writings

Posts primarily featuring written work.

Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

Posted by

0

.
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

.
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

Posted by

1

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.

Mac Intosh, 1940-2021

Posted by

2

.
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

.
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)

Posted by

4

.
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)

.
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

Posted by

6

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

.
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

Posted by

24

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 →

Bauhaus: Evolution of an Idea

Posted by

1

Theodore Lux Feininger
Criticism, Summer 1960
.

I grew up with and at the Bauhaus. I was nine years old when my father was invited to join the founding staff in 1919, which necessitated our family’s removal from Berlin to Weimar. In my memory, the moving was attended by cheery circumstances. In the first spring since the cessation of hostilities a great upsurge of hope was evident everywhere.

I liked the town and surroundings of Weimar, and best of all was the Bauhaus atmosphere itself. A boy does not trouble his head about the origin and history of things, and I accepted the interesting people and their works, and the attention they paid to me and my works, as something which might have been there always, but which was certainly very agreeable and delightfully different from the musty disciplines of the Gymnasium. The Bauhaus population was fond of gaiety and given to playing and the celebrating of feasts; a paper lantern serenade under our windows on my father’s birthday remains an unforgettable experience.

In the following years, as was inevitable, other preoccupations intruded upon the Arcadian felicity of the beginning, and when, seven years later, I became a student at the Bauhaus myself (the youngest ever admitted), I could probably have dimly remembered the childish participation but was engrossed in so new and different a situation that it seemed like a new world altogether.

Thirty-three years have gone by since that time; and the more I ponder now what has always seemed so familiar, the more material for wonder I find opening to me. These findings are of a dual, intertwining nature. I am impressed with the effect and forming power the school has had on my own development, but especially with the uniqueness, the scope, the bold novelty of inception, of a community into which I had wandered, when young, as unquestionably as I might have strolled casually into some ancient church; something that “had always been there.” I discover that it had not always been there and that soon it was not to be there any more at all. I must attempt to separate the strands of personal recollection and gradual enlightenment as to the social meaning of what is known as “The Bauhaus,” an organization born out of the collaboration of many minds. At the beginning of it all, with his strong spirit of devotion, stands the vision and the genius of Walter Gropius. Continue reading →

1929 letter from Varlam Shalamov to the director of OGPU

Posted by

2

Last month I posted an article by Valerii Esipov contrasting Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Both were survivors of Stalin’s gulag system, but diverged sharply at a political and stylistic level. With regard to the former of these, Shalamov had been involved in the Trotskyist Left Opposition toward the end of the 1920s. He was first arrested in February 1929 for his participation in a student movement that demanded the publication of Lenin’s “testament,” which described Stalin as too rude and power-mad to serve as secretary of the CPSU(b). Shalamov would serve nearly three years at a chemical construction site, under conditions which only seem mild by comparison with his later stint at Kolyma. Upon his release in 1931 he returned to Moscow, but his freedom proved short-lived: after marriage and the birth of a daughter, he was rearrested in 1936 and sent to the North, where he would remain until 1954.

During his first bout of imprisonment and encampment, however, Shalamov penned a remarkable letter. What follows is one of the most fearless documents I have ever come across. It was addressed to the director of the Soviet secret police, at the time known by the acronym OGPU, and boldly restates his political convictions in favor of the Left Opposition. Leon Trotsky’s name is invoked twice, here in July 1929, endorsing one of his articles and referring to him as a leader of the October Revolution. A letter like this would have gotten one promptly shot without trial just several years later, and it seems to me a small miracle that Shalamov did not suffer a worse fate even during this earlier (relatively lenient) moment. Perhaps notable, especially because of the uproar surrounding the use of the phrase to migrant detention centers in the US: Shalamov was writing from a facility that referred to itself as a “concentration camp” [концентрационный лагерь], though this was before this designation had such a stigma attached to it.

I’ve translated the letter below in full but am looking for a bigger venue interested in publishing it. Send me an email if you’d like to read the translation or if you know of any publications that might want to feature it.

6.VII.29 г.
Коллегии ОГПУ ЦК ВКП(б)
Прокурору ОГПУ

.
Разделяя взгляды большинства ленинских оппозиционеров, я не разделил их судьбы. Брошенный в концентрационный лагерь — один — без всякой моральной и материальной поддержки — в среду уголовников, растратчиков, шпионов и контрреволюционеров — среду, с которой я не только никогда не имел ничего общего, но где можно боролся против них за партию, за советскую власть и ее политику. В обстановке полной моральной изолированности, больше того — бойкота и издевательств (именно, как разделяющий взгляды оппозиции) заставлен я отбывать срок. Нахожусь в тяжелых культурных условиях, не имея времени читать книги, газеты, журналы, совершенно от них оторванный. Решительно протестуя против подобного обращения с оппозионером — прошу перевода для отбывания срока в политизолятор к моим товарищам, к людям, с которыми у меня общий язык. Арестован в г. Москве 19 февр. 1929 г. Получил приговор 28 марта 1929 г. В лагере с 1 апреля 1929 г. Еще раз излагаю в общем и кратком мои политические взгляды.

