This panel brings together Red Wedge, the only English language Marxist journal with a mission of engaging cultural production as a whole, and the Leftovers communist discussion group. Approaching its eighth anniversary, Red Wedge Magazine makes it a point, as goes our slogan, to “rekindle the revolutionary imagination”, towards what we refer to as a Popular Avant-Garde. We reject populist and social conservative arguments within and beyond the Left that “experimental” cultural production is beyond the ken of the working classes, indeed we emphasize the role that this type of cultural production has played in revolutionary social movements since 1789. Taken as a whole, the speakers at this panel aim to resuscitate what is deemed merely a leftover, an obscurantist folk practice, a popular song, a cultural sensibility. This is to say, to examine the means in which working class life is lived beyond the narrowly conceived point of production. Queer and countercultural “weird” types constitute a growing fraction within the American working classes, and indeed, within the International Left. Struggles and debates within cultural theory and praxis constitute a vital part of any socialism in our time.

"Cultural Marxism? Damned Right: Queer Panic, Anti-Semitism and the Origin of Rock Music"
—Jordy Cummings

‘What Is Transsexual Realism?’ An Embedded Inquiry Into A Nascent Counter-Counter-Culture"
—Jules Joanne Gleeson

"Dialectics of the Stars"
—Omnia Sol

"Foreshadowing the Queer & Trans Concrete Universal of Communism in Aesthetic Practice"
—Anja Weiser Flower

Moderated by Stephen Maher.

Sponsored by Red Wedge and Leftovers Live.