Opinion polls, volatile voting patterns, and street protests demonstrate widespread dissatisfaction with the current system, yet the popular response so far has largely been limited to the angry outcry of No! But negation, by itself, affects nothing. The dominant system doesn’t dominate because people agree with it; it rules because we’re convinced there is no alternative.

We need to be able to imagine a radical alternative – a Utopia – yet we are haunted by the disasters of “actually existing” Utopias of the past century, from fascism to authoritarian socialism. In this re-issue of Thomas More’s generative volume, scholar and activist Stephen Duncombe re-imagines Utopia as an open text, one designed by More as an imaginal machine freeing us from the tyranny of the present while undermining master plans for the future.

Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it.

In this volume, and its accompanying website, Utopia is re-imagined and brought into the digital age as a participatory technology for undermining authority and facilitating new imagination.

“A welcome new intervention into an old text. Re-read through the lens of Duncombe’s extensive – and persuasive – introduction, More’s Utopia is revealed as a subversive methodology for approaching utopias, one that engages and expands our capacity for political invention and imagination. Open Utopia is an infinite demand that splits the subject open to new possible worlds rather than giving a closed plan.” – Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless

“I first read More’s Utopia as a student in Soviet times and remember it vaguely as a text venerable, but totally irrelevant to any lived experience. Stephen Duncombe’s re-introduction helps me better understand how literature can be newly needful and differently taught.” – Tatiana Venediktova, Moscow State University

“Everybody knows the difference between an open and a closed door. Fewer know the difference between an open mind and a closed mind, especially on the American left, where intellectual policing often replaces intellectual encouragement. Stephen Duncombe, in conversation with More and the horrifying history of utopia and utopians, opens minds and doors and reaffirms the importance of utopian thinking. Adelante, excelsior!” – Reverend Donna Schaper

Contract and Contagion presents a theoretical approach for understanding the complex shifts of post-Fordism and neoliberalism by way of a critical reading of contracts, and through an exploration of the shifting politics of the household. It focuses on the salient question of capitalist futurity in order to highlight the simultaneously intimate, economic and political limits to venturing beyond its horizon.

In capitalist history, as well as in philosophy, finance, migration politics, and theories of globalisation, contagions simultaneously real, symbolic and imagined recur. Where political economy understood value in terms of labour, Contract and Contagion argues that the law of value is the law of the household (oikonomia).

In this book Angela Mitropoulos takes up current and historical theories of affect, intimacy, labour and speculation to elaborate a queer, anti-racist, feminist Marxism, which is to say: a Marxism preoccupied not with the seizure of opportunity to take power, form government, or represent an identity, but a Marxism which partakes of the uncertain movements that break the bonds of fate.

“In this stunning reworking of the philosophical fibres of economy, Angela Mitropoulos provides an expansive realignment of how risk is apportioned and contingency valorised. The result is a febrile politics of debt and credit to pre-occupy the movements in and for the future.” – Randy Martin, author of Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management

“Angela Mitropoulos’ work moves beyond the impasses of autonomist Marxism and queer theory to forge a critical analysis of the imbrications between economy, nation-state and family. Locating the dynamic of capital in the ‘double movement’ of contract and contagion, Mitropoulos radicalizes the Marxian critique of contract while refusing the foundational nostalgias of the left. Most forcefully, Mitropoulos proposes the prism of household politics (or oikonomia) as a means of interrogating the shifting nexus between the sexual and the economic across different regimes of accumulation. Baroque and incisive, this book will unsettle the most familiar of political categories.” – Melinda Cooper, author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

Autonomedia's Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2013! Our 21st annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever!

Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

32 pages, 12 x 16 inches, saddlestitched

isbn 978-1-57027-259-2 : price $9.95 : 32 pages

Buy two, get one free!

Dictionary of Operations is the third in a series of new lexica. After defining the field of "Tactical Reality" (2002) and "Strategic Reality" (2009), this concise manual to the contemporary cognitive environment analyzes 72 terms to access the operative logics of social and anti- social media.

Dictionary of Operations highlights the subtext of the politics of information and the underlying framework of media reality in digital networks. Global conflicts over resources accelerate the social crises of mediated representation. Cognitive algorithms question the autonomy of the individual and its freedom of action. Looking into the intimate relation between knowledge and control it identifies the financial crisis as a crisis of rationality and claims "Economy as fate is the swindle of the century".

Dictionary of Operations focuses on the subjective dimension of information technology related to potential political action. The text follows ancient connections between conjuring and the dark art of truth projection and asks: If every communication is an oracle, who owns meaning which authorizes legitimate knowledge?

Dictionary of Operations reflects illusory mirror worlds and excavates media-archaeological ghost stories that continue to haunt the world. Tracing the omnipresent trails of monsters, zombies and ghosts in the infosphere it declares "To be human is to be haunted, bound in chains to a past dominating the present."
Dictionary of Operations defines transversal practices between theory and activism, digital media and street culture. It covers terms ranging from A-T, from "Absolute Mammon" to "Truth Production". Drawing on anomalies as allies against enforced normalization it builds on an insight from an ancient Babylonian text: "one cannot escape misery without revolting against the established powers."

“Finally we have a volume that collects the many essays that over a period of four decades Silvia Federici has written on the question of social reproduction and women’s struggles on this terrain. While providing a powerful history of the changes in the organization of reproductive labor, Revolution at Point Zero documents the development of Federici’s thought on some of the most important questions of our time: globalization, gender relations, the construction of new commons.”
—Mariarosa Dalla Costa, coauthor of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community and Our Mother Ocean

“As the academy colonizes and tames women’s studies, Silvia Federici speaks the experience of a generation of women for whom politics was raw, passionately lived, often in the shadow of an uncritical Marxism. She spells out the subtle violence of housework and sexual servicing, the futility of equating waged work with emancipation, and the ongoing invisibility of women’s reproductive labors. Under neoliberal globalization women’s exploitation intensifies—in land enclosures, in forced migration, in the crisis of elder care. With ecofeminist thinkers and activists, Federici argues that protecting the means of subsistence now becomes the key terrain of struggle, and she calls on women North and South to join hands in building new commons.”
—Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern

“The zero point of revolution is where new social relations first burst forth, from which countless waves ripple outward into other domains. For over thirty years, Silvia Federici has fiercely argued that this zero point cannot have any other location but the sphere of reproduction. It is here that we encounter the most promising battlefield between an outside to capital and a capital that cannot abide by any outsides. This timely collection of her essays reminds us that the shape and form of any revolution are decided in the daily realities and social construction of sex, care, food, love, and health. Women inhabit this zero point neither by choice nor by nature, but simply because they carry the burden of reproduction in a disproportionate manner. Their struggle to take control of this labor is everybody’s struggle, just as capital’s commodification of their demands is everybody’s commodification.”
—Massimo De Angelis, author of The Beginning of History: Values, Struggles, and Global Capital

“In her unfailing generosity of mind, Silvia Federici has offered us yet another brilliant and groundbreaking reflection on how capitalism naturalizes the exploitation of every aspect of women’s productive and reproductive life. Federici theorizes convincingly that, whether in the domestic or public sphere, capital normalizes women’s labor as ‘housework’ worthy of no economic compensation or social recognition. Such economic and social normalization of capitalist exploitation of women underlies the gender-based violence produced by the neoliberal wars that are ravaging communities around the world, especially in Africa. The intent of such wars is to keep women off the communal lands they care for, while transforming them into refugees in nation-states weakened by the negative effects of neoliberalism. Silvia Federici’s call for ecofeminists’ return to the Commons against Capital is compelling. Revolution at Point Zero is a timely release and a must read for scholars and activists concerned with the condition of women around the world.”
—Ousseina D. Alidou, Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa (CAFA), Director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University and author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger

“An enthusiastic and interesting excursion into the psychedelic fringes of hasidic culture.” — Alan Moore, author, V for Vendetta, Watchmen

“Here’s this emerging genius dude who has a big and growing following in real life and online — this guy who makes Judaism new and real again,who digs deep into the Chassidic tradition for its deeply stoned truths. A Jewish Terence McKenna, mining the Torah’s hidden landscape…” — Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist

“Yoseph Leib is the rebbe on this subject. Who else?” — J.H. Chajes, Professor of Jewish mysticism, Haifa University

“As Flannery O’Connor beckons us into the restless, gothic American
south, and A.M. Homes backs us into bizarre and frightening corners
of our suburbia, Chavisa Woods guides us through a strange, troubling
vision of domestic life in the rural U.S.” — Go Magazine

“From the sweet smell of trumpet flowers to the touch that can
kill, Woods’ work is honest, clear-headed and hard-hitting.”
— Steve Dalachinsky

“Woods is writer who watches, waits, and thinks for herself, bringing
us close to the infernal life of the Americanly Ignorant and the
articulate seer who lurks among them.” — Jennifer Blowdryer

“The stories in this book are strong as a punch with endings that
hit as hard as a full beer can to the head.” — Katharine Arnoldi