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Interview with a Medical Device Engineer
Pleased to share the transcription for an interview I did for Vital Signs magazine, a publication by and for hospital workers in Bristol, UK. We touched on numerous topics, including global supply chains, the abstraction of hospital labor into monetary concerns, engineer and scientists subjectivities, worker organizing, medical device design paradigms, speculation about communism, and more.
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Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism
How might communism work? How can we approach this question with any rigor? What roles do industrial production, planning, and deliberative decision-making have in communism? In just under 21,000 words Phil Neel and I try to provide an answer to these questions.
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Fixed Capital
Short reflections on a recent factory visit of mine. Published in the Futon section of Strange Matters issue 2.
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Engineers, Materialism, and the Communist Method
I explore the relationship between engineering – both as an abstract process and as a profession made up of real people – and the communist project. I elucidate the materialist kernel at the core of the engineering method and the political implications thereof.
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Red May 2023: We Have Never Been Post-Industrial
I recently organized a panel talk with my friends and collaborators Wendy Liu, Phil Neel, and Anette Ramos. Link inside.
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Review: “Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital” by Søren Mau
A wide reaching synthesis that expertly ties together many threads of contemporary Marxist thought. It is both well-written and intellectually useful. All communists should read it at least once.
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A Tale of Two Engineer-Artisans
Anecdotes about coffee and wine. Making a case for why artisans and engineers have more overlap than people think.
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Review: “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072” by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi
A valiant effort to meaningfully speculate on what communist revolution might look like and what society it would bring into being. While this books does many things quite well, it does not quite stick the landing.
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Productive Distribution: Speculation on Communist Manufacturing by Volume
Preliminary charting of dialectic between decentralized high mix low volume production and centralized low mix high volume production in a speculative communist society
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Technical Expertise and Communist Production
On the character of technical expertise developed in “high mix low volume” vs “low mix high volume” manufacturing operations. I chart out what this means for communism as both a political movement and an eventual productive state of affairs.