About halfway through One Battle After Another, soldiers wearing combat fatigues and brandishing guns break into a convenience store, looking for Willa Ferguson, the movie’s fugitive protagonist, as well as for evidence of illegal immigrants. This is a scene we are all familiar with: the armed entry of infantry into an enemy building. The military hand gestures and codes. The careful scouting of rooms for hostiles. Except, this isn’t Black Hawk Down or the Hurt Locker. We are not in Iraq or Afghanistan. And these soldiers have ‘police’ stitched to their uniform.
We are in ‘Baktan Cross’, USA. The war has come home.
One Battle After Another is a magnificent movie in many ways, most of which are much better expressed by professionalcritics. The excellent pacing means that despite coming in at 2:40hrs the movie doesn’t feel long. The story is gripping. The characters flawed but interesting, with Leonardo diCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro and in particular Sean Penn all putting in stellar performances. The cinematography is beautiful, from vertiginous car chases to the carefully curated details in a family home. The minor garnish of magical realism provides for effective symbolism without ever really stretching the bounds of plausibility. The soundtrack is frenetic and of a kind with the movie’s feverish momentum. Watching One Battle After Another is like stepping onto a frantic and relentless rollercoaster. When you finally grind to a halt, you feel exhilarated, confused about what just happened, and wondering if you have to go on the ride again to fully appreciate it.
There is no shortage of excellent scenes in One Battle After Another, but one that stood out most starkly for me is the ‘police’ arriving in the fictional town of Baktan Cross for their womanhunt for Willa Ferguson (Infiniti). In its reminiscence of countless war movies, it shows us a country at war with itself, its military an occupying force on its own soil. This is a movie about the imperial boomerang having fully circled back.
Where have all the comrades gone? Once a common term of address for those engaged in joint struggle for a better world, decades of defeat, betrayal and marginalisation leave it barely used except ironically. In Comrade – An Essay on Political Belonging, Jodi Dean seeks to recover the term by arguing it defines a unique and necessary relationship for common struggle. As a union organiser, I was very sympathetic to this endeavour. Effective collective organising undeniably demands a strong level of commitment and discipline that cannot be attained through allyship or arise spontaneously. As Rodrigo Nunes and Vincent Bevins convincingly argued in Neither Vertical nor Horizontal and If We Burn respectively, neither disorganised horizontalism nor the post-capitalist networked citizen can amass the power we need for the struggles we face. Unfortunately Dean’s argument doesn’t succeed in revitalising the comrade for the 21st century, attempting to resurrect the ideal comrade from the 19th century instead. The effort is commendable, but unconvincing. The old order has gone, and we cannot simply will it back into existence.
At the conclusion of Mass Effect 1 we foiled the plan of the Reapers, sentient robot ships bent on eradicating interstellar civilisation, to teleport into the galactic capital and start their murderous rampage. Mass Effect 2 picks up the story shortly after, with our hero Commander Shepard relegated to patrolling the far reaches of space so that galactic politicians can more easily ignore your constant pleas to prepare for the delayed but not averted Reaper attack. No change here from the previous game where all politicians are inept and only the Space Marines™ can be relied upon to save the galaxy.
Though not even the Space Marines, as it turns out. In an unexpected turn of events, Mass Effect 2 kills off the player within the first five minutes, only for Commander Shepard to be resurrected two years later by our old friends Cerberus. Yes, the same human-supremacist, experimenting on live test subjects, rogue-black-ops-gone-terrorist Cerberus we encountered in Mass Effect 1. This setup presents excellent potential to challenge the player through the game’s morality mechanic, but predictably Mass Effect 2 is too timid to exploit it. You can agree with Cerberus’ ‘the end justifies the means’ philosophy or not, you can file your disagreement with their methods or not, the game will unfold as it unfolds. It is morality as aesthetics rather than ethics, and maybe there is a reflection here of a contemporary politics that is equally vacuous and free of stakes.
On 21 December 1988 at approximately 19:02, Pan Am Flight 103 was cruising over Scotland when a bomb exploded, rupturing the aircraft. All 243 passengers, 16 crew, and 11 residents of the small town of Lockerbie were killed as the aircraft crashed onto the town, its jet fuel igniting on impact. The majority of passengers were Americans, travelling home for Christmas. After a long investigation, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbasset al-Meghrahi was convicted in 2001 for planting the explosive, though his single conviction remains controversial to this day.
37 years later, there has been remarkable amount of interest in the Lockerbie bombing, with two TV series on British television and Small Acts of Love, a new play to celebrate the reopening of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre. Yet where the TV series focus on the investigation into the bombing and questions of responsibility and attribution, the play focuses on people: how they react and move forward after their lives are shattered, and how kindness can grow new bonds of friendship in the scorched earth of loss.
Every now and then a movie surprises you. That’s not unusual, but I hadn’t expected that movie to be Marvel’s Thunderbolts*. I too am no stranger to ‘Marvel Fatigue’ and have not really been invested in anything after Endgame with the exception of Loki and WandaVision*. When enjoying a movie requires an advanced degree in Marvelology you have lost me. Thunderbolts* only got its viewing as a sort of last hurrah before our Disney+ subscription goes the way of the OG Avengers. So it was a pleasant surprise when it wasn’t just a half-decent superhero movie, but offered an radically interesting perspective on mental health and redemption.
