Between Thought and Expression: Utopia and Improvisation

September 18, 2018 Jordy Cummings

The dream of utopia is difficult to find. Not always a “good dream”, it can just as well be a nightmare. More properly, the dream of utopia is a dream we cannot categorize according to the binary of nightmare and “sunshine daydream”. Yet, like a mole burrowing away, utopia can be found in the strangest of places, which once apparent become obvious. Like the hidden erotica on a Camel cigarette pack, utopian impulses cannot be unseen – or unheard, its mark indelible like ink that will never wash away.

Truba

September 13, 2018 David Renton

Silent, by Olivia Mansfield. — *Silent,* by Olivia Mansfield.

In my blackened room, I leapt from a tall building, I descended past the ends of the earth and there was nothing to stop my fall.

My neck wrenched as I shouted, “It hurts.”

The pain paused for a moment and it returned.

I was not the one falling it was my pain it was intimate it was generous.

Illuminating Reality From Within

August 22, 2018 Michael Löwy interviewed by Red Wedge

From Anupam Roy's Surfaces of the Irreal. — From Anupam Roy's *Surfaces of the Irreal.*

The term “critical irrealism,” though present and well-known in the spheres of literary and arts scholarship, is unfamiliar to most. But then, so is living in the world of 2018. It is also alienating and in constant violent flux. Which means perhaps there is something for this critical irrealism to teach us…

Michael Löwy has written about critical irrealism – along with realism, Surrealism, Situationism, Romanticism and a great many other aesthetic approaches. He is the author of many books on a wide array of topics written from a Marxist perspective, from liberation theology to uneven and combined development, from Che Guevara to Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka.

Combustible Fictions: The Literary Novel in the Anthropocene

August 15, 2018 Trish Kahle

Come with me into the hidden abode of literary production. Here, behind the comings of age amidst tragedy, the journeys of self-discovery traveled through existential crises, and the excavations of rotting family ties, lies a darker secret: the coal heart of the modern novel.

For Amitav Ghosh, himself the author of many novels including The Hungry Tide and Sea of Poppies, the idea that fossil fuels are at the heart of the modern novel is no metaphor, but rather historical fact. The assumptions of literary narration, he reminds us, are based on a second background assumption — “the orderly expectations of bourgeois life.”

Riots and Reality: Sorry to Bother You and Radical Irrealism

August 3, 2018 Alexander Billet

Capitalism is an irrational system which refuses to see itself for what it is. Like an obnoxious trust fund kid slumming it at a dive bar, it cannot help but loudly declare how ingenious and deserving it is. Accepting its arguments for how things are and how they change is to accept the argument that there is some method underneath the layers of madness, that its opulence can somehow be separated from its exploitation, that it has something other than an ever-deepening inhumanity in its future. While our dreams are deemed irrational, capitalism’s degradations are justified as science.

To grasp the significance of Sorry to Bother You is, on some level, to grasp this truth about capitalism. Boots Riley has written and directed a film that is being celebrated by the far-left and mainstream critics alike. Those familiar with Riley’s musical and lyrical work with the Coup know that he is adept at combining his unabashed revolutionary politics with a skewed, cartoon-like worldview.

Most Things Die In the Winter Here: 3 Poems

July 25, 2018 Crystal Stella Becerril

(in dreams)
my teeth fall out.

I am a mouth full
of crowns and empty
houses; my gums, bloody
shores where ancestral trauma still washes up
today.

Bad Dreams

July 9, 2018 The Editors

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.

It's All In the Groove: A Marxist Theory of Music

June 26, 2018 Mark Abel interviewed by Kate Bradley

Afrobeat by Doba Afolabi. — *Afrobeat* by Doba Afolabi.

Much analysis of modern music focuses on lyrical content, but how can we understand modern musical forms? What relation do they have to the capitalist world in which they’ve developed? To answer these questions Kate Bradley interviewed Mark Abel, author of Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time.

Kate Bradley: Is it fair to say that Groove is a defence of popular music from a Marxist perspective? Could you summarise your argument in brief?

Mark Abel: It is a defence of popular music, but in the first place it is an attempt to explain why the music of our time sounds the way it does.

Realism, Modernism, and the Spectre of Trotsky: Part 2, Greenberg

June 12, 2018 Neil Davidson

Jackson Pollock’s She-Wolf (1943). — Jackson Pollock’s *She-Wolf* (1943).

In the first part of this article I discussed Lukács and his theory of Realism. I now want to turn to Clement Greenberg, “the major theoretical figure of the late modern age and indeed that theoretician who more than any other can be credited as having invented the ideology of modernism full-blown and out of whole cloth.” At his best, Greenberg deserved his reputation as a critic quite as much as Lukács for his clarity of description, refusal of jargon and, above all, focus on the materiality of the work of art. The most productive phase in his career spanned the 20 years between his first major article, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and the codification of his mature views in “Modernist Painting” (1960).

Who Will Be Pirate Jenny?

June 4, 2018 Adam Turl

The following is an artist talk by Red Wedge's Adam Turl at the opening of his exhibition, The Barista Who Disappeared, at Artspace 304 on June 1, 2018 in the artist's home town of Carbondale, Illinois. This exhibition marks the last (for now) iteration of Turl's two-year project, The Barista Who Could See the Future, about a coffee shop worker and artist living in Southern Illinois who believes he has visions of the future. The city of Carbondale is facing a crisis as budget cuts and inflationary tuition hikes are undermining Southern Illinois University (the city's main employer) with the active hostility of the university's board.

Taming a Rude Beast: Marx@200

May 28, 2018 Frances Madeson

Karl Marx, born in Trier, Germany and buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, never visited the U.S. himself. Nearly a third of the 38 artists included in the Marx@200 Show in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are from outside the U.S. This provides powerful global context to a show that was born from a hunch that the 2008 global financial crisis had turned many artists toward Marx in a concentrated way. Curators Kathy Newman and Susanne Slavick – Carnegie Mellon University professors of literature and art, respectively – have brought together an impressive array of visual artworks themed around the figure of Marx, his writings, and capitalism’s depredations.

Electric Kool-Aid Asshole: Tom Wolfe Dies

May 23, 2018 Jordy Cummings

Tom Wolfe is dead. He lived long enough to be a celebrated icon, emulated across the political spectrum. Wolfe affected the old-fashioned American pose of a chronicler, an H.L. Mencken or Horace Greeley, yet Mencken was a sincere Nietzchean misanthropist while Greeley, a friend of Marx, was a sincere liberal. Wolfe, on the other hand, was a reactionary poseur who dressed up in slave-owner’s garb nearly every day. While readable in the way one chortles at an Alex Jones video, Wolfe contributed more to the American intelligentsia’s self-mystification than just about any other writer of the last hundred years.

On Boris Groys: “Every Revolution Begins with a Lie”

May 8, 2018 Joe Sabatini

Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (left) and Duchamp's Fountain (right). — *Worker and Kolkhoz Woman* (left) and Duchamp's *Fountain* (right).

Paris based cultural theorist Boris Groys exerts a strange pull on the minds of many who seem predisposed to accept what he has written about everything except the Soviet experience. When it comes to his writings about the relationship between art, curation and the internet, he is listened to and his ideas are formative of our contemporary discourse on modern art.

When it comes to his varied works on philosophers, we engage with his iconoclasm. There is something attractive about a way of looking at philosophy that draws its model from Duchamp’s (or R. Mutt’s) expo of an upside-down urinal.

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.

Announcing Red Wedge No. 5, "Bad Dreams"

March 22, 2018 The Editors

Pompeii by Olivia Mansfield, whose work appears in Red Wedge issue five. — *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.”

Hacking the Spectacle

March 14, 2018 Darren Cullen interviewed by Colin Revolting and Tony Aldis

Called a “Corbynite cartoonist” by The Sun and a “Britain hating anarchist who knows the value of nothing” by Tory MP Johnny Mercer after he showed his work at Momentum’s The World Transformed festival in September 2016, Darren uses the language of advertising to make art about the “empty promises of consumerism and the lies of military recruiters”.

Whilst training for a career in advertising he became “steadily horrified at the ethical implications involved”, and instead began to use the techniques he had learned to subvert and satirise it. “I see advertising as being a kind of horrible glue which holds it all together: miltarism, neoliberalism. It’s the Spectacle”. In the interview Darren describes himself as “a conscientious objector in the war against consumers”. One of his main themes is advertising by corporations and the army which targets children through psychological or emotional manipulation.