Lefebvre on irony

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu Nov 25 11:41:55 PST 1999


Marx seemed to apply generally Hegel's maxim that comedy is superior to tragedy. Perhaps Marx applied this in discussing the enormously depressing nature of capitalism and its overwhelming dominance of us with constant humor and wit. It's hard to have enough enthusiasm for changing the whole wide, stubborn world if we are profoundly sad all the time.

I'm real depressed about global capitalism, the collapse of the first go at socialism, the steady diet of defeats for the working class, the daunting dominance and war machine of the big burghers. Somebody tell me some jokes that work.

CB


>>> James Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com> 11/17/99 08:37PM >>>
Concerning Marxists and irony, what about the Great Ironist himself, Karl Marx? His writings from the earliest like the 1844 Manuscripts to his polemics against fellow Yong Hegelians sucn as The Holy Family, to the Communist Manifest all the way to Capital are all dripping with irony. Was it is his intention that Marxism be the property of a small ironically-aware elite or did he have perhaps a different approach to the uses of irony than did say Plato or Swift? You also seem to imply that ordinary workers cannot understand or appreciate irony. Is that really the case or is it perhaps the case that certain forms of irony may well not be to their taste but other forms may be. If that is the case then how does Marx's brand of irony fit in?

Jim Farmelant

On Wed, 17 Nov 1999 14:05:09 -0600 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> writes:
>Doug, what I read in the whole of Lefebvre's piece is an extended
>chanting of "Thank god that I Lefebvre am not as other men." In
>other words, I see not self-consciousness or "irony" in his sense
>but sort of a dour puritanism.
>
>I still say that irony is a weapon to use against others, to
>consolidate
>
>a rather smug "we" against "them." While I don't doubt, actually, the
>goodness of Swift's intention, the *effect* from its day of
>publication
>of "A Modest Proposal" has been not to aid Irish peasants but to
>create a fraternity/sorority of "those who know" (those who "get
>it" in such smug superiority to the great unwashed. And Swift was
>perhaps the only satirist (at least according to some of his critics)
>who aimed at his blows striking the reader. All other ironic
>satirists as well as unsatiric ironists that I know of aim at the
>creation of this smug society of the intellectual elite. That was
>certainly the effect aimed at by Plato in the creation of that
>master ironist, Socrates.
>
>It is also important to recognize that over time just a small
>proportion
>
>of marxists are intellectuals, or even very skilled readers. The
>insistence
>that marxists be ironists is an insistence that marxism should remain
>the private property of a small intellectual elite.
>
>Carrol
>
>

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