Have a spare $1 billion? You could replace Veritas Investments as San Francisco’s largest landlord
The sprawling apartment empire built by Veritas, San Francisco’s largest and most...
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Achewood is back, and it’s weirder than ever
Achewood is back from Circumstances.
culture
CINCO DE MAYO
originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 2003; this longer version appeared in CommonDreams.org, May 5, 2006; reprinted in Mesh Magazine #14, May/June 2006 Maximillian I of Mexic…
history
What is class today?
Amelia Horgan How should we understand class? Gabriel Winant I'm very glad to talk about this because I think that, despite our reliance on the concept of class on the socialist left, we don't always mean the same thing by it. I think the best way of understanding class is as a process. Harry Braverman says that alth
I think the best way of understanding class is as a process. Harry Braverman says that although we tend to resort to a shorthand when describing the working class, in fact, when you look closely, you're always looking at something more fluid than solid — the constant transformation in both the forces and the relations of production.
That's to say that although there is a hard, non-negotiable conceptual core of what it means to be in the proletariat, there is a wide belt of contingency around that. Take unemployment — this is a classic intervention over the last couple of decades: to explain un- and underemployment, as an important part of global proletarian experience, the forms of contingent attachment to the labour market.
And it's once you allow for these kinds of empirical and to some degree, conceptual flexibilities around the harder Marxist core of class analysis that you also gain new tools for thinking about the relationship of gender and class of race and class.
But it does require new forms of empirical investigation, it requires conceptual adjustment, it requires Marxists to take on insights from feminism, most importantly in this case. Then the reason these things become controversial is that it then raises new questions about political agency and possible sites of solidarity, which I think is what's generative about this approach of describing.
It seems to me that it's actually quite difficult to see how that that could be from a reading of and fidelity to Marxism; how it could be that you could imagine a kind of stable ordered concept of class? It seems that the whole dynamic of the transformation of the forces and relations of production and the genesis of the industrial reserve army, once you begin to really flesh that out sort of sociologically and empirically in a way that Marx only sort of does, requires this sort of openness.
Both gender and race are phenomena of the material base, if you want to use a base and superstructure metaphor, that's to say, they are forms of organisation of the forces of production, or of one force of production in particular — labour power — which they render available in particular forms for which they set the cost of reproduction, and at particular levels, again, all contingent, contested, all of that.
It’s for this reason, with a few further theoretical steps that you’d need to fill in, that service work in general including housework (we can see housework as an unwaged subset of service work) is resistant to productivity increases and is therefore typically relegated to the margins of the capitalist mode of production: either entirely non-commodified as in the home or only partially incorporated into the money economy by means of state subsidy.
And to show that from any given kind of point in the development of capitalism there are not necessarily immediate possibility of social transformation, but that the material bases are always developing in ways that can give rise to struggle. Those struggles can be generative and can take you somewhere. And that this is as characteristic of a post-industrial service economy as it was of an industrial economy although differently so.
Less generously, I suppose, I would say that the conflation of those three points that I just laid out — the collapse of the strategic and the material questions into a f humanistic question — bespeaks a kind of nostalgia. And nostalgia in general seems like completely at odds with Marxism.
Because it does seem to me that institutions of social reproduction don't analytically pre-exist the capitalist social relations that are around them. They are produced in and around and through the kind of development of capitalism in ways that permeate them much more powerfully than I think that kind of shorthand analysis would suggest.
This is speculative, but it seems to me that the ongoing decomposition of normative gender that we can all see around us, is in some ways, a kind of automatic development, or rather a kind of mechanical development almost, of the ways in which the capitalist mode of production is not able to reproduce itself that effectively anymore through a strictly gendered division of labour.
one thousand times this
There is a wider variety of genders that are becoming kind of possible and needed, but that's extremely politically fraught and contested. This argument is to link the question of how human beings are gendered and gender themselves to the question of the division of labour.
But nevertheless, as I always tell my students, it used to be that in many shops, when a manager entered the shop, the workers would all put down their tools and stop working, that you would not work while the manager was looking at you.
When I have worked in workplace organising this was always the thing I tried to find out about workers and about their jobs and about their relations with each other. What are those little moments where they have identified just a tiny sphere of autonomy, a tiny practice of resistance? Do they talk about that with each other? Do they share those? And often you find that they do. You know, “Hey, I found a way of listening to music while working in the warehouse, if the boss doesn't know. I have a hat on over my earbuds”, things like that.
And certainly, in the care economy, which I study, there's a perverse way in which that goes the other way, where workers actually have to break the rules in order to make sure patients are taken care of sufficiently. Because management is sort of tacitly expecting and banking on workers own kind of, let's call them democratic practices.
I’m always trying to get people to recover the term “busting the rate” for when you go too fast. In graduate school, I used to say to people who finish their PhD too fast “What are you doing? you're busting the rate! We take seven years in this shop!”.
care-work
Viewpoint: We Are All Salts
Today’s revival of union “salting” could not be more welcome or more urgently needed. A tactic as old as the labor movement itself, salting describes going to work in an unorganized workplace where there may be a chance to help initiate new union organizing. It’s also a label for taking jobs at already unionized employers, hoping to play a positive role. But here I will deal with the former: taking jobs to help spur new organizing. LABOR’S CRISIS Whatever amount of salting is underway today—it’s impossible to precisely measure—it cannot come soon enough. The U.S.
labor
TV Writers Say They’re Striking to Stop the Destruction of Their Profession
Television shows across the country are going dark because their writers have walked off the job. The strikers say they had no choice but to walk, as new technology and the squeeze from executives have put their very livelihood in serious danger.
tech-industry
Family of Banko Brown calls for accountability at Supes’ meeting
Following the DA's confirmation that Banko Brown was unarmed, supporters want answers, demanding that evidence be made public.
The Last of Us co-director calls for unionisation after not getting HBO credit | VGC
“Maybe we need unions in the video game industry to be able to protect creators"
150 AI Workers Vote to Unionize at Nairobi Meeting
More than 150 workers for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT pledged to establish the first African Content Moderators Union
tech-worker-organizing
SF DA Boudin says police refused to help in boba shop bust, so he was forced to rent U-Haul
The San Francisco Police Department refused to participate in an operation to arrest a man who ran a global fencing ring out of a Quickly Boba Tea Cafe earlier this month, according to District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
National Guard explains their role in fighting San Francisco's fentanyl crisis
"What I want to do upfront is dispel a lot of rumors," Major General Beevers said. "The California National Guards' presence in this is not going to be boots on the ground in San Francisco."
'Maybe we cried too much' over shoplifting, Walgreens executive says | CNN Business
Throughout the pandemic, major retailers have warned about surging theft and a rise in brazen shoplifting attempts. But a top Walgreens executive now says the freakout may have been overblown.
Whole Foods says its Civic Center location closed over safety concerns. That’s not the whole story
San Francisco’s liberalism didn’t cause the corporation’s Civic Center closure. Bad...
In San Francisco, a Troubled Year at a Whole Foods Market Reflects a City’s Woes
Tech workers have stayed home, and ongoing social problems downtown are forcing civic and business leaders to confront harsh realities about the city’s pandemic recovery.
Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get to School
When crossings are blocked for hours, kids risk their lives to get to school by crawling through trains that could start at any moment. Ambulances and fire trucks can’t get through. The problem has existed for decades. But it’s getting worse.
bleak
Column: Sorry, San Francisco is not the crime-ridden hellhole the far right claims it is
The far-right loves to paint San Francisco as a crime-ridden 'hellhole.' The celebration of an iconic transgender club is a reminder of what the city is really about.
Tom Sachs Promised a Fun Cult
The sculptor likes to call his studio part of his art practice. Working there could often be scary.
art
Spain’s Labor Minister Yolanda Díaz Is Working to Rebuild the Left
Spain’s labor minister Yolanda Díaz is a Communist — and her success restoring workplace protections has made her the country’s most popular politician. Now her new electoral platform Sumar is trying to use that popularity to revitalize the Spanish left.
No representatives of Podemos attended Díaz’s candidacy launch, as party leader Ione Belarra insisted a bilateral agreement between Sumar and her formation on left primaries and the internal distribution of funds would be needed to secure her presence. In the wake of this public display of disunity, both sides have gone on the attack in the media ratcheting up tensions further.
Yet in an interview with Jacobin’s Eoghan Gilmartin, PCE leader and Izquierda Unida MP Enrique Santiago argues that the Left is ultimately “condemned to work together.”
For example, the 2022 labor law reform, which cracks down on short-term precarious work contracts and secures new trade union protections, was not vetoed by the EU. Or after the European Commission repeatedly told us that we could not intervene in the energy markets, it ultimately had to accept the so-called “Iberian Exception” [under which Spain and Portugal passed a partial cap on the cost of electricity production].
Sumar as a political project is not about moderating political discourse or renouncing principles but rather widening the Left’s limits to form a majoritarian project capable of changing the political balance of forces in this country.
In contemporary societies, which are ever more complex, parties alone only have a certain social reach; but new processes of political aggregation require opening up participatory mechanisms beyond internal party structures.
The latter include major reductions in the cost of public transport, even making commuter trains free of charge.
We are condemned to work together and to reach an agreement. There is no other option. One Podemos leader told me the other day, as we were negotiating coalition for May’s local and regional elections, that “we don’t like that you are sitting down with splinter groups that broke off from us [such as Íñigo Errejón’s Más País].” My response was, “You were formed as a splinter group from us, and we are constantly working with you.” And if we go back far enough, we are all splinter groups from the Socialist International!
the-left
Dean Preston vs. GrowSF is San Francisco's spiciest political feud
In conversations with SFGATE, Supervisor Dean Preston and GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss...
ngrok blog: Introducing ngrok-rs - safe and portable network ingress to your Rust apps 🦀
Today, we're excited to announce ngrok-rs, our native and idiomatic crate for embedding secure ingress directly into your Rust applications. If you’ve used ngrok before, you can think of ngrok-rs as the ngrok agent packaged as a Rust crate.
technical
Dril Is Everyone. More Specifically, He’s a Guy Named Paul.
Paul Dochney posted his way into the halls of internet lore. After 15 years of anonymity, can he emerge without compromising his act?
The TikTok Ban Isn’t About National Security. It’s About the Global Dominance of US Tech.
After decades of justifying tech expansion on the basis of free speech, US policymakers threatening to ban Chinese-owned TikTok are now changing their tune. The about-face reveals their real objective: preserving the dominance of American tech capitalists.
The Undercover Organizers Behind America’s Union Wins
At Starbucks, Amazon.com and other big employers, activists known as “salts” have been a key to labor success. And they say they’re just getting started.
Accepting Our Idiocy
AI isn't sentient, humanity is vain.
artificial-intelligence
housing
The technologies of all dead generations
A couple days ago, I keynoted a conference at Penn’s Annenberg School organized by David Elliot Berman, Victor Pickard, and Briar Smith. It was called “Democratizing the Internet: Platforms, Pipes, Possibilities,” and it brought together a wonderful collection of people, who shared their work on the political economy of the internet and offered their thoughts on what should be done to improve things.
tech-and-socialism
cops
Bob Lee deserved better than to be killed — and then co-opted in death
Robert Harold “Crazy Bob” Lee died on the pavement in the wee hours last Tuesday after being stabbed while he walked through an abandoned downtown street. Bob "Crazy Bob" Lee deserved better to be knifed while walking alone at 2:30 a.m. in downtown San Francisco — and then co-opted, in death, to push a bogus narrative about the city.
SF program saves two dozen tenants from Ellis Act eviction
Just as Paul Mooney and his neighbors thought they'd have to fight their Ellis Act eviction in court, a Mission nonprofit came to the rescue.