Warning, contains spoilers
Several elements make Thunderbolts* stand out from the recent Marvel fare. For one, it manages to take itself lightly without getting zany. While in the opening scenes we see Yelena Belova (Black Widow’s adopted sister, played by Florence Pugh) at work ‘cleaning up’ some off-the-books lab run by the movies baddie, we simultaneously hear her narrating how even her work cannot fill the emptiness she feels inside. The contrast is poignant, but ends in a lighthearted flourish when visuals and narration synchronize to show us Belova has been talking to a tied-up goon all this time. A goon who clearly has more important things on his mind than an assassin’s existential angst.
After discussing Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism in my last post, it felt appropriate to follow it up with a seminal text by one of the other key representatives of the early 21st Left: David Graeber. Graeber was strongly involved with the Occupy Movement and is credited with coining its famous “we are the 99%” slogan. An anthropologist by training, Graeber, like Fisher, applied his critical eye to a whole range of social phenomena, including debt, bureaucracy and social resistance. Sadly, also like Fisher, Graeber died too young, succumbing to acute necrotic pancreatitis in 2020.
Where Fisher gave us the insight that it remains easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, one of Graeber’s enduring concepts is that of ‘bullshit jobs’. Bullshit jobs made their debut in a short essay in STRIKE! Magazine in 2013, which remarkably is still online. The essay generated a flurry of interest, including several surveys commissioned by pollsters like YouGov, which led Graeber to expand it into a full sized book. Unfortunately, what makes for a strong provocative essay does not necessarily translate into convincing social analysis. I had a vague recollection of Graeber’s argument from having read the essay years ago, and as with Fisher’s Capitalist Realism remember the sense of it expressing a truth that we all feel but can find hard to express. I was intrigued how Graeber had developed the original argument of the essay into a full length book, so decided to give the audiobook a listen. This was, sadly, a disappointment. The book is a padded out version of the essay, with the padding reinforcing its weaknesses and diminishing its strengths.
Every now and then a text is published that explosively captures its zeitgeist. For early 21st century Britain (and the West beyond), Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There no Alternative is such a text. The title of its first chapter (“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”) has become and remains a truism on the Left. The first part of the book’s title has become the descriptive term for the pervasive sense that there is, indeed, no alternative. That we are forever stuck in an Eternal Present of a crumbling public realm, increasing precarity and environmental disintegration, all the while being told by our capitalist overlords that this really is the best of all possible worlds.
Capitalist Realism came out in 2009, resonating with the politics that emerged from the Great Financial Crash: Occupy, student protests in the UK and elsewhere, the abortive resistance to austerity, the failed revolutions of the Arab Spring. If anything, events since then reinforce the observation that resistance is indeed futile. Reading Capitalist Realism for the first time in 2025, I was struck by how much it is of its time yet remains relevant today.
There must be a point where history becomes culture. When the cultural artefacts by which we choose to remember an event overgrow it to such an extent as to obscure it. It seems this is what has happened to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. The shock, despair and anger of those times have long since dissipated, while we continue as if nothing has happened in our Eternal Present, and cultural commentary on the Crash has been safely defanged for consumption as mere entertainment.
The immediate aftermath of the Crash saw a flurry of books, movies and documentaries trying to make sense of what happened and, maybe more importantly, what didn’t happen afterwards. These were followed by plays, such as the The Lehman Trilogy. Premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival this year Make It Happen is a play in the same tradition about the meteoric rise and fall of Royal Bank of Scotland and its CEO, Fred Goodwin.
In 1992 Francis Fukuyama published his now infamous The End of History and the Last Man, commonly understood to proclaim that with the victory of liberal market democracies, history had run its course and we could all kick back and relax in the knowledge that we lived in the best of all possible worlds. A lot of history has happened since then, and continues to happen. Yet our collective cultural imaginary remains singularly foreshortened, giving rise to the oft-cited observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the spirit of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, we might say that Fukuyama’s book would have been better titled ‘The End of the Future’.
The hegemony of the present and the absence of a plausible alternative future is particularly noticeable in much science fiction. I’m with Ursuala K. le Guin in that good science fiction tells us something about the present, but sadly much of it simply is the present, with added spaceships. Mass Effect, originally released in 2007 but re-released as a remaster in 2021, is a prime example of the latter type of science fiction. I decided to replay it partly for nostalgia, and partly because I never played the third installment of the trilogy.
“Where is the revolution?” With rising inequality, impending ecological breakdown, ongoing genocide – many of us feel that ‘something should be done’,. Then we look around and see everyone else turning up at work, doing the dishes or just trying to get through the day. And so we, too, put the day’s misery out of mind and get on with it. The rent must, after all, be paid.
Hegemony Now! – How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (and How We Win It Back) Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams interrogates why this happens. Why, if so many of us so acutely feel the injustices of our present moment, does nothing ever seem to change? Gilbert and Williams seek the answer in an update of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Gramsci introduced the term during the days of Mussolini’s fascism to describe the ability of one group in society to exercise control over everyone else. Control here doesn’t need to mean men with guns, nor does it mean total control of the North Korean variety. Instead, hegemony describes a state where a dominant group, or bloc of groups, manages to get just enough of the rest of us to do as they wish to keep themselves in power, using a variety of means, most of them not directly violent.