GLOBAL BODY

by Amadeo Bordiga

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I used Google Translate to create this crude machine translation of Amadeo Bordiga’s essay on Corbusian modern architecture, urban densification and architectural verticalism. I edited it only to preserve formatting and remove hypertext. Hopefully we’ll get a competent and careful translation of all of Bordiga’s texts so that machine translations are unnecessary.

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On the Edge of Time

Space Against Concrete

We are encrypted: is it allowed?

The earth on whose bark we live has the shape of a ball or sphere. As a demonstration of how foolish the distinction between easy and difficult to understand, we fall into a first digression by noting that such a concept, arduous for a thousand and one thousand years for the most brilliant geniuses, is now familiar to the seven-year-old child. It would not make sense a doctrine that assumes that there is a great course of history accomplished with grandiose leaps from the succession of classes, and then stopped in front of the problem that to the advancing, revolutionary class, only pills of easy concepts should be presented .

Unlike Silvio Gigli we are therefore asking you some difficult difficult problems. We will give you the beatings and the answers.

This Terra ball, therefore, has a diameter of about 12,700 kilometers, which was calculated by measuring its belly, on which the platinum sample meter kept in Paris at the International Measurement Institute was reported forty million times. How did they do when they passed over the water? Let us also leave every tone of joke and imitation of the “habit” of speaking difficult for the difficult, and to make people say: but how cultured the author is, you don’t understand anything at all! – on which the fame of ninety-nine percent of the great men is based.

So with other calculus (fourth grade) it is assumed that the surface of the Earth is five hundred million square kilometers. The seas occupy more than two thirds of it, and only 150 million remain to walk dry. Among these are the polar caps, the deserts, the very high mountains, and therefore it is assumed that a 125 million remain to the human species – the only one that now lives in all areas of the sphere together with its pets.

Since today the books say they know that “we are” in 2,500 million, we human animals poking their noses everywhere, it is clear that on average this species of ours has a square kilometer for 20 of its components.

At school it is said: average population density of inhabited lands: twenty souls (in fact, the much more numerous corpses of the buried do not count) per square kilometer.

The idea of ​​how many twenty people we all have, and that of the square kilometer is not difficult. We are in Milan: it is the space that occupies the Park between the Arco del Sempione and the Castello Sforzesco, including the Arena. If only fifty thousand of them manage to cram for the big football matches, in the whole square kilometer at the density of compact crowd (rallies of Mussolini, Togliatti and the like) there are five million souls (in pain) that is the gathered population of Milan, Rome and Naples abundant. 250 thousand times more than the average density on Earth.

Therefore the poor mean twenty symbolic men in the square kilometer, if they stood at the crossroads of a constant-mesh net, would stand at each other at 223 meters; they couldn’t even talk. If they were cheating women, worse then if they are candidates for Parliament!

However, man is not planted on the ground like trees, much less crowded into colonies like the madrepores of which we spoke the other time, and moving in a thousand guises he placed himself very irregularly in the different spaces, where the bark of the planet is divided.

The density in Italy is 140 people per square kilometer, and therefore seven times more than the average. The most crowded province is that of Naples: 1500 inhabitants per sq km: 55 times the terrestrial average. The densest countries in Europe (and in the world) are Belgium, Holland and England (apart from Scotland) which are around 300: 15 times the human average. The country with the lowest population beyond Sweden and Norway is Russia: for the European part 29 inhabitants-sq. Km, just above the earthly average.

The densities of the continents are: Europe 53, Asia 30. But then we fearfully drop below the human average. North Central America 8.5; Africa 6.7; South America 6.3; Australia-Oceania 1.5. So we come to the thirteenth part of the universal average.

The density of the United States is 19, therefore lower than that of European Russia (i.e. up to the Urals and the Caucasus). Perfect coincidence with the media on earth: is this the reason why they want it all?

The population, however, is distributed in the USA with sensational differences: even leaving out small districts, they range from 0.5 in the Nevada desert to 240 in the tingling New Jersey, slightly less large than Lombardy.

Finally, we note that all the RSFSR, which includes Siberia, has a density reduced to 6.8. As for the whole USSR, the density is 9 inhabitants per sq. Km., And the most populous of the federated republics is the western Ukraine with 70.

Human hives

If we neglect the “sparse” population, mainly rural, and we only deal with men who are “agglomerated” in the cities, as we already noted, we have, considering the density, a snap to figures that are far above, about a thousand times more than the earth’s average: as scientists say, we go in a different order of magnitude. It is not difficult to understand how the population of the countryside considered alone sees the density compared to the general one in every large or small district.

Establishing how many men are scattered and how many those agglomerated , we place in the world or in Italy, is instead a problem for the most rough. Even adding the populations of the cities over a certain number of inhabitants chosen arbitrarily, we put 5 thousand, the conclusion is deformed by the fact that we have the figures of the municipalities. Now for example in Rome the municipality is much larger than the city and therefore there is part of the population scattered in the figure, in London the municipality is much smaller than the city, and therefore it is all agglomerated population, while it remains to be added in whole or in all the part of the “Greater London” zone begins. We venture that a fifth of men live in cities all over the world, while the ratio will be zero in central Africa, at least half in Belgium.

However here are the new figures, which for their shifted order of magnitudethey usually refer to the hectare, while we will continue here to give them per square kilometer, which includes one hundred hectares. Greater London (while the projects in progress still dilate it, but with the system of the satellite cities, of about 50 thousand inhabitants twenty kilometers on average from the historical core), on 600 square kilometers welcomes eight and a half million men: density 14 thousand. But in London you can breathe even better than in the filthy neighborhoods of Jews, Chinese or Italians. The most strangled Italian city, Naples, in its core of 800 hectares and therefore 8 sq km. it assembles no less than 600 thousand of the million inhabitants in the administrative municipality, to which neighboring municipalities joined: the density reaches the figure of 75 thousand, which is a true inhuman limit exceeding 3750 times the earth’s average. Even considering the municipality of Naples divided into the twelve traditional districts, therefore removing the so-called “villages”, the density is always 45 thousand, that is triple London. Abstractly considering a generic “nineteenth-century” city that has five-storey buildings and streets wide enough to occupy four tenths of the whole area, a not difficult technical calculation shows that each room or “room” takes about 5 square meters. “Covered” and 3 m2. “Urban.” But out of every three rooms only one is intended for housing, and on average (Italy) hosts one and a half people, for example a family of six members has four rooms. So every inhabitant, so to speak, Abstractly considering a generic “nineteenth-century” city that has five-storey buildings and streets wide enough to occupy four tenths of the whole area, a not difficult technical calculation shows that each room or “room” takes about 5 square meters. “Covered” and 3 m2. “Urban.” But out of every three rooms only one is intended for housing, and on average (Italy) hosts one and a half people, for example a family of six members has four rooms. So every inhabitant, so to speak, Abstractly considering a generic “nineteenth-century” city that has five-storey buildings and streets wide enough to occupy four tenths of the whole area, a not difficult technical calculation shows that each room or “room” takes about 5 square meters. “Covered” and 3 m2. “Urban.” But out of every three rooms only one is intended for housing, and on average (Italy) hosts one and a half people, for example a family of six members has four rooms. So every inhabitant, so to speak, for example a six member family has four rooms. So every inhabitant, so to speak, for example a six member family has four rooms. So every inhabitant, so to speak,it has about 16 square meters. in the compact city , hygienically just tolerable: we are therefore to prove the density of 60 thousand. Where there are in addition to the streets and squares also gardens, parks, etc., the density improves, that is, it decreases.

So the historical process that with its thousand aspects has massed the men in the cities on the average of the advanced countries has led them from a national density that we place both 200 (most populous central Europe: ten times the Earth) to an urban density that in the best hypotheses , of real garden cities, exceeds 20 thousand men on the sq. km. (a hundred times more than in the nation, a thousand times more than on Earth).

We know that the origin of this massing lies almost entirely in the spheres of the capitalist era, few and not immense dominant myriad capitals of rural villages being enough for pre-capitalist regimes.

But capitalism still does not want to stop, and as in all its other phenomena, it cannot. And this very important process defines it. It is in fact the quantitative measures that count, and not the qualitative political and propaganda labels. All that reduces space to man is capitalism.

La cité radieuse

In fact, there were those who thought and – unfortunately – implemented better; Mr. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret from Geneva, by profession architect. Who is this man? One moment, you know it too: the great men change their name, and what resonates throughout the world is Le Corbusier .

The citizen Le Corbusier enters the rank of that category of cerebral supporters who alone is a sufficient phenomenon to make the partitoni that once called proletarians and communists suck. Of him, and what is worse than his theories and methods, we speak very well in the Soviet press and in all that is a projection in the world, as indeed was well spoken in the fascist and Nazi press, and imitations are also encouraged and applications, some of which delight the immense Moscow, the daughter of ten types of human organization, sovereignly stretched over grandiose spaces, indeed whose dominating force was always distance and space, the low and thinned building, whose fire stopped the poisoned wave of capitalism overthrowing Bonaparte in the Beresina.

Moscow cannot help but compete with New York today. But skyscraper and paranoia Le Corbusier are not the same thing. It should not be believed that the twelve million Newiorkeans are in their constellation of cities narrower than Londoners, despite the greater height of the buildings. In the 30-storey building, first of all the proportion of the office premises to the residential ones is no longer three but ten or twenty, the height is reached only in a narrow pinnacle, the streets are ten times at least wider than in the cities of the type “European nineteenth century” from which we first derived the “indexes” of crowding; each inhabitant has at their disposal a neighborhood and not two thirds of room, and so on, so that in the end the thickening is the same, and does not go beyond the said twenty thousand per sq. km., indeed it beats the 14 thousand of Greater London, without any doubt.

We read a brilliant description of Le Corbusier’s building, erected on his project and direction in Marseille. The articulator has some effective lines, such as that in the 330 cubicles destined for 1,600 tenants “space is more precious than uranium”. It is not this parody, but a coherent reference of the corbusistic doctrines: 
« With his constructions Le Corbusier anticipates the radiant future of humanity that has no land to wander […] Its architecture is a painful struggle against the superfluous, a anxious race towards the conquest of spaces for life ».

However, more than the impressions and appreciation that can derive from the writer’s preconceptions, the numbers count (as we said) for us. Here some ear-eaters can learn what it means that quantity turns into quality and not, inappropriately, in terms of class-party relationship.

