Örsan Şenalp on Mon, 19 Nov 2018 12:38:31 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Was cultural Marxism the leading force behind the new world order |
Dear Brian, dear all, Quinn's interview is great, and boo is greater! I do join the recommenders of it. It is extremely helpful for the sake of de-toxication. Yet, there is something else that must be recognized about the nature of all this ‘toxication’ going on. Which is a fatal historical mistake of the Left, first with the silence about the oppression of an original paradigm at the time of its rise. An emancipatory vision of cultural change as a constructive revolutionary force; which was/is needed to be grown, as a better world building praxis, by generating a new culture, the culture of the future, through figurative and self-changing praxis today; it rised very near to Lenin, and supressed by his conscious and decisive efforts. Then secondly this has-reproduced along the 20th century. As Bifo would call it, it was encapulsated. Next to Gramsci, amongst the pioneers of ‘cultural Marxism’, the names of Early Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer, as well as independent authors like Korsch, Bloch, Lukacs, Benjamin, Brecht, Weil, so on are counted often. While the major source for the ideas on the cultural question has always been the key debate which took place between Lenin and Bogdanov between 1907-08 to Lenin’s death in 1924, so the participants of this debate, not only intellectuals but artists and workers alike. All the names counted above were witness to Lenin’s wrath but subscribed to it to oppose its worsened manifestation in Stalin. These include Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other ‘leaders’ or nomenclature; so-called leaders of the left and right opposition to the center (which was held by Lenin first and occupied by Stalin after him). They all obeyed and benefited from Lenin’s authoritarianism, which suppressed the cultural question, together with Bogdanov’s person; only a bright alternative. Lenin promoted Plekhanov’s crude Materialism even over his own views in his Hegel study in 1914-15, where he admitted neither Plekhanov nor him was a real Marxist. Of course, he never published his notes, in opposite after Plekhanov died he reclaims him as the father of the Russian Marxism (as father-son and holy spirit). Gramsci was in Moscow between 1922 and 1924; from the days when the proletarian culture debate made a comeback; ProletKult suppressed by Lenin’s orders, and Bogdanov was arrested in August 1923 for his ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities! If Icould i would attaching some excerpts from Noemi Ghetti's 2016 book: The Postcard of Gramsci which presents a major discovery. For those who can read Italian, I strongly suggest reading this beautifully written book. What Noemi's book puts forward is the proof and expanding argument of Gramsci's, together with Iulca Schucht (his wife and mother of his two sons), secretly starting to translate Bogdanov's science fiction novel Red Star into Italian, in the Summer of 1922 (pp. 30-31). The book proofs that Gramsci actually did proceed and finalized the translation, together with Iulca. Since both Gramsci and Iulca were lacking proficiency in the languages required (Gramsci in Russian, and Iulca in Italian. The proof of the completion of the translation is given in another letter exchange that took place in January 1923, some telegrams between January and November 1923 when Gramsci left to Vienne (pp. 99-102), and Gramsci asks Iulca if the translation is finished or not; Iulca answers that she had it when they met; and then Gramsci replies asking why didn't she gave it to him when they met he could have taken with him to Italy and publish it. In these letters, though there are no more mentioning of any names, neither of the book nor Bogdanov; yet Gramsci calls himself a 'counter-Revolutionary' sarcastically -probably referring to Bogdanov's arrest that took place several months before. Bogdanov released in later October 1923. The rest of Noemi's story is beautifully built around these delicate relationships between Gramsci and his love in Moscow between 1922-24, under the shadow of Bogdanov and Lenin rivalry around the status of the ProletKult, the organization and movement, and in general with regard to the creation of new proletarian culture in the aftermath of the revolution. Below are some of the free access key sources on this connection of Lenin-Bogdanov-Gramsci, which I believe is the ‘encapsulated’ (as Bifo Berardi use the term) anti-toxin of contemporary toxicity of the term Cultural Marxism. I think such encapsulation, by Lenin, Stalin and others, and the continuation of such encapsulation by Marxian orthodoxy, as well as the preservation of that encapsulated paradigm by structural and post-structural heirs of this line has been one of the main sources that allowed the ruling classes to benefit from the post-modern and identity-based versions of “classless-cultural analysis”; which was found of CIA, ford and Rockefeller Foundations, Soros, USAID and European Commission... this was class base of continutaiton of encapsualtion of Bogdanov and his new paradigm; the geniune Cultural Marxism -from the East. The culture of the future: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=C604A1C437049247A677D67F5C03F79A Revolution and Culture: https://monoskop.org/File:Sochor_Zenovia_Revolution_and_Culture_The_Bogdanov-Lenin_Controversy.pdf Culture as Organization in Early Soviet Thought: Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult (2016): https://monoskop.org/log/?p=17785 Bukharin and the Origins of the Proletarian Culture Debate: https://monoskop.org/images/a/a0/Biggart_John_1987_Bukharin_and_the_Origins_of_the_Proletarian_Culture_Debate.pdf The Cultural Hegemony of the Proletariat: https://monoskop.org/images/4/40/Scherrer_Jutta_1989_The_Cultural_Hegemony_of_the_Proletariat_The_Origins_of_Bogdanovs_Vision_of_Proletarian_Culture.pdf Alexander Bogdanov’s Conception of Proletarian Culture: http://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/09546545.2013.806081 Merli, Paola (2013) Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy, policy, and institutions in Gramsci: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/37168/1/Gramsci%201.pdf Best, Orsan On Sun, 18 Nov 2018 at 04:46, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 3:32 PM <analoguehorizon@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> 'Cultural Marxism' is a conspiracy theory propagated by the extreme right. The article posted by Ico above is good and I think it's fair game to bundle anyone who openly promotes or subscribes to it with the likes of Breivik. The European New Right have been reading Gramsci since the 70's afaik. > > > Certainly the term is to be avoided like the plague. However, Flick's memory of his radical professor is a perfect account of a widespread strategy in the 70s. In the 80s, British cultural studies provided a Gramscian theory for demands that had come straight out of experience. I don't think right-wing Gramscianism began in North America until the 90s, when conservatives finally realized what a powerful strategy this had been. > > Anyway, it's a pleasure to read and listen to Quinn Slobodian. He makes the point that for neoliberal theorists like Hayek or Buchanan, there is no fixed doctrine, rather a constantly shifting field of challenges and opportunities in which they deploy changing ideas to meet core goals. He also shows that as the harms of financially driven globalization became obvious after 2008, the critique of neoliberalism was adopted and transformed by the new populists. The panorama is now much more complicated than right vs left. There are still neoliberals moving to replace all politics with their version of free-market economics. There are neofascists recoiling in horror from a globalism that they blame on the left. There are Keynesian social democrats who think they can revive the post-WWII boom. There are identitarians who blame everything on white males. There are old leftists who see the future in one big union. There are environmentalists with their increasingly inconvenient truth. There are anarchists convinced that civilization is about to end, good riddance. And that's just in the so-called West, which no longer controls a world increasingly dominated by the rise of Asia. > > We are smack in the middle of the great crisis that technopolitical theory accurately predicted. As in the Thirties, an economic crash has set off incomparably more severe political problems. Most intellectuals are hopelessly confused, because they can't face the complexity and also, more understandably, because their loyalties and solidarities force them to go on using languages inadequate to the present. But amazingly, you can turn on Jacobin radio and listen to Quinn Slobodian. So who says Occupy accomplished nothing? Such an interview proves that democratic socialists can think, a rare activity these days. Theorists of the next generation, open your eyes. You have nothing to lose but your illusions. > > https://www.blubrry.com/thedig/39413662/a-history-of-neoliberalism-with-quinn-slobodian > > optimistically? I guess so, Brian > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org > # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: