The Future Is A Mixtape

An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: "Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains." We must fully acknowledge that there is no human society without trees, rivers and air – just as there is no Earth without the sun. The web of one life lives along the lines woven by other li...

In the midst of global apocalyptic collapse, the so-called solutions on offer from the imperial core are miles away from even marginal forms of dignity. The disdainful refusal to muster anything more than symbolic misdirects buried under bureaucratic mazes of means testing illuminate how deeply incapable the neoliberal boot-strap ideology is of addressing basic human needs. An anxious capitalist c...

We stand at the precipice of apocalypse – together bound by "The Legacy of Domination" to a dystopian world in the midst of full-melt collapse. The death-drive of empire can no longer hide behind a facade of limited bourgeois comforts, as the parade of twenty-first century catastrophes lays bare the macabre realities of a social order designed for maximum hierarchy. But another legacy of human his...

Inhabitants of other worlds looking down on our earth for the first time may very likely deduce that this planet is dominated by a civilization of cars, and we humans are just puddles of mud hidden inside. We live in a world turned upside-down—a utopia for automobiles, where instead of being communities built for freedom & flourishing, our cities are glittering monuments to petroleum, patriarchy,...

The wealthy have enjoyed generations of post-scarcity, living as they do in self-isolated bubbles of private hoarding. But what about the rest of us? The billions of us who can't afford the last three months of unpaid rent, or have to ration life-saving medications, who skip meals in order to afford college textbooks, or who are washed away in the floods of climate catastrophes? Our shared reality...

One of the many outrageous and surreal moral paradoxes of life in the imperial core  was made disturbingly obvious early on during the COVID crisis in a shuttered Las Vegas—then void of tourists—when its city officials moved unhoused residents into an empty outdoor parking lot. In a woesome illustration of capitalism's hallmark scarcity in the midst of plenty, looming directly above the forgotten...

In the second part of our conversation and collaboration with the Coffee with Comrades podcast, we begin seeking out works of literature, cinema, and scholarship that might illuminate Anti-Anti-Utopian blueprints for building new worlds. As Matt remarks, it's virtually impossible to come up with a list of films that would be called utopian, but Pearson argues that you could – in fact – come up wit...

For this special episode, Matt & Jesse venture out of their self-inclosed Build-A-Bear tent thanks to the gracious prodding of their new friend and comrade, Pearson, host of the always excellent Coffee with Comrades podcast, in order to imagine alternatives and discuss the theory of "Anti-Anti-Utopia." While each of us who've seen a Hollywood summer blockbuster, perused Netflix, or owned a dog-ear...

"Physical places like cities matter when we want to think about social change," writes Leslie Kern. So in this third episode in a trilogy on 21st century feminisms, Matt & Jesse move from celebrating feminist manifestoes to exploring feminist geographies with a discussion of Kern's Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World . This richly observed mapping of man-made urban spaces expertly ju...

How might feminism be reinvigorated to fully reverse our age of climate chaos and techno-feudalism? Will the next feminist wave be revolutionary enough to address the totality of capitalist cis-heteropatriarchal racism? Sitting on the knife's edge between despair and hope, humanity picks up a silhouette manuscript of its own death, but which, if flipped over, reveals pages that illuminate a way ba...

What would it mean if our society prioritized social reproduction above production for profit? Our racist, cis-heteropatriarchal, capitalist dystopia is a world turned upside-down—where the essential work that creates & sustains life is assigned to women and subordinated to the making of profit. Instead of aiming to undue this perversion, mainstream feminism of the past decade has prioritized a "L...

What would it mean to gain a sense of the world if it was nothing more than a series of geometric patterns? What if there were a few simple shapes that could describe the complex dynamics of our byzantine world and provide solutions to intractable global problems? Would this instantly recognizable geometry unlock long-obscured fundamental truths? Gilded upon the artwork accompanying these humble c...

In this, the second part of our double-album release, we return to our familiar conversational format to discuss the ideas and diagnoses put forth in CrimthInc's poetic manifesto, To Change Everything . The 48-page pamphlet documents a dizzying array of morbid disorders from the same sick nation-states that give you endless awful B-sides, such as: "Disney's Manifest Destiny," "Healthcare, Sometime...