The principle of over-exploitation of space goes as far as these brainy tendencies: overlapping the greenery of urban gardens (tomorrow also that of wheat and potato fields!), The transit roads and the covered area of buildings vertically on the same space. Verticalism , this deformed doctrine is called; capitalism is verticalist. Communism will be “horizontalist”. For the imperial dictatorship he advised Caius Julius to cut the high poppies, for the proletarian dictatorship it would be better to cut those, and with them the high buildings. We can respect a Michelangelo or a Bernini and maybe a bourgeois Eiffel or Antonelli, certainly not this “democratic” Jeanneret.

Men or herring?

So the first essay of the non house, but unité d’habitation , which should become a neighborhood, against the ridge of a rise in the ground, in sunny and Mediterranean Marseille, rests on thirty-six bare pillars under which, since there are no walls or walls, the road and a so-called garden pass. The fool of official caliber amazes, but technically the “realization” (beautiful word forcaiolista according to which everything exists prius in intellectu , first in the more or less leaky heads, and then in factu, that is, in the vile and passive matter) is within the reach of every good master builder with a hundred-page manual (respectable him) in his pocket. We evaluate this rectangle on the thirty-six pillars of 800 square meters, down and up: whoever finds fault can send us the plan and the elevation. After the empty height of the ground floor there are not nine floors, but nine streets or corridors-apartments in which each cubic decimeter is designed to act as a mobile, as a tool, and ultimately as a space in which the guest is placed , trying not to overflow from the project measures. We are also tempted to mock by describing the operating room designed to cut those that are too long or wide …

There are 330 cubicles in the nine floors and destined for 1,600 inhabitants, subject to strict regulation regarding the use of single and common spaces. Let’s not go into the ways of living and living of these inhabitants of the building, which the aforementioned journalist has fun to define as a decorated penitentiary , a gray hut and a ghost ship . We consider the data that are, in the project, in the number of 1,600. Making 1,600 fools stay in 800 square meters means being down from ten covered square meters per inhabitant to half a meter! We want to be cautious and assume that not all units they will be home, but also work and public services, and therefore the inhabitant will space in a meter and a half (mind you; they are nine floors, old-fashioned, and in the house everyone has to move him and tools about five meters paintings, a small room).

We would have reached 650 thousand beings per square kilometer, but we would still like to foresee thirty percent of streets and squares, thinking that artificial light and air conditioning do not come to put the various parallelepipeds in direct contact, plugging entrances and windows, and we go down to 400 thousand men on the sq. km. We even foresee that there are large empty spaces and parks in the city: Le Corbusier will always have reached, an excellent stevedore, two hundred thousand bipeds in one square kilometer.

Nature has therefore given the human species so much land to be there in twenty per square kilometer.

Civilization and history have wanted to tighten ten times more in the most advanced nations: let’s talk about progress.

The type of urban organization established that the most fortunate and advanced in culture and wisdom gathered in the cities, being a thousand times closer.

The capitalist mania for the accumulation of sardine men did not stop here, and for it the Le Corbusier, deliberately closed their eyes, do not tell the uninhabited deserts as they can be in Canada or Australia, but to the same expanses of the green fields of crops, from which alone comes the life to whose fullness they claim to provide, they want to barricade at least another ten times more, keeping the living ten thousand times thicker than the earthly average, and perhaps thinking of multiplying human ants by such relationships!

Whoever applauds these guidelines must not be defined only as a follower of doctrines, ideals, capitalist interests; but as a participant in the pathological tendencies of this supreme period of capitalism in putrescence and dissolution, which by dint of apology of its science and its technique, overcoming any obstacle, founds (as Engels said) cities in their human excrement in so much “Functional” that the ultra-rational system will see the inhabitant identify the bathtub and the sewer.

The revolutionary struggle for the gutting of the fearful sprawling agglomerations can be defined as: communist oxygen against capitalist sewer. Space against concrete.

The rush to thicken does not have for reason the scarcity of space, which despite human prolificity, also the daughter of class oppression, abounds everywhere and in every sense, but the needs of the capitalist mode of production, which inexorably pushes forward its discovery of work in masses of men.

Yesterday

Savings on «constant capital»

Since we do not write here to immerse ourselves in the voluptuousness of the creative spirit, but in pure partisan service, it is necessary to stop and prove that we are not launching a new verb and not even discovering a new law in history, but they are solidly calculating in the footsteps of established doctrine.

Marx after having described in the first book of “Capital” the process of capitalist production, which although being framed in the wider social and historical field, presents above all the class relationship between capitalists and workers within the company ; and after having studied the circulation of capital in the second book, that is, its reproduction by means of that part of manufactured goods that do not go to direct consumption, but are instruments of further production, in the third and incomplete book he tackles “the process of capital taken as a all “which leads to the” concrete forms “that are really encountered in society, such as” mutual action of the different capitals, competition and common conscience of the agents of production ” (1).

Clearly the discussion was to culminate in chapters on the “political” action of the struggling classes, as we have said many times, and on the awareness of class action, the derivative and final superstructure of all the rest.

