#rail me lenin

[jadewazzletime]

[damnesdelamer]

What flavour of communist and/or gay are you? /Gen

I'm not really sure what this means.

Not to spout clichés or take myself too seriously, but to some extent I think labels confine us within rigid structures which ultimately only serve our enemies. I know it's just a shortcut, but even the fact that you say 'flavour' kinda reiterates the idea that lots of the associated terminology positions us as existing for consumption.

Of course I know language matters. Indeed, I think a disproportionately large amount of leftist in-fighting is down to word choice and communication. More often than not, when anarchists refer to the state and Leninists refer to capital or bourgeois democracy, we're all talking about the same systems of harm and oppression. I also believe that what's most important is what we do, not how we identify.

I actively avoid the 'discourse' surrounding queer terminology. For years in my youth I railed against the word 'bisexual' because I didn't like that it implied I have two distinct sexualities, and for awhile I even called myself 'ambisexual' in an attempt to prompt a deconstruction thereof. But then I decided that I like the colours of the bi flag, which is really all that matters, because it's just aesthetics.

So I guess let me put it this way: I'm a trade union organiser who specifically represents queer union members. I grew up reading Marx, and some of the greatest influences through my adolescence on how I approach the world were Gramsci and Mao, and later Fanon and Butler. I spent a lot of my twenties questioning whether I count as trans, as I have always been very comfortable with both my masculinity and my femininity, but at some point I realised very clearly that the gender I was assigned at birth is not reflected in either.

I very strongly believe in the value of Lenin and Leninism to global struggle; but likewise I have taken a lot from Malatesta, Luxemburg, Adorno, and so on. I also think, while they are to be scrutinised rigorously, there is much to be gained from the likes of Trotsky, Foucault, or ‎Žižek. I am a staunch anti-Zionist, but Memmi nevertheless teaches us a great deal about the plight of the colonised.

I am probably closer to an orthodox Marxist than I am to a Leninist or anarchist, but ultimately I think all this orthodoxy reeks of bourgeois affectation. The questions we should be asking are: who is most impacted by the realities of a given situation, and what are they saying, what do they need? Once upon a time in the west, and certainly still in most cases, this is BIPOC and sexual others, so we read Davis and Feinberg and Öcalan and Ahmed and Tuck and Yang. It is the strength of the revolutionary to adapt to the material conditions at hand, and remain undaunted.

In the end, we have more in common with one another than we have with ruling classes, right? So let us gather together! If this is the final struggle, let each stand in our place.

[arpov-blog-blog]

The Elite Movement Laying the Foundation for a MAGA That Will Outlast Trump and Remake America: Inside NatCon Part I | Religion Dispatches

...“Most people can’t even articulate a political thought. Like, why do they get to vote? It’s stupid.”

It’s the evening of September 11, and I’m sipping whiskey by the bar at a 4-star resort hotel in Miami, as a 29-year-old financial analyst, R., outlines his desire to dismantle democracy with an intense, focused composure. All around us, dozens of mostly young white men sporting smart blazers—a motley crew of conservative political operatives, think tank analysts, journalists, academics, and students—mingle by the resort’s open-air pool and palm trees, cigars and drinks in hand, sharing their own distaste for liberal democracy, and their plans to turn that distaste into action. One day into the third annual National Conservatism conference, and after a long afternoon of impassioned speeches about the culture war, R. is fired up—and maybe slightly drunk.

“I reject equality,” R. tells me as I strain to hide my alarm behind a veneer of curiosity. Citing fascist thinkers like Julius Evola and Carl Schmitt, he endorses white nationalist ‘race realism’—thepseudoscientific theory that different racial groups carry biological and genetic differences that manifest in group disparities in IQ, wealth, moral and social norms, and more—and rails against “bio-Leninism,” the Left’s supposed strategy to mobilize biologically low-status social groups in order to win power. 

What’s needed, R. tells me, is “a status hierarchy where you have a healthy society, with good values promoted and degenerate things shunned.” If he could snap his fingers and institute his ideal political system in the US overnight, I ask him, what would it be? “An absolute monarchy,” he replies without hesitation. “If you don’t have a positive vision of what your morality should be, and have the conviction to say, ‘we’re right, everyone has to obey these rules’—then the Left will impose their shitty rules, like chopping up children in the womb, or ridiculous things like pregnant men.”

All around us, conference attendees continue to sip cocktails, exchange business cards and discuss their own fervent opposition to bodily autonomy, LGBTQ rights, racial justice movements like Black Lives Matter, ‘wokeness,’ and liberalism more broadly, alongside more bread-and-butter topics like the challenges of working on Capitol Hill, conservative legal strategy, and the likelihood of a DeSantis presidential run in 2024. I ask R. if his penchants for natural inequality, hierarchy, and dominance are popular among other NatCon attendees."

[babybluebex]

Now a real question

What kind of kinks Daniel's characters would have?

oh boy THIS is a pandora’s box

hmm i guess i’ll go down my list of my favs of The Danny Bunch™ lmao

alex kerner (goodbye lenin) has a thing for smoking. he likes to watch you smoke, and he HAS to smoke after sex. god forbid you go to a party with him and someone passes you a joint, because homie is Erect Instantly. he also likes for you to be on top, so most of your fucks are like he’s on the couch and just looking up at you. i also feel like he has a thing for, like, your hips, and he’ll always grab at them/bite them. there’s been more than one occasion where he’s left teeth marks on your hip. he likes to eat you out. he likes the way your thighs quiver around his head when you’re close. he loves to have you suck him off too, and his favorite is when you choke and gag on his cock and his precum dribbles down your chin. just the thought of THAT alone is enough to get him off.

andrea marowski (ladies in lavender) is a sub, so THATS something we have to talk about. this boy is a sub and a bottom, and he has the worst mommy/daddy kink ever. he just wants to be good for his partner and hear how he’s such a good boy. praise kink. praise kink AS HELL. if he EVER has to dom/top, he is a service top. if his partner has breasts, boy he is ALL OVER THEM. he likes to hold your tits and roll your nipple between his fingers, he likes to rest his head on them when cuddling, and man oh man he is forever on a quest to have a titty in his mouth. he also likes for you to be on top, and he’s sucking your tits the entire time (my breastfeeding kink goes brrr). baby man. that’s all.

niki lauda (rush)... where do i start with this guy. maybe it’s not so much a kink, but he’s into quick fucks. right before/after a race, he’ll shove his partner against a wall and just Go To Town. i also feel like he likes bareback/creampie, but not breeding. he just wants to own his partner. degradation as hell— “god, you’re such a whore on your knees like this, bet you wanna suck off every racer here, huh?” and i touched on this earlier but it bears repeating: he Can and Will take pictures of you and keep them in his wallet/pocket/sun visor, anywhere he can possibly have them. just a picture of his fist in your hair and you can sorta see his cock buried in you in the corner of the picture, and if someone sees the polaroid, he’s just Proud. i also feel like he likes to overstimulate you, so he’ll fuck you until you’re so close that you can taste it, and he’ll pull out and do whatever the fuck. and teasing AS HELL. “if i place first, i’ll come back and fuck you stupid, how does that sound?”

laszlo kreizler (the alienist), like niki, is into quick fucks. like, pushing your skirt up and just fucking you hard and fast, then returning to work like nothing ever happened. (he likes to see your weak legs, and he’s proud of himself if you have to sit down). he also likes really slow stuff too, though, and he’ll take his time laying you down and undressing you and will kiss your neck and it’s the definition of Making Love. although, unlike niki, las is ALL about that breeding kink. he doesn’t really want kids, but he’s in love with the idea of seeing his partner all big and pregnant and barefoot around the house. it’s all part of staking his claim on you. he also really likes giving his partner hickies, because the clothing of the period allowed for shit like that (high collars on shirts, long sleeves with coats, etc). i feel like there’s a hint of choking in there too; he just grabs at your cravat when fucking you and won’t stop until he sees tears in your eyes.

zemo (tfatws) just... again, he is worthy of his own post, but i’ll make this quick: choking. spanking. pulling your hair. spitting (on your tits, in your mouth, on your cunt before he slides into you). a little tiny bit of slapping too (just Smack A Clit and hear a bitch whimper, i agree). he also has SUCH a thing for like, buying you nice jewelry and fucking you while you’re wearing it. bonus points if it’s a necklace and he gets to watch it bounce off your tits while you fuck yourself on his cock. and buying you nice makeup and edging you until you’re crying and that expensive mascara is running in rivulets down your cheeks.

padre domingo (MY MF MANS)... i literally have no idea where to start with this guy. he DEF is all about what’s bad and sinful and looked down upon, so he likes forbidden rendezvous, which include railing you over the alter. he’s into bondage, but in the way that he’ll wrap his rosary around your wrists and keep count of how many orgasms he’d given you (or, alternatively, how many times he’s edged you). bonus points if he has access to your rosary, so he has TWO rosaries and DOUBLE the number yknow. also... i haven’t really talked ab this before... but... anal. he likes it. he buys into the idea of like “god’s back door” or whatever the fuck, so he’ll be in your ass and like fingering your cunt and pinching your clit WOW i am actually turning red here. he also likes eating you out, mainly for the moment where you squeal when he sucks on your clit and your thighs try to close around his head. he likes for you to be loud. he likes to hear how much pleasure he’s giving you.

hmmm... i think i’ll end this with someone i haven’t touched on before: checo from paradise mall (or, as i call him, emo baby boy who DEFINITELY listens to three cheers for sweet revenge on a fuckn loop)

he just. he. he likes to have his hair pulled. he loves his long hair and, even when y’all aren’t fucking, he likes to have his hair played with. he also likes quick fucks; like, the picture above gives me very “we’re out with friends but you look delicious, come with me to the bathroom and let me rail you”. and he has you leaned over the sink and is fucking you from behind, and he shoves his fingers in your mouth and forced you to watch yourself in the mirror, and he’s in your ear the entire time “you’re squeezing the shit outta me, honey. ya like watching yourself get fucked like the dumb little slut you are? yeah, you fucking like it, i can feel your little cunt getting wetter by the second.” size kink as HELL too, like, he’ll press his hand to your belly as he fucks you and he’ll go harder and faster until he feels himself through you against his hand. he likes to mark you up too, so like hickies on your neck, collarbones, shoulders, thighs, stomach, hips. if he knows that you’ll be wearing a specific item of clothing in the coming days, he will make the darkest, most obscene marks in places that he KNOWS will show.

feel free to add onto this

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

What inspired you to write in the first place? That, and where the hell did the idea of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" come from?

Oh man, I feel like you should have asked me this a few years ago as then I’d have better than vague remembrances of where this all began.

Well, first, as for writing I can’t say I really know.

I’ve always loved writing, even before I got my fanfiction account at the Dawn of Time I was writing. It was either strange short stories or essentially fanfiction (I can’t remember my exact age, I think I might have been eight or something, but I essentially wrote a fanfiction screen play of what should happen after The Lord of the Rings. It has been purged from every computer ever as I shortly after realized it was hot garbage and its very existence haunts me to this day.) Eventually I was introduced to fanfiction by a friend and, well, I’ve been stuck here ever since.

It’s the same for me with reading/movies, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with the world of fiction.

As for “Lily”, as you can imagine, it’s kind of a weird story that still won’t explain where the hell that out of nowhere AU came from. I like to think it’s interesting though.

