mind reader

Dear friends,

We live in existentially challenging times – between actively unfolding western-backed genocides on several fronts, growingly desperate climate emergencies even at sub-1.5°, and the engulfment of despotic fascist and anti-human behaviours from general society. Social division, ecological collapse, backstabbing and horrors beyond comprehension literally abound and are par-for-the-course in daily reporting, news feed updates, and Lemmy communities. Between these radically distressing flashes of information, imagery, and propaganda, interspersed with memes and other desensitising content, it is easy to feel lost, helpless, worried, anxious – you name it. But I’m more concerned about two reactions to these trends which I’ve seen unfold firsthand. The first response, prima facie, may seem harmless: apathy, the second response, much less harmless, is lateral violence. However, both these responses undermine the fundamental fabric of working-class solidarity, the emancipatory potential of human action, and fundamentally accelerate late capitalist plundering.

In conversations, both face-to-face and online, I see increasing anger and frustration. People disillusioned by the status quo, either demanding action or demanding change. While a whole different line of inquiry could be started by examining the nature of this thinking through a “blame” lens (i.e., are you doing anything about it? Or just bitching?) I think it is worth taking a moment to check in on how this kind of thinking starts as organic potential for change but is quickly sublimated by hegemony. Let’s take a second to think through an example, and I’m going to do this in a familiar context but without great familiarity with the actual situation just for our hypothetical purposes here today.

John Patterson had lived in Virginia Beach his whole life. His favourite spot, the front porch, where he had spent countless evenings watching the sunset over the Chesapeake Bay. He’d dismissed the warnings about climate change as political fearmongering, even as his insurance premiums crept up year after year.

“The climate’s always changing,” he told his daughter Sarah during their fortnightly calls. “Been here sixty-eight years, seen plenty of storms. Nothing different about them now than when I was a boy.”

Sarah, who worked as an environmental scientist in Maryland, had tried sending him articles, data, projections. Of course, he waved them away, just like he’d waved away her suggestions to sell the house and move inland. The property had been in their family for three generations. His father had built it “with his own hands”.

But in July 2024, as he watched the storm surge from a Category 4 hurricane push six feet of water through his neighbourhood, something shifted in John’s understanding. The water wasn’t just coming from the ocean—it was coming from everywhere. The rain was relentless, the kind of deluge that the paper would later explain was becoming more common: “intensifying rainfall, both hurricane and non-hurricane” along the East Coast.

From the second floor of his house, John watched as his beloved porch disappeared under the murky water. His neighbour’s SUV floated by like a toy boat. The National Guard evacuated the elderly couple three doors down by boat.

Later, in the shelter at the local high school, John overheard someone mention that the flooding was hitting Black communities in the area particularly hard. He remembered dismissing similar concerns in the past, but now the statistics from the research were playing out in real time before his eyes: “The top 20% proportionally Black census tracts are expected to see flood risk increase at double the rate of the bottom 20%.” [1]

When Sarah finally reached him by phone, he was sitting on a cot, staring at the FEMA paperwork in his hands. The damage to his house was estimated at over $300,000. The insurance would only cover a fraction of it.

“Dad,” Sarah said gently, “remember that paper I sent you last year? The one that predicted a 26.4% increase in flood risk by 2050? We're seeing those changes now, not thirty years from now.” [1]

For the first time, John didn't argue. Instead, he looked around the shelter at the hundreds of other displaced residents—young families, retirees, students—all victims of what the paper had clinically termed “the physical phenomenon” of flooding.

“I should have listened,” he said finally. “All those years, the signs were there. The higher tides, the worse storms, the flooding on sunny days. I just didn't want to see it.”

