12.2.25

Bibliocausto


Em 2001, Novo México, uma comunidade religiosa, dominada pelo cristofascista Jack Brock, queimou uma centena de livros do bruxinho Harry Potter. O obsessivo reverendo "culpou" J. K. Rowling de que sua literatura incentiva a feitiçaria. Um produto diabólico, Harry Potter é o diabo e está destruindo a nossa gente, disse o eclesiástico. Não é de se surpreender que a horda de fanáticos admitiu não haver lido um livro da série de fantasia.

The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83


The pressure of student radicals also resulted in the introduction of special courses on Marxism or in such subjects as Marxist economics into universities, where ignorance in these matters had often been profound. They became quite common in the English-speaking world in the 1970s. However, even without such pressure the penetration of Marxist influence into the academic institutions and disciplines increased notably, partly because Marxist intellectuals of the older generation advanced in their careers while younger ones of the 1960s vintage entered them, but largely because in many fields the contributions of Marxism had been integrated even by those who had no special sympathy for it. This was notably the case in history and the social sciences. Neither the Annales school of historians in France nor its chief, Fernand Braudel, showed any significant Marxist influence in their early days. Yet there are more references to Marx in Braudel’s important late work Capitalism and Material Life than to any other single writer, French or foreign. This eminent historian was far from being a Marxist, but a major work on this subject could hardly not refer back to Marx. Given this convergence, there were large fields of research tilled by both Marxists and non-Marxists in much the same way, so that it became difficult to decide whether a particular work was Marxist or not, unless the author specifically advertised or disclaimed, defended or attacked, Marxism.

The debate within Marxist economics, which revived spectacularly from 1960, had always been lively, when not stifled by dogma imposed by superior authority.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

11.2.25

The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83


Badge of Marx

The changing social composition of the Marxist population reinforced the tendency to pluralism, but also (through the new intellectual constituency for Marxism) tended to extend Marxism beyond the strictly political field into the general academic and cultural sphere.

The most influential economic textbooks decided in the 1970s to include a special section on Marxist economics. In France, for example, Marxism thus became just one component of an intellectual universe which also contained others – de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or whoever else was influential in the senior classes of French lycées or discussed in the fifth and sixth arrondissements of Paris. Marxist intellectuals who grew up and acquired their Marxism in such a culture might find it desirable to translate Marxism into whatever was the prevalent theoretical idiom, both to make it comprehensible to readers unused to Marxist terminology. A typical product of such a period is G.A. Cohen’s reformulation of the materialist conception of history in the terminology of, and applying "those standards of clarity and rigour which distinguish twentieth-century analytic philosophy". Or else they might simply produce some combination of Marxism with other influential theories – structuralism, existentialism, psychoanalysis or the like.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Nature does not right


To rouse passionate concern for environmental and ecological questions is very difficulty in proletarian organisations. 

10.2.25

The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83

 

The bibliography of Marxist philosophical publications multiplied after 1960, and indeed the national and international debates among Marxists which attracted most attention among radical intellectuals were those associated with philosophers: Lukacs and the Frankfurt School, the Gramscians, and Della Volpe, Sartre, Althusser and their various followers, critics and opponents. [...] Taste for such philosophical discussions also became very marked where philosophy was not a part of general humanist higher education, as in the Anglo-Saxon countries.Philosophy tended to encroach upon other disciplines, as when Althusserians seemed to consider Marx’s Capital as though it were primarily a work of epistemology.

The rethinking of the bases of Marxist theory was an essential element in the necessary critical scrutiny of Marx’s own work and of Marxism as a coherent and consistent body of thought. 

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Homo futilitus


The notion that satisfying consumers often trivial demands be the organizing principle of the capitalist economy.

9.2.25

The paralysis of criticism: society without opposition


This society is irrational as a whole. Its productivity is destructive of the free development of human needs and faculties, its peace maintained by the constant threat of war, its growth dependent on the repression of the real possibilities for pacifying the struggle for existence – individual, national, and international. The established society has available an ascertainable quantity and quality of intellectual and material resources. How can these resources be used for the optimal development and satisfaction of individual needs and faculties with a minimum of toil and misery?

Social theory is historical theory, and history is the realm of chance in the realm of necessity. Therefore, among the various possible and actual modes of organizing and utilizing the available resources, which ones offer the greatest chance of an optimal development?
 
Contemporary society seems to be capable of containing social change – qualitative change which would establish essentially different institutions, a new direction of the productive process, new modes of human existence.

This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society; the general acceptance of the National Purpose, bipartisan policy, the decline of pluralism, the collusion of Business and Labor within the strong State testify to the integration of opposites which is the result as well as the prerequisite of this achievement.

In the absence of demonstrable agents and agencies of social change, the critique is thus thrown back to a high level of abstraction.

The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible. The distinction between true and false consciousness, real and immediate interest still is meaningful. But this distinction itself must be validated. Men must come to see it and to find their way from false to true consciousness, from their immediate to their real interest.

In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupations, skills, and attitudes, but also individual needs and aspirations.

Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion.

In the face of the totalitarian features of this society, the traditional notion of the “neutrality” of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques.
 
The way in which a society organizes the life of its members involves an initial choice between historical alternatives which are determined by the inherited level of the material and intellectual culture. The choice itself results from the play of the dominant interests.

As the project unfolds, it shapes the entire universe of discourse and action, intellectual and material culture. In the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives. The productivity and growth potential of this system stabilize the society and contain technical progress within the framework of domination. Technological rationality has become political rationality.

Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979

Where is Brazil in the history of Marxism?


Nos países desenvolvidos o marxismo se transformou em uma análise da sociedade moderna quase naturalmente devido a conversão de intelectuais à perspectiva materialista e a expansão de excelentes instituições de educação. Os jovens intelectuais não só fizeram crescer a presença de Marx como proporcionaram um mecanismo de reprodução para a divulgação de textos marxistas para um público mais amplo.

Por que não me ufano


Most people keep the brains
between their legs
(don't you find?)

Morrissey

O estado brasileiro em vez de dar incentivo à riqueza nacional (com uma justa distribuição e novas estruturas), difundir o bem-estar, o trabalho digno e estável e valorizar o trabalho intelectual em nossa geografia, serve mais para exacerbar os conflitos de interesses, praticar o nepotismo e excitar os baixos egoísmos e as atrozes paixões da religiosidade.

Os partidos políticos não são elaboradores das novas intelectualidades. Se é que foram algum dia elaboradores de novas consciências.

The organic universe


The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r2 , which is a little more abstract. And in the course of that transformation, the gods and angels were relegated to more remote times and more distant causality skeins. The history of science in the last five centuries has done that repeatedly, a lot of walking away from divine microintervention in earthly affairs. It used to be that the flowering of every plant was due to direct intervention by the Deity. Now we understand something about plant hormones and phototropism, and virtually no one imagines that God directly commands the individual flowers to bloom.

So as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm. The theologians give that one up, and it walks over onto the science side of the duty roster.

Carl Sagan
1934 - 1996

8.2.25

Por que não me ufano


A maré intelectual de Karl Marx e do marxismo em todo o mundo chegou a seu ponto máximo na década de 1970 e declinou nos anos 1980 e desapareceu nos anos 2000. Os ventos não sopram mais a favor de Marx.

Percebam que não há movimento de jovens marxistas no Brasil, se houver é, no mínimo, de uma timidez exacerbada. Os partidos políticos, por sua vez, não são mais elaboradores das novas intelectualidades integrais. Se é que foram alguma vez elaboradores de novos pensadores.

Na periferia do capitalismo exalta-se a mentira teológica e rebaixa o saber fundamentado. Eu não vou usar a escola como modelo de instituição rebaixada porque ela sempre esteve rebaixada, até pelos seus próprios corpos. A escola nunca foi uma organização cultural.

Socialism and religion


Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. 

We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.

Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work. We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.

Vladimir Lenin
1870 - 1924

Ideologiekritik Iluminista


O uso público da razão é o que fazemos como cidadãos e intelectuais. Ele atua sobre as manifestações externas do mal-estar moderno, e em primeira instância contra o irracionalismo. Serve para reparar o mal, criticar o subdesenvolvimento e apontar as perturbações que não enriquecem a vida. No mais puro estilo da Ideologiekritik Iluminista, a razão desmascara o fanatismo religioso, o totalitarismo comunitário, a burrice sistêmica, a imaturidade, o nacionalismo e a desigualdade econômica como formas monstruosas de realização de desejo, de regressão e perpetuação do arcaico.

Por que não me ufano


Note que a democracia, a luta pela igualdade econômica e social e uma perspectiva humanista não são questões de princípios e muito menos objetivos da vida política e social da periferia do capitalismo. Os padrões de pobreza continuam assombrosos.

O irracionalismo brasileiro é hoje um fato social. A razão (que poderia criar um fato social oposto, construir uma boa sociedade, por exemplo) não é sequer uma força histórica. As estruturas psíquicas de submissão favorecem a recepção das ideologias dominantes, suas falsas representações que reforçam e perpetuam as mentiras teológicas e a aparição de políticos eminentemente abomináveis.

