Guerrilla History - Art and the Working Class w/ Taylor Genovese

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

An unusual episode, but one that is a lot of fun and quite useful as well!  We have a returning guest, Taylor Genovese (see our episode on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 to hear his previous appearance), AND a guest interviewer today, Safie Ashirova.  We talked about Alexander Bogdanov's Art and the Working Class, which Taylor has just translated into english for the very first time and has been released today at peacelandbread.com/books.  A major examination on the necessity for proletarian art, and ideas of how to foster it, this is a book that everyone should check out (not least because the pdf version is free)! Taylor Genovese is a PhD researcher of anthropology at Arizona State University and an editorial board member of the fantastic journal Peace, Land, and Bread.  You can follow Taylor on twitter @trgenovese and on his website at taylorgenovese.com.  You can also follow Peace, Land, and Bread on twitter @PLBmagazine and on their website at peacelandbread.com. Safie Ashirova is a Russian linguist and Russian literature aficionado.  She can be followed on twitter @sonja_tschka. Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and well. Welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of the co-hosts of Gorilla History, Henry Huckimacki, and this is going to be kind of an intelligence briefing, but it's going to be rather unusual compared to our previous episodes. So listeners, if you're unaware and you're hearing this on our general feed, intelligence briefings are our roughly twice a month episodes that half of them roughly are early access on our Patreon and the other half are Patreon exclusives. This one is going to be early access and as I said, it's a little bit unusual because I'm joined by two guests, one of whom is going to be co-interviewing with me and the other one is a returning guest of the show, but we have a very

exciting book to be discussing with you during this intelligence briefing. So before we introduce the book, let me introduce or have my co-interviewer introduce herself to you for the first time. I'm going to be co-interviewing, returning guest, Taylor Genovese with Sophia Ashirova. Hello, I'm Sophia Ashiroba, a Russian linguist, and a lover of Russian literature. Yeah, absolutely. And given what the conversation that we're going to be having is, having a Russian linguist and lover of Russian literature is more than apt. And I'm very, very happy that you agreed to do this with me. Joining us again, the response to our previous episode with him was tremendous, and I know that this is going to be a great conversation as

well, is Taylor Genovese, who, again, listeners, if you haven't heard our episode with him on the English Peasance Revolt of 1381, go back just a few episodes and find that. Adnan, I and Taylor got together for that discussion. But Taylor, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners once again, just very briefly? Yeah, my name's Taylor Genevese. I'm a PhD candidate at Arizona State University. I study the Russian Cosmists, which was a political theology in the 1800s that advocated for unlimited space travel and human immortality. And I look at kind of the disjunctions and the continuities between that philosophy and the way capitalism has gripped a hold of it, especially in our current times. And I have just recently translated a book by

Alexander Bogdanov called Art in the Working Class, which we'll talk about today. Yeah, as you mentioned, Taylor, that's what we're going to be talking about today, this new book, Art and the Working Class, which, as I had been teasing earlier before this recording, it's a very interesting book to be talking about because this book is both brand new and over 100 years old at the same time. And that's because this book was written by Book Dan of over 100 years ago. But thanks to your translation and Iskra Books for putting this out. It's going to be available in English for the first time right around the time that we're going to be releasing this. So very interesting that we have a book that is going to be

both brand new and over 100 years old. And I have to say that I'm very proud that we, Sophia and I were the first people to read the proof of this book before it came out. And it was a great pleasure and a great honor. So thank you for including us in that. And yeah, it was great. So without any further ado, let's get into the conversation now. Taylor, we're going to be talking about Alexander Bogdanov's book, Art and the Working Class. Can you briefly introduce that work to the audience and explain what I mean by the book? The book is both brand new, not even released yet at the time of recording, and over 100 years old at the same time. Sure, yeah.

Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian polymath. He was a political revolutionary. He founded the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party with Vladimir Lenin. He is kind of written out of the history of that, and we can talk about that a little later maybe. But he was also deeply interested in the arts, and he founded a organization called proletarian culture, which the portmanteau in Russian is prolet cult. And he wanted to use this organization to educate workers so that they would have a foundation of political and cultural education. so that they could take leadership positions in political parties. And this book that he wrote, Art and the Working Class, was submitted to further that goal.

It was written and published in 1918, but it has not been translated into English until I decided to scoop it up and do so. So it came out in 1918 initially in Russian. It was published in the newspaper called proletarian culture first. Each chapter, there's three chapters. Each chapter was published in the newspaper in issues one, two, and three respectively. And then was turned into a monograph, a pamphlet, political pamphlet, and published as a book as well, which it was entitled, Art in the Working Class. And so that book form is what I have translated into English. And so I'm excited to have that be out into the world of English speakers finally after over 100 years.

Before I let Sophie ask the next question, I also just want to mention that you also wrote an excellent introduction to the book. You had great footnotes in the book. So it wasn't just translation work that you were doing. You really made the book accessible for a modern audience who perhaps wasn't aware of what was going on. in 1918, Russia slash Soviet Union. Really a great introduction. So kudos on that. Safi, do you want to take the next question?

Oh, go ahead, Taylor. Just to further that, if you're unfamiliar completely with Russian, you know, figures or literary giants or whatever, then that's A-OK. You can go ahead and not be familiar with that because I do make sure to answer to end. annotate it quite a bit in the footnotes. Yeah, before I ask the next question, I just wanted to say that when I, when I just started reading the book, I was like, yeah, the writing style is so great. And Henry was like, no, that's Taylor's. Wait a sec. Let's, yeah, let's see how Baghdana writes, you know, even in the translation.

Yeah, because you were talking about the introduction. Yeah, yeah, I was like 10 pages in. Yeah. Okay. So before we dive deeper into the discussion about the book, I think it would be really useful for the listeners to know what the thesis of the book is. So Taylor White, don't you introduce that? Yeah. So Bogdanov, since each chapter was initially published as a article in a newspaper, they kind of have this recursive quality to them in which he kind of goes

through an argument about why there needs to be culture for the working class specifically and not just the working class taking the culture of the ruling classes or or kind of high art, we might say, and really applying critique to it instead. And so he works through this kind of three point argument, but is recursive about it. So he'll talk a little bit about the first part of the argument in the second chapter. And then the third chapter, he'll kind of reach back up and pull out the main qualities of the previous chapters, which I think actually makes it easier for an audience that may not be super familiar with art history, but is interested in art to be able to grasp onto some of his arguments. So his real, his main thrust in this

is that one, there needs to be a culture developed by and for the working classes. In his context, he's talking about Russia, but really he wrote this to extrapolate across the world. So one, there needs to be working class art. And two, there needs to be ruthless criticism of all art because he doesn't make the argument of wanting to throw all the art of the past away. In fact, he wants the opposite. He wants the working class to be able to understand what went into that art and then be able to use the excellent parts of good works of art to continue artistic form and

method. So he wants to, one, be able to have the working class create their own art and be able to understand critique and pull from these older forms of art because he argues that these past forms of art are the heritage, the kind of the people that made it, they didn't die in vain. In other words, he wants to be able to have everyone be able to access that art and understand it. Yeah, before we dive in a little bit deeper into the three sections of this book, you mentioned how his philosophy of what we should be doing with art was that we should be integrating the beautiful parts of this art. We shouldn't be throwing it away. Now, before we get into the individual components of this, I should mention, and I want to mention, that Bogdanov and

Lennon at this point. We're having some very heated discussions, writing essays directed at one another. And they had some disagreements on this specific point. Can you perhaps lay out how Bogdano's view fundamentally differs from Lennon's view, perhaps points where they were similar, but there really was a divide between the two of them on their view of what should be done with art. Yes, Lenin was pretty adamant that art needed to be assimilated in a dialectical process. This is kind of a point of contention, perhaps, or can be argued in different ways. But the way that I see it is that Lenin really wanted to have art in the past be run through the same dialectical processes that the classroom. struggle was being run through and that there wouldn't be any difference in fact between an artistic

revolutionary movement and a class revolutionary movement. But Donov, on the other hand, really wanted to rely on critique as the main mechanism of how past artistic achievements could be reintegrated into the working class artistic movements. So therefore, it needed to be a kind of separation between the class movement and the, you know, the class warfare class revolutions and an artistic revolution. So, you know, Bogdanov makes this point where he really starts to kind of foreground this concept called hegemony, where perhaps there's kind of these undercurrents of thought throughout a society that has kind of runs underneath everything and isn't usually thought of consciously necessarily, but he really

wanted to focus on that concept and be able to use critique to pull out what was going on in artistic movements. And so it was really a separation between the two revolutionary movements. And so therefore, Lenin really disliked this because he saw it being a fully integrated revolution. And in fact, ended up absorbing the prolet cult organization into the commissariat for education eventually once Lenin, quote unquote, won over Bogdanov's positions. Yeah, moving on to the three sections of the book. Let's start with chapter one. What is proletarian poetry? That's how Bogdanov names this chapter, and that's the

question that I'd like to ask you. Yeah, he's, he takes a, so in the first chapter, he takes a very anthropological look at art, right? He starts, some could argue like in the Neolithic times, right? He starts by saying the, the first artistic movement of humankind or the cries of labor or the way that people exert themselves. you know, the sounds they make as they're exerting themselves in labor. He claims that this is the initial genesis of poetry. And then labor songs moved from, came out of this. Military songs came out of this.

And eventually cadence and the way that poetry is recited and written came out of human labor. This is a very Marxist view of the world, right? It's in line. Probably Lenin would also agree with this. It's in line with a historical materialist view of the world. However, what he then shows is that as classes start to form, poetry begins to split. And people, for example, who are the landlord classes

or the classes that were able to kind of live outside of the cities and sit in nature and not have to toil any longer, were able to come up with what he calls a lyrical poetry. This is poetry that we probably, most of us assume as what poetry means, right? Kind of florid, uh, affective poetry, poetry that speaks to the soul, speaks to, you know, feelings and such. This begins to separate because then the people who are in the cities, people who are, uh, or people who are working the, the earth in the feudal system, uh, and then eventually people that are stuck in the cities are not able to connect to nature any longer, and therefore there's this split that starts to happen

between how poetry is written and used. And he argues that in the latter setting, when people are in the cities, they're not able to connect or understand or be able to dissect the older poetries that were kind of florid and written by people of higher classes, right, or people of, you know, landlords, feudal lords, these kinds of things. And so then they start to write poetry that is disconnected from that or are trying to imitate that without any kind of critical thought to it. And he says that this is incredibly damaging because if you're just imitating other class as poetry, you're also unconsciously absorbing other values that they have that would be

antithetical to a person who is not a landlord or not a feudal lord or a boss or a manager or whatever. And so this is what he starts to pull apart and talk about in a historical way in this first chapter. What is proletarian poetry? Yeah, excellent. That was a great overview. And there's a lot more that I would like to say on that and we'll have a chance to later in our conversation. So if we don't have time for it in this section, we'll put it towards the end of the interview and we'll get to it there. So chapter two then is on artistic heritage. And I think that we covered this point relatively extensively already. I mean, not nearly as much as Book Danav does in his chapter, but is there anything that you want to add on this, Taylor, before we move on to chapter three,

Is there anything that really would be essential for the listeners to understand about Bogdano's view of artistic heritage? Just to clarify that before we get on to the critique. Yeah, I'll just repeat myself or say what I've said already in a different fashion, just so people see the continuity at this point. But unartistic heritage is really where he tackles this idea that all artistic works are the heritage of humankind as a race versus art being kind of this high-brow way of thinking and being able to access and utilize. But in order to have that be a common heritage of humankind, there needs to be a critical lens that is administered to past art so that like the working class specifically is able to incorporate the really good,

artistically good elements of past artistic movements, but be able to parse that from the values and the um i guess the the the the even the political economy that goes into uh different classes poetry and art uh yeah in the last section of the book is critique of the proletarian art uh so what should be should we be critiquing actually and how should we um yeah should we approach it so this last chapter is probably the most controversial uh it's the the the the chapter that probably sent Lenin into a fit of rage and sends many of us, myself included even many parts of his argument, into fits of rage as well. But I think it's important to read because there's a lot of really good points that he makes.

And it's good to have kind of this well-rounded idea of what people were talking about then and how it connects to today. when he's talking about critique of proletarian culture, this is where he goes in and he gives a method of how this can be done. And he does this by actually critiquing worker poetry. He does this throughout the whole book, but in this last section he really starts to focus on it. In one section, he takes one worker's poetry, he takes three of his poems over the course of a period of time

to show exactly how, using critique and gaining class consciousness will actually change the poetry and will, and tries to show that material conditions can actually change artistic outcomes. And he does a really good job of doing that, actually, by following some of these workers' poetry over periods of time, where they go from kind of imitating peasant poetry, as he calls it, or the poetry of the people who lived outside of the cities but weren't landlords, right? And how that is imitated at first, even though this person came from the city. And then as they're going through revolutionary education and revolutionary thought process,

the poetry changes to become what he argues is proletarian poetry. But in order to do this, he says and shows that people need to critique all of these great, works of art. But Donov was very, very interested and loved Shakespeare's Hamlet. He talks about Hamlet and so many of his writings. He's like a Hamlet fanboy, so much so that, in fact, one of the, one of his great English language biographies is called Red Hamlet that was written by James White, I believe. It's a really great biography of Bogdanov, but he really was this, he was obsessive about

about Hamlet. He loved it. And in this book, he uses the play, Shakespeare's play of Hamlet to talk about how one can critique this from a proletarian point of view. I won't go into the details too much with this because it would be great to go and read it for yourself. And you can see how deeply he pulls apart a work of art that was deeply entrenched in aristocracy and deeply had deep affinity with aristocratic thought, but still held proletarian points of view. And so he does this here. He also, quite controversially in this chapter, begins to rip apart all contemporary artists that happen to be writing in this time, which I disagree with.

And others, I think, would also disagree with. And that point especially is quite interesting to read. We'll definitely talk about that in a little bit. bit. I know that Sophie has a million things that she wants to say about that section, but before we do, I just want to nail down a little bit of an example of this critique of proletarian art and proletarian poetry from Section 1. By giving an example, and perhaps you can help me, you know, remember this example. But he took an example of, I believe, a worker who was starting to write poetry. And he, in his writings, was focusing on himself at the beginning

as an individual, right? And then he was writing about trees, individual trees. And then he sees this transformation of this individual as a proletarian artist where he stopped seeing the trees as individuals and more as members of a collective forest. It was a very interesting analysis of this. And he was attributing it to the person's rising class consciousness, essentially. I mean, he didn't come out and just explicitly stated as simply as I did. But essentially that what he was pulling it is that by developing this class consciousness, we can integrate ideas of collaboration, of, you know, communalization into art in a way that we still are able to maintain beauty. And he, I mean, he flat outside that this artist was not a very skilled poet. I do

remember that. He's like, this guy is an amateur. But look at this development here. Look at how he's gaining this class consciousness. So it was very interesting that he was diving into his specific examples and looking diachronically. So over time, over the course of this artist's quote unquote life, as the person was looking more on an individual basis within their poetry and was claiming that this is antithetical proletarian poetry. This is not proletarian art. And then as time goes on seeing it from more of a communalistic perspective and seeing it as more of a member of a community, that that is proletarian art. And that's what we should be trying to foster. Is there anything that you can add on that or any other examples? Because that was just the one that popped

into my head because it was kind of, I mean, it was kind of funny in honesty, the level to which he dissects this and was like, no, you cannot talk about individual trees. It's only trees of a forest that you should be talking about. Yeah. No, that's a great example. That's probably one of my favorites, too, just because, number one, he highlights an amateur poet's poetry, right? This is, this is a man, Bogdanov is, at this point in time, as he's writing this, is kind of at the height of his popularity. As we talked about, he and Lenin were really budding heads, and part of that reason is because Bogdanov was gaining so many supporters in this kind of cohort of 1970. revolutionaries. So many people, including many of Lenin's close kind of comrades,

Bukharian and Max Gorki, these folks who also held these high cultural positions, agreed with and defended Bogdanov against Lenin. So there was, he was kind of this big figure in the cultural scene. And he pulled these kind of unknown worker poets and displayed, there are even if he was critiquing them and perhaps was a little bit gruff in his critique you know as saying you know this needs a lot of work but you know here here's something this but even just publishing their work is kind of in this context quite generous of somebody to rather than just saying this person is doing you know garbage and without publishing the actual work. But he was very, so back to the idea of looking at forests or kind of being

floored with your poetry, but still having class character, he also really writes about how he dislikes and it's actually a detriment to poetry to only focus on revolutionary poetry, only focus on the struggle, only focus on military themes. He says at one point, like, there's hundreds of these poems that drown out other good poetry because everybody is only talking about this. He does argue and show that when a class consciousness rises in a revolutionary setting, this is naturally going to occur because there is nothing that they can fall back on. But there really needs to be these juts, these attacks into showing all of life. He really argues that poetry is about every aspect of life. It cannot only be the revolution

that you're writing about and that the artist needs to have the freedom to both write what they write or create, what they want to within their whole life and also to not be, on the other end, to not be restricted to only writing or creating in political, you know, explicit political context, what he calls civic poetry. So, yeah, this is, that, that was a great example of showing that these kinds of revolutionary class consciousness can arise in lyrical, florid poetry. Yeah, and as you mentioned, there's something of a, you know, looking at a tendency towards either beauty or violence within poetry and how he's saying that we need to focus more on

beauty. I have something that I want to say on that, but I'm going to hold it for later because I want transition us into the next part of this interview. So as we mentioned at the top, this is a more than 100-year-old work that has now been translated into English for the first time, thanks to you. I'm going to step back for the next couple minutes and let Safi ask a question or two or however many you want because, I mean, after all, I have a Russian linguist sitting next to me. It would be a shame to not utilize. But not a translator, though. Yes, well, it would be a shame to not utilize her talents in this field to ask some questions that are much more incisive than I could

possibly hope to within this field. Okay, then I'm going to have to apologize for the very rudimentary question that I'm going to ask after this introduction. I'm not going to ask whether this piece was hard to translate because really, I think it was, but rather, what are the most challenging aspects of the translation? Were there any parts that made you want to tear her out or something because that that happened to me a lot and I know well you know I've translated things or I've attempted to translate some things that were really really a piece of cake in terms of understanding and reading but as soon as you try to translate it it's impossible and yeah that's that's my question yeah uh the short answer is yes I did want to tear my hair out many times

And there were, I pragmatically what I did was I had to house sit for my family. And what I ended up doing over the course of about three weeks, I think, of house sitting with them is this is, that's all I did for about 12, 14 hours a day, seven days for three weeks, just translating this because I wanted to try and get as much as I could get done over the summer. since I'm a PhD student, I have a little bit extra time in the summer because I only work about half time then. And so I was really just cramming to try and get this done. And it's exactly that right. And I should also say that I am not an expert Russian speaker. In fact, I can read and write Russian a lot easier than I can speak it because I taught myself Russian over the big, I had learned it over a period of time, but the real bulk of my learning came when COVID hit when I could spend a lot of time at home kind of trying to teach myself.

I mean, it wasn't really teaching myself either, right? That's eliminating the labor of all the people on YouTube that I've watched and that sort of thing. But anyway, the alphabet, people who are not familiar with Russian linguistics, the Russian alphabet, was actually changed by the Soviet leadership to simplify it. And they did an excellent job of doing that. As somebody who's first language wasn't Russian, learning the way Russian is written now is much easier than the Russian alphabet that Bogdanov used to write this because it hadn't been the time when the alphabet was simplified, extraneous characters were

eliminated and combined with other ones to make it easier for the Soviet program of literacy to take place, right? They, you know, literacy skyrocketed after the Soviets took over because this was one of their chief political platforms, right? Was to have everyone learn to renew, right? But so one of the biggest hurdles was me having to then go back and learn with all of these other crazy characters that were in his work, what those sounds were, how they then tied into those, the words that he was writing. And so then some certain words I just had to like relearn in this old, the old alphabet. And so that was incredibly difficult. The other difficult part was he drops, as you'll see in this text, so many references.

to so many people, some of them I had no idea what he was talking about. And so then that required a lot of side research, right? So he would just drop this guy Fet, as you will see in Fet's poetry. And then that's all he says. I had no idea who Fet was when I was translating this. So then I had to kind of stop translation, move over to research mode, dig up and find out who Fet was, what he was creating, you know, the kinds of art that he was creating, what people were saying about him then, what then people were saying about that artist in the time that Bogdanov was writing. And so it creates these a little tangential difficulties as you're trying to translate these these texts that were written for people in that time that would have had all of these

kind of cultural touchstones to be able to understand. You mentioned all those extraneous characters and it reminds me of some of the museums that we've been going to here in Kazan and every time we see some of the old cultural artifacts, she's pointing out, oh yeah, that's an extraneous character, that's an extraneous character.

This one is eliminated, that one is eliminated and it has, oh my, I don't know how, you know, somebody who even knows modern Russian would be able to read old Russian because it's so different. I mean, it wasn't that hard. I just started a little bit of Old Slavic.

It's not that hard. You just have to know old Slavic. Oh, okay. Thank you very much for that. I mean, just in comparison, that's what I, that's all I'm saying. Right. Yeah. So now that we know that the secret to doing it, a good translation, is looking at old Slavic,

Sifie, why don't I just let you continue talking about translation and asking very, very smart questions about translation? Oh, you should see the look that she's giving me listeners. Okay, so my next question is about the transliteration that he went for in the book. Do I have to explain what transliteration is? Go for it. A lot of our listeners are going to be unaware. Yeah.

So transliterating something is just spelling it in a different alphabet. So instead of making the readers rely just on your translation, you also provide them with, yeah, with those transliterated um words which is to say the way that the words sound in russian but written in latin characters so the alphabet that you listeners non-russian speaking listeners are familiar with but the way that the words sound in russian that's what she's talking about yeah in uh those words and expressions that you do transliterate um are usually like very very russian uh so like uh time of troubles right Yeah. So I found those really useful and helpful because it was a real experience for me reading the book in English, being a Russian. And the book was written by a Russian person. So why did you decide to go with them? Yeah, that's a great question. I wanted to write this book in the spirit of Bogdanov's, his real ethos of political education.

