Thought
at Work.

When McKerracher was realizing that everything he had taken for granted in leftism was up for question, he looked around for a sort of post-left theory school — or at least one that would be “neither left nor right.” Instead, all he found were socialites on Twitter, influencers and academics loyal to an “Old Left,” and people on podcasts or videos who spend all their efforts reacting. The only theory schools in existence acted like everything was already known, that no intro courses were required — and in fact, one could rarely even find a full lecture (they tended to prioritize grad-seminar-style discussions, not something very useful for a worker with earbuds trying to get the most out of his listening time while at work).

What McKerracher was seeking was a place with hundreds of hours of rigorous lectures that both introduce and go deep — taking students new to theory into philosophy, critique of political economy, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, post-structuralism, and critical media theory, alongside basic philosophy of science, religion, anthropology, and sociology. Unable to find any such place, he chose a period of separation from the attention economy, academia, and activism — working at Amazon warehouses and listening to thousands of hours of the books he knew would be necessary for such a school to exist. This period of moratorium was meant to critically take to task the mainstream presuppositions he had internalized in his “anti-right fusionism,” and at the same time give himself the time to “live in the questions” (something denied by the culture of speed in activism and academia that both demand certainty and loyalty to preordained paths).

McKerracher realized he would need opportunities to test ideas in a seminar, to lecture, and to set up lectures from others if he was ever to take his work to the next level. In December of 2022, he launched Theory Underground. Neither left nor right, the goal was to equip free thinkers with the tools for principled theory capable of understanding, intervening in, and ultimately changing the situation. McKerracher has given half of the lectures; the other half have been brought by fellow travelers, old and new, who had something special to offer that could not be found elsewhere. Now that the basic skeleton has been built, 2026–2027 are about building atop it while sinking roots much deeper into the relevant texts by drawing on SAARUTU’s scholarly briefs and master reference documents in STUDY.