In chapter V, before going so far as to establish the law of the tendency to fall in the average rate of profit, Marx deals with a point of primary importance: the economy (savings), in the use of constant capital .

Dialectically (one of the points poorly reported if not seen by Stalin in his well-known text) capital, like any capitalist, does everything to raise its profit, and therefore also the rate of its profit. If capitalist society wanted or could oppose the discoveries and inventions that increase the productivity of human labor, only then, making the number of proletarians exploited hyperbolic even for non-exalted consumption without stopping, would be able to avoid the fall in the rate (see « Dialogato with Stalin », third day) (2). But being unable to do so, capital struggles with other means to delay and slow down the rate drop, which however accumulation and concentration make well compatible with the unlimited rise in the total mass of profits and the figure of profit per company .

In each company the return on capital is given by the excess of the selling price of all the goods produced (for example in the year) on the cost of them, or the cost of production. So capital tries to sell at a high price, and to reduce production costs. Further on, Marx will deal with the effect of changes in market prices, here he deals with production costs.

In Marxist theory, the cost of production splits in two: variable capital, which is the anticipated and sustained expenditure for all wages and salaries, and constant capital , which is the expenditure to purchase raw materials and keep constructions running efficiently, machinery etc. Here it is not the obvious means of increasing profit, given by the lowering of wages, also because this is not the general trend of capitalism, at least in the phase following the first most ferocious decades. Worker wages historically grow as a monetary figure, also grow as a value in non-devalued currency, that is if expressed in lire or dollars 1914, but if measured in average social work time it decreases , even though it has increasedthe working standard of living, since precisely the growth, in technical terms, of the productivity of labor has brought down the value if not the price of all the goods that the worker consumes. But of this elsewhere.

For the time being, the selling price and the price of wages remain unchanged: it is obvious that capital throws itself at reducing the cost of the constant part of the capital spent. Not only are there various means of achieving this, but there is a clear trend in this direction of the capitalist economy.

Marx also puts aside a first means: increase of the working day for the same wages (and also for wages increased in proportion to the hours, even when the “overtime” is paid more). In fact, in this case, if you do not save on the raw materials consumed, you will save on the use of machines and constructions, shortening the “rotation” or the production cycle they are capable of. We note that the capitalist many times finds a means to achieve this economy in continuous processing shifts which, for example, by avoiding the cooling of the ovens, they earn calories, or profit.

Parasitism one and three

But even assuming that the workers manage to reject any change even paid for working hours, there are three other first-rate factors.

1) Enlarge or group companies. The very fact of associating the workers previously isolated, even without any modification, to the operating technique, leads to a huge saving: in the construction of the single laboratory, in lighting, heating, other general expenses, etc. Just think of the heat loss of many small forges compared to a large one surrounded by the many forgers who introduce their piece to it, while working with the same hand tools as before, and a hundred other examples.
” All this economy, which derives from the concentration of the means of production and their mass use, presupposes, however, as an essential condition the agglomeration and action of the workers, that is to say the social combination of labor.. It therefore originates from the social character of work in the same way that surplus value comes from the surplus-labor of each individual worker considered in isolation ” (3).

2) The recovery of waste, waste from each production, which becomes a useful material for other processes (by-products) as they are available in large quantities, while in small production they had to be thrown away. Here is another asset of saving on the expenditure of production and therefore of capitalist profit, which in turn derives only from the social character assumed by work.

3) The technical improvement due to new inventions, the introduction of new machines, etc. in companies in other sectors that produce the raw materials, machines and tools needed by the company at a lower price . Here too, a development due to the fact of mass production that has stimulated and stimulated human ingenuity to solve technical problems, useless for small production, produces a non-social benefit, but from the capital advocated in itself:
« What in this guise returns to the capitalist’s benefit and in turn represents an income that is the product of social labor, even if not directly exploited workersby the capitalist himself. That development of the productive force always leads us, ultimately, to the social character of the work put in place; the division of labor in society ; to the development of intellectual work , primarily of the natural sciences. What the capitalist benefits from are the advantages realized by the system of the social division of labor as a whole. It is the development of the productive force of labor in the sector of activity extraneous to that specific to the capitalist, that is, in the sector that provides the latter with means of production, the cause for which the value of the constant capital employed by the capitalist undergoes a relative decrease, and the rate of profit therefore increases »(4).

Those companions, even the best ones, who reduce the antagonism of interests to the simple duel between the individual capitalist and his worker, in paying him more or less, and close him within the company, should be invited to reflect on these essential quotes. The antagonism of the social classes, on the other hand, is based on quite another appropriation that capital makes, turning to its exclusive domain all the much larger proceeds of the improved social performance ., resulting from the combination of workers and the decrease in the average working time contained in the products. If, for the first brute fact, removing the direct surplus value, the worker could work six hours instead of eight, due to the effect of social performance, given the rationalization of every ancient waste of the production by parcels, and the grandiose technical inventions, you should only work one hour.

Where to hit

And it is precisely the field of surplus value that will be removed from the capitalist but not given to the worker, who will have to contribute with it to the services of general organization. Consequently, conquest is not there, but in social organization, which must be aimed not at the profit of capital, but at the elevation of the conditions of living labor . In socialist society, indeed, the worker will only lend to society a just “overwork” while the “necessary work” will be reduced to him because of the increased technical power, because of the ten steel slaves that each of us today could have, while a century ago he had none.

