Bogdanov and His Work

Review: David Rowley on two new publications

John Biggart, Georgii Glovelli, and Avraham Yassour, Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928. Aldershot,England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998. vii + 495 pp. Notes and appendices. $85.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-85972-623-2.

John Biggart, Georgii Glovelli, and Avraham Yassour, Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot, England and Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1998. x + 362 pp. Figures, notes, appendices, and index. $72.95 (cloth), ISBN 1-85972-678-X.

Reviewed by David G. Rowley, Department of Social Science, University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
Published by H-Russia (May, 2000).

How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?

Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) -- scientist, philosopher, economist, physician, novelist, poet, and Marxist revolutionary -- is mostly ignored by general histories of Europe and Russia and generally appears only as a minor character in the more specialized works of Russian philosophy and the Russian Social-Democratic movement. Yet it seems that no one who becomes familiar with his work fails to be utterly impressed by it. Most Bogdanov scholars believe him to be one of the most creative and profound European thinkers of his age.

Bogdanov was an original philosopher who attempted to reconstruct Marxism upon a modern epistemological footing (replacing Plekhanov's correspondence theory of knowledge with a sophisticated reinterpretation of Ernst Mach's Empiriocriticism). [1] His conception of the role that culture would play in building Communism bears a striking resemblance to Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony. [2] Most importantly of all, in his Tektology: Universal Organization Science, Bogdanov ambitiously proposed that all physical, biological, and human sciences could be unified by treating them as systems of relationships and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems. His work anticipated in many important ways Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory. [3]

Bogdanov also had the potential of making important and humane contributions to Russia. His idea of Proletarian Culture suggested a non-violent path to Communism, [4] his political principles were far more moderate than Lenin's, [5] and his contributions to the theory of economic planning, if taken into account by Soviet planners, might have produced a viable and humane economic system. [6] Bogdanov was a practicing medical doctor throughout his career and helped to organize the Soviet Union's pioneering Institute for Blood Transfusion. (He died in the course of an experimental transfusion in which he exchanged his blood with that of a patient.) [7] Finally, Bogdanov was apoet and a novelist -- once again a pioneer -- in the genre of science fiction. [8]

Nevertheless Bogdanov's fame in the West has never extended beyond a rather small group of specialists on Russian and Soviet intellectual history. Perhaps because he was an active Marxist revolutionary, he was ignored by his contemporary European philosophers and scientists, and his impact on the development of Western philosophy and science was nil.

In the Soviet Union, conversely, Bogdanov was very well known indeed -- as a Bolshevik pariah. Ever after their famous break in 1909, when Lenin engineered Bogdanov's ouster from the leadership of the Bolshevik faction, Lenin relentlessly attacked and denigrated Bogdanov's ideas. He saw to it that Bogdanov's philosophy would always be branded as false, anti-Marxist, and anathema for Russian Communists. Bogdanov's works were published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, but their influence is difficult to gauge. Because the accusation of "Bogdanovism" was career-ending, anyone who had been influenced by Bogdanov's thought would have attempted to conceal it.

Thus, the general tendency of works on Bogdanov has been to consider the "might-have-beens." How much more humane might the Communist regime have been had Bogdanov's political, cultural, and economic ideas been put into practice?

The ease of Western research on Soviet history has always depended on not only accessibility to Soviet archives but also the interests of Soviet archivists and bibliographers. The fact that Soviet historians took a negative view of Bogdanov was not important in itself (Western and Soviet scholars often disagreed on points of interpretation); what was crucial was the lack of interest in the gathering of information on Bogdanov's life and unpublished works. Research on Bogdanov's career was extremely difficult.

Like many another aspect of Russian life and culture, it was only at the end of the Brezhnev era that Russian scholars began to take an interest in Bogdanov and finally to appreciate his contributions to science and philosophy and his potential contributions to Soviet society. [9] In the late 1980s two international conferences on Bogdanov (the first in Moscow and the second in London) brought Russian and Western scholars together, and the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences established an International Commission on the Legacy of A. A. Bogdanov.

This collaboration of Russian and Western scholars has produced two volumes that will begin a new era in Bogdanov-studies: the first a bibliography and handbook for research, the second, an appraisal of Bogdanov's contributions to science.

I cannot find words adequately to praise John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour's collaborative work: Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1973-1928. This exhaustive bibliography, archive guide, and research handbook more than fulfills the most utopian dreams of any scholar interested in the life and thought of Bogdanov.

The book begins with three introductory chapters. In "The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov," John Biggart surveys not only the evolution of attitudes toward Bogdanov in the Soviet Union and Russia but also Bogdanov historiography and bibliography in the West. Georgii Gloveli outlines the chief features of Bogdanov's intellectual development in "Bogdanov as Scientist and Utopian." Finally, Nina S. Antonova and Natalya V. Drozdova describe and discuss the "Collection of the Central Party Archive."

The heart of the work is a chronological bibliography of every known piece of writing to have come from Bogdanov's hand -- not only his published writings (including books, articles, book reviews, and letters to the editor), but unpublished notes, letters, drafts, and even cartoons. For each item we are provided the Russian title (if titled), English translation of the title or description of item (if untitled), and where that item can be found. If the item was published, full citations are provided (if an article appeared in more than one journal, all references are given); the archival holding of the draft manuscript, if extant, is also given. For all unpublished manuscripts, complete archival information is provided for both Russian and foreign archives. Whenever one of Bogdanov's books was reviewed or one of his articles commented upon by his contemporaries, those reviews or comments are cited as well. For most of Bogdanov's letters or unpublished manuscripts, an English summary is given (and frequently an English summary of responses to Bogdanov's letters). Cross references are made to previously published bibliographies. The yearly bibliography is followed by "Undated Materials," "Political Cartoons," "New Editions, 1989-1998," and "Works in Translation" (in 22 languages from Armenian to Yiddish).

Three appendices are also invaluable. "Bogdanov: A Biographical Chronicle," by Peter Alexandrovich Plyutto presents the key events of Bogdanov's life, from birth to death, along with sources documenting those events (and, of course, the archival or published location of those sources). In "Aliases and Pseudonyms," Maya Davydovna Dvorkina lists all Bogdanov's aliases in chronological order and indicates the sources of the information. In Appendix 3, "Archives, Libraries, Sources," John Biggart provides a cross-reference to the former and contemporary names of Russian state archives and libraries. He lists and describes private collections of papers relating to Bogdanov, lists the relevant holdings of the Central Party Archive, discusses the nature and locations of Boris Nikolaevsky's six-volume collection of "Materialy" relative to Bogdanov's struggle with Lenin for the leadership of Bolshevism, lists the full names of the Russian and foreign libraries referred to in the bibliography, notes important relevant reference works, and concludes with a bibliography of publication of scholarly studies of Bogdanov in Western languages.

