When I listened to the “American Radical” podcast for the first time, I had a hard time keeping track of the people and events so I decided to take detailed notes. Then I realized that the podcast episodes added up to almost three hours. I was pretty sure that only a relatively small number of […]
One Foot in the Present, Another in the Future: Food Coops
The San Francisco Bay Area loves cooperatives, aka coops, which were invented in 1844 when the Rochdale Pioneers in Lancashire, England banded together to help themselves and their community. It was an auspicious beginning. 1844 was a year before Frederick Engels of Marx and Engels fame described, in The Condition of the Working Class in […]
More from the Vault: A Brief Encounter with Orlando Pirates
The following piece appeared in Issue #7 of Hard Crackers Magazine, which can be purchased here. I don’t know why I looked round towards our production vehicle. We were in Soweto, in late afternoon sunshine, filming an elderly former soccer star kicking a ball with kids on a scrubby recreation ground, and if somebody […]
Mao’s Children
Editor’s note: A long, long time ago, strange groups populated a lot of the left wing in the US. This is a fictional story about one of them. Avery has previously written a piece of short fiction for the Hard Crackers special print issue, dedicated to founder Noel Ignatiev. That issue can be purchased here. […]
Review of Earth II
Keanu Reeves clicks on the television, to be greeted with dire warnings of impending climate collapse. Antarctica is melting at a startling rate. The coming decades will be defined by death, disease, rampant flooding, rising seas, and widespread species extinction. “The date!” he demands. The talking head responds that a dramatic uptick in these trends […]
Property: Is it Theft? Is it Freedom or Is it Both? Merry Christmas!
Not long after Thanksgiving this year, I went to San Francisco’s Japantown (“Jtown” to locals). Surrounded by commodities for sale and in a high rent district I was reminded of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s famous remark, “La propriété, c’est le vol!, which is usually translated as “Property is theft.” That’s the kind of remark I’d expect from […]