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Companies that license standard essential patents, or SEPs, often engage in unfair price discrimination tactics.

SEPs are essential to products that adhere to certain technical standards such as cellular and Wi-Fi. Some products can include hundreds of standards, and some standards can involve thousands of patents.

The Brattle Group’s report finds that “the US needs 400 megahertz of full power, licensed spectrum in the next five years to meet projected demand.” This disparity in the allocation of spectrum between licensed and unlicensed usage in the US is creating a lag in the planning for the timely availability of spectrum needed to power mobile services. The US government has assigned seven times more spectrum for Wi-Fi and unlicensed applications compared to supporting commercial networks. Additionally, if the US lags behind China in deploying advanced wireless networks and devices, there will be substantial economic ramifications.

Failing to rectify the current spectrum imbalance could have far-reaching implications for national security. As Clete Johnson from the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes in the first of a series of papers focusing on 5G and security, this disparity raises long-term concerns regarding capacity for data gathering and other national security and economic implications. The situation also warrants an examination of the consequences associated with China’s adoption of the 6 gigahertz spectrum for their mid-band needs.

Lewis and Johnson 23 (James Andrew, Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Clete, Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 9/26/23, “Modernizing Spectrum Allocation to Ensure U.S. Security in the Twenty-First Century,” https://www.csis.org/analysis/modernizing-spectrum-allocation-ensure-us-security-twenty-first-century, dhiya)

The ubiquitous connectivity that 5G provides is central to twenty-first century national security. That makes adequate radio frequency spectrum for commercially licensed 5G use—particularly the mid-band spectrum that is ideal for high-capacity, wide-area 5G deployments—also central to national security. This licensed spectrum will constitute the backbone of the 5G future. Presently, the United States has a significant shortage of licensed mid-band spectrum allocated to 5G when compared to China and other countries, and China is projected to further widen that disparity in the coming years.

In the antitrust realm, the story is a bit more that Trump picked up on the anti-monopoly movement and used it for his own ends. For instance, Trump followed through on his campaign promise by bringing a merger challenge against the AT&T-Time Warner merger, though a judge ruled against him. He didn’t act on Amazon’s monopoly, but he did bring monopolization cases against Google and Facebook, the first cases against big tech in two decades. The administration also blocked Facebook’s attempted launch of its own currency Libra, and ended Amazon’s giant cloud contract with the Pentagon. Trump even promulgated rules against pharmacy benefit managers, and forced hospitals to reveal their price list publicly.

Yet, consolidation worsened, as most mergers went through unimpeded, from CVS-Aetna in health care to Disney-Fox in streaming to the Linde-Praxair industrial gas merger to the Northrop-Orbital merger that placed one corporation in charge of our nuclear arsenal. Trump Antitrust chief Makan Delrahim actually lobbied for the Sprint-T-Mobile deal, which has raised cell phone costs. Trump eliminated the antitrust agency for farmers, as seed and chemicals moved from the Big Six (Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, Dow and DuPont) to the Big Four (Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina-Syngenta, and BASF). We’re still living with Delrahim’s legacy; the rent-fixing cartel run by RealPage exists in part because the Antitrust Division allowed that company to buy out its competition in rent management software.

In 2016, Donald trump liked to talk tough about corporate America. On the campaign trail, he said that Amazon was “getting away with murder” by influencing federal tax policy and promised that, if elected, he was “not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.” Shortly before taking office, he accused pharmaceutical companies of—you guessed it—“getting away with murder” by charging exorbitant prices for prescription drugs.

That version of Trump sold himself as a populist outsider willing to take on not just the country’s political establishment but also its business elite. His victory proved that a Republican politician could win without pledging allegiance to the free-market dogmas that had dominated the party since Ronald Reagan. On economics, Trump seemed poised to radically remake the GOP’s ideological foundations.

