Fully Automated Luxury Socialism: Oscar Wilde’s Antiwork Politics

Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination

Oscar Wilde is regarded as the emblematic figure of Aestheticism and Art for Art’s sake and thus of the autonomisation of the arts in late nineteenth-century Britain. That is why The Soul of Man under Socialism, his most overtly political essay, published in The Fornightly Review in February 1891, has often baffled critics and elicited contradictory responses. This article shows how The Soul of Man under Socialism articulates politics and aesthetics and it looks into its afterlives, in particular its publishing history in Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as some of the readings and reinterpretations it has prompted in the academic field, more specifically the political uses of this essay in the context of British queer theory. The aim of the article is to highlight the way Wilde’s essay reflects and problematizes the uneasy negotiation between words and action, aesthetics and politics, art and commitment and raises questions that are still relevant today.

Review: <i>Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media</i>, by Claudia Costa Pederson

Editorial paper for the guest-edited special issue Utopia and Fashion “Utopia and Fashion” comes at a time when the fashion industry faces a self-inflicted crisis that forces it to fundamentally rethink its own future. The desire to address the wrongs of the status quo and imagine alternatives and future possibilities has always been the driving force behind utopian thinking. The production of this special issue, “Utopia and Fashion,” at a time when the future of our relationship with fashion is being so widely discussed is not motivated by a wish to find “a stick with which to beat contemporary fashion,” which, according to fashion historian Aileen Ribeiro, has often been the case in utopian writing.19 On the contrary, this special issue is intended to be an initial contribution to what we hope could become a long-term dialogue regarding both the role of fashion in utopian thinking and the potential of utopian thinking to reimagine and inspire better futures for fashion. Included in this issue are three articles with a historical focus; two of these examine the role of fashion in selected utopian and dystopian texts, while the third explores more radical early twentieth-century visions of nudity as liberation from the oppression of dress. The other contributions engage with the critical issues surrounding fashion production and consumption. In addition to the essays in the “Articles” section, we include contributions from contemporary artists and designers whose practices, in different ways, challenge how fashion and clothing are currently used, experienced,and appreciated. By including the “Artist Statements” section, we aimed to bridge the often unhelpful gap between theoretical discussion and practical implementation and so complement some of the discussion in this issue with tangible examples of how fashion and our relationship with clothes can be rethought through art and design practice.

Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

Given their position as key players in their respective party systems – not to mention their growing importance in the coalition formation process – it is perhaps surprising that political science has only reluctantly given left parties serious scholarly attention or, as Bale and Dunphy (2006) have put it, brought these parties 'in from the cold'. Doing just this has been the major purpose of this book. As is clear from our case studies, a considerable number of factors come into play in shaping the behaviour of these parties. Institutional factors, for example, have clearly impacted on left parties in Norway, Denmark and Sweden (owing to their traditions of minority government and negative parliamentarism), in Finland (with its special rules concerning the government formateur) and in Spain (with an electoral law that works heavily against minority parties without heavy regional concentrations). Leadership and organisation issues, meanwhile, have also affected left parties' strategic choices in most of the countries considered here (perhaps most especially in the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Finland), while situational factors (including 'external shocks') have forced left parties to reconsider their strategies in several cases (above all in Germany, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands). Finally, party system factors – analysed in considerable detail below – appear to play significant roles in shaping left parties' behaviour across all our case studies. As a result, many of the left parties considered here find themselves in key bargaining positions, especially in those countries where social democratic parties have fewer coalition options and/or historically better relationships with their cousins on the left. Consequently, as the authors in this volume have made clear, left parties are not substantially different from other parties in terms of the 'hard choices' that they are forced to make.

Hey, you have to go forward into the 21st century. I figure we could go forward united . . . I'm talking about the black Americans who share that 400-year history of being here in America. One of the things with Radio Golf is that I realized I had to in some way deal with the black middle class, which for the most part is not in the other nine plays. My idea was that the black middle class seems to be divorcing themselves from that community, making their fortune on their own without recognizing or acknowledging their connection to the larger community. And I thought: We have gained a lot of sophistication and expertise and resources, and we should be helping that community, which is completely devastated by drugs and crime and the social practices of the past hundred years of the country . . . If you don't recognize that you have a duty and a responsibility, then obviously you won't do that. Some people don't feel that responsibility, but I do, so I thought I would express that in the work. In the 21st century we can go forward together. That was my idea behind the play. Radio Golf (2005) is both August Wilson's Old Testament to the past and his New Testament to the future. Never one to mince words, even in the last few months of his life, he sounds his challenge to the black middle class to engage in the battle for the black man's soul. Wilson selects a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history to illustrate a 'state of emergency' which Walter Benjamin in Illuminations (1969) calls the rule rather than the exception for those who subscribe to the tradition of the oppressed. Radio Golf depicts Pittsburgh's Hill District in 1997, a year which marks the critical moment of its possible extinction in the name of progress. As the city proceeds to rid itself of blight, it also creates a 'moment of danger' which affects both the historical content of the African American tradition and its receivers.

