I know this is six years late to the Mutual Exchange Symposium on markets and planning, but I finally grasped the words to describe an intuition I've long had on the question of planning. If you believe that decentralized planning at any meaningful scale is viable, you have not just an obligation to advocate for it rhetorically, but to also do the work to manifest a version of it in the here and…
In response to various cultural and electoral victories over the last couple months, we've seen people declare that "Woke 2" is now a thing. While many pointed to the success of the Bad Bunny Super Bowl half-time performance as a turning point, particularly when compared to the conservative alternative hosted by Turning Point USA, but I held off on finishing this essay until ICE left the city of…
heroImage Once again I write within the context of unfolding events, this time geopolitical, to make a deeper theoretical point that includes predictions about the future. This is of course always questionable enterprise, particularly given the stakes. Some of what I wrote here is already outdated. Nonetheless. On the 28th of February air strikes by Israel and the United States began on the…
They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term. – Charles Stross, Accelerando One obvious role for a radical intellectual is to do precisely that: look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer…
In the last few years there’s been a spate of articles published about Curtis Yarvin in left or left of center outlets. Part of this is that he’s increasingly engaged in public debates with such figures. But it’s also that he’s become a presence in the world – see his connection to the now Vice President J.D. Vance, his role in an edgy New York City art scene called Dime Square and even him…
One doomer sentiment I’ve seen floating around my Bluesky feeds in the last couple days is that the current moves by the Trump regime are part of some 4D chess to trick people into protesting against him so he can unleash a violent crackdown that places him as god-emperor for life. And while that is certainly a future possibility there’s a difference between that being some savvy plan pulled off…
When it comes to the presentation of radical aesthetics in any sort of media, both mainstream and niche, Leftist intellectuals tend to dismiss it as trickery and subterfuge. The example that comes to mind is Slajov Zizek talking about how the greenwashing employed by corporations like Starbucks was an attempt to lull us into a false sense of security so people would give up on critiquing the…
I, like I’m sure many of you, have spent the last couple days swinging from outright despair to mild anxiety and concern. The situation in the United States right now is, to use the technical term, extremely fucked. I’m an Australian, but there’s no way the damage will be confined to the borders of the United States. However I have something of a silver lining in the fact that the right in…
As a project, anti-capitalism has seen immense intellectual energy expended in its name. It can claim some of the most brilliant thinkers of modernity. Despite this, in terms of outcomes things have largely been miserable. There’s all the genocides, police states, and conquests that were justified in the name of socialism or communism. But as bad as all those are, I think what makes it all the…
Formatted as a zine for reading. Art by Raj Villarin Not A Good Century for Thinking One curious thing about the history of Anarchism and Marxism is despite the long history of rivalry and conflict between our respective traditions, there’s an implicit acceptance of Marx by many Anarchists. When Anarchists are pushed about just what exactly capitalism is, what many describe is entirely copacetic…
It’s been a mainstay of the radical left for a long time to blame the lack of radical activity by whatever particular collective subject they believe to have potential on some sort of capitalist subterfuge. The various arguments for what exactly happened range considerably but they tend to assume that a subset of the population who would otherwise revolt against the system have been brought off…