“A lot of it was just sheer grinding shitwork. You think making a revolution is all agony and ecstasy? It’s not, it’s mostly drudgery. Hard, disciplined, repetitive work that’s boring and necessary. But what keeps you going is that twenty times a week something would happen—out there, in that lousy …
When you read, as you often do, of an extremely wealthy person doing something of questionable legality — an Elon Musk, perhaps, appearing to bribe voters on a wide scale, or a Harlan Crow seeming to buy favorable court decisions by showering a justice with money and benefits — you …
The die, for me at least, has been cast. After months of argument – with friends, with family, with my own comrades, with countless people online and in person – I have cast my vote in the 2024 election. I won’t be coy: I did not vote for Harris or …
It is becoming harder and harder to pretend what kind of country we live in anymore. The irony of it is that we do pretend, harder and harder, every day. As the distance between the rich and the poor becomes ever more vast, and the aspirational middle shrinks to the …
There is no value that we might possess that is worth the cost of another person’s suffering. This is one of the fundamental lessons of anti-capitalism, of anti-imperialism, of any conception of humanity that frames our existence as anything more than a brutal, winner-takes-all struggle of each against each. It …
I. What Is and What Never Should Be It can be very easy, living where and how we live, to lose sight of what we refer to, and even then in quotes ironic or otherwise, as reality. We are, as people, overburdened by the needs of commerce, and are thus …
There is, we are told, no ethical consumption under capitalism, and so it is. Any participation in a system of exploitation is exploitative, and one cannot engage in even the simplest acts of daily survival without being, in some way, complicit with the cruelty and destruction that the system is …
When one mask comes off, others start to follow, and in quick order. America’s rightward turn, its fascist lean, is finding allies everywhere; if they are not necessarily ideological allies, they are at least opportunistic ones. So it is that many of the country’s biggest and most rapacious corporations have …
Our wars are never just; our heroes are never pure. Paul Fussell, whose service in the American infantry during the Second World War defined his entire life and work, understood this. He wrote that all wars are ironic because the distance between the reasons for fighting them and the things …
This time, we are told, is not like the other times. This time — this this time, not all the other this times — it is nothing more than the future of democracy at stake. If we (and the ‘we’ here is not Republicans, never Republicans, nor is it liberal …
Gosh, do I love the ’70s! America’s Weirdest Decade is always a source of entertainment, whether it’s actual culture produced by the most drugged-up people in history at the time, or the tribute-culture produced by the slightly less drugged-up people who may or may not remember it. Many of the …
If you are an organizer or an activist, think about the time you felt most effective, most powerful, most joyful in struggle. Was it alone? Was it in solitude, your face bathed in the artificial light of a telephone or a laptop screen? Was it after finding le mot juste …
One of the primary contradictions of the present moment is that unionism in the United States is enjoying its biggest surge in decades, while union membership is at one of its lowest points in history. Decades of neoliberalism, privatization, outsourcing, and the erosion of full-time direct employment have resulted in …
This weekend, in a squall of rain and a first breath of the cold months to come, we went to the Galewood Crossings AMC to see a movie. It was movie weather; the kind of weather that makes you want to spend a few hours in a warm, plush seat …
What is there to say, at a time like this? What is the point of speaking, of writing, of talking amongst ourselves, when a people who have been oppressed and harried unto death for almost a century are being obliterated on a daily basis? Why bother with such powerless pleading, …
