I found this here at Today in Social Sciences. It simplifies some things, of course. You have at first the “feudal lords” who fight with the “serfs and peasants.” That conflict gives you a winner: “city life.”

Then those who enjoy “city life” clash with the “guilds.” That results in a new group of victors: “entrepreneurs” who in turn then end up fighting with the “proletariat” and then we finally get the final outcome: “communism.”

That’s a whole lot of simplification of Marx even accounting for the fact that the image was made for an undergraduate course called “Cultural and Institutional History of Modern Europe.” I’m not criticizing a professor’s choices, but merely pointing out that there are multiple ways to communicate the essence of Marx’s ideas about history to a somewhat apathetic young student population. And that it’s easy to fudge things.

To wit: what is interesting here is the way two of the categories are chronologically positioned: the “City life” people come first, and then the “Entrepreneurs.” Yet, as should be obvious, there’s (a) a lot of overlap between the two and (b) there’s nary a mention of the bourgeoisie here. As my esteemed colleague has been ably chronicling here and here, it is almost impossible to separate the notion of “City life” from definitions of the “bourgeoisie.” In fact, conceiving one is impossible without the other.

My point here? Teaching Marx (even to apathetic teenagers) demands some care in definitions.

Aelita (1924) was not the first science fiction movie set in space (that honor generally goes to Le voyage dans la lune [A Trip to the Moon] made in 1902). But it was probably one of the most influential early films in the genre. Aelita was based on a novel of the same name published a year earlier written by Russian novelist Aleksey Tolstoy. The movie was a sensation in Soviet Russia, and one of the first true “blockbusters” in the history of cinema. The man behind the movie was Yakov Protazanov, who had gained a modicum of fame already in pre-Revolutionary times, but whose Aelita elevated him to iconic status in the world of newly emerging Soviet cinema. Much like modern Hollywood movies, weeks of intense advertising preceded the release of the movie; airplanes dropped thousands of leaflets announcing the opening over several cities. Tickets for the premiere were sold out, and the size of crowd on opening night was so overwhelming that Protazanov himself was unable to attend.

Protazanov completely reimagined Tol’stoy’s original novel, which was about a Soviet soldier who travels to Mars and incites a proletarian revolution among the bourgeois Martians. In the book, Aelita, the queen of Mars, falls in love with the soldier, and shenanigans ensue. In Protazanov’s hands, the story becomes much more sophisticated. The protagonist, Los, is a soldier whose background is bourgeois and is married to sweet Natasha. He receives a radio message from Mars and becomes distracted from his marriage. Turns out that on Mars, Queen Aelita rules over a brutal state that exploits its workers. But the Queen herself becomes obsessed with Los who she can see through a telescope. She begins to reject the exploitation endemic in her state. Soon, Los and a fellow proletariat go to Mars on a rocket and help the Queen dismantle the totalitarian state, but it turns out that the Queen was simply making a grab or power; she had never intended to end exploitation. The revolution fails. In the end, Los wakes up and realizes it was all a dream.

In the movie, the revolution in Mars is riddled with ambiguities that don’t demarcate along binary poles such as capitalist vs. communist or bourgeois vs. proletarian. Even the outcome is ambiguous. Some have argued that such an approach was Protazanov’s commentary about the complexities of the New Economic Policy (NEP) initiated by Lenin in the early 1920s when there was a mixed economy (with limited private enterprise). Enabled by looser censorship restrictions, this was a time of rich and experimental artistic expression in film, literature, art, and pretty much everything under the Sun. Soviet society was complicated and driven by conflicting impulses.

Unsurprisingly, Protazanov’s ambiguous take on socialism rankled Soviet officials who wanted the soldier to overthrow the bourgeoisie and create a new proletarian culture on Mars. As late as 1928, Soviet newspapers were still complaining of the “petty bourgeois ending” of the movie where Los returns to the domesticities of marriage, and not the task at hand: socialist revolution.

Aelita was important for many reasons, but often forgotten is how much it influenced real people to do real things. It influenced a generation of Soviet space enthusiasts, many of whom later went on to create the actual rockets and spaceships that opened the Space Age in the 1950s and 1960s. One of the major Soviet projects in the 1960s to send humans to Mars (never finished, unfortunately) was affectionately named “Aelita” by its designer, Vladimir Chelomey, who remembered watching the movie as a kid.

The picture above is a composite of four different scenes. On the top left, we see Queen Aelita (played by Yuliya Solntseva). The two shots of sets evoke the sets of Fritz Lang’s more famous Metropolis, which Aelita influenced.

For the complete movie, go here. For more on the culture of space enthusiasm in the 1920s, a good place to start is here or here.

Most people, if they think of punk music, generally focus on the sound associated with bands such as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, and so on, i.e., fast, loud, minimalistic, and short guitar-based songs. But in many ways, the real revolution was not punk, but post-punk, which loosely defined the bands that came in the wake of original punk. Although there’s a visceral frisson to that original music, it was also somewhat conservative and doctrinaire in its musical sensibilities: guitar, bass, drum, fast, loud, yelling, etc. So when bands like Joy Division, Gang of Four, the Pop Group, Talking Heads, the Slits, etc. began to literally dismantle the building blocks of modern pop music and rebuild entirely new idioms, it seemed like a a brave new world. This period, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was arguably the most innovative period in the history of modern pop music. Simon Reynolds has written an entire book about this time, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.

