Ronald E. Purser: McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

James C. Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism

Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution.


For Afro-pessimists it is not the economic sphere that forms the ‘base’ from which the ‘superstructure’ of civil society, politics, and culture emerges, but antiblack violence that makes possible and is necessitated by global capitalism, freedom, civil society, and the interlocutors life of white (and nonblack)


Black Americans are what some might call ‘the canary in the coal mine’ insofar as they are the first to suffer the consequences of political and economic restructuring.


If the exploitation axis is characterized by the homogenizing wage relation... then the axis of expropriation relies on a logic of differentiation that reproduces racialized (as well as gendered) subjects.


The subprime crisis showed us that in the U.S., creditworthiness itself is racialized, as there was an a priori association of blackness with risk. This is consistent with the general moral construction of race, which is undergirded by the assumption that black Americans are immoral (read: criminal) and that they don’t contribute to society or make good in social promises (read: lazy and welfare-dependent).


I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside, looking in. Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk. Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static. We were teenagers when he got locked up, and now he’s balding. My life slowly ambles along while my brother’s life stands still.


When people identify with their victimization, it is important to critically consider whether they use this gesture as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power in a social space. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.


The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.


It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism.


Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.


The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC, typified by charismatic figures like Milo. But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls. When this happened, nobody knew who to take literally anymore, including many of those in the middle of this new online far right themselves.

Peter Fleming: The Worst Is Yet To Come

Twenty or so people were waiting outside a grey little apartment. London was cold tonight. It was a “rental viewing” and the agents were late. Even so, given the shortage of accommodation in the city nobody was going anywhere. Including myself. Each of us needed somewhere to live. And fast.

A black BMW pulled up and two suited men stepped out. Mmmm. Men? Both looked about eighteen, more like boys. The British rental market is deregulated and anything goes, so this wasn’t surprising.
“Hi guys”, the two agents beamed, unlocking the front door as the throng clambered to get out of the cold.
As I entered my worst fears were confirmed. A complete shithole — but one that would still suck up nearly half my monthly salary.

I asked one of the “boys” if the apartment had central heating. “Have no idea,” the youngster replied. He was darting from room to room, seemingly without purpose, high on some fashionable amphetamine no doubt.
The other bug-eyed youth demanded to see everyone’s passports. He started to photograph them on his phone. The government’s new “Hostile Environment” policy concerning illegal immigration meant rental firms had to check everyone’s papers.

I pulled out my New Zealand passport and bug-boy froze. “You better have a valid visa buddy”, he hyperventilated. I did as it happened, which he scrutinised with suspicion. “Bit funny looking, isn’t it?” he commented. New Zealand passports have a black jacket.

I continued to wander through this glorified cave.

In the bathroom — it hadn’t been cleaned since the previous occupants had left, in a hurry apparently — I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person before me was pale and exhausted. My eyes darkened as I surveyed the damage.

The suited boys were still bullshitting next door. I looked down at my hands. They were tight white balls. Here I was, a forty-four-year-old man, betoken to those two coked-up little shits, begging for an apartment that wouldn’t look out of place in Midnight Cowboy. Jesus, was I a contemporary manifestation oWhen I arrived in England in 2003, it was so much easier to take the brutality. Conditions were rough back then too, of course. The rent was outlandish and the city resembled a rubbish tip as today; but London’s possible overthrow was a unique part of its internal narrative, a radical vitality that reached its darkest corners, breathing life into its wasted infrastrucf Ratso Rizzo?


I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Jesus Christ, what happened? My body had not only visibly aged, but become grotesque too. I looked like a distorted Francis Bacon painting. Fat and pale, with tinges of bluish pink.

As I turned away in disgust, I remembered the swollen, unhappy people I’d seen after first arriving in England a decade before. Somehow, I had become one of them, working too much and not exercising.

I decided to visit my doctor for a check-up and he took a blood pressure reading. “Mmmm, that can’t be right”. He took another, “Impressive”, he muttered.

He gave me that look you never want to see from a health professional, something like, “I don’t know why you are wasting time talking to me, you should call an ambulance.”


Milton Friedman famously argued against Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Focus on profits, he said, and let the stateand churches deal with human welfare. However, CSR became popular nevertheless and is now big business. Almost every corporation has a CSR programme of some kind. The concept is fundamental to neoliberal utopianism because it peddles the falsehood that capitalism can be both ruthlessly profiteering and kind to the planet. Have its cake and eat it too. As a corollary, governmental regulation is deemed unnecessary. CSR provides an excuse for corporations to regulate themselves, and we all know where that leads. It is no surprise that CSR is most visible in controversial industries like mining, oil and gas, arms manufacturing and tobacco (often involving glossy brochures and websites depicting happy African children playing in green rainforests). Moreover, the tax benefits enjoyed by billionaire philanthropists are another good reason they like CSR.



Revolutionary pessimism practices a speculative negativity that goes too far… much too far. It perceives in this decomposing world both a taste of things to come and a way out. When unhappiness is weaponised in this manner, we will have very little to lose. And our survival depends precisely on that loss.

