As ICE storms Chicagoland, Chicago’s organizers speak. Stacy Davis Gates, Benji Hart, Arti Walker-Peddakotla, Ric Wilson, and others discuss ongoing ICE raids, Trump’s threats to send in the National Guard, and the solidarity we need to survive these times. Audio + transcript:

Far-right and neo-Nazis school shooters have carried out numerous deadly attacks this year - many influenced by and posting on, the same websites - yet the mass media and politicians focus on manufactured fantasies of left-wing violence. www.kunc.org/news/2025-09...

To defend the center/left from political & institutional collapse they would need to borrow tactics from left movements or to rally masses of people to themselves, both of which would require some degree of center/left hegemony. That's gone, largely by their own hand.

Antifa is not an organization, it's an orientation. Anyone can be antifascist. Everyone should be.

Online SRT lab is in an hour! QR code in the original poster was broken. ZOOM LINK HERE 👇🏽 purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/9206239251...

I'm not much of a novel reader anymore but an incredible thing about them can be the demonstration that everyday people's conversations are beautiful. Perhaps listening to novels, as I mostly do now, even emphasizes this. The task is to carry this recognition into daily life.

Labor unions and other organizations organized a march to demand the end to the military occupation of DC today.

BREAKING "Several purported detainees at the Alligator Alcatraz migrant prison, and their families, contacted Noticias 23 to report that riots were taking place at this migrant prison in the Florida Everglades." www.univision.com/local/miami-...

As further national guard deployments loom, along with ongoing DHS human snatching ops, I keep thinking about this sentence from T Derbent (who came to my attention as the author of a history of The German Communist Resistance against fascism).

Lateish last night I completely killed the vibe hanging out in the kitchen with my partner when I accidentally went into exhaustive detail recounting the plot of the film Barbarians which I had then just watched and which had thoroughly struck me with dread.

Many of the men deported to CECOT said they are permanently changed: struggling to sleep, drink water or leave their homes. One man broke into tears describing how he had a panic attack the first time he walked down a busy Venezuelan street.

My latest in the new edition of Hammer and Hope.

Just turned in my final round of proofs. Guess this is happening for real now. Out November 4th:

Trying to think about the present relevance of Mike Davis's Prisoners of the American Dream, I slid into a detour thru his late writing. It reminded me that when he passed, I'd hoped someone would assemble a bibliography of his uncollected work. Here's my contribution. Let me know what I missed.

“The reason is the organized resistance: the people who literally went to war with them in Paramount, in Compton, in Bell and Huntington Park,” said Ron Gochez, a member of Unión del Barrio, an independent political group that patrols neighborhoods to alert residents of immigration sweeps.

Reminder: LA kicked his ass. DC can too

Two things can be true: 1) The President has legal authority over the D.C. police and the D.C. National Guard that he doesn't have *anywhere else* in the country; & 2) Even if this doesn't set a legal precedent, it sets an ominous *political* precedent for pretextually overriding local government.

When the nat guard/feds kill someone in DC, probably, it's going to go down. Some have called Trump 2.0 a revenge tour for the 2020 Rebellion, seems more correct today (tho not the whole story). Seems at least likely, that he's hoping to provoke, so he can crush, an uprising.

What Court Order? Federal Agents Keep Raiding LA Workplaces Despite Ban theintercept.com/2025/08/07/i...

I learned a lot in Nelson Lichtenstein's "The Marxism of Mike Davis," which seems to have been slept on when it dropped last week, perhaps because it was in Jacobin lol. Particularly interesting was the stuff on his NLR era & his course away from a more structural Marxism.

What I hate most about "Home" isn't that it's a bad song but that it's a perfect artifact of the culture industry of 2010—folksy nostalgia covering lack of depth. If I listen without thinking, it might move me to tears—like an Obama speech from that moment & so much else.

now published: The Socialization Debate Revolutionary Confusion after the German Revolution of 1918 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 46, Issue 1, 2025, Pages 93-122 doi.org/10.5840/gfpj...

New union news just sent to my inbox: Workers across four Blue Bottle Coffee locations in the Bay Area won their union election in a 22-5 vote. Here's the press release with more info:

Winning mass working class support for trans rights is absolutely possible. Broad sympathy for trans people was turned by a handful of major newspaper and magazine editors, nazis and a few fashy feminists. Most people care about bodily autonomy and letting others find their path. We can win

Reading thru @scuttle_chicago's "Previous Tactics from the Fight Against ICE," it strikes me a) what's incredible about the LA movement is largely innovation in stitching tactics together thru community hubs, b) that that zine should be read by everyone wondering what to do rn.

Forget marxology for a minute and start doing césaireology where you discuss how he never wrote colonial/imperial "boomerang" in french, he wrote "blow back" or "back lash", which has different implications.

Obviously they are serious about the hiring drive. But their Gestapo recruitment posters are goofy af. Interesting they lean into the supposed-to-be badass women images, while the suited men look dweeby. Anyway I thought the LA Times story on limits to ICE hiring was 👍 www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07...

Authoritarian neoliberalism: make more people houseless, poor, surveilled, and automated out of a job, and then throw them in a hole.

