-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Inside vs. Outside: The Proletarian Composition Problem
Communism is not the restructuring of capitalism’s distribution of goods, but a complete overhaul of how and why they are produced in the first place. This tendency of capital towards deindustrialized workforces reduces the proportion of workers that are positioned to enact this fundamental productive transformation in a revolutionary situation. This is one of the central problematics of modern communism: the…
-
Engineering, Commodity Production, and Capitalist Domination (Part 2)
Those of us who have accumulated the technical expertise necessary to enable the endless churning of things from factories have done so as part of a vast machine built on an absurd amount of suffering. This suffering cannot be undone, but can potentially be redeemed if this expertise is leveraged towards building a society where planetary domination by the alien logic…
-
Engineering, Commodity Production, and Capitalist Domination (Part 1)
The role of engineers in capitalism is two-fold: our labor simultaneously enables the domination of other laborers through the deployment of technology in service of capital accumulation while also itself being subject to domination by capitalism. A modern anti-capitalist approach to politics must account for the complex role of engineers, as engineers play not only a pivotal role in capitalism, but…