Reflection 02: January - March 2026
In January we published our first quarterly reflection covering the last three months of 2025. We posed the question: how do artists respond to the contemporary challenges presented by capitalism, imperialism, and rising fascism? Against the backdrop of an ongoing US-funded genocide of Palestinians, the start of 2026 encompassed an escalation of these challenges: On January 3, the United States dropped bombs across Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, and abducted the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, alongside his wife, Cilia Flores. A few days later, on January 7, agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killed a woman named Renée Good in broad daylight with dozens of witnesses. Since January, our country has waged a war against Iran; laws established by discriminatory bills, such as Kansas Senate Bill 244—which forbids transgender individuals from changing their gender identity on licenses and birth certificates, as well as opening them up to lawsuits should anyone suspect them of breaking the letter of the bill—have prevailed, giving momentum to the continuing attacks on trans-rights; and data corporations have threatened the livelihoods of working people with their drive for more data centers across the country to expand AI capabilities—a push that eliminates jobs and endangers the environment.
It’s easy to trudge along in 2026 with a loss of hope. This is where we must remind ourselves that hope is not only a concept of desire; hope is, most importantly, a mechanism for survival. History is defined by conflict between opposing forces, and we’ve learned from our collective struggles that progress prevails. In Detroit, working-class people are struggling and organizing at the forefront of the issues that impact their lives. Leland House residents are organizing through the Detroit Tenants Union to seek justice for their sudden displacement and the restriction to their belongings. Asamblea Popular is building a mass network of Migra Watch to monitor the presence of ICE; developing education on immigration rights such as teach-ins, literature, community forums; providing mutual aid support for families impacted by ICE terror; and offering legal services for immigrants. In the darkest of times, there is a light, and that is the force of the collectivism, perseverance, and hope of a working-class people’s movement. Art’s place in this fight is where our research and art-centered political education begin.
In our conversation with Drew Younker, she directly confronts the question of how artists can be involved in making a better world possible. In January she released a single from her band, Dry Fruit, called “Hold Contra,” inspired by the daily contradictions of her life: being working-class and forced to sell her labor daily at a market-rate while her bosses make more than double her pay, as well as her experience as a trans woman. In addition to her music practice, Drew is an activist in the popular front. At music shows, she has helped fundraise for Asamblea Popular, gathered signatures for the Invest in MI Kids[1] ballot initiative, and has used her mic to vocalize the need for people to get involved in the movement against rising fascism.
Drew’s balance between her personal expression, art, and community involvement is one example of how artists operate as contributors to a broader movement for progressive change. While all art is political, art does not require an overtly political message for its presence and its creator to play a role in a larger social and political struggle. To reiterate what Drew called out in her conversation, joining an organization or a campaign is the very least artists can do for their role in a mass people’s movement.
Musicians find their struggle to be against a beast of a music industry. This industry exploits the creative labor of artists through the packaging and sale of their creative outputs in a market predominantly dominated by streaming services, where investors make millions and most artists—particularly of the working-class DIY scene—make no living. Daniel Ek, founder and Chief Chairman of Spotify, has a net worth of $9.5 billion. The artists on Spotify earn on average $0.007 per stream.
Ek is also the founder of Prima Materia, a European-based venture capital firm that invests in technology-centered companies. The firm’s $690 million investment in Helsing, a German-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) military tech company, landed Ek the position of Chairman. Helsing describes itself as a “new type of defense company” providing “AI-enabled precision mass and autonomous systems across all domains.” It develops AI strike drones, underwater surveillance devices, and autonomous fighter jets. It’s hard to think of a clearer example of the ties between music and imperialism, or, more specifically, the killings and destruction of regions across the world in the name of “defense.” This connection doesn’t go unnoticed by music lovers. In the wake of Prima Materia’s multi-million dollar investment, a subscriber-driven boycott of Spotify sprang to life with the support of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement, as well as the No Music for Genocide (NMG) campaign. Additionally, music artists began to pull their work off Spotify, including Deerhoof, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Xiu Xiu, and My Bloody Valentine, to name a few. It’s unlikely any of the most popular names in the music business will do the same—most of the music stars with high stream counts have made it into the ranks of the capitalist class, and their interests reflect that. Instead, this drive by music artists is rooted in the working-class.