Except we know this is not how the story goes. Indeed, the radical denial of immensity of natural disasters, even when they happen before the right’s very eyes, is ignored. Phenomenologically perhaps there is psychological safety in ignoring threats to your existence so much beyond comprehension that no amount of action could create meaningful change. But this is just a cop out. And instead of quiet resignation to accept their fate, more and more people are moving to denialism – even fatalism in the face of the uninhabitable planet that their comfortable mediocrity has bred for those left alive today. Perhaps, however, even worse than this is the startling rise in despotic, narcissistic, and utterly unhinged people – derangement may be a response to deeply unsafe environments, except that this manifests as lateral violence. Too often, now, left-on-left violence, rather than any bona fide worker solidarity to try and fix things.

The phenomenon of lateral violence among the left, particularly at identity intersections, serves as another mechanism through which capital maintains its hegemonic control. When marginalised groups turn their legitimate anger and frustration horizontally rather than vertically – attacking those who should be comrades rather than the systems of oppression that harm them both – we see the successful deployment of divide-and-conquer tactics by the ruling class. This manifests in vicious callouts over perceived ideological impurities, in the weaponisation of identity-based grievances against potential allies, and in the elevation of individual trauma over collective struggle. While the wounds that drive such conflicts are often real and valid, the redirection of revolutionary energy into internal strife rather than external resistance ultimately serves only to maintain capitalist power structures. The bourgeoisie need not lift a finger to suppress radical movements when the left is busy tearing itself apart over who is most oppressed or whose analysis is most pure. Indeed, the bourgeois continue to stoke identity wars on the left for this very purpose – how queer are you really? How brown are you really? How disabled are you really? The not-so-subtle messaging in self-professed “left leaning” parties speaks volumes about their true purposes. Vanguarding capital, distracting the progressives, and ensuring their portfolio of properties grows immensely – not looking at Anthony Albanese in particular, or anything. When we couple this notion of lateral violence with disengagement, we see a deeper story emerging about human responses – capitalist fatalism – which grips the populous in a sick configuration of hegemonic victory that sees us all die so musk can launch his rockets (and other billionaires can apologise for his political flip flopping [2]).

The widespread disengagement from ecological collapse, often but not exclusively unfairly attributed to younger generations, represents a deeply troubling success of capitalist propaganda and ontological infection. Generationally, there is a growing trend of disconnecting from reality, embracing capital, and denying the shared realities of our increasingly doomed world. Arguments in this camp suggest that “older generations may have some remnant memory of connection to land and nature” and that the “kids these days” only know techno-optimist narratives and manufactured alienation from the natural world – therefore “old good, young bad” in a tale as old as time. But there is something to the dejected, depressed, and disengaged “youth” – and that story is, equally, hegemony. Either, younger people know “too much” in that they are so paralysed by the dire situation we find ourselves in, they know “too little” because their education system is so hegemonic that anything remotely analytical has been stripped from the curriculum, or their engagement with the world has been deliberately forestalled by capitalist megacorps and social media such to prevent any revolutionary wave.

What has eventuated, here, is a population largely incapable of processing the reality of environmental catastrophe. Either they fight each other over perceived identity divisions, they bury their heads in the sand, or they further embrace conservative and fascist dialogues that seek only to embed capitalism as the ontic frame for production until the planet is quite literally on fire. All of these scenarios manufacture apathy which serves capital’s interests perfectly. No need to organise counter-revolutionary action if everyone is either fascist, bored on TikTok, or attacking each other. Rather than organising against the corporations and systems destroying our planet’s capacity to sustain life, increasingly more retreat into dissociative consumption, treating climate disaster as background noise to be scrolled past rather than an existential threat demanding immediate collective action. And it’s not just climate that gets this treatment, it’s all the 1%’s disasters unfolding. They have perfected the free pass, and deputised the 99% to distract ourselves from their fuck ups.

When we do engage in activism, it is reconfigured betwixt a paralysing tension of awareness of crisis and feelings of personal helplessness that ultimately maintains the status quo. Well, shit, that’s grim. So what?

