“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (via leftliberty)
March 2011
74 posts
- Calvin: The problem with rock and roll is that the generation that created it is now the establishment. Rock pretends it's still rebellious with its video posturing, but who believes it? The stars are all either 45-year-old zillionaires or they endorse soft drinks! The 'revolution' is a capitalist industry! Give me a break! Fortunately, I've found some protest music for today's youth. This stuff really offends Mom and Dad!
- Hobbes: Easy-listening Muzak?
- Calvin: I play it real quiet, too.
An Essay Collection from Walter Benjamin →
mediafire.com
noxe:
1940 Survey of French Literature.pdf
Central Park.pdf
Critique of Violence.pdf
Doctrine of the Similar (1933).pdf
Eduard Fuchs - Collector and Historian.pdf
Goethe - The Reluctant Bourgeois.pdf
Goethe’s Elective Affinities.pdf
Lichtenberg - A Cross Section.pdf
Moscow Diary.pdf
On the Concept of History.pdf
Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century (NLR).pdf
Rigorous Study of Art.pdf Surrealism - The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.pdf
The Author as Producer.pdf
The Story-Teller - Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov.pdf
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.pdf
Theories of German Facism - On the Collection of Essays War and Warriors.pdf
Lenin's niece dies in Moscow →
news.yahoo.com
Olga Ulyanova, a niece of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin who wrote several books praising her uncle and family, has died in Moscow. She was 89.
Lenin never had any children of his own, and Ulyanova was one of his last known living relatives, according to the government in the Ulyanovsk region, which was named after her family. She was the daughter of Dmitry Ulyanov, Lenin’s younger brother and one of the first members of the Bolshevik party.
Olga Ulyanova, a chemist and a writer, died in Moscow on Friday, the regional government said. The cause of death was not given.
Her uncle, Vladimir Ulyanov, took Lenin as his nom-de-guerre in 1901 while in exile near the Siberian river of Lena. Sixteen years later, Lenin headed the Bolshevik revolution. He died in 1924, when Ulyanova was almost two years old.
After Lenin’s’ death, his embalmed body was placed in a mausoleum on Red Square, where it is open to the public.
Following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, many Soviet critics demanded the removal of his body from the mausoleum, seeing it as a symbol of the Communist past.
Ulyanova fiercely objected. “Those who want his reburial are just malefactors,” she told the Interfax news agency in 2007.
She had fond memories of growing up in the Kremlin with other children of Bolshevik leaders and said she never abused her status as Lenin’s kin. She worked as a professor of chemistry and physics at various universities and wrote extensively about her uncle.
“It was a mistake to turn him into an icon,” she told the Italian Panorama newspaper in 2008. “But ideological distortions, falsification of his theories were even a bigger mistake.”
text received today from a former prof of mine
Just met spivak. We had lunch. I have stories.
“Here’s to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!”
—
C. Wright Mills. Mills was invited to speak in the Soviet Union as an honored guest, due to his criticisms of economies in the West. He was asked to make a toast at a banquet, and in his contrarian way, toasted Trotsky, whose works had been banned in the Soviet Union by Stalin.
i was just told about this incident last night at the bar (drunken conversations about trotsky and stalin and c wright mills’ motorcycle….)
Adam Gluntz: An Open Letter to College Liberals →
calebmaupin.blogspot.com
Dear College “Liberals”,
I have a serious bone to pick with you. Several, actually. I am growing sick and tired of college pseudo-left liberalism that seems to predominate on campuses across the United States. I find that most college liberals championing causes and candidates whose agendas are actually quite right-wing and personally, I find it quite revolting. I find the college liberal movement condescending, bourgeois, elitist, and all around detrimental to actual leftists who seek crazy things like equality and the liberation of humanity.
this is a great article. read it!
“We know that we shall not obtain the victory of woman suffrage in a short time, but we know, too, that in our struggles for this measure we shall revolutionise hundreds of thousands of minds. We carry on our war, not as a fight between the sexes, but as a battle against the political might of the possessing classes; as a fight which we carry on with all our might and main without hatred of the other sex; a fight whose final aim and whose glory will be that (one day) the proletariat in its entirety, without distinction of sex, shall be able to call out to the capitalist order of society, ‘You rest on us, you oppress us, and, see, how the building which you have erected is tottering to the ground.’”
