Explore every episode of the podcast Woodbine Podcast

Chaia Heller & Mason Herson-Hord join Andrew and Matt to discuss their work with the Institute for Social Ecology, co-founded by communalist philosopher Murray Bookchin in Vermont in 1974. We reflect on the ideas and legacy of both Bookchin (1921-2006) and Occupy Wall Street; the need for joy and the celebration of life; the limitations within both Marxism and anarchism for facing our present ecological crisis; the task of counter-hegemony and keeping a set of ideas alive across generations; and the role of feminism and creating new forms of socialization together.

--"Ecology, Desire and Revolution: An Interview with Chaia Heller" - Rebecca DeWitt, 1999: http://www.cwmorse.org/archives/perspectives.on.anarchist.theory.vol3.no.2-fall1999.pdf

--"Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life" - Chaia Heller, 1999: http://new-compass.net/articles/notes-ecology-everyday-life

--"Biotechnology, Democracy, and Revolution" - Chaia Heller, 2005: https://social-ecology.org/wp/2005/01/biotechnology-democracy-and-revolution/

--"A Government From Below" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2018: https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2018/a-government-from-below/

--"Assembled in Detroit" - Mason Herson-Hord, 2020: https://assemblymag.org/assembled-in-detroit/

Chaia Heller is a writer, activist, anthropologist, and artist who has been teaching political and feminist theory at the Institute for Social Ecology for nearly four decades. Chaia has been active in movements ranging from ecofeminism and the Left Greens, to the global justice movement, and Occupy. Chaia is the author of The Ecology of Everyday Life (Black Rose Books) and Food Farms and Solidarity (Duke University Press).

Mason Herson-Hord is an organizer and writer in Detroit, Michigan, where he is an active participant in the development of neighborhood assemblies and the solidarity economy. He is a founding member of Symbiosis, a North American federation of dual power organizations, and a board member of the Institute for Social Ecology. His work has been published by outlets like the Next System Project, ROAR Magazine, The Ecologist, and Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

Andrew volunteers at Woodbine and is currently working toward finishing a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen join Giulia and Matt to discuss their shared nomadic journey as artists, anarchists, parents, curators, teachers, partners, writers, thinkers, friends, and so much more. In 70 minutes, we discuss their last 50 years of collaboration. Meeting amidst the utopian movements of the 60s, they were influenced by their encounter and friendship with anarchist groups such as Anarchos, the Judson Dance Theater, and Situationism in America. Believing in the power of collectivity and the potentials of oppositional culture, their work has dealt equally with the spectacle of disaster and the invisibility of daily life. With a practice simultaneously reflecting on authorship and ownership, audience and autonomy, independence and institutions, they have been editors of the radical film journal Jump Cut, and curators and archivists of forgotten revolutionary cinema.

--"Escape Routes" - Ernie Larsen, 2021: https://herri.org.za/5/ernie-larsen/

--"Flying under the radar: notes on a decade of media agitation" - Ernest Larsen, 2014: https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc56.2014-2015/LarsenAnarchistActivists/index.html

--"The Dialectics of Making Movies: Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen interviewed by Lia Yoka" - 2009: http://womenfilmeditors.princeton.edu/assets/pdfs/MILLNER_Dialectics_of_Making_Movies_Yoka.pdf

--"The Last Word: To unite filmmakers and film critics" - Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, 1979: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/LarsenMillnerEdl.html

Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen collaborate on film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and other research projects. Together they have produced more than a dozen films exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, and storefronts. Millner creates installations such as The Domestic Boobytrap, which detournes U.S. army manuals to manifest the vulnerability of domestic space, with blueprints and models of boobytraps placed in everyday life situations within the nuclear family. Larsen's feminist detective novel Not a Through Street was nominated for an Edgar Award. His nonfiction novel The Trial Before The Trial, describing his “disruptive” service on a grand jury in New York, was published by Autonomedia. He is currently writing a novel about the French anarchist Ravachol.

