I even argued with my boss that it would ALWAYS be the PanAm Building! and she was not amused–paradoxically, my pain-in-the-assedness may have been why she then offered me a permanent position at the beautiful new MetLife Building–which I refused, imagining she wanted a little light S&M with me as the M in a light bondage office sequence. They had the most beautiful lobby just as PanAm was disappearing, i was constantly there while everything still said PanAm everywhere, on the old elevators and these marvelous large planters full of flower beds, which is fairly unusual indoors (you usually get the big quiet Ficus and Scheffleras in big wooden containers that never call attention to themselves but give a garden-variety ‘airy effect’).

The strangest criticism was that the PanAm Building blocked off the view up Park Avenue, but the Helmsley Building, though smaller, just above it, had already blocked it off, leaving a only a few more shafts of light at its side, since it was smaller. My love for the PanAm Building was not only that at a few levels at several levels all the way up were, I believe, dividing stories that contrasting in such a way as to suggest something somehow ‘pineapple-tropical’ (I’ve until now concealied this quite eccentric image, so that constitutes a confessional–I’d even sing the old theme from ‘Picnic’ on my way to the job when I’d see these, and I never did it when I worked in the fucking World Trade Center or Moody’s Investors Service.

But the main thing is that it was an enormous pleasure to be inside those walls: The halls were often twice the width in any other skyscraper, the ceilings were much higher, and you could really feel this space. Except for my schoolmarmy boss, all the people in this company were somehow a part of this breezy feeling of space–they were delightful and had none of the horrible constant anger I found in, say, Garment District law firms and, much worse, ad agencies, those nightmares of the world. My bad attitude would even disappear there. One of my other bosses there would open up a gym and let the handyman guys play basketball at their lunch hour every day. Colleen, the beautiful girl who I would sit in for, would be in another position for the day, and come back and flirt for awhile. Bute Luther would come up and tell me about rough gay bars in seamy parts of the Village. Heidi would tell me how to avoid the horrible schoolmarm when she tried to get me to go ‘carolling’ at Xmas. It was so strangely pleasant that I would look at myself in Colleen’s mirror at the desk, and I would somehow always be reminded of Marilyn Monroe, I’m not sure why. i didn’t even mind faxing, which I usually hate more than anything.

Okay, this was very self-iindulgent, but maybe it gives an idea of how spaces themselves to allow for a more expansive atmosphere in what is a fairly conventional workplace (although United Media was a pretty thriving outfit at the time.) I also, for example, worked at United Media and Better Homes and Gardens, and the tone was tight and bitchy at all times–and the space was very tight and close. Does that make any sense. Anyway, thanks for the additional information on one of my favourite buildings. I went so crazy when they took the signs off, that one of my friends remarked on ‘your Proustrian pain’ and two old lady friends went to a church rummage sale and found two old PanAm blankets that would have been used on the flights and bought them for me. And I still treasure them and use them.

I think our disagreement is merely two tautologies confronting each other uneasily, by which I mean it’s one of definition. If you define “the state” as the instrument of class rule, then yes, if “the state endures,” so does class rule. If you define “the state” as that body which is not the entirety of the populace but is empowered occasionally to make decisions which affect the populace, then maybe we can have a “state” without “class rule”? I am thinking only of the Commune here, or some version of syndicalism.

But really I’m proposing something relatively materialist: instead of imagining “abolition of the state” as a goal, let’s imagine “the end of surplus value” as a goal and move from there. I suspect something other than absolute direct democracy will resolve itself, and if I call that “the state,” that’s only nomenclatural. But perhaps you’re right that one needs to abandon the bad habit of using the term…

>So if we can accept that a state form of some kind will endure, we can ask the two >questions: what kind of state form, and what do we really want to abolish?

Well, I’m not sure I do accept this. I guess it depends on what we mean by the ‘state.’ I’m pretty compelled by the idea that the state is an organ of class rule–giving up on its abolition would thus mean giving up on a classless society. And, however much blind optimism of the will this might mean, I’m not ready to give up on that. At least not today. . . especially when [cue pessimism of the intellect] it seems like such a remote possibility!

But neither planning nor organization require the state in the sense of class rule, nor does a fidelity to communism in its strict sense rule out a role for a particular form of the state in meantime, or in the transition. Perhaps that’s what you mean by endure?

I mean, I’m all for agreeing that there will be no perfect society whatever happens, no end to ideology, all that stuff: et in Arcadia ego, etc. But must we accept the ineluctability of the specialized roles and positions of power that a state seems to require by definition?

A great thread, this one.

Is that the former PanAm, now MetLife Building on Park Avenue? or another one somewhere else? I’m one of the few people who ever loved the PanAm Building here, and it was completely transformed when the death people w. Snoopy came in and changed the signs at the top, putting the old PanAm ones in a museum in Florida. I realize this has more to do with some neoliberal (me) than it does with Socialism, but ‘American corporate power’ was mentioned, although I haven’t the slightest idea what the building itself was the death of in an ideological sense. The building is quite amazing inside.

Aside: but with the SI to some extent (read the texts on the derive, they differentiate theirs from the Surrealists precisely because the Situationist derive is NOT random, that it was Active) and Benjamin to a major extent, this is (cue sigh from the back of the class) a dialectical question. The impulse ‘efface the traces’/vs ‘an archaeology of ephemera’, and the tension is between the two. Benjamin was as interested in Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos as he ever was in the Surrealists: esp in ‘Experience and Poverty’ and the Arcades, essential reading for those who appear to think WB is WG Sebald. This sense of being pulled by both impulses or working off the tension between the two is also found in lots of practitioners, eg Kurt Schwitters, Karel Teige…

(if I may say so there’s some stuff about this in my book, which got rewritten a lot after the version I sent you)

Jane’s question is the right one: “So if we can accept that a state form of some kind will endure, we can ask the two questions: what kind of state form, and what do we really want to abolish?”

And as an act of penance, I’ve just posted on bad nationalization, which seems to echo some of the points here about the state as servant of neoliberalism…

It’s all so helpful though, this… Thanks…

I’d echo Voyou and Jasper’s points on the state and the SI though. Over here, the state actually spends more on the railways now than when it used to own them, and this is the case across the board. Surely it’s a mistake to see neoliberalism as the negation of the state, when what it actually entails is the state reacquiring a role as enforcer for capital: which has always been its role, excepting the 1945-79 interregnum. And one shouldn’t mistake the SI’s degeneration into wandering-around-Paris for its original possibilities. Their ‘Imaginist Bauhaus’ does have a very big clue in the name…