Today, on the other hand, the capitalist system considers all these infinite resources inherent in capital, the virtue proper to capital, and keeps the worker completely alien to the conditions for carrying out the work . The capitalist, like the imperfect Marxists, sees in the salary figure “the only transaction” that runs between him and his worker. He therefore has no interest in the economies of constant capital, but only in that which is attempted on variable capital, on the money spent for his week. But this means that, to save on everything, capital first of all saves on the safety and hygiene of human working conditions. This brings us back to our theme: city and countryside, cement and space, sewer and oxygen:
«Such an economy goes as far as the overcrowding of workers in confined, unhealthy premises, what is called, in capitalist terms, construction savings; the storage of dangerous machines in the same environments, without adequate means of protection against this danger; the absence of precautionary measures in production processes which, due to their nature, are harmful to health or involve risks (such as in mines), etc. Not to mention the lack of any provision aimed at humanizing the production process, making it pleasant or at least bearable. This would be, from the capitalist point of view, a waste without purpose and senseless. With all its skimping, capitalist production is generally very lavish with human material, just like, thanks to the method of distributing its products through trade [hey, hey, from Moscow!] and its system of competition, it is very lavish with material means and on the one hand it makes society lose what the other earns individual capitalists ” (5).

Of this other powerful chapter, with a programmatic essence for those who do it “for several years macro” (other than read it from the barber and immediately ask for the last Selection !) We will now report only the lock.
” The management of a plant organized on the basis of new inventions entails much higher costs than the plants that subsequently arise on its ruins (…). We get to the point that the first entrepreneurs in most cases fail and only the following ones, in whose hands buildings, machinery etc. end up cheaply. begin to thrive. It follows that in general the most unworthy and despicable category of monetary capitalists is the one that derives the greatest profit from all the newdevelopments in the universal work of the human spirit and their social application through combined work ” (6).

It is the description, worthy of Michelangelo’s chisel, made a letter from the cursed century he pompously spends, in the cult of the triumphant beast.

Today

Inflationary techniques

If reformist laws have changed something in the organization of the factories, imposing certain security costs on the capitalist, of which it refers to a thousand doubles elsewhere, the aforementioned concept of Marx must be brought to the “urbanistic” scale with a certain effect. To save false expenses , for this usual and criminal reason with advanced capital relief, and echoed by the cretineria of papier-mâché opponents paid to play the same record, in the big cities, in thelarge cities, between the densely populated houses and the factories often glued to them and “surrounded” by them in the demographic development and incessant urbanization, deposits of harmful materials, explosives and war vehicles become clogged, above all for the overlapping of railway stations. sorting and storage of ports, airports and other services. And the chronicle of every day, and it seems with particular sadism at the beginning of this 1953, describes frightening accidents of all kinds, which are nevertheless never ceased to meet. The lightness and the arrogance of the technical bureaucracies, in fearful crescendo of war in war, collaborate in it. And the war itself no longer appears so dangerous, if production and life are bloody. Nor is it understood that the only measure in the opposite direction is: thinning out! Interpose greater distances between the various services and at least stop the installation of new monsters in the heart of residential areas and industrial areas. Even the lesson of carpet bombing and coventrization (7) was not enough for this .

The capital freed the serfs who the feudal vassalage nailed to the ground, with a serious disfigurement of human dignity, but with an excellent formula to keep, for example, uniform the territorial density in France. They were forced to stay still, but where they could eat and sleep and spread as much as needed. The urbanization responded to the demands of rampant factories and the historical conquest of “combined work”. Until the plant consisted of an immense dormitory with many placesas a single architect, it is clear that there was nothing else to do: countless workers to work in a small space, and therefore to live and live in a small space, as much greater wealth was produced. Given to the wage earner a lick of life more than the craftsman and the bifolco, the enormous mass of benefit served to enlarge and beautify the cities above all: if in the old regime a palace was enough, in the new one a hundred headquarters were required for the ruling class and fun.

But all the innumerable technical inventions followed certainly did not lead to further amassing major operators in a small place. In reverse. If we were looking for an index defined as “technological density” given by the number of workers who must be collected in a given space, for a given production, we would see that the general law is that this density tends to decrease.

In the mechanical industry a huge number of operations that were carried out by groups of laborers and a series of skilled workers are simplified by the use of automatic mechanisms or remotely operated by very few control panel operators. The area of ​​the Fiat factories has grown more than the number of workers, and production has increased even more.

Marx had already been able to describe the revolution brought about by the mechanical loom replaced by the hand loom in the textile industry, which brutally decimated the number of workers for the same spindle batteries. Today in the white industry there are mechanical mills where the whole plant castle obeys only one operator, from the pouring of the grain into the hoppers up to the exit of the sacks of flour. And gradually.

On the same agricultural land, when the tractor replaces the hoe or the plow taken from animals, the number of farmers required by the same farm and by the same extension of cultivated land falls enormously.

And finally we can draw another example from navigation. In the triremes and in the galleys a boat of a few tens of tons contained a hundred and more rowers, slaves or criminals, tied to the benches. Today a much smaller engine and shunting staff, and less than that of the less ancient sailing ships, is enough to conduct a five thousand tons transatlantic liner.

Coordinate, don’t suffocate!

With the inventions and the enormous increase in labor productivity, the coordination of many workers remains , but there is no longer any reason to be the bestial massing in contact with the elbow. This even happens in the war! After all, Fourier and Marx were not wrong in defining life imprisonment for the factories, to which since then claimed defenders of the workers have raised stupid hymns, idealizing them as opposed to rural production, which at least torments (even in ancient forms) the muscles, but does not intoxicate the lungs and The liver.

The very modern production forms that use networks of stations of all kinds, such as hydroelectric power plants, communications, radio, television, increasingly give a single operating discipline to workers spread out in small groups at enormous distances.

The combined work remains, in increasingly vast, beautiful weavings, and the autonomous production disappears more and more. But the technological density previously mentioned decreases steadily. The urban and productive agglomeration therefore remains not for reasons dependent on the optimum of production, but for the duration of the profit economy and the social dictatorship of capital.

When it is possible, after having crushed this dictatorship with every force more obscene every day, to subordinate every solution and every plan to the improvement of the conditions of living work , shaping for this purpose what is dead labor , constant capital , the furniture that the human species has given over the centuries and continued to give to the crust of the earth , then the brute verticalism of the concrete monsters will be mocked and suppressed, and for the huge horizontal expanses of space, displace the gigantic cities, the strength and intelligence of the the animal man will gradually tend to make uniformon habitable lands the density of life and the density of work , now made forces in agreement and not, as in today’s deformed civilization , fiercely hostile, and held only together by the specter of servitude and hunger.

Notes

1. See K. Marx, “Capital”, ch. 1, p. 55.
2. See « Dialogato con Stalin » (published in episodes 1-4, 1952, of «The communist program»), where Stalin’s point of view is criticized, according to which the law of the tendential decrease of the average rate of profit it gives way, in monopolistic capitalism, to the “fundamental law” of the “search for maximum profit”. The brief analysis shows that the two “laws” are not in contradiction at all, since the search for and the realization of the maximum profit does not in any way prevent the tendency to fall of the average rate of profit.
3. See K. Marx, “Capital”, ch. 5, p. 122.
4. See K. Marx, “Capital”, ch. 5, pp. 125-126.
5. See K. Marx, “Capital”, ch. 5, p. 132.
6. See K. Marx, “Capital”, ch. 5, p. 155.
7. The English city of Coventry was razed to the ground by a particularly intense bombing in 1940.

Source: «The communist program» n. 1 of 8-24 January 1953

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Machine-translated from http://www.sinistra.net/lib/bas/progra/vako/vakoabefai.html

Image: Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse building under construction in Marseille.

“At this point some viper must be hissing: ‘Aha! the old devil is going to gallop about montage again.’

Yes, montage.

For many film-makers montage and leftist excesses of formalism – are synonymous. Yet montage is not this at all.

For those who are able, montage is the most powerful compositional means of telling a story.

For those who do not know about composition, montage is a syntax for the correct construction of each particle of a film fragment.

And lastly, montage is simply an elementary rule of film-orthography for those who mistakenly put together pieces of a film as one would mix ready-made recipes for medicine, or pickle cucumbers, or preserve plums, or ferment apples and cranberries together.

Mot only montage … I should like to see the expressive activity of man’s hand freed from these lesser portions of his toilette, away from these supporting aggregates. 

One encounters in films individually fine shots, but under these circumstances the value of the shot and its independent pictorial quality contradict one another. Out of tune with the montage idea and composition, they become esthetic toys and aims in themselves. The better the shots, the closer the film comes to a disconnected assemblage of lovely phrases, a shop-window full of pretty but unrelated products, or an album of post-card views.

I do not stand by any means, for the ‘hegemony’ of montage. The time has passed, when with the aims of pedagogy and training, it was necessary to perform tactical and polemical twists, in order to free montage broadly as an expressive means of cinema. But we must face the question of literacy in film-diction. And we must demand that the quality of montage, of film-syntax and film-speech not only never fall back behind the previous work, but that these go beyond and surpass their predecessors – this is why we should be deeply concerned in the struggle for a high quality of film culture.”

– from Film Language by Sergei Eisenstein, 1934, pp. 111-12 in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory

Image: a still from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin – mutinous sailors sit atop a mast, piled on a crow’s nest and yard; stays cut through the sky around them.

from the catalog Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World, pp. 144-5

by Sergei Eisenstein, 1929

Exactly a year ago, on August 19, 1928, before the montage of Old and New had begun, I wrote, in connection with the visit to Moscow of the Kabuki theater:

“In the Kabuki … a single monistic sensation of theatrical ‘provocation’ takes place. The Japanese regards each theatrical element, not as an incommensurable unit among the various categories of affect (on the various sense-organs), but as a single unit of theatre. … Directing himself to the various organs of sensation, he builds his summation [of individual ‘pieces’] to a grand total provocation of the human brain, without taking any notice which of these several paths he is following.”

My characterization of the Kabuki theater proved prophetic. This method became the basis for the montage of Old and New.

