artwork by Omnia Soi
Dear Red Wedge comrades
We want to make an announcement as to where we are as a project, and what to expect from us in 2020.
2019 has seen lowered capacity on our editorial collective, along with editors busy both with the grind of employment and other projects, and indeed life itself. Hence, what was to be our fall online issue will be our winter 2020 issue, to be released in early February. We are excited about this issue, including a new essay from Neil Davidson, the finale of a series of three essays Neil has written for us. New Red Wedge contributor and film scholar Shalon van Tine presents an original theory of 90s cinema and the transition from analogue to digital. There is a long and spectacular account of the great cybernetician Stafford Beer by Jeremy Gross. This plus original new work from long time Red Wedge contributors Kate Doyle Grifftihs, Jase Short, Nikeeta Slade and Toby Manning; essays from Red Wedge editors Joe Sabatini, Laura Fair Schulz and Jordy Cummings; an intervention from our comrades at Locust Review, and a meticulously written and sober history of Red Wedge a an institution over the last eight years, written as a collaboration between a number of current and former editors. This plus short stories from Red Wedge editor Tish Markley and poetry from Margaret Corvid and a great deal more top shelf content.
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.
In recent discussions, we have come to think of Red Wedge, however small to be, at least at our best, a “Political Center” in the language of Hal Draper, who cites Lenin’s Iskra as an early example. Political Centers are often “organized simply as an editorial board or other editorial enterprise” and that “political centers of this sort have frequently undertaken organizing functions as their influence spread”. Draper also stipulates that “a political center does not have to be a sect. More: a political center can undertake a relationship with its followers which is not bedeviled by the rigid requirements of organizational life, its life-and-death votes, faction fights, splits, internal disputes, and ingrown rituals of imitating a miniature or micro-”mass party”. Given that some of us lived through the experience of the ISO in the United States or the SWP in the UK, we want to continue to develop this ecumenical and non-sectarian approach. Yet times have changed. We expand on these points in our coming history of Red Wedge.
For the first time in all of our lives, a coherent socialist movement, and with it, an ecosystem of journals or centers are developing, and along with it, a Left intelligentsia. Red Wedge makes no pretence of attempting to lead such a culture. Rather, we see our role shifting with the growth of the Left, from one of cultivating “Left Aesthetic Regroupment” (a task we feel we have fulfilled) to playing a role in articulating and exercising a Left cultural and artistic praxis predicated upon being of assistance to our movements and our class as it is on the move. It’s the least we can do, and you can be certain that we will continue to do our part and make our cases.
We also will be continuing to play to our strengths, organizing interventions at the various Historical Materialism conferences, with our comrades from Locust Review, Leftovers, and others – the next being a full-scale art exhibit and panel series this coming spring in Montreal. We have discussed interventions at other gatherings of the Left in the coming year, so watch for us.