Join the Haymarket Book Club to take 50% off Everything!

Podcast

A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre

Join Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Garrett Felber for the virtual release event for the long-awaited biography of Martin Sostre—the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.

Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967.

Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey.

Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”

Get the book: https://www.akpress.org/a-continuous-struggle.html

Speakers:

Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State, and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, American Studies, and Africana Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she served as Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics from 2014-2024. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations, including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso 2022), and Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California 2007). Recent publications include an Introduction to V.I. Lenin Imperialism and the National Question (Verso 2024), and a foreword to the English translation of Making the World Clean by Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths and MIT Press 2024). The Antipode documentary Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (dir. Kenton Card. 2021) features her internationalist work. Honors include the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis) and the 2022 Marguerite Casey Freedom Scholar Prize.


This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and AK Press.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nuu8ylfmak

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

More Episodes

May 17, 2022

Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and M4BL w/ Donna Murch & Barbara Ransby

Join Donna Murch and Barbara Ransby for a conversation about state violence, racial capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives. This is a book launch event for Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives by Donna Murch, available at Haymarketbooks.org. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. “Donna Murch is one of the sharpest, most incisive, and elegant writers on racism, radicalism, and struggle today. In this collection of essays assessing the current contours of the contemporary movement against racism in the United States, Murch combines a historian’s rigor with a cultural critic’s insights and the passionate expression of someone deeply engaged with the politics, debates, and key questions confronting activists and organizers today. This is a smart and sophisticated book that should be read and studied by everyone in search of answers to the profound crises that continue to confront this country.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation Get Assata Taught Me at Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1650-assata-taught-me ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Donna Murch is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and is the president of the New Brunswick chapter of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She is the author of Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, and Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. Barbara Ransby is a widely acclaimed historian of the Black Freedom Movement, award-winning author, and longtime activist. She is the John D. MacArthur Chair and Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Black Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also directs the Social Justice Initiative, which promotes connections between academics and community organizers working on social justice. A founding member of Scholars for Social Justice, she works closely with activists in the Movement for Black Lives and The Rising Majority. She is an elected fellow in the Society of American Historians, as well as a recipient of the Angela Y. Davis Prize for public scholarship from the American Studies Association. Ransby is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century and Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/iInE0_B3Rqk Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 21, 2022

Intimate Partner Violence and Abolitionist Safety Planning

Join us for a lively exploration of the concept of "abolitionist safety planning" and supporting survivors from feminists and abolitionists. In situations of domestic violence, survival can become criminalized in unexpected and chilling ways. However, because isolation is a central strategy of abuse, many survivors lack the community and resources needed to find support for both the violence as well as the risks of criminalization. What can concrete support for intimate partner violence survivors look like from a prison abolitionist perspective? What can it look like in practice to support survivors while being acutely aware of both the dangers of abuse and the overwhelming violence of the criminal legal system? Join us for a lively exploration of the concept of "abolitionist safety planning" from feminists and abolitionists, who will share their experiences, challenges, and lessons learned from supporting survivors in situations of active and ongoing violence. Speakers: Mariame Kaba (moderator) is an organizer, educator, curator, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots abolitionist organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Kaba is the author of We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Missing Daddy, See You Soon and Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators with Shira Hassan. Aracelia Aguilar (she/her) is one of the Empowerment Directors at DeafHope, providing direct services to Deaf DV/SV survivors. DeafHope recognizes the system barriers and institutional oppressions Deaf survivors navigate through to get to safety, and Aracelia's advocacy strongly focuses on putting the survivor at the center of the work. Aracelia has also received training under Sujatha Baliga and Mimi Kim to incorporate Restorative and Transformative Justice into the work of DeafHope. Aracelia provides Teen Dating Violence, Consent & Boundaries, and Sexual Violence presentations for Deaf teens at High Schools all over the Bay Area. Rachel Caidor (she/her) has spent over 25 years providing direct service and organizational support to rape crisis and domestic violence survior support agencies in Chicago. She is a member of Love and Protect and supports the work of the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Shira Hassan (she/her) is the founder, co-creator and principal consultant for Just Practice, a capacity building project for organizations and community members, activists and leaders working at the intersection of transformative justice, harm reduction and collective liberation. She is the former executive director of the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, an organizing and grassroots movement building project led by and for young people of color that have current or former experience in the sex trade and street economies. Hyejin Shim (she/her) is a Building Community Power Fellow at Community Justice Exchange. She has over a decade's experience in supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence, particularly immigrant, refugee, and criminalized survivors of abuse. Hyejin is a co-founder of Survived and Punished, a national organization dedicated to supporting criminalized and incarcerated survivors of gender-based violence. This event is sponsored by Community Justice Exchange, Survived and Punished, Interrupting Criminalization, and Haymarket Books. https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org https://survivedandpunished.org https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QEVuJuBrj5A Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 23, 2022

