June 2011
47 posts
Gramsci: Social Democrat or Revolutionary Communist? →
kasamaproject.org
By Roberto Robaina — Brazil was one of the first countries in Latin America to rediscover Antonio Gramsci. This was important in itself, but it was also attended by the theoretical distortions of a left that, although it was breaking with Stalinism, still resisted the alternative of a revolutionary perspective.
Gramsci’s writings certainly do leave some room for confusion and reformist reinterpretation. There is room for debate about his view of the capacity of the workers to achieve cultural hegemony before they have conquered state power, for example. The confusion arises from the analogy he draws between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions, without making it clear that the proletariat cannot achieve cultural hegemony in a bourgeois society precisely because of the nature of bourgeois hegemony and its domination of the most powerful ideological apparatuses—a very different situation from that of the bourgeoisie in its battle against feudalism.
Critical Culture: Just putting this out there... →
criticalculture.tumblr.com
Maybe Europeans’ hatred of Roma persons (aka. gypsies) isn’t motivated by racism, but rather by the bad behaviour of Roma children and their parents’ unwillingness to discipline them. Seriously, these punks could easily give the brattiest of spoiled North American tots a run for their money.
Near Florina in Greece, at an outdoor market, about three children around the age of ten cornered a woman I had been talking to and started groping her. They didn’t stopped until her boyfriend punched the biggest one in the back of the head.
In Skopja, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, a kid tried to steal my wallet as I was paying for a sandwich. Thankfully, the co-owner’s wife was able to contain the kid as we struggled over it.
The guide who took a group of us to Bitola instructed our small group to not give money to the children who would surely beg us, because they wouldn’t leave us alone for the rest of the day. However, the one American in our group didn’t listen to him and ended up having her butt squeezed and her camera stolen after handing each child five Euros before we managed to shake them.
Jesus Christ. Today I am destined to argue with small-minded people on the internet it seems. Critical Culture, this is so disappointing! I have enjoyed your blog in the past and found much of it pretty good political/social commentary - but this is just straight-up boring racism. No reflection on the consequences of structural exclusion and discrimination; the histories of white supremacy and eurocentrism; the economic imperatives that create classes of thieves. Let’s make widesweeping assumptions about a whole race of people. Let’s project our moral norms of child-rearing onto them. Let’s label those kids who are easily the most disenfranchised and persecuted across Europe as “brats” and actually place them alongside the privileged spoiled kids of North America. Seriously? Boring, boring, boring.
Not to even mention the vulgarism of blaming children for the violent hatred projected onto a group of people…
“Let us speak plainly: Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
—
Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy (aka Leninism or Marxism?), 1904
(via easternblocparty)
LOL at butchering Luxembourg. I’m bored of this “she was a ‘good’ marxist, not like that mean Lenin” bullshit - she was excellent, and in the end was in agreement with Lenin but was betrayed by the kind of reformist cowards that now frame her to Bolshevik-bash -she would be so upset.
(via therevolutionwillnotbetweeted)
Please. Gimme a break. This is pretty much the most undialectical pseudo-marxist commentary I’ve read on the internet all week (and I read a lot of crap on the internet). Engaging with Luxemburg’s criticisms of Lenin does not make one a filthy reformist, nor is it a historically inaccurate butchering of her thought - Luxemburg did, indisputably, say these words! This person seems to imply that blogging on tumblr any criticism of Lenin puts you in the camp of liberal revisionists and naive ultra leftists. Clearly such a dogmatic approach to a history of marxism is dangerous, and, to be frank, incredibly anti-marxist.
I posted this quote because I think it still holds relevance for the question of organization in a contemporary context. Luxemburg’s critiques of Lenin’s democratic centralism, and the question of democracy within revolutionary organizing more generally, was one of the most compelling discussions arising out of socialist thought in the last century - and it’s clearly a conversation that isn’t over. It’s pretty arrogant and undialectical to assume otherwise. Orthodox bullshit that sees these theoretical discussions as automatically and inherently anti-Leninist, counter-revolutionary, dumb ultra-leftism, bourgeois moralizing and/or dirty dirty reformism - as demonstrated by this guy above - adds nothing to a critical reflection on these times nor to a dialectical reading of what is to be done today.
P.S. To be clear, I appreciate a lot of what Lenin did and has to offer revolutionary organizing and thought today. He’s by no means the “bad marxist” to my Rosa “good marxist” Luxemburg. And I am well aware that Luxemburg was in agreement with the Bolsheviks on most accounts, and even despite the disagreements she did have, was always in support of them - and those faults she did see in them she regarded as the result of the failures of the international social democracy as a whole. However, again, I do not think that any of this means that those folks trying to be a good revolutionary today should not engage with Luxemburg’s criticisms of the Bolsheviks nor should they remain silent more generally on where Lenin may have gone wrong.