&lt;p&gt;Abstract This article aims to present the limitations of distributive justice theory as a conceptual foundation of the paradigm of the growth and prosperity in economy, and then proposing the idea of contributive justice and the dignity of human work as a new economic paradigm. Why is contributive justice important, and what is its relevance in the discourse of economic paradigm? By using the method of literature study and critical analysis, this article indicates that the idea of contributive justice is essential to overcome the lack of distributive justice. The distributive justice fails to understand that human labour is not only economic. Human labor is not just an instrument for consumption purpose. Human labour is essentially social and cultural. Based on the very idea of contributive justice, human labour is a source of individual self-social esteem, the way of contributing for common good and winning the social recognition from the society. Amid the global economic competition that intensifies the social and economic inequality, contributive justice offers the idea of dignity of human work as a new paradigm of economy. This article concludes that economic efforts in the 21st century, both in the global and in Indonesia, must consider&lt;br /&gt;the dignity and value of human work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Key Words : Distributive justice; contributive justice; economy; the dignity of human work.&lt;/p&gt;

Towards the beginning of the 21st century, Hugo Chavez, the strong man of Venezuela, convoked his Latin American allies to fight against the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposed by the United States. Inspired by Cuban style socialism, he presented the Bolivarian Alternative in order to prepare themselves best in facing the decline of the American empire. He not only publicly supported Evo Morales of Bolivia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, but also purchased a great amount of arms from Russia to strengthen his domineering posture. What Chavez did has raised a new disturbance in Latin America. The region's already complicated situation seems to have returned to a situation of conflicts between different groups. However, this time the focus for dispute is not international political security or the confrontation between East and West but instead international political economy or the confrontation between northern countries and southern countries. Under the influence of globalization, the rising regional self-identity, their determination to fight against capitalism, the left-wing political position following the experience of the European Union and the regional integration under socialism have all merged into the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. It is still uncertain if the Alternative can endure through the global financial crisis. Nevertheless, through the mobilization of Chavez in Latin America, his intention to form a divided West Hemisphere between northern and southern America has enjoyed some kind of success. If Chavez can effectively motivate a consensus of collective security, a new political and economic development in the West Hemisphere might be expected.

The Russian Revolution and the American Left: A Long View from the Twenty-First Century

As Chapters 1 and 2 have illustrated, the Left Party went through a challenging and decidedly unpredictable first 15 years in existence. By 2005 it appeared, in spite of its inglorious past in the GDR, to have found a place in contemporary German politics, and it is undoubtedly becoming an ever more ‘normal’ part of the German party system. Thus far we have mapped out the roller coaster ride that the Left Party has experienced in everyday practical politics. We have also illustrated that the Left Party’s successes and failures have been analysed by political scientists in different ways; some have persisted in seeing it as a dangerous, populist, extremist party on the fringes of democratic acceptability, others as a milieu-based protest party articulating fuzzily defined eastern German interests, while yet more have, as we have seen, concentrated on analysing the party’s progress through the prism of left-wing politics. While all have had some merit, the results of the 2005 federal election, the merger of the PDS and the WASG into Die Linke and the establishment of the new party as a serious actor with genuine long-term prospects indicate that an approach based on the latter may now have the most mileage. Finally, thus far we have also concentrated primarily on the past rather than the future, avoiding any analysis of what problems, predicaments and dilemmas the ‘new’ Left Party is likely to be faced with. This chapter makes a start in rectifying this.

Automated condition monitoring of pavements is seeing a paradigm shift in the twenty-first century, as the focus is increasingly shifting from visual to 3D imaging. The 3D measurement represents the ground truth, within the bounds of discretization of the imager. Hence, working with the 3D data and interpreting it is a lot easier. The 3D laser scanners are the current norm for range imaging. Laser scanners, although technically versatile and extremely accurate, are very expensive. Therefore, the need for alternative 3D imaging technologies is imperative, especially in the developing world context. The coming decade will see alternative technologies first target large pavement distresses, like potholes, before moving onto smaller defect types. In this regard, this is the first study that treats the stereo imaging of roads from a moving vehicle, for any distresses, and especially for pothole measurements. A fast stereo matching procedure is proposed. A preliminary keypoint matching estimates the global disparity between the stereo pair. The estimated disparity is used toward further keypoint and block matching procedure, by concentrating on smaller image regions. Images obtained from a moving vehicle are preprocessed to reduce the effects of image blur. Furthermore, algorithms to determine key critical metrological parameters, such as the area, depth, and volume, of a pothole are also developed. A benchmarking of the proposed system shows that the 3D measurements are within 3 mm for static situations and 5 mm when imaged from a moving vehicle. At 10-km/h vehicle speed, potholes are imaged to accuracies of −20% for volume, −15% for area, and −4% for depth, when compared to static imagery.

