and memory in the period of national liberation struggle and the socialist Yugoslavia. He published two monographs Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and The Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020), and recently co-edited (with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri) a volume Nights of the Dispossessed. Riots Unbound (Columbia Press, 2021), and with Marian Burchardt Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017)

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, educator, and theorist. She is interested in popular spatial literacy and her research explores how political economy and legislative frameworks produce built environment. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, London (UK). Her  work includes PhD thesis called Constructing Nonalignment: The Work of Yugoslav Construction Companies in the Third World 1961-1989 and she is a co-author of Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments among other projects. 

In this part of the discussion our guests offer a brief synopsis of Yugoslavia’s role in the development of the nonaligned movement. From there we discuss the role of Yugoslav architectural and construction firms in the construction of physical infrastructure within other non-aligned countries. This leads into some discussion around Yugoslavia and racialization, whiteness and what it means to be European. Connected to this is a discussion of Yugoslavia’s market reforms the contradictions they produce for the country’s workers, and an examination of how professionalization produced certain class contradictions and bourgeois or white aspirations that furthered certain racist and anti-solidaristic tendencies within Yugoslavia.

Just a quick note that the splicing of this conversation on Yugoslavia into two parts was arbitrary and based on the length of the discussion. There are references in this portion of the conversation to comments made in part 1. It is possible to listen to either episode independently but we strongly encourage folks to listen to both parts to get a fuller picture of the overall discussion.

Our monthly goal for April is to add 40 patrons this month again, to keep up with non renewals and help us continue to sustain our work here. So kick in $1 a month or whatever you can spare at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and join the wonderful folks who make this show possible. Our next study group, which will focus on Frantz Fanon’s Wretch of the Earth will begin later this month.

Links:

Part 1

Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments

Partisan Ruptures 

The Partisan Counter-Archive

This is part 1 of a 2 episode discussion on Socialist Yugoslavia, the legacy of the Yugoslav Partisan struggle, and on how we think about and understand transition with relation to Yugoslavia and post-Yugoslav context. For this discussion we are thrilled to welcome Gal Kirn and Dubravka Sekulić to the podcast. 

Gal Kirn is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture at the University of Ljubljana. Kirn's research has focused on the theme of transition in (post)socialist context, in particular in the fields of art, politics and memory in the period of national liberation struggle and the socialist Yugoslavia. He published two monographs Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019) and The Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020), and recently co-edited (with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri) a volume Nights of the Dispossessed. Riots Unbound (Columbia Press, 2021), and with Marian Burchardt Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017)

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, educator, and theorist. She is interested in popular spatial literacy and her research explores how political economy and legislative frameworks produce built environment. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, London (UK). Her  work includes PhD thesis called Constructing Nonalignment: The Work of Yugoslav Construction Companies in the Third World 1961-1989 and she is a co-author of Surfing the Black: Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and its Transgressive Moments among other projects. 

In this first part of the discussion we will talk about the transition out of Yugoslav socialism, and we talk a bit about histories of Yugoslav self-management economically, politically and culturally. We also discuss social or societal property, anti-fascism as a positive transnational political project, and why the nationalist and genocidal war in Yugoslavia was necessary to breaking up certain structures of Yugoslav socialism. 

In part two we will discuss more of Yugoslavia’s role within the nonaligned movement, some of its interesting legacies of design, development and construction. And we think about Yugoslavia and racialization, including Yugoslavia and the various Post-Yugoslav states within a context of whiteness and what it means to be European. 

We were able to hit our goal in March both for postage for our incarcerated reading group, and also for patreon. We’ll be picking a new book soon for the book club. Our monthly goal for patreon is to add 40 patrons this month again, to keep up with non renewals and help us continue to sustain our work here. So kick in $1 a month or whatever you can spare at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and join the wonderful folks who make this show possible and you’ll also get a notification when our study group starts back up later this month where we will be studying Frantz Fanon’s Wretch of the Earth.

In this episode we interview Brooke Terpstra and James Carlin, members of Oakland Abolition and Solidarity. Oakland Abolition and Solidarity supports prisoners’ efforts to organize for their own self-defense against inhumane treatment. They function as a liaison, building bridges between inside and outside to support prisoners organizing their local chapters. They advocate the abolition of incarceration, white supremacy, and capitalism.

We speak with Brooke and Carlin about a recent announcement made by California Governor Gavin Newsom, that claims that he will transform San Quentin prison into a Norwegian style prison. This claims has been widely disseminated within mainstream media, alongside visions of Newsom as some transformational prison reformer. Ultimately this is a form of carceral propaganda that serves a similar function of other forms of copaganda that we see all the times with relation to policing. 

