Since When Has Working Been a Crime?
This article by Dave Ranney was originally publishedย in Hard Crackers on February 4th. It is even more timely now. In the months since, Trump’s immigration police forces have stepped up their targeting of undocumented workers in workplaces. As Dave argues, it is essential that we focus our efforts on building a broad working-class resistance to …
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An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education
Interview with esteemed labor historian David Roediger about his memoir, An Ordinary White: My Anti-Racist Education.
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The Return of the Magonista?–Los Angeles and Borderland Revolt
This article was written in the days immediately following June 6th. The author was not able to participate in the street movement due to geographical distance from Los Angeles. ConquestIn August of 1846, US troops under Stephen Kearney occupied Santa Fe without firing a shot. In January of 1847, a combined force of Hispano and …
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Dancing for FDR: How My Father Met My Mother (and Vice Versa)
A key drama at the heart of all our personal origin stories is the saga of how our parents met. Iโve known the basics of this piece of my family history as long as I can remember. My mom and dad met, so the story went, when they were paired as dance partners performing in …
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The Karen Effect:ย A Cop Town’s Reckoning with Police Power
Americaโs latest referendum on police power is coming from an unlikely place: Canton, Massachusetts, a mostly white upper middle class and pro-police suburb located just fifteen miles outside of Boston. Jury deliberations began this week in the second murder trial of Karen Read, who is accused of killing her cop boyfriend. For the past three years, the case has divided Canton, with a significant number of residents convinced that Read is being framed by the police and the wealthy local families with ties to them. While the case has all the elements of a true-crime saga, its significance lies in that it is shedding a light on the deepening crisis of police legitimacy among white Americans. In addition, it is also revealing–yet again–the pernicious effects of whiteness, as seen by the inability or unwillingness of Karen Read supporters to connect her fight against a corrupt police and legal system to the current anti-ICE/police uprising.
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From Anaximander to Marx, part 3
The end of the road of the sect For quite a few years after Healyโs exposure I, and others, still carried on trying to build โthe partyโ which was really just a small group of self-appointed โrevolutionariesโ. I only finally shed this delusion during the Yugoslav war. I was sitting in the cab of a …
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From the Archives
The Moral Economy in the Black Rural South
(Reprinted from the July-August 2019 โThe Brooklyn Rail) Once you drive out of Huntsville, within 15 minutes you run into deeply rural areas. Open fields, some cultivated, some wild; mobile homes and modest bungalows mix with a growing number of new suburban houses; fortunately, not enoughโyetโto change the social character of the area. The lanes …
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Crisis on top of crisis in Kensington
During this COVID-19 crisis, probably many of us have had moments where we have thought, โOh, shit, whatโs going to happen when coronavirus spreads to (fill in the blank)? We have worried about those who fill the manifold jails and prisons of this land, and weโve already seen those horrible potentialities begin to unfold. Weโre …
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