What Is Wood/Work?
Wood/Work is a place for select essays of mine (one or two per month) on culture, climate, and political organizing in the Capitalocene. This ugly word is what some scholars have called our ugly epoch out of the belief that it is the rapacious compulsions of capitalism—not the sins of wayward individuals or humanity in general, as the concept of the Anthropocene would have it—that are at the root of our greatest planetary and social problems. Ecological breakdown and global warming, cost of living crises and gentrification, patriarchy and racialization, labor precarity and crises of care—all of these are features, not bugs, of a system that is structurally incentivized to devalue certain lives for the enrichment of others, and that can only sustain its cancerous growth by pushing nature—both human and non—to the breaking point. If there is anything that motivates me to write here or elsewhere, it is the desire for this to be nothing less than common sense.
All of this is just to say that the politics here will be unapologetically (democratic) socialist. There will be no moralizing screeds against MAGA “deplorables” and those who don’t recycle, no identitarian gatekeeping, no indignant surprise at the electoral power of the price of eggs. These liberal tendencies represent a divisive politics that is too apt to confuse symptoms for causes, is antithetical to building real power and community, and often can’t see past the end of its self-righteous nose. Instead, I’m interested here in what we might call a materialist politics of critical compassion, summed up in a mantra attributed to the late Michael Brooks: be kind to people and ruthless with systems. It’s easier said than done. Yet the solidarity created via the former is our best hope for creating the power required to take on the latter. A politics that aspires to anything less is not worth our time.
Does the world need Wood/Work?
No, it doesn’t. Substack is a platform that encourages writers to believe that everything they write is worth reading (it isn’t), that editorial curation and feedback—to say nothing of more rigorous peer review—are expendable nuisances (they aren’t), that a world already drowning in “content” somehow still needs more of it (it doesn’t), and that we should be excited about a platform that helps creatives “entrepreneurialize” themselves in good neoliberal fashion in the wake of the slow death of journalism (we shouldn’t). For these and other reasons, I try to publish elsewhere and avoid slipping into the abyss of presumptuousness and solipsism that is this medium. Yet it’s also nice to have a place to put writing that isn’t well served by those elsewheres. So that’s what this is: a place mostly for essays that are too long, too short, too offensive, too inoffensive, too footnoted, too niche, too weird, or too tough to categorize for elsewhere.
Who Is Robert (Wood)?
I’m a freelance writer and editor, academic, political organizer, and musician living in Brooklyn, NY.
My political writing has appeared in The New Republic, Monthly Review online, Truthout.org, New Politics, and elsewhere. I’ve also written essays and criticism for 4Columns.org, The Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Academy of Music, composer Nico Muhly, San Fransisco Contemporary Music Players, WQXR radio, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, and others; promotional materials for BAM, The New York Times, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, City Center, Cloud Gate Dance Theater, and French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF); and has served as an editor for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the French Embassy.
As an organizer, I’ve worked as a field co-chair, coordinator, and lead on numerous electoral, legislative, climate, and labor campaigns with the NYC Democratic Socialists of America. Prior to joining DSA, I co-represented 350Brooklyn in the Stop the Williams Pipeline Coalition, which organized the victorious fight against the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline, a $1 billion fracked gas pipeline proposed for New York Harbor. I also served as an activist intervenor in the New York City region’s 2021 National Grid rate case, helping to win climate concessions from the corporate utility as well as rate relief for low-income New Yorkers.
As an academic, I’ve presented papers at numerous conferences and am currently co-authoring an article with film and music scholar Lindsey Eckenroth on music as neoliberal self-care in the early films of Jim Jarmusch.
Prior to my freelance and organizing work, I was senior copywriter at BAM, where I worked for a decade. I’m also an active musician, performing on banjo, keyboards, and upright bass with various groups around New York City and the Hudson Valley and Catskills region. I’ve got a Ph.D in music history from the CUNY Graduate Center, with a dissertation on composer Edgar Varèse and the experience of modernity, and a B.M. in piano performance from the Eastman School of Music.
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