``..But did you read Kagarlitskys' article? He is currently on a speaking tour in the US and will speak at UC Berkeley this Friday (04/06). I plan to go - wanna report?'' -Brad Mayer
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Yes, that would nice---I work Fridays and Saturdays---so, do post something on it.
I read Kagarlitskys' article, and about the only objection I had to it was that it didn't mention that eastern european governments were toppled by masses of people in the streets. And hence their cumulative mass movements were responsible for the subsequent tidal effects in FSU, not the western powers, the US, or capitalism. Now those movements (at least as seen from here some ten thousand miles away and ten years later) may have been co-oped by a counter-revolutionary middle class seeking to become the new capitalist elite---but it still started in the streets.
As to assuming counterrevolutionary charges against the broad, mostly cultural critique undertaken by whatever composes postmodernism, those claims need to be developed and not simply dished out in advance.
While it is certainly agreed that creating `new forms out of new material' is one necessary task, understanding and assimilating about twenty years worth of ideas and critiques, say from the Seventies through the Nineties has to be done. There were many reasons for such a broad intellectual reaction against both the hegemony of modernity and its ever growing deterioration into a proto-fascist and totalitarian capitalism. Not the least of the points in this critique was attacking the overbearing position of the isolated individual and its theoretical needs and freedoms of action and thought. And, simultaneously, a critique of the ordering of power in hierarchal tiers of privilege and submission.
So, I would argue that among the new forms needed are composing that understanding and assimilation, regardless of how over producted and over raught the foundational material might be.
To carry on Kagarlitskys historical metaphor and parallel with middle to late 19c France, which seems to fit pretty nicely, notice that most of the intellectual critiques and assimilations of that period were contemporary with one revolt after another against the direction of what was then developing to become mass industrial society and its attending modernity as a broad cultural-intellectual foundation. I think one of the reasons this period seems to fit as at least a possible model is because of a reconstruction of Marx. I suppose it is the other way around, the reconstruction and resuscitation of Marx, leads us (or me at any rate) to revisit the period and discover its possible parallels. That capitalism has gone off the deep end in a conceptually empty political climate these days, heightens the effective similarities. And, I think K's argument that Soviet and other theoretically communist states and movements did effectively work to keep the lid on the totalitarian domination of capital and make life livable in the west through fairly consistent liberal reforms.
On the other hand, I don't particular subscribe to the idea that the Russian Revolution was equivalent to the French Revolution and that these functioned in similar ways through their respective periods. The reason is that the latter was preceded by and contemporaneous with the Enlightenment which was primarily a philosophical and intellectual development. In contrast the Russian Revolution was preceded by and was contemporaneous with the industrial revolution which was primarily an economic and social development. There are obviously many connections between the software of the enlightenment and the hardware of industrialization, but they effected the respective societies and periods in vastly different ways.
To over simplify, one rationalized the mind and the other rationalized the body. And one of the more important directions that has grown out of postmodernist movements and assaults on modernity has been to re-examine precisely these developments and their dependence on all the varieties of theories of rationalism which have impacted/formed both mind and body.
In the meantime, I am sure we can agree to get together in the street, scream our heads off, and throw rocks at McDonalds, PG&E, and the sleezey state government.
Chuck Grimes