What brings the revolutionary moment? I am not referring to the political struggle that takes place within every mass movement—unions or workers’ councils, soviets or provisional government, abolition or free-soil, black power or civil rights, etc.—but the moment when subordinated individuals whom no exhortation, not even free beer, can lure out of their homes become […]
Archives for June 2019
Bookstore adventures
From 1992 to 1998 I worked at a large independent bookstore. Mostly I worked in the store room. They started me on paperback literature which was a mess. My task was to alphabetize and stack the books such that they could easily be found in the event of a request, or simply for re-stocking the […]
Some Reflections on Prison Labor
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: A popular notion in some progressive circles holds that US prisons are a chain of sweatshops and plantations where hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people labor under excruciating conditions to generate profits for transnational companies. Can you shed light on this view? James Kilgore: We need to re-think this notion. While such […]
At The Pain Clinic, North Alabama
I’m in Boaz, Sand Mountain, with a friend going to the local pain clinic. The waiting room is filled with middle-aged, rural/small-town, working-class whites who generally look in poor health. A crowded waiting room full of oxygen tanks and people who are either too obese or too thin, with few falling in-between. An extra-wide chair […]
UPDATE ON THE 2019 CRICKET WORLD CUP (as of June 15, 2019)
You won’t see anything about this in the NY Times, so I am taking responsibility for giving you yesterday’s news today or is it tomorrow’s news yesterday. This is all about the Cricket World Cup, currently being played throughout England and Wales. South Africa finally won a match today. They beat Afghanistan. So they are […]
The Black and White of It
One of my neighbors living three buildings down had his leg amputated several months ago. At first, the doctors thought it was a Brown Recluse spider bite but later figured out it was a circulation problem. Much of the lower leg turned black before the VA amputated it in Birmingham. I kept wondering when they […]