The Dumpster Fire of 2020 is over, but the song remains the same: capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy rage on in a celebrity-fueled clusterfuck of mass death and ecological collapse. And so it begins: A new calendar unfurls like a blanket to smother or console our traumatized lives. The New Year is a time when Christmas decorations get wanly huffed into garage boxes and when people busy the...

In the annals of Occupy Wall Street, in what seem like distant folktales, hundreds of sites burst open like wildflowers in the morning light of 2011. Born by water and sunlight, but pitched by wind and dirt, one encampment after another would rise only to be crushed by the brutal boot of the State before this movement could figure itself out. While this horizontal uprising's rejection of represent...

Dejected and defeated—by the slimmest of electoral margins—Donald J. Trump spent his post-election nightmare hiding at a Washington golf club straddling between swings of his Titleist 910D2 Driver and plans for a bitter campaign of denials, recriminations and lawsuits. Having narrowly snatched victory out of the jaws of their own defeat, McLiberals celebrate the vanquishment of America's cosplay f...

If aliens could beam to our shores with recording devices, a savage irony would immediately and immaculately light up their antennas: not only does our global society fail to provide The Golden Square to every person on Earth, humans are increasingly forced deeper and deeper into debt for those fundamental rights to Food, Shelter, Healthcare, and Education. The debt-staircase has become grossly ab...

For this special episode, Matt & Jesse are joined by Shawn Vulliez from the SRSLY WRONG Podcast for a very important discussion about how the concept of Library Socialism might dovetail with the idea-shape of The Golden Square. As Shawn laments, the inexorable crisis of capitalism is that it turns us into "Tool-Handed Monsters who can't hug our own children." But published in 1971, Murray Bookchin...

In terms of audience reception, art can be a source of ridicule and scandal in mainstream society: as seen in Marcel Duchamp's notorious Fountain – a readymade sculpture that's a porcelain urinal flipped upside down and signed "R. Mutt"; but just as well, art can also create terrifying horror with a political charge (Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud ), spectral presence and spiritual depth (Louise...

As The New World burns into Old World ruins, climate chaos warps the safely contoured psychic borders between the dystopian films we watch inside versus the reality of scorched skies and deadly plagues outside. To build a world worth living for, we must find a way to transform our economies, build resilient communities of zero-carbon housing for all and keep fossil fuels in the ground – all while...

During most summers in the U.S., one can expect soundtracked montages of pure Americana: music festivals, camping trips, BBQs, an onslaught of smash'em'up Marvel movies, beach parties, and 4th of July fireworks. But this summer, the world over, regardless of nation-state hallucinations and the petty borders carved by ancient violence, Mother Earth coughs up plagues, spits out wildfires, and vomits...

What would Socialism look like? All too often, when the Left tries to define "socialism," they stumble into the weeds with seven pairs of trousers tied to their ankles as they hop helplessly with socks stuffed in their mouths, attempting to hit a golf ball with their neighbor's dildo—all done in order to get that hole-in-one, even though they had already swung three times, which had lead to them t...

In the most famous scene from the legendary film, Network (1976), populist news anchor, Howard Beale, creates a viral sensation before the internet became a thing: he tells his viewers, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" And thousands of people across the country yell from their windows and rooftops repeating the mantra, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymor...

For this episode, Matt & Jesse build upon their prior discussion (Episode 026) of Erik Olin Wright's posthumous book, How to Be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century , by mapping out how we might best choreograph the dance steps in making revolution fully realized. Wright's historically magnificent project of delineating the internal contradictions of class in America (and the world over) made him...

On this episode, Jesse & Matt spin the radical salad by saying the quiet parts out-loud about how we go from the first manifestations of a rebellion—with the Floyd Uprisings—toward the massive euphoric heave of a revolution that must be made at a time when the Covid-Collapse is occurring in fast-break waves upon our no-job, no-rent lives. As organizers rattled through megaphones across America in...