Introducing a Marxist lecture series at the Spitzer School of Architecture

In the summer of 2012 a stranger at the CCNY campus in Harlem pushed Marxist propaganda on unsuspecting students. Being an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, I naturally responded with polite disbelief and a few choice words in my native Russian. I didn't give much thought to the incident. After all, Marxism wasn't openly taught at CCNY. Progressivism, yes. But not explicitly Marxism. That is until the fall of 2024.

Today, as an alum of the Spitzer School of Architecture, I was invited to a?semester-long lecture series that, according the the organizers??"revisits Friedrich Engels' 19th-century arguments about the housing crisis and capitalist exploitation but inverts Engels by putting design, architecture, and planning first."?If?you?wonder what Engels had to say on the issue of housing, a speaker's note by Laurence Vale, an MIT Professor of architecture, reveals:??"In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production."

I am sure we gave it all in the Soviet Union at the cost of millions of murdered and exiled peasants, dissidents and other innocents. For those who survived, state-owned housing known as "kommunalka",?meant multiple families sharing a single apartment with a single kitchen and one bathroom. Public ownership of farmland or "kolkhoz", and other means of production meant abject shortages of basic necessities, endless lines and a two-tier distribution system - one for the masses and another one for the terror state apparatus. And finally here in NYC, after decades of failures in the public housing sector, we are witnessing a transfer of multi-family public housing to private management in the form of long-term leases.

Despite all this, Marxism has gone mainstream in the US and is aggressively promoted by the yesterday-progressives. In this election year, I am asking you to seriously consider where Marxism leads. For me and other immigrants I know from the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, it is not a question of outcome, just a question of time. If you are open to this discussion, I recommend two first-hand accounts of life brough about by Marxism: "White Nights" by Menahem Begin or "Gulag Archipelago", by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, both books (still) readily available on Amazon. If you are a member of a book club, consider reading and sharing these books with others in your group.