write-ups

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 →

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.

Marx still haunts capitalism two hundred years on

Posted by

1

“The bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.”
— Marx to Engels, 1867

Indeed, it would seem they haven’t forgotten him. Over the last few weeks, major bourgeois news outlets have congratulated Marx for “being right” about capitalism: New York Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Independent, and even Vice. Little consolation, all this posthumous praise, for while capitalism remains unstable as ever, the prospect of proletarian revolution feels far away. Perhaps it is less embarrassing than Jonathan Spargo, Marx’s first American biographer, taking to the pages of the New York Times a hundred years ago to enlist Marx to the side of the Entente: “Today Is the 100th anniversary of Marx’s birth: Bitterly opposed to Prussia and an ardent admirer of America, his record shows where he would have stood in the present war.”

You can download some relevant biographies and introductions to Marx’s work below:

  1. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918)
  2. Max Beer, The Life and Teaching of Karl Marx(1920)
  3. Otto Rühle, Karl Marx: His Life and Work(1929)
  4. Boris Nikolaevsky & Otto Mänchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (1932)
  5. Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (1939)
  6. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (1948)
  7. Werner Blumenberg, Portrait of Marx (1962)
  8. Maximilien Rubel, Marx: Life and Works(1965)
  9. Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (1968)
  10. David McClellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973)
  11. Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx(1993)
  12. Rolf Hosfeld, Karl Marx: An Intellectual Biography (2009)
  13. Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (2015)
  14. Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)
  15. Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts to the International (2018)

Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag Karl Marx, Enkel von Meier Halevi Marx und Chaje Eva Marx. Halte durch, du alter fetter Sack!

200 years on, Marx still haunts capitalism

Aurora 43
5.5.2018

.
Karl Marx — political philosopher, historical materialist, economic analyst of capitalism and its class society; above all, revolutionary fighter — was born in Trier, Germany on 5 May 1818. For anyone today fighting for an end to capitalism his life is cause for celebration. Marx’s work enabled us to understand the basic dynamic of capitalism, its place in the history of civilizations, and learn from the historical ebb and flow of the class struggle. As Engels said at the graveside of his friend,

Before all else, Marx was a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, to make it conscious of its situation and its needs, and conscious of the conditions for its own emancipation — that was his real life work.

Marx was not the first person to recognize the struggle between classes or to hold out the prospect of communism springing from the revolt of the oppressed against the powerful and wealthy who robbed them of the product of their toil. But when the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848 it was also revolutionary in a deeper sense. It took the age-old struggle for a classless society out of the realm of utopian dreams and millenarian uprisings and put it firmly onto historical, materialist ground. Continue reading →

Theories of the young Marx

Posted by

2

.

Wer die Ju­gend hat, hat die Zukun­ft.

— Karl Lieb­knecht

.
In a civil­iz­a­tion that’s grown old, ours is a cul­ture that prizes youth. No longer as pres­age to a ra­di­ant fu­ture, but part of a per­man­ent present. Philo­sophy paints its gray on gray onto the pages of Teen Vogue, the Ar­ab Spring fol­lowed by an Is­lam­ist Winter. From Young Thug to la jeune-fille — to the fa­mil­i­ar re­frain of “I like their early stuff bet­ter” — all beauty is fleet­ing, as the pro­verb goes. A sea­son or so later, it loses its luster. Ef­forts at re­in­ven­tion or renov­a­tion more of­ten than not end up a laugh­ing stock. Worse yet: ig­nored. Mod­ern­ity thrives off the eph­em­er­al, Baudelaire no­ticed long ago, to the point that an en­tire style took youth as its theme. “Ju­gend­stil is a de­clar­a­tion of per­man­ent pu­berty,” ob­served Ad­orno, “a uto­pia that barters off its own un­real­iz­ab­il­ity… Hatred of the new ori­gin­ates in a con­cealed ten­et of bour­geois on­to­logy: that the tran­si­ent should be tran­si­ent, that death should have the last word.”

Raoul Peck’s film Der junge Karl Marx premiered last month in Ber­lin. It’s his second ma­jor re­lease already this year, the first be­ing I am Not Your Negro, a doc­u­ment­ary based on the life of the Afric­an-Amer­ic­an writer James Bald­win. Though it was nom­in­ated for an academy award, the Haitian film­maker’s ef­fort ul­ti­mately lost out to the five-part ES­PN epic OJ Simpson: Made in Amer­ica. Most of the Marx biop­ic was shot in Bel­gi­um back in 2015. While I’m al­ways wary of sil­ver screen por­tray­als of great his­tor­ic­al fig­ures, I per­son­ally can’t wait to see it. As a way of cel­eb­rat­ing its de­but, then, I’m post­ing sev­er­al ma­jor art­icles and es­says on the theme of the “young” Marx. Usu­ally, the young­er Marx is con­tras­ted with or coun­ter­posed to the older Marx, al­though the dates as­signed to each phase is a mat­ter of some con­tro­versy among schol­ars. If you don’t be­lieve me, just glance at the fol­low­ing pieces to get a sense of the wide range of opin­ions:

  1. Erich Fromm, “The Con­tinu­ity in Marx’s Thought” (1961)
  2. Gajo Petrović, “The ‘Young’ and the ‘Old’ Marx” (1964)
  3. Louis Althusser, “On The Young Marx” (1960) and “The Evol­u­tion of the ‘Young’ Marx” (1974)
  4. Ir­ing Fetscher, “The Young and the Old Marx” (1970)
  5. István Mészáros, “The Con­tro­versy about Marx” (1970)
  6. Paul Mat­tick, “Re­view of Marx Be­fore Marx­ism” (1971)
  7. Lu­cio Col­letti, In­tro­duc­tion to The Early Writ­ings of Karl Marx (1973)
  8. Michel Henry, “The Hu­man­ism of the Young Marx” (1976)

Continue reading →

Jan Tschichold and the new typography

Posted by

6

.
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 →

Meaningless gibberish and decoloniality

Posted by

8

.
“Radical universal decolonial
anticapitalist diversality,”
and other adventures in
academic mumbo-jumbo
.
.

Been reading various exponents of so-called “decolonial” theory of late — Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, and Ramón Grosfoguel, etc. So-called because its parameters are somewhat unclear. As far as I can tell, it didn’t really crystallize as a distinct discourse until the 1970s or 1980s. Even then, it wasn’t named as such. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did this designation emerge, promoted principally by scholars of Latin America. It was then retroactively applied to figures like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, who are today treated almost as decolonial theorists avant la lettre. Personally, this seems a rather sneaky operation. Césaire and Fanon weren’t academics, to begin with, and understood their own work as part of a project to literally decolonize the remaining colonies of European empires. That is to say, in other words, the removal of all colonial administration and oversight, withdrawal of colonial armies, usually within some sort of national liberation and self-determination framework.

Here a few distinctions might help to clear up the confusion. First of all, the distinction between “decoloniality” and “decolonization.” Decoloniality doesn’t refer to colonialism per se, but to a peculiar postcolonial condition dubbed “coloniality.” Quijano has theorized this in terms of “the coloniality of power”: “Coloniality of power is thus based upon ‘racial’ social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. Eurocentric coloniality of power has proved longer lasting than Eurocentric colonialism. Without it, the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained…” Nelson Maldonado-Torres also riffs on this theme, only he ontologizes it, invoking Heidegger even as he criticizes the Nazi philosopher’s “forgetfulness” of “the coloniality of being”:

Coloniality is different from colonialism. While colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a people rests on the power of another nation, making such nation an empire, coloniality instead refers to longstanding patterns of power which emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus does coloniality survive colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, common sense, the self-image of peoples, aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. As modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday.

Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular sociohistorical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise — the most widespread and ambitious yet in the history of humankind — that capitalism, i.e., an already existing form of economic relation, became tied to forms of domination and subordination that would be central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas, and then elsewhere. Coloniality refers, first and foremost, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatiotemporal matrix of what was called at the time America.

This rhetorical sleight of hand solves a number of tricky problems for decolonial theorists. Latin America was already decolonized, by the end of the nineteenth century at the latest. Spain underwent a series of revolutions during that time that made it far too unstable to maintain substantial overseas holdings. Mexico enjoyed several decades of autonomy, losing a bit of territory to the United States before being invaded by Louis Napeolon’s France. But that lasted only six years, between 1861 and 1867. A few Antillean islands changed hands with the Spanish-American War, and Europe along with the US have consistently meddled in the domestic affairs of Central and South American countries since then (e.g., Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, the Falklands War in 1982), but that’s more or less been the situation. Continue reading →

Anti-Bolshevik propaganda posters: Metal as fvkk

Posted by

9

.
Recently, I was contacted by a fellow named Harry K. Wärts via The Charnel-House’s Facebook page. Admittedly, I don’t check the messages I receive there too often. Nevertheless, this caught me a bit off-guard:

Hey, I’m in the Swedish death metal band Gravebomb. We’re great, and also eager for exposure. I really like your blog, so I think it’d be great if we could do a share-for-share thingy. Both as a way to turn on death metal fans to communist theory (as it is the musical equivalent or expression of a “ruthless criticism of everything existing” [Marx]) and as a way to get revolutionary communists into death metal and our band in particular. Don’t know if you like the idea, but I think it would be pretty edgy.

You can check out our album Rot in Putrid Filth on Spotify to see if it’s for you.

Since I didn’t get back to Wärts in a timely fashion, he wrote me another note: “Why will you not respond to our calls for solidarity in propaganda?”

Obviously this was something I needed to do. Can’t just leave a comrade hanging.

Initially I was skeptical. Most of the metal coming out of Europe, especially the Nordic countries, is intensely reactionary — fascist, even. Plus, I’m not even much of a metal fan these days, though I was back in high school.

Acquaintances on social media urged me to do so, however, “for the love of all that’s unholy.” Fuck it, I thought to myself. Hence the present post.

Glancing at the track list, we find song titles like “Killing Apex,” “Hack the Heads off the Preachers,” “Funeralizer, and “Parasite Spawn.” Sound revolutionary to me. Regardless, I’m not going to listen through their entire catalogue and scrutinize their lyrics to make sure they convey a communist message or ruthless critique. Not like communists censor music, after all… Oh wait…

To accompany this music, I’m posting a series of anti-Bolshevik artwork that can only be described as “metal as fvkk.” Early anti-Bolshevik agitprop posters — from roughly 1905 up through the end of the 1940s, but especially 1917-1939 — make up some of the best adverts for Bolshevism. Despite their explicit intention to frighten people with the specter of communism, or dissuade them from joining it, these posters fucking rule. Who wouldn’t want to be an undead skeleton commie killing fascists?

Kvltvrbolschewismvs? Underground black metal enthusiasts should at least appreciate the images of communists burning churches.

Bloody Sunday 1905 GvjdoTA Die Gefahr des Bolschewismus [The Danger of Bolshevism] com_8_MGzoom e545a3d724c179b4624cb41755e6a8d7 focus-400-grande1 - frame2Art.IWM PST 13079 plakat_antisov23 plakat_antisov24 Die Heimat ist in Gefahr 2 Schließt Euch fest zusammen gegen Spartacus (…) Continue reading →

Brexit stage Left? Or maybe better not at all

Posted by

6

.
The amount of leftist posturing around the issue of Brexit exists in inverse proportion to the actual potential of the situation, which as everyone knows is zilch. It reflects the flailing impotence of the contemporary Left and the total absence of a viable proletarian or internationalist alternative. Neither the vote to leave nor the vote to remain is radical in the least.

Several months ago, in their official statement on the matter, the Communist Party of Great Britain therefore observed: “Cameron’s referendum is a cynical maneuver that pits reactionaries against other reactionaries… Likewise, the ‘out’ campaign is dominated by noxious chauvinism, [aiming to replace] ‘Fortress Europe’ with the stronger ‘Fortress Britain’.” From Cardiff a voice justly proclaims a pox upon both Britannia and Europa, advising abstention from this plebiscitary farce.

Yet even the call for communists to abstain feels like something of an empty gesture given the current context. Mike Macnair, one of the authors of the aforementioned statement, has basically said as much. “Boycotting the vote is what I am arguing for,” explained Macnair at a panel organized by Platypus in London. “Had we more forces, I’d argue not merely for a boycott but to disrupt this vote as a sham, a fraud, and an anti-democratic initiative.”

Amidst the cacophony and confusion a quote from Lev Trotsky has resurfaced, which echoes uncannily across the ages and seems to speak to the present dilemma. While the constellation of forces is no doubt quite different, and Marxists should refrain from drawing hasty historic parallels, the quote is nevertheless well suited to the task of trolling left Brexiteers — for example the Swappers (slang for members of the British Socialist Workers Party), as well as the independent Trot septuagenarian Tariq Ali:

If the capitalist states of Europe succeeded in merging into an imperialist trust, this would be a step forward as compared with the existing situation, for it would first of all create a unified, all-European material base for the working class movement. The proletariat would in this case have to fight not for the return to “autonomous” national states, but for the conversion of the imperialist state trust into a European Republican Federation.

Meanwhile, Sp!ked has been running a public campaign in support of the Brexit. The whole thing has been an embarrassment, painful to watch, with Neil Davenport holding fast to a naïve majoritarian model of democracy. “Particular people seem not to trust ordinary people to vote the right way in an election. So how would they feel about them taking over the means of production?” As if this were not simply repeating the same populist platitudes always inimical to revolutionary Marxism. Continue reading →

MEGA [Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe] on MEGA

Posted by

12

.
Back in the 1920s, the Russian revolutionary and Marxist scholar David Riazanov began to compile a new, more complete edition of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. He was, unfortunately, purged during the 1930s for supposed involvement in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. Riazanov was thus unable to see this project through to the end. Nevertheless, he set the wheels in motion for future Marxologists and exegetes like Maximilien Rubel, Roman Rosdolski, and Michael Heinrich. Work on the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe [MEGA] continues today.

Anyway, I recently happened across a trove of full-text PDFs of the MEGA stored on the New Zealand cloud service known as MEGA, appropriately enough. You can download the files as a .zip file by clicking here. Quietly amused that this arrived to me indirectly via a certain oversharing Francophile lefty editor type. Makes me wonder what all his posturing over “pirate scab PDFs” was really about.

Riazanov.jpg

Speaking of which, Budgen — Lars Ulrich of the online left — is apparently upset with me yet again. Class act that he is, Sebastian associated me with the disgusting rape advocate Roosh V. (an antisemitic conspiracy theorist and extreme misogynist) and the disgusting pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shrkeli (who jacked up the price of vital medicines once he’d secured exclusive rights over the drugs). If anyone resembles a douchebag who sells stuff he didn’t develop himself for obscenely inflated prices while monopolizing said product… you would think it was Budgen. Especially considering the company he keeps: people who make fun of others with physical deformities or who have a darker complexion on account of their ethnic background. Roosh V. and Simon Weston are reactionaries, to be sure, but that should hardly be seen as giving one license to make racist or ableist comments about them. Continue reading →

Margaret Bourke-White in the USSR, 1931

Posted by

2

.
Margaret Bourke-White was one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, and certainly one of my personal favorites. Early in her career she was granted access to the rooftop of the Chrysler Building, where another photojournalist captured her image atop one of the metallic eagles jutting out the side. This iconic photographic can be seen below, along with some other early photos she took of various buildings.

Bourke-White On The Chrysler Building

Photographer unknown, Margaret Bourke-White on Chrysler Building Scaffold, New York, 1930. Syracuse University Library, Department of Special Collections.