All in all, this is a monumental achievement. John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour will have the gratitude of all present and future Bogdanov scholars.

If Bogdanov and His Work provides the tools necessary for researching the life and thought of Alexander Bogdanov, its companion volume provides both explanations of why Bogdanov is worth study and suggestions of further avenues of inquiry.

Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, is the product of a conference on "The Origins of Organization Theory in Russia and the Soviet Union" held at the University of East Anglia, UK in 1995. The Russian and Ukrainian scholars who attended the conference more than confirm the attitudes long held by Bogdanov enthusiasts in the West. Their papers, though disagreeing on certain points of interpretation, are all tributes to Bogdanov's brilliance and creativity.

As the title suggests, the principal interest of the contributors is the nature and importance of what Bogdanov considered to be his greatest achievement: Tektology: General Organization Science, but they also comment insightfully and productively on other aspects of his philosophic and economic thought. [10]

The section on Bogdanov's philosophical foundations both evaluates Bogdanov's epistemology (Empiriomonism) and investigates its relation to Russian and Western European thought. To mention a few examples: James White discusses Bogdanov's intellectual debt to Ludwig Noire, and both White and Vadim Sadovsky show that Bogdanov was struggling with the relation between exterior reality and inner consciousness in very modern ways. Simona Poustilnik discusses Darwin's influence on Bogdanov's thought, and Peter Plyutto compares Bogdanov with the Russian systems-builder V. I. Vernadsky.

The section "Applications in Economics" covers an aspect of Bogdanov's career that has to my knowledge been ignored in the Anglophone academic world--his contribution to the theory of economic planning. Andrei Belykh argues that Bogdanov made a profound impact on Soviet economic thought and particularly on planning in the early 1920s. Saltan Dzarasov suggests that Bogdanov was a forerunner of the theory of convergence because he proposed that economic planning and use of market relations should coexist in a collectivist society.

"General Theory of Systems" discusses the central issues of Tektology, Bogdanov's project to uncover the unity of the physical, biological, and human sciences by analyzing the basic patterns of organization that are common among them. Bogdanov posited a fundamental oneness of reality, asserted that scientific laws and processes are isomorphic among all fields of science, and that the apparent diversity among the various branches of science is due only to narrow specialization and incommensurable terminology. The scholars in this section recognize Bogdanov's Tektology as a revolutionary work that anticipated both cybernetics (automatic information processing and control) and general systems theory (the idea that all systems--physical, biological, and social--operate according to the same principles). Some of the most intriguing implications of Bogdanov's thought are raised in Peter Dudley, "Tektology: Birth of a Discipline?" Yunir Urmantsev, "Tektology and GST: A Comparative Analysis," Nemil Gorelik, "Tektology and Organizational Systems," David Schapiro, "A Tektological Approach to Multi-Connectivity and Dualism in Complicated Systems."

One of the most impressive aspects of this book is the stature of the scholars who participated in the conference. Some of the most respected names in Russia appear--indeed, almost half of the contributors are members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, economics, synergetics, systems analysis, and historyof the natural sciences. Moreover, it is a mark of contemporary Russian fascination with Bogdanov that both of these works will be published in Russian translation under the auspices of the "International Bogdanov Institute" which was founded late last year in Moscow with the support of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

However, the contemporary emphasis of the contributions somewhat limits the volume's usefulness to historians of Russia. The articles and roundtable discussions were not intended to introduce a Western audience to Bogdanov's thought. They are written by scholars very familiar with Bogdanov's works for other scholars with similar expertise. Moreover, the authors are, for the most part, writing for their Russian contemporaries rather than for western historians of Russia. That is, they are more interested in the validity and present-day usefulness of Bogdanov's ideas rather than in the light that Bogdanov's works cast on Russian society and culture from the early 1890s to the late 1920s.

Western historians will find it of interest in two ways, however.

First, Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia provides Western observers a glimpse of contemporary Russian intellectual culture. It is only natural that a work dealing with Bogdanov's Organization Science should approach his work from an objective, scientific viewpoint, but in their comments the authors reveal rather different preoccupations from the cultural and philosophic concerns of the West. Like Westerners they are very interested in questioning and deconstructing old paradigms and narratives, but unlike them they seem to take as unproblematic the nature of consciousness and its relation to exterior reality. Vadim Sadovsky, as I mentioned above, does connect Bogdanov's epistemology to problems of post-modernism, but this is an aspect of his thought that receives very little attention from the other contributors. Instead they treat Bogdanov as a realist, concerned less with the problem of how human thought constructs the world than with how the world is constructed in itself.

They represent Bogdanov as the last of the nineteenth-century systems-builders, and they themselves are interested not only in systems science but in systems-building (among authors they take very seriously are Nikolai Fedorov, Vladimir Vernadsky, and Lev Gumilev). In this regard it is significant that, although the contributors to this volume cite current Western scientific work in information science and evolutionary biology, they do not place Bogdanov in the context of contemporary Western philosophic and scholarly thought. Instead, they examine his relationship to Comte, Spengler, Spencer, Schumpeter, and Jung. It thus appears that the Russophone academic community is looking for systematic explanations (modeled on the natural sciences) of historical development.

I do not intend this comment as Anglo-American-centric criticism of these Russian and Ukrainian scholars for not sharing Western concerns. I merely point out that they have a different intellectual agenda. Indeed, the West could benefit from their refreshing corrective to the Western belief in a disjuncture between language and reality. The Western postmodern focus on reality as a discursive construction is a project that many in the West find tedious, pointless, and perhaps even socially harmful. Much may be gained from sharing Bogdanov's confidence that the world actually exists, that its basic principles can be discovered, and that this knowledge can be used to make it a better place.

Second, although Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia is likely to be of immediate use mainly to Western evolutionary biologists, information scientists, and systems theorists, it nevertheless may suggest to historians some interesting avenues of research. For example, the frequent references to Russian scholars and thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be welcome starting points for those who would like to consider Bogdanov less as a Marxist revolutionary and more as a Russian philosopher and sociologist of knowledge who also happened to be a Marxist.

Perhaps the feature to which scholars should pay particular heed is the short bibliography "Publications in Western Languages" which appears in both volumes. Although not completely up-to-date (it lists only one article published since 1992) it appears otherwise to be fairly exhaustive. Yet it includes only 81 books and articles in English, French, German, and Italian. For a thinker, scientist, and activist of Bogdanov's originality and depth, this is the merest beginning. There is plenty of fertile ground for future research. Students of Russian science, culture, and intellectual life who are seeking topics for master's or doctor's theses will be well served by both these works--but particularly by Bogdanov and His Work.

Thanks to the work of Biggart, Glovelli, and Yassour, we can expect a revolution in the field of Bogdanov-studies. Scholars are prepared as never before seriously to seek answers to the question: How Important Was Alexander Bogdanov?

Notes

[1]. For discussion of his philosophy of knowledge, see Eileen Kelly, "Empiriocriticism: A Bolshevik Philosophy?" Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique, 22, no. 1 (Jan-Mar, 1981) and David G. Rowley, Millenarian Bolshevism, 1900-1920 (New York: Garland, 1987).
[2]. Zenovia Sochor, "Was Bogdanov Russia's Answer to Gramsci?" Studies in Soviet Thought, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1981).
[3]. For a survey of Bogdanov's thought in this regard see S. V. Utechin, "Philosophy and Society: Alexander Bogdanov," in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (London: Allen and Unwin,1962). There are now two English versions of Tektology. George Gorelik translated one of Bogdanov's abridgments of Tektology under the title Essays in Tektology. The General Science of Organization (Seaside, California: Intersystems Publications Limited, 1984). A full English translation of the 1989 Russian edition has also appeared: Bogdanov's Tektology, Book 1, forward by Vadim N. Sadovsky and Vladimir V. Kelle. Edited, with an introdcution by Peter Dudley (Hull, UK: Center for Systems Studies, 1996).
However, Bogdanov's insights into systems science had no real impact upon the West. It seems certain that Norbert Weiner was unfamiliar with his work, and Nikita Moiseev (in his contribution to Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia) is the only scholar who asserts that Ludwig von Bertalanffy "must have known of Bogdanov's work." The consensus holds that Bertalanffy did not.
[4]. See David G. Rowley, "Lenin and Bogdanov: Epistemology and Revolution," Studies in East European Thought, 48, no. 1 (March 1996).
[5]. See Zenovia Sochor, Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).
[6]. See the articles by Andrei Belykh and Saltan Dzarasov (listed below) in the volume under review.
[7]. See Douglas W. Huestis, "The Life and Death of Alexander Bogdanov, Physician, Journal of Medical Biography, 4, no. 3 (1996).
[8]. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, eds., Alexander Bogdanov: Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
[9]. In Chapter 1 of Bogdanov and His Work, "The Rehabilitation of Bogdanov," John Biggart recounts this process.
[10]. Here is the full table of contents:
*Part One: Introduction
John Biggart, "Introduction," Leonid Abalkin, "Bogdanov's Tektology: Towards a New Paradigm."
*Part Two: Philosophical Foundations
Galina Alekseeva, "Bogdanov and the Development of Science in the Twentieth Century," James White, "Sources and Precursors of Bogdanov's Tektology," Vadim Sadovsky, "From Empiriomonism to Tektology," Natalya Kusminykh, "Monist Philosophy as the Basis of Tektology," Simona Poustilnik "Biological Ideas in Tektology," Peter Plyutto "Pioneers in systems Thinking: Bogdanov and Vernadsky," and Georgii Gloveli "Psychological Applications of Tektology."
*Part Three: Applications to Economics
Nadezhda Figurovskaya, "The Economic Ideas of Bogdanov," Andrei Belykh, "Bogdanov's Tektology and Economic Theory," Vladimir Maevsky, "Bogdanov and the Theory of Economic Evolution," Saltan Dzarasov, "Plan and Market in Bogdanov's Tektology," and Victor Parmenov "Tektology and Economic Reconstruction."
*Part Four: General Theory of Systems
Nikita Moiseev, "Tektology in contemporary perspective," Peter Dudley, "Tektology: Birth of a Discipline?" Yunir Urmantsev, "Tektology and GST: A Comparative Analysis," Nemil Gorelik, "Tektology and organizational systems," David Schapiro, "A Tektological Approach to Multi-Connectivity and Dualism in Complicated Systems." Mikhail Kuzmin, "Social Genetics and Organizational Science."
* Part Five: Appendices
John Biggart "Tektology: Editions and Translations," John Biggart and Francis King, "Profiles of Russian scientists and Philosophers."

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Posted: 2 June 2000

NORDSTREAM 2 ECODISASTER

Is Data the New Gas?

Oleksiy Radynski

e-flux
Journal #107 - March 2020

Smiley-face graffiti on a gas pipe at the Nord Stream 2 construction site in Lubmin, Germany. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Axel Schmidt.

1.

In Brussels on May 1, 2019, Rick Perry, then-US energy secretary, announced that “seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi Germany occupation, the United States was again delivering a form of freedom to the European continent.” And, in the twenty-first century, he added, “rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it’s in the form of liquefied natural gas.”1 Perry was referring to a deal that would double the size of US gas exports to Europe. But from what, exactly, would Perry’s “freedom gas” liberate Europe?

Perry’s colorful statement came as an explicit snub to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, a project that Russia and Germany have been pursuing since the 2010s to link the two countries directly via the Baltic seabed. The pipeline’s route bypasses intermediary countries like Ukraine, whose state budget depends heavily on gas transit revenues. Nord Stream 2 is expected to double the capacity of the already existing Nord Stream pipeline, increasing the volume of transmitted gas up to 110 billion cubic meters a year. Into 2020, Merkel’s government continues to defend this massive gas infrastructure project that’s been mired in controversy from the start.

Strangely enough, most of the criticism facing the Nord Stream 2 project comes from a geopolitical, rather than an ecological, perspective.2 Its critics say that this pipeline would disproportionately increase the EU’s dependence on Russian fossil fuel exports.3 It’s also quite clear that the actual political rationale for this project is to render obsolete the subterranean, Soviet-era natural gas arteries that run through large parts of the European continent that are no longer under Russia’s control. Following Russia’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territories in 2014, Merkel’s government’s adherence to the Nord Stream 2 project did not cease to raise eyebrows.4 After the downing of a passenger plane over the Donbass in July 2014 by pro-Russian proxies, the ensuing sanctions against Russia did not affect the project in any way. In German public debate, the fact that the completion of Nord Stream 2 would likely cause the economy of Ukraine to collapse, a country at war with Russia, has been constantly referenced—but to little avail.5

The intricacies of the ongoing Nord Stream 2 debate, however, miss a rather large elephant in the room. Without questioning the importance of countering Russia’s neocolonial wars in Ukraine and elsewhere, it is easy to see why the biggest problem with the new pipeline is not at all the fact that it will deprive Russia’s neighbors of their transit revenues. Such revenues, in fact, fuel gross corruption schemes, like those that define Ukraine’s political process, and guarantee the concentration of exorbitant wealth in the hands of oligarchs.6 Nor is the biggest problem the fact that Nord Stream 2 will provide the Russian autocratic elite with another powerful tool to subvert European politics. The real problem is that this tool, just like its countless counterparts, undermines the future of planet Earth by bringing the irreversibility of climate change one large step closer. And this time, placing the blame squarely on Russia is clearly not an option.

With Germany’s ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as a manager, and Mathias Warnig (an ex-Stasi officer with a long-standing connection to Vladimir Putin) serving as the CEO of the project, it is not surprising that the German government values its Nord Stream 2 commitment more than its widely anticipated green transition. In a truly Orwellian move, Nord Stream 2 presents itself as an environmentally friendly initiative that will help decrease carbon emissions from oil and coal, fossil fuels that are, it is claimed, much dirtier than natural gas. This argument is refuted by ecologists who assert that, despite being relatively “cleaner” than much of the existing carbon infrastructure, projects like Nord Stream 2 would increase the structural, long-term dependency on fossil fuels to such an extent that a transition to a carbon-free economy—something that the Earth’s biosphere needs much earlier than we plan to institute—might actually never occur.

At the time of this writing, the construction of Nord Stream 2 has been halted due to US sanctions against the project, which will most likely merely delay the pipeline’s completion by about a year. But why is it that the only real form of opposition to Nord Stream 2 comes from the power that would simply prefer to cook the planet with its own “freedom gas”?

Gerhard Schröder, ex-chancellor of Germany and chairman of the board of directors of Nord Stream 2, and Matthias Warnig, former member of the Stasi and CEO of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Wolfram Scheible.

2.

In May 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed an executive order titled “On the Strategy of Economic Security of the Russian Federation until 2030.” This order includes a list of ongoing “challenges and threats to the economic security” of Russia identified at that time. High on the list—number six of twenty-five points—is a threat formulated as follows: “Changes in the structure of global demand for energy resources and their consumption patterns; development of energy-saving technologies and reduction of material consumption; development of ‘green technologies.’”7

This statement warrants closer attention. It’s not difficult to see why the “development of ‘green technologies’” is an existential threat to the Russian Federation, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels and, according to most estimates, the owner of the largest stock of reserves of natural gas on Earth. This particular list of “threats and challenges” also happens to coincide more or less with a number of actions that are necessary to undertake if humanity is serious about its survival on the planet. As it becomes increasingly evident that the future of humankind depends on its ability to switch to a global economic model that would make the industrial burning of fossil fuels obsolete, the mere hope of such a switch—however distant it might seem at the moment—is now officially recognized as a threat to the regime that governs Russia. Clearly, the Russian political model values the future of fossil fuel and capital flows over the future of the innumerable species (including humans) whose existence is threatened by climate change. A question worth asking, then: Is the Russian government actually being, perversely, more straightforward than most other governments about the fact that they are ultimately accountable to entities such as gas, oil, and their derivative petrocurrencies, rather than to the members of human society who voted them into power?

Well before Trump came to power, it was abundantly clear that the global carbon-based capitalist model is incompatible with the futures of democracy and of the environment. Despite the broad scientific consensus on the grave effects of the fossilized economy on the planetary climate, and despite the cautious intergovernmental half-measures to prevent a catastrophic scenario (like the nonbinding Paris Accord of 2015, which the US government has already opted out of anyway), “extreme” fossil fuels investments continue to surge.8 Of all the fringe ideologies and discarded ideas that the Trump presidency has brought into the mainstream, climate change denialism could probably have the most lasting and damaging impact on the future of humankind. Of course, Donald Trump’s “climate skepticism” is far more publicized than that of his Russian counterpart and political patron—even though the effect of the latter could be more fundamental, given Putin’s global support of fossil fuel kleptocrats and right-wing conspiracists, Trump included. Like Trump, Putin has repeatedly questioned the human-made nature of climate change, and went as far as to ridicule the use of alternative energy sources like wind turbines for the alleged harm their vibration may cause to worms, urging them to “come out of the ground.” (The US president, meanwhile, focuses on turbines’ apparently murderous effect on birds). Again, this unprecedented (and scientifically baseless), disproportionate concern for subterranean, nonhuman entities—inanimate, like oil and gas, or animate, like worms—provides clues as to the actual allegiance of a certain public servant named Vladimir Putin.

Most commonly, the Russian political model is the object of human rights–based, postcolonial,9 or liberal-democratic criticism of what the Putinists themselves call “the illiberal model.” In order to make sense beyond the redundantly anti-communist “post-sovietology” in the vein of “Cold War 2.0,” these perspectives should necessarily be supplemented with (or sublated in) more universalist—that is, ecological—modes of critique. It is well-known that the infrastructure for the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels—mainly, the oil and gas pipelines that cover the Eurasian continent—form the basic source of the economic and political survival of Putinism. Moreover, those networks guaranteed the emergence of a particular political regime, which arose in the 1990s on the ruins of the Soviet Union and solidified in the early 2000s—largely due to high prices of oil and gas on the global market.

Surprisingly, Russia’s catastrophic climate policies are largely ignored in most critical accounts of the looming ecological disaster. Naomi Klein’s verdict in This Changes Everything (2015)—that capitalism is incompatible with the survival of planetary ecology—is nowhere more obvious than in the case of Russia’s current capitalist model. Still, Russia is conspicuously absent from Klein’s critique: in This Changes Everything, Russia is only mentioned twice; the collapse of the USSR also gets two mentions. For the ecological critique of capitalism to become a truly global political front, as Klein urges, Russia’s disproportionate exemption must be overcome.

Given the overwhelming importance of oil in the twentieth-century economy, political and economic theorists have given this kind of fossil fuel a great deal of attention. In many cases, this scrutiny is informed by the notion of the “oil curse,” that is, the tendency of oil-rich states to evolve into autocracies: internally oppressive, externally aggressive, and overall inefficient. This notion has of course been unfavorably applied to Russia and the fossil fuel lobby that is running the country, along with Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and other states “cursed by oil.” In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell exposes the limitations of the “oil curse” theory. Instead, Mitchell undertakes a study of “democracy as oil—as a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the process of producing and using carbon energy.”10 Mitchell’s book seeks to answer a critical question: “Can we follow the carbon itself, the oil, so as to connect the problem afflicting oil-producing states to other limits of carbon democracy?”11 As natural gas overtakes oil’s previous status as the most important fossil fuel of the current century, this inquiry should be extended. Will oil-based liquid modernity make way for a data-based, gaseous postmodernity?

What follows is an attempt to “follow the carbon itself,” by tracing and collaging its various footprints within histories of ideas, technology, and popular culture, in an effort to grasp the evasive substance of natural gas through the no-less-evasive field of the social imagination—informed by the Cold War and the current geopolitical attempts at its reenactment.

In 2017, The Economist famously claimed that “data is the new oil.” At the time, Wendy Chun’s response to this statement was: “Big data is the new COAL. The result: global social change. Intensely energized and unstable clouds.”12 Still, both coal and oil are likely to decline as energy sources. Another question worth asking, then, is: what if data is actually the new gas?

Participants in the Baltic Sea Day Environmental Forum 2017 couldn’t care less about the ecological aspects of Nord Stream 2. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 / Anatolij Medved.

