The Ex-Worker

The revolutionary social experiments in the Kurdish territories of northeastern Syria remain under attack. As SDF forces mount fierce resistance in Sêre Kaniyê and waves of outraged protest sweep the world, the news in recent days has been full of the “ceasefire” negotiated by Turkey and US Vice President Pence. But what is really going on? And why is it so important to aspiring revolutionaries around the world? In Episode 68 of The Ex-Worker, we begin by deconstructing this so-called ceasefire, drawing on an account and analysis shared by anarchist volunteer currently in the war zone. But the bulk of this episode consists of an in-depth interview with an anarchist from the US who participated in a solidarity education delegation in Rojava this summer. She offers detailed insights into daily life amidst revolution and war, the council system and other social and political institutions, the role of military veterans and martyrs in public life, processes for absorbing criticisms and revising revolutionary prax

As the crisis in Rojava deepens and political turmoil spreads across the world, it’s critical for us to understand how we got here. Who exactly are the Kurds, and why have so many thousands of them been willing to risk their lives fighting against ISIS and to defend their autonomy? What can we learn from their struggle? In this episode, we examine the historical background to today’s conflict by looking at the decades of militant Kurdish resistance that led up to the formation of the autonomous cantons of Rojava. You’ll hear an audio version of CrimethInc.’s detailed 2015 essay “Understanding the Kurdish Resistance: A Historical Overview and Eyewitness Report,” which tracks the emergence of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) and its conflicts with Turkish nationalism, waves of insurgency and repression, the evolution of Kurdish radical thought, the Revolutionary Patriotic Youth Movement, the Gezi Park uprising in Istanbul, the siege of Kobane, and lots more. To bring you up to date on developments since then, w

An urgent crisis is unfolding in northern Syria, with implications for global geopolitics and revolutionary possibilities for years to come. In response to US troop withdrawal and a green light from President Trump, the Turkish military has invaded Rojava, an autonomous Kurdish region within the borders of Syria, killing hundreds and displacing over 100,000 so far. Activists around the world have condemned the invasion as a boon to ISIS, a prelude to ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish population, and an effort to destroy an important experiment in self-organization by an increasingly fascist regime. The Kurdish-led Syrian Defense Forces have just struck a deal with the regime of Bashar al-Assad to bring Russian-backed Syrian government troops into Rojava in hopes of halting the Turkish advance. The experiments in autonomy and democratic confederalism enacted in the cantons of Rojava have been inspiring to many anarchists; but the combination of the dire threat of annihilation by the Turkish military and the pain

On August 26th, riot police under orders from the newly elected right-wing government stormed and evicted four squatted social centers in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, in a serious attack on both precarious migrants and the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements. In response, Greek anarchists have organized assemblies and demonstrations, while solidarity efforts have poured out from across the world. Both shaken and inspired by these events, the Ex-Worker podcast has emerged from hibernation to ask anarchists in Exarchia what’s going on and what needs to be done. This episode explores the situation in Exarchia through three interviews with anarchist residents of the renowned radical neighborhood. The first is an audio version of “The New War on Immigrants and Anarchists in Greece,” published on the CrimethInc. blog on August 28th, which gives an in-depth analysis of the evictions with historical context and insight into the dynamics of the Greek anarchist movement, supplemented by an excer

Welcome to Episode 11, the final installment of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This episode concludes the book with personal reflections about the author’s own journey in and out of the desert and the unavoidable links that bind all of us across all borders. To become a real force for change, those who would act in solidarity must overcome the limits of privilege politics and guilt, understanding our activities as fighting for our own lives and dismantling the illusion of separation between ourselves and others. What links migrants, solidarity workers, and all people struggling to survive amidst the disorienting nightmare of postmodern civilization is the pursuit of dignity—a sentiment beautifully expressed in a message sent by Rachel Corrie, an American solidarity worker in occupied Palestine, to her mother in 2003 just weeks before she was murdered by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to stop a home demolition.

Welcome to Episode 10 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. Over the past two months, we’ve explored the ins and outs of irregular migration across the US/Mexico border. Where does it leave us? As the crises produced by climate change and economic exploitations intensify across the world, revolutions turn in to wars, which beget tyranny, which in turn provoke revolutions. In this climate of escalating chaos, what can we do? This episode explores the meaning of revolution in the twenty-first century, looking at the forms it has taken and assessing what it would take to defend it today. The Zapatista struggle offers one of the most durable and promising models of autonomy we’ve seen in recent decades—yet the limits it has encountered point towards unavoidable contradictions facing those who wish to avoid warfare and bloodshed but also cannot defend their achievements against remorseless foes without the force of arms. A harr

Welcome to Episode 9 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. The border doesn’t end at the border: the violent regime of citizenship constrains and ruins lives throughout the north, as a chilling story of a narrow escape from death makes clear. Yet this ongoing migration constitutes, against all odds, a powerful form of resistance that is changing the United States in unpredictable ways. This installment begins to explore what it might take to actually end death in the desert—which would also mean dismantling the global systems of exploitation, colonialism, white supremacy, and state power that lie at its roots. We can take inspiration and strategic guidance from some of the stories that appear in this episode, ranging from an extraordinary migrant whose ingenuity and determination helped him to survive multiple crossings against unthinkable odds to a team of civil disobedience activists whose simple action managed to briefl

