Eric Thomas Chester was assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and, later, lecturer at San Francisco State University. In the 1960s, Chester was active in the civil rights movement and Students for a Democratic Society. He has worked as a cab driver, union organizer, and substitute teacher. He remains an activist in the trade union solidarity movement and the Socialist Party, and was the Socialist Party's vice-presidential candidate in 1996. He is the author of Socialists and the Ballot Box. His essays have appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Critique, Z, Insurgent Sociologist, Resist, Public Finance, Changes, and Against the Current.