The impact of AI is seeping into every facet of our lives and it’s happening at a pace that is hard to grasp. There are ever more efforts made by corporations to incorporate AI into every-day business; students are increasingly using AI in their toolbox to generate assignments; journalists are finding their work taken over by AI at a startling rate; and there has been an influx of articles and panel discussions on transitioning into an AI world, attempting to share a pearl of wisdom of how AI should either be railed against or embraced.
With an unprecedented funding growth that has already reached $297 billion for three AI companies over the first three-months of 2026, it’s no surprise that people are feeling overwhelmed by the speed, growth, and impact of the technology [2]. Simultaneously, there is an overwhelming amount of acceptance of using AI as a tool to complete basic tasks to increase efficiency. Data centers are being built at record speed in order to make up for the demand and anticipated growth of AI.
Michigan, home to the largest fresh water source in the world, is receiving immense pressure to build data centers across the state. In order to combat the reckless environmental destruction of the Great Lakes region, House Bill 5594 was introduced to slow the pace of data-center developments and enable municipalities to make informative decisions on ordinances and regulations around potential data-centers in their area [3]. This is not only an important step towards protecting life regionally, it is also a necessary step toward global solidarity, as the same AI systems that are harvesting data here in Michigan can be connected to events and decisions made around the world—possibly including the war crimes being committed in Iran [4].
A people’s movement led by the working class is the only movement that can succeed across a number of issues, including AI. Since artists are primarily part of the 99%, their involvement in these movements becomes ever more needed. As with Boycott Spotify, however, a broader question arises: how do artists reclaim artist platforms and spaces? This is the artist’s iteration of a similar question: how does a worker reclaim their labor and its products?
South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, is a popular arena for music artists to contend with these questions. Initially started as a music festival to showcase local artists by giving them an opportunity to perform live to a wide audience, it tacked on film and digital media in the 90s and later solidified itself as a conference for tech innovation. Each year in March, musicians from small music scenes across the world are welcomed to the fest alongside technology start ups and CEOs, including the Co-CEOs of Spotify.
Interestingly, the festival this past March included a conversation session between the Guardian and Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist known for his leadership during the student encampments at Columbia University where he was then a graduate student. Khalil was targeted, abducted, and nearly deported for his pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activism. His inclusion in SXSW comes just years after more than 60 artists dropped out of the festival due to its sponsorship by the U.S. Army and Raytheon, a weapons manufacturer now rebranded as RTX. While the Army had previously boothed at South By in the past, RTX’s involvement sparked extra scrutiny due to the company's supply of weapons to Israel. It is a seemingly strategic move to include a widely known Palestinian activist in this year’s schedule of events. Despite their best efforts, SXSW cannot erase the concrete relationship between culture and war. Participating artists, particularly from progressive and working-class backgrounds, are then faced with an ever-growing existential dilemma regarding their art under capitalism: how does one reconcile their dependency on a multi-million dollar music industry with the wider struggle being waged against US Imperialism?
The United States imperialist apparatus works constantly to manufacture consent for the atrocities of war abroad and terror on the domestic front. Art—and especially music as a compelling and accessible means of communication—has always found itself subject to channeling agendas of ruling class war profiteers. The momentous performance of the “Star Spangled Banner” at every major sports game in the US at the time of US-funded genocide and the war on Iran is one example of where pro-imperialist, nationalist symbolism pervades “apolitical” social gatherings through music [5][6]. In pop-culture, examples from post-9/11 country music come to mind, such as Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” where he sings about the retribution to be paid to those who carried through the act of terror committed on American soil by a foreign entity (of course, this same anger is rarely extended to acts of terror committed on Americans by other Americans).
While considering how art helps make a better world possible, we must contend with how art is used to uphold the pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist agenda of the ruling class. This topic was most prevalent during our Study Group sessions in February and March; both sessions looked at the relationship between art and capitalism, and both examined the necessity of art in shaping cultural acceptance. For artists who are operating in the face of rising capitalist crises and fascism, these relationships require more consideration. The fact that art is used in preserving US imperialist ideology makes it resolutely more urgent for art—and more specifically, artists—to oppose this. Part of an artist's role in making a better world possible is to resist the use of art in manufacturing consent for capitalist exploitation and imperialist terror, and to denounce complacency.
