The Mission
For years, amongst friends and acquaintances, I’ve been waxing poetic about my grievances with American politics. Our destructive foreign policy adventurism (often to the detriment of our domestic well-being) and the political establishment’s indifference to working class plight have created a void in the political space that is currently being filled by the ugliest tribalist voices and tendencies.
Our politics are bought and sold by corporations, the very same corporations where most of us forfeit our rights at the doors of for eight or more hours a day.
But talk is cheap, and I was beginning to feel like the sorts of armchair analysts I’d often deride. It was time for me to take some kind of action. Hence, the name of this newsletter: Praxis, meaning action or practice. The mission of this newsletter will be two-fold:
Leverage my skills as a writer to cover relevant stories and analyze current events through a pro-working-class lens, and;
Document my experiences participating in mutual aid, direct action, and organization towards addressing the most pressing issues in the hopes of inspiring like-minded people.
For me, point number two is particularly intriguing. There is no shortage of political commentary online, but simultaneously, there is a dearth of useful information for how to actualize political desires beyond the ballot box.
Direct action is a new experience for me. It will take time, and I hope it to be a learning experience for both myself and the audience.
Expect a mixture of regular, short-form news coverage and more infrequent analysis, guides, and more. I’ve yet to settle on a concrete cadence, as this is not my full-time job. But if any of that sounds intriguing, I implore you to join me on this journey.
I’ve spent the last several years undergoing a sort of political metamorphosis. Growing up as the son of Iraqi and Libyan immigrants in the wake of 9/11, you can imagine that I’ve always held some contempt and skepticism for our contemporary political reality given the destruction its flag-bearers left in their wake (in both of my ethnic lands of origin). However, it wasn’t until fairly recently that a string of material evolutions in my own life led me to introspect on my own experiences as a working class American, one who has experienced a set of conditions ranging from poverty to great fortune over a relatively short timespan.
In the earliest years of my adulthood, I was relatively ambivalent about politics. I had sort of drunk the Kool-aid on this notion that one could simply work their way out of any hole in America, and that most of the people complaining otherwise were just lazy and undeserving. One might think that an ascension from food stamps and material turmoil to moderate success and financial comfort in my dream field would have the effect of affirming this sort of reactionary “bootstraps” preconception that many of us carry; that if I could personally make a life for myself out of hard work, then surely the legend of American meritocracy we all sell ourselves must be true.
I used to buy it. Perhaps if I were myopic and self-centered, I still would. Don’t get me wrong, and allow me to shed some humility for a moment; I do consider myself a hard-working and intelligent person, and I do think that I had a direct role in bettering my circumstances. But ultimately, my greatest takeaway over the years has been that our position on the grand totem pole is relatively arbitrary, and an anecdote does not an argument make. I couldn’t ignore the data on real wages versus productivity, the ever-shrinking feasibility of home ownership for most my age, the widening gulf of wealth, and all of the brilliant people I had ever personally known who have undeservedly struggled to make their place in this world and make ends meet, often facing mountainous uphill terrain everywhere they turn.
I’d begun to seek answers, and through simply analyzing data at the surface level, I began to unravel the contradictions in many of the American Exceptionalist truisms we are brought up to believe in so fatalistically. For instance:
In spite of what the austerity hawks suggest, the last time American debt-to-GDP was this high was at the tail end of World War II, which preceded 30 years of rising living standards for Americans and an expansion of social programs coinciding with a gradual reduction, not an increase, in debt-to-GDP.
The US, one of the last developed countries on Earth to not adopt some form of single-payer universal healthcare, spends far more on healthcare per capita with worse outcomes than most other developed countries.
There is no correlation between public interest for a policy and its likelihood of being passed, whereas the interests of economic elites correlates very strongly with likelihood to pass (never mind how even the public interest itself is often manipulated by this same cohort).
I could go on, but then, I wouldn’t have anything to write about! I began to notice that the loudest proponents of some of those aforementioned truisms were also the same voices who most ardently sought to justify those atrocities in the Middle East and beyond. As I began to seek answers to some of these contradictions, I began to encounter intellectuals like Chomsky, Graeber, Parenti, Wolff; people who were offering a sobering and intellectual critique of the status quo not rooted in the rising vitriolic nationalist sentiment we see taking grip across the country today, but through a materialist lens that seeks to make sense of our world through history, data, and a rich tradition of critique so that we may one day hope to grow beyond our current economic reality.
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