Among the many bands he covers is a long-forgotten feminist band known as The Au Pairs who sang about gender and sexual politics. Much of their music — choppy, catchy, tense — was a critique of what they considered bourgeois sexual relations: conventional ‘boring’ romance between men and women trapped in their prescribed roles played out through entire lifetimes. There’s courtship, then sex, then marriage, the missionary position, children, separate spheres for men and women, etc. On their debut album, Playing with a Different Sex, Au Pairs lead frontwoman, Lesley Woods, an outspoken feminist (and lesbian, for what it’s worth) articulated a stark world where men and women are trapped and sapped of life by modern capitalism/bourgeois life.

My favorite Au Pairs song is “Come Again” in which she expertly problematizes rote sex between a man and a woman in which they ask each other to “come again” like robots having sex. The footage above is from the famous Urgh! A Music War, a massive multi-day concert in 1980 that brought together many post-punk bands. [See also Feminist Music Geek and The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock’n’Roll (1995) by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press.]

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, the avant-garde sensibilities of Russian art were infused with a kind of utopianism, manifested in a dizzying array of aesthetic approaches that cut across fiction, poetry, art, architecture, photography, graphic design, theater, and film. Much of this explosive and experimental wave in the 1920s was designed explicitly to counter bourgeois ideas about art and culture.

One early manifestation of this mood was Proletkul’t (or Proletarian culture / Proletarskii kul’tur), a movement organized in September 1918 by Aleksandr Bogdanov, a comrade-in-arms to Lenin and author of the trend-setting cosmic fiction novel Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda, 1908) about a socialist revolution on Mars, the red planet, get it?. Proletkul’t’s goal was to foster and develop culture among the proletariat in order to allow it to participate in the proper organization of society. To a large degree, Proletkul’t’s mandate derived from Bogdanov’s belief that a cultural revolution among the proletariat had to precede a political one. Proletkul’t disseminated Bogdanov’s notion that not only was there such a thing as proletarian culture, but also proletarian science, which unlike bourgeois science recognized that science was socially determined. (Modern philosophers of science, of course, now basically agree that science is socially determined and not structured around objective notions of “reality”).

By 1919, Proletkul’t had about half-a-million recruits who were actively fostering working class culture and art, helped by as many as 34 publications, 300 local organizations, and even a university. As work by Lynn Mally and others have shown, Proletkul’t had a significant degree of autonomy from Bol’shevik orthodoxy and was a genuine contribution to avant-garde art. This forward thinking ethos came, I like to think, because Proletkul’t members took the most forward thinking ideas from bourgeois art, ejected all the elitist stuff, and added a dollop of millenarianism.

Although Proletkul’t basically died off in the early 1920s by the time Lenin died, it cast a long shadow over Soviet art. You had futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky taking on many of its themes, the rise of proletarian theater, a fascination with modern technology, and often even bits of iconoclasm. The most famous example of this outpouring were probably Russian director Sergei Eisenstein’s movies of the 1920s, including Battleship Potemkin (1926), one of the one most critically revered movies of all time.

A curious postscript about Bogdanov: He became rather obsessed with various “sciences” such as tectology and the science of blood transfusion. He came to believe that blood transfusion between people could be the model of a collective society (as a path to eternal youth). Alas, he died in 1928 after he injected himself with the blood of a student who had tuberculosis to test out his theory. Nikolai Krementsov in a recent biography of Bogdanov connects Bogdanov’s early work on science fiction, his Bol’shevik political work, his campaign for Proletkul’t, and his blood transfusion research as reflective of a single unified ideology about collective notions of existence.

So, um, turns out that when the English were traipsing around India, and particularly the heart of British India, Bengal, they had very particular ideas about Bengali men. These men, according to the English were the epitome of emasculated colonial subjects. Most (in)famously, the Right Honorable Thomas Babington Macaulay reserved some rather choice epithets for Bengali men, noting (in the 1830s) that:

Whatever the Bengali does he does languidly. His favorite pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bodily exertion; and though voluble in dispute, and singularly pertinacious in the war of chicane he seldom engages in personal conflict, and scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. There never perhaps existed a people so thoroughly fitted by habit for a foreign yoke.

Macaulay’s characterization of Bengali men was quite influential, and served to justify, argues Mrinalini Sinha, the social ordering of colonial Bengali society as one essentially subordinate to the British. After all, if these men were rather effete, then it was in their nature to require the strong hand of British rule. Eventually, there grew a kind of common wisdom among the British about the archetype of the “effeminate Bengali babu.” But Sinha notes:

If in the past effeminacy loosely characterised all the inhabitants of Bengal, in the second half of the [nineteenth] century it was used quite specifically to characterise the Indian middle class, or a section of this class identified as babus…. effeminacy came to be associated only with a small percentage of its total population. The majority of Bengalis, the labouring classes, and certain low-caste groups … were quite specifically exempted from the charge of effeminacy… Over time, effeminacy had evolved from a loosely defined attribute associated with the entire population of Bengal, and sometimes by extension all of India, to an attribute associated very specifically with Western-educated Indians, a large majority of whom were Bengali Hindus.

So basically, this was a class of Indians who were educated by the English, literate, and rather overtly intellectual in their preoccupations, and yes, bourgeois. (Ironically, they invoked Western liberal ideals in support of Bengali nationalism). If I might extend the stereotype, this was the Indian version of the English dandy, but one who romanticized a particularly pastoral, nature-oriented, and men-who-work-the-land ideal of Bengali nationhood even as they avoided the illiterate laboring classes in Bengal like the plague. In other words, they were Orientalist Orientalists.

What I find interesting is that to this day, Bengalis of a certain type, still labor under the caricature of the hyper-intellectualized poet types. And let’s face it, there’s a bit of truth in this caricature. The Bengali (Bangla) word for poet is “kabi” (pronounced kobi). But when you say kabi kabi in rapid succession, it evokes a particular type of person, a Bengali deep in thought, smoking a cigarette at a tea shop, staring deeply into space, perhaps composing poetry, undoubtedly pining for unrequited love from both a woman and from Bengal itself, and plotting some utopian revolution without having moved an inch from his tea shop. (Needless to say, Lenin would not have approved).

I do not intend to say that Macaulay was right. He was a flaming racist. But one wonders whether all the stuff that Macaulay and others said about Bengalis was eventually accepted and perhaps even a bit internalized by some Bengalis. Was this the secret power of Western Orientalists? That they were able to convince The Other, i.e., the subjects of their rule to take on the very stereotypical qualities that the Westerners wished the colonial subjects to have?

So, apparently a professor at Carlton University (in Canada) has put together a graphic novel version of The Communist Manifesto titled (obviously) The Communist Manifesto: Illustrated. Associate Professor George Rigakos says that:

The Manifesto is a foundational and fundamental text that students should be aware of. I thought it would be intriguing to bring this part of history alive using a graphic novel or comic book approach that would engage more students.

According to a journalist’s report on the graphic novel (which has graphics from Argentinian artist Victor Serra):

Rigakos has inserted prologues to all four parts of his Manifesto, including a reckoning between the father of communism and an old revolutionary in Highgate cemetery in London, where Marx is famously buried. The hero/villain opposition familiar to readers of graphic novels [sic] becomes the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and a resplendent visually realized class pyramid completes Rigakos’ cartoon vision of Marx and Engels’ words.

The plan is for it to be a 4-volume work with the first one titled Historical Materialism.

So that got me thinking: do the superheroes that populate our current imagination fall into a bourgeois/proletariat typology? Can we say bourgeois = Batman, Iron Man, Daredevil, etc., and proletariat = Spiderman, Superman, Captain America, etc.?

Above, an explanation for both the French and Russian Revolutions. In both cases the bourgeoisie led the charge, both promised democracy and devolved into terror, both viciously attacked organized religion, and both killed the royal family. Oh, both Robespierre and Lenin were lawyers.

OK, I’m simplifying of course, but it’s not a bit ironic that two of the most famous revolutions in European history were led by people who had reached adulthood as bourgeois individuals. Were the bourgeoisie then, the most revolutionary force in history?

My esteemed colleague’s fascinating post about bourgeois guilt in the Middle Ages naturally prompted me to ponder how to explain bourgeois guilt in the modern context. But first, what is “bourgeois guilt”? My admittedly subjective feeling is that it is short-hand for self-loathing of the privileged classes combined with largely symbolic acts of philanthropy dressed up in patronizing etiquette. All of which reminded me of Mother Teresa. Now, the prevailing wisdom is that she was a saintly creature devoted to ministering the poor and sickly in Calcutta (Kolkata for all you locals). But there is a minority opinion about her too. (And I’m not just talking about Christopher Hitchens’ wittily-named polemic against her, The Missionary Position). I’m thinking of Indian-American leftist intellectual Vijay Prashad’s somewhat infamous essay published soon after Mother Teresa’s death in 1997. In the piece, entitled “Mother Teresa: Mirror of Bourgeois Guilt,” Prashad wrote:

“For Mother Teresa poverty is the condition of saintliness. Poverty, then, ceases to be bad and instead becomes something to be celebrated. The poor can be treated with condescension as those who will redeem the world by their acceptance of charity. Such an approach becomes a part of a global enterprise for the alleviation of bourgeois guilt rather than a genuine challenge to those forces [i.e., modern capitalism] that produce and maintain poverty.”

He adds that “[u]nlike the bourgeoisie, she remains dressed in simple garments and continues, in humble fashion, to trod a self-admitted endless path,” but ultimately she is part of the “charity industry, a trough for bourgeois guilt.” He concludes, “[t]here will be many Teresas in the future to assuage this sensibility of guilt, itself unresolvable under the cruel rule of capital.”

The cruel rule of capital. What do you say, Lenin?