| Welcome to my website! I don’t know how you arrived here, but now that you have, I hope you find something worthwhile. First, let me tell you a little about myself. I was born into a working-class family in central New Jersey in 1953. My father was a factory worker and my mother a grammar school secretary. While in high school, I became active in the movement against the Vietnam War and organized students against the repression of free speech at my own school. When I turned eighteen, I went to Yale on a scholarship. It was quite an experience of culture shock. Over the four years I was there, I met only two other students from working-class families. When I graduated, the great-great-grandson of JP Morgan was immediately ahead of me in the procession line. He was complaining that his girlfriend pissed him off because she got in the way of his making money. On the positive side of the ledger, I met my future wife, Danielle at Yale, who later became a clinical psychologist, and am still in touch with a number of close friends from those days. After college, I entered a Ph.D. program in philosophy at Boston University. I went there specifically to study with the famous Hegelian, J.N. Findlay. While there, I served as a picket-line coordinator in a campus-wide strike of faculty, librarians, and clerical workers that got national news coverage. I wrote an article about that which was published in The Encyclopedia of Strikes in the United States. A little later, I became active in the movement against US intervention in Central America. After receiving my doctorate, I moved to New York where I taught in the philosophy department at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University. I also joined Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, which took me to the 1988 Democratic Party convention with the New York delegation. That ended my illusions that it’s possible to change anything significant with electoral politics. I soon returned to Boston where I got a job teaching philosophy at UMass Boston. I started as a part-time member of the “adjunct faculty,” working without health or pension benefits and for ridiculously low pay. But a colleague and I launched a successful campaign for full benefits, decent pay, full-time appointments, and job security. I spent the next seven years and an additional two years somewhat later organizing adjunct faculty throughout the city of Boston as well as nationally. You can read about that in the Labor section below. After those first seven years of intense labor activism, I founded Virtual Art Initiative, a project that has sponsored exhibitions of virtual art both online and in real-world art galleries in Boston and on Florida’s Space Coast. At its height, VAI involved thirty artists from fourteen countries. My own virtual artwork has been exhibited in Canada, Italy, and the United States. I have written essays, book chapters, and books on a wide range of topics, including art and aesthetics, the nature of time, Marx and Western Marxism, Spinoza, Deleuze, the ancient Chinese philosopher, Zhuangzi, and the relation between real magic and conjuring (magic-trick magic). I have also written a number of journalistic pieces on the Sanders campaigns, the rise of the Far Right, the crisis in Greece in 2015, French anarchism, the resurgence of socialism in the United States, and the significance of recent hype as well as genuine advances in robotics (I have built several robots). I retired from teaching in 2019, but not from life. I spend much of my time writing and remain politically engaged, although a little more quietly now. I spent two months in China just before Covid 19 upended everyone’s life. When in China, I came down with pneumonia, which has led me to wonder whether I was ground zero in the U.S.. My wife says I’m crazy. You can find many of my writings here as well as my photographs, virtual artworks, experimental videos, and links to the Gary Zabel Papers at the Healey Library Archives. If you have comments or questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can find the contact form on the sidebar. |
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