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I can look over my posts and writings from the past 28 years and see that I am some sort of left-communist, libertarian Marxist, but it is not easy for me to understand myself as a novelist. So, I wanted to attempt to introduce myself as such, and, unsurprising, I have a lot to do with things that are not myself.

Particularly my mentor, the dearly departed Loren Goldner, RIP, who also happened to be the most important thinker of our time.

I don’t say such things lightly.

This recent past, since, say, 1968, has been one of the most confusing times in human history. Loren Goldner, since then, when most of his cohort were either entering factories, or becoming postmodernists, or becoming professionals, undertook to make sense of the swirl of changes in political economy, leading to changes in the organization and self-conception of the working class, leading to changes in the functioning of bourgeois political institutions, and revealing the inadequacy of the “left”, which was really the “progressive state civil service”, even to the management of capitalism, let alone to the liberation of humanity. The left was shattered into culty or identitarian bits in the 1970s, the “activists” left the working class behind, and the working class the world over was savagely beaten over the next 30 years.

The beatings are ongoing, but things have started, slowly but surely, to change. The “union summer” of 1996, the UPS strike of 1997, the anti-globalization protests of 1999 in Seattle, Milan, and Seoul—these, I think, were the first indications that a new era of class struggle has been opened, and it continues, up through the George Floyd riots to the UAW offensive of the past year.

Loren told me on more than one occasion that revolutionaries are the “night watchmen” of history. We record and report, like C.L.R. James said, but the only reason is to be able to read back the record when the working class is on the move. So that the lessons of the past will not have been lost.

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And that’s what Rytius Records is ultimately all about.

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