In both traditional and experimental prose, this special issue revisits the connection between depicting the world and making claims upon the human as self-narrating subject. At once advancing a critique of the present and recounting a process of writing out from under the emergency of the present, the essays propose to place the here and now under erasure. Collective thinking and writing is one method through which leftist intellectuals have operated in reactionary times, and the issue uses this methodology to explore extraction, privatization, data-mining, and other workings of global capital.