Christian Matheis

There is No Hierarchy of Freedom and Liberty: Another Gift from Audre Lorde

By Christian Matheis (November 14, 2016) In the 19th and 20th century, when the U.S. was formally, legally segregated under Jim Crow laws, regressives cried “freedom! liberty!” in order to paint a false moral picture of their ill-gotten, mean-spirited grip on political and economic power. When activists responded with efforts to desegregate, those who opposed civil rights often…
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Antonin Scalia’s Legacy and the Righteous Machinations of Law

By Christian Matheis (February 16, 2016)

Why Don’t the Names of Gun Manufacturers Make the News?

By Christian Matheis (October 5, 2015) “He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman. She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance.” The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

Political Explosions Versus Moral Harmony: Can anarchists imagine another sort of liberated radical?

By Christian Matheis (September 3, 2015)

What’s the Retail of Two Cities?

By Christian Matheis Imagine you hold a particular place truly sacred. Perhaps a town, or a building, or a region. Let’s give the image a bit of life. The place, your most cherished, holds sacred for your community. As the sine qua non – that without which nothing else in your life can matter – you consider it holy, divine,…
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Should Anarchists Vote?

Chris Dixon ends his recent book Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movements with a series of questions that are meant to confront and guide the direction of future organizing projects. Some of these questions have to do with electoral politics: How should people dedicated to anti-authoritarian politics relate to this sphere?

Walking Away From Paradise: Teaching Ursula K. Le Guin and Social Justice

The Anarres Project for Alternative Futures takes its inspiration, in part, from the imaginative work of Ursula K. Le Guin. For decades, her speculative fiction has woven together fantastic worlds with reflections on the nature of human life and the meaning of a socially just world.

What We Broke the First Time

Pressing the Restart Button on Liberatory Movements By Christian Matheis Recently, I posted the following question on a social media site: If feminism hit the reset button and we got to fix what we broke the first time, what would the do-over look like?

Fair play or liberation?

Inequality, political cheating, and liberatory thought in the 21st century By Christian Matheis In a recent opinion piece in The New York Times, Joseph E. Stiglitz addressed the dismal condition of U.S. domestic policies and political machinations. Rebuking the regressive view that with democratic liberties we must also live fated to the dominance of capitalist industries, Stiglitz rightly takes…
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What’s the Appeal of Marriage Equality?

By Christian Matheis By the middle of 2014, legislative, judicial, and electoral actions in 19 U.S. American states have paved the way for nationalized access to marriage for adult couples without restriction to sex or gender. The movement for “gay marriage” or, more inclusively, “marriage equality” has gained broad support in social, political, and economic facets of contemporary U.S. society….
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