Kasper Sonne (Danish, b. 1974), Borderline (New Territory) No 55, 2014, 200 x 300 x 5 cm

Thomas Wright, The Pleiades c.1711

Maria Chojnacka At The Sea Shore, detail, 1973. Thread and seashells.

From “Weaving, a handbook of the fiber arts” by Shirley Held, 1978.

For some time now, one of the most successful tactics of the ruling class has been responsibilisation. Each individual member of the subordinate class is encouraged into feeling that their poverty, lack of opportunities, or unemployment, is their fault and their fault alone. Individuals will blame themselves rather than social structures, which in any case they have been induced into believing do not really exist (they are just excuses, called upon by the weak). What Smail calls “magical voluntarism” — the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be — is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society, pushed by reality TV “experts” and business gurus as much as by politicians.

— k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)

Everything upon which their thrones are set is made by the workers’ hands.

Strike, 1925 
dir. by Sergei Eisenstein

Helena Almeida, Tela Habitada, 1976

The Furies (1934) by Slavko Vorkapić, opening montage sequence of Crime Without Passion (1934)

Capitalism is the celebration of a cult sans reve et sans merci [without dream or mercy]. There are no “weekdays.” There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us: each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper. And third, the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement.

Walter Benjamin, Capitalism as Religion (1921)