—
Clara Zetkin, as quoted in Angela Davis’ “Revolution and Womankind: On Clara Zetkin’s Selected Writings” (from Davis’ book: Women, Culture and Politics)
Davis go on to discuss the questionable politics of the vote (because we’ve all read our Emma Goldman) explaining its significance for working class struggle: “What the bourgeois women perceived as ultimate goals, the proletarian women should have interpreted [according to Zetkin] as weapons in the battle to participate in the class struggle on an equal basis with men… Zetkin asserted that middle-class women perceived woman suffrage as a natural right to participate in the political processes of an equally natural and immutable bourgeois society. For working-class women, the ballot was, on the contrary, a social right, a demand that had arisen as a clear consequence of the emergence of the capitalist economic system… ‘They are particularly eager for it in order to aid in the struggle against the capitalist class.’”
I wonder if Zetkin would have felt the same way if she could have anticipated the meaning of universal suffrage today - which in the West has never achieved the political usefulness Zetkin hopes for here in this quote, but instead has been rendered one of capitalism’s finest tools of obscurantism, derailing real political change.
oh, comrade, you are so dialectical and critical. I think I agree a lot with the ideas you present here. I'm not a huge fan of Judith Butler, but you seem to be taking the best points she's making to post here. And also the good, and not so typical, quote of Rosa Luxemburg. :)
Just a spontaneous compliment from my side. ;)
Btw. where are you from and do you have a political organisation you are organised in?
thanks for the kind words! it means a lot coming from a blogger i admire quite a bit. (initially i read your first words as sarcasm! as i read on i was relieved that you weren’t in fact being a jerk.)
i’m not very enthusiastic about butler myself, given my general wariness of postmodernism’s depoliticizing and narcissistic conclusions, its inevitable complicity in all the fucked up relations of domination and exploitation happening today - but butler’s started to use her position of power to speak out concretely against israeli apartheid and that is something i can appreciate. and as for rosa - she’s a real hero of mine.
i am living in a smallish town outside of toronto, canada (tho am moving to england in sept. for grad school). we don’t have much here in the way of your typical working class/marxist organizations, but i have a subscription to the workers vanguard and have developed sympathy for the sparts (tho to be honest, my understanding of marxist sectarianism is limited and i’m hesitant to say much before i have the chance to learn more. i also have a tempered wariness towards some of the dogmatism i’ve witnessed amongst classical marxists) …. other than that i am involved with my town’s local palestinian solidarity group, which is headed up by my housemate who is from ramallah, but that’s all for these days.
take care comrade,
sara
“Perhaps Kafka might be instrumentalised to overcome the loss of standing that Israel has suffered by virtue of its ongoing illegal occupation of Palestinian land. It matters that Israel comes to own the work, but also that the work is housed within the established territory of the state, so that anyone who seeks to see and study that work must cross Israel’s border and engage with its cultural institutions. And this is also problematic, not only because citizens from several countries and non-citizens within the Occupied Territories are not allowed to cross that border, but also because many artists, performers and intellectuals are currently honouring the cultural and academic boycott, refusing to appear in Israel unless their host institutions voice a strong and sustained opposition to the occupation. The Kafka trial not only takes place against this political backdrop, but actively intervenes in its reconfiguration: if the National Library in Jerusalem wins its case, to have access to the unpublished and unseen materials of Franz Kafka one will have to defy the boycott and will have implicitly to acknowledge the Israeli state’s right to appropriate cultural goods whose high value is assumed to convert contagiously into the high value of Israel itself. Can poor Kafka shoulder such a burden? Can he really help the Israeli state overcome the bad press of the occupation?”
