Episode 1123
Ambulance work under late capitalism.
Feb 4 2020
It is the peculiarity of our historical time that revolution is not in the cards - so I'm asking if this is not very likely to happen, do we have to give up? I say no, we can find resources for a radical change, without the crutch of a revolution, without the crutch of crisis, without the crutch of utopia - even the wonderful socialist utopia. We do not need it to go in a different direction, the direction against capitalism.
While Chuck is out this week, we revisit our first interview from 2020. Theorist Albena Azmanova examines the dynamics of post-2008 precarity capitalism, the left's long failure to strike through capitalism's competitive production of profit, and explains why radical change for the precarious multitude is possible without a revolutionary break - but through subversive pragmatism.
Albena is author of Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia from Columbia University Press.
Micah Herskind
Jun 25
Resisting "Cop City" in America's Most Surveilled, Unequal City / Micah Herskind
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Jan 30 2020
Posted by Alexander Jerri
Welcome to the Moment of Truth, the thirst that is the drink.
I know Democrats are capable of being just as mendacious and self-serving as any human being, and have been, but the Republicans in the Senate are just stunning models of perfidy. Simply taken on their own terms, by their own standards, or ostensible standards, they’re outdoing themselves. Even taking the least flattering definition of the already disgraced label, “conservative,” they’re not coming close to measuring up.
It’s a scary night to think about how low a human being can debase himself. It’s crazy-windy tonight, strong wind swirling around us, sounds like my apartment building is being flushed down an enormous toilet.
I just watched a short video of a crowd berating Rudy Giuliani as he’s being escorted down the street by cops. “You’re a piece of shit, Giuliani!” I feel like videos like this are all I want to watch.
Now it’s morning, I’ve just finished a supply run for the axe-throwing bar job site. It’s still blustery outside, not as rollicking as last night, but a steady wind punctuated with gusts. It’s a gustery day, as famous Detroit weatherman, wisecracker, alcoholic, and Holocaust survivor, Sonny Eliot, might have said.
The morning finds Los Angeles strewn with detritus from palm trees, some fronds weighing upwards of 50 lbs. Such a piece of tree debris once came crashing through the cargo space window of my Subaru Legacy wagon. I was about 2500 miles away from the car at the time, thank fate.
Even now, palm crud is drumming intermittently on my car roof. It’s a shaggy city, raining its dandruff on us all. Out here, at the edge of the continent, the sunset edge, with Republican perfidy wafting its sickly stench across the land, I’m reminded of our nation’s dark roots, the ones we can’t hide no matter how much peroxide we use.
The first novel written here in what would become the USA was called Wieland, by Charles Brockden Brown. Remember, as I describe this, that it was written before the War for Independence, when this was still a land of people driving fence posts into the ground, every man had to drive his own fence posts into the ground, that was a thing men had to do. Mama wouldn’t do it for him. Everything was made out of wood. People were barely accustomed to science yet.
And here’s a guy writing a book,... read more