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Mihály Biró, 1886-1948

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Bud­apest nat­ive Mihály Biró (1886-1948) joined the So­cial Demo­crat­ic cause early in life. He spent the peri­od between 1910 and 1914, design­ing strik­ing and widely noted posters and il­lus­tra­tions for the SZDP [Hun­gari­an So­cial Demo­crat­ic Party].

Fol­low­ing the First World War, Biró be­came the graph­ic mouth­piece of the new Red Army of the Hun­gari­an So­viet Re­pub­lic. The ad­vent of the right-wing dic­tat­or­ship of Miklós Hort­hy soon forced him to flee to Vi­enna, however, where he cre­ated the Hort­hy Port­fo­lio (1920), con­sist­ing of col­or litho­graphs doc­u­ment­ing the at­ro­cit­ies of the Hort­hy re­gime.

Along­side the polit­ic­al posters — Biró’s true call­ing — he also cre­ated posters for in­di­vidu­al busi­nesses and the boom­ing film in­dustry. Biró fi­nally fled from Aus­tro­fas­cism in 1934 and settled in Czechoslov­akia, where he be­came ill and deeply de­pressed. In 1938, he suc­ceeded in flee­ing on to Par­is, where he was to stay un­til 1947.

It was only in 1947 that he was able to re­turn to Bud­apest, where he died in 1948.

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Resources on communization

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“Com­mun­iz­a­tion” is a the­or­et­ic­al cur­rent that emerged from the French ul­traleft after 1968. Gilles Dauvé is usu­ally cred­ited with coin­ing the term ac­cord­ing to its con­tem­por­ary use in his 1972 es­say on “Cap­it­al­ism and Com­mun­ism” (though in­ter­est­ingly, a cog­nate ap­peared in Eng­lish as early as 1849 in the journ­al of the Brit­ish Owen­ite Good­wyn Barmby, The Pro­methean). Later in that dec­ade, the ed­it­or­i­al col­lect­ive Théo­rie Com­mu­niste ex­pan­ded on the no­tion in at­tempt­ing to the­or­ize “com­mun­ism in the present tense.” It be­came the linch­pin of their more pro­cess-ori­ented vis­ion of how to tran­scend cap­it­al­ism. Rather than pos­it­ing com­mun­ism as some sort of end-goal or a fi­nal state to be achieved after an in­def­in­ite peri­od of trans­ition, com­mun­iz­a­tion un­der­stands it­self as an on­go­ing state of move­ment or flux. Or, as Léon de Mat­tis ex­plains, com­mun­iz­a­tion in­volves “the over­com­ing of all ex­ist­ing con­di­tions can only come from a phase of in­tense and in­sur­rec­tion­ist struggle dur­ing which the forms of struggle and the forms of fu­ture life will take flesh in one and the same pro­cess.”

A num­ber of art­icles by Gilles Dauvé, Karl Nes­ic, Bruno As­tari­an, and oth­er mem­bers of the group Troploin have been trans­lated in­to Eng­lish, along with pieces by Ro­land Si­mon, Bern­ard Ly­on, Léon de Mat­tis, and oth­er mem­bers of the groups Blau­machen or Théo­rie Com­mu­niste. Per­haps the best work on com­mun­iz­a­tion to ap­pear in Eng­lish to date, however, is the ori­gin­al ma­ter­i­al put out by End­notes, which formed in 2008 after a po­lem­ic between Brit­ish pub­lic­a­tion Auf­heben and Théo­rie Com­mu­niste. Moreover, the transat­lantic peri­od­ic­al Sic then co­alesced in 2011, pub­lish­ing its second and fi­nal is­sue in 2014. (The journ­al has since be­come de­funct, re­portedly as the res­ult of dis­agree­ments over the overly “aca­dem­ic” in­terest in the the­ory dis­played by the Amer­ic­an wing com­pared with fo­gies meet­ing in forests back in France. Not to men­tion the shit­storm that en­sued once it was dis­covered that Wo­land, one of Sic’s con­trib­ut­ors, had be­come a high-level func­tion­ary for Syr­iza in Greece. Dia­lect­ic­al De­lin­quents first blogged about it back in April of 2015, eli­cit­ing a series of re­sponses and re­crim­in­a­tions).

You can down­load full-text PD­Fs of the fol­low­ing com­mun­iz­a­tion texts by click­ing be­low:

Miscellaneous
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  1. Gilles Dauvé and François Mar­tin, The Ec­lipse and Ree­m­er­gence of the Com­mun­ist Move­ment (1997, 2015)
  2. Gilles Dauvé, A Con­tri­bu­tion to the Cri­tique of Polit­ic­al Autonomy (2008)
  3. Ben­jamin Noys, ed., Com­mun­iz­a­tion and Its Dis­con­tents (2011)
  4. Bruno As­tari­an, Gilles Dauvé, Jean Bar­rot, Everything Must Go! The Ab­ol­i­tion of Value (2016)

End­notes
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  1. End­notes 1: Pre­lim­in­ary Ma­ter­i­als for a Bal­ance Sheet of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury (Oc­to­ber 2008)
  2. End­notes 2: Misery and the Value-Form (April 2010)
  3. End­notes 3: Gender, Race, Class, and Oth­er Mis­for­tunes (Septem­ber 2013)
  4. End­notes 4: Unity in Sep­ar­a­tion (Decem­ber 2015)

Sic
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  1. Sic: In­ter­na­tion­al Journ­al for Com­mun­iz­a­tion, Volume 1 (Novem­ber 2011)
  2. Sic: In­ter­na­tion­al Journ­al for Com­mun­iz­a­tion, Volume 2 (Janu­ary 2014)

Chuǎng
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  1. Chuǎng 1: Dead Generations (2015)

I have nu­mer­ous ob­jec­tions to the vari­ous strands of com­mun­iz­a­tion the­ory, though I find the prob­lems it’s raised to be im­port­ant. These may be briefly enu­mer­ated.