Orthodox montage is montage on the dominant. I.e., the combination of shots according to their dominating indications. Montage according to tempo. Montage according to the chief tendency within the frame. Montage according to the length (continuance) of the shots, and so on. This is montage according to the foreground.

The dominating indications of two shots side by side produces one or another conflicting interrelation, resulting in one or another expressive effect (I am speaking here of a purely montage effect).

This circumstance embraces all intensity levels of montage juxtaposition – all impulses:

From a complete opposition of the dominants, i.e., a sharply contrasting construction, to a scarcely noticeable “modulation” from shot to shot; all cases of conflict must therefore include cases of a complete absence of conflict.

As for the dominant itself, to regard it as something independent, absolute and invariably stable is out of the question. There are technical means of treating the shot so that its dominant may be made more or less specific, but in no case absolute.

The characteristics of the dominant are variable and profoundly relative. A revelation of its characteristics depends on that combination of shots which itself depends on the dominant!

A circle? An equation of two unknown quantities? A dog chasing its tail? No, this is simply an exact definition of a film law. A fact.

If we have even a sequence of montage pieces:

A gray old man,

A gray old woman,

A white horse,

A snow-covered roof, 

we are still far from certain whether this sequence is working towards a dominating indication of “old age” or of “whiteness.”

Such a sequence of shots might proceed for some time before we finally discover that guiding-shot which immediately “christens” the whole sequence in one “direction” or another. That is why it is advisable to place this identifying shot as near as possible to the beginning of the sequence (in an “orthodox” construction). Sometimes it even becomes necessary to do this with – a sub-title.

These considerations completely exclude a non-dialectic statement of the question concerning the single-meaningness of a frame within itself. The film-frame can never be an inflexible letter of the alphabet, but must always remain a multiple-meaning ideogram. And it can be read only in juxtaposition, just as an ideogram acquires its specific significance, meaning, and even pronounciation (occasionally in diametric opposition to one another) only when combined with a separately indicated reading or tiny meaning – an indicator for the exact reading – placed alongside the basic hieroglyphs. 

In distinction from orthodox montage according to particular dominants, Old and New was edited differently. In place of an “aristocracy” of individualistic dominants we brought a method of “democratic” equality of rights for all provocations, or stimuli, regarding them as a summary, as a complex. 

The point is that the dominant (with all these recognized limitations on its relativity) appears to be, although the most powerful, far from the only stimulus of the shot. For example: the sex appeal of a beautiful American heroine-star is attended by many stimuli: of texture – from the material of her gown; of light – from the balanced and emphatic lighting of her figure; of racial-national (positive for an American audience: “a native American type,” or negative: “colonizer-oppressor” for a Negro or Chinese audience); of social-class, etc. (all brought together in an iron-bound unity of its reflex-physiological essence). In a word, the central stimulus (let it be, for instance, sexual as in our example) is attended always by a whole complex of secondary stimuli. 

What takes place in acoustics, and particularly in the case of instrumental music, fully corresponds with this. 

There, along with the vibration of a basic dominant tone, comes a whole series of similar vibrations, which are called overtones and undertones. Their impacts against each other, their impacts with the basic tone, and so on, envelop the basic tone in a whole host of secondary vibrations. If in acoustics these collateral vibrations become merely “disturbing” elements, these same vibrations in music – in composition, become one of the most significant means for affect by the experimental composers of our century, such as Debussy and Scriabin.

We find the same thing in optics, as well. All sorts of aberrations, distortions, and other defects, which can be remedied by systems of lenses, can also be taken into account compositionally, providing a whole series of definite compositional effects (employing lens-openings from 28 to 130).

In combinations which exploit these collateral vibrations – which is nothing less than the filmed material itself – we can achieve,  completely analogous with music, the visual overtonal complex of the shot. 

The montage of Old and New is constructed with this method. This montage is built, not on particular dominants, but takes as its guide the total stimulation through all stimuli. That is the original montage complex within the shot, arising from the collision and combination of the individual stimuli inherent in it.

These stimuli are heterogeneous as regards their “external natures,” but their reflex-physiological essence binds them together in an iron unity. Physiological in so far as they are “psychic” in perception, that is merely the physiological process of a higher nervous activity.

In this way, behind the general indication of the shot,  the physiological summary of its vibrations as a whole, as a complex unity of the manifestations of all its stimuli, is present. This is the peculiar “feeling” of the shot, produced by the shot as a whole. 

This makes the shot as a montage-piece comparable to the separate scenes within the Kabuki method. The basic indication of the shot can be taken as the final summary of its effect on the cortex of the brain as a whole, irrespective of the paths by which the accumulated stimuli have been brought together. Thus the quality of the totals can be placed side by side in any conflicting combination, thereby revealing entirely new possibilities of montage solutions.

As we have seen, in the power of the very genetics of these methods, they must be attended by an extraordinary physiological quality. As in that music which builds its works on a two-fold use of overtones. Not the classicism of Beethoven, but the physiological quality of Debussy and Scriabin.

The extraordinary physiological quality in the affect of Old and New has been remarked by many of its spectators. The explanation for this is that Old and New is the first film edited on the principle of the visual overtone. This method of montage can be interestingly verified. 

If in the gleaming classical distances of the cinematography of the future,  overtonal montage will certainly be used, simultaneously with montage according to the dominant indication, so as always at first – the new method will assert itself in a question sharpened in principle. Overtonal montage in its first steps has had to take a line in sharp opposition to the dominant. 

There are many instances, it is true – and in Old and New, too – where “synthetic” combinations of tonal and overtonal montage may be found. For example, in Old and New, the climax of the religious procession (to pray for relief from the drought), and the sequence of the grasshopper and the mowing-machine, are edited visually according to sound associations, with an express development which exists already in their spatial “similarity.”

Of particular methodological interest, of course, are constructions that are wholly a-dominant. In these the dominant appears in the form of a purely physiological formulation of the task. For example,  the montage of the beginning of the religious procession is according to “degrees of heat saturation” in the individual shots, or the beginning of the state-farm sequence is according to a line of “carnivorousness.” Conditions outside cinematographic discipline provide the most unexpected physiological indications among materials that are logically (both formally and naturally) absolutely neutral in their relations to each other.

There are innumerable cases of montage joining in this film that make open mockery of orthodox, scholastic montage according to the dominant. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to examine the film on the cutting table. Only then can one see clearly the perfectly “impossible” montage joining in which Old and New abounds. This will also demonstrate the extreme simplicity of its metrics, of its “dimensions.” 

Entire large sections of certain sequences are made up of pieces perfectly uniform in length or of absolutely primitively repeated short pieces. The whole intricate, rhythmic, and sensual nuance scheme of the combined pieces is conducted almost exclusively according to a line of work on the “psycho-physiological” vibrations of each piece. 

It was on the cutting table that I detected the sharply defined scope of the particular montage of Old and New. This was when the film had to be condensed and shortened. The “creative ecstasy” attending the assembly of montage – the “creative ecstasy” of “hearing and feeling” the shots – all this was already in the past. Abbreviations and cuts require no inspiration, only technique and skill. 

And there, examining the sequence of the religious procession on the table, I could not fit the combination of its pieces into any one of the orthodox categories, within which one can apply one’s pure experience. On the table, deprived of motion, the reasons for their choice seem completely incomprehensible. The criteria for their assembly appear to be outside formally normal cinematographic criteria. 

And here is observed one further curious parallel between the visual and the musical overtone: It cannot be traced in the static frame, just as it cannot be traced in the musical score. Both emerge as genuine values only in the dynamics of the musical or cinematographic process. 

Overtonal conflicts, foreseen but unwritten in the score, cannot emerge without the dialectic process of the passage of the film through the projection apparatus, or that of the performance by a symphony orchestra.

The visual overtone is proved to be an actual piece, an actual element of – a fourth dimension!

In three-dimensional space, spatially inexpressible, and only emerging and existing in the fourth dimension (time added to the three dimensions). The fourth dimension?! Einstein? Or mysticism? Or a joke? It’s time to stop being frightened of this new knowledge of a fourth dimension. Einstein himself assures us:

“The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of ‘four-dimensional’ things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult. And yet there is no more common-place statement than that the world in which we live is a four-dimensional space-time continuum.”

Possessing such an excellent instrument of perception as the cinema – even on its primitive level – for the sensation of movement, we should soon learn a concrete orientation in this four-dimensional space-time continuum, and feel as much at home in it as in our own house-slippers. And we’ll soon be posing the question of a fifth dimension!

Overtonal montage is revealed as a new category among the other montage processes known up till now. The applied significance of this method is immediately immense. And that is why this article appears in a number devoted to the sound film!*

In the article cited at the beginning, pointing to the “unexpected junction” – a similarity between the Kabuki theater and the sound film, I wrote on the contrapuntal method of combining the visual and aural images:

“To possess this method one must develop in oneself a new sense: the capacity of reducing visual and aural perceptions to a ‘common denominator’.”

And yet we cannot reduce aural and visual perceptions to a common denominator. They are values of different dimensions. But the visual overtone and the sound overtone are values of a singly measured substance. Because, if the frame is a visual perception, and the tone is an aural perception, visual as well as aural overtones are a totally physiological sensation. And consequently, they are of one and the same kind, outside the sound or aural categories that serve as guides, conductors to its achievement. 

For the musical overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say: “I hear.”

Nor for the visual overtone: “I see.”

For both, a new uniform formula must enter our vocabulary: “I feel.”

The theory and methodology of the overtone have been cultivated and made familiar by, among others, Debussy and Scriabin. Old and New introduces a concept of the visual overtone. And from the contrapuntal conflict between the visual and aural overtones will be born the composition of the Soviet sound film.

—

*This issue of the newspaper Kino for August 27, 1929, was chiefly devoted to the reports and speeches at the All-Union Conference on the Sound Film, held earlier in the month.

Image: a still of the cream separator sequence in Eisenstein’s Old and New. Visual tone is set by a dark ground of a rural-industrial environment with metal containers, in which an ecstatic woman is superimposed with the image of the cream-separating machine at work.

“A drawing may represent a three-dimensional space, but the character of the drawing remains two-dimensional. Thus, the impression generated by a drawing is always dualistic: on the one hand, we perceive the image as three-dimensional, but we also perceive the play of lines in the two-dimensional plane. This dualism places drawing in a special category of art.”

– Lev Vygotsky, The Psychology of Art, 1922, p. 237