Re: <nettime> Was cultural Marxism the leading force behind the new world order

[Örsan Şenalp <orsan1234@gmail.com>]

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
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