Timothy Morton: Being Ecological

Arguments for the radical cognitive change required to fix ecological catastrophe.

The idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining... There is a lack of attention to what is being efficiently sustained.


Bataille gave a name to this smooth functioning myth: the restricted economy. A restricted economy is one in which the dominant theme is efficiency: minimum energy throughput. The Earth is finite, and economic flows must be restricted to its finite size and capacities. So much ecological ethics, politics, and aesthetics is based on the economy of restriction.


Things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way.


Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.


We’ve been thinking that we are on top of things, outside of things or beyond things, able to look down and decide exactly what to do, in all sorts of ways for about 12,000 years.

Alex S. Vitale: The End of Policing

The problem is not police training, police diversity, or police methods. The problem is the dramatic and unprecedented expansion and intensity of policing in the last forty years, a fundamental shift in the role of police in society. The problem is policing itself.


At root, they fail to appreciate that the basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.

Federico Campagna: The Last Night: Anti-Work, Atheism, Adventure

Imagine growing up as a young atheist in a stiflingly Catholic
country. Imagine migrating to London, the Babylon of 'really existing
atheism'. Imagine the expectations.


When I first set foot on the cold, secular ground of the metropolis,
I felt that I couldn't have asked for more. A few empty churches,
scattered here and there. No Vatican City, no Pope. Charles
Darwin's face on banknotes. I could finally breathe freely.
Yet I realised quickly that something wasn't right. Somehow, the
smell of religion still lingered in the air, as sickening as always. I
found it on the trains coming back home from the office, filled
with exhausted workers. I smelt it on the benches on a Monday
afternoon, covered with the beer cans of the unemployed. Most of
all, I felt it surrounding me when I walked into the office every
morning, finding my colleagues already there, frantically typing
on their keyboards as if fiddling with digital rosaries. I had
walked in perfectly on time, why was everybody there already?
Why did they look so satisfied when they greeted me from their
desks? They were working hard, harder than they were expected
to. And in the evening, when the darkness of Northern Europe
enveloped the office blocks and young professionals' houses,
they were still at their desks, typing as fast as greyhounds race.
Looking at me packing up, as if I had been a weak opponent
abandoning the match before time. Why did they keep working
late, when no pay or praise was ever to be awarded to them by
anybody? What did they find in their silent, tragic sacrifice?
Once again I was surrounded by that smell. The same smell that
filled the churches of my childhood on a Sunday morning. It had
spread everywhere. Not just in churches, but all around the
office blocks. Not just confined to one day a week, but every day
- eight, nine ten hours a day. No longer accompanied by the
chanting of monks, but by the clicking march of a million ants on
the keyboard of one, immense metropolitan organ.
Religion had never left. I had never managed to escape it. Its
name had changed, but its believers remained the same. They
were just a little more honest, a little more self-sacrificing than
the old Catholics back at home. Possibly, a little more fanatical.

Owen Hatherley: Ministry of Nostalgia

Gill sans, muted colours, Blitz spirit, crown logos, wartime cooking, duplicate ration cards...


'Austerity Britain', the period roughly from the 1940s until around 1955, when rationing was finally lifted by a Conservative government, is the direct opposite of ‘Austerity Britain’ Mark Two, the period from 2009/10 until the present when a financial crisis caused by property speculation and ‘derivatives’ culminated in massive state bailouts of the largest banks, followed by an assault on what remained of the public sphere after thirty years of neoliberalism. But this most recent austerity has nonetheless been overlaid with the imagery of that earlier era. At times this has been so pervasive that it felt as if parts of the country began to resemble a strange, dreamlike reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s, reassembled in the wrong order.


So what emerges particularly clearly from all of this is that austerity - in terms here of developers and investors wanting safety and predictability - has pushed much of the very fabric of London towards an austerity-nostalgic aesthetic. Whereas in very recent memory London seemed to want to look like Dubai-on-Thames, it now increasingly resembles a cross between Islington in the 1820s and Poplar in the 1950s, two moments of austerity and rectitude. [...] Boris Johnson hasn’t the power and certainly hasn’t the will to build thousands of new council flats in London, but what he and his administration have managed to do is help developers build thousands of luxury flats which look like council flats, and can appear to be ‘in keeping’ with them.


In Britain today we are living through exactly the kind of housing crisis for which council housing was invented in the first place, at exactly the same as we’re alternately fetishising and privatising its remnants. From substandard speculative housing development to runaway inflation of mortgages and rents, from resurrected Rachmanism to houses in garden sheds and garages, from empty flats in the north to neo-Victorian overcrowding in the south, from a forced exodus due to to unemployment in one city to a forced exodus due to house prices and rents in another, we face a massive problem for which, once, the solution was the building of well-designed, well-considered, well-planned modernist buildings, often erected on the ashes of shoddily-designed, unplanned, badly made, profit driven housing of the past. Instead, what is actually happening is that we’re transforming the surviving fragments of that solution into one of the main contributors to the problem, as social housing becomes the new front of gentrification, and the architect-designed modernist flat the new loft conversion.


