About

David McKerracher (M.A.) is the founder of Theory Underground: Thoughts at Work, where he pioneers the future of work and learning, bridging the life of the mind with the work of the hands at the foundations of life. His base of operations is at McKerracher Family Farm, a small, regenerative family farm in North Idaho, where he and his wife Ann are the second generation, starting the third with their newborn son. His research focuses are in critique of political economy, existential phenomenology, and socioanalysis (“through and beyond Marx, Heidegger, and Bourdieu!”). He is the author of Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy (foreword by Slavoj Žižek) and Waypoint: Timenergy, Critical Media Theory, and Culture War, and Castration Culture (forthcoming). McKerracher leads an ongoing seminar, as well as workshops, for members at Theory Underground. He is the Editor-in-chief of Underground Theory and is currently developing Canon: The Liberal Arts Trading Card Game (Canon: TCG).

SAARUTU — the Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground — is the (de)research arm behind the briefs and master reference documents. It is a collective of anonymous post-grads and autodidacts that, under the leadership of Sawyer the Commissioner, builds full-quote, page-anchored reconstructions of the primary sources: instruments to write from, not study aids.

The Summer '26 SAARUTU cohort: Sawyer the Commissioner, Cynic, Joyce Miller, Vigo Hansen, Prophet Doctor Gus, Romulus, Jane Austin, Cato, Remus, Hakim Sana'i, Renfield Wintermute, Etta, George Elliot, Scarius, Prim, Nx. Bartleby, Hector, Nan, Cassius, Hank, Pippin, NMG.

Theory Underground Publisher's Statement

Theory Underground Publishing exists to put out books that matter, in a timely manner, with an emphasis on substance over form. I publish my own work and the works of people I believe in. The standard is: does this need to exist, and does it say something that isn't being said elsewhere? If yes, it goes out. If the writing is rough in places, good. That means someone was actually thinking.

In the same way that rock music in the 1970s was already co-opted and overproduced for mass consumption, leading to an explosion of underground music, publishing today has become sterile and scripted. English classes taught most of us form over substance, grammar over ideas, definitions instead of concepts. In the same way that schooling teaches so many people to hate mathematics, a proportionate number learn to fear writing. The cards stay hidden. People allude to what they know rather than putting it on the table and trying to genuinely think in dialogue with others. Theory circles are full of people who will name-drop a thinker but cannot unpack a single concept from their work. That is not thinking. That is fashion.

Theory Underground pushes the "fuck it button" on all of that. I am not waiting for permission, peer review, or institutional backing. I am not holding work back until it is pristine. Learning is a way of life, and learning requires becoming comfortable with failing and growing as you go. The books published here reflect that. They are thinkers in process, not monuments.

So when your critical eye catches a spelling or grammar mistake, pride yourself in the fact that you are reading work in the underground: real people with no institutional backing learning how to think and communicate, not for upward mobility, profit, or fame, but because it matters as an end in itself.

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 RESEARCH.