culture

Our art archive contains texts and content related to culture, art, music, literature, film and more.

Tom Jennings’ essay on cinema representations of European Asians & Muslims .

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.

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.

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".

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!

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."

A history of Surrealism and its links with politics and, in particular, anarchism and socialism.

The philosopher-psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek’s take on the aftermath of the September 11^th attacks, including his trademark references to popular culture to explain his Lacanian psychoanalysis. He presents a choice: “there are two fundamental ways to react to such traumatic events which cause unbearable anxiety: the way of superego and the way of the act”, and it is in ‘the act’ in which he sees the possibility to escape “the reassertion of the barbaric violence” (note: this is not the longer book of the same name).

A history of song, music and revolutionary working class politics in France from the 1789 Revolution up to the 1980s and punk.