After Left Melancholia: A Winding Walk Though the Wreckage

April 30, 2018 Alexander Billet and Adam Turl

In Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens (2016) the first and last shots of the film are of the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria – constructed by the Communist state to commemorate the secret formation of its forerunner, Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, in 1891. After the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, it was abandoned. Today its vast chambers, statues and mosaics are crumbling.

Geyrhalter’s 90 minute film is composed entirely of stationary shots of human-made buildings that have been abandoned to the elements. Shopping centers in Fukushima, abandoned theatres in Detroit, nondescript hospitals, office buildings, shoreline amusements parks flooded by the tides.

Red Wedge at "The Great Transition"

April 13, 2018 The Editors

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.

Americanism as 20th Century Communism

April 9, 2018 Earl Theodore

Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924). — Lev Kuleshov’s *The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks* (1924).

Artists, radicals and radical artists have always looked at the future, the horizon, and seen a telos of emancipation. From modern-day left-accelerationism to 90s anarcho-cybernetic to prog-rock’s discovery of the synthesizer, the future has been an emancipatory muse. Owen Hatherley’s Chaplin Machine engages what could be termed an early example of left-accelerationism: the Soviet avant-garde’s absolute fascination with America. Indeed, going with Hatherley’s beautifully written and sometimes cheeky account with this fascination that, to be frank, sometimes borders on mystification, one can even reverse the aphorism of Earl Browder, the old social-patriotic leader of the American Communist Party, “Communism is 20th century Americanism.” This is to say that to those in the early Soviet avant-garde, and indeed cultural producers in general, Americanism was 20th century communism.

I Would Like + The Bolshevik

April 6, 2018 Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Untitled by Ilya Kabakov. — *Untitled* by Ilya Kabakov.

I would like
to be born
in all countries,

to lack a passport
to the panic of the poor Foreign Ministry,
to be with all the fish
in all the oceans

Dance, Dance, Revolution: Exploring Soviet Disco

April 2, 2018 Jordy Cummings

A specter is haunting the American liberal public: the spectre of Vladimir Putin busting a move.

Accused by a range of liberal public figures of masterminding a plot to elect Donald Trump to the presidency, Putin looks and acts the part, like a “bad guy” in an eighties Hollywood film – all the while cultivating friendships with “good guy,” Steven Segal. Perhaps reflective of his days as an intelligence officer based in East Germany between the rise of Gorbachev and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Putin is enamored with the action aesthetic of the Reagan years.

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