Initially this online issue was to focus primarily on the intersections of socialist politics, technology, and culture. While the issue still does that it has evolved to include further questions of current left-cultural praxis.
Read moreA Partial + Schematic History of Red Wedge
Red Wedge (RW) was started in 2012 by a group of (then) ISO (International Socialist Organization - US) comrades around Alexander Billet, Brit Schulte and others. From the beginning there was a commitment to, tension and dialectic between, RW’s desire to play a modest role helping develop the actual production of socialist, left-wing, and working-class art, and its role reckoning on the socialist theory of art.
Read moreAn 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.
Read morePartially 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.
Read moreIn 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.
Read moreRed Wedge Special Online Issue
This special online issue includes essays by Shannon Bell, Jordy Cummings, Laura Fair-Schulz, Joe Sabatini, Adam Turl, and Cam Scott; interviews with Anupam Roy, Tyler Bee from the Beehive Design Collective, and Kate Doyle Griffiths; reviews from Jason Netek, Agatha Slupek, annd Neil Rogall; poetry and short stories from Urvi Kumbhat, Benjamin Balthaser, Margaret Corvid, Tish Markley and Trish Kahle; visual art from David Mabb, Richard Reilly, Jon Cornell, Laura Fair-Schulz, Octavio Quintanilla, Nathan Nun, Anupam Roy and Adam Turl; audio/video from Alexander Billet, Magally Miranda-Alcazar and Adam Turl.
Read moreRed Wedge at HMNY: “Socialism in Our Time”
We have sponsored two panels at “Socialism in Our Time.” Taken as a whole, the speakers at both panels aim to resuscitate what is deemed merely a leftover, an obscurantist folk practice, a popular song, a cultural sensibility. We question standard accounts, for example, of “outsider art” or simplistic sociological accounts of counterculture. Our panel participants are visual artists, experimental musicians, queer activists, educators and critics. Put simply, we enter the hidden abode of cultural production from a wide variety of standpoints and a shared commitment to the communist project.
Read moreRed Wedge #7: Call for Submissions
Red Wedge is pleased to announce a call for submissions for our next issue, intended for release in late spring of 2019. The theme of the issue, our seventh, is fifty years since the 1960s.
Decades are fictions, albeit useful ones. Same with anniversaries. When we mark time and look back, we can either wallow and anesthetize, or cast an eye back to the present, colliding the two in such a way that the tension reveals a future.
Read moreBad Dreams
Art by Adam Turl.
Ring around the rosies,
Pocket full o’ posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down!
Most everyone knows this nursery rhyme. Urban legend places its origin in the Great Plague of London in 1665 and 1666 – one of the last major outbreaks of bubonic plague on the European and Asian continents – the beginning of the end of a three hundred year pandemic.
Read moreRed Wedge at "The Great Transition"
Red Wedge is excited to be one of the organizing groups of “The Great Transition: Preparing a World Beyond Capitalism,” to be held from May 17th through the 20th at the Science Campus of Université du Québec in Montréal, Québec. Combining the North American iteration of Historical Materialism and the Summer School of the Nouveaux cahiers du socialism, and featuring over 120 sessions and 300 speakers from 12 countries, the conference is going to be one of the most vibrant and diverse on the North American left this year.
Read moreAnnouncing Red Wedge No. 5, "Bad Dreams"
Pompeii by Olivia Mansfield, whose work appears in Red Wedge issue five.
For as total and overwhelming as it appears, the dystopian often contains a seed of its radical opposite: utopia. Red Wedge, as a publication dedicated to the revolutionary imagination, believes this wholeheartedly. It is a necessary truth. We also believe that we need to hold tight to it. Now more than ever.
Modern life for millions is a nightmare. Climate change is threatening our very notion of a stable and natural reality. The far right is ascendant in a growing number of countries. Neoliberalism, in all its exposed cruelty and indifference, continues to stride along on the back of its most effective mantra: “There Is No Alternative.”
Read moreThe International Women's Strike: Feminism for the 99% and an Emancipated Culture
There is something rotten in Hollywood. If anything has been proven by the events and revelations of the past few months, it is that. It is also clear that the rot goes far deeper than Harvey Weinstein. Though he is clearly the worst kind of predatory slime. Or any collection of creepy, entitled individuals with a measure of power. It is a culture in which abuse is not just accepted but often rewarded, or at the very least invites no consequence.