Let’s try and learn from John Patterson, then, ey? Let’s take a moment to collectively breathe in - no, really, breath in right now, the deepest breath you’ve taken all day. Now consider the world around you. What changes have you seen first in yourself, second in the natural world, and third in the state of equity and equality. Does it feel like progress was made in leaps and bounds and then not at all? Does it seem that progress was never made and in fact we have just continued to backslide? What actions have you taken to resist the status quo? And where do you see yourself being able to push new frontiers of socially cohesive activism in the future? I’m tired, friends, and I’m sure you are too. But there is so so much at stake here. I, for one, think if we can reconfigure our thinking like John, and accept that things are dire and that this is no way to live – for anyone – then we have at least made a start.

So how do we help people reconcile their lived experience with the scientific realities? How do people end up with John’s response? And once we get there, how do we ensure that it’s not a hopeless come depressed end but rather the start of a workers revolution that acknowledges this system does not work for 8 billion of us? We are stronger than they ever will be, and we have the power and potential to change the course of this planet. Working together, understanding intersectional pressures, acknowledging the deep and differential pain that capitalism twists upon us each day, we can find new ways. We’re deeply creative creatures, and I know with some mental space we can find answers to the anguish, rather than embracing fatalism and denial at the end of the world.

Did I end on a cheerier note? I don’t know, but I tried.

Aidan.

[1] Wing, O. E. J., Lehman, W., Bates, P. D., Sampson, C. C., Quinn, N., Smith, A. M., Neal, J. C., Porter, J. R., & Kousky, C. (2022). Inequitable patterns of US flood risk in the Anthropocene. Nature Climate Change, 12(2), 156–162. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01265-6

[2] DHH recently wrote a post defending Musk and his millions in political support because “rocket catch fancy durrr”.

Dear friends,

An attendee at a presentation I gave once said to me “it seems you just truly wish to belong in the academy”. This remains one of the most problematic and troubling interpretations of my work to date, something, at the time, I found deeply hurtful, and which has since sat with me as a space which demands further clarity in my thinking and articulation of positionality. Just a few days ago I met with a colleague who is doing research in an area of interest — student participation in direct democracy, and we discussed the dual notion of participation and rebellion; the way the counter-hegemony asserts different relations, challenges norms, and fights for transformation all while being exploited, stolen from, and dispossessed of knowledge, praxis, and possibility.

Let’s do some theory, first, before I further disambiguate myself. If we understand that hegemony, in contemporary globalised colonial capitalism this can truly be understood as a global phenomenon, is a constantly evolving and moving beast. Hegemony, a tool of primarily coercive domination for a ruling class, configures the thinking of societies. Put plainly, the cultural hegemony reflects a relatively palatable projected cluster of norms, values, and practices which reinforce and produce benefit for the professors (qua “espousal”, not “an academic”) of that ruling class group. This is a radical simplification, necessarily, but the fundamental gist is that through carefully, and constantly, transforming the “acceptable” the 1% are able to manipulate, control, and enforce their views and values onto the 99%. Largely, hegemony is required to perpetuate capitalism, because nothing about capitalism is natural or human, and for the 1% to continue to benefit the messaging must constantly shift — even in contradictory ways — to ensure the continuation of capital.

Institutions, then, play key roles in this perpetuation, configuration, justification and so on, as we have discussed on many occasions here on mind reader. In my life, I have always accidentally found the limits of hegemony — as an activist, worker, thinker, person, I am constantly pushed against the edges. Labelled “justice sensitive” I find the superexploitation of friends, family, colleagues, and random strangers utterly unacceptable. Through becoming more familiar with theory, notions of cultural supremacy, the ongoing impact of colonial capitalism, and so on, I have only become more attuned to the deep injustice rendered upon this planet by the 1% in the name of “progress”: ecological, social, human, animal, planetary, and so on — the deep inequities of capitalism loom large and condition the way I think and act against the systems of this “progress”.