And in that spirit of education, I wanted to give as much detail as I could. And in that case, particularly in my introduction, when I was quoting Bogdanov specifically in my introduction in documents or books or pamphlets that have yet to be translated into English, I wanted to give the transliteration number one so that those that do speak Russian can, at me about how terrible my translations are, to also just enter that into the discourse, right? Allow people to not have to go back, search out the quotes for someone who maybe only knows Russian a little bit or even people that do know Russian to not have to go back, have this mind switch to another language, try and find the quote, then switch back into English and

continue on, rather to give the transliterations so that you can say it out loud and then be able to know what he was saying, debate whether what he was saying was how I translated it, or just to be able to learn some Russian. I mean, how I started learning Russian was reading Russian studies texts that had transliterations and so that I can start to, you know, peg what certain words meant how they were pronounced, et cetera. I used, I tried to use a standard of a, there is kind of like an English standard way of writing transliteration that is like a modern way of doing it. I tweaked it a couple of times to have the certain words be pronounced for the way that most American English people would say the word. If they sounded it out, it would kind of come out the way it would come out

in Russian. Of course, transliteration is not perfect at all. And if you only say what it's transliterated, you would probably not be able to get the exact pronunciation, but it gives you a good start to learn. But then again, even if you know the letters in Russian, you can't always pronounce it right anyway, like in my case. And she always laughs at me when I try to say Chornaya, because, you know, you always want to say Cher because of the letter that's there. But Of course, Russian. Oh, fit, that one, Russian author. Yeah.

Actually, he wasn't fit. He was foot. But, yeah, see, so, I mean. But, no, no, like, very few Russians know about it. So. Nobody knows Russian. This is the moral of the start. Nobody knows Russian, and we're all fools for trying.

Do you have anything else? And remember, remember, Russia is enormous, right, for listeners. And regional dialects exist within Russian the same way they do in every language. And so people who may be from, you know, the far east may argue something different. Just keep in mind that their dialects exists and those kinds of things will be debated. Yeah, thanks. You know, I would even dare say that those transliterations made your translation much more nuanced than it would have been without them. Because in some cases, it actually matters what do you have in those parentheses,

like a Bogdanovism and Leninism, right? In English, they kind of sound neutral, like both of them. Well, for this audience. Yeah, for most people, when they hear Leninism, it's not exactly neutral. But yes, for the guerrilla history audience, Leninism is seen very at least neutrally. Yeah, but the transliterated word is Bogdanovshina. And the ending is very, very derogatory. So that's how you understand, yeah, how Lenin looked at it.

And it wasn't just bigdanivism, just like Leninism. So that was what I wanted to point out. No, that's great. That's awesome because those little cues are really great for people that do know the language, right? Because Leninism is Leninism versus, you know, it isn't Bogdanovism. that that is the Russian word for it, right? It was this kind of pointed, pointed but subtle attack that Bogdanov's thoughts were lesser than what in Lenin's opinion was his kind of philosophies.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, very interesting, but I'm going to get out of the translation section now so that I actually have something constructive and productive to contribute because that was not my field. But you mentioned both of you that this term that roughly would be equivalent to Bogdanovism in English is derogatory. And this is something that you pointed out for me, Safi. Can we just go back basically to where the conversation started?

And this is where we'll get a little bit deeper, a little bit more ideological, because the audience here is a very ideological audience. And then we can even start talking about personal opinions and things like that in this section of the interview. Why, what was this falling out that Lenin and Bogdanov had? Because as you mentioned, back in like 1897, Bogdanov was writing economic pieces that Lenin was praising. You know, it was very fond of them. And at the turn of the century, Lenin and Bogdanov were like the two leading lights within the Bolshevik faction of the Russian worker social democratic party. but very shortly thereafter there was really a falling out we alluded to this earlier i'm not saying

that we didn't talk about it but can we dive in a little bit deeper as to what these ideological rifts were between lenin and bogdanum because i think that that'll be both interesting for the audience and it might also set us up for some follow-ups and more discussion of the content of this book and the historical situation in which it was released yeah this is so it's important to remember, as you said, Bogdanov was Lenin, pretty much one of Lenin's only defenders

early on. He was one of, he was, you could make the argument, he was the second Bolshevik ever, right? He founded the Bolshevik faction with Lenin. During a time when, for those that know this history,

that Julius Martoff was really just kind of hurling every insult and attack he possibly could against Lenin. And Lenin was really outnumbered by almost everyone in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party except for Bogdanov and a few other of his associates. But Bogdanov was this kind of educational and political force to be reckoned with who came to Lenin's kind of aid and defended him against all of these attacks.

they founded the Bolshevik faction. Then Bogdanov participated in the 1905 Russian Revolution. He was present in St. Petersburg, what was then St. Petersburg? He wrote, or he edited two Bolshevik aligned newspapers. He wrote tactical leaflets akin to like Che Guevara's guerrilla warfare book that kind of gave these pragmatic ways of how to build blockades, how to, you know, flank people in cities, these kinds of things. He wrote a lot of adjutop during that revolution. And then he was arrested along with everyone else at the kind of counter revolution that came down after that.

And then it was around that same time that while Bogdanov was imprisoned, that he came across imperial criticism. And this is where a lot of people are going to understand the rift, now between Lenin and Bogdanov. Bogdanov found it quite compelling this theory of imperial criticism that he tried to merge it with Marxist historical materialism to create a new philosophy, a way of thinking that he called imperial monism, a monist holistic way of thinking, in which everything was kind of interconnected. His ideas, he eventually been refined into this theory that he named tectology, he wrote

an entire book on it. And technology actually is one of the earliest instances of human thought in what we call modern systems theory, in what we call cybernetics. Bogdanov was thinking about this kind of stuff early in the 1900s. Lenin, however, was horrified by Bogdanov's ideas on imperial monism. Many people will be quite familiar with Lennon's book against Bogdanov. But quite interestingly, that book is sometimes not, people don't really know who Bogdanov is, even if they have read Lenin's kind of screed against him.

But this is where the rift starts to happen. And both of these men were intellectual powerhouses. they were both, in my estimation, had enormous egos. They probably both wouldn't have been very nice human beings to be around, but they contributed these excellent ways of thinking and interacting with the world. They were just slightly different ways of interacting. But Donov really wanted to try and create a holistic way of looking at the world. And Lenin really wanted to dive into how to change the systems,

that were currently in. So it was kind of this big, you know, micro macro way of thinking about things where if it wasn't such a dire revolutionary point in time, perhaps the falling out wouldn't have been as ugly and violent as it had been. Yeah, you mentioned that they wouldn't have been very nice to be around. I think that that's fairly safe to say, unless you were, you know, a child or a cat in the case of Lenin, because he was noted for being extremely kind with children and extremely fond of cats. So if you were one of those two groups, maybe Lenin would be the guy to be around,

but, you know, there's enough screeds of Lenin against basically everyone and everything around him that, you know, if you weren't a child or a cat, you may have wanted to keep your distance. Sophia, I'm going to pitch this to you because, you know, before having read this book, I had only experienced Bogdanov, more or less in passing. I had seen him referenced a little bit

in histories of the Soviet Union, histories of the Russian Revolution, where he was fairly prominent within kind of the preambulatory phases of the revolution, you know, as we were talking early on, turn of the century, turn of the, of the 20th century, where he was one of the two leading lights within the Bolshevik Party. I'd see him mentioned there, but, you know, as time went on, he became less and less and less mentioned in these works that I had seen, and I had never really, I guess, either never had come across or never had bothered to go out of my way and look up, book down of previously,

until reading this book. I'm curious what your experience with Bogdanov was. Were you particularly aware of him? Was he taught in any of your courses here as a Russian? Well, first of all, I'd like to say that I totally go along with what I just said. Like, I only experienced him in passing to you, despite completing a couple of courses in Russian history. Sure, I'm not an expert.

But when I think Lenin, I don't think Bigdanov, yeah, standing. right next to him. That's just something that doesn't happen. Yeah. So I would, I'm wondering whether it be fair to say that he was kind of raised from history. And if so, then why? As you, as you called him, you know, was it the second Bolshevik? That's, that's what I'd like to ask. Yeah, that's great. I think that it is fair to say just because so many people are unfamiliar with him that he was erased. I want to be cautious about the word erased, of course, because this is levied against anti-communists for absolutely everything when it's actually quite a misunderstood way of communicating. And maybe this is for a future episode. but the idea of being erased from photographs wasn't like Russians were idiots and didn't know

that these people never existed. It was a way of communicating to the public who were in power and who weren't in power. It was just a communicative device, right? This is, it wasn't a kind of evil instant anyway. We can go on a tangent about that later. But because Bogdanov was so antagonistic against Lenin. And as the Soviet Union was evolving and grounding itself in Leninism, because remember early on in the revolution, Leninism wasn't the thought process. That's the other thing that I'm really trying to bring it into clarity is that there were a lot of figures who had a lot of different ideas.

A lot of them agreed and disagreed with each other. But as the Soviet Union began to evolve, particularly throughout the 20s, 30s and onwards, Leninism, and then Stalin's articulation of Marxism, Leninism, began to kind of codify within the Soviet Union as the ideological base. And as this happened, of course, you cannot have people who were antagonistic against the base of your political ideological project be included in it. That said, Stalin himself asked Bogdanov to rejoin the Communist Party and take a leadership role after Lenin's death. So even the people who were in the kind of upper strata of the Soviet Union understood Bogdanov's strengths, even though he had all of this past with Lenin. But when you go to like the statewide ideological hegemony idea of who can be included, who must be.

excluded, but Donov falls into those that must be excluded just because he had so many antagonistic ideas against Leninism and Lenin as a man, right? As a person, Bogdanov hated him. And it was reciprocally felt by Lenin as well. What I want to do now is I want to kind of focus back in on the contents of the book, but with more of our personal feelings and reflections turned on them. That's not to say that we're smarter than Bogdanov or that we're smarter than Lenin or that, you know, the hindsight that we have now makes us a much better position to see whether the approaches that are championed within this book would be relevant or not. But I think that it would be interesting for the three of us coming from different backgrounds

and, you know, somewhat similar but still disparate perspectives to opine a little bit on the things that are said in the book because much of what Bogdanov says in the book, if not everything that he says, is put very bluntly, very matter-of-factly as if this is what is correct. This is what it should be done. And I think that there's a lot of places where, you know, if perhaps if he had left a little of wiggle room in there, that might have been a little bit easier to receive, like, you know, this might be something that we should look at, not this is the way. But yeah, so I want to turn over to one of the things that we had mentioned previously, but that I'm curious of your take on because it's something that was just rattling around in the back of my mind as kind of a thought

without really any sort of firmness behind it. So this would be the tendency towards either beauty or violence within the way that art is moving at a current current period of time. You mentioned that much of the poetry and whatnot at the time, including art, was very violent in nature. it was looking at, you know, violently tearing down the bourgeoisie. It was violently getting rid of these individual bourgeois members of society, war. It was a common theme. And but then throughout this, I mean, several points in the book very firmly calls for, we need to make art more beautiful and try to not focus so much on violence.

And you brought this up earlier because he felt that only focusing on violence, was not a successful tactic in terms of developing sort of a proletarian culture and a proletarian ideology. But I almost feel that this is much more difficult than he's kind of leading on because we have to understand capitalism as a violent process in itself. You know, it's easy for members of the landlord classes, he pointed out in the book, to go out into their dachas in the countryside and look at the beautiful rainbows and the singing birds in the forest on the lakes that they have their nice property on while the masses are being exploited, you know, being maimed by industrial technology, having fingers taken off in machines

and then being told, I rub some dirt and get back on the line because we have profits to make. Of course, keeping in mind that this was mostly a peasant society at this time, it wasn't, you know, mass production as the norm. But what I'm kind of driving towards is that we have to understand that capitalism, particularly this kind of egregious capitalism that was prevalent at the turn of the 20th century in Russia, is a violent process against the proletariat and against the peasantry. It's not like, of course, there was imperialist wars going on at the time, including World War I. You know, there were wars going on. But just the daily existence was a form of violence against these workers. and to expect the workers to kind of transcend that ingrained violence and to be looking for

beauty in their art, I think is kind of missing the point of what the daily experience of these people are like and what that's doing psychologically to them. You could, of course, bring in people like France Fanon into how people's psyche is affected by, you know, Fanon was talking about colonialism, but let's just talk about capitalism more generally. So like I said, it's not really a question and it's hardly a firm thought, but while I was thinking about this, point that he was making it just hit me he's always trying to focus on trying to go more towards beauty and away from depictions of violence whereas the violence is being perpetuated on the proletariat and the peasantry every day under capitalism and particularly under forms of you know

psychotic capitalism that we were facing in russia at the time i don't know if you have any thoughts on that or not taylor yeah um no that's a great point he does stress this quite a bit of wanting to not always focus on the violence or focus on war. However, he does say that he does not also want poetry to only be what he says sparkling. And I like that he uses this word, right? That it has to only focus on that which is beautiful or that which is, you know, harmonious. In fact, he has a really nice section in there in which he kind of tears into the people that say that poetry needs to only be this kind of beautiful, florid way of writing. He says, you know, what was so great and sparkling about the German imperialists that marched into the Baltics and slaughtered our comrades in Ukraine and in the Baltic states and in Poland, right?

He explicitly says that it can't just be that. It can't be one or the other. What he really had an issue with is the poetry's move towards, he calls it militarism, but what he really means is this kind of focus on the individual. And he was seeing a tendency in a lot of early revolutionary art and poetry in which there was a targeting of individuals to go to your landlord's house

and rip out their intestines. And there were plenty of poetry that was very violent in this fashion. He was cautioning against focusing on the individual. He was really wanting people to remember and pay attention to the fact that this is a class struggle, that we are not against individual

members of the bourgeoisie, we are against the system that puts them in a position of power that allows them to lord over the proletariat. And so while we do need to tear out their intestines, we don't want to glorify the fact that we should be targeting individuals. Rather, keep your eye on the revolutionary discipline, right? We need to focus on that class, go after the class, smash, destroy, you know, bloody capitalism. But let's not get too deep into a terrorist mindset. And in this way, he agrees with Lenin in Lenin's critiques of, you know, terror and Lenin's critiques of the left socialist revolutionaries, which Bogdanov also disapproves of their tactics of assassination and tactics of wanton violence, right? And so the,

He tries to tread a line, and perhaps he doesn't do it as effectively as he could, right? That was more or less what I was trying to allude to. I know that for people that didn't read the book, what I said could have been misconstrued as me saying that he didn't focus on the fact that there is a place for violence in art. And, of course, there needs to be violence for revolution to happen. He's not some, you know, crazy utopian, although he was accused of being a utopian by Lenin, many others, but he wasn't discounting the necessity of violence at any stage. All I was trying to get to, and listeners, when this comes out, which when you hear this,

it'll be right around the time that it comes out, you should check it out because the PDF is free and the books are going to be really cheap. Read through it, and I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying that I'm right and Book Danone was wrong, but the impression that I got was that he really was trying to push farther away from violence without considering the violence inherent within the system. He understands that violence is necessary to overturn the system, but I think that he's failing to account for, at least in the way that this was written, right? I'm not saying that again, I'm not as familiar with Bogdano's thought, perhaps in other places. He writes more extensively on this. But in this particular writing,

it seems like that kind of component of it, the violence of the system, was sort of lost in, you know, there was just a lapse there and that by discounting that he does himself a bit of a disservice uh of course i also agree we need more beauty in the world but uh we have to understand the conditions that we're operating under um taylor if you have anything that you want to follow up on that otherwise i'll turn it over to sophie for for the next point no that's that's that's great i and i agree with you as well i just wanted to to throw some of mcdonov's words in there before we tear him down absolutely absolutely i knew that you were on page with me but i the listeners really get this book and read it and let me know what you think um sophie as you were reading this book

multiple times you would come up to me and be ready to tear my hair out uh such as it is for things that book then have had written in this book and i'm going to give you a platform to critique them i will just say critique them so perhaps where do you do you want to start with your thoughts about this book and some of the points that were made within it? Just give us one. So Taylor has a chance to also reflect on this. Well, all of it was in the third section, right? So critique of the proletarian art. I don't know. You were complaining in the first section, too. I was complaining in all of the sections. But I think I was frowning the most in the third section, I'd have to stop every couple minutes to calm down because, yeah, for some

reason, McDonov was really, really keen on just attacking my favorite artists, my all-time favorites. And, well, it's really hard for me to stay impartial. Name a few of them. The listeners might be familiar with them. Yeah. Alexander Block, yeah, he was a symbolist, one of the most famous symbolists. within the Russian symbolist movement, for sure, then, well, Mayakovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky. They're very different, but I love both.

I'd say that Bogdanov starts his offensive against both of them, and he just picks on them. I don't know. Yeah, so he writes here, it is necessary to study those who are mutually coherent. an artistically stable. Sorry, that's my handwriting. And not those who come and go, like the Andres, the Beaumonts, the blocks, end quote. So just as an aside, before I let you rant a little bit more,

remember that Bogdanov in this book was talking about how we should not be throwing anything out and we should be trying to take the beauty from different phases of history. You know, this was bourgeois art. For sure, this was a period where the bourgeois reigns, supreme but we can find very beautiful things artistically within here and we should try to you know kind of assimilate some of those things within our proletarian culture as we build it but then as sophie mentioned when he raises these specific artists it really sounded like you know throw their works

overboard into the deep of the sea and might as well throw the you know the the the corpses of these writers out with it as well you know like it was very very negative uh feel free to continue Well, that was an unconscious reference that you just made to the slap in the face of common taste, which you also mentioned. It wasn't that unconscious. We did talk about it. Yeah, which you Taylor also mentioned in the note section. Yeah. Well, you know, when I explain what the slap in the face of common taste is. Right. So it was the futurist manifesto, right, in Russia, because the original futurist manifesto was published in it. by an Italian guy whose name pulling a blank on.

It's Marianne Miller or something along those lines. Yeah, correct me if I'm terribly wrong. Taylor's nodding and giving you the thumbs up. Yeah, okay. And, well, what they did, those futurists in this manifesto, they just stated what they were advocating and what they perceived as art. And the rest was just bashing, yeah, all the old artists.

And in one section of it, they say, just take Pushkin Tolstoy and all of those old writers and throw them overboard because they're not needed anymore. And the 15-year-old me was like, yeah, sure, go for it. Like, I like Maya Kovsky, we don't need them. But then I reread some of my, the most notable works of Pushkin and, you know, a couple times. And there was no, please let him stay on the ship. They're important. Yeah, that was a shift in my understanding of this art, too.

It wasn't that unconscious that I mentioned throwing them overboard. See, I do my background research for this show, believe it or not. Taylor, any reflections that you want to make on that before? I'm sure she'll have something else to complain about very soon. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. This is the point of contention that I agree with as well. Before I bash him, I will say his justification for why these contemporary artists should be ignored. It's actually the same as Lenin's analysis, which is that these artists were working within a system that was already in degenerate.

degenerating in that they were operating within the bourgeois world as it was dying and therefore their art was speaking to decadence right this is a word that both Bogdanov and Lenin used to describe the symbolists the futurists all of the people who were kind of the contemporary forerunners of what would have been then modern art right modern Russian art so with that out of the way I do think he's also wrong, right? He, you know, Bogdanov, he was. He was venomous with the way he talked about this, right? He describes Miyakovsky as a show-off intellectual advertiser.

That's how he describes the brilliance of Miyakovsky's art, right? And, you know, maybe part of this is also because Mayakovsky admired Lenin. He, my, many of Miyakovsky's artwork, people are probably incredibly familiar with, even if you don't know who Miyakovsky is because he created all of the iconic, basically all of the iconic artwork of Lenin, yeah, that if you could see, if the listeners could see are displayed behind Henry and Sophie right now. But those artworks were created by Miyakovsky. So maybe this also had to do a little bit with the fact that, you know,

Miyakovsky was an admirer of Lenin, and this was at the height of Lenin and Bogdanov's arguments. But yeah, so he saw all of these movements as being wrapped up within a degenerative, decadent style that didn't speak to the working class because it was in decline in a bourgeois worldview. That said, I mean, most Russians disagreed with both Lenin and Bogdanov in this case. Mayakovsky's public funeral was the third largest in Soviet history, only topped by that of Lenin and Stalin. He was loved by and communicated to the working class of the Soviet Union. So, and the same goes for most of the other symbolists, right, Balmont Block. These are, these are other poets and artists who people might be familiar with. I think the 12 is the most

famous block poem, um, in which he kind of, uh, provocatively writes, uh, kind of the, uh, 12 apostles of Jesus as Soviet, uh, Soviet soldiers. Um, uh, so, you know, that this kind of playful, uh, combination of old and new, uh, was something that both Lenin and Bogdanov didn't, didn't really like that much, but was really connected to and used as revolutionary fuel for the working classes, uh, during that time. even if kind of the intellectuals in the party that being Lenin and Bogdanov didn't like them very much. One point to make of the futurists specifically is that some of their pointed critiques really did speak well and truthfully in that, you know, the futurists in Italy became the cultural powerhouses of fascism, right? the idea that nothing old was good and everything new was powerful and needed to be in place

was used by Mussolini and the fascists in order to justify the rise of fascism right and so the futurist movement had this not that all futurism is like this right there was a split between kind of so you could describe as left and right futurists right but so futurism had this component that was built into it of hating and despising the old. You know, a lot of futurist art was about burning museums to the ground. And, you know, as you said, throw all of that work overboard. And only the new and beautiful and shiny should exist. And you can see how this can be morphed into a fascist ideology. Right. So there is some, we need to parse and pick apart these arguments between these folks and then be able to use what's good

and in the spirit of the futurist chuck away that, which is not. Yeah, in all fairness, I wasn't a huge fan of the futurists are either, but, you know, yeah, when Bogdanov starts laying out what symbols are in poetry and in art more generally, and this is just a more general. I mean, it's just my personal complaint. He didn't even take any of Block's poems. Like, why? Because he was a symbolist.

And his symbols are so good. I don't know. In the afterlife, I hope that Bogdanov can hear me. And he should read Block a bit more deeply than he did. Yeah, that's just something to throw. out there. Yeah, you know, I mean, Bogdanov's idea of what a symbol is even.

He defines symbol, I think, in order to not, in order to reject any of the symbolists. All right. It's a very pragmatic way. He says a symbol must relate to a concrete idea.

And therefore, if it doesn't, it's going to confuse people. So he uses like the idea of a ghost, right? If a ghost doesn't act the way that most people think ghosts act, even though it's a symbol, then it fails. And of course, this writes out a lot of imaginative poetry and art, right? If you define things as needing to be very pragmatic and practical. And perhaps he did this just so he could, you know, shit on all the symbolists, basically, right? Yeah. So,

we're going to start wrapping this up, but I want to go around the horn one more time. This just kind of struck me that it would be interesting to do this. So I'll do mine first since I haven't given you any notice that this is what was coming. I want to hear what everybody thinks was either the best or the most useful point of this book. Because I think whether or not you agree or disagree with most of the book, and Sophia is shaking her head at me, whether you agree or disagree with most of the points, this is still a very useful book. I found a lot of the points in it really useful. And now, Sophia's nodding. So you can tell she also agrees with this point.

It's a podcast. Of course. That's why I'm having to narrate. So I want to hear what everybody thinks is the most useful thing from this book, as well as perhaps, if you can, the thing that really rustled you the most. Like, what was the thing that you either disagree with the most or found particularly just wrong? And I know, Sophie, you just complained about a couple of things. but if you can just narrow it down to one or perhaps something that you didn't even raise yet. So I'll start with mine since this is just something that hit me first.

I think that the thing that I found quite useful was an example in this book, which was an analogy that he made with regards to free thinkers. And Taylor, he had a very good footnote on how we should think of free thinkers. He's not talking about the weird new age atheist movement from like 2005 to 2008 or whatever it was. These are people that actually were legitimate free thinkers and were trying to take as much as they could from different religious movements to further their understanding of the world. I thought that this was quite an interesting point that he was making in the book, which is if you go in without being outright skeptical of a, a specific movement or a specific tendency, a specific ideology, a specific religion, etc, et cetera, et cetera, a specific form of art.

If you don't go in with that preconceived skepticism or that preconceived notion of like, ah, this is garbage, you'll much more likely to be able to pick out pieces that we can be used in a constructive way of understanding the world. And as Bognav points out in the book, art is a form of understanding the world. That is what we have to understand first and foremost is that art, well, you know, many people think of it as just a form of beauty. It is a way for us to further our understanding of the real world. And by going in with an open mind with being a true free thinker, not Stephen Pinker or, you know,

whoever, go in with an open mind, take that art in, look at it, process it, even art that at the face of it, you don't like, and look for redeeming qualities of it. think of why those are redeeming qualities. And the reason that he brought up religious rethinkers is he said, you know, somebody who is an atheist is just going to discount any religion. But even somebody who is a Catholic, for example, who looks at Buddhist traditions is not going to be able to see some of the inherent teachings of Buddhist tradition

in a way of understanding the real world as somebody who is a free thinker. You can think of it as like an agnostic person who's very open to the ideas from different religions, that person is going to pick up a lot more of the nuance of those religious teachings and what they say about the real world than somebody who has a preconceived notion of this religion is right. We can think of it as this ideology is right, this form of art is right, whatever. If you go in with that truly open mind, you really can start to extract more true lessons from something. You can understand the world in a better way. And by doing that and by seeing what are the useful parts of things, we can kind of construct a new form of art or advance art in a way that both is more reflective of the real world, both under capitalism as well as hopefully under socialism and communism in the future, and is representative of what people's experiences were like in those times, as well as just to help people understand the real world in a more comprehensive and nuanced way while using beautiful images to really.

do that. I thought that this was quite interesting. I really liked the example of the religious people, you know, free thinkers versus people who were atheists just rejecting everything out of hand versus people who had already, you know, selected religion themselves that just had these, because they had selected a religion, they were kind of biased against certain things, just inherently, even if they were trying. I thought that was quite useful. But if I was going to look at what I thought was the least useful thing is that. Taylor, feel free to jump in. Just a quick, I just wanted to interject, because I really liked his phrase for an atheist. He calls atheist believers in reverse. Yes. It was actually a phrase in Russian that I had, I really wanted to make sure I nailed down

because he puts it in quotes. And so he's really trying to like stress that. And so I thought that was like an interesting framing for someone who's a revolutionary. right? That's like a, that we think of like the Soviet Union as being so anti-religious, but he was in an atheist state, right? This is like the Cold War propaganda. But, you know, one of its chief thinkers is calling atheists believers in reverse that they're the same as believers, but just, you know, so I just wanted to throw that little, uh, worried out because I really liked the way he described them. Absolutely. I mean, I also really enjoyed that. I just couldn't remember exactly what it was off the top of my head because like I said, this question came

up like in the last five minutes in my head. But the thing that I found that was the most off-putting is kind of two related things. And we've already discussed it. So I'll be more brief on this point. The fact that he wants to basically look through previous art, extract the most beautiful things from it, and then just use that to create this new art without understanding the context in which those previous pieces of art were really created in. I mean, he really was trying, at least my reading of it. And Taylor, you were the one who was going through the source

material. So feel free to let me know if I'm misunderstanding this. But to me, it almost read like he was trying to take what was nice about previous art, bourgeois art from the past during feudal societies, during capitalist societies, et cetera, slave societies, and just trying to take those beautiful things and make a proletarian art out of it, like almost like a Frankenstein, without having people understand the historical context and the social context, the material context of the people that were living in those societies because that requires more work. But in my mind, that's also what makes the art most interesting is the context in which

the art was made, understanding those perspectives, understanding who made the art, who it was directed towards, and what the actual material conditions within that society for the average person were like. And my reading, again, and I could be wrong, was that, he was trying to divorce that from that to make this new proletarian art that incorporated the beautiful components of previous art. But at the same time, and this is the other component that we had previously mentioned, there was some people that he just wanted to throw overboard.

So I found this a very interesting dichotomy that he was trying to just pull all these positive influences from basically everybody, except for these specific people who, as we mentioned, are pretty widely acclaimed. Even, you know, during the Soviet Union period, they were widely acclaimed. by people within these circles, and he wants to throw those ones overboard. So it was very strange to me. It was kind of off-putting, and it didn't really make sense from like a theoretical framework sort of way.

So if either of you want to reflect on either of those things, go ahead. Otherwise, Sophia, I'll turn it over to you, and we can finish with Taylor. Yeah, so the most useful, I mean, the thing that I found the most useful in this book, actually I haven't raised it yet and it was critiquing the old art and attaching it I mean attaching those interpretations right to the play or right to the to the poem right to the novel well there was one specific example that Bogdanov provided so it was about it was about a play he suggested that after the play, some literary critics should go on stage and just critique this old play. And that was something that totally put me off because I wouldn't want to go

in such a play. And by critique, you mean provide a critical analysis for the audience, not like say, this sucks, this sucks, but yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So not just criticize it, but provide a point of view, like a proletarian point of view. A way of looking at this piece through the eyes of a proletarian. That's how I would put it. Yeah, and that felt to me like just like an attempt of pigeonhole art because that's not what do you do. And just like Henry mentioned, it was like ripping that piece out of the context.

that it was created in. Because when I read Pushkin now, I don't think to myself, oh, my God, I'd like to be a landowner, or I'd like to be a peasant. That's not how I perceive it. I just think of the beauty of the work of art within the context that it was created in. And of course, I read commentaries because a lot of the references are just, well, nonsensical to me. They don't say anything. So I have to. make an effort to understand them by actually, like, looking them up or grabbing a commentary, like Nabokov's commentary on Eugene O'Nanagan, an excellent one. But again, that's my choice as a reader and not a compulsory thing. Yeah, so I don't want to be told how I have to look at this thing. I think that can be pretty dangerous. And, yeah, as you see, I'm pretty opposed to it. But still, it is very, very useful insight. And your least favorite thing?

So I think that, you know, you complain during your most useful part. I'm really looking forward to hearing what the thing that you disliked the most was. Oh, that's difficult. Why don't you pitch it all word to Taylor? Well, I think that that almost sounded like a combined point. Like, you hated it and thought it was useful at the same time. So I guess that that's a good note to end up for you, Sophie. Thank you very much.

Taylor, let's pitch us over to you and see what you were able to think up in the last five minutes. Yeah. Also, what's interesting on what you mentioned there, Sophia, is the fact that Bogdanov both, this is where we run into some of the contradictions, right? Because Bogdanov talked about how artists need. to be free to do what they want. He also, all of his critiques of Lenin is that he's an authoritarian and telling people what to do too much and not thinking collectively and collectivity. And then meanwhile, here's Bogdana saying, oh, after a play, there should be, you know, a party meeting

in which everyone in the theater, the doors are locked and you must analyze this play in a proletarian point of view. And, you know, and I think that's probably, I'll start with what I dislike the most going off of that because I think it's the similar, it's similar with me in that he pretty much just tries to be overly pragmatic with everything, right? Everything has to have this pragmatic component. Maybe it's because of the time that it's written, they're embroiled in the beginnings of the Civil War, right? In which everyone in the revolution, especially in the leadership, all they were thinking about

was how to suppress the bourgeoisie as both a class and their thought. So maybe this contributed to it. But all of his arguments had to do with the pragmatism of it all, right? Like, here's what you need to do. And, you know, the end of one chapter is like, people need to explain newspaper articles to workers. And you should explain, you know, the way that people are writing and thinking and give the kind of these didactic messages to everybody, which nobody response. And to positively no one likes to be you know told exactly one correct way of art right so in that way that's kind of frustrating in the to say the least and infuriating and wanting to like tear the book in half like a phone book trick or something in the in the most but the component that

I like the most in Bogdanov and it was as I was translating it's what drew me to it the most. And maybe it's because I'm so interested in Antonio Gramsci is that Bogdanov was really on this train of thought that Gramsci started to go on concurrently with him, or a little bit after Bogdanov actually, but there's no evidence that either of them read each other. But they both were really starting to try and conceptualize this idea of social hegemony, that there were these concepts that were trans temporal. They went through time. They went through culture. They went through ideology that were damaging throughout history, right? That we have, you know, the saying now, we need to kill the boss in your head. That is what Bogdanov was trying to say in this,

right? As we need to destroy the landlord in our cultural perception, right? Because we're, even if we're unaware of it and it's unconscious in our minds, we carry these reactionary regressive ideas with us. And we see these things manifested today, right, in the so-called patriotic socialism, right? Or so-called cancel culture. These are reactionary regressive ideas that are couched in like ideas of inclusivity, but they're purely reactionary and they're counter-revolutionary, but they're not seen that way because they're embedded within us in a similar way that Gramsci talks about cultural hegemony. McDonough was trying to say this, but he couldn't quite come up with a conceptual word for it,

and he's really grasping at it. And you can see it in his later works in this work is one of them, where he's really trying to explain what hegemony is, but he doesn't have the word because Gramsci hasn't kind of articulated it so perfectly as he does. So that aspect I find super useful in this in being able to pinpoint and see things that are happening today through Bogdanov's eyes then. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I actually had been meaning on bringing up Gramsci. When you mentioned Tejemone earlier, and you mentioned it in the book as well, I believe in the introduction, if not one of the footnotes, but I think it was the introduction. And I think that that was a very useful point and very

very interesting that they came that they were really working within the same theoretical framework independent from one another at close to the same period of time but yeah i i had forgotten to ask that so thank you for bringing that up um but yeah overall i think that this was a really fun conversation i really enjoyed talking about this book i enjoyed reading the book uh sophie did would you recommend people to read it yes yes it's a very useful book uh in fun to read too infuriating at times but you know that's partially what makes it fun yeah absolutely so taylor why don't we start off the closing out by having you tell the listeners how they can find the book if they're interested in that because you'll be able to read it for free listeners in case you know

that slip past you earlier when we mentioned that yeah uh so iskra books is the publishing concern of the center for communist studies which also publish publishes the journal peaceland and bread I'm on the editorial board for that journal and part of the center. And so ISCRA books and the whole centers, we kind of the whole center's mission is to provide a free education, right? So all of our peer-reviewed articles and all of our books are available for free download as a PDF. And if you prefer a physical copy, we try and keep the cost as low as possible, I believe.

The Bogdanov book will start at 12, and they usually start to go down as time goes on. So you can find information about the book at peacelandbred.com slash books, and peacelandbred.com hosts both the journal, Peaceland and Bread, and Bread, and our books. So we have one other book out right now, and we have several others coming out very, very soon. one by Luna Oye and another by Derek Ford, who folks may know both of them. So you can head over there and get it for free, or if you want the physical copy, we try and keep it as low as possible. So you can go over to the website and find that.

And speaking of art and the working class, the cover is a work of art in itself. Yeah, Ben Stonkey is the, he was one of the founders, and he's the kind of the, the um the real artistic drive uh in both peaceland and bread and isker books and his his talent is you know phenomenal overwhelming uh and so he designed all of the the internal uh art as well in the book yeah really really incredible uh so i guess now that we're going to close this out sophie why don't we start with you telling the listeners how they can follow you on twitter i know that she doesn't really use it that much, but I'm going to convince her to use it a little bit more because you do have very useful thoughts. I just put out very strange stuff. That's okay. They like strange stuff. They listen to a

show that has three hour episodes about communist history. So why don't you tell the listeners how they can follow you? Okay. So it's at S-O-N-J-A underscore T-S-C-H-K-A. Yeah, so Sonia with a J-U-S-C-H-K-A. Yeah, so Sonia with a J underscore T-S-C-H-K-A, whatever that means. It's true, man. Yeah, okay, like I said, whatever that means. Taylor, why don't you tell the listeners how they can follow you? And you already mentioned peaceland and bread. Just another plug for peaceline and bread.

Incredible resource. I can't stress that enough. I mention it all the time when I'm on Twitter. I mentioned it in our previous episode with you on guerrilla history about the Peasants Revolt, where you, I, and if none, had a conversation about the peasants revolt of 1381. But the journal, Peaceland and Red, is really an invaluable resource. And issue five should be coming out pretty darn soon at this point. So I'm really looking forward to that as well. But how can the listeners find you, Taylor? Yes, listeners could find me on Twitter at

T.R. Genevese, my name, my last name, with a T.R. in front, which are my first two letters of my name. you can also find me at taylor genovese.com where i have any of my other writing and film work and photography work visual work there uh so uh yeah and i'm on instagram at the same or uh same username if you're on there uh and yeah so i'm i'm looking forward to hearing what people think so feel free to reach out to absolutely listeners again do pick up the book i think that you'll find a lot of use in it and uh i think that we should try to stimulate a conversation about this because we don't talk enough about art on the communist slash socialist left. Art is, you know, we always think about like proletarian struggle, but we

don't think about depictions to help achieve that struggle and advance that struggle. So this is something that, you know, we should try to have a conversation about. So do pick up the book and join those conversations with people like Taylor, I'd be happy to join in any of them. And anybody else that reads this, you know, reach out. Do start those conversations. So listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. That's H-U-C-K-1-995. You can follow Gorilla History on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-R-I-L-A-U-R-A-L-A-Hust.

And you can help support the show, pay for our platform fees and whatnot by going to patreon.com forward-slash guerrilla history. Again, Gorilla being spelled G-E-R-R-I-L-L-A history. You get bonus episodes. you get early access to things like this. But yeah, I highly recommend that. So listeners, until next time, solidarity.

I'm going to be able to be.