In Berlin 5777, a new communist Haggadah for a Red Passover Seder was brought forth into the world. It replaces the communist Haggadah of  Brooklyn, 5771. This new one is the first Red Haggadah since the Jewish Bolsheviks used them in the 1920s. I now offer it here for use (the Hebrew text came out backwards, unfortunately). The historical background text is below, but to do an actual seder, one must download the Haggadah and follow the steps. Love live October 5778!

Download the Haggadah for a RED SEDER: to read/ to print

The celebration of Passover is traditionally associated with the spirit of freedom and independence. The seder ceremony features a special menu, the reading of the Haggadah (the retelling of the story of Exodus), songs, and even games. Passover is also the only Jewish celebration whose ritual requires dialogue between children and parents. All this creates an ideal basis for the introduction of new concepts in a popular, well-known format. By the end of the nineteenth century Jewish radicals in Poland, the United States, and Canada were employing the Passover seder for the promotion of political views as well as a way to criticize their opponents. Various political movements organized political seders in interwar Poland.

Soviet Jewish activists, too, did not miss the opportunity to use Passover as a propaganda tool. In 1921 the Central Bureau of the Bolshevik Party’s Evsektsii sent instructions to all local branches to organize “Red Passovers.” Popular brochures that came to be known as “Red Haggadahs” were published, specifying how to conduct the alternative celebrations. Many were written by local activists following a series of centrally directed patterns. One of these was the Komsomolishe Haggadah (Komsomol Haggadah), published in Moscow in 1923 by Moyshe Altshuler. Traditionally the start of Passover (an eight-day holiday during which the consumption of bread or leavened products and yeast is forbidden) is marked with the Bdikas khometz — a search for all remaining traces of leavened food, followed by its burning. In Altshuler’s Komsomolishe Haggadah, this ceremony was transformed as follows:

Ten years ago [in 1917] the working class of Russia with the help of peasants searched for khometz (leaven) in our land. They cleaned away all the traces of landowners and bourgeois bosses in the country and took power in their own hands. They took the land from the landowners, plants and factories from the capitalists; they fought the enemies of the workers on all fronts. In the fire of the great socialist revolution, the workers and peasants burned Kochak, Yudenich, Vrangel, Denikin, Pilsudskii, Petlyura, Chernov, Khots, Dan, Martov, and Abramovich. They recited the blessing: “All landowners, bourgeois and their helpers — Mensheviks, Esers, Kadets, Bundists, Zionists, Esesovtses, Eesovtses, Poaley Zionists, Tsaarey-tsienikes, and all other counterrevolutionaries should be burned in the flame of revolution. Those who are burned should not ever survive, and the rest should be given to us and we shall transfer them to the hands of the GPU.

The Komsomol Haggadah combines all enemies of the Soviet regime as khometz, and recommends burning them. Equating antagonists who were notoriously anti-Jewish, such as the commander of the White Army Aleksei Denikin, to Jewish Soviet opponents, such as Bundists or Zionists, was a popular method of Soviet propaganda. It was not important why or how but simply that they were portrayed as being equally obnoxious.

Haggadah shel pesakh (Story of Passover), cover from the second edition. Drawing by Alexander Tyshler. Moscow, 1927

Every seder ritual was transformed in the Soviet Haggadah. The traditional handwashing and blessing before the meal became a political statement:

Wash off all the bourgeois mud, wash off the mold of generations, and do not say a blessing, say a curse. Devastation must come upon all the old rabbinical laws and customs, yeshivas and khaydorim, that becloud and enslave the people.

Soviet ideologists saw a clear need to create viable alternatives to established rituals and holidays for Jews. They considered that, during the transition period, these rituals had to be based on Jewish traditions and then gradually lead to the establishment of completely new Soviet holidays. In the 1920s these holidays were used both as propaganda against the old religion and promotion of the new political system and ideology. The most notable attempt was the organization of alternative Passover and Yom Kippur celebrations.

An editorial, “Far vos zaynen komunistn kegn religye” (Why Communists are against religion), and an article, “Fun vanen shtampt roshashane un yomkiper” (The origins of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur), both by I. Yakhin, argue that Judaism spefically uses the fall holidays to exploit poor. Caricatures and skits, which parodied Jewish holy books and traditions, supplemented these theoretical explanations. The point was driven home by labeling books, songs, and even prayers as “capitalist.” For example, the thirteen principles of the Jewish faith (ani maamin) were called “Der kapitalistisher ani maamin” (The capitalist principles of belief) in an article written by P. Lafarg in Der apikoyres.

“Der kapitalistisher ani maamin” predictably replaces God with money:

I believe that capitalism rules over body and over soul.
I believe in spirit (the capitalist child) and in credit (that originates from it).
I believe in gold and silver, from which an altar is made in order to breathe a soul into paper money.
I believe in a 5 percent rent increase and also in a 4.3 percent inflation of paper money.
I believe in extending the working day.
I believe in a constant decrease in salary.
I believe in fooling the public and falsifying products.
I believe in the eternal principles of our holy faith, the official political economy.

Der kapitalistisher ani maamin” expresses the essence of Soviet arguments against capitalism in a form familiar to traditional Jews. Ironically this form derives from the text that summarizes the essence of Judaism. Yet the new ani maamin is not offered as a surrogate replacement for the religious text. Rather, it works as an aid to the transition from religion to atheism, capitalism to socialism and “backwardness” to “modernism.” Once these goals are achieved, texts like this one will not be needed.

Bdikas khomets (Search for leaven). Illustration from the first edition of Hagadah far gloybers un apikorsim (Passover story for believers and atheists). Kharkov, 1923.

A similar principle is used in rewritten popular short stories, jokes, articles, theatrical performances, and songs, which are parodied in order to convey a new Soviet message. An example is a remake of the Yiddish song “Zol ikh zayn a rov” (Let me be a rabbi). Here is the original song:

Zol ikh zayn a rov,
Ken ikh nit keyn toyre!
Zol ikh zayn a soykher,
Hob ikh nit keyn skhoyre.
Vil ikh zayn a shoykhet,
Hob ikh nit keyn khalef,
Vil ikh zayn a melamed,
Ken ikh nit keyn alef.

Let me be a rabbi,
I don’t know the Torah!
Let me be a merchant,
I don’t possess goods.
I want to be a shoykhet,
I don’t have a ritual knife.
I want to be a melamed,
I don’t know the alphabet.

The published Soviet parody reverses the meaning of the old song:

Zol ikh zayn a rov,
Keyner darf mayn toyre!
Mitsves un maysim toyvim
Iz gor a knape skhoyre!
Keyner efnt nit mayn tir,
Nit keyn khupe, nit keyn get,
S’bageyt zikh shoyn on mir!

Let me be a rabbi,
Nobody needs my Torah!
The commandments and good deeds
Are now useless goods!
Nobody opens my door,
No wedding, no divorce,
People get along without me!

The Komsomol Haggadah at times altered the order of activities. Its style also differed from the traditional Haggadah, as the Soviet publication was geared for a different audience, a meeting of friends rather than family. The following provocative questions are modeled after the four questions in the original Haggadah:

Why is Passover not a true festival of the Jewish people if all Jews celebrate their release from slavery? Is it not harmful for young workers to refuse to celebrate it? You always teach us to hate slavery and show how necessary it is to struggle for freedom. You have festivals like May Day and the [anniversary of the] October Revolution, and all the workers go to demonstrations, so why can’t we celebrate the liberation from Egypt and regard this as the national day of Jewish freedom?

Indeed, some Soviet Haggadah texts provide more moderate explanations. They simply replace “God” with the “October Revolution”:

We were slaves of capital until October came and led us out of the land of exploitation with a strong hand, and if it were not for October, we and our children would still be slaves.

The Komsomol Haggadah, however, provides another answer. It explains the appearance of the ancient holiday of spring and how it was transformed into Passover for the benefit of priests and, later, rabbis. It introduces historical and ethnographical “facts” to show that a similar festival existed among some “Arab tribes” and that the custom emerged entirely because of illiteracy. It provides “logical” explanations for every detail of the story. Thus the fire on Mount Sinai is not a reflection of the divine appearance but rather an eruption of an old volcano; the matzo are flat because this is a traditional spring bread; the exodus is the wandering of a nomadic tribe; and so on. The final exclamation of the seder, “Next year in Jerusalem,” symbolizing the connection of the Jewish people to the Promised Land and the hope that the Messiah will come, is substituted by “This year a revolution here; next year—a world revolution!” The Komsomol Haggadah argues that Passover is not a celebration of real freedom but rather of spiritual slavery, because the holiday comes only from heaven. In contrast, genuine freedom is in the hands of the proletariat, and therefore one must celebrate May Day.

Dayenu (Enough), a page from a special Passover edition of Der apikoyres. Moscow, 1929

According to the Komsomol Haggadah, Passover deals with only Jewish matters whereas May Day is an international holiday meaningful to all. Therefore Altshuler also internationalized the Haggadah:

Instead of the story of how the sea was divided, we speak about the brave heroes of the Red Army near Perekop. Instead of the groaning of the Jews in Egypt and God’s miracles, we speak about the real sufferings of the proletariat and peasants in their resistance against their exploiters and their heroic struggle.

The final part of the Komsomol Haggadah instructs followers to cast away “the mold of generations”—the clergy and nationalist festivals—and praise the revolution and workers’ holidays.  In later years additional variations of the Red Haggadah appeared as supplements to the Moscow Yiddish monthly Der apikoyres. They are predominantly in verse form and stray further from the traditional version than Altshuler’s rendition. The Red Haggadah of the 1930s consists of new stories of the Exodus connected with Soviet reality, which were to be accompanied by the singing of the Internationale and the eating of bread (strictly forbidden during Passover). Some traditional motifs, however, are retained, including the popular seder song “Dayenu” which recites all the benefits the Jews have received from God. After each verse the refrain says: “If You [God] had done only this for us, it would have been enough!” The Red seder presents this song as being sung by counterrevolutionaries. It explains, in popular form, the reasons for the interruption of the NEP campaign and shows that “capitalist elements” will survive if they are given the slightest opportunity:

Ven bolshevikes voltn kumen,
Un voltn gornit tsugenumen
Volt geven, az vey tsu undz gor… dayenu.
Ven zey voltn yo genumen,
Nor zey voltn lozm handlen,
Voltn mir alts tsurik bakumen,
Un s’volt geven… dayenu.
Bay dem umgliklekhn handl,
Ven s’volt nit geven keyn finotdiel,
Voltn mir fun zey gemakht a tel,
Un s’volt geven… dayenu!

If the Bolsheviks just came,
And did not take anything
It would be for us quite… enough.
Even if they took something,
But only let us trade,
We would get everything back
And this would be… enough.
We would trade unsuccessfully,
And if there were no financial [e.g., taxation] department,
We would do away with them,
And for us it would be… enough!

In the parody dishonest entrepreneurs criticized the Soviet regime, incidentally revealed the flaws in its economic system, and plotted its destruction. In this way the authors of the parody attempted to convey that opponents of the Soviet regime used religion and religious songs to mask their intentions. Thus religion and religious observance are subtly equaled with economic sabotage. Generally this is how religious songs are parodied in Soviet propaganda texts. Yet a notable exception is a version of the four questions in the same Haggadah in which a positive character transforms the four questions into an accusation: the son blames his father for observing the “dark” tradition and not struggling with the rabbis:

Kh’freg dikh tate, ma nishtane,
Bist oysvaksn gor gevorn
Host keyn deye un di meye
Iz oykh nit vi in yene yorn!

I ask you, father: “How does it differ?”
You are completely grown up,
But you don’t have any standing,
and your business is also not like it used to be.

Following his speech, the son does not wait for a response but begins telling the story of the Red Exodus. The action takes place in Soviet Russia. Those who are expelled are “evil,” whereas, ironically, the heroes are identified with the Egyptians, signifying that, during the Exodus, Jews did not deserve to stay in Egypt and were therefore discarded. The villains in this Haggadah are “Rabbi Denikin” and “Rabbi Kolchak,” who are attempting to ruin the lives of the proletariat. By equating White Army generals such as Denikin and Kolchak, who were known antisemites, with rabbis, the Red Haggadah tries to demonstrate that both groups are dangerous enemies.

Kolchak and Denikin continued to be represented as enemies in Soviet ideology many decades after the Red Haggadah and Red seders were discarded and forgotten. Yet the principles used in the construction of Red seders, such as across-the-board negation, played an important role in the formulation of Soviet propaganda messages.

Alternative seders were conducted through the mid-1930s. Gradually these activities moved to Jewish schools and aimed to attract children rather than to convince adults. New Soviet holidays such as May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution finally replaced modified versions of Jewish holidays in the mid-1930s. Some families continued to celebrate the Passover seder, often in its modified form (without prayers), and although red seders disappeared from public memory, their message still lived in the minds of many of those who witnessed them.

Illustration from the first edition of Hagadah far gloybers and apikorsim. Kharkov, 1923.

Most of the children knew how to celebrate Passover and did so every year; the families obtained American matzo and saw Passover as the only festival of Jewish national solidarity. The inhabitants liked the festival much more than May Day because during Passover they received gifts, the entire family gathered at home, and they ate delicious food. May Day, on the other hand, was a day full of boring meetings and lectures. Typical responses included: “My father was angry because he had to attend the official gatherings”; “My mother was angry, too, because Father was not at home”; “The children were not in a festive mood, especially since they did not fully understood why it was a holiday.”

Efim G. remembers a song of the Red seder conducted in his shtetl of Parichi:

Mi asapru, mi adabru,
Hey, hey, lomche dreydl,
Ver ken visn, ver ken tseyln

Vos dos eynts batayt, vos dos eynts batayt
Eyner iz Karl Marx, un Marx iz eyner,
Un mer nit keyner.

Vos dos tsvey batayt, vos dos tsvey batayt
Tsvey iz Lenin-Trotsky
Un eyner iz der Karl Marx,
Un Marx iz eyner, un mer nit keyner.

Vos dos dray batayt, vos dos dray batayt
Dray iz internatsional, tsvey iz Lenin Trotsky,
Eynts iz Karl Marx, un Marx iz keyner, un mer nit keyner.

Who will tell me, who will say
Hey, hey, turn the dreidel
Who can know, who can count

What does one mean, what does one mean?
One is Karl Marx, Marx is one
There is no one else.

What does two mean, what does two mean?
Two is Lenin-Trotsky
One is Karl Marx,
Marx is one, and there is no one else.

What does three mean, what does three mean?
Three means Internationals, two means Lenin-Trotsky,
One is Karl Marx, and there is not one more.

This song is a parody of a traditional Passover song. The original words say: “One is God, two are two scrolls of Torah, given to the Jews on the mount of Zion, and three are the number of the Jewish fathers [Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob].” Efim G. actually thought that this was a Soviet Jewish song. He did not know that this was an adaptation of a much older Jewish song until he came to the United States in 1989, where he was invited to a traditional Passover dinner.

The structure of this “Red Passover” song differs markedly from that of officially published antireligious songs. Official songs retain old melodies and commonly substitute religious themes with negative images, such as in the “Red Dayenu,” which portrays NEPmen, or capitalists, as enemies. Consequently songs adapted from religious sources were designed to satirize those people who were still observant (and who were also presumed to be anti-Soviet). Here, the content of the Soviet Passover “counting” song clearly reflects the popular, even subconscious understanding of Soviet ideology that replaced old sacred symbols with the new gods (positive images of Soviet leaders). In the 1920s this type of substitution occurred only in unpublished songs. The government did not want to “replace gods”; rather, it wanted to attack religion through the creation of negative associations. It was not until the mid-1930s that Stalin replaced God in many officially published Yiddish folksongs.

Despite the antireligious content of the Red seders, they were distinctly Jewish events, organized for Jews, by Jews, and, equally important, they were conducted in Yiddish. Even the building in which the event took place was frequently a former synagogue. Most Jews did not perceive these activities as anti-Jewish. They saw them as Soviet Jewish events, created for their entertainment, and also as traditional holidays. Even after the most successful Red seders, which were attended by large audiences, the majority would go home and celebrate traditional Passover seders. Furthermore, those who conducted the Red seder often hurried to conclude the event since their families were waiting for them at home to celebrate the traditional seder. This was described by participants at such events. Velvl K., for example, was one of the organizers of the Red seders:

While I was at the Yiddish teachers’ training college [tekhnikum], my fellow students and I were sent to the shtetlach in the Ukraine to help organize anti-Passover campaigns. We prepared long lectures and discussion meetings. Sometimes even khometz food (such as bread) was provided for distribution. Many people came to join us. People in the shtetlach liked to see us, educated young men and women, who came to their shtetlach from Kiev. They were extremely friendly. I remember that, by the second day after our arrival, each of us had several invitations to private Passover seders in different houses… We enjoyed the holiday just as everyone else did after the official part of the day was over.

Removing the bourgeois khometz, Komsomolishe Haggadah, 1922

More Stories about the Red Seder:

The children often did not see any contradiction between their religious upbringing at home and antireligious propaganda in school. They thought that the family followed certain rules, and society followed others. Ian D. further explains:

My family was traditional. My father used to go to the synagogue. She [my mother] kept a good kosher house. Everything was kosher at home. We lived a Soviet way of life [sovetish shteyger], but it was all kosher.

….

Sometimes children were forced to perform antireligious actions in school that were organized in the form of a game. Many respondents reported that the idea of Passover was connected with various unconventional activities. Samuil G., who took part in these events in a shtetl in the Ukraine, remembers:

As a child I loved Passover very much. I loved the kugel [baked pudding, as of potatoes or noodles] that my mother baked for the holiday. She made it in a very special way that I have never tasted since. I loved how everything went crazy in the house as we were changing dishes for Passover and my grandmother was cleaning the house ferociously. The atmosphere at the [Yiddish] school was different, too. Of course, we didn’t have the day off or anything like that. Still, we had many interesting activities taking place in school. First, older children, the komyugistn  [Komsomol members] would come to conduct some activities for us. They explained how religion oppressed the masses in other countries. We played many interesting games together. For example, on the first day of Passover, they would gather us together and give each of us ten pieces of bread. We were given the task of going to Jewish houses and throwing a piece into the window of ten different houses. The one who was the fastest would receive a prize. We enjoyed the game very much, especially when the old, angry women came out of their houses and ran after us screaming “Apikorsim! ” [“Heretics!”]. We felt like heroes of the revolution and were very proud. But in the evening we would all go home and celebrate the traditional seder with all the necessary rituals.

Children were not the only ones who faced the complexities of this dual existence. Adults, too, had to make compromises between their traditional ways of life, modern changes in society, and, perhaps most important, their possible sources of income. Here is the testimony of a former Byelorussian resident, Efim G.:

My father could do any job. He was a jack-of-all-trades. He was a tailor, a barber, and a baker. After the revolution he became a professional atheist and the chairman of the working committee. Then he became a chairman of the shtetl council. My father had an especially good income during the time of Passover, when he worked as a zetser [matzo bakery assistant]. The fact that he was also a professional atheist didn’t prevent him from carrying out his job. It was a very good source of income because all our neighbors were believers. We didn’t even think there were any contradictions in this.

On a cultural level, Passover and May Day were viewed not as contradictory but as fulfilling different functions. Passover was a family holiday, with specific rituals and traditions that celebrated national freedom from slavery. May Day, similarly, signified deliverance from servitude but on a class level. Yurii B. asserts:

Passover was only for the Jews and it was celebrated at home, whereas May Day was celebrated at the club. There were people of different nationalities there. There were Ukrainian, Polish, and Czech villages around us, so inhabitants of these villages would come to the club to celebrate the holiday. The club was a cultural center for them, too. Because it was situated in a Jewish shtetl [Romanov], it united Jews with all other nations. May Day was the perfect opportunity to celebrate something together with other nationalities.

The coexistence of Soviet and Jewish holidays created mutual influences on the rituals associated with these celebrations.

…

Another popular theme in anti-Passover propaganda concerned how the holiday allegedly fostered social and economic injustice. Many publications accused rabbis of organizing Passover rituals for personal financial gain. Various stories spoke of the covert techniques rabbis employed to approve food as kosher for Passover, including a “guarantee” that was purportedly based entirely on bribes. Further, ordinary believers are portrayed simply as victims who lose their money to the schemes of the religious elite, while atheists are portrayed as the wisest citizens of all. One story made the comparison explicit in the portrait it draws of two friends: the one who observes Passover is constantly in debt, and the other is a thrifty atheist, able to save enough money for his family to build a new house.

…

Etya G. (b. 1920) took part in the staging of an oral newspaper when she was in school in the Ukrainian shtetl of Kopaigorod in 1928. She describes it as follows:

The most popular of the children’s activities in the club was the zhivaia gazeta  (living newspaper). Each child received his or her own lines to recite. We staged a living newspaper against religion. It was in Yiddish. I even remember the words… I remember we were fighting against Passover, against these Jewish religious ceremonies. We used to sing:

Vi ikh efn a Peysekhdik zekl,
Gefin ikh an apikoyres a brek.

When I open the Passover bag,
I find there a piece of a heretic.

Etya also remembers that Komsomol members in her shtetl used to throw pieces of bread into the Passover bags that children were given. These pieces of bread (which were forbidden to be eaten during Passover) were called “a piece of a heretic” (apikoyres a brek).

For example, during Passover living newspapers often criticized people who baked matzo and sold it to their neighbors. Such testimony, however, actually helped members of the audience find out where matzo was being baked and how to get it.

The mass production of Yiddish propaganda plays began in 1925 and reached its peak in 1931. During this period buffooneries (bufanades), typically short, one-act comedic plays with political undertones, became a popular genre that was used for propagandistic purposes… Yiddish performances also attacked Judaism, Jewish political parties (especially Zionists), Trotsky, and kulaks. The plays often promoted policies of the Soviet regime that were directed toward Jews, such as the organization of agricultural settlements. Most of these performances were musicals, consisting of alterations of traditional Yiddish songs, rewritten so as to make them simple to learn and easy to remember.

Many parodies were based on the story of Passover. For example, Avrom Vevyorke (1887–1935) first published the play In midber  (In the desert) in 1925. This anti-Passover parody revolves around two competing groups of Jews. One group includes members of the Komsomol, and the other brings together their opponents, notably Zionists and Bundists. The head of the second group is Moses, who wants to lead them to Palestine. The Komsomol group, in an effort to convince other people to join them, offers to build a socialist state instead. The Komsomol members use various arguments and methods, including the sexual seduction of Moses by one of the Komsomol members. The play ends with a complete victory for the Komsomol. All the members of the second group repent and go on to build the Socialist Soviet country. Even Moses refuses to go to the “Arab land” and stays to help establish the new Communist state with his new Komsomol girlfriend.

The sharpest conflict of the play is in the area of international politics. The lyrics of the songs used in the performance often incorporate idiomatic Yiddish expressions combined with Soviet ideological messages. For example, the “villains” explain their agenda as follows:

Mir zaynen sheyne yidn,
Gehandlt in dem mark,
Ver a shoykhet, ver a rov,

Un ver a feter kark —
Firt undz Moyshe iber yamen
In Balfurs medine,

Vet men vayzn dort di tir,
Geyen mir keyn Khine,
Marsh, marsh, marsh!
Oy, Oy, Khine,

A goldene medine,
Chan Kay Shi un Chan Tsai Li
Tsienistn fun bestn min!

We are good Jews,
We were trading in the marketplace,
Some are ritual slaughterers, some are rabbis,

Some are just fat necks.
Moses leads us across the seas,
To Balfour’s country,

If they don’t let us in there,
We will go to China,
March, March, March!
Oy, Oy, China,

A golden land,
Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang Tsai Lee
Are the best Zionists!

The Yiddish expression sheyne yidn  (literally, “beautiful Jews”), which usually refers to “respectable Jews,” here applies to market traders, one of the least respected professions according to Soviet ideology. In the next two lines, “the rabbi” and “the butcher” are called “fat necks.” In Soviet jargon “fat” meant “bourgeois” or “capitalist,” that is, antisocialist. The Yiddish expression feter kark  (fat neck) also refers to an “insensitive person.” Therefore, by calling butchers and rabbis “fat necks,” the author of the play created a negative association with these professions and made them an object of satire. In the play Moses, an acknowledged Jewish leader, only assists market traders and “fat necks,” not the poor Jews in need of help. This implies that Moses is not a leader of all Jewish people but rather only the rich

The play In midber equated Chinese leaders (who were hostile to the Soviet government at the time) with Zionists, and suggested that both were equally harmful to the Jews. To summarize, Avrom Vevyorke’s creation effectively rejected Passover, ridiculed Jewish customs and social structure, and informed the audience about the latest trends in Soviet policies.

For example, Dovid Edelshtadt describes the rebellion of the Jews in Egypt as a social revolution:

In dem land fun piramidn
Geven a kenig beyz un shlekht.
Zaynen dort geven di yidn,
Zayne diner, zayne knekht.

In the land of pyramids
Was an angry and evil king.
The Jews were there,
As his servants and his slaves.

Later in this song the author draws parallels between the exodus of Jews from Egypt and social revolution. He describes a new Jewish rebellion that allows the Jews to build a free society. Even though the Soviets presented the story of Passover entirely differently, the song still was published many times during the Soviet period, perhaps because of its revolutionary spirit.

Zing zhe arbeter, freylekh lebedik,
Breyter makh di trit,
S’kumt a naye glik, s’kumt a naye lid,
Zing a frayhayt lid!

Sing, worker, happily, merrily,
Make your step wider,
A new happiness is coming, a new song is coming,
Sing a freedom song!

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All historical text on the Red Seders of Jewish Bolsheviks comes from Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939.

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They raised a beetroot in the air and shouted “F*** capitalism!”

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Sorry, but I find this shit hilarious. Jewdas are a bunch of Yiddish anarcho pranksters, but they are far better than most when it comes to diagnosing and opposing antisemitism on the Left. They do lots of Palestine solidarity stuff, but they’ve always been careful to emphasize the dangers of antisemitic forms of anti-Zionism. Plus, they had no problem kicking that dumbass Ken Livingstone in the teeth.

Corbyn played this all rather well, I must say, and doesn’t come off as disingenuous in the least. Really, after flipping out on him for attending Seder, how is the public supposed to take these same people attacking him as an antisemite seriously? Instead, shifting the narrative, the media has attempted to portray Jewdas as a bunch of dangerous extremists — i.e., “a hate-filled group that mocks Judaism.”

Oz Katerji, the New Statesman journo who covered this story, stressed that members of Jewdas weren’t all “extremists.” Nevertheless, he questioned the wisdom of Corbyn in attending the event:

I am sure the Jewdas Seder was a blast, I’m sure the vast majority of those in attendance are good people. But the leader of the opposition should know better than to associate with a group that take pride saying  “Burn down parliament.”

Like, come on. That’s awesome. If anything, it should have been Jewdas that was reluctant to meet with the leader of any parliamentary party. Either way, Jez said he “learned a lot” from the evening’s festivities. Wish they’d schooled Corbyn about some other matters, however, maybe taught him to hum the bars of “Daloy politsey!” (a Yiddish anarchist song, “Down with the Police!”).

What follows is a nice testimony by Rob Abrams originally posted on the Open Democracy website.

When I found antisemitism on the Left, Jewdas were there for me

Robert Abrams
Open Democracy
April 2nd, 2018

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By now, it is very possible you have heard of Jewdas. In the last 48 hours, this community of mostly left-wing, non- and anti-Zionist Jews based in the UK has gone from being a medium-sized network of friends to the talk of the hour. Previously celebrated for its use of humour and playful feather-ruffling by some while being dismissed as a minor inconvenience at best by others, everything changed when Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn joined the group for a Passover Seder on Monday evening.

Against the backdrop of a vicious debate about antisemitism in the Labour party, news publications including the BBC, Sky News, the Daily Mail, the New York Times, and the Israeli Haaretz have all clamored to define Jewdas. It’s hard to express in words just how surreal it was to write this sentence.

I first began to attend Jewdas events at a time when I was desperately in need of a spiritual home. Growing up in an intensely Zionist community as a descendent of early founders of now flourishing cities in Israel, I had found it very hard to reconcile my Jewish identity with my profound discomfort with the nationalist rallying around Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2008-2009. At this time, I did not want anything to do with my community. It was simply too much for me to handle.

It was a comfort to learn that I was not alone. I was part of a not insignificant portion of my generation of British Jews who walked the same painful steps. The first steps led us away from our community, but the next ones brought many of us back to it in a way none could have predicted.

I was a thoroughly convinced, unflinching participant in the secular antiwar movement as a secular British citizen who just happened to be from a Jewish background until one day in 2009-2010. It was a protest outside the Israeli embassy in London. I had been mixing with the crowd, minding my own business when I heard a group of young men chanting “1-2-kill a Jew, 3-4-kill some more!” Attempting to confront them, I was left feeling demoralized by the lack of support from people I had presupposed would take a stronger stance on anti-semitism in their midst.

Discovering the Jewdas community thus felt liberating. A place in which I and others like me could mutually explore the complexities of our identities safe from judgment. After many nights spent in books and online archives piecing together amazing facets of lesser-known Jewish history that had just barely survived the physical destructions of European and Middle Eastern Jewry, here was a community of people that celebrated these histories.

It went further than mere celebration. Jewdas is a movement that actively lives our diaspora heritage. Be it through the organising of Jewish and Arab musicians performing Andalusian Muwashahat music, performances of Yiddish poetry and music to help fund the restoration of an old synagogue in Whitechapel, celebrating the victory over the Blackshirt fascists at Cable Street, or even setting up a language school teaching diaspora languages to help fund education for refugees.

Yet, when the attacks against Jewdas started in the wake of Corbyn’s attendance of the community’s Passover Seder, none of this was taken into account. Jewdas members were dismissed as uncaring of concerns about antisemitism. Even worse, the president of the Board of Deputies Jonathan Arkush went as far as to claim that Jewdas “is a source of virulent antisemitism.”

To believe this, you have to ignore so much. You have to ignore guides and workshops produced by Jewdas challenging antisemitism on the Left, opposition to Ken Livingstone and others on the Left dismissing the issue of antisemitism. More drastically, you have to ignore moments in which Jewdas members have put themselves in the line of harm to oppose violent organized neo-Nazis, such as Eddie Stampton’s attempted “anti-Judification” march.

As shocked as I am by Arkush, I’m not surprised. It goes without saying that the head of a communal body who have already done so much to alienate young, progressive-thinking Jews is hardly going to be supportive, even for the sake of maintaining plurality within the wider community.

I am surprised however by the response of many self-ascribed “moderate” progressives from both inside and outside the community. A common theme has been to applaud Jewdas for its use of comedy and satire and then go on to question the wisdom of Corbyn attending the group’s Seder. Such individuals are questioning whether this was the right time, and whether or not this move was antagonistic.

Such concerns only hold up if you have already first internalized the idea that Jewdas is a little more than a group of court jesters without any actual legitimacy. Behind the humor and chain-yanking of Jewdas, there is a serious guiding point about alienation and the very real experiences of many people, young and old alike in our community. Without this guiding point, Jewdas would neither be relevant nor funny. I welcome the idea that Corbyn should meet other members of our diverse community, something that would be greatly helped if he were in fact invited to other Seder events in the first place. That must not detract from the fact that Jewdas is, whether you like it or not, a legitimate part of this community with a legitimate Jewish lived experience however alternative it may be.

It’s clear what the attack on Jewdas is really motivated by. When those of us who have been deemed unacceptable for so long finally get a platform to be heard from, that is disturbing for those who maintain power in our community, whether they were elected or otherwise.

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Yesterday marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Below you can download a number of histories and firsthand accounts of the revolt, and below that read an article Marcus Barnett wrote on the subject last year for Jacobin. Roughly 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were killed by gas or bullet over a six-week span in 1943, after 92,000 or so perished from starvation or disease the three years before.

About the authors below: Edelman and Goldstein were Bundists, while Rotem and Zuckerman were left-wing Zionists. Gutman was later an inmate of Auschwitz, where he narrowly survived. Berg was only a child when she lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, and refused to share further details of her experience or speak out after a translation of her diary (by Henri Lefebvre co-author and Frankfurt School fellow traveler Norbert Guterman) was serialized in American newspapers in 1944.

• Mary Berg, Growing up in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary (1944)
• Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights (1946)
• Bernard Goldstein, Five Years in the Warsaw Ghetto (1946)
• Yitzhak Zuckerman (Antek), A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1974)
• Simha Rotem (Kazik), Memoirs of a Warsaw Ghetto Fighter (1986)
• Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1994)

Daily life in the ghetto

Scenes from the uprising

Remembering the Warsaw ghetto uprising

Marcus Bennett
Jacobin Magazine
April 19th, 2017

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On the eve of Passover 1943 — the nineteenth of April — a group of several hundred poorly armed young Jews began the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the first insurrections against Nazism.

For a small group of fighters, realizing — in the lyrical words of one militant — that “dying with arms is more beautiful than without,” an isolated group of Jewish militants resisted for twenty-nine days against a much larger foe, motivated by a desire to kill as many fascists as they could before they themselves were killed. The uprising, etched into the collective memory of postwar Jewry, remains emotive and emboldening.

That their heroism was a crucial part of the war is disputed by nobody today. But less known is the extent to which the uprising, far from being a spontaneous one of the masses, was the product of planning and preparation from a relatively small — incredibly young — group of Jewish radicals.

The ghetto

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Within a few weeks of the Nazi consolidation of Poland, Governor Hans Frank ordered four hundred thousand Warsaw Jews to enter a ghetto. By November 1940, around five hundred thousand Jews from across Poland had been sealed behind its walls, severed from the outside world and plunged into social isolation. Surrounded by a ten-foot-high barrier, the creation of the ghetto meant the relocation of approximately 30 percent of Warsaw’s population into 2.6 percent of the city, the designated area being no more than two and a half miles long and having previously housed fewer than 160,000 people.

In the ghetto, Jews were forced to live in chronic hunger and poverty. Many families inhabited single rooms, and the dire lack of food meant that roughly one hundred thousand people survived on no more than a single bowl of soup per day. The sanitation system collapsed, and disease became rampant. By March 1942 onwards, five thousand people died each month from disease and malnutrition.

The situation was dire — and yet, the initial response of the Jewish community leadership was one of inaction. Following the creation of the Judenrat (Jewish Council) — a collaborationist organization established with Nazi approval to allow easier implementation of anti-Jewish policies — some inhabitants fell into a false sense of security. An attitude permeated the ghetto, proffered through the lens of Jewish history, that Nazism was just another form of persecution that the Jewish people must suffer and outlast.

Others — such as the Hashomer Hatzair militant Shmuel Braslaw — began to recognize a jealous respect for the Germans among the ghetto’s residents. “Our young people learn to doff their caps when encountering Germans,” wrote Braslaw in an internal document, “smiling smiles of servitude and obedience . . . but deep in their hearts burns a dream: to be like [the Germans] — handsome, strong and self-confident. To be able to kick, beat and insult, unpunished. To despise others, as the Germans despise Jews today.”

Against this demoralization, circles of defiance could be found in the self-organization of the left-wing of the Jewish community. Communists, Socialist-Zionists of varying descriptions, and social democrats organized themselves into sections in the ghetto, aiming to transform the misery into meaningful political organization. All parties — the Bund, a social-democratic mass organization that had enjoyed huge pre-war popularity; the Marxist-Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair; the left-wing Zionist party Left Poale Zion; and the Communist Party dedicated themselves to this strategy, organizing cells that sought to revive collectivist attitudes among an emotionally crippled and disaffected Jewish youth.

In dark times, the cell structures of youth organizations provided a social and psychological anchor against hunger and depression. “The day I was able to re-establish contact with my group,” wrote the Young Communist militant Dora Goldkorn, “was one of the happiest days in my hard, tragic ghetto life.” In the project to develop a resistance leadership among the youth, keeping spirits high was crucial; acts of friendship such as the sharing of food were as important as distributing anti-Nazi literature.

By 1942, the various youth organizations felt confident enough to consider the formation of an “Anti-Fascist Bloc.” On the insistence of the Communists, a manifesto was drafted that sought to unite the Jewish left in the Warsaw Ghetto, with the hope of generalizing this political unity across other ghettos.

Calling for a “national front” against the occupation, for the unity of all progressive forces on the basis of common demands and for armed antifascism, the manifesto echoed the pre-war Popular Fronts in its organizational methodology.

The Left Poale Zion enthusiastically joined, as did the Hashomer Hatzair — who reemphasized their fidelity to the Soviet Union, despite the Kremlin’s opposition to Zionism. The Bund, however, were less reliable, due to their historic anticommunism and rejection of specifically Jewish armed action; a party that resolutely stated Poland was the home for Polish Jews, many Bundists refused avenues other than Polish-Jewish unity of action.

The paper of the Anti-Fascist Bloc, Der Ruf, reached publication twice. Its contents overwhelmingly focused on applauding Soviet resistance and urging the ghetto inhabitants to hold out for imminent liberation at the hands of the Red Army.

The bloc’s fighting squads contained militants belonging to all varieties of labor movement groups, but the lynchpin of the organization was Pinkus Kartin. A stalwart of communism in prewar Poland and a veteran of the International Brigades to Spain, Kartin was a leader both politically and militarily. To the historian Israel Gutman, who himself was active with Hashomer Hatzair in his youth, Kartin “undoubtedly impressed” the underground’s young and inexperienced cadre.

It was the arrest and murder of Kartin in June 1943 that signaled the end for the Anti-Fascist Bloc. His arrest triggered an intense repression against the prominent Young Communists, who saw their numbers decimated and were driven into hiding. It is for this reason that when the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) was founded several months later, the Communists were absent at first — although their political line was upheld and applied by those such as Abraham Fiszelson, a Left Poale Zion leader who had been Kartin’s right-hand man and had befriended him in Spain.

During this period, figures from the right-wing of the Jewish community formed a rival group, the Jewish Military Union (ZZW). Led by the right-wing Zionist group Betar and funded by high society, the ZZW relied upon ex-army officers who could fight orthodox warfare with the Nazis using regular army discipline — unlike the ZOB, which considered itself the armed expression of the Jewish workers’ movement. Furthermore, the ZZW’s connections to Polish nationalists, the antisemitic Polish government-in-exile and the right-wing Revisionist-Zionist movement provoked suspicion among the ZOB leadership.

By contrast, in the eyes of Israel Gutman, the typical ZOB volunteers were “young men in their twenties, Zionists, communists, socialists — idealists with no battle experience, no military training.” While the propaganda of the ZZW was staunchly nationalistic, the ZOB’s propaganda and literature encouraged antiracist internationalism, offered intellectual positions on the world situation, and debated the labor movement.

Despite the darkness of their times, members of the ZOB belonged to a political tradition that desired a better world, and sought to create it through their struggle.

The resistance

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The ZOB set as its aim an anti-Nazi insurrection. However, it recognized that paramount to achieving this was the strengthening of the organization’s position in the wider community — it was decided that it had to involve the intimidation and execution of Jewish collaborators with the occupiers.

For ZOB militants, collaborators represented an auxiliary wing of fascism that was instrumental in facilitating the deportation of Polish Jewry. To demonstrate that this stance would not be accepted in the ghetto, ZOB militants chose to execute Jewish policeman Jacob Lejkin. For his “dedication” in deporting Jews to Auschwitz, Lejkin was shot, and his example triggered widespread panic in the collaborating establishment. This was followed by the execution of Alfred Nossig in February 1943. Józef Szeryński, the former head of the ghetto police, committed suicide to avoid his own fate.

These acts ensured ZOB’s centrality in the resistance movement, and also encouraged resistance from beyond their ranks. They aimed to prove that challenging collaboration was both possible and a moral duty — and within a short period of time had won many ghetto inhabitants to this position.

As the months progressed, the specter of death became ever-present. Between June and September 1942, three hundred thousand Jews had been deported or murdered, a destruction of the Polish Jewish community. In these desperate circumstances, people lost everyone and many young people began to dispense with anxieties about protecting their families and commit instead to militant political activity. Simply put, the more Jews were murdered in the ghettos, the less personal obligations were felt by survivors, and the more the feeling of responsibility for causing further anguish from Nazi reprisals receded.

Contempt was shown for the self-determined martyrdom of Adam Czerniakow, the Judenrat leader who committed suicide in July 1942. For young Jewish socialists such as the prominent Bundist Marek Edelman, Czerniakow had “made his death his own private business,” a symbol of privilege in contrast to Edelman and his working-class comrades awaiting their turn on the deportation lists. For them, he said, the overwhelming sentiment in these times was that political leadership necessitated that “one should die with a bang.”

The uprising

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In many senses, the hopes of the Left in calling for a common struggle against Nazi barbarity had outlived its constituency: the Jewish community was in the process of being exterminated. What now mattered was the initiative young leftists took upon themselves — and the majority favored an uprising.

On the morning of Monday, January 18, six months after the first mass deportations of Warsaw Jews (which reduced the number of ghetto inhabitants from four hundred thousand to approximately seventy to eighty thousand), ZOB militants emerged from the crowds of deportees to attack German soldiers, killing several. A series of attacks followed over four days, where militants infiltrated lines of slave laborers marching towards the Umschlagplatz [Deportation of Jews], stepped out of rank at a given signal, and assassinated their German guards. Though scores of ZOB fighters fell, the confusion created by the fighting allowed some to flee — and demonstrated to others that Nazi bodies could also fall in the ghetto.

By April 1943, there was a general awareness that the ghetto was to be entirely liquidated. A general armed revolt was scheduled to happen at the next Nazi provocation. On April 19, five thousand soldiers led by SS general Jürgen Stroop entered the ghetto to remove the final inhabitants; in response, approximately 220 ZOB volunteers began their attack, located in ersatz positions in cellars, apartments, and rooftops, each armed with a single pistol and several Molotov cocktails.

The revolt caused chaos, catching the Nazis off guard and killing many Wehrmacht and SS soldiers. In response, the humiliated German army, suffering losses at the hands of prisoners they thought long defeated, initiated a policy of systematically burning out the fighters. To paraphrase one ZOB militant, it was the flames — not the fascists — whom the fighters lost out to. Vicious hand-to-hand combat raged for days, and by late April coordinated warfare by the ZOB collapsed, the conflict now largely consisting of the Germans burning small groups of armed Jews out of bunker hideouts created to evade capture.

According to accounts, both the red flag and the blue-and-white flag of the Zionist movement were raised over ZOB-seized buildings. The youngest fighter killed had been a Bundist activist aged thirteen. Though clearly inexperienced as a fighting force, an anonymously authored Bund internal document that reached London in June 1943 stressed the “exemplary” political unity and “fraternity” between leftist groups in combat. The unswerving dedication to which the young fighters of the ZOB clung to their dreams of socialism was exemplified most movingly in a May Day rally held amid the ghetto’s ruins.

Participating in the rally, Marek Edelman reflected that

The entire world, we knew, was celebrating May Day on that day and everywhere forceful, meaningful words were being spoken. But never yet had the Internationale been sung in conditions so different, so tragic, in a place where an entire nation had been and was still perishing. The words and the song echoed from the charred ruins and were, at that particular time, an indication that socialist youth [were] still fighting in the ghetto, and that even in the face of death they were not abandoning their ideals.

Leading militants of the ZOB committed mass suicide on May 8, surrounded by the German army at their base on Mila 18. By mid-May, the ghetto had been razed, and the Great Synagogue of Warsaw personally blown up by General Stroop on May 16 to celebrate the end of Jewish resistance. A mere forty ZOB combatants had escaped onto the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, where scores more fell before war’s end in the subsequent city-wide uprising of 1944.

The lesson

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In our times, war criminal George W. Bush can pay comfortable tribute to the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. So can fellow humanitarians David Cameron and Barack Obama, who both offered speeches dripping with moralism about the heroism of the revolt. Their platitudes are the product of the historical reduction of the event over time — something which is likely to increase as more witnesses to the Holocaust leave us, often with unrecorded testimony.

More dangerous still are active attempts to erase the politics that produced such heroic resistance. Just this week, the University of Vilnius in Lithuania announced that it would honor Jewish students murdered in the Holocaust — as long as they had not participated in left-wing political activity or anti-Nazi militancy.

Against this attack on history, the Left’s task is to defend the fighters of the ZOB from the condescension of official patronage or the dark possibilities of state demonization. We can only do this by restating what so many of these people were — young militants, committed to left-wing ideals, brimming with enthusiasm for a better world, pushed to oblivion alongside their community.

Jews by birth and communal affiliation, they also engaged in the struggle as internationalists, a determined part of a worldwide struggle against fascism and capitalism. As weakened as they were, their attitude — that to submit meant death, that resistance even in the face of impossible odds was a moral imperative — inspired imprisoned Spanish Republicans, French communist peasants, their fellow Poles watching from behind the ghetto walls, and their fellow Jews languishing in the concentration camps.

Their story is a reminder of the Holocaust’s brutality and hopelessness, but also a shining example of those who in the worst of circumstances — in the words of the partisan poet Hirsh Glik — could never say that they have reached the final road.

South African Trotskyist Hillel Ticktin first made a name for himself in the 1970s and 1980s, with a groundbreaking reexamination of the political economy of the USSR. Much of his work has been fragmentary, taking the form of short articles or occasional essays, quite often in polemical exchange with authority figures such as Ernest Mandel and Charles Bettelheim. Only two books have so far resulted from these efforts, published in close proximity to one another, both offering late reflections on systems about to collapse: The Politics of Race: Discrimination In South Africa (1991, on the old apartheid regime) and Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System (1992, on the Soviet Union).

You can download these, along with numerous pieces from his journal Critique and the CPGB’s Weekly Worker by clicking on the links below:

1. “Towards a Political Economy of the USSR” (1974)
2. “Political Economy of the Soviet Intellectual” (1974)
3. “The Capitalist Crisis and Current Trends in the USSR” (1975)
4. “The Current Crisis and the Decline of a Superpower”(1976)
5. “The Contradictions of Soviet Society and Professor Bettelheim” (1976)
6. “The USSR: Beginning of the End?” (1977)
7. “The Class Structure of the USSR and the Elite” (1978)
8. “Rudolf Bahro: A Socialist Without a Working Class” (1979)
9. “Socialism, the Market, and the State: Another View: Socialism vs. Proudhonism” (1979)
10. “The Ambiguities of Ernest Mandel” (1980)
11. “The Afghan War: The Crisis in the USSR” (1980)
12. “The Victory and Tragedy of the Polish Working‐Class: Notes and Commentary on the Polish Events “ (1982)
13. “Is Market Socialism Possible or Necessary?” (1984)
14. “Andropov and His Inheritance: The Disintegration of the USSR under the Banner of Discipline” (1988)
15. “The Contradictions of Gorbachev” (1988)
16. “The Transitional Epoch, Finance Capital, and Britain: Part 1, The Political Economy of Declining Capitalism” (1988)
17. “The Transitional Epoch, Finance Capital, and Britain: Part 2, The Origins and Nature of Finance Capital” (1989)
18. “The Year After the Three General Secretaries: Change without Change” (1989)
19. The Politics of Race: Discrimination in South Africa (1991)
20. Origins of the Crisis in the USSR: Essays on the Political Economy of a Disintegrating System (1992)
21. “The USSR after Chernobyl” (1993)
22. “The Political Economy of Class in the Transitional Epoch” (1993)
23. “Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher: Allies in Crisis” (1994)
24. “The Decline of Capitalism” (1995)
25. “The International Road to Chaos” (1995) (1995)
26. “The Growth of an Impossible Capitalism” (1997)
27. “What Will a Socialist Society be Like?” (1997)
28. “The Nature of an Epoch of Declining Capitalism” (1998)
29. “The Political‐Economic Nature of the Purges” (1999)
30. “Lessons of the Russian Revolution” (2001)
31. “Where are We Going Today? The Nature of Contemporary Crisis” (2001)
32. “Theses on the Present Crisis” (2002)
33. “Why the Transition Failed: Towards a Political Economy of the Post‐Soviet Period in Russia” (2002)
34. “The Third Great Depression” (2003)
35. “Towards a Political Economy of War in Capitalism, with Reference to the First World War” (2004)
36. “Paul Sweezy — Marxist Political Economist, 1910-2004” (2004)
37. “Marxism, Nationalism, and the National Question after Stalinism” (2005)
38. “Political Consciousness and its Conditions at the Present Time” (2006)
39. “Decline as a Concept, and Its Consequences” (2006)
40. “A Critical Assessment of the Major Marxist Theories of the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism” (2006)
41. “Political Economy and the End of Capitalism” (2007)
42. “Don’t Revive Absurd Slogans” (2007)
43. “1956 as the Year of Stalinist Upheaval and the Iconic Transfer of Imperialist Power to the USA” (2007)
44. “Notes on Zionism and Other Matters” (2007)
45. “Results and Prospects: Introduction to Critique’s Issue on 1968″ (2008)
46. “A Marxist Theory of Freedom of Expression” (2009)
47. “A Marxist Political Economy of Capitalist Instability and the Current Crisis” (2009)
48. In Defense of Leon Trotsky” (2010)
49. “The Crisis and the Capitalist System Today” (2010)
50. “The Myths of Crisis: A New Turning Point in History?” (2011)
51. “The Theory of Capitalist Disintegration” (2011)
52. “Stalinism, Its Nature and Role” (2011)
53. “Marx’s Specter Haunts the Wealthy and Powerful” (2011)
54. “The Decline of Money” (2012)
55. “Rosa Luxemburg’s Concept of Crisis in a Contemporary Theoretical Context” (2012)
56. “From Finance Capital to Austerity Muddle” (2013)
57. ““Mandela: He was a Bourgeois Hero” (2013)
58. “The Permanent Instability of Capitalism” (2014)
59. “What is the Capitalist Strategy?” (2014)
60. “The Period of Transition” (2016)
61. “The Permanent Crisis: Decline, and Transition of Capitalism” (2017)
62. “A Marxist Philosopher: István Mészáros, December 19, 1930-October 1, 2017” (2017)

Ticktin’s writings on the socioeconomic character of the Soviet Union have been immensely influential, inspiring groups like Aufheben as well as individuals like Neil C. Fernandez (whose dissertation he advised) and Christopher Arthur. He raises issues that every Marxian Sovietologist must work through, even if one disagrees with his conclusions. Below I will disaggregate his ideas in three parts, beginning with his politics vis-à-vis the CPGB (PCC), moving through his historic claims about the USSR vis-à-vis Fernandez and Paresh Chattopadhyay, and then finishing with some methodological and thematic notes again vis-à-vis Chattopadhyay.

On democracy, empty slogans, and political strategy

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Although Ticktin shares the CPGB’s commitment to rigorous debate and an open exchange of ideas, he differs from them in several important respects. First of all, with respect to their emphasis on democracy. Others have noted the way in which the CPGB has made a fetish of the democratic principle, even leading some erstwhile left communists to abandon their previous hostility to “the canons of formal democracy.” Mike Macnair, for instance, defends the organization’s official plank on this score: “Socialism represents victory in the battle for democracy.” Yet as Chris Cutrone has pointed out, Marx and Engels in fact championed the cause of the proletariat in the battle of democracy [die Erkämpfung der Demokratie], not in the battle for democracy: “Note well that for Marx this was the battle of democracy, which he took to be already established, and not the battle ‘for’ democracy as some yet unattained ideal.”

In one of Ticktin’s earliest articles for the Weekly Worker, he underscored precisely this ambivalence in the Marxian attitude toward democracy. Discussing the lessons of October, he declared:

How far can you have democracy within a civil war, a semi-war, etc.? Obviously in some senses all socialists are democrats, but in some senses socialists are not democrats either. Socialism goes beyond democracy, which is attacked from Marx onwards precisely because it requires a state. We must move beyond formal democracy and towards genuine self-determination, as it were: the freedom of the individual within society. This means that we obviously cannot get what we want while we are struggling. Secondly, capitalism ensures that we cannot have even formal democracy. We know that. We know the nature of elections. While we struggle with them and work with them — because we have to — what we are saying to people is that we want a lot more than this. More real control over society than simply the right to vote every few years.

This means that socialists, just as Lenin and Trotsky did, have an ambivalent attitude towards democracy, because they know the way it is controlled by the capitalist class. This was a necessary feature of what happened between 1917 and 1921. The defense of terror by Trotsky — with the endorsement of Lenin and the leadership of the Bolshevik Party — took place against a background where there was no alternative. You cannot have democracy in the middle of a battle. The kinds of democracy that were actually available were extremely limited. Of course, we have to say that we are in favor of maximum control from below and in principle we are in favor of the working class itself being in control. But if the conditions do not allow it, they do not allow it… It does seem to me that at the present time there is a considerable fetish for formal democracy. We are moving into a period where our struggle will be much bigger, much more important, and we shall have to fight with those people who see democracy in purely formal ways.

Similarly, attempts to resuscitate long-dead slogans about the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which Lenin advanced from roughly 1905 to 1912, are pointless and misguided. “Don’t Revive Absurd Slogans!” counseled Ticktin, responding to Jack Conrad (though also implicitly to Macnair). John Eric Marot has since took Lars Lih to task for asserting in his 2011 biography that “Lenin took a dangerous step when he moved beyond Old Bolshevism’s strategy of democratic revolution alongside the whole peasantry.” Furthermore, Jim Creegan weighed in last year for the centenary: “[Conrad and Lih] would both like to deny that Lenin (and eventually through him the Bolshevik Party) abandoned their earlier concept of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry, and — in deed, if not in word — embraced the theory of permanent revolution elaborated by Trotsky in 1906.”

Personally, I suspect the CPGB’s attachment to this old formula stems from their enthusiasm for Old Bolshevism, especially as contextualized by Lih in his close study of What is to Be Done? This enthusiasm even led Lih to surmise that October 1917 represented something like “the curious triumph of Old Bolshevism,” despite Lenin’s explicit repudiation of its core principles in the April Theses. Incidentally, I think this is why the CPGB disparages State and Revolution and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder: these works undermine the naïve democratism of Lenin’s earlier programmatic text. Ticktin’s Trotskyist orthodoxy insulates him from such revisionist readings, fortunately, as well as from tailing activist fads like the “Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions” campaign with regard to Israel. Here Ticktin is consistent with his own prior opposition to similar measures being taken toward apartheid South Africa, writing in 2007 and 2009:

Much has been made of a comparison [of Israel] with South Africa before 1990… Such a comparison is invalid. The political economy of South Africa was based on the superexploitation of the majority of the population and the so-called black homelands were little more than a propaganda ploy and a means of control over black urban workers. In contrast, Israel has dispossessed the Palestinian population of their land and turned the Israeli state into an exclusive ethnic and religious entity. Nor is it true that the boycott against South Africa caused the South African government to change its attitude. South Africa changed when the US capitalist class decided that it would no longer sustain that country’s racist attitude by lending to the South African state and when it was clear that the opposition had been defeated. It helped that the Communist Party, which effectively controlled the ANC, took an increasingly conservative line. For many, the settlement consecrated with the elections of 1994 was a classic sell-out, in which the majority of the population could gain little if anything. Such has been the result. The standard of living of the majority may even be lower than it was in 1994, while a wealthy black bourgeoisie has formed in association with a growing “middle class.” The point is that boycotts have played a particular class role in the past. While not actually pressurizing change, they propel “elites” to power. It can, however, be different if the boycott is called by trade unions on a trade union basis, calling on trade union members to put forward left-wing demands.

The emergence of a boycott movement will certainly embarrass the Israeli regime, though it is unlikely to have much more of an effect… However, the argument that a boycott of Israel will achieve very much is dubious. In the first instance, the comparison with South Africa is simply wrong. The boycott of South African goods had little or no effect on the Nationalist Party in South Africa or on the supporters of racial discrimination in general. It did not help to change South Africa. That came as a result of the uprisings in South Africa and the decision of the US ruling class to come to a deal over the issue. Many people do not realize that the US was discussing the issue of South Africa in the middle to late 1980s with the Soviet Union in Geneva, or that the US had limited the extension of loans to South Africa.

Unlike many who endorsed the boycott motion, Ticktin further drove home that “the left must come out clearly both against antisemitism and Islamic fundamentalism. It cannot be forgotten that it was the antisemitism of the Arab regimes which drove out around one million Jews from their countries and into Israel [in 1948]. If not for this action, Israel might have had difficulty continuing to exist… Trotsky was… right when he said that in every economic crisis antisemitism grows. As we argued in the last issue, antisemitism has to be condemned and fought wherever it exists and, unfortunately, some of the movers of the [boycott] motion failed to condemn the real antisemitism in Hamas and Hezbollah… Sections of the left have unfortunately abandoned class politics in the Middle East, preferring to go along with Hamas or others of the Palestinian right. They excuse the widespread use of antisemitism.”

On this point, Ticktin’s recent writing reconnects with subjects he explored in decades past. Namely, the widespread antisemitism of the old Soviet Union, which made use of antisemitic tropes and language despite officially disavowing the ideology. “Antisemitism is undoubtedly condemned by Marxism and is hence officially regarded as reprehensible [in the USSR], and there has been no official doctrine of antisemitism, yet the regime has promoted antisemitism since the time of Stalin. Similarly, the regime condemns chauvinism, but it clearly promotes Russian control.” Ticktin investigated these contradictory facets of Soviet reality over the course of the seventies and eighties, even spilling over into the nineties.

Theory of the USSR

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Broadly speaking, Ticktin falls into the “neither-nor” school of Marxian interpreters of the USSR. In other words, he held that the Soviet Union was neither socialist nor capitalist in nature. Rather, he maintained that the mode of production which prevailed within its borders lacked any coherence whatsoever. “The form [of the USSR] is not one of a dominant and subordinate mode of production. On the contrary, it is one of contradictory laws operating throughout every aspect of the society. A system has evolved in which price and the residual forms of value that exist have been subordinated to the interests of the individual or the administration.” Elsewhere, Ticktin explained the difficulties in discerning the “laws of motion” governing such a society: “The problem [of determination] is particularly complex because of the nature of the society, which, not being a mode of production, is at a higher level of contradiction than a mode of production. No general rules of the kind that ‘economics does not determine politics’ can be deduced.”

Significantly, Ticktin nowhere uses the phrase “non-mode of production,” which the Aufheben group coined to characterize his view of the USSR. He grounds this view historically already in a 1974 text: “It appears to me more useful and correct to regard the USSR as a society which historically overthrew capitalism but which then had its own dictatorship of the proletariat removed. The result is the existence of remnants of both formations, creating an economic system of its own kind where survivals are clearly traceable but which also lacks the fundamental drives of both formations. Consequently it possesses a higher level of contradiction than any socioeconomic formation before or since.” Rephrasing this a bit some two decades later, Ticktin wrote:

What I am arguing here is that the USSR is not a viable social formation, that it is not a mode of production, comparable to capitalism or feudalism, as indeed follows from the above discussion; but this does not imply that the USSR will break down tomorrow. On the contrary, the USSR has its own form of limited stability as well as its own form of decay. The USSR is a regime that cannot permit opposition to exist, and hence its decline can only take the form of disintegration of the system. The pulling apart of the poles of the system, so that the social groups, factions, and economic categories each stand in opposing and noncooperating forms, is the form of disintegration. There is no mature form of the USSR. It is an historical accident, an accident brought about through the defeat of the October revolution in the form of the seizure of power by a bureaucratic ruling group. Just as Neanderthal man could never become man, so the USSR can never reform to become socialism or capitalism. It is an unfortunate deviation of history, which is now, under Gorbachev, coming to an end.

Nevertheless, capitalism — that is, the mode of production par excellence — is from the outset global in its logic, even if it is empirically localizable both in terms of its origins in England (after some nonstarters in the Italian city-states and the Low Countries) and eventual spread to Western Europe, the Americas, and the rest of the world. In its spread, some locations may be said to be peripheral to or outside of the sphere of generalized commodity-production, but once it encompasses a virgin territory or opens up a new market its distinctive dynamic takes hold. Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had only begun to develop the social and economic structures characteristic of capitalism, pace Marot, even if these were largely imported from abroad by the tsarist state. Lenin, Trotsky, and their Bolshevik comrades gambled that a revolutionary seizure of power in Russia could provide the “spark” that would then ignite the flames of social revolution throughout Europe.

Obviously, despite uprisings in nearly thirty countries across the world between 1917 and 1923, the revolution stalled out. Encircled and blockaded by hostile powers, the communists beat a temporary retreat, reintroducing limited markets and autonomous civil society during the NEP. Following Trotsky, upholding the classical Marxist outlook, Ticktin doesn’t believe it is possible to ever achieve “socialism in one country.” “Socialism cannot come into existence, qua socialism, as opposed to surrogate forms, usually monstrous forms, until capitalism has effectively been defeated on a world scale,” he writes. Ticktin forgot to add that, absent this defeat, any endeavor to inaugurate transitional measures leading to socialism would be doomed to failure. At best, the measures taken by the USSR after 1929 merely created a temporary zone of exclusion wherein the normal laws of commodity production were suspended for the duration. The USSR was an island lost in a sea of capitalist accumulation, surrounded on all sides, imperfectly quarantined from what went on without.

“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, Potrait 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. Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)
14. 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

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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.

It is fashionable to regard the Manifesto as a brilliant piece of prose by a young Marx before he became an intolerant dogmatist in later years. There is no denying the inspirational style of the document which Marx reshaped out of Engels’ drafts. From its famous opening to its defiant conclusion, the Manifesto was a rallying call to the working class: “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of communism… Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”  This was a time when revolution was threatening the old feudal regimes throughout much of Europe, a time when the working class was already organizing on its own account but not yet in a position to overthrow the rule of capital. But the Manifesto should not be dismissed as a romantic flight of fancy by an over-exuberant young Marx.

Ever since joining the Young Hegelians as a student at Berlin University, Marx had devoted his considerable brainpower to challenging existing institutions and ideas, including religion, philosophy, history, politics and the economic basis of society itself. Underpinning it all was the historical materialist approach which he and Engels worked out as they undermined and went beyond his peers. Like all revolutionary ideas, historical materialism did not spring from nowhere and it is essentially uncomplicated. (In fact, too straightforward for most academic Marxists.) “Before everything else, life involves eating and drinking, habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is, therefore, the production of material life itself.” Starting from this insight the whole of human history appears in a different light. Instead of the actions of “great men,” the power of religious beliefs or the ideas of philosophers being the key to shaping the world, we can see that underlying it all is the class struggle over who controls the production and distribution of life’s necessities. In this light the various civilizations of the past can be understood in terms of how one class in society — the people whose labor produces life’s necessities — are denied ownership or control of the land, raw materials and tools they work with as well as the product of their labor. Much less than a “social contract” the domination of the ruling class is reinforced by laws, religious precepts, military force — in other words, the state.

So far all the epochal changes in history have been the result of the struggle of a rising class to consolidate their economic hold over the means of production by getting control of the state. However, when it comes to the proletariat, the working class, who live by wage labor whose numbers are growing with the expansion of capitalism, “They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” The only way we proletarians can become masters of society at large is by destroying the basis of our exploitation — i.e. capitalism and its wages system — by putting the means of production back into the hands of society as a whole so that everyone can participate in deciding how best to meet human needs. In the process the state, that weapon for securing the domination of one class over everyone else, will fade away as “in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonism, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

The need for political struggle

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There is nothing inevitable about this. Marx’s materialism is far from a religious creed. While it’s true that his later economic studies enabled him to explain capitalism’s inbuilt tendency to crisis and collapse, Marx never argued that capitalism’s economic crisis would in itself lead to communism. On the contrary, precisely because the working class has no property to use to build up its own power within capitalism, the struggle for communism has to be a conscious political struggle where workers as a whole can see the prospect of a different world beyond their day-to-day skirmishes with capital. In other words, the onus is on the communists, those who have the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement to form a distinct political party which will spearhead the struggle.

This is not to say that the communist program was set in stone in 1848. Marxism is nothing if not a method to learn and preserve the lessons from historical experience in order to frame a clear guide for action to the wider working class movement. Marx devoted much of his life to the First International whose members accepted that, “To conquer political power has become the great duty of the working class.” [Marx’s Inaugural Address, November 1864] When it collapsed after the defeat of the Paris Commune the historical calumny is that this was due to Marx’s “statism.” (For the anarchists the need for political struggle was equated with taking over the existing state.) Nothing could be further from the truth. As the International at first accepted: “One thing was especially proved by the Commune, viz., that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” [The Civil War in France; Address of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, written by Marx.]

This is one of the cornerstones of the communist program today but it is not the only issue. Now, when world capitalism is facing a crisis of existence, when the next financial crash is waiting to happen; as more and more proletarians are excluded from ‘the labor market’, when trade wars are already on the agenda and the carnage in Syria is openly presented as a global proxy war … In short, when it is more urgent than ever for the global working class to recognize that they alone hold the possibility of a civilized alternative to capitalist barbarism, the most important lesson we can draw from Marx today is the urgent need to form a political organization which can always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. This party will not be a government in waiting but a guide of the wider class movement which through the communal organizations it creates can alone build a new society.

It is vital that 21^st-century Marxists, who have rejected the old lie that Stalinism = communism, or that state ownership is a step towards communism, should be ready to engage in the urgent political work needed for forming the international revolutionary party. Understanding the falling rate of profit provokes crises, recognizing that beyond hierarchy and elites there is a ruling capitalist class and a working class; investigating the real working and living conditions of today’s wage workers; encouraging workers to resist and organize for themselves: all these are part of today’s communist work. We just need to remind ourselves of the need to create that international political body which understands the line of march of the proletariat as a whole.

Model for a monument to Karl Marx in Moscow by Boris Korolev, 1919

Art as rhetoric

Boris Groys
Particular Cases
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In light of recent discussions about art as knowledge production and the ways art should or could be taught, it seems fitting to look back at the early days of modernism. Avant-garde art was not yet taken for granted then, having instead to be legitimized, interpreted, and taught. One influential example of such a strategy of legitimization is Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911). The book posits an equivalence between art production, art theory, and art teaching, in order to render art rational and scientific, with the aim of establishing it as an academic discipline. Over the course of his artistic career, Kandinsky made various attempts to give an institutional form to his ideas. Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) both the group and the almanac of the same name — can be seen as the first such attempt. Following his return to Russia from Munich at the outbreak of World War I, and especially throughout the postrevolution years, Kandinsky engaged in extensive institutional activity, teaching as a professor at Vkhutemas (Higher Art and Technical Studios, from 1918), as well as founding and directing the Moscow Institute of Artistic Culture (InKhuK, 1920-1921) and GAKhN (State Academy for the Scientific Study of Art, 1921). During his time at the Bauhaus, from his appointment in 1922 until its closure in 1933, he pursued his analysis of art as a science and academic discipline, as reflected in Point and Line to Plane, a theoretical treatise published by the Bauhaus in 1926.

The rigor and determination with which Kandinsky pursued the academicization of art has often been overlooked due to misunderstandings caused by his choice of words. His use of “the spiritual” is a prominent example, since it implies certain religious themes and attitudes that he did not necessarily share. Rather than “the spiritual,” it would be better to speak here of “the affective.” Kandinsky’s book begins with a distinction between art as the representation of eternal reality and art as a means of conveying emotions and moods. Right at the beginning of the book, Kandinsky claims that the representation of external reality leaves us cold as viewers. He describes a typical exhibition of the time:

Animals in sunlight or shadow, drinking, standing in water, lying on the grass; near to, a Crucifixion by a painter who does not believe in Christ; flowers; human figures sitting, standing, walking; often they are naked; many naked women, seen foreshortened from behind; apples and silver dishes. […] The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures “nice” or “splendid.” Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. This condition of art is called “art for art’s sake.”¹

This description clearly shows that what Kandinsky found irritating about naturalist painting was its formalism. When the motif is dictated from outside, all that matters is how it is executed — the formal skill of the artist. Kandinsky opposes this formalist vision of art: only when one has defined what art is can one inquire into the how.

For Kandinsky then, art is a medium for conveying affects. Rather than portraying external facts, art should visualize and transport inner states of mind. Consequently, he makes inner necessity the criterion for evaluating art: a picture is successful if it adequately expresses specific emotions and moods. And if a picture does this, it is of no consequence whether or not it is a faithful rendering of external reality. A picture may be figurative or abstract — what matters is that it uses only those forms and colors needed for the visualization and efficient transmission of certain emotions. The greatest misconception with regard to the notion of inner necessity is that it is often understood in Expressionist terms, as an inner urge compelling the artist to paint this picture and not that one. The most important aspect of the argument is thus overlooked: for Kandinsky, the emotions and moods reside not in the person but in the picture. The ability of the picture to express and transmit certain moods to the viewer has nothing to do with whether or not the artist “actually” experiences the mood in question. Which is why Kandinsky later spoke of inner necessity in more functional terms: it is purely a question of which means an artist considers necessary to infect viewers with a mood, to create an emotion in them. The artist is a specialist in the production and transmission of emotions, not their subject. Looking back, Kandinsky states that “brainwork” needs to “outweigh the intuitive part of creativity” ending, perhaps, with “the total exclusion of ‘inspiration’,” so that future artworks are “created by calculation” alone.²

In this light, it is clear why Kandinsky equated art and art theory: he wanted to develop a visual rhetoric that would be similar to discursive rhetoric. One should not forget that rhetoric was one of the principle academic disciplines. Ever since the early Sophist schools in ancient Greece, there has been an interest in how particular beliefs, views, emotions, and moods can be transmitted to others. This question was(and remains) especially important to lawyers. Before deciding to make a name for himself as a painter, Kandinsky worked as a lawyer. So he knew only too well that the truth of a matter and the way this same truth is communicated are two different things. The communication obeys rules of its own, and it was the rules of art, understood as a visual rhetoric, that Kandinsky sought to reveal through his own art and writing. This task is indeed both artistic and scientific. If an artistic portrayal of affects can be “calculated,” then it can also be taught and learned. All of Kandinsky’s paintings can thus be understood as teaching materials, examples of how visual rhetoric works. This is also the significance of the remarks on the psychological effects of colors and forms that make up the greater part of Concerning the Spiritual in Art. They can be read as prolegomena to the art science of the future, framed as a study of the rules of visual rhetoric.

Like Sophism before it, rhetoric has always been viewed with suspicion on account of its ability to serve evil ends. Which is why Kandinsky repeatedly underlined the artist’s ethical duty to make sure his rhetorical forces serve the good. As history was to show, this warning was not unfounded. During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Alphonse Laurencic, a French artist and architect of Slovenian origin, used the ideas in Concerning the Spiritual in Art to decorate cells at a prison in Barcelona where Francoists captured by the Republicans were held. Each cell looked like an avant-garde art installation. With the compositions of color and form in the cells, Laurencic aimed to cause the prisoners to experience disorientation, depression, and deep sadness. To achieve this, he relied on Kandinsky’s theories of color and form. And prisoners held in these psychotechnic cells really did report extreme negative moods and suffering due to their visual surroundings. One can say, then, that Laurencic had· a better grip on the meaning of Kandinsky’s treatise than many Expressionist-minded artists and art theorists, as he used Kandinsky’s ideas not expressively, but for a purpose — however dubious this purpose may appear in retrospect.

Traditionally, rhetoric has an implacable enemy: the claim to truth. Ever since Plato, it has been asserted that truth has no need of additional rhetoric, being persuasive on the basis of it own immanent evidence. In his first major treatise, Kandinsky claims that the effect of a picture on the viewer does not depend on the artist’s ability to truthfully portray the external world. A picture makes its impact solely thanks to the emotions it produces in the viewer via its composition — i.e., by specific deployment of purely painterly means. Later, Kandinsky was confronted with another, far more radical claim to truth: both the art of the Russian avant-garde (in particular the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich) and geometric abstraction in the West (like that of Piet Mondrian) once more laid claim to pictorial truth. But this time it was not the truth of referentiality, but that of self-referentiality: now, the picture was to explicitly manifest both itself and its medium. Kandinsky’s response was not unlike the strategy he had already developed in Concerning the Spiritual in Art; he wrote Point and Line to Plane as a critique of the new avant-garde dogmatism.

Instead of accepting the geometric constructions of the radical avant-garde as entities that are immediately evident, Kandinsky analyzed their geometric lines and figures as vehicles that transport specific affects. The point, in all of its variations (square, circle, etc.), is thus interpreted not as an elementary self-contained form, but as an element removed from its usual context in writing where it marks a moment of interruption: silence in the middle of speech.³ This meaning remains even when the point is placed on the “basic plane” of the picture. Moreover this independent position of the point, performing an interruption beyond what is usual, is interpreted by Kandinsky as a “useless, revolutionary state of affairs,”⁴ not a neutralization but a radicalization of the usual function of the point. Kandinsky de facto interprets Malevich’s Black Square (1915) — a black square inside a white square — as a symbol of the ultimate silence: death. The straight line, on the other hand, is interpreted as the manifestation of a specific constant force. Kandinsky writes, “The entire field of straight lines is lyric, a fact which can be explained by the effect of a single force from the outside.”⁵

Surprising as it may seem at first, this interpretation of strict geometry that negates its claim to self-evidence then permits Kandinsky to speak of jagged and curved lines as “dramatic” because they give the impression of being influenced by a number of different forces. Thanks to this transition from the lyric to the dramatic, the supposedly self-evident geometric construction is subsumed as a special case under the concept of composition. Once again, the principle of inner necessity prevails: rather than contenting himself with geometric forms alone, the artist must use all forms that allow him to express and convey specific constellations of forces and the corresponding affects.

Kandinsky is especially elegant and persuasive in how he undermines the avant-garde’s claim to address the specific media of the individual arts, in particular the medium of painting (a claim that, after World War II, was to extend far beyond these avant-garde beginnings, thanks especially to Clement Greenberg’s championing of the “flatness” of the “modern picture”). But Kandinsky shows that one can only speak meaningfully about the medium of the canvas if this basic plane is understood as infinite, or at least of indeterminate size. The basic plane of any individual painting however only ever has a single finite configuration, a specific form with its own expressive force, being limited by two vertical and two horizontal borders that are “lyric.”⁶ Moreover, the picture plane may be shaped like a square or dominated more by horizontal and vertical borders. Each of these configurations of the picture plane has a specific mood-generating effect. This critique of the usual concept of the medium, or the mediality of the medium, is indeed a profound and radical one. The medium only becomes the message if the medium is infinite — which it can never be. As something finite, the medium is subject to its respective particular form.

Kandinsky practiced his critique of art’s claim to truth in the name of a visual rhetoric understood as a positive science. This visual rhetoric aimed to study the artistic means that transport specific affects — with the goal of accurately calculating the emotional impact of art. But like discursive rhetoric before it, whose failure led to its demise as an academic discipline, visual rhetoric was not destined to last. Nonetheless, Kandinsky has shown that every artistic form is emotionally charged and thus also manipulative. There is no such thing as pure, autonomous, self-referential, and totally transparent art. For Kandinsky, behind all art there reigns a dark force that manipulates the viewer’s emotions. The role of the artist consists in taking control of this force — which can only be achieved partially. But at least the artist is capable of exploring the workings of this force — and thus focusing attention on it as such. Kandinsky’s visual theory remains just as relevant as it was in his day — however, not as a positive science, but as a critical analysis of art’s claim to truth.

Notes

¹ Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1977), 3.
² Cited in Max Bill, introduction to Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern: Benteli Verlag, 1952), 10-11 (trans. Nicholas Grindell).
³ Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1979), 25.
⁴ Ibid., 28.
⁵ Ibid., 67.
⁶ Ibid., 129.

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My introduction to Ivan Segré’s polemical review of Whites, Jews, and Us (2016), by Houria Bouteldja, follows below. The full review, translated by Ann Manov, can be read over at the LA Review of Books. Be sure to check it out; it’s long but excellent.

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Houria Bouteldja is a controversial figure in France. She is the spokeswoman of the Parti des indigènes de la République (PIR), a group (and now political party) founded in the wake of the 2005 Paris riots to promote decolonial politics, a “third way” beyond divisions of left and right. Decolonial theory originated as a discursive framework among Latin American academics during the early 2000s, but soon spread to other parts of the world. Unlike postcolonial theory, with which it is often confused, the premise here is that one cannot speak of life today as “after” colonialism. For the PIR, despite the collapse of Europe’s overseas colonies, “decolonization has yet to be finished” (as Bouteldja told Saïd Mekki in a 2009 interview). In 2012, Bouteldja described their outlook to a Madrid audience as more of a mentalité: “Being decolonial is above all an emancipated state of mind.” The PIR’s position on this count clearly echoes the work of Frantz Fanon (among others), whose writings are frequently referenced in Bouteldja’s own.

Long before the release of Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous in 2016, Bouteldja was already known to the French public for her incendiary statements. Her book-length debut — a poetic, almost literary text, more manifesto than treatise — continues in this vein. Bouteldja opens with a chapter entitled “Shoot Sartre!”, a common refrain heard from pro-colonial French nationalists during the war in Algeria. She provocatively appropriates the refrain, not because she agrees Sartre should have been shot for supporting Algerian independence, of course, but to criticize his continued support of Israeli independence after 1967. Instead, she claims as a “hero” of decolonial politics former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom Bouteldja praises, with some reluctance, for declaring “there are no homosexuals in Iran” at Columbia University in 2007 — in other words: “at the heart of empire.” She takes the risk of admiring the statement’s provocation, even if she also explicitly recognizes that Ahmadinejad was lying. But in him, she sees “an arrogant indigenous man” speaking up to the West, something Sartre was ultimately — when it came to the issue of Zionism — unable to do. For very different reasons having to do with history and the discourses of sexuality in the West and the Middle East, Joseph Massad, a professor at Columbia, reached a conclusion similar to Ahmadinejad’s a year before in Desiring Arabs, a work Bouteldja cited in her 2013 critique of “gay universalism.” Evidently, avoiding the charge of homophobia is not a priority for Bouteldja. The more important, more fundamental issue (“the only real question,” as she puts it) is the oppressed status of the indigenous. In a chapter titled “We, Indigenous Women,” Bouteldja considers the risk of indigenous masculinity imitating white male masculinity, and asks instead “which part, in the testosterone-laden virility of the indigenous male, resists white domination.” That part can be used, she suggests, “toward a project of common liberation.”

Reviews of Bouteldja’s book in France have been unsparing. Ariane Pérez excoriates its celebration of family, race, virility, and religion as reminiscent of the anti-Dreyfusard Édouard Drumont, as well as the suggestion that indigenous women remain “loyal Penelopes” to indigenous men (a suggestion that arrives, one should add, as part of the paragraphs criticizing the ways in which indigenous masculinity imitates white masculinity in response to the West’s attempt to decimate non-Western masculinity, thus making the colonial project on this count come “full circle”). Pérez reminds readers that Stalin often disguised his antisemitism as anti-Zionism, a comparison Bouteldja invited by posing, two thumbs up, next to the graffiti’d slogan “SIONISTES AU GOULAG — PEACE — (mais Goulag quand même).” Roland Simon of Théorie Communiste dubs Bouteldja and the PIR “entrepreneurs of racialization,” declaring: “Critique must be uncompromising on these issues: tactical homophobia, latent antisemitism, sympathizing with pro-Saddam elements during the Gulf War, scrapping women’s struggles (‘for the moment’), etc.” Malika Amaouche, Yasmine Kateb, and Léa Nicolas-Teboul likewise take Bouteldja to task in their materialist theorization of race for identifying Israel with “the Jews.” What to make of those responses, which Bouteldja largely anticipates in her book and recurrently marks as the “traps” of Western thinking into which the liberal (as well as the more radical) left will all too quickly step? Another review, signed by “the friends of Juliette and the spring,” faults La Fabrique editor Eric Hazan for publishing this “right-wing pamphlet.” Hazan and others have since signed a letter intended to counter some of these charges.

Translated here is Ivan Segré’s polemical review of Bouteldja’s book. Previously, Hazan’s publishing house had put out a couple works by Segré, a longtime critic of Israel. Segré’s pamphlet The Philosemitic Reaction: Treason of the Intellectuals came out in 2011, subsequently rendered into English by David Fernbach for a 2013 Verso collection along with a piece by Hazan and the philosopher Alain Badiou. David Broder did the translation of Spinoza: The Ethics of an Outlaw for Bloomsbury in 2017, three years after it appeared under the imprimatur of La Fabrique. Hazan must have expected glowing praise for the new title by Bouteldja from his own in-house reviewer. Yet something clearly did not sit right with Segré about the decision to print Whites, Jews, and Us. For his efforts, Segré was attacked as “an Israeli Camus” in the official organ of the PIR, essentially a turncoat. “I cannot explain his reversal,” lamented Hazan in a rejoinder.

While Rachel Valinsky’s English translation of Bouteldja’s book, Whites, Jews, and Us (Semiotext(e), 2017), has so far failed to generate the same buzz in the United States as it did in France, it was reviewed by Ben Ratskoff in LARB and was the subject of a scholarly roundtable featuring Jared Sexton, Yassir Morsi, Joshua Dubler, Nazia Kazi, Gil Anidjar, and Su’ad Abdul Khabeer for Immanent Frame. The American (US) philosopher Cornel West’s brief preface, which comes to a little over two pages, lends the book his authority as a respected antiracist activist and intellectual. It is to all of those conversations that the translation of Segré’s review will hopefully contribute.

— Ross Wolfe
August 2018

Saturday, 7-10 PM
November 24, 2018

The Base, 1302 Myrtle Avenue
Brooklyn, New York 11221
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Facebook event page

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Pavlos Roufos presents his new book A Happy Future is a Thing of the Past: The Greek Crisis and other Disasters, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail. Setting the 2010 Greek economic crisis in its historical context, Roufos explores the creation of the Eurozone, its “glorious” years, and today’s political threats to its existence. By interweaving stories of individual people’s lived experiences and describing in detail the politicians, policies, personalities, and events at the heart of the collapse, he situates its development both in terms of the particularities of the Greek economy and the overall architecture of Europe’s monetary union.

With both austerity and debt burdens still present, Pavlos answers the question: If the programs were doomed to fail from the start, as many claim, what were the real objectives of such devastating austerity? This broad examination also illuminates the social movements that emerged in Greece in response to the crisis, unpacking what both the crisis managers and many of their critics presented as a given: that a happy future is a thing of the past.

A careful and penetrating analysis of the cruel torment of Greece, and its background in the emerging global political economy, as the regimented capitalism of the early postwar period, with gains for much of the population, has been subjected to the assault of neoliberal globalization, with grim effects and threatening consequences.

— Noam Chomsky

This presentation is sponsored by Prometeo collective. You can read an excerpt from Chapter 6: Years of Stone, pp. 96-102, below.
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A happy future is a thing of the past
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Reaktion Books | UChicago Press | Amazon

The beach beneath

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The movement that began in Syntagma Square in late May 2011 and very soon spread out to squares all over Greece (thus gaining the nickname “squares movement”), represented one of the most condensed moments of the struggle against the crisis, its consequences and management. Many have argued that it did not have a specific aim or demand; according to one’s politics, this observation had either a negative or a positive undertone. However, there can be no doubt whatsoever that the masses that took to the streets, occupied public spaces and fought for almost two months to defend them, were directly concerned with putting an end to the austerity policies that were underway. And these policies, as we have seen, were nothing but a systematic attempt to render people’s ability to survive in a way that was meaningful to them increasingly difficult.

Despite the fact that the first call to gather at Syntagma Square came from an unknown Facebook account, 30,000 people showed up on the first night. Within one week, the number would exceed 200,000. Contrary to the tense moments of strikes and demonstrations, the crowds at Syntagma spent the first few days starting up conversations, debating burning topics, exchanging life stories. The atmosphere was one of enthusiasm, surprise and hyped expectations. As political organizations and other institutions were busy trying to decode and categorize the meaning of this novelty, people enjoyed the moments away from wannabe leaders and arrogant experts, eager to discover in each other the potential for disrupting a process that had disrupted their lives. Contrary to most descriptions, usually from people who were not there, Syntagma Square had no clear dividing lines (such as the infamous top and bottom square divide): as at any festival or large social gathering, people moved interchangeably from one spot to another, savoring their friends’ company, meeting new people, flirting insatiably, taking part in the assembly or having a laugh at parliament and its guards.

Perhaps due to this joyous context, the people in the square had no trouble in identifying their enemies: politicians and political parties that were displaying their commitment to austerity; smaller political parties, groups and organizations that, just like advertising agencies, were, above all, concerned with attracting new customers for their commodity/ideology; the mass media, whose aim was to present (and consolidate) austerity as necessary; the bosses, whose pursuit of profit made them more than willing to celebrate the restructuring process as a means of further reducing labour costs; the trade unions, identified as being the mediation between capital and labour power on the side of capital and its political representatives. On top of that, the Syntagma occupation was, from its inception, a place where racism and the xenophobic sentiments that had forcefully appeared shortly before were not tolerated.

What is particularly of interest in relation to the Syntagma movement was that large parts of the established Left, its various groupuscules and even some more radical corners exclaimed an immediate negative reaction to its outbreak that could also be described as Pavlovian. For some, this was somewhat understandable: left-wing groupings that can only sustain any sense of coherence by force-feeding their identity on others (selling papers, collecting signatures, waving their distinguishable flags and memorabilia) were either ignored or forced to leave. In fact, it was mostly those of the established Left who saw in this movement a chance for increasing their voters’ clientele and were strategic enough to hide their political membership, such as Syriza members, who remained there. As far as the more radical milieu was concerned, their reaction can only be explained as the concentrated result of years of marginalization or isolation and echo-chamber comfort.

In their case, the creation of an identity of radicalism by way of excluding the “reformist” or “passive” majority rendered them incapable of understanding that their abstract propagation of social uprisings or even revolution necessitates an interaction and coexistence with this very majority and all its contradictions. This is precisely the difference between a political movement (one that is created and sustained through a network of shared political ideas) and a social movement (one that brings people together on the basis of their social position and not their  ideology or morals). To the extent that the austerity measures were directly attacking people’s social existence as proletarians or proletarianized, the Syntagma mobilization was a formidable opportunity to engage in and explore the potentials and limitations of class antagonism in Greek society as it is and not as people would like or imagine it to be. However likely it might have been that these struggles would be riddled with contradictions and problems, this is not a matter of choice. A leap into the open air of history is not accompanied by invitations for “friends/comrades-only.” Rather, it is only through direct engagement that a movement’s contradictions and even reactionary tendencies could be identified and fought against; and it was only by trying to be clear and honest about its content and character that its real limitations and potentials could be explored. At the end of the day, presenting the squares movement as something that it was not has essentially mystified its eventual failure to prevent austerity and this is, among other things, a heavy burden for future movements.

Who’s afraid of antipolitics?

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It has been a monotonous battle cry of the established Left of the last decades to proclaim their indignation against what they term the “disappearance of politics.” Taking a cue from the portrayal of “neoliberalism” as the process of the domination of technocratic and ruthless market forces against “democratic procedures,” the Left has consistently proclaimed the erosion of democracy as one of the fundamental problems of our times. In this respect, it came as no surprise that many of the Left who participated in the squares movement were shocked (or even disgusted) at the antipolitical tendencies present.

One does not need to be a particularly acute observer, however, to draw the obvious conclusion that when the Left speaks of struggles, its primary concern is how to put itself in a position to lead and control them. For such a mediation to be effective, the necessity of political separation is crucial: in other words, the necessity of recognizing the importance of experts, intellectuals, leaders or the fetish of organization. It is true that, as of late, a certain “horizontal” structure is proclaimed by many to be the preferable configuration, but the lack of content of this catchphrase makes it a rather elusive category. In this context, the Left’s attitude towards the squares movement was not merely the result of their self-important preoccupations. It was, at the same time, the direct result of the extensive damage that had been inflicted on politics during the crisis, the obvious delegitimization of common political processes. Thus, and while many on the Left applauded the denunciation of the official political class, the mass media and, obviously with less vigor, the trade unions, they shivered when confronted with an understanding that this rejection also included them. Thus when the popular assembly of Syntagma included suggestions such as excluding national symbols, flags, political parties and organizations, many organized political activists felt — rightly so — that their role was being undermined.

Left-wing parties or organizations have certain advantages during social explosions. They have better access to infrastructural resources (money for posters, megaphone installations, computers), as well as a steady supply of members whose function is to promote a specific party line in a condensed and calculated manner, hoping to exert enough influence and direct popular anger towards their own ends, usually parliamentary. But social uprisings are not merely technical matters: having control of the megaphones or producing tonnes of banners and posters does not, in itself, change a given social dynamic, nor can it easily distract people from the real reasons that bring them to the streets. In Syntagma’s context, the attempts of the Left (and primarily Syriza) to take control of the narrative by dominating the assembly, or the smaller working groups, brought them up against not simply those who opposed their ideas politically but the fact that their approach and proposals appeared irrelevant to the practical necessities of the square. Thus while there is no doubt that Syriza members tried to control discussions during the assemblies by positioning themselves in key positions of the ‘organizing committee’, they were hardly as successful as people have claimed in retrospect.

It was not only the fact that some of their members were not yet particularly experienced manipulators that proved an obstacle to their goals; more often it was, in fact, the honest portrayal of their vision that alienated people. For example, Syriza members tried to set the tone of the political discussions in the square by organizing one of the most boring events in the square’s history: not only was the setting itself in sharp contrast to the usual atmosphere of the square (using a large table for the expert speakers, and chairs for the audience, they reproduced the formal structure of a lecture), but the speakers, apparently convinced they were speaking to idiots, spurted out endless banalities for hours. The official purpose of this grandiose production was to act as the starting point for a campaign that would declare part of the public debt as odious and therefore refrain from paying it, a vision close to Syriza’s aspirations but mostly irrelevant to those who participated in the mobilizations. Though the event was tolerated, in the same way that Syriza was tolerated, it hardly influenced any debates.

Nonetheless, while the immediate instincts of participants in Syntagma worked against recuperative attempts, a major limit of the squares mobilization was that its antipolitical form did not generate a similar content. Politics, as a separate and separating sphere of activity, is not only to be found in parliament and/or the official organizations and groupings of the Left. It is, above all, a structurally embedded belief in a certain process, historically grounded on existing social relations. Thus, and though the squares movement included the formal rejection of political processes (opting for “direct democracy,” another fashionable phrase empty of real content), it had nothing to say against informal processes. The rejection of traditional political practices was thus replaced by a fetishism of procedure, whose aspiration to radicalism was confined to the promise that all voices would be heard. As a result, while rightfully rejecting the lectures of “experts,” the square ended up pointlessly glorifying the monologues of “non-experts.” The ensuing “succession of monologues” might have been inspiring in its rejection of the usual, hopelessly gendered, professionalism that one comes across in these cases, but it ended up being a barrier to the practical necessities of the movement, as it became increasingly difficult to reach any decision that could act as a real barrier to the ongoing austerity. What remained was the illusion that words (whether angry, confused or heartfelt) could play a role in halting a process of economic restructuring.

The helplessness felt vis-à-vis the implementation of austerity was eventually compensated by a fetishistic enthusiasm over “participation.” Claiming its rightful spot in the catalogue of meaningless catchphrases of our times, “participation” is only capable of describing a “being-there,” while having nothing to say about the content of what one is doing. In the end, as is often the case with fetishism, the term came to mean its opposite: doing nothing while being there. Instead of using this truth (being there) as a starting point for specific actions, a large contingency of the movement felt it was enough to merely declare their presence and moral superiority over those who were deciding their fate in order for economic restructuring to stop. Not surprisingly, it did not.

Goldner on Elbaum

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Commune has a new review out of the 2018 reissue of Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air, which recounts the trials and travails of the New Communist Movement in the US. Written by Colleen Lye, “Maoism in the Air” is very sympathetic to the book’s central thesis: namely, that three distinct strands of American Maoism (Cultural Revolutionary, Third World nationalism, and orthodox Marxism-Leninism) shaped the politics of the post-’68 generation in a novel and generally beneficial way. Lye even goes a step further than Elbaum, remarking on the NCM’s institutional legacy that “today’s academic field of critical ethnic studies might well be described as a space where anti-racism and anti-imperialism continue, in a different key and perhaps even unknowingly, the Marxist-Leninism of the ’68 generation.”

She may well be right about this, but I hardly think this is a legacy to be proud of. Usually the so-called “long march through the institutions” is seen as a political defeat held up as an intellectual victory. Marxism’s relegation to the academy is a sign of its neutralization, in other words. I can only speak to the field of Jewish Studies, which is what I’m most familiar with, but for the most part I find it a useless discipline — despite my persistent interest in the history of Jews. Regardless, I was somewhat surprised to see such a positive review of Elbaum’s book in the pages of Commune, a magazine that I am very excited about. (For any readers who haven’t already, I encourage you to check out Jay Firestone’s ethnographic survey of alt-Right NYC and Paul Mattick’s outstanding piece on the centenary of the German Revolution.)

Admittedly, I’ve never understood the appeal of Maoism for American communists, either in the seventies or today. Perhaps it possessed some exotic aura back then, or was maybe just a dope aesthetic. Either way, the theory and practice of the Chinese brand of Stalinism ought to have been long discredited by now. Virtually all of the national liberation movements that were supposed to destabilize global capitalism and pave the way for international socialist revolution have been seamlessly reintegrated into the world of commodities. Nowadays, of course, there is the added association of Maoist ideas with the Black Panther Party, which is still celebrated as a high point in the history of revolutionary politics in the US. How much of this is simply mythologization after the fact is difficult to say, but it was certainly influential.

But even in light of this association, the attraction of Maoism is difficult to grasp. It was recently revealed, in fact, that the person who introduced the Black Panthers to the writings of Mao was an FBI snitch. Richard Aoki, the Berkeley radical and leader of the ethnic studies strike, informed his Bureau contact: “The Maoist twist, I kind of threw that one in. I said so far the most advanced Marxists I have run across are the Maoists in China.” Despite this ideological straightjacket, BPP spokesmen like Fred Hampton were able to say fairly interesting things (all this before he was gunned down in Chicago at the age of 21). While it gave Hampton the perspective he needed to denounce the empty culturalism of Stokely Carmichael, whom he referred to as a “mini-fascist,” it otherwise limited the Panthers’ scope of inquiry into capitalist society.

Loren Goldner’s review, lightly edited and reproduced below, provides a much-needed corrective to the laudatory reception Revolution in the Air has met with so far. Goldner grounds his critique of Elbaum in the left communist and heterodox Trotskyist tradition he belonged to at the time, even though he likewise went to Berkeley and knew many of the same characters. Other Maoists, such as Paul Saba, have gently criticized Elbaum’s book over the last few months. Saba contends that the main fault of the NCM — of which he was also a veteran — was its theoretical poverty, and that it might have benefited from a more sophisticated Althusserian-Bettelheimian viewpoint. Quite the opposite holds for Goldner: the New Communist Movement was wrongheaded from the start.

You can read a 2010 interview with Elbaum by clicking on the link, but otherwise enjoy Goldner’s blistering review. Maoism may still be “in the air,” as Lye contends, if the various Red Guard formations are any indication. According to Goldner, however, it might be in the air the same way smog and other pathogens are.

Didn’t see the same movie

Loren Goldner
August 2003

Review of Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che. London/New York, Verso, 2002.

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The sleep of dialectical reason will engender monsters.

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Without exactly setting out to do so, Max Elbaum in his book Revolution In The Air, has managed to demonstrate the existence of progress in human history, namely in the decline and disappearance of the grotesque Stalinist/Maoist/“Third World Marxist” and Marxist-Leninist groups and ideologies he presents, under the rubric New Communist Movement, as the creations of pretty much the “best and the brightest” coming out of the American 1960s.

Who controls the past, Orwell said, controls the future. Read at a certain level, Elbaum’s book ( describing a mental universe that in many respects out-Orwells Orwell), aims, through extended self-criticism, to jettison 99% of what “Third World Marxism” stood for in its 1970s heyday, in order to salvage the 1% of further muddled “progressive politics” for the future, particularly where the Democratic Party and the unions are concerned, preparing “progressive” forces to paint a new face on the capitalist system after the neoliberal phase has shot its bolt.

I lived through the 1960s too, in Berkeley of all places. I was in an anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialist milieu (then called Independent Socialist Clubs, which by the late 1970s had spawned eight different offshoots) a milieu the author identifies with “Eurocentric”Marxism. We argued that every state in the world from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to North Vietnam and North Korea, by way of Albania, was a class society, and should be overthrown by working-class revolution. We said the same thing about all the Third World “national liberation movements” and states resulting from them, such as Algeria, and those in the then-Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau). We were dead right, and Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists,” who cheerleaded most or all of them, were dead wrong. This is now clear as day for all with eyes to see. We based our perspective on realities that did and do not to this day exist for Elbaum and his friends: the question of whether the Russian Revolution died in 1921 (Kronstadt) or 1927 (defeat of the Left Opposition). In Elbaum’s milieu, the choice was between 1953 (death of Stalin) and 1956 (Khruschev’s speech to the Twentieth Party Congress). “Eurocentrics” that we were, we took note of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous China policy in 1927 (which Mao Tse-tung at the time had criticized from the right); of Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Third Period policy and its results in Germany (above all), but also throughout the colonial world (e.g. the 1930 “Communes” in Vietnam and China). We critiqued Stalin’s treacherous and disastrous Popular Front policy, which led to a mutual defense pact with France, the reining in of the French mass strike of May-June 1936, and above all to the crushing of the anarchists and Trotskyists (and with them the Spanish Revolution as a whole) in Barcelona in May 1937 (it also led to the abandonment of anticolonial agitation by the Vietnamese and Algerian Communist Parties in the name of “antifascism”). We were disturbed by the Moscow Trials, whereby 105 of 110 members of Lenin’s 1917 central committee were assassinated, and by the Stalin-Hitler pact, through which Stalin handed over to the Gestapo dissident factions of the German Communist Party who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, We read about Elbaum’s one-time hero Ho Chi Minh, who engineered the massacre of thousands of Vietnamese Trotskyists in 1945 when they advocated (with a real working-class base) armed resistance to the return of English and French troops there after World War II (Ho received them warmly under the auspices of the Yalta agreement, wherein Uncle Joe had consented to further French rule in Indochina). Stalin had done the same for Greece, where again the Trotskyists were slaughtered while pushing for revolution, and in western Europe, where the French and Italian resistance movements were disarmed and sent home by their respective Communist Parties. We studied the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953, and the Hungarian Revolution (and Polish worker unrest) of 1956; we distributed the brilliant Open Letter to the Polish Workers’ Party (1965) of Kuron and Modzelewski. We were heartened by the Polish worker uprising in Gdansk and Gdynia in December 1970, which arguably heralded (through its 1980-81 expansion) the end of the Soviet empire. Elbaum mentions none of these post-1945 worker revolts against Stalinism, which were undoubtedly too “Eurocentric” for him — they did after all take place in Europe — assuming he heard about them. At the time, he and his milieu would have undoubtedly described them as revolts against “revisionism.”

From 1970 onward I moved into the broader, more diffuse anti-Stalinist milieu in the Bay Area. We read Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; we discovered Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, and the Situationists; we saw Chile’s 1970-1973 Popular Front once again crushed by the same collaborationist policies which Elbaum’s Stalinist lineage had first perfected in France and Spain in 1936, and unlike Elbaum and his friends, we were hardly startled when the Chinese Communist Party embraced Pinochet. It had not escaped our ‘Eurocentric” attention that China itself had pushed the Indonesian Communist Party to adopt the same Popular Front strategy in 1965, leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands (a success for US imperialism that more than offset the later defeat in Indochina), or that it had applauded when the Ceylonese regime (today Sri Lanka) bloodily repressed its Trotskyist student movement in 1971. We were similarly not shaken, like Elbaum and his friends, when China went on to support the South African intervention against the MPLA in Angola, or call for the strengthening of NATO against Soviet “social imperialism,” or support the right-wing regroupment against the Communist-influenced Armed Forces Movement in Portugal in 1974-1975. We “Eurocentrists” snapped up the writings of Simon Leys, the French Sinologist, documenting the crushing of the Shanghai proletariat by the People’s Liberation Army in the course of the ‘Cultural Revolution,” the latter lasting from 1966 to 1976. Elbaum and his friends were at the same time presenting this battle between two wings of the most elephantine bureaucracy of modern times, as a brilliant success in “putting politics in command” against the capitalist restorationists, technocrats, and intellectuals, and burning Beethoven for good measure. All of these writings of Chinese Stalinism struck us more as the second-time farce to the first-time tragedy of the worldwide ravages of Soviet Stalinism from the 1920s onward. Elbaum and his friends cheered on Pol Pot’s rustification campaign in Cambodia, in which one million people died; no sooner had they digested the post-1976 developments in China after Mao’s death (the arrest and vilification of the Gang of Four, the completion of the turn to the U.S. in an anti-Soviet alliance) when, in 1979, after Vietnam occupied Cambodia to depose the Khmer Rouge, China attacked Vietnam, and the Soviet Union prepared to attack China. How difficult, in those days, to be a “Third World Marxist”!

We had been shaped by the worldwide renaissance of Marxism set in motion by the serious diffusion of the “early Marx” and the growing awareness of the Hegelian dimension of the “late Marx” in the Grundrisse, Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. We leapt upon the “Unpublished Sixth Chapter” of vol. I of Capital as demonstrating the essential continuity of the “early” and “late” Marx (though we did not yet know Marx’s writings on the Russian mir and the ethnographic notebooks, which drew an even sharper line between a truly “late Marx” and all the bowdlerized productivist versions coming from the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals). A familiarity with any of these currents put paid to the ‘diamat” world view and texts which were the standard fare of Elbaum’s world. It was of course “Eurocentric” to rethink Marx and official Marxism through this new, unexplored continent, “not Eurocentric” to absorb Marx through the luminosity of Stalin, Beria, and Hoxha. The Marx who had written extensive journalism on India and China from the 1840s onward may have been “Eurocentric” but the braindead articles emanating from the Peking Review about the “three goods” and the “four bads” were, for these people, decidedly not.

Rosa Luxemburg and everything she stood for (including her memorable writings — no doubt “Eurocentric” — on primitive accumulation in the colonial world and her rich material on precapitalist societies everywhere in Einführung in die Nationalökonomie) meant nothing to these people. Her critiques of Lenin, in the earliest months of the Russian Revolution (not to mention before 1914), and of the right to national self-determination, did not exist. Elbaum and his friends were not interested in the revolutionaries who had criticized Lenin during the latter’s lifetime (or at any point), and they remained blissfully unaware of Bordiga, Gorter, and Pannekoek. The philosophical critiques of Korsch and Lukács similarly meant nothing to them. They never heard of the 1940s and 1950s CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, the early Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, the French group Socialism or Barbarism, Paul Mattick Sr., Maximilien Rubel, the Italian workerists, Ernst Bloch, or Walter Benjamin. They seriously argued for the aesthetics of China’s four “revolutionary operas” and songs such as “The Mountain Brigade Hails The Arrival of the Night Soil Carriers” while the serious Marxist world was discovering the Frankfurt School (whatever the latter’s limitations) and Guy Debord.

Then there was the influence of “Monthly Review” magazine and publishers. Baran and Sweezy had migrated from the Soviet Union to various Third World “anti-imperialists” to China; they were infused with the “Bandung” climate of 1955 and the brief moment of the Soviet-Chinese-neutralist “anti-imperialist” bloc. Names such as Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah loomed large in this mindset, as did the later “Tricontinental” (Latin America-Africa-Asia) consciousness promoted by Cuba and Algeria. The 1966 book of Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, (which, years into the crisis of the Bretton Woods system, did not even mention credit) became a major theoretical reference for this crowd. This was supplemented by international names such as Samir Amin, Charles Bettelheim, Arghiri Emanuel, and the South American “dependency school” (Cardoso, Prebisch, et al.). But the lynchpin was Lenin’s theory of imperialism, with its idea of “imperialist superprofits” making possible the support of a “labor aristocracy” and thereby the reformism of the Western working class, against which this whole world view was ultimately aimed. Even today, after everything that has discredited Sweezy’s economics, Elbaum still uses “monopoly capital” as one of his many unexamined concepts.

Because in the world of Elbaum and his friends, while the reading of Capital may have been on the agenda of many study groups (in reality, in most cases, the study of Volume I, which is tantamount to reading Hegel’s Phenomenology only on the initial phase of “sense certainty” of English empiricism and skepticism), it was far more (as he says) the pamphlets of Lenin, or if the truth be known, of Stalin, Beria, Mao, Ho and Hoxha which were the main fare. (My favorite was Beria’s “On The History of Bolshevik Organization in the Transcaucasus,” reprinted ca. 1975 by some long-defunct Marxist-Leninist publisher.) Elbaum is honest, in retrospect: “the publishing houses of the main New Communist organizations issued almost nothing that remains of value to serious left researchers and scholars.” He might have added that it wasn’t worth reading at the time, either, except to (briefly) experience ideology run amok. Whereas for the political world I inhabited, the question was the recovery of soviets and workers’ councils for direct democratic worker control of the entirety of production (a perspective having its own limits, but far more interesting ones), by Elbaum’s own account the vision of the socialist society in Marxist-Leninist circles was rarely discussed beyond ritual bows to the various Third World models, today utterly discredited, or the invocation of the “socialism in one rural commune” of William Hinton’s Fanshen, or the writings on Viet Cong “democracy” by the indefatigable Wilfred Burchett (who had also written lyrically about Stalin’s Russia 30 years earlier). The real Marxian project of the abolition of the law of value, (i.e. the regimentation of social life by the socially necessary time of reproduction), existed for virtually no one in the 1960s, not for Elbaum, nor for me. But the Monthly Review/monopoly capital world view, in which capitalism was understood not as a valorization process but as a quasi-Dühringian system ultimately of power and domination, meshed perfectly with the (in reality) populist world view of Elbaum et al. Through Baran and Sweezy a kind of left-wing Keynesianism pervaded this part of the Left, relegating the law of value to the capitalism of Marx’s time and (following Lenin) seeing everything since the 1890s as power-political “monopoly capital.” This “anti-imperialism” was and is in reality an ideology of Third World elites, in or out of power, and is fundamentally anti-working class, like all the “progressive” regimes they have ever established. It did not trouble Elbaum and his milieu that the role of the Third World in international trade had been declining through from 1900 to the 1960s, or that 80% of all direct foreign investment takes places between the three major capitalist centers of the US, Europe, and East Asia (so much for Lenin’s theory of imperialism); the illusory prosperity of the West, in their view, was paid for by the looting of the Third World (and, make no mistake, the Third World was and is being looted). The ultimate implication of this outlook was, once again, to implicate the “white” (e.g. Eurocentric) working class of the West in the world imperialist system, in the name of illusory bureaucratic-peasant utopias of labor-intensive agriculture. This working class in the advanced capitalists countries had meanwhile, from 1955 to 1973, carried out the mounting wildcat insurgency in the US and Britain, May 1968 in France and the “creeping May” of 1969-1977 in Italy, apparently not having been informed by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists” that they were bought off by imperialism.

A number of unexamined concepts run through Elbaum’s book from beginning to end: revisionism, antirevisionism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, ultraleftism. Elbaum never explains that “revisionism” meant to this milieu above all the ideological demotion of Stalin after 1953, and that therefore those who called themselves “antirevisionists” were identifying, implicitly or explicitly (usually the latter) Stalin’s Russia with some betrayed “Marxist orthodoxy.” In his counterposition of “revisionism/antirevisionism” Elbaum does not devote one line to the consolidation, in 1924, of the grotesque concept of “socialism in one country,” a concept that would have made Lenin (whatever his other problems) wretch. (Not for nothing had Lenin’s Testament called for Stalin’s removal as General Secretary, another “fact” that counted for nothing in the mental universe of “Third World Marxism.”) For someone who is writing about it on every page, Elbaum has, in fact, no real theory of Stalinism whatsoever. Whereas the milieu I frequented stayed up late trying to determine if the seeds of Stalinism were in Leninism, Elbaum and his friends saw mainly or entirely an unproblematic continuity between Lenin and Stalin, and affirmed it. As for “Marxism-Leninism,” Elbaum does admit that it was a concoction of Stalin.  In its subsequent career “Marxism-Leninism” could mean anything to anyone, anything of course except the power of soviets and workers’ councils which in every failed proletarian revolution of the twentieth century  (Russia 1905 and 1917-1921, Germany 1918-1921, Spain 1936-1937, Hungary 1956, France 1968) had more genuine communist elements than all the large and small totalitarians in Elbaum’s “Third World Marxist” pantheon put together.

“Ultraleftism” for Elbaum means little self-appointed vanguards running amok and demarcating themselves from real movements. Elbaum seems quite unaware of the true historic ultraleft. One can agree or disagree with [Anton] Pannekoek (whose mass strike writings influenced Lenin’s State and Revolution), [Herman] Gorter (who told Lenin in 1921 that the Russian revolutionary model did not could not be mechanically transposed onto western Europe) or [Amadeo] Bordiga, who called Stalin the gravedigger of the revolution to his face in 1926 and lived to tell the tale. But such people and the genuine mass movements (in Germany, Holland, and Italy) that produced them are a noble tradition which hardly deserves to be confused rhetorically with the thuggish antics of the (happily defunct) League for Proletarian Socialism (the latter name being a true contradictio in adjecto, inadvertently revealing bureaucratic dreams: Marxian socialism means the abolition of wage-labor and hence of the “proletariat” as the commodity form of human labor-power). As indicated above, figures such as [Karl] Korsch, [Paul] Mattick, [Cornelius] Castoriadis, and the early CLR James (whatever their problems) can similarly be considered part of an ultraleft, and unlike the productions of Elbaum’s milieu, their writings are eminently worth reading today. One Dutch Marxist organizing in Indonesia in 1908 had already grasped the basically bourgeois nature of nationalism in the then-colonial world, an idea Elbaum was still catching up with in 2002.

“Internationalism” for Elbaum means mainly cheerleading for the latest “Third World Marxist” movement or regime, but in reality his vision of the world is laughably America-centered. He refers on occasion (as a source of inspiration for his milieu) to the French mass strike of 1968, which swept aside all self-appointed vanguards, “Marxist-Leninists” first of all. This is lost on Elbaum. By the early 1970s, Trotskyist groups had clearly out-organized the Marxist-Leninists, and for what it’s worth, today the two largest Trotskyist groups, Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste, together account for 10% of the vote in French elections and are now larger than the Communist Party, without a Marxist-Leninist in sight. In Britain, similarly, Trotskyist groups out-organized the Marxist-Leninists hands down, played an important role in the 1972 strike wave (never mentioned by Elbaum), and today the British Socialist Workers’ Party (not to be confused with the American rump of the same name) is the largest group to the left of the Labour Party. Elbaum refers in passing to the Japanese far left of the 60s as an influence on some Japanese-Americans, but he seems blissfully unaware that the Zengakuren was overwhelmingly anti-Stalinist and mainly viewed Russia and China as state-capitalist. The most creative and internationally influential currents of the Italian 1970s, the so-called operaisti or workerists, were breaking with Leninism from the early 1970s at the latest. (To be fair, in Italy and in Germany large Maoist and Marxist-Leninist groups did exist, and the Trotskyists were basically marginal.)

On the subject of Trotsky: I am not a Trotskyist, and have basically (as previously indicated) since my callow youth viewed all so-called socialist societies as class societies, and not (as Trotskyists do) as “workers’ states.” But I have more respect for Trotsky (who should be distinguished from the Trotskyists) than I ever had or will have for Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim il-Sung, Castro, Guevara, or Cabral.

Wearing the blinders of his milieu, Elbaum shows real ignorance of Trotskyism. (“Third World Marxism’s” philistine hatred for Trotsky, while generally not stooping to 1930s “Trotsky the agent of the Mikado”-type slanders, was exceeded only by such ignorance.) Blinded by his milieu’s acceptance of complete and positive continuity between Lenin and Stalin, the world events of the early 1920s, which decisively shaped both Trotskyism and the aforementioned ultraleft (and the last eighty years of human history) have no importance for him. Hence (as indicated earlier), the triumph of “socialism in one country” after 1924 and the total subordination of all Communist Parties to Soviet foreign policy are totally unproblematic for these people, as were all the debacles of the Comintern mentioned earlier. Similarly, the question of the relationship of the Bolshevik party and Soviet state to the soviets and workers’ councils, i.e. the question of the actual working-class management of society, which was settled (in the negative) by 1921, is of no consequence either. It is Eurocentric to be concerned about Soviet history before the rise of Stalin, not Eurocentric to admire Stalin’s Russia with its ten million peasants killed in the 1930s collectivizations, its massacre of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the Moscow Trials, its factories operating with killing speed-up under direct GPU control or its twenty million people in slave labor camps at the time of Stalin’s death. For such a view, “revisionism” must therefore be Khrushchev’s (equally top-down) attempt to decompress (a bit) this nightmare. The memory of Stalinist Russia still weighs on the consciousness of masses of people around the world as the seemingly inevitable outcome of trying to do away with capitalism, and reinforces the still potent neoliberal mantra “there is no alternative,” but why the people Elbaum describes as the “most dynamic” part of the American left in the 1970s were so taken with the Stalinist legacy never seems to strike him as a major problem to be addressed.

Elbaum might also inform himself about Trotsky’s (and Marx’s) theory of permanent revolution, which was the centerpiece of the Bolshevik internationalist strategy in 1917, and its repudiation by Stalin the key to all the post-1924 politics swallowed whole forty-five years later by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxists.” Permanent revolution-rightly or wrongly-meant the possibility that a revolution in a backward country like Russia could link up with (or even inspire; cf. Marx’s preface to the 1882 Russian edition of the Manifesto) revolution in the developed European heartland, and in that way be spared the bloody primitive accumulation process which every capitalist country from Britain to Russia to contemporary China has necessarily undergone. It is this theory, and not some “Eurocentrism,” that made (the small minority of) honest Trotskyists keep their distances from regimes using “Third World Marxism” as a fig-leaf for capitalist primitive accumulation. Most Trotskyists were howling with the wolves that “Vietnam Will Win!” Well, we have seen what won in Vietnam (and even more so Cambodia).

This is hardly the place to describe the devolution of Trotskyism since Trotsky, but honesty and courage of convictions were not the strong suit of the [Ernest] Mandels and [Jack] Barneses and [Michel] Pablos who shaped it after 1940. Elbaum sees the American SWP as the main face of Trotskyism for 1960s and 1970s leftists in the US (and he is right about that), and claims that Trotskyism’s involvement with “old 1930s issues” and “European questions” was the main hindrance to a larger impact of Trotskyism when the Third World, from China to Vietnam to Cuba was supposedly sizzling with revolution and the building of socialism.

In point of fact, watching the SWP (like their French counterparts Ligue Communiste) in the 1960s and 1970s, I could only laugh up my sleeve watching the way they buried their critique of Stalinism (as in the case of the Vietnamese NLF) in the fine print of their theoretical journals while rushing after popularity, waving NLF flags, in exactly the milieu influenced by Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.” To take only one anecdotal example: In a 1969 debate in Berkeley between the ISC and the SWP, we put SWP spokesperson Pete Camejo up against the wall about the 1945 massacre of the Vietnamese Trotskyists in front of a large New Left audience. And Camejo conceded that, yes, Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh had in fact oppressed the Vietnamese comrades of the Fourth International. I am sure most of the New Leftist cheerleaders present considered our point to be “ancient history” — just twenty-four years earlier! Today, as they watch Vietnam rush into “market socialism” with investment capital from Toyota and Mitsubishi, I am sure they do not think about it at all. I remember Camejo’s brother Tony telling a similar audience that we should not be too critical of black and Latino nationalism in the US because blacks and Latinos had not yet passed through their “bourgeois revolution,” as if American blacks and Latinos did not also live in the most advanced capitalist society in the world. But he had put his finger on a certain reality, since many of the black and Latino nationalists of the 1960s and 1970s were in fact on their way to middle-class careers, once the shouting died down, as uninterested in genuine proletarian revolution (and the true twentieth century examples of it) today as they were then. (They were and are in this way no different from the great majority of the white New Left.) Elbaum approvingly quotes Tariq Ali attacking those who (such as myself and the ISC to which I belonged) saw no difference between “Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, or Castro and Batista,” whereas all of world history since Ali uttered that remark has demonstrated nothing except that the main difference made between old-style US-backed dictators and “Third World Marxist” dictators with state power is that the latter better prepare their countries for full-blown capitalism, with Mao’s China exhibit A for the prosecution, and Vietnam following close behind.

Further, Elbaum never seems to notice that many of the twentieth century Marxists still worth reading today (and he apparently has not read them), such as the early Shachtman, James, Draper, and Castoriadis, made their most important contributions in a break to the left of Trotskyism. In 35 years in leftist politics, I have met many ex-Stalinists and Maoists who became Trotskyists and council communists; I have never met anyone who went in the opposite direction. Once you have played grand master chess, you rarely go back to checkers.

Finally, while Elbaum rightly says that the turn ca. 1969 of thousands of New Leftists to the American working class was largely fruitless, he does neglect one important counterexample, namely the success of the International Socialists (the renamed ISC after 1970) in building the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and through it being the sparkplugs for the election of Ron Carey as President of the Teamsters in 1991. There is no question that this development, however much it turned into a fiasco, was the most important leftwing intervention in the American labor movement since the 1940s. I no more wish to go off on a long tangent about that terribly-botched episode than I wish to expound on the history of Trotskyism; I left the IS milieu in 1969. It is rather, again, to show Elbaum’s blindspot to the real flaws of his own tradition. The IS’ success with TDU came at the price of burying (at least for the purposes of Teamster politics) the fact that they were socialists, not merely honest trade-unionists (It turned out that Carey wasn’t even that.) Anyone educated in a Trotskyist group (and the IS, despite its rejection of the socialist character of the so-called “workers’ states” was Trotskyist on every other question), in contrast to most Stalinist and Maoist groups, develops a healthy aversion to the trade-union bureaucracy and to the Democratic Party. Elbaum provides a long history of how Maoism evolved out of the wreckage of the old CPUSA after the 1960 Sino-Soviet split. Some of these groups looked back to the CP under Browder; others preferred William Z. Foster. But almost all of them saw something positive in the CP’s role during the Roosevelt era, both in the Democratic Party and in the CIO. The problem of those working off of Trotskyism was, on the contrary, the “bureaucracy” that developed in exactly the era of CP influence; the problem of those working off of Marxism-Leninism was “revisionism” (Stalinists and Maoists for some reason don’t have too much to say about bureaucracy, except-as in the “Cultural Revolution,” when they are supporting one bureaucratic faction against another). And the concept of “revisionism” rarely inoculated these people against seeking influence in high places, either with Democratic politicians or with trade-union bureaucrats, as the CP had done so successfully in its heyday. It is certainly true that many of Elbaum’s Marxist-Leninists did neither. But he seems to ignore the fact that the ability of a group like the IS to intersect the Teamster rank-and-file rebellion of the 1970s and thereafter had something to do with the fact that they, in contrast to every Marxist-Leninist around, were not approaching the American working class with tall tales about socialism in Cuba or Albania or Cambodia or North Korea. The oh-so-radical defenders of Beijing’s line, whether for or against the “Gang of Four,” turned out to be defending a considerable part of the global status quo.

Finally, if Elbaum would lift his head from the rubble of “Third World Marxism,” he might notice that, in Britain and France, Trotskyist groups have a solid mass base (whatever one thinks of the politics involved), whereas Marxist-Leninists are almost nowhere to be seen; and even in the politically-backward U.S., groups such as the ineffable ISO, not to mention the youthful anarchist scene, are attracting more young people interested in revolution than any Marxist-Leninists. Being for the overthrow of every government in the world lets you see and do things that the baggage of Pol Pot or Shining Path or Kim Jong-Il conceals.

It is now time to turn to the merits of Elbaum’s book, which, contrary to what the reader may conclude from the above, it indeed has. First — and with this I have no quarrel — Elbaum attacks the “good sixties/bad sixties” vision of figures such as Todd Gitlin, for whom the late-sixties turn to revolution was the “bad sixties,” compared to the early sixties Port Huron vision of participatory democracy. Revolution was necessary then, and is necessary today, whatever the current ideological climate might favor. Elbaum is also right in critiquing Gitlin’s (and many others’) almost exclusive focus on the white New Left, seeing the movement essentially collapse with SDS in 1969-1970, and not recognizing its extension, particularly among blacks and Latinos (not to mention the thousands of white New Leftists who went into the factories, and the wildcat strike wave which lasted until 1973).

But Elbaum does put his finger on the fact that the Third World Marxist/Stalinist/Marxist-Leninist and Maoist milieu was much more successful, in the 1960s and 1970s, in attracting and influencing militants of color. And he is equally right in saying that most of the Trotskyist currents, not to mention the “post-Trotskyists” to whom I was closest, were partially blind to America’s “blindspot,” the centrality of race, in the American class equation. The ISC, when I was in it in Berkeley in the late 1960s, was all for black power, and (like many other groups) worked with the Black Panthers, but itself had virtually no black members. Trotskyist groups such as the SWP did have some, as did all the others. but there is no question that Elbaum’s milieu was far more successful with blacks, Latinos, and Asians (as was the CPUSA). To cut to the quick, I think that the answer to this difference was relatively straightforward. As Elbaum himself points out, many people of color who threw themselves into the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s and joined revolutionary groups were the first generation of their families to attend college, and were — whether they knew it or not — on their way into the middle class. Thus it is hardly surprising, when one thinks about it, that they would be attracted to the regimes and movements of “progressive” middle-class elites in the Third World. This was just as true, in a different way, for many transient militants of the white New Left, similarly bound (after 1973) for the professional classes, not to mention the actually ruling class offspring one found in groups such as the Weathermen. Elbaum does point out that the white memberships of many Third World Marxist groups were from working-class families and were similarly the first generation of their families to attend college. He also shows a preponderant origin of such people in the “prairie radicalism” (i.e. populism) of the Midwest, in contrast to the more “European” left of the two coasts, one important clue to their essentially populist politics. These are important social/historical/cultural insights, which could be developed much further. Charles Denby’s Black Worker’s Notebook (Denby was a member of Raya Dunayevskaya’s New and Letters group) effectively identifies the middle-class character of the Black Power milieu around Stokely Carmichael et al., as well as black workers’ distance from it; the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers similarly critiqued the black nationalist middle class, though it was hardly antinationalist itself.)

It is undeniable that the 1960s movements of peoples of color in the U.S. were influenced by the global climate of the decolonization of most of Africa, the Middle East and Asia following World War II, and the “decentering” of actually Eurocentric views of Western and world history, following the 1914-1945 “decentering” of Europe in the new lines drawn by the Cold War. They were similarly influenced by — and themselves were the main force enacting-the shattering of centuries of white supremacy in American society. It would be idealistic and moralistic to explain their attraction to “Third World Marxism,” Maoism and Marxism-Leninism by the meaningless assertion that “they had the wrong ideas.” One important part of the answer is definitely the weight of arriving middle-class elements in these political groups, who are today to be found in the black and Latino professional classes. But the typical black, Latino or Asian militant in the U.S. waving Mao’s little red book or chanting “We want a pork chop/Off the pig” was not signing on for Stalin’s gulag, or the millions who died in Mao’s “great leap forward” in 1957, or mass murder in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the ghoulish torture of untold numbers of political prisoners in Sekou Toure’s Guinea (where the black nationalist Stokely Carmichael spent his last days with no dissent anyone ever heard about), any more than the working-class militant in the CP-USA in 1935 was signing on for the Moscow Trials or the massacre of the Spanish anarchists and Trotskyists. All the above real history and theory blotted out or falsified by “Third World Marxism” was available and known in the 1960s and thereafter to those who sought it. The question is precisely one of exactly when groups of people in motion are ready to seek or hear certain truths. What Elbaum can’t face is that the entirety of “Third World Marxism” was and is anti-working class, whether in Saigon in 1945 or in Budapest and Poznan in 1956 or in Jakarta in 1965 or in case of the Shanghai workers slaughtered in the midst of the “Cultural Revolution” in 1966-1969. Workers, white and nonwhite, in the American sixties sensed this more clearly than did Elbaum’s minions, blinded by ideology. As Marx said, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, speaking of the English Revolution of the 1640s:

…in the same way but at a different stage of development, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed for their bourgeois revolution the language, passions and illusions of the Old Testament. When the actual goal had been reached, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke drove out Habbakuk.

When the upwardly mobile middle class elements of the 1960s and 1970s New Left and Third World Marxism, both white but also important numbers of blacks and Latinos, had established themselves in their professional and civil service jobs and academic tenure, suburban life and VCRs drove out Ho, Che, and Mao. Things went quite differently, above all for blacks without a ticket to the middle class, as one can see in the difference between the ultimate fates of even the Weather Underground after years on the run, and black political prisoners such as Geronimo Pratt.

But, to conclude, if Elbaum has offered us hundreds of pages on the wars of sects and ideologies that no one — himself included — misses, it is not from an antiquarian impulse. The real agenda is spelled out in one of the effusive blurbs on the dust cover: “Finally, we have one book that can successfully connect the dots between the battles of the 1960s and the emerging challenges and struggles of the new century.” The giveaway is Elbaum’s treatment of the Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, which are presented as something almost as momentous as the 1960s, and which offered the few Marxist-Leninist groups (“Marxist-Leninists for Mondale” as someone once called them) still around their last chance at mass influence. In contrast to the 1960s, the Jackson campaigns came and went with no lasting impact except to further illustrate the dead end of the old Rooseveltian New Deal coalition and the Keynesian welfare-statism that was the bread and butter of the old Democratic Party and of the CP-USA’s strategy within the Democratic Party. And when all is said and done, this fatal legacy of the CP’s role at the height of Stalinism in the mid-1930s is Elbaum’s legacy as well. Just as he tells us nothing about the true origins of Marxism-Leninism and Third World Marxism, Elbaum tells us nothing about the CP-USA coming off its 1930s “heroic” phase, herding the American working class off to World War II through the enforcement of the no-strike pledge, the calumny of any critic of US imperialism’s moment of arrival at world power as a Hitlero-fascist, and applause in the Daily Worker for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is necessary to connect some further dots: this book aims at being a contribution to some new “progressive coalition” wedding the American working class to some revamping of the capitalist state in an all-out drive to “Beat Bush” around a Dean campaign (or something like it) in 2004. It joins the groundswell of dissent among capitalist forces themselves, currently being articulated by the likes of George Soros, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph Stieglitz, and Paul Krugman as the still-dominant neoliberal paradigm of the past twenty-five years begins to seriously fray. While Elbaum’s book makes occasional passing reference to economic hard times times the 1970s, he does not see the extent to which American decline has circumscribed any possible agenda of “reform,” which can only be some kind of “Tax The Rich” scheme, share-the-wealth — the declining wealth — kind of left populism, with suitably “diverse” forces that will probably be the final fruit of the “progressive” middle classes, whites and people of color, that evolved out of Elbaum’s “Third World Marxism.”

Despite what Elbaum thinks and what he and his milieu thought thirty years ago, the fate of the world is in the hands of the world working class. In contrast to thirty years ago, however, this working class is no longer limited to North America, Europe and Japan, but is now spread through many parts of the “anti-imperialist” Third World, led by China. The East will be red again, not as the bureaucratic-peasant hallucination of the “Third World Marxists” of the 1960s and 1970s, but as a genuine working-class revolt against precisely the forces that used “Third World Marxism,” in the Third World as in the U.S. and Europe, to muddle every social question and advance their social stratum. The remnants of these forces are positioned today in and around the Democratic Party and the trade union bureaucracy, as well as in the antiglobalization movement, readying themselves to again revamp the capitalist system with torrents of “progressive” rhetoric, as they did in the 1930s and 1940s.

The only thing that is “progressive” in today’s world is working-class revolution.

It’s never easy to look yourself in the mirror and own up to your mistakes. For a long time, I balked at the very idea. Part of it felt too reminiscent of Stalinist/Maoist self-criticism, in its ritualized form of самокритика or autocritique. Whenever a person demands that someone else “self-crit” online, the image that most readily comes to mind is that of medieval flagellants — lashing their own backs while begging forgiveness for their sins. Quite often it feels forced and insincere, as if the people who yield to the demand are just going through the motions in order to be quickly absolved and be done with the matter as soon as possible.

But another reason I refrained from public self-criticism is that my views change rather gradually, to the point where I only notice that I’ve changed my mind well after the fact. Sometimes I think a certain degree of stubbornness can be a virtue, insofar as it means you stick to your guns and don’t just bend in the direction of a shifting wind. Other times, however, it is clearly a vice, especially when you are in the wrong. Even then, when I recognize that I no longer hold my former position on a given issue, I am reluctant to announce that this is the case. Not because I’m unwilling to admit I was wrong, but because I’d prefer to demonstrate this through my actions moving forward instead of dwelling on the past.

Unfortunately, though — or maybe fortunately, for those who like to keep score — the internet has a long memory. I’ve certainly said plenty of stupid shit in my time, things I either regret or simply don’t agree with anymore. There were things I shouldn’t have said, situations I should have handled differently, arguments I should’ve considered more carefully before posting or tweeting or whatnot. You can probably find evidence of them if you look hard enough. Really it shouldn’t even be that hard, as I have not made much of an effort to scrub Twitter or other social media of dumb controversies I’ve been involved in (unless someone specifically asked me to take something down).

Perhaps it would help to be a little more concrete. Just to give one example of something I’ve changed my mind on, or have rather come to a better understanding of, take trans struggles. When debates over gender fluidity first came up several years ago, I knew virtually nothing about the issues trans people have had to deal with. I’m still far from an expert, obviously, but to get a sense of how ignorant I was at the time, I only learned what the prefix “cis-” meant around 2013. Before then, I had no idea what any of it meant. Or really what a whole host of related terms signified. By late 2014 or early 2015 I’d rethought my views.

Much of the discourse on this topic, to be fair, was pretty new back then. And it’s still evolving, though it seems to have stabilized a bit. Regardless, I could’ve done more to learn about it before shooting my mouth off or weighing in on the matter. For example, when Facebook introduced its exhaustive list of fifty-six new gender options four or five years ago, I poked fun at it on social media, since I figured the more customizable taxonomy was introduced so Zuckerberg would have more data about the users of his website to sell to ad agencies. Looking back, I don’t think what I said was too egregious or intentionally hurtful, but probably came off as insensitive all the same. 

There’s still a lot of work I have to do on this, I realize. Often I forget someone’s preferred pronoun (they/them is especially hard for me to get used to, for whatever reason) but would never purposely misgender anyone. Please, if I’ve fucked up, just let me know and I will make every effort not to repeat the mistake. Back when I started to read about the debate within feminism between trans-exclusionary radfems and transfeminists, it seemed a really trivial thing to get hung up about. I even sympathized at first with the radfems, who insisted that people were just “language policing” them and looking to shut down open debate.

Years of seeing the bad faith engagements, if not outright bigotry, by transphobic radfems has erased any sympathy I might have had with them. At this point, the radical feminists who oppose measures like the bathroom bill — allowing trans individuals to use bathrooms in accordance with the gender they identify — are indistinguishable from evangelical Christians. I do think some of the rhetoric used by trans activists can seem overly aggressive and off-putting, particularly to those who are unfamiliar with the terms of the debate, but I have no patience left for TERF ideologues committed to baiting trans people under the pretext of having a dialogue.

Julian Vigo and Meghan Murphy are odious figures, while Michael Rectenwald and Spencer Sturdevant are just out-and-out reactionaries. The former pair insist they are “human rights consultants” and feminist lawyers, while the latter pair present themselves as freethinkers challenging the thought-taboos of the Left. Even those with more leftist credentials succumb to this crap, though. Paul Cockshott is a well-known Marxian economist, to provide a further example, but lately all he seems able to do is bang on about homosexuality and “transgenderism” on his blog. Christine Delphy is a noted materialist feminist, with several translations of her works put out by Verso, but on her blog at least she is busy repping Julie Bindel and Murphy of late.

Nevertheless, I still think articulating a materialist critique of identity politics is a crucial task for revolutionary Marxists today. Despite its status as a bugbear for rightwing types, who associate it with “cultural Marxism,” it remains one of the chief ideological obstacles to building workers’ power today. Of course, it will not do to simply replace one form of identity politics with another, say vulgar workerism, as this is in many ways the Urform of every identitarianism that came later. And we must take pains, in our critiques of identity politics, not to echo reactionary talking-points. Here an old distinction might prove useful: i.e., the notion of criticizing something “from the left” versus “from the right.”

So I am certainly not disavowing everything I’ve ever written or argument I’ve ever made. J. Sakai’s Settlers is still a bad book, even if I appreciate some of the stuff he has written about contemporary fascism. “Decolonial theory” is still mostly academic crap. Contemporary art still mostly sucks and art in general needs to be abolished. I hope I’m not just going soft, but I don’t have an appetite for controversy like I did when I was younger. Polemic is still necessary at times, but perhaps more sparingly than in the past. Online drama is mostly idiotic, and gets in the way of the vital work that needs to be done, so I sincerely apologize to anyone I’ve offended and hope to be better.

Mary Jo Bang
Paris Review
09.17.2017

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In 1915, twenty-one-year-old Lucia Schulz wrote in her journal that she could imagine herself using photography as “a passive artist,” recording everything from the best perspective, putting the film through the chemical processes she’d learned, and adding to the image her sense of “how the objects act on me.”

On her twenty-seventh birthday, at the Registry Office in Charlottenburg, a borough of Berlin, she married the Hungarian Constructivist painter Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and became, in the blink of a bureaucratic instant, Lucia Moholy. A few years later, when Moholy-Nagy was recruited to teach as a master at the Bauhaus school, Lucia went with him — she, her camera, her technical skills, and her knowledge of the darkroom.

The Bauhaus, a school established in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, would eventually become an influential international design movement. The clean sculptural lines of its buildings, the bent steel and leather Bauer chairs, Marianne Brandt’s elegant globe-and-square tea sets would come to represent a break with the preindustrial past. The look itself would become a signifier of urban modernity and of modern life. When Lucia arrived at the Bauhaus, she became, at Gropius’s invitation, the de facto Bauhaus photographer, albeit unpaid. The glass negatives would remain hers, however, presumably to do with as she wished.

The iconic photographs of the newly built Bauhaus buildings in Dessau were taken by her, as were the photographs of the “new models of up-to-date products” that came out of the workshops in both Weimar and in Dessau. Her photographs, as well as the objects they document, embody the “form follows function” philosophy that gave rise to the school. She framed the objects in a manner that suggests that if there ever was a fussier ornamental past, it had disappeared; now there is only the sleek new. Years later, she would write one of the first popular books about photographic history, A Hundred Years of Photography; of that Neue Sachlichkeit (or “New Objectivity”) moment, she would say,

This was the beginning of a counter movement: photographers, after having been made over-conscious of tone values and balance, began to be more object-conscious than ever before. The object in the picture became self-assertive; and so did the details of the object. Nothing was without significance. The minuteness of detail became essential … It was the beginning of modern object photography, sometimes called “straight” photography.

In addition to those documentary photographs, she and Moholy-Nagy experimented with making photograms of objects arranged on light-sensitive “daylight” paper, a process that didn’t require expensive darkroom equipment. While he taught, she worked for a local photographer and enrolled as a student at the Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig. In Marginal Notes: Documentary Absurdities, she writes, “We each of us followed a separate routine during the day, and in the evening continued our experiments with renewed zeal … Through all those years we had kept quiet about the extent and manner of our collaboration. How then should friends and colleagues have realized the exact circumstances? Any attempt to sort out, in retrospect, the share owing to the one or the other of the participants or to the two together would be utterly futile.”

When photographed objects are removed from a larger context, the photographer herself tends to disappear. Having grown used to seeing the kind of product shots that were so new then, Moholy’s photographs now read as forensic evidence of a radical moment in design and architectural history. The photograms, on the other hand, suggest an innovative authorial presence and a signature way of making art. It is much debated whether the photograms by Man Ray (Rayograms) predated or followed those by Moholy and Moholy-Nagy. Today, only her former husband’s name is associated with the photograms, even though she introduced him to photography and participated in the making of them.

A photograph is said to “read,” meaning the viewer makes meaning from what is seen inside the photographic frame, somewhat like the way we make meaning from a page of text. Of course, text is not an image, but only patterned marks that represent speech sounds the eye strings together for the brain to then translate into morphemes that have meaning. Looking at a photographic image is more like taking in a gesture. The retina accepts and interprets not in the speech center but elsewhere. We attempt to match the image to what we know about the world, the way we match a hand waving to the idea of coming (hello) or going (goodbye), although gestures, by definition, involve motion and still photographs capture only a slice of the implied motion.

All of Moholy’s Bauhaus images signify not only their subjects but the audacity of a new way of envisioning that belongs to her and to her sliver of a historical moment. Surface embellishment is replaced by a marriage of essence and utility. The Bauhaus designers, many of whom were women whose names are no longer known, did away with traditional curlicues and gingerbread trim. In print, the Bauhaus participants used sans serif lettering instead of German Gothic. They even did away with capital letters. Their ideas were anti-hierarchical and, to some, heretical. The craftsperson and artist were to be considered as equals, cost was to be reduced by machine production. These notions undermined the idea of a constructed social structure based on nationalistic pride, inherited privilege, and “legitimate” Aryan identity. The Nazis were having none of that. As early as 1931, the school was deemed suspect on the grounds that it was “cosmopolitan” and it was forced to move from Dessau to Berlin. After Hitler was named Chancellor in 1933, it was closed.

In August of that same year, Moholy, herself a secular Jew, fled Berlin after Theodor Neubauer, a member of the Communist Party in the Reichstag, was arrested in her apartment. She left behind more than five hundred glass negatives in the care of Moholy-Nagy, from whom she had separated in 1929 but remained friendly with. But when Moholy-Nagy left Berlin, he gave Lucia’s negatives over to Gropius, who brought them with him to America in 1937, when he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design. That same year, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus. Soon after the two men emigrated to the States, they began using Moholy’s negatives to promote their own work, without her knowledge and without attribution.

Moholy believed that her negatives had been destroyed during the bombing of Berlin, but she grew suspicious that they still existed, and that her name had been erased from them, when, at the end of the war, she discovered monographs about the Bauhaus that had been published in the interim. In a 1954 letter to Gropius, she inquired about their whereabouts: “[I] should like to make another attempt at locating my own collection of documentary material, i.e. the considerable number of photographs (original negatives) which I took during my Bauhaus years. I wonder if there is anything you can recall, possibly from discussions with Moholy who took care of them when I left in 1933.”

To which Gropius replied:

Long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me… You will imagine that these photographs are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them; so I hope you will not deprive me of them. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if I sent you contact prints of the negatives? There are a great many, but I certainly understand that you want to make use of them yourself. Anyhow it will be a relief to you to know that they are in existence and in good shape. I have never left them out of hand.

Knowing very well that she had not given her negatives to Gropius, Moholy devoted the next three years to recovering them, including hiring an attorney. In 1957, Gropius finally returned some to her, sending them COD and in shoddy packaging, with significant breakage. For the remainder of her life, Moholy would work to have her name associated with her images.

Photographs have a way of defining an era. Not only do Moholy’s photographs define the era of Bauhaus design, but they also define an era of the silent contribution of women artists. In the front of Lucia’s A Hundred Years of Photography is a brief epigraph by the French caricaturist Honoré Daumier: “Je suis de mon temps” — I am of my time.

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NB: Robin Schuldenfrei’s article “Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy’s Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of the Bauhaus Legacy,” originally published in the History of Photography, details Moholy’s efforts to reclaim her negatives and deconstructs the impact of her images on modern architecture.

No, I have never doxxed anyone. And I never would. Having been doxxed before by neo-Nazis as a “commie Jew,” the very idea is abhorrent to me. (This was mostly my fault, incidentally: I used to troll Stormfront message boards with drive-by comments like “lol, Slavs are white?” and then watch them tear each other to shreds. Forgot to block my IP address, stupid me.)

I hate even having to address this, but since it’s become an issue I might as well tackle the rumor in public so that everyone knows:

Several years ago, in early 2015, I was involved in an argument with some people online. Yes, shocking, I know. But looking back at it now, I realize I was often a jerk and didn’t conduct myself as well as I could have. Many of my views have changed since then, anyway, and at any rate I regret saying hurtful things. For whatever reason, though, this group I had been arguing with began to refer to me shorthand by my initials, “RW.” Unfortunately this led to a huge misunderstanding.

Around the same time a virulently anticommunist and antisemitic page called RedWatch popped up on Facebook. It’s affiliated with the far right British National Party. We later mass-reported it, and got it taken down, so you won’t find it on FB anymore. Regardless, it soon started publicizing the private details of communists — even outing a couple of my close friends. Getting word out as quick as they could, to warn people about the threat, some people wrote “RW is doxxing leftists.”

Of course, RW stood for “RedWatch” in this context. But I guess someone misinterpreted it as “Ross Wolfe,” since people had been referring to me that way. This probably sounds farfetched, but it’s what happened, and anyone interested can see a screenshot where the accusation was raised and then amended when it the person learned I was not reporting anyone or breaching security. Don’t worry, the names have been removed and are all color-coded so you can see who is talking to who without their identities being revealed. Irrelevant comments have also been cut out.

A bunch of people defriended me when the warning first went out and then later refriended me once they learned what’d happened. Since I didn’t hear anything more on the matter for years, I assumed it had all been cleared up. Just last week, however, I was told by a local organization in NYC that I am no longer welcome at their meetings or events because of concerns that I might represent a “security breach.” Rumors, even baseless ones, have a way of sticking around on the internet, and I guess that’s the case here.

I know how important security concerns are. When serious accusations are made, you have to take it seriously. So I fully understand precautions must be taken to ensure everyone’s safety, and don’t blame anyone who heard these false rumors and decided to take action. You were just trying to be cautious and make sure everyone was safe. But I also think it’s important to set the record straight, because I have never and would never doxx anyone.

There may still be other issues people have with me, and that’s fine. I know I’ve been an asshole at times and should be held accountable for that. We of course have to keep an eye out for infiltrators and snitches. Snitch-jacketing is also a concern, though. Or should be, at least, as it corrodes trust between revolutionaries and makes our job that much harder.

Right now we desperately need to organize against the capitalist order and some of its morbid symptoms that have emerged of late. White supremacy and chauvinistic populism are on the rise in the US and elsewhere around the world, as well as Zionism and other forms of minority nationalism that emerge in response to majoritarian forms. Homophobia, transphobia, and other prejudices persist and have even intensified in recent years. This is the task ahead of us.

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:

• № 1 (Winter 1993)
• № 2 (Winter 1994)
• № 3 (Spring 1994)
• № 4 (Winter 1995)
• № 5 (Winter 1996)
• № 6 (Summer 1996)
• № 7 (Spring 1997)
• № 8 (Winter 1998)
• № 9 (Summer 1998)
• № 10 (Winter 1999)
• № 11 (Spring 2000)
• № 12 (Spring 2001)
• № 13-14 (Summer 2001)
• № 15 (Fall 2001)
• № 16 (Winter 2005)

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.

On this day exactly a century ago Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered in cold blood by Freikorps troops under the command of the Social Democratic Party. It decapitated the leadership of the young German Communist Party which then oscillated between putschism and opportunism for the rest of its existence. The consequences were that the world revolution, which the revolutionaries in Russia had counted on, did not take place. This led the Russian Communists down the road, not to international socialism, but to the construction of a new form of capitalism which, however, was falsely baptized as “socialism.” Under Stalin this became one of the most horrific anti-working class regimes of the twentieth century. Today the criminals of Social Democrats who murdered Luxemburg and Liebknecht hypocritically pretend they had nothing to do with it whilst Stalinists and Trotskyists who defend the former USSR as somehow communist all reveal their anti-working class credentials. After almost a hundred years of counter-revolution a capitalist system, whose crisis increases every day, offers us nothing but more misery, war, and environmental degradation but a new generation is arising which is taking up the last challenge to the ruling class thrown down by Rosa Luxemburg a few days before her death:

Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

The “Spartacus” revolt

In early January 1919, just days after the formation of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (the Communist Party of Germany, KPD), the new, supposedly socialist German government sacked the head of the Berlin Police, Eichhorn, who was popular among the genuine socialists. The KPD joined in the calls for a demonstration against this act, which was just the latest in a series of provocations against the workers of Berlin. This demonstration succeeded in preventing Eichhorn’s successor from taking office. Against the votes of the KPD, who correctly believed a revolutionary uprising was premature, the “revolutionary shop stewards” and left wing of the centrist Independent Social Democratic Party now formed a revolutionary committee to overthrow the government.

A general strike was declared and ten days of street fighting ensued. In the course of the fight part of the revolutionary committee split to enter negotiations with the government, thus paving the way for its eventual victory. The day after the fighting was over, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, leaders of the KPD, were murdered by government troops along with the hundreds of workers who had already been cut down.

Background:
The Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

To understand the background of these events, we first have to look at the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). This was founded as the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands — Socialist Workers’ Party of Gemany — in 1875, as the merging of the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiter-Partei (SDAP, “our people,” according to Marx and Engels) and the larger Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV, General German Workers’ Union, who were, roughly speaking, Lasalleans).¹

Despite the ADAV being over 60% larger than the SDAP, Marx and Engels judged the merger as ill-advised and were extremely unhappy about the unification program, yet eventually Marxist views triumphed in the new party. However, this came about after a long struggle under conditions where the party was subject to suppression, under Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist law, passed in 1878 after the SDAP demonstrated that they had significant electoral support.

IIndeed, the victory of Marxism was aided by state repression which made the Lasallean idea of collaboration with the state as a socialist programme look faintly ridiculous. Not only that, but the party itself grew while operating in illegality. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, parliamentary representatives were exempt from the suppression (they had to stand for election as individuals). Secondly, the Party was very successful in organising despite its illegality. Thirdly, Bismarck also tried to steal the Party’s clothes by passing social reforms. The latter tactic backfired by being too transparent, and the Party got the credit for the reforms. A final factor, probably the most decisive, was the enormous growth of capitalist industry in Germany in the period of the Party’s illegality.

By the time Bismarck was sacked and the Anti-Socialist Law abandoned in 1890, the Party, which soon changed its name to the SPD, had not only grown, but had laid down the basis for uninterrupted further growth in membership and electoral success for over a decade and a half.

The pre-WWI SPD was famous for dominating an alternative world to official Germany, with many aspects of working-class life being under its sway, from sports and cultural activities to, of course, politics. Hundreds of newspapers were published by the Party across Germany. All this made it difficult to imagine political life on the left outside its orbit. But the health of the Party was only apparent. Despite Marxism being officially triumphant, it was so in name only.

Imperialist war

In the years leading up to WWI, the SPD was eaten away from within by nationalism. Some of its leaders, especially David and Legien (who headed the union apparatus), were out and out imperialists and racists. They were opposed by many on the left of the Party who were formally commited to resisting war. However, the identification of the Party mainstream with the German state, that is, to their own bourgeoisie, was an overriding factor.

This contradiction was very evident in the days leading up to the outbreak of world war. As late as 25 July 1914, the SPD called for an anti-war demonstration. Three days later, 10,000 workers were on the streets of Berlin. Yet, on 4 August, the SPD representatives in the Reichstag voted² for war credits which enabled the German Empire to finance the war. Its right wing leaders had secretly agreed to do just that a month before the war broke out.

The 4 August was correctly seen by the left as a betrayal of the class by the SPD, with Luxemburg being particularly devastated. However, it neither led to a split, nor to what may have been better, preparations for a split in order to bring the maximum numbers out of the SPD.³

Although the left of the SPD was shocked by the Party’s betrayal, they were not completely paralysed by it. They began to organise against the war, with Liebknecht being the first to vote against war credits when they were extended in December 1914. Amongst other successes, there was an anti-war demonstration organised by Karl Liebknecht, which brought 10,000 people onto Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, on May Day 1916. Even though Liebknecht was arrested for high treason after speaking at this demonstration, the number attending shows that there was scope for gathering up opposition to the war into organisations consistently opposed to it and therefore to the SPD.

Nevertheless, the central plank of the left’s conception of their activity was to win back the SPD to the “true path.”

Only by pouring merciless scorn on all our “half-measures and weaknesses,” on our own moral collapse since August 4, and on the liquidation of our entire system of tactics employed since August 4 can the reconstruction of the International begin.⁴

Rosa Luxemburg

Thus the task was seen as reconquering the old Second International and its parties, not as opposing them as agents of the bourgeoisie, its system and that system’s wars.

By contrast, the betrayal was treated as exactly that by Lenin along with a large swathe of the Russian Bolsheviks. Social Democracy for them was henceforth a bourgeois party and the Second International would have to be replaced by another, communist International. Lenin’s view was reflected in those organisations in Germany who operated against the war outside the SPD, like the Internationale Sozialisten Deutschlands (International Socialists of Germany, ISD) and the group around the Lichtstrahlen (Shafts of Light) publication.

In their attempt to reconquer the SPD, Luxemburg and Liebknecht formed a group inside the Party, the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), which signed up to the centrist Manifesto written by Karl Kautsky, even though it was far from representing their own politics. In time, the SPD reacted by expelling its centrist and left wings, who then founded the Unabhaengiger Sozialdemokratischer Partei Deutschlands (Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, USPD), on the basis of the centrists’ politics, with the Spartakusbund, but without the ISD and Lichtstrahlen. This lack of a clear break with the politics of social democracy, evidenced by the Spartakusbund joining with the centrists in the USPD, was to cost the proletariat dear.

The problem

The October Revolution in Russia saw a massive transfer of power to the proletariat organized in the form of Soviets. This revolution was understood by Lenin and many of the Bolsheviks at the time as merely the first step in a world revolution. Moreover, without further steps on the road to a global seizure of power by the working class, the Russian step was bound to be reversed. Or, as he put it in March 1918, “Without a German Revolution we are doomed.”

And as Luxemburg put it:

In this sense theirs [the Bolsheviks’] is the immortal historical service of having marched at the head of the international proletariat with the conquest of political power and the practical placing of the problem of the realization of socialism, and of having advanced mightily the settlement of the score between capital and labor in the entire world. In Russia, the problem [our stress] could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia.⁵

Rosa Luxemburg

Failing to answer

On 30 October 1918, reacting to the German Admiralty’s demands that they sacrifice their lives in a pointless battle for “honor,” the sailors on two battleships in Kiel mutinied, but then surrendered in the face of threats of being torpedoed. 400 mutineers were taken prisoner.

A mass assembly of sailors demanded the release of the prisoners, and the authorities responded by banning further assemblies and sent out armed patrols. In the face of this action by the state, the sailors did not back down but instead began disarming the patrols. One of the larger patrols opened fire on the sailors and, against this backdrop of mounting tensions, the sailors organized themselves into the first sailors’ council of the German revolution.

At the request of the local governor (the representative of the Kaiser’s state) Gustav Noske, a leading member of the SPD, was sent to Kiel to negotiate with the mutineers on its behalf. Finding this impossible, as the movement had already gone too far to meekly surrender, he instead used his “socialist” credentials to put himself at the head of the movement in order to lead it along paths compatible with the continuation of bourgeois rule.

Meanwhile, the revolution begun at Kiel spread to other towns and the SPD continued to act to derail the movement onto “safe” ground. The SPD also brought the USPD into the game, partly to contain the latter, and partly to use its greater proletarian credibility to disguise the nature of its tactics. By mid-December, the revolution had set up workers’ and soldiers’ councils across Germany. However, the situation had been stabilized by the SPD and USPD’s efforts to steer the councils away from the political demand of “all power to the soviets” and to limit the councils’ efforts to arm themselves.

In effect, the revolution had come to a standstill. A congress of German workers’ and soldiers’ councils was held 16-21 December, but it was dominated by the SPD and the non-Spartacist part of the USPD. Instead of claiming political and economic power for the councils — i.e. the working class as a whole — it relegated itself to having a supervisory role over the government, in effect acknowledging the bourgeoisie’s right to rule.

In the wake of the councils’ congress, the “International Communists” (Spartakusbund, IKD, Lichtstrahlen and others) held a conference, and under the urging of Radek, a representative of the Bolsheviks, overcame the reluctance of the Spartakusbund to leave the USPD,⁶ and decided to hold the founding Congress of a new party, the KPD, from 29 December 1918 to 1 January 1919.

Ever since the SPD’s support for the war had revealed its total opposition to the interests of the international working class, there had been a crying need for a political force capable of showing that a revolution was needed in Germany: not to secure the legal rights of the bourgeoisie but to sweep away the capitalist system itself. Any German revolution had to be part of a wider, world proletarian one to overturn the power the bourgeoisie and its forms of rule, introduce a socialist economy and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

From the Russian October Revolution onwards, the rule of the councils over the whole of society had to be emphasised as the necessary form of that proletarian dictatorship. In other words, the idea that councils were either a temporary measure, to fill in while bourgeois rule was indisposed, or simply a supervisory device, to organise the working class in support of a revived bourgeois state.

Providing political clarity is the primary task of a revolutionary proletarian organization. Beyond the day-to-day technical tasks of a revolution, such as organization and military activity, where revolutionaries participate just as part of the proletariat, the political party has to clarify the ends to which these technical tasks are devoted.

The German revolution was marked by a lack of clarity about the roles of the political actors on the scene, what the interests of the proletariat actually were and what the tasks of the revolution were, at least on the side of the proletariat itself. By contrast the SPD already had enormous organisational control over the working class and it was extremely skilful in using the existing apparatus to steer the proletariat away from where it needed to go.

The revolt

In military terms, the bourgeoisie was still unsure of which parts of its army were reliable, and which would go over to the revolution, so it supplemented its forces by using the Freikorps, protofascist forces comprised of supposedly demobilized army personnel (mainly ex-officers) who had access to military hardware superior to that possessed by the proletarian forces, and which had a clear view of the class allegiance of their social democrat bosses. They knew that the SPD was on their side, as, via Noske they obeyed that party’s orders. Even while the congress of German workers’ and soldiers’ councils sat, workers were being murdered in other parts of the country as part of the testing of the waters for an attempt to crush the revolutionary forces militarily. These murders weren’t the only provocations.

On New Year’s Day, the government disarmed the 75th Infantry Regiment in Bremen, a regiment deemed to be “untrustworthy” (i.e., likely to defend the proletariat). 22 strikers were killed in Upper Silesia on 3 January. Eichhorn, a left USPDer who was trying to run a “revolutionary” police force (despite this being a contradiction in terms, especially before the overthrow of the old regime, he was nevertheless popular among workers) was sacked, in what was a clear provocation.

The USPD, the revolutionaere Obleute (revolutionary shop stewards) and the KPD met, and, against the KPD’s warnings, voted to establish a revolutionary committee to coordinate the overthrow of the government. Despite the fact that the Spartakists were against this endeavor, the coming events were to be known as the “Spartakus” uprising, partially because the KPD stood by the vote out of proletarian solidarity but largely because the SPD wanted to blame them and destroy them. “Kill Liebknecht” posters were soon appearing on walls across Berlin.⁷

The KPD’s reluctance was based on a sober assessment that the conditions for a successful revolt had not yet matured. A sign of this immaturity was the trust that the many revolutionary proletarians still had in the USPD. But the USPD was itself divided between those close to the SPD and the more proletarian elements. As a result it could, and did, sway from enthusiasm for action to switching to negotiation; and, as Rosa Luxemburg noted in Rote Fahne, was incapable of any clarity about the purpose of revolt. The tragedy was that the KPD had been formed too late and lacked both the preparation and the influence necessary to hold back the revolt.

Even as the committee was being formed, workers were spontaneously taking action, occupying the offices of reactionary newspapers. The first action of the committee was to call for a general strike, a struggle for power and a mass demonstration on 6 January.

Street fighting broke out, and, true to form, the leaders of the USPD entered negotiations with the government, deserting the workers they had called on to fight. The government handed arbitrary power to Noske, the army units they had feared to trust turned out to be loyal or neutral and the revolt was crushed over the next week or so, with the Freikorps doing the final mopping up. There were about 3000 deaths, principally on the revolutionary side. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were murdered the day after fighting stopped, 14 January.

Apart from Bremen, Bremerhaven and Düsseldorf, where Council Republics were declared, solidarity action from outside Berlin failed to make much impact. The extreme localism of the German revolutionary movement was another factor which hampered its success. Even the Spartacists were prone to it and Luxemburg in her final writings was calling upon other cities to rise alongside Berlin.

Continuing to fail

Such localism played into the hands of the SPD (which had a national organization) and in the wake of the failed Berlin uprising, there were a series of other proletarian revolts, all of which were put down by the Freikorps, by troops loyal to the government or by a combination of both. The most noteworthy example was the Munich Soviet, which lasted for a couple of months, defeating the regular army before being overwhelmed by the Freikorps.

In many places, as in Berlin itself, workers’ uprisings were in response to the government’s provocations, so that the government was able to choose when and where to fight, an enormous advantage as it was able to deploy its initially weak forces in a concentrated fashion. In this way, the government could achieve victory, despite its vulnerability to a co-ordinated revolutionary assault in the early days of the revolution.

While the SPD government was stabilizing the military situation to its advantage, two political developments were occurring. Firstly, the political forces behind the Freikorps were deciding that the SPD was so dependent upon it that they might as well rule in the place of the SPD. Secondly, the left of the USPD split and joined the KPD, under the name Vereinigte Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (VKPD, unified KPD), which was soon replaced in practice by the old name, KPD. This merger with the very unclear left USPDers added to the incoherence of the KPD.

Both of these developments were made apparent in the Kapp Putsch, which was launched on 13 March 1920. The eponymous Kapp was a member of the rightwing Deutschnationaler Volkspartei, and was supported in his attempt to become Chancellor of Germany through armed force by parts of the state’s military apparatus, as well as by the Freikorps. The SPD called a general strike, which was initially opposed by the KPD, regardless of the fact that the correct course was clearly to support the strike, despite the proletarian blood on SPD hands, and to push it to go further. Moreover, the KPD called on workers to lay down arms. This call was ignored, and the workers in the Ruhr, and elsewhere, formed Red Armies.

Under pressure from the Communist International, the KPD reversed its position, and the Putsch collapsed after an effective general strike and under the threat of the Red Armies. The KPD’s newly reinforced reformism was not finished, however. It met with the government, and, in exchange for the SPD’s promise not to use the Freikorps against workers again, it called on the Red Armies to lay down their arms. The SPD simply dissolved the Freikorps into the regular army and used that to unleash White Terror in the Ruhr.

Against this background, some of the opposition currents in the KPD split to form the Kommunistischer Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (KAPD). Although it was clear that the revolutionary crisis in Germany was not going to last forever, the formation of the KAPD was carried out in an overhasty fashion, incorporating elements which had no place in a proletarian organization, such as the National Bolshevists around Laufenberg and Wolffheim. The result was that the new organization had to have two founding Congresses, the second without the more dubious elements. More time had been wasted in a classic case of more haste, less speed. The KAPD was riven by localism, councilism and syndicalism and did not long survive.

For its part the KPD, shorn of its most experienced leaders like Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Jogiches, and Leviné oscillated between opportunism, adventurism and even ended up supporting “national bolshevism” itself in 1923. By this time though it was increasingly the tool of a Communist International which was dominated by the need to defend the USSR not to extending the world revolution. By the time Stalin was promoting the idea of “socialism in one country” the revolutionary cause was already lost.

Lessons

The failure of the “Spartakus” uprising was the first episode of the bitter lessons to be drawn from the inability of the old SPD left to break from that party after its great betrayal of its supposed principles and, more importantly, of the working class.

If there had been a clean break at the moment that the SPD had shown its internal rottenness by supporting imperialist war; or, perhaps more realistically, a prepared separation of all the revolutionary elements after some months, at most, a couple of years; when the war ended (in no small part due to Russian October) the new party’s exposure of the SPD as part of the bourgeois political apparatus would have had time to undermine that party’s fake socialist credentials. This may not have entirely prevented the SPD from putting itself at the head of workers’ movements in order to corral them into support for a ‘democratic’ capitalist state, but it would have weakened that strategy, and made it obvious where it was carried out.

Obviously, carrying out propaganda against the SPD during the state’s tight wartime domestic security would not have been an easy task, but the left did manage to propagandize against the war itself, so the biggest additional difficulty was realizing that this task was a necessary starting point for posing the way forward to a socialist future.

In addition, if the KPD had broken earlier, it might have had sufficient influence to prevent workers responding to local provocations designed to draw them into battles they could not win, and save their strength for a serious assault on state power.

Finally, the German revolution was in desperate need of clarity about what the councils were for — i.e. the organization of a proletarian dictatorship against the bourgeois, of society in its transition to socialism and the seed of the forms of administration of socialism itself.

The USPD acted to obscure the role of the workers’ councils — they were often in favor of them, but not as the fundamental basis of a new society, just as temporary organizers while proper bourgeois government was in trouble. At most, the USPD settled for the councils as technical supervisors of the real business of government: the exploitation of the working class. These “centrists” might have been won over to a more revolutionary vision of the role of workers councils by a German Communist Party, had this been founded in time to be able to build on the success of October in Russia.

EDL

¹ Ferdinand Lasalle was an ideologist of an alliance between the aristocracy and the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and pushed all sorts of rubbish like a class-independent “Free State.”
² Traditionally, the SPD voted as a bloc in the Reichstag. In its representatives’ internal meeting, the vote for approving the war credits was 78 to 14, showing that a significant minority was at least there to be won to anti-war activity, even in the parliamentary party.
³ The SPD was not the only Party of the Second International (which grouped like-minded parties across the world) to make this betrayal. Indeed, the whole group, apart from honorable, but small, exceptions like the Serbian Party, left the terrain of the working class.
⁴ Quoted in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, Monad Press, 1984, pg. 95.
⁵ The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, 1918.
⁶ Especially as the USPD left the SPD-USPD government under pressure from its rank and file, on 29 December.
⁷ For further details, see “A Hundred Years On: Lessons of the German Revolution.”

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Wer die Ju­gend hat, hat die Zukun­ft.

