Discussion in NYC about the “Contours of the World Commune”

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New York friends! I’m reposting below a notice from the Ridgewood-based Woodbine collective. Readers of this blog will likely remember a couple events I’ve organized there in the past: a talk on class struggles in China by the late great Loren Goldner of Insurgent Notes, and a discussion of the war in Ukraine featuring Sander from Internationalist Perspective, John Garvey from Insurgent Notes, and the Ukrainian communist Andrew. They do lots of great community organizing, along with reading groups and Sunday dinners. Follow them on Twitter and Instagram for more info. The address is 585 Woodward Ave Ridgewood, NY 11385.

My comrade, with whom I met up last summer while vacationing in Berlin, is in town this month. He’s a member of the Friends of the Classless Society, which publishes an occasional journal called Kosmoprolet along with other Germanophone groups scattered throughout Europe. Their reformulation of “class consciousness” in their 28 theses remains one of my favorites: “Class consciousness does not consist in the recognition of being a class, but rather in the knowledge of no longer having to be one. Revolution does not consist in the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, but rather in the self-abolition of the proletariat.”

Please join our Research Group this Sunday at 5pm for a discussion with a friend visiting from Berlin’s Friends of the Classless Society. We will be looking at their 2019 text from Endnotes #5, “Contours of the World Commune.” Links to readings below.

One way of reading the current situation is that the existing order persists not so much due to enthusiastic mass support as thanks to the fact that another society seems hard to imagine today. Capital has materialized itself in technology and logistics, in the organization of space, in the fabric of everyday life. If we do not believe in escaping to cozy communes in the countryside, how can we envision a new classless society starting from these circumstances? How could billions of people around the world coordinate their activities without resorting to market mechanisms or state centralism? What could the transformation (not “abolition”) of labor look like?

These are some of the questions we could discuss in reference to “Contours of the World Commune,” from Endnotes No. 5. Founded in 2003, the Berlin-based circle “Friends of the Classless Society” occasionally publish the journal Kosmoprolet together with similar tiny groups.

Readings
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Hegel and Stalinism: The murder of Jan Sten

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Iosef Stalin fancied himself a great theorist of proletarian struggle. There was just one problem: he was extremely mediocre when it came to theoretical matters. Once, while he was attempting to theorize about economics at a meeting in the mid-1920s, the Marx-Engels Institute head David Riazanov interrupted: “Stop it, Koba! You’re mak­ing a fool of your­self. We all know the­ory isn’t ex­actly your strong suit.” Many years after this insult, in 1937, Stalin would have him executed. Riazanov was not the only widely-respected scholar who would fall victim to his wounded sense of pride, however.

Besides his lack of economic knowledge, Stalin was also notoriously deficient when it came to philosophy. To correct this deficiency, he engaged the services of a precocious young philosopher from within the party ranks, the Latvian Bolshevik Jānis Stens or Jan Sten. Despite being twenty-one years Stalin’s junior, Sten had already secured an editorial position on the premier theoretical journal of the Soviet Union, Under the Banner of Marxism, and risen to become deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute under Riazanov. He had served with distinction in the Red Army during the Civil War.

Sten designed a biweekly course for his much older pupil consisting of both the classical German idealist tradition as well as later commentators. The main thinkers they went over were Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Ludwig Feuerbach along with Marxist theoreticians like Karl Kautsky and Georgii Plekhanov and the British Hegelian Francis Herbert Bradley. Unfortunately, Stalin had little aptitude for such instruction and would regularly ask, “What does this have to do with the class struggle or Marxism?”

Roy Medvedev — an old communist dissident, still alive at 98, though today he is a supporter of the Putin regime — recalled in his landmark text Let History Judge the testimony of the Old Bolshevik Evgenii Frolov:

Hardly anyone knew Stalin better than Sten. Stalin, as we know, received no systematic education. Without success Stalin struggled to understand philosoph­ical questions. And then, in 1925, he called in Jan Sten, one of the leading Marxist philosophers of that time, to direct his study of Hegelian dialectics. Sten drew up a program of study for Stalin and conscientiously, twice a week, dinned Hegelian wisdom into his illustrious pupil. (In those years dialectics was studied by a system that [Mikhail] Pokrovsky had worked out at the Institute of Red Professors, a parallel study of Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.) Often Sten told me in confidence about these lessons, about the difficulties he, as the teacher, was having because of his student’s inability to master Hegelian dialec­tics. Jan often dropped in to see me after a lesson with Stalin, in a depressed and gloomy state, and despite his naturally cheerful disposition, he found it difficult to regain his equilibrium. Sten was not only a leading philosopher but also a political activist, an outstanding member of the Leninist cohort of old Bolsheviks.

The meetings with Stalin, the conversations with him on philosophical matters, during which Jan would always bring up contemporary political problems, opened his eyes more and more to Stalin’s true nature, his striving for one-man rule, his crafty schemes and methods for putting them into effect… As early as 1928, in a small circle of his personal friends, Sten said: “Koba will do things that will put the trials of Dreyfus and of Beilis in the shade.” This was his answer to his comrades’ request for a prognosis of Stalin’s leadership over ten years’ time. Thus, Sten was not wrong either in his characterization of Stalin’s rule or in the time schedule for the realization of his bloody schemes.

Sten’s lessons with Stalin ended in 1928. Several years later he was expelled from the party for a year and exiled to Akmolinsk. In 1937 he was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one of the chiefs of the Menshevizing idealists. At the time the printer had just finished a volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that contained a major article by Sten, “Dialectical Materialism.” The ordinary solution — and such problems were ordinary in those years — was to destroy the entire printing. But in this case the editors of the encyclopedia found a cheaper solution. Only one page of the whole printing was changed, the one with the signature of Jan Sten. “Dialectical Materialism” appeared over the name of M.B. Mitin, the future academician and editor in chief of Problems of Philosophy (Вопросы философии), thus adding to his list the one publication that is really interesting. On June 19, 1937, Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison.

To be clear, Sten’s brand of Hegelianism was not the only one available to international Marxism in the period immediately following the October Revolution. In fact, his particular school of Hegelian Marxism stood in direct opposition to a version that I personally find much more convincing, that of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Béla Fogarasi, and Jozsef Revai. For Sten belonged to the philosophical current led by the former Menshevik Abram Deborin, which also included representatives such as Nikolai Karev and Israel Vainshtein. But Stalinism would ultimately reject both possible Hegelianisms. Continue reading →

Preliminary materials for a theory of the Young-Hegelian E-Girl

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So I went with some friends to the Hegelian e-girls’ VIP “symposium” last Saturday, August 3. It was held in the backdoor patio space of a Persian restaurant in Crown Heights, where they sometimes hold DSA meetings. The event attracted a strange mix of people. Everyone from Dimes Square bohemians to bookish members of the Platypus Affiliated Society, too-online theorycels to actual grad students excited that somebody was throwing an event on Hegel. Various online commenters and podcast hosts like Jamie Peck and Joshua Citarella were also in attendance. By far the most important organizational connection to the event, however, was that of the newfound American Communist Party (ACP), the so-called “MAGA communist” splinter from the old Stalinist US Communist Party (CP-USA). Later, I’ll briefly go over some of the major figures from that group. There were about 150 people total.

My friend Alex Gendler and I went on The Antifada pod to give a rundown of the event. What follows are some of my remarks from the episode, which I’ve transcribed and reworked in light of new material that’s become available. Before I proceed, though, I do want to defend the idea of being able to go to an event for the lulz or whatever. Or even just to look at it anthropologically, to see what kind of people would show up. You don’t have to “go native” like that dude Crumps has with the Dimes Square scene. (He was there, too, for anyone keeping count.) And I’m sure there were some who were genuinely curious to hear what the e-girls had to say for themselves and were interested in what sort of crowd would be there, though anyone who saw the way this event was advertised could have probably guessed. I don’t think the mere fact of showing up to something implies political agreement.

Serious criticisms can certainly be made of many of the groups and individuals who went to this symposium, as well as the e-girls themselves, and that’s precisely what I’m hoping to do. I get that some people might object: “Why are you giving this thing oxygen? It’s pure spectacle.” And I’d agree with them — but we live in a spectacular society, so here we are. I’m going to start by talking about the conciliar organization of the e-girls, and some of the drama that swirled around the event(s) they planned. Then I’m going to address what I took to be the philosophical content of their statements and try to locate their outlook within the history of Hegelianism more broadly. Finally, I’ll examine the politics behind the Hegelian e-girl council and speculate about what their concrete goals might be.

Council and controversy

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When I was first thinking about how to dissect this event, I thought one could maybe break it into two parts. They call themselves “Hegelian e-girls,” after all. So we could ask what it means to be an Hegelian, and what it means to be an e-girl. But thinking about it more, I realized there’s a third term. They’re not just “Hegelian e-girls”; they’re an “Hegelian e-girl council.” What does it mean that they’re in a “council”? Just how organized is this? I really thought we wouldn’t have to address this aspect of it, because the whole thing is just a silly internet phenomenon that these two e-girls — Nikki and Anna — were trying to parlay into a real-life meetup. A couple of them had met up in the preceding weeks and taken a selfie together, which they then posted with the caption “the Hegelian e-girl Enlightenment has arrived.” But it’s hard to know how seriously to take that.

Even a day after the event, though, there was a bunch of drama specifically surrounding the “council” part. It turns out there had been a third Hegelian e-girl. One of the former e-girls, Sanje Horah, who’d been in that photo announcing the arrival of the e-girl Enlightenment, publicly tweeted her misgivings about the direction of the project. She said she’d resigned from the Hegelian e-girl council a week or so before the party. This confused me, because to say that you resigned from something suggests that it had some sort of formal structure or sense of official membership. Does it just mean she left the groupchat? A groupchat had been mentioned by a number of Twitter users, especially after someone approvingly shared an image of Red Scare cohost Dasha Nekrasova aiming a gun at a racist effigy of an Islamic terrorist. Either way, it was hard for me to tell if everyone in the groupchat actually belonged to the council. The e-girls apparently have a Patreon, run by Nikki, so there’s that. However you cut it, a “council” with only two people is pretty small. Unless they plan on expanding.

Regardless, Sanje Horah voiced a few objections people on the outside had been making. In particular she felt like Anna, whom she’d been closest with, was being dishonest about what they hoped to achieve with this whole project. Sanje further alleged that Anna’s good standing largely stemmed from her incomprehensibility, because people don’t have a clue what this is actually all about. Possibly Anna doesn’t, either. There’s probably something to that. Fundamentally, though, Sanje thinks there is something deceptive about the way the e-girls have gone about this and the various milieux they’re trying to appeal to. Sanje self-identifies as a centrist, and was uncomfortable with how it seemed like the e-girls directed most of their ire against the left while remaining more or less silent about the right. Beyond her political concerns, she had philosophical worries as well. She thinks they have “a very vulgar understanding of dialectics” and that the project is “literally sub-Hegelian.” Looking back, Sanje said she regrets ever having been involved. Continue reading →

Interview with Gazete Duvar

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Recently I was contacted by Kavel Alpaslan of the paper Gazete Duvar, an independent outlet from Turkey founded in 2016. He was interested in interviewing me about my blog, Soviet architecture, and urban planning. The interview was translated into Turkish, but it was originally conducted in English via email. You can read my original responses below.

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1. First we’d like to talk about your blog, The Charnel House. Can you tell us its story? How it started, how it’s going?

I started The Charnel-House back in 2008, a year or so after I finished my undergraduate degree in history and philosophy at Penn State. So my first few posts were actually just papers I’d written on Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and Hegel. Already at this time I’d begun reading some later theorists as well, for whom German idealism was a touchstone: figures like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Henri Lefebvre, and Slavoj Žižek. But I hadn’t really written anything about them as yet, though they would deepen my engagement with Marxism.

Later, I entered grad school at the University of Chicago. There I took some classes with Moishe Postone and began to study Marx more seriously. I had some familiarity with Marx and Marxism from my involvement in the antiwar movement during the mid-aughts and my exposure to different sectarian soft fronts, primarily Trotskyist organizations. My interest was primarily in early Soviet history, and my sympathies lay with Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle for succession after Lenin’s death. So when I returned to blogging semi-regularly in 2011, I began commenting on contemporary politics as well as historical matters connected to Marxist theory and the Soviet avant-garde.

At UChicago, I was a student of the great historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. She recommended that I read Vladimir Paperny‘s Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin, which was astonishing. Paperny originally wrote this text in the late seventies, but it was so controversial in the USSR that it really only circulated among samizdat presses in the West. The book is sweeping and grandiose in its claims, not all of which I agree with, but which captivated me. I read Boris Groys‘ Total Art of Stalinism next, but then went back and read books like Anatole Kopp‘s Town and Revolution and then the original publications. When I moved to New York from Chicago, I got in touch with the recently deceased Jean-Louis Cohen, and sat in on some classes with him.

For about six or seven years, I updated the blog fairly frequently, sometimes even multiple times a week. My work situation at the time was a bit more irregular, so I was able to post more often. The content was somewhat varied. At times I wrote off-the-cuff commentary on current events, while other times I posted more formal analysis. Still other times I reposted articles and essays that were rare, but which I felt deserved a broader audience. When it came to updates on art and architecture, including various modernist magazines and publications, I tried to include as many high resolution images as I could. I’d devote some posts to individual thinkers whose work I valued, featuring PDFs of their writings.

In recent years I’ve become a teacher, which is much more demanding on my time. My blog hasn’t been quite as active since then, but I still post occasionally. I continue to do research on topics of interest, and have published a number of articles in outlets like Brooklyn Rail, Situations, Rethinking Marxism, and Datacide, as well as architectural journals like The Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis, Calvert Journal, Strelka Magazine, and Archithese. Right now I am working on a large project about the Marxist theory of the family. Still, I hope to return to blogging more at some point.

2. We would like to comment on constructivist, futurist art and architecture in the Soviet Union. Especially the first two or three decades. Many people portray the Soviet architecture as “depressing” and “rough” but is it really like that? What makes people think that? 

I’m not sure if cubo-futurist, suprematist, and constructivist art is thought of as bleak. More often it has been dismissed as too abstract, or childishly simple in its rendering of basic shapes. Let’s move on to architecture, though, which is more what I focused on. A number of misperceptions surround the legacy of modern architecture in the former USSR. There were different waves of modernism in the Soviet Union: 1) the “heroic” avant-garde of the early twenties through the early thirties, which built a few iconic workers’ clubs and handful of other structures but largely remained on paper; 2) the Khrushchev-era revival of functional forms, which actually did provide mass housing and produced some notable government buildings; 3) late period Brezhnevian quasi-brutalism, which largely continued the previous trend while integrating stylistic elements from the West.

When people think of drab Soviet блокови, or East German plattenbauten, they generally have the second two waves in mind. And in truth much of this, particularly the хрущёвки, were of notoriously poor quality, even if it was impressive that they managed to house so many people in such a short period of time. I recently contributed a chapter on Soviet modernism of the fifties and sixties to a collection The Visibility of Modern Architecture, edited by Gevork Hartoonian. Here I made use of Marx’s old line, amending Hegel, about how things historically happen twice: first as tragedy, then as farce. Khrushchev was in some ways the last utopian leader of the USSR, despite upholding the Stalinist political edifice. But the architecture of the period, to the extent that it took inspiration from the immediate post-revolutionary years, was but a pale imitation.

The early Soviet architectural avant-garde was more visionary, and arguably on the cutting edge of modern architecture worldwide (especially in the second half of the twenties). It was self-consciously part of the broader European and American movement, translating texts by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier while also exchanging in student exchanges between Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. Early on, many of the structures were fairly fantastical, especially those developed by former painters and sculptors. Tatlin and Lissitzky are exemplary in this respect, though Nikolai Ladovsky and his followers extended it further. Iakov Chernikhov was perhaps the pinnacle of this trend, with his architectural fantasies. Later came more functionalist designs, starting with the Vesnin brothers and Moisei Ginzburg the OSA milieu surrounding the journal Современная архитектура.

Relatively few avant-garde buildings during this period were actually realized, partially owing to the low technological level of the Soviet Union at the time and in part due to the lack of a centralized state mandate that would have taken them up on their more ambitious proposals. Of those that were built, even fewer remain, and many of those that do are in rather poor condition. Konstantin Mel’nikov’s Rusakov Workers’ Club, Ilya Golosov’s Zuev Workers’ Club, Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building, Noi Trotsky’s Pravda building, Ivan Nikolaev’s Textile Institute, and Mikhail Barshch’s planetarium. Many modifications were made, as the buildings were often repurposed or overhauled with little regard for the original plan. A few have been renovated with an eye to restore them. But most today are in a sorry state.

As far as these buildings looking depressing, I suppose it’s a matter of taste. Personally, I find them elegant and innovative. Because of the low level of technology in the early Soviet Union, avant-garde architects were unable to build on the mass scale they envisioned. They only succeeded in completing a fairly small number of projects. Given that their buildings were fairly exceptional, then, it’s no wonder that they never became monotonous in the way that Khushchev-era units did. However, the technological limitations they faced meant that they had to be very clever in the way they approached construction. Their range of materials and building methods was constrained, but they often devised very novel solutions. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Special issue of Insurgent Notes on the conflict in Ukraine

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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:

  1. Ross Wolfe, “Introduction to the issue on Ukraine”
  2. Sanderr, “Capitalist crisis and the war in Ukraine”
  3. John Garvey, “Against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for the successful resistance of the Ukrainian people”
  4. Andrew, “Untimely thoughts: Notes on revolution and Ukraine” [French]
  5. Pablo Jiménez, “War of the decomposition of Russian capitalism: Neo-imperialism, uninhibited violence, and global civil war” [Spanish, German]
  6. Antithesi, “Contra Leninist anti-imperialism: Capitalist war means social peace”
  7. Karmína, “Response to John Garvey”
  8. Rob Myers, “The war in Ukraine through some memories of the Yugoslav wars”
  9. Devrim Valerian, “Revolutionary defeatism today”
  10. Gilles Dauvé, “Peace is war” [French]
  11. Konstantin Bethscheider, “Contradictions in the German discourse around the war in Ukraine”
  12. Grigory Yudin, “Another Russia is possible: On the moral responsibility of Western leaders for the war in Ukraine” [Russian, German]
  13. Kosmoprolet, “Behind the frontlines: An interview with Andrew after the counteroffensive”
  14. Ricardo Noronha, “War as spectacle”
  15. Jacques Camatte, “Two short texts on the invasion of Ukraine: Death and extinction & Nothing is resolved” [French: 1 & 2]

Maybe I’ll put together a PDF of the issue for those who prefer to read it that way.

In general, I plan to post more links to work I’ve written, translated, or edited. And I hope to get back into updating this blog more regularly.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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
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  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
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  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
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  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
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  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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