I’ve periodically added various other things to the front page, like my Flickr photos and Last.fm loved tracks. If you read this blog via RSS, you won’t see these, which I imagine you’re fine with, but if not, they all have feeds of their own, and I’ve but together a Google Reader “bundle” which will let you subscribe to everything that shows up on the front page.

Related posts:

1. It’s wrong to wish on space hard­ware Is it? These Soviet space program matchboxes (linked to by owen) suggest not....
2. “The pos­si­bility of some­thing happening…” The English countryside was soporific. Cary didn’t agree with those who said it was boring. Certainly, it lacked the variety of a mountain vista, or even the romantic touch of a coast over the sea, but if you made an effort there was a certain fascination in the succession of...
3. Bumping in the back room I loved the new Girls Aloud track when I first heard a terrible quality radio rip. I was actually a little disappointed when I heard a proper quality version; it turns out my imagination had inserted a storming gay bassline (not that the real version doesn’t have a moderately storming...

All of which is to say, I hope you all have a good communist christmas.

Related posts:

1. A.C. Grayling: Ex­clu­sive video footage An 8 year old girl takes the Dawkins line on religion, enraging Bill O’Reilly....
2. Secular re­li­gion? John Gray in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago joined the trend of writing kind of stupidly about religion and secularism. Gray rather wants to have his cake and eat it, arguing that secularism is based on religion and, anyway, secularism is worse than religion. Now, the first  half...
3. Dawkins’s apologia The most recent of them have found the correct expression for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against “phrases.” They forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they...

Related posts:

1. I don’t miss JK and Joel though, ob­vi­ously I hadn’t realized until I was back in England over Christmas, but I kind of miss Radio 1. At least during the day, the playlist still has a vague remnant of a kind of public-service universalism, which is very different from the rigid demographic separation of American radion stations. Of...
2. “There’s a red star up on the Christmas tree” I think I may have been living in California too long, partly because I found myself saying “thank-you so much” to somebody the other day, and also because I was surprised yesterday when, on landing in London, the pilot wished everyone on the plane “Merry Christmas,” rather than some more...
3. Things to like on British TV Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on Celebrity Big Brother. The This Life special nostalgically reviving lazy mid-90s reflexive “irony” (Egg has written a book! Little does he know he is just a character himself!). The current state of British dance music, as filtered through ads for compilations. A surprisingly...

To me, at least, this version of commercial design as a neon-inflected industrial heroic is bizarre, but also oddly inspiring. Now, the 1930s were also a time of inspiring aesthetic and political movements: but perhaps too inspiring. The inter-war years had a level of radicalism I find difficult to imagine, and so it seems to me that any left-wing enthusiasm for the 30s runs a real risk of being nostalgic in a paralyzing way. What’s so interesting about the 1950s is that many of the things that appear so radical in the 1930s—technological progress, social democracy, modernist design—reappear in the 1950s as banal. I’m a fan of the banal in general, but especially in this case, where the imminent future of modernity appears to be in the process of making itself immanent, overlapping with the most trivial advert for swimsuits or ham.

What underlies this cultural shift, I think, or part of it, is that the 1950s had to deal with being the time in which the dreams of the 1930s came to pass, in William Morris’s sense:

But while I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name (A Dream of John Ball).

Whether through the construction of institutions that, if you squint, look a bit like socialism, or through consumerism’s fruition as a kind of neon simulacrum of the realm of freedom, the 1950s flickered between a genuine victory for collective social projects (the NHS, for instance), and a strangely nightmarish parody of the socialist vision (the job for life). The 1950s, then, were the end of history not as peaceful decline into senesence, but a terrifying combination of stasis and uncertainty.

Hence the 1950s’ particular attitude to the future. It’s not an accident, I think, that the flying cars and jetpacks that populate the future that seems to have gone missing are largely inventions of the 50s; our idea of future kitsch comes from the fact that it was in the 50s that the future became kitsch. The future as neither a grand and heroic telos, nor as an unattainable absurdity, but something else, or both at once.

But why resurrect the 50s now? Because perhaps we are still living in the 50s, in two senses. We live with an image of the future and a concept of futurity that was developed in the 50s; but we are also experiencing a sort of repetition-as-farce of the 50s. If the 50s were the period in which the dreams of the 1930s were, in their way, achieved, are the early years of the 21st century not the period in which the long neoliberal dream has finally achieved its full triumph? A rather parodic triumph, to be sure, as the market economy begins to fail even by its own curious standards. In which case, the 50s can be a useful reference point, a period of  both stasis and creation dialectically dependent on one another, and a reminder that the time of the end of history is not the end times.

Related posts:

1. Here is the rose, dance here I’ve quoted William Morris from A Dream of John Ball before: But while I pon­dered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what...
2. Googie apoc­a­lypse As I have my finger on the pulse of pop culture, I watched Wall-E on ABC Family yesterday, and I’m glad I did; with the 50s aesthetic and the social system based on laziness, it’s pretty much the film version of this blog. There’s an interesting aesthetic choice, which it...
3. The dis­ap­pearing pro­le­tariat Poetic as it is, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” is surely quite false, both as an empirical description of history and as a summary of Marx’s broader theory. For the same reason in both cases, in fact. It’s not true that, throughout...

You can, and should, complain vociferously about the harms and wrongs perpetrated by capitalism, but to describe them all as violence makes it impossible to distinguish between what happens when an multinational oil company raises its prices and when it pays to have people bullied off land above an oil deposit. Being paid a low wage and being shot in the head are two different things. If you use the same word for both you are muddling, weakening and misdirecting your argument.

