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Siegfried Krakauer's  The Salaried Masses  explores the lives, the hopes, the dreams, and ultimate dissapointments of Berlin's pracarious middle class (named the "salariat" by Walter Benjamin) in the late 1920s. This is a class of people who are alienated from their work but paid just enough to consume a little extra. The salaried masses are immersed in Adorno's culture industry and suffer from Marx's alienated labor. They are unhappy but not desperate. Whereas the unemployed consider killing themselves, the salaried masses have just enough auspicious consumption to keep them thinking too hard about what's going on. In fact, as one interviewee remarks, thinking too hard is a distraction from what would otherwise be more interesting. The salaried masses, young and surrounded by commodities, have absorbed the ideas of the bourgeoisie, much like the characters in Georges Perec's 1965 novel  Things: A Story of the Sixties .  Alas, a mass of things does not...

I recently attended my first Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, IL. This year’s conference was far larger than the last one hosted in 2018, with more than 4,000 people in attendance. A friend of mine and veteran conference attendee attributed the increased number of participants to a buildup due to the COVID-induced pause, as well as the growth of unionized and/or union-curious education workers over the past four years. Demographics on conference attendees would be helpful. What unions were present at the event, and was there an increase in membership attendance from previous years? How many attendees were part of a union and how many were “unorganized” (like myself)? How many were gig, part-time, or otherwise precariously employed? Were the unemployed sections of the working class represented? The mood of the conference was lively and positive. There were many young people present, especially those involved in Starbucks and Amazon unionizing. There was a strong sense of community and...

What could a child know of the Spanish Civil War? What could they know about the POUM, the  International Brigade, the Friends of Durruti, and the Communist International? Not the specifics of course. But children must have heard the sounds. They must have seen the soldiers. Maybe our hypothetical child felt a current in the air - something indescribable - when Franco announced his victory. Victor Erice's masterpiece almost didn't make it out of Spain. The film was completed two years before Franco died and had to pass through various censors. Despite the depiction of an anti-fascist soldier (supposedly the first sympathetic depiction of the Francoist opposition since the civil war), The Spirit of the Beehive was released to the world unscathed. According to Erice, who was given access to notes written by the censors, the authorities found the film slow and boring and doubted its ability to draw an audience. Such are the contingencies of history. Today, The Spirit of the B...

Antonio Gramsci was born in a small town on the island of Sardina, part of the then Kingdom of Italy. He is perhaps best known for his work within the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and devotion to the revolutionary cause in the face of Mussolini's fascist terror.  Spanning some 3,000 pages, his Prison Notebooks are a feat of immense strength in the face of his (soon-to-be fatal) carceral conditions, and his works continue to serve as a source of knowledge and inspiration for contemporary Communist movements. Gramsci's greatness will be forever embodied in the words of a fascist prosecutor: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." The documentary film Gramsci 44 ( available here ) details the life of the titular Italian during a little-known period of his life: the brief captivity on the island of Utica, prior to his much longer imprisonment in Rome. In 1926, Gramsci was sentenced to a five-year term on the tiny island along with several other ...

"The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment: Qui le croirait! on dit,  qu'irrités contre l'heure  De nouveaux Josués  au pied de chaque tour,  ...

  Protests began in Chile during the middle of October following the announcement of a 30 peso fare increase for the national metro service. In response, students staged fare evasion campaigns using the slogan ¡Evade! and occupied dozens of metro stations. The protests have since grown in size, embracing long-standing resentment over income inequality and the privatization of resources such as education and utilities, as well as demands for the resignation of President Enrique Piñera. City walls are covered in various slogans, including Rosa Luxemburg’s famous dictum declaring “socialism or barbarism”, and demonstrators wave the flag of the indigenous Mapuche people. Various reports from the ground paint a compelling picture of class struggle in one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, where 1% of the population controls some 26% of the total wealth. By design, the neoliberal policies pushed forward under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinoche and continued...

  Martin Monath: A Jewish Resistance Fighter Among Nazi Soldiers By Nathaniel Flakin Pluto Press, $20.00. Martin Monath lived during tumultuous times; his short life intersected with events that included both World Wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War. He was, as author and translator Nathaniel Flakin explains, a “child of war and revolution” (p. 7). Monath lived several lives under a host of different names, made many friends (and many more enemies), and died twice. Reshaping Monath’s life through a variety of hard-to-find sources, Flakin expertly places the story of one man within the larger context of what the late Eric Hobsbaum termed the Age of Extremes . Monath’s door into Marxism and the struggle for proletarian emancipation was not an uncommon one for young Jewish men growing up Berlin. In 1917, the Balfour Agreement sealed Britain's support for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Antisemitism — what August Bebel call...

What fascinated him about [superstructure and substructure] was that the spirit and its material manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire's correspondences, which clarified and illuminated one another if they were properly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which holds them together and enables the historian or philologist to recognize that they must a11 be placed in the same period. When Adorno criticized Benjamin's "wide-eyed presentation of actualities" (Briefe II, 793), he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do. Strongly influenced by surrealism, it was the "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations...

I saw a street lamp and it reached out to the moon, To lay on top of it and subsume it to its own vested light. before the moon that retreating prude changed its mind And the earth laid down for the sun to sell out its counterpart. It’s not too much money, it’s never too much, We’re past saving up of course Put it back in we'll get some machinery And eventually we’ll have enough to drill that starry plot.

Naked and never again Standing on this hill Together, while deepwater spills Tonight they abrogate an end. Before in the dark they played and bashed the cymbals and snares til the rare passerby sat to listen, smoke, or stare. When that song was over they packed up the kit; Maybe they missed the rhythm but the music was shit. They’re yelling again in the rain but smell a fire idling late through their sets. And they both know that one isn’t there but she still talks about depth.