Skimmed a bit of that back in the early 80's at UCSC. I have read tons of back issues of The New Masses and Masses and Mainstream that Charles Humboldt of The Party edited in the 50's.
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-
hoac&month=0402&week=d&msg=7fgUycvYLhkQYdKCBckOyw&user=&pw=
> ...As for bop, I agree with Stephen Schwartz. When I was into it as a
teenager, none of my LYL friends went along with me. I did, however, see
Dizzy Gillespie perform at a CP function in the Bronx. And as Stephen well
knows, the "critic" Sidney Finkelstein, if I can refer to a Stalinist hack
by that term, wrote a book "Jazz: A People's Music," that tried to endorse
bop and modern jazz as appropriate for Party culture. It didn't work. The
comrades preferred the simplicity of the line they could seek to get across
in folk songs.
Ron Radosh
http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/i7705.html
> ...An assault on humanism was also one of French structuralism's
> hallmarks, an orientation that in many respects set the tone for the more
> radical, poststructuralist doctrines that followed. As one critic has
> aptly remarked, "Structuralism was . . . a movement that in large measure
> reversed the eighteenth-century celebration of Reason, the credo of the
> Lumières."9 In this spirit, one of the movement's founders, Claude Lévi-
> Strauss, sought to make anthropology useful for the ends of cultural
> criticism. Lévi-Strauss famously laid responsibility for the twentieth
> century's horrors--total war, genocide, colonialism, threat of nuclear
> annihilation--at the doorstep of Western humanism. As he remarked in a
> 1979 interview, "All the tragedies we have lived through, first with
> colonialism, then with fascism, finally the concentration camps, all this
> has taken shape not in opposition to or in contradiction with so-called
> humanism . . . but I would say almost as its natural continuation."10
> Anticipating the poststructuralist credo, Lévi-Strauss went on to
> proclaim that the goal of the human sciences "was not to constitute, but
> to dissolve man."11 From here it is but a short step to Foucault's
> celebrated, neo-Nietzschean adage concerning the "death of man" in The
> Order of Things.12
For Lévi-Strauss, human rights were integrally related to the ideology of Western humanism and therefore ethically untenable. He embraced a full- blown cultural relativism ("every culture has made a 'choice' that must be respected") and argued vociferously against cross-cultural communication. Such a ban was the only way, he felt, to preserve the plurality and diversity of indigenous cultures.13 His strictures against cultural mixing are eerily reminiscent of the positions espoused by the "father of European racism," Comte Arthur de Gobineau. In The Origins of Inequality Among Human Races (1853-55) the French aristocrat claimed that miscegenation was the root cause of European decline. The ease with which an antiracism predicated on cultural relativism can devolve into its opposite--an unwitting defense of racial separatism--was one of the lessons that French intellectuals learned during the 1980s in the course of combating the ideology of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front.14
Lévi-Strauss's polemical critique of Western humanism represents a partial throwback to J. G. Herder's impassioned defense of cultural particularism at the dawn of the Counter-Enlightenment in Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774). For Herder, a dedicated foe of universal Reason's leveling gaze, it was self-evident that "Each form of human perfection is . . . national and time-bound and . . . Individual . . . Each nation has its center of happiness within itself, just as every sphere has its center of gravity."15 While Herder's standpoint may be viewed as a useful corrective to certain strands of Enlightenment thought (e.g., the mechanistic materialism of the High Enlightenment; La Mettrie, after all, sought to view "man as a machine"), in retrospect his concerted defense of cultural relativism ceded too much ground vis-à-vis the political status quo. To achieve their ends, the advocates of political emancipation required a more radical and uncompromising idiom. Unsurprisingly, they found it in the maxims of modern natural right as purveyed by philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and Condorcet.
During the 1960s among many French intellectuals cultural relativism came to supplant the liberal virtue of "tolerance"--a precept that remained tied to norms mandating a fundamental respect for human integrity. When combined with an antihumanist-inspired Western self-hatred, ethical relativism engendered an uncritical Third Worldism, an orientation that climaxed in Foucault's enthusiastic endorsement of Iran's Islamic Revolution.16 Since the "dictatorship of the mullahs" was antimodern, anti-Western, and antiliberal, it satisfied ex negativo many of the political criteria that Third Worldists had come to view as "progressive." Similarly, Lévi- Strauss's unwillingness to differentiate between the progressive and regressive strands of political modernity--for instance, between democracy and fascism--suggests one of the perils of structuralism. By preferring the "view from afar" or the "longue durée," the structuralists, like the anti- philosophes of yore, denigrated the human capacities of consciousness and will. Instead, in their optic, history appeared as a senseless fate, devoid of rhyme or reason, consigned a priori to the realm of unintelligibility.17
The parallels between the core ideas of Counter-Enlightenment and postwar French thought have been shrewdly analyzed in a recent study of Maistre's intellectual legacy. With tact and discernment, Owen Bradley phrases the problem as follows: Maistre's absence from current debates is a yet much greater surprise given the uncanny resemblance between his work and the dominant trends in recent French thought. Bataille on the sacred as the defining feature of human existence . . . Blanchot on the . . . violence of all speech and writing; Foucault on the social function of punishment in pre-Revolutionary Europe; Derrida on violence and difference . . . all of these themes . . . were anticipated and extensively elaborated in Maistre's writing.18
In many respects, these suggestive remarks concerning the strangely underresearched affinities between Counter-Enlightenment and the postmodernist credo form the core of the study that follows.