—
Judith Butler, “Who Owns Kafka?” in London Review of Books, 3 March 2011
sorry, here’s another quote on this topic… now that i am re-reading the article a lot of interesting things are springing up. the issue of who owns kafka is indeed super interesting in our contemporary times, raising questions not just about israeli’s occupation of palestine (as is addressed in this quote and of great importance), but also of ownership, copyright and capitalism; of language and identity (that kafka’s ‘perfect german’ is considered a factor is pretty fascinating); and of belonging (given the themes of kafka’s own work). um: yous should read this article, because it’s interesting.
Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya: beware the lies of March →
guardian.co.uk
By Neil Clark, The Guardian
It’s March, the sun is shining and spring is just around the corner. Oh, and Britain is bombing a foreign country again. If you’ve got a distinct feeling of deja vu about what’s been going on this weekend, then it’s hardly surprising.
In this very week in 1999 Britain took a leading role in the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
And on this very day in 2003, Britain took a leading role in the bombing – and invasion – of Iraq.
And now we’re at it again in Libya.
We’re being told we have to intervene in Libya to “protect the Libyan people” from being murdered by the forces of Gaddafi. We’re told that having declared a ceasefire, Gaddafi “stepped up the attacks” on civilians. And that doing nothing about the dictator is simply not an option.
Now all this could be true – but our experience of other March military assaults in which Britain has played a prominent role suggests we should, at the very least, treat with one huge barrow-load of salt the claims currently being made about why we’re going to war.
What's your point with that quote about Kafka?
thanks for the question. i would encourage you to read butler’s piece in full (linked in the post) to get ‘the point’ of what she is saying. perhaps a good quote that gets to the heart of the question of kafka’s jewishness is (pardon the length):
If Kafka is claimed as a primarily Jewish writer, he comes to belong primarily to the Jewish people, and his writing to the cultural assets of the Jewish people. This claim, already controversial (since it effaces other modes of belonging or, rather, non-belonging), becomes all the more so when we realise that the legal case rests on the presumption that it is the state of Israel that represents the Jewish people. This may seem a merely descriptive claim, but it carries with it extraordinary, and contradictory, consequences. First, the claim overcomes the distinction between Jews who are Zionist and Jews who are not, for example Jews in the diaspora for whom the homeland is not a place of inevitable return or a final destination. Second, the claim that it is Israel that represents the Jewish people has domestic consequences as well. Indeed, Israel’s problem of how best to achieve and maintain a demographic majority over its non-Jewish population, now estimated to constitute more than 20 per cent of the population within its existing borders, is predicated on the fact that Israel is not a restrictively Jewish state and that, if it is to represent its population fairly or equally, it must represent both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens. The assertion that Israel represents the Jewish people thus denies the vast number of Jews outside Israel who are not represented by it, either legally or politically, but also the Palestinian and other non-Jewish citizens of that state. The position of the National Library relies on a conception of the nation of Israel that casts the Jewish population outside its territory as living in the Galut, in a state of exile and despondency that should be reversed, and can be reversed only through a return to Israel. The implicit understanding is that all Jews and Jewish cultural assets – whatever that might mean – outside Israel eventually and properly belong to Israel, since Israel represents not only all Jews but all significant Jewish cultural production.
so, the point with the earlier quote? that, to put it simply, the israeli state’s claim to ownership over kafka has not only the aforementioned dangerous consequences, but it also seems to oversimplify kafka’s own self-identification and personal relation to jewish identity.
“Alongside this impressive immersion in Jewish things – perhaps we could call it a mode of being enveloped – Kafka also voiced scepticism about that mode of social belonging. Hannah Arendt, whose own sense of belonging was similarly vexed (and became a subject of dispute with Gershom Scholem), made famous one of Kafka’s quips about the Jewish people: ‘My people, provided that I have one.’ As Louis Begley has recently made clear in a quite candid biographical essay, Kafka remained not only in two minds about Jewishness, but sometimes quite clearly torn apart. ‘What have I in common with Jews?’ he wrote in a diary entry in 1914. ‘I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.’”
—“Who Owns Kafka?,” Judith Butler, London Review of Books, 3 March 2011 (via stephenrettger)
