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In this short article first published in 1952, Amadeo Bordiga addresses “activism” as “an illness of the workers movement” that exaggerates the “possibilities of the subjective factors of the class struggle” and neglects theoretical preparation, which he claims is of paramount importance. Recently a number of texts have emerged to challenge the unquestioned paradigm of “activism” among Marxists and radicals. Here’s a brief list that I’ve compiled:

1. “Activism,” by Amadeo Bordiga (1952).
2. “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” by Theodor Adorno (1968). Some notes on the decoupling of theory and practice.
3. “Resignation,” by Theodor Adorno (1969). Responding to accusations made against the Frankfurt School.
4. “Militancy: The Highest Stage of Alienation,” by L’Organisation des jeunes travailleurs révolutionnaires (1972). Following the wave of radicalism in 1968.
5. “Action Will Be Taken: Left Anti-intellectualism and Its Discontents,” by Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti (2003). From the antiwar years.
6. “Introduction to The Decline of the Left in the Twentieth Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression,” by Benjamin Blumberg for Platypus (2009).
7. “Additional Remarks on the End of Activism,” by Theorie Communiste (2011).

As I’ve written elsewhere, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and others — one might add Luxemburg, Pannekoek, or Trotsky — would have found the word “activism” [Aktivismus, активизм] unintelligible, especially with respect to their own politics. Nowhere does it appear in any of their writings. Lenin only mentions “activists” [активисты] after 1918, and mostly then in connection with certain Menshevik factions that were “actively” opposed to Soviet power. Even when he’d use roughly equivalent terms like деятели [often translated as “activists,” though more literally “doers”], Lenin’s usual attitude was derisive. He referred, to give just one example, to “some local ‘activists’ (so called because they are inactive).” 

Bordiga’s article thus provides a vindication of sorts, coming from one of the old-timers who was involved in revolutionary agitation and organizing after 1917. Victor Serge described Bordiga as “exuberant and energetic, features blunt, hair thick, black, and bristly, a man quivering under his encumbrance of ideas, experiences, and dark forecasts.” Davidovich, for his part, praised “the living, muscular and full-blooded revolutionary thought of Amadeo Bordiga.” Anyway, most of the others from this period didn’t live long enough to see “activism” become the modus operandi of the Left. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the classical Marxist pairing of theory and practice gave way to the hazier binary of “thought” and “action.”

Here I think Bordiga is nicely complemented by some lines by Theodor Adorno, writing in a more scholarly vein:

Thought, enlightenment conscious of itself, threatens to disenchant the pseudo-reality within which actionism moves…[A]ctionism is tolerated only because it is considered pseudo-reality. Pseudo-reality is conjoined with, as its subjective attitude, pseudo-activity: action that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity, without admitting to itself to what extent it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevated into an end in itself. (“Resignation” in Critical Models, pg. 291)

The only thing I disagree with in the following article is Bordiga’s characterization of the USSR as “state capitalist,” by which he means something quite different than Tony Cliff (but which seems inadequate nonetheless). I like that he repeatedly invokes Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: A Infantile Disorder (1922), which is especially remarkable given that Ilyich aimed many of his sternest criticisms in that book at Bordiga. Translation modified here and there for readability’s sake.

Activism

Amadeo Bordiga
Battaglia Comunista
November 7, 1952
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It is necessary to insist on the word. Just like certain infections of the blood, which cause a wide range of illnesses, not excepting those which can be cured in the madhouse, activism is an illness of the workers movement that requires continuous treatment.

Activism always claims to possess the correct understanding of the circumstances of political struggle, that it is “equal to the situation.” Yet it is unable to engage in a realistic assessment of the relations of force, enormously exaggerating the possibilities based on subjective factors of the class struggle.

It is therefore natural that those affected by activism react to this criticism by accusing their adversaries of underestimating the subjective factors of the class struggle and of reducing historical determinism to that automatic mechanism which is also the target of the usual bourgeois critique of Marxism. That is why we said, in Point 2 of Part IV of our “Fundamental Theses of the Party”:

…[t]he capitalist mode of production expands and prevails in all countries, under its technical and social aspects, in a more or less continuous way. The alternatives of the clashing class forces are instead connected to the events of the general historical struggle, to the contrast that already existed when bourgeoisie [began to] rule [over] the feudal and precapitalist classes, and to the evolutionary political process of the two historical rival classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat; being such a process marked by victories and defeats, by errors of tactical and strategical method.

This amounts to saying that we maintain that the stage of the resumption of the revolutionary workers movement does not coincide only with the impulses from the contradictions of the material, economic and social development of bourgeois society, which can experience periods of extremely serious crises, of violent conflicts, of political collapse, without the workers movement as a result being radicalized and adopting extreme revolutionary positions. That is, there is no automatic mechanism in the field of the relations between the capitalist economy and the revolutionary proletarian party.

It could be the case, as in our current situation, that the economic and social world of the bourgeoisie is riddled with serious tremors that produce violent conflicts, but without the revolutionary party obtaining as a result any possibilities of expanding its activity, without the masses subjected to the most atrocious exploitation and fratricidal massacres being capable of unmasking the opportunist agents, who implicate their fate with the disputes of imperialism, without the counterrevolution loosening its iron grip on the ruled class, on the masses of the dispossessed.

To say that an objectively revolutionary situation exists, but that the subjective element of class struggle (i.e., the class party) is deficient, is wrong at every moment of the historical process. A blatantly meaningless assertion, a patent absurdity.

It is true, however, that in every wave of struggle those who pose the greatest threat to the existence of bourgeois rule will often act in a counterrevolutionary manner, for all intents and purposes. Even when it seems that everything — the machinery of state, the social hierarchy, the bourgeois political apparatus, the trade unions, the propaganda system — has come to a halt and is heading toward its inevitable destruction, the situation will never be revolutionary if the revolutionary party is weak, underdeveloped, or theoretically unstable.

A situation of profound crisis in bourgeois society is susceptible to revolutionary subversion only when “…the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way…” (Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism”: An Infantile Disorder). That is, when the ruling class can no longer effectively operate its traditional mechanisms of repression, when “…a majority of the workers…fully realize that revolution is necessary.”

Such consciousness on the part of the workers can only be expressed by the class party, which is in the last analysis the deciding factor in transforming the bourgeois crisis into the revolutionary catastrophe of all of society.

In order to save society from the maremágnum [maelstrom] into which it has fallen, it is therefore necessary that there should be a collective revolutionary organ of thought and action that can channel and illuminate the subversive will of the masses. For this task the ruling class is incapable of offering any help, because it cannot discover appropriate new forms with which to liberate the productive forces that exist and direct them toward new development.

This “not wanting to live in the old way” of the masses — which alone provides the will to struggle and impulse to act against the class enemy — itself presupposes the crystallization of a solid revolutionary theory within the ranks of the proletarian vanguard, which is called upon to develop and guide the revolutionary masses.

In the party, consciousness precedes action, unlike what takes place among the masses and at the level of the individual.

If, however, someone were to say that this is nothing new, nothing really modern, and inquire whether we are trying to turn the revolutionary party into a small circle of scholars, of theoretical observers of social reality? Never. In Point 7 of Part IV of our 1951 “Fundamental Theses of the Party,” we read:

Although small in number and having but few [connections] with the proletarian masses, in fact jealously attached to its theoretical tasks, which are of prime importance, the Party, because of this true appreciation of its revolutionary duties in the present period, refuses to become a circle of thinkers or of those searching for new truths, of “renovators” considering as insufficient the past truth, and absolutely refuses to be considered as such.

Nothing could be more clear!

The transformation of the bourgeois crisis into class war and revolution presupposes the objective collapse of the social and political framework of capitalism. Still, this is not even possible if the great mass of the workers is not won over to or influenced by the revolutionary theory disseminated by the party a theory that is not to be improvised on the barricades. But will this theory be distilled behind closed doors by scholarly labors without any connection to the masses?

Against this stupid accusation made by the fanatics of activism, one may quite correctly respond that, the indefatigable and assiduous labor of defense waged on behalf of the doctrinal and critical patrimony of the movement, the everyday tasks of immunization of the movement against the poisons of revisionism, the systematic explanation, in the light of Marxism, of the most recent forms of organization of capitalist production, the unmasking of the attempts on the part of opportunism to present such “innovations” as anti-capitalist measures, etc., all of this is struggle, the struggle against the class enemy, the struggle to educate the revolutionary vanguard. It is, if you prefer, an active struggle that is nonetheless not activism.

Do you seriously believe that the arduous and exhausting task of restoring the revolutionary Marxist critique is merely a theoretical undertaking? The whole gigantic bourgeois machine is committed, from morning to night, not so much to the refutation of revolutionary theory — nota bene — but rather to the demonstration that socialist demands can be realized against Marx and against Lenin. Not only political parties but also established governments swear that they govern (i.e., oppress) the masses, all in the name of communism.

Who would dare to deny that this is also a political labor, an active struggle against the class enemy? Only he who is possessed by the demons of activist action could think such a thing.

Even if it is weak in terms of numbers of adherents, any movement that works to free revolutionary theory from unprecedented adulterations, from opportunist contaminations — in its newspapers, its meetings, the factory discussions that it holds — thus performs a revolutionary labor. It labors on behalf of the proletarian revolution.

By no means can it be said that we conceive the task of the party as a “struggle of ideas.”

Totalitarianism, state capitalism, and the downfall of socialist revolution in Russia are not simply “ideas” to which we oppose our own ideas. They are real historical phenomena, which have eviscerated the proletarian movement by leading it onto the treacherous terrain of anti-fascist partisan formations, into the ranks of the fascists, the national front, and pacifism, etc.

Those who carry out a Marxist interpretation of these real phenomena and confirm its theoretical predictions assuredly perform a revolutionary service. Even if they are few in number, and far removed from the limelight of “grand politics” [die große Politik], they are nevertheless establishing an itinerary and point of departure for the proletarian revolution. And it seems to us that there has been no serious examination of these problems outside of the fundamental positions advocated in our journal Prometeo (especially the study “Property and Capital”).

A resumed revolutionary movement does not require a potential crisis in the capitalist system for its realization. Crisis in the capitalist mode of production is already a reality the bourgeoisie has experienced at every possible stage of its historical career. State capitalism and imperialism mark the extreme limits of its evolution, but the fundamental contradictions of the system persist and are becoming more acute. The crisis of capitalism has not been transformed into the revolutionary crisis of society, into a revolutionary class war, because the workers’ movement is still crushed under the weight of the defeats it suffered over the last thirty years. Even as the chaos of capitalist production gets worse, the counterrevolution still reigns triumphant due to strategic errors committed by the communist parties of the Third International — errors that have led the proletariat to look upon the weapons of counterrevolution as its own.

Resumption of the revolutionary movement is still nowhere in sight because the bourgeoisie — by implementing bold reforms in the organization of production and the state (state capitalism, totalitarianism), by sowing doubt and confusion, etc. — has delivered a shattering and disorienting blow. Not to the critical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, as these remain intact and unaffected, but rather to the capacity of proletarian vanguards to apply Marxist principles in interpreting the current stage of bourgeois development.

In such conditions of theoretical disorientation, is the labor of restoring Marxism against opportunist distortions merely a theoretical task?

No, it is the substantial and committed active struggle against the class enemy.

Ostentatious activism seeks to make the wheels of history turn with waltz steps, swinging its derrière to the symphony of electoralism. It is an infantile disorder of communism, but it spreads marvelously even in the nursing-homes [sanitaria] of politics, where retirees of the workers’ movement go to die.

Requiescant in pace… and then, almost magically, the activists mobilize like an armored division as soon as they’re dispatched to conquer the nuclei of our groups in the factories. (You really don’t need an electronic calculator to count our members). They laughably claim that these chickens and ducks, the imperialist blocs, are identical in weight, form, and color — that they’re all of equal strength. With this sophistry the activists thus exhaust their highly fluid analysis, which they moreover deny anyone else is capable of undertaking. And then, finally, they give in to the deadly temptation that the easy chairs of parliament (or some government ministry) exercise over their sorry old behinds…

All activist psalms end in electoral glory. Back in 1917, we saw the sordid conclusion of the social democracy’s hyperactivity. After decades of activity entirely devoted to the conquest of parliamentary seats, mixed trade union commissions, and political influence, they were bathed in an aura of unstoppable activism.

When the time came for the armed insurrection against capitalism, however, it became clear that the only party to engage in insurrection was the party that had the least experience “working among the masses.” During the years of preparation it’d been the one that, more than any other, worked to preserve Marxist theory. It was then seen that those who possessed a solid theoretical training marched against the class enemy, while those who’d enjoyed the “glorious” patrimony of the struggle shamefully choked on their own words and went over to the other side.

So we are familiar with the fanatics of activism. Compared to them, carnival barkers are gentlemen. That is why we maintain that there is only one way to avoid their contagion: the classic kick in the ass.

Amadeo Bordiga
Naples, 1952

Translated in November 2014 from the Spanish translation published in Internationalist Papers, No. 8, 2000.

Originally published in Italian in Battaglia Comunista, No. 7, 1952 as “Dizionarietto dei chiodi revisionisti: Attivismo,” Part II.
Spanish translation available here.

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Below is republished the Latvian-Jewish art historian Meyer Schapiro’s epic troll of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, which originally appeared in 1968. He takes aim at the primary example used by Heidegger in his essay on “The Origin of the Work of Art”: a painting of a pair of shoes by the artist Vincent van Gogh. Schapiro contends that the artwork Heidegger examines, which is supposed to disclose an ageless truth about the relation of being to world, represents something entirely different from what he claims. Painstakingly reconstructing the exhibition Heidegger attended where he first saw the Van Gogh painting (gleaned from a letter in response to his inquiry), Schapiro pinpointed the precise work referred to in the essay.

Needless to say, Schapiro’s article cause quite the stir in aesthetic and philosophical circles. Jacques Derrida, the French theorist and longtime champion of Heidegger, responded to the controversy at length in his book The Truth in Painting, where he concludes: “Schapiro, insouciant, lays a trap for Heidegger. He already suspects the ‘error,’ ‘projection,’ ‘imagination’ in Heidegger’s text.”

The relevant works can be downloaded here:

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) in Off the Beaten Track (1950)
2. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh” (1968)
3. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (1987)
4. Meyer Schapiro, “A Further Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh” (1994)
5. Babette E. Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music, and Eros in Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and, Heidegger (2006)

An orthodox Trotskyist living in New York during the 1930s, Schapiro was moreover an associate of the Frankfurters-in-exile Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In 1937, he even helped the pioneering critical theorists find an apartment near Columbia University. Much to Adorno’s surprise, Schapiro was already acquainted with Walter Benjamin’s writings on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility.” Writing to Benjamin, who was then living in Paris, Adorno urged him to “establish contact with Schapiro, who is extremely familiar with your writings and in general is a well-informed and intellectually imaginative man…Politically speaking, Schapiro is an active Trotskyist. Here is his address: Prof. Meyer Schapiro, 279 West 4th Street, New York, N. Y. (he reads German fluently).”

Benjamin met with Schapiro in Paris in 1939, at the request of Adorno, who hoped his friend might be persuaded to move to New York. Tragically, Schapiro was unable to convince Benjamin to emigrate. He committed suicide near the Spanish border a year later.

Schapiro’s political involvement during that decade even led him to correspond with Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The former Red Army leader clearly appreciated the gesture, writing: “You belong to the camp of friends who as yet are not too numerous but who are, fortunately, increasing.” Later Schapiro acted as an intermediary between Bronstein and the surrealist leader André Breton, setting up the meeting where they would co-write the manifesto “Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.”

The still life as a personal object: A note on Heidegger and Van Gogh

Meyer Schapiro
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In his essay on The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger interprets a painting by van Gogh to illustrate the nature of art as a disclosure of truth.[1]

He comes to this picture in the course of distinguishing three modes of being: of useful artifacts, of natural things, and of works of fine art. He proposes to describe first, “without any philosophical theory…a familiar sort of equipment — a pair of peasant shoes”; and “to facilitate the visual realization of them” he chooses “a well-known painting by van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times.” But to grasp “the equipmental being of equipment,” we must know “how shoes actually serve.” For the peasant woman they serve without her thinking about them or even looking at them. Standing and walking in the shoes, the peasant woman knows the serviceability in which “the equipmental being of equipment consists.” But we,

as long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of equipment in truth is. In van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. There is nothing surrounding this pair of peasant shoes in or to which they might belong, only an undefined space. There are not even clods from the soil of the field or the path through it sticking to them, which might at least hint at their employment. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet.

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness of the field-path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-in-self.[2]

Professor Heidegger is aware that van Gogh painted such shoes several times, but he does not identify the picture he has in mind, as if the different versions are interchangeable, all disclosing the same truth. A reader who wishes to compare his account with the original picture or its photograph will have some difficulty in deciding which one to select. Eight paintings of shoes by van Gogh are recorded by de la Faille in his catalogue of all the canvasses by the artist that had been exhibited at the time Heidegger wrote his essay.[3] Of these, only three show the “dark openings of the worn insides” which speak so distinctly to the philosopher.[4] They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant. They might be shoes he had worn in Holland but the pictures were painted during van Gogh’s stay in Paris in 1886-87; one of them bears the date: ’87.[5] From the time before 1886 when he painted Dutch peasants are two pictures of shoes — a pair of clean wooden clogs set on a table beside other objects.[6] Later in Arles he painted, as he wrote in a letter of August 1888 to his brother, “une paire de vieux souliers” which are evidently his own.[7] A second still life of “vieux souliers de pay san” is mentioned in a letter of September 1888 to the painter Emile Bernard, but it lacks the characteristic worn surface and dark insides of Heidegger’s description.[8]

In reply to my question, Professor Heidegger has kindly written me that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show at Amsterdam in March 1930.[9] This is clearly de la Faille’s no. 255; there was also exhibited at the same time a painting with three pairs of shoes,[10] and it is possible that the exposed sole of a shoe in this picture, inspired the reference to the sole in the philosopher’s account. But from neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others, could one properly say that a painting of shoes by van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work. They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city.

Heidegger has written: “The art-work told us what shoes are in truth. It would be the worst self-deception if we were to think that our description, as a subjective action, first imagined everything thus and then projected it into the painting. If anything is questionable here, it is rather that we experienced too little in contact with the work and that we expressed the experience too crudely and too literally. But above all, the work does not, as might first appear, serve merely for a better visualization of what a piece of equipment is. Rather, the equipmental being of equipment first arrives at its explicit appearance through and only in the artist’s work. What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant’s shoes, is in truth.”[11]

Alas for him, the philosopher has indeed deceived himself. He has retained from his encounter with van Gogh’s canvas a moving set of associations with peasants and the soil, which are not sustained by the picture itself. They are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy. He has indeed “imagined everything and projected it into the painting.” He has experienced both too little and too much in his contact with the work.

The error lies not only in his projection, which replaces a close attention to the work of art. For even if he had seen a picture of a peasant woman’s shoes, as he describes them, it would be a mistake to suppose that the truth he uncovered in the painting — the being of the shoes — is something given here once and for all and is unavailable to our perception of shoes outside the painting. I find nothing in Heidegger’s fanciful description of the shoes pictured by van Gogh that could not have been imagined in looking at a real pair of peasants’ shoes. Though he credits to art the power of giving to a represented pair of shoes that explicit appearance in which their being is disclosed — indeed “the universal essence of things,”[12] “world and earth in their counterplay”[13] — this concept of the metaphysical power of art remains here a theoretical idea. The example on which he elaborates with strong conviction does not support that idea.

Is Heidegger’s mistake simply that he chose a wrong example? Let us imagine a painting of a peasant woman’s shoes by van Gogh. Would it not have made manifest just those qualities and that sphere of being described by Heidegger with such pathos?

Heidegger would still have missed an important aspect of the painting: the artist’s presence in the work. In his account of the picture he has overlooked the personal and physiognomic in the shoes that made them so persistent and absorbing a subject for the artist (not to speak of the intimate connection with the specific tones, forms, and brush-made surface of the picture as a painted work). When van Gogh depicted the peasant’s wooden sabots, he gave them a clear, unworn shape and surface like the smooth still-life objects he had set beside them on the same table: the bowl, the bottles, a cabbage, etc. In the later picture of a peasant’s leather slippers, he has turned them with their backs to the viewer.[14] His own shoes he has isolated on the ground; he has rendered them as if facing us, and so worn and wrinkled in appearance that we can speak of them as veridical portraits of aging shoes.

We come closer, I think, to van Gogh’s feeling for these shoes in a paragraph written by Knut Hamsun in the 1880s in his novel Hunger, describing his own shoes:

As I had never seen my shoes before, I set myself to study their looks, their characteristics, and when I stir my foot, their shapes and their worn uppers. I discover that their creases and white seams give them expression — impart a physiognomy to them. Something of my own nature had gone over into these shoes; they affected me, like a ghost of my other I — a breathing portion of my very self.[15]

In comparing van Gogh’s painting with Hamsun’s text, we are interpreting the painting in a different way than Heidegger. The philosopher finds in the picture of the shoes a truth about the world as it is lived by the peasant owner without reflection; Hamsun sees the real shoes as experienced by the self-conscious, contemplating wearer who is also the writer. Hamsun’s personage, a brooding, self-observant drifter, is closer to van Gogh’s situation than to the peasant’s. Yet van Gogh is in some ways like the peasant; as an artist he works, he is stubbornly occupied in a task that is for him his inescapable calling, his life.

Of course, van Gogh, like Hamsun, has also an exceptional gift of representation; he is able to transpose to the canvas with a singular power the forms and qualities of things; but they are things that have touched him deeply, in this case his own shoes — things inseparable from his body and memorable to his reacting self-awareness. They are not less objectively rendered for being seen as if endowed with his feelings and revery about himself. In isolating his own old, worn shoes on a canvas, he turns them to the spectator; he makes of them a piece from a self-portrait, that part of the costume with which we tread the earth and in which we locate strains of movement, fatigue, pressure, heaviness — the burden of the erect body in its contact with the ground. They mark our inescapable position on the earth. To “be in someone’s shoes” is to be in his predicament or his station in life. For an artist to isolate his worn shoes as the subject of a picture is for him to convey a concern with the fatalities of his social being. Not only the shoes as an instrument of use, though the landscape painter as a worker in the fields shares something of the peasant’s life outdoors, but the shoes as “a portion of the self ” (in Hamsun’s words) are van Gogh’s revealing theme.

Gauguin, who shared van Gogh’s quarters in Arles in 1888, sensed a personal history behind his friend’s painting of a pair of shoes. He has told in his reminiscences of van Gogh a deeply affecting story linked with van Gogh’s shoes.

In the studio was a pair of big hob-nailed shoes, all worn and spotted with mud; he made of it a remarkable still life painting. I do not know why I sensed that there was a story behind this old relic, and I ventured one day to ask him if he had some reason for preserving with respect what one ordinarily throws out for the rag-picker’s basket.

“My father,” he said, “was a pastor, and at his urging I pursued theological studies in order to prepare for my future vocation. As a young pastor I left for Belgium one fine morning, without telling my family, to preach the gospel in the factories, not as I had been taught but as I understood it myself. These shoes, as you see, have bravely endured the fatigue of that trip.”

Preaching to the miners in the Borinage, Vincent undertook to nurse a victim of a fire in the mine. The man was so badly burned and mutilated that the doctor had no hope for his recovery. Only a miracle, he thought, could save him. Van Gogh tended him forty days with loving care and saved the miner’s life.

Before leaving Belgium I had, in the presence of this man who bore on his brow a series of scars, a vision of the crown of thorns, a vision of the resurrected Christ.

Gauguin continues:

And Vincent took up his palette again; silently he worked. Beside him was a white canvas. I began his portrait. I too had the vision of a Jesus preaching kindness and humility.[16]

It is not certain which of the paintings with a single pair of shoes Gauguin had seen at Arles. He described it as violet in tone in contrast to the yellow walls of the studio. It does not matter. Though written some years later, and with some literary affectations, Gauguin’s story confirms the essential fact that for van Gogh the shoes were a memorable piece of his own life, a sacred relic.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, «Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes», in Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1950), 7-68. Reprinted separately, in paperback, with an introduction by H.-G. Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1962). Trans. by A. Hofstadter, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in A. Hofstadter and R. Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty (New York: Random House, 1964), 649-701. All quotations are from the excellent Hofstadter translation and are reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York. It was Kurt Goldstein who first called my attention to Heidegger’s essay, presented originally as a lecture in 1935 and 1936.
[2] Origins of the Work of Art, 662-63. Heidegger refers again to van Gogh’s picture in a revised letter of 1935, printed in M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by R. Manheim (New York: Anchor Books, 1961). Speaking of Dasein (being-there, or “essent”) he points to a painting by van Gogh: “A pair of rough peasant shoes, nothing else. Actually the painting represents nothing. But as to what is in that picture, you are immediately alone with it as though you yourself were making your way wearily homeward with your hoe on an evening in late fall after the last potato fires have died down. What is here? The canvas? The brushstrokes? The spots of color?” (Introduction to Metaphysics, 29).
[3] J.B. de la Faille, Vincent van Gogh (Paris: 1939): no. 54, fig. 60; no. 63, fig. 64; no. 225, fig. 248; no. 331, fig. 249; no. 332, fig. 250; no. 333, fig. 251; no. 461, fig. 488; no. 607, fig. 597.
[4] La Faille, op. cit., nos. 255, 332, 333.
[5] La Faille, op cit., no. 333; it is signed “Vincent ’87.”
[6] La Faille, op cit., nos. 54 and 63.
[7] La Faille, op. cit., no. 461. Vincent van Gogh, Verzamelde brieven van Vincent van Gogh (Amsterdam: 1952-64), III, 291, letter no. 529.
[8] La Faille, op. cit., no. 607. Van Gogh, Verzamelde brieven, IV, 227.
[9] Personal communication, letter of May 6, 1965.
[10] La Faille, op. cit., no. 332, fig. 250.
[11] Origins of the Work of Art, 664.
[12] Origins of the Work of Art, 665.
[13] “Truth happens in van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean that something is rightly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes that which is as a whole world and earth in their counterplay — attains to unconcealment…The more simply and essentially the shoes appear in their essence…the more directly and fascinatingly does all that is attain to a greater degree of being. (Origins oft he Work of Art, 680).
[14] La Faille, op. cit., no. 607, fig. 597.
[15] Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. by G. Egerton (New York: Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1941), 27.
[16] de Rotonchamp, Paul Gauguin 1848-1913, 2nd ed. (Paris: G. eres, 1925),33. There is an earlier version of the story in: Paul Gauguin, “Natures mortes,” Essais d’art libre, 1894, 4, 273-75. These two texts were kindly brought to my attention by Professor Mark Roskill.

Mikhail Lifshitz
The Philosophy of Art
of Karl Marx (1931)
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It is interesting to compare Marx’s “Debates on the Freedom of the Press” (1843)[1] with Lenin’s “Party Organization and Party Literature” (1905),[2] in which he speaks of creating a free press, “free not only in the police sense of the word, but free from capital as well — free from careerism; free, above all, from anarchic bourgeois individualism.” As opposed to the “mercenary commercial bourgeois press,” and the “deluded (or hypocritically delusive) dependence” of the bourgeois writer “upon the money bags, upon bribery, upon patronage,” Lenin set up the principle of party literature. While Marx’s articles in the Rheinische Zeitung were on an incomparably lower level of political understanding, there can be no doubt that even in 1842 Marx directed his criticism against not only police censorship but also against freedom of the press in the bourgeois sense.[3] And he also showed, even at this early stage, some signs of the doctrine of party literature.

From the point of view of Marx’s political beliefs in 1842, the struggle for party literature coincided with criticism of feudal-bureaucratic censorship. And herein lies the great difference between Lenin’s conception of “party” and that of the young Marx. Lenin held that the destruction of feudal censorship was a problem of the bourgeois-democratic revolution, whereas party literature is a weapon of the proletariat in its struggle against anarchic bourgeois literary relations. No doubt the two problems are not separated by a Chinese wall; one grows out of the other. Nevertheless, they are different and within certain limits even opposed. To confuse the democratic ideal of a free press with the problem of saving it from the freedom of a “literary trade” was characteristic of young Marx as a revolutionary democrat.

The censor was his principal opponent. Obeying the dictates of the government, the censor attempted to eradicate every trace of party struggle in literature, prohibiting even the use of party slogans. Already in his first article on freedom of the press, “Comments on the latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” (1842), Marx unmasked the duplicity of the Prussian government which, while suppressing all party struggle, actually came out as “one party against another.” The censor’s instructions contained some “aesthetic criticism.” The writer was expected to use a “serious and modest” style. As a matter of fact, however, any crudeness of style could be forgiven provided the content was acceptable to the government. “Thus the censor must sometimes judge the content by the form, sometimes the form by the content. First content ceased to serve as a criterion for censorship; and then in turn form vanished.”[4]

The censor’s aesthetics imposed on the writer mediocrity on principle. “The truth is universal. It does not belong to me but to everybody. It possesses me, I do not possess it. My possession is the form which constitutes my spiritual individuality. Le style, c’est l’homme. And how! The law permits me to write, but on condition that I write in a style not my own!”[5] The only legitimate style, according to the royal censorship regulations, was one of vague monotony, a grey official style. “Voltaire said: Tous les genres sont bons, excepté le genre ennuyeux [Every style is good, except the boring style]. Here the genre ennuyeux is the only one permitted.”[6] There is a resemblance between genius and mediocrity. The former is modest, the latter pale. But the modesty of the genius does not mean a renunciation of clarity, conviction, power of expression. “The essence of the spirit is always the truth itself,” wrote Marx. “And what do you interpret as its essence? Modesty. Only a rogue is modest, says Goethe; it is your wish to transform the spirit into such a rogue? Or would you not prefer modesty to be that modesty of genius of which Schiller speaks? Well, then, first transform all your citizens, and above all your censors, into geniuses. In which case the modesty of genius will not, like the language of cultured men, consist in speaking with the accent and employing the dialect which is proper to him; it will consist in forgetting modesty and immodesty, and getting to the bottom of things.”[7]

In this connection Marx’s views were not unlike those of Goethe and Hegel on the “one-sidedness” of genius.[8] Genius, they thought, is marked not by a spineless neutrality to all things, but rather by its definite attitude, its one-sidedness. According to Hegel, the artistic renaissances of the past were bound up with the undeveloped state of social relations, with the artist’s dependence upon a solid structure of social life, upon definite contents and traditional forms. Hegel regarded the dissolution of this original definiteness as necessary and progressive. But together with progress and the realization of freedom comes also artistic decadence. “When the spirit attains a consciously adequate and high form, and becomes a free and pure spirit, art becomes superfluous.”[9] The contemporary “free” painter (the art of bourgeois society Hegel calls “free art”) is deprived of any engrossing content. His reactions are all automatic, and he knows but a cold devotion to epochs and styles. Everything attracts him, and nothing in particular. “Free art” becomes a world of stylizations, paraphrases, individual cleverness, and originality.

Young Marx’s views have much in common with this doctrine of Hegel’s. Among Marx’s marginal notes on Grund’s book we find the following passage:

It has been observed that great men appear in surprising numbers at certain periods which are invariably characterized by the efflorescence of art. Whatever the outstanding traits of this efflorescence, its influence upon men is undeniable; it fills them with its vivifying force. When this one-sidedness of culture is spent, mediocrity follows.[10]

As we already know, from his entire career in the Rheinische Zeitung, for example, Marx did not believe that creative art is irretrievably lost with the past.

On the contrary, he showed artists the way out of the crisis which overwhelms art in a society where “self-interest” predominates. This way out Marx saw in the identification of the artist’s individuality with a definite political principle, in the open and vigorously stressed “accent and dialect” of a political party. It was with this idea in mind that he attacked the vagueness of romanticism, its flirtations with primitive poetry and modern mysticism, the middle ages and the Orient.

It would not be correct, however, to identify this viewpoint on the part of Marx with the Hegelian doctrine of the “self-limitation” of genius. ‘The man who will do something great,” wrote Hegel, “must learn, as Goethe says, to limit himself. The man who on the contrary would do everything really would do nothing, and fails.”[11] True enough, Hegel criticized the romantics for their aesthetic polytheism, their excessive versatility, their lack of self-limitation. But these ideas Marx interpreted in an entirely different way. “Self-limitation,” as Hegel conceived it, had nothing to do with a revolutionary party and its political principles permeating the creative work of the artist or poet. Quite the contrary, self-limitation must take place within the confines of bourgeois society. In revolution Hegel saw only negative freedom brought about by some “faction” which, if victorious, becomes another government. Such change, according to Hegel, is only a transitory step towards a better-organized constitutional state, in which every person is a particle in the scheme of the division of labor. Consequently Hegel, contrary to his original plan, justified the “free art” of bourgeois society in that the artist, after confining himself to a definite theme, must devote himself to its traditional interpretation. Thus bourgeois society, on the very day after the revolution, sought to adopt the “continuity” and “certainty” of the old social forms which it had fought as a destructive force. And this was what Hegel had in mind in demanding that the artist becomes conscious of his “individuality and definite position,” and perform his share of work under the protection of a well-organized governmental police.

“Certainty,” in the Hegelian sense of the word, by no means conflicts with the “free art” of bourgeois society, and provides no escape from its false liberty. Only partisanship in art, partisanship in the sense indicated by Marx and Lenin, can give the modern artist that precision and concentration of will, that creative “one-sidedness” which is essential to genuine art. The beginnings of this doctrine can be found in the creed of young Marx in the period of the Rheinische Zeitung.

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Notes

[1] Debatten über Pressfreiheit (Debates on the Freedom of the Press), MEGA, I, I/1, pp. 179-229.
[2] V I Lenin, Collected Works, X, Moscow 1962, pp. 44-49.
[3] “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction,” in Easton and Guddat (eds.), op cit. (footnote 6), pp. 67-92.
[4] Ibid., p. 90.
[5] Ibid., p. 71.
[6] Ibid., p. 73.
[7] Ibid., pp. 72-73.
[8] “Limitation” of aim and work is a recurrent theme in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. “Many-sidedness prepares, properly speaking, only the element in which the one-sided can act…The best thing is to restrict oneself.” (Part I, Ch IV), and “To be acquainted with and to exercise one thing rightly gives higher training than mere halfness in a hundred sorts of things” (Part I, Ch XIII). Cf Part II. Ch XII. and the poem Natur und Kunst. For one-sidedness in Hegel see footnote 10 below.
[9] G W F Hegel. The Philosophy of History, New York 1956.
[10] Marginal note in Grund. p. 25 — ML.
[11] G W F Hegel, Logic, translated by William Wallace, London 1931, p. 145.

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Excerpted from Evgeni Pavlov’s excellent review of Lifshitz’s letters to Lukács, published in Russian. Back when he was less busy translating Bogdanov and Lifshitz, Evgeni used to comment on this blog extensively:

The fate of Mikhail Lifshitz is unusual: relatively obscure in the West and mentioned mostly in the context of his collaboration with György Lukács in the 1930s, his body of published literature is both large and well-known in the former Soviet Union, even if one factors in the decline of interest in all things Marxist after the 1990s. Partially as an attempt to salvage some modicum of genuine philosophical thought from the imposing amount of mindless official Marxism, partially due to its genuinely enduring originality and profundity, the works of Mikhail Lifshitz have continued to be published and, in the case of the already mentioned unpublished archives, have continued to be brought to the educated public’s attention. Lifshitz wrote in a variety of genres; his essays appeared in the Soviet Union’s most read and popular periodicals while his scholarly books were deemed valuable contributions to philosophy, history, literary theory, and aesthetics.

Mikhail Lifschitz was born in 1905 in Crimea, then part of Russia. As an enthusiastic editor of Lifschitz’s first translated monograph, Angel Flores, put it: ‘At the time of the October Revolution Mikhail Lifshitz was a homeless waif roaming the streets of Czarist Russian. Today this young man is one of the finest Marxist critics.” In the 1920s he moved to Moscow to pursue his studies as an artist but later, having become disaffected with the theoretical positions of his teachers at Vkhutemas [Higher Art-Technical Studios], he joined David Riazanov’s Marx-Engels Institute.

In 1975, describing Lifshitz’s ideas as “intelligent materialism,” Evald Ilyenkov wrote:

If one scans the entirety of everything written, or more precisely, created by Mikhail Alexandrovich Lifshitz throughout his life, it becomes obvious that what one sees are the consequently presented chapters of one large book, one large study that can be properly identified using the title of one of his books — Art and the Modern World. This large book does not fall into fragments, each work here —even if it comes out decades later — turns out to be the development, the supplement, the concretization of the earlier chapters: they are all united by one logic, connected by the unity of position, by unity of the general principles, that are shown in more concrete ways with each step. And it could not have been otherwise, it should not have been otherwise, if it was a scientific study conducted with the use of Marx’s method of the development of concepts from the abstract to the concrete, from the clear understanding of the general conditions of emergence and development of phenomena to the clear understanding of those results to which this development lead and still leads.

This characterization is especially invaluable coming from Ilyenkov whose own project in philosophy resembled that of Lifshitz in one important (and now almost forgotten) realm: the relationship between philosophy, culture (art, literature, music and so on) and the ‘communist ideal’ of a new human being, formed as a result of the political-economic changes to come, i.e. as a result of the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the accompanying abolition of the division of labour. In short, both Lifshitz and then Ilyenkov argued that genuine Marxism concerns itself not only (or even not so much) with political and economic changes, but also (or perhaps primarily) with the cultural and societal changes that are inevitably connected to the development of the truly communist society of the future. While Ilyenkov spoke of the communist ideal in terms of the ‘problem of the ideal’ in philosophy, Lifshitz set the tone for this conversation in his many essays and books on specific works of art and culture, articulating a genuinely Marxist critique of their form and content: how do they promote or inhibit the development of the new type of human being, a human being of the future?

Here are Lifshitz’s two major works that’ve been published so far:

1. Mikhail Lifshitz, Literature and Marxism: A Controversy
2. Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1931)

Creativity and individual freedom under communism

Mikhail Lifshitz
The Philosophy of Art
of Karl Marx (1931)
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The historical role of the capitalist mode of production is to bring into the sharpest possible focus the contradictions of social progress; at the same time it prepares the ground for the annihilation of all these inequalities and antagonisms. The very division of labor gives rise to contradictions between the three “elements”: “productive forces,” “social relations,” and “consciousness.” The social division of labor is not, however, an eternal cate­gory. As a class stratification of society it disappears, and as a professional hierarchy it withers away in the transition to communist society.

But what does this transition mean with regard to aesthetic creation? Does it not mean the destruction of all distinctions between the aesthetic and the non-aesthetic in art, just as in life the contradiction between the artist and the ordinary mortal is removed? Does not collectivism, generally speaking, suppress all individual originality and talent? Such are some of the bourgeois objections to communism. These objections Marx and Engels dealt with in criticizing Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own. Stirner, one of the founders of anarchism, distinguished between “human” work, which can be organized collectively, and “individual” work, which cannot be socialized in any manner. For who can take the place of a Mozart or a Raphael?

Marx and Engels wrote:

Here again, as always, Sancho [i.e. Stirner] is out of luck in his choice of practical examples. He thinks that “no one can compose your music in your stead, or execute your designs for a painting. Raphael’s works can be done by no other.” But Sancho should have known that not Mozart himself, but someone else, largely composed and completely finished Mozart’s Requiem, and that Raphael “executed” only a small portion of his frescoes.

Stirner imagines that the so-called organizers of labor wish to organize the whole activity of every individual, whereas it is precisely they who make a distinction between directly productive labor, which must be organized, and labor which is not directly productive. As far as the latter kind of labor is concerned, they do not think, as Sancho imagines, that everybody can work in Raphael’s place, but rather that everybody who has a Raphael in him should be able to develop unhindered. Sancho imagines that Raphael created his paintings independent of the division of labor then existing in Rome. If he will compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he will see to what extent the works of art of the first were conditioned by the flourishing of Rome, then under the influence of Florence; how the works of Leonardo were conditioned by the social milieu of Florence, and later those of Titian by the altogether different development of Venice. Raphael, like any other artist, was conditioned by the technical advances made in art before him, by the organization of society and the division of labor in his locality, and finally, by the division of labor in all the countries with which his locality maintained relations. Whether an individual like Raphael is able to develop his talent depends entirely upon demand, which in turn depends upon the division of labor and the consequent educational conditions of men.

In proclaiming the individual character of scientific and artistic work, Stirner places himself far below the bourgeoisie. Already in our time it has been found necessary to organize this “individual” activity. Horace Vernet would not have had the time to produce one-tenth of his paintings if he had considered them works which “only this individual can accomplish.” In Paris the tremendous demand for vaudeville and novels has given rise to an organization of labor for the production of these wares. which are at least better, at any rate, than their “individual” competitors in Germany.”[1]

Thus bourgeois society itself makes attempts to organize the higher forms of spiritual labor. “Needless to say, however, all these organizations based upon the modern division of labor achieve results which are still very inadequate, and represent an advance only by comparison with the short-sighted self-sufficiency existing until now.”[2] But we should not confuse this so-called “organization of labor” with communism. In communist society those confounded questions concerning the disparity between highly gifted persons and the masses, disappear. “The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in certain individuals. and its consequent suppression in the broad masses of the people. is an effect of the division of labor. Even if in certain social relations everyone could become an excellent painter. that would not prevent everyone from being also an original painter. so that here too the difference between “human” work and “individual” work becomes a mere absurdity. With a communist organization of society, the artist is not confined by the local and national seclusion which ensues solely from the division of labor, nor is the individual confined to one specific art, so that he becomes exclusively a painter, a sculptor, etc.; these very names express sufficiently the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.”[3]

Collectivism, far from suppressing personal originality, in reality provides the only solid ground for an all­-sided development of personality. Marx and Engels stated this emphatically in The German Ideology. They knew full well that a new cycle of artistic progress can begin only with the victory of the proletariat, the abolition of private property, the spread of communist relations. Only then can all the forces now exhausted by capitalist oppression be liberated. “The destruction of private property is the complete assimilation of all human feelings and characteristics.” The new society, wrote Marx, in criticism of “crude,” leveling communism, does not stand for the “abstract negation of all education and civilization.” It does not propose “to suppress talent by force.” Quite the contrary, “in communist society — the only society in which the original and free development of individuals is no mere phrase — this development is contingent precisely upon the very association of individuals, an association based partly on economic premises, partly upon the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and finally upon the universal activity of individuals in accordance with the avail­ able productive forces. Thus the question here concerns individuals on a definite historical level of development, and not any random individuals…Naturally the conscious­ ness of these individuals with respect to their mutual relations is likewise altogether different, and as remote from the “principle of love” or dévouement [dedication] as from egoism.'[4]

Communist society removes not only the abstract contradiction between “work and pleasure” but also the very real contradiction between feeling and reason, between “the play of bodily and mental powers” and “the conscious will.” Together with the abolition of classes and the gradual disappearance of the contradiction between physical and spiritual labor, comes that all-sided development of the whole individual which the greatest social thinkers hitherto could only dream about. Only communist society, in which “the associated producers regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power,” can establish the material basis for “the development of human power which is its own end, the true realm of freedom…The shortening of the working day is its fundamental premise.”[5]

According to Marx’s doctrine, therefore, communism creates conditions for the growth of culture and art compared to which the limited opportunities that the slaves’ democracy offers to a privileged few must necessarily seem meager. Art is dead! LONG LIVE ART! this is the slogan of Marx’s aesthetics.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. (London, England: 1965). Pg. 431.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., pg. 432.
[4] Ibid., pgs. 483-484.
[5] Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III. (Moscow, USSR: 1966). Pg. 820.

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The latest round in the ongoing saga between Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and Chris Cutrone of the Platypus Affiliated Society (PAS) stems from the latter’s review of the former’s book, Revolutionary Strategy, and contains a number of points that might interest readers of this blog. Among other things, they debate the role of the party in Marxist politics, its relation to the state, and the troublesome figure of “democracy” as it exists under capitalism. In his critique of Macnair’s overemphasis on the democratic republic as the form by which proletariat must govern, Cutrone writes:

Capitalism makes the democratic revolution both necessary and impossible, in that the democratic revolution constitutes bourgeois social relations — the relations of the exchange of labor — but capitalism undermines those social relations. The democratic revolution reproduces not “capitalism” as some stable system (which, by Marx’s definition, it cannot be) but rather the crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism, in a political, and hence in a potentially conscious way. The democratic revolution reconstitutes the crisis of capitalism in a manifestly political way, and this is why it can possibly point beyond it, if it is recognized as such: if the struggle for democracy is recognized properly as a manifestation of the crisis of capitalism and hence the need to go beyond bourgeois social relations, to go beyond democracy. Bourgeois forms of politics will be overcome through advancing them to their limits, in crisis.

Unfortunately, the response by Macnair in the pages of the Weekly Worker is one of his weaker ones. He accuses Cutrone of “vacuous circularity,” mistaking the materialist dialectic for some sort of mystical abracadabra. Perhaps in a future post I’ll explain why I think Cutrone’s argument is basically right, even if Macnair’s motivations are understandable given the abuse of Leninist organizational principles on the sectarian left.

Anyway, I’m posting this 1924 article by the Hungarian Marxist revolutionary and critic Georg Lukács because I think it addresses some of the issues at the center of this debate. Furthermore, it’s useful insofar as it pits the respective avatars of CC and MM against each other in a fairly neat fashion: Kautsky for Macnair, and Lukács for Cutrone. Macnair tends to dismiss Lukács as a “philosopher-king,” and his writings as “theoretical overkill.” Obviously, in this I side with Lenin and Lukács against Bernstein and Kautsky. But you can be the judge.

Bernstein’s triumph: Notes on the essays written in honor of Karl Kautsky’s seventieth birthday

Georg Lukacs
Die Internationale
VII, № 22 (1924)
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The main thing, however — as I’ve already said to you — is to do something like this, but not to say so.

— Ignaz Auer, Letter to Bernstein

The man who did it without saying so, the man who did not preach but actually practiced the revision of Marxism, the transformation of revolutionary dialectics. into a form of peaceful evolutionism, was none other than Karl Kautsky. It was, therefore, only fitting and logical that the reformists of every country should come together to celebrate his seventieth birthday. The Vorwärts report on the celebration in London was equally true to form in its — correct — emphasis on the real climax of the proceedings.[1] “It was only when the aging Eduard Bernstein finally rose from his place to the right of Kautsky, the man who, like Kautsky, has faithfully preserved and administered the enormous intellectual heritage of Marx and Engels throughout his life, that the celebration acquired its peculiar, deeper significance…The words that Bernstein uttered were words of friendship. Adler once quoted, in a different context, the saying that what divides people is insignificant beside the multitude of factors which unite them. For Kautsky and Bernstein, this saying took on a new and special meaning. When Bernstein had finished speaking and the two veterans, already legendary figures in the eyes of a young third generation — embraced and held each other for several seconds, it was impossible not to be deeply moved. Indeed, who would have wished it otherwise?”

Kautsky himself does not dispute such harmony with Bernstein. On his attitude to the World War he writes : “I was very close to Bernstein at that time. It was in the war that we rediscovered each other. Both of us maintained our theoretical individuality, but in our practice we were now almost invariably at one with each other. And so we have remained ever since” (Self-Portraits, pg. 26). These words indicate the spirit in which the Kautsky jubilee took place. While the struggles concerning Marxist “orthodoxy” which occupied Kautsky’s early period and culminated in the Bernstein debate are fading increasingly into the past as an insignificant episode, those disputes which he waged after the first Russian revolution — initially with Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, and others, later with Lenin and Trotsky — are developing into the central concerns of his life’s work.

Hence it is no coincidence that appreciation of Kautsky should be based chiefly on his latest sizable work, The Proletarian Revolution and Its Program, a book in which all his reformist tendencies manifest themselves clearly in the guise of a new “theory of revolution.” Karl Kautsky is acclaimed by all reformists as the great theoretician of revolution. And rightly so. For their sabotaging of revolution, their fear of revolution, their frantic efforts to prevent revolution — all this has found its clearest theoretical expression in the life’s work of Karl Kautsky.

Precisely therein lies Bernstein’s triumph. The isolated “differences of opinion” have in any case long since been forgotten. The really crucial question even then was whether, in the period leading up to the decisive power struggles between bourgeoisie and proletariat, social democracy would become the leader of the revolutionary class, or whether it would hurry to help the bourgeoisie to survive this, the severest crisis in its history. Bernstein expressed his preference for the latter course in a premature, overly frank and tactically clumsy fashion. Had his arguments been really discussed and their consequences properly and thoroughly analyzed, the Social Democrats would inevitably have been split. This would have left the bourgeoisie facing a party which, though numerically weakened, took a clear and determined revolutionary line. It was Karl Kautsky’s historic mission in that situation to thwart the clarification of such problems, to prevent the development of any such tension, and to preserve at any price the unity of the SPD (and with it that of the Second International). He has fulfilled this mission faithfully. Instead of calling openly for the liquidation of the revolutionary theory of Marxism, as Bernstein did, Kautsky argued for a “development,” a “concretization” of the Marxist theory of revolution. This new approach, while apparently rejecting Bernsteinian reformism, in fact provided the theoretical underpinning for precisely what is central to Bernstein’s conception of history, namely the notion of peaceful evolutionary progression towards socialism.

L. Boudin has summarized this vocation of Kautsky’s quite clearly: “Not until the smoke of battle [the allusion is to the Bernstein debate. G.L.] had cleared somewhat and this battle had been practically won could Marx’s great successor — Karl Kautsky — write the series of masterpieces which for the first time explained Marxist theory as an evolutionary conception of the coming social revolution” (Die Gesellschaft, pg. 44). Z. Ronais puts it in similar terms: “In Kautsky’s struggle with reformism, where the theoretician proved to be better at Realpolitik than the shortsighted, merely practical, day-to-day politicians, history has decided in Kautsky’s favor” (Der Kampf, pg. 423). In The Proletarian Revolution and Its Program, which his admirers have consequently and quite rightly hailed as his greatest achievement, Kautsky expresses this equivocal and ambiguous theory with the utmost possible clarity. He claims that he is not intent on liquidating the revolution. Quite the reverse, in fact: he attempts to grasp its essence, the essence of the proletarian revolution, quite clearly, and to protect the proletarian revolution from any possibility of being confused with the bourgeois revolution. But it is precisely this “pure” proletarian revolution which, in Kautsky’s exposition, acquires a form which objectively is such as to make it essentially equivalent to Bernstein’s notion of peaceful progression towards socialism.

For this revolution takes place within democracy. And the significance of democracy is precisely “that it brings the greatness of this power [of the proletariat, G.L.] clearly to light while obviating the need for a confrontation of armed forces” (The Proletarian Revolution and its Program, p. 82). The advantage of this kind of revolution over the bourgeois variety is precisely that a counter-blow, a counter-revolution does not usually follow it (ibid., p. 96) — provided, of course, that the principle of “pushing the revolution forward” (ibid., pgs. 85-94) which Rosa Luxemburg erroneously took over from the bourgeois revolution is not applied. Under such circumstances, clearly, to talk of democracy as being a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” is to employ “one of the most ludicrous slogans produced in modern times” (ibid., pg. 112). And so on.

It is not our intention at this point to write a critique of Kautsky’s theory of revolution, the crowning thesis of which is the notorious notion of the coalition government as a transitional form between capitalism and socialism. We have been concerned only to demonstrate the method with which Kautsky “transcended” Bernstein’s fundamental tendencies — the struggle against dialectics in the theoretical domain and against “Blanquism” in the practice of the working-class movement. On the one hand he seemed to refute them, but on the other he turned their objective content into a permanent element of the theory and practice of the SPD. Bernstein was naïve enough to imagine that it was possible to turn a continental workers’ party quite openly into an ally of the bourgeoisie, that it was possible to talk a continental working class into believing that the age of peaceful democracy had arrived. Where Kautsky scores over Bernstein is in his apparent recognition of the revolutionary moments in the world situation, although, of course, he puts a theoretical construction on this recognition which — unintentionally — leads to the same ultimate consequences in practice as Bernstein’s approach. For instance, Kautsky sees quite clearly that democratic means are useful only within democracy, and that the struggle for democracy has to be waged with other means (op. cit., pg. 82). But since, on the one hand, he does not concretize what these “other” means should be, and since, on the other, he is concerned to attune the proletariat exclusively to the notion of the peaceful “proletarian” revolution, he arrives in practice at the same results as he would have done if he had decided to apply the democratic means exclusively and in all situations. With the difference, however, that he has meanwhile succeeded in diverting workers, who though instinctively revolutionary, do not yet think clearly, from the real problem: the power struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat. It is this diversionary strategy: this deliberate attempt to prevent a clear and correct split between revolutionaries and reformists in the workers’ party, or — when a split has already become inevitable — the engineering of a false split. It is this which constitutes the historic mission of Karl Kautsky as the theoretical leader of the Centrists in the Second International. The Serbian, [Zivko] Topalovich, explains in a very characteristic essay the necessity of this sort of diversion for reformism. He agrees with Kautsky that in Western countries “only a modified form of class hegemony, but not a dictatorship, is possible” (Der Kampf, pg. 419). But

in Eastern Europe, in contrast to the West, the power of capitalism has increased, whereas the power and class situation of the proletariat has remained unchanged. Which is why the proletariat in the East does not grasp the new constructive rise to power of the rejuvenated West European proletariat. This blindness to the necessity of such development and its various stages drives it to look towards anarchism as a salvation for revolutionary socialism (ibid.).

He goes on to emit a sigh of nostalgia for “Vienna,” for the late lamented Two-and-a-Half International [or IWUSP].[2] “Those Western comrades who perhaps find these considerations petty should bear in mind that we have to do battle, not merely with our immature bourgeoisie, but also and especially with an immature working class, which is more susceptible than its Western counterpart to those forms of demagogy which appeal to the basest instincts” (ibid., p· 421).

This antithesis between “east” and “west” is by no means a merely geographical distinction (although Kautsky himself also represented it in this way; cf. the remarks in his piece on Liebknecht-Luxemburg-Jogiches about the “English” and “Russian” types of working-class movements). Even in the West it can happen that the proletariat is not sufficiently “schooled” to be able to realize properly the Kautskyan ideal of the pure proletarian revolution, where the struggles to gain political power (as Kautsky sees it!) are waged “by great organizations which have existed for decades, rich in experiences, fully schooled, with carefully thought-out programs and leaders who are as renowned as they are experienced” (The Proletarian Revolution and its Program, pg. 77). In those cases where a conflict does arise in this respect, Kautsky exploits this self-same antithesis tactically or historically. Tactically, for instance, in the debate with Rosa Luxemburg on the question of the mass strike. Unlike the unsubtle and outspoken trade union leaders he did not directly oppose the mass strike movement, nor did he reject the mass strike out of hand; he merely offered a “strategy of attrition” as an alternative to what he called the “strategy of violent overthrow” propagated by Rosa Luxemburg (Neue Zeit, XXVIII, 2). The most fatal historical consequences of this approach manifested themselves at the decisive moments of the World War, in the theory according to which imperialism is not a necessary stage of capitalist development but a more or less “chance” episode of development as a whole. Consequently, this theory maintains, it is as mistaken to fight  imperialism from a revolutionary position (Luxemburg-Lenin) as it is to support it (Cunow-Lensch). The fight should be for peace, for the establishment of the normal preconditions of the proletarian revolution. Even today, ten years after the outbreak of the war, Helene Bauer — who has learned nothing from history — is still preaching the same gospel according to Kautsky. ‘It is not imperialistic war as a salvation from total collapse, but much rather monopolistic domination of the world by what Kautsky calls international “ultra-imperialism” and Hilferding a “general cartel”, which is latent in the imminent economic tendencies of capital. But of course it can also be forced in the direction of war through the power of the pre-capitalist factors…” (Der Kampf, pg. 389). The inevitable practical consequence of this perspective is that those sections of the proletariat which are instinctively too revolutionary to give their support to Cunow and company but are not able to grasp the situation properly and draw the correct conclusions, turn into an ‘appendage’ of western democracy. The one-sided emphasis on German-Austrian war “guilt” also serves this twofold purpose: diversion from the real central issue for revolutionaries (imperialism and civil war) on the one hand, blind allegiance to “western democracy” on the other (cf. Friedrich Adler’s essay in Der Kampf). No, it is certainly no coincidence that Bernstein and Kautsky came together in the World War and that they have remained “almost invariably at one with each other ever since.”

This is why, in my view, Kautsky is historically important. Lenin’s greatness consisted in consciously shaping the unity of the proletarian movement from a consistently revolutionary standpoint, removing those elements antagonistic to the revolution and seeking an alliance with all objectively revolutionary forces. Kautsky, on the other hand, has been utterly consistent in attempting at all times to blur theoretically the decisive problems of revolution; he was never prepared to sacrifice organizational unity with the reformists for a single moment, and he was always willing to pay any price to preserve that unity. Hence, even as early as the first split in the Russian party he was bound to support Martov against Lenin. The jubilee issue of Der Kampf has published a very typical letter of his on precisely this question. He writes:

Should every party member be forced to join the secret organization? Or, to put it another way, should the scope of the party be limited to match that of the secret organization? German Social Democracy was faced with the same question at the time of the Emergency Law; its answer was no. It does not serve our cause to admit to the party only those elements capable of organizing themselves secretly. Nor does it serve our cause to take all those who support it into the secret organization. A secret organization should not grow beyond certain minimal limits if it is to remain viable and undetected. We have no cause to expand it beyond those limits (at a given place), and they are determined by practical considerations. The expansion of the party, on the other hand, should know no limits (pg. 471).

This passage illustrates Kautsky’s basic idea only too clearly. His prefatory remarks to the effect that he has “never been an organizer in the practical sense” and therefore is “none too competent” in this matter merely reinforces our view; namely, that Kautsky sees the question of organization purely from a technical-cum-mechanical point of view. Just as he conceives of the bourgeois revolution as “purely elemental” and the proletarian revolution as “organized” (in the sense of a rigid organization of big-wigs); just as he never seriously examines the dialectical interrelationship between spontaneity and organization (i.e. in the final analysis: between class and party); so, too, he regards the entire historical process. He, the “orthodox” pupil of Marx, consciously rejects the very crux of the Marxist method: the inner, dialectical connection between all “spheres” or “fields” which, viewed in the reified terms of bourgeois thinking, necessarily appear as separate and independent of one another. The most typical example of this is the rigid separation of economics and politics in The Proletarian Revolution and its Program. However, it is precisely this turning away from dialectics (again, a triumph for Bernstein!) which enables him to fulfill his historic mission. Which is: to cling to the entire vocabulary of the Marxist method and yet to derive conclusions from it which amount objectively to the elimination of the class struggle and to the cooperation between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Objectively, then, it was Bernstein who was victorious in the struggle between Kautsky and himself. But his triumph was possible only in the form of victory for Kautsky. Only Kautsky’s theory could manage to transform the substance of Bernstein’s reformism into the theory of a large part of the working class.

The most valuable thing about these laudatory pieces is that they bring this connection very clearly — albeit unintentionally — into the open. They enable every thinking worker to appreciate how correct Lenin was to see in the Centrists and in their theoretician, Kautsky, the most dangerous enemies of the revolutionary proletariat, and how correct he was to fight them. Apart from that, they consist — with very few exceptions — of more or less diligent examinations of single issues or short articles on Gandhi, Freud, Spann, and other topics of “current interest.”

Notes

[1] This review appeared in Die Internationale, VII/21-22, 1924 (ed.). The essays in honor of Kautsky appeared as follows: Die Gesellschaft, Special number with contributions by Max Adler, Boudin, Chernov, Bernstein, Stampfer; Der Kampf, XVII, 10-11, Special number with contributions by Ellenbogen, Helene Bauer, Friedrich Adler, Abramovich, Bracke, Hillquit; Der lebendige Marxismus, Jubilee issue in honor of Karl Kautsky’s 70th birthday (Jena); Die Volkswirtschaftslehre der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen [Self-portraits by Economic Theorists of the Present], vol. I, articles by Bernstein, Diehl, Herkner, Kautsky, Liefmann, Pesch, Julius Wolf (Leipzig).
[2] The International Union of Socialist Parties, usually referred to as the Vienna Union or the Two-and-a-half International, was founded at a conference held in Vienna from 22 to 27 February 1921. The impetus leading to its foundation had come from the Swiss Socialist Party and the English Independent Labour Party. It claimed a following of 10 million members and included, in addition to those mentioned, the Austrian and French Socialist Parties, the right wing of the German Independent Socialist Party (the ‘left having merged with the Communist Party), the Russian Mensheviks and a number of smaller groups, who had left the Second International, but were reluctant to join the Third. However, after The Hague conference of December 1922, the Second International and the Vienna Union agreed on fusion. The Tactical Theses of the Third Congress of the Third International claimed that the Two-and-a-half International was “trying to hover between democracy and proletarian dictatorship. In fact it is helping the capitalist class in every country by encouraging a spirit of irresolution among the working class” (Degras, op. cit., pp. 209-10 and 256).

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Almost two years ago, I posted a fairly extensive collection of early Soviet antireligious propaganda from the 1920s and 1930s, along with some excerpts from Engels and Lenin on the necessity of atheist agitprop. Recently a comrade, Amber Frost (who is always brilliant), reblogged it for Dangerous Minds. This post today will serve to expand on the subject. It features some more rare images, part of a 1923 essay by Trotsky, as well as a few more of my own thoughts.

Obviously, there is very little original to say. So we begin, as ever, with the classics. Marx’s essential views on religion can be summed up in the following famous lines from the introduction to his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843):

Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man — state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

As Marx began to turn his studies away from the critique of German classical philosophy toward the critique of British political economy, he no longer concerned himself with lengthy diatribes against religion. This is not at all because he changed his mind about it; rather, he considered the issue more or less settled. In an 1879 interview he granted to the Chicago Tribune, Marx once again affirmed: “We know that violent measures against religion are nonsense. But this is an opinion: as socialism grows, religion will disappear. Its disappearance must be achieved by social development, in which education must play a part.” (Socialists today evidently do not share Marx’s conviction. With respect to the lengthier passage cited above, Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin has stated in an interview: “Everyone completely misinterprets that Marx quote. It’s the conditions that, in Marx’s formulation, force people to turn to religion for solace in the first place that need to be combated. But even that is patronizing! I believe religion will always exist in some form. People are drawn to it for existential reasons.”)

For the leaders and theoreticians of the Second International, religious faith was rightly considered a private matter to be left up to personal conscience. One’s political conduct must of course be thoroughly atheistic, however, as this occurs within the broader realm of public affairs, where men are answerable to each other (and cannot be seen taking orders from on high). Sometimes socialists grant membership in the party to believers, sometimes for tactical reasons, but as a rule they preferred devout unbelievers. Countering the philistine notion that Marxism was in any way “compatible” with religion, Trotsky wrote in June 1923: “We will admit into our ranks those comrades who have yet to break with religion not in order to reconcile Marxism with Islam, but rather tactfully but persistently to free the backward members’ consciousnesses of superstition, which in its very essence is the mortal enemy of communism.”

Generally, however, Marxists prefer devout unbelievers. The goal is not always to “meet them where they’re at,” as the vulgar expression goes. Pannekoek explained in a 1907 text on “Socialism and Religion”: “In declaring that religion is a private matter, we do not mean to say that it is immaterial to us, what general conceptions our members hold. We prefer a thorough scientific understanding to an unscientific religious faith, but are convinced that the new conditions will of themselves alter the religious conceptions, and that religious or anti-religious propaganda by itself is unable to accomplish or prevent this.”

Rationalism does indeed tend to fall flat in the face of the objective irrationality of society. Science and education can pierce the enchanted circle of religious mysticism and superstition only to a point. Deeper desiderata remain undispelled because reality itself lies fractured. God is dead, as Nietzsche said, but something of Its shadow survives, much as the shadow of the Buddha livcd on, cast in a cave for centuries after the Siddhartha died. While Lenin would later call for a program of “militant atheism” in 1922, as part of a broader materialist initiative, he understood by this both direct propaganda against religious teachings and institutions as well as the indirect alleviation (or, better yet, annihilation) of those miserable social and economic conditions which give rise to religious ideology in the first place.

Trotsky’s piece, reproduced below, highlights precisely this “dialectical” character of Marxism’s struggle against religion. Enjoy!

Antireligious propaganda

Leon Trotsky
Pravda [Truth]
July 22, 1924
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Let us pause once again on the question of antireligious propaganda, as one of the most important tasks in the sphere of everyday life. Here too I quote from the thirteenth congress resolution. It is brief: “Considerable attention should be paid to propaganda promoting the natural sciences (antireligious propaganda).” I don’t remember whether this kind of formulation has been used before, putting antireligious propaganda in parenthesis after “propaganda promoting the natural sciences.” Even if it was, it has now been authoritatively confirmed. This constitutes a demand for a new and different approach to an old problem.

Under the beneficial influence of the impetus generated by your congress, by the very fact of its being called, I have been forced to look through a great deal of published material which ordinarily I would not have had time to review, in particular the satirical journal Bezbozhnik [Godless], where there are a great many cartoons, sometimes quite effective ones, by some of our best cartoonists, a magazine which surely has its positive role to play within certain, primarily urban, circles, but which nevertheless is hardly following the right track in the struggle against religious superstitions. Issue after issue one finds in its pages an ongoing, tireless duel being conducted with Jehovah, Christ, and Allah, hand-to-hand combat between the talented artist [Dmitrii] Moor[11] and God. Of course, we are to a man on Moor’s side completely. But if this was all we were doing, or if this was our main work, then I am afraid the duel would end up as a draw…

At any rate, it is perfectly evident and beyond dispute at the present time that we cannot place our antireligious propaganda on the level of a straightforward fight against God. That would not be sufficient for us. We supplant mysticism by materialism, broadening first of all the collective experience of the masses, heightening their active influence on society, widening the horizon of their positive knowledge, and  with this as our basis, we also deal blows at religious prejudice (wherever necessary).

The problem of religion has colossal significance and is most closely bound up with cultural work and with socialist construction. In his youth, Marx said: ” The criticism of religion is the basis of all other criticism. ” In what sense? In the sense that religion is a kind of fictitious knowledge of the universe. This fiction has two sources: the weakness of man before nature, and the incoherence of social relations. Fearing nature or ignoring it, being able to analyze social relations or ignoring them, man in society endeavored to meet his needs by creating fantastic images, endowing them with imaginary reality, and kneeling before his own creations. The basis of this creation lies in the practical need of man to orient himself, which in turn springs from the conditions of the struggle for existence.

Religion is an attempted adaptation to the surrounding environment in order successfully to meet the struggle for existence. In this adaptation there are practical and appropriate rules. But all this is bound up with myths, fantasies, superstitions, unreal knowledge.

Just as all development of culture is the accumulation of knowledge and skill, so is the criticism of religion the foundation for all other criticism. In order to pave the way for correct and real knowledge, it is necessary to remove fictitious knowledge. This is true, however, only when one considers the question as a whole. Historically, not only in individual cases, but also in the development of whole classes, real knowledge is bound up, in different forms and proportions, with religious prejudices. The struggle against a given religion or against religion in general, and against all forms of mythology and superstition, is usually successful only when the religious ideology conflicts with the needs of a given class in a new social environment. In other words, when the accumulation of knowledge and the need for knowledge do not fit into the frame of the unreal truths of religion, then one blow with a critical knife sometimes suffices, and the shell of religion drops off.

The success of the antireligious pressure which we have exerted during the last few years is explained by the fact that advanced layers of the working class, who went through the school of revolution, that is, acquired an active attitude toward government and social institutions, have easily shaken off the shell of religious prejudices, which was completely undermined by the preceding developments. But the situation changes  considerably when antireligious propaganda extends its influence to the less active layers of the population, not only of the villages, but also of the cities. The real knowledge that has been acquired by them is so limited and fragmentary that it can exist side by side with religious prejudices. Naked criticism of these prejudices, finding no support in personal and collective experience, produces no results. It is necessary, there­ fore, to make the approach from another angle and to enlarge the sphere of social experience and realistic knowledge.

The means towards this end differ. Public dining halls and nurseries may give a revolutionary stimulus to the consciousness of the housewife and may enormously hasten the process of her breaking off from religion. Chemical crop-dusting methods for destroying locusts may play the same role in regard to the peasant. The very fact that the working man and woman participate in club life, which leads them out of the close little cage of the family flat with its icon and image lamp, opens one of the ways to freedom from religious prejudices. And so on and so forth. The clubs can and must accurately gauge the tenacious power of religious prejudices, and find indirect ways to get around them by widening experience and know ledge. So also in antireligious struggle, periods of frontal assault may alternate with periods of blockading, undermining, and encircling maneuvers. In general, we have just entered such a period; but that does not mean that we will not resume a direct attack in the future. It is only necessary to prepare for it.

Has our attack on religion been legitimate or illegitimate? Legitimate. Has it had results? It has. Whom has it drawn to us? Those who by previous experience have been prepared to free themselves completely from religious prejudices. And further? There still remain those whom even the great revo­ lutionary experience of October did not shake free from religion. And here the formal methods of antireligious criticism, satire, caricature, and the like, can accomplish very little. And if one presses too strongly, one may even get an opposite result. One must drill the rock — it is true, Lord knows, it’s hard enough rock! — pack in the dynamite sticks, run back the wires for the fuses, and…after a while there will be a new explosion and a new fall-off, that is, another layer of the people will be torn from the large mass…The resolution of the party congress tells us that in this field we must at present pass from the explosion and the attack to a more prolonged work of undermining, first of all by way of promoting the natural sciences.

To show how an unprepared frontal assault can sometimes give an entirely unexpected result, I will cite a very interesting example, which is quite recent, and which I know about from comrades only by word of mouth, since unfortunately it has not been brought to light in the press yet It comes from the experience of the Norwegian Communist Party. As you probably recall, in 1923 this party split into an opportunist majority under the direction of Tranmael,[2] and a revolutionary minority faithful to the Communist International. I asked a comrade who lived in Norway how Tranmael succeeded in winning over the majority — of course, only temporarily. He gave me as one of the causes the religious character of the Norwegian fishermen. Commercial fishing, as you know, has a very low level of technology, and is wholly dependent upon nature. This is the basis for prejudices and superstitions; and religion for the Norwegian fishermen, as the comrade who related this episode to me wittily put it, is something like a protective suit of clothes.

In Scandinavia there were also members of the intelligentsia, academicians who were flirting with religion. They were, quite justly, beaten by the merciless whip of Marxism. The Norwegian opportunists have skillfully taken advantage of this in order to get the fishermen to oppose the Communist International. The fisherman, a revolutionary, deeply sympathetic with the Soviet Republic, favoring the Communist International with all his heart, said to himself: “It comes down to this. Either I must be for the Communist International, and go without God and fish [laughter] or I must, with heavy heart, break from it.” And break he did…This illustrates the way in which religion can sometimes cut with a sharp edge even into proletarian politics.

Of course, this applies in a greater degree to our own peasantry, whose traditional religious nature is closely knit with the conditions of our backward agriculture. We shall vanquish the deep-rooted religious prejudices of the peasantry only by bringing electricity and chemistry to peasant agriculture. This, of course, does not mean that we must not take advantage of each separate technical improvement and of each favorable social moment in general for antireligious propaganda, for attaining a partial break with the religious consciousness. No, all this is as obligatory as before, but we must have a correct general perspective. By simply closing the churches, as has been done in some places, and by other administrative excesses, you will not only be unable to reach any decisive success, but on the contrary you will prepare the way for a stronger return of religion.

If it is true that religious criticism is the basis for all other criticism, it is also no less true that in our epoch the electrification of agriculture is the basis for the liquidation of the peasant’s superstitions. I would like to quote some remarkable words of Engels, until a short time ago unknown, concerning the potential importance of electrification for agriculture.

Recently, Comrade Riazanov has brought out Engels’s correspondence with Bernstein and Kautsky for the first time letters that are extraordinarily interesting.[3] Old Engels proves to be doubly fascinating, as more and more new materials of his come to light, revealing his character ever more clearly, from both an ideological and a personal point of view. I shall now cite his quotation touching directly on the question of electrification and on overcoming the gulf between town and country.

The letter was written by Engels to Bernstein in the year 1883. You remember that in the year 1882 the French engineer, Deprez, found a method of transmitting electrical energy through a wire. And if I am not mistaken, at an exhibition in Munich — at any rate, one in Germany — he demonstrated the transmission of electrical energy of one or two horsepower for about fifty kilometers. It made a tremendous impression on Engels, who was extremely sensitive to any inventions in the field of natural science, technology, etc. He wrote to Bernstein:

The newest invention of Deprez…frees industry from any local limitations, makes possible the use of even the most distant water power. And even if at the beg inning it will be used by the cities only, ultimately it must become the most powerful lever for the abolition of the antagonism between town and country.

Vladimir Ilyich did not know of these lines. This correspondence has appeared only recently. It had been kept under a hat, in Germany, in Bernstein’s possession, until Comrade Riazanov managed to get hold of it. I don’t know whether you comrades realize with what strict attention, and yet with what strong affection, Lenin used to pore over the works of his masters and elders, Marx and Engels, finding ever new proof of their insight and penetration, the universality of their thought, their ability to see far ahead of their times. I have no doubt that this quotation — in which Engels, on the day after a method has been demonstrated, basically in laboratory terms, for transmitting electrical energy over long distances, looks over industry’s head and sees the village and says that this new invention is a most powerful lever for abolishing the antagonism between town and country — I have no doubt that Lenin would have made this quotation a commonplace of our  party’s thinking. When you read this quotation, it is almost as if old Engels is conversing from the bottom of the sea (he was cremated and his ashes buried at sea, by his wish) with Lenin on Red Square…

Comrades! The process of eliminating religion is dialectical. There are periods of different tempos in the process, determined by the general conditions of culture. All our clubs must be points of observation. They must always help the party orient itself in this task, to find the right moment or strike the right pace.

The complete abolition of religion will be achieved only when there is a fully developed socialist system, that is, a technology that frees man from any degrading dependence upon nature. It can be attained only under social relationships that are free from mystery, that are thoroughly lucid and do not oppress people. Religion translates the chaos of nature and the chaos of social relations into the language of fantastic images. Only the abolition of earthly chaos can end forever its religious reflection. A conscious, reasonable, planned guidance of social life, in all its aspects, will abolish for all time any mysticism and devilry.[4]

Notes

[1] Moor was the pseudonym of Dimitri S. Orlov (1883-1946), a prominent caricaturist and cartoonist. After the October Revolution, he worked for the State Publishing House. In 1920 he did posters for the Red Army and the Chief Political Administration, and in 1921 to combat the famine. After 1 922 , he was a regular cartoonist for Pravda.
[2] Martin Tranmael ( 1879- 1 967 ) was the leader of the Norwegian Labor Party and editor of its major newspaper. After resisting the demands of the Executive Committee of the Comintern to expel dissidents, he broke completely with the International and later helped bring the Norwegian Labor Party into affiliation with the Socialist International.
[3] David B. Riazanov ( 1870-1938) was an historian and philosopher who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917. He organized the Marx and Engels Institute and later withdrew from political activity. But his scholarly and scrupulous attitude toward party history made him offensive to Stalin, who ordered him to be implicated with the defendants at the 1931 trial of a so-called “Menshevik Center,” which was accused of plotting to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. He was dismissed as director of the Marx and Engels Institute, later found guilty of treason, and eventually shot.
[4] Compare with Marx’s claim in the first chapter of Capital: “The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.”

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MECW, vol. 13
Pgs. 102-104

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In order to understand…all the actual complications in the East, it is necessary to cast a retrospective glance at its past history and development.

The Koran and the Mussulman legislation emanating from it reduce the geography and ethnography of the various people to the simple and convenient distinction of two nations and of two countries; those of the Faithful and of the Infidels. The Infidel is “harby,” i.e. the enemy. Islamism proscribes the nation of the Infidels, constituting a state of permanent hostility between the Mussulman and the unbeliever. In that sense the corsair-ships of the Berber States were the holy fleet of Islam. How, then, is the existence of Christian subjects of the Porte to be reconciled with the Koran?

According to the Mussulman legislation,

If a town surrenders by capitulation, and its habitants consent to become rayahs, that is, subjects of a Mussulman prince without abandoning their creed, they have to pay the kharatch (capitation tax), when they obtain a truce with the faithful, and it is not permitted any more to confiscate their estates than to take away their houses…In this case their old churches form part of their property, with permission to worship therein. But they are not allowed to erect new ones. They have only authority for repairing them, and to reconstruct their decayed portions. At certain epochs commissaries delegated by the provincial governors are to visit the churches and sanctuaries of the Christians, in order to ascertain that no new buildings have been added under pretext of repairs. If a town is conquered by force, the inhabitants retain their churches, but only as places of abode or refuge, without permission to worship.

