I live far outside the boundaries of mainstream United States intellectual and political life. I’m a historian, writer, editor, and political analyst, and have participated in social movements all my life, from anti-nuclear and anti-war efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, to persistent labor agitating on and off the job (especially with Processed World magazine in the 1980s-90s), to the Critical Mass bicycling movement that propelled me into a role in new urban movements in Europe and Latin America during the 21st century. I write semi-regularly on this blog and I’ve published ten books with various publishers, all known to be on the “Left” (Verso Books, Pluto Press, AK Press, City Lights Books) or my own imprint, Full Enjoyment Books. I’ve had several titles translated and published in Italy and one in Brazil. My blog is read by a few hundred people, my books sell in the few thousands, and I have friends and fans from San Francisco to Santiago to Sao Paulo, Berkeley to Bergamo to Buenos Aires, Portland to Puerto Alegre, Mexico City to Milano, Toronto, Rome, and Guadalajara and points in between. I am proud of this, and it makes me happy and hopeful.
Coyotes, an ever more common sight on Bernal Heights, seen here at dusk on April 21.
I am far from silenced, and by many measurements I’m a modest success (even if I haven’t been able to economically support myself writing). But still, I’m a sublebrity (hat-tip to Brian Awehali for this great neologism) at best, and just another invisible “content producer” to most people. I’ve made no effort to get a “real job” since I was in my mid-20s, and have never tried to get my work in front of the big New York publishers, never connected with an agent, nor have I tried very hard to break into big circulation periodicals (a couple of tries led nowhere).
I’ve never officially made more than $25,000 in any of my 45 adult years, but I’m debt-free and even have a bit of savings, and with my very low Land Trust rent, my sweetheart and I live a materially comfortable life.
You could say I lack ambition. But actually I am profoundly ambitious with regard to my own goals, some of which I’ve had all my life (overthrow wage-labor and capitalism; live well now and work as little as possible), and others that have taken shape as I’ve gotten older:
• produce a dynamic archival space for recording and debating our shared history;
• participating in unfolding movements of techno-scientific workers to reclaim the purpose and design of their own work, and redirect the technosphere to a radically different way of life;
• adapt urban life to natural systems that undergird our existence, especially, perhaps, someday, redoing our relationship to fresh water, personal mobility, and public space;
• live to see the decommodification of housing and the reinvention of neighborhood life/politics.
• etc. etc. etc. …
Yes, I can keep adding to this list, but as a relatively isolated voice, not involved at the moment in any movement or political organizing effort, what’s the point? I like hearing and seeing my voice—if I didn’t I wouldn’t keep writing. But I am self-aware enough to know that narcissistic satisfaction is not an adequate reason to add more words to the empty, always urgent cacophony that is already burying countless intelligent ideas and vital critiques, including, presumably, my own!
We’ve all trekked up and down and all over Bernal countless times during this past year… but I still feel blessed that it is just a 25 minute walk from home.
With this predicament as my daily starting point, I ponder new books I want to write (and add to the tidal wave of new work always crashing over any of us trying to “keep up”), including a prequel novel to my previous After the Deluge, and two more histories of San Francisco covering 1957-67 and 1980-2020… or should I pursue a systemic reworking of our unique digital archive at foundsf.org to adapt it better to current stylistic preferences for online presentations, including adding a map interface?… or should I pursue building a solar energy commons, starting with our co-op building and reaching out to all the neighbors whose backyards connect in this large urban block in San Francisco’s Mission District, and pioneer a model of urban grassroots reinvention?
One or more of these projects will certainly reach fruition in the next years, maybe all of them! But I have to admit I kind of liked the Covid hiatus. It fit with my well-cloaked agoraphobia, removing any expectation that I would be going to events or seeing people out in the world. I have been quite content walking and biking on my own, seeing people very occasionally, hosting walks and tours outdoors during these months, and having hours every day to read, devouring dozens of books, following my curiosity and interests wherever they led me. I love being a completely independent public intellectual!
