Red Wedge #6: “In Defense of Transgression”
To be on the left, to dream and organize for a better world, is inherently a transgressive act. To transgress is to test boundaries, to ask why they were there in the first place, and to demand they be reshaped. It is also a key part of what it is to dare to experience life as a human being in a profoundly inhuman world. Red Wedge’s sixth issue, “In Defense of Transgression,” is dedicated to exploring this through the prism of art, culture, and the socialist vision. At 140 pages, it asks very simply what the transgressive act looks like in the realm of human creativity, and how artists and organizers can defend and build upon it.
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Red Wedge #5: "Bad Dreams"
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.” Should we even bother with dreams of optimism, of anything better? We don’t have a choice. We can’t afford to give up the dream, but we will also be woefully unprepared if we don’t face and examine the nightmare, even acknowledge the ways in which the threat of oblivious spurs us forth to create something better. As the song says, “from the ashes of the old…” Red Wedge’s fifth issue is devoted to unpacking these questions.
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Digital
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.
Red Wedge has a few ideas regarding this last point. To us, the art, the poetry, the music, the performance, the mass imagination unleashed by these events; are worth not just revisiting and understanding on their own terms but engaging on their own. If art encourages us to imagine ourselves beyond the confines of our time and place, then anyone committed to radical social change must ask how in 1917 that vision traced a line from what was to what could be, and whether that trajectory has any meaning for us today.