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COMMUNISTS IN SITU

* About

leberwurst proletariat

SEPTEMBER 28, 2021

FOR SOCIALISM (LANDAUER, 1911)

PDF / Aufruf zum Sozialismus

See also: Landauer: Revolution and Other Writings / All Power to the Councils!

> For socialism — let it be said immediately and the Marxists ought to hear it,
> as long as the wisps of fog of their own obtuse theory of progress are still
> in the air — does not depend for its possibility on any form of technology and
> satisfaction of needs. Socialism is possible at all times, if enough people
> want it. But it will always look different, start and progress differently,
> depending on the level of available technology, i.e., also of the number of
> people who begin it and the means they contribute or have inherited from the
> past — nothing begins from nothing. Therefore, as was said above: no depiction
> of an ideal, no description of a Utopia is given here. First, we must examine
> our conditions and spiritual temperaments more clearly. Only then can we say
> to what kind of socialism we are called, to what type of men we are speaking.
> Socialism, you Marxists, is possible at all times and with any kind of
> technology. It is possible for the right people at all times, even with very
> primitive technology, while at all times, even with splendidly developed
> machine technology it is impossible for the wrong group. We know of no
> development that must bring it. We know of no such necessity as a natural law.
> Now therefore we will show that these our times and our capitalism that has
> blossomed as far as Marxism are by no means as you say they are. Capitalism
> will not necessarily change into socialism. It need not perish. Socialism will
> not necessarily come, nor must the capital-state-proletariat-socialism of
> Marxism come and that is not too bad. In fact no socialism at all must come —
> that will now be shown.
>
> Yet socialism can come and should come — if we want it, if we create it — that
> too will be shown.
>
> – Gustav Landauer, 1911

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SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

THE ILIAD, OR, THE POEM OF FORCE (SIMONE WEIL, 1940)

PDF

The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force was written in the summer and fall of 1940,
after the fall of France .. It may thus be read as an indirect commentary on
that tragic event, which signalized the triumph of the most extreme modern
expression of force. It was originally published, under the acrostical pseudonym
“Emile Novis,” in the December 1940 and January 1941 issues of the Marseilles
literary monthly, Cahiers du Sud. The present translation is by Mary McCarthy.
The quotations from Homer were first translated from the French manuscript by
Miss McCarthy and then checked and revised by Dwight Macdonald in accordance
with the Greek text. “The Iliad” appeared in the November 1945 issue of Politics
and was later issued in pamphlet form.

—-

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force
employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks
away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its
relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it
could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those
dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of
the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose
powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday,
at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest
of mirrors…. [PDF]

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

RUSSELL JACOBY (B. 1945) – SELECTED WORKS

> Academic Marxism is hardly the whole of the political Left. Recent symposiums
> on the Left have stressed that the goals of the past decades have not been
> met: racism, poverty, discrimination, remain current realities; the 80s will
> see groups trying to survive in the teeth of government retrenchment and
> recession. This is undeniable. The struggle to survive cannot be criticized;
> yet it has little to do with the fate of a political Left. Nor is this an
> insult. The Left has often confused oppression with revolution; the most
> oppressed were the most blessed. Yet it belongs to basic Marxism that there is
> no automatic link between suffering and revolutionary activity. Marx never
> argued that the working class suffered more than the peasantry. The specific
> conditions of the working class prompted the hope of revolution. That various
> socioeconomic groups and minorities are in for a bad deal in the coming years,
> cannot be doubted. It can be doubted that they will cross the line separating
> the struggle to eat from the struggle for emancipation. Those who are sound in
> body and mind will not fight the revolution; those who are mutilated beyond
> repair cannot: this is the curse which has bewitched the revolutionary
> project.
>
> The next years will be the era of partial struggles. Groups will enter the
> political arena to do battle for separate rights and interests: rent control,
> health care, environment, and so on. It would be arrogant to write any of this
> off. A wildcat strike to preserve a coffee break which is being eroded away is
> surely justified. Yet the struggles are fragmentary, local and transitory. The
> whole is elusive. If the strength of contemporary radicalism is its localism,
> this is also its weakness. As always the danger is in self-righteousness and
> self-mystification: the confusion of better garbage collection with
> revolution. Apart from any ends which are achieved, partial struggles keep
> alive an arena for political activity and commitment; for many individuals
> this will be critical — and more: a renaissance of political activity is
> unthinkable without the participation of individuals. When the conditions
> change, those who have remained in the daily fray may be able to show the way.
> To be sure, in the rat race of daily politics they may also forget the way.
>
> – Russell Jacoby, “Crisis of the Left?” (1980)

