#FridayFlashback

Rowan Fortune

Jun 18, 2021
11 min

Notes on British Transphobia

In this essay I explored a very British oppression and the hope that solidarity can offer. It was first published by the A*CR on 5 Jan 2020. This is my final re-released #FridayFlashback essay. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. ~ Karl Marx In his excoriating essay ‘Notes on the English Character’, novelist E. M. Forster located the

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Rowan Fortune

Jun 11, 2021
11 min

The Limits of Professional Socialism

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is a look back at various third way ideologies, arguing that they all have their origins in the same political impasse and compromises. It was first published 9 May 2020 on Time To Mutiny. Much of life under lockdown has been taken up in a series of Zoom meetings on socialist theory. One of the more interesting I have attended, organised by local Momentum activists, took on the ideas of

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Eugenics: utopian obscenity to culture war

Rowan Fortune

Jun 4, 2021
6 min

Eugenics: utopian obscenity to culture war

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay explored a Twitter controversy around eugenics, Richard Dawkins, the Tory Party, and Malthusianism, asking, why does this bad idea keep haunting capitalism? It was first published 18 Feb 2020 on Time To Mutiny. The ephemera of social media are often best ignored. Throwaway trends can become all consuming (and even time wasting) for online left activists, soon vanishing from public memory

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Rowan Fortune

May 28, 2021
7 min

Socialist Misery and World Catastrophe

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay accepts that the crisis is ahead of us and has never been so stark, but argues that the temptation to retreat into pessimism, miserablism and indifference must be resisted. It was first published by Mutiny 24 July 2020. The stakes ahead are stark. Any global realignment towards a capitalist political hegemony to overcome the twinned disasters facing our species—climate change and economic

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Rowan Fortune

May 21, 2021
3 min

Domestic Dystopias

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is a review of Unheimlich Manoevres in the Dark. It was first published Feb 21 2020. How do we traverse an ‘uncanny world; a place of unquiet homes, bitter-sweet memories and domestic dystopias’? This is the conundrum driving Tracy Fahey’s fiction, steeped as it is in both a scholarly love of the history of horror as well a writers aptitude for finding new avenues for timeless puzzles. On

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Rowan Fortune

May 14, 2021
5 min

A Utopia of Writing

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is a look at Andrey Platonov’s essay ‘Factory of Literature’ . This essay was first published July 3 2020. Art is organically an essential part of life, just like sweating is part of a human body and motion is part of wind. I am advocating for the smell of the authors’ soul in his writings and simultaneously for the real faces of people and groups in the same work. Available online, intro

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Rowan Fortune

May 7, 2021
5 min

Organising Time

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is a look at time for Marx, Ricœur and Hudis; the vast concerns of an eternal scene. It was first published June 26 2020. Be wise to-day; ’tis madness to defer; Next day the fatal precedent will plead; Thus on, till wisdom is push’d out of life. Procrastination is the thief of time; Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves The vast concerns of an

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Rowan Fortune

Apr 30, 2021
4 min

Dreams from a Networked Scriptorium

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. This essay is about crises, Covid-19 and what shows through the cracks. It was first published June 19 2020. Over the last few weeks, as well as my usual run of manuscripts (novels, memoirs, etc.) I have worked daily on editing pieces (interviews, essays, reports, statements) for Mutiny, the socialist organisation to which I proudly belong. I have also put together videos; live-tweeted protests comr

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Rowan Fortune

Apr 23, 2021
4 min

You Have Only Your Silence to Lose

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about twhy the left must learn to write. It was first published June 5 2020. Thanks to the technologies of modern capitalism, shaped by profit seeking, many forms of self-expression once considered essentially human (dance, song, acting) have been professionalised. Where such activities are still encouraged, it is often uniquely in childhood. And how often do we look to children dancing

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Rowan Fortune

Apr 16, 2021
6 min

Dick’s Realities

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is a review of Philip K. Dick’s Time Out Of Joint, an exploration of Gnosticism and Postmodernism. It was first published May 22 2020. Because I’m the center of the universe. At least, that’s what I’ve inferred from their actions. They act as if I am. I only have that to go on. They’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to construct a sham world around me to keep me pacified. Buildings, cars,

