Submission Guidelines

Form

Negation was initially founded to provide a publishing platform for young radicals without professional connections or an established writing career. If you’re an inexperienced writer but have ideas you want to express, send us a pitch. If you’re more experienced and looking to write something that wouldn’t work for any other outlet, send us a pitch. We do not require that writers dial anything down, make political compromises, or sand off any rough edges for the sake of professionalism or respectability.
Take any angle you want. Write a critique of political economy, a poem, an examination of a film or book, a philosophical investigation, a personal essay, whatever. Your focus and your method don’t need to fit a specific archetype as long as they produce something useful. What do we mean by “useful”? If you write something that contributes to the understanding of the reader, puts forward new concepts, develops a new vocabulary, opens up new possibilities, conducts interesting experiments, transforms perceptions, etc., we’ll put it out. We don’t want to publish dull summaries of political or cultural moments, narcissistic vanity projects, or empty provocations.
For a piece to be valuable, it needs to be coherent, or at least justifiably incoherent. A rambling, messy, and awkwardly-written submission with strong potential may be accepted, but we’ll have an editor work with you to tighten up its structure or clarify any unclear wording and thinking. However, writers will get final approval over the content (and title) of their piece before it gets published; the role of the editor will be collaborative.
Please, don’t submit anything annoyingly long or avoidably short.

Content

Never lose sight of capitalist relations of production and other dominant forms of subjugation. You don’t need to place economics at the center of your work, but we’re only interested in publishing thinking that remains tethered to the historical and material reality of capitalism and interrelated modes of social oppression. We want to understand the world we were born into so that we can create a new one, and we’ll never advance in the direction of that goal without a historical materialist perspective.
Make sure to cite sources and statistics when necessary.
Don’t try to minimize, defend, or justify any form of social oppression. We aren’t going to accept any reactionary whining. We are not at all interested in pieces proposing compromises or half-measures on issues of racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-indigeneity, antisemitism, national chauvinism, or any other mode of subjugation.
Break from stagnant traditions and exhausted styles. There’s nothing exciting about regurgitations of old doctrines and discourses. Don’t lean on empty jargon or repeat slogans by rote. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to read the mechanical recitation of the slogans and teachings of long-dead movements. Use the old to construct something new. Infuse your work with the destructive and creative energies of youth.

Pay

As of writing this, our rate for pieces is $70/piece. For sake of transparency, this is roughly ⅔ of our monthly Patreon support. The funds not used to pay our authors are generally used to cover fees for our website and header designs, to pay production costs for our podcast, and to meet the cost of shipping hard copies of our dossiers to our Patreon subscribers, free of charge to them. In the past, we have been happy to meet writer requests to donate their pay to causes of their choice, so long as those are broadly in line with the Negation mission statement.