Mikkel Bolt

RESISTANCE: We try to analyze President Trump as a late-capitalist fascist whose political program is based on racial exclusion, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny and a vision of national rebirth. This in a country where more than 30 people are killed by firearms every year, an average of over 000 victims a day. But also: we see a return to political crime to suppress protests. This is the case everywhere today, but besides the US it is especially visible in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Emirates and Iran.

DESTITUTION: The triumphant narratives of national liberation, anti-imperialism and socialism have become exhausted. Today we see new mass protests as destitutive acts. They no longer take place with reference to the labor movement's models of social transformation, neither social democratic, Leninist nor Eurocommunist. The resistance does not coalesce into a recognizable and redeemable political demand, instead it grows into a hatred of the entire political system.

PROTESTER: It is as if a generalization of misery, depression, climate anxiety and state terror has taken place, so that young people in both the south and the north are staring in despair at a world in disintegration. In this reworked book excerpt, Mikkel Bolt shows the community of the new mass protests. It is as much an anthropological as a political showdown that we see taking shape.

ESSAY: Most Surrealists had participated in the First World War, André Breton and Louis Aragon, for example, were sent to the front as medical students on the French side, and Max Ernst was an artilleryman in the German army. The senseless trench warfare endowed the Surrealists with an intense hatred of the ideals to which the warring parties referred. The plan was to initiate the necessary dismantling of the basic categories of the capitalist mode of production such as profit and wage labor, but also art and literature as activities reserved for a few selected individuals.

LANYARD: The Israeli army has dropped more than 70.000 tons of bombs over the area. That's more bombs than in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the Second World War – and three times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. What happens to concepts like democracy, rights and justice in light of the genocide in Gaza?

ESSAY: The cultural expression of current crisis capitalism is 'immediacy'. The keywords are speed and availability. But contemporary art of immediacy is the paradoxical reversal of the avant-garde's privileging of the artist as a creative individual and the liberation of the viewer. And is today's new 'insurgent anarchism' an expression of a rejection of this logistical late capitalism?

activism: The growing part of contemporary art intervenes in ongoing political debates and uses the relative autonomy of art as a starting point for art activist interventions outside the art space.

POWER: The storming of Congress in 2021 was an attempt to reaffirm the white world that emerged with the colonization and renaissance during the 14th century. A prerequisite for colonization was the devaluation of socially constructed others who were racialized as black or dark – as backward or as non-human.

RIGHT OF USE: Use assumes ownership. Homeless people can't just move into empty apartments. But it is a mismatch between use and property in late racial capitalism. Also when it comes to patents. Property can be financial violence.