Figures

In his 2017 book De la Vertu, Jean-Luc Mélenchon attacks the corruption and immorality of contemporary politics.1 In support of his arguments he cites Colette Audry’s book Les militants et leurs morales [The Activists and their Moralities].2

The revolutionary career is not a series of banquets and a string of honorific titles, nor does it hold the promise of interesting research or professors’ salaries. It is a passage toward the unknown with misery, disgrace, ungratefulness and prison as its way stations. Only an almost superhuman belief illumines it, and merely talented people therefore choose it only rarely. – Horkheimer, Dawn, 1926-1931.

Historical Materialism is greatly saddened to hear of the death of Irish socialist and art historian Martin Gaughan. A specialist in Weimar radical culture and an inspirational teacher, he was part of the generation who contributed to the revival of interest in the historical avant-garde. A modest and quiet man, Martin was enormously learned and was a regular at Historical Materialism conference in London and the seminar Marxism in Culture, helping sustain the seminar while staying with his sister Mona and her husband Bill in Bloomsbury.

Heroine of the Revolution, widely considered to be its greatest journalist, read by millions in the new mass circulation Soviet press, role-model for the ‘new woman’ of the Revolution, revered in myths and legends, Larisa Reisner has also had much serious murderous sexist hatred thrown at her by its enemies, the more sensational the better, the more effective at shutting down any proper discussion of her life and work. Because heaven forbid we should be inspired by her short life in the Revolution, blown away by the power and beauty of her writings. She was a talentless hack, churning out Bolshevik propaganda for the illiterate masses, parading around in the furs and jewels of the murdered royal family, living in luxury while Russia starved, a monster of depravity, barely human, a nymphomaniac, who played sex games with her White prisoners before torturing them to death, who slept with all the Party leaders to advance her career as a writer. As Lenin said, ‘The poets of the lie are boundlessly inventive.’

In May 1941, a new prisoner was brought into cell 44A of the police prison at Roßauer Lände, Vienna, Austria. A fellow-prisoner, Hans Landauer, a veteran of the Austrian Brigade in Spain, later remembered; ‘not yet fifty years old, he was already an old man. Short, red-hair – in as far as it was possible to say this of someone with so little hair left – the mouth almost without teeth, dressed in an ill-fitting suit, timid, indeed almost frightened…’ Soon his cellmates learned his name. He was Franz Koritschoner, an early member of the Communist Party of German-Austria and in the early years of the Party one of its most important leaders. Since 1930, he had lived in the Soviet Union where he had worked for the Red International of Labour Unions or Profintern. There, he was arrested as part of the ‘purges’ in 1936. A colleague of the Profintern who was arrested at the same time later remembered that Koritschoner was sentenced to three years of imprisonment. He appealed against the verdict, which was revised. Koritschoner was now sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. He spent years in penal colonies in the far North, suffering from hunger and extreme cold. He fell ill with scurvy and, at times, was forced to work as a gravedigger. After all, the mortality rate in the camps was very high. In April 1941, he was, together with around 40 others, handed over to the Gestapo in Lublin, Poland. After an interval of several weeks at Morzinplatz, the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo, he arrived in the police prison at Roßauer Lände.

By Georg Fülberth and translated by Gregor Benton [i]

By Karen Vesper and translated by Gregor Benton[1]

“Marx’s theory of society and history was obviously not devised in order to provide a more adequate understanding of culture. It was meant to be an instrument of political practice.” (1982)

By Stefan Gužvica

The brilliant essay which makes up prison notebook 22, viz. ‘Americanism and Fordism’, was written by Gramsci in 1934, five whole years before Agnelli started FIAT’s giant Mirafiori complex near Turin, where Fordist methods were first used in a big way. The shortcoming of Gramsci’s otherwise remarkable notes is that he never gets round to the issue of how the new levels of automation associated with mass production (conveyor systems, semi-automatic machines, etc.) were transforming the nature of skills and affecting workers’ experience of work.

Fergus Millar (1935–2019), Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1984 until his retirement in 2002, who died a little over 2 years back. His scholarship was prodigious, but just as important, he was a remarkably kind, unassuming person (not an iota of self-importance!) who would go out of his way to be welcoming to new graduates in the Classics Faculty, as I know from my vivid memory of a reception (in Michaelmas 1987) where Fergus appeared affably out of nowhere to rescue a couple that must have looked pretty lost.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), the great German theologian who was executed by the Nazis in 1945. He was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1943 and hanged exactly two years later (at Flossenbürg concentration camp), accused of associating with the group that conspired to assassinate Hitler in July 1944. Tragically, his execution took place just three weeks before Hitler killed himself.