My review of Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny’s documentary Spaces of Exception published today in Screen Slate:

When I was a little kid we could go anywhere we wanted to go—no fences,” says a Navajo man from Black Mesa in Arizona. The montage reveals a landscape of sparse stripmalls, chemical tanks, and endless pipelines. Despite being a reservation, the sacred land and burial grounds here have been steadily enclosed for coal mining that strips the land and poisons crops and groundwater. In Pine Ridge and Akwesasne, locals regret their economic deprivation; meager government assistance, gambling, and alcohol offer them little other than half-assimilation into American misery.

Others express gratitude that the hardships of these reservations and refugee camps make the necessity of liberatory action clear and present. Palestinian youth with dreams of returning to their ancestral lands trade stones for teargas with Israeli border police. A group of traditionalist Lakota march through their reservation calling for spiritual renewal to the heartbeat of a drum. A Mohawk digs a boundary marker out of the earth with an excavator. A Navajo elder who has refused displacement hosts her extended family for a feast of fry bread and mutton at her homestead. “Their greatest form of resistance is being who they are,” a Navajo man explains in voiceover. “The autonomy that we have is here. .‌ . . It’s about sustaining what we have .‌ . . and fighting for it as hard as we can to protect that.”

Read the rest here: https://www.screenslate.com/articles/spaces-exception

Check out the premier of Spaces of Exception at Anthology Film Archives October 27–30, and the directors’ accompanying short film program, “The Native and the Refugee.”

The new edition of the Woodbine Space‘s new theory and literary journal Reservoir features an essay by myself, Ella Fassler, and Andreas Petrossiants about the history of Queens’ autonomous sports culture, and Woodbine’s pandemic-era project of building an autonomous soccer league in Ridgewood:

The journal is available for order through Autonomedia or in person November 9th at a reading at the Property is Theft space in Williamsburg, or, while supplies last, at Woodbine’s Sunday Dinners.

On a related note, I supplied an endorsement for the English translation of Mickaël Correia‘s People’s History of Soccer.

Baumbach sprinkles some Hitler and Nazi references throughout the film, but there is never the sense implied in the book that reducing fascism to a quirky cultural study obscures its uninterrupted recurrence on the margins of middle-class life. Now that this depoliticized and deliciously edgy reframing has allowed the alt-right to meme Hitler back through the Overton window, it is impossible to imagine a professor delivering Jack Gladney’s theatrically exuberant lecture on Hitler without being “canceled” or called up for a Fox News appearance. And yet, the students listen with unquestioning admiration, as if the Holocaust was no different than one of Suskind’s Roger Corman–esque car crashes.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/toxic-streaming-event-on-noah-baumbachs-white-noise/

A debate in the Nation between myself and Corey Pein about if alien visitors would be socialist. My take:

There is no evidence that aliens are visiting Earth or that they exist at all, let alone anything indicating where they might fall on the political compass. Most theories about UFOs should be read as thinly veiled political metaphors for our shortcomings today and where society might be headed. Depictions of aliens as insectoid invaders or rapacious scientists, for example, reflect the traumas of colonialism and war and the systemic cruelty in our history and society. But the internal contradictions of our current world order mean it cannot exist for much longer.

Read the rest and Corey Pein’s rebuttal here: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/aliens-socialism-posadism-ufos/

My review of Jarrod Shanahan’s excellent history and analysis of Rikers Island and penal welfarism in the Field Notes Section at The Brooklyn Rail

When Johnny Cash performed for the inmates of San Quentin prison in 1969, he wrote a song especially for the occasion. The first several verses ask why the prison exists and what good it could possibly do for those imprisoned there or society as a whole. Its last verse concludes, to a roar of applause:

San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell
May your walls fall and may I live to tell
May all the world forget you ever stood
And may all the world regret you did no good.

At the time, the song was considered naïve pandering. This was still the era in which liberal academics and politicians believed in “penal welfarism,” that America’s carceral institutions could be transformed into something better than the torturous dungeons described by Cash. A notable example was the planned expansion of New York’s Rikers Island from a small penal work camp to a state-of-the-art facility of human rehabilitation. Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives, the first history of Rikers written in what may be its final years, explains why the project failed, why renewed progressive efforts to replace facilities like Rikers today will fail again, and why Cash was probably right.

READ THE GREEN BOOK May 2022 tour 

On April 20, 2020, I Want to Believe (nicknamed The Green Book by fans), was released as the world entered lockdown. Framed by the wave of uprisings in Chile, Hong Kong, and Ecuador, alongside the “Show me them aliens” raid on Area 51, the book is more than a simple political biography of the idiosyncratic Trotskyist leader J. Posadas, but also an investigation into revolutionary potential in our catastrophic era of radical politicization through memes. 

Gittlitz will discuss the connection between conspiracy and UFO communities and the revolutionary left, and world events since the book’s release–especially the pandemic and George Floyd Uprising, in the context of the post-Posadist autonomist revolutionary project described in the book’s closing chapter.

May 5th, New Olreans, 7pm at Metalworks. See Lobelia Commons for more info
May 9th, Tucson, Arizona, 7pm at the Blacklidge Community Collective
May 11th, Los Angeles, 7pm at Stories Books w/ Anna Merlan
May 14th, Oakland, CA, 7pm at Tamarack
May 16th, Portland, SJAC Community Center, 8:15 pm
May 20th, Seattle Washington 7pm at Third Place Books (Ravenna location)
May 24th Minneapolis, 6pm at The Landing Strip
May 27th, Chicago, Pilsen Community Books w/ Jarrod shanahan

I’m now producing a podcast covering select articles from this JHP journal out of Johns Hopkins. In the first episode, Peter Adamson (LMU Munich) talks to Jari Kaukua (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) about his essay “Avicenna’s Outsourced Rationalism.”

Listen to the full episode here: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal-history-philosophy/podcasts

Memorium to the singer of the World/Inferno Friendship Society, Jack Terricloth, the scene he built, and the world he wanted to smash:

Their third LP, Just the Best Party (2002) hailed their new scene of school-skippers and cheapskates who sneak into shows (often assisted by the band) and snatch liquor bottles from the bar in its opening track “Zen and the Art of Breaking Everything in this Room.” The song identified both their friends and their enemies: the police, shit-talkers, moralists, and most of all, yuppies already taking over downtown Manhattan and Williamsburg. If a show wasn’t going well, because the venue had fucked them over or simply wasn’t punk enough, the pounding opening of Zen became a signal to fans, like Black Flag’s cover of “Louie Louie,” to mercilessly rip the place apart.

Read the rest at Hard Crackers Journal

My editorial for the August 9th issue of the Nation about the Branson vs. Bezos space race, and how Gagarin and Armstrong did it all much better 60 years ago.

Yet even billionaires are forced to use the language of collectivity that space travel, both scientific and science-fictional, has always carried with it. Bezos’s Blue Origin claims a larger vision of “millions of people…living and working in space to benefit Earth.” Branson says Virgin Galactic, whose flights currently start at $200,000 a ticket, will “open space to everybody.” While SpaceX promotes Mars colonization as having the potential to make humanity a “multiplanetary species,” Musk admitted in an interview with Joe Rogan that “if this species is going to survive, we kind of have to escape.”

This nihilistic sentiment inadvertently reveals the anxieties of the one percent. We are already in an era of civilizational catastrophe fueled by political, economic, and environmental instability. Elite schemes of private islands and apocalypse bunkers no longer seem adequate to repel the inevitable billions of climate and war refugees, unemployed and precarious workers, and everyone else immiserated by the barbarity of the current order. There is only one way left to run: up.

Read the rest: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/branson-bezos-space/

A new essay on the emergence of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch of the US Military, the history of the space race to secure hegemony for the US and its corporate allies, and the surprisingly true story behind the Mr. Show sketch about blowing up the moon!

Available in text format the Pluto Books blog or as an audio essay for Antifada patrons (alongside an interview with Bruce K. Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space).