The governance, or lack thereof, of the great republic.
Friends, colleagues, comrades: I have a confession. I like Chapo Trap House. Yes, that’s right: I am a big fan of one of the most popular podcasts in existence. I listen to it regularly; I talk about it with some of my friends; and I look forward to each new episode. …
Okay, thanks, Kerry — that’ll wrap up the checkins from the Calligraphy for Stalinists working group. Good job, everybody, and we’re all really looking forward to the “Merry Christmas from the Gulag” cards this year. Now, if there’s no other new business…yeah, Carl? Well, that’s really old business, Carl, and …
There was a time when I used to say, in agreement with the great Paul Fussell, that July 4th was the one day we should hold up nothing but praise for the things that make America great. The rest of the year should be given to relentless criticisms of what …
Who are your comrades? The more time I spend in the political space that involves ground-up building of resistance and alternatives to capitalist hegemony — call it activism, call it organizing, whatever suits you — the more I begin to notice the patterns that we use to trip ourselves up …
In these exciting times when the only thing Americans love more than billion-dollar superhero movie franchises is petty intra-party political sniping, I thought it might be time to return to a favorite obsession of mind: the ideological leanings of various comic book characters. This has been explored in-universe a bit …
Ladies and gentlemen, my constituents, citizens of my lovely home town of Fleenerville, voters, and Platinum V.I.P. Brunch Club Super-Tee level donors; my beloved wife Plovis, and my two wonderful sons Coho and Spelt, who flew in to support me tonight right after their Offal Studies final at Klumner State …
Another week, another flame-out between liberals and the left over which we should ‘choose’ in the alleged battle between class and identity. Believe me, folks, I don’t like writing these pieces any more than you like reading them, but until we can bury this utterly false dichotomy once and for …
It’s been a busy week as I help my comrades prepare for the Democratic Socialists of America’s national convention, to be held here in Chicago in only a few months. I’ll also be running for a leadership position in our local chapter — a prospect that, I must admit, fills …
The news that Hillary Clinton, during her time as the First Lady of Arkansas, was in charge of a staff that consisted of unpaid prison labor is…well, not exactly news. It’s a ‘revelation’ published in her own memoir, written and published over twenty years ago, and only recently rediscovered by a …
So here we are again, talking about materialist dialectics vs. identity politics as if the two could exist independently of one another. Longtime readers will know that I’ve struggled with this issue for years, and the stark contradictions between what I will describe for the sake of convenience as the …
As I write this, the Republicans of the U.S. House of Representatives have just voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in favor of legislation of their own making. That the American Health Care Act is a complete disaster almost goes without saying; it will rob millions of people of …
This year’s May Day sermon is an expanded version of a speech I gave this morning at the dedication by Alderman Carlos Ramirez Rosa of Chicago’s 35th Ward of an honorary street named for the great radical freedom fighter Lucy Parsons. We’re all here today because of Lucy Gonzalez Parsons. …
Ever since the 2016 election, when the Democratic establishment faced a surprisingly strong challenge from Bernie Sanders and his relatively mild form of economic leftism, liberal partisans have insisted that everyone in America is underselling the damage done by racism. (Everyone, that is, except themselves. No one rolls their eyes …
It was only a matter of time before Donald Trump led America into another pointless, brutal conflict overseas. The only surprise is the speed with which he did it; most presidents would wait until they were in much more dire domestic straits before giving into the instinct to prop up …
For the good of the country, we are often told, the infighting between liberals (or, as they are properly understood, the party of nice rich people) and the left must cease. Exactly which faction is supposed to lower its guns first is implicit, but so far they refuse to do …
