What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi. Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.
Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences
POLITICS AFTER THE END OF THE END OF HISTORYWhat happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher’s London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how public life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency — while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out.Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the “end of history” and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post–Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private passions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power.Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq’s disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so inconsequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment.
The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition
The Nation on No Map examines state power, abolition, a…
We Do This 'Til We Free Us
New York Times Bestseller “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”
AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum
This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
AI, Decomputing and the Interregnum
This paper treats AI as diagnostic for the deeper changes taking place in the existing order of things. It uses AI's alignment with both the political economy and with the dualisms that underpin it, including race, gender and anthropocentrism, to highlight the nihilistic character of the current restructuring. AI's scaling and accelerationism are taken as examples of the wider tactics being invoked by hegemonic power to maintain control under changing conditions. From this perspective, the massive build-out of data centres isn't simply a seizure of energy resources but a manifestation of an aggressive and misogynist technopolitics. The paper argues that a liberal push for digital sovereignty doesn't interrupt these dynamics but plays into the hands of emerging technofascism. It proposes instead the prefigurative tactic of 'decomputing', which draws on degrowth, deautomatisation and a convivial approach to technology. It explores decomputing as a means to mitigate both material and relational harms and as a decisive turn towards infrastructuring the common good. The paper concludes that AI is the contradiction that reveals many others, not least the gap between claims to legitimacy and the actuality of destructive violence, and proposes an alternative technopolitics of reciprocity that prioritises care and sustainability.
Beyond AI: Infrastructuring the Common Good
Rather than taking AI as a central focus, this paper treats it as diagnostic of deeper contradictions. AI intensifies extractivism while being unable to deliver on its promises, and its rampant scaling of energy and resource demands heralds a form of ‘total mobilisation’. This paper proposes decomputing as a programme for pushing back against such technocratic nihilism. Decomputing adopts a degrowth framework and advocates for reclaiming agency through deautomatisation and people’s councils, in order to develop convivial alternatives that centre an ethics of care. It is a philosophical and tactical response to the wider crisis of care induced by the collapse of existing systems. Decomputing proposes a prefigurative praxis for those experiencing ruptures in the infrastructures of everyday life, while minimising the opening for an authoritarian turn or war economy. Rather than capitulating to an increasingly fascistic world order, decomputing advocates a shift in the idea of order itself, one that means challenging the idea that ever more advanced tech is synonymous with progress. The paper argues that reclaiming critical infrastructures can be decoupled from the collapse of the general technopolitical regime, and makes a plausibility argument informed by destituent power and largely forgotten British cybernetics. Where the Luddite call was to ‘put down all machinery hurtful to the Commonality’, the goal of decomputing is the infrastructuring of the common good.
Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought
I really think that I know that Americans now are simply overwhelmed; like what is happening, what can we do. Everybody's tendency is understandably to try to take care of yourself; cover your back, make sure you have a house, a door for the key. I say that as understandable as that is, it seems to me that we cannot afford to divorce ourselves from what is happening in South Africa, for example, or for that matter, what is happening in West Germany, or Poland any more than the Reagan administration divides these issues. I think that the Reagan Administration and people in that; they see everything in global terms. From Brooklyn to Angola is not a big jump for them at all. I think that unless we, the people, begin to think in the same way, to make these connections, really on a visceral level, I feel for the survival of the species [Jordan 1981]
The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State by Emmaia Gelman - Hardcover
Scholarship is a powerful tool for changing how people think, plan, and govern. By giving voice to bright minds and bold ideas, we seek to foster understanding and drive progressive change.
Preface | The World After Capital
Since publishing the previous version of The World After Capital, I have met with people across the political spectrum to discuss the ideas from the book. When I present these in person, I emphasize that the ideas are neither left nor right but forward (credit to Scott Santens who first used this phrase about Universal Basic Income). My writing, however, at times has alienated readers who identify as being more on the right. In this new edition, I am therefore making an extra effort to emphasize how both my diagnosis of where we are at and my suggestions for how to move forward do not map onto the existing political divides. Instead this is a new way of understanding our challenges and opportunities that can be the basis for movements and parties that are not trapped in Industrial Age ideology.
Imperial State Capitalism
A new geopolitics is shaping the development of AI and the energy transition.
Freedom Now | Polity: Vol 52, No 3
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinventing the economy as the true site of freedom. To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression
This groundbreaking collection explores the profound power of Social Reproduction Theory to deepen our understanding of everyday life under capitalism. While many Marxists tend to focus on the productive economy, this book focuses on issues such as child care, health care, education, family life and the roles of gender, race and sexuality, all of which are central to understanding the relationship between economic exploitation and social oppression. In this book, leading writers such as Lise Vogel, Nancy Fraser, David McNally and Susan Ferguson reveal the ways in which daily and generational reproductive labour, found in households, schools, hospitals and prisons, also sustains the drive for accumulation. Presenting a more sophisticated alternative to intersectionality, these essays provide ideas which have important strategic implications for anti-capitalists, anti-racists and feminists attempting to find a path through the seemingly ever more complex world we live in.
The Prospects of a Pluriversal Transition to a Post-Capitalist, Post-C
This book critically engages with a central dilemma facing counter-hegemonic movements as global crises intensify: how to foster systemic change while
Elon Musk’s Race War Just Took Darker Turn—Time for a Global Response
The violent fascist riots in Belfast reveal the future that the trillionaire really wants. We need an international movement to constrain him.
Imperialism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
That's the meaning: You cannot just take tools whose purpose and politics is dominance and violence and "make them liberatory". This goes deeper than "just" embedded politics or lofty talks about ethics, it comes down to what kind of relations you believe do and should and must not define the world.