So, this was when I was first getting serious into writing HP fanfiction. Before that I was mired in the Death Note fandom and I can’t say that Harry Potter really interested me. Then I realized I could chuck Harry out the window and make it all about Tom Riddle. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” had picked up both a fair amount of steam and also a fair amount of notice and my mind started to wander (as one’s mind does). 

I wanted to write a Master of Death fic. I’d seen a lot around but none really went where I wanted. Harry the god was usually too young and far too human, at best he’d be sort of cynical and jaded and try to convince you this was wisdom. I wanted a god Harry who really was a god and slowly had to come to accept it. So, the vague idea that was “Lily” before “Lily” was born was that it’d be a Master of Death story focusing on a millennia old Harry who then returns to his human origins in one desperate attempt to reclaim his humanity.

Only he’s so old, weird, and inhuman that it immediately goes off the rails. He warps the very reality around him when he returns, things stop making any real sense, and the more he tries to cling to being Just Harry the more things fall apart.

Early on in the story he was going to unconsciously make this... I guess we’ll call it a construct. It’d look human but it wouldn’t really be, but instead would be this thing he’d created to essentially deal with all of his problems for him and be Harry Potter (chosen one, boy who lived, person who has to deal with Tom Riddle for him) in his place. This was actually Lily. The reason she’d be the spitting image of Harry’s mother, calling herself Lily, in this version was because Harry’s so weirdly hung up on his mom that he makes this artificial clone of her to be his best friend he can be all weird about. 

As the story would progress “Lily” would become more and more of a person, has to deal with horrifically traumatic garbage in Harry’s stead in a world where she doesn’t even really exist, and would slowly start pressuring Harry to admit he’s a goddamn God already and stop putting her through this horror show. Harry, naturally, wouldn’t as he has convinced himself he’s not responsible for this madness.

Probably sometime around Goblet of Fire, and getting her name thrown in the goblet, “Lily” would have enough and have a giant meltdown and go AWOL in order to force Harry to man up already. Lily would eventually die/be deconstructed as Harry’s forced to admit she’s something that sprung from Mummy Issues and his own personal hang ups on his human life. The story would  eventually end with Harry manning up already, admitting this is all a farce he’s set up, and gracefully exiting stage left. 

And that’s about as far as I got with the planning of the “Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus” that never happened.

The trouble was, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that “Lily” was the far more interesting and engaging character. Harry as he was, while severely flawed, didn’t drive the plot on his own or in all that interesting of a way. He’s there to mostly be in denial and be a catalyst, it was Lily’s trials and tribulations that I actually cared about. (Though in retrospect the vague outline of the original is still pretty damn good, if bleak.)

And so the story started to morph into something else completely. What if we still had that Master of Death Harry (only kinder and less of an asshole) but instead “Lily” really is a Harry Potter. She’s an alternate Harry Potter of a world that’s mostly the same, but a little different here and there, and for whatever reason is closer to the source of what Harry Potter really is.

So, Lily’s story began to form, in which she’s navigating the strange destiny of Harry Potter with friends in all the wrong places and trying to figure out the meaning of this often cruel, cold, world we live in. I debated for a while making her another Harry (male character) but I chose not to for a few reasons.

1) Lily’s personality comes off as more abrasive and strange as a little girl than a little boy. She doesn’t fit societal expectations of what a little girl should be like and I very much wanted that.

2) The prophecy in Lily’s universe is inherently wrong. It provides the wrong gender which has very important implications for The End of the World that Rabbit keeps bringing up.

3) It allows me to be very up front that this Harry Potter is not at all the same as the one we know. Yes, I’ve seen similar things done with male alternate!Harrys but I feel like it’s a fast short hand to swap the gender for me to make really really large changes to characterizations without people blinking. Lily is a Harry, not the Harry.

4) The Lily Evans and Lily mistaken identity thing was vital to the plot. 

I then made her Eleanor rather than Harriet as I, again, wanted to be very clear that she’s not Harry. She encompasses Harry’s role in life but they are extremely different characters.

Anyways, from the very beginning it was always about “the meaning of life” more than anything else (hence the title) and so pretty soon after the Lily centered story began to form Wizard Lenin, Rabbit, and the whole overarching plot was born. 

And here we are, years later, in which I knew it was an epic but I had no idea it’d be this damn long.

[nicomacheannothing]

11-25-2020

My keyboard is mildly fucked because I spilled lemon water all over it the other week. It still works, but it’s all slow and finicky now. I’m only letting ya’ll know cause I’m pretty sure my dumb typos are only going to increase as a result haha.  It might seem completely random, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my clothes lately. For one thing, I bought waaaay to many new things during the pandemic. It wasn’t like... dropping thousands on designer clothes, it was just taking advantage of massive sales, but still. I’m swimming in clothes. 😅

I love having a lot of options to choose from, but I keep having these mini existential crises whenever I switch up my style. I used to watch a lot of YouTube videos related to alternative fashion. Whenever one of those YouTubers would do Q&A videos, they would always get someone asking something like “do you ever want to not dress up?” The YouTuber would almost always respond with some version of “no, this aesthetic is just part of who I am. I never want to just not be myself”. I’ve come to realize and slowly accept that I... just don’t feel that way. My clothes are not “me” and I am not my clothes. Sounds weird, I know. I love fashion and my instagram account is basically a fashion blog. But I still don’t have this deeply personal attachment to a single, unified aesthetic that EVERYONE seems to have.  Sometimes, I want to wear Victorian Goth clothing, sometimes I really just want to wear jeans and a t-shirt. The common thread is that I always have some reason for choosing the outfit that I do. Sometimes, the reasons are too personal or conceptual to explain, but there’s usually some sort of symbolism there. Take the jeans and t-shirt as an example. Sometimes, I’ll dress that way because I’ll have seen a young woman at the store who somehow looked stunningly beautiful in a very simple outfit like that. I’ll want to try to capture that beauty in my outfit just for that day. There are times when I’m trying to evoke the vibe of a character from a show or movie I recently saw. Idk, it’s hard to explain but... my way of putting outfits together results in my being this weird style chimera. I’m not sure if that resonates with anyone else. I’ve been this way my entire life. I remember of my classmates in high school remarking that I seemed to wear a different style of clothing everyday. Back then, my staple inspirations were hip-hop aesthetic, Islamic modesty standards, a professor who I was in love with and Joseph Stalin at the Yalta conference. Yes, I chose clothing based on every one of those things on multiple occasions. I don’t have pics of all of them handy, but here’s me in what a lot of the non-preppy kids were wearing when I was in high school:

And this is the kind of thing the aforementioned professor wore. A lot of long skirts and short heels:

Oh, and I wore that fucking red hat everywhere. It had a pin with Vladimir Lenin on it.  I feel like this post is going off the rails lol. My point is that I don’t think my clothes are “me” exactly. They’re more like expressions of things I love or things that interest me. I sometimes feel weirdly guilty for not having a “brand”. The most accurate way to describe my style overall has always been “edgy, but classy”. That’s usually what I shoot for. I know I’m weird but... I spent too long trying to “fit in” when I was a kid and I gotta just embrace my weirdness. That’s what people usually end up liking about me anyway haha.  BTW, I’m wearing a Lion King shirt today. I wanted to embody Austin’s childhood nostalgia. And, I was listening to the “Rhythm of the Pridelands” album on my walk today. It’s my favorite. I might have to blog about that next! :D

[yalerussianchorus-blog]

Blog Post for Friday, May 31st by Gabriel Mesa

May 31, 2019

I would say this day began at the crack of dawn, but the sun rises at 3 AM in Moscow. A smaller contingent of the chorus managed to wake themselves up after the chaos of the free day that came before. Following the hotel breakfast (a hot dog and eggs with a consistency reminiscent of tres leches cake), the 17 of us were off to the metro station. We groggy travelers made our way through the Moscow underground to the Leningradsky train station, and on our way we admired the intricate and majestic metro as always. Upon arriving, we stood in the center of some stalls while Stepan bought the train tickets to Sergiev Posad. Although we were fascinated by the one dollar book stands around us, the piece de resistance was a KFC stall which was the first thing to catch our American eyes. It really is the small things that make such a big difference. After a brief discussion about the improvement regarding service and food in Russian fast food chains, I remarked that in this moment Russia seemed more capitalist than the USA.

Stepan returned with our tickets and we were, in classic YRC style, scrambling to make the next train. The so called ¨Elektrichka¨ (an electric train serving the greater Moscow area) was a full and colorful place. We were sat far from one another, next to the many Russian commuters. Vendor after vendor entered our train car, selling goods ranging from ice cream to woven bags, though no one was aggressive nor pressing. After these interesting sales pitches, I settled into a conversation with Stepan and Reed, the YRC members who were seated near me.

It was about halfway through our train ride to Sergiev Posad that the ticket collector came around. After he scanned my ticket in order to check that I was not a ¨rabbit¨ (a term for those who hop car to car without paying), Stepan told us to keep the ticket. This took me by surprise because I assumed the five dollar fare was one way. Apparently a three hour train trip cost five dollars in total. What a place!

As we approached the end of our exploration of the infamous Russian rail gauge, we sang some songs for the other passengers. They loved them. Several of them were adamant about finding out where our next concert would be and at what time. Soon we arrived at Sergiev Posad.

The train platform stood in a small ravine between woods upon woods. We followed the three or four other passengers that got off at the station up a narrow staircase into even more forest. What followed was a ten minute walk through trees and unpaved roads until we arrived at our destination. Behind a solitary bus stop was a large path leading to a gate. As we approached and tried to collect our party, a Siberian Husky strode excitedly in our direction. He greeted us with a wide smile, wet fur, and eyes of two different colors: one pale blue and the other dark brown. The dog’s owner soon followed and lead us to his farm. As we approached through mud and tall grass, new dogs weaved in and out of our group. In the end, they totaled about ten. It was also at about this point that I began to rethink my decision to wear my suit rather than bring it to change, a decision initially motivated by a desire not to carry a suit around and to get good pictures on the horse.

This old Soviet collective farm had a surprising charm. The greenery had so overgrown the rusted metal structures that the two seemed now inseparable. This almost post-apocalyptic fusion was the perfect backdrop to mount our steeds. Our guide led horses one by one out of the barn and we formed a line leading to the field. Most of us were beginners or close to it; I had only ridden twice before. Nevertheless, we all were elated to ride in the vast field ahead of us. The sun shone down after the rain such that all the grass glistened with tips of light. When we finally began to control our horses, we all lined up for a photo and burst into a song about exactly what we were doing: riding our horses through the fields of Russia. I then began to roam around the property, followed by three other choristers. This entire time we all were trying to get our horses to gallop fast, though all unsuccessful. I finally persuaded mine though much shifting and prompting into a fast pace. Much to everyone’s surprise, the horses behind mine matched the new speed, and we trod on laughing and frantically trying to control the energetic steeds. I then switched out with some of the members on the ground. After several more songs and pictures, we returned to the barn and said our goodbyes.

A tiring riding session inspired a rapacious desire for food. We unpacked a bag full of sandwich supplies and snacks, though we supplemented it with goods from the small food store across the street. I practiced some Russian with the cashier after she refused to believe that I was American, most likely due to my attire and dark hair/eyes. Even having explained the history of the chorus and what we were doing here, she wanted to know my background so I just told her I was Spanish (partially true). After waiting a while for the bus, we decided to take some incredibly cheap Yandex cabs (Russian UBER) and in groups of four we made it to our next destination: the first concert of the day.

Upon arriving at the gates of the Detski Dom, a home for the deaf and blind, we greeted the group of chorus members who just arrived from the train station. Outside the building were statues made of various interesting textures for the children to explore. A woman showed the men into the library to change and the women into another room. Having already worn my suit to ride the horses, I brushed off some dirt and occupied the rest of my time before the concert by reading children’s books which were perfect for my Russian reading level. As we entered the auditorium and began with the roar of Tebe Boga Khvalim, many of the children were taken aback and excited. One of them had hearing problems and was signing to Stepan and waved to all of us throughout the concert. I am fairly sure we were loud enough to be heard even by him. After the concert we performed the parade of cabs again and were off to the Patriarch’s monastery.

Once we entered what seemed to be a gigantic white fortress reminiscent of the walls of Minas Tirith, a group of monks received us and brought us to a changing room. One of them was a native Alaskan who spoke fluent English, though the power of this country caused him occasionally to forget English words that he knew in Russian. They instructed us to meet back at their beautiful green and gold amphitheater in an hour. Most of us took that time to snack and tour the grand churches. We grabbed some fresh kvass and a bought a monastery cake that was just a larger and more delicious fig newton with Old Church Slavonic writing on it. Carrying our loot around the grounds, Zosia, Hank, and I observed the many people that flocked across the square from the ongoing service to the holy fountain to the many relics. The American priest gave us a tour of the oldest church whose interior was dark yet glorious. The chorus then lined up outside the performance hall.

Our act was preceded by a group of older women dressed in very traditional Slavic clothing. They had a very gentle sound which contrasted against the brash chorus routine and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was lucky to be singing with them later that day as well. After we sang through our regular lineup on tour so far, Stepan decided to throw in the patriotic song Kon’ and we began the progressively more intense opening sequence. Just as we knew the soaring and inspiring chorus which was coming next, so did the audience. They began clapping throughout the introduction with gasps of excitement. Despite being a world away, we were able to connect to these people’s sense of home and pride. The director of the monastery choir reinforced this concept when he said that we sang with heart and the spirit of the music despite “technical issues.” I came out of that concert quite spirited, and became even more so when I learned we were going to Stepans house for an afterparty.

During our general scramble to the various bus stops and taxi stands, I noticed a sizable bust of Lenin right outside the monastery. Interesting juxtaposition. We filled up an entire bus and I had to wait with Stepan, Agata, and Malcolm for the next one which came within 30 seconds. Halfway through the ride, Stepan realized that he had promised his host to buy vodka for their party so we go off and on again. The short interlude consisted of Stepan running inside and grabbing an armful of spirits. Seeing this boozy bundle, the cashier said to him, “let’s get to know each other,” justifiably implying she needed to see some ID. The chorus met at the final bus stop and walked down yet another forested path to the residence of Stepan and his host family.

By the time we opened the gates to the yard, the festivities had already begun. To my surprise the Slavic women’s group was there in full force but normal clothing; they apparently were comprised of Stepan’s neighbors. A man with an accordion played nonstop for two hours, inviting us to sing and dance to every new song as if it were his grand finale. Russian food was laid out all across a table about twenty feet long. My personal favorites from the offerings were seasoned pig fat, blini pancakes, and potatoes of a superb quality. The only issue was the mosquitoes, though they seemed to bother people less and less as the night drew on for reasons that here are heavily implied. We were taught traditional dances and sang our own rendition of Country Roads as we are oft inclined to do in all sorts of places, much to the chagrin of some of the more decorum-minded members of the chorus (of which there are few). The night wound down and simultaneously up with a string of emotional toasts. One particularly funny moment was when Lance was translating Stepan’s Russian toast and understandably mistranslated a toast to people across the sea to a toast to sea-people which garnered much laughter then and for the rest of the trip. As a grand finale, we engaged in a fiery sing off with the other group which brought everyone closer together. Suddenly, we realize we have to catch the last train out of the town and everyone scrambles to get a cab or get driven. My car ride was an extension of my intensive Russian courses at Yale, as a native Muscovite chorister spoke with one of our hosts throughout most of the trip. She invited us to a Slavic music festival in Germany and we all said our thanks and goodbyes.

Having engaged in very active leisure time for the last three to four hours, we all were understandably tired as we made our way to the train platform with around 10 minutes to spare. Soon after boarding, Hank and I spoke with a Jazz musician in Russian, pooling our collective four semesters of the language to achieve a moderate success. After the first stop, a man with a violin entered the cabin (filled with only the chorus and a few more passengers) and began an emotional rendition of the Game of Thrones theme song, complete with backing track. He was good and the entire chorus pooled all their change to give to him, though not without a request. I believe it was Beau who then  volunteered me to sing a rock song as he did later in the tour as well (though I never am inclined to refuse). After searching mutually known tracks, we settled on Winds of Change by the Scorpions. I picked up the mic connected to the man’s speaker and Stepan and I harmonized on a violin-heavy cover of a rock song about the very country we were touring. While an unfortunate ride for those wishing to rest, the spirit of rock and roll was strong that moment. I settled into a nice conversation and the beginnings of this blog post for the rest of the journey.

Upon taking the metro from the train station to the hotel, I was greeted by my long lost roommate: James Han. He unfortunately received his passport back from the visa agency late so he had to delay his flight a week, though he arrived that afternoon and was ready to explore Russia. Though everyone else had gone swiftly to rest and we had and early rehearsal the next morning, we still had a hunger to do more.

It was around 2:30 AM when James and I decided to go on an adventure. James’ part in this is more excusable considering he was still on USA time, but I certainly wanted to explore the fabled woods to our north. We set off on the main street, as complete darkness was stayed by the ever twilight sky. As we passed a gas station, the most lovable wet stray approached us. I, with bolstered confidence from my rabies shots several months ago, let the dog come near. We bonded and, in keeping with the Russian tradition of naming dogs American human names, we called him John (Джон). The friendship lasted the rest of our journey. He would not leave our side even though we did not have any food to give him. Even when we went into a club to go the bathroom, he waited patiently outside. As we walked away I called to him in Russian and said “let’s go,” and he obedient followed. A Russian man on the porch of the club remarked with surprise “He listens to you?” After some more walking, we entered the great wood, which lies right next to the city streets. A great wilderness at the doorstep of the hustle and bustle of the civilization represents Russian towns and cities as a whole. We stepped into the beauty of a clear European forest filled with birch and extending for miles upon miles according to Google maps. At around 5:00 AM we left the forest and arrived back at the hotel thirty minutes later. Once we went inside we knew we had lost John, but we will not forget him.

This day was filled with so many wild and life-changing experiences. This is why I miss tour so much already. The bonding we had as a group and the connection we made with the people (as well as the dogs and horses) we met is a feeling I will take with me forever. Though it is very difficult for me to say, I am glad that I missed the Bon Jovi Moscow concert that day to experience all the brilliant moments this day on tour had to offer.

[yobaba30]

We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump

~ Sarah Kendzior Flyover Country Former Correspondent

My fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you.

Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured.

Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today.

Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget.

Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them.

Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.

A president-elect who wants to strip our country down for parts

It is increasingly clear, as Donald Trump appoints his cabinet of white supremacists and war-mongers, as hate crimes rise, as the institutionsthat are supposed to protect us cower, as international norms are shattered, that his ascendency to power is not normal.

This is an American authoritarian kleptocracy, backed by millionaire white nationalists both in the United States and abroad, meant to strip our country down for parts, often using ethnic violence to do so.

This is not a win for anyone except them. This is a moral loss and a dangerous threat for everyone in the United States, and by extension, everyone abroad.

I have been studying authoritarian states for over a decade, and I would never exaggerate the severity of this threat. Others who study or have lived in authoritarian states have come to the same conclusion as me.

And the plight is beyond party politics: it is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.

None of us deserves what’s coming

I am writing this not for those who oppose him, but for those who support him, because Trump and his backers are going to hurt you too.

I live in Missouri, now a bright red state, alongside you. I have faced the same economic misery as you, struggling to stay afloat since the recession, which never ended though many falsely claimed it did. I have the same anxiety over crime and racial tension and corrupt leadership as you. I am an independent, not a Democrat or a Republican, because I am as disappointed in political parties as you.

I am writing down my own good memories, and some of them are with you. I have walked beside you in our state parks, along our flowing rivers, and in our cities and small towns. I have talked and laughed with you in St. Louis, in Cape Girardeau, in Hannibal, in the Ozarks, and in the devastated rural areas in between, while surrounded by your signs and hats proclaiming support for Donald Trump. You do not deserve what is going to happen to you, and I do not deserve what is going to happen to me, because there is absolutely no one in the world who deserves what may be coming.

He told us his plans all along, though most chose to downplay or deny them

You can look to the president-elect himself for a vision of what is to come. He has told you his plans all along, though most chose to downplay or deny them. You can even look back to before his candidacy, when in February 2014, he went on Fox News to defend Russia. Why a reality TV host was on Fox News defending Russia is its own story, but here is what he said

Listen to what Trump said already back in 2014. about his desired outcome for the United States:

“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have a [chuckles], you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great.”

This is what “Make America Great Again” means to Donald Trump. It is how he has operated his businesses, taking advantage of economic disasters like the housing market crash for personal gain. It is why, during a long and painful recession, he made “You’re fired” a national catchphrase, because he understands that sometimes it feels good to know that the person getting fired, for once, is not you. He said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and people would still vote for him, and he said he could grab women “by the pussy” because “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

The system is rigged in his favor

He is right about that last part. No one holds Trump accountable, because he is exactly what he claimed to be railing against: an elite billionaire with no concern for the average person, a kleptocrat who enjoys taunting people less powerful than him with threats. When you have that kind of money, which Trump was given in birth and further gained through fraud, there are few limitations to the ways you can hurt people.

He is right that the system is rigged: it is rigged in his favor. And now it is rigged against you, unless we find a way to stop it.

I have been to the Trump rallies, not as a journalist, but as an observer in the crowd. I talked with you and you told me your hopes for the country under him, how you felt you were watching history being made, how you thought he was going to stick it to those who have been screwing us. I know the loyalty he inspires. I know it is unearned, because he lied.

Trump’s vision for the United States is echoed in that of his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, a man who even the very right-wing Glenn Beck describes as a dangerous, sociopathic racist. In 2016, a reporter from the Daily Beast recalled this conversation with Bannon:

“I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.

Shocked, I asked him what he meant.

“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

The days of free speech may soon end

This mirrors Trump’s own goals of destroying the United States, and it mirrors the intentions of dictators everywhere, who see people as objects to be manipulated and discarded, and not as real human beings. I have seen dictatorships firsthand in the former Soviet Union. I have friends who were imprisoned for expressing even the slightest criticism of the state, friends who had their businesses shaken down by the government and were left bankrupt, and friends whose family members were murdered by state security services.

I have worked, often unpaid, as an expert witness in political asylum cases for people from authoritarian states, because I will do anything to help people in this terrible position. The brutality they have endured, the fear of the state that prevents them from making independent choices, is something difficult for American minds to fathom.

The *8mainstream media has promoted him ceaselessly and are now rationalizing and normalizing Trump’s most extreme policies **owned and operated by Sinclair Broadcasting

We are a deeply flawed nation, and those who are minorities or poor have faced state-sanctioned cruelty as well as limited opportunities. But it is simply not the same as authoritarianism.

Though our speech is often challenged, we can still speak. We can debate each other and come up with ways to improve our country. We can scream at each other and mock each other and tell each other our political choices are terrible. You will miss those days, they may end soon.

You may be wondering why I am writing a letter to Americans in a Dutch news outlet. It is because I do not trust the US outlets to remain free, and believe that many are already compromised. The mainstream media who Trump proclaims to hate are actually his best friend. They have been all along, promoting him ceaselessly, and they are now rationalizing and normalizing his most extreme policies. Trump tells you to boycott CNN, but CNN’s boss always had a framed Trump tweet on the wall.

For what it’s worth, Trump supporters, I have always supported your boycott of CNN. But this common ground is grim.

Preparing to live like a nation of dissidents

It is possible that I will end up living like the dissidents who I defended from foreign dictatorships for so long. I will talk in coded terms, as I have started to do already. Did you think it was a coincidence that I published an article about Elijah Lovejoy, a journalist who sought freedom for all and was killed by St. Louis mobs, right before the election? I will try to continue to publish in foreign outlets. I will rearrange my life so I can fight this fight, because I am fighting for my country, and I never give up on my country or on my countrymen.

But I need you to fight too, in the way that matters most, which is inside. Authoritarianism is not merely a matter of state control, it is something that eats away at who you are. It makes you afraid, and fear can make you cruel. It compels you to conform and to comply and accept things that you would never accept, to do things you never thought you would do.

You do it because everyone else is doing it, because the institutions you trust are doing it and telling you to do it, because you are afraid of what will happen if you do not do it, and because the voice in your head crying out that something is wrong grows fainter and fainter until it dies.

We are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned

That voice is your conscience, your morals, your individuality. No one can take that from you unless you let them. They can take everything from you in material terms – your house, your job, your ability to speak and move freely. They cannot take away who you truly are. They can never truly know you, and that is your power.

But to protect and wield this power, you need to know yourself – right now, before their methods permeate, before you accept the obscene and unthinkable as normal.

My heart breaks for the United States of America. It breaks for those who think they are my enemies as much as it does for my friends. You still have your freedom, so use it. There are many groups organizing for both resistance and subsistence, but we are heading into dark times, and you need to be your own light. Do not accept brutality and cruelty as normal even if it is sanctioned. Protect the vulnerable and encourage the afraid. If you are brave, stand up for others. If you cannot be brave – and it is often hard to be brave – be kind.

But most of all, never lose sight of who you are and what you value. If you find yourself doing something that feels questionable or wrong a few months or years from now, find that essay you wrote on who you are and read it. Ask if that version of yourself would have done the same thing.

And if the answer is no? Don’t do it.

[cannibality]

Even if i agreed with people’s critiques of the soviet union, many of which are frankly based on the idea that in every situation there was a heaven-sent Correct Decision which soviet leaders deliberately ignored because they were evil, it would still have no bearing on whether or not Marxism-Leninism should be a guiding principle for our revolutionary politics. 

Marxism-Leninism is a form of organising ourselves and a way of thinking about the problems we face as members of the working class. It’s a methodology, not a hagiography - I’m not a Marxist-Leninist because every other decision made by every other Marxist-Leninist is inscribed on my heart, but because I think the principles grouped under this thing we call Marxism-Leninism are the ones best suited to the task of freeing ourselves from capitalism and imperialism in the 21st century. 

Like any methodology, indeed like any thing, Marxism-Leninism is vast and contains internally contradictory aspects. Pointing at any given thing the USSR did that you don’t like and saying ‘well that happened, so your political projects are pointless because you use Marxism-Leninism’ is as reasonable as me arguing that because Makhno’s army massacred Jews in Eastern Ukraine, we should be trying J20 black bloc protesters for war crimes. Expecting a tendency of political thought to be internally consistent over, in some cases, centuries, and using the existence of those contradictory aspects that I, as a Marxist-Leninist, am critical of, as a reason for why Marxism-Leninism should be foreclosed on is just... childish. It isn’t actually critiquing the thing which exists. Marxism-Leninism is the organisational model which drives revolutionary organisations throughout the colonised world, drives struggles for women’s liberation, drives struggles to abolish the white supremacist prison system. If you’re too committed to railing against some fictive tankie to actually explain in what ways you think contemporary Marxist-Leninist organisations are making mistakes, you aren’t worth arguing with. Literally all I’m asking of you is that you actually criticise the thing that you’re so mad about, but whenever I do this people’s eyes roll into the backs of their heads and they start babbling about shit that happening almost a hundred years ago. The working class, the survivors of colonialism, the people who are giving their lives in a desperate battle against a system which turns human beings into blood - they deserve better than that. 

If you wouldn’t tell Assata Shakur, tied down to that prison bed, that she’s a piece of shit authcom tankie, don’t fucking do it to anyone.

[cyberneticpeoplespolis]

Inaction and Liberalism

I write this mainly in response to Ti Lamusse’s excellent On Building a Revolutionary Organisation. Since this was shared as an internal document in Organise Aotearoa I wanted to generalise some of the critiques of organisational liberalism and add some of my own, in order to analyse the inertia that paralyses many left organisations. 

Organisational Liberalism:

No doubt many of On Building a Revolutionary Organisation’s critiques of liberalism within the party come from Mao’s seminal Combat Liberalism directive of 1937. You don’t have to be a Maoist to recognise this as a vital resource for any organiser, and a good source of self reflection for anyone who worries about their ego influencing their activism. Combat Liberalism’s central message is that there are multiple forms of Liberalism. The Ideological strain is something most socialists are already intimately familiar with, and can be generalised as the ideology of individualism. Political and Organisational Liberalisms stem from this ideology, and they can paralyse any organisation in a number of ways. Mao identifies eleven types of organisational Liberalism:

Inability to criticise friends when they are wrong.

To gossip rather than make public criticism.

Playing it safe and ignoring things that don’t affect us.

Finding our own opinions more important than those of others.

Engaging in personal attacks.

Ignoring incorrect views

Forgetting we are Communist and never agitating.

Allowing the masses to be harmed, and doing nothing.

Working half-heartedly, without plans.

Considering ourselves better than others out of pride.

Being aware of our own faults and doing nothing.

To say that organisational liberalism infects the left isn’t a personal criticism of anyone. Everyone internalises liberalism to a certain degree, as liberalism is a reflection of the cultural hegemony of capitalism. It is a creeping influence of petty competition and personal interests into politics, and the only defence is  mindfulness and introspection, along with robust democratic structures when that is not enough. Organisational liberalism can take the form of members taking on too many responsibilities at once. What at first appears to be selfless devotion of time and energy to organising can in truth be an inability to see our own weaknesses and limits due to pride. This kind of liberalism easily takes hold in a left where a small group of organisers have to spread their energies very thinly across multiple projects and movements. It can be the inability of activists to criticise their own parties because of the social pressures and benefits of being in such a tight-knit group. Looking to the party for our social and emotional needs goes hand in hand with this, as does the problems that come with cadreism - the idea that the party must be incredibly cohesive, small and ideologically pure.

Finally, Liberalism can take the form of “cultural problems” within an organisation. An uneasy atmosphere of unspoken party lines, ignored arguments and domination by unelected leaders. A lack of criticism and introspection allows for these problems to occur. Note that freedom to criticise is different to the “Freedom of Criticism” that Lenin spoke against - he was specifically railing against the treatment of all criticism (especially ideologically liberal criticism) as equal to radical criticism.

Fetishising Membership

Treating the desire to gain members as a form of Liberalism may seem odd when Mao’s 7th form of liberalism is “To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation.”

However the fetishisation of membership is much more of an issue in the modern context of a socialist movement divided along historical lines that date back a century or more. There are points that many of us will never agree on, and they are not invalid arguments simply because they are old ones. But the vast majority of these historical questions - what happened in 1863? 1905? 1929? 1968? - are extremely distant to the majority of working people today. There are deep contradictions in the socialist movement, and a lot of them will be worked through only in practice, experimentation and struggle, but to not work with other tendencies wherever practical is liberalism. Our own parties are not as important as the broader task of raising consciousness. Gaining members is not as important as raising consciousness, and ultimately basing the success of the party on membership deeply misunderstands where our appeal lies. Two people blocking a small path between police and an oppressed group raises consciousness more than a party of thousands that submits to reformism and liberal infighting. A party in its naive infancy can embolden workers in a city much more than a bigger organisation that has long since alienated themselves from workers and fellow activists, through infighting and toxicity. Ultimately having members counts for little if members aren’t utilised well, with sound theory and a culture that fights organisational as well as ideological liberalism.

Members aren’t drawn to a party through a thousand text messages and the feeling that they are a contact that the organisation desperately needs in order to perpetuate a revolving door membership of burnt-out students. Members gravitate towards parties that inspire through their actions. Organise Aotearoa appeared to have instantly gained a highly respectable number of members when it first formed, only to find that many lost interest after months of inaction.

Democracy

Any activist would do well to read Jo Freeman’s (Joreen’s) The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It’s an excellent dissection of how anti-democratic structures take hold in unstructured organisations, and how a set of seven principles is necessary to ensure equality. It pairs well with Combat Liberalism and when reading both it is easy to see how many of the problems Joreen describes originate in organisational liberalism, as the egocentric individualism of liberalism easily leads to tyranny in unstructured parties. The seven principles Joreen describes are:

Delegation: assigning authority through democratic procedures.

Responsibility: delegates need to be responsible to the other members

Distribution: authority needs to be spread evenly to prevent monopolies.

Rotation: authority can’t be permanent and should be subject to recall.

Allocation: roles should be assigned based on skills, which members develop together.

Diffusion of Information: every member should be told as much as possible.

Equal Access to Resources: every member should be able to request resources. 

Since a certain degree of liberalism is unavoidable when working under a capitalist society, it’s important to have processes in place that prevent the liberal tendencies of members from subverting the organisation. Structure is essential in keeping organisational liberalism from flourishing, and anywhere that structure isn’t clearly visible and observed by members, liberalism will find a way.

Aotearoa’s leftist organisations seem to do a particularly poor job of principles four and six. Speaking from personal experience, transparency and clear structure are the main things that make left parties appealing to me. Any party that doesn’t clearly tell you who is in charge, and how their power is limited, probably has something to hide.

Internet Socialism

This is a more minor point, but a concrete reason as to why our leftist parties are so inactive. Internet activism offers a lot in the way of catharsis and aestheticised politics (more on that later), so much so that it’s easy to feel as though a lot has been accomplished without any real movement. Meetings are much more useful, democratic and deliberative spaces for discussion than the internet. Facebook’s structure in particular leads to anti-democratic structures in the form of unelected admins, facilitators and regular posters who can drown out anyone else. I’m no luddite, but until we make our own digital architecture, the structure of our groups will be defined by the enemies of our movement. Until such a time comes that we can fight against the de-neutralisation of the internet, it can only supplement rather than replace our in-person organising.

