Ehhhhh… that does not mean what you think it means.
Mao set people to task as criticizing themselves in term of their commitment to Communism/Maoism. This was a weapon of brainwashing and terror.
Picture this: You live in a society wracked with revolution and from time to time the revolutionaries hold a rally wherein people are dragged out of the crowd, denounced as traitors( counter-revolutionaries ) tortured and killed.
Now, Dear Leader tasks his people to spend days writing these self-criticisms.
No, by all means, dont mind me. Lark yourself silly, my friend.
I want to add that certain terms are overused and this leads to confusion. For instance, in our world “object” is kinda overused ( I perused your github ) So from time to time I have to be very specific about what I mean by “object” which defeats the purpose of having a simple word to describe a concept.
If you read Dialectic of Enlightenment, it’s quite clear that the authors are familiar with the Odyssey and 120 days of Sodom, though unfortunately not with Jazz. Critiques are most effective when they are informed and deeply layered.
Why criticize Asian society from the ouside? Why run the risk of building subtle misperception upon subtle misperception?
I agreed in a very general way about the Western focus, and don’t claim it to be exclusive. Also I am not clear what you mean about culture warrior rhetoric. Rhetoric of “culture warriors”, or other people’s rhetoric about them? Either way, I have never seen this defined with much clarity. In modern culture, it tends to be recognized that everybody has an agenda of some sort, so this would mean that people are culture warriors in various ways. It’s disingenuous to use the term as a pejorative while implying that you are ideologically neutral.
Since you have kept coming back to the Frankfurt School, I will clarify that theirs seemed to be at its core a critique of Germany itself, using the broader context of Western Society for perspective.
If you read books on philosophy and culture, you might find that much of the work from outside Europe and the Americas is never translated into Western languages. Many of the historical works I have looked for (such as my recent searches for Taoist works of Korea) exist only in their original historical forms, without much scholarship, study, or translations happening anywhere. This has been slowly improving, especially in India, and more recently with classical works from Tibet. There has been a fair amount of work done to preserve some of the colorful ritual from these parts of the world, but scholarship of the underlying frameworks of monastic logic is still quite rare. Some of this might be due to lack of access or attention to rare texts, and also levels of interpretation where parts of traditions are documented in writing, while other parts are only transmitted orally. The only regions of Asia where I know of much modern cultural critique being somewhat accessible are Japan and India.
Well, there is a reason for that. As I mentioned, Marxism itself I see as a critique of and reaction to the industrialization of the West. Of the economics and biases behind then-modern mass-production and commerce. This might indicate why, through most of the 20th century, one doesn’t find these kinds of critiques of Thailand, Peru, or Mashantucket Pequot. Instead, non-industrial cultures might need to be accessed through study of sociology and anthropology. Which is more likely to yield interpretations of these cultures from a Western perspective.
The same dumb place most non-war wars come from. The war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war against cancer, the war on marriage, the battle of the sexes, the war on christmas. And, yes, now the war on gamers.
#I think it’s far less valuable to critique other cultures when I don’t live there. I’d prefer to critique my own and possibly make it better.
If you want to critique Asian cultures or African cultures or anything else - go right ahead! Nobody is stopping you. But you can’t dismiss a body of work by saying “hey, they’re only talking about this building that we’re living in, not that building over there!” when the goal is to discuss this building, not architecture in general.
I can’t remember the writers involved, but I remember once reading an essay by a Marxist academic in the “third world”, reacting to a postmodern academic Marxist from the US. It went roughly, “What do you mean, it’s not your place to comment on cultural struggles in the postcolonial world? We’re supposed to have a common project. Back me up!”
again, totalitarians will coopt anything, even stars-on-bellies…
I think you need to work on your definition (I know you love that exercise) of “fruit.” Would someone beating their child with a yardstick be a “fruit” of the ISO?
Worth noting that they were also obsessively studying the danger points of the real life examples of non-capitalist planned economies as well! The whole point was to avoid sacred cows, and to always compare on-the-ground realities to find the ways that power had invaded a well-meaning ideal, and to figure out how to prevent it in the future.
“Subject to criticism” is a lot different from “murkily raise the spectre of.” This whoole discussion started with your early comments which did the latter. Nobody has objected to the former.
And this mindset is exactly why there is a school of critical theory like the Frannkfurt school… people assume the only people who built the modern world were white, protestant, anglo-saxons, when in reality, it was built by many people’s interacting in various ways. The Anglo-saxon-protestant culture does not have a lock on civilization, nor are they solely repsonsible for it. Do you understand how offensive it sounds when you completely dismiss everyone else who built America and Western Europe into what it is today? That is part of what critical theory was and is trying to do, to broaden our understanding of how we get from there to here.
What makes that sort of critical framework tough for an outsider, especially if they are white, western, in a position of various kinds of privilege, etc, is that you run the risk of bringing your own cultural prejudices along with you and deeply muddying the waters. It’s far more productive to be able to bring an analysis from the inside, because you are more aware of cultural nuances than an outsider would be. That being said, I know of some fine works that focus on non-western culture.
I recently found out that the theory of state capitalism – that state ownership and state coordination of production don’t, in themselves, change class relations and the relations of production, and that this was not only the form of the Soviet Union’s political economy, but globally a trend in monopoly capitalist states – was actually outlined by Pollock in the 1930s. I’d long understood it as the big breakthrough in Trotskyist thought in the postwar period.
Pollock also predicted then that massive arms spending would offset the declining rate of profit through absorption of overproduction and postpone economic crises for an extended period of time. In the 1970s, this idea was re-invented as the theory of the permanent arms economy, as an explanation of the “long boom”.
I have to wonder now if Trotskyists were basically plagiarizing Pollock, or if they just missed these older arguments through poor scholarship and a general disregard for the Frankfurt School.
