Adventures of Mr. Chris

For those who missed it, there was an excellent event recently at The New School called Hip-Hop: Race, Politics, and Hyper-Masculinity that was organized by some former and current New School folks, and featured two panel discussions about hip-hop culture and politics, with a strong emphasis on race, gender and sexuality. A big shout to the organizers for putting on this excellent event, and I hope we see more of these in the future. Being a lifelong hip-hop fan, as well as thinking a lot about the politics of hip-hop, I found this panel both exciting and frustrating at different times and for different reasons. Read More

So after a day of marching, rallies, speakers and events here in NYC, what did the May 1 General Strike change? That’s the question that’s been on my mind since I went to bed last night, and is still with me now. And to be honest, I don’t think anything is changed. OWS has shown it can still turn out a sizeable crowd for a major day of action, but it also shows that much of OWS has run out of creative political steam. But most fundamentally, it has exposed two key problems:

1. Organized labor is not committed to a radical transformation of society along the lines that many in OWS have discussed and pushed for, yet the movement continue to pretend that unions are a make or break alliance
2. The tactics of OWS have grown stale, predictable and ineffective to the point of almost being comical

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