A Foreign Sound: John Roberts, *Philosophizing the Everyday*

[Jeffrey Rubard]

Philosophizing
the Everyday
Revolutionary Praxis and
the Fate of Cultural Theory
JOHN ROBERTS

Pluto Press

The Everyday and the Machino-technical

One of the highpoints of this theoretical elaboration of byt is
Trotsky’s writing from the early 1920s in Pravda, first collected
in English under the title of Problems of Life in 1924 (and
republished as The Problems of Everyday Life in 1973).10 In
this collection, and other writings up until his exile in 1928,
Trotsky returns again and again to the everyday as the focus
of the achievements of the Revolution and the site where the
Revolution is to be defended and deepened. As the focus of
the working class’s cultural and spiritual development the
‘everyday’ is where the revolution is to be made and remade in
accordance with the new conditions of socialist construction:
‘The older generation, which is more and more diminishing,
learned communism in the course of a class struggle; but

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 21
the new generation is destined to learn it in the elements of
construction, the elements of construction of everyday life.’11
Here Trotsky is following Lenin’s directive to the Party to
shift its energies after the consolidation of power from political
work to cultural work, or rather, to the transformation of
political work into cultural work. ‘Leninism is the knowledge
and ability to turn culture, i.e. all the knowledge amassed in
previous centuries, to the interests of the working masses.’12
In this way the Revolution, Trotsky declares, unleashes a new
kind of politics in which all aspects of social and cultural life
are subject to evaluation and transformation. Politics are now
the mediating form between the collective self-activity of the
proletariat and the new cultural forms of everyday life.
The object of acquiring conscious knowledge of everyday life is
precisely so as to be able to dissolve graphically, concretely, and
cogently before the eyes of the working masses themselves the
contradictions between the outgrown material shell of the old way
of life and the new relationships and needs which have arisen.13
Indeed, the disclosure of the contradictions of everyday life
as the basis for new cultural forms and relations is at the very
heart of what ‘distinguished Marx’s method’.14
Also exemplary of this shift of political work into cultural
work in the early 1920s were Alexandra Kollantai’s writings
on gender, sexuality and marriage (even if the ‘gendering of
the everyday’ was largely absent from the theorization of the
concept until Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949)
and Lefebvre’s work on femininity in the 1960s).15 Kollantai’s
commitment to sexual equality and sexual liberation in a period
of extraordinary ignorance and reticence on sexual questions
within the workers’ movement, and within the Bolshevik
party in particular, directed women to the possibility of new
kinds of social relationships with men and, therefore, to the
transformation of the categories of everyday experience. As
Trotsky himself argued in alliance with Kollantai, ‘The central

22 PHILOSOPHIZING THE EVERYDAY
task in the transformation of everyday life is the liberation
of women.’16
But, if the transformation of the everyday provided an
expanded cultural space through which the revolution saw
itself, this cultural space was nevertheless overdetermined by
a strongly unifi ed sense of what these modernizing conditions
in the transformation of experience might actually be. The
Bolshevik critique and transformation of the everyday was not
an aesthetic critique of capital and political economy, it was a
technical and technist transformation of pre-capitalist forms as
the demand for industrialization, at Party level, overwhelmed
any prospective or experimental link between the emancipation
of labour, gender relations and aesthetic discourse. In this all
aspects of the transformation of everyday life – the critique of
bourgeois high culture, artisanal cultural practices, religion,
prevailing gender relations – were offi cially mediated through
this industrial, modernizing imperative and machino-technical
culture. In Kollantai, for instance, underlying her call for sexual
liberation at certain points is an almost brutal commitment
to the free availability of women’s bodies, as if pleasure itself
had to be subject to quantifi able levels of sexual promiscuity
in order for the boundaries of bourgeois morality to dissolve.17
As such, Lenin’s, Trotsky’s and Kollantai’s cultural politics are
far from being free of the instrumental directives of what many
leading Bolsheviks cited approvingly as the Americanization
or Taylorization of the Revolution. Indeed, although Lenin
and Trotsky diverge on what the politicization of culture
might entail under this imperative – Trotsky and Kollantai
being far more sympathetic to modernism – they were perhaps
its most vocal defenders. Lenin sees the fi rst responsibility
of the politicization of culture as the development of class
consciousness and identity through the discipline of industrial
labour.18 He is largely indifferent, therefore, in fact antagonistic,
to any arguments that would weaken the refoundation of
industrial production and the emergence of the Soviet Union