Books:

Russell Jacoby – The end of utopia_ politics and culture in an age of
apathy-Basic Books (2000)

Russell Jacoby – The Last Intellectuals_ American Culture in the Age of Academe,
2nd edition (2000)

Russell Jacoby – The Repression of Psychoanalysis

russell jacoby – dialectic of defeat: contours of western marxism

russell jacoby – picture imperfect: utopian thought for an anti-utopian age

russell jacoby- social amnesia: a critique of contemporary psychology from adler
to laing

Essays and Reviews:

Real Men Find Real Utopias _ Dissent Magazine

Argument_ Michael Burawoy and Russell Jacoby _ Dissent Magazine

jacoby class symposium

jacoby crisis of the left

jacoby laing cooper and the tension in theory and therapy

jacoby marcuse and the new academics

jacoby narcissism and the crisis of capitalism

jacoby politics of crisis theory II

jacoby postscript to authoritarian state

jacoby reply to slater

jacoby review of adorno

jacoby review of braverman

jacoby review of reich book

jacoby review of slater

jacoby review of the political philosophy of the frankfurt school

jacoby the politics of objectivity

jacoby the politics of subjectivity

jacoby towards a critique of automatic marxism

jacoby what is conformist marxism

jacoby – Review of Shulamith Firestone – 1971

jacoby -Review of Jay’s Dialectical Imagination – 1974

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SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

THE VALUE FORM, REIFICATION, AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE COLLECTIVE WORKER
(MILCHMAN, 2010)

ALAN MILCHMAN (MAC INTOSH) 1940-2021

Internationalist Perspective
Issue 57: Fall/Winter 2010 [PDF]

Marx’s critical theory exposed a mode of production, a civilization, based on
value, which he described as a “deranged” or “perverted form” [verrückte Form],
in which social relations between persons are inverted and appear as relations
between things. It is the abstract labor of the working class that produces and
reproduces this deranged form. As Max Horkheimer, in 1937, put it in
“Traditional and Critical Theory”: “[H]uman beings reproduce [erneuern], through
their own labor, a reality which increasingly enslaves them.”1 It was Georg
Lukács, in his essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in
the collection History and Class Consciousness (1923), who had first elaborated
a theory of reification through which the effects of the value form, that
perverted form, and the commodity fetishism that was integral to it, seized hold
of society. Lukács’ accomplishment, even before many of Marx’s own vast
“economic” manuscripts had been published, was a theoretical breakthrough upon
which Marxism as a negative critique of capitalism is still based.

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AUGUST 17, 2021

CORRESPONDENCE ON THE GERMAN STUDENT MOVEMENT: ADORNO-MARCUSE, 1969

[Image 1. Anti war protests at the University of California, San Diego, 1970.
Credits: Fred Lonidier]

FIELD republishes today this 1969 letter exchange between Theodor Adorno and
Herbert Marcuse on the German student protest movement. First appearing in
the New Left Review in January-February 1999, these letters are too relevant to
the present moment to be consigned to the place of memorabilia. In them, we
sense the foundational common code of friendship that tied these thinkers
together, despite profound theoretical disparities which their words suggest are
irreconcilable. Today’s urgency to engage politically with pressing matters such
as the cost of human lives for the maintenance of the status quo, the resurgence
of neo-fascist rhetoric in the public sphere, and the United States’ military
involvement in foreign affairs, make these authors’ exchange as relevant as it
was almost four decades ago. Like “Teddy” and Herbert, today’s academics need to
reconsider how to reconcile theory with the violence of police brutality,
imperialist intervention in remote geographies, and the need for new forms of
political contestation. Writing at times of vigorous student protest movements
in Germany and California, Adorno and Marcuse exemplified different takes on the
political responsibility of scholars, poles that appear still unaltered in
today’s multifaceted attack on the autonomy and sustainability of public higher
education around the globe. Their conversation is testimony to the propensity of
academic labor to forget its inscription in the world and its indebtedness to
it. The original New Left Review publication (I: 233, January-February 1999) can
be found
here: https://newleftreview.org/I/233/theodor-adorno-herbert-marcuse-correspondence-on-the-german-student-movement.

San Diego, November 2016.

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AUGUST 10, 2021

KARL MARX AND THE IROQUOI (ROSEMONT, 1989)

Leaders from five Iroquois nations (Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and
Seneca) assembled around Dekanawidah c. 1570, French engraving, early 18th
century.

by Franklin Rosemont, 1989, in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion

PDF

There are works that come down to us with question-marks blazing like sawed-off
shotguns, scattering here and there and everywhere sparks that illuminate our
own restless search for answers. Ralegh’s so-called Cynthia cycle, Sade’s 120
Days, Fourier’s New Amorous World, Lautremont’s Poesies, Lenin’s notes on
Hegel, Randolph Bourne’s essay on The State Jacque Vaches War letters,
Duchamp’s Green Box, the Samuel Greenberg manuscripts: These are only a few of
the extraordinary fragments that have, for many of us, exerted a fascination
greater than that of all but a very few “finished” works.

Karl Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks[1] -notes for a major study he never lived to
write, have something of the same fugitive ambiguity. These extensively
annotated excerpts from works of Lewis Henry Morgan and others are a jigsaw
puzzle for which we have to reinvent the missing pieces out of our own research
and revery and above all, our own revolutionary activity. Typically although the
existence of the notebooks has been know since Marx’s death in 1883, they were
published integrally for the first time only eighty-nine years later, and then
only in a highly priced edition aimed at specialists. A transcription of text
exactly as Marx wrote it- the book presents the reader with all the difficulties
of Finnegan’s Wake and more, with its curious mixture of English, German,
French, Latin and Greek, and a smattering of words and phrases from many
non-European languages, from Ojibwa to Sanskrit. Cryptic shorthand
abbreviations, incomplete and run-on sentences, interpolated exclamations,
erudite allusions to classical mythology, passing references to contemporary
world affairs, generous doses of slang and vulgarity; irony and invective: All
these the volume possesses aplenty, and they are not the ingredients of smooth
reading. This is not a work of which it can be said, simply, that it was “not
prepared by the author for publication”; indeed, it is very far from being even
a “rough draft?’ Rather it is the raw substance of a work, a private jumble of
jottings intended for no other eyes than Marx’s own-the spontaneous record of
his “conversations” with the authors he was reading, with other authors whom
they quoted, and, finally and especially, with himself. In view of the fact that
Marx’s clearest, most refined texts have provoked so many contradictory
interpretations, it is perhaps not so strange that his devoted students, seeking
the most effective ways to propagate the message of the Master to the masses,
have shied away from these hastily written, disturbingly unrefined and amorphous
notes.

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AUGUST 3, 2021

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896)

“This is a brief sketch of what I am looking forward to as a Communist: to sum
up, it is Freedom from artificial disabilities; the development of each man’s
capacities for the benefit of each and all. Abolition of waste by taking care
that one man does not get more than he can use, and another less than he needs;
consequent condition of general well-being and fulness of life, neither idle and
vacant, nor over burdened with toil. All this I believe we can and shall reach
directly by insisting on the claim for the communization of the means of
production; and that claim will be made by the workers when they are fully
convinced of its necessity.”

William Morris Archive / wiki / News from Nowhere [PDF] / William Morris’s
Utopianism [PDF]

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JULY 31, 2021

PAUL LAFARGUE (1841-1911)

“For the end of the social revolution is to work as little as possible, and to
enjoy as much as possible.”

