Hard Crackers Journal

Taking up where the inimitable Race Traitor left off, Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life is guided by one principle: that in the ordinary people of this country (and the world) there resides the capacity to escape from the mess we are in, and a commitment to documenting and examining their strivings to do so.

From the introduction to each issue:

"American society is a time-bomb where the impending explosion, whatever its form might be, is endlessly hinted at by the more or less horrifying “little” degradations of daily rape, murder, stupid violence of different varieties (perhaps most notably urban gang violence), episodic mass killings (with or without apparent motive), drug and alcohol-induced stupors, drug overdoses, callous health care and classroom teaching, apparently crazy people talking on subway platforms, and so forth. We “see” these kinds of events in different ways—sometimes up close and personal, other times by reading the local newspapers or the online media or watching cable TV. Attentiveness to daily lives is absolutely essential for those who would like to imagine how to act purposefully to change the world."

PM Press has all issues of this contemporary, cutting-edge journal. Please select from the drop-down menu.
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Issue No. 1, Spring 2016:
Highlights include: stories of jail and prison, South Africa, track and field, racism in hospice care.
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Issue No. 2, Fall 2016:
Highlights include: reports from north and south, New England to California and up and down the Midwest, depicting life at work, in prison, on the street, efforts to save communities, reminsiscences of growing up in another time and comments on films old and new.
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Issue No. 3, Fall 2017:
Description from the editors' introduction: "The third issue of a unique publication: political but not absorbed in elections or program, literary but not inflated, scholarly but not scholastic."
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Issue No. 4, Winter 2018:
Highlights include: two articles from South Africa (two generations apart), two from the New York City subways, and two accounts of life among those often referred to as homeless.
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Issue No. 5, Summer 2018:
Highlights include: stories from Spain and South Africa and from all over the U.S to demonstrate that a better world is possible and to examine the barriers to it, including the barriers that have been erected by those who must build it.
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Issue No. 6, Winter 2019:
Highlights include: stories related to the U.S. South, plus an analysis of public schools in Brooklyn, a tale about cabbing around Doha, plus a written tribute to Lowell May, the late Hard Crackers editor to whom this issue is dedicated.
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Issue No. 7, Fall 2019:
Highlights include: a variety of pieces that examine through a current lens the societal paradox once described by C.L.R. James as: "The unending murders, the destruction of peoples, the bestial passions, the sadism, the cruelties and the lusts, all the manifestations of barbarism of the last thirty years are unparalleled in history. But this barbarism exists only because nothing else can suppress the readiness for sacrifice, the democratic instincts and creative power of the great masses of the people."
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Special Issue - A Tribute to Noel Ignatiev, Spring 2021:
This special issue pays tribute to Noel Ignatiev, who started the Hard Crackers project in early 2016. Noel steadfastly maintained that the so-called "ordinary" people of our world hold in their grasp the potential to be extraordinary in all endeavors, including the pursuit of revolutionary change to form a new liberated society. Like C.L.R. James, he believed that “the future is in the present.”
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Issue No. 8, Summer 2021:
Highlights include a collection of writings broadly related to the COVID pandemic and touching on the uncertainties of daily life in 2021: incarceration, nostalgia for the socialty of working class neighborhoods destroyed by gentrification, electoral madness in the swing state of Pennsylvania, exploitation of workers at Amazon.
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Issue No. 9, Fall 2022:
This issue considers the broad theme of "Another Place." This other place can be geographical, spatial, episodic, in the past or in the present, but above all it is rooted in reality.
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