media and culture
News and articles about work, policy and workers' struggles in the media and culture industries around the world, and analysis and reviews of art, culture and the media.
The Arts and other Social Diseases
Art arrives abstracted and objectified into a poor substitute for real human presence, even in the presence of humans. The arts are a freakish sideshow. It’s a tonic for the troops that detracts from the barren terrain of everyday life. Students of the arts are the only masturbators to act as carriers of social disease.
The author would like to thank the Institute of Comparative Boredom for hot meals and counselling.
First published by Pentagon, 1992.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this pamphlet are not necessarily those of the ICB or the author.
Acknowledgements
I would especially like to thank Rebecca Gadd, Benjamin Franks and Alexis Lacheze-Beer for their support and ideas.
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.
Hope, faith, charity, lottery
Written a few years ago when the UK Lottery was only recently introduced; reflections on The Lottery and the hope invested in its promise by the consumer.
Outside of mass struggle – and nowadays that seems to be almost all the time - we are constantly niggled with an anxious envy, constantly confronted with forces which compare our lot with those who are better off.
Reservoir of poses - Gregor Jamroski
This article first appeared in the late 1980’s in an obscure, apparently one-off, magazine called Hopeless Tasks which emerged from Seattle, USA. It’s a neatly stated situationist-influenced critique of pop culture recuperation, bands as entertainment commodities and the weaknesses of punk ‘radicality’.
Source; endangeredphoenix.com
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Section one
I
Korean workers ring in new year with strike for press freedom
Media workers have launched a general strike against a new set of state laws which they claim will enable the government to seize control of the press.
Thousands have been on strike since late December against the South Korean government's package of seven laws, the so-called MB laws, which they claim will restrict press freedom.
Around 4000 workers have joined the stoppage, from 74 newspaper and broadcasting companies, called by the the National Union of Media Workers.
Manufacturing consent: a propaganda model - Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
Chomsky and Herman explain their brilliant "propaganda model", which illustrates how the media functions in Western democracies and what constraints exist on what it can and can't say, and why.
Written in 1988
Franz Kafka and libertarian socialism
Michael Löwy explores the links between the seminal writer and the anarchist/libertarian socialist movement.
Clearly, the work of Franz Kafka cannot be reduced to a political doctrine of any kind. Kafka did not give speeches but fashioned individuals and situations. In his work, he expressed a Stimmung or sense of feelings and attitudes. The symbolic world of literature cannot be reduced to the discursive world of ideologies.
The Sun - spoof newspaper from the Wapping strike, 1986
Short spoof issue of The Sun newspaper produced by anarchists to support the News International printers strike at Wapping in 1986.
digitised by libcom.org
Tube posters four-day strike
Over 100 workers for CBS Outdoor who put up posters on the London Underground striking for four days over a sub inflationary pay offer.
Around 130 RMT members working for the transnational subsidiary contracted to put up posters on London’s Tube, are to strike for four days from Thursday over a sub-inflation pay offer that would erode the living standards of already low-paid staff.
All change in Angel Alley
I’ve recently been having a lot of fun with old bits of paper at Freedom Press indulging my mild archiving OCD, as preparations are made to move the building's retail arm downstairs by our tame shop-guru amid a serious change-around.
As the hordes of people who have been to Freedom know, we have for a long time had something of an eccentric setup. On the top floor, alongside a somewhat mysterious office there is the home of the Advisory Service for Squatters.
