What can be said about the Grateful Dead that has not been said before? They are on one hand somewhere below Coldplay and Nickelback on the list of hatred-objects for Leftists of who came of age between the late 80s and late 90s, signifying affluent Frat Kids tripping balls and hacky sacking, earnest liberals reading Sean Wilentz and taking bong hits, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, they were an emblem of a very particular milieu at a certain period...
Read moreChina Mieville’s novels are genre fiction at their best. They can be largely grouped into two broad categories: Twisted takes on British and European urban life (The City & The City, King Rat, Kraken) and kaleidoscopic, imaginative, and often Marxist fantasy and sci-fi adventures (The Bas-Lag trilogy, Embassytown). This changes rather drastically with This Census-Taker, Mieville's latest, which combines trace elements of magical realism and fantasy with the minimalism of authors like Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. This odd mashup works to produce a narrative that is engrossing, thought-provoking, and perhaps excessively ambiguous.
Read moreJesa Dior Brooks is a musician and artist. Their work positions the individual experiences of anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle in an art historical context. They are part of the “Afropunk” duo Thee Mistakes and a member of the band Meathorse. Brooks will be performing and participating in the inaugural exhibition of the Dollar Art House, “The Hard Times Art Show,” on September 30 in St. Louis. I interviewed them in the lead-up to the event.
Read moreAlex Pullman claimed to have been abducted by aliens. While aboard their spacecraft he had the following visions of the future. The bombs and missiles of World War Three were frozen above the world's cities just as the UFOs arrived. Later that day long-dead communards reappeared as zombies and ghosts – walking anachronisms in the streets of each city and town. The "Evicted Art Blog" will, over the coming months, share Pullman's account of his visions.
Read moreThe harsh noise, glitchcraft album NJENA by St. Guillotine & The Red Mass is an experimental, musical sigil (an inscribed or painted symbol considered to have magical power) which acts as a meditative soundtrack to the adepts initiation into The Communal Order of the Ouroboros. The Communal Order of the Ouroboros is an open coven for all communist witches, warlocks, and other magical and/or mystical Marxists. The only initiation to become a member of this anonymous coven, is to become possessed by the Spectre of Communism (the communal ghost of every living and dead communist). Through communion with the Spectre, the class consciousness of the adept is raised, and the initiate gains the revolutionary magical skills necessary to combat Moloch and the dictatorship of capital.
Read moreThe uses and abuses of Rosa Luxemburg as a revolutionary icon are many, and they tend to focus excessively on the tragedy of her death or on her intellectual relationship with Lenin. Old Stalinists display great alabaster busts that disfigure her as a mute, empty eyed martyr to the cause of the mass murderer with whom she shares a bookshelf. Far worse than irrelevant or instrumental, the left has managed to render one of the most magnetic, vivacious and daring of its intellectuals as boring. Consequently the most exciting thing about, Red Rosa, Kate Evans’ graphic biography of the Polish-born German revolutionary is that when she undertook this extremely ambitious project, she scarcely knew anything about her.
Read moreCapitalism, contrary to really any architectural experience, is not concerned with memory or with nostalgia or with remembering anything at all. Rather, capitalism is out to expand and reconfigure its gains, to exploit and, as you say, disavow. It forgets, and it forgets purposefully in order to expand further, and in its forgetting there is a bleaching forgiveness that is so total and permanent that it is negating in its testimony.
Read moreRecent years have seen an application of the Marxist concept of uneven and combined development (UCD) to the study of cultural and aesthetic production. With a few exceptions, however, this application has been limited to the medium of literature.
This panel interrogates the framework of UCD and aesthetics through questioning the nature of the relationship and expanding said framework into music and visual art. It also discusses the relationship between aesthetics and the geographic changes of neoliberalism.
Read moreRed Wedge is currently fundraising to attend the Historical Materialism conference in London. We need your help.
Red Wedge is the only English-language Marxist cultural website and publication dedicated to all aspects of creative culture (art, music, film, poetry, fiction, dance, etc.). We believe that art and creativity aren’t just side issues to the fight for a radically different future, but integral to it. The ability of ordinary people to imagine something different is essential to the socialist vision, and we seek to highlight art, music, poetry, fiction, film and analysis that help feed this radical imagination.
Read moreWhat’s the best thing about Gary Ross’s The Free State of Jones? It is clearly a film that will rile the “All Lives Matter” crowd. For conscious white-supremacists and “color blind” racists alike, the portrayal on screen of a white Southerner – an army deserter – in league with runaway slaves in defiance of the tax man, the war machine, and the system of human bondage, amounts to a giant slap in the face. And it should be. But The Free State of Jones is much more than that. Here we have a mainstream film about a band of rebels in conscious opposition to economic inequality and horrendous racial injustices. What's more, they are led by a proponent of a utopian, agrarian-socialist vision of society.
