Stafford Beer: Eudemony, Viability and Autonomy

What if the global economy were structured, not to send wealth into the hands of a tiny group of oligarchs, but rather to ensure the best possible lives for everyone, ensuring that people lived fulfilling lives free from want, engaged in activities that interested them and engaged them, enabling them to pursue their own interests alongside working for the common good? What if people worked in co-operatives, coordinated together to meet the needs of society, organized from below rather than from above, with the workers themselves as the beneficiaries of their labor? What if the global economy elevated workers instead of immiserating them?

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Don't Look Back: 1980s Music + The Counterculture

n the perma-retro that constitutes contemporary life, the 80s is a montage from Wall Street (1987) St Elmo’s Fire (1985) and Desperately Seeking Susan (1985): a sequence of wet-gel, shoulder pads and designer suits backed by bombastically upbeat music. Even 80s revisits like Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and Black Mirror’s San Junipero (2016) don’t go far from the format. We don’t often speak of right-wing utopianism – more of its “cold stream” realism – but the enduring fantasies of the 80s exemplified just that. For all both Wall Street and Wolf of Wall Street’s acknowledgement of 80s’ corruption, cruelty and volatility, it is the class-A rush of acquisition, consumption and social contract-busting that stays with the viewer. And the same is true of book and film of Bonfire of the Vanities and even American Psycho.

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The Portions of the Day: Screen-Time + Time Discipline

Though the notion of cursing sundials seems quaint today, these lamentations, attributed to the Roman playwright Plautus, speak to an anxiety about the draining nature of time measurement that still seems prescient. In 1967, over two centuries after Plautus died, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson would take time out of the hands of poets and put it into the hands of historians and anthropologists with his essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” where he traced the relation of “clock-time” through the emergence of waged labour in the industrial revolution:

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Memez

INGA ORTIZ [Assassin #6] stood above the corpse of Governor Irina Blythe-Pillsworth. The governor’s eyes were staring up at the gilded bathroom ceiling in the Grand City Hotel. They betrayed none of the horror they’d shown when she’d turned a corner, just moments ago, and saw an Employed leaning against a marble sink.

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A Worker Reads Graphic Novels

“Normie” socialists, having largely lost recent political arguments in the new socialist movement – particularly in the righteous backlash against Angela Nagle – seem to be redoubling their efforts on the cultural front. Jacobin recently posted two highly questionable articles along these lines; John Halle’s “In Defense of Kenny G” and Alexander Dunst’s “Graphic Novels Are Comic Books, But Gentrified.”

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An Announcement from Red Wedge – Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Following the new issue, Red Wedge will be moving, perhaps temporarily into the type of institution it was in its early years, that is primarily an online publication, with - we hope - regular content, blogs, film and music criticism and so on. Contributions are welcome! Whether we do another full-fledged issue, print or online, later in 2020 or beyond, depends on our capacities. Yet we feel we have been remarkably effective, historically at cultivating and curating unique online content, both non-fiction and fiction, both words and images. Indeed, with a massive archive of written work dating back almost a decade, we find readers continually reading articles from the website from many years ago. We encourage newer readers to dive into the Red Wedge rabbit-hole, featuring work from the likes of Ashley Bohrer, David Renton, Michel Lowy and many more of today’s great minds of the far left. We have plans to, time permitted, make the archive more user friendly, but even as it stands, there is a plethora of material that, in a sense, gives an historiography of the Left and culture since 2012.

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Born Again Labor Museum (HM London)

This presentation on the “Born Again Labor Museum (BALM)” by Adam Turl (read here by a robot) was given, along with papers from artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb, at a workshop on different strategies for salvaging the “utopian impulse” in contemporary art, at the Historical Materialism conference in London (November, 2019).

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Partially Automated Dystopias + Utopias (Call for Submissions)

Every new technology seems to promise both liberation from drudgery and new forms of economic and social control. The contradictions between dead labor (accumulated productive capital) and living labor (workers), between the forces and relations of production, have always been at the center of Marxism. The way these contradictions play out in the cultural realm is contingent and evolving. Karel Capek’s 1920 play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), was translated into dozens of languages, popularizing both the idea of the robot – and the idea of robot rebellion. Working-class audiences, at the time, tended to identify with Capek’s robots – who were not exactly mechanical automatons, but rather artificial persons of a sort. Within a few decades, however, the mechanical automaton “robot” replaced Capek’s artificial humans in popular consciousness. The mechanical robot was increasingly viewed as a threat; perhaps in response to the growth of unemployment by automation, the mechanical slaughters of the imperialist and world wars, and the alienation of post-war corporatism.

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Erasing Arnautoff

A false narrative has been produced pitting “aging white male art historians” against “young people of color.” This narrative is doubly false as some of the murals’ most prominent defenders are not white; and there is evidence that many students do not want the frescoes removed.[3] Moreover, this narrative creates a false choice between art and the needs and aspirations of the exploited and oppressed. The question to be examined here is (at least) twofold: why has this false narrative come to dominate and, secondly, what lessons do these dynamics hold for contemporary socialist artists.

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In Defense of Transgression

In the days following Donald Trump’s election, we at Red Wedge – shell-shocked and terrified as we were – ran an editorial arguing the basics of survival and resistance for artists and leftists alike. Few need reminding of the terrors that were – and still are – gripping those close to us. Non-male identifying friends and comrades were threatened for wearing their hair “too short.” Armed posses of white supremacists were announcing their intent to patrol colleges and abduct professors teaching the “queer agenda.” The need for self-defense was obvious. And it still is. 

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Sewerbot

Sparking arms, busted legs, broken heads, and smoking torsos, fell into the sewer with splashes and wet slaps. I listened from the top of the pile, upside down and pressed between a torso and a cement wall. I heard, above me, men return the cart to SynCorp’s loading dock. I paused for a few beats of silence and turned on my ocular lights.

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Preliminary Notes Toward a Gonzo Marxism

Marxism is many things. Whether or not one agrees with the likes of Michael Heinrich that it is not a worldview (I believe it most certainly is), it denotes a varying set of processes of collective and individual human practice and cognition. Whether or not you want to call that a worldview, well, you do you, boo.  To define it is thus, in a sense, to engage in it. Marxism of course is not limited to being operationalized, as it were as a “discourse” or a set of written procedures. As is apocryphally told, the great American revolutionary socialist Big Bill Haywood once remarked that he neve read Marx’s Capital but his body was covered with “marks from capital”.  Yet accepting the absolute primacy of sensual creative human practice, what Marx calls “form giving fire” of human labour, there is still the word and the set of words, the discourse, better yet, the rhetoric, or even better yet the poetic.

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