First of all, I am not con­vinced that the no­tion of a “trans­ition­al peri­od” is so prob­lem­at­ic that it must be done away with al­to­geth­er. Marx main­tained in his “Cri­tique of the Gotha Pro­gram” (1875) that “between cap­it­al­ist and com­mun­ist so­ci­ety lies the peri­od of the re­volu­tion­ary trans­form­a­tion of the one in­to the oth­er. Cor­res­pond­ing to this is also a polit­ic­al trans­ition peri­od in which the state can be noth­ing but the re­volu­tion­ary dic­tat­or­ship of the pro­let­ari­at.” Seizure of state power, wheth­er first “smashed” or left re­l­at­ively in­tact, is ana­thema to the com­mun­izers. En­gels’ quip about the ex­iled Blan­quist com­munards also comes to mind: “These thirty-three are com­mun­ists be­cause they ima­gine that, as soon as they have only the good will to jump over in­ter­me­di­ate sta­tions and com­prom­ises, everything is as­sured, and if, as they firmly be­lieve, it ‘be­gins’ in a day or two, and they take the helm, ‘com­mun­ism will be in­tro­duced’ the day after to­mor­row. And they are not com­mun­ists if this can­not be done im­me­di­ately. What child­ish naïveté to ad­vance im­pa­tience as a con­vin­cing the­or­et­ic­al ar­gu­ment!”

Second, I do not ac­cept the premise, ad­vanced by both End­notes and Théo­rie Com­mu­niste, that “pro­gram­mat­ism” is dead and gone. “Pro­gram­mat­ism” broadly refers to the era of work­ing-class polit­ic­al pro­grams, so­cial­ist parties and syn­dic­al­ist uni­ons, in which in­di­vidu­als’ status as pro­du­cers was af­firmed. All claims to polit­ic­al le­git­im­acy were thought to flow from this fact. Though they dif­fer some­what on the dates that bookend this peri­od­iz­a­tion, the two journ­als share the same gen­er­al con­clu­sion that this era is at an end. Joshua Clover and Aaron Ben­anav summed it up suc­cinctly in a 2014 art­icle, “Can Dia­lectics Break BRICs?”:

The col­lect­ive ex­per­i­ence of work and life that gave rise to the van­guard party dur­ing the era of in­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion has passed away with in­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion it­self. We re­cog­nize as ma­ter­i­al­ists that the cap­it­al-labor re­la­tion that made such a party ef­fect­ive — not only as idea but as real­ity — is no longer op­er­at­ive. A changed cap­it­al-labor re­la­tion will give rise to new forms of or­gan­iz­a­tion. We should not cri­ti­cize present-day struggles in the name of ideal­ized re­con­struc­tions from the past. Rather, we should de­scribe the com­mun­ist po­ten­tial that presents it­self im­man­ently in the lim­its con­fron­ted by today’s struggles.

Richard Ru­bin of Platy­pus raised some points back in 2013 with which I still for the most part agree. While End­notes’ ap­prais­al of the polit­ic­al im­pot­ence of the Left in the present is sim­il­ar to that of the Platy­pus, Ben­anav con­ten­ded that the lat­ter’s ana­lys­is did not pen­et­rate down to the hard un­der­ly­ing real­it­ies that ex­plain why this is the case. By re­main­ing at the level of ideas, fo­cus­ing on ideo­lo­gic­al re­gres­sions and the dia­lectics of de­feat, Platy­pus failed to see the changed so­cioeco­nom­ic con­di­tions that lie be­neath. “Fail­ing to see this ma­ter­i­al basis for the death of the Left, Platy­pus is help­less to de­scribe the char­ac­ter of class struggle over the last dec­ade and a half,” Ben­anav ar­gued. “Their per­spect­ive com­pletely cov­ers over the real gap that sep­ar­ates the present from the past. Work­ers are only able to find a com­mon in­terest di­luted through the ex­tra­ver­sion of class be­long­ing in­to some oth­er weakened form of an af­firm­able share of ex­ist­ence.” Even­tu­ally, Ru­bin countered. “It is true in a cer­tain sense that the con­di­tions for re­volu­tion emerge from struggle, but there are many dif­fer­ent forms of struggle. People do not al­ways come to the con­clu­sion that they should struggle, and even then they of­ten struggle in un­pro­pi­tious ways.”

Un­like End­notes, I be­lieve the so­cial­ist work­ers’ move­ment re­mains the un­sur­pass­able ho­ri­zon through which alone cap­it­al­ism can be over­come. If these older mod­al­it­ies of struggle no longer have any real pur­chase on the world, then it is not just a par­tic­u­lar form of polit­ics that has seen its last but rather polit­ics it­self. Len­in once re­marked that polit­ics prop­er only be­gins once you start count­ing in the mil­lions: “As long as it was (and inas­much as it still is) a ques­tion of win­ning the pro­let­ari­at’s van­guard over to the side of com­mun­ism, pri­or­ity went and still goes to pro­pa­ganda work; even pro­pa­ganda circles, with all their pa­ro­chi­al lim­it­a­tions, are use­ful un­der these con­di­tions, and pro­duce good res­ults. But when it is a ques­tion of prac­tic­al ac­tion by the masses, of the dis­pos­i­tion, if one may so put it, of vast armies, of the align­ment of all the class forces in a giv­en so­ci­ety for the fi­nal and de­cis­ive battle, then pro­pa­gand­ist meth­ods alone, the mere re­pe­ti­tion of the truths of ‘pure’ com­mun­ism, are of no avail. In these cir­cum­stances, one must not count in thou­sands, like the pro­pa­gand­ist be­long­ing to a small group that has not yet giv­en lead­er­ship to the masses; in these cir­cum­stances one must count in mil­lions and tens of mil­lions.”

Some fur­ther ob­jec­tions with which I gen­er­ally con­cur were made by Don­ald Par­kin­son already more than a year ago. Oth­er points of con­ten­tion are fleshed out in the piece be­low, by some Ger­man com­rades in Kos­mo­prolet. End­notes trans­lated this piece last year, to vent­ri­lo­quize their “frus­tra­tion with the way [com­mun­iz­a­tion] has be­come as­so­ci­ated with a new the­or­et­ic­al brand and/or rad­ic­al iden­tity.” It’s a great piece.

tullio-crali-aerial-machine-1980

On communization and its theorists

Kosmoprolet
January 2016
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This text was ori­gin­ally pub­lished in the Friends’ journ­al Kos­mo­prolet as a re­sponse to Théo­rie Com­mu­niste’s cri­tique of the Friends’ 28 Theses on Class So­ci­ety. A trans­la­tion of Théo­rie Com­mu­niste’s ori­gin­al cri­tique can be found here.

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In the 1970s, some­body in France in­ven­ted the word com­mun­iz­a­tion in or­der to ex­press a fairly simple, but im­port­ant idea: the pro­let­ari­an re­volu­tion is not the self-real­iz­a­tion of the pro­let­ari­at, but its self-ab­ol­i­tion. This idea is noth­ing new, for it can already be found in a po­lem­ic­al work from 1845.1 However, it nev­er played a strong role in the labor move­ment, sig­ni­fy­ing at best the ho­ri­zon of a dis­tant fu­ture. Rather, the con­quest of polit­ic­al power by the pro­let­ari­at topped the agenda. In the sub­sequent trans­ition­al so­cial­ist so­ci­ety, which was still to be dom­in­ated by com­mod­ity pro­duc­tion and the strict meas­ure­ment of the in­di­vidu­al share of so­cial wealth, the pro­let­ari­at would lay the found­a­tions for com­mun­ism as a class­less so­ci­ety in which there would be no more wage sys­tem and, in­deed, no more pro­let­ari­at. The term com­mun­iz­a­tion ex­presses the ob­sol­es­cence of this no­tion. Ac­cord­ing to the pro­ponents of com­mun­iz­a­tion, com­mun­ism is not a dis­tant goal, but the move­ment it­self which elim­in­ates all ex­change re­la­tions as well as the state. As is ap­par­ent from our 28 Theses on Class So­ci­ety, we share this per­spect­ive, al­though we do so, ac­cord­ing to a French the­ory circle, in a fash­ion that is halfhearted, and ul­ti­mately bound to the “af­firm­a­tion of the pro­let­ari­at.”2 It is this we seek to ex­am­ine be­low.

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Journey back into the vampires’ castle: Mark Fisher remembered, 1968-2017

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I nev­er met Mark Fish­er, but we cor­res­pon­ded of­ten via e-mail. And he was al­ways very en­cour­aging. Right after I wrote a scath­ing re­view of “con­fer­ence com­mun­ism” in early 2014, “The Ghost of Com­mun­ism Past,” Mark sent me the fol­low­ing: “Your piece on con­fer­ence com­mun­ism, sent to me by a fel­low ed­it­or, fairly well nails down what we hope Zer0 isn’t. We en­joyed it, happy new year.” Fish­er would of course de­part from Zer0, along with many of his peers, to found Re­peat­er Books later that same year. Nev­er­the­less, his com­mit­ment to an ac­cess­ible, non-aca­dem­ic but soph­ist­ic­ated Marx­ism was un­flag­ging.

Cap­it­al­ist Real­ism was his prin­cip­al achieve­ment in the realm of the­ory, the fruit of a long series of re­flec­tions and in­tro­spec­tion con­duc­ted largely on­line. In it he railed against “the slow can­cel­la­tion of the fu­ture” en­acted by post-com­mun­ist cap­it­al­ism. Tak­ing its cue from Jameson’s in­sight — no less true for hav­ing been quoted ad nauseam — that “it is easi­er to ima­gine the end of the world than it is to ima­gine the end of cap­it­al­ism,” Mark asked if there was “really no al­tern­at­ive” to the neo­lib­er­al re­gime of Re­agan and Thatch­er. Some of his mus­ings about men­tal health, which reg­u­larly fea­tured on his K-Punk blog, also ap­peared with cas­u­al bril­liance in this text:

The cur­rent rul­ing on­to­logy denies any pos­sib­il­ity of a so­cial caus­a­tion of men­tal ill­ness. The chemico-bio­lo­giz­a­tion of men­tal ill­ness is of course strictly com­men­sur­ate with its de­pol­it­i­ciz­a­tion. Con­sid­er­ing men­tal ill­ness an in­di­vidu­al chemico-bio­lo­gic­al prob­lem has enorm­ous be­ne­fits for cap­it­al­ism. First, it re­in­forces cap­it­al’s drive to­wards atom­ist­ic in­di­vidu­al­iz­a­tion (you are sick be­cause of your brain chem­istry). Second, it provides an enorm­ously luc­rat­ive mar­ket in which mul­tina­tion­al phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies can peddle their phar­ma­ceut­ic­als (we can cure you with our SS­RIs). It goes without say­ing that all men­tal ill­nesses are neur­o­lo­gic­ally in­stan­ti­ated, but this says noth­ing about their caus­a­tion. If it is true, for in­stance, that de­pres­sion is con­sti­tuted by low sero­ton­in levels, what still needs to be ex­plained is why par­tic­u­lar in­di­vidu­als have low levels of sero­ton­in. This re­quires a so­cial and polit­ic­al ex­plan­a­tion; and the task of re­pol­it­i­ciz­ing men­tal ill­ness is an ur­gent one if the left wants to chal­lenge cap­it­al­ist real­ism.

How much sad­der it all seems, read­ing these words now, in light of his sui­cide. Mark con­fessed in an art­icle for The Oc­cu­pied Times that he “suffered from de­pres­sion in­ter­mit­tently since [he] was a teen­ager.” Ob­vi­ously it would be pre­sump­tu­ous to con­clude that the miser­able state of left­ist dis­course had any­thing to do with his de­cision to end his life; too many oth­er factors might have been more im­me­di­ate or prox­im­ate. But it would be just as mis­guided to main­tain that this had noth­ing to do with Mark’s over­whelm­ing sense of des­pair in re­cent years, es­pe­cially since he so fre­quently lamen­ted the sorry place at which we’ve all ar­rived.

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Mies van der Rohe

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Fotograf: Willy Römer
ab 1930-1933 Direktor des Bauhauses in Dessau
Aufnahmedatum: 1931
Aufnahmeort: Berlin
Objektmaß 13×18 cm
Inventar-Nr.: WR_ON0026

Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe hardly needs any in­tro­duc­tion to read­ers of this blog, or in­deed to any­one more than cas­u­ally fa­mil­i­ar with the his­tory of twen­ti­eth cen­tury ar­chi­tec­ture. Still, a few words might be in­cluded here for those who haven’t yet had the pleas­ure. He was the third dir­ect­or of the le­gendary Bauhaus art school, after the pi­on­eer­ing mod­ern­ist Wal­ter Gropi­us and the con­tro­ver­sial Marx­ist Hannes Mey­er. Des­cen­ded from stone­ma­sons, Mies entered the build­ing trade at a young age. Pri­or to his ten­ure at the Bauhaus, he was an ap­pren­tice along with Gropi­us in the stu­dio of Peter Behrens, who also later su­per­vised a Swiss prodigy by the name of Charles-Édouard Jean­ner­et (ali­as Le Cor­busier). Un­der the Ger­man mas­ter’s tu­tel­age, Mies gained an en­dur­ing ap­pre­ci­ation for the Prus­si­an clas­si­cist Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Be­sides Behrens, the oth­er mod­ern in­flu­ence on Mies dur­ing this early phase of his ca­reer was the Dutch­man Hendrik Pet­rus Ber­lage, through whom Europe learned of the ground­break­ing designs of Frank Lloyd Wright in Amer­ica.

Mies’ turn to full-fledged mod­ern­ism came in the 1920s, after he came in­to con­tact with Kurt Schwit­ters and oth­er mem­bers of the in­ter­na­tion­al av­ant-garde. Al­though his com­mis­sions earli­er in the dec­ade still came from cli­ents whose taste was rather more tra­di­tion­al, Mies nev­er­the­less began writ­ing bold art­icles and mani­fes­tos for the con­struct­iv­ist journ­al G. Oth­er con­trib­ut­ors to this peri­od­ic­al were artists and crit­ics such as El Lis­sitzky, Wern­er Gräff, and Wal­ter Ben­jamin. Jean-Louis Co­hen, au­thor of The Fu­ture of Ar­chi­tec­ture (2012), de­tails the vari­ous ex­per­i­ments Mies con­duc­ted around this time. In 1926, he was se­lec­ted to design the monu­ment to Rosa Lux­em­burg and Karl Lieb­knecht in Ber­lin. Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of the 1927 Wießenhof ex­hib­i­tion, spear­headed by Mies, a num­ber of more dar­ing projects now opened them­selves up to him. Villa Tu­gend­hat in Brno, Czechoslov­akia and the Wolf House in Gu­bin, Po­land were only the most fam­ous of these projects. In 1929, Mies was chosen to design the Ger­man pa­vil­ion for the world’s fair in Bar­celona, which re­ceived wide­spread ac­claim. You can read more about these works in an ex­cerpt taken from Alan Colquhoun’s his­tor­ic­al sur­vey Mod­ern Ar­chi­tec­ture (2002).

portriat-of-german-born-american-architect-ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-1886-1969-as-he-sits-in-a-chair-in-his-home-chicago-illinois-1956 mies-van-der-rohe_casa-de-campo-de-ladrillo-1924-mies-van-der-rohe portriat-of-german-born-american-architect-ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe-1886-1969-as-he-peers-from-between-a-model-of-his-26-story-twin-apartment-buildings-located-at-860-on-the-right-and-880-lake

In any case, just as Mies was be­gin­ning to make a name for him­self, Gropi­us asked Mies to step in and re­place Mey­er over at the Bauhaus in Des­sau. At the time, Mey­er was em­broiled in a scan­dal con­cern­ing his com­mun­ist sym­path­ies. He ex­ited, along with many of his left-wing stu­dents, to plan new cit­ies in the USSR. (Eva For­gacs has writ­ten ex­cel­lently about the polit­ics that sur­roun­ded this de­cision). With the rise of Hitler in 1933, Gropi­us’ icon­ic Des­sau build­ing was com­mand­eered by the Nazis and the school moved to Ber­lin. Mies’ choice to stay in Ger­many, and in­deed col­lab­or­ate with the fas­cist au­thor­it­ies, has been chron­icled at length by Elaine Hoch­man in her 1989 study Ar­chi­tects of For­tune. Co­hen dis­misses this book as a bit of journ­al­ist­ic sen­sa­tion­al­ism, but its charges are worth tak­ing ser­i­ously. Sibyl Mo­holy-Nagy, for her part, nev­er for­gave him for this. “When [Mies] ac­cep­ted the com­mis­sion for the Reichs­bank in Ju­ly 1933, after the com­ing to power of Hitler, he was a trait­or to all of us and to everything we had fought for,” she wrote. In a 1965 let­ter, she fur­ther re­but­ted the his­tor­i­an Henry-Rus­sell Hitch­cock:

Mies van der Rohe seemed to be wholly a part of that slow death when he fi­nally ar­rived in this coun­try in 1937. His first scheme for the cam­pus of the Illinois In­sti­tute of Tech­no­logy is pain­fully re­min­is­cent of his deadly fas­cist designs for the Ger­man Reichs­bank, and the Krefeld Fact­ory of 1937 proved the old Ger­man pro­verb that he who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas. Yet he was the only one of the di­a­spora ar­chi­tects cap­able of start­ing a new life as a cre­at­ive de­sign­er fol­low­ing World War II, be­cause to him tech­no­logy was not a ro­mantic catch­word, as it had been for the Bauhaus pro­gram, but a work­able tool and an in­es­cap­able truth.

Per­son­ally, I am in­clined to agree with the judg­ment of Man­fredo Tafuri and his co-au­thor Francesco Dal Co. Mies was for the most part apolit­ic­al; i.e., “not con­nec­ted with any polit­ic­al ideo­logy.” Either way, as Mo­holy-Nagy her­self noted, he en­joyed great fame and prestige throughout the post­war peri­od, in which he con­sol­id­ated the form­al prin­ciples of the in­ter­na­tion­al style of the twen­ties and thirties, des­pite his op­pos­i­tion dur­ing those dec­ades to form­al­ism or “prob­lems of form.” However, Tafuri was right to deny this ap­par­ent vari­ance: “There is noth­ing more er­ro­neous than the in­ter­pret­a­tion of Mies van der Rohe in his late works as con­tra­dict­ing the Mies of the 1920s, or the read­ing of his late designs as re­nun­ci­at­ory in­cur­sions in­to the un­ruffled realm of the neoaca­dem­ic.” In many ways, it was only dur­ing this later phase of his ca­reer that Mies was able to real­ize the pro­gram­mat­ic vis­ion he laid out between 1921 and 1923. One need only take a look at the apart­ments he de­signed in Chica­go or Lake Point Tower, posthum­ously real­ized by his pu­pils John Hein­rich and George Schip­por­eit, to see the em­bod­i­ment of the spec­u­lat­ive of­fice build­ing and the sky­scraper he en­vi­sioned back in the 1920s. Really, it is a shame that Mies’ sig­na­ture style has lent it­self so eas­ily to im­it­a­tion, be­cause the fea­tures which seem rep­lic­able con­ceal the subtler secret of their pro­por­tions.

At any rate, you can down­load a num­ber of texts which deal with the work of Mies van der Rohe be­low. Fol­low­ing these there are a num­ber of im­ages, sketches and de­lin­eations of vari­ous proven­ance (most come from MoMA’s col­lec­tion), as well as pho­to­graphs of both Mies and build­ings which were real­ized. Texts on Mies writ­ten by Co­hen, Colquhoun, and Tafuri/Dal Co fin­ish these off.

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Wilhelm Reich’s synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis

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Back in June, in a post fea­tur­ing cri­tiques Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács wrote on Freu­di­an psy­cho­ana­lys­is, I an­nounced that I’d shortly be post­ing a num­ber of works by the Marxi­an psy­cho­ana­lyst Wil­helm Reich. A couple days earli­er, of course, I’d pos­ted an ex­cel­lent piece by Ber­tell Oll­man on Reich from his 1979 es­say col­lec­tion So­cial and Sexu­al Re­volu­tion. Need­less to say, this post is long over­due.

Some brief re­marks are there­fore ap­pro­pri­ate, in passing, to frame Reich’s rel­ev­ance to the present mo­ment.

First of all, Reich is rel­ev­ant to con­tem­por­ary dis­cus­sions of fas­cism. His work on The Mass Psy­cho­logy of Fas­cism re­mains one of the most in­nov­at­ive and pro­found Marx­ist ef­forts to un­der­stand ideo­logy as a ma­ter­i­al force that has ap­peared to date.

Moreover, this forms a pivotal point of de­par­ture for a host of sub­sequent at­tempts to the­or­ize re­volu­tion­ary sub­jectiv­ity — both in terms of con­scious­ness and of de­sire. To­mor­row or the next day I hope to jot down some of my own thoughts on the mat­ter, us­ing Reich for ref­er­ence.

Last but not least, Reich’s thoughts on sexu­al eman­cip­a­tion are con­sid­er­ably ahead of their time. Con­sider, for ex­ample, this ex­cerpt from one of his journ­al entries dated 1939, while in Oslo:

The past few nights I wandered the streets of Oslo alone. At night a cer­tain type of per­son awakes and plies her trade, one who these days must view each bit of love with great fear but who will someday hold sway over life. Today prac­tic­ally a crim­in­al, to­mor­row the proud bear­er of life’s finest fruits. Whores, os­tra­cized in our day, will in fu­ture times be beau­ti­ful wo­men simply giv­ing of their love. They will no longer be whores. Someday sen­su­al pleas­ure will make old maids look so ri­dicu­lous that the power of so­cial mor­al­ity will slip out of their hands. I love love!

While some of his views on ho­mo­sexu­al­ity might seem an­ti­quated or back­wards today — he saw it as a de­vi­ant be­ha­vi­or, linked to lat­ent au­thor­it­ari­an tend­en­cies — the fact re­mains that Reich favored de­crim­in­al­iz­a­tion and pro­tested adam­antly against its re­crim­in­al­iz­a­tion in the So­viet Uni­on un­der Stal­in.

In­cid­ent­ally, this is why I find it so ab­surd that left­ists look to ex­cuse Castro’s ho­mo­phobic policies pri­or to 1980. Eduard Bern­stein was pro­mot­ing gay rights dur­ing the 1890s, and Au­gust Bebel ad­voc­ated the re­peal of laws against sod­omy as early as 1898.

Re­gard­less, here are the prom­ised PD­Fs, along with some rare im­ages and a trans­lated art­icle by the Itali­an Trot­sky­ist Aless­andro D’Aloia. I have taken the liberty of de­let­ing some need­less asides about the Big Bang, a pe­cu­li­ar hangup the In­ter­na­tion­al Marx­ist Tend­ency re­tains with re­spect to the­or­et­ic­al phys­ics des­pite none of its mem­bers be­ing qual­i­fied enough to judge the mat­ter.

Continue reading →

Jan Tschichold and the new typography

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Like many of his con­tem­por­ar­ies, Jan Tschich­old ad­hered to a kind of “apolit­ic­al so­cial­ism” dur­ing the 1920s. Wal­ter Gropi­us, Lud­wig Mies van der Rohe, and nu­mer­ous oth­ers shared this out­look. He helped design books for the left-wing “Book Circle” series from 1924 to 1926. Tschich­old quoted Trot­sky’s Lit­er­at­ure and Re­volu­tion (1924) with ap­prov­al in the in­aug­ur­al is­sue of Ty­po­graph­is­che Mit­teilun­gen, pub­lished that same year:

The wall di­vid­ing art and in­dustry will come down. The great style of the fu­ture will not dec­or­ate, it will or­gan­ize. It would be wrong to think this means the de­struc­tion of art, as giv­ing way to tech­no­logy.

Dav­id Crow­ley and Paul Job­ling sug­gest that “Tschich­old had been so en­am­ored of the So­viet Uni­on that he had signed his works ‘Iwan [Ivan] Tschich­old’ for a peri­od in the 1920s, and worked for Ger­man trade uni­ons.” Some of this en­thu­si­asm was doubt­less the res­ult of his con­tact with El Lis­sitzky and his Hun­gari­an dis­ciple László Mo­holy-Nagy, a le­gend in his own right.

In 1927, a pen man­u­fac­turer ac­cused Tschich­old of be­ing a com­mun­ist, which promp­ted fel­low ty­po­graph­er Stan­ley Mor­is­on to rise to his de­fense. From that point for­ward, his work be­came even less overtly polit­ic­al.

jan-tschichold-sonderheft-typographische-mitteilungen-1925

Yet he re­mained cog­niz­ant of the re­volu­tion­ary ori­gins of mod­ern or­tho­graphy. “At the same time that he was pro­mul­gat­ing the de­pol­it­i­cized func­tion­al­ism of the New Ty­po­graphy,” writes Steph­en Eskilson. “Tschich­old still re­cog­nized his debt to Con­struct­iv­ism’s Rus­si­an, com­mun­ist roots.” Chris­toph­er Burke thus also writes in his study of Act­ive Lit­er­at­ure: Jan Tschich­old and the New Ty­po­graphy that

Tschich­old’s com­pil­a­tion con­tains the Con­struct­iv­ists’ Pro­gram in an ed­ited and abridged — one might even say adul­ter­ated — Ger­man ver­sion ad­ap­ted by Tschich­old him­self. The Marx­ist-Len­in­ist rhet­or­ic of the ori­gin­al is sig­ni­fic­antly toned down: for ex­ample, the pro­clam­a­tion in the ori­gin­al that reads “Our sole ideo­logy is sci­entif­ic com­mun­ism based on the the­ory of his­tor­ic­al ma­ter­i­al­ism: loses its ref­er­ence to sci­entif­ic com­mun­ism in Tschich­old’s ver­sion. He was ob­vi­ously tail­or­ing the text for his read­er­ship in Ger­many, where the Novem­ber Re­volu­tion im­me­di­ately after the First World War had been ruth­lessly sup­pressed. The Ger­man Com­mun­ist Party lead­ers, Karl Lieb­knecht and Rosa Lux­em­burg, were murdered in cold blood on 15 Janu­ary 1919 by right-wing, coun­ter­re­volu­tion­ary troops with the ta­cit ac­cept­ance of the So­cial Demo­crat gov­ern­ment of the Wei­mar Re­pub­lic it­self.

