ari on Tue, 11 Sep 2018 20:15:28 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Gramsci nettime-l Digest, Vol 132, Issue 6 

Both are non sequitur, Alex.
1. No reason I should attack Stuart Hall. In fact, he's produced much that is both useful and open, for instance: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/stencilled-occasional-papers/1to8and11to24and38to48/SOP01.pdf
2. I have not talked about fables but point taken, I should have prefixed political economy with "critique of" - I thought it was obvious. As for the breadth and scope of it, there's a great series by Marx I'd recommend. 

Thanks for the book recommendation, Orsan.

I agree with you, Matze.

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 13:08:37 +0200, Alex Foti wrote:

your caricature of gramsci's postwar reception should then also
include an attack on Stuart Hall and any kind of cultural Marxism.
Also i would like to know what is this fabled political economy that
we should never violate - the falling rate of profit?

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 12:52 PM, ari <ari@kein.org> wrote:

I never got this argument.
Gramsci was an open Marxist, thus open to the abuse of all the closed Marxists around. He kept his ear to the ground and during the rise of Fascism, he was quite isolated and marginalised by his contemporary closed 
Marxists because, amongst other things, he was trying to seriously
understand the phenomenon without jumping to facile conclusions about the working class and its true destiny or false consciousness. He could see well that there was no true destiny: the revolution didn't happen, or rather, a revolution was happening, but not of the sort Marxists like him wished for. And all their careful work of political agitation was ultimately serving the wrong causes. But analytically, Gramsci was in agreement with Lenin that all you have is class formations. Nothing is static or prefigured. Everything 
historical. This earned him enemies from both sides, but the genuine
sensitivity to changing subjects around him also earned him followers on the ground. There is no notion of hegemony, in Gramsci, that isn't rooted in 
class.
Jump from the 1930s to the 1980s and you have the Laclau and Mouffe
travesty. The pair put forward their celebration of identity politics on the 
back of this open Marxist. What I am reading wherever I see this
evisceration of Gramsci's notion of hegemony is really a commentary on Laclau and Mouffe. I can join critics of Laclau and Mouffe anytime. They were useless to Marxism and quite pernicious influences on the new left, precisely for allowing all considerations on the political economy of class formation to fall out of view and interest. But when I see their ugly painting of Gramsci as a post-class cultural theorists I must object. There 
is no such thing.




Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Quick Review.. (Florian Cramer)
   2. Re: Quick Review.. (David Garcia)




----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:58:33 +0200
From: Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com>
To: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
Cc: a moderated mailing list for net criticism
        <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Quick Review..
Message-ID:


<CADCyihQAMJs1snGY00oDB4icKenW+-RX2ESBoeZXbUz6jhwkXA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Thanks, David - as I said in the discussion in Berlin, Stewart and I ended 
up
in a weird place where we practically taught the "Alt-Right" its own 
history.
One shouldn't read too much into its grasp of Gramsci though. This is what 
Milo
Yiannopolous wrote about him in the original manuscript of his book
'Dangerous' (that Simon & Schuster ended up not publishing):
And so, in the 1920s, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci decided that the time had come for a new form of revolution -- one based on culture, not class. According to Gramsci, the reason why the proletariat had failed to rise up was because old, conservative ideas like loyalty to one's country, 
family values, and religion held too much sway in working-class
communities.
If that sounds familiar to Obama's comment about guns and religion, that's because it should. His line of thinking, as we shall see, is directly descended from the ideological tradition of Gramsci. Gramsci argued that 
as
a
precursor to revolution, the old traditions of the west -- or the
'cultural
hegemony,' as he called it -- would have to be systematically broken down. 
To
do so, Gramsci argued that "proletarian" intellectuals should seek to challenge the dominance of traditionalism in education and the media, and 
create a new revolutionary culture. Gramsci's ideas would prove
phenomenally
influential. If you've ever wondered why forced to take diversity or 
gender
studies courses at university, or why your professors all seem to hate western civilization ... Well ' ..new you knew who to blame Gramsci. 

(Because of the lawsuit, the manuscript is publicly available here:



https://www.dropbox.com/s/bjc0n5dll244o2w/Milo%20Y%20book%20with%20edits.pdf?dl=0
)
-F
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Arianna
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