If capitalism is good at anything, it is making things. I mean “things” not in an ontological or otherwise formal sense but more in the manner that declutter gurus use it: general assorted human-made and/or human-claimed objects.

Welcome to the second edition of the Against Utopia monthly newsletter, where I explore problems of social organization, philosophy, biology, politics, and more through an epistemological anarchist lens. Or in simpler (cruder) terms, analyzing the authorities’ basis of knowledge and mostly concluding that they should fuck off, so we can flex our autonomy. If you’re…

If you follow the news about Russia, then you probably know what’s happening right now with opposition and political activists. Putin’s dictatorship focuses on torture and imprisonment of everyone who disagrees with authoritarian anti-social politics. If somebody is struggling against total poverty and unfairness, then they will face repression from  government structures such as FSB…

Sadly, there are still some people — people within the activist left, even, who are pacifistic. When I describe someone as pacifistic, I do not only mean that they are intentional, explicit pacifists — though, yes, all pacifists are pacifistic. By ‘pacifistic’ I don’t mean that they are explicit pacifists, but that they are irrationally…

Anarchist bookfairs are one of the most interesting features of anarchist life. A bookfair is immediately recognizable as hierarchical. There are the booksellers and there are the consumers. What separates the two is not merely the physicality of a table, but the capital investment it represents. Those distroing have usually been required to purchase space…

It is not a coincidence that when patents and copyrights are described in formal documents or discussions they are always labeled as “intellectual property” and virtually never as the simple term “property.” Calling it simply property would generate confusion with actually existing forms of private property, such as land, cars, and stocks. Such private property…

You can donate to Chelsea Manning’s legal fund here.  “[I] will accept whatever you bring upon me,” Chelsea Manning told a judge before being jailed for refusing to testify to a grand jury, mostly likely concerning her heroic efforts at leaking American war crimes almost a decade ago. Grand juries are secret hearings designed to…

Many would-be radicals mistake throwing the baby out with the bath water for radical inquiry. “Abolish X thing” has been a useful frame for the moral immediatism we espouse. If it is cruel and unjust, our goal must be its abolition. However, after identifying X thing as Bad, we may, in our haste, obscure the…

In critiquing and analyzing a state policy proposal like the Green New Deal from an anarchist perspective, I should throw in the usual disclaimers about my working assumptions. I’m not an insurrectionist and I don’t believe the post-capitalist/post-state transition will be primarily what Erik Olin Wright called a “ruptural” process. Although the final transition may…

Quentin Meillassoux is a contemporary French philosopher and a teacher at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris. He is also part of the movement that Ray Brassier, a fellow philosopher and translator of some of Meillassoux’s work, christened “speculative realism.” This disparate group is connected almost solely by a rejection of correlationism—which is the notion that we…

Click here to donate now. cw: skip first paragraph for mentions of graphic anti-LGBTQIA violence It has been a brutal week for LGBTQIA communities in Brazil. A queer Brazilian friend is heartbroken over the murders and suicides of 3 people close to him in just the last 4 days. The stories of these deaths are…

Burn the Black Flag In nearly every major city and most small towns, there are anarchists, or people with unlabeled anarchist values, plotting ways to create space for our radical projects promoting positive freedom. In most cities, our efforts are duly encumbered with the toil of filling in the abyss of gaps in state services:…

Gelderloos complains at length about perceived small misreadings and misrepresentations in my piece warning about skews to “Diagnostic of the Future” but then he engages in a number of such himself. “They say I claim that fascism should only be critiqued at the institutional level, and never at the ideological level.” But note that I…

William Blum began his adult life as an anti-communist liberal working as a technical functionary in the US State Department, until he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War and went on to a career in radical journalism. Among other things, he covered the Pinochet coup from Chile and worked with renegade CIA officer Philip Agee…

I think it’s a shame that anarchists don’t write more on either geopolitics or analyses of the future; over the last two centuries our greatest successes have come from our imagination and foresight. For this reason I applaud Peter Gelderloos’ recent attempted forecast, published in a variety of forms by Crimethinc. There’s much to agree…

Even if you’ve never read a comic book or seen a superhero movie, Stan Lee has affected your life. His storytelling. His approach to heroism. His moral lessons. His ethos, embodied in the catchphrase “Excelsior!” The Mount Rushmore of modern pop culture surely has a spot for him. His imagination permeates humanity’s modern collective imagination….

Gavin Mueller’s recent article for the boundary 2 online journal, “Digital Proudhonism” is a Marxist critique of what Mueller describes as “Digital Proudhonism,” a catchall term for those who believe that technology is lowering class barriers. Digital Proudhonism is not a formal ideology but rather an undercurrent expressed by a variety of individuals from all…

Reason magazine editors Nick Gillespie and Katherine Mangu-Ward have recently debated the question of minarchism (i.e., minimal government) vs. free-market anarchism. As an anarchist, I’m obviously on Mangu-Ward’s side of the debate. But both writers make some assumptions about strategy that I find problematic. I’ll start with Gillespie, who expresses impatience with “boring, tedious, and…

If the problem with taxation is the coercion, then surely the priority of any coherent and consistent libertarian reformism on taxes should be to minimize the number of people who are robbed at all. Of course this would mean entirely abolishing taxes on the poorest. By the non-aggression principle, a mugger drawing a gun on…

When evaluations of reality become seen entirely in terms of their utility as rhetorical weapons it ruins a group’s capacity to get an accurate lay of the land and efficiently strategize. Everything becomes about winning debates, not about ultimately winning ground. One of the main things the social media age has done is collapse divides…