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These days even mere attempts to improve capitalism are often called ‘Socialism,’ while in reality they are only reforms. But such reforms cannot be considered socialistic because true Socialism does not mean to ‘improve’ capitalism but to abolish it altogether.

Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with Capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk-takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failures in America, requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for one means certain losses for others. As Sandage narrates in his compelling study, losers leave no records, while winners cannot stop talking about it, and so the record of failure is “a hidden history of pessimism within a culture of optimism.” This hidden history of pessimism, a history moreover that lies quietly behind every story of success, can be told a number of different ways; while Sandage tells it as a shadow history of U.S. Capitalism, I tell it here as a tale of anticapitalist, queer struggle. I tell it also as a narrative about anti-colonial struggle, the refusal of legibility, and an art of unbecoming. This is a story without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbably, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.