Tschich­old him­self called for an ob­ject­ive, im­per­son­al, col­lect­ive work destined for all, es­pous­ing a vaguely left-wing but not overtly com­mun­ist point of view com­mon to many state­ments from this peri­od of In­ter­na­tion­al Con­struct­iv­ism in Ger­many. Des­pite quot­ing Trot­sky in Ele­ment­are Ty­po­graph­ie, Tschich­old did not be­long to the Ger­man Com­mun­ist Party, nor was he as­so­ci­ated with any par­tic­u­lar “-ism” or group, apart from the Ring neue Wer­begestal­ter later in the 1920s and 1930s, which had no polit­ic­al di­men­sion.

Re­gard­less, the Nazis sus­pec­ted Tschich­old of har­bor­ing com­mun­ist sym­path­ies. Continue reading →

Early Soviet children’s books, 1924-1932

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The Young Polytechnician: Housing (1931)

the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools001 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools002 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools003 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools004 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools005 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools006 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools007 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools008 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools009 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools010 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools011 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools012 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools013 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools014 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools015 the-young-polytechnician-housing-al%ca%b9bom-dli%ef%b8%a0a%ef%b8%a1-raboty-v-shkole-i-stupeni-a-workbook-for-elementary-schools016

Out with bourgeois crocodiles!
How the Soviets rewrote children’s books

Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian
May 4, 2016
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In 1925, Galina and Olga Chichagova il­lus­trated a two-pan­el poster that called for a re­volu­tion in chil­dren’s il­lus­tra­tion in the new So­viet Uni­on. The left pan­el fea­tured tra­di­tion­al char­ac­ters from Rus­si­an fairytales and folk­lore — kings, queens, the Fire­bird, the witch Baba Yaga and, my fa­vor­ite, a cro­codile in el­eg­ant night­cap and dress­ing gown. “Out,” read the cap­tion, “with mys­ti­cism and fantasy of chil­dren’s books!!” Continue reading →

Fear trumps love

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One sign, waved by someone some­how #Still­With­H­er, reads: “Not my pres­id­ent.” An­oth­er echoes the pop­u­lar chant: “We re­ject the pres­id­ent elect.” Fi­nally, and most ubi­quit­ously: “Love trumps hate.”

Such are the slo­gans seen and heard at anti-Trump ral­lies since elec­tion res­ults rolled in. Call­ing them ri­ots is push­ing it; these are pretty pro­sa­ic af­fairs. I usu­ally don’t put too much stock in the mot­toes and phrases mind­lessly re­peated at rituals of dis­sent, but here the last ex­ample men­tioned at the out­set in­struct­ive. Does love in­deed trump hate? Per­haps. Read­ers of Ma­chiavelli will re­call that there’s an­oth­er sen­ti­ment, however, more power­ful than love or hate: fear. More on this a bit later; for now, let’s ex­am­ine the forms of mo­bil­iz­a­tion that have cropped up in re­sponse to the pro­spect of a Trump pres­id­ency.

Hysterical liberalism and protest politics

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Lib­er­als know that people are angry, so they’ve brought in their ap­poin­ted “com­mu­nity lead­ers,” preach­ers, and vari­ous oth­er “peace­keep­ers” to pre­vent these protests from be­ing any­thing oth­er than im­pot­ent cry-ins. M. Har­lan Hoke was for­tu­nate enough to at­tend a de­mon­stra­tion in Philly or­gan­ized by So­cial­ist Al­tern­at­ive, rather than by dis­gruntled Dems. He com­ments that SAlt at least man­aged to stay on point by fo­cus­ing on val­id eco­nom­ic griev­ances and the need for com­pre­hens­ive so­cial re­form, while also ac­know­ledging the con­cerns of groups frightened by Trump’s in­flam­mat­ory rhet­or­ic on im­mig­ra­tion, re­li­gious dis­crim­in­a­tion, and abor­tion.

Else­where, in the more “spon­tan­eous” marches — quickly com­mand­eered by pro­fes­sion­al act­iv­ists and NGO rep­res­ent­at­ives loy­al to the Demo­crat­ic Party — their pur­pose was much less clear. In a post on his new blog, Im­per­i­um ad In­fin­itum, Hoke ob­serves that “in oth­er cit­ies, the theme of the protests is ba­sic­ally angry ob­li­vi­ous Demo­crats. Their mes­sage is what? Vote Demo­crat in the 2018 and 2020 midterms? Just keep protest­ing Trump?” Protest polit­ics are fairly lim­ited to be­gin with, and I have my cri­ti­cisms even of pop­u­lar front co­ali­tions formed by parties and or­gan­iz­a­tions fur­ther to the left (I’ll get to this later). For now it’s enough to em­phas­ize that lib­er­al­ism is a total dead end.

 

Woke celebrit­ies like Lena Dun­ham, Beyoncé Knowles, and Aman­da Mar­cotte are also out in force, of course, ex­press­ing their sanc­ti­mo­ni­ous dis­may. Katy Perry is pro­claim­ing open re­volu­tion in widely-shared tweets. But these are un­likely to carry over in­to the real world. Pop sing­er and Ary­an god­dess Taylor Swift has re­mained con­spicu­ously si­lent throughout all of this. Then again, she’s un­wit­tingly be­come the darling Valkyrie of the al­tern­at­ive right, so maybe it’s in her best in­terest to hang back for a bit and see how things play out. Ri­ot grrrl pi­on­eers Le Tigre hope­fully re­gret that cringe-in­du­cing video en­dorse­ment of the would-be Ma­dame Pres­id­ent. Continue reading →

Reap the whirlwind

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But muh rain­bow co­ali­tion of mar­gin­al­ized iden­tit­ies will smash the kyri­archy as we sprinkle ma­gic di­versity pix­ie dust over every­one and cre­ate a shiny lib­er­al Star­bucks uto­pia. Yes­ter­day was 18 Bru­maire CCXXV ac­cord­ing to the French Re­pub­lic­an cal­en­dar, by the way. Just a happy co­in­cid­ence, I’m sure.

