Pollux’s Spears SARAH NICHOLS It soon became clear to me that it was impossible to render understandable the concentration and interconnections, in other words the anatomy of imperialism, without using the graphical method of which I became one of the rare specialists worldwide. 1 Cement is the binding agent for concrete. A homogenous, low- value, perishable bulk commodity, it is the constant in reinforced concrete. 2 But a trio of graphics, published in 1946, depicts it as another sort of binder, one gluing a whole swath of the build - ing material industry into a conglomerate. An array of building materials is shown framed by cement—or, rather, by the network of companies that produce it. 3 The three graphics are the center - piece of an exposé titled The Cement and Building Material Trust published under the pseudonym “Pollux,” after the mytho - logical twin, positioning the unmasking of corporate-political power structures as a heroic act. 4 At the time of publication, the author’s real identity remained unknown. The Swiss conserv - ative press doggedly attacked Pollux’s work and attempted to smear any number of figures by accusing them of being behind the moniker. 5 Finally in 1953, with palpable satisfaction, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung unmasked Pollux, revealing that while his work had been published in Social Democratic and pro- union periodicals, the author not only held communist sympa - thies—an association Social Democrats were taking pains to disavow—but had defected to East Germany. Behind Pollux was Georges Baehler, a hydroelectric engineer who had worked for eighteen years in Switzerland, France, and Morocco before switching to his particular form of economic research. The three graphics, then, were drawn by an engineer—one with firsthand knowledge of the materiality of construction—to subvert the cartels that structured his professional life. Working outward from this insight, the present article situates the graphics, first in their biographical and political context, then in a longer history of organizational and anti-imperialist draw - ings, in order to locate their intervention at the intersection of information and materiality. Though Pollux was unmasked, Baehler’s voluminous, obsessive work and resulting archive of over 30 linear meters of newspaper clippings, articles, corre - spondence, and half-finished research projects has never been properly unpacked. This article is thus also a first pass at and invitation to further research his compelling and complicated life and work. In the mid-1930s, Baehler made what he describes as an abrupt shift from building systems to interrogating them. Just before, he had worked on the El Kansera dam in Morocco Grey Room 71, Spring 2018, pp. 141–155. © 2018 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 141 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 (1928–1934), for which François de Pierrefeu—who began collaborating with Le Corbusier in 1931 on the journal Plan s— was lead contractor. Baehler describes the experience as both his most important success as an engineer but also his first encounter with colonialism and the “stranglehold” held on the country by European finance. 6 From Morocco, he moved to Paris in 1935, attributing an easy landing to Le Corbusier— a fellow émigré from La Chaux-de-Fonds —and Paul Vaillant- Couturier, editor of L’humanité , at the time, the official news - paper of the French Communist Party. 7 From 1936 to 1939, he worked within the Maison de la culture on rue d’Anjou and for the Confédération générale du travail (CGT; General Confederation of Labor) and, together with a group of collabo - rators released pieces under the name Pierre Lenoir that cri - tiqued the power of global finance, including an investigation of the French cement industry. The outbreak of war forced Baehler back to engineering. While managing a hydroelectric plant in Corrèze, he was arrested by the Vichy regime for Resistance activities and was eventually involuntarily repatriated to Zurich in 1942. There, he found work at Elektrobank, a company that financed and planned hydropower projects worldwide. 8 At the same time, Baehler continued writing articles and founded a publishing house (Verein für wirtschaftliche Studien , 1944–1946) that released a series of five antitrust missives on topics such as the electrical and insurance industries and the complicity of German corpo - rations supporting the Nazi regime. 9 Baehler returned to Paris in 1945, working for the Centre d’études et de recherches économiques et sociales (Center for Social and Economic Study and Research) of the French Communist Party. Then in 1950 he relocated to the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany). There, under the pseudonym Baumann, he wrote on topics such as the Bonn government, the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, and Krupp— a sampling of the GDR’s bogeymen and antagonists. As in Paris, his publications were supported by a research position, this time at the Forschungsstelle Baumann (Baumann Research Unit) within the Deutsches Institut für Zeitgeschichte ( German Institute for Contemporary History ). By the end of the 1950s, his articles taper off, and some speculate he lost favor with the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party). 