3.

The first ever computer hacker to feature in a Soviet film appeared in a political drama called Deal of the Century (1985). In one scene, this American hacker (played by popular actor Valentin Gaft) struggles to break the computer security system of a Soviet trade mission in Germany, in his effort to prevent the signing of a gas contract between West Germany and the USSR. The film is generously interspersed with documentary news footage of the Reagan administration’s attempts to prevent the deal that would allow the export of Siberian gas to West Germany. Those attempts did, in fact, happen, but they failed to halt a decades-long process that ultimately led to the emergence of the Soviet Union—and later, of Russia—as a major carbon empire.

In 1970, the Soviet Union and West Germany signed the contract that inspired the film. The contract was preceded by a decade-long global dispute following the discovery of unprecedented reserves of natural gas in Siberia. The Soviet Union lacked the technology to construct the pipeline system needed to transport the gas to consumers, while West Germany—whose industry was capable of providing these pipes—began showing interest in helping the Soviets build this system. West Germany’s offer of assistance with construction came with the condition that the new pipelines would penetrate the Iron Curtain and that Siberian gas would flow to the West. Throughout the early 1960s the US government fiercely opposed the idea, and in 1963 then-chancellor Adenauer had to ban German pipe exports to the USSR. Still, part of German industry cherished the plan, and in 1970 the pipe ban was overcome. After the deal was signed in Essen in 1970, it was colloquially called “gas in exchange for the pipes.” Russian historians unequivocally refer to this contract as “the deal of the century.” This was the first in a long series of deals between Western powers and the Soviet Union that, after its collapse, has led to the emergence of an autocratic system based on a ruthless extractivist attitude to the Earth’s resources, facilitated by transcontinental oil and gas transportation networks.

Those networks—the world’s longest at the time—required unprecedented technological expertise, and in this regard the Soviet Union could not count on Western technology (as it did with the German pipes). In the Soviet TV series Acceleration (1984), a group of cybernetic scientists are tasked with computerizing the natural gas transportation network after the US blocks delivery of some needed technology. In one of the scenes, the cyberneticians discuss this gas network as a self-regulating living organism. One of them proposes the concept of the “animation/resuscitation of the equipment.”13 In other words, they recommend reframing the gas network as an intelligent being with a subjectivity of its own, carrying billions of cubic meters of natural gas to be emitted into the atmosphere—a truly post-humanist utopia of a Soviet kind.

This animation or resuscitation of the gas network wasn’t an outlandish fantasy on the part of the filmmakers. In fact, the plot of Acceleration was loosely based on the life story of Viktor Glushkov, a pioneering computer scientist tasked with building oil pipeline networks, among other things, after his bold idea of an information network for the USSR was shelved, and his groundbreaking research on socialist artificial intelligence was put on the back burner by authorities. Glushkov was a leading figure in Soviet cybernetic science, a science that he claimed had to be applied to each and every sphere of socialist society. He declared that cybernetics allowed for the transformation of “the social sciences into exact sciences.” As a result, he claimed, society as a whole would function as one gigantic cybernetic organism running on feedback loops and socialist self-regulation. In 1970—the same year of the “deal of the century”—top party officials downsized Glushkov’s idea for an overwhelming information-management-and-control network to a series of smaller-scale, disparate network projects. For the better part of the 1970s, he was busy computerizing the Druzhba (Friendship) oil pipeline network that carried Siberian oil into Eastern Europe.

In public, Glushkov held that his Druzhba network was an example of a perfect marriage of cybernetics and ecology, claiming that

we’ve developed methods that allow for the use of contemporary computing machines to predict the behavior of all kinds of ecological systems, to model all future options for the development of these systems, and to discover the solutions that would allow us to find the right compromise between the economic needs of the people and their natural need to preserve the environment.14

During closed-door meetings, however, he delivered much darker accounts of his fossil fuel networks, claiming that they were not economically feasible due to the inevitable exhaustion of oil resources.15

Glushkov’s cybernetics had its roots in the Cold War reception of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theories, which proliferated in the USSR soon after Stalin’s death. However, Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a tool for mastering nature stemmed from a strand of philosophical thought that had much deeper roots in the Soviet context. It’s hard to ignore the affinity between Glushkov’s vision of cybernetics as a mode of total socialist management and the “universal organizational science” of Alexander Bogdanov—philosopher, natural scientist, and militant Bolshevik. Bogdanov coined the term “tektology” to describe his totalizing vision of a neopositivist science outlining the universal principles (those of organization as opposed to disorganization) that underlie every known phenomena in the universe: from galaxies to human societies to bacteria. Bogdanov radically undermined not just the distinction between natural sciences and the humanities, but also between theory and practice—a stance later adopted by Glushkov, who claimed “unity of theory with practice” as a founding principle of his cybernetic science. The latter’s position also shared with Bogdanov’s tektology the belief that natural, social, and technological systems function according to the same organizational principles, which may be scientifically identified and put to purposeful use.

For Bogdanov, nature was “changeable,” following knowledge of the universal rules of progress that he had offered to the Bolsheviks (no wonder that McKenzie Wark, in her 2015 book Molecular Red, regards Bogdanov as a Soviet prophet of the Anthropocene). Bogdanov’s work on tektology, published in the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, was no doubt a major influence on the Bolshevik project of “revolutionizing nature,” as Oksana Timofeeva names the Soviet effort of “diverting rivers, blasting mountains, making animals speak: the idea was to transform the Earth by means of technology in order to make it, as Andrei Platonov says, more ‘kind to us.’”16 Bogdanov’s tektology is also cited as a major (albeit, uncredited) influence on Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s general system theory, the cybernetic theories of Ross Ashby, and the writings of Norbert Wiener himself—via the German translation of Tektology, published in 1926. For instance, it’s been pointed out that in Tektology, Bogdanov described the notion of feedback, crucial for cybernetic science, using a different term of his own coinage: “bi-regulation.” In the Soviet Union, Bogdanov’s writings were officially denounced as idealistic perversions of materialist dogmas. His tektology only made a comeback in the postwar decades, as it was incorporated into Western cybernetic science and reimported back to the USSR in a vertiginous transcontinental give-and-take of ideas.

The abridged English translation of Tektology starts with a claim that’s actually absent in Bogdanov’s original—at least in such straightforward terms: “In the struggle of mankind, its aim is dominion over nature. Dominion is a relationship of the organizer to the organized.”17 Still, this entangled paraphrase of Bogdanov accurately reflects the perception of his ideas by later practitioners. When Glushkov proposed building a computer network for the total management of economic and information flows, he was setting out on a truly tektological endeavor. When the Soviets were building the transcontinental networks for fossil fuel flows, they were guided by the idea of “changeable” nature. Few could see the direction this change was taking.