Impera ainda na periferia do capitalismo um forte esquema fascista: direção irracionalista, oprimidos privados de pensar em termos de conhecimento científico, ditadura do poder e ditadura da economia, estrutura de dependência, funcionamento perverso do Estado, privação do desenvolvimento integral da capacidade cognitiva dos jovens, colapso da narrativa e da argumentação e antielitismo, ou seja, o impedimento da classe baixa à cultura superior.

7.2.25

Military knowledge and Marxism

 

Marxism, like Darwinism, is the highest school of human thought. Methods of warfare cannot be deduced from Darwin's theory, from the law of natural selection, but a military leader who had studied Darwin, would, given the presence of other qualities, be better equipped thereby: he would have a wider horizon and be more resourceful, he would take note of aspects of nature and of man which previously he had not noticed. This applies to an even greater extent to Marxism.

Leon Trotsky
1879 - 1940

Study and read


Interest in historical problems declined spectacularly in the 2000. Reading is not one of the major recreational pursuits in the middle class.

The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83


The radical wave of the late 1960s affected Marxism in two main ways. First, it multiplied the number of those who produced, read and bought Marxist writings, in a spectacular manner, and thus increased the sheer volume of Marxist discussion and theory. Second, its scale was so vast – at least in some countries – its appearance so sudden and unexpected, and its character so unprecedented, that it appeared to require a far-reaching reconsideration of much that most Marxists had long taken for granted.

The radical wave was peculiar in several respects. It began as a movement of young intellectuals, who were, specifically, students, whose numbers had multiplied enormously in the course of the 1960s in almost all countries of the globe, or more generally, were the sons and daughters of middle-class families. In some countries it remained confined to students or potential students, but in others – notably in France and Italy – it provided the spark for industrial movements of the working class on a scale not seen for many years. It was an extraordinarily international movement, crossing the boundaries between developed and dependent countries and between capitalist and socialist societies: 1968 is a date in the history of Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia as well as Mexico, France and the USA. However, it attracted attention chiefly because it swept through countries which formed part of the core of developed capitalist society, at the peak of its economic prosperity. Lastly, its impact on the political system and institutions of several of the countries in which it occurred, however short-lived, was disproportionately dramatic.

The growth of Marxism since the 1950s took place primarily, and in some cases overwhelmingly, among intellectuals who now formed an increasingly large and important social stratum. Indeed, it reflected the radicalisation of important parts of this stratum, especially of its young members. Formerly Marxism’s social roots had been primarily, and often overwhelmingly, in movements and parties of manual workers. This did not mean that many books or even pamphlets on Marxist theory were written, or even read, by workers, though the self-educated working-class militant (Brecht’s ‘lesender Arbeiter’) formed an important sector of the public for such Marxist literature as was studied in the discussion circles, educational classes, libraries and institutes associated with the labour movement. Thus in the coalfields of South Wales a network of over a hundred miners’ libraries grew up between 1890 and the 1930s, in which the union and political activists of this area – notoriously radical since before 1914 – acquired their intellectual formation. What it meant was that organised workers in such movements accepted, applauded and imbibed a form of Marxist doctrine (‘a proletarian science’) as part of their political consciousness, and that the great majority of Marxist intellectuals, or indeed of any intellectuals associated with the movement, saw themselves essentially as serving the working class, or more generally, a movement for the emancipation of humanity through the historically inevitable rise and triumph of the proletariat.

6.2.25

Por que não me ufano


Percebam que os representantes políticos de extrema-direita não promovem um nível cultural suficientemente sério entre os seus trabalhadores. Nesse sentido, os seus eleitores abandonam conscientemente as obras políticas significativas por textos motivacionais e pregação religiosa, continuam a ser crianças manipuladas e desconhecem que também fazem parte do mundo das vítimas do capitalismo.

The Influence of Marxism 1945 – 83


The leading orthodox Marxist critics saw themselves as commentators or referees rather than supporters or players in the football match of culture. This did no harm to their historical analysis of artistic developments as symptoms of the decay of bourgeois society – an impressive analysis. And yet we cannot but be struck by the externality of their observations. Every Marxist intellectual saw himself or herself as a participant in the labours of philosophy and the sciences, however amateur; hardly any saw themselves as participants in the creative arts. They analysed the relation of art to society and the movement and gave good or bad marks to schools, artists and works. [...] Marxists found it difficult to see any role for the artist under capitalism except as a propagandist, a sociological sympton or a "classic".

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

The Socialist Ideal

 

Considering the relation of the modern world to art, our business is now, and for long will be, not so much attempting to produce definite art, as rather clearing the ground to give art its opportunity.

William Morris
1834 - 1896

5.2.25

In the Era of Anti-fascism 1929 – 45


In the period 1929-45, what drew Marxists and non-Marxists together was thus more than the practical need to unite against a common enemy. It was a profound sense, both underlined and catalysed by the slump and Hitler’s triumph, that both belonged together in the tradition of the French Revolution, of reason, science, progress and humanist values. The identification was made easier for both sides by the version of Marxist philosophy which became official in this period and by the transfer of the centres of Western Marxism to France and the Anglo-Saxon countries, in which both Marxist and non-Marxist intellectuals had been formed in a culture penetrated by this tradition.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Reflections on Marx and Marxism


Second Eric Hobsbawm, the most significant, and certainly by far the most influential publication of Marxist science was J.D. Bernal’s The Social Function of Science.

In the Era of Anti-fascism 1929 – 45


Elite recruits to communism should not obscure the numerically very substantial proportion - in Britain and the USA a majority - the anti-fascist and communist students who did not come from the British "public school" or the elite US "prep schools" and "Ivy League" universities, and those intellectuals who did not come from universities at all. In the history of 1930s Marxism institutions like the London School of Economics and City College, New York played a role as important or more important than did Oxford and Yale. Among the British Marxist historians of the generation of the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of those who later became well known came from grammar schools, and indeed often from provincial non-conformist Liberal or Labour backgrounds, though several of them converged with the elite in the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In France, the narrow ladder of meritocratic promotion brought sons of Republican lower officials and primary school-teachers to the higher levels of left-wing intellectualism as well as the sons of professional families with a long tradition of higher academic education. In short, in the countries of established liberal democracy, where fascism made little mass appeal to the middle and lower middle classes, the recruitment of antifascist intellectuals was relatively broad.

This is particularly obvious among the large number of non university intellectuals. We know that 75% of the members of the British Left Book Club (which at its peak reached 57,000 members and a readership of a quarter of a million) were whitecollar workers, lower professionals and other non-academic intellectuals. This public was certainly similar to the mass public for cheap and intellectually demanding paperbacks which was also discovered in Britain in the middle 1930s by Penguin Books, whose main intellectual series was edited by men of the left. The bulk of the passionate champions of folk-music and jazz in both Britain and America – they contained a disproportionate percentage of young communists in Britain – were also to be found on the borders of the skilled class of workers, subaltern technicians and professions and the middle class, as well as among students. The growing field of journalism, advertising and entertainment provided employment for both non-university intellectuals and such university intellectuals as did not choose to make a career in one of the traditional public or private professions – particularly in countries like Britain and the USA, where entry into these new fields was comparatively easy. New centres of organised anti-fascist and left-wing activity therefore developed in such centres of the film industry (which was then the major mass medium) as Hollywood, and in mass journalism of a non-political or not specifically reactionary kind.

Anti-fascism was therefore not confined to an intellectual elite. It included those librarians and social workers in the USA to whom communism made a particularly strong appeal. It included those whom the elite despised: "the discontented magazine-writer, the guilty Hollywood scenarist, the unpaid high school teacher, the politically inexperienced scientist, the intelligent clerk, the culturally aspiring dentist". It thus reflected the democratisation of the intelligentsia.

Eric Hobsbawm 
1917 - 2012

4.2.25

Por que não me ufano


A propaganda estatal não condiz com a realidade subdesenvolvida do brasileiro. Vejamos o caso da educação, que é assustador. Qual é o estímulo intelectual dos jovens? Quais são os debates e as conversas com fundamento que fazem parte do cotidiano do principiante? O sistema brasileiro não mantém seus estudantes livres de carências, distrações, muito pelo contrário. Os estudantes chegam ao ensino médio sem nenhum preparo. Muitos dormem de cansaço ou de tédio, desconhecem autores essenciais, morrem de preguiça ao praticar a leitura. Os firewalls da fé não são curiosos. O estudo, convenhamos, não é uma prática social importante para o terceiro mundista. E jamais será. E o sistema educativo que aprova todos em nome da imagem forjada de um Estado não distingue alunos diligentes dos negligentes. Alunos educados e inteligentes são muito raros de encontrar. O jovem brasileiro nada mais é que a lata de lixo da indústria cultural. Nem mesmo os pais se preocupam com a carreira acadêmica de seus filhos. Não são rigorosos e a sociedade brasileira não exige sabedoria mas mistificação.


The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


A more powerful and direct link with socialism came through the applied and decorative arts. The link was direct and conscious, especially in the British Arts and Crafts movement, whose great master William Morris (1834 – 96) became a sort of Marxist and made both a powerful theoretical as well as an outstanding practical contribution to the social transformation of the arts. These branches of the arts took as their point of departure not the individual and isolated artist but the artisan. They protested against the reduction of the creative workercraftsman into a mere "operative" by capitalist industry, and their main object was not to create individual works of art, ideally designed to be contemplated in isolation, but the framework of human daily life, such as villages and towns, houses and their interior furnishings. Indeed, the Arts and Crafts movement and its development, "art nouveau", pioneered the first genuinely comfortable bourgeois lifestyle of the nineteenth century, the suburban or semi-rural "cottage" or "villa", and the style, in various versions, also found a particular welcome in young or provincial bourgeois communities anxious to express their cultural identity – in Brussels and Barcelona, Glasgow, Helsinki and Prague. Nevertheless, the social ambitions of the artist-craftsmen and architects of this avantgarde were not confined to supplying middle-class needs. They pioneered modern architecture and town-planning in which the social-utopian element is evident – and these "pioneers of the modern movement" often, as in the case of W.R. Lethaby (1857 – 1931), Patrick Geddes and the champions of garden cities, came from the British progressive-socialist milieu. On the continent its champions were closely associated with social democracy.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


Whether we read intellectual history backwards, singling out the thinkers who have since come to be accepted as the ancestors of modern sociology, or whether we look at what was accepted as the influential sociology in the 1880s – 1900s (Gumplowicz, Tatzenhofer, Loria, Winiarski, etc.), the presence of Marxism is both strong and undeniable. The same is true in the field of what today would be called political science. The traditional political theory of "the state", developed in this period, perhaps chiefly by philosophers and jurists, was certainly not Marxist, yet, as we have already seen, the philosophical challenge of historical materialism was strongly felt and answered. The concrete investigation of how politics operated in practice, including such novel subjects for study as social movements and political parties, was likely to be more directly influenced. We need not claim that, at a time when the emergence of democratic politics and mass popular parties made the class struggle and the political management of the masses (or their resistance to such management) a matter of acute practical concern, theorists needed Marx to discover them. Ostrogorski (1854–1921), exceptionally for a Russian, shows no more signs of Marx’s influence than de Tocqueville, Bagehot or Bryce. Nevertheless, Gumplowicz’s doctrine that the state is always the tool of the minority holding the majority in subjection, which may have even had some effect on Pareto and Mosca, was certainly in part influenced by Marx, and the Marxist influence on Sorel and Michels is obvious.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


The most obvious criterion of contemporary arts acceptable to social democracy (there was never any doubt about the founding fathers) was that they should present the realities of capitalist society frankly and critically, preferably with special emphasis on the workers, and ideally with a commitment to their struggles. This did not in itself imply a preference for the avantgarde. Traditional and established writers and painters could just as easily extend their subject-matter or their social sympathies, and indeed among the painters the turn to the depiction of industrial scenes, workers or peasants and sometimes even scenes of labour struggles (as in H. Herkomer’s Strike) was most usually found in mildly progressive but far from avantgarde figures (Liebermann, Leibl).

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

3.2.25

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914

 

A quotation from one of the most influential American sociologists may indicate the standing of Marxism. "Marx", wrote Albion Small in 1912, "was one of the few really great thinkers in the history of social science... I do not think that Marx added to social science a single formula which will be final in the terms in which he expressed it. In spite of that I confidently predict that in the ultimate judgment of history Marx will have a place in social science analogous to Galileo in physical science".

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


There is nothing comparable in the period of the Second International to the intense interest of brilliant natural scientists in Marxism in the 1930s.

Scientists brought up in Eastern Europe like Marie Sklodkowska-Curie, and perhaps those trained or working in the Swiss universities, heavily colonised by the radical eastern intelligentsia, were clearly cognisant of Marx and debates about Marxism. The young Einstein, who as is known married a Yugoslav fellow-student from Zürich, was therefore in touch with this milieu.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Por que não me ufano

Note-se, levando em conta as variações nacionais e regionais, que a influência do marxismo sobre as camadas populares é essencialmente nula. O âmbito de debate marxista não é sequer amplo dentro da arena educacional. Nesse contexto, fica difícil a doutrina marxista chegar a ser hegemônica algum dia no tecido social ou de mesmo construirmos interpretações heterodoxas legítimas de debate dentro da teoria marxiana.