Brooke and Carlin talk about some of the realities of San Quentin, its role in our imagination of prisons in the US which unsurprisingly out of step with the reality on the ground inside. We also talk about these concepts of "the Norway Model," or "Norwegian prisons," or "Scandinavian prisons," and how these concepts function in our society. Discussing the propaganda purpose they serve, which is more significant than the actual reality of these types of projects. There’s also some discussion of efforts, which happen across the country, to develop a small set of programs inside individual prisons that can serve as smokescreens for the prison system as a whole. To have an individual prison capable of hosting tours, and producing 5 o’clock news segments of prisoners doing organic gardening, taking yoga classes, or training emotional support dogs as part of an effort to mystify the level of violence that is the every day reality of all prisoners locked up.

We also talk a little bit broadly about why the idea of Norwegian prisons has currency in the US, who this appeals to, and discuss possible motivations for politicians deploying this language and image through the media.  We close with a brief discussion of whether California actually represents a model for decarceration with its declines in prison population over the last 15 years or so. 

Most of this conversation is dedicated to debunking certain ideas and mythologies, but the work of groups like Oakland Abolition and Solidarity is extremely important. Here is a link to their website and also a link where you can donate to support their work. 

And for us we’re really close to hitting our monthly goal on patreon, we only need 4 more new patrons at the time of this show. So kick in $1 a month or whatever you can spare at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism and join the wonderful folks who make this show possible. 

Other links:

Journalism For Liberation and Combat (featuring Brooke Terpstra and many other organizers and media workers)

Our previous episode with Brooke from 2019

This episode is about the Campaign to Free the Pendleton 2. In this discussion Too Black from the Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 and from Black Myths Podcast returns to MAKC. He is joined by Rodney “Big R” Jones and TheKingTrill.

Big R, who was incarcerated in Indiana State Penitentiary in 1985 along with the Pendleton 2 talks about the events that led to the egregious political repression of John "Balagoon" Cole and Christopher "Naeem" Trotter.

Each of our guests share details of the case and the campaign. In discussing the campaign we get into some basics of organizing, and building an organization or coalition around a campaign that has a fighting chance in the midwest. Also a discussion about how we politicize issues and activate people into action and struggle around an issue, rather than resting at the level of sympathy and caring. Beyond that there’s an important discussion around building connection inside and out, and on the ethic of care, and defense and preservation that animates the Pendleton 2, which is not unique to them at all, but is absolutely noteworthy and admirable.

Two quick plugs for us, we are sending copies of Decolonial Marxism by Walter Rodney into our incarcerated reading group this month. Support here.

Also we do have a push this month to add 40 patrons, we need 11 more new patrons to hit that goal, so if you appreciate the work we do bringing you these conversations on a weekly basis, your financial support is what really makes that possible. Join up with the other amazing folks who make this show possible for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

We’re going to include a bunch more links about this struggle, ways to get involved, ways to learn more and do political education around it for yourself and for others, and stay tuned towards the end of the episode there’s more discussion on what the campaign needs and how you can plug in and support directly.

Content Notice: This episode does contain discussions of anti-Black violence & brutality, but they are critical to understanding the campaign and supporting the freedom of the Pendleton 2.

Links:

Idocwatch.org

Trailer for the film, The Pendleton 2: They Stood Up Directed by TheKingTrill, Produced/Edited by Too Black, featuring Big R

LinkTree for ways to learn/support the Pendleton 2

TheKingTrill’s Youtube Channel

Email for the Campaign To Free The Pendleton 2 is thependleton2 at gmail dot com

In this episode we have a roundtable discussion grounded around the book The Mohawk Warrior Society: A Handbook on Sovereignty and Survival. For this discussion we have all four of the editors of this book, Philippe Blouin, Matt Peterson, Malek Rasamny and Kahentinetha Rotsikarewake. In addition Karennatha and Kawenaa, two other members of Kanien'keha:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) joined the conversation.

The book we discuss does a lot of things. It presents the works of Louis Karoniaktajeh Hall, it discusses what the Mohawk Warrior Society is, and Louis Hall’s influence and participation and activation of that movement as an autonomous political force. It also discusses some of the history of their vibrant and at times quite successful struggles against colonialism, but also against forces of assimilation, annihilation, and appropriation. The book also provides a number of resources to help understand the philosophy embedded in Mohawk language and thought, in which the Mohawk Warrior Society is grounded. This is a sovereign tradition of anticolonial resistance to genocide that crosses the imposed colonial borders of the US and Canada, and still exists in defiance of setter law and ways of knowing. As is discussed in the show, it is also potentially a guide or an offering. The Mohawk Warrior Society has out of necessity often been a somewhat secretive formation, this book and conversation offer a glimpse into their world view, and it’s incumbent upon us to listen in and take note.

This virtual roundtable features six guests. Due to time constraints there is just a lot that we weren’t able to get to in this conversation and so we really encourage folks to pick up the book and read it. We’ll include links in the show notes.

The book’s editors and our guests are:

Kahentinetha Rotiskarewake is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Gon-e-en-gay-ha-ga) from the Bear Clan in Kahnawà:ke. Initially working in the fashion industry, Kahentinetha went on to play a key role as speaker and writer in the Indigenous resistance, a role which she has fulfilled consistently for the last six decades. During this time, she witnessed and took part in numerous struggles, including the blockade of the Akwesasne border crossing in 1968. She has published several books, including Mohawk Warrior Three: The Trial of Lasagna, Noriega & 20–20 (Owera Books, 1994), and has been in charge of running the Mohawk Nation News service since the Oka Crisis in 1990. She now cares for her twenty children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Kahentinetha means she who is always at the forefront.

Philippe Blouin writes, translates and studies political anthropology and philosophy in Tionitiohtià:kon (Montréal). His current PhD research at McGill University seeks to understand and share the teachings of the Teiohá:te (Two Row Wampum) to build decolonial alliances. His work has been published in Liaisons, Stasis and PoLAR. He also wrote an afterword to George Sorel’s Reflections on Violence.

Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He is the co-director of The Native and the Refugee, multimedia documentary project on American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps.

Malek Rasamny co-directed the research project The Native and the Refugee and the feature film Spaces of Exception. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.

And as I said Karennatha and Kawenaa who are two other members of Kanien'keha:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) joined the conversation as well. It was an honor to host them.

And if you appreciate conversations like this, we are on a push for the month of March to add 40 patrons, we’re about half way there, and we have just less than half of the month remaining so kick in $1 a month and join the wonderful people who make this show possible and become a patron of the show. You can do that at https://www.patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Other links:

Support the MAKC/Prisons Kill book club

Buy the book from Massive Bookshop

Buy the book from PM Press

Conversation at Concordia referenced in the episode.

In this episode Dylan Rodríguez returns to the podcast. 

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. His lifework focuses on liberationist, anticolonial, and abolitionist confrontations with the antiblack, colonial, and white supremacist violences that permeate the ongoing Civilization project. He was elected to serve as President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021, and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars. Since 2021, he has served as Co-Director of the Center for Ideas and Society.

Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and the UCR Department of Black Study, among others.

He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association.

In January of 2021 we published an episode with Rodríguez on his most recent book White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide. In that conversation along with many of the other themes and topics from that book, Rodriguez began to frame out some thoughts with us on counterinsurgency. This past fall on Black Agenda Report, Dylan published an interview with Roberto Sirvent entitled "Insurgency and Counterinsurgency." 

In this episode we pick up that conversation, talking about counterinsurgency as a totality, as a curriculum, and as epistemic. We get into various elements of what that means to Rodriguez, and about the composition of the counterinsurgent bloc. We also talk about how we recognize it, resist it and embrace beautiful revolutionary wildness.

For this month our book for incarcerated readers is Walter Rodney’s Decolonial Marxism. A big thank you to Verso Books for donating the copies. We do need to raise some money for shipping for those and there’s a link in the show notes where you can pitch in to that effort over at Massive Bookshop.

We also have a big goal for this month, we’re hoping to add 40 patrons for the show. Despite meeting our goal in February, we actually had more non-renewals than new patrons for the month. So we are hoping we can make up for that in March. Our show is totally supported by listeners like you, we don’t sell ads and we don’t run on any grants. So if you appreciate our work and get something out of it, then become a patron of the show for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism

Links: 

More of Dylan’s books, edited collections, and writings (in collections) can be found at Massive Bookshop.

Dylan Rodríguez can be reached on Twitter (@dylanrodriguez), Instagram (dylanrodriguez73), and Facebook.

In this episode we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Gerald Horne to the podcast. 

Dr. Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. His research has addressed issues of racism in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights, international relations and war. He has also written extensively about the film industry. Dr. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and his B.A. from Princeton University. 