A munitions clearance operation on the Nordstream 2 pipeline route, which runs in close proximity to World War II chemical weapons dumping grounds. Copyright: Axel Schmidt.

4.

In the summer of 1982, a gas explosion of unprecedented proportions was said to have destroyed the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline. In his 2004 memoir At the Abyss, Reagan administration official Thomas Reed claims that this explosion was caused by Canadian equipment added to the pipeline—sabotage via a Trojan horse tactic. (Post-)Soviet experts, on the other hand, vehemently deny that this explosion ever took place.18 They claim that the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline network could not be hacked at the time, because it was not yet computerized to a sufficient degree. Given the lack of evidence related to this purported explosion, it seems that the gas network hack took place in the realm of information, rather than through technology—a case of information warfare.

By that time, massive amounts of Siberian natural gas were being exported to Western Europe, and new contracts signed in the wake of the Soviet–German “deal of the century” were proliferating. This caused consternation amongst US officials, who saw this German strategy as suicidal: not only would Europe’s access to energy be dependent on Soviet gas networks, but the latter could also, according to some military experts, be used to fuel the Soviet army in case of European invasion. The Germans themselves, though, had adopted a more dialectical-materialist approach to the problem of Soviet natural gas.

Otto Wolf von Amerongen, chairman of the German East–West Trade Committee from 1955 to 2000, later recalled the logic behind the deal: “The gas pipe through the continent is, if you wish, an instrument that not only makes us dependent on the Soviet imports, but also, vice versa, renders their ‘crane’ dependent on the West.”19 In his conversations with German chancellor Ludwig Erhard, von Amerongen introduced the political dimension into this dialectical vision: “If we are linked together through our gas pipelines, this will mean much more than the sale of pipes or the purchase of gas. The will also lead to a positive change in the political picture in the Soviet Union.”20

What kind of change would that be, and how would it be achieved? Von Amerongen: “I was always sure that this deal had introduced another constant medium of communication, a reliable bridge for further development, or to be more precise, the rebirth of the traditional German–Russian connections that were lost in the course of decades after the October coup in Russia in 1917.”21

Construction corridor for the Russian onshore section of Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Copyright: Nord Stream 2 AG / Agiteco.

With gas as a medium of communication, what kind of message did its networks convey? At stake was no less than the legacy of what von Amerongen (an ex-Nazi) referred to as “the October coup.” In the 1980s, with the Soviet economy failing while (and, in fact, because of) the lucrative fossil fuel export deals proliferated, party elites were faced with the chance to put this enormous wealth to personal gain. The top-down collapse of Soviet Communism was, among other things, the result of a successful attempt by the party apparatus to privatize the enormous profits derived from the extractivist economic model in its transition to capitalism. The message delivered by the Western elites to their Soviet counterparts—“abandon communism for your personal profit!”—was conveyed through the medium of natural gas.22

In the post–Cold War world, after the “end of history”—which is gradually morphing into the end of a habitable climate—is a project like Nord Stream 2 designed to serve as another channel of constant communication? With US sanctions against Nord Stream 2 strangely appearing as a reenactment of the Reagan-era sanctions against the Trans-Siberian pipeline, are we definitively stuck in a final historical loop, a dead end in which the only real resistance to this politically and environmentally devastating project comes from a no-less-devastating competitor whose only solution is: burn “freedom gas” instead? Abandon the planet for your personal profit!—this is the message conveyed by virtually every communications medium in this echo chamber, be it the medium of an underwater gas pipeline or an liquid natural gas terminal.23

But if carbon infrastructure is a medium of communication, then it can be—like any other such medium—disrupted, subverted, and hacked. This is where, to quote Nick Dyer-Witheford, the dominant structures are most vulnerable today: “If we’re going to look at the equivalent of something that was like strike power, we need to look to hacking, we need to look at the new vulnerabilities of capital that lie in its transportation and logistics networks, we need to look at the possibilities of the interruption of its various types of energy flows: both electrical and otherwise.”24 But who would be the agent of this strike power?

One recent development in the extraction industry provides a glimpse of what form this agent might take. In January 2020, Russian Gazprom announced a major decrease in its monthly production of natural gas. The reason for this decrease? Unexpectedly high temperatures in gas extraction areas.25

Postscript: This is a revised version of an essay that was intended for publication in the Almanac of the Center for Experimental Museology, but it was withdrawn by the author after it was censored by the publisher, V-A-C Press (Moscow). The fragment excised by the editors is reproduced here in full:


The moment at which this text is written is crucial and greatly impacts what I have to say in the following paragraphs. I’m writing these lines on the fortieth day of Ukrainian film director Oleg Sentsov’s hunger strike, while he is held in a Russian prison camp in the Arctic. Sentsov demands the immediate release of all political prisoners from Ukraine currently jailed in Russia. Before he was kidnapped by the Russian Federal Security Service during the military occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in May 2014, Sentsov resided with his family in Crimea. Together with the anti-fascist eco-activist Olexander Kolchenko, he was accused of plotting a terrorist attack as a protest against the annexation of Crimea by the Russian army. Detained in Crimea, Sentsov and Kolchenko were then kidnapped and transported to the Russian Federation, where, in defiance of all judicial norms, the two were stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship and put on a show trial that found them guilty—despite the absence of evidence, and on the basis of forced confessions by two other tortured political prisoners. Sentsov and Kolchenko were sentenced, respectively, to twenty and ten years in prison camps. In Russia, this trial had been instrumental in silencing any possibility of dissent against the 2014 occupation of Crimea and Russia’s sparking of the war in East Ukraine. This silencing especially targeted artists and cultural workers: the scapegoating by the Russian secret services of Oleg Sentsov, who had worked in Crimea as an auteur filmmaker, was conspicuously random, as if its sole meaning was to send a message to other artists: stay away from politics, for this can happen to anyone. In a similar vein, the conviction of Olexander Kolchenko was meant to introduce a purely Orwellian dimension into this process: a committed anti-fascist, he, along with Sentsov, was accused of participation in a far-right Ukrainian group. The imprisonment of Sentsov and Kolchenko led to a swift deterioration of cultural and artistic links between Russia and Ukraine, with numerous Ukrainian artists and cultural workers boycotting any Russia-related projects. As a counterpart to this boycott, since 2015 I’ve been practicing a strategy of accepting invitations from Russian non-state institutions with the purpose of hijacking public debate and staging interventions based on the cases of Sentsov and Kolchenko. While working on this particular essay, I was surprised to discover that no special intervention of this kind would even be needed in this case, as my research trajectory had actually brought me to a point that reflects the context of Sentsov’s case with unexpected clarity. While this research is focused on the manifold ways that the exploitation of natural resources, primarily natural gas, affects cultural and political developments by boosting colonial and authoritarian practices, Sentsov is holding his hunger strike in a town called Labytnangi in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region in Russia’s Far North, which is where one of the world’s largest gas fields is located. There, reduced to the position of homo sacer, Sentsov is challenging the regime from the very heart of Russia’s natural gas empire. It is an extremely dire, but somehow, still strangely hopeful coincidence which reinforces the intuitions that brought this text into existence.