The depoliticisation of aesthetics.

This is perhaps the most esoteric of my arguments as to why we’re gripped by inactivity, and yet I see this as a recurring theme in what I’m told by people who are relatively new to left activism. We should be listening to new activists most of all as they have the most to tell us about what radicalises people in the present moment.

If there’s one thing that marxist meme pages have taught us, it’s that aesthetics, specifically aesthetics that are appropriated by politics, actually radicalise people. This makes a lot of sense in the context of Walter Benjamin’s work on the aestheticisation of politics, which he described as a fundamental precursor to fascism. Conversely, the appropriation of aesthetics by politics is a redeeming factor, a radicalising factor that marxists can utilise. Fascists obscure politics from the material plane by turning it into an art form, and we need to respond by bringing materialism into art. I keep hearing from new leftists that marxism should be fun, vibrant, and with defined aesthetic sensibilities. This is often ignored by the more serious voices in the room who take it as the naivety of newcomers, when it actually scratches at deeper truths about what brings people to politics. We are artistic beings and we need to bring politics to where people are. The art world has already degenerated into an elitist agent of gentrification, so we need to democratise and politicise art in response, allowing it to infiltrate every space in the same way that capitalist art (advertising) infiltrates every corner of our field of vision.

Just this week I watched as a new leftist, a trans marxist who recently joined the DSA in the US, created a facebook frame that said “Communist Cutie” with a little love heart, and a hammer and sickle. The frame did the rounds so quickly that a council communist on the other side of the world, with no connection to the creator, had applied it to their own profile within 48 hours. That is the power of politicised aesthetics, and it is very telling that it was a new leftist that best exhibited this. Aesthetics is how we normalise our politics, how we make the depoliticised think about us in a new way.

There is no excuse for inaction. There are so many tools available to us that the only question is where to begin, and really, anywhere would do.

"Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes"

[impressivepress]

In defense of Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry frescoes

“Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” at the Detroit Institute of Arts, March 15-July 12, 2015 The current exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” treats the 11 months the famed Mexican artists spent in the city, between April 1932 and March 1933.

The exhibition contains much that is fascinating and even sublime. However, the overall approach taken by the curators, which exalts art concentrated on the “self,” is troubling and, in some places, wrongheaded and even reactionary.

Rivera (1886-1957) and Kahlo (1907-1954) were married in August 1929, and spent much of the years 1930 to 1933 in the US, in response, in part, to an anti-communist witch-hunt in Mexico. A socialist and supporter of the October Revolution, Rivera had been expelled from the Communist Party of Mexico in 1929 for speaking out in opposition to Stalin.

While in Detroit, Rivera painted his magnificent Detroit Industry frescoes, which remain the centerpiece of the DIA. The murals depict industrial production in all its facets, with workers at the center of the imagery, as well as the natural and social processes that culminate in modern human life. This complex work directs the viewer to many of the great dramas and dilemmas of the 20th century.

The DIA show contains full-sized cartoons, the preparatory drawings for the murals, as well as documentary videos, paintings and drawings by both Rivera and Kahlo from before, during and after the time the artists spent in Detroit. The cartoons, in particular, are spectacular, but fragile. They have not been seen for thirty years.

A brief video of Rivera at work is riveting. The great care, precision and enthusiasm with which he and his collaborators carried out the mural work are evident. Often working eighteen hours at a time, the Mexican artist lost a great deal of weight in the course of the Herculean physical and mental effort.

Another video clip shows workers in soup lines, and then, on March 7, 1932, Dearborn police and Ford company thugs attacking the Hunger March of 3,000 unarmed, unemployed people as they approached the Ford Rouge Plant. Four workers were shot to death in the infamous incident, a fifth died of his injuries three months later and 60 more were wounded in the bloody attack.

The funeral procession five days later, estimated at 60,000 people, shook the city’s foundations as chorus after chorus of “The Internationale” echoed for miles. That took place only weeks before Rivera and Kahlo arrived.

A series of works illustrates Rivera’s art prior to his stay in Detroit. There is the iconic portrait of Emiliano Zapata, the revolutionary peasant leader, and a lithograph of a peasant, “Boy with Dog,” from 1932. The unforgettable paintings “Flower Day” from 1925 and “Flowered Barge” (1931) in his mature, glowing, monumental style, appear as well. “Sawing Rails,” done in Moscow in 1927, and “Soviet Harvest Scene” are also on display.

Frida Kahlo’s “Portrait of Eva Frederick” from 1931 is appealing and shows the influence of Rivera. Her painting “Frieda and Diego Rivera, 1931” uses a flattened, primitive approach. Kahlo’s “Window Display on a Street in Detroit” (1932), the first painting she completed in Detroit, is quite touching.

Rivera’s pieces, “Juanita Rosas,” “Self-Portrait” and “Nude with Beads,” all from 1930, and “Friend of Frida,” from 1931, along with Portraits of Edsel Ford and DIA director William Valentiner, responsible for Rivera’s coming to Detroit, are included as well.

On May 24, 1932, Valentiner wrote in his diary with deep respect and admiration: “Today Rivera made a sketch of me in profile, with finest red and black chalk. While other artists usually waste a lot of paper, he used only one sheet. With the greatest assurance he drew the outlines with fine and even lines. It was at its best after half an hour, when the sketch was finished… Contrary to other great artists, he immediately brings out the likeness between the portrait and the model. With his mathematically inclined mind he immediately hits upon the right proportions.” (Margaret Sterne, The Passionate Eye, The Life of William R. Valentiner)

Unfortunately, as noted above, the remarkable character of many of the works in “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit” does not compensate for the exhibition’s real and significant weaknesses, which tend to compromise and undermine its important material.

At the center of the difficulties lies the organizers’ unjustifiable attempt to elevate Kahlo’s artistic stature and, more generally, to make the case for art that primarily explores the individual artist’s “anguish and sense of suffering,” in the words of a DIA press release. This effort is in line with contemporary identity politics and upper-middle class self-absorption. This inevitably involves, implicitly or explicitly, diminishing or dismissing the significance of the Detroit Industry frescoes and its subject matter.

To understand why the frescoes are so offensive to contemporary art museum officials and critics alike, one has to grasp the driving forces in Rivera’s artistic life in the early 1930s, which animated the painting of the murals. The Mexican painter was inspired by great events, especially the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, in the production of his most important works.

It will come as a revelation, and one hopes an inspiration, to many who attend the exhibition that there is a history and tradition of revolutionary art. It has proved possible in the past to develop the highest forms of creative expression wedded to the aspirations, struggles, sufferings and trials of the masses. Rivera and his work were perhaps the greatest demonstration of this possibility in the field of fine art in the 20th century.

Leon Trotsky, whose supporter Rivera became for a number of years, wrote in 1938: “In the field of painting, the October revolution has found her greatest interpreter not in the USSR but in faraway Mexico… Nurtured in the artistic cultures of all peoples, all epochs, Diego Rivera has remained Mexican in the most profound fibres of his genius. But that which inspired him in these magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art, in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and profundity.” (“Art and Politics in Our Epoch”)

Rivera defended Trotsky against the vicious attacks of Stalinism and was instrumental in the Russian revolutionary’s obtaining asylum in Mexico in 1937. They collaborated, together with André Breton, on an important “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art.” The omission of Trotsky’s name from the exhibition can hardly be an accident.

One of the extraordinary videos on display at the DIA shows a mass of workers battling police, as well as Rivera and Kahlo in front of a banner advertising works by Lenin and Marx in English. “There remained one thing left for me to prove,” said Rivera, speaking of his trip to the US. “My theory of revolutionary art would be accepted in an industrial nation where capitalists rule.” An overhead view of the DIA courtyard when the murals were opened to the public in March 1933 shows the space packed wall to wall.

Both in the mural work and in the video footage, a powerful sense of the industrial working class in Detroit emerges. Museum-goers perhaps used to the often demoralized and irrationalist outpourings of postmodernism, racial politics, feminism and other trends in recent decades will be struck by the massive and creative force of the working class.

The viewer must also be struck by the striking parallel, despite the changes over many decades, between present-day Detroit and the situation described in one of the videos of growing popular anger over the mass poverty at one pole of society and the immense wealth at the other, in the midst of the Depression. Many must see this and think, “So it remains today!”

The Industry frescoes are the greatest draw at the DIA and have always held a special place with the most conscious elements of the population in Detroit and beyond. The threat to the DIA two years ago, in connection with city’s filing for bankruptcy protection, aroused popular outrage. On the one hand, DIA officials are obliged to pay nominal tribute to the frescoes, describing the work as a “masterpiece” in their promotional material. On the other hand, the current show contains a sustained and consistent attack on Rivera and his work.

Before the Detroit Industry murals were made public in 1933, right-wing forces and religious bigots were howling for their destruction. Rivera’s artistic response was powerful and enduring. The frescoes depict the emergence of the working class, drawn like minerals from all regions and races and formed in the cauldron of industrial production into the central creative force of a bright future.

Now, however, a new kind of attack is under way, proceeding from within, as it were, from the DIA hierarchy and the art world.

Along these lines, certain aspects of the current exhibition’s organization are significant. The room containing Rivera’s breathtaking cartoons, for example, is followed by one almost entirely devoted to Kahlo’s miscarriage, or abortion, that occurred while she was in Detroit.

Three weeks before Rivera began to paint his murals, his wife entered Henry Ford Hospital. Evidence suggests, according to the exhibition catalogue, that Kahlo induced the loss of her pregnancy on July 4, 1932 by ingesting quinine. A few weeks later, with Rivera’s encouragement, she made the lithograph “Frida and the Abortion, 1932” to memorialize the event.

The end of her pregnancy figures prominently in Kahlo’s work and may have influenced Rivera’s decision to replace an agricultural scene, which appears in the exhibition as a full-sized cartoon, with a healthy infant curled in a plant bulb. This remarkable series of cartoons of the images that surround the infant is at the center of the current show. Root systems extend into rich soils and subterranean aquifers. Plowshares cultivate the surrounding terrain.

The artist said the image represented the museum “as the central organism for the development of the aesthetic culture of the community.” (“Dynamic Detroit--An Introduction,” Creative Art, April 1933). Giant, exquisite female nudes cradle fruits and grain on either side and lovingly watch over the child--the picture of a rich and satisfying future for all.

In any event, the loss of the unborn baby was traumatic for Kahlo and Rivera, but the curators’ decision to raise this personal tragedy to the level of a world-historical event strikes a false, tasteless and disoriented note.

In Kahlo’s “Henry Ford Hospital, 1932” we are confronted with a stricken woman, in a pool of blood, connected by multiple umbilical cords to a fetus, a snail, a pelvis and several other objects. The curator’s argument that somehow this agonizing, intimate experience must supplant the grand conception of a harmonious future for all mankind is deeply disturbing.

This sort of imagery becomes the basis for the claim, for example by the New York Times’ Roberta Smith, that “Kahlo emerges in the final galleries as the stronger, more personal and more original artist.” Kate Abbey-Lambertz headlines her piece at the Huffington Post, “How Frida Kahlo’s Miscarriage Put Her On The Path To Becoming An Iconic Artist.”

One of the foulest efforts to denigrate Rivera, Michael H. Hodges’ “Kahlo trumps Rivera in popular fame,” recently appeared in the Detroit News, a chief organ of Detroit business circles. There is a certain appropriateness here. The new, slightly more sophisticated, assault on the murals is taken up by the newspaper that was at the center of the original attacks.

On March 19, 1933, a News editorial argued that the Rivera murals were “psychologically erroneous, coarse in conception and, to many women observers, foolishly vulgar.” The News further asserted that the work was “un-American, incongruous and unsympathetic,” recommended that DIA director Valentiner be fired and concluded that “perhaps the best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work and return the Court to its original beauty.”

Hodges’ piece in March 2015 takes a different tack, assembling fashionable and snobbish contemporary attacks on Rivera. The News journalist first notes that in 1932 Rivera was one of the most famous artists in the world. “How times have changed,” he observes, and then carries on: “Kahlo, the subject of the hit 2002 movie ‘Frida,’ has morphed into a pop-culture superstar and feminist icon, her fame today easily swamping Rivera’s. To explain this, curators and art historians point to changing fashions and the compelling nature of Kahlo’s personal narrative, which resonates with our self-obsessed age.

“For Rivera, one-half of the current Detroit Institute of Arts blockbuster… it’s been quite a fall from grace,” he writes.

Hodges calls on none other than the current, soon-to-retire, DIA director Graham Beal to help make his case. Beal terms Kahlo “an international superstar,” adding, “you often have to explain to people--particularly anyone under 40--just who Rivera was and why we should care.” (Who talks like this, using terms like “international superstar?”)

The News article continues: “‘When I first visited here in the early 1970s,’ he [Beal] adds, ‘Rivera looked hopelessly old-fashioned and wrong-headed--realistic, political, and in a way, propagandistic. Her art is much more in keeping with today--highly personal and intimate, full of pain and uncertainty.’”

These comments speak to decades-old processes that are now coming to a head. Wide layers of the so-called intelligentsia, who have become affluent and moved far to the right, no longer feel the need to conceal their social indifference and outright hostility to the working population… and their utter obsession with themselves. It’s repugnant.

They latch onto Kahlo because what they read in her art corresponds to their own unease, interpreted in purely existential and individual terms. Rivera’s challenging and carefully conceived imagery of people at work or engaged in epic struggles against war and disease, ignorance and prejudice is compared unfavorably to a series of pictures focusing on one individual’s physical and psychic injuries.

The attack on art that addresses great social questions is relentless. On the audio guide, for example, guest curator Maria Cotera, a Women’s Studies professor at the University of Michigan, asserts that we now know that “the minor is where we find the big ideas” and that “big ideas became deeply personal.” Wall texts celebrate Kahlo’s subjectivism and criticize Rivera for advocating and explaining political principles and big historical and intellectual conceptions.

The curators write, for example, “Her [Kahlo’s] intellectual and artistic interests hinged on defining and representing herself,” while “Diego Rivera wanted his murals to become part of a dialogue about society that supported his intellectual and artistic agendas.”

The line of the exhibition, never stated in an honest manner, is that Rivera may have had some justification for his social art given the conditions of the 1930s, but we have long since transcended the period when art and politics concentrated on the working class. Kahlo’s critique of life is far more profound, “more thorough” than the class struggle conception promoted by Rivera because it is not fixated on changing the external world. Instead, it focuses on the inner being and “deeper” questions such as gender, sexuality, etc.

These views inevitably raise more directly the question of Kahlo’s art and career, a subject far too large for extended treatment here. It is evident that the discovery of Kahlo coincides with the emergence of gender politics and postmodern ideology in the 1970s and 1980s.

As “Made in Her Image: Frida Kahlo as Material Culture,” by Lis Pankl and Kevin Blake, points out: “It is certainly no accident that Kahlo’s popularity rose with the linguistic and cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences. With a greater emphasis on representation and identity politics, the academy found in Kahlo a perfect subject for analysis. Kahlo’s complex ethnicity… artistic autoeroticism, and evident links to gender construction are of much appeal to poststructuralists.”

One cannot place all the blame for the uses to which she and her work are put on Kahlo, but there is certainly some basis in the art itself for the current infatuation. It does violence to the history of art and helps no one to reduce Rivera, a colossal figure who drew upon a profound study of art and conveyed powerfully the impact of the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, to the benefit of Kahlo, a figure identified with extreme subjectivity. Such a readjustment in the artistic-intellectual world’s opinion must give one pause.

The victim of a serious accident at the age of 18 that required her to undergo dozens of surgeries over the course of her lifetime, Kahlo was no doubt a gifted artist, but her work is strikingly dominated by considerations of herself and her difficulties. She produced 143 paintings, 55 of which were self-portraits. Why so many? “Because I am so often alone,” she explained, “because I am the subject I know best.” Yes, but did she truly understand herself? An immense focus is hardly a guarantee that one understands a subject all that well.

There is something static, unchanging, in Kahlo’s self-portraiture, even immature. Of course, she died quite young and she came under various influences, not all of them happy or helpful ones. But in the self-portraits of Rembrandt and van Gogh, for example, one feels an unending intellectual and aesthetic development, the result of a bottomless curiosity about the world, history, society, resulting in an intense and compassionate realism.

A self-portrait is more than a picture of an individual. In its psychological depth and rigorous objectivity, a great self-portrait points beyond itself to something about the human situation in general, and perhaps the artistic personality in particular. Kahlo’s self-portraits are unusual and distinctive, but they tend to refer the viewer always back to Kahlo and her immediate situation. They seem often to be a reminder of her anguished presence more than a window onto something broader. One cannot help but have the feeling these paintings are intended in part to impress and even to shock.

The subject cannot be removed from art, nor should it be, but there is a distinction between dealing honestly and vividly with oneself and one’s circumstances and self-obsession. If a work becomes excessively personal, the universal may be lost in the process.

At a certain point, if the representation becomes too particular, why should anyone else care a great deal? Kahlo was neither the first nor the last person to suffer physical ailments and complications. Pankl and Blake write, “Kahlo’s depictions of bodily pain are the most widely explored elements within her work.”

Art also requires a certain detachment, and the most compelling artistic figures have treated suffering, including their own, with restraint and dignity, not self-pity.

Uncritical admirers of Kahlo are miseducating the public and aspiring artists as well when they suggest, by implication, that wholeheartedly embracing one’s afflictions or perhaps one’s biology by itself is a possible route to artistic greatness. If such were the case, there would be no need for a serious study of art or society, or a concern with the fate of anyone other than oneself. And, indeed, such an outlook helps account for the largely desiccated, angst-ridden and self-centered art that predominates today.

All in all, the DIA’s “Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit,” a peculiar and contradictory event, raises a host of pressing issues.

Much of the imagery, including video imagery assembled by the curators themselves, tends to direct the museum-goer toward the big events of the 20th century, to the revolutionary role of the working class and, by implication, to a consideration of what point society and the human condition have now reached. After all, the exhibition is being held in an economically devastated city, where tens of thousands of people face the possibility of having their water shut off in the near future!

Yet the show’s organizers and museum officials, along with their media apologists, are waging a ferocious ideological campaign in opposition to such concerns—even at the expense of the DIA’s own centerpiece—in favor of art, in the words of the New York Times ’ Smith, suffused with “existential torment.”

The defense of the Detroit Industry frescoes falls once again, as it did in the 1930s, to the only social force with an interest in the cultural development of the population as a whole and in art that looks at life and reality critically, the working class.

~ Tim Rivers, David Walsh · 21 April 2015.

[brazenautomaton]

“ Say what you will about the Soviet Union: the Communist Party was loyal. They got things done. Every crazy and stupid thing that the Politburo approved got done. Yes, it took a while to achieve that result. Stalin had to kill a lot of people. But it wasn’t through sheer terror and cruelty that the Communist Party worked. The Communist Party had a system. Which worked. It still works today in China. You might have noticed how people in the West today talk about China in these same terms. China gets things done, it does them fast and cheap. China got the world’s biggest high-speed rail system in the time that it takes to dig a tunnel in Boston. And for not that much more money. That’s not a coincidence. That’s Leninism at work. “

are you fucking shitting me, Bloody Shovel guy? are you fucking shitting me? both of these governments are infamously terrible at accomplishing actions, their decision-making processes were calcified and sclerotic, the only thing they are good at is lying to people who want to believe their lies about how effective and agentic they are.

China’s economic boom is not because of the decisions of Communist apparatchiks! The most useful thing China’s government has done is lie to everyone about how good the economy is going!

[theabigailthorn]

What I’m Reading, Simon Critchley, “Infinitely Demanding”

Critchley’s goal in this book is to put forward an entirely new view of meta-ethics and then apply it to both theology and politics. Easy Peasy! The meta-ethics bits are actually quite good - he has interesting ideas about how the self comes to form around ethical demands that maybe can’t even be met. He also takes an interesting stance on where moral reasons come from. I do think those sections are a bit incomplete and go too far too fast though. Unfortunately the rest of the book goes a bit off the rails. The theological bits are illuminating to an extent but left me with more questions and get quite woolly towards the end of the chapter. Critchley says that we need to apply his new meta-ethical perspective to politics, which is a fair enough line of inquiry, but he dismisses oceans of political philosophy - notably Lenin, and then later on anarchist thinking - a bit quickly for my liking. There is one excellent section where Critchley makes a stellar theoretical defence of what is these days called ‘identity politics,’ though when this book came out in 2012 it didn’t have an official name yet; he admits this bit is largely drawn from earlier work by Courtney Jung. 

The rest left me scratching my head: Critchley has a Žižekian tendency to cite not actual political activists, but other writers writing about political activists (including Žižek). He also can’t resist namedropping: large sections of the book are impenetrable if you don’t know Kant, Marx, Freud, Hegel, Levinas, Badiou, and a host of other tricky thinkers. The recommendations his final section make have already been taken up by activists who (I admit I presume) never read this book. 

Contrast this with something like Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism, which presents a solidly grounded ethical and political program whilst remaining accessible and rooted in practically centring those who have skin in the game in concrete activist projects. It was during the final section of this book that I began to ask myself who is Infinitely Demanding for? Critchley writes that he hopes it will be the glue that can bind disparate cells of radical politics together, but then why is it largely impenetrable to all but the most highly educated of readers, and so abstracted away from examples of real struggles? That’s not to say political activists are uneducated by any stretch; just that if you make a nine-mile reading list the barrier of entry to your political movement you might miss out on a few recruits. Contrast that with a writer like Lenin, whose Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism is pretty accessible despite its complexity. Or even contrast it to fascist writers today, for whom the barrier of entry is just, “Hey - ever noticed things are a bit shit?” Why write it this way?

Because this book is for people who think about politics for a living, not people who think about politics because it’s killing them. This is a book by and for the privileged Leftist commentariat; that’s why it can end by saying that we need to start engaging ethically with politics, because to the author that’s a choice rather than something forced upon him already. That’s why the praise on the back is mainly (though not exclusively) from academics, not survivors of the very worst of contemporary politics. It’s preaching to the choir; selling Marxism at a farmers’ market so we can all go home feeling clever and a bit edgy. I fully admit this puts me smack dab in the target audience, but I was still a bit disappointed when I struggled through to the end that so many bits were kept obscure and so many questions left unanswered, chief among which was, “Why was this made?” Like LOST. I’m harping on the negatives: there are bits of it, especially early on, that really are quite good and I will be turning parts into upcoming episodes. When Critchley is summarising other famous philosophers he does a fine enough job: I understand Plato better having read this book, which is a positive. If you’d like to check it out for yourself you can get it here.