Paul Lafargue (1841-1911), Karl Marx’s son-in-law, was a leading member of the
French socialist movement and played an important rôle in the development of the
Spanish socialist movement. A close friend of Friedrich Engels in his later
years, he wrote and spoke from a fairly orthodox Marxist perspective on a
wide-range of topics including women’s rights, anthropology, ethnology,
reformism, Millerandism, and economics.

Biography
Bibliography

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JULY 27, 2021

THE DAEMONIC: CONCEPT OF A NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION (LÖWENTHAL, 1921)

In Frankfurt School on Religion [PDF]

First Published: in Gabe – Herrn Rabbiner Dr. Nobel Zum 50. Geburtstag, J.
Kauffmann Verlag Frankfurt a. M. in 1921; Source: Leo Löwenthal Schriften. 5
Bände – Band 5: Philosophische Frühschriften, Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main,
1987; Translated from German: P. Alexander Schneider; Redaction and Markup: P.
Alexander Schneider, @stadtstaat. marxists.org

Editors’ Note: Das Dämonische was originally written in 1920 as a seminar paper
for Karl Jaspers’ [12] seminary in Heidelberg. It was mainly dedicated to the
second chapter “Weltbilder” in Jaspers’ recently released Psychologie der
Weltanschauungen. It was not a mere reproduction of Jaspers’ thought but a
philosophical treatise with messianic aspiration. The text reveals many features
Löwenthal would maintain during his career such as his relationship to Marxism,
to Psychoanalysis, and to a messianic interpretation of the religious. He is
also concerned with orienting himself after the leading thinkers of his time
such as Bloch and Lukács, but also figures such as Husserl, Goethe, Xenokrates,
Kierkegaard, Wilhelm Wundt, and even the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Löwenthal is
one of the founding members of the Frankfurt School and many of the ideas which
would later become influential in creating Critical Theory can already be found
here making it not just interesting to those studying Löwenthal or negative
philosophy of religion, but the history of Western Marxism as a whole.

The text was first published in 1921 in remembrance of Rabbiner Dr. Nobel’s 50th
birthday, one of Löwenthal’s most important mentors. The subsequent Suhrkamp
publication is entirely based on this and apart from updating some spelling,
changing the German quotation marks to French comillas, and adding real italics
where the original couldn’t due to technical limitations remains unchanged. Due
to this there were no footnotes for the entire text, let alone for quotes. These
were most carefully recreated to the best of our abilities; we also added
footnotes to explain certain translation decisions and give more insight into
the terminology used in the text most likely alien to the average reader. We
tried to orientate ourselves with the translations of authors Löwenthal cited to
maintain a coherent vocabulary for those familiar with the English translations
of the aforementioned works. When this did not work we tried to find good
neologisms and did our best to explain these using footnotes.

This translation would not have been possible without @stadtstaat.

This translation is dedicated in loving memory both to Leo Löwenthal and Helmut
Dubiel without whom I would have never had the pleasure of reading, yet alone
translating this text.

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JULY 20, 2021

WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE RED ARMY FACTION (WOHLFARTH, 2006)

by Irving Wohlfarth, Radical Philosophy 152, 153, 154 (2008-9)

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Benjamin and the Red Army Faction – is the subject even worth discussing? Its
background, or underground, has, it is true, hardly been broached in the
secondary literature. Yet both sides claimed that violence was needed to avert
disaster; and Benjamin underwrote an ethics which did not shrink from the
‘revolutionary killing of the oppressor’. But a difficult question remains. Does
any kind of fuse or trail lead from his words to their deeds? If so, it would
mark a striking instance of the general problem: how responsible is a thinker
for the fate of his/her ideas? Such questions were hardly foreign to Benjamin.
He had, he wrote only a year before Hitler seized power, not yet considered what
meaning might be extracted from Nietzsche’s writings ‘in an extreme case’. But
who, or what, determines, precisely when such a case obtains? Does the
trajectory of the Red Army Faction (which will here henceforth be termed the
RAF) raise in retrospect the question of the political meaning that might be
wrested, in an extreme case, from Benjamin’s writings – especially since such
states of emergency were their common concern?

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JULY 13, 2021

THESES AGAINST OCCULTISM (ADORNO, 1947)

by Theodor Adorno, from Minima Moralia

I. The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. This
has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional.
Instead of defining both, in their unity and difference, by conceptual labour,
it mixes them indiscriminately. The unconditional becomes fact, the conditional
an immediate essence. Monotheism is decomposing into a second mythology. “I
believe in astrology because I do not believe in God”, one participant in an
American socio-psychological investigation answered. Judicious reason, that had
elevated itself to the notion of one God, seems ensnared in his fall. Spirit is
dissociated into spirits and thereby forfeits the power to recognize that they
do not exist. The veiled tendency of society towards disaster lulls its victims
in a false revelation, with a hallucinated phenomenon. In vain they hope in its
fragmented blatancy to look their total doom in the eye and withstand it. Panic
breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose
control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had
to fear from nature.

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JULY 6, 2021

LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITAL: THE DEGRADATION OF WORK IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
(BRAVERMAN, 1974)

by Harry Braverman

DOWNLOAD PDF

The transformation of working humanity into a “labor force,” a “factor of
production,” an instrument of capital, is an incessant and unending process. The
condition is repugnant to the victims, whether their pay is high or low, because
it violates human conditions of work; and since the workers are not destroyed as
human beings but are simply utilized in inhuman ways, their critical,
intelligent, conceptual faculties, no matter how deadened or diminished, always
remain in some degree a threat to capital. Moreover, the capitalist mode of
production is continually extended to new areas of work, including those freshly
created by technological advances and the shift of capital to new industries. It
is, in addition, continually being refined and perfected, so that its pressure
upon the workers is unceasing. At the same time, the habituation of workers to
the capitalist mode of production must be renewed with each generation, all the
more so as the generations which grow up under capitalism are not formed within
the matrix of work life, but are plunged into work from the outside, so to
speak, after a prolonged period of adolescence during which they are held in
reserve. The necessity for adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form,
for overcoming natural resistance intensified by swiftly changing technology,
antagonistic social relations, and the succession of the generations, does not
therefore end with the “scientific organization of labor,” but becomes a
permanent feature of capitalist society.

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JULY 2, 2021

STATISTICS AND SOCIALISM (PAUL MATTICK, JR., 2016)

On Otto Neurath

Paul Mattick Jr. (presentation at Anton Pannekoek conference, Amsterdam 2016)
PDF

One of the preconditions of the creation of socialism, Otto Neurath wrote in
1925, is that society ‘must know from which conditions it starts at a certain
moment and what it can undertake.’ To have such information, ‘above all the
labour movement needs a statistics of the conditions of life. Its object should
not be to establish total consumption or average consumption—these are of little
significance—but the ‘standard of life’ of the main social groups and
classes.’[1] Of course, it is not ‘society’ that will create this new order:
‘Socialism in practice … will be brought about by the political victory of the
proletariat …’[2] hence ‘Statistics is a tool of the proletarian struggle! An
element of the socialist economy, the delight of the advancing victorious
proletariat and, not least, a foundation for human solidarity.’[3]

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JUNE 28, 2021

KARL KORSCH (1886-1961)

“Marxism as an historical phenomenon is a thing of the past. It grew out of the
revolutionary class struggles of the first half of the nineteenth century, only
to be maintained and re-shaped in the second half of the nineteenth century as
the revolutionary ideology of a working class which had not yet regained its
revolutionary force. Yet in a more fundamental historical sense, the theory of
proletarian revolution, which will develop anew in the next period of history,
will be an historical continuation of Marxism. In their revolutionary theory,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gave the first great summarization of proletarian
ideas, in the first revolutionary period of the proletarian class struggle. This
theory remains for all time the classical expression of the new revolutionary
consciousness of the proletarian class fighting for its own liberation.” – The
Crisis of Marxism, 1931

Books (pdfs):

Marxism and Philosophy (1923) – by Karl Korsch

Karl Marx (1938) – by Karl Korsch

Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory – edited by Douglas Kellner (1977)

Karl Korsch: A Study in Western Marxism – by Patrick Goode (1979)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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JUNE 23, 2021

A FEW CLARIFICATIONS ON ANTI-WORK (ASTARIAN, 2016)

by Bruno Astarian, Dec 2016, hic-salta

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The text below is a translation of my post Quelques précisions sur
l’anti-travail initially published online by ediciones ineditos . This
translation included several errors, some of them having me stating the opposite
of what was meant. The translation below has been corrected accordingly, and is
thus the only one being valid.

For an episode of its program “Getting Out of Capitalism,” Radio Libertaire
asked me to do a presentation on anti-work, based on the pamphlet I published
with Echanges et Mouvement in 2005. Upon re-reading it, I realized that there
was a need to correct or clarify certain points of view expressed at the time. A
few paragraphs in italics are reproduced without any change from the 2005
brochure.

Introduction:

There is some confusion about the notion of anti-work. My brochure, “On the
Origins of Anti-Work” (Echanges et Mouvement, 2005), did not escape this fate.
The confusion arises from a lack of precision in defining the notion of
anti-work. On the one hand, it groups in the same category as anti-work certain
behaviors such as a worker’s laziness, when he or she tries normally to do the
least amount of work, or a preference for (compensated) unemployment or living
on the margin. Such practices of refusal of work, of resistance, are as old as
the proletariat itself and do not define modern anti-work. On the other hand,
the confusion lies in classifying as anti-work forms of resistance to
exploitation that are in actual fact pro-work, e.g. Luddism. I believe that we
should save the term anti-work for the struggles of our time (since ’68) which
demonstrate that the proletariat is no longer the class that will affirm itself
in the revolution as the class of hegemonic labor, nor is it the class that will
make work mandatory for everyone or replace the bourgeoisie in managing the
economy.

To better understand the specificity of the term anti-work, it has to be placed
in a historical perspective. It should be noted that what we are interested in
here are struggles in the workplace, against the usual characteristics of the
relationship between workers and their means of labor (absenteeism, sabotage,
lack of discipline in general).

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JUNE 15, 2021

INTERCOMMUNALISM: THE LATE THEORIZATIONS OF HUEY P. NEWTON (VASQUEZ, 2018)

by Delio Vasquez, Viewpoint, 2018. See also: Intercommunalism by Huey Newton,
1974 [PDF]

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On September 5, 1970, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party
(BPP), introduced his theory of intercommunalism at the Revolutionary People’s
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. 1 He later expanded on this theory
before an audience at Boston College in November of that year, and then again In
February 1971 during a joint talk he gave with psychologist Erik Erikson across
several days at Yale University and later in Oakland. 2 Newton’s opening remarks
at Yale lasted over an hour but were reduced to about ten pages in the
subsequently published In Search of Common Ground. 3 As a philosophical
foundation for his remarks on intercommunalism, that introductory speech
included an engagement with the work of Hegel, Marx, Freud, Jung, Kant, Pierce,
and James, among others. 4 Portions of the material of this main speech, the
subsequent Q&A, and other writings of Newton’s were later combined, recomposed,
and expanded upon under the title of “Intercommunalism” in 1974, the same year
that he completed his bachelor’s degree and fled temporarily to Cuba. This text
had until now been available only through access to the Dr. Huey P. Newton
Foundation Inc. Collection (1968-1994), held in archive in Stanford University’s
Special Collections. 5 It is now reproduced here, available to the public at
large for the first time, accompanied by this introduction.

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JUNE 8, 2021

MARXISM: YESTERDAY, TODAY, AND TOMORROW (MATTICK, 1978)

by Paul Mattick (1978)

From Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? by Paul Mattick, edited by Paul
Mattick Jr., published by Merlin Press, 1983

In Marx’s conception, changes in people’s social and material conditions will
alter their consciousness. This also holds for Marxism and its historical
development. Marxism began as a theory of class struggle based on the specific
social relations of capitalist production. But while its analysis of the social
contradictions inherent in capitalist production has reference to the general
trend of capitalist development, the class struggle is a day-to-day affair and
adjusts itself to changing social conditions. These adjustments find their
reflection in Marxian ideology. The history of capitalism is thus also the
history of Marxism.

