The Future Is A Mixtape

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 "Lean In" strategy, advocating "equal opportunity domination" as the ultimate horizon of gender equality. According to this liberal-feminist doctrine, what the world needs is not the abolition of social hierarchy, but simply a more diverse representation to maintain seats of power that already enshrine and expand inequality. Thankfully, this bankrupt approach has been counter-punched by a new wave of feminist strikes emerging in recent years, including ones in Spain, Poland and the #RedForEd strikes in the U.S. that swept across the country in the months after Trump's election. In the powerful and accessible book Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser articulate an urgent anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and eco-socialist vision of a feminism informed by the International Women's Strike Movement. So in this episode, Matt & Jesse celebrate this new, more radical, more intersectional feminist vision for the 21st century—by exploring this indispensable text that is a brief, focused clarification of key issues in our shared emancipatory struggle. While it may seem like an outdated term, "the personal is the political"—a key rallying cry of 60's Student Movements and Second-Wave Feminists—is a zeitgeist phrase that is ever worthy of being rescued in our Age of Climate Despair. The essential truth of this maxim is increasingly evidenced in women's lives, and especially for single mothers and women of color who represent the majority of Americans who are laboring for starvation wages, risking their lives during a global pandemic to keep the world working for everyone else that doesn't look like them. And though the voices and perspectives of women are so often silenced, shunted and brayed by Boyland Domination, we must recognize that the path towards justice and human liberation requires a robust feminist analysis. Because, on the Periodic Table of Injustice, the subjugation of women is the most common element found in the world. Misogyny is everywhere and it damages all of our lives, devaluing and dehumanizg women, trans, and non-binary folks, while unjustly exalting masculinity in a violently enforced tyranny of suffocating gender constructs. We live in a world designed by, and for, the interests of patriarchy, one of the very oldest forms of social hierarchy—an ancient institutional structure whose abolition must first start with the building of The Golden Square. So indeed, this rousing document, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, offers a forthright proclamation of values, and in so doing, properly identifies all those paper clips stuck to that sick magnet called capitalism. One-by-one, fingers to palm, the authors help us pry off those paper clips, so we can put them back in the bowl of new beginnings.

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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 conversations between comrades sit three defining shapes: a triangle, a square, and a circle. So for this episode, Jesse & Matt will map out the contours of these three fundamental Idea-Shapes: The Poison Pyramid, The Golden Square and The Utopian Sphere. This simple arrangement of basic shapes illuminates an emancipatory trajectory: a systemic diagnosis of our dystopian world; a necessary and practical new social contract that extends dignity and freedom to all; and finally, visions of our utopian potential and the flourishing, post-scarcity future we all deserve. This triptych of Idea-Shapes outlines a comprehensive "No-Bullshit Theory" about the double-down shitty myths that ceaselessly gaslight us, the shared abundance that we must claim in the here-and-now, and ultimately, how the joyful promise of our utopian horizon should be a central cause for collective motivation. These radical essentializations of the world offer a framework for dealing with the chaos of the social order, and clarify how we can erode the compounding systems of hierarchy that poison everything with unending violence, despair, and disorder. As a condensed syllabus for this "Grad School for Radicals," these three shapes unlock a critical deep-systems curriculum that provides transformational engagement without the typically mystifying pretense of intellectual knowledge-hoarding. And so these conversations seek to give unmistakable clarity in contrast to the shouting hordes of bad-faith actors who needlessly complicate things–both for their own fame-seeking vanity and to further the ruling-class drive to keep the masses from winning a deep democracy. So if we wish to reverse the apocalypse, we must answer these three deceptively simple questions: Where are we? Where are we going? And what should we be aiming for? The ruling elite never hesitate to assault our modest aims for meaningful lives with their garish distractions of consumer-glitter, privatized-pleasure, and the ritualized-worship of their god-awful ideas. Despite eons of bad myths blocking our potential, this certainty remains: we all live in a delicate interdependence upon this beautiful spaceship called Earth. There is no Planet B. It will take everyone one of us—not just the lone, logical Spock—to repair our ship's precious and damaged Warp Drive. Once fixed by our many hands, all of the stars, both seen and unseen, will beckon to us with open smiles.