Напряженная политическая жизнь последних лет вынуждала каждого настоящего советского гражданина так или иначе определить свое отношение к сегодняшнему и завтрашнему дню. Continue reading →

Varlam Shalamov versus Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Posted by

5

Few authors are so commonly cited in anticommunist literature as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Since the appearance of The Gulag Archipelago in the early seventies, it has been invoked at every turn by everyone from the “new philosophers” of France to the Canadian self-help guru Jordan Peterson. No doubt Solzhenitsyn is a great author, from a purely literary standpoint. His reactionary politics are quite separate from this consideration, but ought to have been of much more concern to Jewish ex-Maoists like Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut (who are constantly on the lookout for signs of left antisemitism, yet seem to ignore Solzhenitsyn’s numerous antisemitic statements).

Alain Badiou, who has a bone to pick with the nouveaux philosophes, often contrasts the work of Solzhenitsyn with another chronicler of the gulags. Varlam Shalamov was an adherent of the Left Opposition in Russia, and as such was arrested as a Trotskyist — first in 1929 and then again in 1937. (Perhaps significantly, the Maoist Badiou fails to so much as mention Shalamov’s Trotskyism.) Without question, Shalamov is more redeemable at a political level than Solzhenitsyn. But his prose is no less moving, and in its spareness may in fact be stylistically superior.

You can read below an essay by Valerii Esipov from the Shalamov website, originally written in 2002. Quite good. Even includes a quote from Adorno, which is relatively rare among Russian intellectuals. Right now I’m preparing to review the new translation of Kolyma Stories, so it helps.

Varlam Shalamov, 1970s

Cerebration or Genuflection?
Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Valerii Esipov
Russkii Sever №4
January 23, 2002

 

.
It was almost twenty years ago, back when Brezhnev’s era was coming to a close. A small crowd, some forty people, were paying their last respects to a writer nearly forgotten by his contemporaries.

Many thought he had already died. “Varlam Shalamov is dead,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn declared to the whole world from America. Meanwhile, Shalamov still walked the streets of Moscow. He could be seen on Tverskaya, when he ventured out from his hole to buy groceries. He was a ghastly sight, reeling down the street like a drunk, falling over. The police force of the “model communist city,” always on guard, would lift him off the ground, and Shalamov, perfectly sober, would present a doctor’s note about his illness, Ménière’s disease, a disorder which affected his balance and had been exacerbated by years of camps. (This note, which the writer always had on him during the last years of his life, is kept in the Shalamov Museum in Vologda).

On top of that he was also almost blind and deaf, and in 1979, when he was already 72, he was put into a nursing home for the disabled. He was alone, without a family, and he was visited only by a few friends and acquaintances, as well as foreign journalists. This kept the KGB ever on the watch. At the hospital, he kept on writing poetry. It contained no politics, only Shalamov’s characteristic stubbornness:

As before, I’ll do without a candle.
And I’ll lift myself without a jack.1

Plainclothes officers were present even at the cemetery during Shalamov’s funeral. But then, only forty people attended in all.

Why bring this up now? Many details are, after all, well known. These details made anyone who has read Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales and appreciated his greatness as a writer and a human being feel personally ashamed for Shalamov’s fate. Just as one felt ashamed for the lives destroyed or crippled by Stalin’s regime. Then, back in the first years of perestroika, we believed that this shame could be cathartic to our society.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case. The two sad facts I would like to relate here are entirely unconnected, but each could epitomize Russia’s current demoralization and its recent history. Continue reading →

Race Traitor and Hard Crackers

Posted by

1

Back issues of Race Traitor, a journal that ran irregularly for sixteen issues between 1993 and 2005, were recently uploaded online. Edited by the great John Garvey and Noel Ignatiev. You can download them below. Merry Christmas:

Some really good stuff in here. I’ve blogged Loren Goldner’s excellent essay “Race and Enlightenment” already, but there is plenty more to dig into.

Anyone who likes Race Traitor should also check out the new journal Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life. Lots of the same people are involved over there. Plus, their site just got a makeover; it’s way more navigable and user-friendly than before. Follow them on Twitter, too.