Read moreSolidarity With Educators: Against the Neoliberal School
Wounded Book, by Adam Turl.
Educational institutions are sites of struggle. Sometimes openly, sometimes hidden under layers of bureaucracy, but always consequential. Last week, lecturers at 64 UK universities walked off the job to prevent their pensions being gutted. On the other side of the Atlantic, public school teachers in every one of the 55 counties in West Virginia also went on strike. It is illegal in the state for public employees to strike at all, and yet the teachers have already appear to have wrenched concessions from the putrid opportunist of a governor, Jim Justice.
Read moreEchoes of 1917
El Lissitzky's Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge, 1920.
At 9:40pm on October 25th, the forecastle gun of the battleship Aurora fired an ear-shattering round into the air. It was a blank, an empty shell. One-year prior, the Aurora had been contributing to the carnage of World War I, patrolling and bombarding in service to the Russian Empire. Now it was docked in Petrograd and under the control of a revolutionary sailors’ committee, most of whom supported the Bolsheviks. The blank round was, so the story goes, the first shot in the October Revolution, which overthrew the Provisional Government and established the first workers’ state in history.
Read moreRed Wedge at Historical Materialism London
Red Wedge will be presenting two panels at this year's Historical Materialism London conference. This year's conference takes place at the confluence of three auspicious anniversaries: the 20th anniversary of the HM journal, the 150h anniversary of the publication of Marx's Capital, and the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
It is no surprise to anyone familiar with Red Wedge that we share HM's commitment to Marxism's reinvention and rediscovery. Which is why we are glad to be contributing these panels, dedicated to a creative and critical assessment of the Marxist aesthetic experience.
Read moreRed Wedge Issue Four: Echoes of 1917
Left: from the cover of Red Wedge No. 4, "Echoes of 1917." Right: Storming the Winter Palace in Eisenstein's October.
It has been a century since the Russian Revolution. The occasion has naturally provoked all manner of commemorations. The establishment calls it an unfortunate sequence of events never to be repeated, the right spits its vicious bile at the memory of a workers’ world, and the Left, to one degree or another, celebrates and analyzes and tries to ask how to make the history come alive again. How to make the dream of total liberation, of workers power and radical democracy, into a reality.
Read moreThe Great Transition: Red Wedge at Historical Materialism Montreal
Red Wedge is proud to be contributing to the organizing of the very first Montreal Historical Materialism Conference. Held from May 17-20, it is a bilingual conference, and an excellent chance to break down barriers between English and French speaking activists and scholars. The them of the conference is ambitious: “The Great Transition,” reflecting a sorely needed optimism but also rooted in practical and sober theory.
Read moreThe Return of the Crowd
The art of Howard Barry, some of which features in Red Wedge issue three.
How in the hell does Jeremy Corbyn become such a sensation at Glastonbury? A sixty-eight-year-old politician propped in front of a crowd of young people gathered to take in Run the Jewels does not on the surface sound at all like the raw material of cultural memory. And yet, when he spoke, the crowd chanted his name (to the tune of the White Stripes no less). They cheered and applauded and shouted themselves hoarse.
There is, ultimately, no reason they shouldn’t have. The leader of the Labour Party who led it to its best showing in twenty years did so by saying that this crowd of young people matters.
Read moreRed Wedge Goes Quarterly with "Return of the Crowd"
Red Wedge is now taking orders for our third issue "Return of the Crowd." Get a copy on wedge shop or subscribe. We are also strongly encouraging all supporters to become part of our patron program through Patreon.
As the above video details, we are hoping for issue three to be a big step forward for a publication that deserves to play a role in building the kind of imaginative and militant left we so sorely need. As with any radical project, it doesn't happen without support. Lend us some and we will do our best to return the favor in the form of a fantastic magazine and website.
Read moreRed Wedge (Print) is Going Quarterly
There are big changes coming to Red Wedge’s publication and posting schedule. Starting with issue three (out in July) on “The Return of the Crowd," Red Wedge will be going quarterly.
Since the founding of Red Wedge in 2012 there has been a mushrooming and further development of left-wing and explicitly socialist publishing. As readers may know, we have spent much of the past eighteen months discussing our way forward, and feel that our current moment, our current environment, demands that Red Wedge professionalize itself.
Read more