... an architecture voided of its original content - at the very moment when it is most needed.

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams: Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work

The next move was ours, and we just stood there, waiting for something to happen, like good conscientious objectors awaiting our punishment after our purely symbolic point had been made.
- Dave Mitchell


Our view is that, contrary to its popular presentation, neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism in ascribing a significant role to the state.7 A major task of neoliberalism has therefore been to take control of the state and repurpose it.8 Whereas classical liberalism advocated respect for a naturalised sphere supposedly beyond state control (the natural laws of man and the market), neoliberals understand that markets are not ‘natural’.9 Markets do not spontaneously emerge as the state backs away, but must instead be consciously constructed, sometimes from the ground up.10 For instance, there is no natural market for the commons (water, fresh air, land), or for healthcare, or for education.11 These and other markets must be built through an elaborate array of material, technical and legal constructs. Carbon markets required years to be built;12 volatility markets exist in large part as a function of abstract financial models;13 and even the most basic markets require intricate design.14 Under neoliberalism, the state therefore takes on a significant role in creating ‘natural’ markets. The state also has an important role in sustaining these markets – neoliberalism demands that the state defend property rights, enforce contracts, impose anti-trust laws, repress social dissent and maintain price stability at all costs.


With the potential for extensive automation of work – a topic that will be discussed further in the next chapter – it is likely that we will see the following trends in the years to come:
1.The precarity of the developed economies’ working class will intensify due to the surplus global labour supply (resulting from both globalisation and automation).
2.Jobless recoveries will continue to deepen and lengthen, predominantly affecting those whose jobs can be automated at the time.
3.Slum populations will continue to grow due to the automation of low-skilled service work, and will be exacerbated by premature deindustrialisation.
4.Urban marginality in the developed economies will grow in size as low-skilled, low-wage jobs are automated.
5.The transformation of higher education into job training will be hastened in a desperate attempt to increase the supply of high-skilled workers.
6.Growth will remain slow and make the expansion of replacement jobs unlikely.
7.The changes to workfare, immigration controls and mass incarceration will deepen as those without jobs are increasingly subjected to coercive controls and survival economies.


It's not Mondays you hate, it's your job.


The repetitiveness of a nine-to-five job, combined with the tediousness of most work, is hardly an appealing prospect for a life-long career.

In a world of synthetic freedom, high-quality public goods would be provided for us, leaving us to get on with our lives rather than worrying about which healthcare provider to go with. Beyond the social democratic imagination, however, lie two further essentials of existence: time and money. Free time is the basic condition for self-determination and the development of our capacities. Equally, synthetic freedom demands the provision of a basic income to all in order for them to be fully free.58 Such a policy not only provides the monetary resources for living under capitalism, but also makes possible an increase in free time. It provides us with the capacity to choose our lives: we can experiment and build unconventional lives, choosing to foster our cultural, intellectual and physical sensibilities instead of blindly working to survive. Time and money therefore represent key components of freedom in any substantive sense.


The latest cycle of struggles has been exhausted, undone by their tendencies towards folk politics, and everywhere today mass outrage combines with mass impotence.


High-risk inventions and new technologies are too risky for private capitalists to invest in; figures such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk slyly obscure their parasitical reliance on state-led developments…


The dreams of space flight, the decarbonisation of the economy, the automation of mundane labour, the extension of human life, and so on, are all major technological projects that find themselves hampered in various ways by capitalism. The boot-strapping expansionary process of technology, once liberated from capitalist fetters, can potentiate both positive and negative freedoms. It can form the basis for a fully postcapitalist economy, enabling a shift away from scarcity, work and exploitation, and towards the full development of humanity.


Neoliberalism, as secure as it may seem today, contains no guarantee of future survival. Like every social system we have ever known, it will not last forever.

Greil Marcus: Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Today, so many years later, the shock of punk is that every good punk record can still sound like the greatest thing you've ever heard. "A Boring Life," "One Chord Wonders," X-ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours!," the Sex Pistols' singles, the Clash's "Complete Control"—the power in these bits of plastic, the tension between the desire that fuels them and the fatalism waiting to block each beat, the laughter and surprise in the voices, the confidence of the music, all these things are shocking now because, in its two or three minutes, each is absolute. You can't place one record above the other, not while you're listening; each one is the end of the world, the creation of the world, complete in itself. Every good punk record made in London in 1976 or 1977 can convince you that it's the greatest thing you've ever heard because it can convince you that you never have to hear anything else as long as you live—each record seems to say everything there is to say. For as long as the sound lasts, no other sound, not even a memory of any other music, can penetrate.

What remains irreducible about this music is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex—as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history—to live as if something actually depended on one's actions—and that demand opens onto a free street. Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, the music briefly made it possible to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs: things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as bad jokes, and for the music to come forth as a better joke. The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes: nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything was possible. In the pop milieu, an arena maintained by society at large both to generate symbols and to defuse them, in the only milieu where a nobody like Johnny Rotten had a chance to be heard, all rules fell away. In tones that pop music had never produced, demands were heard that pop music had never made.