As of March 2020: Oleg Sentsov survived his hunger strike, which lasted for 145 days. He and Oleksander Kolchenko were released by the Russian government in a prisoner swap in September 2019.

V-A-C press is a project of V-A-C Foundation, cofounded by Leonid Mikhelson, head of Novatek company, Russia’s second-largest natural gas producer, based in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Region where Oleg Sentsov was held illegally.

XXXXXXXXX


Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. His films have been screened at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), DOK Leipzig, Bar Laika by e-flux, and Kmytiv Museum among other venues, and received awards at a number of film festivals. His texts have been published in Proxy Politics: Power and Subversion in a Networked Age (Archive Books, 2017), Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and East Europe: A Critical Anthology (MoMA, 2018), Being Together Precedes Being (Archive Books, 2019), and in e-flux journal. After graduating from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, he studied at Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program (Beirut). Radynski is a participant of the Visual Culture Research Center, an initiative for art, knowledge, and politics founded in Kyiv, 2008. Currently, he is a BAK Fellow at basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht.

© 2020 e-flux and the author

 “Physiological collectivism”: the origins of the Institute of Blood Transfusion’s ideas and their practical realization 

Mariya S. Sergeeva 

I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation 8 Trubetskaya St., building 2, Moscow 119991, Russia 

Abstract.

 “Physiological collectivism”, a method for the creation of the “new man”, was developed in Russia in 1910–1920s, and served as a pretext for organizing the first Institute of Blood Transfusion in the USSR, the first director of which was its author, the physician, philosopher, and political activist A.A. Bogdanov (1873–1928). Bogdanov’s idea of “physiological collectivism” emerged as part of a dream for a socialist society based on universal unity and equality. Drawing on his own theory of “universal organized science”, Bogdanov argued that the key to sustained and stable development of society was “collectivization”. However, the revolutionary experience showed that the unification of various class representatives was impossible without the formation of a single organizational way of thinking and a profound change and unification of citizens’ consciousness. A unique opportunity to unify the people at a biological level was stipulated in the “exchange blood transfusion” method developed by Bogdanov. It was based on philosophical concepts of E. Mach, W. Ostwald, R. Steiner, and N.F. Fedorov, as well as biologists’ and geneticists’ data. The phenomenon of conjugation in the simplest form affirmed loyalty to philosophical constructs and allowed Bogdanov to offer his own mechanism for the transfer of experience between generations. The announcements of Soviet geneticists, who claimed the possibility of acquired characteristics being inherited, justified his theory. Thus, “physical collectivism”, or exchange of blood between the people, “reinforcing each body along the lines of weakness,” was developed by Bogdanov as the most effective way of building socialism. The creation of the Institute of Blood Transfusion was the result of an interdisciplinary synthesis of philosophy, natural science and social ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Physiological collectivism”: the origins of the Institute of Blood Transfusion’s ideas and their practical realization (historymedjournal.com)

 

Engineer Menni and the Prose of Project Management

The recent efforts of Mckenzie Wark to rehabilitate Bogdanov have brought back more than just the lovable vampiric theorist from his bloody grave. With him emerge the concurrent spectres of utopia, state socialism and grandiose public works. Bogdanov, the activist revolutionary of 1905, had by 1917 become a theorist of the abstract, a scientific socialist, and a constructor of tangible Martian utopias. It is on Mars that Bogdanov pursues the doppelganger of Earthly socialism, and so, it is to Mars we go, by means of the collected translation Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia.

What is Mars for Bogdanov? If he defines Nature as “that which labor encounters,” Mars becomes something like “that which theory encounters”.

Mckenzie Wark makes use of the Deleuzian notion of molar and molecular in order to reach Bogdanov. If the molar is the realm of abstract grand thinking, high level concepts, and authoritarian pronouncements, then the molecular is the unseen, the below the below, the minute and particular, carbon liberation, and the world of “actually existing theoritism”. We must contrast the molar concepts of history, philosophy, love, art, with the molecular concepts of metabolic rift, development, attraction, and labor.

What does Bogdanov’s Mars represent? It is a world that is much older than ours, and yet has only progressed a few hundred years ahead of humanity (at least by 1905 – who knows what they’re up to now). They are a communist utopia of course, but have graduated to that position in much more molar way than the Earthlings were trending; because Mars is a harsher, larger, and sadder world, the populace, constrained to smaller plots of inhabitable land; Martians are much more tolerant of social development, much less cruel, much more abstract themselves as historical characters. Leonid (or affectionately, “Lenni”), the main character of Red Star, notices in Martian culture, art, politics, a certain abstract remove which contrasts with the brashness and threatening asymmetry of the development of the proletarian movement on Earth. As comes out in discussion:

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think that you are wrong. True, the conflicts on Earth have been more acute than ours, and the natural environment has always shown a greater tendency to retaliate with death and destruction. But perhaps this is due to the fact that Earth is so much more richly endowed with natural resources and the life-giving energy of the sun. Look how much older our planet is, yet our humanity arose only a few tens of thousands of years before yours and is at present a mere two or three hundred years ahead of you in development. I tend to think of our two humanities as brothers. The elder one has a calm and balanced temperament, while the younger one is stormy and impetuous. The younger one is more wasteful with his resources, and prone to serious errors. His childhood was sickly and turbulent, and as he now approaches adolescence he often suffers from convulsive growing pains. But might he not become a greater and more powerful artist and creator than his elder brother? And in that case, will he not eventuaily be able to adorn our great Universe even better and more richly? I cannot be certain, but its seems to me that this is what may happen.”

Which is the molecular and which is the molar? In some sense, Mars is the same sort of abstraction as that used by Marx in Das Kapital, the abstractions that David Harvey’s brilliant youtube course makes commodity-clear; in Marx, certain real variables must be factored out of the equation because they over-complicate the development of a solution or tendency. In this sense, Martian society has progressed along molar lines. Big ideas have always managed to triumph with relative ease; the great public works of the canals have succeeded. Earth, on the other hand, is out-of-whack; it is full of metabolic rift, molecular instability, ideas emerge too soon or too late, and coalitions are much more radioactive. They even have a chiller, more widely read Martian doppelganger of Karl Marx, the “renowned Xarma”.

