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Part of the IWW’s founding was in response to something called “craft unionism”, which is where rather than organizing by one’s industry, one organizes by way of their job. Take the average supermarket for instance. Despite all being in the same industry, the workers at a supermarket will have different lines of work – cashier, butcher, inventory, loss prevention, etc. In the view of the IWW, this kind of unionism allowed employers to pit one group of workers against the other, because this kind of unionism was divisive.

Consequently, the IWW operates on “industrial unionism”, wherein members are organized into industrial unions based on the industry they work in. For instance, despite a butcher working at a local deli and a frycook working at a McDonald’s, these two workers would be in a foodstuff union.

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Rudolf Rocker was a German anarchist, best known for his work Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice.

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Narrator:
He would go on to delete his review blog that year.

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Raekwon is a master of story-telling, perhaps one of the best to ever do so through the medium of hip-hop. He is also a man who knows his music history. I say all this because it shouldn’t have (but nonetheless did) come as a surprise that he and Cee-Lo Green managed to create an entire biography of the late great Marvin Gaye.

Rae managed to bring forth detail and vividness in a manner that usually only a biopic would be able to do. Furthermore, he brought out the tragedy and darkness that lie in the heart of one of America’s greatest talents. It’s a great song by great artists about great artists. Really, what more can one ask for?

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As I’ll be discussing a bit more in-depth with number two on this list, I went through serious mental health issues this year. And I know a lot of people don’t have to live with that. So for those of you who don’t: This is what a depression episode feels like.

It makes you feel worthless. It makes you feel alone. It hurts, it isolates you, and to the outside it can seem poetic in it’s own morbid way. Lorde somehow managed to encapsulate that into a song, and even more impressively, got it some airplay. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking song, and if it gets no awards I’ll be genuinely shocked (that said, I probably won’t notice because I don’t fucking watch the Grammys).

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Now ordinarily I’d talk about Lorde in a poetic sense, because that’s the kind of artist she is. “Green Light” is no exception to that, it’s quite the portrait she paints of herself on this song. But what made it stand out so early on in the year, and what kept it on my Best Of list is just how stark of a contrast it is to her previously.

Lorde is that sit-in-the-corner artist type. The kind of person who makes cloudy, very mental kind of music. The stuff of art nerds, basically. So when she made something so much more alive, vibrant and fun, I couldn’t help but be amazed. That this song faded off the radio playlists is a travesty, because it should’ve been blaring throughout the year.

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You know what hip-hop’s needed recently? Something grimy and lyrical. Something vicious. Something New Yorky. A good old-fashioned smack in the mouth, get your blood pumping, blow your mind to the back of this auditorium level of lyricism that just gets you going. Thank God Raekwon’s still around.

“This Is What It Comes To” is Raekwon going off with all the viciousness of a junkyard dog. It’s militancy in it’s most raw form, it harkens back to the kind of bigger than life mafioso don of a character he portrays in his raps, and it’s a great introduction to The Wild, a fantastic album by a fantastic rapper.

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I missed the chance to put anything from Carly Rae on prior year end lists. I am not making that mistake twice. In a year of doom and gloom, in a year of nationalist posturing, in a year of continued environmental decline, racist violence, class antagonisms, and overall just grim shit… Sometimes you gotta relax and find something cheery.

Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t necessarily breaking new ground. What she does do is make pop music that conforms to no trend on the radio right now, and instead pulls from the past to create modern, fun, and dare I say captivating music. “Cut To Feeling” is no exception. It’s a big, bombastic, and fantastic jam that I cannot help but feel happy listening to.

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Trigger warning: mention of suicide & drugs.

































I almost died this year. I almost threw back some pills and overdosed. I barely survived. To this day I’m not sure how my brain overcame that strange anti-instinctual urge to finally put myself out of my own misery. A lot of people are lucky not to live with depression or mental health issues, which Logic talked a lot about this year. And while a lot of people were praising and playing the song named after the suicide hotline, I think this song is much more important.

Logic describes what it’s like to have an anxiety attack. It doesn’t function on (no pun intended) logic, it doesn’t really make sense in the grand scheme of things, it’s a horrible fit of psychological pain, and it makes you feel indescribable amounts of agony. And when you first get diagnosed, or think that’s what you’ve got, you wanna deny it. That can’t possibly be it. You can’t possibly be fucked in the head. But you are. And Logic does something even more brave than an admit to having these thoughts – He says “It’ll be OK. We’re gonna survive this.” No message could be more important. I wish Logic nothing but the best.

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Ordinarily, I’m not one to give my politics a front-row seat when making my year-end lists. That said, I am at the end of the day a libertarian socialist. By extension, I hate the state apparatus, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and everything that goes along with that. So when Badmon himself decided that railing on the US government and the white supremacist capitalist hellhole that it endorses was a good idea… well, fuck what did you want me to do with that? Joey Bada$$ is a gifted MC, no one can make the argument he’s not. And after hearing what can only be described as the Best Album of 2017, and probably one of the angriest records of the decade, there was only one appropriate person to give Song of the Year to. All I can say is that you need to hear this Earth-shattering finish of a song for yourself. If you listen to nothing else on this list, let it be this song.

Happy New Year everybody. Let’s see that 2018 is a year we get free.

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