The artifacts and self-guided exhibits in this museum are enough to make anyone a believer.

For more information visit https://www.expeditionbigfoot.com/

Follow us on Instagram and Threads @appalachianfootballroadshow and let us know what you think about the season so far, where you want us to take the Roadshow this year, what you want us too cook at the tailgate, and more!

Competition is what a capitalist economy is built on, so when things aren't working out in ways that we can actually tolerate, people tend to jump to the conclusion that there's something wrong with the competition that we need to fix. But competition right now is doing exactly what we should expect it to do -- and that's the problem.

One Way Street takes a hard look at economics and how most of the economics field can't actually address the real problems we're facing in the economy because their analysis starts from a position so broken and detached from reality that they can't recover and provide any useful answers, only excuses. So hop in and join us on a trip to find some real answers by finding a real framework we can actually use to analyze our problems. Our driver is Anwar Shaikh, an economist whose framework is exactly the kind of roadmap we need to do real analysis and come up with real solutions.

As Shaikh says, competition isn't a dance, its a war. The winners tend to destroy their competitors and reshape the market and the world in their image. By understanding this, we free ourselves from the dogma of mainstream economics and give ourselves a chance to reroute ourselves towards an economy that we actually want to live in.

You can find a full semester worth of Anwar Shaikh's master's course surveying his groundbreaking book Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB1uqxcCESK6B1juh_wnKoxftZCcqA1go

Follow us on Instagram and Threads @appalachianfootballroadshow and let us know what you think about the season so far, where you want us to take the Roadshow this year, what you want us too cook at the tailgate, and more!

The cameras are a lot of fun to use, and we had a lot of fun talking to the vendors and looking at the toys. We figured you might too.

I've done this show for a long time, and it used to be something really special! It seems like that's probably over as, for the second year in a row, basically no one showed up. That's a shame, and it puts a bit of a financial strain on our toy making and toy selling enterprise.

To that end, if you see anything in the Mountain Town Toys booth (green tablecloths) that you want, reach out to @mountaintowntoys@retro.social and I'll sell it to you, because I need to recoup some funds. If you see something at one of the other booths you want, I can put you in touch.

We probably won't do this show again, and I'd be surprised if many other vendors do.

Music by Pursey and Fixing Nothing. Used without permission, but with lots of love.

Video footage CC-BY-SA, audio ... talk to Nelson and Pursey.

Thanks for watching.

But a colonial regime isn't really accountable to an election. Their rule was based in force, so why didn't the British just ignore the result? They even had the CPP's leadership, including its charismatic head Kwame Nkrumah, in jail when the election took place.

Our answer comes from one of Nkrumah's most well known sayings: organize, organize, organize. The people of Ghana and their revolutionary leadership had embarked on a campaign to organize themselves in order to defeat the British colonial regime over the preceding years. They built up a network of local and national organizations, building off the existing social organizational structures already in place, and they used this framework to engage in just about every kind of non-violent resistance around. They coordinated boycotts, they held marches, protests, and demonstrations, and in 1950, they launched a general strike, which was what had landed Nkrumah and the other leaders of the CPP in jail prior to the 1951 election landslide.

Ghanaians didn't just wait for an election and hope for the best. They built a mass movement with its power rooted in the people, and they prepared to remove the colonial regime by whatever means necessary. So sure, the British could have waved away the result of the election, banned the CPP, and kept Nkrumah and his cadre in jail. But then what? A people prepared for a general strike are almost equally prepared for a revolution, and the masses would have been ready for revolutionary armed struggle, if that's the path the British had forced them down.

And reading about this is what made me want to make this video; waiting for another election and seeing what happens is like waiting to put on our seat-belts until we crash. We need to follow Nkrumah's message and organize. Being ready for a general strike should be our organizational goal, because like the Ghanaians showed us, a people who are organized enough for a general strike are organized enough to do anything they need to do in order to liberate themselves. So in this video, we go over some the history of Ghana and show how they succeeded in liberating themselves from colonialism, and we tie that to our current political predicaments, looking for the foundations we can lay to get us ready for a general strike.

Here's some of the key things I've been reading that led to this video and which could be some good material for your local revolutionary reading groups:

Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution by CLR James (this is the book with the most pertinent information about the Ghana revolution in particular, so if you're looking for more information about those events, this is definitely a great place to start).
https://files.libcom.org/files/CLR-James-Nkrumah-Ghana-Revolution.pdf

Tell No Lies, Claim No Easy Victories by Amilcar Cabral (In particular, the chapter from this book called The Weapon of Theory is an excellent and concise piece for your reading group).
https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm

The State and Revolution and What Is To Be Done? by VI Lenin (These are two of the most essential reading group texts in my opinion, they're concise and direct and cover a lot of the fundamentals of revolutionary organization).

