Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

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I am shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden passing of the architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen. Cohen was a giant in his field, perhaps the last capable of producing a truly comprehensive account of modern design from the perspective of someone who still had a stake in its project. One of his students, Anna Kats, put it well in a public post: “Jean-Louis Cohen was the twentieth century… The entire century seemed to have happened to him, because of him, or to have passed before him in some immediate way. Losing him is losing a world.”

After the first wave of heroic histories of modern architecture—written by the likes of Siegfried Giedion, Nikolaus Pevsner, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Bruno Zevi, and Leonardo Benevolo—came a number of more critical retrospectives. Kenneth Frampton and Manfredo Tafuri each explored the contradictions of modernism, offering subtler dialectical narratives informed by the Frankfurt School and Marxism. Similarly, William Curtis sought to both historicize and globalize the modern movement by expanding its canon of master practitioners.

While Cohen initially specialized in the Soviet avant-garde, his interests eventually grew to encompass the whole of international modernism. His encyclopedic 2012 overview of The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History, is as far-ranging a survey as anything written by the authors I just mentioned. Cohen also organized numerous exhibitions on Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and lesser-known architects like André Lurçat. His accompanying studies of these figures are among the best available.

Politically, Cohen struck me as a Tocquevillean. Unlike Tafuri, whose work he memorialized in a moving 1994 piece, Cohen was not a radical. He rightly abhorred the undemocratic authoritarianism of the Stalinist state, but seemed to suspect that all Marxist politics tended in that direction. Although a protégé of Anatole Kopp, Cohen was a liberal. Despite this, he remained principled and consistent amidst mainstream pressures to censor anything with a connection to Soviet or Russian history in light of the war in Ukraine.

Just a few months ago, for example, after NYU professor Peder Anker launched a ridiculous and defamatory online campaign against Anya Bokov’s outstanding VKhUTEMAS show at Cooper Union, Cohen was among the most outspoken in support of Bokov. Surprisingly, The New York Times chose to cover the controversy, and reached out to him for comment:

Jean-Louis Cohen, a New York University professor and an architecture historian who has written on the VKhUTEMAS since 1978—he was a thesis adviser to Bokov—disputes the show’s involvement with Soviet imperialism. “I don’t think you can establish any connection between this version of the avant-garde and Russian imperialism,” he said in a phone interview. He noted that Stalin’s regime was equally repressive to independent national movements and to freethinking institutions like VKhUTEMAS. Its professors and students were ostracized, with scores sent to the gulags. Some were executed. The Soviet state expunged VKhUTEMAS.

“So you take Pushkin out of the libraries? You cancel Tschaikovsky concerts? You don’t perform Chekhov?” Cohen asked. “That’s a dogmatic, rigid position which I personally don’t share.” Cohen added that the design school was not strictly Russian: There were many Ukrainian students and teachers in VKhUTEMAS, along with Jews, Armenians, Tartars, and other ethnic groups [I made a similar point in a comment on Anker’s original article attacking Bokov].

Furthermore, and on a personal note, Cohen was always extremely generous towards me. When I left grad school in 2011 and moved to New York, feeling somewhat adrift in life, he invited me to sit in on some of his lectures and classes on the Soviet avant-garde. Years later, he asked me to attend a talk he was giving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and graciously accepted a request I made for an interview about it. I’ve included some photos I took of Cohen from his lecture at the Met and before our interview.

Below you can find a selection of Cohen’s books and articles in PDF form, followed by my aforementioned interview with him and the review I wrote of his CCA exhibit on “Amerikanizm” in Russian architecture. The interview was originally published in the Field Notes section of the Brooklyn Rail, edited by Paul Mattick (himself a longtime admirer of Cohen’s writings on art), while the review was originally published by Strelka Magazine, which has voluntarily ceased publication since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

  1. “The Emergence of Architectural Research in France” (1987)
  2. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1994) [third edition, revised and updated]
  3. “‘Experimental’ Architecture and Radical History: Remembering Manfredo Tafuri” (1995)
  4. Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893-1960 (1995)
  5. “A Conversation with Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss” (Summer 1999)
  6. “Exhibitionist Revisionism: Exposing Architectural History” (September 1999)
  7. “Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers, and Beyond” (2006)
  8. “Introduction to Toward an Architecture (2007)
  9. “Soviet Legal Documents on the Preservation of Monuments” (Summer 2008)
  10. “Le Corbusier’s Tsentrosoiuz in Moscow” (Summer 2008)
  11. “Preserving Modernism: A Russian Exception?” (Summer 2008)
  12. “Scholarship or Politics? Architectural History and the Risks of Autonomy” (September 2008)
  13. “Mirror of Dreams” (Fall 2010)
  14. The Future of Architecture since 1889: A Worldwide History (2012)
  15. “In the Cause of Landscape” (2013) [from the exhibition Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes]

Quite a few pieces are missing from this list. Most notably: Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR (1992); Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (2011); and Building a New New World: Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture (2020). Cohen has another piece forthcoming in The Visibility of Modernization in Architecture: A Debate (2023), a collection where I’ve also got an essay. My essay goes over the rediscovery of modernism under Khrushchev. Not terribly original, but hopefully solid.

Architecture and revolution

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Jean-Louis Cohen is among today’s preeminent historians of modern architecture. The following interview took place the evening of October 21, 2019, and focused on four main points: the enduring relevance of the Soviet avant-garde; the relationship between revolutionary architectural form and revolutionary social content; the legacy of the Vkhutemas school for architecture in Moscow, often overshadowed by the smaller German Bauhaus; and Cohen’s new show at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal on “Amerikanizm in Russian Architecture.”

Ross Wolfe (Rail): Last spring, you delivered the inaugural Leonard A. Lauder lecture series at the Metropolitan Museum. You chose to cover the first two decades of modern architecture in the USSR, under the title “Art x Architecture: Russian Intersections, 1917–1937.” Why this topic? What does the Soviet avant-garde have to teach us today?

Jean-Louis Cohen: Let’s start with the end. I don’t think that the avant-garde “teaches” us anything. It remains a unique historical experience. I’m very skeptical about the idea of being “taught” by history. But, that said, studying this experience can help us make decisions and consider the condition of architecture and the arts today.

The Russian avant-garde, globally speaking, was split into many currents, subcurrents, movements, etc. So the term “avant-garde” subsumes widely diverse innovative efforts that developed in Russia already before the revolution. Everything started around 1912 and continued in varied forms all the way through to the late ’30s. The basic message was that art, and research into unseen forms, could be articulated with social change, that art, or the most extreme forms of radical innovation in art, could embody values of social change. In parallel, the generous values of the early Soviet Union were lost between the 1917 revolution and the Stalinist regression of the early ’30s. That’s the basic thing.

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Special issue of Insurgent Notes on the conflict in Ukraine

The latest issue of Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice, on the conflict in Ukraine, is out. I helped edit it, and hope that it serves to prompt further discussion and debate around the topic. Thanks to John Garvey and Amiri Barksdale for their work in getting it published, and to all the contributors and translators. You can access the articles via the website, or directly by clicking the links below:

Yuri Rozhkov’s photomontages for the Mayakovsky poem “To the Workers of Kursk” (1924)

 

In 1924, the self-taught artist Iurii Nikolaevich Rozhkov created a series of photomontages inspired by Vladimir Maiakovskii’s poem “To the Workers of Kursk” and the geological discovery of the Kursk Magnetic Anamoly (KMA). Rozhkov’s series for Maiakovskii’s ode to labor is both an example of the political propaganda of the reconstruction period of the NEP era and a polemical answer to all those who relentlessly attacked Maiakovskii and criticized avant-garde art as alien to the masses. The article introduces Rozhkov’s less-known photomontage series as a new model of the avant-garde photopoetry book, which offers a sequential reading of Maiakovskii’s poem and functions as a cinematic dispositive of the early Soviet agitprop apparatus (dispositif). Aleksandar Bošković argues that the photopoem itself converts into an idiosyncratic avant-garde de-mountable memorial to the working class: a dynamic cine-dispositive through which the the early agitprop apparatus is realized in lived experience, reproduced, and transformed, thus delineating its shift towards the new dispositif of the late 1920s — socialist realism.

Рабочим Курска, добывшим первую руду…

Было: 
  социализм – 
    восторженное слово! 
С флагом, 
  с песней 
    становились слева, 
и сама 
  на головы 
    спускалась слава. 
Сквозь огонь прошли, 
  сквозь пушечные дула. 
Вместо гор восторга – 
  горе дола. 
Стало: 
  коммунизм – 
    обычнейшее дело. 
Нынче 
  словом 
    не пофанфароните – 
шею крючь 
  да спину гни. 
На вершочном 
  незаметном фронте 
завоевываются дни. 
Я о тех, 
  кто не слыхал 
    про греков 
      в драках, 
кто 
  не читал 
    про Муциев Сцев_о_л, 
кто не знает, 
  чем замечательны Гракхи, – 
кто просто работает – 
  грядущего вол. 
Было. Мы митинговали. 
  Словопадов струи, 
пузыри идеи – 
  мир сразить во сколько. 
А на деле – 
  обломались 
    ручки у кастрюли, 
бреемся 
  стеклом-осколком. 
А на деле – 
  у подметок дырки, – 
без гвоздя 
  слюной 
    кле_и_ть – впустую! 
Дырку 
  не пос_а_дите в Бутырки, 
а однако 
  дырки 
    протестуют. 

