Co-written with Dot on January 2022.
With the defeat of the final challenger to the centuries long reign of Capitalism, a new millennium began, the End of History. As long as we embrace the tenets of good governance under a capitalist democracy, we can flourish. Only a matter of time until we are all the same, a collection of developed nations hand-in-hand in their mutual prosperity. That was the promised future. Each a democratic polity, each a wealthy polity, each an entity that admires the cultures of one another while proud of their own as the final solution to the question of human politics remains solved once and for all.
It has been three decades since then, and the truth has been far more sour than we hoped. Whatever we waited for after 1991 was simply not there. There was no future, no further passage of time. Capital has crushed the new world and used the rubble as the foundations to expand its own. Technology has progressed, but time has stopped. The revolutionaries lie dead, their flame snuffed out. But “Rejoice!” they tell you, for you can look upon a painting of the flame and those who held it, or watch the films they made and hear the songs they wrote, all to scrape off an identity of yours independent of capitalism, but one that is ultimately ineffectual in its effort to affect it. All this lies within the vile museum they have built for you, so that you can feel some memory of this flame that you have never held and satisfy the urge to revolt, that still dwells somewhere in the depths of your soul, choking for air in the darkness.
Will you consign yourself to the life that your parents have lived, what of your children? What would you have their birthright be? Even with all the developments, all the progress, and all the wealth, do you feel comfort in knowing the same alienation you feel will be hereditary until the end of time? Imagine the wonder one must’ve felt when gazing upon the aeroplane for the first time. But now, when you look to new technology, all you can feel is dread as to how it will be monetised, how it will be used to oppress and exploit you, or how its malfunction will bring in an apocalypse. The world has abandoned the passion and energy of progress and now merely puppeteers its corpse.
But this was not the case once, and it can still be undone. Though the flame of past revolution is gone out, have you not matches and lighters, cars and rifles? You need not endlessly struggle to relight that which is already cold when you have the tools to start your own fire. And for fuel you need look no further than this rotten structure you dwell within, with just the slightest spark all the walls and pillars of this wretched world will catch alight and burn it all away. Once all the dead and dying are buried miles deep in the ashes of their creation and no discernable trace is left of their world you will be ascendant. The young, unharmed by the flames and nourished by hatred and speed will spring forth and in their image birth a new world.
The first Futurists published their manifesto in 1909 and though their movement was incredibly flawed, with many of its number taking the side of reactionary forces and joining the early Fascist movement in Italy, their work still provides the basis for this Manifesto.
- As written in the first Manifesto, ‘We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness’. This remains the purest distillation of Futurism even in the modern day. Our lives and art must still be filled with energy and motion, they must embrace speed and revolt. The glorification of the past must be rejected in all forms, sluggish romanticism and revivalistic nationalism.
- Art has once more come to glorify immobility and slumber. Art is consumed to escape from the drudges of exploitation and atomization. Art is made to escape from the drudges of monotony and ossification. Art has become our opium to tolerate this world, and we have all become the connoisseurs of escapism. We will abandon such cowardly sentiments and exalt movements of aggression and dynamism. Art shall no longer leave us comfortable in our drudges excited for what comes next, art shall no longer leave us with the thinkpieces we imagine in our head. Art is to be made to inspire us to live passionately and chaotically, and to die with the same conviction.
- Beauty exists only in struggle. Rage and love and ecstasy and all those emotions that burn within the greatest works of art have been caged and allowed to waste away. Our work must be a violent assault on the senses, on all institutions of tradition and culture and all forces of the unknown. Even in the headspace of the radical Futurist, the truth remains that even all of our own actions will inevitably become a new tradition, and every new tradition must be replaced with a revolution. If our imagination is endless, our revolutions are even more so.
- The beauty of speed that Futurists once saw in the car and the aeroplane has been stripped away and it must be reclaimed. Technology has been chained to the oppressive purposes of Capital, but it is not yet lost to us. The car was the favoured tool of the Futurist, so it shall become ours once more. Even now if it is a part of our identity, the identity we derive from the automobile does not derive from our personal identification to it, but from the status symbol its price represents. No longer shall they be mass-produced things, mobile cages intended for commuting and no more. We must take up the carcasses of these soulless things and make them our own. The luxury of the things we own must come from the identity we imprint on them; for it shall no longer be the things that define us, but it ought to be us who define them.
- The world order that has persisted for so long is on the very brink of collapse, we are mere moments away from the dawning of the new age. So look no more to the past when the infinite expanses of the future lie unexplored before you. We all live under the same country, the kingdom of Capital. We all share the same worries, the same fears and same aspirations. This mutuality may be solidaristic, but it is what makes this world of ours monochrome, and it is up to us to make it multicolour. Make it all blood red, or sea blue, or sparkling yellow; but do not succumb to black and white.
- You must not be afraid to leap from the precipice of the Old World, for as you fall mighty wings of the finest steel will erupt from your back and propel you to heights unimagined. For every victory shall remind the rest how little this current state of ours would actually be missed.
It is today that we issue this manifesto to inspire each of you to create new art, beyond the reckoning of our current society. It is not enough to simply make art that is ‘anti-capitalist’, for that has been done, for decades and decades people have made art that called for change, for reform, and for revolution. Well, has there been change? Or has our desire for change been commodified and sold back to us as our new folk tales, our new mythologies, and has agitation turned into nothing but our new punchline? We consume anti-capitalist art, we find solidarity in mutual alienation, we yearn for a world better than this one, and we find solace in knowing that we aren’t alone in being aware of precisely how dysfunctional this world is in its minutest of details. And that hasn’t been enough.
Like musicians that wallow about how terrible modern music has gotten, we are left to curl in the toxicity of frustration over our lack of new victories, or we nostalgically look back on past regimes and attempted revolutions that we imagine were the would-be bulwarks against this modern condition. The final victim that walks the plank of capitalism towards drowning has been imagination. And it seems our imagination is drowning, in a sea of anti-capitalism. It seems an endless sea, for there are no islands there to swim towards, no direction to reach towards, nowhere to go after anti-capitalism. As much as we hate this current state of ours, all our imaginations can now roost is how bad this is all going to get.
It is not enough to make art today that calls for a new tomorrow, you must make the art of this tomorrow, create the paintings and poems and music of the world you wish to see and it will be so. If you still have an imagination left in you, use it, exert it, spread it. Our goal is to make art so evocative of the future as if those of the future came to this very past to impart it with us.
And so, as 113 years ago, standing on the World’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars! Just as we shall a hundred years later after today, and the hundred years after that. The moment our struggle is victorious is the moment you, the reader, reads this and feel nothing but confusion at how much this has lost its relevancy.
