What Next with The Paul Street Report?

Help Me Think About Taking This to the Next Level

Dear readers and subscribers:

I’ve been doing Substack pieces for a month now.  Thank you to all who have become subscribers, both paid and unpaid.

You may have noticed my politics: militant opposition to the now fascist (I’m quite serious about that and have been for six-plus years) Republican Party combined with radical Left criticism of “the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems” (one of my recurrent phrases) and the killing confines of United States electoral politics.

For me, telling the awful truth about the Republi-fascists deepens rather than softens revolutionary Left criticism of the nation’s other major capitalist party.  The “inauthentic opposition” and “hollow resistance” Dems are deeply complicit in the lethal, creeping fascisation of the world’s most powerful and dangerous country.

Think of The Paul Street Report as a radical Marxist Substack alternative to my fellow Substackers Glenn Greenwald (who has apologized for the Republi-fascist nightmare countless times on FOX News, including numerous appearances with our contemporary Goebbels himself – Tucker Carlson) on the right and Michael “Blue Tsunami” Moore (a brilliant liberal-progressive filmmaker who goes super-squishy on the dismal Dems every election cycle) on part of what passes for a “left” in the US. 

That said, I feel much closer (to say the least) to Mike, whose films I have generally celebrated (with the notable exception of Canadian Bacon!) and on occasion (back when I was allowed in academic classrooms) assigned. And I understand why he does the electoral thing even if I think it’s a mistake to go as far as he does with it.

When I look at the writings and other content posted by other Substackers, it’s clear that the thinker I’m politically and intellectually closest to here is my friend Chris Hedges. As I look more, I’ll find others more in my lane (I’ve been enjoying Substack posts from Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Heather Cox Richardson, for example, both fellow historians).

My next Substack essay (Thursday morning) will elaborate on my politics. Titled “Tell Me Again How I Was Crying Wolf,” it responds to two false and mansplainy charges I have received over the last five years from those predominantly older, white, and male critics that I (at first jokingly) labelled “the Trumpenleft”:  (1) the accusation of being “hysterical” (an unmistakably gendered jab) and “crying wolf” about the fascist menace posed by Trump and Trumpism; (2) the related allegation (truly laughable to anyone who knows my long record of publication and activism) of being in bed with the Dems.   My Thursday essay is an (I hope) interesting reflection on what it means to both anti-fascist and highly critical of the Dems at one and same time – imagine – these days.  

But I digress.

Substack is a great writing platform: easy on the eyes, easy to make edits, easy to add photos, and lots of smart readers.  A Substack writer doesn’t have to do all that maddening tech stuff that is associated with running their own Web Site (or pay someone to do that).   

Cool. I think I’ll stay.

But this fall and winter I need to take my Substack through some growing pains.

I’ve been doing two long essays --- 2500 words and up --- per week.  That is feeling increasingly unsustainable, time and body wise.  I am known for long form and richly annotated/hyperlinked reflections but 5-6000 words a week is a bit much.

So what I am thinking here is that I will stay with my usual extended reflections on Thursday and shift toward OP-Ed length and style (600-900 words, 1000 tops) on Mondays.

Another matter, and sorry for taking so long to get to my main point (talk about “burying the lead”): people may notice that I’m not requiring payment for any Substack content. That too is unsustainable going forward.  I’ll soon have no choice but to add some paid material. I’m not much on money, commercialism, commodification and capitalism in general (being a revolutionary socialist and all that - 😊) but this is (tragically) a capitalist society (which may well be the end of us, quite frankly) and I am as interested in paying for food and heating bills as anyone else.

(I will spare readers my woeful tale of anti-radical economic and professional-/liberal-class punishment in the dominant ideological institutions’ not-so leftmost outposts: academia, the NGO sector, labor, and journalism/punditry.  The financial and career penalties for serious and non-armchair left/anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist (and now anti-fascist) radicalism are neither minor nor mysterious (it’s not for nothing that so many academics and journalists keep their heads down and temper their language and analyses). I am of course hardly alone in experiencing the ugly consequences of moral-ideological policing and – frankly – cowardice on what passes for “the left” in the USA.)

Here I thought I would ask current subscribers (and anyone else reading this) what sort of additional content would make an upgrade to paid attractive/worthwhile:

·       A weekly office hour or two to discuss social and political issues, past and present, with me online?

·       Spoken word/audio versions of articles?

·       A podcast (not that I know how to do podcasts yet)?

·       A weekly 5-7-minute audio rant/soapbox speech similar to the talks I sometimes give at movement rallies?

·       Other ideas? (One outlandish notion is that I might someday teach an online class matched to my background as an historian and activist. It might be possible to do that via this platform.)

Bear in mind that the writing I am struggling to make a half-way sustainable career from involves crafting books and speeches as well as online essays.  By supporting me here you help me not only produce Substack content but also collect and synthesize my ideas at the book and spech levels.

Let me know your ideas either in the comments sections attached to this post or (better) in an email to streetbook17@gmail.com (Put “IDEAS FOR PAID CONTENT” in the subject line).

If you want to write me on this or other matters, please use and bookmark that new email address.  My main gmail account is a bit overwhelmed with Substack notifications these days. I created streetbook17@gmail.com to take some heat off that account.  

You don’t have to want to upgrade to paid subscriber to advance some recommendations.

Thanks in advance for your ideas! 

P.S. Many friends felt that I should have titled my Substack “The Paul Street Journal.”  I almost did that: the ironic play on the capitalist Wall Street Journal was obvious and attractive. I held back because I didn’t want to sound like I was keeping a close watch on finance capital and its machinations --- that’s not my specialty.  At the same time, “journal” to me implied an impressionistic, almost diary-like subjectivism that doesn’t really capture my approach.  Still, I may have erred from a strictly brand- and eyeballs-seeking perspective. 😊