k-punk

Two books I’ve recently endorsed, and which I would heavily recommend:

“What’s left of public space after thirty years of neoliberalism? Sam Berkson’s new collection, Life In Transit, finds the degraded relics of public space on public transport. Like the music of Burial or Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah zines, Life In Transit is attuned to the peculiar loneliness of life in neoliberal Britain. In the UK, trains and buses are now ‘public’ in name only, since most are operated by private companies. And, with the rise of the mobile phone, they are much less likely to be spaces where we overhear the intimacies of others rather than strike up a conversation with a stranger. By turns lyrical, acerbic and bitingly humorous, Berkson’s poems describe a world in which, ordinarily, the only “sympathetic solidarity” is that of commuters who reluctantly cough together. Yet public transport remains a space where our lives can still be transformed by unexpected encounters with others, and where the shadow of another world – collective, egalitarian, democratic – can sometimes be glimpsed.”

“Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy’s vivid and invigorating Beyond Capitalism builds upon the analysis of leftist paralysis I started to develop in Capitalist Realism. Writing from the perspective of experienced activists, Cooper and Hardy offer an incisive and clear-eyed explanation of why the left has so far failed to take advantage of the current major crisis of capitalism. But this analysis is not just another jeremiad; it is a contribution to a leftist renewal which Cooper and Hardy believe is within our grasp. The future is ours for the reclaiming, and Beyond Capitalism outlines some concrete strategies for how we can win it back.”