The Russian Revolution by Walter Rodney (If you were drawn to James' Nkrumah book, I would actually recommend this more if what you're looking for is a book on theory rather than history. Rodney comes to a lot of the same kinds of conclusions as James when it comes to the masses leading the way and revolutionary organizations trying to coordinate and direct the masses towards maximum impact).

Tip of the Spear by Orisanmi Burton (not necessarily a book about revolutionary theory per se, but Burton's book about the Long Attica Uprising of the early 70's has a lot of valuable lessons about revolutionary organizations in the prison system and the state's methods of suppressing these rebellions. I think that in our current predicament, with increasing ICE captivity in US prisons and the threat of incarceration being aimed at political dissidents, considering the implications of this book could be important for anyone who ends up within the machine. The methods the state has used to separate political radicals within prisons might become weakened with an influx of political prisoners and understanding the successes and failures of the Attica uprisings and the backlash to it could be vital for future political prisoners).

Blood In My Eye by George Jackson (Jackson's theory of fascism, which he describes as essentially a method of reform for the in-groups in society, is pretty crucial right now).

Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci (This is one of the more theoretical things that I think is worth really taking some time with right now. Gramsci contributed a lot to developing ideas of "base and superstructure", the theory of how economic and material foundations in society (the base) create and reinforce the culture, like religion, art, sports, education, and ideology (the superstructure). All of which tend to promote a positive view of the base relations. In our case, the rich have power in the base (the economic relations in society) and "our" culture is really mostly their culture, because a lot of it is designed by and for the ruling class to promote their worldview. We have to know how this mutual reinforcement works in order to fight the ruling class ideology and culture that gets implanted into the working class by osmosis if we want to organize the working class).

On Contradiction, On Practice, and Combat Liberalism by Mao Tse Tung (again, these are all great reading group material because they're short and concise, but powerful. On Contradiction + On Practice should probably be read together as they're complementary. Combat Liberalism would likely surprise a lot of people, as its not really a piece about the ideological tenets of liberalism, it identifies behaviors like conflict avoidance as liberal traits, and I think the behaviors it speaks out against are all important things to try to keep out of organizations. We need healthy organizations and Combat Liberalism has a lot of important things to say to that effect).

Ready for Revolution by Kwame Ture (FKA Stokely Carmichael)(This whole book is a wealth of knowledge and inspiration but its long and probably not your best bet for a reading group in its entirety, but the sections about his time in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in particular have a ton of important lessons about organizational structures and dynamics when working in the messy world of a real movement. If you wanna incorporate this knowledge, I would suggest having one of your members read it and report back at a Teaching Circle -- more about Teaching Circle in the video)

Leave more revolutionary book recommendations in the comments! I'm hoping to do a live stream follow up to this so let me know what kind of questions you have and what things you'd like us to talk about on that live stream, or if you'd like to participate!

Follow us on Instagram and Threads @appalachianfootballroadshow and let us know what you think about the season so far, where you want us to take the Roadshow this year, what you want us too cook at the tailgate, and more!

You can watch the full show here: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/83McEYqJpCqn1UmWXqGWq2

Don't forget to check out our Roku app by the way, where you can watch this show and every other awesome New Ellijay TV original program on your TV. And while you're at it, maybe install it onto someone else's TV too.

You can watch the full show here: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/83McEYqJpCqn1UmWXqGWq2

Don't forget to check out our Roku app by the way, where you can watch this show and every other awesome New Ellijay TV original program on your TV. And while you're at it, maybe install it onto someone else's TV too.

Don't forget to check out our Roku app by the way, where you can watch this show and every other awesome New Ellijay TV original program on your TV. And while you're at it, maybe install it onto someone else's TV too.

Speaking of which, check out our video on Luigi Mangione and the US "health insurance" scam, which is called State of Denial.

And don't forget to add the New Ellijay TV app on all your Roku devices so you can watch this show and all our other programs directly on your TV. I installed it on my grandma's TV and you should too, she'll love it!

Did you know we have a Roku app too??? Be sure to install the New Ellijay TV app on your own Roku device, your parents Roku, your Grandma's Roku, the Roku at the next hotel you stay at... really just any Roku that's not password protected. Who's gonna stop you, Brian Thompson?

On this special mini episode of New Ellijay TV Talks to You, we're revisiting the topic of trade and tariffs, focusing this time on the specific tariffs we're facing, and the brewing battle between Trump and major retailers around the country who are less than happy about the predicament they find themselves in regarding the tariffs.

Here's the link to that first episode in case you missed it: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/n67o7YmiGXjCFCXxgmHAFb