May Day felt like the right moment to step back and connect the dots: war profiteering, oil windfalls, Congress shrugging off its own authority, and a system that somehow always finds a way to privatize the gains and socialize the damage.

And then… workers across the country say “no work, no school, no shopping.”

This one pulls together a lot of threads I’ve been working on for a while, including some new thinking around “vassals” and Varoufakis’ technofeudalism (which, fair warning, may have triggered yet another round of edits to a long-simmering essay).