As co-creators of the collaborative video project State of Emergency, they involved 15 artists in protesting U.S. invasions of the Middle East. In 2008 at the Oberhausen Film Festival they co-curated  “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” 10 programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. They co-curated the Fall Flaherty Foundation series in 2013 at Anthology Film Archives, under the title “Global Revolt: Cinematic Ammunition.” They are co-curators of Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form non-fiction films and videos, for Facets Media. They organized and contributed to the collaborative book Capital’s Greek Cage (Autonomedia), an exploration of Greece’s near-collapse in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Their most recent video How Do Animals and Plants Live? is an inquiry into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki on July 27, 2016.

Video Data Bank: https://www.vdb.org/artists/sherry-millner

Autonomedia: https://autonomedia.org/?s=larsen

Facets DVD: https://www.facetsdvd.com/searchresults.asp?Search=millner&Submit=

Sandi Hilal and Pelin Tan join Malek and Matt to discuss alternative pedagogies of unlearning in Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and within refugee spaces in Europe and the Middle East. Together we talk about questioning our social coexistences, decolonization, conflict, and care. How and where do we learn new ethical and artistic practices amidst collapse, as our relationships to infrastructure and institutions change within moments of rupture? We speak about the contested meanings of public and private space in a colonial context; the need for designing self-organized autonomous infrastructures to cultivate free thought; and the intifada as both a pedagogical practice and a producer of new forms of knowledge. What does it mean to have a collective creative praxis, “one that is not grounded in practices of empathy, but rather in the knitting of the commons”? How does our work intervene in built environments, and create new spaces from which to speak?

Urgent Pedagogies: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/

Campus in Camps: http://www.campusincamps.ps/

Decolonizing Architecture Art Research: https://www.decolonizing.ps/

Arazi Assembly: http://araziassembly.org/

Sandi Hilal is an architect, artist and educator. She is currently the Co-Director of DAAR, Decolonizing Architecture Art Research, an architectural and art collective that she co-founded in 2007 with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman, in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Sandi is the initiator of the living room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host, and to activate the rights of temporary people to host and not to eternally be a guest. She co-founded Campus in Camps in 2012, an experimental educational program hosted in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem with the aim to overcome conventional educational structures by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production connected to greater transformations and the democratization of society. Her latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019), co-authored with Alessandro Petti, is a book, a catalog, and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and experimentation, and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement. Hilal co-authored with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014) an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization.

Pelin Tan is a sociologist and art historian based in Turkey. Tan is a curator of Urgent Pedagogies in design&art by IASPIS (Stockholm), and collaborates with artist Anton Vidokle on essay films about the future society. She is a member of the Arazi Assembly based in Mardin.

--“Camps as Trans-Local Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2017: https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/refugee-heritage-conversations-pelin-tan-camps-as-trans-local-commons/6760

--“The Question of Collectivity: Dispossession, Surplus, Commons” - Pelin Tan, 2019: http://collectioncollective.art/text/the-question-of-collectivity-dispossession-surplus-commons

--“A Conversation with Pelin Tan: Field as entanglement and transversal methodology” - Ishita Sharma, 2020: https://topologicalatlas.net/blog/a-conversation-with-pelin-tan-on-studying-place-as-a-constellation

--“Planetary Migration under Anthropocene: Crisis and Solidarity “- Pelin Tan, 2020: http://migrazine.at/artikel/planetary-migration-under-anthropocene-crisis-and-solidarity

We’re joined by Jose Rosales, Carla Bottiglieri, Luhuna Carvalho, and Giulia Gabrielli for a roundtable on Marcello Tari’s book, There is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, published in English this spring by Common Notions.

We discuss a genealogy of the concept “destituent power”, alongside the historical movements it’s been a response to: Italy in the 70s, Argentina in 2001, and the aftermaths of both the Arab Spring and Occupy movement. We think with Tarì alongside Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari, Tronti, and Agamben on the existential and methodological questions of use and inoperativity, strike and gesture, de/subjectivation and conversion, territory and exodus, civil war and political theology, and infrastructures of reproduction.

