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THE AVANT-GARDE WAS A MODERN THING. It came in the middle of the nineteenth century, circa 1848, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as the proletariat multiplied and the democratic spirit became enamored of the absolutist state under the bewitching spell of the antagonism of capital and labor. As the art critic Clement Greenberg noted in his classic essay, “Avant Garde and Kitsch”: One and the same civilization produces simultaneously such different things as a poem by T. [Read More]

CAPITALISM IS IN A MOVING CONTRADICTION in that it presses to reduce labor employed to a minimum and yet posits wage labor as the only way for 99 percent of people to make a living. People may recognize this as a simplified (or bastardized, if you like) version of a section of Marx’s contentious “Fragment on Machines.” At first glance, substituting “wage labor” for “labor-time” may appear to dilute the problem. [Read More]

Frans Ari Prasetyo is an independent researcher and photographer. He is with the Ethnography Lab, University of Toronto. He works on urban politics with various grassroots communities, underground collectives and the urban marginalized. He can be reached at fransariprasetyo@gmail.com. INDONESIA PROMISED AN AMBITIOUS PROGRAM of agrarian reform. Based on that ambition, Jokowi’s government released a presidential regulation on agrarian reform. This was done, together with the 2018 Global Land Forum meeting, in Bandung, several months before the presidential election. [Read More]

This article originally appeared in Die Platypus Review #10 in German.1 It has been translated into English by Clint Montgomery. WHEN IT COMES TO LYOTARD’S POSTMODERN THESIS about the end of grand narratives, from enlightenment to historicism, everybody knows he’s talking about Marx. Politically speaking, no other grand narrative survived the 19th century. For the fate of the enlightenment stood revealed in its stance toward socialism: since the emergence of the workers’ movement, liberalism was left with two options, either curtail its own ideals in cultural pessimism or just straight up make camp with the enemy. [Read More]