Enlightenment


Freud opõe sem cessar o conhecimento lento e seguro que nos é dado pela ciência às especulações vazias da metafísica ou à pregação delirante da religião.

Razões do Iluminismo


Iluminismo é maioridade, é autonomia, e a aceitação inquestionada da autoridade religiosa bloqueia o crescimento, adiando indefinidamente o acesso à idade adulta.

2.2.25

Debt: the first 5000 years


It is no coincidence that the new phase of debt imperialism has also been accompained by the rise of the evangelical right, who, in defiance of almost all previously existing christian theology, have enthusiastically embraced the doctrine of supply side economics; that creating money and effectively giving it to rich is the most biblically appropriate way of bringing about national prosperity.
 
David Graeber
1961 - 2020

Educação tóxica


Na periferia do capitalismo, nem mesmo a criança escolarizada vai atingir o estágio do pensamento crítico, que permitiria a ela relativizar valores e analisar o "discurso" dos políticos e dos artistas da indústria cultural.

No último ano que lecionei, as crianças do ensino básico de uma escola em Curitiba cantavam em uníssono Baile de Favela e tinham um desdém pela prática de leitura. A educação de qualidade passa pelo desenvolvimento integral da capacidade cognitiva, fora isso é demagogia.

Por que não me ufano


A onda irracionalista está submergindo o Brasil, entramos na era digital do colapso da estrutura argumentativa.

Por que não me ufano


Não é difícil observar a diferença de estilo cognitivo das crianças e adultos de países subdesenvolvidos e das crianças e adultos de países desenvolvidos.

Como muito bem apontou Rouanet, glorificar o estilo de pensamento da criança e do adulto subdesenvolvido não é somente um absurdo científico, é uma posição visceralmente reacionária. A Greta Thunberg tem um domínio argumentativo tão embasado que nenhuma jovem e adulto brasileiro domina.

As razões do Iluminismo


As pessoas que exaltam as competências práticas do menino que sobrevive vendendo laranjas não se dão conta de que não são essas competências que vão permitir à população favelada transformar suas condições de vida, e sim, precisamente as competências de que ela não dispõe: a de pensar abstratamente, a de contestar valores, a de perceber que a ordem existente é modificável. Em vez de idealizar o que deveria ser denunciado, essas pessoas fariam melhor se refletissem sobre os meios para facultar a todos o acesso ao estilo cognitivo mais complexo.

Sérgio Paulo Rouanet
1934 - 2022

Unpopular Essays


Whose authority? The Old Testament? The New Testament? The Koran? People choose the book considered holy by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others. As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices.

Bertrand Russell
1872 - 1970

Por que não me ufano


A criança do terceiro mundo não tem nenhuma chance de disputar intelectualmente com uma criança que nasceu em Genebra. Embora não precise ir tão longe. A criança subdesenvolvida não tem os meios para atingir níveis de pensamento crítico que permitirá a priori imaginar a construção de uma boa sociedade. Falta-lhe as categorias teóricas necessárias para tal. Ainda mais em uma sociedade onde a depreciação da inteligência é o seu ethos.

Por que não me ufano


A ideia da "razão como inimiga da vida", que vigora na periferia do mundo, é o topos do Contra-Iluminismo, o mesmo que inspirou as fantasias feudais e o mito ariano da grande raça caucásia.

Nesta fórmula, a religião continua aliada do despotismo político, à medida que mantém os homens em estado de infantilismo, impedindo-os de pensar por si mesmos. A aceitação inquestionada da religião bloqueia o crescimento, adiando indefinidamente o acesso à idade adulta e a construção de uma boa sociedade.

1.2.25

Mal estar na modernidade


A mais importante dimensão do Contra-Iluminismo brasileiro: o irracionalismo. Sabemos por que nossos estudantes consultam I Ching para descobrir se vão passar no vestibular; por que os políticos de Brasília confiam mais no búzios do que nas projeções macroeconômicas e por que no intervalo entre duas reprovações os secundaristas meditam no interior de pirâmides de cristal. Sabemos por que o irracionalismo grassa dentro da própria psicanálise, por que certos analistas se interessam mais pelo Tao do que por Freud, por que o passado é investigado mais para procurar vidas anteriores do que para procurar traumas infantis, e por que a metempsicose fascina mais do que a metapsicologia. Todos esses fenômenos são atalhos que conduzem a resultados imediatos. E é preciso convir que uma análise que se limita, como diz Freud, a converter a miséria histérica em infelicidade banal, não é tão eficiente como a que revela à paciente, depois de três ou quatro sessões, que ela é a reencarnação de uma princesa persa.

