Nihilist Optimism

For Heritage Open Days 2026 , Colchester Castle opened its doors free of charge for one day. We took along a copy of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch and read several passages from it inside the Castle. The audio from this is available as Season 2, Episode 12, of the Minor Compositions podcast . Colchester Castle is usually remembered through much longer histories: Roman Camulodunum beneath it, the Norman keep built above, siege and civil war, and eventually its transformation into a museum. But for centuries the Castle was also a prison. In 1645 it became one of the sites of the East Anglian witch persecutions. Matthew Hopkins used the Castle as a base for interrogating women accused of witchcraft; Colchester Museums records that thirty-five women from north-east Essex were brought there and questioned as part of the persecutions commonly associated with the “Manningtree witches.” Some of those imprisoned in the Castle never survived confinement. Hopkins himself does not appea...

These sections (223-262) push the inversion already underway in the earlier parts of Workers and Capital much further. What begins as the methodological priority of working-class struggle over capitalist development becomes something stranger and more demanding: an attempt to think knowledge, history, technology, organisation, even capitalism itself, from the standpoint of the force capable of abolishing it. The working-class point of view is not another interpretation of the same world. It changes what counts as knowing the world in the first place .   There is something wonderfully improper in Tronti’s demand for the “right to be despised as scholars” (224). Research conducted from the working-class point of view has no particular interest in proving that it can play by the rules of recognised knowledge. It takes on instead what he calls the “honour of isolation”: working clandestinely, underground, refusing the fantasy that knowledge becomes more truthful the further it wi...

Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds Pluto Press, London, 2024. ISBN 9780745349404 To read Trans Femme Futures is to find trans politics displaced from the terrain where it is most often made to appear. Rather than beginning by asking what transness is, who counts as trans, or which institutions should certify and protect particular identities, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift begin elsewhere: with what people are already doing together. Their concern is with the ways lives are made, sustained and transformed through friendship, care, desire, shared knowledge, collective experimentation and struggle. Transness is not primarily treated as a stable identity requiring recognition, but as movement: away from what has been imposed, through relations that make other forms of life possible. As they put it early in the book, “Transness doesn’t strive for a pre-determined outcome, but takes shape along the way – sensually and relati...

“James Brown gives the people what they want; I give them what they need.” – Sun Ra Mixtape on Firefly Frequencies Mike Kelley remembers the exchange in the collection Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals . He has seen Sun Ra at the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival and finds his way backstage afterward. Somewhere nearby in memory is James Brown: another bandleader, another extraordinary spectacle, another way of organising bodies through sound. Kelley asks Sun Ra about the difference. Sun Ra answers with what sounds almost like a joke, or a boast, but also like a theory of aesthetics: James Brown gives the people what they want; Sun Ra gives them what they need. Memory complicates the story. At the 1974 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival in Exile, Brown and Sun Ra were in fact programmed on the same Friday-night bill, though Kelley’s recollection appears to fold together different years and different performances. But perhaps the confusion improves the story. It prod...

Improvised music tends to arrive burdened with a surprisingly limited collection of images. On one side is the noodly jam band: musicians wandering amiably through an indefinitely extended groove, waiting for something to happen and apparently unconcerned if it ever does. On the other is the ecstatic saxophone solo inherited from the popular memory of free jazz: eyes closed, cheeks inflated, the player pushing upwards towards some threshold where expression becomes scream, transcendence or bodily exhaustion. Improvisation appears either as endless conversational meandering or as heroic individual release. Neither model is particularly helpful for approaching Eddie Prévost. There are moments in this performance with Signe Emmeluth and Anton Lukoszevieze that could be located within the histories of free jazz or free improvisation. Emmeluth’s alto saxophone can move rapidly between fine melodic fragments and more abrasive, fractured cries. Lukoszevieze’s cello carries its own accumulated...

Capital cannot produce social cooperation by itself. It must make living labour carry it – and that dependence is where struggle begins. The history of the working day is not, for Marx, the story of enlightened reform gradually moderating the excesses of industrial capitalism. It is the record of a “protracted and more or less concealed civil war” (202) between capitalists and workers. The isolated worker, formally free to sell their labour-power, is powerless to determine the conditions under which that power will be consumed. Left alone in the marketplace, the worker “succumbs without resistance” (202). It is only through workers acting collectively that limits can be placed upon capital’s apparently unlimited right to command labour. This changes how the struggle over the working day must be understood. It is not simply a dispute about how the products of society should be divided: how much goes to wages, how much to profit, who receives more and who receives less. The apparent laws...