The Olympia Communard: Dispatches from the Olympia Rail Blockade – By Various Authors – MP3 – PDF – Torrent – Archive – YouTube

For seven days during the winter of 2016, radicals, revolutionaries and ne’er-do-wells – inspired by the then unfolding revolt at Standing Rock – built a blockade encampment on the train tracks in downtown Olympia, Washington (Nisqually and Squaxin Land), in order to stop a train full of essential fracking supplies from reaching the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. One year later the blockade reemerged and for another twelve days during the winter of 2017, participants took a stand against the industrial machinations of death.

This compilation of writing comes from the second year of the blockade and was intended to be record of sorts, of a special time and place affectionately referred to by its participants as the Olympia Commune. In the Olympia Communard’s own words:

“It is simply the perspective of some future possible world, glancing back at the collapse of this world and searching for those elements of redemption hidden therein”.

More audio resources on the Olympia Train Blockade(s) check out

The (Ex)Worker #61: The Olympia Train Blockade (2017)

SoleCast on the Olympia Blockade  (2017)

IGD Cast – Discussion on the Blockade (2017)

IGD Cast – Audio Report (2017)

IGD Cast – Barricade That Train (2016)