This article traces the development of what may be called Indonesian critical discourse particularly related to the position of “West” and “East” from the colonial period to the New Order era. The development of this discourse and its manifestation in Indonesian literary theory began with a postcolonial debate on the construction of Indonesian modernity, i.e., toward which center it is going to be oriented. The tension between Western-centric discourse, on the one hand, and traditional orientation, on the other, characterized the earliest intellectual debate in the 1930s. This argument took a different contour in the 1960s when the tension turned out to be between social realism and liberal humanism. The banning of leftist ideology and teaching after 1965 gave way to the unchallenged dominance of the traditional humanist outlook in the literary-critical scene. The paper argues that the present hegemony of traditional humanist approach in Indonesian consciousness is rooted in its distinctive development in these few decades.

Reviewed by: Marxisms in the 21st Century: critique, crisis and struggles eds. by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar Theodoros Rakopoulos (bio) Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar (eds) (2013) Marxisms in the 21st Century: critique, crisis and struggles. Johannesburg: Wits University Press This fascinating and timely book oscillates interestingly between two sets of tensions that the authors –and particularly the editors in the introduction and the conclusion – address in convincing terms. The first tension rises in thinking how do we reconcile a plurality of Marxisms while embracing Marxism as a coherent set of guiding principles, without becoming post-Marxists. The second tension concerns what kind of guiding principles Marxism provides: analytical or political? The varied approaches therefore that Williams suggests in the introduction (12) entail a plurality of meanings to the term Marxism as well as a plural reading of Marxist politics in the light of political developments of the 21st century. The book, if taken as a whole, seems to suggest that it is futile to address this distance of analysis and politics. Most authors thence depart from a situated analytical perspective. We therefore have chapters where there is analysis and critique of Marxism as politics (ANC’s ‘Marxism’ for instance), chapters where there is a critical reading of Marxist analysis (and politics) alongside other traditions (Foucault, feminism, ecology), and chapters where Marxist politics are assessed in the context of new social realities (South Africa’s urban social movements). The contemporary period is then seen as a prism to analyse in sobriety either current affairs in Southern Africa or (mainly unfortunate) events in the African 20th century. For these reasons, this book’s title is indicative of its contributors’ and editors’ intentions: the stress is first on the plural tense of the noun [End Page 133] (Marxisms) and then on the timing: 21st century. However, adapting a plural take that is open-ended comes with responsibility: we should differentiate between ideology and analytical systems. On this note, it would be helpful to decipher what this collection is not. The collection in then not contributing to the ongoing debate involving scholars like Zizek, Badiou, Balibar and others, on new-found Marxism. It is therefore not a philosophical book, as the theoretical contributions are few (Veriava’s chapter stands out in this respect). It is not a strictly politicised book either, and partakes only to a small extent in the Latin American-centred debate for and on ‘socialism for the 21st century’ (although one chapter ends with an Evo Morales quote (162)). The collection is not in a political theory, as much as in a critical policy direction and in its most theoretically driven chapters it decidedly becomes part of what Burawoy (2003; and this volume) calls a sociological Marxism (46). This Marxism, that takes advantage of Gramsci (as per Satgar’s chapter) and Polanyi (as per Burawoy’s chapter) is positioned in civil society. This focus illuminates the book’s relevance, and comes at a crucial time and place in the three ways that the subtitle explains: a time and place of crisis, critique and struggle in civil societies of Africa, and in the global capitalist context. These three themes, organising the material, permeate all three chapters: One. Democratising and Globalising Marxism, Two. Marxism and Left Politics; and Three. Crises of Marxism in Africa and possibilities for the future. An attention to critique is given in Chapters One and Two, while Chapter Three delineates a Marxism for South Africa and from an ‘African’ perspective, as it deploys Marxisms in a framework of the South addressing social and historical patterns of the South. Satgar, taking Gramsci to this Southern trajectory, interestingly notes how the concept of ‘passive revolution’ could help us understand post-apartheid SA (66-67). He urges us to see the historicist Gramsci outside his strictly Italian references, by tracing the argument, for instance, to Cosatu’s policies. His point that ‘all history is world history’ brings Gramsci in dialogue with Wallerstein; it would be interesting to trace this further in a discussion of how notions such as the ‘subaltern’ influenced post-colonial studies, or how this interacts with Eric Wolf’s work on...