Activity

you know how sometimes you want to write about the working class
you go to the factory district
but there is no working class
just a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee
when you see out of the corner of your eye a giant shadow
it must be a representative of the working classes
you think
and yo…

OUR ACCOUNTS OF HEROIC social movements tend to begin at the moment of insurgency, when the cameras show up. The years of bitter, lonely, and seemingly futile struggle get the Ken Burns treatment less often. Even of the heroic age of SNCC in Mississippi, the historian Charles Payne writes, “Field r…

My own view is that the best way for unions to grow is to combine the strengths of these different strata of the working class. SEIU has tried this, in a way. From its base of hospital workers and janitors (middle-stratum jobs), the union has made incursions up and down, attempting to organize adju…

The accelerationists are right in one respect: although it’s by no means “necessary,” more of labor may yet be broken before much can recover. It’s only by trial and error that unions have ever figured out how to become what the workers have come to need; the movement has historically grown in grea…

Organized labor, by contrast, is at its finest both reliable bureaucracy and mass spirit. That these two souls contradict each other suggests the difficulty of challenging the socially powerful for decades on end: you must be both lawyer and pamphleteer, accountant and agitator. On the one hand, as…