Yesterday my daughter turned 37; her daughters are going to turn 4 and 1 in another month. My dad hit 89 in January, and I made it to 64 in March… With these markers in time, it’s impossible not to notice how short our lives are. I’m already past the age that most people made it to a century ago. My mom died in late 2019 at 83, and my dad is still going, with expectations that he’ll make it at least to his mid-90s since he’s still mentally perfectly sharp. His mobility is severely compromised, and his hearing is going, but otherwise, why not? Meanwhile, my granddaughters are bursting with life, and my daughter is thriving as a mother, a public intellectual, an activist, and on the cusp of putting herself into the maelstrom of public school teaching for the first time. It’s all so darn interesting! And encouraging!
With age comes a deepening sense of the passage of time, but also of its immensity. And with new histories being written, reinterpreting or rediscovering histories that stretch back to times in the distant “pre-historical” past, the blip that constitutes our moment in time shrinks towards its eventual obscurity. All of my own writing and thinking are a product of the peculiar decades from the 1960s to the present (I was born in 1957). In my last post I mentioned the odd feeling of seeing government money being widely distributed, putting a thin tiny patch on a beleaguered and discredited social safety net. My whole adult life has unfolded in a time of aggressive capitalist assault on living standards, aggregate wages, the environment, and life in general, with the United States in particular responsible for a couple of dozen wars and literally millions of dead.
The persistence AND paucity of meaningful resistance also characterizes this period. I’ve been part of countless demonstrations, movements, and counter-cultural efforts to shift the values and priorities of this society, but the real experience of the past 40 years is one of continual loss, shrinking expectations, growing pessimism, and a broad collapse of empathy and solidarity all around me (albeit with many people trying their best to resist and reverse those trends). The dominant reality of being in the heart of the most militarized empire in world history, and seeing the wars and mayhem imposed on other countries either enthusiastically supported or blithely ignored, makes me feel a bit crazy. Seeing that culture of war and domination gradually engulfing daily life “at home” is enraging too, even if it’s impossible not to feel that some of those mass shootings, misogynistic violence, and police murders represent the (militaristic) chickens coming home to roost. But we know who suffers from this, and there’s no pleasure or even schadenfreude when the actual human consequences are part of the picture. As I write this, police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder, better than not for sure, but such a rare occurrence with so much attention only underscores how out of whack the whole system is. No doubt the mass demonstrations last summer, combined with the numerous eyewitnesses and witness videos were what produced this exceedingly rare case of accountability for police murder.
Perhaps years from now we’ll look back on this as a turning point, perhaps in combination with the repudiation of Trump and his racist followers, where we finally began the actual process of reconstruction and reparation that will take generations more, but maybe at last we’ve moved irrevocably onto that path. Let’s hope so, and do all we can to make it so.
Made it on 35-mile ride on our new e-bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and San Rafael-Richmond Bridge from where this photo was taken… nice views!
Waiting in line for the vaccine at SF General Hospital, late February 2021.
I was just talking to a friend who said something like, “maybe with Biden it’ll get better,” referring to housing or senior care or food quality or… I can’t remember what it was. But I have heard this sentiment plenty of times in the past couple of months, and if you read the national liberal press, from the NY Times to the Nation or New Yorker or Mother Jones, there’s a palpable enthusiasm for the FDR-like “boldness” of the Covid $2 trillion, with its new basic income for children, its extended unemployment and medical premium subsidies, etc. The long, sordid history of Biden’s opportunism is being quickly swept under the rug in favor of this new, unencumbered embrace of a post-Reagan, post-neoliberal re-energizing of the government.
Lost in all this, besides Biden’s decades of support for racist policing and his corrupt pandering to credit card and banking industries, is the role of concentrated capital in running the show. There’s no way Biden or Harris is anything but in service to concentrated capital. So to understand this moment better, we have to go beyond the immediate drama of whether or not the Democrats will take the power they hold by a sliver and expand it through DC (and maybe Puerto Rico) statehood with its two (or four) new senators, put through the voting rights acts bills that have already passed the House, etc. Any serious effort to hold, consolidate, expand, and extend their power simply requires they overcome the reticence of Feinstein, Sinema, Manchin, and the other millionaire Senators defending the Jim Crow filibuster in the name of a long-lost bipartisan comity.
