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• Re-thinking Marx's Capital today—"a politics of revolt and the poetry of the future"

  Earlier this week, Fredric Jameson was interviewed by Rabble.ca, one of Canada's most progressive media outlets, to discuss his recent book Representing Capital and to remind readers of the continued relevance of Marx in the 21st century. He explains the urgency of Marx not so much in terms of nostalgic affirmations of a pastoral communist vision, but as a tremendous resource for understanding the deeper nature of crisis, unemployment and globalization, which, needless to say, are among the most defining political and economic issues of the present. In the interview, Jameson emphasizes the indispensability of Marx's magnum opus and its value in finding alternative ways of thinking through the structural effects of this "infernal machine that is capitalism." Also, clarifying some of the prevailing misconceptions and obfuscations made by others over Marx's original thoughts, he points to the possibilities for today's readers of being nourished by the surprising timeliness and force of much of Capital's analyses. For instance, he is particularly hopeful about the book's ability to guide readers to overcome much of the "self-defeating conservatism" currently hobbling today's Left.

  He mentions, for example, that:

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  By Michael Bacal / 15 February 2012 / post comment

• Competition now closed: win Fredric Jameson books to mark new Vorticists exhibition

  To mark the new exhibition, Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, which opens at the Tate Britain today, Verso are giving away Fredric Jameson's classic book, Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, along with two of his other books. 

  While Fables of Agression primarily focuses on Wyndham Lewis' novels, Lewis was also the founder of the short-lived avant-garde Vorticist art and poetry movement. Among its other key members were the artists Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and it was also linked with modernist poets Ezra Pound, who gave the movement its name, and T. S Eliot). 

  The Tate exhibition focuses on the art of the Vorticist movement and the paintings of Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, showcased in the only two Vorticist exhibitions ever to have taken place. It also highlights the often overlooked female Vorticists, who included Helen Saunders and Dorothy Shakespear. From the exhibition blurb: 

  Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I. This exhibition celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition ...

  This exhibition aims to shine a new light on this revolutionary group of artists, presenting the style, radical aesthetics and thoughts of one of the most truly avant-garde art movements in British history.

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  By Tamar Shlaim / 14 June 2011 / 7 comments