O irracionalismo opera na sociedade, introduzindo uma disjunção entre prática e saber. Mas opera também no interior do próprio saber.

O mandarinato da era eletrônica cumpre completentemente sua missão de sacralizar a cultura de massas.

Atacar a alta cultura, em nome da cultura popular, significa avolumar o caudal de um antiintelectualismo suicida que tornará mais incerta a luta emancipatória.

Sergio P. Rouanet 
1934 - 2022

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


Italian academic intellectuals were so strongly attracted to Marxism that much of Italian Marxism was little more than a dressing poured over the basic positivist, evolutionist and anticlerical salad of Italian middle-class male culture. Moreover, it was not only a movement of youthful revolt. The converts to Italian Socialism/Marxism included established and mature men: Labriola was born in 1843, Lombroso in 1836, the writer De Amicis in 1846, though the typical generation of the leaders of the International was that of c. 1856 – 66. Whatever we may think of the kind of Marxism or Marxisant socialism which prevailed among Italian intellectuals, there is no doubt about their intense preoccupation with Marxism. Even the polemical anti-Marxists (some, like Croce, themselves ex-Marxists) bear witness to it: Pareto himself introduced a volume of extracts from Capital selected by Lafargue (Paris, 1894).

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Por que não me ufano


A sociedade brasileira piorou à medida que foi reproduzindo as condições de desigualdade econômica e política além, obviamente, da alienação religiosa que, em proporções diversas de expansão e perversidade, continua vigorando. O analfabetismo é a sua face mais visível.

A maioria dos "intelectuais" brasileiros não sente atraída pela teoria marxista e sim por uma vida intensa voltada para o consumo sustentada pela estrutura pública, uma fuga apolítica sem nenhuma análise introspectiva da perpetuação da miséria escancarada.

Leve-se em consideração que o aprendizado do bem-pensar e do bem-dizer não faz parte do projeto educacional do Brasil.

Irracionalismo nacional


O que se pode fazer para sensibilizar o empresariado a investir em livros? É inacreditável encontrar cidades sem um mísero sebo, não vou mencionar livraria com uma rigorosa curadoria marxista. O Brasil continua distante de padrões do primeiro mundo, estamos longe de níveis modernos de bem-estar.

31.1.25

Mal-estar na modernidade


Freud declara guerra à tradição como o mais radical dos iluministas. Por que devemos aceitá-la? Por que nossos antepassados a aceitaram? Mas eles eram pessoas grosseiras, muito ignorantes que nós. Por que há livros, como a bíblia, que comprovam a veracidade da tradição? Mas esses livros são, na maioria dos casos, lacunares e contraditórios. Por que é proibido pô-la em dúvida? Mas isso é a melhor confissão de que a tradição é fraudulenta.

Temos que pensar por nós mesmos, em vez de aceitar a tradição. É nisso que consiste a maioridade, é na superação de todos os infantilismos que consiste nossa verdadeira dignidade. São as crianças que vivem de ilusões - crenças sem fundamento objetivo, influenciadas quase exclusivamente pelo desejo. O homem maduro enfrenta a realidade, por mais dura que seja. Ele ficará, com isso, "como a criança que deixa a casa paterna, onde gozava de tanto calor e aconchego. Mas o infantilismo deve ser vencido, não é verdade? O homem não pode ficar eternamente criança, precisa um dia confrontar-se com a vida hostil".

Para atingir a condição adulta, para aprender a usar sua própria razão, o homem tem que livrar-se do Denkverbot, da proibição de pensar. Há uma proibição de pensar que Freud chama, curiosamente, de Loyale Verbot, a que se destina a assegurar a lealdade dos súditos (Braven Untertanen). E há o Denkverbot imposto pela religião.

É o mais infantilizante de todos, porque a religião deve sua origem a uma situação infantil: a impotência da criança diante do pai. Deus é a projeção do pai num registro supra-sensível. A religião é uma forma fantasmática de proteger o indivíduo dos perigos da natureza, da implacabilidade da morte, dos sofrimentos impostos pela vida social. Ela minora o infortúnio terrestre e promete no paraíso uma beatitude compensatória. Ela é nociva individualmente, porque o Denkverbot que ela induz impede o homem de fazer racionalmente os sacrifícios pulsionais exigidos pela civilização, e com isso a culpabilidade inconsciente passa a ser o destino do indivíduo. E é nociva socialmente, porque na qualidade de neurose coletiva ela impede uma regulamentação pulsional capaz de promover um verdadeiro equilíbrio entre os objetivos de preservação do grupo e as reivindicações individuais de felicidade. O crente troca uma gleba terrestre por um latifúndio na Lua. O homem sensato, pelo contrário, segue o conselho do poeta, abandonando os céus aos anjos e aos pardais.