I've seen this sentiment from a few sources. There is truth to it (economic/institutional imperatives partly align university leadership interests w/ Trump), but the idea that an unpopular president lacks coercive power defies history. Unpopular presidents are short on persuasion not coercion.

Perhaps one small consolation, for the immediate future, regarding ICE transforming into a political police is that they tend to be so used to operating without due process that they don't know how to generate charges that will stick to an arrested protestor. www.latimes.com/california/s...

What is the most compelling piece of writing on the revolutionary viability of "class struggle elections" in the current era? I doubt I have many proponents of that few in my follows, but if possible I'd love to hear from supporters as much as critics if I could.

We’re launching a website of revolutionary speculative fiction, art and poetry set in the world of Everything for Everyone! We’re calling it Project 2052. To support author honoraria, subscribe as a sustainer, make a one-time donation, or pitch a story here: www.commonnotions.org/project2052.

What I learned patrolling for ICE in Terminal Island. The same federal facility that detained Japanese Americans in 1942 is now the staging ground for immigration raids across LA. One San Pedro resident documents what he’s seen and why history feels like it’s repeating itself.

I was just looking into a review copy of Phil Neel's new book, Hellworld: The Human Species and the Planetary Factory. I thought the release date was Sept. I knew that, like all Hist Mat series, the initial hardcover would be $$$. With institutional access you can currently download the book free.

Attorney in #SanFrancisco explains how community mobilizations against ICE block deportations. "When you ask what can you do, this is exactly what you can do. Organize...show up and scare ICE away. Actions like these literally save lives. Because of their action today, ICE didn't show up."

Community members are bravely standing up to ICE troops attempting to conduct a mass raid on a cannabis greenhouse in Camarillo, CA. People on the ground reporting that federal troops have continued to attack crowd with tear gas: www.instagram.com/p/DL8SP_DgfAa/

My political sympathy is with the anti-state abolitionists re: police & ICE, but I do think that some of the critiques of the soc dems we've been seeing are on the idealistic side, in that they don't raise a compelling plan of action beyond calling ppl to show up in the street.

Last week, we lost the poet, activist, and scholar Joshua Clover. Those who want to pay homage might donate to their local bail fund.

My review of Jasper Bernes's book The Future of Revolution just dropped on Field Notes. "a narrative...of revolutionary examples since Marx’s writings on the 1871 Commune." Also "as an intellectual history and theory of what is now called 'communization,' perhaps the most comprehensive to date."

My review of Jasper Bernes's book The Future of Revolution just dropped on Field Notes. "a narrative...of revolutionary examples since Marx’s writings on the 1871 Commune." Also "as an intellectual history and theory of what is now called 'communization,' perhaps the most comprehensive to date."

Interested in starting a new tenant organization in your neighborhood or city? Organizers from @vancouvertenants.bsky.social, Puget Sound Tenants Union, and @latenantsunion.bsky.social will present & lead a discussion. Sunday April 13, 4:30 / 7:30 Register at bit.ly/ATUN-april13

Hey y'all! We just wanted to thank the contributors (Holden Taylor, @malcontent.bsky.social , @benfteresa.bsky.social , and Zara Cadoux to our Abolish Rent ( @haymarketbooks.org , @city.bsky.social Leonardo Vilchis) dossier. That's all for right now, but more in the future. Links in thread 👇🏽

Hey y'all! We've got the latest entry in our Abolish Rent ( @city.bsky.social , @haymarketbooks.org ) dossier. Zara Cadoux looks at Abolish Rent as both an organizing tool and work off public geography: spectrejournal.com/tenant-organ...

ICYMI: @malcontent.bsky.social 's contribution to our dossier on @city.bsky.social and Leonardo Vilchis's 's Abolish Rent ( @haymarketbooks.org ) is still live on our website. We'll be adding another piece to the dossier the dossier by @benfteresa.bsky.social this Friday (3/21).

"The Commune Form and Abolish Rent are exceptional, concise works on the prospects of communism in rural and urban areas., respectively" @malcontent.bsky.social reviews @city.bsky.social / Leonardo Vilchis & Kristin Ross. Highly recommended::

This is a lovely piece. I don’t think there are nearly enough efforts to think thru the metabolic rift in terms of composition of movements.

The tenants and the defenders of the earth (often peasants), fighting to sustain their lives against landed, state, and capitalist exploitation, violence, "making our community by defending it," and in so doing they convivir, they commune spectrejournal.com/convivir-a-s...

In "Convivir, a Synonym for Commune?" my latest on @journalspectre.bsky.social I wrote about @city.bsky.social & Leonardo Vilchis's Abolish Rent & Kristin Ross's The Commune Form, starting from a revived communist theme via @tenantpower.bsky.social—the abolition of the separation of town and country

spectrejournal.com/convivir-a-syn… We've got an entry in our Abolish Rent dossier live. Drawing on Abolish Rent (@haymarketbooks.org) and Kristin Ross's The Commune Form (@versobooks.bsky.social), @malcontent.bsky.social argues that communism must traverse the rural/urban divide.