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In defense of Slavoj Žižek
. The title of this post recalls Žižek’s own 2008 work In Defense of Lost Causes. Not one of his better books, in my opinion. Žižek remains one of the few redeemable intellectuals of our time. Despite,...
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Can a homosexual be a communist? Harry Whyte’s letter to Stalin, 1934
. Editor’s Note. The following is an excerpt from Moscow (Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, 2013), the new book by New York-based artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Moscow, which will be officially released on...
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Dmitrii Moor, Bolshevik cartoonist and propagandist (1883-1946)
My favorite Bolshevik propaganda artist of all time might be Dmitrii Orlov, better known as “Moor,” who was active in revolutionary struggles from 1905 through the Russian Civil War and World War II....
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Against accelerationism, for Marxism
. Introductory note I reproduce here a short post by my friend Reid Kane critiquing the fundamental premises of “left accelerationism.” For those unfamiliar with this theoretical formation, I advise...
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Fauxcahontas: On Andrea Smith, colonialism, and “authenticity”
. The Andrea Smith debacle likely won’t get as much play as the Rachel Doležal incident from a few weeks back. In my opinion, though, Smith is way worse than Doležal. Not only has she been lying about...
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No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci
. After I debunked Molly Klein’s baseless claim that Žižek was the editor of the Ljubljana student zine Tribuna when it printed a translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a few of her...
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Nothing new to see here: Towards a critique of communization
Donald Parkinson Communist League June 30, 2015 . Originally posted at Communist League Tampa . Awaiting the release of Endnotes 4, I decided to write a critique of the broad tendency of communization,...
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Gosprom: The State Industry building in Kharkov, 1925-1928
. The most breathtaking of all constructivist projects has to be the Gosprom complex (or “Palace of Industry”) in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. There can’t have been anything else of this scale and...
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The death of Marat and the death of art
. Jean-Paul Marat, the famous French revolutionary and member of the Club des Cordeliers, was assassinated by the Girondin sympathizer Charlotte Corday two hundred twenty-two years ago today. David’s...
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Cognord: The Syriza trilogy
. COGNORD is unfortunate enough to have been born in Greece, and fortunate enough to have participated in the social movements which attempted to put a halt to the capitalist devaluation of that...
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Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece: Narkomfin during the 1930s
. Recently I happened across a cache of extremely rare photos of Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece, Dom Narkomfin, in Moscow. They are reproduced here along with a brief popular exposition...
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Under artificial skies: Planetaria and modernism
A couple years ago or so, I posted a number of photos of the Moscow planetarium designed by Mikhail Siniavskii and Mikhail Barshch. The planetarium was built in 1929, and still stands today — albeit...
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Toward a materialist approach to the question of race: A response to the...
. The Charnel-House introduction . A few months ago, I wrote up a critique of the “decolonial dead end” arrived at by groups like the Indigènes de la République. Despite being welcomed in some quarters...
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The mind and face of Bolshevism (1926)
. You can download an illustrated full-text PDF of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism by clicking on the embedded link. What follows is an introduction to it and some thoughts on an all-too-familiar claim...
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The golden age of bourgeois portraiture, before the rise of photography
. What follows is an assortment of extremely high-resolution portraits of famous figures gleaned from various sources around the web, along with a short text by the French photographer and media critic...
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Open source Marxism: Free PDFs from Historical Materialism, Verso, and Jacobin
. Stumbled across an amazing database of free Marxist PDFs, the posts of which seems to be password protected but whose files are nevertheless accessible. (You can click any of the hundreds of links...
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The Stenberg brothers and the art of Soviet movie posters
Alma Law: Let’s begin, if you’re agreeable, simply with some biographical information. Vladimir Stenberg: My father was born in Sweden in the town of Norrkoping and he finished the Academy in...
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Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer’s adventures in the Soviet Union, 1930-1936
. I’ve posted about Hannes Meyer several times already. For those who don’t know, Meyer was the second Bauhaus director. He stepped in after Walter Gropius returned to his own private practice in 1928,...
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A black man in Turkmenistan: Langston Hughes’ 1932 account of Soviet Central...
Below are scans of the communist and Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes’ copy of his own short tract on Soviet Central Asia, from 1932. It was published under the title A Negro Looks at Soviet...
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“¡Que viva Mexico!” Eisenstein in North America (1931)
For anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing, Experimental Cinema was basically an organ of Soviet avant-garde movie-making published in English. It includes articles written by Sergei...
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