#special issue The urgent need to struggle

01.Our Principles: Self-Organization, Collectivism, Solidarity

The Chto Delat? platform unites artists, philosophers, social researchers, activists, and all those whose aim is the collaborative realization of critical and independent research, publication, artistic, educational and activist projects. All of the platform’s initiatives are based on the principles of self-organization and collectivism. These principles are realized through the political coordination of working groups—the contemporary analogue of soviets. The projects undertaken by any of these groups represent the entire platform and are closely coordinated with one another. At the same time, the existence of the platform creates a common context for interpreting the projects of its individual participants.

We are likewise guided by the principle of solidarity. We organize and support mutual assistance networks with all grassroots groups who share the principles of internationalism, feminism, and equality.

DV: Everyone has long ago given up wracking their brains over the question of whether it is possible to elaborate precise rules for organizing the work of a collective. It is now quite rare to come across a new manifesto or declaration. The cult of spontaneity, reactivity, and tactics—the rejection of readymade rules—is the order of the day. Tactics, however, is something less than method. Only by uniting tactics and strategy can we arrive at method. Hence it is a good thing to try one’s hand at writing declarations from time to time.

DR: But why now this declaration? I think it marks an important point in Chto Delat’s evolution from collective to counter-institution. We are trying to translate things we learned to (dis)agree upon over the last years into a broadened context with new constituents; to outline the principles of counter-institutional behavior very different from the extremely hierarchical and exploitative institutions that produce the social relations of the art world today. The main use of such an admittedly utopian endeavor is arguably that it shows us how far we have to go to realize our dreams of solidarity. That, and not the outlining of “rules,” is the whole point of writing declarations in the first place.

DV: These are the basic principles of the structure of the platform – I would also call them as ideal structure of work that unfortunately in reality function differently. The main problem is the lack of collective initiative, the growing passivity of the most of the participants. So at the moment the platform functions more as the space of identification, as a kind of identity that marks all people who are openly involved with it with a certain basic position. Also I hope that during the possible change of general political situation from repressive-reactionary towards progressive the platform could play a role of a trigger of different process and facilitate the growing number of its members with the tool for collective work.

For the great and powerful Russian language, the language

of Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov?

Oh yes, after all it was none other than Pushkin

who wrote to Chaadaev

(and everyone reads this poem in school)

AS: What I mean is probably that this lack of subjectivity was increasingly thematized by poetry itself, and it became part of its auto-reflexive structure, and here, I can see a parallel to philosophical debates about subjectivity and the subject in the post-Heideggerian sense. Can you make a kind of parallel or link to the poetical notion of displaced subjectivity and a philosophical problematization of the subject in post-Heideggerian terms?

GA: I would suppose that the analogy is very strong. But I suppose you know this very famous essay by Michel Foucault on the author…

Recently I understood clearly that art couldn’t help but be communist. This is not at all a manifestation of ideology, as it would seem to some. Nor is it dogma. It is just that suddenly it became obvious that all art – from Ancient Greece to the present day; that art which has overcome the egoism and conceit in itself – contained the potential to be communist. Regardless of its pessimism or optimism, such art is dedicated not to some social group but to one and all. This is not some kind of propaganda trick. That’s what happens with an artist whose art is not afraid of people. Often art is either afraid of losing itself in the crowd or, the other extreme, it attempts to be artificially populist so it isn’t suspected of being refined or subtle, or is addressed to an in-crowd of discerning connoisseurs and experts.

When I think about the art worker’s place in contemporary reality, unexpected pictures flash before my eyes: a poet torching an ugly office building in the city center or an artist, his face covered by a bandana, being arrested by seven cops at a demo. I like these pictures. Boring is the artist who has convinced himself that his place is in the studio from eleven in the morning to seven in the evening. And fine is the poet who doesn’t merely rock the Internet or club slam with his words, but devotes himself to activism

Gustave Courbet, one of the greatest artists of the nineteenth century and a founder of Realism, was active in the Paris Commune. He didn’t hesitate for long when the revolutionary committee offered him an important post in the new government. Here is what he wrote his family: Here I am, thanks to the people of Paris, up to my neck in politics: president of the Federation of Artists, member of the Commune, delegate to the Office of the Mayor, delegate to [the Ministry of] Public Education, four of the most important offices in Paris. I get up, I eat breakfast, and I sit and I preside twelve hours a day. My head is beginning to feel like a baked apple. But in spite of all this agitation in my head and in my understanding of social questions that I was not familiar with, I am in seventh heaven. Paris is a true paradise! […] The Paris Commune is more successful than any form of government has ever been.

This transcript is a excerpt of a workshop during which the reconstituted Karl Marx School of the English Language read the second to last chapter on primitive accumulation in Capital Vol. 1. An audio installation with paintings by Dmitry Gutov was shown in the framework of the exhibition “Principio Potosi” at the Reina Sofia Museum for Contemporary Art.