10 During Baehler’s time in both France and East Germany, his research was published in journals and newspapers of ruling leftist governments, yet it was the short period in Zurich where, writing against the grain, his work generated the most controversy. Throughout Baehler’s work, pervasive concerns include the concentration of power in the hands of the few (especially when passed down through familial links), the tendency toward monopolization in different industrial sectors, and—uniting the two—the oligarchic superimposition of corporate and polit - ical power. Baehler uses the English word trust in both the 142 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00246 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 German and French editions of his books, treating the trust as an import from American capitalism. 11 In his usage, trust refers to a large corporation whose hegemony over a given industry tends toward a monopoly, like Standard Oil. 12 In the case of cement, trust is also used to refer to an industry woven into an effective monopoly by common actors and investment. From Standard Oil onward, trusts were condemned from both ends of the economic spectrum. Free-market economists attacked monopolies, viewing them as a distortion of fair compe - tition, while Marxists critiqued them for fostering consumption, forming a new bourgeoisie, and feeding a brutal form of expan - sionism. While Pollux’s graphics deal with a topic that was hotly debated in his time, his early work is somewhat solitary, more in dialogue with an earlier generation of scholars than his contemporaries. Baehler draws heavily from Vladimir Lenin’s Pollux [Georges study of imperialism. In 1916, Lenin argued that the inherent Baehler]. tendency toward concentration in capitalism created not just “Deutschland” monopolies but a pernicious overlap between finance and (Germany). From Wer leitet industry, thereby ending any semblance of a free-market system Deutschland? and propelling a worldwide search for new sources for expan - (Who leads sion. 13 In 1910, Rudolf Hilferding, in a work influential for Germany?, 1945), plate 6. Lenin, had described the growing separation between capital and production and with it the emergence of a new group of powerful individuals. These insiders—often financiers—held seats on many corporate boards and their interests came to influence disparate industries. This interweaving of industries through finance and the resulting power of their alliances were what Baehler sought to “unmask.” Paul Sweezy’s theory of monopoly capitalism, published in 1942 at the height of Pollux’s activity but known to Baehler only later, offered a revi - Nichols | Pollux’s Spears 143 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey_a_00246 by guest on 30 September 2021 sion of Lenin’s theory similar to Baehler’s views. While par - tially rejecting the notion of the central power of finance, Sweezy saw that capitalism was no longer a free-market sys - tem. The state had become an economic instrument, and the world economy was an interlocked network of states—more or less capitalist—experiencing varying degrees of monopoly. 14 | | | | | The three cement industry plates are different views of the same subject: the Swiss building material industry at midcen - tury. Plate 1 shows the industry in western, French-speaking Switzerland centered on the concerns of cement producer Ernst Martz; plate 2, German-speaking Switzerland through the group of companies owned by the Schmidheiny family; and plate 3, a simplified representation of the industry as a whole, with substantial overlap between the two groups. Financial institutions are at the top, a placement that reflects their impor - tance. 15 Major figures or institutions are below, linked businesses from other sectors are at the sides, and foreign subsidiaries are at the bottom. Though their names may seem unfamiliar, sev - eral are of continuing global importance today, albeit under new names such as LafargeHolcim, UBS, and Credit Suisse. 16 Boxed text indicates organizations of all kinds, while circles indicate powerful individuals. 17 Arrows from circle to box indi - cate membership on the board of directors; tapering lines indicate a president, vice president, or delegate. Arrows between two boxes indicate common board members, and tapered lines indicate that the organization at the narrow end is a subsidiary. A dashed line indicates that the person, association, or connec - tion no longer exists. Though an economic diagram, Pollux traces familial connections and close personal associations, indicated here by thin lines. 18 The plates only show connec - tions, the pieces of the network that confirm interweaving. In a deceptive omission, independent board members are not shown.