JON BALDWIN recommends a provocative assertion of how working-class culture can rethink knowledge
Blood sacrifice for profit
ANDY HEDGECOCK recommends the application of ‘Gothic Marxism’ for its memorable portrayal of the physical violence done to working people
PRIMAL SITE OF VIOLENCE: The Chicago meatpacking yards, 1909, where jounalist and novelist Upton Sinclair spent seven weeks in 1904 gathering information for his novel The Jungle while working incognito for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason
These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE, JOHN GREEN and ANGUS REID review An Army of Women, Julie Keeps Quiet, The Friend and The Ugly Stepsister
GORDON PARSONS squirms at a production that attempts to update Shakespeare’s comedy to a tale of Premier League football
Above a Gothic bar just down from Brighton station, something spooky is happening, suggests JAMES WALSH
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MIK SABIERS enjoys the theatrical feminist six piece who have a lot of fun that the audience feeds off as the set rolls on
Capitalism: A Horror Story
by Jon Greenaway, Repeater Books, £10.99
STUDIES of the radical imagination tend to emphasise gritty realism at the expense of the irrational. Jon Greenaway’s latest book corrects this imbalance by highlighting links between capitalism’s real-world atrocities and the imaginatively constructed evils of the horror genre.
The approach employed, “Gothic Marxism,” draws on the objectivity of Marxist analysis, but is also rooted in the traditions of romanticism. Greenaway sees it as a philosophy that allows us to reinterpret the past, describe the horrors of contemporary society and theorise about a utopian future. Specifically, it supports a radical interpretation of the literature and films of the horror genre.
The book outlines the long history of supernatural and macabre imagery in critiques of capitalism. For example, Marx and Engels opened the Communist Manifesto (1848) with the phrase “A spectre is haunting Europe” and, in the first volume of Capital, Marx’s metaphors are soaked in the blood and viscera of exploited workers. According to Greenaway, this language was not chosen for impact or decoration, but to capture the severity of the damage wrought by capitalism.
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