Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe, Volume 1

Because the serial failures of capitalism’s present crisis—economic, political, environmental—continue to batter the area, Black field: A checklist of the Catastrophe is a tool for recording, interpreting, and transmitting occasions as they take place. however it bargains neither dire predictions nor fake hopes. as a substitute, it embraces the secret of what could transpire. The observe “catastrophe” has now not regularly signified “disaster”; through the 16th century, in particular in theater, it got here to intend “a reversal of what's expected.” Black Box is eventually a documentary undertaking, a checklist of the disaster, yet it’s an open query the place the inquiry will take us. it can be a list of the disastrous finish. Or it can be a list of the turning.

The first quantity comprises an eclectic yet obtainable selection of reportage, interviews, letters, fragments, and theoretical responses from many of the brightest minds in severe conception. Its authors have despatched dispatches from American criminal yards, the delivery graveyards of India, deadly out of the country drone moves, roads crisscrossing the Mississippi Delta, childhoods in progressive Zimbabwe, and kitchens the place undocumented employees wash dishes. by means of taking a extensive geographical and aesthetic stance, Black Box might be a constellation of rules and knowledge that issues towards the future—whatever it can hold.

The Black field Collective emerged after numerous years of symposia, analyzing teams, summer time camps, wood-splitting, and barn-raising. The poets, newshounds, lecturers, metaphysicians, artists, and strategists of the collective assemble on a regular basis at a retired dairy farm within the foothills of the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle to discover attention, neighborhood, and the movement of communizing/commonizing currents. Black Box is our first try to gather a critique that will wake up us from the dream global that's so successfully reproduced via capitalist culture.

“What occurs should you stroll away? What occurs should you don’t? Black Box is either a philosophy of the road and a poetics of progressive come across. I supply my ecstatic help to its ‘curriculum of shocks.’ this is often a rare new magazine. each web page is voltage, orientation, verge.” —Bhanu Kapil, writer of Ban en Banlieue

“To imagine opposed to and past the human disaster that's capitalism, we have to holiday down partitions, open doorways, pass thresholds, communize anywhere we can—a black field now not as containment yet as point of interest of the circulation of undefined, undefinable rupture.” —John Holloway, writer of Change the area with no Taking energy: The that means of Revolution Today

“Black Box subverts the implicit time table of such a lot media shops to disclaim the reality or to distract us from it. The magazine investigates what's, an important step in the direction of knowing what must be.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., writer of In the area of Hungry Ghosts: shut Encounters with Addiction

“Black Box is both our jointly written obituary or a time pill of capitalism in its dying throes. Let’s make it the latter.” —Will Potter, writer of Green Is the recent pink: An Insider’s Account of a Social stream less than Siege

“We purely exhibit the realm what it truly is combating for, and awareness is whatever that it has to procure, no matter if it doesn't are looking to. The reform of realization is composed only in making the realm conscious of its personal realization, in awakening it out of its dream approximately itself, in explaining to it the which means of its personal activities. Our complete item can in basic terms be … to offer non secular and philosophical questions the shape equivalent to guy who has turn into aware of himself.” —Karl Marx, writer of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy