Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We’re often on the road, moving from place to place and staying in motels. It is not possible to form close friendships under such circumstances, and even when we settle down somewhere for a few months or a year, it is difficult to make friends. People reasonably think that it is not worth cultivating a relationship with a couple who will be moving soon. And we feel the same. This is the way we have chosen to live, so we are not complaining. Still, however, we enjoy human interactions, so we try to have them in whatever ways we can. We enjoy talking to people in grocery stores, Laundromats, truck stops, and motels. Usually, we just make small talk, but sometimes we take on more weighty matters. A motel desk agent from India tells us how much he misses his family back home. He is going to miss the birth of his first grand child. The owner of a Laundromat confides her aspirations for her son. A grocery clerk with splints on both wrists badmouths the boss. The woman who has been cleaning our room introduces us to her little boy, whom she brings to work because she has no one else to watch him. We buy him a present for his first birthday. Read More

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Below is an excerpt from Naming the System. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC is the Spanish acronym) is the oldest revolutionary army in Latin America. Since 2002, it has been under some of its severest attacks by the Colombian government under the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe, aided by considerable U.S. military aid and personnel, who are in Colombia allegedly to eradicate the drug trade, but really to contain and defeat the FARC. The FARC has suffered many blows in the past few years, including the death of its founder and leader Manuel Marulanda in 2008 and the murder of several of its top leaders. Yet, it continues to fight, and it still controls large areas of the country and maintains its capacity to disrupt the Colombian economy. An update on FARC, with an overall negative view of its future, can be found at http://www.coha.org/farc-a-perilous-future-a-grim-recent-past/. All things considered, I do not think the FARC can overthrow the government, and I think it is likely that the FARC has lost a good deal of its initial revolutionary trajectory. Read More

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 When I first began to teach, I had many veterans from the war in Vietnam in my classes. Between my first year in 1969 and the revolutionary victory in 1975, tens of thousands of soldiers returned home.  The college in which I taught was in the steel-mill town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and like most working class cities, Johnstown had more than its share of veterans. Read More

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My mother turned eighty-five years old on January 26.  She’s a small, grey-haired woman with plenty of wrinkles.  When she was young, she had long brown hair and a pretty Italian face.  She and my dad were a handsome couple.  We used to laugh a lot together, and I can still get her laughing.  Wordsworth said that the child is the father of the man.  And so too the child is the mother of the woman.  You never really conquer what you were.  A poor girl in a poor town, with a poor mother and no father, breathing in the coal smoke, beset by worries, finds it hard to be happy as a woman.  You always jump when the phone rings.  Anyway, what my mother was and is helped make me, for better and worse, what I am.  Here’s a story I wrote.  My mother has read it.  I think she had mixed feelings about it.  It is from my book, In and Out of the Working Class.    Read More

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The State  Today there are many social scientists who believe that capitalism is gradually transcending the government, meaning that governments can no longer regulate and control capital accumulation. This view is incorrect. Capitalist economies developed alongside of strong central governments and cannot exist without them. Capitalist production and distribution occur within markets marked by intense competition and extreme individualism. Without some sort of central control, markets would devolve into chaos as rampant cheating and violence erupted over market control. A central government is needed to make laws and rules for the smooth operations of markets: laws to compel contracts to be honored, laws to ensure minimal product purity, a bureaucracy to enforce laws and rules, and so forth. Governments are also necessary for the production of certain outputs essential for capitalist production but which the markets themselves will not cause to be produced. Either because no capitalist could be sure of reaping the reward of a particular investment or the investment is beyond the means of any single capitalist, the state must undertake certain investments. It must provide for the national defense, build roads, bridges, lighthouses, port facilities, airports, railroad lines, and provide for the general education of the work force. Read More

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