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— k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016)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

Man Ray. Les yeux de Lee Miller.

Anna Riwkin (1908-1970). Birgit Cullberg, n/d. 

There are lots of forces today which aim to deny all distinction between the commercial and the creative. The more this distinction is denied, the more amusing, understanding and well-informed people think they are. In fact, they are only translating capitalism’s demand for rapid rotation. […]

When advertising people explain that advertisements are the poetry of the modern world, this shameless proposition forgets that there is no art which aims to compose or reveal a product which corresponds to public expectations. Advertising can shock or want to shock, it corresponds to a presupposed expectation. An art, on the contrary, necessarily produces the unexpected, the unrecognized, the unrecognizable. There is no commercial art; it’s a meaningless phrase. There are popular arts, of course. There are also arts which require more or less financial investment, there is a commerce of arts but no commercial arts.

— Gilles Deleuze, The Brain Is the Screen (1989)

Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy