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

On Tue, 11 Sep 2018 at 12:53, 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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