The Next Axial Age: Salvaging a workable future from metacollapse

2500 years is long enough for us to have learned that escape from community, and from the earth, is not a solution, but a root cause of our troubles. John Zerzan In 1949, in his book The Origin and Goal of History, the German philosopher Karl Japsers coined the term “Axial Age,”. In Jaspers’ view, similar ways of interpreting the world emerged in different civilizational … Continue reading The Next Axial Age: Salvaging a workable future from metacollapse

Last Chance Moonshot – Part 3: Modern Money Theory

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. Dick Cheney Who the hell cares about the budget? We’re going to have a country. Donald Trump In Part 1, we looked at UBI as the new primary purpose of government, the only way out of the immediate predicaments of underemployment, collapsing labor value, and the political explosiveness generated by the resulting economic deprivation. Then in Part 2, we explored … Continue reading Last Chance Moonshot – Part 3: Modern Money Theory

Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying

As we come down the home stretch of the shitshow that is the 2024 Presidential election, it has become clear that our problem is not just Trump, or his legion of followers, or even the entire American political system, which has tipped over completely into plutocratic servitude. What is really crippling us is a dysfunctional set of ideas, a system of zombie ideas so entrenched … Continue reading Hard to Kill: Zombie Ideas That Need Slaying

Morality & the Meaning of Money

Dreams of individual accomplishment and desires to contribute to the common good become firmly attached to waged work, where they can be hijacked to rather different ends: to produce neither individual riches nor social wealth, but privately appropriately surplus value. Kathi Weeks, “The Problem with Work” Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing … Continue reading Morality & the Meaning of Money

Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

The development of new, alternative perspectives define utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion and so … Continue reading Avoiding Armageddon: (2) Cracking the utopia code

The Last Fiction – Part 3

History is not repeating itself, we are unfolding a new page in national life. The past has gone forever. There is no abiding present, it flies while we name it, and as it flies it is our duty to provide for the thick coming future. . . . We are to shape the future. We cannot escape the duty. — William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley … Continue reading The Last Fiction – Part 3

Transparent Trojan Horse – Part 2

In Part 1, we confronted the uncomfortable reality that unequal societies like ours do not, unfortunately, fix themselves gradually or peacefully. Instead, conditions ossify and then worsen, until one of the Four Horsemen of violent upheaval comes galloping along to level the socioeconomic landscape. So at the very moment when we need maximum flexibility to confront the looming spectres of climate change, ecological devastation, and … Continue reading Transparent Trojan Horse – Part 2