In 1906, two men recently released from a Tsarist prison started collecting boots, linen, and clothing for comrades still being marched into Siberian exile. Harry Weinstein and B. Yelin had no organization behind them yet, no funding, no headquarters. They had a list of names of people who were cold, and a decision that those people were not going to be forgotten just because the state had put them somewhere designed to make forgetting easy.

From that first list of names, the Anarchist Black Cross's story reaches Nestor Makhno's Ukraine and Bolshevik repression, then Giuseppe Pinelli, an ABC member killed after three days of police interrogation in Milan, and Kotoku Shusui, executed in Japan in 1911 despite an urgent appeal London anarchists sent within weeks of his arrest. From there it carries through Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal, written from a federal prison cell, that eventually became the Anarchist Black Cross Federation; Angela Davis, who was never an anarchist but faced the same state claim this episode is about; and Mariame Kaba's work with criminalised survivors in Chicago today.

In the present, Mapuche political prisoners in Chile and Anarchist Black Cross Belarus are still doing exactly what Weinstein and Yelin started in 1906: tracking names, raising money, refusing to let a government's prisoners become a government's secret.

Further reading: Matthew Hart, "Yelensky's Fable: A History of the Anarchist Black Cross" — available via libcom.org Mariame Kaba, We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021) Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kate Sharpley Library, "Urgent Appeal" (Freedom Group, London, 1910) — katesharpleylibrary.net Global Nonviolent Action Database, "Mapuche prisoners hunger strike for law reform, Chile, 2010" — nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu

Tags: Anarchist Black Cross, prison solidarity, Białystok, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Giuseppe Pinelli, Kotoku Shusui, High Treason Incident, Mapuche prisoners, Chile, ABC Belarus, Ojore Lutalo, abolition, anarchism

Show notes: Prison Solidarity and the Anarchist Black Cross A Thousand Small Fires — Season 2, Episode 8

The Anarchist Black Cross started in 1906 as two men in Białystok collecting boots and letters for comrades marched into Siberian exile, and it's still running today — through fascist Italy, a failed appeal in Japan, a Marin County courtroom, and present-day Chile and Belarus, asking what solidarity actually costs the people who practice it.

In this episode:

• Harry Weinstein, B. Yelin, and the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross in 1906
• The 1919 renaming, Nestor Makhno's Ukraine, and Bolshevik repression
• Giuseppe Pinelli, the Piazza Fontana bombing, and Italy's strategy of tension
• The Kotoku Shusui case and the London appeal that couldn't stop an execution
• Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin's 1979 proposal and the Anarchist Black Cross Federation
• Angela Davis, the Soledad Brothers, and the Marin County courthouse takeover
• Mariame Kaba, Survived and Punished, and criminalised survivors
• Mapuche political prisoners and the 2010 Chilean hunger strike
• Anarchist Black Cross Belarus and the Black Nightingales

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On May 1, 1886, roughly three hundred thousand workers across the United States walked off their jobs at once, demanding an eight-hour day nobody had granted them. No court had ruled in their favor. They simply stopped, together, and dared their employers to run without them. Emma Goldman put the theory behind it into words a generation later: anarchism, she wrote, stands for direct action.

That argument runs from Haymarket through Lucy Parsons and the founding of the IWW, into the Flint sit-down strike, where a twenty-three-year-old organiser named Genora Johnson built the Women's Emergency Brigade out of the wives and sisters of the men occupying the plants. From there it moves to the 1973 Durban strikes, illegal under apartheid, that built independent Black trade unionism from nothing; ACT UP's Sell Wellcome action, which cut the price of AZT within days; and the Chipko movement, where women in the Indian Himalayas wrapped their arms around trees a logging company had already been given permission to fell.

The harder question direct action never fully answers gets asked too: once a movement rejects a single leader who gets to call the shots, who decides what counts as legitimate action at all? Occupy Wall Street lived that argument out loud, in real time, with no chairperson to settle it either way.

Further reading: Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910) — available via The Anarchist Library and Project Gutenberg Jacqueline Jones, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons (Basic Books, 2017) Genora Johnson Dollinger, oral history "Striking Flint" — Marxists Internet Archive / historyisaweapon.com Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, "The 1973 Durban Strikes: Building Popular Democratic Power in South Africa" — thetricontinental.org Mark Bray, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street (Zero Books, 2013)

Tags: direct action, IWW, Lucy Parsons, Haymarket, Flint sit-down strike, Genora Johnson, Durban strikes, Chipko movement, ACT UP, Food Not Bombs, MST, Occupy Wall Street, diversity of tactics, anarchism

Show notes: Direct Action Gets the Goods. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 7

One tactic, one argument, four continents: from the eight-hour-day strike of 1886 through a stock exchange balcony chained shut in 1989 to land and forests defended by force of bodies. What do these very different fights have in common, and the harder question underneath: who decides what counts as legitimate action once no one's in charge?

In this episode:

• Lucy Parsons, the IWW, and "direct action gets the goods"
• The Flint sit-down strike and Genora Johnson's Women's Emergency Brigade
• The 1973 Durban strikes and the birth of independent Black trade unionism
• ACT UP's Sell Wellcome action and the price of AZT
• Food Not Bombs — a thousand chapters, sixty countries, one refusal to stop
• The MST's land occupations and Paulo Freire's literacy campaigns
• The Chipko movement and Gaura Devi's stand in Reni
• Occupy Wall Street, Mark Bray, and the diversity-of-tactics debate that never resolved

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.