-- “Xeniteia: Contemplation and Combat” - Mario Tronti & Marcello Tarì, 2020: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4757-xeniteia-contemplation-and-combat

-- “Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline” - Hostis, 2020: https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/

--“How Does One Shoot a Frozen Clock?” - Luhuna Carvalho, 2020: https://illwill.com/how-does-one-shoot-a-frozen-clock

-- “Spirituality and Combat: A Conversation with Marcello Tarì” - Matt Peterson, 2021: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/118/391829/there-is-no-unhappy-love-the-communism-of-destitution/

Carla Bottiglieri studied Classics and Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy and Performing Arts/Dance at the University of Paris 8, France, while working in the field of contemporary dance and theatre. An independent researcher, she deals with an unidentified territory on the margins of aesthetics, clinics and politics. She has been studying different methods in the field called somatics, which she understands as practices related to the “use of bodies”.

Luhuna Carvalho has just finished writing a thesis on Operaismo and Autonomia, and is a part of the RDA69 social center in Lisbon.

Giulia Gabrielli is an artist and researcher interrogating, in solitude and company, the question of how to live.

Jose Rosales is a researcher based in Queens, currently co-editing a series of conversations entitled 'Diversity of Aesthetics' alongside Andreas Petrossiants and Vicky Osterweil.

Mary Boger, Michael Lardner, and Kazembe Balagun join Amogh and Matt to discuss the New York Marxist School, the Brecht Forum, and the Marxist Education Project--experiments in both radical pedagogy and autonomous space in NYC dating back to 1975.

We trace together the how and why of our political histories, as well as the Brecht Forum’s organizational evolution from collective, to committee, to board of directors, to staff--and finally back again to collective. We’re warned of the challenges and contradictions in running such a program through the forms of the non-profit industrial complex, and the need to insist upon self-conscious, voluntary participation in a strategic project aimed at building community rather than audience. Such a space is a place to think out loud together, process and analyze current events, and develop a revolutionizing curriculum. We’re reminded of the Brecht Forum’s core organizing principle of being both non-dogmatic and non-sectarian--to emphasize culture, art, poetry, and music as being essential to the process of both movement building and becoming a better person. How and where do we organize ourselves to undo the individualization, fragmentation, demoralization, commodification, and brutality we experience--to work toward an intergenerational re-socialization and self-education based on compassion and care?

--“The Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School: To the Next Generation” - Mary Boger, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/remembering-arthur-felberbaum

--“Reflections on the Brecht Forum / New York Marxist School” - Liz Mestres, 2013: https://dev.sd.brechtforum.net/issue/62/reflections-brecht-forum-new-york-marxist-school

--“Our Legacy” - Marxist Education Project, 2014: https://marxedproject.org/our-legacy/

--“Brecht Forum Promo Video” - Kazembe Balagun, 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQbziBfDEg4

Mary Boger, a founding member of the New York Marxist School/Brecht Forum in 1975, is a long-time Capital teacher for movement activists, and has been involved in solidarity and human rights struggles for many years. Her CUNY Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology is entitled "A Ghetto State of Ghettos: Palestinians under Israeli Citizenship."

Michael Lardner has worked in truck stops and road construction, and as a typographer and designer, with decades of coordinating complex printing processes. In 1977 he began his engagement with The School for Marxist Education, which eventually became The Brecht Forum, and since 2014 he has done coordination and programming for The Marxist Education Project. He has helped organize the Revolutions Study Group, the Capital Studies Group, and the Literature Studies Group.

Natasha Lennard and Matthew Whitley discuss some themes and questions from the updated paperback edition of Natasha’s book, Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, published last month by Verso.

We talk about acting and thinking in the absence of Trump’s dominance of the mediasphere, and how we relate to debates around the “crisis of liberalism” and “collapse of the center” in a now-Democratic Party controlled government. We reflect on 10 years after Occupy, with indigenous and abolitionist movements now centered in any imagination of liberation, and the many crises that won’t be solved legislatively. We ask how to not let emphasis on prefigurative mutual aid practices--which create interdependency and care, intimacy and community--cede the ground of “policy”, which reimagines the structural conditions within which we live. And how do we find and use alternative, authentic, strategic voices in our present media ecology to articulate and build legibility for utopian horizons of flourishing and autonomy?