[greatwar-1914]

Tsar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (1868 - 1918)

“What am I going to do? What is going to happen to me, to you, to Alix, to Mother, to all Russia?“

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Romanov was born on May 6, 1868, in the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, south of St. Petersburg. He was the eldest son of his parents, Alexander Alexandrovich, the heir to the Russian throne, and Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Nicolas’s grandfather was the Tsar, Alexander II, known as the Liberator for emancipating Russia’s serfs in 1863. Their family, the Romanov dynasty, had ruled Russia for three hundred years. Nicholas would be the last emperor.

Unlike his soft-hearted, liberal grandfather, Nicholas’s father was a reactionary, whose conservative and religious values strongly influenced Nicholas’s beliefs. In 1891, Nicholas’s father acceded to the throne when Alexander II was murdered by an anarchist revolutionary. This murder convinced both Alexander III, and his son, against offering further reforms. Yet Nicholas’s education did not prepare him at all for his future role as Russian emperor.

Although he had a close relationship with his mother, Nicholas’s father believed his son to be silly and weak. Tsar Alexander III was a very strong ruler and saw no need to share a job with his uninterested heir. He refused to let him participate in any affairs of state; once, when Nicholas was twenty-five, a minister suggested that he be allowed to head a committee to supervise the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Alexander III was incredulous. “Have you ever tried to discuss anything of consequence with him?” asked the Tsar about his son and heir. “He is still absolutely a child; he has only infantile judgements. How would he be able to become president of a committee?”

The Romanov family in 1893. From left to right: Tsarevich Nicholas, Grand Duke George, Empress Maria Feodorovna (Princess Dagmar of Denmark), Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Xenia, Grand Duke Michael, Tsar Alexander III seated.

In neither his education nor his temperament did Nicholas show much aptitude to be emperor. He enjoyed foreign languages and history, but struggled with economics and politics. In general he preferred sport to books, when older he delighted in the military and served for a year when he was nine-teen. In 1894 he married Princess Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, a German noble, with whom he had four daughters and a son, Alexei. Alexandra was an assertive woman whose personality dominated the weaker Nicholas, and she strongly reinforced his belief in autocratic rule and his resistance to democratic reforms. In contrast to his political life, Nicholas’s home life was serene. He was a wonderful family man, a devout Orthodox Christian, and devoted to his wife and children.

The same year that he married, Nicholas became the Tsar when his father died of kidney disease. The newly-crowned emperor had not expected to be thrust into the role so soon, and he panicked about running the vast Russian empire all by himself. It was the moment, he wrote, that he “had dreaded all his life.” He confessed his fears to a cousin: “Sandro, what am I going to do? What is going to happen to me, to you, to Alix, to Mother, to all Russia? I am not prepared to be Tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to ministers.”

Nicholas determined to uphold the status quo as Tsar, but unfortunately evens abroad and at home forced his hand. Hoping not to be left out of the imperial scramble, Russia grew its industry in the Far East, and forced concessions from China in Manchuria. Yet Russian’s expansion provoked the Japanese, who attacked Russia’s eastern border in 1904, beginning the Russo-Japanese War. Europeans were convinced that the white Russians would easily triumph over the “yellow” Japanese, but the Japanese embarked on a series of victories ending in the total destruction of the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tshushima in 1905.

Nicholas and Alix’s engagement photo, 1894.

The defeat was a stunning humiliation for Russian prestige. At home it sparked outrage and crisis that turned to strikes and riots. In January 1905, Russian troops opened fire on demonstrators in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, killing many. Outrage turned to outright revolution, and eventually the Tsar was forced to grant concessions in a constitution, as well as establish an elected parliament, the Duma.

Despite some elements of democratic reform, Nicholas tightened his autocratic rule. Secret police crushed revolutionary elements in the cities, and voting laws prevented the election of radicals. A travel guide for foreigners published in 1914 warned against taking photos in rail stations - offenders would be arrested.

The Tsar’s most pressing crisis, however, was at home. His son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexei, had hemophilia, the scourge of interbred European royal families. Nicholas and Alexandra despaired for their child and sought any means to help him. They turned to an unlikely source, a disheveled mysticfrom Siberia named Grigori Rasputin. Rasputin’s monasticism belied his true character, that of a debauched womanizer and con-man. Russian noble society despised him, but Alexandra especially confided in him, and Rasputin strengthened her belief in Nicholas’s divine right to rule. His influence steadily eroded the trust Russian people felt for their Tsar.

Nicholas (left) with his cousin King George V of England. They are wearing German military uniforms while on a visit to Berlin. Despite their likeness, George refused to help Nicholas or offer him asylum during the Russian Revolution, fearing that he might be toppled as well.

Nicholas’s failing popularity received a boost in 1914, when Russia went to war against Germany and Austria. Although Nicholas was close to his cousin, the Kaiser (they wrote to each other as “Nicky” and “Willy”), Russians enlisted en masse and displayed loyalty and love for their royal family. Yet endless failures at the front burst newfound support for the Tsar, especially when Nicholas took over from his cousin as supreme commander in 1915, a position in which he demonstrated no talent. The unending string of military disaster was now firmly pinned on him. Worse, economic deprivations at home soon turned into crisis. Russia was deeply in debt and many were starving. Approval of the royal family soured; they were thought to be living in luxury while ordinary Russians died at the front or starved at home.

In March 1917 (February of the old Russian calendar), demonstrations in St. Petersburg (now Petrograd) again turned to revolution. This time, Nicholas had no army to turn to - the military was in a state of collapse, with many soldiers deserting to go back home and take part in the revolution. Helpless, Nicholas abdicated on March 15, 1917. He hoped to go to England for asylum, but the British government (fearing he might provoke the British left) refused his request. Five hundred years of Russian Tsardom ended with NIcholas.

A shaky liberal-socialist Provisional Government was set up to replace the monarchy, but the war continued to go badly. Nicholas went into house arrest in the Urals with his family. His situation worsened in the fall of 1917, when a radical communist party, the Bolsheviks, ousted the Provisional Government. Civil war began in Russia between the Bolshevik “Reds” and the “Whites”, a complex mix of warlords and political parties who opposed the Bolsheviks.

The Russian royals played no role in the Civil War, but the Bolsheviks feared that the Tsar and his family could become a symbol for the White armies to rally around. Nicholas, Alexandra, and their children were transported to a house in Yekaterinburg for safe-keeping, but in the summer of 1918 the war was going poorly for the Reds and the Czech Legion, a unit of the White army, was rapidly advancing towards Yekaterinburg.

Nicholas in captivity at Tsarskoye Selo. This is one of the last photos taken in his life.

On the night of July 16-17, as the Czechs neared, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin ordered the execution of the royal family. What actually happened is still shrouded in some state secrecy, but what is known is that a truckload of local Bolsheviks and foreign soldiers entered the house and ordered the ex-Tsar and his family to the basement. The Empress asked for chairs for her and thirteen-year-old Alexei to sit upon. The Red commander brought in two chairs, and then informed the stunned Tsar that he had been condemned to death. “What? What?” asked the Tsar. The executioners brought out revolvers and began shooting the family. The four daughters, between twenty-two and seven-teen years old, had been hiding some of their jewels in their clothes which deflected the bullets. The Bolshevik shooters stabbed them with bayonets and shot them in their heads, and stabbed to death their maid, who had shielded herself with a pillow full of jewels.

The executioners burnt, dismembered, and buried the bodies. In 1976 a team of investigators found their grave, but did not release the information until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rumors had long abounded that one of the daughters, seven-teen year-old Anastasia, had survived and escaped the massacre, which were put to rest. In 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonized the family as saints; today the place where they were buried is the site of a church.

[evilelitest2]

Top Nine Reasons why Marxism Failed in Implementation

100 years ago (though not on this day) The Soviet Union overthrew the Tsarist goverment to usher in a new age of Utopian politics..and that didn’t go so well (and now a bunch of tankies are pissed at me). So why is it that Marxism tends to not work out so well in the implementation.  Just forward note, I am mostly talking about the schools of Marxism that are descended from Leninism and actually attempted to control a nation, so when Marxists Orthodoxy folk come in and say “Hey Lenin skipped the Capitalist step” yes I know, I”m talking about the Marxist states that actually exist.  

Number 1: Party Vanguardism 

So while the popular image of Marxist revolutions is a giant crowd of people storming the palaces and killing all the nobles, Marxist organization principle was based around Party Vanguardism, basically a small elite group of ideologically pure Marxists will take over the country in a lightning coup, seize control of the goverment and implement the necessary social reforms for the sake of the people.  The idea is that since the average people are far too ignorant/stupid/religious/superstitious/easily confused what have you appreciate the Marxist Utopian vision, they would basically forcibly implement the system upon them from above.  Party Vanguardism came about in the French Revolution with the Conspiracy of Equals as a response to the sort of self destructive nature of French revolutionary mob politics.  Problem is when you give a small elite total control of the country whose primary qualification is their ideological purity you wind up with a bunch of people living in a total fantasy world and people who aren’t actually qualified are put into positions of power.  Small groups like that are also really suitableness to infiltration by opportunistic egotists (Stalin) but also are prone to corruption and autocracy by those within because those in the vangaurd are like “I seize power” and then they are like “I has power” but they never seem to get to the “giving up power” stage....hmmm

Number 2: No Balance of Power 

So why is it that Marxists regimes always become dictatorships (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tito, Castro, the Kim Family and much much more) If your nation is led by a single Party who can best implement the great wonderful Utopian vision, then there isn’t really any room for an opposition party.  At first glance this sounds great, no stooges of the capitalist machine trying to gum up reform and plan military coups (that wasn’t sarcastic that happens a lot with right wing opposition parties), but here is the problem.  If you’re regime has no built in mechanism to counter the leadership if they go wrong....then holy shit will they go wrong.  And ambitious morally dubious men will quickly realize “Wait...if I seize control of this goverment, then I will live out the rest of my life as a communist god king cause there isn’t any check on my power”.  And those men will fight to obtain as much power, and once they have it, it is basically too late for the Communist state, because once a dictator seizes power they can ruin the state so thoroughly it is impossible for it to right itself under communist principles, as we have seen in both the Soviet Union and Maoist China.  Because while Marxists never intend to implement a horrible dictatorship, there is not safeguard to stop it, and that is why it always happens.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  

Not that I want to defend the US system too much because it is a mess, but Trump obviously wants to make himself into an autocrat...but he can’t, at least not yet.  The system is so decentralized and opposition is so easy that he can’t even get his travel bans implemented.  Power needs safeguards put into place to keep it in check, otherwise autocracy.

