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Molecular Red
Theory for the Anthropocene
McKenzie Wark
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Molecular Red
Theory for the Anthropocene
McKenzie Wark
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About This Book
In Molecular Red, McKenzie Wark creates philosophical tools for the Anthropocene, our new planetary epoch, in which human and natural forces are so entwined that the future of one determines that of the other. Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, the Soviet and then the American. The fall of the former prefigures that of the latter. From the ruins of these mighty histories, Wark salvages ideas to help us picture what kind of worlds collective labor might yet build. From the scientific pioneers who were trying to transform science during the Russia Revolution, to visionaries contemplating cyborg possibilities and science fiction dreams in late 20th century California, Molecular Red not only looks at the crisis of climate change that we face but also how we might be able to understand it, and how we might salvage some hope out of the wreckage.
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PART I
Labor and Nature
1
Alexander Bogdanov: Workings of the World
LENINâS RIVAL
There is a magnificent photograph of the famous writer and Bolshevik sympathizer Maxim Gorky watching Alexander Bogdanov play chess with Lenin. It is 1908 and Lenin is visiting Gorky and his houseguest Bogdanov at Gorkyâs villa on the island of Capri. Bogdanov won that match, and according to Gorky, Lenin was not a good sport about it.1 Gorkyâs attempt to reconcile Lenin and Bogdanov, the leading lights of the party, did not go well. Borrowing a line from Hamlet, Gorky accused Lenin of trying to play people like flutes. And yet of these three once-famous people, it is Lenin who is best remembered.
In the larger game between them, Lenin checked Bogdanovâs designs on how to organize the theoretical, scientific, and practical stratagems of the workersâ movementâand did so more than once. We rarely remember much about those whom the grand masters beat in the heat. Even though, when the masters are defeated in their turn, there might be something to glean from the faded tactics of the losers. Now that Leninâs world too is listed in columns of the defeated, perhaps we can pick through the strategies of his opponents and find things of value; now that itâs time to build the world again, again.
Our species-being is as builders of worlds. This is the central proposition of all of Bogdanovâs thought. Letâs not concern ourselves just yet with what the boundaries of the âhumanâ might be. Itâs a category endlessly caught up in differences and similarities with the categories of the animal, the angelic or the machinic.2 Letâs just think of us, for now, as Darwin might, as a population. And while we now know that all our writings may well be âreadâ by the machines of the security agencies, I will assume that the human is a population to which you, dear reader, most likely belong, and whose collective well-being is something you might care for. Bogdanov, who knew some Darwin, had more interest in the life of this species-being than in its definition.
Bogdanovâs version of social democracy was always more about the self-organization of workers than about building a party to seize the state.3 It was always more attuned to the struggle in and against nature to organize a way of life. Nature is of course an elusive category, prone to slippage between the material and the divine, between substance and essence.4 As Bogdanov was well aware, different kinds of social organization produce wildly different images of it. Nature is for the moment then a category without a content. It means simply that which labor encounters.
Born in the industrial town of Tula in 1873, son of a school inspector, Bogdanov was educated at boarding school. Bogdanov: âExperience of the malicious and obtuse authorities there taught me to hate rulers and deny all authority. I was awarded a gold medal on completion of my studies.â5 He was first arrested in 1894, and arrested and exiled several times thereafter. Exile to Vologda in 1901 only furthered his political education, among the thriving dissident community there. Here he wrote one of the earliest and most widely used handbooks on Marxist economics.6
Nicolai Berdyaev: âHe was a remarkable man, extremely sincere and utterly devoted to his ideas; but he had a rather narrow mind, and constantly engaged in finicky and sterile sophistryâ7âincluding in disputes with Berdyaev, who was then retreating from Marxism, in which Bogdanov probably bested him with his sophisticated version of the same. In Vologda he met several other internal exiles whom he later recruited into the Bolshevik faction of Russian Social Democracy, including the future Commissar of Enlightenment Anatole Lunacharsky, and the co-translators of Marxâs Capital. He joined the Russian Social Democratic Workersâ Party in 1899.
Like many activists in Russia at the time, he had little interest in or knowledge of the factional squabbles of the leaders of the party in European exile. He didnât meet Lenin until 1904, in Switzerland, when he was thirty-one and Lenin thirty-four. There Bogdanov was welcomed into the fractious conclave that was the Bolshevik faction of the party.
Back in Russia, he became Leninâs front man, and a Bolshevik representative on the St. Petersburg Soviet in the 1905 revolution. The legendary Bolshevik bank robber Kamo offers a colorful portrait of Bogdanov the revolutionary: âKrasin introduced me to a great man. Together they run the military-technical center for the Bolsheviks. You must understand that this man knows everything. He writes scholarly books, he makes bombs and dynamite. He also treats patients, you know, as a doctor.â8
During the 1905 revolution Bogdanov was arrested again. In prison, he completed his first major philosophical work, Empirio-monism, and on his release sent Lenin a copy. In his Finland retreat, Lenin composed a long letter to Bogdanov on it. Bogdanov returned the letter, writing that in the interests of maintaining their political unity, he would pretend never to have read it. His alignment with Lenin disintegrated by 1907.
Three things were at stake.9 First, Bogdanov opposed Leninâs rightward tack after the failure of the 1905 revolution. Lenin wanted the Bolsheviks to participate in elections, while Bogdanov wanted to keep the party underground and continue revolutionary work, and many in the party agreed with him.
Second, there was apparently also some squabbling over party funds. Bogdanov and the Bolshevik engineer Leonid Krasin had control over money raised through âexpropriationsââbank robberies. It is hard to imagine Lenin having much tolerance for political or intellectual independence, but for both to then be combined with financial independence must have been particularly galling.
Third, the two men were never in agreement on philosophical matters. Lenin hewed closer to the âdialectical materialistâ orthodoxy of George Plekhanov, who was aggressively opposed to the theoretical innovations starting to emanate from Bogdanov and his circle. Plekhanov once even wrote a polemic addressed to âMr. Bogdanovââas he refused to consider the author of such heresies a comrade.10 Lenin and Bogdanov maintained unity within the Bolsheviks so long as they were agreed on tactics. When that unity broke down, the philosophical dispute came out in the open.
Bogdanov led the left-wing of the Bolsheviks against Lenin from 1907 to 1911. Leninâs position was a difficult one. Bogdanov may have had more support than Lenin among the Bolsheviks in exile, and most certainly among those still in Russia, which may be why Lenin attacked him on philosophical rather than political grounds. He took aim at Bogdanovâs Empirio-monism.
Published in three volumes from 1904 to 1906, Empirio-monism addresses the impact on Marxist thought of the new physics, and the âspontaneousâ philosophy that sprang from it, of Ernst Mach and others. For Mach, a scientific theory is just the most economical way of describing sensory experience. He withdrew the warrant for metaphysical speculation about what is real, beyond what can be said about what is observed. Bogdanov found in Mach a useful line of retreat from the would-be materialism of Engels and Plekhanov, which had raised the scientific theories of their timeâonly some of which would prove enduringâinto metaphysical âlaws.â11
At a time of increasing repression within Russia and political crisis within the party, it rather puzzled militants that Lenin in exile was spending his time in libraries researching philosophical questions. The result of these labors was Leninâs lengthy polemic against Bogdanov and other âMachists,â Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909). Gorky thought this tract had âthe sound of a hooligan,â but it did the job.12
Being âphilosophicalâ rather than political may have helped the book evade censorship. It certainly checked the influence not just of Bogdanovâs theoretical innovations but also of his political line. Lenin secured his expulsion from the Bolsheviks, andâwhether intentionally or notâset the dismal precedent of trials of doctrinal orthodoxy, as if correct action on any and every issue required the correct âlineâ in philosophy.
Whether Bogdanovâs political tactics would have been better than Leninâs need not concern us, but his theoretical tactics certainly hadâand continue to haveâmerit, even if they diverged from the first principles of so-called âdialectical materialism.â But then, as Gilles Deleuze once noted, the first principles in a philosophy are less interesting than the second or third principles.13 Even with third principles, thereâs no end to the fruitless argument to be had.
Of more interest might be the kinds of practices of knowledge that can be built on a particular theoretical configuration. Stuart Hall: âTheory is always a detour on the way to something more important.â14 It is the contention of Molecular Red that Bogdanov offers, even today, a base on which to build a practice of knowledge for the era of the Carbon Liberation Front. Bogdanov retreated from the sterile attempts to construct a materialist metaphysics and took his stand on a realist approach to sensation itself, opening a path for thinking about the practice of knowledge as organized sensation. Such pragmatism seems timely again.
Alienated from Lenin on political, practical, and theoretical matters, Bogdanov, Gorky, and Lunacharsky formed their own faction. They ran two party schools in Capri in 1909 and Bologna in 1910, funded by Gorkyâs earnings as a celebrated writer and perhaps some expropriation funds Bogdanov still controlled. The Capri gathering was the moment when an intellectually open Bolshevism existed, if only for a brief moment.15
The Capri school didnât last. The students were arrested on their return to Russia; Bogdanov and Gorky fell out; Lenin patched up his relations with Gorky, while Lunacharsky drifted back under Leninâs spell. Alienated from his party, by 1909 Bogdanov considered suicide. He gave up politics in 1911 to concentrate on literary and scientific work. At odds with both Lenin and Gorky, with the Bolsheviks in disarray, Bogdanov watched from afar the long, slow counter-revolution that unfolded in Russia. It was in these difficult circumstances for the revolution, for the party, and for Bogdanov personally that he wrote, of all things, a utopia.
Bogdanovâs utopia, Red Star, proved rather popular, and was a founding text of Soviet science fiction. It is the pole-star by which Bogdanov himself navigated the tempestuous times that were to follow. By attending to Red Star, we can understand something of Bogdanovâs project and how it might be reimagined for the era of the Carbon Liberation Front.
RED MARS
âWell, you should write a novel for the workers,â says Lenin to Bogdanov, âon how the predatory capitalists have despoiled the Earth and wasted all its oil, iron, lumber and coal. That would be a very useful book, Mister Machist!â16 Or so Gorky recalled, or thought he recalled, from Leninâs visit to Capri. Much to Leninâs annoyance, Bogdanovâs novel was rather more original and sensational than that.
The utopian fable Red Star (1908) and its prequel, the vampire story The Engineer Menni (1913), are didactic tracts that popularized Bogdanovâs ideas about labor, nature and revolution. Both are set on Mars. Older and further from the sun, Martian life is less energetic than on Earth, less violent in its struggles, and more advanced.17 The two books, taken together, are thought-experiments conducted in a parallel planet. Certain variables are missingâMars lacks competing statesâbut in its essentials, pre-revolution Mars is not unlike where twenty-first-century Earth actually ended up after the victory of the Carbon Liberation Front.
In Engineer Menni, what drives the story is the tension between a vast, state-directed development project and the interests of finance capital. Martian capitalism is on the brink of crisis. Markets must expand, but thereâs nowhere left to grow. Menni the engineer proposes a canal-building project as the solution, a project so vast it will lead to whole new planetary spatial form. It will even alter the climate.
A delicate political compromise puts a state-run agency in charge, but this does not appease financial interests. Meanwhile, the workers are angry about the casualty rate that ensues from a particularly difficult stretch of terrain. Finance seizes on this as an opportunity to privatize the whole project. Their alternate route for the canal is through earthquake country. While the work is easier and thereâs a quick profit to be made, in the long run it will endanger whole populations along the shaky new route. The logic of accumulating capital, with its own special reality, dominates that of labor struggling in and against nature to build and maintain a habitable world.
The workers find toiling for finance capital worse than working for the engineer-dominated state corporation. Netti, a radical engineer, proposes a worker-engineer alliance against the one percent. He writes an exposé of corruption and incompetence on the project, and releases it to coincide with a general strike. Bogdanov wants to combine the interests of workers who labor directly with resistant matter with those who hack the information that organizes direct labor and a knowledge of nature.
But Nettiâs agenda is far more ambitious: âWhat must we do so that we ourselves can know and see, and not just constantly believe? Or is that impossible? Is it always going to be like it is now? And if it is impossible, then what is the use of living and struggling if we are to remain slaves?â18 The worst form of slavery is believing instead of knowing, of taking on faith what hasnât been derived from the careful testing of what is sensed.19 The goal is not just to throw off the vampire squid of finance capital, but to organize again the whole of labor and knowledge.
Red Star takes place after Engineer Menni, on socialist Mars. Gender equality prevails, if still patterned on a masculine norm. The Martians enjoy a liberated sexuality, free from repressive morality if not from emotional complexity. It is a vision rather like that of Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai. Martian medicine is of course advanced. They practice blood transfusion as a restorative therapy.20 Bogdanov h...