Figure 5 — Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International(1919), an “exercise in the…music of the future”[«экзерсис…музыки будущего»]” (Trotskii)Figure 6 — Lebbeus Woods’ Wave <strong>House</strong> (1997): “We can know the future to exactly thesame extent that we can know the past or imagine the present…having been invented.”11
city of the last couple centuries. 34 In order to carry out this neo-Neolithic revolution, Ajlcalls for a policy of “repeasantization” — a telling slip-of-the-pen. 35 Presumably, whathe means by this is not literally the restoration of some sort of peasantry, as this feudaltitle tends to imply a certain legal and political status: enserfment, congenital bondage tothe land (the manor or estate of a local nobleman), and the compulsory alienation of one’sproperty and labor to his lord as part of a corvée system. Most farmers are not peasants.Rather, what Ajl probably has in mind is a new yeomanry, tilling the soil in the bucolicsplendor of the countryside. Although he insists that “smallholder agriculture is not anantiquarian curio,” the spirit that animates Ajl’s atavistic vision is clearly conjured out ofthe ideological ectoplasm of romantic anti-capitalism. 36 It is nourished on “the view thatif only capitalism had not come into existence we could all be living in a happy hobbitlandof freed peasants and independent small producers.” 37This would perhaps seem a neat bit of buffoonery — a quaint throwback to the petitbourgeoissocialism dismissed in the Manifesto as “reactionary and Utopian” 38 — were itnot for the widespread support it enjoys in anti-capitalist circles today. <strong>The</strong> idyllic past itportrays is, of course, a fiction. Family farming has since the 1970s become fetishized bythe “small is beautiful” Left, roughly around the same time as family-owned farms beganto go extinct (transformed into subsidiaries of large-scale agribusiness). Leftish urbanitesand self-proclaimed student radicals today often see in traditional agriculture the vestigesof a simple, honest, and upright way of life that has otherwise been lost in modern times.34 That is, one that is “centered on agriculture,” against Mumford’s megalopolis. Ibid., pgs. 25-26.35 Ibid., pg. 26.Though apparently, Ajl is not to blame for this grotesque nomenclature; Laura Enriquez first introducedthe term in a piece on Cuba from 2003. Enriquez, Laura J. “Economic Reform and Repeasantization inPost-1990 Cuba.” Latin American Research Review. Pgs. 201-218.It is almost certain, however, that this is what Ajl had in mind when he spoke of “repeasantization,” as hegoes on to praise Cuba for its reforms.36 Ajl, “Planet of Fields.” Pg. 26.37 Davidson, Neil. “Bourgeois Revolutions: On the Road to Salvation for all Mankind.” Socialist Review.December 2004.38 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Translated by Samuel Moore.Collected Works, Volume 6: 1845-1848. (International Publishers. New York, NY: 1976). Pg. 510.12
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