Related posts:

1. Ul­tra­left re­formists The curious thing about communism is how blandly realistic it is. It’s a straightforward reformist demand: “yes, go ahead and reform capitalism, but the only conceivable change at this point is towards communism.” Consider the demands for a social wage: it’s the only form of payment that makes any kind...
2. Are they aware of pol­i­tics? As the University of California gears up for tomorrow’s day of action, I’ve been hearing one argument against the walkout that deserves a little further attention. This argument proposes that there is a contradiction in a protest in favor of education that proceeds by students and academics halting education for...
3. See also “revolutionist,” “communistical,” etc I’ve been reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. Above all, it makes me want to live in the twenties, when it would have been possible to call oneself a “Bolshevist,” but it is a fine book for many reasons, including this description of early Fordism: If all the advertising...

Related posts:

1. Obama: America’s Sarkozy? I was impressed with his willingness to look at the issues that France faces in a new ways, not bound by tradition and dogmas. — Obama on Sarkozy Of course, the main reason to hate Obama is the worry that, in a certain depressing sense, he’s right. Like Sarkozy, Obama...
2. Change must come through the barrel of De­mo­c­ratic party pro­ce­dure Much as I dislike George Bush, I don’t think he’s actually a Nazi. Which makes it doubly odd that he’s such a fan of facist-sounding language (the one that really does my head in is calling America “the homeland”). It seems like a strange kind of cultural illiteracy: Bush adopts...
3. Thesis titles I won’t use I’ve been thinking a bit about what I want to end up writing about; I’m having difficulty not scoring potential topics on the basis of how many Maoist poster titles I could work into the chapter titles. My current not-actually-going-to-use title is Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy: Action and Utopia...

Happy International Workers Day.

Related posts:

1. Some quotes from Marx A couple of quotes I happened to stumble across: The attitude of the General Council in regard to the “Religious Idea” is clearly shown by the following incident: — One of the Swiss branches of the Alliance, founded by Michael Bakunin, and calling itself Section des athées Socialistes, requested its...
2. “I can sit and stand / Beg and roll over” ...
3. I don’t miss JK and Joel though, ob­vi­ously I hadn’t realized until I was back in England over Christmas, but I kind of miss Radio 1. At least during the day, the playlist still has a vague remnant of a kind of public-service universalism, which is very different from the rigid demographic separation of American radion stations. Of...

Related posts:

1. What war? When I thought, while watching the new Girls Aloud video, “I wasn’t expecting that white phosphorous imagery,” I filed it away as the sort of trivial and rather bad taste joke twitter is made for. But the more I thought about it, the more odd it seemed. Is it a...
2. I really really really want a… A day when the Spice Girls are rumored to be reforming seems like an appropriate time to mention my surprise that, according to Google, no-one has made the obvious “zig-a-zig objet petit a” joke. Or maybe ten years ago it didn’t occur to anyone to use a global computer network...
3. Curse you, Richard Dawkins I had intended to return to a more regular blogging schedule with one or more tremendously scholarly posts about silent films. Obviously, the problem there is that I then don’t write anything at all until I’ve got time to discuss the finer details of Hegel’s relationship to Buster Keaton. So,...

Related posts:

1. What is Google taking when it takes our data? The internet is having one of its periodic freak-outs about a privacy policy change. Gawker posted a ridiculous, trolling article, which made its way onto Tumblr, and now is showing up in the Washington Post and on Democracy Now. The sentence causing all the concern is: In a radical privacy...
2. Ap­pro­pri­ately, the 1000th post is about why I don’t write so many posts One of the things I built in to the current design of this blog is that the layout for posts, and most especially for the front page, only really makes sense for long-ish posts. My thought here was that Twitter would take the strain of short comments and “hey look...
3. FOR THE UNCON­DITIONAL DEFENSE OF PARIS HILTON AGAINST ANTI­SEMITIC WITCH­HUNTS The pious outrage Thursday over heiress Paris Hilton’s “early release” from jail in Los Angeles, accusations of “special treatment” and the vindictive demands that she receive “justice,” i.e., punishment, have nothing healthy or progressive about them. Excellent article about Paris Hilton on the World Socialist Website. While k-punk’s criticisms of...

Ufologists and scientists were greatly disappointed when they found out that the fishermen had eaten the monster. They said that they were not scared of the creature so they decided to use it as food. One of the men said that it was the most delicious dish he had ever eaten

Related posts:

1. In a May that began with demon­stra­tions for open borders and against the war… Adam asks, “what happened to Hardt and Negri?” An interesting question; the current lack of interest in them is rather surprising, given that Empire was and is pretty much entirely correct. I was reminded of this by a post on ads without products, in which: When it gets to the...
2. The in­ternet didn’t kill news­pa­pers; news­pa­pers killed news­pa­pers I didn’t include American newspaper readers in my earlier credulity index because, hilariously, American newspaper readers are not merely credulous, but adulatory. Hence their mistaken belief that there’s something still alive for the internet to kill. On the contrary; if the internet can destroy the rotting corpse that gives off...
3. DEFEND NORTH KOREAN SO­CIALISM AND THE GLO­RIOUS PEOPLE’S BOMB FROM BEIJING RE­VAN­CHIST OP­POR­TUNISM AND SEOUL-WASHINGTON-IAEA FASCIST AG­GRES­SION Well, not really, obviously. Nuclear bombs anywhere are hardly good news, and I’m not going to endorse North Korea as an example of good government, socialism, or anything else. Still, I’m quite scared enough that the US has nuclear weapons, and I find it difficult to be any more worried...