So then, amidst an activist depiction of higher education, a comment suggesting that my issue is simply that I do not feel belonging is fundamentally deeply opposed to my very nature. Not only do I not want to belong to an institution which is built on racist, sexist, ableist super-exploitation, but my entire communication has either sailed past the listener, or I have failed, fundamentally, to articulate the problematic nature of the system to which this particular group of listeners belonged. Indeed, while this one instance — an early one in my career — stands out, there are countless occasions across my academic and activist life where my abject abhorrence at the system has been misinterpreted as my need to belong. This depiction could not be further from the reality.

Proudly, I feel a part of a counter-hegemony which is emerging all across the globe which is fighting for better ways of being, thinking and doing. Ways which acknowledge history, but build bridges to better governance, relationality, ecologies, and economies. In situating ourselves in relation with each other, understanding the urgent and fundamental need to live in sustainable ways, to defund genocides, to centre democracy directly in the hands of those systemically disempowered, disenfranchised and othered — this new way, which does not yet hold a concrete shape — is emerging as a strong, robust, working class and democratically distributive way forward. Now, there are so many of us that there is even a palpable feeling when you meet like-minded people, those who have fought, not to belong, but to transform a system that is cruel, exploitative, and unjust. This counter-hegemonic movement stands against capitalism, it is embodied in countless youth who face a system designed only to hand them shackles for their own ankles, it is lived in old activists who fought for deep social transformation in the 1960s, 1980s, 2010s, not gone, now finding footing for a new social order.

However, while there feels to be hope, this journey is no where near over. Lamentably, “new” institutions are formed to “take the cream” from the best of these new ways forward. This process, similar to class ascendancy (a contradiction worth further examination at another time), is how the hegemony maintains its vice grip on the 99%. By taking the best, palatable, and low-cost solutions to big problems, devouring them and regurgitating them upon a capitalist base is a pattern repeated across history by assimilationist thinkers — and vanguards of the colonial capitalist hegemony, of which, let me assure you as though you were under any illusion, there are far too many in our “great institutions”. Even purportedly new ways forward advanced by traditional intellectuals, those who seek to further the capitalist project, which verge on participatory, egalitarian, and equal are cast aside in contemporary times because division has seized the centre stage as political strategy. The “left” of politics has now, too, engaged in a divisive, hateful, and anti-factual movement in the name of advancing capital — ha, as though the liberal left ever wanted anything but a veneer of social inclusion.

This “social inclusion” is, however, both what I rally against, and among the largest threats to organic intellectualism in universities and public spaces today. Advancing narratives that simultaneously borrow the worst of capitalism’s hatred, and argue for “inclusion”, “incorporation” and “acknowledgement” are what your tax dollars fund in our institutions — particularly in disciplines such as education and social science, where radical philosophy, analytical social science, and activist and radical feminist studies have been stripped to the bone by funding changes, competitive creep, and other neoliberal and fascist notions of what is important. Instead of, what was undoubtedly a white malestream, the 1960s radical, we have arrived at the “picture of a radical” whose research focus is on assimilation, incorporation and social inclusion — what is not said, but is deeply written, is that this “inclusion” is for fulsome participation in capitalism.

And here’s (another) the rub. A counter-hegemony is emerging. It takes many localised forms all around the planet, but it has one thing in common. It acknowledges the truth of the situation in which we find ourselves. Hegemonic colonial capitalism has destroyed the lives of countless people — regardless of culture, gender, notions of ‘able-ness’ — and left radically unequal super-exploitation in its wake. Importantly, here, I need to stress that at the intersections between these social constructs, capitalism has a very real and multiplicative affect on negative experience, conditions, and possibility at those intersticies. But the driving and fundamentally common experience is that everyone in the 99% has been dispossessed from cultural expression (unless it serves capitalism), has been removed from connection to materials, land, histories, spaces (unless it serves capitalism), and has been stolen from to feed the bloated bourgeois leisure class who catch rockets out of the sky while millions starve, corporations and governments fund genocides, and countless daily injustices continue.

