This paper addresses feminist materialism as political practice through a case study of IWW-Earth First! Local 1, the late Judi Bari's organization of a radical ecology/timber workers’ union in the ancient redwood forests of Northern California. Rejecting the Earth First! mythology of timber workers as ‘enemies’ of nature, Bari sought to unite workers and environmentalists in pursuit of sustainable forestry practices against the devastating approaches favoured by multinational logging corporations. In so doing, she brought a working-class feminist perspective to the (...) radical ecology of Earth First! Bari's work provided a significant instance of community organizing in opposition to the masculinist, exclusionary practices and misanthropic posturing of Earth First!'s self-proclaimed ‘eco-warriors’ and ‘rednecks for nature’. What is perhaps most interesting about the development of Local 1 is the articulation of feminist, environmentalist and labour discourses through a series of political actions. (shrink)

Oratorical practice may be viewed as the material enactment of a philosophy of class struggle. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I propose “orator-machine” as a concept-term to describe speech making in the context of the open exterior of interconnected human and nonhuman machinic assemblages in capitalist modernity. My argument is based on a reconsideration of a single address, delivered by William D. “Big Bill” Haywood in 1911 at the Cooper Union in New York City. Reading (...) Haywood against the grain—as a conceptual innovator—allows me to demonstrate a mode of analysis that affirms the philosophical quality and ontological politics of oratorical performance. (shrink)