Bourke-White was born in New York City in 1904. She became interested in photography while studying at Cornell University. After studying under Clarence White at Columbia University, she opened a studio in Cleveland where she specialized in architectural photography. In 1929 Bourke-White was recruited as staff photographer for Fortune, and made several trips to the Soviet Union. Eyes on Russia, a firsthand account of her experiences in the USSR, was published in 1931.

Her impressions of the USSR in the early 1930s were varied, but generally positive. “When Fortune was in its infancy during the thirties, the land of tantalizing mystery was Russia,” Bourke-White later recalled. She dubbed the Soviet Union “the land of the day after tomorrow.” The title was ironic, apparently. For not only did this indicate the country’s futuristic bent; it also hinted at deeply-rooted confusion:

During my trips in the early thirties — and I made three brief ones — Russia was always the land of the Day After Tomorrow. I suppose the underlying cause for the many bureaucratic delays was fear of taking responsibility. The confusion was deepened by a novel experiment designed to get rid of bourgeois Sunday. People took their “day of rest” every five days, not on the same day but staggered. The purpose was to make work continuous. The result was highly discontinuous. It seemed a puzzle ingeniously designed so that the man you wanted to see on any particular day was away enjoying his day of rest. I have never known anything since to compare in sheer difficulty with my assignments in Russia: the baffling postponements, the mysterious absence of reasons. It was a valuable experience, and I am glad to have had it so early in my work. Russia was a lesson in patience.

Le Corbusier, the famous modern architect, likewise noted this experiment in reformatting the work week in his postscript “Moscow Atmosphere” in Precisions (1930). But the title also suggested communism’s headlong dive into the future. Making her way through the Soviet Republic of Georgia, Bourke-White also stumbled across Stalin’s closest relations. She photographed the communist leader’s mother, great-aunt, and several others. A few decades later, she recorded a few snippets about their meeting. Aside from Stalin’s family and relatives, Bourke-White also photographed a number of other eminent personages in the Soviet Union: Karl Radek, Sergei Eisenstein, Hugh Cooper, etc. Ten years later she would portray Stalin himself. In addition to these figures, however, she also took many portraits of ordinary people from everyday life in the USSR.

Deeply influenced by her experience of the Great Depression, she became increasingly interested in politics, joining Life in 1936.  Her photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on its first front cover. In 1937 Bourke-White worked with the best-selling novelist Erskine Caldwell on the book You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). The book was later criticized for supposed “left-wing bias,” upsetting whites in the deep South with its passionate attack on Jim Crow. Bourke-White was a member of the American Artists’ Congress. The group supported state-funding of the arts, fought discrimination against African American artists, and supported artists fighting against fascism in Europe. She also subscribed to the Daily Worker and was a member of several Communist Party front organizations.

Margaret Bourke-White, 92 canvas

Bourke-White married Caldwell in 1939. They were the only foreign journalists in the Soviet Union when the German Army invaded in 1941. When Bourke-White and Caldwell returned to the United States in 1942, they collaborated to produce another attack on social inequality, Say Is This the USA? During the Second World War, Bourke-White served as a war correspondent, working for both Life and the US Air Force. Having survived a torpedo attack en route to North Africa, she was with United States troops when they reached the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war Bourke-White continued her interest in racial inequality by documenting Gandhi’s non-violent campaign in India and apartheid in South Africa. She also captured a grisly photo of a South Korean soldier smiling after decapitating of North Korean communist guerilla. During the Korean Civil War, the US backed the South Korean army and even directly supported it with marines.

The FBI had been collecting information on Bourke-White’s political activities since the 1930s and in the 1950s became a target for Joe McCarthy and the Unamerican Activities Committee. However, a statement reaffirming her belief in democracy and her opposition to dictatorship of the left or of the right, enabled her to avoid being cross-examined by the committee. In 1952 Bourke-White was discovered to be suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Unable to take photographs, she spent eight years writing her autobiography, Portrait of Myself (1963). Margaret Bourke-White died at Darien, Connecticut, in 1971.

Below is posted an excerpt from her autobiography that goes over her first round of visits to Russia in the early 1930s.

14109426_1_l

 

Land of the day after tomorrow

Margaret Bourke-White
Portrait of Myself
September 1963

 

In the early thirties, when Fortune was in its infancy, the land of tantalizing mystery was Russia. No foreign photographers had been allowed across Russian borders to take a direct look at what was going on under the Soviet Five-Year Plan. Foreign engineering consultants — mostly Americans — came and went with comparative freedom. But for the professional photographer from the outside world, it was a closed country. Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open, and I wanted to be first.

With my enthusiasm for the machine as an object of beauty, I felt the story of a nation trying to industrialize almost overnight was just cut out for me. Peasants who had been taken from the plow and put on the punch press — how did they manage this jump of centuries? Although my approach was nontechnical, I had been in factories enough to appreciate that industry has a history-machines are developed and men grow along with them. Here was a unique opportunity to see a country in transition between a medieval past and an industrialized future.

No one could have known less about Russia politically than I knew — or cared less. To me, politics was colorless beside the drama of the machine. It was only much later that I discovered that politics could be an absorbing subject, with a profound effect on human destiny.

The person most helpful in giving me background on Russia was Cleveland’s live-wire city manager, Dan Morgan. From him I got some conception of the tremendous range of heavy industry being built with the technical assistance of American firms. There was virtually a little Cleveland within Soviet borders. Warner & Swasey and Foote-Burt were tooling up Stalingrad. Two of Cleveland’s leading construction companies, McKee and Austin, built some of the biggest installations in the Soviet Union — from steel mills in Siberia to oil refineries on the Black Sea. Detroit, too, was prominently represented by Ford; Schenectady by General Electric. Ford’s industrial architect, Albert Kahn, was laying out the entire group of factory buildings for Stalingrad, now Volgograd. The Newport News Shipbuilding Company was furnishing what were then the world’s largest hydroturbines for Dnieprostroi, and the huge Dnieper Dam was erected under the experienced direction of Col. Hugh L. Cooper, builder of America’s Muscle Shoals.

These great American builders and their staffs of engineers and planners were not, of course, dangerous Reds, or even fellow travelers. They were not working for ideological or propaganda purposes, but strictly for business reasons or — as the Marxists might have said — “the profit motive.” The role played by American industrialists in building up the Soviet giant cannot be overestimated.

Margaret Bourke-White, American engineer Col. Hugh Cooper, the chief conslultant for the construction of Russia's Dnieper Dam, holdling pipe as he poses before the dam's spillway (1931)

The idea of running photographs of the sprouting industries of the USSR intrigued Fortune’s editors, but they had grave doubts whether I could get anything done. They were sending me to Germany to take pictures of industry, and I decided to push on from there. I had applied for a Russian visa six months earlier at Intourist, the Soviet travel agency in New York. In Berlin, I was puzzled when I discovered my visa was not waiting for me, because the Intourist official had been so enthusiastic about my industrial photographs. “Your pictures will be your passport,” he kept repeating.

Not only was there no visa at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, but the officials there had never heard of my grand plan to chronicle Soviet industry, or of me either. I opened up the ever-present portfolio of my industrial work and was told again my pictures would be my passport. The Embassy officials dismissed me courteously with instructions to return the day after tomorrow. I returned the day after tomorrow and continued to do so for five and a half weeks.

I woke up before dawn one morning and restlessly started walking from the Hotel Adlon past the Brandenburg Gate and up Unter den Linden. As I passed under the window of the Soviet Embassy, I heard a whistle over my head. I looked up, and there, at the window, stood the Soviet consul. He was waving a piece of paper. It was the telegram granting my visa. I bought a cheap trunk and filled it with canned food. I had been warned that if I traveled off the beaten path, I would find near famine conditions. That night I left for Moscow.

During my trips in the early thirties — and I made three brief ones — Russia was always the land of the Day After Tomorrow. I suppose the underlying cause for the many bureaucratic delays was fear of taking responsibility. The confusion was deepened by a novel experiment designed to get rid of bourgeois Sunday. People took their “day of rest” every five days, not on the same day but staggered. The purpose was to make work continuous. The result was highly discontinuous. It seemed a puzzle ingeniously designed so that the man you wanted to see on any particular day was away enjoying his day of rest. I have never known anything since to compare in sheer difficulty with my assignments in Russia: the baffling postponements, the mysterious absence of reasons. It was a valuable experience, and I am glad to have had it so early in my work. Russia was a lesson in patience.

Even getting to one of these evaporating appointments was a feat. Taxis were rare and apt to break down on the way. Next choice was a droshky, a carriage so worn it seemed a breath would blow it to pieces. You were at the mercy of the bearded driver who might dump you out halfway to your destination if he thought his horse was tired. The next possibility was to get on a streetcar if you could get the conductor to stop when it was literally dripping with human beings.

I remember a day when my interpreter and I squeezed into one of these bursting streetcars. The conductor held out her hand for our fare: “Ten kopecks.”
……“We do not have change,” said my interpreter. “But here’s a ruble.”
……“But I cannot take the ruble. I cannot take tips. It’s against the law.”
……“What shall we do? We have no kopecks.”
……“Get off the car.” The conductor stopped the car in the middle of the crowded street, and in true Russian fashion, the passengers discussed our dilemma.

While the debate raged, streetcars halted, traffic slowed to a standstill. Finally, the passengers rose unanimously to our support. We could stay on the car. We could keep our ruble. The car started and the blocked traffic rolled into motion again.

With all the absurdities, there was a quality about the people I can only call exasperating charm. On my visits to the various commissars, I was always received hospitably. Inevitably, I was told two things: one was to return the day after tomorrow; the other was that my pictures would be my passport. Yet I was fortunate in having something as tangible as my pictures of American steel mills, factories and refineries to show what I wanted to do photographically in the Soviet Union. I began getting very limited permission to take pictures in and around Moscow. On alternate days, I did what little work I could, and on the Days After Tomorrow, I visited the Commissariats of Heavy Industry and Railroads, pressing for a big tour with proper authority to travel and take pictures. During these visits, scores of admiring Russians crowded in to examine minutely my pictures of American factories, while I slipped in reminders that there were many beautiful pictures to be taken in Soviet factories. I had come for only a few weeks, and already half of my time had trickled uselessly away.

“Yes,” the officials would say. “The Amerikanka is right. The great Lenin said, ‘Time is our most precious possession’.” I don’t know whether it was the counsel of the deceased Lenin that took effect or my persistence, but finally the Day After Tomorrow really came, and I set out to tour the industrial centers with a highly competent young girl interpreter, my trunk of food, my bulky camera cases, a sheaf of permits and, most important, that portfolio of photographs that indeed was to be my passport. The pictures soon became dog-eared and battered, but they opened many doors.

Everywhere I traveled, I heard about the Amerikanskoe tempo. It was the watchword of the hour, the ultimate in praise. In Stalingrad, particularly where the factories were modeled after Ford in Detroit, the workers adored the conveyor belt as a symbol of the Amerikanskoe tempo. The workers who gathered in crowds made suggestions, smoked cigarettes, eulogized the conveyor, broke into oratory at the very sight of it, did everything but run it.

At Dnieprostroi, during the first month, half of the locomotive cranes were busy picking up the other half that had broken down on the job. The workmen were like children playing with new toys. In the power installations, they acted as though throwing on a new generator was like turning on an electric fan. The endless meetings to decide whether or not to use a new tool exasperated the American technicians; tools were hard to get. The tractor was the object of special reverence, but still the tractor operators ran them up and down the fields like racing cars until they broke down.

Machine worship was everywhere; it permeated even the classic Russian ballet. Little girls with gear wheels in gold or silver painted on their chests danced Machine Dances. The people were worshiping at new shrines with the fervor of religious zealots. It was as though they needed to replace their religion — which was being taken away from them step by step. They looked on the coming of the machine as their Savior; it was the instrument of their deliverance.

Continue reading →