The damage, then, that assimilationists do is twofold. First, they suggest that you only really belong if you “belong” to capitalism. Second, through asserting you “should” belong, and want to belong, that any counter-hegemony is useful only so long as it serves capitalism. This is a sick, broken, and misanthropic position to hold — and I am tired of pretending that “social inclusion” is anything other than a pro-capitalist washing of history to ensure that “difference” is exploited only by capitalists. The assimilationist agenda, then, serves as a tool of the hegemony to neutralise genuine counter-hegemonic movements. By co-opting the language of inclusion and diversity, it creates a facade of progress while fundamentally preserving the exploitative core of capitalism. This “inclusive capitalism” is nothing more than a more palatable version of the same system that continues to extract value from the 99% for the benefit of the 1%.

What we need, instead, is to nurture the radical re-imagining of our social, economic, and political structures. This re-imagining must come from the ground up, from the organic intellectuals emerging from the struggles of the working class, the marginalised, and the dispossessed — and, to be clear, progress here is being made. It will, necessarily, reject the false promise of assimilation into a system that is fundamentally built on exploitation and instead work towards creating new forms of social organisation that prioritise human needs, ecological sustainability, and genuine democratic participation. The academy, in its current form, is ill-equipped to nurture this kind of radical thought. Its structures are too deeply intertwined with the capitalist hegemony, its funding too dependent on maintaining the status quo. Yet, paradoxically, it is within these very institutions that we must continue to fight, to carve out spaces for counter-hegemonic thought and action. Not to belong, but to transform… But it’s hard fucking work.

In solidarity,

Aidan

Reference material:

Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.

Fraser, N. (2019). The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.

Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.

Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

Giroux, H. A. (2014). Neoliberalism's War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books.

Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books.

Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.). (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.

Dear friends,

I have been necessarily pondering “end times” – conceptually a troubling thought. We’re seeing the slow motion collapse of ecology, social fabric, and empire. However, we are not seeing, as Marx and Engels infamously foretold, the end of capital concomitant with these collapses. Instead, capitalism’s hegemonic stranglehold on thought, production, ideology, community and more is ceaselessly suffocating any revolutionary potential. So powerful have the oligarchs become that alternatives are endlessly forestalled in capitalist realism.

Who voices “different” in these times? And what possible alternatives exist to create a new world, a new way, and some hope? This is what occupies my thoughts - cheery, ey?

Borrowing from some of the best of philosophy and ontology, let’s consider that time is cyclical. Imagining that the “end” of an era is, in fact, the beginning of something new. At the moment, I feel a grim and troubled modernity encapsulating the very way we speak, think and interact – bound in a deep evil, capitalism. This endless intensification of a singular mode of production, such that it has embraced a truly global exploitative and extractive way of working (ontology), feels inescapable – and that is part of the problem. If I, too, accept that capitalism is the end of humanity, then I have succumbed to capitalist realism. Instead, we need radical hope in the face of these times.

So, in practicing what I preach, let’s really think about what the future might be – the end of the world is the end of capitalism, but the end of capitalism is the beginning of something new and different. My hope is that humanity, this too often selfish, manipulated, and narcissistic being, flourishes and finds its positive transformation. Instead of negativity, social and cultural disintegration, and fatalism in capital’s grasping of ecology and economy, that rather we collectively wake up, pump the breaks, and seize capitalism’s fall, not as the end of ecology, but as the beginning of a new form of truly grassroots participatory democracy and change.

There is an inevitability in collapse, fatalism, capitalism, this will either lead to our collective heat death – the intensification of the already back-to-back record breaking global catastrophes, including floods, tornadoes, fires, and more that currently grip our ecology. Or, it could lead to the end of the expropriative and pathologically evil capitalist class. Redistributing resources, knowledge, and power back to the people to whom it belongs - the 99%. I hope that we are able to realise the damage that this sociopathic class enact on us every single day, and that we assert a better way. Not a new group of capitalists – but genuine distributive decision making.