Natasha Lennard is a columnist for The Intercept. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Bookforum and the New York Times, among others. She teaches critical journalism at the New School for Social Research and is the author of “Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life" (Verso).

Matthew Whitley is a writer and organizer affiliated with the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council - MACC NYC. He is currently a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, with a research focus on alternative economies in Catholic social teaching. He also serves on the steering committee of the Emergency Committee for Rojava and co-edits the radical artists' imprint Cicada Press. His poetry chapbook, "Do You Like the Word Crisis?", was published by Commune Editions in 2019.

--"Anti-fascist Practice and Impossible Non-Violence" - Natasha Lennard, 2018: https://evergreenreview.com/read/anti-fascist-practice-and-impossible-non-violence/

--“Why 'Mutual Aid'? – social solidarity, not charity” - Matthew Whitley, 2020: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/why-mutual-aid-social-solidarity-not-charity/

Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Jennifer Scuro discuss Richard’s recent book The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, published by AK Press in December.

We discuss communism and love as an experience and a practice, of both commitment and devotion, towards new valuations beyond exchange. We think about forms-of-life versus forms-of-governance, and the role of the “precarious commune” and Gemeinwesen in our conceptualization of a communism of love beyond capitalism. We talk about contemporary revolts, and the need for revolutionary alternatives to “revolution”. And we use the framework of critical disability studies to talk about attention, care, and labor, and how our relationships of love are currently valued.

--"Love: a counterpower to capital worthy of its name" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://roarmag.org/essays/communism-of-love-gilman-opalsky/

--"The Communist Secret of Love" - Richard Gilman-Opalsky, 2021: https://illwill.com/the-communist-secret-of-love

--"The Eternal Return of Revolt: A Conversation with Richard Gilman-Opalsky - 2020: https://illwill.com/the-eternal-return-of-revolt

Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He is the author of six books, including Specters of Revolt, Precarious Communism and Spectacular Capitalism. Dr. Gilman-Opalsky’s work explores the powers of everyday people, particularly those typically regarded as powerless. He challenges the idea that politics is solely the business of the professional political class, and highlights how impoverished and marginalized people participate in changing the world in the most important ways.

Jennifer Scuro, Ph.D. (she/her) is author of The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lexington Books, 2017). She recently was interviewed for Shelley Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability, and is working on a series of video interviews with Monica Vilhauer, Rogue Philosophers, discussing practical philosophy, philosophical counseling, and public philosophy.

Kazembe Balagun joins Malek and Matt to discuss Raoul Peck’s new 4-part film on HBO, Exterminate All the Brutes. We discuss recent Hollywood dramatization and the visualization of abstract political concepts, as well as decolonial thought, media, and art in the 21st century. How do we confront the ghosts of the past, and where do we find hope and meaning when politics has failed us? How can we face the unimaginable and unspeakable horrors of European violence of the last 500 years without mystifying this reality? How do we divorce the archaeology of humanism from techniques of dehumanization, and how are we to understand the global adoption of these techniques in the 21st century? Where do we locate our own hearts of darkness, and what excavations are we called to do while living within the everydayness of American capitalism? How do you contribute a revolutionary analysis when there’s not a revolutionary organizational form to make sense of it? How can we decenter whiteness as we reconstitute what it means to be a human being, looking to friendship and solidarity for the development of a new common language?

--"Set It Off: The Current Uprising is a Chance to Reset American History" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://rosalux.nyc/the-current-uprising/

--"What We Learned in the Trump Era" - Kazembe Balagun, 2020: https://indypendent.org/2020/12/what-we-learned-in-the-trump-era/

--“Towards a Syrian ‘Politics of Life’” - Malek Rasamny, 2020:

https://www.aljumhuriya.net/en/content/towards-syrian-“politics-life”

--"The Revolution Post-Explosion" - Malek Rasamny, 2020: https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-revolution-post-explosion/

--Essential Reading & Viewing - Raoul Peck, 2021: https://www.hbo.com/exterminate-all-the-brutes/raoul-peck-essential-reading-films

--“Exterminate All the Brutes” Syllabus: https://www.hbo.com/content/dam/hbodata/documentaries/exterminate-all-brutes/resources/eatb-syllabus-210412.pdf

Kazembe Balagun is a writer/cultural historian/activist, and former program director of the Brecht Forum and member of the Red Channels Collective.

