“Marx Reloaded” is a cultural documentary (52 min., ZDF/ ARTE, 2011) that examines the relevance of German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx’s ideas for understanding the global economic and financial crisis of 2008—09. The crisis triggered the deepest global recession in 70 years and prompted the US government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from collapse. Today the full implications of the crisis in Europe and around the world still remain unclear. Nevertheless, should we accept the crisis as an unfortunate side-effect of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why it happened and its likely effects on our society, our economy and our whole way of life?
Today a new generation of philosophers, artists and political activists are returning to Marx’s ideas in order to try to make sense of the crisis and to consider whether a world without or beyond capitalism is possible. Is the severity of the ongoing recession a sign that the capitalist system’s days are numbered? Ironically, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, could it be that communism might provide the solution to the growing economic and environmental challenges facing the planet?
Written and directed by Jason Barker – himself an experienced writer, lecturer, translator and doctor of philosophy – “Marx Reloaded” comprises interviews with leading thinkers on Marxism, including those at the forefront of a popular revival in Marxist and communist ideas. The film also includes interviews with leading skeptics of this revival as well as light-hearted animation sequences which follow Marx’s adventures through the matrix of his own ideas.
Interviews with leading experts include: Norbert Bolz, Micha Brumlik, John Gray, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Nina Power, Jacques Rancière, Peter Sloterdijk, Alberto Toscano, Slavoj Zizek.
Impossible to have a drink at JFK airport without showing your ID whatever your age is (Michel Foucault was so right when he said more than 30 years ago that the Society of surveillance is replacing the old society of repression), New York. Photo Olivier Zahm
André is known on the street by his graffiti-artist alter-ego’s tag, Mr. A, and for his “Love Graffiti” concept. Mr. A is a funny round face with a huge smile and a wink that follows you everywhere. You can spot him all over the world — often in pink! — a color pretty much taboo in the graffiti world, although not when it’s used with André’s monochromatic style. Love Graffiti features tags of people’s names commissioned by their loved ones. André does them in pop colors on surfaces near to where the people live so that they can’t miss seeing them.
Most of the street graffiti of the past 20 years involved street artists painting anonymous tags for an anonymous crowd. Some of these artists merely stained a depressing urban landscape; a few others, such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KAWS, Neckface, and, of course, Samo, went on to become famous gallery artists. André always resisted abandoning the street for the galleries. Rather, he’s given graffiti art a new dimension by presenting it in the clubs and nightspots he participates in opening and promoting all over the world. In doing so he has proactively changed the nightlife of Paris, New York, Tokyo, and other cities. He has reinterpreted the meaning of graffiti art from that of an underground opposition to that of a friendlier and more utopian alternative. André is one of those rare people able to make things happen naturally and his generosity is amply expressed in the romantic nightspots he creates.
After going from the walls of the street to the walls of the clubs, André’s next move was choosing drawing over classic canvas work. In his quiet moments he prefers drawing on scraps of paper or in notebooks. This work he rarely shares with others — it’s the product of a personal and intimate activity, one he keeps far from the commercialism of art. Here is a selection of drawings André made especially for the Colette Show and for Purple, drawings influenced by the psychedelic love imagery of the ’60s and ’70s and by André’s memories of the comic books he read as a child. In his world drawings have a special currency — they’re like billets-doux to share love. For André, the only way to escape the smothering blanket of capitalism, in or out of the art world, is with the things money can’t buy: love.
I only discovered Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) after reading his posthumously published Travels with Herodotus, whom he describes as “a consummate reporter: he wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he can later note down what he learned and saw, or simply to remember later,” and which accurately fits Kapuściński.
Named journalist of the century by his native Poland, Kapuściński was for decades his country’s only foreign correspondent, covering Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He was jailed 40 times and faced life-threatening situations with the equanimity of a person used to living with it. Since publishing Travels with Herodotus, the reporter, poet, and author has hit Macolm Gladwell’s now famous “tipping point,” when recognition rises to form a new cultural meme, to use Richard Dawkins’ term for a cultural unit of information. He wrote brilliantly on Africa (The Shadow of the Sun), the last days of the Soviet Union (Imperium), Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia (Emperor), and the five-day war, in 1969, between El Salvador and Honduras over a soccer match.
Maybe because he’d lived under Stalin’s maddening shadow, Brezhnev’s detente, and perestroika’s move toward openness, Kapuściński had the requisite talent and imagination to put into perspective the awkward opposition between European and American capitalism, whose supermarkets, as he notes in The Shadow of the Sun, brim with “every conceivable object that man has ever invented and produced, and subsequently transported, stowed, and piled up, all of which results in the customer not having to think about anything,” and the greater world beyond. In Africa, he writes, in comparison, “a single bowl, a handful of grain, a sip of water … a nothing becomes a deeply significant something because … imagination anoints and exalts it.” In all of his books the forces of symbolism and myth bang up against capitalist consumerism and its inculcated logic, framing his humanistic worldview. He’s been criticized for inaccuracies, but what he saw and felt, and the clarity of his prose, offer a necessary realism about the hungry margins of the world and their looming, unresolved, and perhaps irresolvable relationship to the over-sated center. Read him.
