What is it that makes us socialists? It’s not our actions, for the most part. We organize shoulder to shoulder with other sections of the working class, and mostly we do what they do. It’s not our allegiances. The US working class has not yet built a viable workers’ party, however far along that path […]
“It’s very funny how scared they used to be of unions.” —Robert Evans, “Part 2: How the John Birch Society Invented the Modern Far Right”, Behind the Bastards (podcast, Dec. 17, 2020) “A sect presents itself as the embodiment of the socialist movement, though it is a membership organization whose boundary is set more or […]
This document represents my personal opinions at the time of writing, and not the official position of any organization to which I belong. What is a labor union? A labor union is “the first attempt of the workers to abolish competition between workers” (Engels 1845, Condition of the Working Class in England). This means: 1) […]
In his principal doctoral thesis, Gilles Deleuze wrote: “Philosophy […] must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls. But the name of Marx suffices to save it from this danger.” Difference and Repetition (1968, Eng. trans. 1994) At this moment in history, as the end of the first quarter-century of the new […]
Resources linked in this doc: As a working teacher, I’m always thinking about ways to make the history of ideas accessible to ordinary people—say, the average undergrad or advanced high school student. Some people publish articles. Some people post. I make slideshows and typeset mathematical notes. 1. Notes on Capital vol. 3, ch. 10, “The […]
The worksheets linked below develop financial and economic themes, including labor exploitation, throughout the first half of our Quantitative Reasoning course (up to and including the Financial Math unit). For example, Worksheet 2 draws a connection between hourly wage rates—which students understand intuitively from everyday life—and proportion equations for similar triangles. The mathematical model of […]