
#11: Already, Not Yet
The Delusions of Decline: Biden Quits Afghanistan
by the Salvage Editorial Collective
On the spleen, lachrymosity, crybullying, amnesia, sanctimony, stupidity, entitlement and tantrums of imperial decline.
Did You Know?
by Heba Hayek
Extract from Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies.
Left Fukuyamaism: Politics in Tragic Times
by Barnaby Raine
Stalinism 2.0; or, living with the desolation of past hopes. Everything old is new again, only more ironic-but-also-completely-sincere.
Selected Images
by Patty Paine
Art.
Nothing and Everything: Mourning Against Work
by Sarah Jaffe
What’s left to grieve when mass death, climate catastrophe, and police murder fill our present? All of it. And more.
The Darker Shades of Green
by Kevin Ochieng Okoth
Left decline; AfD stagnation; Green decay. Things do not fall apart: the centre, it turns out, can hold. Making sense of the German elections.
Denial Futures
by Tad DeLay
Such violent delusions have violent ends. Dispatches from the late Capitalocene.
What’s ‘Left’ of Lulism?
by Luísa Calvete Portela Barbosa
Lula. Bolsonaro. Lula again? A survey of the past, present, and future of the Workers’ Party.
That Beauty Which Hath Terror In It:
In Praise of Nature Writing
by Richard Seymour
For a counter-extinction, rapturous engagement with all the natural wonder capital would steal from us. Escape without escapism.
Histories of People, Histories of Rupture
by Jules Joanne Gleeson
Who writes our history? Who decides who we are? A brief consideration of two approaches to queer history.
Communism, the Manifesto and Hate
by China Miéville
Notes on the inevitability, necessity, purity and perfection of a scandalous emotion.
Special Plants
by Heba Hayek
Extract from Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies.
From This Issue
Communism, the Manifesto, and Hate
Against the rolling eyes of the know-all cynic, we should retain shock at those litanies of iniquity capitalism throws up. That they provoke in us an appropriate, human, humane response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering. Who would we be not to hate this system, and its partisans?
The Darker Shades of Green
So what role will, or can, Germany’s next government play in enabling the social and economic transformation so desperately needed to address the climate crisis? Above all, the Merkel era provided a bulwark against any sort of social-ecological transformation.
Denial Futures
We are, all of us, in denial about what awaits us in the Changes. Not just the conservatives. Liberals and social democrats deny as well; so too does the Left. Denial is repression, the putting away of an unpleasant idea. We deny because we are human. We repress. Repression and the return of the repressed are the same. What cannot be confronted converts into stranger commitments and violence.
What’s ‘Left’ of Lulism?
In the end, the most crucial question for Brazil is not where the left is, or who can replace Lula, but what kind of society is ‘left’ when the opposition retreats?
Histories of People, Histories of Rupture
There are clear limits to how many political victories can be won through disputes over points-of-fact. But this ‘popular’ face of queer history does not seem likely to exhaust itself yet.
That Beauty Which Hath Terror In It: In Praise of Nature Writing
Both ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, in this sense, are for spectators. We visit, and contemplate, but do not participate. Yet this suggests that any nature worth writing about is always somewhere else. Must nature writing, to achieve its world-defamiliarizing, transcendent effect, take us to Great Scenery – forests, islands, frozen seas, mountains, ocean floors, jungle canopies, river deltas, landscapes criss-crossed with hedgework forming rumpled parallelograms – made remote by the territorial matrix of the capitalist state?
Nothing and Everything: Mourning Against Work
The lack of time and consideration for grief in particular is built into the capitalist mode of production, which cannot care if humans die. Capitalism cannot pause for death or accommodate the inherent weakness, frailty, and emotionality of human bodies.
Left Fukuyamaism: Politics in Tragic Times
The campists are right, not about the states they defend or the revolutions they condemn or defile, but about this. They bear witness to the awkwardness that accompanies talk of hope and freedom and equality today. In a sense, they embrace the recognition that these are strange and foreign terms now, and so in wielding them they choose to sound like cynics and not like the feebler ingenue.
The Delusions of Decline: Biden Quits Afghanistan
If truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps the last thing to die is bloodthirsty sanctimony. Biden, once a hawkish advocate of the ‘war on terror’, had little choice but to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. US military strategy had collapsed, as even the Pentagon had finally recognised. The fictitious state in Kabul had no independent means of survival. Afghanistan had overwhelmingly turned against the occupation.