The author of over 30 books, just a few of Dr. Horne’s most notable titles include The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Fire This Time, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary, Confronting Black Jacobins, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Race to Revolution, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro American Response to the Cold War, and White Supremacy Confronted. 

In this particular discussion we focus on Dr. Horne’s recent book The Counter-Revolution of 1836: Texas slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of US Fascism. Given that it is over a 600 page book, and our interview was just about an hour long we did not get into many of the threads in that fascinating text. The book examines the specific set of relations and contradictions that led settler separatists to create the Republic of Texas, as well as those that led to the return of Texas to the Union, Texas’s role in the confederacy and the relationship of Texas settlers to slavery. It also examines the completely genocidal position Texas settlers held towards indigenous populations, and their relationship to Mexico which abolished slavery all the way back in 1829, exacerbating some of these contradictions among their slaveowning settler population in the northern part of Mexico that we now know as Texas. The book also extends beyond the Civil War period to look at the development of Jim Crow in Texas after Reconstruction. We strongly recommend people pick it up if they’re interested in learning more about the forging of some of the most fascistic tendencies in US History.

We also talk to Dr. Horne about some of the critiques of his book The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and about the right wing assault against the teaching of US history in this country.

This is our sixth episode we’ve published in this short month of February, and a lot of hours of reading, developing questions, interviewing, and editing have gone into that. The best way to support our ability to continue to bring you this content along with the ongoing study groups that we hold is to become a patron of the show. You can do that for as little as $1 a month at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. And if you already support the show, or if you’re not able to support financially, retweeting, reposting, sharing, and liking episodes on social media does help to connect the episodes to more listeners.

Now here is our conversation with Dr. Horne on US History and counter-revolution.

In this conversation we interview Alejandro Villalpando. 

Alejandro Villalpando is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pan-African Studies and the Latin American Studies Program at Cal State LA. He earned his Ph.D. in Critical Ethnic Studies from UC Riverside, and an M.A. from Latin American Studies at Cal State LA. His work lies at the intersection of Black, Central American, and Ethnic Studies. His co-authored chapter entitled "The Racialization of Central Americans in the United States,” can be found in the edited volume Precarity and Belonging (Rutgers University Press, 2021). He was also a co-founder, co-organizer, and co-facilitator for a year-long political education project entitled the Abolition Open School. Villalpando is also indelibly shaped and inspired to be part of and contribute to the crafting of a world rooted in justice, equity and dignity for all by his young child and partner who remain the bedrocks of his existence.

This discussion is primarily about organizing around the issue of police violence in Los Angeles, specifically south of Interstate 10 where Alejandro is born and raised and continues to live and organize. Villalpando shares a bit about his own experiences growing up in Los Angeles around police violence and around the organized abandonment and criminalization of his community by the state. He also discusses organized violence from a transnational perspective that attends to everything from imperialist wars and CIA counterinsurgency wars in Central America to both interpersonal violence and state violence in the Los Angeles area. Pushing back against these forces through political education, mobilization, and grassroots organizing, Alejandro speaks of the abolitionist work he and his partner engage in, and in the work they do with the Coalition for Community Control Over the Police and with many families who have had their loved ones taken by the state. Along the way Villalpando talks about a lot of the contradictions that come up when working to do abolitionist work in the real world with real people. And he talks about balancing some of the more practical day to day work of organizing around the vexed positions of responding to state violence, with the necessary work of world building and offering up the more expansive horizon of abolition.

Alejandro and his partner are co-convening Heal Together's Anti-Carceral Care Collective which is a space for anyone who needs a grief processing space that’s anti-carceral.

We just sent off our latest book to our incarcerated reading group. We want to thank Pluto Press for donating copies of Josh Myers Of Black Study. We also want to thank Massive Bookshop for kicking in for postage, and also the folks who donated some funds for postage to make that happen. And finally we want to thank our partners over at Prisons Kill.

Lastly, there’s 5 days left in the month of February, we only need 2 more patrons to hit our goal for the month of adding 28 patrons to the show. So if you want to support the show, kick in $1 a month or more be a part of the amazing community of folks that make episodes like this possible on a weekly basis at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism.

Other links:

Steven Osuna's episode (mentioned in this discussion)

Jury Nullification Toolkit (also discussed in the episode)

Villalpando social media links:

IG: @CentAmStudies IG 

IG: @SouthCentralCat911

Twitter: @CSULA_LAS