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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, Sometimes," "Bootstraps Best for You," "Lock'em & Cock'em," "Student Debt Meets Mr. Ramen," and finally, "Do the COVID-Collapse." Many of the threatening obstacles and dangerous injustices diagrammed in CrimethInc's proclamation adhere, like super-glue, to the plastic surface of the U.S. petroleum project. And so, the collective's polemic is always aware that the solutions required must be bigger than one state, one nation or one continent to contemplate, fathom or undertake. The manifesto stirs with telling details and insightful observations about what we know and what we wish to ignore in this, our shared reality that spins like a deranged compass. And while To Change Everything functions as a good primer to anarchist ethics and its attendant traditions, it's worth noting how little it offers in the way of clear, practical, and focused solutions—like The Golden Square—or what Jesse & Matt like to call the "No-Bullshit Blueprint for Socialism" explored in Episode #031. The promise of anarchism is not some grand plan, or some self-righteous political dogma that will magically release us from capitalism's death-grip, but its values demand us to make a clear paradigm shift away from the dizzying maze of domination and violence that perpetually blocks humanity from having any nice things. Anarchism points towards a deep-system critique and an egalitarian ethics of rights and responsibilities that we so desperately need in our institutions and social relations. By flipping the script on a world built on a logic of forced scarcity and do-or-die competition, we can instead design a world of mutual cooperation and shared abundance. As CrimethInc writes, "Every order is founded on a crime against the preceding order—the crime that dissolved it." But we can't commit that righteous crime with a fetishization of poetic ambiguities; we must work in solidarity to build dual power—abolishing institutions of state violence while we build new institutions of care & freedom at every level. Above all else, if we are going to survive together on this fragile planet, we must decommodify life and democratize society. And to do it now, we must start by changing everything.

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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 themselves by hatching plans for privatized notions of change; some post their resolutions publicly on social media, while others whisper theirs sheepishly to friends and lovers, almost all of which get thwarted by the exhaustion, depression, and despair of life in this capitalist inferno. But what if real change in our personal lives is contingent upon the collective emancipation of all of us? Let's face it: each and every year comes with the same urgent imperative: everything must change. But yet, too much is expected to come from within ourselves for ourselves. And our relationship with time is too passive. Upon any year that passes, we too often say that this 12-month cycle did us wrong, did a bad thing, crushed our diaphanous dreams to shards of amber. But what if a year was just a random collection of days, and "2021" is only worthy of its name if it inspires us to abolish what's unjust and hurts us all? This year, unlike past furtive ones, we must work collectively toward a global socialist revolution against the dark, driving engine of capitalism, which forever churns out newer hierarchies to grind against older, more ancient ones. We must start anew with a struggle that confronts the onslaught of climate chaos propelled by a capitalist death-cult. So to burst forth in this New Year, The Future Is A Mixtape humbly offers our version of a double-album. In this episode, Jesse will be flying solo by reading To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal from CrimethInc, an ex-worker collective that surfaced out of Olympia, Washington, more than two decades ago. Immediately following the reading, the next episode contains Matt & Jesse's conversation about this eminently accessible anarchist manifesto. This international network of anonymous, aspiring revolutionaries declares that we should be free to direct our limitless potential on our own terms, and that no government, market, ideology or sky-daddy should be able to tell us what our lives must be; and that, finally, the world should be arranged by self-determination and mutual aid, just as water from a lake is best collected from two hands rather than one.

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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 representation and managerialism were vital and narcotic to some, others found it disorganized and chaotic, garbled by its shrill mic-checks and lack of overt demands. As David Graeber, a co-founder and dream-seeker of this spectacle of mass democracy, wanly stated, "While Americans can do communism, they have absolutely no conception about how to do democracy." Astra Taylor, Graeber's friend and skeptical co-conspirator at OWS, investigates our collective troubles with the idea of democracy in her most recent, gorgeously entrancing work of nonfiction: Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Published in 2019, as a philosophical couplet to her documentary, What Is Democracy?—released a year prior, Taylor's book hums in a noble persistence that democracy is a utopian ideal worthy of our time, despite the term having long been abused and defiled by politicians and plutocrats into a kind of milky nothingness. The author deeply considers the meaning of democracy in a graceful series of paradoxes bound by binaries within each chapter. Much like her meditative and dreamy documentary, Taylor's book asks big questions about the trajectory of democracy in both its idealized conceptions and in its less savory, dirt-dreary praxis points. Jesse & Matt will ponder the philosophical and intellectual questions of these works as masterful collages composed of many voices—where a formerly incarcerated poet-barber exchanges stories side-by-side with Plato, political scientists, immigrants, and school children alike. How can we take democracy from being breath and vibrations of air into a concrete system of self-rule? Astra Taylor's twin projects reflect what democracy does best when we fall into its enchanting thrall: real democracy is a conversation, a struggle to deliberate, to talk and to listen. Certainly, in this era of a global pandemic, economic devastation, and a climate collapse, now is the time—more than ever—to connect, heal and listen to the voices outside of ourselves. Democracy is a word for something that doesn't exist yet; but the quiet acts of deliberation, being vulnerable and listening to others might make this word real for the first time. These wondrous projects demonstrate this politics of listening, a reminder that the mixtape of a flourishing future must be gathered from the songs of us all.

