052: The World of The Golden Square, Part III: Structures & Ecologies
The Future Is A Mixtape
An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: 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 lifeforms, so perfectly balanced, so perfectly clear as to be made invisible by what our eyes have thus far failed to see. No matter the pace or scale of humanity’s technological ingenuity, the Earth sets upon us planetary boundaries and immutable laws of its own ecology. But with DeathKult Capitalism’s...
info_outline
051: The World of The Golden Square, Part II: Experiences & Methods
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 class and its corrupt, craven supplicants are waging an all-out war against any measure of “socialist” “entitlements” that might help build the social infrastructure desperately needed in this...
info_outline
050: The World of The Golden Square, Part I: Definitions & Foundations
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 history travels with us as a persistent revolutionary beacon – “The Legacy of Freedom.” While the pharaohs of our neoliberal capitalist hellscape continue to insist that there is no...
info_outline
049: Every Neighborhood A University
The Future Is A Mixtape
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, and profit. But buried under the grotesque mélange of cul-de-sacs, commodities, and mind-numbing commutes that define our suburban dystopias, rest designs for liberation hiding in plain sight....
info_outline
048: The Long Winding Road to Housing Decommodification
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 in this global society is one of planned scarcity imposed from above: the shimmering Poison Pyramid of a callous status-quo swarming like a rapacious daggered virus into each blood-chamber of our...
info_outline
047: Free Housing For All
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 were the city's glitzy-ritzy hotels with thousands of empty, unused rooms stacked skyward—taunting the unsheltered who were made to sleep below, partitioned by lines of chalked concrete....
info_outline
046: Utopia With Comrades: Part II
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 with a robust list of fiction and non-fiction texts that spell out the shape of this new genre of hope-making. A developmental syllabus of Anti-Anti-Utopian study may start with Ursula K. Le...
info_outline
045: Utopia With Comrades: Part I
The Future Is A Mixtape
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-eared copy of a Hunger Games novel have sipped from the bitter cup of our Terminal Dystopia Syndrome, few have dared to dream of utopia. As something paradoxically both dangerous and...
info_outline
044: The Dawning of The Feminist City
The Future Is A Mixtape
“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 juxtaposes pop cultural reflections, academic scholarship and hauntingly personal accounts of a lifetime struggling to claim feminine space in cities, first as a child, then a teenager &...
info_outline
043: A New Feminism for Our Unfolding Future
The Future Is A Mixtape
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 back to the womb of a better future-possible. If we are going to build a just world for all of us, it must start from a politics that addresses the deep complexity of our collective wounds. So in this...
info_outlineFor 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 the most important Marxist in Sociology post-WWII. After his mapping project of class was completed, the intellectual turned his attention in the latter half of his career to seeing how we might build real utopias in the here and now – after both the failure of statist “proletarian” parties and the success of neoliberalism’s onslaught of rapacious transnational capital, where everything could be outsourced or automated, and where labor was left emaciated, fragmented, and unconscious of its own exploitation. While Wright’s final work provided an excellent diagramming of the strategic logic of Eroding Capitalism, he never outlined how we might orchestrate these various movements on the playing field of global capital in order to build a symphony of revolution. Increasingly, the triumphant narrative that markets “heal the boo-boos” seems ever-less persuasive as capitalism reveals itself to be a harm-grinder against humanity and our desiccated biosphere. Matt will discuss what he argues is our most powerful anticapitalist wedge issue - money in politics, and Jesse will offer his Theory of Emancipatory Struggle along with the strategic directions of The Anticapitalist Compass. In closing, Jesse & Matt will examine how converging emancipatory movements joining in a chorus of revolution can build toward the first glimmers of The Utopian Sphere. The time has come to not only announce that “a better world is possible,” but to detail the choreography of transcending capitalism once and for all. We must make the future ourselves, collectively, and not let the future be made by an oligarchy that seeds DeathCults in its wake.
Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com
Feel Free to Contact Jesse & Matt on the Following Spaces & Places: