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Jean-Louis Cohen, 1949-2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture and revolution

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

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

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

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

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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.

 

Noel Ignatiev, 1940-2019

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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 →

Issue seven release party for Hard Crackers this weekend

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John Garvey reminded me that Hard Crackers is releasing its seventh issue this weekend at Freddy’s Bar in Brooklyn. So if you’re in town, feel free to stop by and grab a drink to celebrate. You can visit the Facebook event page for more details. It says Noel Ignatiev will be there, so I hope to catch up with him!

There will be readings from contributors including James Livingston, who authored “The Fireman” piece, along with many others. Livingston wrote a piece for Jacobin years ago called “How the Left Has Won,” which I found far too sunny and optimistic for my tastes. But he’s a great guy. 

Hope to see you there. Copies of Issue 7 as well as older issues will be on hand, which can be bought for just $6 apiece.

Antisemitism as a “blindspot” for the Left

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Why anyone would want to support Jeremy Corbyn or join the Labour Party is beyond me. I don’t live in Great Britain, so at least I’m spared that grim imperative. From what I’m told, spontaneous adulation for “Jez” and “the absolute boy” broke out on the floor of the DSA convention this last year. A strange occurrence, considering that Corbyn has nothing whatsoever to do with the American political system. He was seen as the limey equivalent to Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy in 2016, so I guess it makes some sense.

Still, since the subject keeps coming up, I might as well address the recurring charge of “antisemitism” that’s been leveled at Corbyn’s Labour. Many of his supporters reflexively suspect this is another attempted coup, an effort by the old Blairite wing of the Party to topple its Corbynite adversary and thereby reassert its dominance. Unfortunately, there’s a very good chance that this is indeed the case. This is unfortunate because antisemitism is a real blindspot for many on the Left, one which is only further occluded by cynical allegations.

Let me lay my cards on the table: I don’t think that Corbyn is a hardened antisemite or anything like that. Efforts to portray him as such are in my opinion transparently opportunistic. Yet again, this is a manufactured scandal resuscitated several years after the fact for political gain. Worst of all, this is leading people to dislike Corbyn for the wrong reasons. Jez sucks not because he’s “the absolute goy,” as some have pithily put it, but because he’s a milquetoast reformist leading a bourgeois political party, who wants to put more cops on the street and complains that foreigners are stealing British jobs.

One can make casually antisemitic, racist, or sexist comments, though, without necessarily being an ideologically committed antisemite, racist, or sexist. This is really the crucial takeaway from theories of structural antisemitism, racism, or sexism. In other words, these ideologies don’t rely on self-consciously antisemitic, racist, or sexist agents or individuals in order to be reproduced societally at an unconscious level. Continue reading →

Moishe Postone, 1942-2018

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(Caricature depicting Postone on the left,
next to Karl Marx and Karl Liebknecht)

Yesterday morning I saw it announced across social media and on several sites, namely by Zer0 Books and Shades Magazine, that my former teacher Moishe Postone has died. I had known from friends close to his family that he was very ill, and heard they were taking him off life support this last weekend. So when news circulated that he had left us, I assumed it was fact and wrote the short tribute published here. Later, a fellow student of Moishe, Istvan Adorjan, contacted me to say the reports were false, and that he was still clinging to life (though probably not for much longer). Obviously, I did not intend to mislead anyone by passing along this information, since I believed it to be true, much less disrespect him or his loved ones.

As soon as I learned of the mistake, I tried to publicize as far as possible that Moishe was still alive. Many others had by then written premature obituaries, including Peter Frase of Jacobin, though he likewise went on to correct it. For some reason,Sebastian Budgen of Verso and Historical Materialism began alleging that that I’d invented the malicious rumor Moishe was dead, despite the fact Budgen had widely shared the false reports of his passing across multiple platforms hours before I even saw anything about it. Ironically, Budgen only learned Moishe was still alive at that point thanks to Brendan McGeever’s crosspost of my note. Nevertheless, he fulminated that I ought to be “boycotted like apartheid South Africa or Zionist Israel” (I can only imagine what Moishe would have said about that).

That the sad occasion of Moishe’s passing would be used by Budgen to perpetuate his silly beef with me is of course petty beyond belief, but it is not surprising, just as little as it should surprise anyone that sycophants hoping to get published by him would kiss his ass all over that status update. Regardless, I intend to dedicate the remainder of this post to the memory of Postone, without worrying about what these idiots might say. Jennifer Moran, a family friend, contacted me a couple hours ago to tell me she had just received a pastoral notice from the synagogue that the funeral will be held at Rodfei Zadek tomorrow. Goodbye, Moishe. You will be missed immensely.

When I attended his lectures on Capital almost ten years ago he was undergoing treatment for cancer, which was subsequently in remission. Apparently it came back. Still, if you haven’t read his groundbreaking contributions to the reinterpretation of Marx’s mature critique, you should do so without delay. His works in English and German can be downloaded below.

An interview with Postone, published almost exactly ten years ago, can be read following a photograph showing him visiting the grave of the Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. For worthwhile critical engagements with Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination, see Loren Goldner’s appreciative “Critique of Pure Theory: Moishe Postone’s Dialectic of the Abstract and Abstract” (2003), Michael Heinrich’s somewhat captious “Too Much Production: Postone’s New Interpretation of Marx’s Theory Provides a Categorical Critique with Deficits” (2004), Chris Arthur’s “Subject and Counter-Subject” (2004), Slavoj Žižek’s sustained reading of it in Living in the End Times (2009), and Chris Cutrone’s “When was the Crisis of Capitalism? Moishe Postone and the Legacy of the 1960s New Left” (2014).

Marx after Marxism:
An interview with Moishe Postone

Benjamin Blumberg & Pam Nogales
Platypus Review 3 | March 1, 2008

 

BB: We would like to begin by asking some questions about your early engagement with Marxism and the impetus for your contribution to it. Very basically, how did you come upon Marx?

MP: I went through various stages. My first encounter was, as is the case with many people, the Communist Manifesto, which I thought was… rousing, and not really relevant. For me, in the 1960s, I thought it was a kind of a feel-good manifesto, not that it had been that in its own time, but that it no longer was really very relevant. Also, hearing the remnants of the old Left that were still around campus — Trotskyists and Stalinists arguing with one another — I thought that most of it was pretty removed from people’s concerns. It had a museum quality to it. So, I considered myself, in some vague sense, critical, or Left, or then the word was “radical,” but not particularly Marxist. I was very interested in issues of socialism, but that isn’t necessarily the same as Marxism.

Then I discovered, as did many in my generation, the 1844 Manuscripts. I thought they were fantastic… At that point, however, I still bought into the notion, very widespread then, that the young Marx really had something to say and that then, alas, he became a Victorian and that his thought became petrified. A turning point for me was an article, “The Unknown Marx,” written by Martin Nicolaus while translating the Grundrisse in 1967. Its hints at the richness of the Grundrisse blew me away. Continue reading →

Moar like Absurdo, amirite?

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Fol­low­ing the mis­sile strike on Shayr­at in West­ern Syr­ia last Thursday, a wave of protests broke out across the United States. These proved something of a mixed bag, as one might ex­pect. In ad­di­tion to those who sup­port the Free Syr­i­an Army but op­pose fur­ther Amer­ic­an in­ter­ven­tion, a num­ber of un­sa­vory sorts also showed up. Por­traits of Putin and As­sad could be seen along­side yel­low signs put out by the AN­SWER Co­ali­tion. A few flags fea­tur­ing the mod­i­fied or­ange tor­nado-swastika of the fas­cist Syr­i­an So­cial Na­tion­al­ist Party or SS­NP, a close ally of the Ba’ath­ist re­gime, also ap­peared at the demon­stra­tions. Some or­gan­izers took a more prin­cipled stand, however, re­ject­ing calls for a heightened US mil­it­ary role while at the same time re­fus­ing to march with As­sad­ists.

While I’m heartened by such un­equi­voc­al de­clar­a­tions of prin­ciple, we are still all too ready to for­give those who make ex­cuses for re­ac­tion­ar­ies. Marx­ists must do more to dis­tance ourselves from bour­geois na­tion­al­ists, re­li­gious fun­da­ment­al­ists, and oth­ers who present false al­tern­at­ives to for­eign dom­in­a­tion. Even more so, we must stop giv­ing a pass to those who dis­cred­it the an­ti­war move­ment through ca­su­istry and mor­al equi­val­ence. Un­der the crude lo­gic of “the en­emy of my en­emy is my friend,” any­one and every­one who chal­lenges Anglo-European he­ge­mony is viewed as a po­ten­tial ally. Clif­fites, like the So­cial­ist Work­ers’ Party (SWP) in Bri­tain or the In­ter­na­tion­al So­cial­ist Or­gan­iz­a­tion (ISO) in the US, lend their “crit­ic­al but un­con­di­tion­al sup­port” to openly an­ti­semit­ic groups such as Hezbol­lah and Hamas against Is­raeli ag­gres­sion in­to Ga­za. Gio­vanni Scuderi of the Marx­ist-Len­in­ist Party of Italy (PMLI) re­cently called on his fol­low­ers to unite with the Is­lam­ic State against West­ern im­per­i­al­ism.

Of course, it’s far easi­er to skew­er ob­scure sects with barely a hun­dred mem­bers than it is to do the same to be­loved Marx­ist aca­dem­ics. Domen­ico Los­urdo, for ex­ample, en­joys the repu­ta­tion in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world of a di­li­gent and wide-ran­ging in­tel­lec­tu­al his­tor­i­an. Richard Sey­mour was among the first to her­ald his work, opin­ing in 2007: “Los­urdo is, if you ask me, the best crit­ic of cap­it­al­ist ideo­logy writ­ing today.” His ar­gu­ments were cited fre­quently, moreover, in the 2010 study Fan­at­icism: On the Uses of an Idea by Ba­di­ou trans­lat­or Al­berto To­scano. Mean­while, the mono­lin­gual Hegel schol­ar Har­ris­on Fluss praises Los­urdo’s re­search to the rafters, Ishay Landa laud­ing him for his “mas­terly dia­lect­ic­al style” [meister­hafte dialekt­ische Art]. Speak­ing just for my­self, I find his book on Hegel and the Free­dom of Mod­erns (1992) to be his strongest work, though his cri­tique of Aren­dt on to­tal­it­ari­an­ism and over­view of Heide­g­ger and the Ideo­logy of War: Death, Com­munity, and the West (1991) are also pretty good.

Glan­cing at some of the PCI philo­soph­er’s past polit­ic­al po­s­i­tions, however, one is shocked to learn that he’s con­sist­ently sought to re­hab­il­it­ate both Sta­lin­ist dic­tat­ors from the age of “ac­tu­ally-ex­ist­ing so­cial­ism” as well as na­tion­al­ist strong­men whose in­terests happened to run counter to US geo­pol­it­ic­al aims in the post­com­mun­ist era. With re­gard to the lat­ter, of these, a couple of cases suf­fice to make the point. Back in the 1990s, Los­urdo was an out­spoken apo­lo­gist for Slobodan Milošević, go­ing so far as to pre­face a pamph­let in de­fense of the dis­graced Ser­bi­an lead­er as late as 2005. Milošević was sus­pec­ted of in­cit­ing vi­ol­ence against Al­bani­ans earli­er in the dec­ade as well as sub­sequent eth­nic cleans­ing cam­paigns in Bos­nia, Kosovo, and Croa­tia. Yet Milošević is not the only na­tion­al­ist strong­man Los­urdo has sup­por­ted since the fall of com­mun­ism in East­ern Europe. He earli­er de­fen­ded the Ro­mani­an premi­er Nic­olae Ceau­ses­cu, in power for dec­ades, from charges of gen­o­cide ar­ti­fi­cially con­cocted by the “lie in­dustry” [l’in­dus­tria della men­zogna] — i.e., the West­ern me­dia — which Los­urdo con­siders an “in­teg­ral part of the im­per­i­al­ist war ma­chine” [parte in­teg­rante della mac­ch­ina di guerra dell’im­per­i­al­ismo].

Continue reading →

Insurgent Notes conference at CUNY Grad Center, Sunday (2.5.17)

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Re­post­ing here the ori­gin­al open call is­sued by In­sur­gent Notes back in Janu­ary, along with the up­dated agenda sched­ule they just re­leased. I’m plan­ning to at­tend, along with a bunch of oth­er people from all around the coun­try. Would be great to see any­one there; In­sur­gent Notes is one of the few present polit­ic­al projects that seems to me worth­while.

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We’re writ­ing to ask you to join us at a pub­lic meet­ing to dis­cuss the broad top­ic of “Build­ing a Rad­ic­al Left in the Age of Trump.” The meet­ing will be held at the CUNY Gradu­ate Cen­ter in New York City on­ Sunday, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2017. We’ll con­firm a date as soon as our in­quir­ies re­gard­ing a pos­sible site are answered.

We are call­ing this meet­ing be­cause, along with many oth­ers, we real­ize that we are en­ter­ing a time of great un­cer­tain­ties and great dangers — dangers that res­ult from what the gov­ern­ment does here and abroad and dangers that res­ult from the emer­gence of a vari­ety of new right-wing pop­u­list and na­tion­al­ist forces that can only be un­der­stood as pre­fas­cist or fas­cist. At the same time, we in­sist that the great ma­jor­ity of Trump sup­port­ers can­not and should not be tarred with such a brush. In­deed, as we wrote in our most re­cent ed­it­or­i­al, “There are people in the Hil­lary camp who are our en­emies, and there are people in the Trump camp who are our po­ten­tial al­lies.” Many people at­trac­ted to the Trump cam­paign, al­tern­at­ively, could be at­trac­ted to a con­sist­ent vis­ion of an al­tern­at­ive to cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety, which up till now has not ex­is­ted. They will not, however, be at­trac­ted to a de­fense of the ex­ist­ing state of af­fairs — no mat­ter how dressed up in no­tions of un­der­stand­ing, tol­er­ance and op­por­tun­ity.

We are con­vinced that the only way out of the ter­rible mess that this coun­try and the world are in is the de­vel­op­ment of a mass rad­ic­al move­ment — a move­ment that will chal­lenge the fun­da­ment­al bases and char­ac­ter­ist­ics of cap­it­al­ist so­ci­ety with a pro­gram for the rad­ic­al re­con­struc­tion of this so­ci­ety un­der the dir­ect demo­crat­ic con­trol of the im­mense ma­jor­ity of the people. Such a move­ment can­not re­strict it­self to par­ti­cip­a­tion in elect­or­al cam­paigns of any kind. We need to be clear — we do not be­lieve that such a move­ment can be built upon the legacies and tra­di­tions of lib­er­al­ism, pro­gressiv­ism, so­cial demo­cracy, or Sta­lin­ism-Trot­sky­ism-Mao­ism.

Over the course of the last six years, In­sur­gent Notes has pub­lished four­teen is­sues of its on­line journ­al. For the most part, we at­trac­ted mod­est levels of at­ten­tion and sup­port. Re­cently, we be­lieve in re­sponse to art­icles and ed­it­or­i­als fo­cused on the elec­tion and its out­come, we have seen a dra­mat­ic up­swing in the num­ber of vis­its to our web­site, the num­ber of com­ments pos­ted and the num­ber of new sub­scribers.

We feel com­pelled to seize upon that mo­mentum to find out how we might con­trib­ute to the de­vel­op­ment of the move­ment that we so des­per­ately need. We re­cog­nize that such a move­ment will be the res­ult of the com­ing to­geth­er of in­di­vidu­als with dif­fer­ent ex­per­i­ences and polit­ic­al con­vic­tions. To­wards that end, we also be­lieve that we need to come up with new forms of polit­ic­al or­gan­iz­a­tion that can al­low for the defin­i­tion of fun­da­ment­al agree­ments, provide space for on­go­ing pro­duct­ive con­ver­sa­tions and en­able us to act in con­cert as events un­fold.

Let’s briefly de­scribe what our pre­lim­in­ary ideas are for the meet­ing:

  • The meet­ing would take up the bet­ter part of a day — per­haps from 11 am to 5 pm.
  • We hope to in­clude pan­el dis­cus­sions on at least the fol­low­ing ma­jor top­ics:
    • The world’s crises and the elec­tion
    • Class and race: is there any­thing new to say?
    • An anticap­it­al­ist vis­ion
    • Cre­at­ing a new lan­guage of hope and re­volt
    • Nam­ing and fight­ing male su­prem­acy
    • Ima­gin­ing new forms of polit­ic­al or­gan­iz­a­tion.
  • We also hope to in­clude op­por­tun­it­ies for people to get to know each oth­er and to act­ively en­gage in con­ver­sa­tions about the most press­ing of the is­sues.
  • We’re go­ing to work hard be­fore and dur­ing the meet­ing to in­sure that present­a­tions and com­ments go far bey­ond the mere re­state­ment of pri­or con­vic­tions or the re-ar­guing of old de­bates.
  • We’d like to en­ter­tain sug­ges­tions for next steps after the meet­ing.
  • We’re hop­ing to spon­sor an in­form­al so­cial event at the end of the day.

Please feel free to cir­cu­late this mes­sage to people who you think might be in­ter­ested. We’ll be post­ing de­tails about the meet­ing on this web­site.

If you have any ques­tions, please write to us.

In hope­ful solid­ar­ity,
The ed­it­ors

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This com­ing Sunday join In­sur­gent Notes for a day-long series of dis­cus­sions around the Trump pres­id­ency and the way for­ward for the re­volu­tion­ary left. Here is the day’s pro­gram:

Agenda for In­sur­gent Notes pub­lic meet­ing

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Sunday, Feb­ru­ary 5, 2017
CUNY Gradu­ate Cen­ter
365 Fifth Av­en­ue/Room 5409

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Cof­fee/re­gis­tra­tion/in­tro­duc­tions
11:00 AM – 11:30 AM Get­ting star­ted — Wel­come and re­view of agenda
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM Mak­ing sense of the elect­or­al cam­paigns and their res­ults: A con­ver­sa­tion between Claire Ca­hen, Loren Gold­ner, and Arya Za­hedi
12:30 PM – 1:15 PM Anti-fas­cism and the alt-Right: A present­a­tion by Mat­thew Ly­ons of Three-Way Fight
1:15 PM – 1:45 PM Lunch & in­form­al con­ver­sa­tions
1:45 PM – 2:30 PM For wo­men’s lib­er­a­tion in an age of re­ac­tion: A con­ver­sa­tion Zhana Kur­ti and Wilson Sher­win
2:30 PM – 3:15 PM Against white­ness again: A con­ver­sa­tion between Amiri Barks­dale, Shemon Salam, and Jar­rod Sha­na­han
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM Brief re­ports on or­gan­iz­ing projects
3:45 PM – 4:30 PM Open dis­cus­sion — Re­ac­tions to the meet­ing/un­answered ques­tions
4:30 PM – 5:00 PM Wrap­ping up — Pos­sible next steps
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM So­cial gath­er­ing

Please note:

  1. At least half of the time in all ses­sions will be re­served for par­ti­cipant dis­cus­sion.
  2. Lunch will be catered; we’d like to ask par­ti­cipants not to leave the build­ing dur­ing lunch.
  3. The Gradu­ate Cen­ter is wheel­chair ac­cess­ible.
  4. We will have a video con­nec­tion — via Google Hangout — to en­able re­mote par­ti­cip­a­tion. There will be an easy sign-in by way of a web link. In­ter­ested in­di­vidu­als should send a mes­sage to ed­it­ors@in­sur­gent­notes.com by Janu­ary 31, 2017 to re­quest the link.
  5. Con­tri­bu­tions will be so­li­cited to cov­er meet­ing costs.
  6. A pic­ture ID is re­quired for ad­mis­sion to the Gradu­ate Cen­ter.
  7. Preregis­tra­tion — we strongly en­cour­age preregis­tra­tion. Send an email mes­sage with name, best email ad­dress and cell phone num­ber to ed­it­ors@in­sur­gent­notes.com. Prefer­ably by Janu­ary 31, 2017.
  8. We hope to have au­dio, and pos­sibly video, re­cord­ings of the present­a­tions and dis­cus­sions.
  9. If you have any dif­fi­culties get­ting to the meet­ing, please send an email to the ed­it­ors’ ad­dress on Feb­ru­ary 7th to ob­tain as­sist­ance.

Protest politics in the age of Trump

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So who else is mad as hell about the sym­bol­ic trans­fer of power between rival fac­tions of the bour­geois­ie? Remem­ber all the demon­stra­tions that spon­tan­eously broke out eight years ago, when Barack Obama was first in­aug­ur­ated? And then the acute sense of out­rage we sus­tained throughout his two terms in of­fice, hold­ing reg­u­lar protests as the gov­ern­ment he over­saw de­por­ted a re­cord num­ber of un­doc­u­mented im­mig­rants?

Oh wait…

None of that ever happened. In fact, the first is­sue of In­ter­na­tion­al So­cial­ist Re­view re­leased dur­ing Obama’s pres­id­ency fea­tured one of his 2008 cam­paign slo­gans: “Yes we can!” Des­pite the fact his for­eign policy plat­form was vir­tu­ally identic­al to that of his pre­de­cessor (save some stuff about shift­ing fo­cus away from the Middle East, to­ward East Asia), and al­though do­mest­ic­ally he merely fol­lowed through on Bush’s bail­out of the banks, most self-de­scribed Marx­ists sat back and cheered to them­selves as Obama was sworn in. The lead ed­it­or­i­al an­nounced that

the elec­tion of Barack Hus­sein Obama as forty-fourth pres­id­ent of the United States is a wa­ter­shed event. In a coun­try where Afric­ans were brought in chains, were slaves un­til 1865, where leg­al (or de facto) se­greg­a­tion was the rule, and where the ma­jor­ity of Afric­an Amer­ic­ans were not giv­en the right to vote un­til 1965, Obama’s elec­tion is his­tor­ic… En­gage­ment is the or­der of the day.

By con­trast, this same pub­lic­a­tion frowns upon any sort of en­gage­ment with the in­com­ing Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion. “Res­ist­ance” is the or­der of the day: “Let the res­ist­ance be­gin. The churn­ing fear and re­vul­sion swirl­ing in­side us as we watch Don­ald J. Trump take the oath to be­come the 45th pres­id­ent of the United States will be at least some­what bal­anced by the sat­is­fac­tion of watch­ing in­spir­ing and un­pre­ced­en­ted levels of protest rising up to greet an in­com­ing pres­id­ent…” Con­jur­ing up the ghost of fas­cism, any­one who en­ter­tains the idea of en­ga­ging with the new pres­id­ent is branded a col­lab­or­at­or.

What’s so dif­fer­ent, though? You’d think that a Marxoid sect that traces its lin­eage to Len­in would re­mem­ber his fam­ous para­phrase of The Civil War in France (1871) in State and Re­volu­tion (1917): “Marx grasped this es­sence of cap­it­al­ist demo­cracy splen­didly when, in ana­lyz­ing the ex­per­i­ence of the [Par­is] Com­mune, he said that the op­pressed are al­lowed once every few years to de­cide which par­tic­u­lar rep­res­ent­at­ives of the op­press­ing class shall rep­res­ent and repress them in par­lia­ment!” Ob­vi­ously it would be folly to ar­gue that both ma­jor Amer­ic­an parties are identic­al. Yet neither rep­res­ents the in­terests of the work­ing class, so why en­gage with either? Continue reading →