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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 fascist and promise to "save the soul of America" by bringing "decency and compassion to The White House"—a castle built by the ruthless exploitation of African slaves. Grazing through the deforested wasteland of our celebrity-food-chain media-scape, Blue-State Brunchers raise their champagne flutes to toasts of a "return to normal" on social media, while millions of desperate Americans remain unfed, unhoused, and unloved. Covid-19, like a knife that never stops, slashes into wounds already open. In the words of Antonio Gramsci: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters." So what must be done to bring a new world to life? While electoral politics should not be simply ignored or discarded, we must recognize that its feckless attachments to spectacle at the expense of direct democracy leave the world more disfigured than transformed. Voting is, ultimately, the excrement end of social change. It's a sign of where power turns to shit: sometimes fertilizing gardens of future flowers; but more often than not, it ends up poisoning our local water systems (e.g. Flint, Michigan). Real democracy requires deliberation: with strangers in the streets, with neighbors on the corner, with colleagues in the workplace, and at home with family & friends. More than just an American obsession with the reality-show dumpster fire of 45, the world has for decades suffered from a sick addiction to Presidential politics, a myopic deference to the almighty power of a single individual. Instead, what we desperately need is real democracy. So, for this episode, Matt & Jesse will consider practical solutions that can finally end the shit-parade of legalized bribery and pay-to-play campaigning that comprise electoral politics as we know it. Beyond the long list of obvious and necessary reforms (including abolition of the electoral college, public financing, and universal suffrage) lies the unearthing of a long-forgotten central pillar of democracy: legislative appointment by lottery. Sortition, or the drawing of lots, is a democratic tool as old as the notion of democracy itself, and may be a key to designing an egalitarian future. Democracy is a fragile, morpheus dream. And ultimately, democracy is a wish we release into the air like a question mark or a song; some sounds dissipate quickly, but others echo through the forest into the ears of others. As Mark Fisher once wrote, "The long dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again."

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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 absurd and toxically tragic—a ruinous prank laid upon us at an ever-accelerating rate since the dawn of neoliberalism. From cradle to grave, we're trapped on a noxious treadmill of Debt Achievement Goals: School Lunch Debt, College Debt, Credit Card Debt, Auto Loan Debt, Housing Debt, Medical Debt, and more. And even after death, debt collectors hound our family members and moralize about unpaid balances. As David Graeber once said, "As it turns out, we don't 'all' have to pay our debts. Only some of us do." And who is that "some of us," exactly? Well, certainly not the 1%; rather only the rest of us—the great unwashed 99%—as we resign to rumination and self-blame for not being entrepreneurial enough. As capitalism forces us to pay for our own existence (while it indiscriminately tears through the Earth's remaining ecologies), we must seriously question the moral plea to "pay all debts." And as it turns out, there is another path that leads us away from Terminal Dystopia Syndrome (TDS). Forged from relationships built during the prefigurative struggles of Occupy Wall Street —The Debt Collective has published an urgent and instructive new manifesto tackling the emergency of now: Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. In this episode, Matt & Jesse consider the emancipatory ideas of this important book, the necessary demand to abolish debt, and how we might reclaim the "intellectual luxuries" we all deserve. The Debt Collective offer a persuasive argument for how and why Debtors Unions have dynamic potential to become the most liberatory union movement in history, providing the leverage needed to redress hierarchies of racial capitalism and colonial plunder by inaugurating a new era of investment in "Reparative Public Goods." Amidst the powerful and dark-tidal pull of the COVID-19 pandemic, Can't Pay, Won't Pay provides a capstone to a trilogy on debt: David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years (an anthropological reckoning); Sam Esmail's Mr. Robot (a popular awakening), and finally, this book by the Debt Collective—a battle plan plan for how we unfuck the world that capitalism has smothered and smeared into shit. A 21st Century Debt Jubilee must be wrought by all of us, collectively.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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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's Post-Scarcity Anarchism provided some initial inklings of a world without work or want—where the even-flow of Social Ecology, Libertarian Municipalism, and an abundance of material resources would allow us to finally hug our children, our shared future. Yet, given the climate chaos of the here and now, it's hard to imagine how we might get there as we face the fast-Fascist collapse of the biosphere. Insects, animals and the Earth's ecosystems die-off while capitalism forces us into collectively stuffing more Big Macs into our mouths. How might we meet the human rights to food, shelter, healthcare and education, and in so doing, create a new horizon for physical objects, where we could live in an ever-revolving circularity of consumer abundance? Beyond the bleak choice between denial of reality or submitting to involuntary human extinction, is there a third avenue left unlisted by popular imagination, one that doesn't require a magic marker to see or decrypt? Thankfully, there is a clear path toward an Ecology of Freedom, where we say goodbye to the continued maintenance of hierarchy and make way for its utter annihilation and dissolution, replacing it with a shared prosperity. As such, we must Decommodify the means to a dignified life, and Democratize every area of society. This dual principle is the only game in town, and its consecrated demands will lead us toward a vibrant and fecund future. These principles need foundations, though, which is why Library Socialism and The Golden Square can mutually embrace as complementary concepts: The Golden Square as the new social contract for society, and Library Socialism as the means for organizing our world. This conversation between comrades traces the beginnings of a mutual vision to address our ecological & social crises with practical solutions and an imminently achievable purpose. Humanity has an infinite amount of untapped potential that these outlined concepts toward a dignified global society aim to unleash. We should break from the Baby Yoda Nostalgia Blankets © of the possible—that keep us swaddled in narrow dreams and demands—and chart a course toward The Utopian Sphere. To paraphrase the now-radicalized Mandalorian (upon hearing us): "The Golden Square is the Objective. Library Socialism is the Way."