— Karl Lieb­knecht

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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)

Fromm was of course an early standout of the Frank­furt In­sti­tute of So­cial Re­search, al­though he later drif­ted away from its aus­pices. He and Her­bert Mar­cuse were both in­flu­enced by the 1932 dis­cov­ery and pub­lic­a­tion of Marx’s so-called “Par­is manuscripts,” writ­ten in 1844. (Mar­cuse and Fromm would also even­tu­ally be­come es­tranged). Petrović was part of the Yugoslavi­an Prax­is school of Marx­ist hu­man­ism, and de­veloped his read­ing of these early works in close cor­res­pond­ence with Fromm. Along with his coun­try­men Danilo Pejović and Mi­hailo Marković, Petrović con­trib­uted to a block­buster 1964 volume on so­cial­ist hu­man­ism un­der Fromm’s ed­it­or­ship. In­cid­ent­ally, it was the in­vit­a­tion sent out to Althusser ur­ging him to take part in this in­ter­na­tion­al sym­posi­um that triggered the “hu­man­ist con­tro­versy.”

The French philo­soph­er later re­called:

The “hu­man­ist con­tro­versy” began as peace­fully as could be ima­gined. One sum­mer day in 1963, at a friend’s house, I happened to meet Adam Schaff, a lead­ing mem­ber of one of our Com­mun­ist parties. (Charged by the lead­er­ship of the Pol­ish Com­mun­ist Party with re­spons­ib­il­ity for the “in­tel­lec­tu­als,” Schaff is both a philo­soph­er known for his books on se­mantics and the prob­lem of man in Marx­ism, I and a high-rank­ing party lead­er es­teemed for his cul­tiv­a­tion and open-minded­ness. He was on his way back from the United States, where he had giv­en talks on Marx to large, en­thu­si­ast­ic aca­dem­ic audi­ences). Schaff told me about a project un­der the dir­ec­tion of Erich Fromm, whom he knew well and had re­cently met in the USA. Be­fore the war, in the 1930s, Fromm had been con­nec­ted with a Ger­man Marx­ist group with ul­tra-left tend­en­cies that aired its views in an eph­em­er­al journ­al. the Zeits­chrift für Sozi­ai­forschung. It was in this journ­al that [Theodor] Ad­orno, [Max] Horkheimer, [Franz] Borkenau, and oth­ers first made a name for them­selves. Nazism drove Fromm in­to ex­ile, as it did many oth­ers. He has since be­come fam­ous for his es­says on mod­ern “con­sumer” so­ci­ety, which he ana­lyses with the help of con­cepts de­rived from a cer­tain con­front­a­tion between Marx­ism and Freu­di­an­ism. Fromm had just re­leased, in the United States, a trans­la­tion of se­lec­tions from texts by the young Marx [Marx’s Concept of Man, 1961]; eager to gain a wider audi­ence for Marx­ism, he now had plans to pub­lish a sub­stan­tial col­lect­ive work on “so­cial­ist hu­man­ism,” and was so­li­cit­ing con­tri­bu­tions from Marx­ist philo­soph­ers from coun­tries in the West and the East. Schaff in­sisted that I par­ti­cip­ate in this project. I had, moreover, re­ceived a let­ter from Fromm a few days earli­er. Why had Fromm, whom I did not know, writ­ten to me? It was Schaff who had brought my ex­ist­ence to his at­ten­tion.

I wrote my art­icle im­me­di­ately. Just in case, and with an eye to the pub­lic that would be read­ing it, a pub­lic I did not know, I made it very short and too clear, and even took the pre­cau­tion of sub­ject­ing it to a “re­write,” that is, of mak­ing it even short­er and clear­er. In two lines I settled the ques­tion of the early Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment with no ifs, ands, and buts, and in ten wrapped up the his­tory of philo­sophy, polit­ic­al eco­nomy, and eth­ics in the sev­en­teenth and eight­eenth cen­tur­ies; I went right to the point, with tol­er­ably un­re­fined ar­gu­ments and con­cepts (a sledge­ham­mer op­pos­i­tion of sci­ence and ideo­logy) that would, if they did not quite man­age to con­vince, at least hit home. I went so far as to in­dulge in a bit of the­or­et­ic­al mis­chief — flat­ter­ing my­self that it would fall in­to the cat­egory of Anglo-Sax­on hu­mor and be per­ceived as such — by put­ting for­ward, in all ser­i­ous­ness, the pre­pos­ter­ous concept of a “class” hu­man­ism. I had my art­icle trans­lated in­to Eng­lish by a com­pet­ent friend who, I knew, would be all the more me­tic­u­lous be­cause his ideas were as far from mine as they could pos­sibly be; and I pos­ted this short ad hoc text without delay. Time was of the es­sence: dead­lines. I waited. Time passed. I kept on wait­ing. It was sev­er­al months be­fore I re­ceived an an­swer from Fromm. He was ter­ribly, ter­ribly sorry. My text was ex­tremely in­ter­est­ing; he didn’t ques­tion its in­trins­ic value; but, de­cidedly, it had no place in the project… Pro­fes­sions of grat­it­ude, ex­cuses. My law of the dis­place­ment of the dom­in­ant had failed to come in­to play. The same went for the hu­man­ist-there­fore-lib­er­al syl­lo­gism: all a mat­ter of the con­junc­ture. One more reas­on for think­ing that between hu­man­ism and lib­er­al­ism on the one hand, and the con­junc­ture on the oth­er, there ex­is­ted something like — as, moreover, my art­icle said, in black and white — a non-ac­ci­dent­al re­la­tion.

Like the Itali­an the­or­eti­cian and Marx­o­lo­gist Lu­cio Col­letti, Althusser was a staunch anti-Hegel­i­an, though the two agreed on little else. Col­letti was a fol­low­er of Gal­vano della Volpe when they first crossed paths, re­call­ing the en­counter years later in con­ver­sa­tion with Perry An­der­son: “When we first met in Italy, Althusser showed me some of the art­icles he later col­lec­ted in For Marx. My ini­tial im­pres­sion on read­ing them was that there was a con­sid­er­able con­ver­gence of po­s­i­tions between him and ourselves, my main re­ser­va­tion about this was that he didn’t ap­pear to have mastered the can­ons of philo­soph­ic­al tra­di­tion ad­equately.” Des­pite this prima facie af­fin­ity, there was a great deal of di­ver­gence that played out in sub­sequent texts. For Col­letti, the 1844 manuscripts and the­ory of ali­en­a­tion de­veloped therein still fall with­in the pur­view of Marxi­an sci­ence.

Plus, avowed anti-Hegel­ian­ism aside, Col­letti was at least hon­est enough to re­cog­nize that “the themes of ali­en­a­tion and fet­ish­ism are present not only in Cap­it­al, but throughout the whole of the later Marx — not just the Grundrisse, but the The­or­ies of Sur­plus Value as well, for hun­dreds of pages on end. Althusser’s ad­mis­sion of their pres­ence in Cap­it­al in fact un­der­mines his whole pre­vi­ous for­mu­la­tion of a ‘break’ between the young and the old Marx.” Col­letti’s re­con­struc­tion of Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment, while im­press­ive, is un­der­cut by his gen­er­al aver­sion to Hegel­i­an dia­lectics and his sud­den shift to­ward a mod­el based upon the nat­ur­al sci­ences. Kev­in An­der­son raises a num­ber of crit­ic­al ob­jec­tions to the con­clu­sions reached by Col­letti.

Ir­ing Fetscher and István Mészáros both be­longed to the Hegel­i­an Marx­ist tra­di­tion, rather than the struc­tur­al Marx­ism of Althusser or sci­entif­ic (“hy­po­thet­ico-de­duct­ive”) Marx­ism of Col­letti. Fetscher was a stu­dent of Theodor Ad­orno, and thus part of the second gen­er­a­tion of the so-called Frank­furt School. Mészáros was a stu­dent of Georg Lukács, by con­trast, and thus part of the so-called Bud­apest School. Each is a more re­li­able in­ter­pret­er of Marx than either Althusser or Col­letti. Neither is as pre­oc­cu­pied with the “hu­man­ist” as­pect of Marx’s thought as Fromm or Petrović. The ques­tion of “hu­man­ism” is one of the more te­di­ous and mis­lead­ing Marx­o­lo­gic­al de­bates out there, something I’ve main­tained in the past. Both Fetscher and Mészáros are good at re­lat­ing rival the­or­et­ic­al in­ter­pret­a­tions of Marx to prac­tic­al di­ver­gences with­in Marx­ism, and the lat­ter in par­tic­u­lar des­troys Althusser.

Round­ing out this se­lec­tion of texts are the Ger­man-Amer­ic­an coun­cil com­mun­ist Paul Mat­tick and the French phe­nomen­o­lo­gist Michel Henry. Without a doubt, they’re nearly total op­pos­ites: Mat­tick prefers the sober and sys­tem­at­ic cri­tique of polit­ic­al eco­nomy con­duc­ted by the Marx of Cap­it­al to the youth­ful in­tu­itions of 1844, though he main­tains con­tinu­ity from one peri­od to the next. Henry’s highly idio­syn­crat­ic in­ter­pret­a­tion stresses “the in­com­pat­ib­il­ity of Marx’s philo­soph­ic­al thought with Marx­ism,” a dis­tinc­tion Mat­tick would not have gran­ted, des­pite his clear pref­er­ence for Marx over the of­fi­cial state ideo­lo­gies set up by au­thor­it­ari­an re­gimes in his name. Mat­tick took is­sue with the im­age of the young Marx as some sort of proto-ex­ist­en­tial­ist, which was em­braced by philo­soph­ers and theo­lo­gians alike.

Writ­ing as these au­thors were in the roughly two-dec­ade span between 1956 and 1976, they dealt primar­ily with 1) the broad­er dis­sem­in­a­tion of hitherto un­known texts by Marx and 2) the mostly verbal re­pu­di­ation of Sta­lin­ism by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956. Al­though dis­covered and pub­lished some time earli­er — “A Cri­tique of Hegel’s Philo­sophy of Right” and Eco­nom­ic and Philo­soph­ic­al Manuscripts both in 1927, The Ger­man Ideo­logy in 1932, then fi­nally the Grundrisse in 1939 — their im­port­ance was down­played in the stifling at­mo­sphere of So­viet dis­course. Only after Stal­in’s death in 1953 were they giv­en a fair hear­ing. Con­cur­rent polit­ic­al de­bates played them­selves out in dis­cus­sions re­gard­ing the sig­ni­fic­ance of these earli­er, un­pub­lished texts.

More re­cently, an­oth­er wave of schol­ar­ship has ap­peared try­ing to settle the ques­tion of the “young” Marx’s re­la­tion­ship to the “old.” Today the polit­ic­al stakes of the ques­tion are far lower, to be sure, with the col­lapse of “ac­tu­ally-ex­ist­ing so­cial­ism” in Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact, and USSR, which might be seen as an ad­vant­age over pre­vi­ous in­quir­ies: an­swers are less politi­cized, less be­hold­en to of­fi­cial state ideo­lo­gies, and more a purely aca­dem­ic af­fair. Rival schools of Marx­o­logy still ex­ist, though, so it’s not as if the field is a neut­ral one. All the same, ar­che­olo­gic­al re­con­struc­tion of Marx’s cor­pus is more com­plete than ever. Here are a few rep­res­ent­at­ive titles:

1. Pierre Macherey, “Althusser and the Young Marx” (2002)
2. Roberto Finelli, A Failed Par­ri­cide: Hegel and the Young Marx (2004)
3. Dav­id Leo­pold, The Young Karl Marx: Ger­man Philo­sophy, Mod­ern Polit­ics, and Hu­man Flour­ish­ing (2007)
4. Tom Rock­more, “Marx’s Early Writ­ings” (2008)
5. Daniel Lopez, “Ali­en­a­tion Marx’s Early Writ­ing” (2013)
6. Go­pal Bal­akrish­nan, “The Ab­ol­i­tion­ist, Part 1” and “The Ab­ol­i­tion­ist, Part 2” (2014)
7. Mar­cello Musto, “The ‘Young Marx’ Myth in In­ter­pret­a­tions of the Eco­nom­ic-Philo­soph­ic Manuscripts of 1844” (2015)
8. McK­en­zie Wark, “Althus­seri­ans An­onym­ous” (2016)

But the mat­ter of Marx’s in­tel­lec­tu­al de­vel­op­ment has al­ways been con­tro­ver­sial, since the in­aug­ur­a­tion of Marx­ism it­self. This will thus form our point of de­par­ture in ex­plor­ing the polit­ics be­hind the ques­tions: How many Marxes were there? And what should be the weight ac­cor­ded to each? Over the next couple weeks or so I in­tend to sketch the dis­cov­ery and dis­sem­in­a­tion of Marx’s early writ­ings, fol­lowed by an over­view of the vari­ous ways the “young” Marx was coun­ter­posed to the “old.”

The real reas­on left­ists are so up­set about the Pep­si ad is that it puts all their purely per­form­at­ive, feel­good protest ac­tions on blast.
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Of course, this is hardly the first time an os­tens­ibly an­ti­cap­it­al­ist move­ment has been ef­fort­lessly re­cu­per­ated by cap­it­al­ism. My per­son­al fa­vor­ite has to be the AXE Peace ad­vert from 2014, which took an­ti­war im­agery from the pre­ced­ing dec­ade and offered it back up in the form of a body-spray. Wells Fargo sponsored a Black Lives Mat­ter event last year in which it even praised the Black Pan­thers, but then re­jec­ted a cus­tom-de­signed deb­it card fea­tur­ing a fist and the text “Black Lives Are Im­port­ant.” This des­pite the fact the bank­ing com­pany was just sued for ra­cial bi­as in deny­ing loans to black and Latino fam­il­ies.

Love it or hate it, one must give the devil its due: Global capitalism has proved far more resilient than either its harshest critics or most fer­vent champions ever expected. You have to ad­mire its per­verse abil­ity to in­cor­por­ate everything that pur­ports to op­pose it in­to it­self while also adding a price-tag.

“Com­mun­ism is not rad­ic­al,” the Marx­ist poet and play­wright Ber­to­lt Brecht once told his friend, the crit­ic Wal­ter Ben­jamin. “It is cap­it­al­ism that is rad­ic­al.” Here Brecht prob­ably had in mind the re­mark Len­in made some twenty years earli­er, ur­ging com­mun­ists to be “as rad­ic­al as real­ity it­self.” The real­ity to which he im­pli­citly re­ferred to was none oth­er than that of cap­it­al­ism. And per­haps he’s right — we’re still much too harm­less.

“Real­ist­ic dis­sid­ence is the trade­mark of any­one who has a new idea in busi­ness.” — Theodor Ad­orno, The Cul­ture In­dustry

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The best we can do right now with re­spect to Syr­ia and vari­ous oth­er world-his­tor­ic­al phe­nom­ena is pre­dict likely out­comes, since we have no abil­ity to mean­ing­fully al­ter the course of events. Ex­cept, of course, if we’re pre­pared to fig­ure out what it would take to as­sert and ex­er­cise real agency in his­tory, something which is much harder than just shout­ing an­ti­war or hu­man­it­ari­an in­ter­ven­tion­ist plat­it­udes. It in­volves identi­fy­ing the forces with­in so­ci­ety that could bend the blind hap­pen­stance of the mar­ket and the clumsy in­trigues of state powers to its will. Po­s­i­tion-tak­ing and slo­gan­eer­ing are mean­ing­less and vain in the ab­sence of ef­fect­ive re­volu­tion­ary prac­tice.

For the time be­ing, however, it has very been en­ter­tain­ing to see Richard Spen­cer and his “Alt-Right” al­lies lose their col­lect­ive shit over Trump’s sud­den 180° with re­spect to Syr­ia. Al­most on cue and all at once, 4chan’s /pol/ seemed to suf­fer an an­eurysm. Some of its mem­bers com­plained that this would mean more Muslim im­mig­rants the West. Oth­ers called upon the an­onym­ous hordes to form a bloc with Putin and wage holy war against the Jews. Mean­while, Steve Ban­non has fallen out of fa­vor in the White House, cucked by the “glob­al­ist” New Jer­sey Demo­crat Jared Kush­ner. With this de­vel­op­ment, lib­er­als might have fi­nally got­ten their wish. Be­cause if Ivanka is now the one really pulling the strings, to stick with the pup­pet-mas­ter meta­phor, then it’s as if Hil­lary Clin­ton got elec­ted after all.

Lib­er­als’ main ob­jec­tion to Trump has al­ways been aes­thet­ic, rather than prin­cipled or sub­stant­ive. They miss the smooth, well-spoken, at times in­spir­a­tion­al rhet­or­ic of someone like Obama to the bizarre toi­let bowl of free as­so­ci­ation that comes out of Trump’s mouth. At the level of policy the two could be com­pletely identic­al, but no one would care so long as everything was de­livered with the right pres­id­en­tial pack­aging. Com­rade Em­met Pen­ney con­veys this grim truth rather well:

So after run­ning a can­did­ate down­loaded from the un­canny val­ley — who didn’t be­lieve in or stand for any­thing, really — and money­balling their way to de­feat against a gold-plated, syph­il­it­ic so­ciopath, I’m see­ing all these mem­bers of the Demo­crat­ic “#Res­ist­ance” come out in full sup­port of the Syr­ia strikes like the bat­talion of over­paid cow­ards they’ve al­ways been.

It’ll be tite af when they re­in­sti­tute con­scrip­tion and make you use an app struc­tured like Obama­care where you pick from com­pet­ing pro­viders to get body ar­mor and bul­lets be­fore ship­ping out to go die alone scream­ing for your fam­ily while their lob­by­ist mil­it­ary con­tract­or bud­dies stuff their pock­ets by the fist­ful. The fu­ture the Demo­crats want is just a gami­fied ver­sion of with the Re­pub­lic­ans want, with maybe Beyoncé play­ing in the back­ground and a sub­scrip­tion to The New York­er.

Nev­er­the­less, it could well be that Trump’s sheer un­pre­dict­ab­il­ity ac­tu­ally re­duces the chances of WW3. Putin was will­ing to play chick­en over Syr­ia with Obama, be­cause he knew Obama is a ra­tion­al guy who knows when to hit the brakes. He’s not go­ing to play that game with someone who would just as soon set him­self on fire or drive the car off a bridge for rat­ings.

All the same, with mo­bil­iz­a­tion against US mil­it­ary in­ter­ven­tion in­to Syr­ia ramp­ing up, it’s more im­port­ant than ever that com­mun­ists be able to stake out a po­s­i­tion that op­poses in­ter­ven­tion­ist wars while also re­fus­ing any sup­port for bour­geois na­tion­al­ists and tin-pot dic­tat­ors like As­sad. Over the past fifty years, anti-im­per­i­al­ists have op­por­tun­ist­ic­ally made com­mon cause with any­one and every­one who de­clare them­selves to be “anti-Amer­ic­an.” This has dis­cred­ited le­git­im­ate ef­forts to op­pose for­eign wars. Marx­ists should re­ject such co­ali­tions and or­gan­ize on an in­de­pend­ent and in­ter­na­tion­al­ist basis, ex­clud­ing na­tion­al­ists of all stripes. But I’m not hold­ing my breath.

It is in this dis­pir­it­ing mood that I’m shar­ing a re­flec­tion sub­mit­ted by Com­rade Hegel Damascene, re­mem­ber­ing the quiet dig­nity of liber­tari­an can­did­ate Gary John­son. John­son remains a beacon of bygone normie-dom in a bat­shit age.

Gary Johnson
Normie prophet in an apocalyptic age

Hegel Damascene
Interstate 95
April 8, 2017
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The tra­di­tion of all dead gen­er­a­tions weighs like a night­mare on the brains of the liv­ing.

.
Sit­ting on an over­pass over I-95, watch­ing cars come onto and off of the George Wash­ing­ton Bridge, I was over­come with the feel­ing of be­ing trapped in the belly of a hor­rible ma­chine. And the ma­chine is bleed­ing to death. I al­ways used to stare at the over­passes near the Garden State Mall, the ar­ti­fi­cial mar­ket­place where high­ways meet, and think about what a Great Civil­iz­a­tion (both words cap­it­al­ized) Amer­ica was. But I saw the cracks back then, too, I just didn’t think they would open up so quickly.

Sit­ting on that un­der­pass, I half ex­pec­ted the of­fices of Kim & Bae, PC to grow legs and start lob­bing mis­siles at Bashar As­sad’s palace. Maybe the Port Au­thor­ity Po­lice build­ing was a fact­ory pro­du­cing mech­an­ic­al cops, who would march out to re­store or­der in the new Salafist prin­cip­al­ity — and de­tain any big beau­ti­ful ba­bies who wanted to leave their young uto­pia for Amer­ica, where they could be a se­cur­ity risk.

Syr­ia is both a source and mi­cro­cosm of the slow col­lapse.

The in­ter­na­tion­al in­cid­ents and refugees it pro­duces are slowly gunk­ing up the gears, but also each fac­tion sym­bol­izes a lar­ger flaw in the world sys­tem. The un­rav­el­ing of the Syr­i­an state is a fast-for­wards ver­sion of the re­cent his­tory of the “West,” with its rur­al-urb­an polit­ic­al di­vide, and a liz­ard caste will­ing to kill its own host so­ci­ety in or­der to pre­serve its power over the rubble. The dif­fer­ence is that every myth is closer to the source. The re-or­gan­iz­a­tion of so­ci­ety along sec­tari­an lines is at least a re­treat in­to iden­tit­ies with real his­tor­ic­al and theo­lo­gic­al back­ing, not a car­bon-copy flag-and-an­them myth­o­logy that’s 100 years young.

Right now I’m in a lib­rary, where I came from a party to write this, be­cause it feels like my head is ex­plod­ing. Be­neath the lay­ers of sweat and un­der­grad misery — es­pe­cially pathet­ic on a Fri­day night — it’s a temple to the myths the WASP civil­iz­a­tion has built for it­self. Hid­den be­hind the piles of Chinese and In­di­an new money, there are mur­als of early mod­ern transat­lantic ex­plorers and Greek gods per­form­ing deeds out of the fever dreams of some in­bred ar­is­to­crat from the late 19th cen­tury. All the while, the ac­tu­al des­cend­ants of Greeks are sit­ting in de­part­ments for the sub­al­terns the WASPs feel guilty stamp­ing out.

Any­one who reads between the lines of an old Greek text, rather than us­ing it as a status sym­bol, sees much more Kanda­har than Columbia, more Has­sakah than Har­vard. After all, the former is named for Al­ex­an­der.

To be fair, every myth­o­logy and iden­tity is made-up when you go far back enough.

It doesn’t mat­ter how ar­ti­fi­cial myths are, though, with a ma­ter­i­al basis. After all, al-Ma’mun got away with see­ing Ar­is­totle in a dream. The sur­face level un­rav­el­ing is the con­sequence of sys­tem­ic shocks: cli­mate change, di­min­ish­ing rate of profit, en­ergy in­stabil­ity, mod­ern hordes of Sea People jump­ing from con­flict to con­flict be­cause Saudi Ar­a­bia couldn’t think of a bet­ter meth­od of get­ting rid of its hot­headed youth than send­ing them as for­eign fight­ers. Cap­it­al­ism and the mar­ket are geni­us sys­tems of or­gan­iz­a­tion, soften­ing the blows by turn­ing these in­to chron­ic rather than acute prob­lems, but some­times it leaks through in sud­den break­downs.

The con­front­a­tion between Rus­sia and the United States in Homs, a res­ult of long­stand­ing liz­ard caste policies mag­ni­fied by Trump’s man-baby ego, is one such break­down. It was a long time in the mak­ing, but it was sup­posed to be gradu­al and con­trolled.

An­oth­er break happened last sum­mer, when the Rus­si­an am­bas­sad­or to Tur­key was as­sas­sin­ated by a rogue spe­cial forces cop in a min­im­al­ist art gal­lery. Des­pite the com­par­is­ons to Sa­ra­jevo 1914, the in­ter­na­tion­al in­cid­ent was not al­lowed to fester, be­cause it didn’t serve the goals of any power. But it make for a good spec­tacle, be­cause of how cine­mat­ic the whole thing went down. (Mor­bidly, it was al­most in­stant turned in­to an In­ter­net meme.) And so the fas­cist who shot the liz­ard was suc­cess­ful in his stated goal: ”do not for­get Aleppo!”

Gary John­son could not be reached for com­ment.

Really, though, John­son’s in­fam­ous “Aleppo mo­ment” was a dis­curs­ive slip. No one in Amer­ica out­side the liz­ard caste knew where Aleppo was, either. Hell, a large sec­tion of the liz­ards prob­ably didn’t know them­selves. But no politi­cian is al­lowed to ad­mit the lim­its of their know­ledge and power. The liz­ard caste is sup­posed to main­tain the fic­tion of om­ni­po­tence, even at the cost of self-de­struc­tion. John­son’s lam­bast­ing by the me­dia was a mo­ment for the liz­ards to dis­tract them­selves from the gan­gren­ous limb called Trump by furi­ously rub­bing dis­in­fect­ant on a pa­per-cut.

Let me save you some time by sum­mar­iz­ing liber­tari­an Aus­tri­an eco­nom­ics: none of the oth­er liz­ards know as much as they claim to — it’s ac­tu­ally im­possible — let’s take our chances with the mech­an­ist­ic sys­tems of the mar­ket rather than a ruler who might de­cide to gen­o­cide you be­cause she’s​ hav­ing a toothache, or a liz­ard who would do the same to pad his re­sume.

At his next cam­paign rally, which I was at, John­son demon­strated that he un­der­stood Syr­ia as a whole even if he got the de­tails wrong. The rally was a shit­show in many oth­er ways, but he was right about that. Many “nor­mal” people don’t know the spe­cif­ics, but they can see the gen­er­al trends. Prob­ably bet­ter then the liz­ard-caste ex­perts, in most cases. A vast ma­jor­ity are too blinkered by vari­ous parts of their daily lives, however. But they can still see the cracks widen­ing, the seams rip­ping, the em­pire eat­ing it­self alive.

And so people re­act to this im­pend­ing #doom in dif­fer­ent ways. Some join apo­ca­lyptic cults, like IS­IS or vi­ol­ent prim­it­iv­ist cells. Oth­ers put their faith in snake-oil sales­men, from Trump to Bob Avaki­an. The smarter ones try to #hustle enough to crawl to the highest point on the sink­ing ship, in hopes of jump­ing onto a life­boat. Of course, the ones in a po­s­i­tion to see the pat­terns most clearly are too damn busy try­ing to sur­vive to do any­thing else.

I’m a bit more for­tu­nate, be­cause my fam­ily ac­cu­mu­lated enough through hard work and luck that I don’t have to sup­port any­one else yet as a young adult. Of course, plenty of smart young people with the chance to get an edu­ca­tion end up climb­ing in­to the liz­ard caste. That’s where I’m really lucky; I in­her­ited enough of my my grand­par­ents’ im­mig­rant anxi­ety to see that the liz­ard caste is doomed. You need a skill that’ll keep you on the life­boat, not phys­ic­al cap­it­al you’ll have to jet­tis­on any­ways.

We need a fuck­ing ark.

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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].

1989 sup­posedly marked a turn­ing point after which the in­flu­ence of the lie in­dustry (he might as well say Lü­gen­pres­se) over daily life be­came total. Los­urdo grounds these para­noid ram­blings in De­bord’s the­ory of the “so­ci­ety of the spec­tacle.” In re­cent years, he main­tains, the lie in­dustry’s fo­cus has turned to Syr­i­an pres­id­ent Bashar al-As­sad, whose re­gime the West is hop­ing to over­throw at any cost. Dis­miss­ing claims that either As­sad or Putin could be “war crim­in­als” in any sense of the word, Los­urdo in­sists that the real war crim­in­als in Syr­ia are the mas­ter­minds in Is­rael and the US, who want to destabil­ize the re­gion. He is there­fore skep­tic­al of al­leg­a­tions that Syr­i­an gov­ern­ment or Rus­si­an forces have com­mit­ted at­ro­cit­ies against ci­vil­ians caught in the con­flict. Spe­cific­ally, Los­urdo denies that bar­rel bombs or chem­ic­al weapons have been de­ployed by the re­gime. The Au­gust 2013 gas at­tacks were staged us­ing a “pho­tomont­age” tech­nique. “By mak­ing the most of its over­whelm­ing mul­ti­me­dia fire­power and new ma­nip­u­la­tion tech­no­lo­gies thanks to the In­ter­net, the West por­trays the Syr­i­an crisis as an ex­er­cise of bru­tal and gra­tu­it­ous vi­ol­ence against peace­ful and non-vi­ol­ent demon­strat­ors,” Los­urdo hy­per­bol­ic­ally wrote in a 2011 art­icle for the 9/11 truth­er Voltaire Net­work. “There is no doubt that Goebbels, evil min­is­ter of the Third Reich, has gained a fol­low­ing… One can­not but re­cog­nize that his dis­ciples in Wash­ing­ton and Brus­sels have even sur­passed their un­for­get­table mas­ter.”

Just in passing, it should be noted that Los­urdo has con­trib­uted more than fifty art­icles in sev­en dif­fer­ent lan­guages to Voltaire Net. Even his biggest fans would likely be dis­turbed by this fact, giv­en the kind of ma­ter­i­al one finds else­where on the web­site. Laurent Guyénot’s art­icle “Septem­ber 11: In­side Job or Mossad Job?” is typ­ic­al of the an­ti­semit­ic filth they reg­u­larly pub­lish. Con­spir­acy the­or­ies abound not only here but on oth­er sup­posedly left-wing ven­ues such as Coun­ter­punch, where au­thors like Is­rael Shamir and Gil­ad Atzmon are fre­quent con­trib­ut­ors. (Shamir, like Los­urdo, has also come out in de­fense of Pol Pot. Pol Pot’s ca­reer began with “a bril­liant na­tion­al-lib­er­a­tion struggle,” ac­cord­ing to Los­urdo, so it is a shame things ended so badly. Where­as Shamir con­tests the scale of vi­ol­ence in gen­er­al, Los­urdo looks to dis­place blame onto the United States. Nix­on and Kis­sing­er’s sat­ur­a­tion bomb­ing of Cam­bod­ia in the early sev­en­ties doubt­less con­trib­uted to the crisis later, but these were hardly the de­cis­ive factor. Here Los­urdo for­gets that the US ac­tu­ally helped prop up the Kh­mer Rouge in the United Na­tions as part of its deal with China, when the killing was most in­tense. Re­gard­less, re­spons­ib­il­ity is again laid at the feet of la «grande» presse d’in­form­a­tion for this por­tray­al).

But the theme of fab­ric­ated news stor­ies (fake news?) shows up throughout all of Los­urdo’s work, even his most schol­arly texts. In War and Re­volu­tion, for in­stance, he writes that “today we know that the testi­mony, state­ments, im­ages, and stills doc­u­ment­ing the at­ro­cit­ies of Wil­helmine Ger­many were the res­ult of skill­ful ma­nip­u­la­tion, to which the nas­cent US cinema in­dustry, shoot­ing scenes in New Jer­sey of the sav­age, bar­bar­ous be­ha­vi­or of Ger­man troops in Bel­gi­um, made a splen­did con­tri­bu­tion.” Los­urdo con­tin­ues: “We can now un­der­stand the ar­gu­ments of his­tor­ic­al re­vi­sion­ism, so-called ‘neg­a­tion­ism.’ For why should the sys­tem­at­ic ex­term­in­a­tion of European Je­w­ry at­trib­uted to the Third Reich not it­self be a myth? Are we just deal­ing with a new, more acute for­mu­la­tion of the charge of ritu­al murder laid against the Ger­mans, con­sum­mated in the Holo­caust of a people blessed by the Bible?” To be sure, Los­urdo does not be­lieve that the Holo­caust was fab­ric­ated of whole cloth. He does, however, re­gard such a view as un­der­stand­able giv­en the per­vas­ive real­ity of me­dia dis­tor­tion. Cer­tainly, a de­gree of skep­ti­cism is war­ran­ted when it comes to de­vel­op­ing stor­ies where the facts aren’t yet known. Pseudo-crit­ic­al ques­tions such as “cui bono?” or “who be­ne­fits?” can lead to the wack­i­est de­clar­a­tions that such and such must be a “false flag” by con­spir­acists both Left and Right. Zion­ists of­ten brush aside video evid­ence of Is­raeli sol­diers mis­treat­ing Ar­abs by say­ing they’re all just act­ors em­ployed by “Pal­i­wood.”

One need only look at the 2008 tome Stal­in: The His­tory and Cri­tique of a Black Le­gend for an ex­ample of how Los­urdo op­er­ates in ex­on­er­at­ing the fallen her­oes of state so­cial­ism. It swiftly be­comes ap­par­ent from read­ing ex­tracts trans­lated in­to Eng­lish that he is little more than an Itali­an ver­sion of Grover Furr. Al­though Los­urdo’s sub­jects of in­quiry vary a bit more than those of his Amer­ic­an coun­ter­part, the two men an­nounced their mu­tu­al ad­mir­a­tion in 2013 through an ex­change of let­ters com­mend­ing each oth­er’s work. Furr was im­pressed by his col­league’s de­fense of the 1939 Mo­lotov-Rib­ben­trop pact, while Los­urdo found him­self per­suaded by Furr’s ar­gu­ments about “peri­od­ic Rus­si­an fam­ines.” When the Itali­an edi­tion of Khrushchev Lied came out, Los­urdo vo­lun­teered to write the pre­face. Like Furr, Los­urdo blames Stal­in’s over­whelm­ingly bad repu­ta­tion in the West first of all on ma­li­cious ru­mors spread by Khrushchev at the ⅩⅩth Party Con­gress of the CPSU. Sid­ing with Mao in dis­ap­prov­al, Los­urdo re­proaches Stal­in’s suc­cessor for “de­mon­iz­ing those who pre­ceded him in hold­ing power.” Yet the un­in­ten­ded irony of the line that im­me­di­ately fol­lows can­not be lost on any­one fa­mil­i­ar with the ju­di­cial trav­esties that oc­curred dur­ing the Great Purges: “On this basis, a truly grot­esque tri­al [!!] against Stal­in de­vel­ops.” Though he doesn’t both­er try­ing to ex­on­er­ate the Krem­lin high­lander for every in­dis­cre­tion, Los­urdo re­jects the in­cid­ence of mor­tal­ity re­por­ted in West­ern stat­ist­ics over­all as “greatly ex­ag­ger­ated.”

So how should the crimes and mis­deeds of past re­volu­tion­ar­ies be dealt with, then? “Deng Xiaop­ing un­der­stood how to push along change without im­it­at­ing Khrushchev’s mod­el of desta­lin­iz­a­tion,” sug­gests Los­urdo. “The enorm­ous his­tor­ic­al con­tri­bu­tions Mao made… are not to be for­got­ten.” Many who had been sup­port­ive of the PRC un­der Mao re­garded the coun­try’s re­in­tro­duc­tion of mar­ket re­la­tions as a be­tray­al of the 1949 re­volu­tion, but Los­urdo ap­plauds Deng’s re­forms for their prag­mat­ism. Warn­ing that “to speak of a res­tor­a­tion of cap­it­al­ism in China would be view­ing the prob­lem too su­per­fi­cially,” he ac­know­ledges that the move away from the hard Maoist line was im­port­ant. At the same time, however, it was im­per­at­ive not to lower Mao’s prestige in the eyes of the people. “Her­oes are ne­ces­sary for the trans­ition from ex­cep­tion­al con­di­tions to nor­malcy,” as­serts Los­urdo, so the fond memor­ies of the Great Helms­man must be up­held even while dis­mant­ling his polit­ic­al agenda. It could be ar­gued, of course, that Khrushchev be­trayed his pre­de­cessor only in word while re­main­ing loy­al to him in deed, where­as Deng re­mained loy­al to his pre­de­cessor only in word while be­tray­ing him in deed. Nev­er­the­less, Los­urdo re­gards post-Maoist China as faith­ful enough to its ori­gin­al goals to still be “the cen­ter of the struggle of co­lo­ni­al and former co­lo­ni­al peoples.” Chinese of­fi­cials were thus fully jus­ti­fied in gun­ning down stu­dents at Tien­an­men Square in 1989, as Los­urdo fig­ures they were US State De­part­ment em­ploy­ees any­way.

Re­sponses to Los­urdo’s ef­fort to ab­solve Stal­in have been less than fa­vor­able on the whole. Back in 2014 the tankie theo­lo­gian Ro­land “fuck­ing” Bo­er de­scribed it as a “well-reasoned and elab­or­ately re­searched book,” but out­side the Marx­ist-Len­in­ist party press few seem to have ap­pre­ci­ated it. The Itali­an Trot­sky­ist Ant­o­nio Mo­scato pub­lished a scath­ing po­lem­ic in 2011 against the “ob­ses­sions” of Los­urdo. Mo­scato, a spe­cial­ist in So­viet his­tory, took par­tic­u­lar aim at his men­dacious meth­od of deal­ing with facts (which he else­where calls “the com­par­at­ive ap­proach”). Un­cov­er­ing nu­mer­ous ana­chron­isms in Los­urdo’s timeline, Mo­scato then goes on to con­front his blatant mis­char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of Trot­sky’s stance on Rus­sia. Es­pe­cially force­ful is his vin­dic­a­tion of charges of an­ti­semit­ism leveled against Stal­in, which seem all the more per­spic­a­cious in ret­ro­spect giv­en that the most egre­gious in­cid­ents of this pre­ju­dice only came after World War II. An even big­ger shit­storm fol­lowed the re­lease of Los­urdo’s book in Span­ish and Por­tuguese. Chris­toph Jünke in Ger­many cri­ti­cized the “neo-Sta­lin­ism” of Los­urdo in a 2000 piece pub­lished by the Rosa Lux­em­burg In­sti­tute, mock­ing the “cyn­ic­al count­ing game” [Spiel bis zur zyn­is­chen Erb­sen­zäh­le­rei] of com­par­ing the num­bers killed by Stal­in to the num­bers killed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and oth­ers.

The loom­ing threat of a “red-brown” (i.e, com­mun­ist-fas­cist) al­li­ance over geo­pol­it­ic­al con­flicts is wor­ri­some, to say the least. Los­urdo is right, of course, to point out that Hitler and Stal­in were not twin broth­ers but mor­tal en­emies. However, as Mo­scato coun­ters, this enmity did not pre­vent them from hav­ing a mu­tu­al re­spect for each oth­er’s ac­com­plish­ments. Nor did it keep them from hold­ing a joint vic­tory parade in Brest-Litovsk, to cel­eb­rate their (re)par­ti­tion of Po­land in 1939. Bud­ding fas­cists like Richard Spen­cer, Colin Lid­dell, and Greg John­son are long­time ad­mirers of na­tion­al­ist strong­men like Putin, As­sad, and Gad­dafi — not least for their de­fi­ance of Is­rael and the US, the two coun­tries sup­posedly most re­spons­ible for “glob­al­ism” around the world. Even left­ish pop­u­lists like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela hold great ap­peal for right-wing na­tion­al­ists who still hold onto the aut­ark­ic ideal des­pite the real­ity of the world mar­ket. Kerry Bolton of Counter-Cur­rents thus ex­claimed “Viva Chávez!” back in 2013. As Marx­ists, we must not al­low our le­git­im­ate op­pos­i­tion to US mil­it­ar­ism or the ex­pan­sion of set­tle­ments in Is­rael al­low us to make com­mon cause with re­ac­tion­ar­ies.

Vul­gar anti-im­per­i­al­ism such as Los­urdo’s is far too close to the isol­a­tion­ist rhet­or­ic of eth­non­a­tion­al­ists for com­fort. While this hardly dis­qual­i­fies all his in­tel­lec­tu­al con­tri­bu­tions, it would be equally mis­taken to think that there is no con­nec­tion between the bad polit­ics of Los­urdo and his the­or­et­ic­al out­look. “Char­lat­an­ism in sci­ence and ac­com­mod­a­tion in polit­ics are in­sep­ar­able,” as Marx put it, speak­ing of Proud­hon.

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Four months back, the Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art opened an ex­hib­it en­titled A Re­volu­tion­ary Im­pulse: Rise of the Rus­si­an Av­ant-Garde. The show re­ceived mostly fa­vor­able write-ups in lib­er­al out­lets like New York Times and New York­er as well as art/cul­ture mags like Stu­dio In­ter­na­tion­al, Seca Art, and He­don­ist. Marx­ist and left­ish pub­lic­a­tions such as World So­cial­ist Web­site (or­gan of the So­cial­ist Equal­ity Party) and Brook­lyn Rail also ran ap­pre­ci­at­ive re­views of the ex­hib­i­tion.

Per­haps my fa­vor­ite crit­ic­al re­flec­tion on the show came from Caesura, an off­shoot from the Platy­pus Af­fil­i­ated So­ci­ety ex­clus­ively fo­cused on art, mu­sic, and lit­er­at­ure. It fea­tured a fairly char­ac­ter­ist­ic but nev­er­the­less poignant ob­ser­va­tion:

Of the stag­ger­ing num­ber of ob­jects on dis­play, most strik­ing was film­maker Dziga Vertov’s 1925 col­lab­or­a­tion with Rod­chen­ko, Kino-Pravda no.21, a pro­pa­ganda film (the title trans­lates to cinema-truth) track­ing the fail­ing health, death and fu­ner­al of Len­in. Black and white graph­ics con­trib­uted by Rod­chen­ko de­pict­ing, without com­ment, the med­ic­al stat­ist­ics of the ail­ing re­volu­tion­ary lead­er cre­ated a palp­able sense of worry as they edge, at an ex­cru­ci­at­ingly slow pace, to­wards the res­ult we all know already: Len­in’s death in 1924. The film showed the massive long-faced pro­ces­sion of mourn­ers at his fu­ner­al, ded­ic­at­ing por­trait shots and name plates to party lead­ers: a hunched over, tear stricken Clara Zetkin, a somber Le­on Trot­sky and Joseph Stal­in stead­fastly look­ing ahead. The lat­ter was ut­terly chilling — a glimpse of a fu­ture yet un­known to the film­makers but known all too well today. Stand­ing, in 2017, in the Amer­ic­an Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art in a mo­ment of ut­ter polit­ic­al con­fu­sion, the tragedy of this mo­ment was cut­ting. Could the mourn­ers have pos­sibly known that they had wit­nessed both the be­gin­ning and the end of a mo­ment of tre­mend­ous his­tor­ic­al po­ten­tial? Did Vertov and Rod­chen­ko real­ize that in their mont­age of party lead­ers it would be Stal­in who would take power? Did they know that, after the crip­pling de­feat of the Ger­man Left the year pri­or, 1924 would mark a clos­ing and not an open­ing of his­tory?

Caesura’s re­view­er fur­ther spec­u­lates that “if the art of the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde has a time­less qual­ity, it is be­cause of its unique his­tor­ic­al ori­gin. Nev­er be­fore or since have artists op­er­ated un­der the thrall of three so­ci­et­ies — crum­bling czar­ist Rus­sia, the dy­nam­ic bour­geois west, and the ad­van­cing specter of so­cial­ism — so dif­fer­ent. It ex­presses all three but be­longs to none.” A sim­il­ar sen­ti­ment is cap­tured by a line in the New York­er: “His­tory is not a con­stant march for­ward; it can stand still for dec­ades and then, as it did in Rus­sia a hun­dred years ago, ex­plode in a flash.” This line it­self merely para­phrases a quip at­trib­uted to Len­in, to the ef­fect that “there are dec­ades where noth­ing hap­pens, but then there are weeks where dec­ades hap­pen.”

I my­self at­ten­ded the ex­hib­it, and was im­pressed by what I saw. Some of the same pieces had ap­peared in spe­cial gal­ler­ies across the city over the last few years, but the sheer wealth of ma­ter­i­al con­cen­trated in one space was breath­tak­ing. Fur­ther­more, the way this ma­ter­i­al was or­gan­ized and form­ally ar­ranged was skill­ful. You can see a pic­ture of me stand­ing next to Lis­sitzky’s “new man of com­mun­ism,” taken from his series for Vic­tory over the Sun. Be­low you can read a fine med­it­a­tion on the show writ­ten by Bloom Correo, a young ul­traleft au­thor who vis­ited NYC just to see it.

Col­lect­ive so­cial know­ledge

Bloom Correo
April 18, 2017
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In timely con­junc­tion with the centen­ni­al of the 1917 Rus­si­an Re­volu­tion, the Mu­seum of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) in New York hos­ted an ex­hib­it titled A Re­volu­tion­ary Im­pulse: The Rise of the Rus­si­an Av­ant-Garde. The ex­hib­it as­sembled an im­press­ive col­lec­tion of dy­nam­ic and mul­ti­fa­ceted works cre­ated dur­ing the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde peri­od in its zenith (1912-1935). Ori­gin­ally brought to­geth­er by Al­fred H. Barr, first pres­id­ent of the MoMA, the col­lec­tion in­cor­por­ates not one art form but many. Sculp­ture, pho­to­graphy, cinema, paint­ing, and graph­ic design are all in­cluded in the ex­hib­it. Film­makers such as the le­gendary Sergei Ei­s­en­stein and Dziga Vertov, paint­ers like Kazi­mir Malevich and El Lis­sitzky, and the pho­to­graph­er Aleksandr Rod­chen­ko are among the many bril­liant artists whose works could be seen at the event.

The ex­hib­it it­self is pre­faced by a short film, a three-minute reel show­ing a fu­ner­al for fallen re­volu­tion­ar­ies as well as scenes of Rus­si­an work­ers tear­ing down tsar­ist icon­o­graphy. The view­er is thus thrust in­to the his­tor­ic­al mo­ment that these artists were cre­at­ing un­der. The jux­ta­pos­i­tion of the sol­emn pro­ces­sion and the glee­ful de­sec­ra­tion demon­strates the con­tra­dict­ory im­pulses op­tim­ism and ex­cite­ment geared to­wards the Re­volu­tion it­self. Though this mo­ment was ground­break­ing, it destabil­ized the en­tire globe and re­quired the sac­ri­fice of many. Yet out of the rubble the yearn­ing for a re­volu­tion­ary fu­ture emerged.

It is from here that the ex­hib­it starts with Pop­ova and Malevich’s early, cu­bist-in­flu­enced works. Both were trend­set­ters in the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde, not­able for pi­on­eer­ing cubo­fu­tur­ism. The style, as the name sug­gests, is a cross of Itali­an fu­tur­ism and Parisi­an cu­bism, two move­ments at the fore­front of European art. Malevich and Pop­ova were not ex­clus­ively in­flu­enced by con­tem­por­ary move­ments out­side of Rus­sia, however; they also drew heav­ily upon Rus­si­an me­di­ev­al art and folk cul­ture.

Most mem­bers of the av­ant-garde in Rus­sia were thus in­ex­tric­ably linked to the in­ter­na­tion­al fu­tur­ist move­ment. Yet their art dis­played a dis­tinctly na­tion­al char­ac­ter. The ex­hib­it uses the cubo­fu­tur­ism of the early Malevich and Pop­ova to where the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde stemmed from in its evol­u­tion. At this early point (1912-1915), the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde was still re­l­at­ively apolit­ic­al in its con­vic­tions, un­like some oth­er art move­ments at the time. In 1916, just as Pop­ova was dis­tan­cing her­self from cubo­fu­tur­ism and rep­res­ent­a­tion­al art, Malevich foun­ded the group Su­premus.

As cubo­fu­tur­ism faded, artist­ic en­deavors amongst the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde grew in­creas­ingly geo­met­ric. Un­der the in­flu­ence of fu­tur­ism su­pre­mat­ism would emerge as new cur­rent in art cre­ated by Kazi­mir Malevich. With this trans­ition, the ex­hib­it takes the view­er in­to a sec­tion fo­cused on this move­ment. Nev­er­the­less, su­pre­mat­ism didn’t ap­pear out of nowhere. It wasn’t a spon­tan­eous cre­ation spun from the mind of a few artists. Traces of su­pre­mat­ism can be found through Malevich’s earli­er pieces, most not­ably Study for Décor of Vic­tory Over the Sun. The paint­ing was made for a fu­tur­ist op­era (Vic­tory Over the Sun), for which Malevich de­signed the sets.

Su­pre­mat­ism’s roots can be traced throughout early Rus­si­an mod­ern­ism, but its sub­sequent de­vel­op­ment can be seen as an ex­per­i­ment to test Malevich’s the­ory of non-ob­ject­ive art. Malevich found that feel­ing has su­per­seded art’s duty to rep­res­ent some sort of ob­ject­ive real­ity. In his book, The Non-Ob­ject­ive World, Malevich fam­ously stated:

By su­pre­mat­ism I mean the su­prem­acy of pure feel­ing in cre­at­ive art. To the su­pre­mat­ist the visu­al phe­nom­ena of the ob­ject­ive world are, in them­selves, mean­ing­less; the sig­ni­fic­ant thing is feel­ing.

in the philo­sophy ex­pounded in The Non-Ob­ject­ive World, Malevich was anti-ma­ter­i­al­ist and anti-util­it­ari­an. Read­ing this text, it’s little won­der why Marx­ists such as Adam Turl re­gard these artists as mere mys­tics. It makes per­fect sense. Look­ing at su­pre­mat­ist works such as Black Square or White Square on White through this lens, the ideal of a “trans­form­a­tion of the zero of form” should seem less tan­tal­iz­ing. But it doesn’t.

Malevich may not have been a polit­ic­al eco­nom­ist, but he and — to an even great­er ex­tent — oth­ers in­volved with the Su­premus group would over­turn the world of the av­ant-garde and bour­geois art, some of them evolving to­ward the much more pop­u­lar con­struct­iv­ism.

El Lis­sitzky saw a great deal in Malevich’s su­pre­mat­ism. Born to a Jew­ish fam­ily in Poch­inok in 1890, Lis­sitzky stud­ied at the Poly­tech­nic School of Darm­stadt in Ger­many as well as the Riga Poly­tech­nic In­sti­tute. After this he moved to Mo­scow, where he swiftly made a name for him­self with­in the fledgling Rus­si­an av­ant-garde. Lis­sitzky helped found the con­struct­iv­ist school of art, along with Tat­lin and Rod­chen­ko, and to­geth­er they took the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde bey­ond the su­pre­mat­ism of Malevich. The town of Vitebsk it­self would be­come some­what of an ex­per­i­ment­ing ground for many of these artists. Con­struct­iv­ist and su­pre­mat­ist art could be found all throughout the town. In the words of Mayakovsky, “the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes”.

It was in this set­ting that Lis­sitzky be­came a lead­ing av­ant-garde fig­ure in the USSR. He de­signed the first flag for the Cent­ral Ex­ec­ut­ive Com­mit­tee of Rus­sia and painted the fam­ous pro­pa­ganda work Beat the White with the Red Wedge. Lis­sitzky is then the only artist in the ex­hib­it the get an en­tire gal­lery ded­ic­ated to him. His Proun (Project For The Af­firm­a­tion of the New) series is ex­hib­ited not only through his paint­ings and litho­graphs, but also through the “mani­festo” he wrote as well as a chil­dren’s book he de­signed, About Two Squares.

The ex­hib­it also goes over oth­er artists between these points, thus avoid­ing the mis­take of a lin­ear present­a­tion from point A to point B to point C (cubo­fu­tur­ism → su­pre­mat­ism → con­struct­iv­ism, more or less). It’s much more el­eg­antly pieced to­geth­er than that. A wide ar­ray of artists is in­cluded along the over­arch­ing path of de­vel­op­ment, which the show oth­er­wise tries to con­vey.

By show­cas­ing the move­ment’s im­pact across every ma­jor me­di­um, the gal­lery of­fers a pic­ture of what it sought to ac­com­plish in the realm of aes­thet­ics along­side the Bolshev­ik party’s am­bi­tions in the realm of polit­ics. While av­ant-garde move­ments ex­is­ted throughout Europe be­fore, dur­ing, and after, and dur­ing World War I, the So­viet av­ant-garde alone was placed at the helm of cul­tur­al in­sti­tu­tions (if only briefly). Artists of all sorts took it upon them­selves to cre­ate a “col­lect­ive so­cial know­ledge” that could guide re­volu­tion­ary work­ers as they em­barked on an un­pre­ced­en­ted world-his­tor­ic­al jour­ney of so­cial trans­form­a­tion.

To il­lus­trate this, the ex­hib­it takes view­ers’ eyes away from the paint­ings lin­ing the halls with a single sculp­ture. An icon­ic pro­pos­al by Vladi­mir Tat­lin for a massive monu­ment to house the Third In­ter­na­tion­al could be seen as an ar­chi­tec­tur­al fantasy jut­ting sky­ward over Pet­ro­grad. Many of the bold­est projects of the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde were prac­tic­ally un­at­tain­able. Yet the un­built as­pir­a­tions of the early RSF­SR re­tain their grip over their pop­u­lar ima­gin­a­tion, even if of­ten over­shad­owed by the built leg­acy left by “ac­tu­ally-ex­ist­ing so­cial­ism.” Sput­nik and the Ber­lin Wall both come to mind whenev­er one thinks of the USSR, along with a long list of proxy wars waged against NATO and the US. It’s no sur­prise.

Re­gard­less, the cul­min­a­tion of the Rus­si­an av­ant-garde’s ef­fort to in­nov­ate a “col­lect­ive so­cial know­ledge” can be seen near the end of the ex­hib­it. Ad­vert­ise­ments, books, and polit­ic­al posters dec­or­ate the walls of this fi­nal sec­tion. It’s al­most as if the cur­at­ors want to sug­gest that the move­ment merely res­ul­ted in banal agit­prop. Wheth­er this was the cul­min­a­tion or simply the last hur­rah of the move­ment is de­bat­able, however. Per­haps the move­ment was putter­ing out any­ways. But as eph­em­er­al as the move­ment was, much of its out­put made a mark on the world.

The great ex­per­i­ments and the­or­ies cre­ated by Rus­si­an av­ant-garde film­makers are es­sen­tial to any un­der­stand­ing of mod­ern cinema. “So­viet mont­age” is of­ten the first thing that’s taught in 101 film classes. Every film schol­ar worth his or her salt knows of Ei­s­en­stein and Vertov. Su­pre­mat­ism and con­struct­iv­ism are also com­monly taught in mod­ern art his­tory classes. If any­thing, this ex­hib­it suc­ceeded in show­ing both the pro­gres­sion of the move­ments dir­ec­tion as well as the vast amount of art forms en­com­passed. On these grounds as well as many oth­ers, A Re­volu­tion­ary Im­pulse is worthy of ad­mir­a­tion and com­mend­a­tion.