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JUNE 2, 2021

THE COMET (W.E.B. DU BOIS, 1920)

by W.E.B. Du Bois (1920) Darkwater, Chapter X, PDF

He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that
swirled down Broadway. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him save in a way that
stung. He was outside the world—”nothing!” as he said bitterly. Bits of the
words of the walkers came to him.

“The comet?”

“The comet——”

Everybody was talking of it. Even the president, as he entered, smiled
patronizingly at him, and asked:

“Well, Jim, are you scared?”

“No,” said the messenger shortly.

“I thought we’d journeyed through the comet’s tail once,” broke in the junior
clerk affably.

“Oh, that was Halley’s,” said the president; “this is a new comet, quite a
stranger, they say—wonderful, wonderful! I saw it last night. Oh, by the way,
Jim,” turning again to the messenger, “I want you to go down into the lower
vaults today.”

The messenger followed the president silently. Of course, they wanted him to go
down to the lower vaults. It was too dangerous for more valuable men. He smiled
grimly and listened.

“Everything of value has been moved out since the water began to seep in,” said
the president; “but we miss two volumes of old records. Suppose you nose around
down there,—it isn’t very pleasant, I suppose.”

“Not very,” said the messenger, as he walked out.

“Well, Jim, the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time,” said the vault
clerk, as he passed over the keys; but the messenger passed silently down the
stairs. Down he went beneath Broadway, where the dim light filtered through the
feet of hurrying men; down to the dark basement beneath; down into the blackness
and silence beneath that lowest cavern. Here with his dark lantern he groped in
the bowels of the earth, under the world.

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MAY 29, 2021

REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN GERMANY (ENGELS, 1851)

by Friedrich Engels (1851-52)

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Marx was asked in the summer of 1851 by Charles Anderson Dana, managing editor
of the New York Tribune, to write a series of articles on the German Revolution.
Founded in 1842 by Horace Greeley, the Tribune was the most influential paper in
the United States at the time. These articles were written by Engels at the
request of Marx, who was then busy with his economic studies and felt, besides,
that he had not yet attained fluency in English. Engels wrote the articles in
Manchester, where he was employed, and sent them on to Marx in London to be
edited and dispatched to New York. Thus, although Engels must be rightly
considered their author, Marx took a big part in the preparation, for in their
almost daily correspondence the chief points were discussed thoroughly between
them. The articles appeared under Marx’s name, and it was not until much later,
when the correspondence between the two life-long collaborators became
available, that the true circumstances were revealed. The contributions to
the Tribune thus begun continued until 1862, and though Marx himself wrote most
of the articles after 1852, Engels continued to help his friend by writing for
him important articles on political and military affairs. When Marx’s daughter,
Eleanor, wrote the preface to the 1896 edition she was still under the
impression that Marx had written the series. [Publisher’s Note to the 1969
edition published in London by Lawrence & Wishart]

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MAY 23, 2021

OBSESSIONS OF BERLIN (MATTICK, 1948)

by Paul Mattick, Partisan Review, Vol.15 No.10, October 1948, pp.1108-1124.
[PDF]

As against the terror of the bombs, the actual conquest of Berlin was of lesser
significance to its inhabitants. Nevertheless, the artillery tore new holes into
the ruins, shot away parts of the surviving buildings, killed many people
running for food and water. The spray of machine guns is visible almost on every
house, every floor, every apartment door. The tanks ground down the streets and
sidewalks. The battle was fought section by section, street by street, house by
house. It is said that sixty thousand Russians died in the struggle for Berlin.
The estimate may be incorrect, but it reveals the ferocity of the struggle.
There are no guesses on the German losses. They lost everything – particularly,
however, their illusions about the Russians.

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