Charlotte Social Equality: Recent Episodes
We are honored to share an interview we did in early May with the great Leon Rosselson, who wrote the song “The Voice That Lives Inside You” which we use as our opening and closing theme music on this show. He is a prolific singer and songwriter in the UK. At 85 years old, he has been writing songs for more than 50 years and is still doing gigs! His songs are rousing, witty, incisive, and poetic. He is perhaps most well known for the song “The World Turned Upside Down” performed by Billy Bragg in 1985. We’ve interspersed some relevant excerpts of his songs here and there throughout the interview. We talked about music, politics, and more. We hope you enjoy!
Also see his website and blog, where you’ll find his writings on some of the topics we discussed, and more.
Part 2 of our two part interview with Scott Nicholas Nappalos about his new book, Emergence and Anarchism: A Philosophy of Power, Action, and Liberation. Nicholas is a nurse located in Miami Florida, and has written dozens of essays addressing questions of political strategy. His widely read works have been published by various radical outlets, and some of you might remember him as one of the editors of Recomposition, which was a small online publication of worker stories, history, and organizing. In this candid and thoughtful two-part interview, Nicholas questions old assumptions and offers some compelling new ways of thinking about social change, drawing from a wide array of practical experiences and studies.
You can read more about the strike that Nicholas discussed here.
To purchase a hard copy of the book from AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/emergence-and-anarchism.html
To download the ebook: https://libcom.org/library/emergence-anarchism-philosophy-power-action-liberation
Part 1 of our latest podcast episode! Will spoke on the phone with Scott Nicholas Nappalos about his new book, Emergence and Anarchism: A Philosophy of Power, Action, and Liberation. Nicholas is a nurse located in Miami Florida, and has written dozens of essays addressing questions of political strategy. His widely read works have been published by various radical outlets, and some of you might remember him as one of the editors of Recomposition, which was a small online publication of worker stories, history, and organizing. In this candid and thoughtful two-part interview, Nicholas questions old assumptions and offers some compelling new ways of thinking about social change, drawing from a wide array of practical experiences and studies.
You can read more about the strike that Nicholas discussed here.
To purchase a hard copy of the book from AK Press: https://www.akpress.org/emergence-and-anarchism.html
To download the ebook: https://libcom.org/library/emergence-anarchism-philosophy-power-action-liberation
On Thursday March 8th we talked across the Atlantic with Moroccan film maker and anarchist Nadir Bouhmouch. We discussed his new film Amussu, a documentary film he describes as an “experiment in cinema from below” made with the indigenous people of Imider, Morocco who have been camped since 2011 protesting Africa’s largest silver mine. We also covered topics including the colonial history of Morocco, the Spanish revolution, anarchism, as well as film and art more generally. In spite of my lack of preparation and poorly worded questions he gave a fantastic interview and I really enjoyed our discussion, and I have a lot more questions I didn’t get a chance to ask. The film has just premiered and the trailer is absolutely beautiful, if you are interested in organizing a screening in your area we recommend that you stay tuned to the Facebook page.
Here is an excerpt from a beautiful article Nadir wrote about Amussu:
“Agraw is the tribal general assembly. It is the Amazigh mode of autonomous and democratic governance par excellence. Since 2011, Agraw has been revived and revised for the 21st century. It is a model for us, and a way of life for hundreds in Imider who have constructed power from below. As a result of the horizontal social relations established by the Movement, one finds in Imider a conscious community where everyone is armed with the word. Here, the old woman who can not read or the young high school dropout have one finger on the pulse of the earth, and the other on their stomachs. Spoken between two angry breaths or after a resilient sigh, their word is heavier than ink and more lucid than a green screen. But their word is not limited to the fiery speeches of tattooed mothers or revolted youth during Agraw. Their word is stretched, shortened, given rhythm, floated on a melody, or marked by a bendir drum. For the word of Imider is also its Izli (poetry), sung on the back of a pick-up, chanted as a slogan, called out from across the mountain or carried across wedding ceremonies throughout the southeast. As one Ait Atta proverb goes: “Tar Izli, Urtamu” — an event without its poem, is an event which never happened. “Amussu” is just another of Imider’s many poems, a small collection of its infinite words.”
In our first podcast episode, Will talks with Alex about the campaign at UNCC for an LGBTQ+ center. Alex provides an insightful discussion of some lessons from the campaign, the political economy of UNCC and higher education, a brief history of neoliberalism, and lessons of radical organizing more generally. You can find some of his writings about this topic here: https://auditinguncc.wordpress.com/