Welcome to Episode 8 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This installment continues to explore the reality of border policy by taking a closer look at the agency that enforces it, describing the atrocities that its agents perpetrate and their mindsets to justify it. The Border Patrol is merely one of the largest and most vicious players in a game that brings lucrative profits to a host of players on both sides of the border, at the expense of the vulnerable migrants who are driven into the desert. The episode concludes with a discussion of the environmental landscape of the desert itself and a poignant reflection on its harsh beauty, envisioning the healing of the land when one day it will no longer be scarred by borders. {May 22, 2019}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Introduction {0:01} Story #1: Fleeing the Dogs {0:46} Assata Shakur: On Morality and Power {4:32} The Border Patrol {4:49} Story #2: The H

Welcome to Episode 7 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. The Border Patrol, with its swollen budget and lavish technologies, clearly has the technical capacity to stop most, if not all, traffic across the border, yet their behavior seems to be at odds with their stated objective. This installment investigates the actual goal of border policy—which is not to end “illegal immigration,” but to control and manage it. While preventing this migration altogether would have catastrophic effects on the US economy, using selective enforcement to funnel traffic into increasingly remote areas while militarizing and hyper-policing certain areas maintains the labor supply while ratcheting up the profits to be made at every step in the process. A variety of stories—some heartbreaking, some hilarious—illustrate how this approach to enforcement impacts the lives of everyday people as they attempt to travel north into the United States. T

Welcome to Episode 6 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This installment investigates the three-tiered border and the process of crossing it, focusing on the places where the most deaths occur—southern Arizona and South Texas. The story of Arivaca, a small community of ranchers and hippies, shows how state arrogance and vigilante brutality turned the population towards solidarity with migrants. The complex politics of the Tohono O’odham reservation at Komkch’ed e Wah ‘osithk (Sells) reflect the fraught relationship between migration, colonialism, and the challenges facing indigenous communities today. The barren deserts and army base lands around Ajo mark some of the most grim and hazardous terrain of the entire border, while the recent surge in deaths around Falfurrias indicates the urgent need for further solidarity. Explanation of the actual mechanics of crossing the border, and the terrible perils faced by vulnerabl

Happy May Day, everyone! Welcome to Episode 5 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. Having discussed the political and economic forces that drive migration north, this week’s installment examines how people get from Central America to the US/Mexico border. The routes vary in risk and cost, and are stratified depending on a traveler’s wealth and nationality, from navigating the expensive and infuriating process of attempting to secure a visa to braving La Bestia, the notoriously dangerous freight trains heading north. Some hazard the northeastern route to Reynosa through Zetas cartel territory, while many traverse the northwestern route to Altar through Sinaloa cartel lands and towards the Sonoran desert. The “unaccompanied minors crisis” of 2013–2014 serves as a case study for how the machinations of powerful states, cartels, and corporations can impact the lives of migrants. Understanding the dynamics of border crossing r

Welcome to Episode 4 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This week’s installment continues the previous episode’s exploration of the conditions south of the border that drive migration north by surveying the situation in the three countries of the “Northern Triangle.” Guatemala’s malnourished, heavily indigenous population languishes in poverty under oligarchic rule, the legacy of centuries of colonialism and a devastating civil war. Our narrator analyzes the numerous problems plaguing the country and examines the unfinished struggle for freedom and dignity that prompted the war, including its impact on global revolutionary imagination through its influence on the Zapatistas. The horrifying levels of violence in El Salvador trace their roots both to economic pressures and to US support for the former reactionary military regime during a bloody civil war. The section concludes with a hair-raising anecdote about the guerri

Welcome to Episode 3 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This installment begins exploring the conditions south of the border that drive migration north by exploring the recent history and economy of Mexico. As NAFTA’s “free trade” policies impoverished and displaced millions, border militarization altered previous patterns of seasonal migration and established a permanent undocumented underclass of millions in the United States. The author cuts through myths around the “drug war,” helping to explain the complex web of players from the Sinaloa and Zetas cartels to the Mexican state and the social movements that contest them both—and how the situation might be transformed, if US drug and immigration policies changed. The episode concludes with an inspiring story of the determined and colorful resistance to state violence by the community of San Salvador Atenco. This episode provides a brief introduction to the fierce, man

Welcome to Episode 2 of No Wall They Can Build, the Ex-Worker Podcast’s serialized audiobook exploring borders and migration across North America. This installment continues last week’s introduction by Defining Terms—just what do we mean by the border, migrants, refugees, solidarity workers, and other key phrases? To begin the long section describing movement From South to North, The Aftermath lays out an unflinching view of the 500-year history of colonization, slavery, and genocide on which today’s capitalist economy and border regimes are based, followed by a harrowing tale of survival by a desert migrant. The Travelers lays out the forces pushing migrants from Mexico and the Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) north towards the United States, illustrating the economics of the situation through a moving story in which migrants and solidarity workers work out the mathematics of international exploitation together. This chapter demystifies the basic dynamics at play in North American mig

