| Sean Bonney | : | Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud |
| Ray Challinor | : | The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War |
| Ben Watson | : | Adorno for Revolutionaries |
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Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud
ISBN: 978-0-9568176-6-2
Published: Sep 2011, 128pp
It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.
Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in 1871, just as the Paris Commune was being blown off the map. He wanted to be there. It’s all he talked about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world you have to point simple shit like that out. But then again, these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. |
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The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War
ISBN: 978-0-9568176-1-7
Published: Sep 2011, 128pp
This book of essays is a shocking read, but the shocks arrive from the history itself, not sensationalist writing. We’ve been told that the Second World War was a war against evil waged by the goodhearted and true. The spectre of Hitler and Nazism is invoked every time NATO bombs are aimed at a defenceless country.
In his scathing account of ruling-class fears, plans and allegiances, Ray Challinor shows how much their every move was governed by competition and self-interest – and anxieties about popular reaction. His evidence shatters the comforting national myth which has been spun around the cataclysm – and shows that people, working-class people, do not like killing each other, they had to be cajoled and manipulated into doing so.
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Adorno for Revolutionaries
ISBN: 978-0-9568176-0-0
Published: May 2011, 256pp
Starting with the commodity form (rather than the 'spirit' lauded by everyone from Classic FM retards to NME journalists), Adorno outlined a revolutionary musicology, a passageway between subjective feeling and objective conditions. In Adorno for Revolutionaries, Ben Watson argues that this is what everyone's been looking for since the PCF blackened the name of Marxism by wrecking the hopes of May '68. Batting aside postmodern prattlers and candyass pundits alike, this collection detonates the explosive core of Adorno's thought.
The Association of Musical Marxists says: Those 'socialists' who are frightened of their feelings can go stew in their imaginary bookshop. For us, great music is a necessity. To talk about it is to criticize everything that exists. |
"For those who have the ears to hear I strongly recommend Adorno For Revolutionaries as a substantial and very readable effort." Dave Black, Hobgoblin
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