Марксизм и критическая теория (Marxism and critical theory)

2022-04-30 14:51:56 Vinayak Chaturvedi - Theorist in Exile

The defence of Marx was part of a broader project. As an essayist extraordinaire, he spent several years writing critiques of what was popularly known in the Anglo-American academy as ‘theory’, which were collected in his most famous book, In Theory (1992). For Ahmad, the theoretical formations of postcolonialism, postmodernism and poststructuralism were characterized by a retreat from socialist politics into ‘fashionable’ discursive strategies their theory not only distanced itself from historical materialism but sought its undoing in the name of dismantling all grand narratives. Ahmad also sharply criticised those postcolonial writers who used ‘exile’ as a metaphor for all ‘Third World’ immigrants irrespective of their circumstances. Some, he argued, were engaged in‘an opportunistic kind of Third Worldism’, whereby wealthy, educated immigrants living in the diaspora for reasons of professional aspiration neglected to distinguish between themselves and those forced to flee their homes for fear of imprisonment, torture or death. Ahmad lamented that this ‘inflationary rhetoric’ had entered the writings of literary theorists who claimed marginality as a strategic subject position in their work.

In Theory received a great deal of attention as a major intervention in Marxist cultural criticism, and for its trenchant critiques of Fredric Jameson, Salman Rushdie and Edward Said. This was softened or at least that is what Ahmad thought with a comradely gesture to his interlocutors: ‘Suppression of criticism, I have come to believe, is not the best way of expressing solidarity’. Criticism was ultimately intended to bring them together. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The book provoked a furore, with many condemning its combative tone as well as its insistence on linking Marxist political economy to the study of literary theory. Ahmad regretted that his criticisms were misconstrued as personal attacks, and he emphasised that he celebrated parts of the work of those he criticised. What he found more disappointing was that many of these detractors failed to engage with his central arguments about ‘Third World Literature’ and ‘Three Worlds Theory’ ­– not to mention his essay titled ‘Marx on India’.

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2022-04-30 12:50:14 Kolja Lindner - Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism

This book mediates between postcolonial positions that criticize Marxist approaches (and Marx’s writings) for their Eurocentrism and defenders of Marx, who claim that this accusation is a myth. In different contributions to this volume, Kolja Lindner pleads for a differentiated assessment of the whole of Marx’s work, including less known manuscripts, and a theoretical reconstruction of various elements that have come into the focus of postcolonial critique: ethnocentrism, Orientalism, false universalism and the oblivion of modernity’s global entanglement. Against this background, two opportunities simultaneously arise: Marx’s Eurocentrism can be deconstructed and his growing awareness of global developments and cosmopolitan struggles established. Открыть/Комментировать

2022-04-30 10:45:39 Nathaniel Mills - Ragged Revolutionaries: The Lumpenproletariat and African American Marxism in Depression-Era Literature

In Marxism, the concept of the lumpenproletariat refers to the masses in rags, outsiders on the edge of society, drifters and criminals, of little or no use politically. But in Ragged Revolutionaries, Nathaniel Mills argues that the lumpenproletariat was central to an overlooked yet vibrant mode of African American Marxism formulated during the Great Depression by black writers on the Communist left. Открыть/Комментировать

2022-04-30 06:38:47 Георгий Мамедов - Соучастие: о колониальности по-русски

Публикуем текст из сборника о ключевых понятиях деколониальной мысли «Деколониальность: настоящее и будущее»

Навязчивый интерес к (де)колониальной проблематике в российском контексте генерируется преимущественно олигархическими арт-корпорациями. Интерес этот продиктован одним — стремлением казаться «современными» и, как ни парадоксально, «западными», быть в контексте интернациональных трендов. Такой культуртрегерский подход не только полностью выхолащивает собственно критическое и политическое значение деколониальной мысли, но и создает искаженное представление о колониальной проблематике в самой России.

https://spectate.ru/russian-colonialism/ Открыть/Комментировать

2022-04-29 20:55:24 #КНИГОЛИКБЕЗ : Подчинение авторитету

Знаменитый йельский эксперимент Стэнли Милгрэма повторяется сегодня в масштабе целой страны. При этом условия, превращающие человека в инструмент, хорошо изучены. Психология конформиста - предмет академических штудий и художественных фильмов. Оправдания, которыми пользуется садист, классифицированы, взвешены и признаны несостоятельными. Как пишет Милгрэм, "главный урок нашего исследования: самые обычные люди, просто делающие свое дело и не имеющие никаких враждебных намерений, способны стать орудием страшной разрушительной силы".
Но почему мы не извлекли из этих уроков полезный опыт? Почему рука обывателя охотно тянется к рычагу пыточного механизма или к бланку для доносов? Как выглядит психологический профиль нормального конформиста? Легких и быстрых ответов на эти вопросы нет, а материал для анализа в книге Милгрэма и в нашей новой реальности - исчерпывающий.



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2022-04-29 17:35:55 Warren Montag - A Welcome and Necessary Encounter Between Trotsky and Gramsci

At the end of 1976, Perry Anderson published his magisterial study, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” in issue 100 of the New Left Review, to mark the journal’s fortieth year in print. The book-length essay was clearly conceived as a critique of the reformism of the emerging Eurocommunist current, for which Gramsci, or rather the Gramsci constructed retroactively by its French and Italian adherents, served as a reference point, providing both a theoretical foundation and a guarantee of its lineal descent from the founding congresses of the Third International. The influence of Anderson’s analysis can hardly be overestimated: it would come to determine how Gramsci was read, at least in the English-speaking world. Reading “Antinomies,” written just after the peak of the revolutionary wave of 1968-1975, today, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the essay’s most striking antinomies or paradoxes are not those Anderson claimed to have discovered in Gramsci, but his own. The “slippages” he identified in Gramsci could be understood as such only in relation to Anderson’s renewed appreciation for both the juridical distinction between state and civil society and the notion of the (European) parliamentary regime as an expression of popular sovereignty/ His reading helped create a broad interest in Gramsci in the UK and the US, even as it produced a grid of interpretation that limited the practical and theoretical effects of The Prison Notebooks. 

It should come as no surprise that one of the most comprehensive attempts to free Gramsci’s work from this grid does not come from Europe or North America, but from the Southern Cone of Latin America. It might be argued that the most difficult challenges, indeed, the greatest threats and dangers, Gramsci faced in both his political and personal life, and which are inscribed at different registers in The Prison Notebooks, appeared or reappeared 50 years later in Chile or, as in the case of Juan Dal Maso, Argentina. The dictatorship installed in 1976 (preceded by several years by a reign of terror against the Left carried out by “non-state actors”) could not be characterized as fascist, but the questions of strategy (the war of position versus the war of maneuver, the united front or the proletarian frontal assault) were posed as urgently and with as much at stake as would have been the case against a fascist enemy. This is the legacy bequeathed by an earlier generation to the revolutionary left in Argentina today, a fund of political experiences and experiments, the living memory of which allows them to be examined closely for whatever knowledge might be gleaned from them. 

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2022-04-29 14:02:52 Biden's Latino Collapse Will COST Dems the Midterms

Recent polling shows that Joe Biden’s approval among Latinos is just 26 percent, the lowest of any group surveyed. This is not because they are “afraid of socialism” or “identify as white,” as many liberal strategists argue. The real cause is much more mundane. They think Joe Biden and the Democrats are failing in areas most important to them: the economy and bread and butter issues.



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