Mike Davis: The Road to City of Quartz and Beyond | Labor | Duke University Press

This essay explores the historiographic ideas and political experiences that influenced the work of Mike Davis, the prolific Marxist historian who died in 2022.
— Read on read.dukeupress.edu/labor/article/22/2/76/399901/Mike-Davis-The-Road-to-City-of-Quartz-and-Beyond

ICE agents pretend to be utility workers, Tucsonans claim

An undocumented man from Honduras, who has lived on Tucson’s south side for more than a decade, narrowly avoided being picked up by immigration agents who initially claimed to be utility workers, according to neighbors who witnessed the apparent immigration operation.

While watering flowers in her front yard Wednesday morning, Christine Cariño was approached by two men claiming to be from Tucson Electric Power, she said. One said they were looking for a neighbor of hers.

“He said, ‘We’re trying to find somebody that wanted a free estimate,’” said Cariño, 37, a mother of three and long-time resident of the close-knit neighborhood, near South Sixth Avenue and Ajo Way.
— Read on tucson.com/news/local/border/article_e949f7c5-d339-4546-804c-cbb3c970af38.html

Tariffs as a Class Offensive – Heatwave

Seen in this light, the tariffs are neither a more or less rational policy choice, nor solely an elaborate grift. They are part of a two-front, worldwide class war unfolding between national bourgeoisies, on the one hand, and between them and the proletarians of their respective countries on the other. That is, the tariffs are a recipe for a renewed ruling class offensive on the workers of the world against a backdrop of accelerating global decline. They express the economic breakdown of capitalist society in political form.
— Read on heatwavemag.info/dossiers/tariffs/jm-tariffs-052925/

FBI and SPD infiltrated Seattle 2020 protests, used informants and surveillance | May 28–June 3, 2025 | Real Change

Five years ago, on the night of June 1, 2020, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent was punched in the face while on “an approved surveillance operation” inside Seattle’s 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, according to FBI intelligence reports. Punched so hard their nose was broken.

The next day, as protest crowds in Seattle grew to over 10,000 people, Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer Rik Hall recommended that SPD “pull their personnel out” of the crowd.
— Read on www.realchangenews.org/news/2025/05/28/fbi-and-spd-infiltrated-seattle-2020-protests-used-informants-and-surveillance

From Racket Theory to Real Domination | CTWG

In the early 1940s, the Frankfurt School developed a body of work—most of it only published posthumously decades later—that has been given the name ‘racket theory.’ That body of work is the topic of Section 2 of this essay.

The other subject of this essay is the French (post-) Marxist theorist Jacques Camatte. In what follows I will be mostly concerned with works dating to before Camatte’s turn towards holocaust denial,1 homophobia,2 transphobia,3 anti-abortion politics, and the nouvelle droite. With regard to the thematic material, I will be focused on drawing out the aspects of Camatte’s work that resonate with the Frankfurt School’s racket theory.

While my verdict on Camatte is fundamentally unfavorable, I have tried my best to keep the text from degenerating into an ultra-left version of the classic “my dad can beat up your dad” argument. Also, I started writing this before Camatte died; it is not a theoretical obituary. Special thanks to James Crane for translating most of the quotations from Horkheimer.
— Read on ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/Rackets_Camatte/