Last year was mostly shit. Remnants of the Arab Spring were consumed by the mutually reinforcing dyad of ISIS and U.S. imperialism. Black bodies lay in the streets of every major American city; murdered by racist police. Whatever you think of Bernie Sanders the life-blood of Occupy has been directed, again, into a bourgeois electoral process designed to demobilize activists. SYRIZA betrayed the Greek working-class and the international left (that had placed so much hope in it). Of course, there are glimmers of hope: the re-election of Kshama Sawant; Jeremy Corbyn’s (Trotskyist, Maoist or Stalinist, pick one) plot to “take over the Labour Party” that he was democratically elected to lead; Black Lives Matter activists are pressing forward… What follows here, however, is not some sort of socialist perspectives-in-disguise. Instead it is my reflection on some of the cultural, artistic and critical products/ideas of the past year (or so); each that I believe are good in their own right, but will also help orient cultural Marxists. What blood-addled revenges and carnivals will we seek in the ruins to come?
Read moreThe Kidnapping of Punxsutawney Phil (Part I)
In 2028, five years after the last winter in the North American continental humid climate zone, Mary Hoagland, the sixteen year old daughter of laid-off Caterpillar workers from Peoria, Illinois, kidnapped Punxsutawney Phil in a bid to stop global warming. She wrote the following poem about the experience during her two year imprisonment in the Peoria County Juvenile Center.
Adam Turl, Kick the Cat at Project 1612 in Peoria, IL. "Remember Winter," acrylic and coffee on canvas.
Adam Turl, The Kidnapping of Punxsutawney Phil I,
acrylic and coffee on canvas (Kick the Cat)
Adam Turl, The Kidnapping of Punxsutawney Phil II,
acrylic, glitter and coffee on canvas (Kick the Cat)
Adam Turl, Saint George of Peoria
acrylic and coffee on canvas (Kick the Cat)
I remember winter
Little Hoths consumed the yard
When it melted
microbes came back to life
hydras battled Hercules
and sloshed in the drainage ditch
running into corrugated pipe
under the drive
The kingdom of six inch trolls
presided over the final frost
I had an epiphany in Sarah’s garage
pulled from a 21 inch Graffix
If Punxsutawney Phil never again
failed to see his own shadow
then winter might return
We could put him in
absolute darkness
or immersive light
or decapitate him
like in those old-timey ISIS videos
The construction dividers
blurred into an orange wall
and I thought I saw a coyote
running alongside Sarah’s truck
on the passenger’s side
If I believed in spirit animals
maybe he could be mine
What if he misses winter too?
Maybe he will swing the machete
that kills the enemy groundhog.
By the time the dragons busted me
in the television warehouse
the groundhog was dead
and I had become Saint George
Or maybe they sent me to
the Maxwell Road snow globe
shook it a couple times
forgot about me
and I spent the next two years
catching plastic flakes on my tongue
Adam Turl is an artist, writer and socialist currently living in St. Louis, Missouri. He is an editor at Red Wedge and an MFA candidate at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis. He writes the "Evicted Art Blog" at Red Wedge, which is dedicated to exploring visual and studio art.
Socialist Prophets in the Wilderness? We Need Our Own Jesse Clyde Howards
Of course there is little to value in Howard’s actual politics, a semi-libertarian hodge-podge of conspiracy theory and John Birch society fever dreams, lamenting a nation under threat by “communism and progressivism.”
But the work is beautiful, a seamless fusion of pathos and politics, of spiritual and social concerns. That Howard was a (mostly) right-wing nut does not change this.
His methods and contributions should be stolen by our side—in favor of “communism and progressivism,” in favor of a radical cosmopolitanism, in favor of workers, in favor of the oppressed, in favor of “combination” and direct democracy.
Read more13 Baristas: Nine Paintings
Trans Venus, Black Panthers, November 7, Magpie, After You Leave, Ascension, Twenty Years in Prison, Damascus, On This Day in History...
Read moreNovember: Network of Anti-Capitalist Studio Artists
We do not believe that art must be dumbed down for the proletarian viewer. But it should address matters of concern to the proletarian majority (the majority of the human race). This does not mean that art should deal solely with economic injustice or simplistic portrayals of social contradictions. It means that we must reject post-modern and neoliberal disbelief and cynicism. Most of all, an aspect of anti-capitalist studio art should be to help restore the revolutionary imagination; the ability of the left and the working-class to imagine alternatives.
This is why we are forming November: an association of anti-capitalist studio artists in the United States. We will foster the exchange of anti-capitalist artistic strategies and promote the sale of our work (at rates that compensateour members but are affordable to working-class patrons). If you are interested in being considered for membership please send 12-20 images of your work (no larger than 1mb each), along with an image identification sheet and a one to three page artist statement to novemberartnetwork@gmail.com
Read moreKen Loach Archive Online
Culture and Revolution (Summer 1961)
The Marxist Internet Archive has uploaded the first series of the International Socialism journal. It is a treasure trove of material from the days when the forerunners to the International Socialists and Socialist Workers Party (UK) combined a fidelity to working-class revolution with open-minds and a vibrant intellectual honesty. Here is a reposted review by Alasdair Macintrye, from International Socialism (1st series), No. 5, Summer 1961. The following piece is interesting, in part, for its fusion of the idea of the romantic and socialist protest: "One was the romantic protest against capitalist ugliness whose culmination is in Lawrence and Leavis. The other was the socialist protest. William Morris held them together in his own day: it is a prime victory of bourgeois ideology to have kept them apart ever since."
Read more13 Baristas Art Collective
The studio/house of the 13 Baristas (second location).
In 2018, six months after the ________________ uprising was crushed by the National Guard, a group of low-wage workers, many of whom worked in coffee chains, formed the “13 Baristas Art Collective.” Its members were art school dropouts or had pretensions to be poets or writers.
Read more12 Concerns for Contemporary Anti-Capitalist Studio Art
1. Narrative Conceptualism: The first concern should be the re-introduction of the proletarian subject. This does not mean an abstracted idea of the proletarian subject inherited from the past (although that need not be ignored) but the actuality of the present proletarian subject: the laborer, the teacher, the bus driver, the fast food worker, the barista, the nurse, the college drop-out, etc. Here we are discussing the individual members of the “army of labor,” the downwardly mobile petit-bourgeois (soon to be proletarians) and the “reserve army of labor.” Taking a cue from underground Moscow conceptualism and strands of post-Soviet Block Eastern European art (as well as elements of so-called “outsider” art in the U.S.) we can resituate the working-class subject within art; not to present merely a victim but to present that subject’s agency and subjectivity.
2. The Constraint of the Proletarian Subject: The contemporary proletarian subject makes history, to borrow from Marx, but not in conditions of their choosing. They are constrained (like the characters of a Brecht play) by material circumstances and the ideologies of the moment. They dream and aspire but are trapped (by wages, gender, disease, failure, heartbreak, war, etc.). The proletarian subject is in a constant state of negotiation and rebellion with that constraint. In this way the subject mirrors the condition of most contemporary artists (trapped by the art market, their days jobs, the demands of the academic avant-garde, art fairs, kitsch, popular culture, their own interactions with class, race, gender, etc.)
Read more