We’re joined by friends Amin and Georgia as we approach the 10-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Together we discuss the general assembly as a module, cultivating spaces of freedom and experimentation, the performance of knowing, not knowing, and unknowing, the experience of threatening power, the accident and rupture, practicing the politics of life, and we remember David Graeber and the many we've lost.

--"The genuine does not exist: Interview with Georgia Sagri" - Apostolos Vasilopoulos, South as a State of Mind, 2012: https://southasastateofmind.com/article/genuine-not-exist/

--"Interview: Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain - MTL Collective" - Annabelle Boissier, Arts Cabinet, 2017: https://www.artscabinet.org/repository/interview-nitasha-dhillon-and-amin-husain-mtl-collective

Amin Husain is a New York-based artist and organizer who has taught courses on art, activism, and strategic use of media. With Nitasha Dhillon, Amin is a co-founder of Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy movement-generated theory magazine; MTL, a collective that combines theory, research, aesthetics, and organizing in its art practice; Direct Action Front for Palestine; and, most recently, Decolonize This Place. He is directing and producing an experimental documentary film about land, life and liberation in occupied Palestine titled, On This Land.

Georgia Sagri’s practice is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles on issues of autonomy, empowerment and self-organisation. From 1997 to 2001 she was a member of Void Network, a cultural, political and philosophical collective operating in Athens. In 2011 she was one of the main organisers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Since 2013 she has been a member of the assembly of the Embros Theatre Occupation, and in 2014 she initiated Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-public cultural space in the heart of Athens. She is professor of performance at the Athens School of Fine Arts. Her book Ίαση: Stage of Recovery will be published by Divided Publishing.

For the third episode in our series of podcasts on Adam Curtis's Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, Amogh and Matt joined The Antifada's Andy, Jamie, and Sean.

We continued discussing historical storytelling and the contemporary development of a worldview. How can Curtis's diagnostic fragments transform into political overcoming? How do we situate ourselves while caught between liberalism and fascism, the human and AI, objective conditions and subjective formation, postmodernism and anti-communism, charisma and belief?

The Antifada: https://www.patreon.com/theantifada

--"'You could be a cult leader': Diane Morgan and Adam Curtis on Brexit, Trump and his new series" - Simon Usborne: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/feb/06/you-could-be-a-cult-leader-diane-morgan-and-adam-curtis-on-brexit-trump-and-his-new-series

--"Adam Curtis on Our Troubled Times, TikTok and Taking Back the Internet" - Thomas Gorton: https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/13105/adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-new-documentary-series-2021

--"What Does The Future Hold? An Interview With Adam Curtis" - Michael J. Brooks: https://thequietus.com/articles/29558-film-adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-interview

--"A Conversation with Filmmaker Adam Curtis on Power, Technology and How Ideas Get Into People's Heads" - Billy Perrigo: https://time.com/5941744/adam-curtis-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/

Last week Adam Curtis released a new 6-part film series, Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. In this discussion, Amogh, Malek, and Matt begin to unpack and respond to the series, asking what Curtis means in aiming to provide an “emotional” history? What are the subterranean forces that animate ideological/social/political movements and their figure-heads? What does it mean to rid ourselves of the past, and is that even possible? How does Curtis’s novelistic approach serve or confuse our understanding of the ambitious historical and political claims of his work, and what if any are the lessons to be taken away? Does Curtis think that all revolutionary movements are doomed to fail? Are these failures written into the movements from the start, or are they the result of the machinations of external powers? What is the idea of ‘power’ that he constantly invokes and where does it lie?

