Common Notions

Background and Leadership

Common Notions was granted tax-exempt status in 2019, registering as the Common Notions Media Foundation, and has published several dozen titles from 2019 to 2024. The organization is structured as a nonprofit foundation and has reported revenues and expenses around $45,000 in 2022. The group’s foundation was funded in 2019 from contributions from three individuals: Jayesh Kanuga, Mansi Kanuga, and Vishnu Amin, which totaled approximately $75,000. ⁴

Malav Kanuga, the president of Common Notions, is not paid by the organization, according to its 990 tax forms. Kanuga is also a postdoctoral fellow at the Media, Inequality and Change Center of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He describes himself as a cultural anthropologist “trained in ethnographic and archival studies of space, culture, and power, as well as uneven development in an internationalist and historical framework.” His biography claims he is “a longstanding participant in several movement-based media projects” such as Common Notions and also notes his work as an urban researcher and activist focuses on “resistances to domination and hierarchy in the urban and social lifeworlds of racial capitalism.” ^{5 4}

Stances

Common Notions, in addition to books, also publishes blog posts on its website promoting radical-left economic and social views. For example, the group shared its response to President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union originally published by Truthout titled “The State of the Genocide: An Alternate Address” that accused the United States and Israel of having a “bloodthirsty ruling class.” ⁶

Another blog post from the organization praised terrorist organizations stating that the American “ruling class:” ⁷

“waged war against the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, against the American Indian Movement, and against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They waged a war against the union movement in the United States, the IRA in Ireland, against Umkhonto we Sizwe in South Africa, against the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and against many other movements and revolutions that were dreaming up a world without war, and a world organized around human need, equality, and radical love.” ⁷

Published Books

In 2021, the group published The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth, a book originally written by radical Indigenous advocacy group Red Nation, which called for “an affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other-than-human relatives to live dignified lives.” ⁸

The group also published The Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual for radical group Strike Debt. The book claimed to offer “strategies for dealing with credit card debt, medical debt, student debt, housing debt, and an analysis of tax debt, sovereign debt, as well as the relationship between debt and climate.” ⁹

How to Break an Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism was a publication written by Annie Xibos Spencer which “argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth.” ¹⁰