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 23
from its pre-capitalist sloth. This is why, although Lenin did not
support many of the extreme proletarian manifestations of this
machino-technical culture, he nevertheless shared in its ruling
spirit. Trotsky’s cultural politics in Problems of Everyday Life,
likewise, are shaped predominantly by the machino-technical
imperative. The aim of revolutionaries, he argues, should not be
to smash Fordism, but to socialize and purge it.19 Such willing
technism generates a tension in his writing on the everyday that
is replicated in much of the leadership: between the Leninist
insistence on the proletariat as the revolutionary inheritors
and guardians of the highest achievements of bourgeois culture
(against ultra-leftist Proletkult nihilism) and the requirements
of modernization and the formation of a new culture.
It is no surprise, therefore, that in the early years of the
Revolution the writings of the American Frederick Taylor
and his Soviet epigone Alexei Gastev were welcomed onto
the Central Committee in the name of the rationalization of
labour. Gastev was the director of the Institute for the Scientifi c
Organization of the Mechanization of Man, which devoted
itself to identifying and refi ning the machino-technical and
temporal demands of the revolution. In this, Gastev and the
Institute were preoccupied with two major issues in relation
to the proletarian reconstruction of the everyday: the quality
of work discipline itself – the Institute employed various
time-keepers to monitor worker attendance and performance
– and a science of ‘revolutionary effi ciency and economy’ in
which human movement and manual skills were measured
and defi ned by the machinic, in order to divest the body of
the worker from the bad habits of bourgeois indulgence and
lassitude. One of Gastev’s favourite exhortations to workers
was to go to bed and get up at a fi xed hour in order that they
might aim at ‘objective hygiene of cerebral activity’.20 One of
his favourite maxims was ‘Unremitting struggle, mastery of the
body’.21 This rhetoric was easily open to ridicule and Gastev’s
obsessive mensuration of the revolutionary body soon fell out

24 PHILOSOPHIZING THE EVERYDAY
of favour, as its palpable anti-humanist technism came into
confl ict with Lenin’s Marxist humanist cultural inclinations;
and later, with the conservative restitution of traditional
cultural forms under Stalinism.
Yet, if the Revolution’s submission to Taylorism is deeply
problematic, it is the machino-technical that defi nes the very
cultural politics of the revolution, and indeed which gives it its
singular and progressive character. This is why if the cultural
transformation of the everyday had begun and ended with
Lenin’s view of the proletariat as the revolutionary conduit of
the monuments of world culture, there would have been no
revolutionary transformation of the everyday to speak of. The
revolutionary transformation of the everyday would have simply
been an act of homage to, and veneration of, the ‘masterpiece’,
rather than a necessary and iconoclastic rupture with the social
and cultural relations and images of the past. The Revolution’s
transformation of the everyday is caught in a visible dilemma,
therefore, during its early years: it is revolutionary technism
which actually defi nes the historical and original character of
the revolution and its cultural dynamism, but it is revolutionary
technism which also prepares the ground for the Revolution’s
future social negation. This is why the debate on the machinotechnical
is at its most astute in that domain where the call
to labour discipline and the ideal of the machinic was less
bound by Party dictates: the avant-garde. In fact, in the early
1920s Constructivist and Productivist circles were the only
places where technism was subject to something amounting
to an internal critique. Constructivism and Productivism were
certainly in agreement with the prevailing machino-technical
ethos: the revolutionary transformation of the everyday could
not be made from the traditional materials, practices and
processes of traditional bourgeois culture. But at the same time,
the defence of the new technical resources of machino-technical
culture was not an argument for the Taylorization of art. On
the contrary, Constructivism and Productivism subjected the

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 25
prevailing machino-technical to a different and more telling
question: in what ways is the emancipation of labour from
capitalist relations of production actually compatible with the
machino-technical? In this, Constructivist and Productivist
artists and theorists such as Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitsky,
Aleksei Gan and Varvara Stepanova asked questions of the
cultural form that the emancipation of labour might take – as
such, the political and cultural implications of these questions
were very different to those proposed by the defenders of the
socialist reconstruction of Fordism.22
It is left to Constructivism and Productivism, therefore, to
assert the necessary breakdown between intellectual labour and
manual labour, artistic labour and productive labour, under
revolutionary culture. Both Constructivist and Productivist
artists talk about the artist’s participation in production as the
basis for the transformation of the identity of both workers and
artists, and the de-alienation of art and labour. Accordingly,
what is distinctive about the avant-garde critique of culture
and the everyday during the Revolution is how much it is
indebted precisely to Marx’s critique of the technical division
of labour in contradistinction to the anti-bourgeois rhetoric
of revolutionary technism. In fact what is remarkable is how
little Marx’s aesthetic critique of political economy enters the
cultural debates during this period. Limited to the avant-gardist
margins, the revolutionary cultural transformation of the
everyday is confined, at Party level, to the demand to increase
the cultural level of workers and peasants. In a society of mass
illiteracy this basic requirement was an obvious priority; and
Lenin and Trotsky rightly attacked those idealists elements
on the left that thought this illiteracy could be transcended
at will. But at the same time the encouragement of cultural
uplift introduced a pervasive dualism into the political rhetoric
of cultural change, in an echo of prewar cultural debates.
Rationalization and discipline of labour came first, cultural
transformation came second. The result was a revolution in the