The Ex-Worker Podcast Collective is kicking off the serialized release of our first full audiobook, No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America. We’ve divided this riveting first person account of life and death in the borderlands into eleven chapters, and over the next three months, we’ll be releasing them in weekly installments each Wednesday. Today, you’ll hear Episode 1: Introduction, which describes how the book was written by a solidarity worker along the US/Mexico border over years of trials and tribulations, and lays out a basic framework for understanding the global apartheid enforced by the border regime. You’ll hear a heartbreaking story about the brutality of migrant detention, and an inspiring one about surviving the journey north against all odds. This episode sets the stage for the in-depth analysis and longer stories of the chapters to come. {April 3, 2019}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Introducing the Border {0:01} Title and Front Matter {1

The Ex-Worker is back! Over the next three months, we will be releasing an audio version of CrimethInc.’s 2018 book, No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration in North America, divided into eleven episodes released every week. In this short episode, we reflect on the evolution of the Ex-Worker podcast as a project, and set the scene for the forthcoming audiobook. In the year and a half since the book was released, much attention has focused on the US/Mexico border, and Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric have prompted widespread resistance. However, the crisis of raids, family separations, inhumane detention, and death and disappearance in the borderlands was in full swing during the Obama administration, and has roots stretching far back in the history of the United States. To provide context for what’s been going on around the border since the book was published, a volunteer from the solidarity group No More Deaths joins us to talk about changes and continuities between the Obama a

It’s our last episode of the season! We have a big report on the Yellow Vests movement in France, and how it shows the need to move beyond the loyal opposition of centrism versus fascism. We say fuck Thanksgiving some, fuck the border a lot, fuck border patrol even more, fuck the government, fuck pipelines, fuck Wal-Mart, but thanks so much to all our wonderful listeners. Stay anarchy. {November 28, 2018}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Intro {0:00} Headlines {0:48} Fuck Thanksgiving {5:00} Migrant caravan news and interview {7:20} Yellow Vests movement—fuck “apoliticism,” fuck centrism, fuck fascism {21:10} Repression roundup {28:00} Next Week’s News {35:30} Download 29:30 minutes long version. Upcoming events/demos/etc: November 30: Mass demonstrations against the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina. November 29 - December 2: Anarchist Book Fair in Umea, Sweden Until December 7: There is a call for autonomous actions against the Laval Migrant Prison being built in Laval, Que

In our second to last episode of 2018, we bring you reports from the anti-fascist counter-demonstrations against right-wing rallies in Philadelphia and Portland. We also bring you a humble, frank letter from anti-fascists who have recently been doxxed in North Carolina. Mutual Aid efforts—organized and spontaneous—are popping up in response to the Camp Fire and to defend the migrant caravan in Tijuana from nationalist haters. From coast to coast, climbers get up in trees and ontop of pipeline construction equipment to defend forests. In Chile, a wave of revolt has spread after the police murder of 14-year-old Mapuche villager Camilo Catrillanca. There is already anti-anarchist repression ahead of the G20 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. {November 21, 2018}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Intro {0:00} Headlines {0:55} Reports from anti-fascist rallies in Philadelphia and Portland {10:10} Anti-fascists speak out about being doxxed {15:10} Revolt in Chile after police murder Camilo Catrillanca

On the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, liberals and centrists are once more playing right into fascists’ hands. Our feature this episode is a reading of the recent CrimethInc. op-ed “Take Your Pick: Law or Freedom; How ‘Nobody Is above the Law’ Abets the Rise of Tyranny,” about the outrageously liberal demonstrations over Trump firing Jeff Sessions. We also interview an anarchist who was at the protest outside Tucker Carlson’s home in Washington D.C. about what really happened there, Twitter’s banning of anti-fascists, and why it’s important to take the offensive in the struggle against fascism. Friday, November 9 was the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, and we bring you a round up of fascist, anti-fascist, and centrist actions from the weekend. Send us news, events, or ideas on how our show can better serve anarchist activity in your town by emailing us at podcast@crimethinc.com. {November 14, 2018}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Intro {0:00} Headlines {0:55} Kristallnacht anniversa

We kick off the episode with a discussion about anarchism and voting. After a roundup of resistance to capitalism and the state, our feature this episode is about Trump’s deployment of thousands of troops to “defend the border” and how it is in most people’s interest to push back on this latest precedent of using the military against civilian populations. We remember recently deceased anarchists Zhlobitsky Mikhail Vasilyevich and Kevin Garrido. There are calls for mobilizations on the border in the coming weeks, updates from the Vaughn 17 trial, and announcements of anti-fascist actions for the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Send us news, events, or ideas on how our show can better serve anarchist activity in your town by emailing us at podcast@crimethinc.com. {November 7, 2018}   -------SHOW NOTES------   Table of Contents: Introduction: Anarchism vs. Voting {0:00} Headlines {5:10} Turning the Army against the People: Border Militarization and the Migrant Caravan {10:45} Remembering anarchists Zhl