--“Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thd5bBUNEw8 (trailer) / https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/ (series)
--“Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis”  (2021): https://www.vice.com/en/article/4ad8db/adam-curtis-charlie-brooker-cant-get-you-out-of-my-head

--“Adam Curtis: Social media is a scam” - Tom Hodgkinson (2018): https://www.idler.co.uk/article/adam-curtis-social-media-is-a-scam/

It's the final day of our fundraiser! Thanks again for everyone's contributions, we appreciate any and all donations to keep our volunteer-run space and project going, now in year 8. https://www.gofundme.com/f/woodbine-moving-fundraiser

This Thursday, February 11th, English filmmaker Adam Curtis will release a new 6-part film series, Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World. In anticipation, Amogh, Malek, and Matt discuss the work and project of Adam Curtis, particularly his most recent film, HyperNormalisation (2016).

In our conversation we touch on Adam Curtis’ stated topic area, his methodology, and its benefits and costs. We discuss Curtis’s vision of politics as ideology vs. politics as system management, and try to sketch a potential history of this division. We look at the reification of the constructed and/or consumerist individual as a political class in the age of social media, as well as both the useful and unuseful ways of framing Curtis’s theories of history and power. What does Curtis mean when he accuses contemporary radicals of ‘not having a coherent vision of the future’? Is his deep pessimism about contemporary political movements warranted? Four years later, how do we reflect on Curtis’s portrayals of Donald Trump, politics in the Middle East, and social life on cyberspace?

--Can't Get You Out Of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021, trailer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thd5bBUNEw8

--HyperNormalisation (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU

--”And then the Strangest Thing Happened” - Owen Hatherley, 2017: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/and-then-the-strangest-thing-happened/

Malek Rasamny is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He is the co-founder of the LERFE space and co-producer of “The Native and the Refugee '' project. He is currently a Master’s student in the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris where he is specializing in religion and society.

Amogh Sahu is a PhD student in Philosophy at Columbia University. He works on social and political philosophy, with a special emphasis on the significance of capitalism in the work of the early Frankfurt School.

This is the last week of Woodbine's fundraiser! With our community's support and generosity we have raised more than $24,000, but we still hope to reach our goal of $30k! We want to continue renovations on our new space, including rewiring our electrical system and redoing the bathrooms, as we keep up with rent and utilities during this extended pandemic. We can't wait to be able to resume our regular calendar of free events, workshops, and community dinners soon! Please contribute what you can, and help spread the word! https://www.gofundme.com/f/woodbine-moving-fundraiser

In this interview, Haris discusses the state’s attack on the Idomeni border camp, the forced relocation of migrants to state run detention c

In this interview, Haris discusses the state’s attack on the Idomeni border camp, the forced relocation of migrants to state run detention centers in the periphery of the city exposing individuals to the most toxic conditions, and efforts by Thessaloniki anti-authoritarian struggles to work with migrants to recuperate housing within the city center itself. Haris also distinguishes squatting in Thessaloniki versus Athens’ Exarchia district. He concludes by discussing the churches and Syriza’s demolition of migrant housing located on church property. We continue the conversation exploring how Greek anti-authoritarian encounters with migrant networks transformed understandings around the commons. In particular, not only creating safe spaces offering all the basic amenities, but spaces of trust and deepening social relations. We then discuss the future of migrant housing squats and self-run camps, the corruption of the refugee aid industry, and the emergence so called “internal” borders within the Greek state restricting movement for migrants refusing to claim asylum within island detention centers.

Intro/Outro Song: Killah P — Zoria

This episode was edited by Joe Kujawa.

Overworked? Underpaid? And still get heat from the bosses that you should be doing more with less cause you’re serving the most vulnerable?

Overworked? Underpaid? And still get heat from the bosses that you should be doing more with less cause you’re serving the most vulnerable? Even clinics and nonprofits claiming the most progressive intentions inherit some of the most exploitative practices against their workers. In this episode, we speak with a healthcare worker who linked up with her fellow docs, nurses, and administrators to resist union busting tactics by their bosses and promote fairer conditions in an LGBT clinic. We also talk with our guest about how she got involved with social justice work before entering medical school and where she is now following the dramatic unionizing effort.

This episode was edited by Joe Kujawa.

