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 Guin’s iconic and epic “ambiguous utopia,” The Dispossessed (1974), and include Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy of novels (1992-96), as well as nonfiction books like Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias (2010), Alex Williams & Nick Srnicek’s Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), and A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal by Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos (2019). These visions of still imperfect, but radically more just & egalitarian worlds teach us that striving toward the utopian horizon is neither naive nor impractical, but instead all too necessary and prudent, especially now. As such, The Golden Square affirms that the decommodification of life and democratization of society are not just revolutionary goals, but in fact, the revolutionary project itself. Beyond the ceaseless academic obsessions with diagramming the corpse of our dystopian hellscape, we must chart a path outside our pyramid-shaped cages by realizing the unconditional rights to food, shelter, healthcare, and education for every person on earth – a readymade threshold separating us from the Utopian Sphere. Moving outward, Pearson, Jesse and Matt talk about the key planks that might make up the political philosophy of Anti-Anti-Utopia and how charting an emancipatory path forward requires an intersectional anti-capitalist compass magnetized to the many symbiotic, multilectical transformations necessary to abolish empire. As Matt has been fond of saying of late: “Be like an anarchist,” first and foremost.

Comprehensive Show Notes Can Be Found at thefutureisamixtape.com

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