This doesn’t mean, as some racists have suggested, a return to sticks, rocks and foraging – not that this is a true depiction of history, but rather a fallacy manufactured by capitalism to enable its realism. Rather, that we turn the tools of technology away from profit and instead focus on creating globally a better way of living. One that really embraces diversity, that finds strength and hope in human invention, and marvels at the possible. Our collective creative, inventive, and fundamentally intelligent energies turned towards survival, thriving, and lifting “all the boats” could truly see the end of expropriative capitalism.

Yes, such a thing as socialism, or anarchy, or whatever you want it to be - it could be. We could assert our values as “care for each other and for the planet”. This is our true role, and it always has been - responding to the needs of our ecology, not destroying it for profits. When we fall out of relation with place, environment, whatever you want to call it, we disconnect from each other, from reality, and allow the narcissistic, manipulative, and despotic reign to ruin us. This needs to end - and the planet will ensure that it does. So how do you want this to go? Work to create collective change now, or give up and let the capitalists make the 99%‘s lives even more impossible before they escape in Elon’s bullshit spaceships?

I think we are past due for serious collective rethinking of governance, collectivity, participation, purpose, and so on. We – the working class – need to assert something new, that cares, that values each other, that builds comradery, before heat death. Because, I, for one, don’t want to see this beautiful planet further damaged by vanity and corporate profits. Its a fake, empty, and bullshit system. Only together can we create hope, alternative ways, and a better world. So let’s do that instead, yeah?

The task before us is always feels monumental, as does anything transformative, but it is never impossible. We can reimagine our relationship with labour, with each other, and with the planet. This reimagining requires a fundamental shift in our ontology – our way of being in relation to the earth. We can move beyond the capitalist realism that has infected our collective imagination and embrace what Gramsci might call a new common sense [1]. This new common sense must be rooted in solidarity, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship.

But how do we get there? How do we find the cracks in the stranglehold of capitalist hegemony? The answer, I believe, lies in praxis – the unity of theory and practice. We need to engage in what Fraser calls boundary struggles [2], challenging the artificial separations between production and reproduction, economy and ecology, that capitalism relies upon – this is not difficult, and is a project we are continuing here in partnership, you and me. This means building alternative institutions and ways of living in the here and now – or at least finding ways of thinking about the possibilities – while simultaneously working to transform existing structures.

We might look to examples like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, who created autonomous zones of democratic self-governance [3]. Or to the growing movement for a “pluriverse” – a world where many worlds fit [4]. These are not utopian fantasies, but real, lived alternatives to capitalist domination, even if they have flaws.

Crucially, as I keep harping on, such transformative projects must be intersectional. We cannot separate the struggle against capitalism from the struggles against racism, patriarchy, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. As Bhattacharya reminds us, social reproduction theory offers a way to understand how these various forms of oppression are interconnected and essential to capital’s functioning [5]. By centring social reproduction in our analysis and our organising, we can build a truly inclusive and liberatory movement – but will we?

The ruling class will not give up their power willingly – they fight dirty. We continuously face repression, co-optation attempts, and, of course, battle at the front lines of ecological collapse. But we have no choice but to persist. The alternative – the continuation of capitalism’s death march – is simply unacceptable, or rather “the end of humanity” (and, yes, maybe that’s not the worst thing).

So, comrades, let us embrace this moment of crisis as an opportunity for radical transformation, please? Let us build networks of solidarity and mutual aid that can weather the storms ahead. Let us create spaces of prefigurative politics where we can experiment with new forms of democratic decision-making and ecological stewardship. And let us never lose sight of the world we’re fighting for – a world of justice, equality, and harmony with nature.
The end of capitalism need not be the end of the (human) world. But it will be if we don’t act. I think we could start something beautiful – if we have the courage and creativity to make it so. The future is unwritten – but it’s not looking great. We can do better.

In solidarity,

Aidan

[1] Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers.

[2] Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of Capital and Care. New Left Review, 100, 99-117.

[3] Holloway, J., & Peláez, E. (1998). Zapatista!: Reinventing Revolution in Mexico. Pluto Press.

[4] Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

[5] Bhattacharya, T. (Ed.). (2017). Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. Pluto Press.