Updated June 2025
“There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge. No one knows what they are if they don’t know what their contemporaries are.” –Friedrich Schlegel
When we founded Negation Magazine in 2020, we saw the project as an outlet for young radicals to cut their teeth as writers, strategists, and critics of capitalism. However, returning to our mission statement in 2025, we realized that some of our editors (and perhaps some of our readers, too) have since lost our claim to youth. That said, five years later our two most important founding convictions remain the same:
The cumulative effects of the genocide, exploitation, and social catastrophe of our time discredit the current order, necessitate a rejection of the way things are going, and justify a widespread desire for something radically different.
If we want to effect real transformation, we’ll have to develop our self-understanding.
What is the nature of the situation we have been born into? What sort of society do we want to live in? What would it take to clear the way for that new social order? What role could we play in the destruction of the status quo and the construction of a different order? These are questions that require rigorous collective thought, and that is the function Negation Magazine is intended to serve.
This isn’t intended to be an opportunity for some social clique or political sect to hear itself speak. The point of this magazine is to contribute to the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. As such, Negation will publish any writing that we take to align with our purpose: challenging and developing communist thought in service of societal transformation. We don’t care about having the right “connections” or belonging to the correct “tendencies”; if you send us something good, we’ll pay you for it and put it out there for people to read and discuss. In fact, we strongly encourage submissions from people without established connections.
We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, so we’ll make an effort to avoid publishing any tedious navel-gazing or bland statements of facts. Escapes into solipsism and book-report-level summaries are equally tedious because they’re equally useless. We won’t write off reflections on personal experiences, but we think it’s important for experience to be converted into practical wisdom—we’re interested in introspection in service of mass liberation. Theoretical or historical writing shouldn’t be approached as a transmission of information or a list of observations but as a guide, the production of new thoughts on the basis of pre-existing knowledge. Analysis shouldn’t be explanation for the sake of explanation but the creation of something that can itself lead to new changes and creations.
As we see it, analysis is useful when it identifies fracture points, deviations, and surpluses in an attempt to determine what can emerge from them (and what can’t). Negation Magazine will fulfill its mission if it can help to uncover forgotten and obscured truths, to critique common assumptions, and to pierce through myths and lies in order to expose reality. The only meaningful way to “raise consciousness” is to alert people to the forces that inhibit consciousness, and then to lead them beyond reflection in the direction of action.
We aim to shed light on the reality of capitalism, while contributing to the communist project and the overcoming of capitalism. The name “Negation” shouldn’t suggest arbitrary or vague negation, but the negation of capitalism specifically, the negation of every form of exploitation and oppression as they really exist, as well as every obstacle on the path to that final negation. There’s a time and a place for abstraction and for aesthetics, but ultimately our objective is absolutely concrete and prosaic: the production, collection, and distribution of writing in an effort to augment, in whatever way possible, the struggle to abolish the capitalist mode of production and all of the other structures and logics that subjugate us.