Too long; do not read.
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 …
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 …
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, …
Let’s talk about the material analysis. Materialism is half of the brain-peelingly difficult (or quite simple, depending on who you ask) concept of dialectical materialism, and thus a cornerstone of Marxist theory and practice. Decades of cultural shorthand, including the catchy if false-consciousness-plagued #1 dance hit by Madonna in 1985, …
I had to Get Off the Internet this last couple of days because things were getting frankly ridiculous. “Things”, in this case, meant “a mystifying preponderance of liberal/left tone cops flitting around social media finger-wagging at anyone who dared to express, in however ironic a fashion, amusement or pleasure at …
We live in an age when the Culture War, the most avoidable conflict in human history, continues to drag on. Despite the fact that it turned out to contain practically nothing we haven’t seen before in half a dozen genres of film aside from some inconsequential shading, the moment Todd …
Every so often, a television series appears that is so unusual, so distinct and with such a deliberately crafted worldview, so unlike anything else that surrounds it in the shifting bars of the channel guides, that it seems like a small miracle that it ever made it on the air …
