Introduction: Looking Out from Here

As the crisis deepens, and nationalism and religious belief, the twin last resorts of capital, are mobilized around the world to set working people everywhere against each other in the false name of "democracy," it might help us to ask … Read full post »

The title is a bit of a holiday joke.  Of course there's nothing easy about understanding the theories of special and general relativity first developed by Einstein, and now expanded to include multiple theories about gravitation and how the universe really works.… Read full post »

In the wake of the massive layoffs, failures on the part of politicians and corrupt business leaders, and the re-emergence of neoliberal savagery in the first world, it is easy to mistake the reaction for an alternative.  It is even easier to assign previously existing alternatives--weak reformi… Read full post »

While Occupy Wall Street continues to grow, and attempts to find a coherent voice, we might wonder what happened to the recovery?  More than a year ago, analysts were predicting a solid rate of growth in most sectors of the American and core European states, but instead what we've seen is a… Read full post »

In The Empire's New Clothes, Paul Street criticizes the foreign policy direction of the Obama administration, and the large degree to which it represents a continuation of the Bush years.  But Street's analysis would be sharper if he had included more material on… Read full post »

Since the victory of Barack Obama in the presidential election of 2008 by an overwhelming landslide over his opponent Sen. John McCain (more than 9 million votes difference overall, more than 150 electoral votes), we have witnessed one of the most unique, and the strangest, sights in history.&nb… Read full post »

It's hard to pinpoint when philosophy came into my life.  The traditional definition of philosophy--that it begins with the criticism of criticism--would suggest that it belongs more to the reflection of old age, or at least the middle years, than it does to youth.  But I think that I… Read full post »

When I was very young, maybe five or six, I can't remember exactly, I used to have a recurring nightmare:

I was walking in a forest.  Up ahead there was a clearing, but it was dark and I was hidden from view by the undergrowth.  In the clearing, a large circular… Read full post »

When I was a kid my father and his friends used to get together to play cards around our kitchen table.  They'd sit up all night talking about politics, the union and its latest confrontation with management, and the general "rotten" state of the world.  There were many different political… Read full post »

Religion is a "delicate" issue because this is the way people usually refer to discussions of religion, and not because it's a good description of the way those discussions are usually conducted. 

When I was growing up, however, I don't remember anyone discussing religion.  In fact, even t… Read full post »

Early one morning when I was nine years old my father took me out to the picket-line of a strike at a slaughterhouse in my hometown.  They killed pigs on an assembly line there.  It was winter, January or February, I can't remember which, and when we arrived at the line… Read full post »

With all the hullabaloo about the murder of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan--and the creepy return of so many Bush era officials to the airwaves to savor this moment--it's perhaps good to remember exactly what were the origins of Osama bin Laden's role in recent history.

Back in 1979 when the Soviet… Read full post »

The good life is absent.  -Rimbaud

We should ask ourselves, "Why is this good life absent?"  This life that is always being projected at us, but which we can never attain.  This good life that is always being grafted onto our own lives, real and unreal.

Because it is in… Read full post »

Now that the managers of the global economic system--politicians, business leaders, big investors, market economists--have decided to restart it without making any major changes to its structures, the squeezing of workers is beginning in earnest.  In the budget battle in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jer… Read full post »

Well, it happened.  The people of Egypt managed to overthrow the U.S. backed Mubarak regime after thirty years of despotic rule.  And with celebrations in Tahrir Square and elsewhere, there was a sense of finality.  But not so fast...

Despite the weird impression fostered by Weste… Read full post »

Albert Cossery was not a son of the poor.  Or, to put it in the street vernacular of his characters, the "son of a dog."  That's just one of the many epithets they use for each other, constantly, in Arabic translated into French--its closest meaning in English being not the literal… Read full post »

Tonight president Obama will give the State of the Union and the topic will be jobs, jobs, jobs.  He'll highlight several (minor) new jobs initiatives, once again champion the (already dead) stimulus, and talk about how urgent it is that we make some (major) cuts to the budget.  But ev… Read full post »

Back in October, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and her colleague Bill Arkin reported on the extensive, out-of-control growth of private security contract work in the federal government.  Their series "Secret America" revealed the booming industry, including hundreds of office buildings sc… Read full post »

With the president busy doing victory laps for caving into the idea of exchanging a few favors for the poor for huge tax cuts for the super-rich, and Washington all aglow in its usual holiday splendor, it's hard to recall that there are those who will be spending Christmas… Read full post »

Conflict is Necessary to Resolve Conflict 

About fifteen years ago, I was working for a large telecommunications company on trying to figure out why their administrators couldn't agree on how to implement a broad new retraining plan in their firm.  The executives felt that th… Read full post »

Back in the early 90's I worked for a small third-party company in internet advertising research.  Online ad revenues were relatively small at the time, still no threat to print or television.  The firm I worked for had one major client in the area, the biggest producer of co… Read full post »

Resistance and speed will be fundamental qualities of the first guerrilla nucleus.     -Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare 

In 2009 popular American filmmaker Oliver Stone traveled south to Latin America to find out about the recent rise of populist leftism there… Read full post »

The Clock, the Mill, and the Machine 

Technology is an interesting fact.  It exists, like any social fact, as something quite apart and separate from its origins.  When we encounter it in the marketplace, we're impressed by certain features of it: speed, versatility, even outwar… Read full post »

If segmentation plays an important role in structuring, and controlling, labor in America today, then it's to the history of the present patterns of segmentation within the workforce we have to turn if we're to discover when and how effective ruptures in the system can occur.

Let's return for a… Read full post »

What we haven't addressed in our investigation of the forms that political economy takes in our own time--neoliberalism, bigoted political reaction, capitalist economics--is the connection between these forms and popular consciousness.  One of the first things we have to get rid of in order to d… Read full post »