The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, are celebrated on the left for their militant opposition to capitalism, their broad church unionism across race and gender lines, and their ability to organize migrant and other precarious workers. As Ahmed White documents, they were crushed by unprecedented violence and vigilantism, which cast a long shadow over the U.S. labor movement and the left. (Encore presentation.) 
Resources:
Ahmed White, Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers UC Press, 2022
The post The War on the Industrial Workers of the World appeared first on KPFA.

The War on the Industrial Workers of the World

Acclaimed program of ideas, in-depth analysis, and commentary on a variety of matters — political, economic, social, and cultural — important to progressive and radical thinking and activism. Against the Grain is co-produced and co-hosted by Sasha Lilley and C. S. Soong.

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In the years following the Russian Revolution, a popular resistance movement sprang up in Ukraine that drew its inspiration from a man named Nestor Makhno. Makhno went on to organize a seven-million-strong anarchist polity amidst the chaos and brutality of the Russian Civil War. Charlie Allison describes Makhno’s appeal, his political beliefs, and his rejection of Bolshevism.
Charlie Allison, No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno PM Press, 2023
(Image on main page by Oleh Kushch.)
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Ukrainian Anarchist

Recent political discussions of marriage have revolved around who should be allowed to wed. But missing from most debates is the question of the unfair privileges conferred by the institution of marriage itself. Scholar Jaclyn Geller discusses the more than one thousand benefits accorded married people, at the expense of the non-married. 
Resources:
Jaclyn Geller, Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, End Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History Cleis Press, 2023
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The Unfair Benefits of Marriage

What are discarded materials from extractive activities like mining doing to life on the planet? According to Gabrielle Hecht, what’s happening in South Africa to and around mountainous piles of mining residues crystallizes a number of thorny environmental and sociopolitical issues faced by communities around the globe.
Gabrielle Hecht, Residual Governance: How South Africa Foretells Planetary Futures Duke University Press, 2023 (open access)
The post Extraction’s Heavy Toll appeared first on KPFA.

Extraction’s Heavy Toll

For over half a century, Big Oil and the plastics industry, through their trade associations and front groups, have sold the public the false idea that plastics are recyclable. Recycling became the mantra of good ecological stewardship, promoted by the likes of city governments, school children, and environmental groups. Davis Allen lays out the mass-marketing of a deception.
Resources:
Center for Climate Integrity, The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the Plastics Industry Deceived the Public for Decades and Caused the Plastic Waste Crisis February, 2024
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The Plastics Recycling Deception

Reclaiming the commons sounds good in the abstract, but what’s being done on a practical level? Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma, the Hawai‘i-based co-founders of Eating in Public, describe projects like Free Gardens and Free Stores. Also: Wren Awry discusses the volume to which Chan and Sharma contributed an essay.
Eating in Public
Wren Awry, ed., Nourishing Resistance: Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Aid PM Press, 2023
The post Food & Freedom appeared first on KPFA.

The War on the Industrial Workers of the World

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