New Reconstruction is an investigation into the poetics and practical realization of utopia. 

New Reconstruction is an investigatory research and publishing project interested in the analytic and poetic foundations of a future emancipatory organism. The project will be coordinating exploratory readings in the social and natural sciences in imminent connection to and presented alongside artistic and literary experiments. In essence, New Reconstruction recognizes the attenuation of human experience, global exploitation of the working class, and rampant environmental plundering. This project is a preparatory meditation prior to material confrontation. 

Contact: info@newreconstruction.press

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A Open Letter to Potential Allies

Friends,

Whereas the democratic republics at the world economic core have failed to develop a more stable world, one devoid of arbitrary despotism, mass immiseration, and identitarian sectarianism—the critics, those without party or banner, march on. The political and economic institutions that wield the greatest power have consistently attempted to navigate crisis, rather than mitigate the factors that precipitate it—and, emphatically, as it concerns the ecological catastrophe, have degenerated the issue to a matter of partisan bickering. Those not willfully blind often nervously glance upwards—whether they see Damocles’ sword, a retreating heaven, or smoke ringing the horizon—with visceral certainty we anticipate the coming danger, the costs of failure. Moreover, we know at a base level that it is the greatest treason toward humanity to have the resources of a western government at hand, as divided and chaotic as it may be, and to have done so little of substance. 

Sometimes boisterous, often in murmurs, the left, a loyal opposition to state, modernity, capital, grows more confused by the year—complicated by the wielding of state power, socialist theory’s state of disarray, and other hurdles that cross the range of strategic considerations in politics. In the coming decade, no matter the immediate outcome of the battle to limit the worse excesses of environmental collapse, those who believe that humanity can intentionally develop society will need to forge themselves into a hardened creative mass. If not in service to that supposed utopia suggested by the old slogan “from each according to their ability, to each according their need”, then this reforging should be driven by the immediate need for a transition away from the capitalist mode of production with complementary economic and resource management strategies. It seems that our options are whole system management or environmental collapse, and then management or barbarity in the face of that collapse. 

For some, this will all ring with ominous tones. For all the ill that can be painted with a rhetorical flourish, a picture of prosperity and world economic development can still be made the center of analysis. The threats that encroach are those made to the republic—they are threats made by reactionary zealots, by revolutionary zealots. To cast off the veil of irony would put one in danger of believing in something, and to believe in something is to be a zealot! The sensible, in chaste sobriety, offer prayer to the god of complexity and uncertainty (it which has no center, no object, and which cannot be known). It is simple to love something that is plastic. You are free because we ask little of you directly, because you have thousands of choices at the market. We are all becoming kinder, gentler. To the seduction of this vision, we can give no credence. Our main response must be to educate. Education can only go so far in these times of willful ignorance and selective attention, but the arguments describing our peril have been made and can be easily picked up again. 

It is my contention that for any mass party to effect the kind of change required by circumstance, and to have a vision wide enough to have those changes be an effectual counter to capital that mass party must from its outset be a global affair. Capital being that war of enterprises that have and will continue to despoil the earth in the name of fiduciary responsibility. Isolated sects have done enough to demonstrate the subjectivist errors to which narrow sighted groups are prone, but even the confines of national borders will need to be overcome should an international system of exchange be challenged. Nationally based parties form nationally based strategies and will ultimately conceive of a nationally based socialism, a future for one people. History has closed the page on these royal pretenders, on the era of bureaucratic dictatorship and state managed capitalism. What is clear is that revolutionary parties, when engaging in statecraft, form institutions reflective of themselves. History has closed the page on parties of bureaucracy and managers, as much as it has on parties of gunslingers and adventurers. The organizational form of the mass party will need to respond to this, foremost by casting off the shackles of the Leninist formulas, blind adherence to democratic centralism, and through conceiving of itself as a federated international whole. However, more basically, a new reconstruction of the left will need to take on the task of reevaluating the analytic foundations of socialist theory, integrating research within the socialist tradition with modern sciences from without—and forming a practical agenda reflective of its broad vision. 

It is with this tremendous mission in mind that I am calling for the establishment of a pilot project, a conspiracy of researchers that may aid in clearing debris from the feet of utopia. The project will be an anticipatory organism with a sole drive: to investigate the most critical issues facing the real world; to discover, or failing this, to develop and promote practical solutions with an eye to long term sustainability; and to lay foundations for the institutional forms necessary to realize a more liberatory world for the mass of humanity. More explicitly, the project will develop an informal knowledge production network, attempt to design a scaffold for the resource exchanges necessary for an alternative economic circuit to be realized, promote wherever our work finds purchase a culture superior to the vacuousness of modernity, and provide material aide to allies in our struggle for a better world. In moral terms, the project will seek a world in which individuals can live lives in accordance with their principals—and where humanity is united in a mutual self-recognition in the other. 

The formation of a hardened institutional core is a necessity if we are fighting to win. In this light, a pilot project can be considered an exercise in cadre building—the training of a specialized force able to effect change in hypercomplex systems all while reproducing itself. The project is then an educational project, the primary objects of education being those within its conspiracy. 

It should however be asserted an essential agreement with those wary of a new dogma; our task is to the contrary, as Marx once described, a “ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.” It is with this spirit that we take up our task. Further, the bonds formed by the project will be without any ideological litmus test save a yearning for a future greater freedom, and an abhorrence of exploitation and oppression.

J H M II

Vega Baja, 2020

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I am anticipating a thinking, acting organism; a terrible colossus that will remake the world in its own image. It looks at itself with contempt, and the world about it with promise. It is disappointed in the external, but can feel the potential held taunt just beneath the contours of banality. One often struggles at first to find a patient’s pulse, however, with practice it takes but moments to tap into that torrent of life—even to catheterize a vein and bring the vital fluids into the external. 

It comes into this knowing, not on faith but through hard practice, that there is something to the found or made out there. The alienation it feels are but birth pangs. If it works for a future worth living it can reemerge into the world more fully realized, more authentic and filled with beauty. Yes, it is contemptuous toward the internal, for if it had been realized or free enough, there would be no movement to be had. 

The organism must be a virus, able to override its host’s reproductive processes, able to insinuate itself into the external on a foundational level, able to win and hold power.