That line of antagonism is extremely simple: the reason for our problems is the bankers and the billionaires.

inning concessions from capital and the state

. Then a man interrupted him and asked “what about violent crime?” Cole unfortunately stumbled through the answer and eventually landed on something like “look I’ve learned not to call the cops, so anyone can learn not to call the cops.”

He expressed concern about not repeating the same mistakes from our last big organizing push with Defund, and had thought a lot about politics since. He said, “it’s like we get in this loop and we don’t know how to stop it, and everyone gets mad at each other, and nothing changes. Why do we keep doing the same events? I don’t want to repeat that anymore. Poor people need to call the police.” I agreed, and I said “you’ve gotten pretty good at expressing this problem. I’m trying to figure it out too. It’s been helpful for me to take some time to study politics and socialist history to see how other people have dealt with old baggage and outdated modes of thinking and organizing.” He liked that

riveting

but now that I’m older they sounded like the final scene in Zoolander: “Check it out everyone, Mugatu’s a dick! And he’s trying to kill the Eurasian Dude.”

harm reduction, racial justice, and non-profit sectors

For them, and for most people, it was the international day against being sober and responsible. “Leave it to anarchists to ruin a perfectly good drinking holiday”, I thought.

We all have a job to do.

Joy went across the street, bought a bottle of liquor and a pack of cigarettes, drank and smoked on the sidewalk for an hour, vomited, then walked back into Big Bank and quit.

ut once a settlement or judgment is reached, the defendant is obligated to hire us to fulfill the claims.

History is replete with cruelty, yet we seem incapable of shocking one another with its mention. The impact of a specific story of undue suffering leaves a mark, but on whom, and under what circumstances, remains uncertain—uncertain in any way that might guide us toward clear resolutions or the avoidance of suffering in some moral form. I take this to be true of humanity, or of any population within a district, city, or collective we might belong to. I don’t yet know how to properly assess the importance of Greek tragedy, its cathartic effect, or the social function it served, any more than I feel compelled to comment on its counterpart in the perverse spectacle of public capital punishment, or the codes, glee, or grim necessity driving prison guards and military personnel to inflict beatings or torture in relative privacy. The point is that, outside of artistic redemption or intentional extremes, most of us are agents of death—often, but also mere facilitators of it. We all have a job to do. The closer that job aligns with our immediate goals, the farther we are from that death or suffering, padding our own bank accounts to avoid the same destruction—or perhaps, the closer to it. It would be unfair to label a grocery clerk an agent of death for ringing up food that might clog a customer’s arteries and contribute to their demise. There is an element of choice, but also the indirectness of facilitating death. Of entropy. What can we say of the owner of a liquor store in the heart of an urban hellscape? I’m sure it depends.

material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society