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. The systematising of these provisions, together with a discussion of the main trends of research in post-Soviet Marxism, provides a starting point for our elaborations. As we develop the traditions of critical Soviet Marxism (in post-Soviet left circles this legacy is referred to increasingly often as ‘Ilenkovist’), key provisions of the method of ascent from the abstract to the concrete and of the historical-genetic approach are being re-actualised in our work . In particular, applying the historical-genetic method to the
realism. My choice of these theorists is strategic: while Muñoz’s work has become a major analytic in current queer studies, Groys’s philosophy of Stalinist art led to a strong revitalization and interest in the link between Soviet Marxism and the traditional avant-garde movements. 10 These two theorists speak to different audiences. Whereas a socialist realist aesthetic wanted to
distinguished between cultural politics, including the use of psychoanalytic terms, and the structural analysis of capitalism. 5 As a result of this split, queer theory has inherited an understanding of the unconscious as unaffected by changes in capitalist production. 6 Unlike previous critics, I drew on a Soviet Marxism’s psychology to show that unconscious elements such
ideology. A second obstacle complicates this project of reconstructing eastern European Marxism. Soviet Marxism was neither simply an alternative ideology to liberal capitalism, nor one of the many ideologies that was in competition on a free market of ideas. The war involving two political systems was a conflict that saw its adversary as a rival that had to be eliminated. In the
characteristically American and resulted from a creative fusion of Western Marxism and indigenous traditions (Schutte, 1993: 18–71). Not only was Marxism localised in an inter-civilisational environment, the ontological hostility it harboured at the height of Stalinism to indigenous traditions and to Christianity was discarded. Mariátegui’s Peruvian Marxism attracted revolutionaries deterred by the hostility shown by pro-Soviet Marxism to Christianity and seeking escape from the suffocating orthodoxy of Stalinism. His philosophy 157 Engagement in the cross-currents of history
the social process of production’ (Horkheimer, 2002 : 197). While sensitive to how economic logics shape society, the founding members of the Frankfurt School did not embrace a crude ‘Soviet’ Marxism. Rather, Horkheimer was critical of purely economistic Marxists, stating explicitly that they ‘badly understood Marx’ ( Horkheimer, 2018 [1931]: 119). What was required
Critique of Political Economy’, in Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), p. 211. 42 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Soch. (Moscow: Isdatel’stvo politicheskoy literatury, 2nd edn, 1955–74), vol. 23, p. 81. 43 My gratitude goes to Vardan Azatyan who drew my attention to these debates several years ago, and who, since then, has been tirelessly grappling with this under-discussed philosophical legacy of Soviet Marxism. 44 Evald Ilyenkov, ‘The Concept of the Ideal’, Historical Materialism 20.2 (2012), pp. 149–93. 45 Ilyenkov
to stress the aggressive expansionist nature of Soviet Marxism. In the 1960s, possibly influenced by the experience of the Vietnam War, which led many Americans to critically reflect on their own nation’s policies and history, a ‘revisionist’ school of Cold War historians emerged. Figures like David Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam (a significant title) tended to stress the defensive nature of Soviet foreign policy, and the aggressive character of US policy; a clear reversal of roles. In more recent times a new school of ‘post-revisionists’ have come to the fore
German hands’. It was not resurgent nationalism but the liberating power of ‘reflective remembrance’ that could rebuild German identity. 17 Habermas was not prepared to dissolve the murder of Jews into some universal reference to the victims of Nazism, as Soviet Marxism insisted. In a discussion of the Berlin Holocaust memorial in Die Zeit in 1999, he criticised the argument that ‘exclusive reference to the murdered Jews now reflects a
also offered a radical model for modernisation that visibly departed from both colonial alliances and the European associations of Soviet Marxism-Leninism, as well as a practical plan for consolidating centralised authority as a revolutionary party.19 FRELIMO’s move towards this strand of Marxism-Leninism can also be seen as a pragmatic choice, necessitated by the contingencies of securing international aid.20 Following the Cultural Revolution, the People’s Republic of China had begun to insist that any liberation movement receiving aid from China must explicitly