Constantinople having surrendered by capitulation, as in like manner has the greater portion of European Turkey, the Christians there enjoy the privilege of living as rayahs, under the Turkish Government. This privilege they have exclusively by virtue of their agreeing to accept the Mussulman protection. It is, therefore, owing to this circumstance alone, that the Christians submit to be governed by the Mussulmans according to Mussulman man law, that the patriarch of Constantinople their spiritual chief, is at the same time their political representative and their Chief Justice. Wherever, in the Ottoman Empire, we find an agglomeration of Greek rayahs, the Archbishops and Bishops are by law members of the Municipal Councils, and, under the direction of the patriarch, [watch] over the repartition of the taxes imposed upon the Greeks. The patriarch is responsible to the Porte as to the conduct of his co-religionists: Invested with the right of judging the rayahs of his Church, he delegates this right to the metropolitans and bishops, in the limits of their dioceses, their sentences being obligatory for the executive officers, kadis, etc., of the Porte to carry out. The punishments which they have the right to pronounce are fines, imprisonment, the bastinade, and exile. Besides, their own church gives them the power of excommunication. Independent of the produce of the fines, they receive variable taxes on the civil and commercial lawsuits. Every hierarchic scale among the clergy has its moneyed price. The patriarch pays to the Divan a heavy tribute in order to obtain his investiture, but he sells, in his turn, the archbishoprics and bishoprics to the clergy of his worship. The latter indemnify themselves by the sale of subaltern dignities and the tribute exacted from the popes. These, again, sell by retail the power they have bought from their superiors, and traffic in all acts of their ministry, such as baptisms, marriages, divorces, and testaments.

It is evident from this exposé that this fabric of theocracy over the Greek Christians of Turkey, and the whole structure of their society, has its keystone in the subjection of the rayah under the Koran, which, in its turn, by treating them as infidels — i.e., as a nation only in a religious sense — sanctioned the combined spiritual and temporal power of their priests. Then, if you abolish their subjection under the Koran by a civil emancipation, you cancel at the same time their subjection to the clergy, and provoke a revolution in their social, political, and religious relations, which, in the first instance, must inevitably hand them over to Russia. If you supplant the Koran by a code civil, you must occidentalize the entire structure of Byzantine society.

Having described the relations between the Mussulman and his Christian subject, the question arises: What are the relations between the Mussulman and the unbelieving foreigner?

As the Koran treats all foreigners as foes, nobody will dare to present himself in a Mussulman country without having taken his precautions. The first European merchants, therefore, who risked the chances of commerce with such a people, contrived to secure themselves an exceptional treatment and privileges originally personal, but afterward extended to their whole nation. Hence the origin of capitulations. Capitulations are imperial diplomas, letters of privilege, octroyed by the Porte to different European nations, and authorizing their subjects to freely enter Mohammedan countries, and there to pursue in tranquillity their affairs, and to practice their worship. They differ from treaties in this essential point that they are not reciprocal acts contradictorily debated between the contracting parties, and accepted by them on the condition of mutual advantages and concessions. On the contrary, the capitulations are one-sided concessions on the part of the government granting them, in consequence of which they may be revoked at its pleasure. The Porte has, indeed, at several times nullified the privileges granted to one nation, by extending them to others; or repealed them altogether by refusing to continue their application. This precarious character of the capitulations made them an eternal source of disputes, of complaints on the part of ambassadors, and of a prodigious exchange of contradictory notes and firmans revived at the commencement of every new reign.

The real point at issue is always Turkey in Europe: the great peninsula to the south of the Save and Danube. This splendid territory has the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization. Slavonians, Greeks, Wallachians, Arnauts — twelve million men — are all held in submission by one million of Turks, and up to a recent period it appeared doubtful whether, of all these different races, the Turks were not the most competent to hold the supremacy which, in such a mixed population, could not but accrue to one of these nationalities. But when we see how lamentably have failed all the attempts at civilization by Turkish authority — how the fanaticism of Islam, supported principally by the Turkish mob in a few great cities, has availed itself of the assistance of Austria and Russia invariably to regain power and to overturn any progress that might have been made; when we see the central, i.e. Turkish authority weakened year after year by insurrections in the Christian provinces, none of which, thanks to the weakness of the Porte and to the intervention of neighboring States, is ever completely fruitless; when we see Greece acquire her independence, parts of Armenia conquered by Russia (Moldavia, Wallachia, Serbia, successively placed under the protectorate of the latter power) — we shall be obliged to admit that the presence of the Turks in Europe is a real obstacle to the development of the resources of the Thraco-Illyrian Peninsula.

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Just over a week ago, I published a series of antireligious images from the early Bolshevik journal Bezbozhnik u stanka along with an article by Leon Trotsky from 1925 on the subject of atheistic propaganda. In it, he praised “the satirical journal Godless, where there are a great many cartoons, sometimes quite effective ones, by some of our best cartoonists…Issue after issue one finds in its pages an ongoing, tireless duel being conducted with Jehovah, Christ, and Allah, hand-to-hand combat between the talented artist [Dmitrii] Moor and God. Of course, we are to a man on Moor’s side completely.” Many of the images are every bit as offensive as the ones printed by the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, the offices of which were recently the target of a brutal assault by reactionary Islamists. Eleven were killed that day, executioner-style. Several hostages at a printing house and a kosher market in Paris were murdered along with the gunmen in the standoff a few days later.

There was obviously no way of knowing this tragedy would take place when I uploaded the aforementioned post. Like everyone else, I followed the drama that unfolded and watched with dismay the flailing attempts by various leftists to spin the story to fit their own preexisting narratives. Richard Seymour’s article over at Jacobin, which largely framed subsequent debate, was exemplary in this respect. While he condemned violence against civilians, he nevertheless felt it necessary to add that “there’s a critical difference between solidarity with the journalists who were attacked, refusing to concede anything to the idea that [they] are somehow ‘legitimate targets,’ and solidarity with what is frankly a racist publication.” Appended to this was the condescending suggestion: “If you need to be convinced of this, then I suggest you do your research, beginning with Edward Said’s Orientalism as well as some basic introductory texts on Islamophobia.”

Islamophobia has been Seymour’s main concern for some time now. Other issues occasionally show up, such as austerity and intersectionality, but these are few and far between. Wasn’t always so: back in 2004 you could still find him defending revolutionary universalism against the idiocy of left-liberal multiculturalism. Take this entry, “Jihad Chic,” from 2004 (back when Seymour was just a poor man’s Christopher Hitchens). Anyway, going from his description of Charlie Hebdo above — i.e., “frankly a racist publication” — one could easily get the mistaken impression that it’s some latter-day Der Stürmer. Surprisingly, Seymour seems totally oblivious to the context in which this imagery appears. His old buddy Sebastian Budgen, on whom he relies for most of his gossip about the French Left, came much closer to getting this right:

There is a silly debate about whether Charlie Hebdo is a “racist” publication or not. Clearly not, in the sense of its origins lying in a left-wing, post-′68, highly transgressive vulgarity and its opposition to the far Right. It is part of the mental furniture of much of the French Left, radical included (think of a mash-up between Private Eye, Viz, Oz, Ben Elton, and The Young Ones), and most people will have affectionate memories of it prior to the 2000s. Charb himself illustrated Daniel Bensaïd’s Marx for Beginners books not so long ago.

Not just that, either. Cabu, one of the staff cartoonists, got his start as a kind of avant la lettre Oliver North. He’d served as a colonial soldier in Algeria, but later publicly lampooned French militarism in numerous comic strips. Virtually everyone involved in the magazine had campaigned on behalf of immigrants and mocked right-wing nationalists like Marine Le Pen. (There is cruel irony in the fact that she’s now cynically using their memory for political gain). Regardless, Seymour’s brief characterization is highly misleading. Perhaps certain cartoons in the magazine could be construed as racist or antisemitic, and several clearly are, but to smear the entire project and those involved in it as virulent racists is grossly unfair. One comrade even went so far as to compare the victims of the attack to “Nazbols.”

Bob from Brockley posted a response to Seymour written by Contested Terrain on his blog. The rest of Seymour’s argument is boilerplate; Contested Terrain parries its thrusts with relative ease. Seymour, he contends, “portrays the attacks in an extremely general way, as if they are somehow a natural (though too violent) response to anti-Muslim racism in France and Europe, rather than being the specific strategic actions taken by specific actors.” This weakness is compounded by an overall reticence to entertain that it might have origins in Islamist ideology. “In [Seymour’s] account, even pointing out the specific radical Islam linkages behind this amounts to supporting state repression against Muslims in general.” He’s since posted a rejoinder to the criticisms he’s received, which more or less states that he thought some things went without saying.

Far worse than this, however, was a piece by Asghar Bukhari, which circulated widely among leftists looking for empty internet hard talk to affirm. Bukhari’s rant is filled with lazy generalizations such as the following: “White people don’t like to admit it, but those cartoons upheld their prejudice, their racism, their political supremacy.” He dismisses “freedom of expression” and “freedom of speech” as just meaningless phrases bandied about by bigots in the West. Of course, Bukhari showed slightly more appreciation for the principle of free speech back in 2001, when he was writing checks to the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving. “You may feel like you are on your own,” wrote Bukhari, “but rest assured many people are with you in your fight for the Truth.” He reassured Irving that many have “suffered like you in trying to expose certain falsehoods perpetrated by the Jews.”

Perhaps more disturbing was the fact that self-identified Marxists were taking this man’s opinions on the terror attacks in Paris seriously, when just six years or so ago he himself was encouraging young Muslims to join holy jihad. “Muslims who fight against the occupation of their lands,” Bukhari wrote back in 2008, “are ‘Mujahideen’ and are blessed by Allah. And any Muslim who fights and dies against Israel and dies is a martyr who will be granted paradise.” It’s not as if these statements are secret, either, or difficult to find out. Another of his articles posted on Medium closes with an approving quotation from none other than Bin Laden. Why are Marxists at all surprised, then, when liberals accuse them of being soft on religious extremism or antisemitism if their actions seem to confirm their worst suspicions? For the most part, I don’t think socialists today are hardened antisemites or supporters of jihad, but they are far too tolerant of those who are.

Still, if there’s anything leftish commentators on Charlie Hebdo generally got right, it’s their warning against the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash in France and throughout Europe. Already several mosques have been defaced, a kebob store has been firebombed, and ordinary immigrants have been harassed. Clearly, the fear of nationalist reprisals against Muslims is far from baseless. Marxists ought to condemn revanchist French chauvinism as well as Islamist murderers. Especially since the vast majority of Muslims living in France (and throughout the world) have not only have condemned the terrorists, but are quite frequently its worst victims. Indeed, people have too soon forgotten the barbaric massacre of over a hundred schoolchildren by the Taliban in Peshawar, Pakistan. Or the ongoing violence being carried out by Boko Haram in Nigeria, where the number of fatalities in the last year now exceeds two thousand. The situation in countries where Muslims are a minority is simply less direct. Juan Cole has rightly noted that “Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

Obviously it is inflammatory and insensitive for white Europeans to insult immigrant populations, telling them that their cultural and religious background is stupid. Nor can one pretend that it’s not racist to depict Arabs, North Africans, and other ethnic minorities using crude cartoon physiognomies that could’ve come straight out of nineteenth-century caricatures of “the Races of Man.” But it’s the assumption that “brown” people need the crutch of religion and the comfort it provides — that they’re simply too naïve or inherently irrational to accept the bleak godless universe we inhabit, as specks of dust on a spinning rock blasted through outer space — that seems to me truly racist. Kenan Malik, a British Marxist who I don’t think can be easily dismissed as just another “white” person, makes precisely this point on his blog Pandaemonium:

Hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a “racist institution” and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is “racist” or “Islamophobic” to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that left-wing “anti-racism” joins hands with right-wing anti-Muslim bigotry.

Mouvement Communiste and
Kolektivně proti kapitálu on
irrationalism and the caliphate

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Neither God nor master! [Ni dieu ni maître!]

— Auguste Blanqui

Communism begins from the outset with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.

— Karl Marx

Whatever were the aims of those responsible for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo, the consequence was to terrorize the whole population. To terrorize so as to prevent understanding, so as to set up even higher artificial barriers between people on the basis of religious belief. Religion has become a veritable arm of political Islam everywhere in the world. In France this is opposed by the religion of state, said to be secular and republican. In presenting itself as the guardian of civil peace, the state calls for national unity around itself. It demands that the population delegates to it the defense of freedom and democracy. It’s a defense which comes at the price of the preventive restriction of individual and collective liberties and an increased repression of all anti-state dissent. For the defenders of “white identity” like the Front Nationale the attack confirmed that “civil war has already started” against an already identified enemy — the Muslims. All Muslims: whether they share the views of the fanatics, whether they fight them or whether they simply silently submit to them. The foreigner, “the other” from here or wherever, is the target for the fanatics on all sides. The despicable attack on Charlie Hebdo plays the game of the state and weakens the only class, the working class, which can concretely fight religious fanaticism where it is rooted, where it seeks searches for its potential soldiers, in working class neighborhoods and in workplaces. This fight is indispensable if we are not to give up the asserting the need for the exploited and oppressed to organize themselves independently against the state, against all states. As for violent political Islam, its objective is to force Muslims to isolate themselves and to serve as cattle to be sacrificed in Syria, or even right here. What matters is to understand this phenomenon so as to be able to fight it without mercy, and without becoming bound hand and foot to the state.

Irrationalism and the caliphate

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Political Islam has become a global subject of debate and of polarization of civil society into illusory opposed communities. Each one of these illusory communities claims to fight in the name of a certain idea of civilization, only being able to fully express itself in the complete defeat of the other, identified as the enemy because of the faith it professes, including the faith in secularism and the state. In the name of such and such a belief in the supernatural, almost anything can be ignored: the question of the millennia-old oppression of women; the family; international migration; jobs; housing; food, etc.

The deforming and mystifying prism of religion becomes the supposed justification for irrationality, rejection of the reality-principle, and more generally the denial of the humanity to enemies of the faith. This specific mystification of social relations penetrates deeply into the heads of numerous proletarians here, in the advanced capitalist countries, as well as into those of their brothers and sisters on the periphery of the most developed capitalist world.

Because of their incontestable success, these reactionary fideist ideas become a powerful material force adding to those that already shape the surface of the capitalist globe. The extension of fideism in all its forms overturns priorities and redefines capitalist camps in all regions of the planet. But, like every ideology, this long wave of obscurantism is not able to hold back the determinism of matter and the social relations which the ideology claims to replace. Capitalism is not threatened by faith any more than the class societies which preceded it. Fideism is nothing other than a particular ideological expression of class submission.

Fideism is a Catholic theological term, linked to traditionalism. According to it the truth can only be known by tradition, not by reason. All knowledge is founded on a primitive revelation that prolongs and enriches Christian revelation. Only faith, the illuminating intelligence (itself intuitive, thus distinct from reason, which is analytical), makes us know the basis of things, that is to say, spiritual realities. More precisely, fideism excludes the possibility that the truths of faith can consist of rational preambles, resting on proof, including a kernel of rationality which could be absorbed into an autonomous philosophy. In another sense, also theological, fideism makes faith consist of trust in God, not in adhesion to dogmas. In all cases, the term fideism implies a defiance of reason; that’s why it had a pejorative flavor to it. In the same way that rationalism tends to overestimate reason to the point of professing that science is the only source of truth (so rejecting in advance any belief), fideism tends to overestimate faith to the point of professing that revelation is the only guarantee of truth (so discrediting the efforts of all rational activity).[1]

The revolutionary proletariat must first of all fight fideism in itself and treat it as what it is: an instrument of class division which reinforces the dictatorship of capital and states and which is used to recruit the exploited and oppressed into new wars which benefit the dominant classes. In particular, the fideism of the Book (Bible) — but also that of Hinduism along with the vast majority of religious beliefs — is dedicated to God, patriarchy and family. The caliphate, the reactionary fideist ideology which seems to be achieving the greatest success right now, is worthy of our attention particularly as it drapes itself in the colors of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism and, above all, constitutes a central element of the aggravation of the geostrategic crisis of the Middle East. This is why we’re devoting a specific text to it, composed of four points.

First point

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The partisans of the caliphate try to establish an order which will be favorable to them in regions where capitalism rules but where it has not (or very little) dissolved the social relations inherited from the class societies which preceded it. Some 10,000 Sunni tribes in Iraq are the clearest example of it. The archaic tribal social structure has survived on the margins of modern capital, feeding itself from oil rent and petty commodity trading, often illegal. The Iraqi Sunni tribe has been transformed by the extension of the domination of capital but the ancestral patriarchal ties have not been broken. The tribe administers its territory. It is a little world closed towards the exterior and the interior, except when it has to accumulate means of survival by clientelism and haggling. Today, a large number of Sunni tribes in Iraq pledge allegiance to the IS.[2] This bloody group guarantees the permanence of the tribal structure. More than that, the self-proclaimed caliphate sanctifies them.

The other face of the present caliphate is represented by people like Mokhtar Belmokthar, known as “one eye,” a Salafist from the beginning who became celebrated from 2013 because of his attack on the refinery at Amenas in Algeria. Also known as “Mister Marlboro,” this sinister character is also at the head of a vast traffic in cigarettes amounting to around a billion US dollars per year in the whole of Saharan Africa. It’s a traffic which has been able to develop thanks to the blood ties with the Tuareg tribes. Smugglers, day-to-day chicken thieves, traders in human beings (prostitution, trafficking of migrants), drug dealers, all these participants in illegal business find in the caliphate a means of consolidating their lucrative activities and a way to develop others, “whitewashed” by adherence to the faith.

IS itself is an important commercial enterprise in Syria and Iraq which trades in oil, women and consumer goods. Its program can be summarized as “who has weapons has bread and women.” This gang presents no danger for capitalism, which can perfectly well accommodate rentiers and traffickers, and, what’s more, creates them. Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Cameroons and Niger, Al-Shabab in Somalia, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Sahel, Al-Qaida in the Arab peninsula (AQAP) in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the Talibans in Afghanistan and Pakistan along with Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia — and those are just the best known ones — replicate the same social relations expressed by IS.

These considerations don’t apply to Shi’a Islam, whose centralized internal organization, similar to fascism, has allowed it to adapt to modern capitalism, just like the Catholic Church.

Second point

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IS was born from the rubble of an Arab nationalism founded on the model of previous popular democracies based on an alliance between a single party (Ba’athist in the cases of Iraq and Syria), the army and a single union. This model aimed at creating modern postcolonial economies, equipped with strong industry, a unified internal market and an effective secular state. This project was smashed from the outside by the progressive collapse of the Russian bloc, and internally by the emergence from the ruins of national liberation of a parasitic ruling caste, corrupt, despotic, and inefficient.

On this basis, the caliphate of IS is in perfect continuity with the Arab regimes which it claims to oppose. Its sources of survival are trade and plunder; its organization is clientelist and stuffed with incompetents. The IS diverges from the Sunni regimes only in terms of geostrategic positioning. And this is from the simple fact that its regime tries to impose itself on the other states of the region, including those for which Sunni fideism is the official religion.

The US has benefited from the fall of the Russian empire and extended its influence over the Arab regimes whose vague desires for capitalist development have been seriously revised over the last few decades. An important new stage was reached by Washington with the active support for the Taliban in the war against Russia in Afghanistan and then with the first Iraq war. These two episodes marked the adoption by the US administration of an aggressive diplomacy in this area, so as to make the US once again into a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East. The Arab Spring gave Washington the opportunity to also occupy a leading role in the whole of North Africa. The attempt has still not produced a conclusive result.

If General Al-Sissi in Egypt destroyed the Muslim Brothers’ organization and followed in the wake of Hosni Mubarak in matters of foreign policy and strategic alliance with Washington, in Libya, the violent removal of Muammar Gaddafi has still not allowed a pax Americana to be installed, nor has that happened in Afghanistan or Iraq.

In their turn, the two regional Middle Eastern powers, Turkey and Iran, have tried, by pursuing very divergent diplomatic approaches, to take advantage of the acceleration of the geostrategic crisis of the region. The first focused on the development of Islamic regimes as an outcome of the “Arab Spring.” For the moment Ankara’s policy has been a failure. Their support, explicit for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, less open for Palestinian Hamas and publicly denied for IS, has ended up with the growing diplomatic isolation of Turkey. The crushing of the Brothers in Egypt, the military defeat of Hamas in Gaza by Israeli troops and the involvement of the Western powers against IS has pushed back the influence of Turkey in the region and weakened its historic relations with the US and Europe.

As for Iran, the setbacks for the “Arab springs” of Sunni inspiration have put it back in the center of the regional arena. Tehran controls Baghdad, has established solid relations with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, preserves its Lebanese bastion, supports Bashar al-Assad with increasing efficacy in Syria, where the regime has shown an undeniable capacity for survival, and profits from its fight against IS. All this has the aim of hastening the end of Western sanctions and resolving the nuclear issue.

Third point

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Outside the geostrategic and diplomatic dimension, the emergence of violent political Islam provides the states of the advanced countries with a formidable weapon of class division, restricting individual and collective freedoms and enlarging the social base which embraces the dominant ideology. Emergency measures increase. Repressing terrorism means that the burden of factual proof becomes less and less needed. What we are seeing is the loss of part of fundamental bourgeois rights like that of expressing opinions by a mere public demonstration.

The specter of the IS cut-throats terrorizes whole sections of the population in the western capitalist citadels. Here, important sectors of the proletariat embrace identity-based ideologies of defense of religion, family and country. Reactionary “white” organizations like the National Front in France, the Northern League in Italy, UKIP in the UK and the NPD in Germany take advantage of this fear. Often, they attract the votes of the desperate poor during elections. They fuse together, willy-nilly, anger against impoverishment and growing insecurity, the rejection by males of the undermining of patriarchy, and fear of immigrants and young hooligans from council estates, under their banner of defense of “tradition,” of the “good old days,” of God, Family and Nation. Paradoxically, they can happily criticize the positions of Islam towards women, all the better to make people forget their own patriarchal oppression of women. And this is not the only confusion within their ideology. In the Czech Republic neo-Nazis demonstrated against Syrian victims of IS (including their sick children) being given refuge.

Populations identified as Muslim in the advanced capitalist countries become the target of all kinds of accusations. Frozen in their own mystified representation as “community of believers” (Umma), they are ceaselessly told to condemn political Islam. A small minority of Muslims chose to take up the image which states stick on them by supporting a caliphate.

In France, their first step towards the caliphate is without doubt anti-Semitism. An anti-Semitism which spreads dangerously and finds fertile soil in the extreme left, who mix up the just condemnation of the conditions of the Palestinian ruled classes under Israeli colonization with support for the so-called “resistance” of the anti-Semites in Hamas, who exercise a dictatorial power of a rare brutality in Gaza and who are in power in all the Occupied Territories thanks to their governmental alliance with the PLO. In France, anti-Semitic attacks make up half of all racist attacks, targeting a population of Jewish origin which is only 1% of the total population. This “Sunni” anti-Semitism finds a favorable echo in the kind propagated by small groups of the “white” far right, as well as the Iranian variety represented by [Alain] Soral and Dieudonné [M’bala M’bala].

Muslims coming from the developed countries who rally to the caliphate don’t have the same motivations as those who live in the peripheral countries. The only thing they have in common is the desire to consecrate the submission of women. Western fighters for the caliphate don’t have a homogenous class origin. It’s more a question of isolated young men, not very informed, without any definite social roots, rejecting proletarianization, refusing the way of life of their parents and not hiding their hostility towards women who have chosen to be independent from men (“sluts”). The promise of a heroic life going beyond isolation and urban and suburban solitude through a brotherhood of war that also sanctifies the dominant role of men in line with the religious precepts of Islam are the two principal arguments in favor of the hijra [migration to a Muslim country] to fight the infidel.

The sacralization of the oppression of women and the family is an essential pillar of the caliphate. Even the most impoverished men find in it the possibility of exercising an absolute power over their spouses. The pious woman who submits in body and soul to her husband gets in exchange the protection of the religion from other males. The walled-up domestic slave, rejecting her own self from the fact of her inaccessibility, the woman nevertheless becomes in the caliphate the object of the most abusive fantasies on the part of the men. The fight for respect of individuals united in a society which has become fully human can only come about by means of the struggle for the liberation of women from the family and male domination. The true significance of the strategic alliance between the revolutionary working class and women’s liberation movements becomes apparent in the countries where fideist ideology can be found.

Fourth point

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The rise of the caliphate has enormously revived the fervor of the anti-Muslim fideists. The priests of the other faiths largely benefit from it. But they also share what is essential with the caliphate: the cult of the irrational and inexplicable, the mystique of the faith and the mortification of the flesh and the spirit. This is why the fight to the death against religion and for the defense of materialism cannot be limited to political Islam.

To those who are in the front line of the war against the bloodthirsty madmen of IS, to those Kurdish and Syrian fighting men and women in Kobanê and elsewhere who love freedom, our message is this: their will and their sacrifice resounds as a universal call to revolt. Yet this message remains incomplete and today is pressed into the service of geopolitical competition between various capitalist powers. Mass resistance against IS in Kobanê is today ruled by Kurdish nationalist political factions from Turkey and Iraq. They exploit it either to establish (in the case of PKK) or to strengthen (in the case of KDP) their own bourgeois dictatorship, and we must have no illusions about this.

That’s why the mortal struggle engaged by volunteers in Kobanê against the caliphate is not aimed at the division of societies into classes that is at the origin of this modern form of barbarism that is the present caliphate and, more generally, of all religious mystification. As Marx explained:

“Futurism” and proletarian art

Natan Al’tman
Iskusstvo kommuny
October 1918
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Certain art circles and private individuals who not so long ago abused us in various “cultural publications” for working with the Soviet government and who knew no other name for us than “bureaucrats” and “perfunctory artists” would now rather like to take our place.

And so a campaign has begun against futurism, which, they say, is a millstone around the worker’s neck and whose claims to “being the art of the proletariat” are “ridiculous,” etc.…

But are they so ridiculous?

Why did it need a whole year of proletarian government and a revolution that encompassed half the world for the “silent to speak up”?

Why did only revolutionary futurism march in step with the October Revolution?

Is it just a question of outward revolutionary fervor, just a mutual aversion to the old forms, that joins futurism with the proletariat?

Not even they deny that futurism is a revolutionary art that is breaking all the old bonds and in this sense is bringing art closer to the proletariat.

We maintain that there is a deeper link between futurism and proletarian creation.

People naïve in matters of art are inclined to regard any sketch done by a worker, any poster on which a worker is depicted, as a work of proletarian art.

A worker’s figure in heroic pose with a red flag and an appropriate slogan — how temptingly intelligible that is to a person unversed in art and how terribly we need to fight against this pernicious intelligibility.

Art that depicts the proletariat is as much proletarian art as the Chernosotenets who has gotten into the Party and can show his membership card is a Communist.

Just like anything the proletariat creates, proletarian art will be collective:

The principle that distinguishes the proletariat as a class from all other classes.

We understand this, not in the sense that one work of art will be made by many artists, but in the sense that while executed by one creator, the work itself will be constructed on collectivist bases.

Take any work of revolutionary, futurist art. People who are used to seeing a depiction of individual objects or phenomena in a picture are bewildered.

You cannot make anything out. And indeed, if you take out any one part from a futurist picture, it then represents an absurdity. Because each part of a futurist picture acquires meaning only through the interaction of all the other parts; only in conjunction with them does it acquire the meaning with which the artist imbued it.

A futurist picture lives a collective life:

By the same principle on which the proletariat’s whole creation is constructed.

Try to distinguish an individual face in a proletarian procession.

Try to understand it as individual persons — absurd.

Only in conjunction do they acquire all their strength, all their meaning.

How is a work of the old art constructed — the art depicting reality around us?

Does every object exist in its own right? They are united only by extrinsic literary content or some other such content. And so cut out any part of an old picture, and it won’t change at all as a result. A cup remains the same cup, a figure will be dancing or sitting pensively, just as it was doing before it was cut out.

The link between the individual parts of a work of the old art is the same as between people on Nevsky Prospekt. They have come together by chance, prompted by an external cause, only to go their own ways as soon as possible. Each one for himself, each one wants to be distinguished.

Like the old world, the capitalist world, works of the old art live an individualistic life.

Only futurist art is constructed on collective bases.

Only futurist art is right now the art of the proletariat.

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Ekaterina Maximova’s 1931 fabrika-kukhnia [factory kitchen or canteen] on Maslennikov in Samara is a constructivist wonder in the shape of a hammer and sickle. Soviet “factory kitchens” were intended to provide proper nutrition to workers and liberate women from domestic slavery (i.e. the anonymous toil and drudgery of child-rearing and housework). Many such public kitchens were built and opened in the 1920s, but the one designed by Maximova is without a doubt the most spectacular.  As with most constructivist buildings in Russia, however, especially in the hinterlands, strategies to preserve this avant-garde monument have been less than adequate. Or more frequently, entirely absent.

Archnadzor noted in an article from March 2008 that “if this building had appeared in a capital, it would have been esteemed and entered the textbooks of architectural history long ago.” (Though the sad state of similar constructivist buildings in other parts of the former USSR should call this assumption int0 question, with the exception of Melnikov’s oligarch-sponsored pieces and Kharkov’s polished Gosprom façade). Most of Maximova’s original design — both the interior and exterior — has unfortunately been destroyed in the course of the extensive reconstructions and modifications it underwent over the 20th century.

In an effort comparable to many countries’ pre- and post-WWII preservation measures, the factory had already been extensively refurbished by 1944. The entire front façade was remade, and covered the face of the building like a sarcophagus built in the classical style. Some internal changes and coverings were also made. In 1998-99 the building was once again transformed, this time into a shopping center. Threatened by demolition several times since, the building now houses stray dogs and the homeless.

Its function and purpose highlight several aspects of the era’s industrial art. These architectural concepts were ideally employed for factories, workers’ clubs, canteens, garages and modern working-class housing projects, airy and sunlit, and even in Moscow a quarter built purposely to maximize sunlight exposure in all the flats; art became a practicality, industrialized, and intended to serve or otherwise stimulate the masses. Housing projects were designed as a vessel to attune Soviet citizens to the perks of communal living.

The hammer and sickle layout must seem an ideological extravagance, a symbolic excess, but similar projects were realized in Moscow and Leningrad: a school in a vaguely similar hammer and sickle shape, or a Red Army theater in the shape of a star. Maximova’s building thus “demonstrated the progressive aesthetic, engineering, and ethical ideas of the Soviet avant-garde.” It was also one of the first buildings in the Volga area with concrete lift slabs/floor structure, a showcase of modern, creative technology.

The factory kitchen itself was located in the hammer, from which three conveyor belts brought the food to the canteen in the sickle. There were two floors, with airy mezzanines and staircases, and the building also housed a sports facility, reading room as well as the kitchen’s administration. The interior and plan design formed an integral, dynamic part of the building’s aesthetic impact; however, these aspects are rarely considered by the city council when it comes time for renovations, considering their lack of expertise.

In the TV-program Dostoianie respublika, it is mentioned that neither federal nor local government is willing to lend aid to these decaying structures. Another tragic example of this is Moisei Ginzburg’s Narkomfin building in Moscow, which appears on the UNESCO list of endangered buildings, while it is literally falling apart (often with people inside, as Owen Hatherley observed during a recent Moscow excursion). Back in 2008 there were again plans of transforming the Samara kitchen-factory, this time into an office center, but by February 2010 the restoration plans stagnated. Today the building faces destruction once more.

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From Edmund Wilson’s landmark To the Finland Station (1940). You can download a full-text PDF of the book by clicking on the link above.

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In the August of 1835, a young German-Jewish boy, a student at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium at Trier on the Moselle, composed a theme for his final examination. It was called Reflections of a Young Man on Choosing a Profession, and it was radiant with those lofty ideals which are in order on such occasions and which in the present case have attracted attention only for the reason that the aspiring young man managed to live up to his aspirations. In choosing a profession, said Karl Marx at seventeen, one must be sure that one will not put oneself in the position of acting merely as a servile tool of others: in one’s own sphere one must obtain independence; and one must make sure that one has a field to serve humanity — for though one may otherwise become famous as a scholar or a poet, one can never be a really great man. We shall never be able to fulfill ourselves truly unless we are working for the welfare of our fellows: then only shall our burdens not break us, then only shall our satisfactions not be confined to poor egoistic joys. And so we must be on guard against allowing ourselves to fall victims to that most dangerous of all temptations: the fascination of abstract thought.

One reflection — which the examiner has specially noted — comes to limit the flood of aspiration. “But we cannot always follow the profession to which we feel ourselves to have been called; our relationships in society have already to some extent been formed before we are in a position to determine them. Already our physical nature threateningly bars the way, and her claims may be mocked by none.”

So for the mind of the young Marx the bondage of social relationships already appeared as an impediment to individual self-realization. Was it the conception, now so prevalent since Herder, of the molding of human cultures by physical and geographical conditions? Was it the consciousness of the disabilities which still obstructed the development of the Jews: the terrible special taxes, the special restrictions on movement, the prohibitions against holding public office, against engaging in agriculture or crafts?

Both, no doubt. There had been concentrated in Karl Marx the blood of several lines of Jewish rabbis. There had been rabbis in his mother’s family for at least a century back; and the families of both his father’s parents had produced unbroken successions of rabbis, some of them distinguished teachers of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Karl Marx’s paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Trier; one of his uncles was a rabbi there. Hirschel Marx, Karl’s father, was evidently the first man of brains in his family decisively to abandon the rabbinate and to make himself a place in the larger community.

The German Jews of the eighteenth century were breaking away from the world of the ghetto, with its social isolation and its closed system of religious culture. It was an incident of the liquidation of medieval institutions and ideas. Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher, through his translation of the Bible into German, had brought his people into contact with the culture of the outside German world, and they were already by Karl Marx’s generation beginning to play a role of importance in the literature and thought of the day. But Mendelssohn, who had been the original of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, produced a result far beyond what he had intended: instead of guiding the Jews as he had hoped to a revivified and purified Judaism, he opened to them the doors of the Enlightenment. For the young Jews, the traditional body of their culture seemed at once to collapse in dust like a corpse in an unsealed tomb. Mendelssohn’s daughters already belonged to a group of sophisticated Jewish women with salons and “philosopher” lovers, who were having themselves baptized Protestants and Catholics. Hirschel Marx was a Kantian free-thinker, who had left Judaism and Jewry behind.

Living in Trier, on the border between Germany and France, he had been nourished on Rousseau and Voltaire as well as on the philosophy of the Germans. Under the influence of the French Revolution, some of the restrictions on the Jews had been relaxed, and it had been possible for him to study law and to make himself a successful career. When the Prussians expelled Napoleon and it became illegal again for Jews to hold office, he changed his name to Heinrich, had his whole family baptized Christians and rose to be Justizrat and head of the Trier bar.

Next door to the Marxes in Trier lived a family named van Westphalen. Baron von Westphalen, though a Prussian official, was also a product of eighteenth-century civilization: his father had been confidential secretary to the liberal Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, the friend of Winckelmann and Voltaire, and had been ennobled by him. Ludwig von Westphalen read seven languages, loved Shakespeare and knew Homer by heart. He used to take young Karl Marx for walks among the vineyard-covered hills of the Moselle and tell him about the Frenchman, Saint-Simon, who wanted society organized scientifically in the interests of Christian charity: Saint-Simon had made an impression on Herr von Westphalen. The Marxes had their international background of Holland, Poland and Italy and so back through the nations and the ages; Ludwig von Westphalen was half-German, half-Scotch; his mother was of the family of the Dukes of Argyle; he spoke German and English equally well. Both the Westphalens and the Marxes belonged to a small community of Protestant officials — numbering only a scant three hundred among a population of eleven thousand Catholics, and most of them transferred to Trier from other provinces — in that old city, once a stronghold of the Romans, then a bishopric of the Middle Ages, which during the lifetimes of the Westphalens and Marxes had been ruled alternately by the Germans and the French. Their children played together in the Westphalens’ large garden. Karl’s sister and Jenny von Westphalen became one another’s favorite friends. Then Karl fell in love with Jenny.

In the summer of Karl’s eighteenth year, when he was home on his vacation from college, Jenny von Westphalen promised to marry him. She was four years older than Karl and was considered one of the belles of Trier, was much courted by the sons of officials and landlords and army officers; but she waited for Karl seven years. She was intelligent, had character, talked well; had been trained by a remarkable father. Karl Marx had conceived for her a devotion which lasted through his whole life. He wrote her bad romantic poetry from college.

This early student poetry of Marx, which he himself denounced as rhetorical almost as soon as he had written it, is nevertheless not without its power, and it is of interest in presenting the whole repertoire of his characteristic impulses and emotions before they are harnessed to the pistons of his system. The style, already harsh and tight-knotted, which suits his satirical subjects, is usually quite inappropriate to his more numerous romantic ones; but even the lyrics have something of the hard and dark crystallization which is afterwards to distinguish Marx’s writing, and they leave in the mind of the reader certain recurrent symbols.

In these poems, we find a woeful old man, all bones, lying at the bottom of the water, but the waves make him dance when the moon is out, for they are cold in heart and mind and feel nothing. There is a man in a yellow house, a little man with a lean horror of a wife; the poet must pull down the shade so that they may not scare off his fancies. There are doctors, damned Philistines, who think the world is a bag of bones, whose psychology is confined to the notion that our dreams are due to noodles and dumplings, whose metaphysics consists of the belief that if it were possible to locate the soul, a pill would quite easily expel it. There are also sentimental souls who weep at the idea of a calf being slaughtered: yet, after all, are there not asses, like Balaam’s, that are human enough to talk?

In one of Karl Marx’s ballads, a mariner is roused from his bed by the storm: he will go forth, he will leave behind him the warm and quiet towns; will put to sea, and let his ship’s sail swell, keep his course by the changeless stars, contend with the waves and the wind, feel the joy of all his forces at full strain, blood pounding in his breast at the danger — he will defy and he will conquer the sea, which is picking the bones of his brother. In another ballad, a second skipper, assaulted by the songs of the sirens — very different from the sailors of Heine, whose bones have whitened the rocks — declares to their faces that their charms are specious, that for them in their cold abysses there burns no eternal God; but that in his breast the gods preside in their might, all the gods, and under their governance no deviation is possible. The sirens, discouraged, sink. In another, a Promethean hero curses a god who has stripped him of his all; but he swears that he will have his revenge, though his strength be but a patchwork of weaknesses: out of his pain and horror he will fashion a fortress, iron and cold, which will strike the beholder livid and against which the thunderbolts will rebound. Prometheus is to be Marx’s favorite myth: he is to prefix to his doctor’s dissertation the speech of Aeschylus’ Prometheus to Zeus, “Know well I would never be willing to exchange my misfortune for that bondage of yours. For better do I deem it to be bound to this rock than to spend my life as Father Zeus’ faithful messenger”; and a contemporary cartoon on the suppression of the paper he is later to edit is to show him chained to his press with the Prussian eagle preying on his vitals. In yet another of Karl Marx’s poems, he proclaims that the grandeurs and splendors of the pygmy-giants of earth are doomed to fall to ruins. They do not count beside the soul’s aspiration; even vanquished, shall the soul remain defiant, shall still build itself a throne of giant scorn: “Jenny! if we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt shall I fling my glove in the world’s face, then shall I stride through the wreckage a creator!”

Old Heinrich, who said that his parents had given him nothing but his existence and his mother’s love, hoped that Karl, with more advantages than he had had himself, would take his place at the Trier bar. He recognized that Karl’s abilities were exceptional, but he disapproved of what seemed to him his uncanalized energies, his all-embracing intellectual ambitions. Though he, too, talks of Karl’s working for the “welfare of humanity,” he is exceedingly anxious for his son to establish good connections, gives him letters to influential persons who may be of use to him in making his career. His letters to his son are a mixture of excited admiration and apprehension — lest Karl’s genius miscarry; and they have the insistence of jealous affection. Old Heinrich reproaches the boy with egoism, with lack of consideration for his parents — Karl rarely seems to have answered his family’s letters; he cries out continually over Karl’s frequent demands for money: does the young gentleman think his father is made of gold? Etc. His mother writes him that he must not neglect to keep his rooms clean, that he must scrub himself every week with sponge and soap, that his Muse must be made to understand that the higher and better things will be promoted through attention to the more humble.

In the meantime, at the University of Bonn, to which he had gone in the fall of 1835, Karl had joined a convivial tavern club, contracted considerable debts, got into trouble with the university authorities for “nocturnal drunkenness and riot,” become a member of a Poets’ Club suspected of subversive ideas and under the surveillance of the political police, taken part in a row which had arisen between the plebeian tavern clubs and the aristocratic Korps associations, and finally — in the summer of 1836 — fought a duel and got a wound over the eye. In a lithograph of the members of his tavern club, made this same year, when Karl Marx was eighteen, he is shown in the background, but with his head held high under its heavy black helmet of hair and thrown back with a look of brooding fierceness from thick and strong black brows and black eyes. — It was decided, with his father’s emphatic approval, that he should be transferred to the University of Berlin, which has beep described by a contemporary as a “workhouse” in contrast to the “Bacchanalian” character of the other German universities.

At Berlin, where he remained till March 30, 1841, he studied law in compliance with his father’s wishes, but neglected it in favor of philosophy, which was at that time in the German universities the great subject of intellectual interest and of which Karl was a born addict and master. Now he shuts himself up to think and study, “repulses friendships,” as he says, “neglects nature, art and society, sits up through many nights, fights through many battles, undergoes many agitations both from outward and inward causes,” reads gigantically, plans immense labors, writes poetry, philosophy, makes translations.

His father’s letters grow continually more troubled. Has Karl more brains and brilliance than heart? Is it a divine or a Faustian daemon that possesses him? Will he ever be capable of domestic happiness, of making those around him happy? Old Marx is impressive in his letters. His son, Karl’s daughter tells us, enormously admired his father and was never tired of talking about him; he carried a picture of him about all his life, and Engels put it in his coffin when he was dead. But much as he got from his father that was valuable, it was vital for the son to reject much. Heinrich’s correspondence with Karl has a certain dramatic interest. It reaches a climax in a letter of huge length and tragic emotional force, written (December 9, 1837 ) five months before the old man’s death — a last desperate effort to save his son from turning into something which the father dreads. He hopes, he tells Karl, that the denying genius may develop into a solid thinker, that he will realize that art is to be acquired only through intercourse with well-bred people; Karl must learn to present himself to the world in an agreeable and advantageous light, he must win consideration and affection. Above all, he must be careful of Jenny, who is bringing to him all her devotion and sacrificing her social position: in return, he must provide her with a place in actual human society, not merely in some smoked-up room beside a bad-smelling oil-lamp, shut in with a crazy scholar.

The old man, who was fond of Jenny and who had done what he could to promote the match, already foresaw the future and felt himself helpless against it. For Karl seems already to have shaken from him the barbarian social world of the beer-swilling and saber-brandishing German students and to have returned to the rabbinical world. He had made his social isolation complete — he was never again to encourage any friends save those who fed his intellectual interests; and he had worked himself into a decline. Sent away to the country to recover, he had read through the whole of Hegel and gone on to the works of Hegel’s disciples. He was already on his way to becoming the great secular rabbi of his century. Salomon Maimon, in the century before, had tried to reconcile rabbinical philosophy with Kant. Karl Marx, also a teacher in the Jewish tradition but now quite free of the Judaic system and with all the thought of Western Europe at his disposal, was to play an unprecedented role as a leader in the modern world.

We shall revert to this aspect of Marx later on: but it may be said here that Karl Marx was too profoundly and completely a Jew to worry much about the Jewish problem in the terms in which it was discussed during his lifetime. The only opinion he would express on this issue was that the usurious activities of the Jews, which had made them unpopular with their neighbors and which to him were more objectionable still, were simply a special malignant symptom of capitalism, which would disappear with the capitalist system. In his own case, the pride and independence, the conviction of moral superiority, which give his life its heroic dignity, seem to go back to the great days of Israel and to be unconscious of the miseries between.

Yet are they? Two of Marx’s poems he rewrote and finally published in 1841. In one of them a wild violinist appears, in a white gown and with a saber at his side. Why does he fiddle so madly? asks the speaker. Why does he cause the blood to leap? Why does he lash his bow to shreds? — Why do the waves roar? the spirit demands in answer. That, thundering, they may crash on the cliff — that the soul may crash on the floor of Hell. — But, musician, with mockery thou tearest thy heart! That art which a bright god has lent thee thou shouldst send to swell the music of the spheres. Nay, the apparition replies, with this blood-black saber I pierce the soul. God knows not, nor honors, Art: it rises from the vapors of Hell — it maddens the brain and it alters the heart. ’Tis the Devil who beats me the time and the Dead March the tune I must play.

Lucifer was to hover behind Prometheus through the whole of Karl Marx’s life: he was the malevolent obverse side of the rebel benefactor of man. In a satirical poem by Engels and Edgar Bauer, written at about this time, Marx is described as the “black fellow from Trier,” a savage and sinewy monster, who creeps not, but leaps, upon his prey, who stretches his arms toward the heavens as if he would tear down their canopy, who clenches his fist and raves as if a thousand devils had him by the hair; and through the years of his later life he was to be familiarly known as “Old Nick.” His little son used to call him “Devil.” True: the devil as well as the rebel was one of the conventional masks of the romantic; but there is something other than romantic perversity in this assumption of a diabolic role.

The second poem is a dialogue between sweethearts: Beloved, says the lover, thy grief stings thee — thou tremblest beneath my breath. Thou hast drunken of the soul: shine, my jewel — shine, shine, o blood of youth — Darling, replies the maiden, thou lookest so pale, speakest so strangely seldom. See with what celestial music the worlds pass across the heavens! — My dear, says the lover, they pass and they shine — let us, too, flee away, let us merge our souls in one. — Then, whispering, with terrified glance: My dear, thou hast drunk of poison; thou must needs depart with me now. Night has fallen; I can no longer see the light. — With violence he clasps her to his heart, death in his breast and breath. She is pierced by a deeper pain; never more will she open her eyes.

Heinrich Marx had died in May of 1838; Karl Marx was married to Jenny von Westphalen in the June of 1843, two years after he had graduated at Berlin.

On the present state of photography

Walter Peterhans
Red 5, special issue on
the Bauhaus (1930)

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The transformation that is taking place before our eyes in photographic methods and their effects is critical. What does it consist of?

It is striking in the seeming unity and forcefulness of working methods and results. But really it does not exist. The illusion of similarity is based only on a rejection of traditional techniques and pictorial methods and on a turn away from the facile, and thus convincingly boring and accurate likeness of Mr. X. It is based too on a shared avoidance of manual procedures that, after the fact, deny photography’s technical principle — detailed, precise reduction of the image in the film — and in its place substitute mechanical coloring. We fail to recognize the magic of its precision and detailing, thus allowing what we already possessed to disappear — all in an attempt to make it the equal of the graphic arts, which rightly display other qualities arising from their different technical means. Hence we have not even noticed that photography is capable of giving us its own new vision of things and people, a vision of upsetting forcefulness, and that it gives this through its own characteristic selection from among the abundance of existing facts, a selection made possible by the decided individuality of its technique.

Consider a ball on a smooth plane. It presents us with various views according to the illumination and the play of shadows. It is a combination of individual properties that we join out of habit. The combination changes. It is always the ball on the given plane, though our eye does not experience the intense harmony to which it gives rise. This occurs, rather, through understanding, through the concept of the ball; in other words, the combination, for the eye, is fortuitous. With manual procedures it is possible to stress the rudiments of a picture and to allow what is not appropriate to disappear. Through exaggeration, deformation, suppression, and simplification manual procedures effect the selection, the transition from object to picture. This is the process of combination from memories, from fixated portions of various views. The transplantation of this method into photography is called chromolithography and bromoil print. But, whereas there the exploitation of the brush is the technique itself, in the pigment process it interrupts the work of the quantities of light that are active at every point and obliterates the activities appropriate to each of these two different technical methods.

We are capable, however, of renouncing the manual continuation of a process that is already completed by purely photographic means, if we simply form the object itself from the point of view of the photographic selection from among the individual facts. Through the establishment of the chiaroscuro, of the spatial order and of the distribution of the depth of field, an image appears, an image that a’ precise technique derives by scanning the object: the ball on the plane, touching it at only one point, forming itself in the same arc up to the opposite pole, in unstable equilibrium, in the atmosphere of the shadows, and built up in the delicacy and force of the silver gray tones. This is a picture of which it may be said, in turn, that the lights do not jump out with the abruptness of the halftones, which is what usually happens in the ordinary process where they either remain without detail, when we want to stress their purity, or else appear coated, when we want to stress their detail. A purely technical problem thus arises from the emphasis on pure lights and on the finest separation of the brightest middle tones as they lie ready in the negative, though they are not able to be copied. The solution of this problem would allow us, for example, to picture snow not only as a bright spot next to the dark spots of the shadows and the earth but in the material palpability of a heap of crystals. Here it is a question of concrete problems of photographic technique, not of Moholyian false problems of photography with distorting lenses or without perspective.

It is well known that platinotype and pigment printing are characterized by a relative abruptness or lack of differentiation. I need not point out here the difficulties that arise with the use of this procedure. It is sufficient to recall that their formal effect goes completely against what we are striving for, because it is not based on the silver particles embedded in the gelatine. Preliminarily, we arrive at the best results through fine-grained development, using amidol with excess sodium sulphate, of somewhat more delicate gradation than it should finally have. In this case the details of the lights are just hinted at and the darks are still differentiated. We produce a transformation in the silver chloride by bleaching the white parts of a head and setting it in the luminous blacks of hard developing paper, at the same time maintaining an exceptional balance in the proportions of size and structure. But this effect is not specific only to photography, and to strive for it means to renounce its greatest possible quality (which can appear fleetingly in, for example, the gray tones of the lips that part like a wilting poppy leaf), in other words, to renounce what it alone can show us. There are more than a few among the modern photographers who adopt these methods, making big and small posters, and produce graphic, not photographic, effects. They are still new to us, and they can still be useful as a blow against the threat of lifeless sterility. And the often great sureness of taste displayed is always welcome. But the black-and-white effect of the silver, which is completely dissolved in the lights and completely reduced in the darks, can also be obtained in the lithographic process, and if the gelatinization emphasizes the glossiness and purity of the tone, we are still left with only gelatinized lithographs, crudely photographed. Consider, by contrast, the small prints that Outerbridge shows us: the subtle treatment of the darks, the sharp detailing of the brightest light tones, the broad and firm middle tones — the whole thing a set of variations on the halftone theme, yielding a delicate proximity and definiteness of the material. Anyone who sees this will never forget the deeper, characteristic results obtained by the methodical development of technical properties specific to photography.

The situation is exactly the same with regard to the photogram, insofar as it is a question of studies of light and dark based on the harmonies that emerge from combinations of the silver gray tones. They school us for the transposition of the natural tones into the silver gray scale, in that they free us from the at first bewildering fullness of the halftones occurring in the natural object. Yet what do they become when they come forth with the claim to be an end in themselves, along with X rays of lilies, orchids, shellfish, and fish? How much more magical is the fact of their connection with the object outside of us, which is beautiful in itself.

Progress can come only from the further development of a technique that is still in its infancy and that has been completely neglected by us under the influence of manual procedures. And it must come from the further development of the positive techniques that are used with developing papers. It is the form of the characteristic curve of silver chloride and silver bromide papers, with the “sudden drop-off” at its lower end, which makes these objects stand before us in their brilliance and unity; here is a vital harmony of the objects among themselves and outside of us. This method of working differs in principle from that of the manual processes. Our free work with respect to the object precedes the technical process, is guided by an exact knowledge of its productivity and of its limits, and is entirely concluded with the introduction of the latter. Thus this process serves merely to verify our notions.

Now we can return to our opening remark about the seeming unity of the different working methods and results. Photographic technique is a process of the precise detailing of the halftones. To suppress this process means to rob the result of its specific photographic qualities. It is possible, nevertheless, to proceed differently, with great taste and artistry, employing, for example, a hot potassium bichromate bath and a second, final development to strengthen the brightest middle tones and saturate the darks, along with a complete looseness and lightness of the grain. What is threatening to emerge in modern photography, as in every movement as it grows, is nothing else than a new academicism, nourished by dilettantism, when we have scarcely freed ourselves from the old one. It is possible, however, to intensify the pictorial character of our photographs more and more, guided by a knowledge of the effects of the technical measures and doing so before their introduction. In other words, we can handle the technique flexibly, like a net that recovers treasure unharmed, allowing us to separate even within the modern trends, dilettantism and academicism from the steady work of the real enrichment of our heritage.

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Remember back when Jacobin was promoting Vivek Chibber? Interviewing Walter Benn Michaels? Publishing articles by Adolph Reed? When Bhaskar Sunkara first introduced the journal in 2011, he explained that while “Jacobin is not an organ of a political organization nor captive to a single ideology,” its contributors could all generally be considered “proponents of modernity and the unfulfilled project of the Enlightenment.”

How distant those days seem now. Lately, the semi-quarterly periodical has taken more particularist turn. Today, it published a piece by the “decolonial” critics Houria Bouteldja and Malik Tahar Chaouch, representatives the Party of the Republic’s Natives [le Parti des Indigènes de la république] in France. Bouteldja and Chaouch condemned the “vague humanism, paradoxical universalisms, and the old slogans of those who ‘keep the Marxist faith’,” saying that these fail to grasp the new material reality of race’s intertwinement with religion in the West. Essentializing indigenous difference, and blasting the establishment politics of the so-called “white left,” the authors resuscitated the worst of 1960s Maoist rhetoric regarding not only the Third World — this relic of Cold War geopolitics — but also marginalized peoples of Third World descent living in First World nations. (A hyperlink embedded in the article refers readers to a collection of essays by all the usual suspects: liberals and ex-Maoists such as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Jacques Rancière).

Calls for “national unity,” especially of the sort called for by the French state following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, are no doubt reactionary to the core. It is important not to lose sight of this fact when raising criticisms of Bouteldja and Chaouch’s argument. This is not what is at issue. What is at issue here is rather the compatibility or incompatibility of revolutionary Marxism with their decolonial worldview. Framing their activism in terms of a rupture with the status quo, the authors wrote:

Despite its marginalization and relative weakness, political anti-racism has succeeded in giving rise to a significant Palestine solidarity movement, putting Islamophobia at the heart of public debate and building various mobilizations of the descendants of postcolonial immigration. This marked a break with the ruling parties and in particular the white left.

Adolph Reed has already convincingly demonstrated the poverty of anti-racist politics, so I won’t reprise his argument here. More pertinent, at present, is the way Bouteldja and Chaouch characterize their relation to the “white left,” and to the radical Left more broadly. Jacobin, which once saw its mission as bringing about “the next left” (echoing Michael Harrington), presumably provides a platform for leftist discourse and debate — everyone from Marxists to anarchists to left-liberals and market socialists. Do Bouteldja and Chaouch really fall along this end of the political spectrum, however?

Not if you ask them. To her credit, Bouteldja at least harbors no illusions when it comes to her convictions. (One cannot say the same of Jacobin’s editors, who chose to publish her coauthored piece). She rejects the Left-Right distinction, an inheritance of the French Revolution, as a colonial imposition. “My discourse is not Leftist,” Bouteldja declared in an address last year. “It is not Rightist either. However, it is not from outer space. It is decolonial.”

Politics proposing a “third way” — a supposed alternative to the venerable categories of Left and Right — is nothing new, of course. Third Positionism has flourished for over a century now, from fascism to Peronism and beyond. Nevertheless, there is a certain novelty to Bouteldja’s claim that Left and Right are inapplicable to indigenous politics, as a foreign set of values foisted upon them from outside. Indeed, this is a rhetorical gesture several times, with respect to a number of different political and intellectual traditions.

Marxism? Enlightenment? Universalism? Rationality? All inventions of the decadent bourgeois West, apparently. Bouteldja situates her own indigenous perspective somewhere in the rarefied epistemic space of radical alterity. Decolonial thought, she contends, “defied the imposed margins: the margins of enlightenment thinking, of western rationalism/rationality, of Marxism, of universalism, of republicanism.” She therefore implores her fellow indigènes to “resist the ideology of White universalism, human rights, and the Enlightenment.” In Bouteldja’s view, the “the cold rationality of the Enlightenment leads…to the fanaticism of market and capitalist reason,” and engenders an “outrageous and arrogant narcissism to universalize historical processes (i.e., secularism, the Enlightenment, Cartesianism) that were geographically and historically located in Western Europe.” Karl Marx himself was nothing more than a white, Eurocentric chauvinist when he dismissed religion as the opiate of the masses. “There are societies which don’t need the separation between the Church and the State, and for which religion is not a problem,” Bouteldja has written. “Religion is not the opium of the people.”

Such deeply anti-Marxist, anti-Enlightenment proclamations seem not to bother Jacobin’s editors. Bouteldja can hardly be held to the same standard as other authors, after all, as her way of thinking is so utterly alien to Occidental minds (“inscrutable Orientals,” innit?). For her, decolonial thought is above all a mentalité, “an emancipated state of mind” available only to those of colonial origin. Perhaps this is why white leftists don’t get the French comedian Dieudonné’s hilarious brand of antisemitic humor, she suggests. In a remarkable speech translated for Richard Seymour’s Leninology blog, where she is introduced as “the excellent Houria Bouteldja,” she admits:

I love Dieudonné; I love him as the indigènes love him; I understand why the indigènes love him. I love him because he has done an important action in terms of dignity, of indigène pride, of Black pride: he refused to be a domestic negro. Even if he doesn’t have the right political program in his head, his attitude is one of resistance. Today, if we were to strictly consider the political offer that Dieudonné and [Alain] Soral embody, it is currently the one that best conforms to the existential malaise of the second and third generations of post-colonial immigrants: it recognizes full and complete citizenship within the Nation-state, it respects the muslim character within the limits and conditions put forth by Soral. It also designates an enemy: the Jew as a Jew, and the Jew as a Zionist, as an embodiment of imperialism, but also because of the Jew’s privileged position.

While Bouteldja has in the past condemned Dieudonné’s rapprochement with the far-right nationalist Alain Soral, it seems to be more on account of the fact that Soral is part of the white establishment than anything having to do with his serial vilification of the Jews. It’s just a decolonial thing, immune to Western criticism, that we as “white leftists” must simply learn to accept. Secularism is a mode of colonial domination, as is homosexuality. Denouncing “gay imperialism,” Bouteldja writes: “The homosexual way of life does not exist in the banlieues, and that’s not entirely a bad thing.” Homosexuality has been “imposed” as an identity in countries where it did not exist [L’homosexualité est imposée comme identité dans des contrées où elle n’existerait pas]. One recalls the infamous remark made back in 2003 by the SWP organizer Lindsey German, leader of the RESPECT antiwar coalition in Britain: “[S]ome Muslims are anti-gay…Now I’m in favor of defending gay rights, but I am not prepared to have it as a shibboleth, [created by] people who…won’t defend George Galloway, and who regard the state of Israel as somehow a viable presence, justified in occupying Palestinian territories.”

Vivek Chibber warned in a Jacobin interview a couple years ago that “[p]ostcolonial theory discounts the enduring value of Enlightenment universalism at its own peril.” The same might be said of decolonial theory today. Not everyone on the communist left has placated this reactionary pseudo-radicalism, however. Aufheben’s critique of Cliffite accommodationism in “Croissants and Roses: New Labour, Communalism, and the Rise of Muslim Britain,” is as relevant today as in 2006. Same goes with the French left communist website Mondialisme, which besides publishing translations of Loren Goldner and Grandizo Munis has released this scathing polemic against Bouteldja’s indigenous party.

Jacobin would to well to revisit its own founding documents, to see whether these still accurately describe its political project.

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I hate to say it, but what strikes me more than anything in rereading Houria Bouteldja’s article is just how painfully French her entire mode of thought is. Far from being fundamentally “alien” and indecipherable to white leftists in the West, her arguments are Western through and through. She recycles the worst of Frog poststructuralist brainrot, precisely when she insists upon her «altérité radicale».

The really astounding thing about this is the way that so many self-declared Marxists, predominantly white Anglophone males, are rallying to the side of a thinker who can only talk about “class struggle” in scare quotes. Perhaps Marx and Engels were wrong, after all: the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of Rassenkampf, not Klassenkampf.

Bouteldja’s polemics against Enlightenment universalism actually has some precedent in (reactionary) French political thought, moreover. Marx has a bit on this in his 1863 Theories of Surplus Value, hardly a piece of a juvenilia. Sub out “Linguet” for “Bouteldja” and switch around the pronouns, maybe get rid of specifics like “contemporaries” and “that was then beginning,” the statement might well stand today:

Linguet…is not a socialist. His polemics against the bourgeois-liberal ideals of the Enlighteners, his contemporaries, against the dominion of the bourgeoisie that was then beginning, are given — half-seriously, half-ironically — a reactionary appearance. He defends Asiatic despotism against the civilized European forms of despotism; thus he defends slavery against wage-labor.

Of course, most of the romantic anti-capitalist motifs Bouteldja relies upon can be traced back to some reactionary European precursor. Her rants against “gay universalism” are clearly underwritten by notions of Kultur and Gemeinschaft as somehow organic and distinct that go at least as far back as Herder. You can almost smell the Spengler, however, in the accounts of decline and cultural pollution by the homosexual bacillus.

At the end of the day, though, it is the “white left” that uncritically embraces this anti-Marxist nonsense that bears most of the blame for its opportunistic pandering.

Paul Demarty
Weekly Worker 1046
February 19, 2015

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There are many stories that can be told about last weekend’s shootings in Copenhagen, of which the most plainly obvious is that it was a copycat attack, inspired by killing sprees in Paris last month.

Though the motives of the suspect, Omar El-Hussein, are still the subject of fevered speculation, it would be a quite remarkable coincidence if he had dreamed up the scheme entirely independently of Amedy Coulibaly and Said and Chérif Kouachi. Like the admittedly much more efficient Paris gunmen, El-Hussein selected as his targets blasphemous artists and Jews, carried out his assaults with automatic weapons, and chose a martyr’s death by forcing a shootout with police.

El-Hussein began his rampage at a café hosting a symposium on free speech and blasphemy, to mark 25 years since the Iranian clerisy’s death sentence against Salman Rushdie. The event saw many militantly irreligious types discussing, in part, the atmosphere in the wake of the Kouachi brothers’ massacre of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. A Femen activist was speaking when the gunfire began. Film director Finn Nørgaard had stepped outside, and was killed immediately.

The most attractive target was probably Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who attracted controversy some years ago for his portraits of Mohammed as a human head on a dog’s body. He has been the object of bungled assassination plots originating as far afield as Ireland and the United States, and lives under the protection of the Danish security services, promoting his and others’ freedom to blaspheme. (A foundation in his name awarded Stéphane Charbonnier, the late Charlie Hebdo editor, a “freedom prize” last year.) Al Qa’eda offered a bounty of $100,000 for his murder; Islamic State recently upped the bidding to $150,000. Apparently the noble cause alone is not reward enough.

El-Hussein fled, and traveled by stolen car and taxi to his home neighborhood (two men were later arrested for abetting his attempts to dispose of weapons and evidence), before showing up at an east Copenhagen synagogue after midnight, still open for a young woman’s bat mitzvah. Another shootout ensued, with several injuries and the death of a volunteer security guard. Eventually, cornered in his flat the next day, he opened fire on police and was shot dead.

The Trotskyists

Geoffrey Hellman
The New Yorker
December 16, 1939
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The political group familiarly known either as the Trotskyists of the Trotskyites is officially called the Socialist Workers Party. A lot of its members feel this name is confusing, since the Party has just about as little patience with the Socialists as it has with the Stalinists, the Lovestonites, President Roosevelt, and Father Coughlin, all of whom the Trotskyists would like to blow up. It regards itself as the orthodox Marxist Party and it looks upon the regular Communist Party as at best a rather contemptible reformist group. During the eleven years of its existence it has consistently maintained direct contact with Trotsky and an uncompromising policy of world revolution against all existing forms of government, every one of which it considers too far to the right. Despite the amount of noise which its members make and the frequency with which they come up in conversation, there are only some two thousand Trotskyists in the country, of whom around six hundred are in New York.

The Trotskyists, who prefer this term to “Trotskyites,” came into being on October 27, 1928, when three members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in New York — James P. Cannon, Martin Abern, and Max Shachtman — were expelled for spreading Trotsky’s doctrines instead of Stalin’s. Trotsky was advocating worldwide revolution while Stalin was insisting on confining the revolution to Russia for the time being. Trotsky had been banished to Turkestan the year before for holding the views he did and was subsequently expelled from the Party. In July, 1928, when the Sixth World Congress of the Communist Party was held in Moscow, Trotsky, still in Turkestan, prepared a detailed criticism of Stalin’s national political program. Translated into the various languages of the delegates attending the Congress, copies of this were distributed by the Party to the twenty-odd members of the Congress’s Program Commission, one of whom was Cannon. Although his copy was plainly marked “confidential” and was to be returned to the convention officials, Cannon was so impressed by it that he not only failed to give it back, a gross breach of Party etiquette, but smuggled it into this country and showed it to his friends, including Abern and Shachtman. These men also concluded that Trotsky’s plumping for universal revolution was a sounder idea than Stalin’s plan of concentrating on Russia itself, and they sought to bring other American Party members around to their point of view. Expelled, after a trial, by Jay Lovestone, then head of the Communist Party in America, the three rebels formed a Trotskyist group, known first as the Communist League of America. Lovestone himself was expelled from the Party six months later, for objecting to Russia’s domination of Communist policies in other countries, and founded the Independent Labor League of America, which opposes both Trotsky and Stalin. As the Cannon-Abern-Shachtman offshoot grew in size and began to win over many Stalinists, the hostility of the mother Communist Party toward it became increasingly bitter. In 1934, the League, by then an affair of several hundred members, changed its name to the Workers Party of the US. In 1936 and 1937 it enjoyed an extended flirtation with the left wing of Norman Thomas’s Socialists. It joined the Socialist Party, took over the left-wing Socialist magazine, the Appeal, and called itself the Appeal Group of the Socialist Party. At the end of 1937 the Socialists kicked out the group because they considered it too radical. With it went a good many regular Socialists. The group then adopted its present name, the Socialist Workers Party [SWP].

The Trotskyists and the Stalinists have been calling each other reptiles, jackals, and general no-goods for so many years in their papers, magazines, and speeches that when the Soviet-Nazi [Molotov-Ribbentrop] pact was signed a couple of months ago I supposed the Socialist Workers, pleased at the discomfiture of the American communists, would be going around with broad grins and a great I-told-you-so air. To check up on this and find out about the party in general, I got in touch with a college classmate of mine who is now a leading Socialist Worker intellectual and a regular contributor to the Socialist Appeal and the New International, respectively the Socialist Workers’ semi-weekly newspaper and monthly magazine. To help me gain the proper perspective, he took me to the party’s headquarters at Thirteenth Street and University Place, the street entrance to which is marked by a discreet sign reading, “Labor bookshop. Books of all publishers. Second floor.” We walked up a rickety flight of wooden stairs and entered a room containing a couple of bare wooden tables, two or three chairs, and seven or eight young men, one of them a Negro, who were arguing violently whether Russia should be regarded as a communist or a fascist country.

My companion disappeared into an adjoining office to arrange for me to meet Mr. Shachtman, and I studied various printed slogans hanging on the walls of the room, among them “The time to apply our action program is now!”, “Every class struggle fighter a two-a-week subscriber!”, “Open the doors to Nazi victims,” and “There is work to be done!” In one corner of the room hung an oil painting showing Trotsky, Lenin, and several other people, with the phrase “Workers of the world, unite!” lettered on the top. While I was looking around, the loud conversation in the room ceased and everyone began to stare at me. A clean-cut young man in a brown tweed suit came up and asked me whom I was looking for, but before I could reply, my guide came out with Shachtman, a shortish, snub-nosed man of thirty-five with a tiny mustache and an air of great jollity. I was struck by his resemblance to one of the figures in the painting, and he informed me that it did indeed represent him and that the picture was the work of Diego Rivera, who had given it to the Party in 1933, when he came here to do the Rockefeller Center mural that was subsequently destroyed. In addition to Trotsky, Lenin, and himself, Shachtman pointed out likenesses of Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, James P. Cannon, and two or three other people whose names I didn’t catch. I gathered that these persons hadn’t posed together and that the picture was a symbolic one.

We went into another room, which was decorated with a second sign saying “There is work to be done!” and a painting by Rivera, depicting Lenin, Trotsky, and six or seven other people. Shachtman pointed to one of them and said, “That’s the man who took the Winter Palace in 1917.” I found out later that Rivera had, in 1933, been considerably more generous to the Lovestonites than to the Trotskyists, having presented them with twenty-one large murals, most of which portray the history of the United States in a way that would never help anyone pass an examination at Groton. These are located at the Lovestonite headquarters on West Fourteenth Street. Rivera must have been above small Leftist differences, for one of his paintings there shows, among others, Stalin, Trotsky, Lovestone, Cannon, and William Z. Foster. Foster, with Earl Browder, assumed the leadership of the American Communist Party after Lovestone was expelled.

Shachtman explained to me that the Socialist Workers Party holds a convention at least every two years and often annually, generally either in New York or Chicago. On these occasions delegates adopt resolutions and elect a National Committee of twenty-five people. The National Committee in turn elects four party officers: the national secretary, the national labor secretary, the editor of the official party organ, the Appeal, and the editor of the New International, which deals more abstractly with theory and the like. Cannon is the national secretary and Shachtman is editor of the Appeal as well as co-editor of the New International, which is headed by James Burnham, a Princeton graduate in his early thirties who teaches at NYU. The Appeal, I was told, goes to seven or eight thousand homes and the New International normally has a circulation of over five thousand, but this has been cut drastically by the war, since nearly a third of the magazine’s readers live in belligerent countries, from which it is now banned.

The party also publishes a third paper, the semi-monthly Challenge of Youth, which is the organ of Trotskyists between sixteen and twenty-one. This group, which accounts for more than half of the Party’s New York membership, is known officially as the Young Peoples Socialist League (Fourth International) and unofficially as the Yipsils. The Yipsils, I was told, are trained to master dialectical materialism and are a wonderfully fanatical group. They hold street meetings all over Greater New York, usually operating in squads of ten or fifteen equipped with a collapsible speaker’s stand, an American flag, and a persuasive vocabulary. They distribute party propaganda and bring party papers and magazines to those newsstands which sell them. In addition they indulge in a rigorous intra-party social life. They organize a great many picnics, dances, and informal parties among themselves, and there is a fair amount of Yipsil intermarriage. Last summer they rented a farmhouse near Peekskill, which they called Camp 3 Ls, a name which the Yipsils never explained to curious natives. It stands for Lenin, Liebknecht, and Luxemburg, three of the major Marxists of the past, and three intertwined letter Ls appear on pins which they wear. Camp 3 Ls was thrown into momentary confusion one day when three or four hitchhiking members were driven into camp by a gentleman who politely insisted on taking them right up to the door. They had asked him just to let them off near the entrance. He also insisted on walking inside and sat patiently through a meeting, already under way, at which preparations for going underground in case this country entered a war were being discussed. His new friends looked at him uneasily and when the meeting was over asked him who he was. “I’m a policeman and those were very interesting speeches,” he said, and drove off.

Shachtman, who was born in Warsaw and brought here by his family at the age of eight months, started out as a sort of Yipsil, although in the Communist Party. He joined when he was sixteen and he has been a professional revolutionist ever since, never having held an outside job of any sort. Although his salary from the party,which fluctuates according to the condition of the treasury, has never been more than twenty-five dollars a week, he has managed to acquire one of the best private libraries of left-wing literature in the world. The salaries of party functionaries come from initiation fees, dues, and voluntary contributions from members and sympathizers. The initiation fee is a dollar and dues are fifty cents a month for employed members and ten cents a month for unemployed members. “Members have to make voluntary contributions,” Shachtman told me. I asked what walks of life the New York members came from, and there seemed to be a difference of opinion on this point, Shachtman said they were chiefly workers from the clothing, marine-transportation, and building trades and young unemployed — “part of the locked-out generation.” Another Party member whom I talked to later estimated that eighty per cent of them were white-collar, middle-class people, including a lot of N.Y.U. and CCNY graduates and undergraduates. He said there were three or four Trotskyists at Harvard now, but none at Yale. I was told that about one-fourth of the Yipsils are girls and that this is an extremely high female percentage in a radical group. Among the adult members of the Party, only one in ten is a woman.

Shachtman explained to me that in addition to the Trotskyists, the Stalinists, the Lovestonites, and the Norman Thomas Socialists, the major left-wing parties around town include the Social Democratic Federation, which is strong in the garment unions and friendly to the New Deal, and the Socialist Labor, or Daniel De Leon, group, another comparatively moderate organization, which the Trotskyists consider stodgy. “Ninety per cent of its members are octogenarians,” said Shachtman scornfully. Moreover, there are a number of minor, or “splinter,” left-wing parties, all of which have splintered off from the Trotskyists. Among these are the Oehler, Stamm, Mienov, Marlen, Joerger, Prometeo, and Field groups, which have anywhere from two or three to fifty members apiece. Shachtman tried to straighten out these factions for me, but I am not sure that he succeeded, since they are in a constant and bewildering state of flux.

For example, as far as I can make out, Oehler and Stamm splintered off from the Trotskyists in 1935 and formed the Revolutionary Workers League, which refused, unlike the Trotskyists at that time, to have any truck with the Norman Thomas Socialists. A year later the Mienovites splintered off from the RWL splinter and formed a sub-splinter known as the Marxist Workers League. In 1937 the Oehlerites also splintered off from the Revolutionary Workers League, leaving Stamm the leader of this veteran splinter. Later on one George Marlen and several followers left the Oehlerites to form the Marlen group, or Limnist League, which regards Trotsky as an agent of Stalinism and lumps the Oehler, Stamm, and Mienov groups together as “left Trotskyists.” The Joerger group splintered off from the Trotskyists in 1937 and formed the Revolutionary Marxist League. The Prometeo group, which is named after Prometheus, consists of three or four Italian Communists who are officially known as the Italian Left Fraction of Communism. “They are extremely rigid and doctrinaire,” explained Shachtman with a certain amount of admiration. He told me that the Field group, or League for a Revolutionary Workers Party of the US, was founded by B.J. Field, a former Trotskyist who was expelled from the Trotskyist Party for gross violation of discipline during the New York hotel strike of 1934. “Both Mr. and Mrs. Field have recently been expelled from the Field group,” Shachtman told me. He also informed me that at least one splinter group, the Weisbordites, is now defunct. It was founded in 1931 by Albert Weisbord, a former Trotskyist who felt that the Trotskyists were not being sufficiently active in promoting and leading strikes. He called his party the Communist League of Struggle and later changed the name to Friends of the Class Struggle, following a recent left-wing tendency to drop the word “Communist” from the titles of their organizations. Weisbord is now inactive politically, Shachtman said. He also told me that the various splinter groups differed from each other and from the Socialist Workers Party in subtle doctrinal ways that would in most cases be too complicated for me or almost anyone else to understand. They frequently engage in negotiations to unite with each other, but nothing ever comes of this. According to Shachtman, the existence of these splinters is a tribute, rather than a reproof, to the Trotskyists, since it results from a freedom of discussion that would never be countenanced by the Stalinists.

I asked for a statement on the Socialist Workers’ position in the contemporary American political scene and was referred to the September issue of the Appeal, which contains a photograph of Cordell Hull, captioned “Bankers’ Hatchet Man,” and the following platform:

1. A job and a decent wage for every worker.
2. Open the idle factories—operate them under workers’ control.
3. A twenty-billion-dollar federal public works and housing program.
4. Thirty-thirty! $30-weekly minimum wage — 30-hour weekly maximum for all workers on all jobs.
5. Thirty-dollar weekly old-age and disability pension.
6. Expropriate the sixty families.
7. All war funds to the unemployed.
8. A people’s referendum on any and all wars.
9. No secret diplomacy.
10. An independent labor party.
11. Workers’ defense guards against vigilante and fascist attacks.

During the past few weeks a twelfth plank has been added to this platform: “Full social, political, and economic equality for the Negro people.” There are only a handful of Negro Trotskyists as yet, but the Party is making a drive to get more. In the recent municipal election, Shachtman ran for councilman in the Bronx, where he lives, on the Socialist Labor ticket and was defeated after a whirlwind campaign, in the course of which he made several extremely long speeches. “I attribute my defeat to the base tactics of my opponents and the general corruptness of the capitalist system,” he told me, smiling. “I am thinking of demanding a recount.” Considering that Shachtman, with 2,269 votes, was only 56,594 behind the low man among the successful Bronx candidates, his faith in the capitalist system was probably not too shaken.

Shachtman showed a greater inclination to discuss splinter groups and his campaign in the Bronx than the Soviet-Nazi pact, but he intimated that the Trotskyists were not as joyful over this as I had expected, because many of them, for all their hatred of Stalin, had until recently still thought of Russia as a workers’ state and now no longer could do so. ” We consider the Nazi pact a calamitous blow for the international labor situation,” he said. I found out later, by hanging around Party headquarters and listening to people wrangle in the corridors, that the pact has caused a terrific rift among the Trotskyists and that many of them disagree profoundly with the position which Trotsky, who is living in Mexico, has taken toward it. For the first couple of weeks after the pact was signed, Trotsky, who is known to his disciples as “the old man,” said nothing about it, although he is generally in constant correspondence with his New York adherents. Finally he came through with a long essay in which he stated that the Soviet-Nazi pact, while constituting additional proof of the degeneration of Soviet leadership, “does not provide any basis whatsoever for a reevaluation of the sociological appraisal of the USSR.” Trotsky went on to condemn the methods by which Russia had acquired part of Poland but announced that the resultant socializing of this territory was, by and large, a good thing and should be approved by the comrades. “Our general appraisal of the Kremlin and Comintern,” he wrote, using his own italics, “does not alter the particular fact that the statification of property in the occupied territories is in itself a progressive measure.” Trotsky has similarly condoned Russia’s invasion of Finland. Since many of his followers feel that this attempted conquest is even less defensible than the Polish affair, his latest position has intensified the rift in the Socialist Workers Party. Trotsky’s stand on the pact seemed to be opposed by most of the Trotskyists I heard discussing it. It has been the subject of interminable debates at Party meetings, where Shachtman and Burnham are the most articulate protagonists of the theory that the pact makes it impossible to regard Russia any longer as a socialist state, and where Cannon is Trotsky’s chief spokesman. The extreme section of the anti-Trotsky bloc thinks the whole Russian experiment should be written off as a bad job. The recent reversal of Stalinist policy in this country is also a topic of earnest discussion among the Trotskyists. Superficially, Browder’s present advocacy of a “rapid transition” in the United States would seem to place the Stalinists in the same camp as the Trotskyists, but the Socialist Workers with whom I talked explained that the current Communist stand had caused them to oppose the Stalinists more violently than ever, since they consider the new Communist Party line hypocritical and merely a sop to Hitler. They are now busy relaying this information to their rank and file. ” I wish you could attend one of the meetings where we thrash things out,” Shachtman said to me. I expressed a desire to do this, and he told me that only Party members could be present. I asked Shachtman what he could tell me about Cannon. “Cannon is the oldest revolutionary in the United States. He’s forty-eight or forty-nine,” Shachtman said.

Leaving Shachtman, I called on Mr. Cannon, a genial, red-faced, gray-haired man, whom I found in an office down the corridor. There were several maps on his wall and a small red pennant with “4th International” on it in white. Cannon was sitting at a desk, smoking a pipe and sipping milk from a cardboard container. “I was a coworker with Earl Browder in the Kansas City labor movement from 1914,” he said to me in a gentle, patient voice. “Our paths diverged in 1928. Now there’s a line of blood between us.” Cannon was born in Kansas City, where his father, a foundry worker, was a conscientious Socialist agitator. Cannon regards himself as a professional revolutionist, just like Shachtman, but confessed that he had occasionally taken a job as baker, railroad worker, newspaper reporter, etc., when he was hard up, and then with considerable regret. “These were just stopgaps,” he explained. “I worked simply as the average man is laid off.” Cannon told me that Stalin’s ideas of economic and social reform had developed along regrettable lines and that the Trotskyists were the orthodox Marxists and not, as many people supposed, a divergent sect. “Our specific weight is much more than twenty-five hundred,” he said, raising by five hundred the estimate of Party membership which other Trotskyists had given me. “We have the most militant, sacrificing, and confident youth movement of any radical group. The movement is a devourer. We aim to absorb the whole life of our members.” Cannon seemed delighted over the fact that the Party contained so many Yipsils, and he informed me with satisfaction that the average age of Socialist Workers’ delegates to Party conventions is only twenty-six or twenty-seven. He asked me to draw my own conclusions from the circumstance that whereas the Communist constitution forbids Stalinists to say as much as hello to a Trotskyist on pain of expulsion, the Trotskyist leaders advise their followers to fraternize with rank-and-file Stalinists as often as possible. I thought this might be an underhanded method of decimating the opposition Party, but he said it really wasn’t. “We educate our people to an irreconcilable hatred of Stalinism but encourage them to associate with the rank-and-filers in order to convert them,” he said. According to Cannon, this has worked out very nicely. “One of our girls married a Stalinist only the other day,” he told me. “The groom has since become a Communist fellow-traveler and it is only a question of time before he will become a Trotskyist.” Cannon said that in marriages of this sort the Stalinist is always the one who is converted. He also told me that the Party had no rich angels. (Another member whom I buttonholed later said the Party did have some rich angels, but he wouldn’t tell me who they were.)

I asked Cannon for an official view of the Russian-German pact, and he replied that it hadn’t changed the Socialist Workers’ belief that the Soviet is fundamentally on the right track. “We consider the Russian government a workers’ state fallen in control of traitors,” he said. “But we won’t change the state, just the personnel, whereas in this country we have to change the entire system.” He told me that if Russia were attacked by the United States, the party would be for Russia — an attitude which struck me as not being exactly cricket in view of the fact that a good many Trotskyists are on relief, and at the same time admirably high-minded in view of the fact that if Cannon were to go to Russia he would undoubtedly be shot.

Cannon said that while the Trotskyists frowned on the Soviet occupation of Poland because it violated principles of self-determination, which they believed in, as a fait accomfli they were for it. “We’re not in favor of the way it’s done, but once it’s socialized we’d defend it,” he said. “The political rascalities of Stalin don’t change our attitude. The determining thing is the economy of the state.” I asked Cannon whether it wasn’t true that many Party members now considered the Russian economy imperialistic rather than socialistic, and he replied that they were in the minority.

“Suppose a majority opposed Trotsky?” I asked. “It would be too bad for the old man,” said Cannon. He said that questions of this sort were put to a vote at Party conventions, one of which will probably be held next spring in Chicago, and that while one delegate’s vote was as good as another’s, the weight of Trotsky’s influence was enormous. Incidentally, from people who had visited him recently, I learned that Trotsky is now living in Coyoacan, a suburb of Mexico City, in a house guarded on the outside by four unreliable-looking Mexican policemen and inside by four young American Trotskyists. Most of the time he sits at his desk reading, writing, and dictating into a dictaphone. He writes with a pen in Russian on pieces of paper which he pastes together until each sheet is two or three feet long. He generally wears loose blue pants, a sweater, and Russian slippers with ankle-high cuffs, and he uses a revolver as a paperweight. His hair and beard are almost white. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and eats sparingly, not being especially fond of Mexican food. He and his wife used to go on picnics a good deal and on these occasions Trotsky would instruct his guards to dig up cactuses for a cactus garden he has planted, but since the death of a son in Paris a couple of years ago, they rarely leave the house. Diego Rivera’s house, where Trotsky used to live, is only two blocks away, but the two men have had a row and don’t see each other any more.

After I had talked for some time with Cannon, people started poking their heads into the national secretary’s office, telling him he was late for a meeting, so presently I left. In the corridor I came across three Yipsils, a girl of about sixteen and two boys around the same age, arguing excitedly about what their attitude toward Russia ought to be. “Maybe Cannon will just accede to the majority at the convention,” the girl was saying. “The real issue is what you should call the Polish invasion.” “When you judge an act, you judge it according to its main features affecting the world revolution,” one of the boys said. ” The invasion of Poland is merely an incident in the war.” “Don’t mix up an incident with a geopolitical grab. There’s a difference, you’ll admit,” the girl answered sharply. “Stalin didn’t merely invade Poland as an incident in a progressive war, but as a policy of Stalinist imperialism.” Both boys objected to this, and one of them said, “I don’t think Shachtman and Burnham acted very well at the meeting.” It was around five in the afternoon by this time, and as I went down the stairs I passed six or seven Yipsils on the landing, all bawling each other out with a militancy and confidence that made me wish they would ask me to one of their picnics.

— Geoffrey T. Hellman

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What follows is a translation of three articles. One is by the Hungarian critic, screenwriter, and film theorist Béla Balázs, while the other two were written by the legendary director and master of Soviet cinema, Sergei Eisenstein. Both men considered themselves Marxists. The former, Balázs, was of a slightly more heterodox cast, comparable perhaps to the position of the young Georg Lukács, his fellow countryman and longtime friend. Eisenstein, by contrast, drifted from the harsh engineering aesthetic associated with constructivism early in his career to the monumental Stalinist style toward the end of his life. At the time of his first exchange with Balázs, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) was making waves in Western Europe and October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927) was about to be released. He explained in 1928 to the visiting curator Alfred Barr, future founder of the MoMA, that

I am a civil Engineer and mathematician by training. I approach the making of a film in much the same way as I would the equipment of a poultry farm or the installation of a water system. My point of view is thoroughly materialist…

Despite their respectful disagreement in the proceeding debate, Balázs and Eisenstein would go on to collaborate quite closely in subsequent years. Balázs wrote the screenplay to The Old and the New, alternately titled The General Line. This film, which featured buildings and set designs by the constructivist architect Andrei Burov (in consultation with Le Corbusier), was shot mostly in 1928 but shelved until 1930 for ideological reasons. In the interim, much had changed: the avant-garde emphasis of the 1920s on collectivism, technology, and the masses had receded somewhat, making way for the pompous heroism of the 1930s. Not long thereafter, Balázs fled Vienna in 1933 to escape Austrofascist persecution — he was a communist, a foreigner, and a Jew — settling in Moscow, where he taught film aesthetics until the close of World War II. Just as Lukács had been harshly criticized by Party dogmatists in the 1920s, so too was Balázs in the 1930s. Such was the changed climate of Soviet discourse during this period.

Eisenstein died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1948; Balázs died the next year in Budapest. You can download a selection of their translated works below. If anyone has retail PDFs of the Richard Taylor translations, please e-mail them to me.

Béla Balázs

• Cloak of Dreams: Chinese Fairy Tales (1922)
• “Film Criticism!” (1922)
• “Chaplin, or the American Simpleton” (1922)
• Visible Man (1924)
• “Wireless Chaos” (1924)
• “Radio Drama” (1924)
• “Compulsive Cameraman” (1925)
• “On a Train at Night” (1925)
• “On Foot” (1925)
• “The Future of Film” (1926)
• The Spirit of Film (1930)
• Theory of the Film: The Character and Growth of a New Art (1948)

Sergei Eisenstein

• “Montage of Attractions: For Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman“ (1923)
• “Notes for a Film of Capital“ (1927)
• Letters from Mexico to Maxim Strauch and Ilya Trauberg (1931)
• “Montage and Architecture” (1937)
• The Psychology of Composition (1940)
• Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1947)
• The Film Sense (1949)

The future of film

Béla Balázs
Kinogazeta
July 6, 1926
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Film can become a work of art only when photography itself ceases to be mere reproduction and becomes the work itself. When the work, the decisive creative expression of the emotions and the spirit, is realized not in staging and acting but through the mediation of the photograph in actual shots.

When the cameraman who does in fact make the picture also becomes its author, the poet of the work, the real film artist for whom acting and staging are the mere “occasion” to which he relates, like a painter to a landscape (preferably the most beautiful one!), to a life only through his brush in a work of art, in the expression of his spirit. As long as the cameraman is last in line, cinema will remain the last of the arts. But the reverse is also true!

In insisting on the artistic integrity of the photograph itself I by no means have in mind the decorative beauty of the shot which, incidentally, you encounter very often and which is not infrequently accorded much greater significance than it deserves. The decorative charm of individual shots gives them something that is statically pictorial, immobile and wrapped up in itself: their “beauty,” as if petrified, is killed by a headlong rush of events in the form of a series of “living pictures” through which the film as a whole staggers staccato fashion from one pictorial shot to another. Whereas the whole essence of cinema lies in the scope of the general rhythm of the passing events of real life.

No! I have in mind the hidden symbolic expressiveness, the poetic significance of the shot that has nothing to do with “decorativeness” or “beauty,” that is not produced either by play or by the object (subject) of the photograph but is created exclusively by the methods and possibilities of photography.

I want to explain this through two recent examples, two wonderful shots from Battleship Potemkin.

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The enthusiasm of the population of Odessa is shown by the increasing rhythm of the groupings of the enthusiastic masses and you begin to wonder: where do we go now? How can they possibly show more enthusiasm, joy, or ecstasy?

Suddenly you see a sumptuous picture. Like a hymn of ecstasy that resoundingly interrupts what has gone before you see the skiffs sailing to meet the battleship. According to the plot they are carrying foodstuffs to the mutinous sailors. In the film it seems as if they are hurrying towards them with millions of hearts.

This delicate winged flight of hundreds of billowing sails evokes an image of the collective display of enthusiasm, joy, love, and hope that no single face, even that of the greatest artiste, could express. It is not the plot motif but the photograph, the photograph itself taken beyond the bounds of the greatest lyricism and of such powerful figurative and poetic force that you can scarcely compare poetry itself with it!

It is in this hidden figurative quality of the shot, that has nothing in common with “decorative” beauty, that the creative poetic opportunities for the cameraman lie concealed.

Then we see the sailing-vessels filmed from the deck. As if by some command they all lower their sails at once. The logical “content” is that the boats have stopped near the battleship. The action of the picture suggests that a hundred sails, a hundred banners have been lowered before the hero. It is this figurative quality of the pictures that contains their original poetry, something that can occur only in a film, only through photography.

For two photographs on the same subject would be deprived of any symbolic or poetic expressiveness if they were merely part of a vast landscape. Then they would not define the expression or physiognomy of the shot.

It is only through an undoubtedly conscious design that crams the whole shot full to its very edges with sails that these photographs acquire the unity of mimic expression and the significance of gesture that become the depth of experience and the sense of the film. There is not even any room for argument here: the poetic expressiveness of the scene is created not by the motif but by the photography.

But this is the only way that can help cinema to stop being a servant of art and become an independent art.

People say to me: both the camera positions in Potemkin that you have described were determined by the director and were not the original and independent ideas of the cameraman.

So be it. It does not matter in this context who is in charge of the photography. It makes no difference whether the director or the cameraman is the creator of such a work of art. The decisive factor is that cinema art of this kind emerges only through the lens; it can only be produced through photography.

On the position of Béla Balázs

Sergei Eisenstein
Kinogazeta
July 20, 1926
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Balázs’ article will surprise some people. Without its concluding stipulation: “The cameraman is the alpha and omega of film.”

We have such respect for foreigners that we might consider this a “blessing.” The idiots on the Moscow evening paper who accorded recognition to the exercises by young Frenchmen that Ehrenburg brought from Paris have declared it to be a “revelation.” These are sheer enfantillages — “children’s playthings” — based on the photographic possibilities of the photographic apparatus. I am not exaggerating when I say that: if we have these “children’s playthings” today, tomorrow they will be used to refurbish the formal methods of a whole branch of art (for instance, the “absolute': the plotless film of Picabia, Léger, or Chomette).

We are taking our conviction that light can come only from the West to the point of absurdity.

Professor Meller journeyed to London, to the egg market. To seek out standard eggs.

He found unusual ones.

A search began.

Which farms, which ranches, which plantations?

Where did this unusual breed of hens come from? Through a chain of Dutch egg wholesalers, agents, contractors and intermediaries they were traced to… the Novokhopiorsk district. This “Sirin,” “Alkonost,” “Firebird” turned out to be a peasant’s hen.

A peasant’s hen from the Novokhopiorsk district. And a London market…

But the hen is not a bird and Balázs is a great authority. Such a great authority that at a stroke his book is translated, published and paid for by two publishers. Why not, if it’s all right to make two films from the same material? One set at sea, one in the mountains, and so on.

To understand Béla Balázs’ position you have to bear two things in mind: the first and the second. The first is the basis (not the economic one), where and for whom his report was written. Filmtechnik is the organ of the German cameramen’s club. Give the cameraman his due or, more exactly, give him the position of respect that he deserves — that is its fighting slogan. But that is already an integral feature of the economic basis.

The cameraman achieves. He is obliged to achieve “self-determination.” To us this kind of program sounds somewhat savage.

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What? In the cultured West?

Yes. In the cultured West. The steel jaws of competition in the Western metropolis are not accustomed to thinking of the “service staff” as individuals. The director is just acceptable. But in fact the hero is of course the commercial director. And the cameraman? Round about where the camera handle ends, that’s where this… mechanic apparently begins.

In the advertisements for Potemkin even the heroic Prometheus wanted at first to leave Eduard Tisse out altogether. So strong is the tradition. That is not surprising because in the UFA-Haus — the multi-storey headquarters of Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft — they don’t even know men like Karl Freund or Rittau by sight. That’s how it is. They told us themselves. Whereas even we know them by sight. They are like the Novokhopiorsk eggs … only from the Cothenerstrasse, where UFA shares its enormous building with the “Vaterland,” the largest cafe in Berlin. And not for nothing. It is not coincidental that this corner is swarming with swastika-wearers (German Fascists) distributing news-sheets and leaflets. UFA will follow suit.

The Tägliche Rundschau of 12 May 1926 writes:

The declaration by the board of the leading German film organization UFA of its truly national and common-sense interests is undoubtedly a slap in the face for the Committee of Censors: “In view of the character of the political inclinations of the film we decline to include The Battleship Potemkin in the distribution plan for UFA theaters.”

On the same subject Film-Kurier writes that, “The wrath of a businessman who has missed the brilliant commercial success of the season is understandable.” But in other ways UFA remains true to itself. And not only UFA but Phoebus and the others, whatever they are called.

The cameramen are setting up a union to defend the character of their activity.

That is the first thing. It explains the emphatic nature of Balázs’ positions.

The second thing concerns that same economic basis. Balázs is unaware of collectivism not just in film but also in its production, in work.

There is nowhere that he can have seen it. He is due in the USSR in July. Then he’ll realize. In Germany man is to man as wolf to wolf and the link between the director and the cameraman is the bank-note. Unity through non-material interest is unknown there.

Balázs’ “starism” is the individualism of bourgeois countries in general. They do not think beyond this in the West. Someone has to be the “star.” One person. Yesterday it was the actor. This time let’s say it’s the cameraman. Tomorrow it will be the lighting technician.

The idea that a film is the result of collective efforts goes to the devil.

What about the man who is nearly dying from the heat of the burning sun, who has to be sponged down, the man Kivilevich whom nobody has ever heard of, who is bent down under the weight of a lighting mirror and dares not move in case a shaft of light should run across little Abraham while he’s being trampled on the Odessa steps?

Or what about the heroism of the five striped assistants?! The “iron five,” taking all the abuse, shouting in all the dialects spoken by the crowd of 3,000 extras who were unwilling to rush around “yet again” in the boiling sun. Leading this human current behind them. Regardless of its mood. By their own example. And what about the Odessa crowd itself?!

What of Kulganek, Stepanchikova, Katiusha, Zhenia, who stayed up three nights in succession to edit the negative for the demonstration copy that was shown on 28 December in the Bolshoi. Do you realize what it means to edit a negative of 15,000 meters down to 1,600?!

Who remembers them? …Even in our own country. Cheap overtime workers who were viewed with suspicion by the work inspectorate.

Their collective enthusiasm a mere debit in the “administrative plan.”

Balázs cannot yet conceive of the idea of the cameraman as a free member of a union of equally creative individuals, not of the cameraman as a “star” but of the camera operator as a cooperator. There the camera crew is a transient pact between self-seeking individuals, here it is a “creative collective.”

In his approach Balázs makes the same mistake in his theoretical principles as he makes in his section on creative organization. Because he dissociates himself from a rigid view of the externality of the shot, from “living pictures” but bases his view on the figurative quality of the shot as the decisive factor, he falls into rigidity himself in his definition of methods of influence.

It cannot be the decisive factor. Even though it responds to such an undeniable sign as the specific result of specific (i.e. peculiar to it alone) characteristics of the instruments of production, i.e. it corresponds to the possibilities that are the exclusive prerogative of cinema. But Balázs’ individualism encourages him to dwell on this.

The shot itself as “star.”

His stipulation about the staccato effect between “beautiful shots” is extremely woolly even in the case of “symbolic shots” because for Balázs the compositional harmony would be preserved in the film as a whole. He does not mention the conditions for a “genetic” (constructive) amalgamation of the shots.

A long time ago, before The Strike was released, we wrote in Belenson’s ill-fated book Cinema Today opposing the individualism of the West: “a), down with individual figures (heroes isolated from the mass), b) down with the individual chain of events (the plot intrigue) — let us have neither personal stories nor those of people ‘personally’ isolated from the mass…” It remains to add one more “down with” — the personification of cinema in the individualized shot. We must look for the essence of cinema not in the shots but in the relationships between the shots just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes etc.

Béla forgets the scissors

Sergei Eisenstein
Kinogazeta
August 10, 1926
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In addition to the lens Balázs has forgotten another defining “instrument of production”: the scissors.

The expressive effect of cinema is the result of juxtapositions.

It is this that is specific to cinema. The shot merely interprets the object in a setting to use it in juxtaposition to other sequences. That is characteristic. Balázs always says “picture,” “shot,” but not once does he say “sequence“! The shot is merely an extension of selection. That is, the selection of one object rather than another, of an object from one particular angle, in one particular cut (or Ausschnitt, as the Germans say) and not another. The conditions of cinema create an “image” [obraz] from the juxtaposition of these “cuts” [obrez].

Because the symbolism (in the decent sense of the word!) of cinema must not be based on either the filmed symbolism of the gesticulation of the filmed person, even if there is more than one (as in theater) or the autonomous pictorial symbolism of the emerging shot or picture (as in painting).

However strange it may seem, we must not look for the symbolism of cinema — for its own peculiar symbolism — in the pictorial or spatial arts (painting and theater).

Our understanding of cinema is now entering its “second literary period.” The phase of approximation to the symbolism of language. Speech.

Speech that conveys a symbolic sense (i.e. not literal), a “figurative quality,” to a completely concrete material meaning through something that is uncharacteristic of the literal, through contextual confrontation, i.e. also through montage. In some cases — where the juxtaposition is unexpected or unusual — it acts as a “poetic image.” “Bullets began to whine and wail, their lament growing unbearably. Bullets struck the earth and fumbled in it, quivering with impatience” (Isaak Babel).

In cases other than those of traditional juxtaposition the meaning acquires its own autonomous sense, distinct from the literal, but no longer featuring as an element of its figurative quality (no literary Darwinism!). The notion of “swine” has its own independent legitimacy and nobody thinks of the figurative fascination of the results of “swinish” behavior. Why? Clearly there is little demand. But figurative expression, generally speaking, forever represents a “mutation” that emerges only in context. When someone says, “I feel crushed,” you still do not know whether “grief” or a “tram” is responsible. It becomes obvious from the context.

But Balázs gets bogged down in skiffs and his own definitions which are far removed from ours: the effect of hauling down the sails (simultaneously) appears to have been created by the symbolism of the collective gesture [Gebärde] and not by the lens. The way the image is cut [obrez], of course, is here exactly as decisive — no more, no less — in the final analysis as the Sevastopol fishermen’s union in toto once they are resolved and able to “symbolize” this scene!

Nevertheless we must welcome Balázs for his good intention of constructing a cinema aesthetic on the basis of the possibilities that are unique to cinema, i.e. on pure raw material.

In this respect he has, of course, rather fallen behind the USSR. But we must not expect a man to discuss the “montage shot” when this concept is generally unknown in Germany.

There are “literary” shots and “pictorial” shots, i.e. those that tell us what is happening (an acted sequence), and those that constitute a performed intertitle (the scriptwriter’s responsibility) or a series of easel paintings (the cameraman’s responsibility).

Germany is unaware of the director’s shot that does not exist independently but is a compositional shot, a shot that, through composition creates the only effect specific to cinema thought.

People still speak of “American montage.” I am afraid that the time has come to add this “Americanism” to the others so ruthlessly debunked by Comrade Osinskii.

America has not understood montage as a new element, a new opportunity. America is honestly narrative; it does not “parade” the figurative character of its montage but shows honestly what is happening.

The rapid montage that stuns us is not a construction but a forced portrayal, as frequent as possible, of the pursuer and the pursued. The spacing out of the dialogue in close-ups is necessary to show one after another the facial expressions of the “public’s favorites.” Without regard for the perspectives of montage possibilities.

In Berlin I saw the last two reels of Griffith’s 1914 film The Birth of a Nation: there is a chase (as always) and nothing formally different from more recent similar scenes. But in twelve years we might have “noticed” that, apart from its narrative possibilities, such, “if you’ll pardon the expression, montage” could offer the prospect of something more, something effective. In The Ten Commandments, where there was no special need to portray the Jews separately, the “Flight from Egypt” and the “Golden Calf” are shown without recourse to montage but, speaking technically, by long shots alone. Hence the little nuances of the composition of the masses, that is the action of the mass, go to the devil.

In conclusion, a word about Bela Balázs’ style. His terminology is unpleasant. Different from ours. “Art,” “creativity,” “eternity,” “greatness” and so on.

Although some prominent Marxists write in the same dialect and this counts as dialectics.

It looks as if this style has become acceptable.

The significance of the Werkbund exhibition on “Die Wohnung” at Stuttgart-Weißenhof in 1927 is universally attested. Organized by Mies van der Rohe two years prior, it aimed to unite the various strands of modern architecture that had been developed earlier in the decade. Despite its commitment to internationalism, its international character was nevertheless somewhat limited by sheer geographical proximity and the haste with which it was thrown together. As Reyner Banham pointed out, it was a largely Berlin affair:

[I]n spite of these international overtones, Weißenhof was primarily a manifestation of Ring architecture, and apart from…four non-German designers…the remaining eleven were mostly Berliners by professional domicile, birth, or attachment — Mies himself, Gropius, Hilberseimer, the Tauts, Scharoun, Döcker, Behrens, etc. The style to which the foreign designs conformed was the style of Berlin by sheer pressure of numbers. No other city at the time could have mustered, as Berlin could by this date, over a dozen convinced modernists of recognizable talent.

Van Doesburg noted at the time that Corbusier, whose distinctive style was already well known, was strongly influenced by the Neues Bauen architects at the Weißenhof estate. Functionalism was out in full force, and van Doesburg had no illusions about its origin: “Principally this trend came from Russia, and therefore it concurs with the communist philosophy of life.” His intuition wasn’t too far off, and indeed the Nazis would denounce the settlement ten years later for its “Bolshevik depravity.” Wolfram von Eckardt, the architectural historian, recalls that the fascists installed pitched roofs onto the flat terraces in order to render them more palatable. Bombs dropped by Allied planes during World War II destroyed several of the buildings. Restoration since has only been partial.

Schulze strikes a slightly different note in his Critical Biography of Mies. In his view, the functionalism on display at the Stuttgart exhibition was more apparent than it was ever actual, largely an aesthetic effect. “To the extent that functionality was one of the New Architecture’s objectives at Stuttgart,” avers Schulze, “it is hard to defend the rapid deterioration of most of the houses — stunningly, within as little as a year or two. In short, Weißenhof was never a triumph of Sachlichkeit and functionalism, but of the image of modernism.”

Below you can read a selection of articles in translation about the exhibit at the time.

Stuttgart-Weißenhof, 1927: The famous Werkbund exhibition on “the dwelling”

Theo van Doesburg
Het Bouwbedrijf
November 1927

I

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Some remarks about the prehistory. The demonstrative architectural exhibition, being held in Stuttgart from July 23 on, means the realization of an idea which has existed for years in the minds of the younger generation grouped around the periodical G (Gestaltung). This notion can be worded thus: since all exhibitions, whether of art objects or of architecture or technology, only show separate portions of an entity, Einzelstücke, and because on the other hand in our modern time the Gesamtarbeit, the unity of a collective stylistic purpose, is the only thing that counts, it must be clear to everyone that the exhibition of separate works of art, architectural models and designs lacking an inner coherence is pointless and passé. On the contrary, the requirement should be the following: demonstration of an entity in which all parts (meaning: color, furniture, utensils etc.) are organically combined. With the regular manner of exhibiting: the placing and hanging of loose objects next to, or on top of, each other, this was of course impossible, because that would be too much of a strain on the imaginative powers of the masses. They wanted to place the visitor within, instead of opposite, the new environment and make him “experience” it, instead of “looking at” it. This new requirement to demonstrate instead of exhibit was put into words for the first time in 1922, at the international artists’ congress in Dusseldorf, by the constructivists: “Stop holding exhibitions. Instead: space for demonstrations of collective work.” And under point 4: “Stop separating art from life. Art becomes life.”[1]

In fact, as everybody will remember, the aim to achieve a Gesamtarbeit formed the basis of the modern art movement in Holland, which around 1916 propagated its ideas in the modest periodical De Stijl and took up the defense for a collective rendering as opposed to an individualistic one. Then, in the midst of the war, no trace of this zeal was to be discerned in other countries, and this is understandable when we realize that this new tendency postulated an international orientation.

The periodical G, in which the functionalists started publishing their views on architecture in 1923, was primarily based on the ideas of the Dutch and Russian artists, the former of which were becoming more and more the aorta of the new direction in Europe. It is because of the initiative of the architect Mies van der Rohe, by far the strongest personality of the group of German constructivists, the core of the circle around G (only five issues of this periodical were ever published), that the common ideal of a demonstrative architecture exhibition was almost completely realized. Not only is the Siedlung Weißenhof Mies van der Rohe’s work with respect to grouping etc., but the stands of construction materials and ingredients in the Gewerbehalle [Trade Hall] and the Plan- und Modellausstellung [exhibit of plans and models] — all of which are of great importance for the entire planning of the exhibition — can be considered his mental property as well. Neither should we forget the Versuchsgelände [testing area], located next to the Weißenhofsiedlung, where the visitor can get acquainted with the construction and building method and the materials used here. Various kinds of solutions for roof covering of flat roofs, sound proof walls etc. are displayed here. Certainly nobody will be surprised that the realization of this wide-ranging demonstration required enormous energy, all the more because unexpected difficulties, prejudices and even political complications had to be overcome; not to speak even of the financial difficulties, resulting from the tight budget with which the organizers had to work. We have to credit the architect Mies van der Rohe, vice president of the Werkbund for having tackled the majority of these problems, assisted by the 15 collaborating architects as well as by his faithful supporters Werner Gräff, Willi Baumeister, Hilberseimer, Döcker etc.; the latter undertook the supervision of the execution of the work.

It is not premature to state that — leaving the quality of the architectural products themselves aside for the moment — this undertaking of a demonstrative exhibition is the product of a modern necessity, not only putting the traditional way of exhibiting in the shadow, but surpassing it, and rendering it obsolete for future use. Those who have visited the exhibition held in Paris in 1925 and compare it to this exhibition, will have to acknowledge that the former sinks into insignificance compared to the construction manifest in Stuttgart. The latter contrasts sharply with the exhibition in Paris, with respect to organization as well as to the exterior aspect.

II

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Impressions of the exhibition. — When we, after visiting the Weißenhofsiedlung, come to the glass display in the Gewerbehalle, we find ourselves, without preparation, in the best and purest presentation of this exhibition in the field of interior architecture (if these words are not a misnomer!). This glass hall, also executed after a design of Mies van der Rohe, owes its creation to the unequivocal task of displaying fragile material (semi-transparent and opaque glass of different colors) in such a way that it would be shown to full advantage. This was realized best by raising glass plates of enormous dimensions straight in the free space as walls, unprotected from top of bottom, without base board, profile or ornament. These glass plates are mounted in narrow, flat frames of nickel-coated steel. The problem was a sober one, but the solution reached the highest point that blessed, inspired visual artists can attain, and that only in very special moments: conquering the material with all of its faults, such as weightiness, resistance and transience, with the maximum of the energy force of the material itself.

Every material has its own energy force, and the challenge is to enhance this energy force to its maximum by proper application. The opposite is: violation of the material by wrong application, whereby a relatively large percentage of the energy force is lost. Weighing one material against another in respect to their energy and character, and proportioning them well, most certainly belongs to the essence of the new architecture. Only in this way can modern architecture bring to realization what it has to offer in involuntary beauty.

Only when iron concrete was, for the first time, applied in the right way (I believe this was done by Wright), were the character of the tension and the energy of the iron concrete shown off to such an advantage that architecture attained a new beauty, involuntarily, without a preconceived aesthetic intention. The same is true for plate glass, seamless floors, and other unjointed surfaces of materials, which by their purity, simplicity and their Gespanntheit [surface tension] are in keeping with the modern mentality.

It is my utter conviction, formed in practice, that only the ultimate surface is decisive in architecture. “How so? and what about the construction, the mechanism?”

The answer to this question is: “The ultimate surface is in itself the result of the construction. The latter expresses itself in the ultimate surface. Bad construction leads to a bad surface. Good construction produces a sound surface with tension.” Indeed, the finishing touch of architecture is in the finish of the surface, interior as well as exterior. The development of the ultimate surface is essential, from the first stone to the last stroke of paint. Every architect having a visual sense for construction knows this, and with this glass display Mies van der Rohe proved to be on top of this new problem.

What must be remembered in this problem of the ultimate surface is the following: only the surface is of importance for people. Man does not live within the construction, within the architectural skeleton, but only touches architecture essentially through its ultimate surface (externally as the city scape, internally as the interior). The functional element becomes automatic, only the summarizing surface is of importance, for sensory perception as well as for psychological well-being. It has an impact on the morale of the inhabitant. A previous generation (for instance, that of the Jugendstil movement from Darmstadt) was impervious to the purity of the surface and violated it by a multitude of separate objects, wanting to camouflage their lack of sense of architecture and construction.

Nowadays things are different, perhaps we have come to the other extreme, and the new ideal of an empty space and a pure surface comes closer to realization all the time. Here we are in the midst of the problem of so-called “interior design” and I will have occasion to go into more details about this — still unsolved — problem in a special article.

III

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Houses are like people. Their features, posture, gait, clothing, in short: their surface, is a reflection of their thinking, their inner life. The glass hall in the Gewerbehalle is the expression of a broad-minded human being with lofty ideas. The same is true for this housing complex, which, on entering the Siedlung, immediately strikes us by its grand conception. The interiors also show this. Although the dwellings are still separated from one another, they do not give us the dreary impression of juxtaposed uniform living-cells.

When shall we finally venture on centralized construction, and assemble a large diversity of dwelling possibilities and life functions under one roof (approximating the American skyscrapers)? Just as, with respect to the interior, the trend points toward the unit space, it will, with respect to housing for the masses, lead us to the “unit dwelling,” standardized in accordance with uniform dimensions (modules). Then also the hopelessly boring repetition of one and the same type of dwelling will not be seen anymore.

This row of mass-produced houses already resembles this kind of “unit dwelling” in many respects, and belongs to the best in its kind in the Weißenhofsiedlung. For the same recurring surface on which to build, different floor plans were designed (with a few exceptions), which warrant, with small variations, about the same economical lay-out. In these dwellings finally the traditional space between ceiling and doors was abandoned.

The latter have been extended to the ceiling, which makes the rooms look much higher than they really are. Because of a lavish use of glass the rooms, corridors, and service quarters are large and light. The floor plan, the living function is orderly and can be followed everywhere. Here we see the great advantage of wide windows, contrasting with the relatively dim rooms and caverns in the castle which Behrens erected between these modern houses, wherein the small openings for the windows are totally out of proportion with the façades.

In the housing block by Mies van der Rohe the interior furnishings were for the most part not the architect’s responsibility. Therefore we find many things there that are incongruous with the modern surroundings (somewhere I even saw an interior where the walls were hung with striped wallpaper!)

But the same holds also true for the extraordinarily brash, overwrought and very depressing “sculpted” baroque interiors by the Swiss Jeanneret (Corbusier), who showed with his two houses constructed in Weißenhof that he, in spite of his many good theories, in practice never overcame the Renaissance and the Baroque. These interiors are speculative esthetic, puristic paintings, converted into sculpture.

IV

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Le Corbusier’s architecture in Stuttgart is strongly influenced by the German functionalists, although these were not as clever as Le Corbusier in employing their construction principles in practice. Shifting of the pillars inward, as Corbusier practices — I believe he was the first to do so — is also derived from them. In Russia, too, people already struggled years ago for the abolition of the traditional concepts of statics and the visual feeling of gravity in modern architecture. Only enrichment of technical possibilities could meet this need. The latest exhibition of suprematist architecture in Moscow (some examples of which could also be seen in the Plan- und Modell-Ausstellung in Stuttgart) showed some bold examples of these endeavors, whereby particularly the daring computations were important. Basic in new architecture is the maximal use of the materials.

With the functionalists, however, the decorative as well as the visual effect has been totally suppressed. Therefore, Corbusier’s villa construction does not agree with this, since with him everything, thus every part as well, is geared to an aesthetic (albeit purist-pittoresque) effect. His interiors are sculptures in color, having a very surprising visual effect, which are, however, only in exceptional cases serviceable as living space. These interiors are conceived too much as studios (like in Montmartre!). In no building is one so much aware of the painter and so little of the constructor as in the dwellings by Le Corbusier.

Nevertheless there is something extraordinarily depressing in the narrow long corridors, which, although their dimensions are derived from the paquebots [mailboats], remind us of the narrow clefts of the trenches. The chocolate-brown of the walls augments this impression even further. No, this architecture, this interior, is not “of our time,” in spite of the fact that very beautiful cubist paintings are hung on the walls.

As a result, the general consensus is that Le Corbusier-Saugnier has, by aiming at outward appearance, with this architecture, except for a few constructive details, stopped being a constructor of such great importance as was accorded him until recently.

Scharoun is much more conscientious. I previously discussed these new tendencies in architecture, which I summarized under the name “Functionalism,” and I am very surprised that the founder of this trend, the architect Häring, is not represented here. Principally this trend came from Russia, and therefore it concurs with the communist philosophy of life. It is after all understandable that, as a reaction to a period of decorative squandering and overloading, another period followed of maximal restraint in architecture and the production of utensils. However, the question whether such a dogmatically, even politically conceived spatial constraint, although only employed for factories and workers’ dwellings, can be carried through from a biological and psychological, in short: humanitarian, viewpoint, should rationally be answered with “no.” There is absolutely no secret in the new construction methods, the problem is sober, clear and business-like, and the correct, logical use of the modern building materials will cause the new form of architecture to emerge quite involuntarily. The latter facilitates a realization on a grand scale (called “industrialization” by me). The “Kossel” system may serve here as an example in miniature.

Although the dwelling has become an easily manageable apparatus for daily living, in which all esthetics are odious, nobody will deny that the surplus of human energy makes demands beyond a solely practical and hygienic space for living. In which form these demands express themselves in the dwelling (the interior) wholly depends on the inhabitant. Everyone carries his surroundings, his atmosphere with him and therefore the neutral living space may be called the most successful. Built-in furniture, even that of cement or concrete, can wreak havoc there. A modern dwelling will not press the taste or the esthetic conscience of the architect upon us, but at best reflect the life philosophy of the individual who lives in it.

In contrast to the attempt at maximal neutralization and austerity in the dwelling (as practiced more or less consistently by the functionalists, among whom I include Stam), nearly all the other interiors may be called obtrusive or “middle class”. In the former, the designers wanted to break with the hypocritical snugness characterizing the interior of a previous generation (with or without symmetry, with or without antimacassars!), of which there are several “modernizations” to be found here, femininely appointed interiors under French influence by designers from Frank, Taut, and Behrens to Oud.

Neither does Scharoun escape those aesthetic treatments of ceiling, walls and details, considered odious according to functionalist ideas. A rational functionalism, as the modern, undecorated utensils show, can only be carried through in the case of passenger ships and train compartments (in which the architects Loos and Corbusier find their inspiration). A solution for the modern dwelling which is satisfactory in all respects has as yet not been found, although the architects Mies van der Rohe, Scharoun, Stam, and also Gropius, though the latter to a lesser degree, are closest to such a solution.

If modern architecture is to become suitable for industrialization, we not only will have to sacrifice most of the esthetic element, but also as a consequence thereof to cut off new construction completely and ruthlessly from the esthetic architectural tradition. This has already happened to the utensils for daily life, which have highly risen in our esteem. We have severed them mercilessly from every notion like “art,” applied art and arts and crafts. Now we recognize that the best, yes — even the most beautiful, utensils are those which were not touched by craftsy fingers. Architecture will also come to this stage. The Siedlung Weißenhof confirms this once more.

Three houses at the Stuttgart exhibition

Mart Stam
internationale revue
November 1927

Germany with its many great towns and many thousands of families, is experiencing a need, an intolerable dearth, unknown to Dutch architects, so well catered for, and sated with inessential fantasies.

Certainly we hear talk in Holland of house-building and workers’ settlements, but in reality there is very little interest in space-planning or interior design.

Germany is experiencing an acute housing shortage; a legacy from the years when the building trade was practically closed down. In every town there are thousands of families, young married couples, who have no home of their own and are forced to spend the best years of their lives as sub-tenants. But now the town of Stuttgart has decided to fight this shortage and realize clearly that it can be overcome only by a mass building campaign. A number of architects were invited to design specimen houses for this scheme. In a very short time plans were drawn up and the model houses erected.

However, it had been somewhat forgotten that a model house cannot just be designed; it can only be created by constant alteration and improvement.

It was also forgotten that houses designed for use by a large part of the population must be closely adapted to their special habits and way of life.

Some of the houses in the Stuttgart Weißenhof housing estate intended as model dwellings were only partly so adapted.

In the case of the three types of Stuttgart house designed by myself, I was fully aware on the one hand that they must suit the German way of life with its customs of laundering at home, making preserves and storing supplies for the winter, and on the other that these domestic occupations can only be truly economic if they are carried out by large enterprises. The Weissenhof settlement is a beginning, but only by the give-and-take of everyday use over a long period can it give rise to a model that is a complete entity in itself, as has happened, for instance, with the bicycle.

I therefore based my designs on regularly spaced points of support, on a framework very simply constructed out of angle iron and on a continuous floor made of precast concrete planks. The exterior walls are sandwich walls with concrete blocks, the blocks being covered with a thin sealing coat. When a large number of identical houses are being erected this system, if well carried out, should result in rapid, and therefore economical, building. A simple construction system of this kind, with a uniform arrangement of piles produces a smooth, simple form with a minimum of projecting parts. Economic considerations will confirm that the large, closed mass is the shape to be aimed at. If the building is broken up into several smaller masses it will require a much larger area of exterior wall, and certainly be much more expensive. The houses are intended (to judge by the requirements set) for the middle classes. It is assumed that there will be no resident maidservant, but that the housewife will probably employ a daily helper or, the domestic arrangements being so convenient, will do the work herself.

The ground floor includes, besides the necessary cloakroom, w.c. and small, functional kitchen, a big room for dining and living. This room is much the largest in the house and includes the staircase (though it could be divided off by a sliding partition), and in two out of the three houses there is a basement work-or garden-room. On the top floor there are three bedrooms and a bathroom-cum-dressing room. We hope to supply illustrations of these and other indoor installations later.

“The dwelling”: Weißenhof exhibition

Werner Gräff
Exhibition catalogue
November 1927

The aim

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According to its most significant pronouncements, the new architecture is striving towards a new way of living, and towards a more rational use of new materials and new constructional methods. These are more important than the creation of a new form or style.

We say “according to its most significant pronouncements” advisedly, since inevitably the mass of its fellow-travelers has fallen a prey to the seductions of formalism, without making the slightest contribution to the essential process of change. This must be emphasized all the more because it is naturally the unusual form which first hits the eye, and resistance to new developments in architecture is always directed primarily against the external appearance.

If the opposition were to seek some clarification of what is meant by a reform of living standards and rationalization of construction methods, the dispute would no doubt be more fruitful.

It cannot be denied that during the course of the last decade the way of life not only of an intellectual elite but also of the large mass of the population, and especially the younger generation, has undergone extensive changes. The more obvious factors in themselves — an increased appreciation of fresh air, color and mechanical aids, the upsurge in sporting activity, social mobility and economic needs — are bound to cause radical changes in our way of living in the long run.

But it has hitherto been impossible to create decisive new forms for domestic architecture, since the process of transformation is still in full swing. Indeed the customary dwelling which has served us for centuries seems unbearably ill-suited to the new generation — almost as if they were given frock coats to wear. Yet we have absolutely no idea of their wishes, not even a tolerably clear indication of the direction they wish to take. What is worse, neither have most of the modern architects. Only a few of them have the necessary frankness, freedom, and visionary strength — the rest, in this present and decisive moment, must content themselves with the role of fellow-travelers.

Frank Lloyd Wright had the necessary qualities twenty years ago. He knew the way to a new kind of living. But his compatriots have so far been unwilling to follow him, and he will have to be patient for another ten years.

Even the vanguard in Europe see that they must have patience for some time yet (although the fellow-travelers in particular have an unfortunate tendency to run ahead of the pack). Obviously a new domestic culture cannot be forced on people. But if the majority of the population are as yet unclear as to the direction they wish to take, one can at least try to sharpen their senses, break down prejudices, awaken instincts, and carefully observe their impulses.

Perhaps the new generation do not know how they want to live purely because they have no idea that they have a choice. In that case they must be shown the new technical postulates of domestic architecture, they must be acquainted with the most practical domestic equipment and machines; they must be made aware of the fact that the most talented architects throughout the world are striving after something new, even if their schemes prove merely fanciful. And so long as one gives practical examples of the different types of dwelling, it is preferable to fix things as little as possible, to show on the contrary that everything has yet to be given its final shape, which will be developed out of the way it is used. This is the reason for the variable ground plans in the skeleton building of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Mart Stam. In this way we can help to discover people’s preferences in their domestic arrangements.

And this, in outline, is the aim of the Werkbund “Dwelling” exhibition, Stuttgart, 1927.

Weißenhof housing settlement, 1927

Sigfried Giedion
Architecture Vivante
February 1928

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The exhibition certainly gave us an insight into actual life. We believe that it has extraordinary significance because it has brought new methods of construction out from the secluded of the avant-garde and caused them to be put into operation on a broad scale. The new architecture can never develop soundly without the active participation of the masses. Of course, the problems that have to be solved are not posed by any conscious expression of the masses. For many reasons their conscious mind is always ready to say “No” to new artistic experiences. But if the unconscious mind is once directed into a new path, then the laboratory product will be broadened and adapted to meet the needs of real life. The Stuttgart exhibition appears to us as the nucleus of such a process, and herein lies its importance.

The Weißenhof housing settlement gives evidence of two great changes: the change from handicraft methods of construction to industrialization, and the premonition of a new way of life.

Mies van der Rohe’s original plan was to interlock the house-plots so that a unified relationship could be created and the green areas would flow into one another. This plan unfortunately could not be realized for commercial reasons. Even so it is possible to experience how relationship and order are created by the level unassertive surfaces of flat roofs in places that would otherwise have been utterly chaotic. In flat towns, such as the Hague, one can observe ow flat roofs create wide interconnecting bands.

The Weißenhof housing settlement is dominated by Mies van der Rohe’s steel-framed apartment house. Even the apartment house, which today usually takes the form of a palace or a castle, is here transformed into a more loosely articulated structure. The steel frame permits one to eliminate all rigid inner and outer walls. For the outside, an insulated filling wall with a half-brick thickness is sufficient, and the inner and outer walls. These window strips are the only limiting factors. These window strips are wide and continuous in order to enable good light to penetrate as deeply as possible into the building. The problem of the apartment house is today (1927) even further from solution than that of the single-family house. Mies van der Rohe’s steel skeleton shows a possible way of unraveling this problem.

Many architectural critics found the continuous steel supports that ran freely through the houses of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier very unsightly. It seems that it is especially difficult for the architect to free himself from the appearance of traditional structural methods in which the walls were the bearing members of the house. It is fundamentally organic to our present-day conceptions of space that complete expression is given to the inner construction of our houses. The continuous steel support is definitely not an aesthetic focal point. It may be allowed to run quietly through the space. Just as the columns of ancient architecture give the onlooker a feeling of security by means of their ordered play of load and support, so the continuous steel or concrete shaft gives today’s onlooker an impression of powerful energy that flows uniformly through the house. The free-standing visible column is thus given a new expressive quality apart from its constructive objectivity. Here is continuous energy at work: nothing in our life remains an isolated experience: everything stands in a many-sided relationship — within, without, above, below!

Mies van der Rohe has followed the possibilities of his building through to the utmost detail. Plywood walls that can be screwed onto the ceilings enable the occupier to alter the disposition of his space at will. Doorless connections between rooms. One is continually amazed at the amount of space that this method makes possible within an area of 70 square meters (750 square feet). It acts upon us as a necessary stimulant — an impetus that can set industry into motion.

Weißenhof exhibition

Wilhelm Lotz
Die Form
November 1927

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The main part of the exhibition is formed by the Weißenhof residential site. It sticks out strangely amid the traditional architecture of the suburban approach from Stuttgart. But when seen by itself it spreads across the slope with surprising naturalness. Such a natural grouping and layout is otherwise only to be found in medieval town quarters and tropical villages. There are no fancy arrangements. The landscape, variations of terrain, sun, light, and air, form an ensemble of living forces into which Mies van der Rohe’s overall plan and the individual houses are sympathetically inserted. Thus the development seems almost like a living organism; everything is naturally interrelated. Indeed, this seems to us the most important and beneficial aspect of the Stuttgart site: that the exponents of the current architectural revolution are not attached to dogmatic principles, they do not stick mindlessly to slogans, but modestly subordinate their ideas to the demands of human life and needs. Yet they also go further than this, not in formal terms, but in the desire to point the way to a new form of living, which will come to terms with the contemporary forces so often regarded even now as the enemies of all human culture: technology, industry, and rationalization.

No doubt much of what is shown can and will be criticized. Errors of detail will appear, but this is why the development was built. It is an experiment and without experiments here are no results, and no progress. In many of the speeches which were made, there were constant and anxious reassurances that this was not an end but a beginning. If these assurances were intended to forestall criticism they seem misguided. The development is bound to become a whetstone for critical opinion. But we should wholeheartedly support the attitudes which have led to the creation of these buildings, for surely no forward-looking human being can doubt that the experiment will bring results of great importance, or that it is an event of great cultural significance.

The exhibition of plans and models should complement the development itself and draw attention to the generation of architects who in every country are standing up openly and sincerely in support of the new architecture. Here one has an overwhelming impression that these developments are not the expression of a style in the old-fashioned sense, based on and embodying a specific formal language, but that they are grounded in the structure of our times, answering to the specific demands of the task in question. And as Mies van der Rohe emphasized in his opening speech, this part of the exhibition shows that the Weißenhof site is not just an example of contemporary fashion in this country but part of a movement which is spreading throughout the world. And we may count ourselves lucky that we are able to examine the designs and plans of this group from all over the world, gathered together here in one place.