But to what end would they consolidate power? What is their real agenda? Finally spending some of the massive federal budget on people below the top 10% of wealth is an easy and long overdue adjustment that may gain the current Democrats enough political capital that they can stay in power longer than their multiple neoliberal predecessors who squandered every opportunity to take care of their erstwhile base. But we still don’t see clearly what their agenda is. Which parts of capital, which futures, are they working for?
From Ocean Avenue on a recent bike ride to the sea, I caught this view…. Farallon Islands visible on horizon just left of the sun streaks.
Decarbonizing the energy economy is a worthwhile goal, whether or not one has any aspirations to break from capitalism per se. Using the pandemic to further consolidate medical capital, maybe even nationalizing parts of it through Medicare and the like, while freeing up Big Pharma and the hospital chains to continue their monopolizing (oligopolizing) ways, looks like one goal. Bolstering the concentrated power of big banks and private equity syndicates seems like another, reinforcing their control over the cash-rich spigot of housing. And maybe the leaders of those industries recognize that their legitimacy has already outlasted several moments when it might logically have collapsed. A turn toward repairing the social safety net, even expanding it modestly, is one way to relegitimize the larger system’s existence and its ongoing control by the .01%. A massive redistribution of wealth, while deserved and necessary, is explicitly NOT the goal of the current regime—the unfamiliar warmth of a shot of stimulus to the safety net already feels like more than we could hope for after four harsh decades. We’ve normalized the austerity imposed during that kleptocratic frenzy, unleashed by Reagan in the proudly greedy ’80s, and that reached its desultory zenith in the venal stupidity of the Trumpist swamp that sought to drown everything in itself.
So now there is a tepid social-democratic left minority in the Congress, claiming the mantel of a Left that wants to check the power of capital. But AOC and Sanders and the gang are all bound to collaborate with the logic of capital accumulation since they have no vision beyond that. The much-promoted “Green New Deal” is fundamentally a strategy of industrial growth and job expansion at a time when we should be reconsidering the basic logic of how our physical lives are organized. Such a consideration might lead some readers to think in personal terms, but that’s exactly wrong, as well said here by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:
…your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. Worse yet, footprint thinking teaches us to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of “people” and “consumption” rather than in systematic dynamics of capitalism and empire… these modes of thought explain our present, disastrous state of affairs by consistently and significantly underestimating how the present is the product of a long past, of a bloody history of power, capital, and class, entwined in the web of life. (p. 204-205)
More industry, more economic growth, more work, are not goals that I associate with a future worth fighting for. A left agenda should be focused on work reduction, resource conservation, ecological repair, and working on a new social consensus on how we measure and self-manage our well-being as a society—and not just locally or regionally or nationally, but globally. And fortunately, there are many examples of new thinking about how we conceive of, and measure, economic life, and well-being more broadly. No matter how we ultimately shift our thinking—even if we embrace my favorite goal of radical work reduction, there is much to do. Reconfiguring how we interact with water, soil, air, and energy are fundamental to our ability to adapt to and thrive in a world that has locked in inevitable climate chaos.
But we aren’t even talking about anything as basic as that. It’s not hard to understand why, given that at least half the population of the U.S. is committed to a backward-looking White American project—based on heavy industry and centralized agribusiness, oil, cars, a segregated suburbia—that is already disappearing into history’s dustbin. Nevertheless, to gird ourselves for the deeper transformation rushing towards us, it is helpful to peruse some of the historic roots of the particular configuration of capitalism we have now, a capitalism that has promoted a process of hyper-concentration that used to be called monopoly (and oligopoly).
With the recent announcement by the Mayor that outdoor restaurant parklets should be made permanent, there is a boom in construction going on… this is Valencia at 18th.
