Because Ed Sheeran doesn’t exist. Not really. He may have at one point, but the avatar that cried onstage in Philadelphia and wants you to cry for him isn’t, in the end, a human with their own wants and needs, separate from the system he’s spent so much effort ingratiating himself to. Make enough decisions that fail to mark where you stand in relation to history, and you eventually vanish completely. Incapable of love, of fairness, of courage or even a modicum of individuality. Just another piece of flotsam aimlessly drifting through the tepid flow of capital.
Read MoreThe City at the End of Capitalist Realism
We have held up both utopia and dystopia as symbols of alterity, to express this, often keeping them at not such a great distance from each other. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is utopian or dystopian depending on how you understand the dialectic of things such as abolition of private property. In a world ruled by the maxim ‘There is No Alternative,’ the first attraction of dystopia is it shows there quite obviously is….
Read MoreImage incorporates an original artwork by Tish and Adam Turl, Born Again Labor Tract 51: No Words are Good Enough for the Martyrs (2026)
Beyond the Reformist Imaginary
The twin determinist-fatalisms of Social Democracy and Stalinism, and consequently the crisis and collapse of these two trends and the mass parties they led, have relegated discourse over the shape of the future to the halls of economic abstraction — to a grand numbers game a dedicated cadre of critics and political economists conduct in perpetuity. The wider movement, meanwhile, either cheerleads all perceived sites of resistance to the main imperialist power, or limits the political horizon to immediate economic and democratic demands, with socialism relegated to a gesture of intent.
Read MoreImage incorporates a glitched version of an original artwork by Laura Fair-Schulz, Gaslit: Fires and Flutters.
Technofascist Irrealism
Our forebears said evil is banal, but still we were unprepared for the crushing weight of the everyday as it unfolds parallel to the shifting tectonic plates of history pursuing the darkest timeline. Politicians gather (like generals… in their masses) and pull levers that threaten to shift ethical poles and move continental thought patterns, leaving collateral damage in all four corners. A future army is set on the march. It might be made up of drones. It will be comprised of killers... Back home your son wants a particular dish, cooked in some specific way. The drains are blocked, in some anomalous way. The algorithms of war pump more data. The real estate magnate botches another sales pitch. It doesn’t matter — he’s not selling anyhow. He’s stealing. Meanwhile, you’ve got a lesson to teach, a bill to pay, a podcast to record, a meme to post, a pizza to cook… all as global techno fascism comes rolling in.
Read MoreDer Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island
Whither the Burgerkrieg auf Normal Island? The UK economy is at near perfect standstill. The state is busy hammering the repression button, the only thing it knows works… and it’s not so sure it works.
Read MoreThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Nigel Farage
Mainstream right wing politicians have been experimenting with summoning their fascist golems. Suella Braverman who, in November 2023, was Home Secretary, after being frustrated at being unable to prohibit a peace march in London on the same weekend as Armistice Day, suggested that ceremonies at the Cenotaph on Whitehall were under threat from “hate marchers” displaying “thuggish intimidation and extremism.” The far right took this, fairly obvious, cue and descended on Whitehall, drunk and high. With no one to fight, they first fought the cops, then each other. Plus la change. Braverman largely blamed the police for this debacle. By December 2023, she was a back bench MP.
Read MoreRemember NFTs?
Digital technology appears as naturally artificial when it is actually shaped by political economy and intensive ideological encoding. It appears as a phantasmagorical being — a neutral cloud of invention floating above everyday life.1 In actuality it is a product of social life, including its privations, exploitations, and oppressions — and it reinforces or undermines those aspects of life, usually for financial and political reasons.
Read MoreMore Things in Heaven and Earth
The socialist politics of art is, in part, centering both the rational and ineffable aspects of being on the actuality of a living revolutionary subject; the working-class both as it is, and as it could be. This includes the aspects of life that resist categorization, mapping, utility and rationality. Accepting this is not a concession to superstition. It is placing a working-class claim on all that it is to be human.
Read MoreTom Alter, Academic Freedom & Socialism vs. Fascism
Few serious people would consider Greg Abbott, the current governor of Texas, to be excessively subtle or nuanced. But even by the crude standards of right-wing politics in the Lone Star State, Abbott turned some heads when he announced on October 19th, in a post on Elon Musk's "X," that college and university professors can and should be fired for mere "ideological differences" with him and his de facto fascist outlook. Right-wing politicians usually talk about such things in a slightly more guarded way, deploying euphemisms and dog whistles.
Read MoreDude, Where's My Aura? or the Babbitry of Intellectual Campism
I contend that Manos, while complaining about the lack of politics in Turl’s work, has written a very apolitical review, predicated upon an intellectual campism rooted in what China Miéville calls “folk Marxism,” received beliefs, rather than dialectical reason. Manos’s view of the politics of art seems entirely functionalist.
Read MoreEscape from Normal Island
The Housing Act 1980 was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity.
Read MoreIlluminating Reality From Within
There is one form of the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past, but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.
Read MoreSocialist Irrealism vs. Capitalist Realism
The default cultural logic of neoliberalism and the political center is capitalist realism. In response the cultural logic of working-class emancipation (socialism) is critical irrealism. The ir – or no – of critical irealism is opposed to a particular kind of realism. Therefore, we should examine it more closely.
Read MoreEveryplace Has Lost Souls
I think every place has a lot of lost souls, but also there's the impossibility of representation. We're from here. I'm from this town, Carbondale, Illinois, and we're familiar with the nature of the loss here in a way we might not be intimately familiar with in other places. But the sort of impetus was the realization the art space is a theatrical space.
Read MoreDead Bees on Hot Cement
The effect is important, not so much the actual individual piece of work. So if you have some good effect, of course you can have good effect or bad effect, but let’s hope that whatever you’re creating has some good effects. As long as that good effect fertilizes the soil that’s what I care about.
Read MoreChicago Public Library Censors Art Exhibit
An art exhibit at the Austin-Irving Branch of the Chicago Public Library (on Chicago northwest side) was abruptly removed on September 18th by order of the city's Library Commissioner following political complaints by two unnamed individuals who are city employees and are on city payroll. Without contacting the Branch Manager or the show’s curator / organizer, the exhibit was censored and ordered to be taken down early. The show was installed on July 5, 2025, and was scheduled through September 27, 2025.
Read MoreWho's Afraid of Kneecap?
Anyone with enough sense can see how stupid the hue and cry over Kneecap is. But then, we live in a particularly myopic age, aggressively forgetful and wantonly incurious. One prone to performative pearl-clutching over simple talk of murder while real murder (indeed, genocide) takes place on a daily basis.
Read MoreWhere Stars Make Dreams and Dreams Make Stars
Orson Welles called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place.” David Lynch, upon his arrival, noticed the brightness. “I love Los Angeles,” he wrote in Catching the Big Fish. “I know a lot of people go there and they see just a huge sprawl of sameness. But when you’re there for a while, you realize that each section has its own mood. The golden age of cinema is still alive there, in the smell of jasmine at night and the beautiful weather. And the light is inspiring and energizing. Even with smog, there’s something about that light that’s not harsh, but bright and smooth. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available. I don’t know why. It’s different from the light in other places.”
Read MoreQuestions from a Poet who Workshops
If we assume a priori there is such a thing as an objectively “good poem” — but do not unpack what that means — do we not risk making normative evaluations of other poets’ work?
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Francisco Goya, Atropos, circa 1819.
It Never Stops Exploding
It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide.
A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer.
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