The physical and psychological impact of incarceration in Germany is shocking, resulting in suicides and other sequelae. In this interview w

The physical and psychological impact of incarceration in Germany is shocking, resulting in suicides and other sequelae. In this interview with an editor of the Gefangenen Magazine, we learn about the prison abolition struggle in Germany and how German activists are joining with migrant collectives to create mutual aid networks, political actions, and other strategies in response.

This episode was edited by Joe Kujawa.

Links: https://themastproject.wordpress.com/ http://www.contraceptionjournal.org/article/S0010-7824(17)30475-4/fulltext https://www.aclu.org

Links:

• https://themastproject.wordpress.com/

• http://www.contraceptionjournal.org/article/S0010-7824(17)30475-4/fulltext

• https://www.aclu.org/other/whats-wrong-fetal-rights

• https://www.listennotes.com/e/7a66b23064f84979aafc93784e3f7152/iii-b-kvelertak-ii-fetal-protection-laws-and-the-consequences-of-health-injustice/]

This episode was edited by Joe Kujawa.

Mental health affects millions of people – 1 in 5 Americans according to some estimates, with half of them not receiving any treatment. Part

Mental health affects millions of people – 1 in 5 Americans according to some estimates, with half of them not receiving any treatment. Part of the problem might be that we see the mind as orderly and contained, when really the mind seems to be characterized by disorder. Some indigenous cultures view 'insane' as synonymous with shamanic capabilities. Kids are medicated because they can't sit in class, even though stillness is antithetical to the imaginative, dynamic, reactive world children inhabit.

In this episode, Frank and Babak talk to their friend and comrade Leijia about personal experiences of mental health, and how considerations of mental health can increase our collective capacity.

Closing Poem: We All Conspire by Mario Benedetti

Reference links:
We are all very anxious

This episode was edited by Joe Kujawa.

This episode was produced by Joe Kujawa & Yvette Hall in Brooklyn, NY. Reference links: When Wellness is a Dirty Word The Wellness Syndr

This episode was produced by Joe Kujawa & Yvette Hall in Brooklyn, NY.

Reference links:
When Wellness is a Dirty Word
The Wellness Syndrom
Life Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
How Wellness Became an Epidemic
Class Combat
Self as Other: Reflections on Selfcare

Closing Poem "Karma" by award winning poet, Dominique Christina

This episode was produced by Joe Kujawa & Yvette Hall in Brooklyn, NY.

This episode was produced by Yvette Hall in Brooklyn, NY.

For this week's podcast we're joined by George Katsiaficas, author of the classic texts The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (1987) and The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (1997), as well as the more recent collections Gen Z Makes History (2025) and Eros and Revolution (2024).

We discuss his idea of the eros effect and what we can learn from following global waves of uprisings. We think together about where both radical consciousness and self-organization comes from, as well as the danger of a Thanatos effect, where we see a contagion of confusion, depression, and nihilism.

LINKS:

--Gen Z Makes History: https://www.eroseffect.com/gen-z-makes-history

--George Katsiaficas's Website: https://www.eroseffect.com/

George Katsiaficas is a social theorist who is known for his many writings on social movements, 1968, and Asian uprisings. A longtime activist for peace and justice, he was a student of Herbert Marcuse. Together with Kathleen Cleaver, he coedited Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. He was a professor of humanities and sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston for more than three decades. Katsiaficas is a militant researcher, who lives amongst and collaborates with the people he writes about and sees his research as advancing global activism, not simply describing or analyzing it.

For this week's episode, Seth Wheeler joins Matt and Tony Iantosca to discuss his work as an archivist, writer, and organizer of creative autonomy in London.

We talk about how social movements retain and transmit historical memory; the contemporary nostalgia for the party form and trade unionism; and the role counterculture plays in cultivating radical subjectivities.