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Public discussion on “War and Capitalist Crisis” in NYC

In New York next week there will be a public discussion, the event description of which you can read below, on the conflict in Ukraine. This is part of a broader effort to gather contributions for an upcoming issue of Insurgent Notes, which is devoted to the topic and will explore the same questions. Check out the call for submissions and list of recommended readings there for more information. You can see the poster below as well..

SATURDAY | September 10, 2022
WOODBINE | 545 Woodward Ave
5:00 PM | Ridgewood, NY 11385

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caught many off-guard across the political spectrum. Many leftists rushed to release statements in support of one side or the other. Groups and individuals with well-established records of being sympathetic to Russia and convinced that US imperialism is the only real enemy (mostly Stalinists, but more than a handful of Trotskyists) sided with Putin and his “Z” campaign, while others stood in solidarity with a national resistance led by the Ukrainian state (other Trotskyists, and even some anarchists). A few pieces by communists emerged that were more circumspect, trying to take stock of the situation, but these were few and far between.

In hopes of bringing greater clarity to the matter, and seeking to articulate a revolutionary approach, we have posed a series of questions clustered around four interrelated themes:

  1. Imperialism and anti-imperialism — perhaps a semantic question, but an important one. Is the war in Ukraine an example of a one-sidedly imperialist invasion of a formerly colonial or subject nation, or an interimperialist conflict (albeit by proxy, on one side)? Beyond the obvious aggression of Russia, what is the role of NATO? Do classical Marxist theories of imperialism still describe the world situation today? What, if anything, is different?
  2. National self-determination — this old concept has been invoked both by those backing Ukraine’s independence from Russia, as well as those promoting the autonomy of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. How does the national question figure into the current conflict? For communists skeptical of the “right” to national self-determination in the first place, the invocation of this concept by both sides perhaps illustrates the antinomies of Stalinist and Trotskyist thought.
  3. Defeatism vs. defensism — in many ways this is the classic debate. What is the proper internationalist response? Is “no war but the class war” still an adequate slogan? Principled opposition to every side in a given interimperialist conflict usually rests on the notion of revolutionary defeatism. But we must still ask ourselves what this looks like when there is no realistic prospect for revolution in the next few years, when the working class is largely disorganized around the world.
  4. Geopolitics and phases of capitalism — How do geopolitical rivalries play into all this? Might an aspiring global hegemon, China, come out from this on top? Does the return of great power conflicts, direct on one side (Russia’s) and indirect on the other (NATO’s), signify a new phase of economic development after “neoliberalism”? What sorts of new struggles might arise from energy and food shortages linked to the war? Marxists have long regarded war as being linked to capitalist crisis, but as a cause or an effect? What kind of crisis (social, economic, political)?

Participants

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John Garvey
 has been involved in radical politics for more than fifty years. He coedited Race Traitor with Noel Ignatiev from 1993 to 2005 and has been the coeditor of Insurgent Notes with Loren Goldner since its inception in 2010. He also currently is a member of the Editorial Group of Hard Crackers: chronicles of everyday life.

Sanderr is a longtime member of the pro-revolutionary group Internationalist Perspective. Many of his articles can be found at the group’s website.

Lilya is an abolitionist organizer and legal worker originally from Ukraine who has been living in the US since the mid-1990s.

Andrew is a communist from Kharkhiv and author of the “Letters from Ukraine” published in Endnotes.

 

Grigory Yudin on the antiwar protests in Russia

Image: Vasily Vereshchagin,
The Apotheosis of War
(1871)

My friend Maya Vinokour translated this piece and sent it to me the night before it went up for publication. It’s an interesting and insightful interview, complete with a quote from Adorno, about some of the sentiment surrounding the invasion. Meduza is an international site dedicated to Russia and the rest of the former USSR, which featured an article I relied on heavily in an essay written for the Swiss architectural journal archithese. The title, reproduced below, is a bit misleading: Yudin’s claim is precisely that there have been pretty significant demonstrations against the war already. Perhaps they will continue, perhaps not; the point is that the Russian public is far from uniformly supportive of Putin’s militarism.

Either way, I feel it’s important to amplify antiwar voices coming out of Russia itself. Karl Liebknecht put it well over a hundred years ago, in formulating the doctrine of revolutionary defeatism, when he wrote that “the main enemy is at home.” Various leftist outlets, from social-democratic Jacobin to the quasi-tankie Grayzone, have either been initially incredulous of the possibility of a Russian invasion to openly supportive once it was a fait accompli. Seeing this all play out over social media has been pretty demoralizing, I must say, as liberals and blue-checks of all stripes have added the Ukrainian flag to their username while Western tankies and rightwing nationalists added the Russian flag. Weirdly, wojak memes have been among the most poignant at expressing this impasse.

As far as political assessments of this dangerous situation go, my sympathies are (as ever) with the statement released by the ICT, which calls for communists to support neither Putin nor NATO. Some might claim that this response is formulaic or boilerplate, but I feel it’s correct nevertheless. European powers, not to mention the US, have been steadily escalating tensions with their sanctions and saber-rattling. Pavlos Roufos lambasted the newfound “unity” being celebrated by the press.

I really hope this is read as offensively as possible: those who rejoice in “EU unity” premised on accelerated militarisation and all out financial war against an authoritarian nuclear power are war mongering sociopaths and should be treated as such.

Other analyses I’ve found useful include Adam Tooze’s sobering analysis of the financial implications of the war in New Statesman. Alex Gendler has also gone on Antifada to discuss the invasion, so take a listen if you get the chance. Yudin has other articles on the current crisis which are worth checking out. Regardless, read the following interview.

 

A dead soldier (covered by fresh snowfall) from the Russian Army, alongside a disabled and damaged MT-LB (APC) armored personnel carrier, near a road leading to the city of Kharkov, Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, February 25th, 2022.

Why no mass protests in Russia?
An interview with Grigory Yudin

Svetlana Reiter
Meduza/Медуза
March 1, 2022
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On February 24, Russia began a war with Ukraine. On that same day, protests broke out all over Russia. It is difficult to call them mass demonstrations in any real sense, although ultimately almost 6,500 people were arrested (in Russia, street gatherings of this type are practically forbidden, with the authorities persecuting even individuals who picket alone). Sociologist Grigory Yudin, too, was arrested and ended up hospitalized following an antiwar protest in Moscow. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter discussed with Yudin why it doesn’t make sense to call protests in Russia “small” — and why he thinks scholars have to take a principled stand.

When we were first arranging this interview, you objected to my statement that antiwar protests were small in number: “Not so small.” What made you say that?

We don’t live in Berlin, where participation in a protest gets you lots of pats on the back. You can end up with a concussion, or spend the night in jail, or be required to remove your underwear [for a cavity search], or [possibly] have a felony case opened against you. Given the current situation, we can’t exclude the possibility that protests will eventually be punishable by 20-year prison sentences or the death penalty. So, yeah, in my view, people are coming out in force.

At a recent protest, you were beaten to the point of sustaining a concussion. Can you give us some more details about that?

Honestly, I don’t really want to talk about it — ultimately, it’s insignificant against the background of the major disaster we’re confronting. But, yes, the evening ended with a concussion for me.

How are you feeling now?

So-so. I’m still recovering.

Has anyone been conducting sociological surveys in order to determine which segments of the population approve of the hostilities in Ukraine?

They’re in progress, but it’s too early to talk about results — there aren’t any numbers for us to rely on. I don’t have them, at any rate.

Is it possible that protests will escalate?

It’s possible, yes. The initial situation was largely unexpected, and in fact studies showed that people in Russia weren’t interested in the topic of Ukraine. Hence the certainty that there wouldn’t be any war.

The danger here is that, when you’re not interested in something, then after a shocking event you’re ready to accept any convenient interpretation on offer. Which is exactly what happened — many people are clinging to the most immediate explanation, courtesy of government propaganda. That’s the most comfortable choice: everyone wants to avoid problems, especially in wartime.

But already there’s a factor that introduces dissonance into the picture — it’s obvious that the blitzkrieg failed. It’s becoming harder and harder to pretend that all of this is happening somewhere far away and will soon be over — on the contrary, it’s already an obviously significant military conflict. Lots of people on the Russian side have already been killed or wounded, with many more to come. Russians have many relatives in Ukraine, and, according to numerous reports, the Russian air force has begun using cluster bombs, which means a lot of civilian deaths.

All of that is going to disturb the picture, and people will be forced to take a clear position. It will become impossible to bury yourself in everyday tasks. Plus, the reality we’re all used to is going to be destroyed by the consequences of economic collapse. Which is why I think that a rise in critical attitudes across different segments of society is likely.

But we’re not the only ones who have figured this out — and we should expect actions in the near future that seek to nip any kind of generalized protest in the bud. Continue reading

Early Soviet avant-garde journal of Contemporary Architecture, 1926-1930

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while, but have been very busy with work and whatnot. The archivists who run the outstanding Russian website Techne have compiled some high-resolution PDFs of the legendary Soviet avant-garde architectural journal Современная Архитектура, usually translated into English as Contemporary Architecture. As Jean-Louis Cohen explained in a 2019 interview I conducted with him, the reason the editors chose this title was because “modern architecture” in Russia was still associated then with the style moderne branch of Art Nouveau which flourished in that country around the turn of the twentieth century.

When the people who run Techne originally posted these resources back in 2014, they included some crude PDFs knitted together from photos I took (of uneven quality) ten years ago in the bowels of the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia. Recently these old files have been thoroughly superseded by direct scans from the Nekrasov Central Universal Scientific Library in Moscow, which I’ve attached below — further organized by year and enumerated beneath.

My view is that Современная Архитектура rivals, if not surpasses, any of the analogous publications of international modernism released in other countries during the period: De Stijl, the Bauhausbücher series, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, etc. Edited by Moisei Ginzburg and the Vesnins over the first three years, and Roman Khiger over the last two, the journal was consistently cosmopolitan in scope and focus. Because its layout is so masterfully designed, I have also included images of the individual pages underneath links to the PDFs.

1926
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  1. Современная архитектура (1926) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1926) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1926) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1926) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1926) № 5-6

1927
.

  1. Современная архитектура (1927) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1927) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1927) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1927) № 4-5
  5. Современная архитектура (1927) № 6

1928
.

  1. Современная архитектура (1928) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1928) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1928) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1928) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1928) № 5
  6. Современная архитектура (1928) № 6

1929
.

  1. Современная архитектура (1929) № 1
  2. Современная архитектура (1929) № 2
  3. Современная архитектура (1929) № 3
  4. Современная архитектура (1929) № 4
  5. Современная архитектура (1929) № 5
  6. Современная архитектура (1929) № 6

1930
.

  1. Современная архитектура (1930) № 1-2
  2. Современная архитектура (1930) № 3
  3. Современная архитектура (1930) № 4
  4. Современная архитектура (1930) № 5
  5. Современная архитектура (1930) № 6

 

Современная архитектура (1926) № 1

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Mac Intosh, 1940-2021

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Was sad to learn that Mac Intosh of Internationalist Perspective passed away on Friday. I don’t know enough details about his life to really write a proper obituary. But I’m told that IP plans to release a statement about his passing, so I will be sure to link to that once it appears. For now, I thought I’d write a brief personal note and then include an outstanding article he wrote that’s since become hard to find online. You can read a moving tribute by another one of his friends here.

Milchman’s biography and political trajectory are quite remarkable. Once he became a Marxist, he and became a founding member of the International Communist Current before leaving to form the more councilist, theory-oriented group Internationalist Perspective. He participated on a couple panels on Wertkritik and on democracy as well, which are worth checking out.

I met him a few times at a Lukács reading group he was running at the New School back in 2013, and he came to a couple events I organized where Loren Goldner spoke. Great guy. The photo below was taken by a friend.

Below that photo you can read an article by Mac Intosh that was obviously up my alley. I had a couple conversations with him about this piece, which I was quite taken with. He discusses Postone’s notion of capital as the automatic subject, replacing the Lukácsian identification of the proletariat with the subject of history. My feeling was that one way to square the two seemingly opposite conceptions is to recognize that capital is the actual subject of history under capitalism, while the proletariat is the potential subject as its obverse. The condition for the proletariat’s (or the collective worker’s) historical subjectivity is revolutionary class consciousness. Alan really liked that formulation.

 

The Value Form, Reification, and the Consciousness of the Collective Worker

Mac Intosh
Internationalist Perspective
Issue 57: Winter 2010

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Marx’s critical theory exposed a mode of production, a civilization, based on value, which he described as a “deranged” or “perverted form” [verrückte Form], in which social relations between persons are inverted and appear as relations between things. It is the abstract labor of the working class that produces and reproduces this deranged form. As Max Horkheimer, in 1937, put it in “Traditional and Critical Theory”: “[H]uman beings reproduce [erneuern], through their own labor, a reality which increasingly enslaves them.”1 It was Georg Lukács, in his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in the collection History and Class Consciousness (1923), who had first elaborated a theory of reification through which the effects of the value form, that perverted form, and the commodity fetishism that was integral to it, seized hold of society. Lukács’ accomplishment, even before many of Marx’s own vast “economic” manuscripts had been published, was a theoretical breakthrough upon which Marxism as a negative critique of capitalism is still based. As Lukács persuasively argued:

Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on higher and higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man.2

However, Lukács’ concept of reification also entailed the claim that the proletariat, as identical subject-object, could escape the enslavement of reification to which Horkheimer would later point. For Lukács, while the consciousness of the bourgeoisie is “imprisoned” within the reified forms imposed by capital, capable only of grasping the immediacy of its social situation, the worker can become “aware of himself as a commodity,” in which case “the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital.”3 In short, for Lukács, despite the reification to which the worker is subject, the possibility of escape for the working class is inherent in the capitalist labor process itself. Indeed, Lukács asserts that the proletarian is compelled to “surpass the immediacy of his condition.”4 But what, then, really permits the proletariat to escape that reified consciousness? Lukács’ answer, a theoretically and sociologically unsatisfactory answer in my view, is:

For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death, whereas the bourgeoisie uses the abstract categories of reflection… to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily life…5

But can the “need” to be aware of the dialectical nature of its existence really explain how the proletariat can escape the effects of reification? Indeed, Lukács’ “explanation” seems more a leap of faith, almost a Pascalian bet, rather than a theoretically rigorous account of the potential that exists within the capitalist labor process, and is instantiated in the “collective worker,” the Gesamtarbeiter. Continue reading

Lazar Khidekel’s aerial city of the future (1925-1932)

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I’ve posted about Lazar Khidekel before. A few years ago, I met some of his descendants who live here in New York. Regina Khidekel, his daughter-in-law, has written some very interesting articles about Khidekel’s speculative architecture, one of which you can read in this collection. Khidekel was a student of the great suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich, and was involved with his group Unovis. Later on, in 1928, he reflected on his path from painting to architecture in a brief “Biography”:

From 1920 to 1922, I participated in the publication of Unovis collections, contributing a series of articles on questions of art and its relationship to production. I spent the last two years at the Vitebsk Artistic and Practical Institute; in addition to coursework assignments, I was engaged with questions concerning the ties between constructive art (cubism, the “relief,” constructivism, suprematism) and architecture. I presented my findings — work that involved not only a painterly but also an architectural content — at the Second Unovis Exhibition in Moscow.

Assuming that my only possible involvement in architecture would occur through the assimilation of the [technical] knowledge on which it is based, in 1922 I enrolled in the Department of Architecture at the Institute of Civil Engineers. I am now a student on the final course. Between the time of my arrival in Leningrad in 1922 and the present, I participated in the Fifth-Year Exhibition at the Academy of Arts in 1923. In 1923, I became a member of the Art and Literature Department of the literary and artistic journal Vulcan [Vulkan], published by Leningrad State University. I served as the head of tours in the Painting Department of the Russian Museum (formerly the Museum of Painterly Culture).

Some images of the Unovis set at Vitebsk and Khidekel from his days in the group appear below.

Over the second half of the twenties, Khidekel became obsessed with the idea of a flying city. Georgii Krutikov’s proposal for a “Flying City” may be more famous, but Khidekel’s fantastic renderings are also worth taking a look at. Recently I came across a cache of images stored on one of my favorite Russian-language websites, Togda Zine, a repository of the heroic Soviet avant-garde. You can view them all below.

Paired with these images is an excerpt from Selim Khan-Magomedov’s encyclopedic account of the Pioneers of Soviet Architecture. I will post the full PDF of that book sometime soon. While not as theoretically ambitious as his student Vladimir Paperny, or the brilliant (if perverse) Boris Groys, Khan-Magomedov was a giant — the ultimate authority of early architectural modernism in the USSR. Enjoy!

Khidekel’s experimental designs

Selim Khan-Magomedov
From Pioneers of Soviet
Architecture
(1983)

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A set of interesting experimental town-planning designs produced by Khidekel during the 1920s develop some aspects of the aero-city concept, and also reveal the influence of other experimental town-planning ideas of that period, such as vertical zoning. Taken as a whole, in fact, all these designs represent variations, and developments of the latter concept. As distinct, however, from the proposals by [Anton] Lavinsky, [El] Lissitzky, and [Konstantin] Melnikov, Khidekel’s projects for a vertical zoning of cities involve a global approach to this town-planning concept: insofar as he was concerned, it was not merely a matter of organizing the area of habitation within a city’s boundaries in a rational way, but of the interaction between human settlement and the environment as a whole. This broad approach accounts for the way in which the architectural complexes in his sketches interact with levels below ground, stretches of water, a virgin environmen,t and supraterrestrial space.

In an attempt to preserve nature intact among the city complexes, Khidekel’s project of 1922 relegated main transport lines to tunnels, and allowed them to surface only in cuttings in the vicinity of buildings. In another project dating from the same year, he designed a building floating above ground and only tenuously linked to it. In 1926, he drew a building at a great height above the Earth and wholly detached from it. Continue reading

Remembering Rosa Luxemburg, 150 years after her birth

The great Polish Marxist and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was born 150 years ago today. In honor of her life and legacy, I thought I’d post some of her works and texts about her along with an introduction to her 1918 polemic The Russian Revolution by Onorato Damen.

Luxemburg was a heroic, larger than life figure, a champion of the working class dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist order. From a young age, she became steeped in the discourse of Marxism and involved herself in socialist causes. Along with Leo Jogiches, she founded the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. When the “revisionist controversy” broke out in the late 1890s, Luxemburg penned what was easily the best response to Eduard Bernstein’s reformism, Reform or Revolution?.

During the next couple decades, Luxemburg became professionally trained in economics and contributed to a number of theoretical debates within international Marxism. Becoming more involved in the German Social-Democratic Party, she initially sided with orthodoxy but by 1910 found herself at odds with its main spokesman, Karl Kautsky. Thereafter she increasingly locked horns with the party’s leadership, until in August 1914 the outbreak of world war led to a world-historic crisis.

Unlike many of her prominent comrades, Luxemburg was unequivocally opposed to the war and took a stand publicly against it. For this she was jailed for several years, as was the firebrand Karl Liebknecht, who would soon become one of her closest cothinkers in opposition to bourgeois militarism. After the November Revolution of 1918, the two were freed and immediately threw themselves into the struggle, agitating for proletarian revolution. Tragically, they were murdered by the Freikorps under orders from the Social-Democratic government.

Of course, Luxemburg was not perfect. She and Liebknecht should have split from the Second and Second-and-a-Half Internationals sooner, and her critique of Marx’s “reproduction schemas” in Volume 2 of Capital was based on mistaken premises. Her theory of periodic crisis was underconsumptionist, moreover. Other Marxist theorists, such as Henryk Grossman, took Luxemburg to task on this score. Nevertheless, she remained an “eagle,” as Lenin put it in a rejoinder to Paul Levi:

We shall reply to [Levi] by quoting two lines from a good old Russian fable: “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles.” Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland [I would argue she was right here]; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released). But in spite of her mistakes she was — and remains for us — an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works (the publication of which the German Communists are inordinately delaying, which can only be partly excused by the tremendous losses they are suffering in their severe struggle) will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world. “Since August 4, 1914, German Social-Democracy has been a stinking corpse” — this statement will make Rosa Luxemburg’s name famous in the history of the international working class movement. And, of course, in the backyard of the working-class movement, among the dung heaps, hens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity will cackle over the mistakes committed by the great Communist. To every man his own.

You can download a number of works by or about Luxemburg below. I wouldn’t recommend all of these books, especially the secondary literature, but there’s useful stuff to be found in many of these selections. Also, be sure to check out the ICT’s article on “Rosa Luxemburg and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement in Poland.”

Works by Luxemburg

  1. Selected Writings
  2. Complete Works, Volume 1: Economic Writings 1
  3. Complete Works, Volume 2: Economic Writings 2
  4. Complete Works, Volume 3: Political Writings 1, On Revolution (1897-1905)
  5. The Accumulation of Capital (1913)
  6. “May Day” (1913)
  7. The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism (1918, 1903) [highly misleading title added by the translator]
  8. “My Idea of Bolshevism” (1918)

Letters of Luxemburg

  1. Letters (1891-1919)
  2. Selected Letters
  3. Comrade and Lover: Letters to Leo Jogiches

Biographies of Luxemburg

  1. Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work (1928)
  2. J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1: 1895-1911 (1962)
  3. J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2: 1911-1919 (1962)
  4. Paul Mattick Sr., “Review of Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl” (1967)
  5. Klaus Gietinger, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (2008)

Works about Luxemburg’s theory and practice

  1. Tadeusz Kowalik, Rosa Luxemburg: Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism (1971)
  2. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1981)
  3. Hillel Ticktin, “Rosa Luxemburg’s Concept of Crisis in a Contemporary Theoretical Context” (2012)
  4. Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga,  “The Early Reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Imperialism” (2013)
  5. Jason Schulman (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (2013)
  6. Jan Toporowski, Ewa Karwowski, Riccardo Bellofiore (eds.), The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange, and Michal Kalecki: Volume 1 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (2014)
  7. Jan Toporowski, Ewa Karwowski, Riccardo Bellofiore (eds.), The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange, and Michal Kalecki: Volume 2 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (2014)
  8. Engin Delice, “The Dialectic Whole Between Theory and Reality in Rosa Luxemburg” (2015)
  9. Jon Nixon, Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal (2018)
  10. Ankica Čakardić, Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (2019)

Novels about Luxemburg

  1. Alfred Döblin, Karl and Rosa: November 1918, A German Revolution (1950)

Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution

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It is fashionable these days to quote Luxemburg’s ideas and positions, especially in her polemics with Lenin. However this return to theoretical and critical Luxemburgism has mainly been carried out by those who have learned nothing from her real thinking or her heroic militancy. They reinterpret her formulations on freedom and democracy in their own way, and mostly for devious motives, whilst for Luxemburg these expressions serve only as a catalyst for the growth of revolutionary consciousness in the masses as they struggle for emancipation. However, on the lips of some enlightened bourgeois and renegade socialists such ideas are useful for dragging the proletariat into the capitalist mindset and the political and economic structures of the ruling class.

The attempt to use Luxemburg’s polemics as a front for the most decrepit and dishonest anti-communism stemming from the Second International and the Two and a Half International, does not deserve special attention. On the other hand, having another look at this same material, a product of the polemics with Lenin, and of the key problems of the party and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as presented and confirmed in the Russian experience, is very timely and fruitful.

At the root of her disagreement with Lenin were the same ideas that are reemerging today in the politics of the vanguard of the international labour movement, except that today they are sharper and more dramatic given the defeat of that burning test of socialism which was the Soviet experience. Continue reading

Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019

Yesterday I learned that my friend and comrade Noel Ignatiev passed away. He’d been in poor health for some time, diagnosed with a rare form of gastrointestinal cancer that made it difficult for him to swallow properly or digest, but it still caught me off guard. A couple weekends ago I’d seen him at the Hard Crackers release party, which I’d gone to with my friends Kaspar, Arianna, Joseph, and Chelsea. Once a few contributors to the latest issue finished speaking, Noel got up there and gave a rousing summary of what the project is about.

To me, at least, he seemed in good spirits. About a year or so ago, after chatting frequently via social media, Noel asked for my number. We talked now and then over the phone, which I barely do with anyone anymore, where he explained to me his condition. But when I saw him at this event, he came off as lively and even optimistic. The doctors apparently had told him there was a good chance they could operate, since the rest of his body was quite strong. So hearing of his death last night came as a shock to me. What a shame we can’t have him around another decade or two.

Most people know Noel from his book How the Irish Became White, or from the journal Race Traitor that he helped edit back in the nineties and early aughts. Ignatiev was a pupil of Theodore Allen, whose epic treatise on The Invention of the White Race was a landmark in the field. Though deeply indebted to Allen, which he was always the first to acknowledge, he eventually broke with his former master. Against the emerging academic field of “whiteness studies,” Ignatiev fulminated that the point was not to study whiteness but abolish it.

Unfortunately, some of the concepts he helped to popularize took on a life of their own after working their way into liberal online discourse. None has been so abused as the notion of “white skin privilege,” which Ignatiev et al. never meant to function as some sort of individualized guilt complex. During an interview with Orchestrated Pulse, he told Vincent Kelley:

John Garvey and I began Race Traitor with the goal of breaking up the white race, as a contribution to working-class solidarity. We never used, endorsed or promoted identity politics; we railed against multiculturalism and “diversity”; we were scornful of those who wanted to preserve the “good aspects” of “white culture” or to “re-articulate” or “decenter” whiteness. We wanted nothing to do with the growing academic field of “whiteness studies.” We did share some vocabulary with individuals and organizations that were traveling on different roads to different places.

The most significant instance of this was the word “privilege.” In light of the political travesties that have developed under the term since, we wish we had differentiated ourselves more categorically from those who wanted to make careers in journalism, social work, organizational development, education and the arts, and who insist that the psychic battle against privilege must be never-ending; instead of challenging institutions they scrutinize every inter-personal encounter between black people and whites to unearth underlying “racist” attitudes and guide people in “unlearning” them. Hectoring people about their privileges was never our approach; it is an annoyance rather than a challenge.

Indeed, though he deftly avoided the question Kelley posed to him about the work of Adolph Reed, Noel told an online discussion group that he’d corresponded with Reed back in the mid-aughts. Reed eventually stopped responding to his repeated queries, so the dialogue sadly came to naught. Though he sympathized with Reed’s critique of identity politics, he feared (quite rightly) that all Reed was offering was warmed-over social-democratic trade unionism. Ignatiev identified far more with the left communist positions of Loren Goldner, who also contributed to Race Traitor.

Others adopted positions on race vaguely similar to Ignatiev’s, but he did not hesitate to criticize or distance himself from their work when they diverged. For example, he wrote a very harsh criticism of fellow STO veteran J. Sakai for his book Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat, which I reposted on my blog (this set off a fresh storm of controversy). More of his notes on Sakai can be accessed here. Ignatiev certainly appreciated the early work of David Roediger on The Wages of Whiteness, and wrote a favorable review of that book in 1992, but was less impressed by Roediger’s recent stuff on intersectionality. Continue reading