History presents a myriad of examples of art functioning in this way. Artists involved in the Berlin DADA movement during the 1920’s were responding to changes in technology and industry, as well as the tragic aftermath of WWI. Artists in this movement decided to shift from the nonsensical Zurich DADA movement of the 1910s into a more politically charged approach inspired by anti-fascism and the Bolshevik revolution. Artists like Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and George Grosz incorporated their condemnation for Nazis, the bourgeois class, and a wider criticism of capitalism into their artwork. These artists did not just stop at criticism—they were thinking about how to build a world better than the one they experienced during and after WWI. We can directly see their ties to socialist movements in the Dadaistischen Zentralrat der Weltrevolution (Central Council of Dada for World Revolution) with their list of demands including “the immediate expropriation of property (socialization) and the communal feeding of all,” or, additionally, in Heartfield’s pioneering use of photomontage in his cover designs for the weekly anti-fascist paper, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ). The Berlin Dadaists were not siloing themselves from the world—they were contributing to the broader fight for a better world for all.
That better world cannot be created alone. It is important for artists to work with their communities and fellow artists to collectively shape it. Spaces like Study Group—which present working-class oriented, art-centered discussions for ideating and learning—are an important component of this work. In our February and March Study Group sessions we grappled with feelings of despair as examples were shared of capitalism’s effects on our mind and bodies; on those who face triple exploitation; and the varying degrees of alienation we endure with each other, our environment, and our labor. But as the great James Baldwin said in an interview, “I never have been in despair about the world. I’ve been enraged by it. I don’t think I’m in despair. I can’t afford despair. I can’t tell my nephew, my niece. You can’t tell the children there’s no hope,” the same rang true for our discussion—moments of despair were met by comments of hope and examples of collectivism in the arts and our community. This experience became a clear example of the necessity and power of coming together to work through the challenges we face today. It also highlighted the significance of art as a bastion of humanity and hope. Our conversation with Indira Edwards from March calls out clearly the power of art such as music in serving that function: its social necessity creates spaces for people of diverse backgrounds to gather and find common ground, lift their spirits, and collectivize around something better for everybody. In their words, “everything has to be social, that's how we learn to be human, and that's how we learn to have empathy for other people.”
Indira’s point is underscored throughout the write-ups of our 30-second reviews. Contributors to this series find hope and inspiration across various mediums of art by various artists, all centered around ideas for how to make a better world possible. Artists have always found ways to struggle against oppression, and it is their integral role in shaping a new world to come that drives the revolutionary optimism of our work.
Heather and Danielle, Jan-Mar 2026
[1] An initiative which unfortunately did not meet the required signatures for getting on the ballot but would have been a substantial progressive step forward for the state of Michigan. The campaign is instead now targeting for 2028.
[2] OpenAI, Anthropic, Waymo
[3] Titled the Data Center Regulation Act, the law would establish a moratorium on the building of data centers in Michigan until August 2027 so that the economic and environmental impact of data centers on people and the environment can be investigated. Grassroots organizations around the state are banning together to take action and speak out against the building of data centers and this bill is one step towards legislation that would help these efforts.
[4] On February 28, 2026 a US air strike hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School, in Minab, Hormozgan province in Iran, killing 168 people, including over 100 children. An investigation is underway to indicate the intelligence gathering for the strike by the US and to see if outdated intelligence was used to move forward with the attack (source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/03/usa-iran-those-responsible-for-deadly-and-unlawful-us-strike-on-school-that-killed-over-100-children-must-be-held-accountable/).
International law requires that there must be information gathered before a strike is initiated to distinguish between military and civilian objects and people. International humanitarian law requires that there must be steps taken to ensure that all civilian people and objects must be protected in a conflict. This US led military attack that is a part of “Operation Epic Fury” or “Operation Roaring Lion” has raised questions into how artificial intelligence is used/misused in military operations today.
[5] I—Danielle—recently went to a Red Wings game and the experience of sitting in an arena full of people who were standing with their hands on their chests and singing along to the national anthem during the continuing terror the US is inflicting upon the middle east was absolutely surreal to say the least
[6] It's important to note that the inclusion of the “Star Spangled Banner” at most major event in the US is not just a commemoration of the US revolution, but specifically a continuous commemoration of US-perceived entitlement to wage war abroad, as evidenced by the throrough honoring of war veterans and militalry officers during these events
