Another way out: Don’t plan a future that fails the present

William C. Anderson

Jun 17, 2026

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“Certainty stimulates orthodoxy, the frozen rituals and intonation of already witnessed truth, and all the other attributes of a theory that is incapable of fresh insights. It represents the end of the process of theorising, of the development and refinement of new concepts and explanations which, alone, is the sign of a living body of thought.” –Stuart Hall 

Our lives are not a joke or a game, but sometimes it certainly feels like it. With global conditions getting more and more bleak, it’s not surprising to see people wondering if anyone cares enough. Major sporting events like the World Cup and the NBA Finals in the U.S. amplify a massive disconnect, as billions are carelessly spent by officials. At the same time, despite Elon Musk being heralded as the first trillionaire, there are those who are taking to the streets in the name of entertainment instead of reclaiming our right to a future. That’s a right that rejects a present full of common ecological catastrophes, genocide, and merciless capitalism. As it stands, this version of reality is daunting for a number of reasons, but especially because disaster has become increasingly gamified. The badness everywhere is subject to prediction markets and betting in ways it wasn’t before. This could lead young radicals to seek out politics that offer readymade plans for a better world. However, any planning we do mustn’t fail the moment we’re currently in. 

Some of the most impactful work that’s happening all around us isn’t glorified. It’s the work of meeting people’s material needs and building innovative responses to rolling disasters. In a new four-part documentary that I had the honor of narrating called “The Elements of Mutual Aid,” you get to see this work up close. Hours of footage show people from Michigan to California to Puerto Rico and elsewhere around the world talking about fixing problems. They’re not necessarily protesting or fighting a militant war against oppression in the streets, but their contributions are invaluable. Healthcare, housing, education, disaster relief, and self-defense are just a few of the types of essentials people explain they’re organizing for. And they’re doing it because it needs to be done, not necessarily because they have a complete vision of what’s on the other side of their labor. There’s a key distinction here.

I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be future-oriented in our ideas to try to shape better societies. That absolutely has to happen. What I am saying is that one of the worst aspects of dogma is becoming too reliant on old blueprints that attempt to forecast what can never be completely foreseen. What’s ahead of us cannot be anticipated without any relationship to seizing our contemporary situation. Even if you do have some grand plan for what revolution, a better world, and novel systems will look like, that means nothing if you cannot produce them in reality. This is at the heart of my ongoing issue with much of the sectarian radicalism around us today. Yet there are certainly people who push back against many of the frustrating scenarios we might worry about through their actions. Oftentimes, it’s not a matter of questioning what is or isn’t happening, as much as it’s supporting what’s already good. If it’s not that, then there’s the challenge to start something that’s effective in its own right. 

This isn’t the flashiness of party politics or the performed conviction of leftist influencers, nor is it the overconfidence of preachy ideologues. If you can see all of the nonsense and realize it’s not accomplishing what it claims to be, then there has to be an alternative. What I’m saying is that if so-called leftism(s) are not being the tangible alternative to fascism, liberalism, apathy, and poverty they claim to be against, then they should be transcended. It’s up to us to see when something is at its limit and write an appropriate epitaph, instead of waiting by the grave of revolution begging it to come back to life. Or better yet, we can choose not to be so far removed that we insist on thinking what was done in the past will look exactly like what needs to be accomplished now. 

Long ago Karl Marx responded bitingly to critics of his work by famously saying his goal was “critical analysis of actual facts, instead of writing receipts … for the cook-shops of the future.” This has become a rallying cry against being overly certain about what the future will or won’t look like. Earlier in his life, he’d also written to his friend at the time, Arnold Ruge, “If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be.” Thirty years apart, these quotes speak to a version of the man over his life that opposed immortal orthodoxies. Despite the piercing and continued relevance of much of his thought, there could be no way of anticipating everything that was to come. It didn’t even take long for that to become clear during his own lifetime.

The Situationist International, a prominent group of left social revolutionaries, pointed this out in some of their classic writings. Reflecting on another exchange by Marx and Ruge, they give a great example of why we never know what’s coming. In “The Beginning of an Era” from 1969, the Situationists wrote: 

“Do you really believe that these Germans will make a political revolution in our lifetime? My friend, that is just wishful thinking,” wrote Arnold Ruge to Marx in March 1843. Five years later that revolution had come. As an amusing example of a type of historical unconsciousness constantly produced by similar causes and always contradicted by similar results, Ruge’s unfortunate statement was quoted as an epigraph in The Society of the Spectacle which appeared December 1967. Six months later came the occupations movement, the greatest revolutionary moment in France since the Paris Commune. 

“The Society of the Spectacle” was the most famous of Situationist co-founder Guy Debord’s works. So, the acknowledgement here that Ruge wasn’t prophetic in his exchange with Marx also mentions how quickly a revolutionary uprising happened in France after Debord wrote about that fact. This is all a part of the challenge of debates about determinacy, or predictions based on fixed references. The legendary Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall addressed as much in one of his writings on Marxism, stating: 

Understanding “determinacy” in terms of setting of limits, the establishment of parameters, the defining of the space of operations, the concrete conditions of existence, the “givenness” of social practices, rather than in terms of the absolute predictability of particular outcomes, is the only basis of a “Marxism without final guarantees.” It establishes the open horizon of Marxist theorising—determinacy without guaranteed closures. 

The paradigm of perfectly closed, perfectly predictable systems of thought is religion or astrology, not science. 

We don’t just need a “Marxism without final guarantees”—we need all of the sections of the left to abandon the guarantees that they all deal in to various degrees. What people are doing around us right now matters because that’s where we attain the new perspective needed to update, discard, and traverse fresh terrain. Authority comes through praxis and experience and the sincere testimony of learnings. There are people in need of support and resources that cannot be met by the recycling of dead patterns. New thinking and explanations will be born of a generation that understands that the job has to be done, not simply preached about. It will be born of a living body of thought that evolved from the breakdown of decaying materials that feed movements, not steer them. 

Editorial Team:
Lara Witt, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

William C. Anderson