30.07.2026

Nothing is fixed or finished

We are seeking to establish a collective of artists, musicians, scientists, academics and activists who can work together across a range of performative platforms. Tam Dean Burn looks forward to the evening culture sessions at this year’s CU

Our cultural programme for this year’s Communist University will begin with the launch of ‘Diderot Gesellschaft Movement’ (DGM) on Saturday August 8 at 6pm. This follows on from discussions at last year’s CU.¹

We are seeking to establish a multi-disciplinary collective of Marxist artists, musicians, scientists, academics and activists, who can work together across a range of performative platforms. The name, Diderot Gesellschaft, draws inspiration from the great 18th century French encyclopaedist and theatre-maker, Denis Diderot, and the German word for a particular type of society that Émile Durkheim described as having “organic solidarity”. It takes inspiration too from Bertolt Brecht’s plans for a similar gathering in the 1930s-40s that never reached fruition due to World War II and the cold war afterwards, but we have added ‘Movement’ to this inherently internationalist moniker to increase its resonance as an activist base and a forum for artistic action.

Last year we seeded a number of projects at CU, all of which we are continuing, along with this year’s new projects. The idea is that nothing is fixed or finished - instead fluid and capable of adaptation and change, as conditions and opportunities arise. At CU2026 we will also launch our DGM Substack platform, where projects can be developed with live and recorded broadcasts, further documentation and means to debate.

As co-chairs and founders of DGM, the Marxist academic Esther Leslie and I will prompt a discussion on what might be included in a DGM manifesto and invite contributions from those attending and involved in the programme through the week. This will be continued at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November, with a manifesto to follow.

There will not be time directly at CU2026 culture sessions for discussion because it was recognised that last year it was a bit much for comrades who had already attended a full day of debating sessions to do so in the evening too. So this year we are keeping them to a tight one hour (6pm-7pm), but, of course, things can be discussed informally afterwards in person or online.

Darko Suvin

In particular, we are honoured and excited to have the eminent Marxist professor, Darko Suvin, involved this year in several of the programmatic projects - including what we have billed as the ‘Darko Days’. In the first of these, on Sunday August 9, we will present a Sprechgesang (‘spoken song’) exploration of Darko’s recent essay, ‘A song of death and ongoing joy: o bella ciao’, about the origins and power of the great song of solidarity which has been taken up and treasured across the world.

As well as a celebration of that inspiring song, this session offers the opportunity to look at how to take the essay form into performance potentials. We sincerely hope that Darko - now 96 years old and living in Italy - will be able to join us on the Zoom for this and other events through the week. Indeed his and Brecht’s mighty presences will be felt first thing each morning, when I will read an extract from their shared poeticisation of the Communist manifesto. To give greater depth and possibilities for further performance I will be attempting to learn the poem by heart as soon as I get this article finished!

On Monday August 10 we begin on a project that gave rise to the idea of using Substack as a platform for DGM. I came across an essay there on ‘Sally Mju’s Marxism’ page, entitled ‘Marx’s communism and the inspiration from Hegel’s “anti-Christ”’, which I found very inspiring, particularly with regard to the use of physical movement metaphors and similes. When I commented on this, the enthusiastic response from Sally (at the time a student living in Vietnam) prompted me to look deeper into the essay, which deals with understanding alienation, spirit and religion from Hegelian and Marxist perspectives.

It reminded me of the legendary speech given by Jimmy Reid, the communist leader of the Upper Clyde shipbuilders, when he was inaugurated as rector of Glasgow University students in 1972. What he said on alienation, known as ‘the rat race speech’, was at the time reprinted in full in The New York Times and praised as the greatest speech since the Gettysburg address! It has recently been sampled by the radical Glasgow academic band, The Tenementals, for a song on their album, Glasgow: a history (volume I of VI).

When I then discovered that the title of the first song on the album, ‘The owl of Minerva’, comes from a phrase by Hegel, my mind was truly blown over how such interconnectedness occurs. I knew for certain that this is another project that needs seeding - especially when we look at the symptom of the very alienation Reid explores in his speech involving the opium of so many people in Glasgow today, which is causing the highest level of drug overdose deaths in Europe. So all of this will be explored on Monday August 11. It affirms what I have come to view as one of the true purposes of art - to show the interconnectedness of everything or how that is being stifled or denied.

Interconnection

Such addiction leads into the next session on Tuesday August 12, when we seed a new project that shows another level of interconnection across the cultural programme sessions. This did have a previous life as a theatre play by Johny Brown (also leader of the music group, Band of Holy Joy), entitled William Burroughs caught in possession of the rime of the ancient mariner. The play pitches Burroughs as the ancient mariner captain with a New York junkie loser crew of Johnny Thunders, Jean Michel Basquiat and Kathy Acker, and was performed at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in April 2002, which I co-directed.

We also begin exploring a possible one-man-show version that connects the celebrated poem by that other drug addict writer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with the Marxist understanding of ‘metabolic rift’ and how capitalism is leading us into such unchartered waters of climate catastrophe. It will feature extracts from Burroughs’ own writings on ecological disaster.

Bill McGuire’s latest book, The fate of the world: a history and future of the climate crisis,² has very recently been published and he will be leading two sessions in the main CU programme on August 13 and 14. After the first, on geo-engineering, we will present a dramatised reading of Bill’s short story, The fix, which deals with the issue and went on to be expanded into his novel, Sky seed.

On Thursday August 13 at our ‘Darko Days 2’ we explore some of comrade Suvin’s many poems and parables including his epic warning, “Thus spake the bitter muse: do not profit by the blood of your fellows!”

Our extended session on the afternoon of Friday August 14 (3.30pm-5.30pm) also owes a debt of gratitude to Darko for his 2023 essay, A long hope: the Prometheus counter-project. It begins with a statement that matches much of what we are attempting too:

This assay [sic!] uses my professional orientations of theatre studies with comparative literature and a movement into political epistemology. Dramaturgy and literature meet here the overwhelming existential threat to all our lives, which demands reflection about how do we understand what we hope and wish to understand? Classical studies, in this case of Athens and Aeschylus, I much honour and try to learn from, but the essay cannot be bound by or to them, for I seek a different animal: how to grasp, amid our danger and distress, the prominent poetic and cognitive view of a similar cataclysm from the past, as a lesson to the present.

The work is, of course, a provisional statement: a contribution.

Marx himself famously wrote in his 1841 doctoral dissertation that Prometheus was the foremost saint and martyr in the philosopher’s calendar (he also makes an appearance in Capital). Another interpretation of Prometheus will be presented live in the session by Camilla Power of the Radical Anthropology Group, who told me: “This is an Indo-European patriarchal story connected to the ‘world historic defeat of the female sex’. I think we know more about mythic structures than Marx did. It’s a menstrual male myth like Jesus Christ.”

That should certainly open up a good debate. We will also have a reading of the play, as translated by Joel Agee (I am trying to get hold of him). He was brought up in the German Democratic Republic and in his introduction states how his version ties in with Jan Kott’s essay, The vertical axis, or the ambiguities of Prometheus. Kott came from a Polish communist background and I had only been previously conscious of him as the author of the highly influential Shakespeare, our contemporary, which I last read when I was playing Hamlet some 40 years ago! So there is lots to explore there too.

Given the crises we are already living through now and the widely held belief that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is vital that we break barriers and build bridges between Marxists of all varieties to use our collective imagination to explore alternatives to the beckoning barbarism.

1. ‘Learning to play our way’ Weekly Worker July 24 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1548/learning-to-play-our-way.↩︎

2. See Jack Conrad’s review, ‘Back to a hothouse earth’ Weekly Worker July 23: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1595/back-to-a-hothouse-earth.↩︎