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Art into life
. Marx once declared, critiquing Hegel, that the historical task confronting humanity was “to make the world philosophical.” Hegel had completed philosophy, effectively brought it to a close. Now all...
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Tatlin’s tower
Nico Israel has a book out that looks fairly interesting, Spirals: The Whirled Image in Twentieth Century Art and Literature. In it he discusses Wyndham Lewis’ vorticism, Vladimir Tatlin’s monument to...
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Современная архитектура: Organ of architectural modernism in the Soviet...
Sovremennaia arkhitektura [Modern Architecture, or SA] was published every other month by the Society of Modern Architects [OSA] from 1926 to 1930. In all, the magazine ran for thirty issues,...
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Adorno’s Leninism
. Lenin and Adorno are not often placed side by side, conceptually or historically. More often than not they are counterposed — the former was a revolutionary man of action, while the latter ruminated...
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Leaked ISO internal bulletins, 2015 edition
. Below you will find the latest batch of internal bulletins from the International Socialist Organization, a US Trotskyist sect. Multiple concerned members, troubled by the group’s lack of...
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Walter Gropius, Monument to the March Dead (1922)
. Between 1920 and 1922 a monument in honor of the workers who lost their lives during the Kapp Putsch was erected in the Weimar central cemetery. It was commissioned by the Union Cartel of Weimar and...
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Trotsky’s Italian connection: Gramsci or Bordiga?
. Since the rediscovery of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks after World War II, there have been a number of attempts to adapt their heavily-coded theoretical content to various political projects....
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About Two Squares: El Lissitzky’s 1922 suprematist picture book for kids
Originally published in the Cambridge Literary Review . Most children’s books do not come with instructions for how to read them. El Lissitzky’s About Two Squares is not most children’s books....
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No tears for tankies
. . Amber A’Lee Frost had an article published on The Baffler yesterday, “Flakes alive! On not attending the Left Forum.” It is, among other things, a hilarious send-up of the weird, wacky, and...
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Sociology of the Charleston massacre: White nationalism, terrorism, “lone...
. Dylann Roof’s manifesto can be read here. (Update: It seems to have been removed, but you can read a full PDF version of the document here). Roof compiles a dossier of the various “races,” their...
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In defense of Slavoj Žižek
. The title of this post recalls Žižek’s own 2008 work In Defense of Lost Causes. Not one of his better books, in my opinion. Žižek remains one of the few redeemable intellectuals of our time. Despite,...
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Against accelerationism, for Marxism
. Introductory note I reproduce here a short post by my friend Reid Kane critiquing the fundamental premises of “left accelerationism.” For those unfamiliar with this theoretical formation, I advise...
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Fauxcahontas: On Andrea Smith, colonialism, and “authenticity”
. The Andrea Smith debacle likely won’t get as much play as the Rachel Doležal incident from a few weeks back. In my opinion, though, Smith is way worse than Doležal. Not only has she been lying about...
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No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci
. After I debunked Molly Klein’s baseless claim that Žižek was the editor of the Ljubljana student zine Tribuna when it printed a translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a few of her...
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Nothing new to see here: Towards a critique of communization
Donald Parkinson Communist League June 30, 2015 . Originally posted at Communist League Tampa . Awaiting the release of Endnotes 4, I decided to write a critique of the broad tendency of communization,...
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Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece: Narkomfin during the 1930s
. Recently I happened across a cache of extremely rare photos of Moisei Ginzburg’s constructivist masterpiece, Dom Narkomfin, in Moscow. They are reproduced here along with a brief popular exposition...
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Under artificial skies: Planetaria and modernism
A couple years ago or so, I posted a number of photos of the Moscow planetarium designed by Mikhail Siniavskii and Mikhail Barshch. The planetarium was built in 1929, and still stands today — albeit...
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Toward a materialist approach to the question of race: A response to the...
. The Charnel-House introduction . A few months ago, I wrote up a critique of the “decolonial dead end” arrived at by groups like the Indigènes de la République. Despite being welcomed in some quarters...
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The mind and face of Bolshevism (1926)
. You can download an illustrated full-text PDF of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism by clicking on the embedded link. What follows is an introduction to it and some thoughts on an all-too-familiar claim...
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The golden age of bourgeois portraiture, before the rise of photography
. What follows is an assortment of extremely high-resolution portraits of famous figures gleaned from various sources around the web, along with a short text by the French photographer and media critic...
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