Como bom iluminista, no entanto, Freud não combate apenas a religião, mas todos os obscurantismos. É o caso do ocultismo. A psicanálise pode desmistificar as práticas supersticiosas, seja mostrando sua falsidade, à medida que são simples realizações de desejo, seja retirando-lhes o lado milagroso, à medida que correspondem a alguma realidade empírica, como talvez seja o caso da telepatia. O ocultismo é um atalho para pseudoverdades, em detrimento do caminho longo e tortuoso que leva às certezas científicas, e por isso pode ser comparado à atividade especulativa de quem quer enriquecer de um lance só, desprezando o trabalho regular e cotidiano.

Sérgio Paulo Rouanet
1934 - 2022

30.1.25

Por que não me ufano


A "mentalidade popular" deveria ser o avesso e a desmistificação da ideologia dominante mas é justamente o contrário: uma cópia da mentalidade dos grupos hegemônicos. Não serve como denúncia política e muito menos como força perceptiva do caráter mistificador da falsa consciência ou da consciência alienada.

29.1.25

Por que não me ufano


As situações econômicas particularmente tensas e desiguais como as do Brasil não engendram no "coração" do subdesenvolvido um desejo de uma ordem inteiramente diversa da estabelecida.

O terceiro mundista não tem forças para lutar contra as classes dominantes locais, que são muito feudais, menos ainda irá ter condições para lutar contra o imperialismo. Falta-lhe a práxis marxista.

Literacy is the Path to Communism


It's not the consciousness of human beings that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.

The Influence of Marxism 1880 – 1914


By the 1890s labour movements not linked to socialism were as common in the Anglo-Saxon regions – Britain, Australia, the USA – as they were rare outside it. Nonetheless in those countries too Marxism was of some significance, though less so than in continental Europe. Nor, especially in the USA, should we underestimate the importance of a mass of immigrants from Germany, tsarist Russia and elsewhere, who often brought Marxist-influenced ideologies with them to the new world as part of their intellectual baggage. And nor should we underestimate the movement of resistance to "big business" during this period of acute social tension and ferment in the USA, which made a number of radical thinkers receptive to, or at least interested in socialist critiques of capitalism. One thinks not only of Thorstein Veblen but of progressive, centrally placed economists like Richard Ely (1854–1943) who "probably exerted a greater influence upon American economics during its vital formative period than any other individual". For these reasons the USA, though developing little independent Marxist thinking itself, became, rather surprisingly, a significant centre for the diffusion of Marxist writings and influence. This affected not only the Pacific countries (Australia, New Zealand, Japan) but also Britain, where the small but growing groups of Marxist labour activists in the 1900s received much of their literature – including not only Marx and Engels but also Dietzgen – from the Chicago publishing house of Charles H. Kerr.

Eric Hobsbawm
1917 - 2012

Karl Marx: man and fighter


The anti-Marxism of today has nothing in common with those movements. He who opposes Marxism today does not do so because, for instance, he denies the validity of Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Similarly there are millions today who acknowledge Marx as their leader, but not because he solved the riddle of capitalist society. Perhaps one Socialist in a thousand has ever read any of Marx's economic writings, and of a thousand anti-Marxists not even one. The strife no longer rages round the truth or doctrine of historical materialism or the validity of the labor theory of value or the theory of marginal utility. These things are discussed and also not discussed.

Boris Nicolaievsky
1887 - 1966

28.1.25

One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society

 

Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of "public opinion" together with its makers. The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization.

Can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination? Between the automobile as nuisance and as convenience? Between the horrors and the comforts of functional architecture? Between the work for national defense and the work for corporate gain? Between the private pleasure and the commercial and political utility involved in increasing the birth rate?

Indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological.

The combination of centralized authority and direct democracy is subject to infinite variations, according to the degree of development. Self-determination will be real to the extent to which the masses have been dissolved into individuals liberated from all propaganda, indoctrination, and manipulation, capable of knowing and comprehending the facts and of evaluating the alternatives. In other words, society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained, and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject.

Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979