Marx in Paris, 1871: Book Launch w/ Michael Löwy & more

Join Haymarket for a discussion celebrating the release of Olivier Besancenot and Michael Löwy’s Marx in Paris, 1871. This deeply informed, eminently enjoyable work of historical fiction places Karl Marx in the thick of the unprecedented events of the Paris Commune. In disguise, employing imperfect but serviceable French, Karl and his eldest daughter, Jenny, encounter and debate many important figures of the movement, including Léo Frankel, Eugène Varlin, Charles Longuet, Elisabeth Dmitrieff, and Louise Michel, eventually returning to England with a profoundly changed sense of political possibility. “This book adds to the tradition evolving since Marx and Lenin. Remarkably accessible, it refreshes, provokes, and thereby develops that movement still further.” — Richard Wolff “This fictional account is a remarkable piece of historical criticism and revolutionary imagination.” —Enzo Traverso Get Marx in Paris, 1871: Jenny’s “Blue Notebook” from Haymarket here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1770-marx-in-paris-1871 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Michael Löwy is emeritus research director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). His books, including On Changing the World and the Politics of Combined and Uneven Development, have been translated into thirty languages. Natalia Tylim is active in the NYC-DSA labor branch. She’s a restaurant worker, a founding member of DSA’s Restaurant Organizing Project, and a member of the Tempest Collective. Valerio Arcary is a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology in Brazil. Todd Chretien (moderator) is an organizer, author, translator, and high school Spanish teacher. He has contributed to several books, including Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics, and is editor of Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/HdPcBkE7OlM Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 24, 2022

Social Work and Family Policing w/ Dorothy Roberts & Joyce McMillan

Join Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. and Joyce McMillan for a conversation highlighting the harms within the so-called child welfare system. Join Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. and Joyce McMillan for a conversation highlighting the harms, and in particular the damage social workers have caused and continue to perpetuate, within the so-called child welfare system. "Social work and Family Policing" will draw on Professor Roberts' decades of research, culminating in her recent book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World and Joyce McMillan's years of abolitionist organizing against family policing. This conversation will explore the systemic oppression of the family policing system, especially against poor Black, Indigenous, and Latinae families. We will explore concrete ideas for how social workers and others working with families can adopt an abolitionist approach. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Dorothy E. Roberts, J.D. is a Professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law whose latest book is Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, and educator. Joyce is the founder and executive director of JMacForFamilies a nonprofit whose mission is to abolish the family policing system while creating concrete community resources in communities of color who are disproportionately affected by systems of harm. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/Q7xo9PsA7ic Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 27, 2022

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Book Launch w/ Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, & more

Join Seven Stories Press and Haymarket Books for a launch of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s important new book, "You Have Not Yet Been Defeated". “The text you are holding is living history.” — Naomi Klein, from the foreword to You Have Not Yet Been Defeated Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. To celebrate the launch of the first English language collection of his essays, social media posts, and interviews, Alaa’s sister Sanaa Seif—herself an activist, filmmaker, and former political prisoner of the Sisi regime in Egypt—will be joined by Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Sharif Abdel Kouddous for a conversation on the wide range of subjects covered in this important new book. To order a copy of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated visit: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781644212455 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Sanaa Seif is an Egyptian filmmaker, producer and political activist. Imprisoned three times under the Sisi regime, she is currently touring the US promoting her imprisoned brother, Alaa Abd el Fattah's, newly published book, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist based in Cairo. He has reported from across the Arab world for a number of print and broadcast outlets including Democracy Now, and is currently an editor and reporter at Mada Masr, Egypt's leading independent media outlet. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and international bestselling author of eight books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough and On Fire, which have been translated into over 35 languages. She is Senior Correspondent for The Intercept and an inaugural Marielle Franco fellow of the Social Justice Initiative Portal Project at the University of Chicago. In 2018, she was named the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University, and is now Honorary Professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers. In September 2021, she joined the University of British Columbia as UBC Professor of Climate Justice and is the founding co-director of the UBC Centre for Climate Justice. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag, as well as the forthcoming Change Everything, and Abolition Geography. Her recent honors include the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice; the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award; The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award; and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Seven Stories Press. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/QdUpDKJ7tKg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks
May 30, 2022

Feminists vs. the War Machine w/ Lux Magazine

Join Lux and Haymarket for a discussion about feminist internationalism in the face of war. How do we practice feminist internationalism? The question has never been more urgent than today, as war rages in Ukraine. This is a problem feminists have faced many times before. Remember when Laura Bush tried to sell the war in Afghanistan as women’s liberation? At the time, the left was hampered by thin relationships with our feminist counterparts in these countries, leaving the anti-war movement vulnerable to claims that women there really did want the help of the US military. Today, we’re committed to strengthening those relationships through conversations like this one. The spring 2022 issue of Lux features several explorations of US empire from a feminist perspective. We talk with the women of the Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association about the US withdrawal, profile National Book Award-finalist poet Solmaz Sharif whose work confronts the War on Terror and her own exile from Iran, report on Okinawa’s multigenerational anti-US-base movement, and pay tribute to Puerto Rican radical Luisa Capetillo. This event will take on the special role that feminism continues to play in anti-imperalist struggles, from the Middle East to East Asia to Latin America, connecting these struggles, and activists, across borders. ----------------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at New York Times Magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center. Her writing covers the War on Terror, Islamophobia, and the Middle East and South Asia. She was previously on the staff of The New Yorker and The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She is currently working on a book about the history of Islamophobia in the United States. Margo Okazawa-Rey is a professor emerita at San Francisco State University and a transnational feminist activist. She works on militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women in the US and around the world. She is a founding member of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and Women for Genuine Security, and was a founding member of the Combahee River Collective. Her recent publications include “‘Nation-izing’ Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists,” and Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives (Oxford, 2020). Sophie Pinkham is the author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine. She has written about Russian and Ukrainian culture and politics for The New York Review of Books, The New Left Review, The New Republic, The Nation, and many other publications. She produced the short documentary Balka, on women, drugs, and HIV in Ukraine. Sarah Leonard (moderator) is editor-in-chief of Lux magazine. She is contributing editor to Dissent and The Nation. (@sarahrlnrd) This event is sponsored by Lux magazine and Haymarket Books. Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/vRuCwaSiHyg Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks