The Gotham Guillotine

The Gotham Guillotine Manifesto 

“The exploited are going to throw a big party. Memory and guillotines.” 

– Roberto Bolaño

Are you sick of capitalist realist lit fic? Exhausted by the applause for odes to normie bullshit? Do think pieces make you question their author’s capacity for thought?

If you’re nodding so hard that your neck is about to snap, then you’re in the right place. 

The Gotham Guillotine is New York’s sharpest socialist literary magazine. Our aims are modest: to overthrow the arts world one molotov cocktail at a time.

The Gotham Guillotine’s editorial board is committed to publishing the socialist creatives of our time and to telling the literary boregeoizzzie to kick rocks. 

This endeavor formed because we were dismayed by the meagre opportunities available for radical artists. You can only be rejected so many times before you begin to wonder if something is wrong not with you but with the system. And our current literary system is busy kissing the status quo’s ass. 

For too long, socialism has been the exclusive territory of academics, activists, and party militants. While working class history is impossible without these comrades, what the movement has gained in brain, it has lost in spirit. 

The first socialists were creatives. You have to have a strong imagination to dream up a caring society in the midst of slavery, theocracy, feudalism, and capitalist savagery.

But artists have long abandoned the socialist cause. They have neutered their politics in exchange for fickle fame. They hang garbage in museums and call them critiques of late stage capitalism. How could it be that after a century of communist class war that the arts scene could be so puritanical, so boring? Did the thick layers of CIA-funded abstract expressionist paint smother their revolutionary spirit?

The Gotham Guillotine is here to unfuck all that.

The Gotham Guillotine is not the place for staid sloganeering, liberal pessimism, or literary bootlickers. There’s enough of that shit already. We want to revolutionize socialist realism, pioneer socialist surrealism, eviscerate capitalist literary conventions, and stuff the ivory tower full of TNT.

Every issue of The Gotham Guillotine will trigger an uprising. Barricades of print issues will be formed minutes after publication. We expect to be the most popular literary magazine in America, if not the world, before you can say fully automated luxury communism. Nothing can damper our revolutionary optimism. Pessimistic punks, fuck off. 

No one’s dared to wage the twenty-first century class war through literature, but history is only made by those who dare. 

We’re gonna change the world. Are you?