Left-lib­er­al “pro­gress­ives” did this to them­selves. This is ex­actly what re­treat­ing in­to cul­tur­al (i.e., iden­tity) polit­ics, while abandon­ing class as the basis for a so­cially trans­form­at­ive co­ali­tion, gets you. If you make no at­tempt to ap­peal to work­ers qua work­ers, the Right will in­ev­it­ably make in­roads with­in that group. As they in­deed have. So I don’t pity any­one who is ser­i­ously dis­traught by these res­ults. Blame for Trump can­not be laid solely at the door­step of “crack­ers” and hicks; he did sig­ni­fic­antly bet­ter among blacks and Lati­nos than Rom­ney, his Re­pub­lic­an pre­de­cessor.

Most anti-af­firm­at­ive ac­tion shit is totally right-wing, so I will be­gin by say­ing that I in no way share the polit­ics of most people who look to cri­ti­cize it. But it’s ul­ti­mately a cos­met­ic meas­ure, which cre­ates a black and minor­ity bour­geois­ie and polit­ic­al elite (“black faces in high places,” etc.). When coupled with gen­er­al eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion and wage de­pres­sion, grow­ing in­come in­equal­ity and job loss, it’s a re­cipe for re­vanchist ma­jor­it­ari­an back­lash. Edu­cated lib­er­al elites ex­pressed noth­ing but con­tempt for the work­ing poor in fly­over coun­try, whom they vil­i­fied as “one re­ac­tion­ary mass” — i.e., a “bas­ket of de­plor­ables” — of ig­nor­ant ra­cists.

In such an at­mo­sphere, even the slight­est over­ture to the work­ing class was bound to res­on­ate enorm­ously. Here, of course, the ap­peal was made us­ing xeno­phobic and hate­ful rhet­or­ic, ex­ploit­ing long­stand­ing ra­cial di­vi­sions and cap­it­al­iz­ing on deeply-felt anxi­et­ies. Plus, the lack of any ap­peal to the work­ing class by the Demo­crats also meant that poor minor­it­ies were not en­er­gized to vote for them. Smug, latte-sip­ping lib­er­als just res­ted on their laurels, se­cure in their be­lief that vic­tory was as­sured by simple demo­graph­ic shifts. All this while of­fer­ing noth­ing to work­ing blacks or Lati­nos, and prom­ising con­tin­ued war on those parts of the globe from which the refugee crisis first arose. Continue reading →

Class, segmentation, racialization: Reading notes

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Théorie Communiste
Lucha No Feik Club
(October 26, 2016)
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Editorial note

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Ori­gin­ally pub­lished by Théorie Com­mun­iste as «Classe/seg­men­ta­tion/raci­sa­tion. Notes». Trans­lated from the French by LNFC, with sub­stan­tial re­vi­sions by Ross Wolfe. I can’t take cred­it for the ma­jor­ity of this trans­la­tion, as I worked from the one pos­ted by the Lucha No Feik Club. Nev­er­the­less, I found this trans­la­tion al­most un­read­able, and so de­cided to go over it again with my (ad­mit­tedly quite poor) French and make some modi­fic­a­tions. Right now it’s prob­ably still un­read­able, but hope­fully a little less so. Just to point out some of my own ed­its, and give a sense of my reas­ons for mak­ing them, a few words might be ad­ded here. For ex­ample, I changed cho­si­fiée from “thingi­fied” to “re­ified.” Un­doubtedly the former is used from time to time, but it comes across here as clunky and in­el­eg­ant. Also, I rendered face à face as “faceoff,” rather than the dread­fully lit­er­al “face-to-face.” Vari­ous oth­er minor cor­rec­tions were made, some of them slight over­sights. Part of the prob­lem is in the ori­gin­al text, however, as there are a couple places where there are word-for-word re­pe­ti­tions of en­tire sen­tences. These were no doubt un­in­ten­tion­al, and have been ex­cised from the present ver­sion.

As re­gards the con­tent, I am quite in­ter­ested in see­ing how Théorie Com­mun­iste relates the phe­nomen­on of “ra­cial­iz­a­tion” [raci­sa­tion] to the struc­tur­al lo­gic of cap­it­al and its his­tor­ic un­fold­ing. Clearly, the art­icle takes race to be a more ar­bit­rary con­struc­tion than gender. Gender is rooted in the sexu­al di­vi­sion of labor with­in the oikos, wherein the fam­ily is the fun­da­ment­al eco­nom­ic unit. There are more bio­lo­gic­al de­term­in­ants for gender, at least ini­tially. Some of this is sketched out in an­oth­er short art­icle pub­lished by Théorie Com­mun­iste, “Uter­us vs. Melan­in,” which as yet re­mains un­trans­lated. However, while race is more re­cent and based on ac­ci­dent­al fea­tures, it is no less real than gender. Théorie Com­mun­iste loc­ates ra­cial­iz­a­tion with­in the seg­ment­a­tion of the work­force, where su­per­fi­cial dis­tinc­tions such as skin col­or and dif­fi­culties of com­mu­nic­a­tion (mul­tiple lan­guages, etc.) be­come mark­ers of dif­fer­ence. Deni­al of these dif­fer­ences, in the name of some norm­at­ive ideal of what class should be, is sharply cri­ti­cized for ig­nor­ing the seg­men­ted real­ity of so­cial­ized labor. Loren Gold­ner put this quite nicely a while back, when he wrote that “the ‘col­orblind’ Marx­ism of many left com­mun­ist cur­rents — a pro­let­ari­an is a pro­let­ari­an is a pro­let­ari­an — is simply… blind Marx­ism.”

Of course, race does not op­er­ate every­where uni­formly. It doesn’t al­ways fall along a col­or spec­trum run­ning from “white” to “black.” To be sure, the leg­acy of ra­cial­ized slavery in the United States over­shad­ows most oth­er his­tor­ic­al de­term­in­a­tions of race. But xeno­pho­bia to­ward vari­ous poor im­mig­rant groups — the Ir­ish in the 1850s, the Chinese in the early 1900s, Itali­ans in the 1920s-1930s, Lati­nos today — also plays a ma­jor role. Para­noia about Is­lam also in­forms a great deal of the hate­ful rhet­or­ic we’ve seen spouted against refugees since 2001. An­ti­semit­ism is less pro­nounced in the United States than in con­tin­ent­al Europe, cer­tainly, but it’s not al­to­geth­er un­known. Ra­cial dy­nam­ics work them­selves out a bit dif­fer­ently in France, with its his­tory of co­lo­ni­al­ism. However, I’m heartened to read that Théorie Com­mun­iste has no pa­tience for the re­ac­tion­ary polit­ics of race peddled by groups like the Parti des indigènes de la République and its lead­er, Houria Bouteldja. Roughly two years ago I cri­ti­cized the cul­tur­al re­lativ­ism of this par­tic­u­lar group, which per­vades de­co­lo­ni­al dis­course in gen­er­al, its “tac­tic­al ho­mo­pho­bia” and “lat­ent an­ti­semit­ism” (as the fol­low­ing art­icle puts it). Later I re­pos­ted an ex­cel­lent piece writ­ten by Ma­lika Amaouche, Yas­mine Kateb, and Léa Nic­olas-Te­boul.. «Classe/seg­men­ta­tion/raci­sa­tion» lam­bastes the PIR, who Théorie Com­mun­iste calls the “en­tre­pren­eurs of ra­cial­iz­a­tion.” I don’t blame Bouteldja et al. for pur­su­ing this en­ter­prise, though; someone had to tap the mar­ket left un­touched by Bloc Iden­titaire.

There has al­ways been seg­ment­a­tion with­in labor power. We must take it, then, as an ob­ject­ive de­term­in­a­tion of labor power un­der cap­it­al that nat­ur­ally leads to a di­vi­sion of labor. Here we have noth­ing more than a di­vide between a ho­mo­gen­eous ma­ter­i­al and a simple quant­it­at­ive grad­a­tion of the value of labor power. (Both simple and com­plex work un­der­go a kind of os­mos­is with­in the cap­it­al­ist mode of pro­duc­tion, from the gen­er­al­ized con­straint of sur­plus labor to spe­cial­ized labor un­der co­oper­at­ive man­age­ment, etc.). However, this seg­ment­a­tion would not be so if it were not but a qual­it­at­ive di­vide with­in an oth­er­wise ho­mo­gen­eous ma­ter­i­al. Two pro­cesses in­ter­vene as they weave to­geth­er: On the one hand the cap­it­al­ist mode of pro­duc­tion is glob­al, cap­able of ap­pro­pri­at­ing and des­troy­ing all oth­er modes of pro­duc­tion while con­serving for it­self the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of those it has re­defined. On the oth­er hand the value of labor power rep­res­ents a mor­al, cul­tur­al, and his­tor­ic­al com­pon­ent. Since cap­it­al­ist ex­ploit­a­tion is uni­ver­sal — i.e., be­cause cap­it­al can take over oth­er modes of pro­duc­tion or make them co­ex­ist along­side it, ex­ploit labor power to­geth­er with those oth­er modes or de­tach them from their former ex­ist­en­tial con­di­tions — cap­it­al­ism is thus an his­tor­ic­al con­struc­tion that brings about the co­ex­ist­ence of all the dif­fer­ent strata of his­tory in a single mo­ment. Seg­ment­a­tion is not merely “ma­nip­u­la­tion.” It ex­ists as the vol­un­tary activ­ity of the cap­it­al­ist class and its pro­fes­sion­al ideo­logues, which forms and an­im­ates an ob­ject­ive pro­cess, a struc­tur­al de­term­in­a­tion of the mode of pro­duc­tion.

If the work­ing class has al­ways been seg­men­ted, it is still ne­ces­sary to con­tex­tu­al­ize this seg­ment­a­tion. That is to say, it must be situ­ated in the gen­er­al form of the con­tra­dic­tion between pro­let­ari­at and cap­it­al with­in a giv­en cycle of struggles. Without this, the op­pos­i­tion to iden­tit­ies — iden­tit­ies wrongly as­so­ci­ated with com­munit­ies — would be solely norm­at­ive. Even if we were to con­fer great cir­cum­stan­tial im­port­ance on this seg­ment­a­tion, its be­ing lies else­where, with­in a pur­ity that is either ac­cess­ible or not. We do not es­cape the mutually ex­clus­ive op­pos­i­tion to iden­tit­ies simply by pit­ting what is against what should be.

Re­gard­ing the re­la­tion between seg­ment­a­tion and ra­cial­iz­a­tion [raci­sa­tion], there ex­ist two uni­lat­er­al stances fa­cing one an­oth­er. Ac­cord­ing to the first, ma­ter­i­al­ism boils down to re­du­cing iden­tity to its found­a­tion — without tak­ing its ef­fect­ive­ness or its lo­gic in­to ac­count. The second, equally ma­ter­i­al­ist stance but­tresses it­self on a re­fus­al to con­sider the facts. It says that if ra­cial­ identity is reduced in toto to its found­a­tion, it’s noth­ing but an arbitrary [volon­taire] and det­ri­ment­al con­struct. Hence, those who turn it in­to an ob­ject merely di­vide the class and pro­mote bar­bar­ism. (I’m hardly dis­tort­ing their po­s­i­tion). What always es­capes both of these stances is the ques­tion of ideo­logy, which is not a re­flec­tion [of the base] but an en­semble of prac­tic­al and be­liev­able re­sponses. Beneath these operate cer­tain prac­tices. Iden­tity comes in­to be­ing wherever there is a sep­ar­a­tion and auto­nom­iz­a­tion of a proper sphere of activ­ity. Each identity or ideo­logy — in the sense of the term em­ployed here — has its own his­tory and mod­us op­erandi, which can be ascertained with reference to the prac­tices op­er­at­ing be­neath the ideo­logy in ques­tion. Iden­tity is therefore an es­sen­tial­iz­a­tion which defines an in­di­vidu­al as a sub­ject.

A norm­at­ive deni­al of ra­cial­ized seg­ment­a­tion does not seek con­tra­dic­tions with­in that which ex­ists, but is rather content to po­s­ition it­self in con­tra­dic­tion to that which ex­ists: class against its seg­ment­a­tion, without con­sid­er­ing that class only ex­ists with­in this seg­ment­a­tion (i.e., with­in the con­tra­dic­tion of pro­let­ari­at and cap­it­al that provides for its re­pro­duc­tion). Norm­at­ive op­pos­i­tion to the real seg­ment­a­tion of the pro­let­ari­at leads to an ideo­lo­gic­al ec­lipse of this real­ity — something the Parti des indigènes de la République [PIR] does in­versely, in its own way. Continue reading →