What in the hell …

And is it an anomaly or a necessity? (more…)

It’s crumbly bits of books. (more…)

My friend Harjit told me about an incident where some racist fuckwit threatened his teenaged cousin recently. Stomach turning. Everything’s okay, like no one’s hurt, but really it’s not okay. That stuff is never okay and there’s nothing to say about it that will make it better and I can’t fucking stand things where there’s nothing to say that will make it better, especially the things where people are clearly just fucked and I get so angry and then I get doubly angry because I know my anger is useless at least in the short term relative to the situation that provoked the anger.

My middle brother, now 20, went through a similar incident as a kid in rural Illinois. I was telling Harjit about it, which reminded me I wrote a thinly fictionalized short short story about it during my period of unemployment a few years back when I was doing a bit of fiction writing, or maybe from before then. I wrote a story about that asshole, that’ll teach him… what a stupid world.

In my last post I parroted part of Walter Johnson’s question, how would it change our reading of Marx and our understanding of capitalism if we started from the history of slavery. Marcus Rediker’s new book The Slave Ship offers further grist for milling this question. (more…)

One of the two birthday gifts I brought to Uncle Karl’s (Great-Uncle, technically) birthday festivities was a small translation from Sandro Mezzadra’s book. In the translated passage, Mezzadra argues for placing forced labor more at the heart of our understanding of capitalism, and making “free” labor (waged labor) less central. (more…)

Okay so my stupid internet was being all, like, stupid, so I couldn’t get on to post my post which I wrote offline. Here it is. (more…)

Details here.

Adam Smith and co thought that markets were the most efficient means of organizing a society. (more…)