One glaring problem that faced the Bolsheviks upon seizing power was the absence of their vaunted class subject. The party had led a successful revolution in the name of the industrial worker, but once the dust settled after the civil war, reality exposed the proclaimed “dictatorship of the proletariat” to be little more than an empty slogan for propagandists. The proletariat was a historico-philosophical no-show. Its truancy had a number of reasons, both factual and theoretical. First, while proletarians had always been something of a rarity in the largely agrarian economy of imperial Russia, the industrial working class became even scarcer after the civil war had decimated the manufacturing capacity of Russia and ruralized the country once again. When the Bolsheviks finally took control, Russia's industrial output had fallen to thirty percent of prewar levels. Historians have consequently described the Bolsheviks as a “superstructure in need of a base” 2 and a “vanguard of a nonexistent class.” 3 Add to this, second, the fact that the physiognomy of the working class was changing in the 1920s as the forces of production shifted away from the methods of heavy manufacture typical of the second industrial revolution toward newer, automated technologies that relied less on physical exertion than on the scientific knowledge of engineers and managers. At least until Stalin's spectacular revival of older, “classical” forms of industry at the end of the decade—a return that seemed to be motivated less by economic exigency than by retrograde iconography—blast furnaces and factory workbenches were being replaced by telematic machinery and bureaucratic control centers. Third, according to revolutionary theory, in the phase of the transition to communism the proletariat was not even a class, strictly speaking, but the social force that abolishes class identity as such in order to establish for the first time in world history the conditions for a truly universal subject. 4 The revolutionary class is, necessarily, the last class. Party philosophers could provide no substantialist definition of this “free dynamei (power, force),” as Marx called the proletariat, since this non-class had no concrete features of its own but was instead understood as an energy that dissolved the existing socioeconomic order. 5 Paradoxically, then, the very success of the revolution “causes the concept of the proletariat to ‘disappear.’” 6

Ten writers—Zahid R. Chaudhary, Anne A. Cheng, Joan Copjec, Tim Dean, David L. Eng, David Halperin, David Kurnick, D. A. Miller, Mignon Nixon, and Spyros Papapetros—celebrate the recently departed Leo Bersani.

Devin Fore introduces the GAKhN Dictionary of Artistic Terms (1923–29), a selection of which is published in translation here for the first time. After a brief history of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN), which was established in 1921 and dissolved in 1930, Fore situates the unfinished collaboration between the academy's Section of Visual Arts and the Philosophical Department in the context of GAKhN's larger commitment to democratizing knowledge, and he suggests that what emerges from these dictionary entries are the contours of a program for a positivist aesthetics.

Anticipating the publication later this year of the English edition of History and Obstinacy , this issue of October presents three texts related to this epochal book by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge: the volume's third chapter and philosophical nucleus, “Elements of a Political Economy of Labor Power”; an interview with Negt and Kluge, made shortly after the appearance of the original edition, which provides a concise introduction to the book's ambitious plan for writing an anthropology of capital; and a more recent interview in which Negt reflects on the historical and theoretical concerns that first motivated this collaborative enterprise.

One of the most important units within Dziga Vertov's conceptual system is the lexeme that means BOND. It recurs throughout his writings, most often appearing as the noun sviaz ' although sometimes it also surfaces as the verb sviazat ' (“to link”). Occasionally it is alloyed with a second lexeme to forge strange and unprecedented compounds, as in Vertov's definition of “kino-eye” as a “film-bond [ kino-sviaz '] between the peoples of the USSR and those of the entire world.” Such insistence on film's status as a visual link, or copula, explains why Vertov, in contrast to contemporaries like Lev Kuleshov, looked askance at proposals to establish a formal ontology for the medium: Itself neither matter nor substance, cinema was instead a constructive means for connecting and binding substances, a means for catalyzing interactions between diverse and seemingly incommensurate objects. Thus, for Vertov, cinema was less an art form with clearly defined generic contours than “a kind of central telephonic exchange,” a means of communication, a coefficient of political activity, or even, in its greatest compass, a “social movement” itself (“Metod kino-glaza,” Iz naslediia , 2:142).