An interview with Andrew Flood about the impressions of the North American anarchist movement he formed during his 2007/2008 44 city tour of the US and Canada. The interviews ends with questions about the comparison of the movement in Ireland with that in Britian and the promotion of anarchism via the internet. This was submitted and published in Black Flag.
Specialist topics: NA tour
In late 2007 and early 2008 I went on a speaking tour of North America of some 44 cities across two Canadian provinces, 18 US states and Washington DC. The start of my blog on this site was the entries I made for the 2008 section of my speaking tour across North America. However as the 14 or so weeks on the road were both exhausting and my access to internet was sporadic most of the entries made at the the time were very short. So over the last year or more I’ve popped in from time to time to edit some of these entries, in some cases expanding them to 5,000 words or more. Hindsight has allowed me to do some background reading but also realise that my tour was happening in the context of two significant events, the election of the first black president and the start of the capitalist crisis of 2008.
Between February and May 2008 I interviewed 31 anarchists in the USA located in 17 different cities. The interviews are linked to below and provide a snapshot of the anarchist movement across the United States and anarchist attitudes towards local struggles and the US elections. The interviews were conducted during my ‘Building a Popular Anarchism in Ireland’ speaking tour during which I spoke at 45 locations across the USA and Canada.
This thread was created for my North American speaking tour to make it easier for people who attended meetings to find more information about the struggles and organizations I covered. It consists of links to the various struggles and organizations I talked about during the tour. The tour covered 44 North American cities in 2007 and early 2008.
I spent the last month Greyhounding around the USA speaking about anarchism in Ireland. Fourteen cities, 20+ meetings in thirty days in cities with populations from thirty thousand to over eight million. On my travels I used the opportunity to record interviews with many of the local anarchists who were organizing the meetings which I edited on the bus and posted to indymedia.ie once I hit my next wi-fi signal. I’ve collated these interviews below, over two hours of audio in all.