26 PHILOSOPHIZING THE EVERYDAY
name of the transmutation of all values, but without any sense
of this transmutation as the possible liberation of sensuous
form from labour. For all Trotsky’s defence of the relative
autonomy of art and of modernist technique his writing did
little philosophically to undermine this dualism. As such, there is
remarkably little Marxist refl ection on the prevailing machinotechnical
culture even in the anti-Stalinist classics of the period.
In Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1933)23 and
Victor Serge’s Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930)24
there is an attenuated understanding of how Taylorization
and the mechino-technical framed and channelled everyday
life and revolutionary ardour.
To my knowledge in this period it is only in The Mind and
Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life (1926)
by René Fülöp-Miller that the everyday, technism and cultural
forms of the revolution are actually discussed, although Ante
Ciliga’s later extraordinary revolutionary anti-Stalinist memoir
In The Land of the Great Lie (1938),25 provides rich insight
into the bureaucratized decay of Bolshevik anti-bourgeois
rhetoric during the early 1930s. Fülöp-Miller is a half-hearted
and dilettantist friend of the revolution, essentially a left social
democratic with a distaste for collectivism and a penchant
for spiritual homilies. Yet in a prescient fashion he identifies
and attacks Taylorization and machino-techical culture on
the grounds that they fail to subject capitalist relations to
the full force of Marx’s critique of political economy. The
Bolsheviks have ‘neglected everything in the doctrines of Marx
that went beyond arid expediency’.26 ‘The mission of [Soviet]
communism is to perfect the mechanization which is already
highly developed in America.’27 But ironically, if he confronts
Taylorization he fails to recognize its cultural critique in the
avant-garde, preferring to endorse the worst kind of anti-avantgarde,
academic practice. Fülöp-Miller, therefore, is not much
of a revolutionary guide to the cultural transformation of the
everyday, but in defending Marx against Bolshevik technism

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 27
he does identify a problem that was to emerge in the literature
on the everyday after Stalinism: the gap between Bolshevism’s
machino-technical transformation of the everyday and the
sensuous liberation from, and transformation of, productive
labour. Indeed, this is the defi ning terrain of the concept of the
everyday as it becomes detached from the Stalinist counterrevolution
in Lefebvre’s writing and the Situationists in the
1950s and 1960s.
A World to be Made: Revolutionary Technism into the
Philosophy of Praxis
In the 1920s and 1930s it is the machino-technical, then,
that transforms the concept of the everyday into an active
cultural category. Without the machino-technical imperative
the revolutionary identifi cation and transformation of the
everyday would not have existed, or would not have existed
in quite the same way. This is why the left critique of Lenin’s
and Trotsky’s revolutionary technism in Constructivism and
Productivism is, in the end, continuous with the machinotechnical;
in the absence of this continuity the avant-garde
would have simply dissolved into revolutionary gesturalism
and aestheticism. As such, the machino-technical is one of the
primary means by which the transformation of revolutionary
politics into revolutionary cultural politics is given its dynamic
focus and identity, radically transforming the tenets of
orthodox Marxism.
Through the revolutionary expansion of the concept of the
everyday – set in motion by the Russian Revolution – there
is a widespread critical revision outside of the Soviet Union
of the categories of pre-Revolution Marxist philosophy and
political theory, in particular the writings of Georg Plekhanov
and Karl Kautsky.28 The orthodoxy subscribed to by Plekhanov
and Kautsky is not the same in detail, but they do share along
with many of the defenders of Second International Marxism

28 PHILOSOPHIZING THE EVERYDAY
of this period a number of core principles that shaped the
general character of the European workers’ movement:
fi rstly, the belief that the development of human society is an
evolutionary process and is determined by the development
of the productive forces; secondly, that the development
of these productive forces need a rational and enlightened
bureaucracy to put these advances in place; and thirdly, that
the encouragement of rational debate and the dissemination
of the natural and social sciences within the working class is
suffi cient to win the working class over to socialism.
In Germany, where this thinking had its most powerful
institutional base, but where also there was a sizeable intellectual
and working-class opposition to this kind of thought, impact of
the Russian Revolution brought about a direct confrontation
with the anti-culturalism of this positivism and economism. And
one of the key signifi ers of this confrontation was the technist
mediation of the ‘everyday’, particularly in the work of artists
and cultural theorists such as Benjamin, where the embrace
of the new technologies and modernist modes of attention
generated a powerful commitment to the links between cultural
practice and revolutionary thought and practice.29 As a result,
the concept of the everyday as a category of revolutionary
cultural transformation is seen as one of the means of
uncoupling Marxism from the stultifying evolutionary and
(non-revolutionary) mechanistic social categories of orthodoxy,
and, concomitantly, freeing art from the aestheticism and the
atemporal principles of the bourgeois art academy.
In placing a primary emphasis on the need for the continuous
development and reassertion of revolutionary agency, the Second
International’s pragmatist and stagist road to socialism – that the
last stage of social and human development is a preceding stage
for the next stage of development – is exposed as a rationalist
and empiricist deviation from the practical–critical content of
Marx’s writing. Hence, the shift from ‘materialism’ to cultural
politics in revolutionary technism sets out to recover the Marx

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 29
that European Social Democratic Marxism after the 1880s lost
or discarded, and that the Russian Revolution repositioned:
Marx as the philosopher and theorist of revolution.
The philosophical critique of the naturalism, economism
and gradualism of orthodox Marxism and the invention of
an interventionist art of the everyday, consequently, inhabit
a similar conceptual universe in the 1920s. Both link politics
to revolutionary cultural practice and revolutionary culture
practice to the avant-garde notion of permanent revolution.
But, unlike in the Soviet Union, an emergent Western Marxism
did not actually produce any substantive theories of the
everyday. Rather, in the most infl uential writing of the period,
the everyday signifi es something like a generalized point of
attraction for the critique of prewar Marxist orthodoxy and
bourgeois science. This is because the emergent theory is driven
not by the objective circumstances of revolution – and therefore
with the practical problems of the ‘construction of everyday
life’ – but by the prospects for revolutionary consciousness and
revolutionary agency under capitalism. The discussion of the
concept of the everyday in early Western Marxism, therefore,
is more generally subordinate to the philosophic (and at
times euphoric) reinterpretation of Marxism as a theory of
revolutionary praxis. Where we fi nd reference to the everyday,
we usually fi nd a philosophical discussion of revolutionary
agency. Marx, however, did not talk about revolutionary
agency as a ‘theory of praxis’. This is because the concept of
praxis was constitutive of his critique of the passive subject
of traditional materialism (Feuerbach) and the speculative
subject of Idealism, it was not something that required
conceptual differentiation. But, after the Russian Revolution,
it became important for revolutionaries to distinguish what
was qualitatively different about Marx’s concept of praxis in
a world of scientistic and positivist readings of Marx. In his
critique of Feuerbach, Marx defi nes revolutionary praxis in
terms of the unity of external, material transformation and

30 PHILOSOPHIZING THE EVERYDAY
self-transformation. Both subject and object are transformed
in a continuous and mutually determining process.30 On this
basis, in the 1920s reference to the philosophy of praxis was
a way of distinguishing Marx’s dynamic concept of praxis
from its competitors, thereby aligning what was irreducible
to the Second International version of Marxism, to the Soviet
Revolution and to the interventionist character of the concept
of the everyday.
In these terms, the three post-revolutionary founding
texts of the philosophy of praxis, Karl Korsch’s Marxism
and Philosophy (1923),31 Georg Lukács’ History and
Class Consciousness (1923)32 – his farewell to a Romantic
naturalization of the everyday as ‘inauthentic’ – and Lenin
(1924),33 the concept of der Alltag is rarely used in any direct
sense and is certainly never a focus for the discussion of
political practice or cultural practice, as in Trotsky’s pre-exile
writings. Yet these books possess a revolutionary fervour that
is incomprehensible without an understanding of the everyday
as one of the key mediating categories of the new revolutionary
epoch East and West, and, as such, the phenomenological basis
of revolutionary practice. As Lukács says in Lenin, invoking his
prewar engagement with Lebensphilosophie and the everyday,
‘the development of capitalism turned proletarian revolution
into an everyday issue’.34 In this respect the signifi cance of the
everyday in Europe at this point lies directly in the cultural,
political and philosophical impact of revolutionary praxis
on a younger generation of Marxist philosophers. Thus for
Korsch and Lukács the overriding question for revolutionaries
in Germany after Bolshevik power is: What are the practical
and ideological problems facing the generalization of the Soviet
revolution in conditions of ‘stable’ bourgeois democracy?
This in turn fi nds its expression in a philosophical defence
of the political, and, as such, a defence of the primacy of
the conjunctural and the particular: what Lenin, following
Marx, called the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.

THE EVERYDAY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRAXIS 31
‘The preeminent aim’ of revolutionary method, asserts Lukács
in History and Class Consciousness, is ‘knowledge of the
present’.35 Or, as he was to say of Lenin’s achievements 40
years later, Lenin’s methodology was always ‘an understanding
of the socio-historical particularity of the given situation in
which action had to be taken’.36