About Me

This site is the personal blog of Tom Wetzel. Tom grew up in a family of self-taught workers who encouraged reading. After graduating from Hollywood High School he worked fox six years in gas station lubebays and pumping gas, and amassed an ever increasing book collection. He worked as a teaching assistant at UCLA when he was a graduate student there in the 1970s and was an organizer of the first TAs union at UCLA . This was an independent union run by a shop stewards council and department assemblie. It was during that period that Tom became committed to syndicalism and revolutionary socialism. Tom’s area of training and focus in philosophy was ontology. He’s especially interested in the defense of philosophical realism.
After obtaining a PhD in philosophy from UCLA, Tom taught logic and philosophy for about six years at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Back in California in the 1980s and no longer part of the academic world, Tom did workplace organizing over a period of years in newspaper production and high tech, and was the coordinator of ideas & action magazine for a decade in that period.
Tom is also interested in transportation issues and their connection to land use and the ecological impacts of cities. By the early 2000s Tom was active in struggles against eviction and displacement and was a founder of the San Francisco Community Land Trust.