Caedmon’s Dream: On the Politics of Style
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. – George Orwell In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing. – Oscar Wilde Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what? – Angela Carter ‘All...
The Demise of the International Proletariat of France
We had nearly the same number of immigrants twenty years ago. But they had another name then: they were called migrant workers or just plain workers. Today’s immigrant is first a worker who has lost his second name, who has lost the political form of his identity and...
Silence In Debris: Towards an Apophatic Marxism
Once there had been the subterranean language with the underground forces. If speech at all then it was the spaces between words, and the echoes the words left, or what might be really meant under the surface. Ann Quin, ‘The Unmapped Country’ The problem with Marxism...
The Person, Historical Time and the Universalisation of Capital
In 1938, Marcel Mauss gave a lecture entitled ‘Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de “moi”’ (‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person, the notion of “self”’). The lecture traces various historical configurations of the ‘person’,...
ISSUE 7 – AUTUMN 2019
Towards the Proletarocene
Towards the Proletarocene: Salvage Relaunched
Salvage is – still – a journal of revolutionary arts and letters. ‘Hope must be abandoned before it can be salvaged,’ we wrote at the time of our launch in 2015. Now that it appears hope is to be so salvaged – cautiously, urgently, warily, exuberantly – we...
Gestational Decrim
‘Liberté, égalité, paternité!’ In France, a coalition headed up by the neoreactionary network ‘La Manif Pour Tous’ (the Demo for Everyone) is calling for a mass demonstration on 6 October 2019 to protest against a proposed law that would extend access to certain...
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Online Exclusives
‘The Function of Autonomy’: Félix Guattari and New Revolutionary Prospects
Félix Guattari is widely discussed among philosophers, particularly feminists and specialists in ecology and technology. But in the Anglophone world, political organisers tend to ignore him. In part this is due to academic paywalls and university strictures confining...
Lebanon: A Ruling Class in Perpetual Crisis
by Elia El Khazen
On May 6th, citizens of Lebanon had the opportunity to vote in a general election for the first time in nine years.
“The Architecture and Anatomy of Political Consciousness”: An Interview with Tithi Bhattacharya
Jordy Rosenberg: Since so many Salvage readers are in the UK, could you talk a bit about your how you see the West Virginia strike in relation to the UK strikes. I know you've been in touch with comrades on both fronts, and I'm wondering if you'd like to discuss...
Pleasure and Provocation: Kay Gabriel Interview with Jordy Rosenberg
Jordy Rosenberg: Can you speak a bit about your formation as a poet and a Marxist? You've founded (at least) two different poetry collectives - Negative Press, "a gay Marxist poetry collective," and Vetch, a magazine of "trans poetry and poetics." How does your own...
Burial at Sea
A glance at the results of the Italian election in March confirms that the trend towards the populist right continues to gather strength in Europe. Support for the Five Star Movement sharply increased in the southern regions and in the islands particularly. I had...
Open letter to the picket-line crossers
Dear colleague, Over the past few weeks of the UCU strike to defend pensions, you have repeatedly crossed picket lines of lecturers and students from your institution. Many of us have asked you to support an action aimed at preventing the imposition of pension poverty...
From the Archive
The Left, Corbyn and Labour’s Future: An Interview with Alex Nunns
Richard Seymour: Reading your book on Corbyn [The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power, O/R Books, 2016], one is immediately struck by the fact that you have opted for an incredibly detailed, textured history and analysis. There’s a sense in which a...
Ragpicking Through History: Class Memory, Class Struggle and its Archivists
In 1990, I watched the Polish film maker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance (1981/1987) without registering the paralyzing potential of a particular scene. The protagonist, Witek, meets an old Communist by chance on a train. As a result of that meeting Witek decides...
How Syriza Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Status Quo
Two years have passed since the Greek government, composed of Syriza and the right-wing “Independent Greeks” party, bowed to the pressure of the European “institutions”, following a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Greeks rejected further EU-imposed...