In this we see, not a rejection of the molar as such as Wark sometimes seems to suggest, but a comparison of the abstract with the concrete – by means of hypothetical abstraction (science fiction). The model of Mars, the cool temperaments of its inhabitants, serve as a template that the Earth is already corrupting beyond repair. In this sense, the Martian sequence can never be a program for the Earth, only ever a vague, super-egoic tease, an unreachable success-factor. Or in a more optimistic vein, Martian technical socialism is the idea that must be pursued by the various romantic truth procedures of love, science, art and politics on Earth, pursued but never fully actualized. Only on Mars is a cohesive “poetics of labor” capable of emerging as a whole. Maybe all that Earth can hope to do in the stead of a fully realized poetics of labor, is capture that movement into a banal realism, a “prose of project management”?

It is funny that Red Star, the more traditional utopia of travel, was a huge best-seller during the Russian Revolution, while its much superior prequel Engineer Menni went pretty much unnoticed. Yet the latter is perhaps the heart of Bogdanov’s project; to turn vulgar Marxism into a technical ideal of socialism, and this technical development, through the figure of the Engineer – the Martian Engineers Menni and Netti, who pre-figure the stupid figures of socialist realism and far surpass them.

Engineer Menni gives humanity hope that it can reach the molar one day too. It is the great manifesto of molar projection. The book is presented as a novel from Mars, translated into English by Leonid. As Leonid mentions in Red Star, there is a certain coolness to Martian literature that seems to find more aesthetic joy in the technical – a kind of latent suprematism or Neue Sachlichkeit. Bogdanov is true to his word when, in Engineer Menni, he really does compose such a novel. The device of writing, not about aliens, but an alien novel as such, is really quite brilliant. The gesture practiced in Menni is very compelling, nigh Lovecraftian in its staging of uncanny familiarity:

Translation from the single Martian language into those of Earth is much more difficult than translation from one Earthly language to another, and it is often even impossible to give a full and exact rendering of the content of the original. Imagine trying to translate a modern scientific work, a psychological novel, or a political article into the language of Homer or into Old Church Slavonic. I am aware that such a comparison does not Batter us Earthlings, but it is unfortunately no exaggeration-the difference between our respective civilizations is just about that great.

But who is Menni? The molar hero. The great architect, engineer, project manager, and a Lycurgus or pre-foundational figure of vulgar, technical, molar Marxism. The novel is about his great project and his interpersonal relationships, but moreso the former. Menni has an idea that will greatly expand the territory of Martian life and progress, exploit the untapped resources of the planet, and progress the species of Martian humanity, which feels cramped and narrow in its tiny pockets of inhabitable land, much like the characters in more recent fictions like Attack on Titan.

This is a socialist realist technique, to write about public works, and the great (projected) unity of state, technology, and labor against the elements. The whole trend of Bogdanov’s science fiction is the unity of labor against natural ferocity. He refutes a future left of localism not yet developed in his era; as Žižek proclaims, the Negri style pockets of progress and local contributions do not suffice to deal with the problems of a socialist race, even once the proletariat has conquered. The real enemy is not a rival class, but nature herself.

Thus in Red Star, the great debate of the Martians is whether to colonize Earth or Venus. Placid and artistic, hedonistic even on the surface, the Martians are all bitterly melancholic because the natural world is trying to kill them and their socialist paradise; a dilemma emerges – colonize and kill the humans in the name of a greater more developed humanity (the view of the Martian Sterni) or go to the inhospitable Venus to mine its resources? They have only enough fuel for one project, and they choose the more comradely, leaving Earth its chance.

Menni shows more the pure poetry of labor and project management, a struggle against organizational inertia and natural obstacles, and how class development and ideational progress attach themselves to technical developments in the concrete world. It is a strange novel. The strangest part is the long hallucinatory sequence of the vampire, the representative of old ideas and once-useful historical processes, like democracy or parliamentarism, that have become dead letters but continue to live on and pester the progressive forces.

Technicality triumphs, and history goes with her, but only, it seems, on Mars.

So far.

We have signs. Everybody on Earth now speaks English. The Martians too had a coming together of language. Beercroft’s “universal language” is now a reality.

But the idea lives on after the man disappears, and you have come to understand the main thing: the creativity that found one of its incarnations in you has no end.

The possibility of the Project Management Novel

So that’s why I came up with the phrase “prose of project management”, as a kind of realist response to the Bogdanovite “poetry of labor”. We need to recognize that tektological and organizational thinking brings about a weird counter-swing from the molar to the molecular and back to the molar again. Like Bogdanov’s notion of “crisis” as either a conjunction or a destruction (crisises C and D respectively). His point is that no crisis is just a pure crisis-D or crisis-C, but that the interesting features of either can appear to be dominantly one or the other, depending on your point of observation. Likewise, the “poetry of labor” needs its “managemental prose”. This is the molar prose of the technical abstraction, the Brechtian “crude thinking”, the concept-as-blunt-object used by committees to bludgeon reactionaries.

This is clearly a different spin on the idea of the “project” from the (quite molecular) “project-as-self” or any other individualistic narcissism; it is almost classically soviet in comparison to what is prevalent today. It should not be taken in the same vein as the Invisible Committee describes the “I AM WHAT I AM”, the petty atomistic personal project of the self:

The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production…It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state. 

The PM methodology to be derived from Bogdanov emphatically rejects this. No slight projects, no larval pupas, and certainly no return. In this sense, molar.

Like the dreams of Benjamin, Platonov, Ehrenberg, Lunacharsky, and Piscator, among many others, the hope of functionalizing or socializing the novel form is so old to criticism that it’s surprising that it hasn’t actually manifested itself more frequently. The valorization of the report, the blueprint, the newspaper as aesthetic endstates was a constant refrain in the 1920s. Eventually this led to a re-capture within literature itself – Brecht and Alfred Döblin, for example, made heavy use of reportage and workerist flavoured functionality for artistic ends.

If rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same may be said of many other good and beautiful things.

If the Soviet Union’s contribution to the great unreadable genres of mankind was the production novel, Engineer Menni stands as an elegant and surprisingly readable precursor. Yet although production is certainly an element, it is far more high level. We see in Menni the possibility for something like a management or project novel. A novel or literary form that takes as its architecture not story arcs, but phases; not character development, but resource management; not plot resolutions, but outcomes; and finally, not moral platitudes or zen like moments of observation, but strictly documented lessons learned.

All of a suddenly he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.

Kim Stanley Robinson.

This functional trend seemed to have gone away for awhile. But the rehabilitation of Red Star/Engineer Menni opens up the possibility for a severe détournement; the language of management, organization, abstract project coordination can be stolen for aesthetic development. And once the literary captures this thinking, it can return it back with a vengeance. No longer will the notions of finance or human resources be linked to solely spreadsheets; a utilitarian flavor will remain, but legends and heroes, or perhaps even new methodologies embodied as heroes. Engineer Menni stands for both a political finality or class division, and a new methodology for the commune as a whole. A vindication of the major or state project, and as such, an aesthetic as much as political vindication.

Our Cause | Two Grenadiers (wordpress.com)