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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 Bourgeois's Spiders series) or art can become a psychedelic wonderland for the masses: as seen in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room – a dazzling and diaphanous fractal maze of half-silvered mirrors that make one feel endless and glowing. But when it comes to how we feel and breathe about art's raison d'être: What's art's purpose for existing? Who gets to make art? Who gets to experience art? Sadly and grotesquely, just the rich. In this capitalist hellscape of commodified depravity and celebrity-driven attention hoarding, all measures of real freedom, including the ability to choose a life in the arts, are reserved only for the rich & famous. No matter who you are or where you were born, there is an alternative version of you behind every dollar of your parents; the money your family has or doesn't have, shapes the trajectory of your life and determines your available options. As such, this tragic lottery is ultimately a game best tossed into history's garbage bin. Our co-hosts will reflect on lifetimes of dashed dreams, yearning for freedom and imagining what art might be like in a socialist future – sketching visions of a New Renaissance waiting just behind the doors concealing humanity's suppressed imagination. Once achieving The Golden Square, where dignified lives no longer worry about food, shelter, healthcare and education, art is inevitably what comes next. We don't need Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket to 15 seconds of Ocean Spray © TikTok fame, which is the newer, crueler, sadder reality of the American Dream. The Golden Square is how we get freedom for everyone, not just a few lucky lottery winners in this vicious, boring dystopia. Building real Socialism will unleash a gazillion blooming flowers of human creativity – singing out in a joyous weave toward The Utopian Sphere. New art will ask new questions, make new demands, and push us toward the unknown horizons of belonging, fulfillment, and happiness never-before realized in human history.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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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 racing against the terrifying ten-year window of opportunity still left to avoid a catastrophic, civilization-ending bio-collapse. But after decades of fumbles and false starts in the environmental movement, a new dawn might be rising. Just one month after the IPCC's alarming 2018 report, The Sunrise Movement and AOC stormed Nancy Pelosi's office, demanding bold action to secure good jobs and a livable future. Just months later, AOC and Ed Markey would go on to introduce resolutions for The Green New Deal in the US Congress. Two years after the viral media success of the Sunrise sit-in, the movement's co-founders have put out a big, thick book called Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can. This volume arrives amid a wave of recent books from writers, activists, and scholars raising urgent calls for a Green New Deal. This anthology presents a collection of endorsements from famous thinkers and organizers of the broader Left who make up the voices of its 16 chapters; so, in accord with that project, we offer this episode as an additional chapter of endorsement; one too radical for its publisher, Simon & Schuster, to find "fit for print." So while this book's target audience is presumably those liberals who are merely Green-New-Deal-Curious, we hope it will serve to expand the massive choir needed to sing a collective chorus for eco-socialism and the end of capitalism. In order to progress towards a just, utopian horizon, we must burn down old myths, heal our cities, and build a world where our collective responsibility to provide each other with the material means for a dignified life is the basis of a new social contract. The world we deserve is one that's as happy & wild as a child's mind in playful abandon.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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