Number 3: Militancy 

This isn’t unique to Communism, and it isn’t always the communists fault, but the violent militant methods embraced by the Leninists descended communist (Yes yes i know not all Communists are Leninists many are peaceful I’m talking about the historical states that have existed).   I know that violent revolution gets romanticized but you know why it so many times turns from “overthrow the fate elites” to “Lets murder everybody” is because it starts as it means to go on.  Once violence becomes an acceptable form of political expression, then violence is just going to happen more, and it becomes just easier to murder you’re political opponents than deal with them in other ways. And when you have an external enemy who the state has to be focused on battling on the first thing to go is individual rights, which is why the French Revolution really went to crazy land once they went to war with Austria and we have seen how the American political system deteriorated once we went to a 16 year long war.  Wars make autocracy more likely, and Marxists states often emerge in a state of war.  This is to say nothing of the fact that when you seize power with weapons, the person with the weapons is always going to be thinking to themselves “I can do this again.”

Number 4: Winner Take All Politics

One of the greatest advantage of democracies is that political losers can still exist within society (one of the greatest failings is that there isn’t any room for economic loser).  Because when making an incorrect political move could result in death, people get a lot more scary.  In a democracy, even a horribly mismanaged one, if you lose an election and can go home to move on with your life, the state as a whole is more stable.  If losing a political battle results in death, then people are going to use any means possible to win, and this is why communist auto-cannibalism comes so quickly, because pretty much everybody has their back to then they will gladly destroy the state in order to come out on top or avoid being killed.  Or like what we saw happen with the Great Leap Forward, people knew that if they didn’t meet production quotas they would be shot, so they lied and said they did, which caused those on top to make terrible estimations about how powerful the state actually was and oh shit famine.  

Number 5: Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism basically means that the state has no independent groups, they have a totality of political power.  I have railed long and hard about how states rights are awful and racist and how much I think the states power needs to be curtailed in favor of the federal goverment, but there is a very good reason why I want state governments to exist.  And I”m not talking about balance of power, by having the implementation of policies go to local governments rather than the central goverment, you can adjust policies to address local concerns.  There are a lot of problems with this like Pork Barrel politics, but one thing you avoid is the constant communist problem of “Lets implement a single policy that doesn’t vary across the entire giant country” which worked out so well with the Great Leap Forward....oh wait.  And since there is no recourse...whoops.

Number 6: Religion

I’m am not trying to get into a religion vs. atheism debate here because I find those debates extremely stupid, just from a practical level targeting people’s religion leads to much more violent reprisals because the common people will ignore their own best interest in order to defend their religion.  The French Revolution really lost its international appeal when they targeted the Catholic Church, same with the Russian and Chinese revolutions, just leave the Church alone and your state will just live longer, no matter how corrupt and conservative they tend to be.

Number 7: Poor Incentive Systems 

One of the biggest issues with communist states  is that it kinda wants people to run on ideologies and so either doesn’t design incentive systems to encourage people to do the work they want, or they only rely on “Do the work or I will shoot you” motivation which just causes this mess of ironically enough, labor problems.  it also makes corruption and needlessly complicated bureaucracy inevitable, which compounds with reason 5 and 1

Number 8: Doesn’t play well with others

Again this isn’t entirely their fault, but communist systems don’t really work co-existing with other countries which means that you don’t usually get a good trade relationship going and the benefits of a debt based economy never really come in, which is why they tend to stagnate economically...along with all the other reasons

Number 9: Its Utopian.  

The problem with Utopian political ideology is that it basically makes any middle ground impossible.  After all, if you are going to bring about a glorious Utopia, then pretty much any crime to achieve that end becomes justified. And if the goal is utopia, why bother with the boring regulatory details like a constitution or specific system. While the American constitution is a giant mess of contradictions and bullshit and it desperately needs reform, but one thing I really like about it is that it assumes everybody is a selfish asshole who is trying to take as much power as possible.  So its designed to try to prevent that, and worked well when it was designed...we haven’t updated it for decades but that is a new problem.  You need to design systems to assume the worse, because the consequences of people taking absolute power are disastrous.  And that is always my issue when I talk to Marxists is that they love theory, but kinda lose when you get to details, which is why marxism is always better as a form of critical theory than an actual implemented policy. 

Ironically bemuse this is a long post, the only people who are going to read it...are Marxists.  Evidently I wasn’t having enough fun getting into fights with Neoreactionaries.  

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

““Immortality” was commissioned from Platonov under the auspices of a large project called “People of the Railway Empire,” initiated by the Union of Soviet Writers and the railway newspaper Gudok (Horn) in late 1935. In line with the new Stakhanovite movement, which showcased particularly productive individual workers in each major industry, on July 30, 1935 Stalin gathered the most illustrious railway workers for an awards ceremony at the Kremlin. By August 17, working at a Stakhanovite pace, the publishing arm of the rail industry prepared and published a commemorative volume, Liudi velikoi chesti (People of Great Honor), which featured brief biographies of the sixty-seven award-winning railway workers. Sometime that autumn a decision was made to commission literary works about them. Platonov was assigned two Stakhanovites of the rails: pointsman Ivan Alekseevich Fyodorov of Medvezh’ia gora station, and stationmaster Emmanuil Grigor’evich Tseitlin of Krasnyi (Red) Liman station. Fyodorov became the protagonist of “Among Animals and Plants,” in which he is maimed while trying to stop a runaway train, is honored at a ceremony in Moscow, and promoted to the position of coupler. Tseitlin was fictionalized in “Immortality” as Emmanuil Semyonovich Levin, the indefatigably caring chief of Red Peregon station.

Platonov (1899–1951) was a natural choice for the project. Born in the family of a railway engineer, he had frequently set his stories in and around rail yards. He explained his railway obsession in a text later published by his widow Mariia:

Before the revolution I was a boy, but after it happened there was no time to be young, no time to grow; I immediately had to put on a frown and start fighting [i.e., in the Civil War] … Without finishing technical college I was hurriedly put on a locomotive to help the engineer. For me the saying that the revolution was the locomotive of history turned into a strange and good feeling: recalling it, I worked assiduously on the locomotive … Later the words about the revolution as a locomotive turned the locomotive for me into a sense [oshchushchenie] of the revolution.

A revolutionary fact gives rise to a feeling and organizes labor, but then returns to a metaphor that rapidly accelerates out of control. This literal belief in metaphor animated socialist realism, the official aesthetic system of the Soviet Union beginning in 1932, and Stalin relied heavily upon the mobilizing power of metaphor when, in 1935, he placed the rail industry at the center of public discourse, as seen in railway commissar Lazar Kaganovich’s speech at the celebration of July 30, 1935:

In The Class Struggle in France Marx wrote that “revolutions are the locomotives of history.” On Marx’s timetable Lenin and Stalin have set the locomotive of history onto its track and led it forward. The enemies of revolution prophesied crashes for our locomotive, trying to frighten us with the difficulty of its path, its steep inclines and hard hills. But we have managed to lead the locomotive of history through all inclines and hills, through all turns and bends, because we have had great train engineers, capable of driving the locomotive of history. We have conquered because our locomotive has been steered by the dual brigade of the great Lenin and Stalin.

Tropes unexpectedly spawn real imperatives. Though Platonov had been marginalized since his stories attracted Stalin’s personal ire in 1929 and 1931, the railway commission promised a way back into print.

“Among Animals and Plants” was accepted by the journals Oktiabr’ (October) and Novyi mir (The New World), but Platonov refused to make the changes they demanded. Both “Among Animals and Plants” and “Immortality” were then rejected by the prestigious almanac God Deviatnadtsatyi (The Nineteenth Year), before being accepted by the journal Kolkhoznye rebiata (Kolkhoz Kids), where they appeared in abbreviated adaptation for children. The decision by the editors of Literaturnyi kritik to publish Platonov’s stories as the first and last ever works of fiction ever included in the journal demonstrates both their high regard for Platonov and their determination, despite his difficulty in finding outlets for his work, to see him in print.

Given the political tenor of the moment—August 1936 also witnessed the first Moscow show trial of Stalin’s rivals—it was an act of no little boldness. In an extended but unsigned preface, the editors explained their decision as dictated by the timidity of literary journals’ editorial boards, which prefer safe “routine” and “cliché” to a realism that reveals contradictions and incites reflection:

We categorically reject the formula “talented, but politically false.” A truly talented work reflects reality with maximum objectivity, and an objective reflection of reality cannot be hostile to the working class and its cause. In Soviet conditions a work that is false in its ideas cannot be genuinely talented.

What sounds like pure casuistry reflects the journal’s consistent position that literary narrative possesses a degree of autonomy, i.e., means of efficacy that cannot be mapped directly onto ideology: “Vigilance is necessary. In order that it be real, actual, Bolshevik vigilance, however, and not just a bureaucrat’s fear of ‘unpleasantness,’ it is necessary first of all to know literature.”

Georg Lukács was a leading light of the journal, and the unnamed editors’ opposition between “literature” and “bureaucracy” calls to mind Lukács’s 1939 essay “Tribune or Bureaucrat?” In fact the entire project “People of the Railway Empire” had been conceived along roughly Lukácsian lines, considering his opposition to pure factography in the 1932 essay “Reportage or Portrayal?” The project was to be rooted in close study of Soviet life, specifically through an archive of transcripts of worker interviews that were commissioned especially for the occasion. As its organizer Vladimir Ermilov stressed, writers would travel to the home locations of their subjects “for personal impressions, so that this figure really comes to life in the hands of this writer when he is writing, working.” The result will be that “this literary work will not be isolated from the specific nature of the railway … in order that these works show people in the genuine, specific surroundings in which they live, work and fight.” Unlike previous collective documentary projects (e.g., on the heroic Cheliuskin expedition to the Arctic Sea or on the construction of the Moscow Metro), authors were urged “to provide stories, highly artistic documentary sketches and literary portraits, written by authors themselves over their personal signature; not reworked transcripts but genuine, self-sufficient artistic works about the person.” In addition to prose works written on the basis of the transcripts, Ermilov encouraged the creation of plays and also a “railway Chapaev,” modeled on the popular 1934 sound film about a Civil War-era commander.

Platonov fulfilled his commission with admirable conscientiousness, completing his two stories by the deadline of February 10, 1936. For “Immortality,” in addition to renaming his protagonist and the location, Platonov appears to have used the (unknown and possibly lost) transcript of Tseitlin’s interview with great license, deriving from it only the basic picture of a railway station chief working tirelessly to keep trains on schedule despite the incompetence and truculence of less conscientious coworkers. In Platonov’s story the logistics specialist Polutorny is preoccupied with finding a Plymouth Rock cockerel for his hens. Another logistics specialist, Zakharchenko, spends most of his time at his pottery wheel producing wares that he sells at great personal profit. Night supervisor Pirogov is depressed, needy, and incompetent, while Levin’s assistant, Yedvak (based on the word for “hardly,” yedva), is simply lazy. Protected only by his loyal but limited cook Galya, Levin sacrifices sleep and nourishment to keep a watchful eye over the entire operation.

In his story Platonov observes a delicate oscillation between documentary source and fictional invention. Traveling to Krasnyi Liman only after finishing the story, Platonov found Tseitlin “intelligent (true, I’ve only spoken to him for ten minutes so far) and very similar to his image in my story.”11 Publishing the story in Literaturnyi kritik, Platonov attached an enigmatic note: “In this story there are no facts that fail to correspond to reality at least in a small degree, and there are no facts copying reality.” Platonov strives for realism, but realism excludes the “copying” of reality. So what, for Platonov, was realism?” - Robert Bird, “Articulations of (Socialist) Realism: Lukács, Platonov, Shklovsky.” E-Flux Journal, #91, May 2018.