Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

Playwright, poet and activist Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) was known for his theory of the Epic Theatre and his attempts to break down the division between high art and popular culture. The Threepenny Opera, his collaboration with composer Kurt Weill, was a milestone in musical theatre, and plays like Mother Courage and Galileo changed the course of modern drama and aesthetic theory. Framed by two world wars, the Weimar Republic and a global depression, Nazism and exile and East German socialism, Brecht’s own life became a project, illuminating and intervening in the ongoing crisis of modern experience, shaped by capitalism, nationalism and visions of social utopia. Brecht ...

Italy’s iconic revolutionary author offers a requiem for the rebels of 1968, of the Hot Autumn and the Creeping May, imagining a blackout like New York City’s famous moment of chaos and in this framework trying to understand the political events that led to the brutal repression and destruction of a generation. Ferocious, despairing, beautiful line by line, this book captures the era we cannot stop leaving.

This conversation was recorded to be featured in our March-April 2021 issue “The Paris Commune and the World” for the 150th anniversary of the Commune. In 2016, Geo Maher published a book entitled Building the Commune (Verso & Jacobin) that describes the last ten years of communal councils’ existence in Venezuela during Hugo Chávez’s presidency. Inspired both by the Paris Commune and Indigenous and Maroon praxes, the Venezuelan communes constitute a key example of the political formations we are trying to analyse throughout this issue. Geo Maher is a Philadelphia-based writer, organizer, and educator. He is the author of three books: ...

I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just ...

The teach-in and festival will focus on the term communisation that recently have become a term for debate within ultra-left revolutionary theory and practice. The days we spent together will consist of a combination of theoretical and practical workshops and film activities, such as screenings and a communist film production workshop. “Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power […]. All past movements were able to bring society to a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money […] ...

Arrancamos un nuevo año con Mario Aguiriano (del podcast Café Marx) y Kolitza. Hablamos sobre la crisis, el comunismo, la pandemia, Marx, las limitaciones de la sociodemocracia y una presentación breve del movimiento GKS (gazte koordinadora sozialista). Música de J.Martina, Harrga y Mattin.

Federica showed up for her appointment with the person who had agreed to purchase her soul. Thus begins Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Massimiliano Geraci’s novel Morte ai Vecchi (Death to the old), in which a device called KapSoul delivers “waves of empathic excitement” to young people before they descend into orgiastic violence against the elderly. The first serial installment of the translated novel is published in this issue of e-flux journal, with further installments coming in the near future. Also in this issue, Jonas Staal illuminates the Martian designs of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, with their unabashedly extractive colonial ambitions. But Staal also reminds ...

About a year ago, while trying to develop a wiki archive for contemporary art at e-flux, we encountered a small technical problem in deciding how to implement a simple menu structure to allow readers to navigate such an archive. We thought first to organize it according to movement. Yet there have been no significant movements in the past twenty years, and artists have not been interested in organizing themselves around any. By medium? But contemporary artists work with their materials in a variety of different, and more often hybrid, ways. By geographic region? Well, that approach is probably better suited ...

This month in e-flux journal, we are pleased to present a special issue focusing on Moscow Conceptualism, guest-edited by Boris Groys in conjunction with an exhibition of the work of Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, curated by Groys and on view at e-flux until January 6, 2012. The essays in the issue take the works and activities of the Moscow Conceptualists—among whom Monastyrski was a central figure—as a departure point for interrogating not only the specific concerns of a small group of advanced artists working in relative obscurity in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, but also how the modest artistic ...

These days, it is fairly clear that we consider art to be a trans-disciplinary field in a position to nurture other disciplines, and to be nurtured by these other disciplines in turn. As promising as this might sound, the terms for this exchange become significant, because it remains unclear what exactly we presume art to offer to the world. When hard pressed, we usually prefer not to prequalify the nature of artistic contribution at all, because in fact artists reserve the right to offer nothing other than doing work on their own terms. This requires a delicate balance, and it ...