Lenin

PROUN

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The “way station” between
painting and architecture

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Image: El Lissitzky,
PROUN 1-C (1919)
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From “Theses on the PROUN: From painting to architecture” (1920)

Not world-illusion
but world-reality

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1. We have named PROUN a station on the path to the construction of the new form. […] From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world — the world of objectivity. This does not mean the creation of a rivalry with the engineer. Art has not yet crossed paths with science.

2. PROUN is understood as the creative construction of form (based on the mastery of space) assisted by economic construction of the applied material. The goal of PROUN is progressive movement on the way to concrete creation, and not the substantiation, explanation, or promotion of life.

The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation.

The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality. […]

El Lissitzky, PROUN retrospective (1923)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 6 (1920)
El Lissitzky, Study for PROUN 4-B (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 7 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN 1-C (1919)
El Lissitzky, PROUN The Bridge (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 2 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 3 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 4 (1919)
El Lissitzky, PROUN 5-A (1919)

Continue reading →

Nikolai Bukharin on the life of A.A. Bogdanov

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Eulogy for a Bolshevik

Untitled.
Image: Bogdanov plays chess with Lenin
at Capri, as Maksim Gorkii looks on (1909)
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What follows is an introduction to and translation of a eulogy Nikolai Bukharin delivered upon the death by Evgeni Pavlov originally published in the Platypus Review. Evgeni had already translated the piece, but I solicited it for publication in the PR. As such, it represents one of my last contributions to the organization’s activities and publications, unless perhaps further transcriptions appear of events I helped put together.

Introduction

Evgeni V. Pavlov

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Nikolai Bukharin opens his “Personal Confession,” written on June 2, 1937, with a list of his “general theoretical anti-Leninist views.”[1] The first item on the list is his “lack of understanding of dialectics and substitution of Marxist dialectics with the so-called theory of equilibrium.” To explain this lack of understanding, Bukharin continues: “[I] was under the influence of A. Bogdanov, whom I wished to interpret only in a materialist way, which unavoidably led to a peculiar eclecticism — simply put, theoretical confusion — where mechanical materialism united with empty schemas and abstractions.”[2] This formulation is revealing in many ways. Bukharin’s renunciation of Bogdanov must be understood in light of the connection between the two. That Bogdanov’s ideas and his very person were influential in Bukharin’s intellectual development is difficult, even impossible, to deny. However, the level of this influence, the amount of alleged “borrowings” and the independence of Bukharin’s own theorizations are up for debate. An additional difficulty arises out of the use that the persecutors of Bukharin made of this relationship in order to discredit his ideas and political positions.

Aleksandr Bogdanov photographed in 1904, while still a close collaborator with Lenin

Aleksandr Bogdanov photographed in 1904, while still a close collaborator with Lenin

The year of Bogdanov’s death — 1928 — was an eventful year in Bukharin’s political life. The fifteenth Party Congress finished its work in December 1927, and the discussions about industrialization and collectivization were heated and fraught with factional conflicts. The grain shortage and the failures in foreign policy greatly contributed to the combative nature of the discussions. On the domestic front, the infamous Shakhty “conspiracy” went from the initial preparatory stages, characterized by intense internal discussions in the Party leadership, to the frenzy of the media’s coverage of the disastrous show trial that took place between May 18 and July 6. In July Bukharin negotiated with Kamenev about a possible opposition against Stalinist hard-liners.[3] In September he penned “Notes of an Economist” for Pravda in which he denounced plans for accelerated industrialization, emphasizing the need to “balance” various aspects of a complex economic system.[4] The political maneuvers by Bukharin and his supporters, attempting to use the Moscow Party Committee in their struggle, ended in defeat with the Central Committee’s condemnation in October 1928. The next month, Bukharin’s views were attacked at the Plenum of the Central Committee, and again in December 1928 at the eighth Congress of Professional Unions. At the joint meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee and the Presidium of the Central Control Committee in January 1929, Stalin delivered his infamous speech — “Bukharin’s Group and the Rightist Deviation in Our Party.” Continue reading →

Politics, a dead language

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Politics — in the emphatic sense — can sometimes feel like a dead language.

Terms and concepts that today should still retain some of their original descriptive purchase (like “lumpenproletariat” or “petit-bourgeois”) are only greeted with blank stares and bewildered incomprehension. It’s like you’re speaking Middle English or something. But then words and phrases that should actually raise a great deal more doubt (like “imperialism,” the “Third World,” or even “the precariat”) are taken for granted, as if everyone knows what they mean, even though it’s not clear at all if they remotely correspond to reality.

Obviously, I’m not interested in adopting some kind of false orthodoxy. Nor would I insist that everyone drop the way they’d ordinarily talk about something. It’s just that when it comes to serious discourse and debate, there needs to be at least some understanding of what these categories once meant and what they might mean today (if anything). Many of them are quite loaded, historically. Continue reading →

What is imperialism? (What now?)