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Rowan Fortune

Apr 9, 2021
6 min

It Would be Impious

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about apocolypse, revolution and Robinson Crusoe. It was first published May 15 2020. In the short story ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster, when the archetypal resident of the machine is informed of the titular event, namely the end of her world, she responds chiefly in disbelief, ‘It would be impious,’ says Vashti, ‘if it was not mad.’ There are many things to unpack about that stor

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Rowan Fortune

Apr 2, 2021
5 min

What Language Insists on Hiding

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The one is a review of Christopher Slatsky's book The Immeasurable Corpse of Nature. It was first published May 8 2020. Nature created glorious structures with no intent or foresight, the Giant’s Causeway being one such example. Competence without comprehension. The illusion of purpose by the purposeless. Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. Na

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Rowan Fortune

Mar 26, 2021
12 min

What’s Real After COVID-19?

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay, written in COVID-19's earlier days, explores the calamity and looks back to Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and Jacques Camatte's Against Domestication. It was first published April 3 2020. OVERCOMING THE SICK SOCIETY In Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Ambiguous Utopia’, The Dispossessed, the utopian Shevek visits a world closer to ours — contemporaneously —than the paradise from which he comes. He

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Rowan Fortune

Mar 19, 2021
5 min

Fiction and the Eternal Now

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay is about the need to imagine beyond our current circumstances, to see beyond. It was first published March 27 2020. I have always lived in London. I have always lived in this flat. I have always enjoyed this view over leafy Chiswick with its church spire and English-town illusion. Just like, when I lived in Tanygrisiau, I had always done so. Had always resided in that slate building. Had a

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Rowan Fortune

Mar 12, 2021
4 min

Disaster Clichés

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay, written in COVID-19's earlier days, is a response to the proliferation of thoughtless clichés at the time. It was first published March 20 2020. There’s always a silver lining; you have to make good of a bad situation; little did I know; you win some, you lose some; easy come, easy go; &c. &c. In these trying times we are spontaneously assaulted by a veritable deluge of readymade clichés

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Rowan Fortune

Mar 5, 2021
5 min

Bioshock’s Glorious Microcosm

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The essay contains spoilers for the plot of the game Bioshock. It was first published Feb 28 2020. To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. ~ William Blake A literary or narrative conceit I truly love is the use of a microcosm or synecdoche to parallel an overarching plot that contains it, providing a story withi

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Rowan Fortune

Feb 26, 2021
6 min

Reincarnation, Identity & Love

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The review of Jan Fortune’s Casilda Trilogy, which was first published January 24 2020. Memory, always made of objects; of good and bad smells, of faded photos in a shabby scrapbook. Trilogies are tricky. It is easy for the rival logics of stories to become unwieldy, to resist proximity. My mother Jan Fortune’s trilogy overcomes this by encoding repetitions and echoes into the heart of the overlapp

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Rowan Fortune

Feb 19, 2021
4 min

Learning Loss

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. The review of the children's Lovecraft book, The Old One and the Sea, was first published January 3 2020. In his introduction to Lex H Jones’s Lovecraftian children’s book (subtitled ‘For The Grown-Ups’), Jim Mcleod asks: ‘When do we introduce Horror to children?’ This question soon steps sideways into a related one, ‘How far do you dilute the horror and fluffy up a demon?’ Jones comes to the view

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Rowan Fortune

Feb 12, 2021
9 min

A Postmodern Cave

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. It was first published December 20 2019. All the astroid mining, Green New Deals and social democrats in the universe cannot stop the jack boots marching. ~Prolekult This is a review of Prolekult’s YouTube Marxist documentary (see below for embedded video). In the past I have critiqued BreadTube (the dominant community of leftist YouTube creators) for its subsumption into a media ecology that pollut

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Rowan Fortune

Feb 5, 2021
12 min

A Fascist Internet?

This is part of a #FridayFlashback series of re-edited and rereleased essays. Here I return to part two of a review of The Twittering Machine, looking at the mediocrity of online microcelebrity. It was first published December 6 2019. chapter 1. our parasocial malaise The telos of the clickbait economy is not postmodernism, but fascist kitsch. Last week I published a favourable review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, a book about the harms and potentials of socia

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