New Future
A kind of feed reader
Marina Vishmidt, a much loved and deeply formative contributor for our magazine from its early years, tragically passed away at the end of April. The scale, originality and influence of Marina’s achievement — as well as the playful and irreverent ways in which she partook in and shaped collective life — has been documented in many recent writings (lucid and affecting Instagram posts, articles, obituaries and Substacks, which are ongoing).
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen contrasts Judith Butler's democratic analysis of Occupy in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly with the concept of permanent destitution as developed by Marcello Tarì in There is no Unhappy Revolution, appearing in English with Common Notions this month. “Now comes the question of the reappropriation of violence, which the biopolitical democracies have, with all other intense expressions of life, so perfectly dispossessed”
The US saw some of the largest riots and protests in its history this year in response to the continuing police murder of black people – most recently the Walter Wallace Rebellion in Philadelphia. Yet there has been scant attention paid to the innovations in struggle specific to these logical revolts. Shemon & Arturo take another look at the phenomenon of car-looting and argue that this tactic is inseparable from black liberation
David Graeber, academic, anthropologist and revolutionary died on 4 September, 2020 in hospital in Venice. To mark his passing and celebrate his life and work, including his contribution to Mute, we publish this eulogy by his friend and comrade Sophie Carapetian
In his review of the recent book Class Power on Zero-Hours (PM Press, 2020), Danny Hayward reflects with enthusiasm on AngryWorkers' attempt to pop the left's cosmopolitan bubble, following their journey through the warehouses, factories and customer fulfilment centres of suburban West London, to reveal the mass of contradictions presently known as the UK
To coincide with Danny Hayward's review of Class Power on Zero-Hours we asked the AngryWorkers for permission to publish two excerpts from their recent book
In a 2015 London Review of Books essay Fredric Jameson briefly imagines the Bolshevik Party as a kind of time machine. The party is a device by means of which Leninist revolutionaries effect a collective leap into the future:
In unprecedented numbers, UK universities are on strike. The UCU-led action broaches the full spectrum of neoliberal misery to which the marketised university subjects both workers and students, via the ‘Four Fights’ of pay, workload, equality and casualisation. Even London’s Royal College of Art, latterly regarded as immune to workplace politics of radical solidarity, is experiencing a historic resurgence of unionising and protest. Its loudly trumpeted status as ‘No. 1’ Art and Design university bore a shadow-side, it transpired, as the sector’s top employer of casualised labour.
On the politics of the pandemic and organising to protect those most vulnerable I know my left wing friends don't want to talk about coronavirus, but to me what is happening right now is terrifying and raises political questions at every level. I would like to see friends talking and thinking about what a political response might look like.
Interview conducted on September 12, 2019 by ACTA, on the occasion of the publication of Baschet’s new book on the Gilets Jaunes uprising, Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde
1 When you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. I guess they exist outside the borderline of what you call ‘kindness’. Kindness which in your mouth has the consistency of raw sewage. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice. 2
People have theorised recent social movements as memes before. However, they tend to make the phrase eclipse the content, placing the (representational) meme over the (real) movement. In the following article, Paul Torino & Adrian Wohlleben, two American participants in the Gilets jaunes struggle in France, discern an inverse logic in play. This is not so much a movement that uses memes to make symbolic demands as a form of movement as meme.
Marina Vishmidt, a much loved and deeply formative contributor for our magazine from its early years, tragically passed away at the end of April. The scale, originality and influence of Marina’s achievement — as well as the playful and irreverent ways in which she partook in and shaped collective life — has been documented in many recent writings (lucid and affecting Instagram posts, articles, obituaries and Substacks, which are ongoing).
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen contrasts Judith Butler's democratic analysis of Occupy in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly with the concept of permanent destitution as developed by Marcello Tarì in There is no Unhappy Revolution, appearing in English with Common Notions this month. “Now comes the question of the reappropriation of violence, which the biopolitical democracies have, with all other intense expressions of life, so perfectly dispossessed”
The US saw some of the largest riots and protests in its history this year in response to the continuing police murder of black people – most recently the Walter Wallace Rebellion in Philadelphia. Yet there has been scant attention paid to the innovations in struggle specific to these logical revolts. Shemon & Arturo take another look at the phenomenon of car-looting and argue that this tactic is inseparable from black liberation
David Graeber, academic, anthropologist and revolutionary died on 4 September, 2020 in hospital in Venice. To mark his passing and celebrate his life and work, including his contribution to Mute, we publish this eulogy by his friend and comrade Sophie Carapetian
In his review of the recent book Class Power on Zero-Hours (PM Press, 2020), Danny Hayward reflects with enthusiasm on AngryWorkers' attempt to pop the left's cosmopolitan bubble, following their journey through the warehouses, factories and customer fulfilment centres of suburban West London, to reveal the mass of contradictions presently known as the UK
To coincide with Danny Hayward's review of Class Power on Zero-Hours we asked the AngryWorkers for permission to publish two excerpts from their recent book
In a 2015 London Review of Books essay Fredric Jameson briefly imagines the Bolshevik Party as a kind of time machine. The party is a device by means of which Leninist revolutionaries effect a collective leap into the future:
In unprecedented numbers, UK universities are on strike. The UCU-led action broaches the full spectrum of neoliberal misery to which the marketised university subjects both workers and students, via the ‘Four Fights’ of pay, workload, equality and casualisation. Even London’s Royal College of Art, latterly regarded as immune to workplace politics of radical solidarity, is experiencing a historic resurgence of unionising and protest. Its loudly trumpeted status as ‘No. 1’ Art and Design university bore a shadow-side, it transpired, as the sector’s top employer of casualised labour.
On the politics of the pandemic and organising to protect those most vulnerable I know my left wing friends don't want to talk about coronavirus, but to me what is happening right now is terrifying and raises political questions at every level. I would like to see friends talking and thinking about what a political response might look like.
Interview conducted on September 12, 2019 by ACTA, on the occasion of the publication of Baschet’s new book on the Gilets Jaunes uprising, Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde
1 When you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. I guess they exist outside the borderline of what you call ‘kindness’. Kindness which in your mouth has the consistency of raw sewage. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice. 2
People have theorised recent social movements as memes before. However, they tend to make the phrase eclipse the content, placing the (representational) meme over the (real) movement. In the following article, Paul Torino & Adrian Wohlleben, two American participants in the Gilets jaunes struggle in France, discern an inverse logic in play. This is not so much a movement that uses memes to make symbolic demands as a form of movement as meme.