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Larry Everest (RCP-USA), Joseph
Green (CV), James Turley (CPGB)

Untitled.
Image: Soldiers in Petrograd hold up a
banner reading “Death to imperialism!
Victory to the Red Army” (1920)
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Platypus Review 59 | September 2013

On April 6, 2013, a panel on “What is Imperialism? (What Now?)” took place during the Platypus International Convention at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The panel was motivated by the ten-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and aimed to discuss whether we are any closer to understanding what imperialism is and the relationship between anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. This panel brought together Larry Everest from the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), Joseph Green from Communist Voice, and James Turley of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was moderated by Lucy Parker of Platypus. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. Video is available here.

James Turley: Imperialism poses a series of problems for us as Marxists and they can broadly be divided into theoretical problems and political problems. The theoretical problems are characterized by the sharp inequalities between states, and this is as much a feature of the global order as the very obvious inequality and exploitative relations between classes. This arrangement has serious effects on how the class struggle plays out in different countries. Imperialism also poses a problem of the historical periodization of capitalism. This is the problem of imperialism as a particular stage of capitalism. Even if imperialism is not a particular stage, it is still in this historical sense a kind of carbon dating mechanism. With regard to political problems, it is clear that imperialism, as a system of unequal relations between states, is a way in which state power is organized globally. In this sense, the paramount political problem facing us as Marxists and revolutionaries, if we want to overthrow capitalism globally, is that the highest level of state power requires a serious political challenge.

British_empire_Color

Imperial map of the world showing British colonial might, 1886

Another issue which has come up, particularly in the last ten years, but which really has existed since at least the early days of the Comintern, is the attitude that we take to forces that are not strictly speaking of the Left but that nevertheless confront and oppose imperialist powers in military conflicts or in other ways. This issue, of course, has caused a serious division on the Left. The guidebook for how we have traditionally dealt with this as a movement is Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which is a sort of brief and very empirical analysis of the nature of imperialism. The background for Lenin’s work was the much larger debate over colonial policy and imperialism in the Second International that began in 1896. Karl Kautsky, who was the foremost theorist of the Second International, wrote a series of articles called Socialism and Colonial Policy arguing that early empires — such as those of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch — were effectively pre-capitalist in nature. They did not export capitalist relations of production, but rather were coercive, absolutist exploitation operations. According to Kautsky, these empires gave way, with the ascent of England as an imperial power, to what he called “Manchesterism.” This was free-trade imperialism. Instead of having coercive and brutal operations — this is Kautsky’s view by the way, it is obviously not true — what you had was the elimination of trade barriers and the expansion of capitalism as a system. Kautsky was writing in 1896 and 1897, by which point it was clear that the mechanisms which led to the First World War were accelerating, and the German state was attempting to acquire colonies. Kautsky’s argument is that the Scramble for Africa and similar forms of late-nineteenth-century imperial expansion are an expression of pre-capitalist forces in Germany and other states, and that this imperialism is actually reactionary with regard to “Manchesterism.” Continue reading →

Leninbulb

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Alternate poster design by Gustav Klutsis, "Electrification of the entire country!" (1921)

Alternate poster design by Gustav Klutsis,
“Electrification of the entire country!” (1921)

Vladimir  Lenin, “Preface” to I.I. Stepanov’s
The Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R. and
the Transitional Phase of World Economy

Written: 18 March, 1922
First Published: Pravda No. 64, March 21, 1922; Published according to the text in I. Stepanova The Electrification of the R.S.F.S.R. and the Transitional Phase of World Economy, Moscow, 1922, checked with the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 245-246
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V.I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Lenin: "Communism = soviet power [совласть] + electrification!"

Vladimir Lenin: “Communism = soviet
power [совласть] + electrification!” (1922)

I heartily recommend this book by Comrade Stepanov to all Communists.

The author has succeeded in giving a very able exposition of exceedingly difficult and important problems. He did very well in not writing a book for intellectuals (as is the practice among many of us who copy the worst manners of bourgeois writers), but for the working people, for the masses, for rank-and-file workers and peasants. To his book the author has appended a list of references for supplementary reading for the benefit of those who may find it difficult to understand some parts of it without further explanation. as well as for the benefit of those who would like to consult the principal works on this subject published in Russia and abroad. Special reference must be made to the beginning of Chapter VI, where the author splendidly outlines the significance of the New Economic Policy, and magnificently answers the “airy” scepticism that is displayed in some quarters about the possibility of electrification This scepticism is usually a cloak to conceal the absence of serious thought on the subject (that is, if it is not a cloak to conceal whiteguard, Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik hostility to all Soviet construction, which, in fact, is sometimes the case). Continue reading →

Spy vs. spy

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Parvus & Harry Dexter White

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Image: Richard Burton in the Cold War classic,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, (1965)
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Was Harry Dexter White an inverted Parvus?

