From Embers: New Content in May 2019

From Embers, an anarchist podcast produced in Kingston, Ontario, presents two recordings from the month of May.

From Embers is a regular anarchist podcast produced in Kingston, Ontario. We produce a few episodes each month about actions and projects going on in so-called Canada that inspire us, or about topics that we think will be relevant to anarchists living north of the border. We are a proud member of the Channel Zero Anarchist Podcast Network.

This month we produced two original episodes:

May 22nd: What Can We Learn From the Winnipeg General Strike?

In 1919, what started as a dispute over how workers in a particular trade should negotiate with their employers became a generalized workers’ revolt that we now know as the Winnipeg General Strike. Don’t click skip just yet! It can be hard to see the relevance in things that happened so long ago, but how to build things that (a) generalize, and (b) actually threaten business as usual is a pressing question for a lot of us today, and while 2019 and 1919 are radically different contexts, they aren’t separate planets. In this episode, I spoke with Sean Carleton, a professor of history and member of the Graphic History Collective about the strike and what lessons we can learn from its history, whether we are labour activists or not.

May 30th: Guillotines, Vengeance and Revolutionary Optimism

This year on May Day in Toronto, anarchists and radicals brought a replica guillotine to a rally at Queen’s Park, leading to outrage in the mainstream media and government calls for a police investigation. In light of this, and in a context where guillotine memes and other gestures towards political violence are becoming more popular, we spoke with an author of the article Against the Logic of the Guillotine published on the CrimethInc website. We discuss the ideas in the article, and tease out some of the philosophical tensions that underpin it.

You can tune in to From Embers in the Kingston area on CFRC 101.9 FM between 8 and 9 PM on Wednesdays. You can also stream episodes directly at fromembers.libsyn.com or subscribe and download them via any major podcatching app on your smartphone.

If you have feedback for us, or ideas for future episodes, please get in touch! You can email us at fromembers [at] riseup [dot] net