Quick note (I mean it for once) on two things I wrote
Hi everyone,
I figure if you follow my little blog/newsletter thing that’s because you’re interested in or at least willing to tolerate the mention of things I’ve written. So with that in mind I figured I’d mention I had an essay in Labor Online recently, here: https://lawcha.org/2025/03/27/where-does-marxism-in-labor-history-come-from-where-does-it-go/
It may be some labor historian inside baseball, as ever your mileage may vary, but the gist is me going ‘hey seems like labor history in the US is informed by some important earlier Marxist scholarship and includes a lot of Marxists in the field and yet we’re not as open about that as we could be and we Marxists in the field are basically less than the sum of our parts because disorganized, that sucks!’
I also had an essay in Counterpunch the other day griping about Bernie Sanders saying stuff like ‘the US has always stood for democracy’ when the truth is the US government has been massively opposed to democracy forever and that there’s a rich, vibrant, beautiful, tragic, and highly informative history of activism and organizing for justice that has sought to resist the government’s brutal actions and the brutal social order it represents. If that’s your cup of tea, it’s here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/04/02/bernies-memory-needs-a-tune-up/
As long as I’m writing, I mentioned the other day I’ve been reading some of Robert Knox’s stuff. Great stuff, I highly recommend it to you. He’s got this piece about the Tories as lawless, or rather how criticism of the Tories as lawless is an understandable but politically very limited framing. I think it’s good and I’m fully convinced, it’s here: https://salvage.zone/the-right-against-the-rule-of-law/ As ever I doubt myself in various ways but I’ve committed in my mind to trying to write a follow up piece basically repeating his analysis applied to the Trump administration. Very briefly for the moment: I don’t think Trump is lawless. I think, as Knox writes about re: the Tories, Trump violates specific bits of law performatively as a tactic for ideological effect, while also often invoking his own particularly right wing version of law and order politics (all versions of which are right wing). I’ll add that I recently finished teaching what is in my view a very good cultural history of the death penalty in the United States, Executing Freedom by Daniel Lachance. I’m biased because the author is a friend and the book teaches well. Anyway, he has a chapter on right wing district attorneys who use appeals to frontier myths and cowboy vigilante stories from US history and a sort of ‘I am guided by my tough, manly moral compass’ posture to political effect. That posture is deeply, deeply conservative, authoritarian, and violent, but it’s not lawless so much as it’s a form of embrace of legality. I think the difference between that and ‘lawless’ are nontrivial, not mere pedantry, both in terms of factual/reasonable assessment and - and imho more importantly - in terms of rhetorical/ideological effect of the two assessments. This is related to Knox’s other paper that I mentioned the other day, about how efforts to oppose the Iraq War ended up leaning on ‘this is an illegal war’ in ways that initially fostered larger mobilizations, thus seemed like a great idea, but soon became pretty inhibiting of those efforts - paper’s great, you can check it out here https://www.academia.edu/64028197/International_law_politics_and_opposition_to_the_Iraq_War. I think if ‘stop this lawless administration!’ becomes the dominant sensibility it will play out like ‘stop this illegal war!’ did, which is to say, badly. Finally, I think the ‘he’s lawless!’ sensibility expresses a political outlook or implied social theory that’s of a piece with the dominant sensibilities of the day and that gets the law and its politics badly wrong in ways that will be, in the long term, pretty negative in effect if not addressed critically.
Lastly, my book - Injury Impoverished: Something Law, Something Something Capitalism Or Whatever - was published five (5) years ago this month. Totally bewildering. Feels both much longer ago and much more recent. I’ve thought about writing something about how I’d write it today if I had it to do over. I don’t know that I will actually do that, might instead do a ‘what questions are left after this, where to next?’ kind of thing instead, I dunno. I can say for sure that there’d be a ton of Tony Smith and Simon Clarke all over it if I wrote it now. If you’d like a second hand copy, Bookfinder Dot Com has them at just under twenty bucks, you could request that your local public library buy one. (I love when that happens. My branch bought one! And then so few people checked it out that it was eventually removed from the collection… I don’t love that but I am at peace. If nothing else it means I’m still punk! this shit is wicked underground, squares wouldn’t understand….) Alright, well, enough. Too much really, we both know it. Anyhow keep on keeping on! Over and out!