READINGS:

--"A Thousand Little Machines" - Jamila Squire & Seth Wheeler, 2024: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/593806/a-thousand-little-machines

--"Against The Grain: Archiving anarcho-punk" - Seth Wheeler, 2025: https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/collateral-damage/against-the-grain-archiving-anarcho-punk

--"No Job, No Rent: I Was a Full-Time Militant in the Nineties" - Seth Wheeler, 2023: https://novaramedia.com/2023/05/17/no-job-no-rent-i-was-a-full-time-militant-in-the-nineties/

--"Food Price Hikes, Social Composition and Auto-Reduction" - Seth Wheeler & Jamila Squire, 2023: https://notesfrombelow.org/article/food-price-hikes-social-composition-and-auto-reduc

Seth Wheeler sits on the editorial board of agit press, a small DIY publishing house dedicated to learning from the history of 'working class autonomy'. Seth volunteers his time at the MayDay Rooms, an archive and organising space for social movements and experimental cultures based in London, where he is currently building a dedicated archive of anarcho-punk. He often writes about the history of autonomy as a political current, with a strong focus on culture as a site of radical potential and as a mode of class struggle.

Tony Iantosca is a writer, researcher, and poet who lives and works in Brooklyn.

Agit Press: https://www.agitpress.net/

MayDay Rooms: https://maydayrooms.org/

In and Against the State: https://www.plutobooks.com/product/in-and-against-the-state/

For this week's episode we discuss Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, which releases nationwide today. Anton, Malek, and Matt talk about Nolan's redemption arc, and defying the code of the gods and the social rituals of the guest/host relation.

READINGS:

--Odysseus as Artist - Paul Chan, 2017: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/odysseus-as-artist/

For this week's episode Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, joins Malek and Matt to discuss his new book Israel: What Went Wrong.

We talk about the comparative frameworks necessary to make sense of history, and the process through which Zionism became a state ideology. We hear about the decline of the Israeli left, and trace the various breaking points that should make the country's status quo untenable.

READINGS:

--"I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era." - Omer Bartov, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/israel-gaza-palestinians-genocide.html

--"The Judeo-Bolshevist Target" - Omer Bartov, 2026: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/07/23/the-judeo-bolshevist-target-jochen-hellbeck/

--"I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It." - Omer Bartov, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html

--A Land for All: https://www.2s1h.org/en

Omer Bartov is the author of many books, including Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past, and Genocide, the Holocaust, and Israel–Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.

For this week's episode, we discuss the State Department's recent report "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism", which was released three weeks ago.

Matt and Sam are joined by D, a lawyer with a wide-ranging practice in civil litigation and criminal defense, to talk about the political context the report is being released in, the myth-making operation its performing to influence both domestic and foreign policy, and the implications in its targeting of the National Lawyers Guild, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the People's Forum.

READINGS:

--"Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism" - The Department of State, 2026: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Cuba-Report.pdf

--"U.S. Squeezes Cuba Even as It Searches for a New Regime Leader" - Tyler PagerJulian E. Barnes and Frances Robles, 2026: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/us/politics/us-search-cuba-leader.html

--"Remarks at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism" - Scott Bessent, Christopher Landau, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, 2026: https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/07/remarks-at-the-opening-of-the-ministerial-on-the-resurgence-of-political-terrorism

--"Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence" - Donald J. Trump, 2025: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/countering-domestic-terrorism-and-organized-political-violence/

For this week's episode Bhaskar Sunkara joins Amogh and Matt to discuss his new book The Blueprint: How Socialism Can Work in the Real World, co-written with Mike Beggs and Ben Burgis.

We talk about the now decade-long arc of millennial socialism, and the role of the media ecology that Bhaskar helped develop. We ask him to elaborate on the book's position on markets and exploitation within a socialist economy. We consider the relationship between the left-populist tactics of the new wave of DSA-backed candidates, alongside the broader program of building a class conscious social base.

READINGS:

--"Reforming Capitalism Is Not Enough" - Bhaskar Sunkara, 2026: https://jacobin.com/2026/06/socialism-social-democracy-class-rupture

--"Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should run for president" - Bhaskar Sunkara, 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/21/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-for-president

--"Zohran Needs to Create Popular Assemblies" - Gabriel Hetland & Bhaskar Sunkara, 2025: https://jacobin.com/2025/12/mamdani-popular-assemblies-democratic-socialism

Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of The Nation magazine, founder and editorial director of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist who has published more than two hundred articles and essays about politics in outlets like the New York Times, The Nation, the Washington Post, and Le Monde.