MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray
Class struggle at the video games console
BEN COWLES recommends an excellent Marxist critique of the video-games industry
Playing with Marx: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
The Bard commutes to work for the first time in 45 years
GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead
GEORGE FOGARTY relishes the music of black British artists that channels Carribbean, Latin and club sounds, along with contemporary west African radicalism
CHRIS SEARLE hears the ordeal of the Palestinian people in the improvised musicianship of a UK jazz trio
DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
(Haymarket Books, £12.99)
ON THE face of it, Marxists might not seem to have all that much to say about video games and gamers might not necessarily have all that much interest in Marx. But Jamie Woodcock’s brilliant book explains why they both should.
Marx made his video game debut in 2015 in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. And it was while playing through a sequence where one of the villains belittle the game’s protagonist while delivering a monologue on the industrial “miracle” that brought him his cup of tea, that Woodcock realised the vast complexity of the video game industry.
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