Read moreAs Ernst Fischer observed in The Necessity of Art, the origin of art in hunter-gatherer societies resulted in the projection of the human imagination on all that which could not yet be understood. Fischer argued that this was both a social and spiritual aspect of early art. Humans, he argued, rebelled against consuming themselves in the confines of their own life. At the same time art served to unite small bands of human beings around common concerns and a common narrative.
Read moreThis text begins with facts, they will not be argued here. We live in a police state founded on white supremacy. Philando Castile has been murdered along with thousands of others for being black. For white supremacy blackness is both a necessary other and its greatest threat.
Any analysis of what Diamond Reynolds did when she livestreamed the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder will be incomplete and totally insufficient to meet the demands of her call for justice. “Truth makes a hole in knowledge.”
Read moreAnnihilate, the new comic by Brandon Daniels and Sam Boven (Hive Mind Comics), begins with what appears to be some kind of microscopic cell, bacteria or virus. It divides. It then relinks as it grows. It is part of a subterranean network, a complex ecology. Evolutionary biology runs its course. It produces larvae and insects. “The grotesque concept of the body is not a closed completed unit."
Read moreThere are those days that seem longer than most. Days when I want to hole up in my crummy corner of the planet apartment complex and never leave. Usually I'm a very social being but we live in a wild world ya'll and sometimes it all feels like too much. Bad friends, bad times, bad relationships, bad vibes. I close my doors, close my eyes, and find reassurance. "Eyelids", produced by Dalessio and I, is an attempt to explore that thought. Hopefully I can uncover the same kind of lyrical honesty throughout my upcoming E.P. Impressions as I did in this single.
Read moreIf you wanted to understand my mother’s commitment to social change, I would start out with her belief, “We don’t become who we are in a vacuum; we are shaped by those around us and our experiences and time.” Born in 1909, Mary Perry Stone grew up in a family of seven in the small town of Jamestown, Rhode Island; she described her childhood as happy and developed a love of art from an early age.
When she was fifteen years old she worked for a summer for a very wealthy family in Newport, Rhode Island who said if she worked for them at their winter home in New York City, she could take art classes at the Art Students League. While the Art Students League experience made her want to continue to study art in New York City, she found the wealthy family shallow and backbiting; the person she admired most was the family’s kind chaperone and cook who had helped her.
Read moreCan America ever truly face its racism – both past and present – for what it truly is? Or is the history of forced migration, bondage and slave labor, legal apartheid, incarceration and horrific state violence too much for it to survive such a revelation? Can it endure the psychic shock and endeavor in some kind of pursuit of truth or reconciliation? Or will it simply implode, come apart at the seams and make way for something new? Something which, hopefully, would not have genocide running through its veins? Langston Hughes tells of a man urging us to “let America be America again,” but Hughes is not so sure such an America ever existed. Neither should anyone today.
Read moreIn this place
(a)
of radiator heat
of knife wounds
of claustrophobia
of totems like broken teeth
Read moreThe playwright Bertolt Brecht, in his polemics with the theorist George Lukács argued: "Even those writers who are conscious of the fact that capitalism impoverishes, dehumanizes, mechanizes human beings, and who fight against it, seem to be part of the same process of impoverishment: for they too, in their writing, appear to be less concerned with elevating man, they rush him through events, treat his inner life as quantité negligeable..."
Read moreRed Wedge is proud and humbled to be the only English language publication examining all the arts from a Marxist viewpoint. Our second issue, “Art Against Global Apartheid”, dropped in May, and we want you to come celebrate it with us. We will have copies of RW2 available for purchase, as well as other cool items (posters, pamphlets, etc). If you're new to the publication, a long time reader who wants to show support, or just want to come talk art and radical politics, we expect to see you there.
Read moreThe model of “self-taught genius” ignores the social genius of Darger’s Child Slave Rebellion. After all, Darger’s work was shaped by the very real instructors of his life; his kind father, his brutal treatment as a ward of the state of Illinois, the “dead-end” proletarian job that awaited him in adulthood. It is no accident that Darger’s epic illuminated manuscript is, at its core, about a rebellion of child-slaves. Nor are his transgender heroes necessarily a mere accident of individual genius or naïveté. Maybe they are glimpses of the future emancipation that could not yet be articulated.
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