ABOUT CHUCK STEFFEN

That's me in the above photo, a recovering Catholic, still on his knees after all these years. It was taken by one of my three brothers (no sisters, sorry to say) in a parking lot around the corner from the assisted-living facility where our parents were coming down the home stretch of life, neck and neck. Mom and Dad died shortly after this picture was snapped, within three weeks of each other and after 68 years of marriage.

I was a professor of US history once upon a time. Now, I live a quiet life as a state pensioner. Before retirement I spent forty years at Murray State University and Georgia State University, educating young minds and writing on a range of topics from labor politics in the early republic to the crises of homelessness and housing in whatever kind of republic we now live under. 

Toward the end of my classroom days I made an eye-opening discovery: a world that seemed to have lost its shine came to life in unexpected ways when I viewed it through the lens of a camera and the theories of Karl Marx. The website before you is my attempt to synthesize these two ways of knowing the world and the political economy that shapes it.