3 The roles prefigurative politics plays in applied strategies of social and political transformation: reproduction, mobilisation and coordination The main debate prefiguration has formed part of throughout the time periods outlined above circulate around whether, or how, it is strategic', where strategy is a word used for making claims about what activity is and is not effective. Recent work makes a strong case that prefiguration is, after all, politically sensible (e.g. Maeckelbergh 2011, Swain 2017, Wagner-Pacific and Ruggero 2019). Nevertheless there remains little dialogue between positions which are critical and those which consider prefiguration to be politically very important. This section addresses that challenge by enumerating the various potential functions of prefigurative politics, then identifying where they may fit in three broad analytical categories that are widely understood to be necessary for movement strategy: reproduction, mobilisation, and coordination (Remoco for short). This formulation presents a set of obvious practices and processes that are well-appreciated - the reproduction of resources needed to act; the tactics that are mobilised; and the orientations towards goals of coordination. It is also used to identify less well documented processes informed by the literature on prefiguration, such as reproduction of collective action that involves experimentation, the building of relationships necessary for collective action, the mobilisation of less recognised tactics such as building alternative institutions, and the way that forms of coordination are empowered by a collective and are distributed across activity, often taking place in a routinized and intuitive way. Building on this, it is argued that disagreement about political strategy and prefiguration often boils down to under-valuing or taking for granted either reproduction or coordination; or to disagreement about priorities. Before outlining the Remoco formulation of social movement strategy it is worth indexing the critiques in a broader discussion of how prefigurative strategy - if something sufficiently distinctive can be discerned as such - has become so controversial. Critiques of prefigurative politics as a political orientation or strategic priority Prefiguration is now generally used to refer to one, another, or both of the practices around 1) building alternative initiatives or practices for an anticipated changed world, or 2) a similarly future-oriented political orientation where the 'means' reflect 'ends' (Yates 2015). But there are other terms referring to these dynamics, which means that some critiques and enthusiastic celebrations of prefiguration focus on only one of these phenomena at a time, while others combine both (see FN1). Common fears about prefiguration therefore circulate around prefiguration, for example, being 1) too localised, small-scale and focused on the present (Gordon 2018: 2) and being too easily co-opted by existing actors (Jeffrey and Dyson 2016) on the one hand; or 2) as fetishizing process Polletta and Hoban 2016, Cornell 2009/2011), alienating newcomers (Polletta and Hoban 2016) and being too closely associated with identity and self-expression on the other (c.f. Raekstad and Gradin, Chapter 7). Similar critiques exist that do not use the term prefiguration, but which target lifestyle politics, anarchism, 'everyday' politics and 'folk' politics. In each case, there is an implicit sense of what would be effective or 'strategic' approaches to social change, and sometimes an explicit rejoinder that differentiates prefiguration as somehow beyond conventional understandings of strategy. At worst, positions on prefiguration and strategy act as a proxy for making empirically unverified claims about what social movement activity matters. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2015)'s assessment of contemporary Anglo-American social movement politics is illustrative. They influentially critique folk politics: a 'common pattern' characterised by political activism 'falling short of achieving goals or of achieving effects beyond the 'minimal" (6). They describe the problem through a series of oppositions: folk politics typically remains reactive rather than initiating actions, ignores long-term strategic goals in favour of tactics [.] prefers practices that are often inherently fleeting, chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future and expresses itself as a predilection for the voluntarist and spontaneous over the institutional [...] there is a preference for the everyday over the structural, valorising personal experience over systematic thinking, for feeling over thinking [...] and for the ethical over the political' (11). Folk politics captures anxieties about prefigurative politics that are identified in section 2, reflecting a long-term trend since Boggs (1977a, 1977b) for associating these characteristics with one pole of a dichotomy, most regularly with movements or tactics that were 'expressive' or 'cultural' as opposed to strategic, instrumental, institutionally-oriented and 'structural' (see section 2). Prefigurative movements prioritised community over organisation (Breines 1989) where 'culture is a substitute for strategy' (Epstein 1991: 18). In most of these cases, the debate is about political efficacy: prefigurative politics was framed as a politics of no demands, goals or ideology (see Graeber 2002). While for Graeber (2002) and Maeckelbergh (2009, 2011) this is a strategy in itself, for critics it indicates an abdication of the possibility of real change. Srnicek and Williams go on to say 'At its best, prefigurative politics attempts to embody utopian impulses in bringing the future into concrete existence today. Yet at its worst, an insistence on prefiguration becomes a dogmatic assertion that the means must match the ends, accompanied by ignorance of the structural forces set against it' (28). The disagreements are hard to tease out because both positions are somewhat extreme, with critiques of prefiguration tending to create a straw man of political action that is naïve, insular or divisive (as Raekstad and Gradin 2020 explain), while its strongest supporters often suggest that prefiguration, despite its contested and broad character, is a strategy in its own right - a very strong claim which would suggest unusual coordination and unity among participants about their goals and their activity. It is helpful to consider the concept of social movement strategy. The dictionary definition of strategy is "The art or practice of planning the future direction or outcome of something; the formulation or implementation of a plan, scheme, or course of action, esp. of a long-term or ambitious nature' (OED 2019). This latter qualification is often used in distinguishing strategy from tactics, yet it remains defined by its relation to them: tactics being the means and plan to win a single campaign (one battle) and strategy as the plan of how to win the struggle (the war)' (Nepstad and Vinthagen 2012: 282). Both definitions, similar to influential discussions of 'strategic action' (e.g. Jasper 2015, Fligstein, and MAdam 2012) emphasise rational planning, leadership and decision-making, and treat strategy as being composed of tactics - which raises problems, because what constitutes 'tactics' or is considered irrelevant movement activity is also an open question. Marshall Ganz also strongly emphasises teleology, while reminding that resources are necessary for this collective action: "Strategy is the conceptual link we make between the places, the times and ways we mobilize and deploy our resources, and the goals we hope to achieve [...] Strategy is how we turn what we have into what we need-by translating our resources into the power to achieve purpose' (2000). Throughout, and in debates on prefiguration and strategy, there is slippage between strategy itself - the plans, and an applied strategy - the programme of political activity that may or may not have strategic characteristics, and is sometimes used to simply mean effective political action. My argument will be that prefigurative processes may play one, or several roles, in an applied strategy - though it is rare that all the components of this applied strategy would be prefigurative. Five functions typically associated with prefiguration might potentially play roles in such a conception of applied social movement strategy. For some authors, prefiguring alternative institutions and practices is considered part of a process of substituting or supplanting institutions (Wright 2010, Holloway 2010, Cooper 2017). The purpose of building alternatives may be to transform a state, a set of practices or a norm. For others, it is about experimentation, innovation and learning, including setting an example or inspiring others (e.g. Gordon 2008, Van der Sande 2013), capturing the key trope important for new social movement theory that movements are innovative and generative of new social forms, ideas and ways of life (Habermas 1981, Melucci 1996). A third function is that prefiguration may be of use in otherwise preparing or resourcing collective actors (e.g. Cornell 2009/2011), picking up on the claims that prefigurative alternatives are sites of socialisation, collective identity formation and care for activists, mentioned in literature on social movements and gender (Stall and Stocker, 1999, Federic 2012), and on 'free' or 'safe spaces' (e.g. Polletta 1999, Futrell and Simi 2004). A fourth function suggested in the literature is that prefiguration is a way of directly achieving something in the here and now, perhaps rejecting compromise, delay or negotiation via a third party - as in work that discusses immediacy (Jeffrey and Dyson 2016, Swain 2017, Gordon 2018) and direct action (e.g. Graeber 2002, Franks 2003, Juris 2008). For an overlapping group of authors, finally prefiguration is a mode of doing activism that pays attention to the micropolitics of political activity which is intrinsically and perhaps morally better than the alternative because it symbolises a distinction from the 'old left' or the Leninist or Trotskyist left where means are justified by the ends (e.g. Breines 1982, Epstein 1991, Gordon 2008).! There is no reason to think that any of these specific functions are inefficacious in and of themselves, yet critiques tend to derive from the anxiety that one of these functions might entirely replace a programme of Left strategic politics, and may therefore be insufficient. Strong advocates of prefiguration, meanwhile, emphasise the first function, although as Wright (2010) argues, it is difficult to imagine the wholesale replacement of important institutions without accompanying confrontation and rupture. I argue that these arguments are best addressed by avoiding the binary language of strategic versus non-strategic action (see Harding 2015), dividing the political purposes attributed to prefiguration into three analytically distinct (but not always empirically distinguishable) categories. These capture the different types of politically relevant social movement activity mentioned in the definition by Ganz (2000) of how we turn what we have into what we need-by translating our resources into the power to achieve purpose': reproduction (of resources and the movement, understood broadly), mobilisation (tactics, again understood broadly), and coordination (the marshalling or direction of activity towards political goals) (Remoco). Reproduction The fundamental category of strategic social movement activity identified in Ganz's definition is resources. I interpret this as the social and political reproduction of resources, skills, relationships and counter-power that movements need in order to be capable of acting collectively. Reproduction refers to the maintenance of resources including and beyond those widely recognised in resource mobilisation literature. It refers to making movement organisations and communities work properly. This not only includes the ongoing production and performances of SMOs, but also of the prefigurative movement infrastructures, institutions and 'alternatives' which resource movements, allow learning, or may supplant orthodox practices or institutions. It also refers to the reproduction of routine, quotidian, unglamorous and 'latent' resources which are not only necessary for movements, they also constitute movements: practices included under the rubric of collective identity (Melucci 1996) and which include social ties, counter-culture, and caring for the movement community (Stall and Stocker 1999). From using spreadsheets to maintain member lists, booking rooms, messaging comrades, liaising with legal observers, the working relationships and friendships that constitute the fabric of collective action itself - activism requires huge amounts of labour generally overlooked and undervalued by researchers and activists (see Federici 2012). Yet without the reproduction of movements there are almost no possibilities for mobilisation and insurgency outside of one-off demonstrations, because there are no resources to mobilise, and the plans for changing society that are produced are unrealistic, utopian or grandstanding. This is one way in which the process of reproduction is part of strategy, but it is important to realise that these categories are mutually complementary - particularly as arguments about prefigurative activity normally treat political action as a zero-sum game. In other words, while movements need to be 'reproduced' in order to mobilise, empower leaders, make demands and create change; it runs both ways, and reproduction of movements is also achieved through mobilisation and coordination. Demonstrations and marches may help build or maintain a movement, as Melucci (1996) reminds - the 'visible' character of movement organising - feeds 'latent' movement activity as well as vice versa and coordination helps participants remember why they are there and why they are needed. Where prefiguration figures in reproduction is obvious, but the strategic functions above of resourcing movements, getting something done in the here and now, and, potentially, considering the micropolitics of organising itself, are all regularly part of movement reproduction, and so might be part of any applied social movement strategy. Mobilisation The category mobilisation is used here to mean processes of deploying social movement resources. But it not only refers to the narrow sense of mobilisation: persuading people to participate politically as a collective through widely recognised tactics. It refers to any exercise of the power and capacity (that needs to be constantly reproduced) aimed towards a specified end (when it is coordinated) - such as the prefigurative tactics of creating new institutions or a mass recruitment drive. Just like reproduction, mobilisation involves practices that are done repetitively - for some activists they are not always explicitly and individually intentionally 'political' in that they are simply what you do when you are an activist or engaging in conflictual collective action. But mobilisation changes the conditions of possibility either through creating something new or engaging in a new form of interaction with opponents or allies, as opposed to maintaining existing power and reproducing the resources needed to wage struggles. Without mobilisation movements do not change anything - they simply reproduce themselves or come up with pie-in-the-sky plans that cannot be coordinated around. Prefigurative political functions thus have several potential roles in mobilisation. Most obviously, prefigurative mobilisation might include setting up the new alternative practical projects that may build oppositional culture or have some other practical purpose (e.g. anti-fascist gymnasiums, seed swaps, power-mapping training courses, feminist music festivals and publishing houses). Mobilisation therefore might include all five of the prefigurative political functions identified above, potentially being part of supplanting existing institutions by alternatives; some experimentation, innovation and learning in the process of either protesting or building alternatives; and the mobilisation of these alternatives might help prepare or resource collective actors in other ways. It might also involve mobilising, building or growing in a way that is micropolitically aligned with the values of the activism; and finally it might allow something to be directly achieved or established in the here and now which is of use for the movement such as through direct action or by creating a useful movement project. Coordination Coordination is the imagining, marshalling, planning and guiding of forces in a particular direction or towards a particular end. Coordination, then, refers to practices or effects of this direct or emergent planning, leadership, coordination, envisioning and imagination. The distinction between direct and emergent coordination is important for debates about prefigurative strategy. Typically, and historically, coordination has been understood as involving the black box of actors directly exercising their black box of agency (similar to Jasper 2015), while a more detailed version would depict forums of leaders deliberating over courses of action which they could subsequently marshal as representatives, leaders or generals. There are two reasons why this is a stylised and incomplete caricature: the first is that it elides the processes through which decision-making is made, negotiations achieved, and courses of action are undertaken. i There are many ways in which groups, populations, actors and resources are coordinated which do not take place through direct processes of leadership and planning, but which happen through improvised alliances, emergent opportunities and provisional goals, improvised activity, and where goals and the action are understood quite different by the different participants. Planning, leadership and coordination could even be an emergent property of an ecology of organisations, infrastructures and projects, although it is unclear how this might arise in any unambiguously productive way without some of the actors involved actively leading, planning or coordinating through communicating and acting together. Yet at the same time, and as critiques of prefigurative politics remind us, without explicit coordination movements do not have an agenda, so may struggle to force opponents to accede to demands, identify opportunities or resources, and force change to happen through connecting up mobilisations. Literature on prefigurative politics tends to downplay direct coordination. Prefiguration is widely understood to be about political possibility, imagination and anticipation: it is about acting in a way that contains some emergent element of coordination within it. It highlights the important point that processes of reproduction and mobilisation often happen independently of established leaders, and 'leaderless' movements often carry out highly successful mobilisations. But at other times, this position is taken too far: it is denied that coordination is necessary at all because of the autotelic 'ends' that are contained within practices or 'means'. Thus. claims that with prefiguration the means are literally the ends suggest that there is no need to directly coordinate because the activity itself prefigures the values or goals of the actor. This is misleading. Random outcomes which are sometimes positive might be expected with this approach, but significant, complex and sustained social change is unlikely. a conclusion which echoes reservations about the 'immediacy of some activism (Srnicek and Williams 2015. Gordon 2018). The second, less controversial way in which prefiguration is about coordination is that the first political function of prefiguration about the substitution or supplanting of dominant institutions with alternatives, suggests itself as a plan for radical social change in a way that none of the other functions do (Gorz 1968, Boggs 1977a, 19776). Since the 1980s this strategic logic has rarely been invoked explicitly, yet even its strongest advocates generally recognised that it is not an entire strategy in and of itself (Wright 2010). Most authors suggest that prefiguration is usually best combined with, and coordinated with, conflict and struggle, which Wright convincingly presents as necessary to force elites to accept new settlements which usually threaten entrenched interests." Furthermore, as with reproduction and mobilisation, coordination is distributed across all three categories of strategic process (Doherty and Hayes 2019). As Stall and Stocker (1998: 730) point out, leadership is produced, mobilised and empowered by those who are not leaders. Participants in social movements also act together intuitively, routinely and often without obvious moments of direct and explicit planning. Reproduction, mobilisation and coordination as a way of making sense of strategic challenges Some persistent disagreements about prefiguration and strategy can be addressed by appreciating the specific roles that prefigurative politics may play in an applied movement strategy, and not over-claiming about the sufficiency of prefiguration as an entire movement strategy in itself. Other disagreements can be seen as debates over what should be prioritised among the practices of both prefigurative and non-prefigurative politics. Critiques tend to derive from the anxiety that elements of reproduction or the less traditional tactics of prefigurative mobilisation might entirely replace Left strategy, or displace traditional tactics and direct coordination. Where the argument is that prefigurative activity may be too localised, small-scale and focused on the present - perhaps when significant energy is expended on creating a 'free space - it is about anxiety that coordination and more traditional mobilisation forms are missing - a fear that in some cases is justified (see Srnicek and Williams 2015). Where arguments are that prefigurative initiatives are too easily co-opted by existing actors, and insufficiently ambitious, it is similarly an anxiety that coordination is missing or not sufficiently direct - or that mobilisation is taking place and being glorified as its own end. Where the concerns are about fetishizing process, alienating newcomers and being too closely associated with identity and self-expression, this may in part be a specific anxiety that subcultural tendencies in reproduction will prevent the possibility of mobilisation (e.g. making recruiting other people difficult) or create difficulties in coordination (e.g. that differences between different elements of a potential alliance will make it difficult to work towards shared goals). Again, they may also be due to worries that coordination is simply not taking place, or that it is insufficient or poorly thought out. Disagreements often rest on a worry that an applied movement strategy is neglecting one of the three components, or is misguided in its approach to them. These are reasonable concerns, and arguments about how best to coordinate, who should coordinate, and how to do so in the most politically efficacious and legitimate way possible are necessary partly because they guides the type of reproduction or mobilisation undertaken. But critiques are made too often of particular practices, tactics and priorities, without giving any benefit of the doubt to practitioners' understanding of what they are doing. When discussion about prefiguration takes a strategy or not-strategic, either/or character - whether that opposes the small versus the grand, local versus the state or international, individual versus collective, micropolitical soundness versus pure pragmatism - debate polarises such that each side effectively glosses over the essential significance of the existing power base and its everyday reproduction; or the development of this power base and its deployment in mobilisation; or the essential political imagination, marshalling and planning of coordination. The risk is that everybody in a movement spends a lot of time demobilising others; the opportunity is to work out what is missing in a general strategy towards the shared goals, and trying to address them. Finally, it is likely that as political opportunities widen or close, and as the community mobilised by movements changes, the possibility of imagining and coordinating significant change also shifts. In certain political moments and for certain movements it might be easy to neglect one part of an applied strategy. Thus, it might sometimes feel like movements are too weak to coordinate or to dare to even imagine, it might feel like they have no power if they are not exercising that power through mobilising, and some reproduction work might feel a frustrating use of energy when that collective energy is scarce. Here the open-ended nature of prefiguration appears to often be inspiring. The intersections and mutual dependency between dynamics of reproduction, mobilisation and coordination may be taken as a reminder that there are many ways to productively contribute towards a movement. Yet it is the ways in which these efforts are combined: building, growing, imagining and coordinating with others towards shared goals, that offer the greatest challenges for most movements. Future work on strategy in and outside academia should focus on reviewing and imagining different approaches to coordination, mobilisation and reproduction across diverse and usually non-bureaucratic groups, networks and identities, whether these are emergent, dependent on some centralised or organised forms, or hybrid.

The ‘Democratic’ in ‘Democratic Planning’ There is a long tradition of critiques arguing that capitalism conflicts with democratic principles, a framing strategy still popular in more recent years (Fraser, 2015; Streeck, 2011; Wolff, 2012). Proponents of varieties of ‘economic democracy’ have classically argued that the economy itself is not a particularly democratic place. Strict hierarchies mean that workers have to follow the command of a company’s owners, who reign workplaces like autocrats. This class power and the related wealth inequality also severely limit the potential of political democracy, with economic elites having disproportionate power to influence parties and decision-making processes. Fraser (2014) adds that capitalism’s particular way of dividing ‘the economic’ and the ‘the political’ places numerous pivotal political questions outside the reach of democratic decision-making, leaving them instead to be decided by capital’s laws of motion and power relations (p. 64ff). Such decisions are not made democratically by those affected by it, but the management of companies under the influence of competition and (extremely) unequally distributed purchasing power. The principles for postcapitalist planning outlined so far solve some of these issues. Societies no longer place their capacity for production and reproduction under the primacy of capital accumulation, but consciously plan what they produce, who produces it, how they produce it and for whom. But how to make sure that such planning is actually democratic? A popular understanding of economic democracy holds that cooperatives based on a ‘one-worker-one-vote’ principle should replace private capitalist firms. Such a principle works for issues related directly to a workplace, but the workers of a particular cooperative or sector are not the only stakeholders in economic decisions, so decision-making processes need to involve other actors, a plurality of scales, and status groups beyond the working class. Karl Polanyi for instance suggested a functional division into producer associations of different industries and a commune as the political community (Bockman et al., 2016). This system ensures a democratization of the production process via the production associations, while making sure that production aims at democratically established social goods via the commune. Prices are not set by central planners, but instead negotiated among producer associations and the commune. Commune and producer associations negotiate the ‘direction of production’ and the producer associations decide autonomously on the ‘technical-economic side of investment’ (Bockman et al., 2016: 407). Along similar lines, proponents of Parecon have similarly envisioned democratic planning as a bottom-up process linking worker councils to consumer councils on various scales (Albert, 2003; Albert and Hahnel, 1991). Samir Amin (2013), however, suggests socializing the leading global capitalist monopolies into public institutions, which are managed by representatives of workers, consumers, the state, local authorities and other units in the value chain (p. 136ff). So a transitionary stage of socialism would appropriate the structuring power of leading corporations and democratize them by placing multiple stakeholders within them. Indeed, there is a plurality of options to ensure different stakeholders have a say in the planning process. The guiding principle might be ‘all-affected’ or ‘all-subjected’. The former means that everyone gets to participate in decisionmaking to the degree that they are affected by the outcome. The latter argues that everyone subjected to a particular governance structure should be involved in its decision-making, transcending both a reductionist focus on nation-states and excluding notions of citizenship (Albert, 2003; Fraser, 2008: 411ff, 2013: 202ff). Either way, the new principle will need to reorganize the scales of politics by relegating different issues of politics to different, overlapping scales. On this issue cybernetic planning could profit from radically democratic traditions within cybernetics itself (Schaupp, 2019). Planning and decision-making need to happen on scales low enough to ensure self-management where possible and to avoid higher scales being overwhelmed with tasks and information. At the same time, issues that transcend local scales need to include higher scales to avoided exclusion of those affected by a decision. In other words: the construction of a library needs to include a different assemblage of scales than coordination to reduce carbon emissions. In addition to this, deliberative theories of democracy hold that decision-making cannot just aggregate isolated priorities into joint decisions (Rendueles, 2021: 256ff). In Saros’s model of platform socialism elaborated above, for instance, individual consumers register their individual needs in their needs profile and thus direct the production process. While the orientation of production toward needs is pivotal, the model leaves out the social process through which such preferences are established in the first place. So a planned economy would not only need socialist laws of motion, but a truly democratic culture featuring (online and offline) spaces for exchange, within which people can engage and in the process discover their preferences (Rendueles, 2021). A final question already implied in several issues mentioned above needs to be spelled out explicitly: how would a transition toward democratic planning impact capital’s ‘social production of difference’ (Lowe, 1996: 28; quoted after Virdee, 2019) and the related racism, sexism, homoand transphobia, colonialism, ableism, and other intersecting forms of institutionalized discrimination? Capital and the state segment the labor force to derive value from labor remunerated below its cost of reproduction and derive stability from the fact that said segmentation prevents the working class from developing consciousness of itself in its entirety (Federici, 2004; Roediger, 2007; Virdee, 2019). Abolishing value and endless accumulation would destroy this institutionalized need to produce and reproduce difference. In the case of racism, for instance, capitalist expropriation creates the foundation for the racialized marking of subjects as targets for oppression (Dawson, 2016; Fraser, 2016). Postcapitalist production units will thus need to be designed in a way that is not driven by competitive environments to reduce its costs by any means anymore, so that they will not reproduce capital’s racialized segmentation of the labor market and colonial expropriations of foreign resources and people anymore. However, with status-based hierarchies and colonialism being much older than capitalism, there is absolutely no reason to assume that postcapitalism would not inherit some of capital’s legacy of racism, colonialism and other forms of discrimination. Even more so since the social production of difference is not reducible to political-economic interests, but possesses a semi-autonomous logic embedded in politics of recognition (Fraser, 2013). While some forms of discrimination are related to both capitalism’s (gendered, classed, racialized, and imperial) divisions of labor and its politics of recognition, others such as of homo- and transphobia derive primarily from the latter. This means that democratic planning of the economy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of full liberation. Planning needs to be designed in a way that accounts for whom capital recognizes in their full humanity and who is excluded from such recognition. Concretely, the outcomes of planning need to remedy capitalism’s (and previous) legacies of injustice, it needs to be reparative in this sense. But in addition to this the planning process itself needs to be designed inclusively as well. Reparative planning would aim to heal capitalism’s unevenly experienced violence instead of merely applying a ‘universal’ perspective (Appel, 2020; Song, 2021; Williams, 2020). This is especially relevant for decommodified, universal basic services (Coote and Percy, 2020; Huws, 2021), the concrete content of which is not objectively given but needs to be subjected to democratic debate (Fraser, 2020). A reparative, abolitionist outcome would be more likely (but not certain) if those affected by planning participate in the planning process. The section on social reproduction already mentioned Parecon’s ‘women’s caucuses’ (supported by anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action), which need to exist for multiple currently marginalized groups. We can see the need for pluralism in social and technical design in recent work and technological discrimination and design justice (Benjamin, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020). If AI-based systems are trained with prejudiced data they will reproduce said prejudices. From AI recruiting tools discriminating against women to facial software not recognizing darker complexion, more and more cases illustrate the problem of design injustice. If cyber-communists plan to design ‘communist software agents’ to help with democratic planning (Dyer-Witheford, 2013), these need to take into account a plurality of needs and priorities, the minority of which has a voice under really existing capitalism. Of course the topic of design justice transcends the topic of socio-technical system design. For instance, planning in healthcare needs to be sensitive to the particular needs of women and sexual minorities, which are currently unmet. Urban planning among others needs to take into account racialized and classed histories of urban design and community construction, but also ableist design practices producing barriers to equal access. The list of examples for particular experiences of capitalism’s unevenness is long, so democratic planning needs to establish planning principles that ensure an inclusive planning process and egalitarian outcomes.

The apocalypse is a dangerous political concept. For many of the scholars discussed above, the problems of the apocalypse are enough to dismiss the end of the world as a viable notion in political thought. However, the method of anti-anti-apocalypticism suggests another way of approaching these critiques. The challenges highlighted offer a set of guidelines for developing a defensible mode of apocalypticism. The primary criterion for a viable political conceptualization of the apocalypse is that it should address and mitigate the authoritarian tendencies associated with the end of the world. Given this, some questions emerge: Is it possible to enlist the apocalypse as a force that opens rather than closes possibilities? Or does the declaration of the end of the world necessarily involve restricting political options? These are the concerns that will guide the remainder of the article.

An analogy is useful in terms of clarifying what is at stake in the defense of the apocalypse. Political theorists of the apocalypse find themselves in a similar position to just war theorists. War, given its strong association with death and destruction, cannot be affirmed without qualification. It is an ineradicably dangerous act in the sense that objections to war cannot, even in principle, be entirely rebutted. However, war is sometimes necessary. Given the conflicts in the current world, pacifism is unlikely to be viable in every instance. The “tragic character” of war resides in this tension between the destructiveness of conflict and the impossibility of peace (Evans Reference Evans and Evans2005, 10, emphasis in original). For just war theory, a consequence of this tragedy is that we require normative regulations for deciding when wars should be fought and what kinds of wars should be prosecuted (for overviews, see Frowe Reference Frowe2022; Lee Reference Lee2012).

Some of the most self-serving and institutionally reactionary academics—those who pose a real danger to collectives and communities engaged in radical forms of movement—are the ones who publish books and articles about radicalism and revolution as well as convincing critiques of policing, racism, antiblackness, gendered colonial violence, sexual violence, prisons, and so on. I bet the organizers you’re referencing in your question are understating the case, too: at least the corporate executives, mainstream media elites, cops, and state officials tend to be far more honest with themselves and others about who and what they are—there’s no pretense or mushiness about their institutional and political loyalties. By contrast, some academics who fuck around with radical, progressive reform, and other social justice and “social change” focused organizations and movements are delusional or dishonest about their intentions, commitments, and loyalties.

Something i’ve learned over the last three decades is that people in my profession have earned default suspicion from serious radicals and revolutionaries, especially when those academics don’t actively participate in collective projects that attempt to move toward radical or revolutionary horizons. I recently participated in a conversation convened by AAPI Women Lead , a feminist abolitionist and pro-sex worker organization based in the Bay Area, in which we emphasized the importance of thinking about “community” as a verb rather than a taken-for-granted noun. In the context of trying to build radical and revolutionary projects, the work and experimentation of community is especially precious and vulnerable.

Academe is slipping into darkness. It is a course that was set for it ever since higher education came under the boot of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, there are a number of different ideological shades of this darkness. On the reactionary side of the darkness spectrum, there are those who favor a return to the ideals of humanism, and, on the progressive side, there are those who favor antihumanism. For some, the former ideology is a legacy of the Age of Rowling and the latter ideology a legacy of the Age of Tartt.

But such clear-cut distinctions among the ideologies of dark academe are quickly problematized if one assumes that both of these Dark Ages offer the promise of the fantasy of control, mastery of the canon, and the always already “specialness” of the individual. Why? Because antihumanism does not promise control, mastery of the canon, or individual specialness, calling the Age of Tartt—which promises control, mastery of the canon, or individual specialness—progressive is problematic. If anything because the Ages of Rowling and Tartt share humanist values, then they should both be regarded as reactionary.

Moves to innocence IV: Free your mind and the rest will follow Fanon told us in 1963 that decolonizing the mind is the first step, not the only step toward overthrowing colonial regimes. Yet we wonder whether another settler move to innocence is to focus on decolonizing the mind, or the cultivation of critical consciousness, as if it were the sole activity of decolonization; to allow conscientization to stand in for the more uncomfortable task of relinquishing stolen land. We agree that curricula, literature, and pedagogy can be crafted to aid people in learning to see settler colonialism, to articulate critiques of settler epistemology, and set aside settler histories and values in search of ethics that reject domination and exploitation; this is not unimportant work. However, the front-loading of critical consciousness building can waylay decolonization, even though the experience of teaching and learning to be critical of settler colonialism can be so powerful it can feel like it is indeed making change. Until stolen land is relinquished, critical consciousness does not translate into action that disrupts settler colonialism. So, we respectfully disagree with George Clinton and Funkadelic (1970) and En Vogue (1992) when they assert that if you “free your mind, the rest (your ass) will follow.” Paulo Freire, eminent education philosopher, popular educator, and liberation theologian, wrote his celebrated book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in no small part as a response to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Its influence upon critical pedagogy and on the practices of educators committed to social justice cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to point out significant differences between Freire and Fanon, especially with regard to de/colonization. Freire situates the work of liberation in the minds of the oppressed, an abstract category of dehumanized worker vis-a-vis a similarly abstract category of oppressor. This is a sharp right turn away from Fanon’s work, which always positioned the work of liberation in the particularities of colonization, in the specific structural and interpersonal categories of Native and settler. Under Freire’s paradigm, it is unclear who the oppressed are, even more ambiguous who the oppressors are, and it is inferred throughout that an innocent third category of enlightened human exists: “those who suffer with [the oppressed] and fight at their side” (Freire, 2000, p. 42). These words, taken from the opening dedication of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, invoke the same settler fantasy of mutuality based on sympathy and suffering. Fanon positions decolonization as chaotic, an unclean break from a colonial condition that is already over determined by the violence of the colonizer and unresolved in its possible futures. By contrast, Freire positions liberation as redemption, a freeing of both oppressor and oppressed through their humanity. Humans become ‘subjects’ who then proceed to work on the ‘objects’ of the world (animals, earth, water), and indeed read the word (critical consciousness) in order to write the world (exploit nature). For Freire, there are no Natives, no Settlers, and indeed no history, and the future is simply a rupture from the timeless present. Settler colonialism is absent from his discussion, implying either that it is an unimportant analytic or that it is an already completed project of the past (a past oppression perhaps). Freire’s theories of liberation resoundingly echo the allegory of Plato’s Cave, a continental philosophy of mental emancipation, whereby the thinking man individualistically emerges from the dark cave of ignorance into the light of critical consciousness. By contrast, black feminist thought roots freedom in the darkness of the cave, in that well of feeling and wisdom from which all knowledge is recreated. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. (Lorde, 1984, pp. 36-37) Audre Lorde’s words provide a sharp contrast to Plato’s sight-centric image of liberation: “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free” (p. 38). For Lorde, writing is not action upon the world. Rather, poetry is giving a name to the nameless, “first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (p. 37). Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt. Freire’s philosophies have encouraged educators to use “colonization” as a metaphor for oppression. In such a paradigm, “internal colonization” reduces to “mental colonization”, logically leading to the solution of decolonizing one’s mind and the rest will follow. Such philosophy conveniently sidesteps the most unsettling of questions: The essential thing is to see clearly, to think clearly - that is, dangerously and to answer clearly the innocent first question: what, fundamentally, is colonization? (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’. Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities. To agree on what [decolonization] is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease, and tyranny... (Cesaire, 2000, p. 32) We deliberately extend Cesaire’s words above to assert what decolonization is not. It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. The broad umbrella of social justice may have room underneath for all of these efforts. By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice. We don’t intend to discourage those who have dedicated careers and lives to teaching themselves and others to be critically conscious of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and settler colonialism. We are asking them/you to consider how the pursuit of critical consciousness, the pursuit of social justice through a critical enlightenment, can also be settler moves to innocence - diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege. Anna Jacobs’ 2009 Master’s thesis explores the possibilities for what she calls white harm reduction models. Harm reduction models attempt to reduce the harm or risk of specific practices. Jacobs identifies white supremacy as a public health issue that is at the root of most other public health issues. The goal of white harm reduction models, Jacobs says, is to reduce the harm that white supremacy has had on white people, and the deep harm it has caused non-white people over generations. Learning from Jacobs’ analysis, we understand the curricular pedagogical project of critical consciousness as settler harm reduction, crucial in the resuscitation of practices and intellectual life outside of settler ontologies. (Settler) harm reduction is intended only as a stopgap. As the environmental crisis escalates and peoples around the globe are exposed to greater concentrations of violence and poverty, the need for settler harm reduction is acute, profoundly so. At the same time we remember that, by definition, settler harm reduction, like conscientization, is not the same as decolonization and does not inherently offer any pathways that lead to decolonization.

This article was first presented as a paper in Germany. The title of this article, Decolonial Thinking and Europe, raises numerous critical questions and some serious concerns.

Does a white man, living and working in Europe, have the right to write about decolonial thinking? Where and in what place should such conversations take place? Is a Zoom meeting, predominantly attended by participants from European institutions of higher education, the correct space and place? Clearly not, on two accounts: it is an exclusive space. It is a space from which far too many are excluded from the conversation, firstly, because of the global divide between north and south and secondly, the digital divide that divides the world into those who have access to the digital world and those who cannot afford that access, because either they cannot afford the technology and/or cannot afford the data costs. These questions can be further expanded regarding Christianity, talking about decolonial thinking in a Christian context, where Western Christianity has played such an integral colonial role in global Christianity.

Here, perhaps, is a manifestation of one of the foundational flaws in anarchist theory: its veneration of human nature (as it understands it, at least). Bakunin claims that “human nature” makes corruption and counterrevolutionary, anti-proletarian actions inevitable once a section of the working class seizes power. Why does he say this? What proof does he have? In a word, none. ‘Human nature’ as it is predominantly understood is nothing more than our proclivity towards certain actions within specific material contexts, which are subject to change — and thus so are the proclivities. Even if it could be established that capitalist society generates some kind of fundamental proclivity among the working class and even humanity as a whole to act out of greed, selfishness and short-termism (which is practically speaking impossible to prove anyway), it does not follow that this is inherent and unavoidable in the human animal itself as some kind of abstract template for our actions. By elevating the human creature itself to the level of pseudoreligious ideology, anarchism practises exactly the same form of ideologising that the bourgeoisie and the feudal and even patrician classes before them have long done. Marxism rightfully does not concern itself with such sophistry, with such meaningless protestations against placing power in the hands of the working class and its party. “During its lifetime the working class state will continually evolve up to the point that it finally withers away: the nature of social organisation, of human association, will radically change according to the development of technology and the forces of production, and man’s nature will be equally subject to deep alterations always moving away more and more from the beast of burden and slave which he was.”²⁴ This links closely with the final problem with Bakunin and the anarchists’ position on the state that we shall address here. Bakunin describes his fictitious once-proletarians as “look[ing] down” on the workers from the “governing heights of the State.” What does this mean? It means, in one clear sense, that Bakunin sees the state as something distinct from society, something separate from and alien to it, something parasitical and detached from the productive elements of society. But never has or will the state be something “imposed on society from without,”²⁵ something that stands above class distinctions, or gendered divisions in labour, or religious and secular ideology alike, or indeed anything else. The state is not separate from society; it is society, it is the inevitable and necessary product of a society as it exists at certain stages of historical-economic development, and without it, the society would be reduced to utter barbarism, open, ubiquitous kinetic violence, a marked decline in living standards for all, both relative and actual, a severe degradation in the quality of goods, and so on. In a word, you would have social and even civilisational collapse. This is because ‘society’ is not one harmonious thing; rather, it is the aggregate of all human social and economic relations, and these humans and their socioeconomic situations are anything but uniform. Without the state, with its monopoly on violence and its often dominant role in the cultural narrative, these contradictions — irreconcilable contradictions — would be acted out through direct, physical struggle. There are but two outcomes to such a thing: either a state will be formed anew, but only after an extended period of acute crisis dealing devastating damage to all, and so the destruction of the state (and more precisely the failure to build a new state to replace it) was not only pointless but entirely undesirable to the society, or, worse still, the construction of a new state, for whatever reason, fails, and the population collapses into a regressed state of primitive-communism. History would have been reset. There does not exist some dichotomy of society and state, only the existence of a society with a state, and if a society has a state, it needs a state, and simply seeking its destruction is entirely misguided and naïve, springing from a fundamental misconstruing of what the state is, what society is, and what one’s own material interests are. In a word, it is idealism — it is utopianism. It should be evident from the rest of this essay that the state is not something that can be simply dismantled and destroyed by force and violence; it can only “wither away” when the material conditions are right. To attempt to act outside of history as anarchism does is dangerous to all, never mind arrogant and individualist. It is a position in absolute opposition to the interests of the workers. General remarks on the nature of class dictatorship Mao Zedong famously taught that “[p]olitical power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”²⁶ Truly there is no more succinct and accurate description of politics — which is, at its core, the systematised control and regulation of violence — than this. Anything that suggests otherwise is an obfuscation; such obfuscations serve an agenda, and all but always one of the ruling class. The class destined to vanquish class society itself has no need of the propaganda and sophistry of traditional class rule; we can, and should, state in no uncertain terms that the only rational expression of our political interests is a class dictatorship won and maintained by force of arms for the exclusive benefit of our economic class at the expense of all others. The proletarian state represents, for the first time in history, the material and thus socio-political interests of the vast majority of the people. From this simple fact an equally simple conclusion can be drawn: namely, that both when the working class is barred from power and when it holds it, it is only benefited by a frank and open understanding of the thoroughly class- and violence-based nature of state power. In the former situation, the proletarian is aware that society is organised upon his exploitation and that he has no material interest whatsoever in the preservation of the status quo, while in the latter, he sees that he should not be afraid of ‘tyranny,’ that the bourgeoisie are justly and necessarily without power and rights, and that should they be granted them, they will use them to undermine and overthrow the régime and institute terror of a previously unprecedented scale and harshness. In short, the stripping away of the pretensions and illusions of the state represent, and reinforce, heightened class consciousness. In terms of our interests, power is best manifested naked, and as proletarians, we have, unequivocally, a side on which to fall in the class struggle. As such, our political goals must include as a matter of necessity the seizure of state power. The lessons of the Paris Commune and of all revolutionary ventures throughout history is that the revolution that does not seize state power is thwarted. Never, in all human history, has this truth been countered. What’s more, the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that it is exactly that: a dictatorship. All true communists know this to be so, and do not fear, but relish the opportunities that lie in controlling the state. The state is a tool — a weapon, and no weapon has morals in and of itself. Only when the sword is taken up and brandished in anger does it become an instrument of war and not simply a sliver of metal. The state is much the same. The anarchic view of the state is one of an enemy of ‘the people,’ one that is inherently undesirable and wretched, whoever straddles it. Marxism is not so naïve, not so utopian: the state serves her masters, and serves them well; when the working class reigns, the state delivers its Terror upon the counterrevolution and with it the socialist society can progress, in time, to a communist one. Without it, the working class movement is simply destroyed the instance the bourgeois reaction can organise itself anew. Marxism is scientific socialism; it is not utopianism. It would be false and misleading to claim that Marxism has ends; rather, it merely has analyses and observations. In their scientific study of the march of history and the intricacies of the capitalistic mode of production, the Marxists have discovered and laid out the series of progressions and laws that, hopefully, this essay has allowed the reader to understand, if only in brief: that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle,”²⁷ that the working class must smash the existing bourgeois state, that the working class must create its own state to serve its own needs, and that this state must inevitably be the last stage of the state in all history. Marxism does not talk of that which is impossible; only that which is possible. The triumphs of the working class movement during the twentieth century prove this to be so, but much that was won has since been lost. As the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene deepens, the need to place power in the hands of the workers intensifies with every passing week towards a singularly apocalyptic zenith. In the past, Marxists have rightly given the slogan socialism or barbarism?, but today, that is no longer sufficient: today, it it must be socialism or extinction? In matters of war and revolution, liberalism’s façades are quick to fall from the eyes of the class conscious worker. The premier and central issue of working class politics must be the conquest of state power. Only then can we change the world.

Our dominant critical understanding of the term racial capitalism stays close to the usage of its originator, Cedric Robinson, in his seminal Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition.3 Robinson develops the term to correct the developmentalism and racism that led Marx and Engels to believe mistakenly that European bourgeois society would rationalize social relations. Instead, Robinson explains, the obverse occurred: “The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force . . . racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism. I have used the term ‘racial capitalism’ to refer . . . to the subsequent structure as a historical agency.”4 Thus the term “racial capitalism” requires its users to recognize that capitalism is racial capitalism. Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires. Most obviously, it does this by displacing the uneven life chances that are inescapably part of capitalist social relations onto fictions of differing human capacities, historically race. We often associate racial capitalism with the central features of white supremacist capitalist development, including slavery, colonialism, genocide, incarceration regimes, migrant exploitation, and contemporary racial warfare. Yet we also increasingly recognize that contemporary racial capitalism deploys liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion to value and devalue forms of humanity differentially to fit the needs of reigning state- capital orders.

When they hear Maoism, many people think of China, Peru, and the Philippines. They picture peasants "surrounding the cities from the countryside." This is, of course, understandable, but a mistake. Maoism is not simply "everything that Mao did," or "everything that happened in China between 1949 and now." I have spent a great deal of my time writing working to dispel these sorts of myths, some peddled in an unprincipled fashion by anti-Maoists. Maoism is a living, breathing science. By science we mean something with universal principles that can be taken and applied by all who have a material interest in making revolution. In the United States, this is Black people, or the New Afrikan nation. It was not by accident that the original Black Panther Party (BPP) developed close relations with the revolutionary leadership of the People's Republic of China. Huey didn't go to China to play; he went to study and learn things that could be applied back home. Of course, he eventually degenerated in political line and practice, taking a right opportunist course along with Bobby Seale (always a centrist) and Elaine Brown (who guided the party, in his absence, into a mainstream political force that led into the arms of the Democratic Party). This opportunism in the highest expression of revolutionary sentiment, practice, and force in this country to date needs to be studied and ruthlessly criticized, yet we should be careful. We must place things in their historical context and ensure that we are able to divide one into two, meaning see the beneficial as well as the negative aspects of a thing but also realize that one aspect must be primary. The BPP was destroyed by a combination of factors: lack of a really scientific method of analysis and cohesive program of political education, failure to promote and apply the Marxist-Leninist principle of Democratic Centralism (debate inside the party, formation of a political line through this debate, and the upholding of this decision by all party members and organs), and a culture of liberalism that ended with comrades fighting comrades, thus opening the door for external factors (the FBI and other LE agencies) to play havoc and get cadre railroaded into prison and killed. We must study and learn all of these lessons, because when we develop another organization with the prestige, mass base, and power that the Panthers had, and we will, they will come for us all again. So, why do we need Maoism? Because we are against the most brutal, bloody, and vicious empire known to humankind. This country is looting and enslaving our class siblings all over the world. To overturn this order of things, to smash it and rebuild it in the interests of the revolutionary proletariat of the entire world, we must apply the synthesis of 200 years of systematic, organized class struggle, which is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the continuity of the revolutionary project that was Marxism-Leninism, with a rupture from the dogmatism and revisionism. Maoists do not uphold "Actually Existing Socialism" because a scientific analysis rooted in the principles laid down by the revolutionary movements and projects that gave us Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao would demonstrate that stealing food from Filipino fisherfolk, like the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been doing, is 100% non-Marxist. This is in disagreement with many Marxist-Leninist organizations today, which uphold these things and other imperialist depredations carried out under the faded red banner of China. The Maoist argument is that Marxist-Leninist terrain has been spent, and the 21st century must learn from Maoism. "You haven't seized state power yet!" others cry. Indeed, and there has never been a truly Maoist party that has initiated armed struggle in the imperialist metro poles. This doesn't mean that Maoist principles cannot be applied to these countries, this means that we must be ever more creative in our application and ever more disciplined in our party-building efforts. Party building in the USA requires the careful and thorough cultivation of a mass base. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people must depend on and follow this party and participate in mass organizations before it can even begin to call itself a vanguard. This is what many who came out of the New Communist Movement of the mid-late 1970s failed to realize. The days of endless squabbling sects that fight over "mass bases" of a handful of other activists must be put to an end, and we must have a truly mass perspective. There is optimism in the spread of For the People (FTP) organizations and the development of the Organizing Committee for a Maoist Communist Party (MCP-OC) which has a more mass orientation and places primacy on the development of a class analysis and political line in the USA that is based in painstaking investigation and rooted in the aspirations and struggles of the most oppressed, along with a record of seeking to develop international solidarity and prison work. This, I believe, is the best hope for New Afrikan Maoists in the United States and I wholeheartedly encourage Black comrades to develop FTP-type organizations in their own communities under OC guidance. Even if this isn't done, at the very least studies in Maoism, studies in Maoist revolutions, and studies in Maoist theory are beneficial. After and during these studies, think about how it can be applied on your block and in your community. Learn about and be like Fred Hampton. Time is up for spinning our wheels; we must get together, unite on a principled and unshakeable basis, and mount a formidable resistance against decades and centuries-old oppression based in capitalism and white supremacy. I also encourage support and donation to the Hampton Institute as an invaluable resource in promoting revolutionary ideology and practice in the finest Marxist tradition.

"logic of elimination" isn't ontological but contingent as a result of capitalist exploitation

1. Turning the world outside in

The study of settler colonies has in recent decades consolidated into a discrete academic inquiry calling itself “settler colonial studies.” This is the most sustained, though not the only, academic attempt to consider the settler colony. Beginning life in the Australian academy, it finds its classic introduction in Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 monograph, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Today the project is carried forward by an eponymous journal, and cemented by academic touchstones like a Routledge Handbook.[1] Settler colonial studies argues for the analytical distinction of the settler colony from other colonial formations, premised upon its drive to secure land rather than labour, and its consequent organisation around the elimination of native societies rather than their enslavement or exploitation.[2] The settler colony, moreover, and unlike other genocidal events, persists. It is, in Wolfe’s phrasing, a ‘complex social formation’ and a ‘continuity through time.’[3] In the settler colony, ‘the colonisers come to stay – invasion is a structure not an event.’[4]x

These formulations take Australia and Australian scholarship as their ‘key paradigm’ or ‘premier exemplar.’[5] That continent’s history, according to this literature, crystallises these core dynamics of settler colonialism and exemplifies their persistence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – an ‘endless cycling of attempts to eliminate or absorb the Indigenous population.’[6] Unalloyed by elements like chattel slavery, Australia held the keys that unlocked the peculiar racialisation of settler colonialism in the Anglo settlements of the Americas and Australasia. In quick time, the paradigms of settler colonial studies extended beyond these continents, with its scholars developing a particularly enduring interest in Palestine.[7] In Lorenzo Veracini’s symptomatic phrasing, ‘As a scholarly field and as paradigm for analysis, settler colonial studies has gone global.’ It has ‘no geographical, cultural or chronological bounds.’[8]

I. IP-SJ Considerations with Respect to Protecting Trade Secrets Generally

Trade secret protection can serve empowerment because the costs of creating and protecting a trade secret are often only marginally greater than the costs of developing and implementing the secret information; anyone with an economically valuable secret can exploit it simply by using it commercially and taking reasonable steps to keep it secret. The use of trade secrets and the provision of legal protection for them can thus be empowering at a low cost – at least compared to the cost of obtaining a patent. Furthermore, the breadth of subject matter eligible for trade secret protection renders this form of IP development and exploitation available to virtually everyone. In addition to typical commercial information such as manufacturing processes, secret chemical formulas, and marketing strategies, trade secrets can include secret cooking recipes, home remedies, and hair and nail care techniques. Any commercially usefully information not generally known to people in the discipline is eligible for protection.

The justifications for protecting trade secrets have puzzled courts and scholars for over a century. 224 Trade secrets, though commonly labeled a form of intellectual property-often, the most valuable form of intellectual property owned by firms today 225 are radically different from other types of intellectual property. Because of trade secret law's unique characteristics including the requirement of relative secrecy, concern with the way a defendant obtains the secret, and the panoply of available remedies (damages, injunctive relief, even criminal sanctions)-it has proven difficult to elicit any scholarly agreement on the theoretical justifications for trade secret law and its place within existing legal doctrine.

Depending on whom you ask, you might hear that the justifications for trade secret law are best laid at the doorstep of tort, property, contract, or even criminal law.226 Trade secret decisions over the last century offer little in the 22 way of clarity.227 The theoretical incoherence surrounding the doctrine has led Robert Bone to conclude that "there is no such thing as a normatively autonomous body of trade secret law," and a separate law of trade secret is, therefore, unnecessary.228 In a recent article, Mark Lemley argues that trade secret law is justified-and best understood-not as a form of traditional property, contract, tort, or other extension of existing common law principles, but rather as intellectual property.2

The nexus of climate change, biodiversity loss, and their associated socio-ecological shifts positions us at a critical crossroads in time. It is clearly too late to prevent global-scale ecosystem change.1 Approximately one million of Earth’s species face extinction risk,2 and over 80% of the ecological processes that underpin ecosystem functioning and the associated support services to people are already affected by climate change.3 The global climate-driven redistribution of species, rapidly warming Arctic, acidifying oceans, and many other impacts both on marine and terrestrial ecosystems point to a future full of uncertainties. The unavoidable reality is that new solutions are needed if we are to survive the major changes under way.

However, humans have survived through multiple ice ages and planetary transformations before—largely as a function of Indigenous wisdom and traditional knowledge. Traditional and Indigenous knowledge has informed human societies for hundreds of thousands of years and is embedded and embodied in cultures and communities around the world. Such knowledge is often defined as deep, complex ways of awareness and co-existence with natural ecosystems and is built and adapted over long periods of time. Indigenous knowledge is also very much about the present, rooted in the wisdom of the past—it supports modes of sustainable living in a given place and manifests as oral histories, material and spiritual culture, art, songs, and the presence on traditional homelands. This rich world of Indigenous wisdom and traditional knowledge exemplifies an often-hidden world that still exists across the planet and provides a basis for the well-being and livelihoods of millions of people in communities deeply anchored by their cultures and languages.4