Welcome to another link roundup! We’re only two weeks into the new year but to me it already feels as though several months have passed, and surely it must be almost time for another break. Failing that, why not peruse some links?
Thanks to Matt for alerting me to this long, excellent piece on the Sanders campaign, which begins by chronicling the journey of one man who switched from Pod Save America to Chapo Trap House, and all that such a switch entailed. All jokes aside, this is maybe the best thing I’ve read so far on how the Sanders campaign is approaching organising, and its strategy to “expand the electorate rather than pander to one element of it”. Too many great bits to choose just one quote to excerpt here - just go and read it yourself.
Speaking of podcasts, it was certainly an interesting experience to hear Matt Christman and Virgil Texas on the, errr, “Skullduggery” podcast. I’ll admit that I have never listened to an American politics podcast other than Chapo, and assumed that the Chapo parodies of liberal wonk podcasts were, ah, parodies. But no! Turns out reality is just as bad, if not worse! The smugness of the hosts here is truly sickening, and honestly it’s up to you to decide if you can stomach it. That said, as my partner pointed out, it is useful to hear socialists having to defend their views, rather than just furiously agreeing with one another on a podcast. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Switching gear a bit: thanks to reader (and writer!) Andy for sending me this piece on recent bail conditions for environmental activists. This is a relatively little-discussed aspect of the way that the legal system, far from being a neutral force for justice, works to punish political activists - and how magistrates and judges often get away with imposing arbitrarily harsh bail conditions, despite this being an abuse of legal processes.
“What about bail conditions prohibiting Extinction Rebellion activists from going into the CBD? Or activists who have stopped coal trains banned from catching passenger trains? Can anybody honestly argue this condition is necessary to stop them reoffending? How about Emily Starr and Matilda Heselev, who in July after blocking the entrance to Adani’s Abbot Pt coal terminal (15km north of Bowen), were given bail conditions barring them from the town of Bowen? Most extreme of all was 21 year old Freya Nolin, who earlier this year was given bail conditions banning her from the state of Queensland – 1,727,000 square km of Australia rendered illegal to her on the whim of one magistrate before she had even been brought to trial.”
In case you’re ever tempted to think that universities represent a kind of respite from the neoliberal hellscape, this piece in Commune by Caroline Jackson is here to persuade you otherwise. It’s full of great stuff about the labour conditions in universities (and the obfuscation thereof), but I particularly loved this spicy morsel: “Academics who attempt to make radical social and political critiques in their writing but fail to confront their role in propping up an exploitative system do the work of the capitalist management class.” YES. I’ve been cooking up a ‘Failchildren of Academia’ Floodcast episode for some time (I get together with a bunch of my friends who also burned out of academia and we air our grievances), so stay tuned for that. And, if you want to read about the experience of labour organising in the academy, I’m never not recommending Alyssa Battistoni’s gorgeous piece ‘Spadework’, probably my very favourite essay of 2019.
Finally, a look inside the Paris strikes, from the perspective of one evening spent on the 96 bus to Richard Lenoir. This piece is full of the funny, thought-provoking, extremely human interactions that Hard Crackers is known for, and these interactions are very effective in making larger political points. At one point, the author meets a young Parisian man, a precarious worker who feels that there will probably not be a pension by the time he’s old enough to collect it. (Incidentally this is a sentiment shared by many of my friends, although this may or may not be an excuse for never paying any attention to their super funds.) As he says:
“We, the precarious workers and those of the small companies, we are very far from the world of the trade unions; it is inaccessible for us, nobody is defending us, no strike fund, so we’re going to pay the real price for this movement. I have nothing against those who are on strike, I’m not saying that it has to stop now without having won anything, but I’m just saying that whatever the government, we get lost every time. And everyone forgets us, the government and the unions. For us there are no strike funds, but I still support those who fight for the interest of all.”
Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash