We held our first Hard Crackers convening in Boston on March 4. Including a one-year-old, seventeen new and old friends of Hard Crackers attended. A Boston old-timer talked about his friends recovering from opioid addictions. A 7th and 8th grade teacher discussed her students preparing to walk out for gun control in the wake of the […]
Editors’ Roundtable
The shooting at Douglas High School in Parkland prompted an exchange among our editors, which we are publishing here. To begin, three items: The first is from the Hard Crackers mission statement carried in every issue: American society is a time-bomb where the impending explosion is endlessly hinted at by horrifying “little” degradations of daily […]
“How Karl Marx Can Save American Capitalism” by Ronald W. Dworkin (Lexington Books, 2015)
Reviewed by Curtis Price “Early Marx also threatens the academy, being critical of the very professors who now stand guard over Marxian scholarship.” This unusual book (unusual because it’s written by a conservative physician and political scientist involved with the right-wing Hudson Institute) offers a penetrating, lucid and well-documented analysis of alienation in contemporary capitalism […]
SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE DISCUSSION
posted by Noel Ignatiev Following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, someone posted the following comment on Facebook: Everyone wants to make school shootings about guns, but no one wants to consider that they might also have something to do with schools. I <shared> the comment on my Facebook page. My <share> elicited a number […]
The Ideal of the Broken Down: On the Neapolitan Approach to Things Technical
Alfred Sohn-Rethel Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the author of Economy and Class Structure in German Fascism and Intellectual and Manual Labor: a critique of epistemology—two important works on economics and philosophy. He spent time in Naples during the 1920s and published this article in a German newspaper. For a couple of hundred years, the informal economy has been the […]
Lift Every Voice
From a new book by Imani Perry, A History of the Black National Anthem “By asserting the cross-cultural and multigenre and style collage of black formalist rituals, I, like [Ralph] Ellison, am disagreeing with a good deal of African American studies criticism. A distinction has sometimes been made by such critics that treats art (or […]