The Spectre

Reviews Ian Thomas | August 25, 2026 Corporate interests have outstripped the supposed hegemony of nation-states for a while now. That fact has spilled beyond boardrooms and corner offices and into the realm of the everyday. The game is the same as it ever was, to make the line go up. Attended by that zero-sum focus on growth and an equally binary disdain for whatever gets in the way of it, oligarchs and their pet politicians are content to run the play that has almost always paid reliable dividends: pit the working class against each other. By undercutting the unity of the working class, rulers continue to run roughshod, unabated, over the whole fucking world. But generations of austerity, war, and deregulation—all in the name of making the line go up for someone, somewhere—have frayed the social fabric so irreparably that through those rips and tears spill humans, lives. The intensity of it all—marked by screaming pundits and the endless scroll of human suffering— might make it all seem novel, but it’s very, very old. art from The Spectre (Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2026) by Lefteris “Boban” Papathanasis, Mauro Vanetti, Vangelis Zikos art from The Spectre (Kersplebedeb Publishing, ...