Len Bracken is the author of several novels and five nonfiction books. Bracken's novels move from glasnost Moscow to fall-of-the-wall Berlin, on to the mid-nineties protests in Paris and Barcelona, to the 2000 U.S. presidential election in Washington, D.C. Although the author has never had a public reading of his novels or done much to promote them, Snitch Jacket nonetheless received coverage from the Associated Press (2006) as well as many small journals.
Born on Andrews Air Force Base (1961), Bracken attended grade school in Rhode Island, Florida and Greece, and high school in California, Virginia and Switzerland, where he was captain of the basketball team and recognized as the most athletic male student. He is a graduate of George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs and of a six-course editing certificate program at the same university. From 2021 to 2023, he completed online courses in creative writing offered by Oxford and Cambridge, two at each university, and he is currently enrolled in a fiction-track masters program at a major U.S. university.
Bracken has studied Russian in Moscow, at AU and GWU, and online with Saint Petersburg State University and Preply.com. His French studies include a stint in Paris at the Sorbonne, and he was rated in 2019 as having a C1 level of spoken French by CCI Paris Ile-de-France.* His partner since 2020 is French—they speak exclusively in her language. Bracken began his study of Spanish prior to the other languages and developed his use of it during sojourns in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Mexico, where he also pursued his passion for surfing, as well as in Spain.
While in Moscow, in 1979, Bracken was targeted by the KGB in an operation that led to the death of a soviet Ukrainian who had occupied the consular section of the U.S. embassy with a bomb strapped to his chest. Bracken was working part-time in the Press and Cultural Section, collating and editing AP and TASS wire service printouts, while also studying Russian. This was his first journalism-related job. His reading of Russian literature at this time prompted his aspiration to write novels and would later lead him to anarchism. With a brief overlap, Bracken was an anarchist before having a career as a journalist, all the while continuing his activity as a novelist.
During the 1990s, Bracken worked at Black Planet Books in Baltimore, which was unionized under the Industrial Workers of the World. In addition to being a member of the IWW, Bracken was part of the Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists, participating notably in the February–March 2001 preparations for the protest in April against the negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas. Bracken traveled to Quebec City and subsequently worked on drafting and translating the NEFAC anti-globalization statement that would be issued at the Third Summit of the Americas, where the trade talks were taking place. After the September 2001 terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, Bracken ceased to identify as an anarchist while continuing to be a staunch proponent of freedom and opponent of war.
In November 2000 Bracken joined the copy desk of the Daily Report for Executives, published by the Bureau of National Affairs, where he received extensive training in legal journalism.† Bracken was the company’s daily beat reporter at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve during the financial turmoil that erupted in the summer of 2007 into early 2008. His reports on the maturity mismatch between mortgage-backed securities and commercial paper loans and on the massive open market operations by the New York Fed were clear indicators of the depths of the crisis that would follow.
From the spring of 2010 to the fall of 2018, he reported for the same firm that became Bloomberg Law on a wide array of trade policy issues—export controls, sanctions, foreign investment in the United States, export financing, tariff preferences, World Trade Organization dispute settlements and negotiations on agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Bracken, for example, covered the TPP talks in Honolulu in 2011 that took place on the margins of the APEC leaders’ meeting, as well as the final TPP negotiations and signing of the draft agreement in Atlanta in October 2015.‡
Bracken was a member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which is part of the Communications Workers of America, from early 2001 to late 2018—a bibliography of his news articles can be found here.
Len Bracken is also the author of one of the first widely distributed books published in the United States suggesting the 9/11 attacks were the work of government provocateurs. Shadow Government: 9-11 and State Terror—reviewed in the Village Voice, September 2002—presents the “state-terror thesis” and describes the event as an “indirect defensive attack,” developing the offensive-defensive theory of terrorism created by Gianfranco Sanguinetti, a close collaborator of Guy Debord. Bracken is the author of the first biography in any language on Debord (Guy Debord—Revolutionary, 1997) and has translated a book by Sanguinetti (The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy: 1975; trans. 1997).
The kamikaze-style attacks, according to Bracken, must always be seen in connection with the anthrax-poisoned letters as interlocking stratagems by the established power designed to gain more power and as a pretext for going on the offensive. He made this case as a featured expert in the Russian film Citadel 911 (Цитадель 911) that was released on the ten-year anniversary of the attacks. Bracken is also the author of what is likely the first general theory of civil war (the longest chapter in Arch Conspirator, 1998), which he presented in May 2002 at Johns Hopkins University along with his related zerowork theory of revolution.
On September 11, 2001, Bracken was in Riga, Latvia as part of the citywide Untitled anti-consumerist exhibition. His subsequent pamphlet, Dialectical Hedonism, posits pain and pleasure in rest and movement as the essential categories of existence. As a translator of Paul Lafargue’s Right to Be Lazy (1883; trans. 1989) and writer-director of the dramatic film The Lazy Ones (2003 and several revised versions), Bracken hopes that through the pleasures of resisting the consumer economy people will successfully oppose the strategy of tension.
Failure to do so runs the risk of martial law and forced labor in detention camps similar to those described in his 2006 essay “New China Syndrome: The Early Rise of Red Capitalism 1979–2005.” This was one of the first in-depth studies of China’s economic, social and environmental transformation covering this or a similar period. Drawing on his three trips to the country, as well as his analysis of widespread protests and rising suicide rates, Bracken stressed the suffering caused by runaway overproduction (available in book form with additional photos at amazon.com).
These works, among others, such as Bracken’s 1998 Aphorisms Against Work, can be seen as precursors to the Great Resignation or Big Quit movement in the United States that commenced in 2021 and to the Lying Flat movement in China that was condemned by that country’s president the same year.
During the nineties Bracken published the journal Extraphile, which was noted in The New Yorker in 1995, and over the years his writing has appeared in publications as diverse as the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory and Ashgate Publishing’s International and Comparative Criminal Justice Series.
Bracken’s nonfiction has been covered by newspapers such as the Washington City Paper (1998; 2004), the Washington Post (1994; 2003) and Le Monde (2013); an annotated bibliography of his books can be found here.
In addition to the translations cited above, Bracken has made an interpretation of Omar Khayyam’s poetry, Persian Love, a reading of which is on Vimeo along with several other videos: Bracken as the lyricist and vocalist of the 1990s underground rock band Access Five §; readings by the author of excerpts from Snitch Jacket and The East Is Black; and a video that attempts to give poetic expression to historiosophy, the speculative philosophy of history. A bibliography of Bracken’s films, videos and recordings can be found here.
Access to some of Bracken’s out-of-print and otherwise unavailable œuvre is possible via the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, which is housed at the University of Michigan library, and via the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
* La Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de région Paris Ile-de-France.
† Bureau of National Affairs classes in: basic news and legal story writing; style; headlines; sources and attributions; legal citations; governmental, legislative, and judicial processes; economic indicators; surveys and statistics; editing longer pieces; interviews; libel; and covering meetings. Bracken also attended numerous continuing legal education seminars on international trade and export control law.
‡ The United States backed out of the agreement in early 2017—it was agreed to again, with minor changes, by the other TPP members as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Transpacific Partnership (CPTPP). It initially entered into force in late 2018.
§ The band Access Five recorded two cassettes, the second of which, Twilight of Humanity (1999), was played in its entirety on two radio stations in New York City. The song “Solar Economics” was played on an FM radio station in Amsterdam and portions of the second cassette were played on Radio Vilnius in Lithuania. The entire cassette was posted on RealAudio, garnering roughly 30,000 listeners per month for several years.