Introduction to The Paul Street Report

I grew up an only child in a troubled but highly educated, liberal and academic household in the shadow of the University of Chicago, with a front-row seat for the great social movements of the Nineteen Sixties.  My father, who struggled heroically with hemophilia and (less heroically) with alcohol, was a liberal-left sociologist. Physical disability kept him of his two preferred professions: jazz piano and journalism.  My mother taught elementary school in the middle of the desperately poor Robert Taylor Homes in the historical heart of Black Chicago.  She brought me to her all-Black classroom twice a year to get a sense of the savage, Dickensian race-class inequalities that mocked America’s “democratic” pretenses within and beyond Chicago.

My earliest political memory is seeing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a dream” speech on a grainy black-and-white television set in Chicago’s South Side Hyde Park neighborhood.  My parents took me at the age of eight to see King speak at Chicago’s Soldier Field on a 99-degree day in the summer of 1966. They participated in King’s Chicago Freedom Movement and opposed the so-called Vietnam War – a bad label for what Noam Chomsky called at the time the US “crucifixion of Southeast Asia.” They were disgusted by the racist authoritarianism of Chicago’s Mayor Daley and United States President Richard Nixon, and by the blood-soaked militarism of Nixon’s predecessor Lyndon Johnson. I have a picture of my mother walking on a teachers’ union picket line in 1969 and another one of her dressed for a Vietnam Moratorium march.

Alienated by repeated moves (to Long Island in 1970 and Ann Arbor in 1973), domestic difficulties, and the “dazed and confused” nothingness of the drug-soaked Seventies, I barely attended school through much of adolescence. But my love for reading and writing and for social protest – products of the Sixties and my years at John Dewey’s original (University of Chicago) Laboratory School – survived. I fulfilled an 11th grade American Literature assignment by writing a new ending to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that featured a mass slave rebellion. The paper came back marked “A+++” along with the astonishing claim that I was “an exceptionally talented writer!” – heady stuff for a teenage truant and budding car thief.

Delinquency proved to be a downwardly mobile gift. It put me in regular contact with contemporaries outside my race-/class-privileged family of origin. (An addiction to pick-up basketball and a six-week bus trip that involved staying in Skid Row hotels across the nation – and in a jail cell one night in the Black ghetto of Knoxville, Tennessee – did the same thing.) It helped consolidate a healthy lifelong dislike for the police. It sent to me to an “alternative” high school (Ann Arbor’s Community High) where I came into inspiring contact with New Left educators teaching outside the standard mind-numbing parameters of bourgeois schooling. It initially cancelled college ambitions, dropping me into a series of bottom-rung jobs (on Chicago’s North Side) – dishwasher, busboy, and bellhop – that provided important lessons on capitalism’s “nickel and diming” exploitation and related psychological humiliation of wage earners (later factory, canvassing, and bus-driving employment would sharpen the instruction.) And it disqualified me from attending the sorts of elite universities where many young adults are granted “successful” careers in return for becoming obedient servants of concentrated wealth and power.

I went to lowly Northern Illinois University (NIU), which curiously hosted the most and best Marxist history department in the county during the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The “little red schoolhouse on the prairie” (as The Wall Street Journal once described the department) was for me a Godsend. I fell quickly and hard for the Marxist classics and for the remarkable work of radical and progressive historians like Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson, EP Thompson, Christopher Hill, George Lefebvre, Albert Soboul, Paul Mantoux, Karl Polanyi, William Appleman Williams, Eric Foner, Herbert Gutman, and David Montgomery. I leapt into the archives, wrote a dissertation in the sub-field of US labor history (at Binghamton University), and spent many years teaching US-American History at numerous colleges and universities in and around Chicago and across northern Illinois.

Thankfully, liberal gatekeepers blocked my ascension to tenure-track employment in History.  It was an ugly experience, but, in retrospect, a break. I’d long and almost subconsciously wanted to concentrate and act on the moving targets of the present and future more than I wished to spend my life researching, writing, and teaching about more fixed subjects in the past.

My focus shifted to current events, politics, and society, where a grounding in history proved an advantage in ways that I initially found surprising.  I achieved rapid “policy research” and “policy adviser” success, rising from an academic social policy research associate position to the head of the research department at the Chicago Urban League (CUL) – a corporate and City- Hall-captive Black “civil rights” organization located just three blocks from the inner-city school where my mother had been teaching the day Dr. King was killed. I used this position the best I could, doing worthwhile work against racist mass incarceration and producing a comprehensive report on racial segregation and inequality in and around Chicago.   

(I returned to NIU one evening soon after the 2001 jetliner attacks to warn a lecture hall full of scared and confused students that Washington would use 9/11 to wreak holy imperialist Hell in the Middle East and to crack down on dissent in the “homeland.”)

I initially received mainstream accolades and foundation backing for my work at the CUL, regularly appearing on local television and radio. But my ability to rise and remain long in the “liberal” NGO and academic world fell with the United States’ monumentally criminal, Orwellian, imperialist, and mass-murderous invasion of Iraq. The horror of this crime and the preposterously false justifications made for it was for me life changing. I lingered in the “liberal” institutional and educational-industrial complex for three years (including a depressing year at NIU’s no longer remotely radical history department) after the messianic militarist George W. Bush launched his malevolent, petro-imperialist invasion and occupation, aided and abetted by imperial Democrats like future US president Joe Biden.  But the die was cast.  The liberal class had offered no serious opposition to the greatest crime of the 21st Century. My days with and around it were numbered.   

I’ve been writing independently – for marginal income – on contemporary politics and events from an historical and materialist perspective ever since. Some Substack readers may recognize my name from CounterPunch, where most of my non-book writing has appeared since late 2015, or, before that, ZNet, Z Magazine, Black Agenda Report, and TeleSur English. I also wrote regularly for now defunct Truthdig in 2018 and 2019. Please see my bio for a breakdown of my past and ongoing employments, titles, and publications, including ten books since 2004. 

The writing I will do here will be geared not to intellectual understanding alone but to understanding meant to inform radical social and political activism striving to change history in a revolutionary way. I have been involved in numerous activist campaigns from the global justice movement of the late 1990s through the struggle against the US invasion of Iraq, the Wisconsin public worker uprising (in February and March of 2011), the Occupy Wall Street rebellion, Black Lives Matter (in various incarnations), the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, the remarkable George Floyd Rebellion, and the recently re-activated fight for abortion rights.  I am on the editorial board of the organization Refuse Fascism and a volunteer with the Chicago chapter of Rise Up for Abortion Rights. 

Changing history in a desirable way to me means understanding acting on past and present in ways that help bring us beyond the interrelated, overlapping, mutually reinforcing structures, institutions, and ideologies of class rule/capitalism, racism, sexism, nationalism, and empire/imperialism. I am more committed to this revolutionary path than ever in mid-late 2022. The evidence is clear that capitalism and its other evil twin imperialism– a world system headquartered in the United States since the end of World War II – and the related hierarchies of class, race, gender, and nationality are bringing humanity to the precipice of environmental self-annihilation while tilting nations and governments towards fascist and other forms of authoritarian rule. These are critical subjects in my last three books: They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014), Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and the Politics of Appeasement (CounterPunch Books, 2020), and This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (Routledge, 2021).

Almost needless to say, this radical and activist perspective has not proven popular with liberal authorities. The leftmost parameters of acceptable debate and action have drastically narrowed across the nation’s reigning ideological institutions over the last half century. This neoliberal restriction poisons the electronic media, which is “in the hands of a half dozen corporations that,” as Chris Hedges writes, “impose a uniformity of opinion and ban the views of us who decry the crimes of empire, the permanent war economy, the apartheid state of Israel, our money saturated political process and social inequality.”

The bans are across the institutional board. Nothing is more darkly amusing to me than the right-wing notion that the universities, the non-profit sector, the unions, the media, and the Democratic Party are permeated and controlled by “the Radical Left.” I wish that were the case! Nothing could be further from the truth – and from my own experience. The personal stories of ideological surveillance and punishment I can tell from the “liberal” academic, journalist, and nonprofit worlds could fill a book.  

It’s never been about the quality of my work; it’s always been about the radical politics. But, of course, it’s not all about me. I am hardly alone in possessing a history of being shut down, disrespected, and marginalized by Democratic Party-allegiant elites in the reigning ideological institutions and venues, including even and indeed especially its “liberal” wings.

Substack provides me an opportunity to retain my independence and do the at once research-based and activism-oriented reporting and commentary to which I am committed. My Substack will provide an alternative and revolutionary space for radical democratic reflection on current events, their historical context and meaning, and what needs to be done to build a decent future beyond the authoritarian and eco-cidal dictates of class rule, empire, and inequality.

I look forward to writing for a new and expanded audience here – and to communicating with readers, writers, speakers, and activists who include The Paul Street Report in their search for root-and-branch truth and transformation.