culture
From Boom To Bust: Roots of Disillusionment
How do I fill my days? A force called "Hard Cash" moves my feet
—Gang of Four, 1982, "Call Me Up"
On Workers Culture - CLR James
The following article is an extract from an unsigned editorial in the newspaper Correspondence, December 12 1953. It may have been written by C.L.R. James, who had written an extensive essay on a related theme several weeks earlier. It should be noted that despite the use of the masculine pronoun throughout the article, the Correspondence group were quite sensitive to questions of gender. Thanks to Scott McLemee for providing this material. This article has been archived on libcom.org from the Red and Black Notes website.
Picket lines, wages and hours, union bureaucrats and even the union meetings do not command the lively interest of the workers that they held in the past. Yet from the stories that we get every day from the shops, we can see a new form of struggle emerging. It never seems to be carried to its complete end, yet its existence is continuous.
On proletarian culture - Die Aktion
Brief article from Die Aktion looking at the bourgeois nature of culture under capitalism.
The decline of bourgeois ideology began long before the collapse of bourgeois society. Bourgeois ideology was finished the moment the bourgeoisie became a ruling class. As a class based on exploitation, conquest, and competition, its cultural leaders preach freedom, peace, and humanity. They teach Kant and live off the interest.
The Closed Window Onto Another Life - endangeredphoenix
Culture is the commodity that sells the whole of the commodity economy. But a critique of art and of culture is virtually absent amongst the revolutionary milieu in the UK, an absence we try to make up for here.
A prisoner who cannot see the sky from his cell window may paint on his wall a scene of birds flying amongst clouds against a blue haze of space. Outside in the wider society art plays a similar role; what is denied and seems unreachable, but possible and desirable, is represented via the window of the picture frame or TV screen.
Ae Fond Kiss, dir. Ken Loach; Yasmin, dir. Kenny Glenaan; Head-On, dir. Fatih Akin (2004). Film review – Tom Jennings
Tom Jennings’ essay on cinema representations of European Asians & Muslims .
Same Difference? by Tom Jennings
“The media and politicians don’t talk about Christian extremism, fundamentalism or terrorism – but everyone who considers themselves a Muslim feels tainted due to the propaganda use of 9/11” (Paul Laverty) [1]
On the poverty of Berkeley life and the marginal stratum of American society in general - Chris Shutes, 1983
A situationist-influenced text from 1983, containing critiques of Berkeley radicalism, the marginal worker, 'natural' commodities (e.g. crafts, food, medicine), the car, jogging, bureaucratic reform, Reaganism, the Black Panthers, criminality, culture/aesthetics, feminism, therapy, Robert Crumb, global class struggle in the 1970s and 80s and South Africa in particular - plus more.
Over the Rainbow Coalition - Slavoj Žižek
Philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek reveals the intolerant kernel of liberal multiculturalism - tolerant of all except antagonism, that is the class antagonism that is the basis of capitalist society.
The credentials of those who, even prior to its release, virulently criticize Mel Gibson's Passion seem impeccable: are they not fully justified in their worry that the film, made by a fanatic Catholic traditionalist with occasional anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments?
Jack Common - selected articles
A selection of articles by the undeservably obscure Jack Common, a Geordie who wrote both novels and essays on various aspects of culture and class relations. His friend George Orwell had written of Common: "he is of proletarian origin, and much more than most writers of this kind he preserves his proletarian viewpoint".
A fascinating writer, his analysis of the emerging mass consumerism of the 1930s & 40s seems to closely anticipate the concept of the 'society of the spectacle' later developed by the situationists.
From the endangered phoenix.com website; http://www.endangeredphoenix.com/
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A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
TV Times 30 September - 6 October
Class War's weekly TV guide for the revolutionary couch potato. Two major documentaries from the Dispatches team this week - on data theft and Myanmar, plus a side to Iran that is little known. Science fiction fans can enjoy the TV version of Logan's Run - unless you are over 30 of course!
Sat 30 Sep 9.10pm - HG Wells: A Life In Pictures. Dramatisation of the life of the socialist writer and father of science fiction.
Mon 2 Oct 8pm Ch4 - Dispatches: Burma's Secret War. Evan Williams, who is banned from Myanmar, enters the country undercover to investigate claims of ethnic cleansing and forced labour.
The depraved heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood - Slavoj Žižek
In this short article Žižek shows how the popular TV series is essentially a reflection of newly acceptable fascistic behaviour - torture, expendability of subordinates - in the 'war on terror', concluding that "24's real problem [is] not the content itself but the fact that we are being told openly about it."
On Sunday, the fifth season of the phenomenally successful television drama 24 will start in the US. Each season is composed of 24 one-hour episodes and the whole season covers the events of a single day.