Aleskandr Parvus, German imperial spy and prominent Marxist theoretician

Aleskandr Parvus, German imperial spy and prominent Marxist theoretician of permanent revolution

1. A German imperial agent planted into the highest echelons of Second International Marxism substantially contributes to Leon Trotsky‘s theory of permanent revolution and helps smuggle Vladimir Lenin out of Zurich into Russia following the February 1917 revolution, thus paving the way for the glorious October Revolution that same year.

Harry Dexter White

Harry Dexter White, Soviet spy and savior of the postwar US financial system at Bretton Woods

2. A Soviet double-agent planted in the highest echelons of the US financial establishment helps devise the Bretton Woods system, fastening international currency to the gold standard and thereby saving postwar capitalism from itself (until the rise of stagflation).

We must construct the Soviet dirigible fleet without delay

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The struggle for lighter-
than-air dominance 

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Image: “Let’s build a dirigible
fleet in the name of Lenin!”
Soviet agitprop poster (1928)
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From an advertisement to appear on the text of a candy-wrapper:

The dirigible

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The bourgeoisie come together
In order to separate us
But the Soviet dirigible
Flies along the border

Vladimir Maiakovskii
Moscow, 1923-1925

zeppelin zeppelin

“Comrade dirigible” [Товаришь дирижабль]
Let’s build an airfleet in the name of Lenin
Over the land of the Soviets must fly Soviet dirigibles
Aleksandr Rodchenko’s terrifying vision of the War of the Future (1930)

Continue reading →

Augustine Kofie's "Triangulation of the golden northeast" (2009)

Dossier on the debate between the International Bolshevik Tendency, Communist Party of Great Britain, and Platypus Affiliated Society

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by Reid Kane Kotlas

Untitled.
Image: Augustine Kofie’s Triangulation
of the Golden Northeast (2009)
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This is reposted from the tumblr page of a contact of the Platypus Affiliated Society, Reid Kane Kotlas. Though I was considering using this space to briefly relate Reid’s intellectual trajectory and how he arrived at the Marxist tradition, as well as our encounter several years back, it’s become clear to me that this would take up too much space. Perhaps this could be the subject of another post. Suffice it to say, at least for now, that our subsequent correspondence was largely the outcome of a debate we had over Lenin’s (in)compatibility with Luxemburg. At the time, he was quite skeptical of the Platypus Affiliated Society and what he then believed was its excessive pessimism with respect to the present. I’d assumed what was probably a haughty and overly dismissive stance toward the actually-existing Left, to which he responded:

I find your defamatory comments about the existing Left (and those of Platypus more generally) to be extremely discouraging. These people are our allies, and while I may disagree with a lot of what they say and do, the way to make that evident is not through condescension, but by expressing critical solidarity, by joining them and trying to steer them in other directions where appropriate, and where there is too great a divide or too much stubbornness, to demonstrate in practice what is wrong with their approach. I agree that its a shame that we are no longer witness to the sort of working class mobilization of the earlier part of the last century, but I don’t count this fact as either a cause or effect of “regression in Leftist consciousness.” The left hasn’t regressed, we’ve been brutally beaten down, silenced, defamed and overwhelmed for a century, and the disorganized and splintered remnants that persist today, however “backward” their thinking may be at times, are not symptoms of the Left’s decadence and degeneration but the first flares of its rekindling.

Later on, I tried to clarify what I’d meant by my remarks and remove some of their needless cynicism, which were unhelpful and probably off-putting. This brought Reid and I into closer accord in our understandings of the present political moment. In an e-mail a little over a year ago, he related to me that “[w]hile before I had reservations about Platypus due to its assessment of the Left, I now basically agree with that assessment.” Recently, it came to my attention that Reid has been quietly and independently dedicating himself to a closer study of some of Platypus’ past engagements. Because of the remarkable lucidity and critical acuity of his observations here, I thought I’d make available his dossier on the debate between the International Bolshevik Tendency, Communist Party of Great Britain, and Platypus. The post also includes a number of helpful links to background readings on the debate. Thanks again to Reid for granting me permission to repost this.
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Ivan Kudriashev's Construction of a rectilinear motion (1925)

Kudriashev’s Construction of a rectilinear motion (1925)

Dossier

The following is a series of documents and recordings relating to an ongoing debate between members of the Platypus Affiliated Society (PAS), the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT). 

I believe these deserve to be grouped together because, in the discursive space sustained between these three distinctive organizations, the central problems of the contemporary left are saliently circumscribed. Any pair of the three organizations, as well as the trio, share interesting points of convergence and divergence. The differences between their respective ideologies, programs, historical perspectives, and practical approaches elucidate that absent locus of revolutionary politics. Continue reading →

Young Lukács

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An interview & photo gallery

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Image: Georg Lukács seated in
the darkness of his library
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From an interview conducted by the New Left Review, translated 1971:

New Left Review: How do you judge today your writings of the twenties? What is their relationship to your present work?

Georg Lukács: In the twenties, Korsch, Gramsci, and I tried in our different ways to come to grips with the problem of social necessity and the mechanistic interpretation of it that was the heritage of the Second International. We inherited this problem, but none of us — not even Gramsci, who was perhaps the best of us — solved it. We all went wrong, and today it would be quite mistaken to try and revive the works of those times as if they were valid now. In the West, there is a tendency to erect them into “classics of heresy,” but we have no need for that today. The twenties are a past epoch; it is the philosophical problems of the sixties that should concern us. I am now working on an Ontology of Social Being which I hope will solve the problems that were posed quite falsely in my earlier work, particularly History and Class Consciousness. My new work centres on the question of the relationship between necessity and freedom, or as I express it, teleology and causality.

Georg.Lukács and Béla Balázs

Georg Lukács and Béla Balázs

Traditionally, philosophers have always built systems founded on one or the other of these two poles; they have either denied necessity or denied human freedom. My aim is to show the ontological interrelation of the two, and to reject the “either-or” standpoints with which philosophy has traditionally presented man. The concept of labor is the hinge of my analysis. For labor is not biologically determined. If a lion attacks an antelope, its behavior is determined by biological need and by that alone. But if primitive man is confronted with a heap of stones, he must choose between them, by judging which will be most adaptable to his use as a tool; he selects between alternatives. The notion of alternatives is basic to the meaning of human labor, which is thus always teleological — it sets an aim, which is the result of a choice. It thus expresses human freedom. But this freedom only exists by setting in motion objective physical forces, which obey the causal laws of the material universe.

The teleology of labor is thus always co-ordinated with physical causality, and indeed the result of any individual’s labor is a moment of physical causality for the teleological orientation (Setzung) of any other individual. The belief in a teleology of nature was theology, and the belief in an immanent teleology of history was unfounded. But there is teleology in all human labor, inextricably inserted into the causality of the physical world. This position, which is the nucleus from which I am developing my present work, overcomes the classical antinomy of necessity and freedom. But I should emphasize that I am not trying to build an all-inclusive system. The title of my work — which is completed, but I am now revising the first chapters — is Zur Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins, not Ontologie des Gesellschaftlichen Seins. You will appreciate the difference. The task I am engaged on will need the collective work of many thinkers for its proper development. But I hope it will show the ontological bases for that socialism of everyday life of which I spoke. Continue reading →

Karl Korsch's Marxismus und Philosophie

August Thalheimer, “Book Review: Karl Korsch, Marxismus und Philosophie“

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Leipzig: C. L. Hirschfeld, 1923

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Image: Cover to the first edition of Korsch’s
Marxismus und Philosophie (1923)
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Platypus Review 48 | July–August 2012

The first English translation of August Thalheimer’s 1924 review of Karl Korsch’s seminal work, Marxism and Philosophy, appears below. The review originally appeared in the Soviet journal Under the Banner of Marxism(Pod Znamenem Marksizma, 4-5 [1924]: 367–373). For an earlier discussion of Korsch’s book, see Chris Cutrone’s review of the 2008 reprint of Marxism and Philosophy released by Monthly Review Press, in Platypus Review 15 (September 2009), and the original translation of Karl Katusky’s review of Korsch that was published in Platypus Review 43 (February 2012).

Reposted from The Platypus Review.

The task that Karl Korsch sets himself in the article comprising the first part of his “Historical-logical Studies on the Question of the Materialist Dialectic,” boils down to the elucidation of the problem of the interrelation of Marxism and philosophy.[1] The article begins by pointing out that the importance of this question has not been recognized until the present day, and that this ignorance characterizes the bourgeois school of philosophy as well as circles of Marxist academics. “For professors of philosophy, Marxism was at best a rather minor sub-section within the history of nineteenth-century philosophy, dismissed as ‘The Decay of Hegelianism’” (52).

As for the Marxist theoreticians, including also the orthodox ones, they too failed to grasp the importance of the “philosophical side” of their own theory. True, they proceeded from different considerations than the professors of bourgeois philosophy, and even assumed that in this they followed exactly the footsteps of Marx and Engels, because ultimately the latter two would sooner “abolish” than create philosophy. But this attitude of the Marxist theoreticians — the leaders of the Second International — to the problem of philosophy can be considered satisfactory from the viewpoint of Marxism precisely insofar as Feuerbach’s attitude to Hegel’s philosophy satisfied Marx and Engels. Shoving philosophy unceremoniously aside, the cultivation of a negative attitude toward its problems did not occur without impunity and resulted in such curiosities as the confession of faith by some Marxists in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Continue reading →