История, искусство, иудаика, воспитание, путешествия. Что общего между библейскими сюжетами в искусстве и еврейской кухней? Что такое билингвизм? Марина Аграновская Библейские сюжеты Галерея шедевров Перекресток трёх стран Города Адриатики Европейская мозаика Еврейские чудеса Ребёнок-билингв Анатолий Сирота Закономерности истории Закономерности в немецкой истории Эволюционный марксизм Маранат хроника Эволюционный марксизм В январе 1889 г. В.И. Вернадский писал своей жене из Мюнхена о великой истине, которую мощный ум Дюрера выразил в картине Четыре апостола... Статьи -> Эволюционный марксизм -> Neo-Marxism: An Attempt at Reformation Neo-Marxism: An Attempt at Reformation Anatoli Sirota Anatolii Moiseevich Sirota is a doctor of technical sciences, professor, and senior research associate of the All-Russian Thermotechnological Institute. Familiar profiles In January 1889, V.I. Vernadskii wrote to his wife from Munich about the great truth that Duerers powerful mind had expressed in his painting The Four Apostles. The dreamer. ... the profound philosopher seeks ... the truth and gives rise to a less profound pupil as an intermediary, who cannot understand the full essence, but is closer to life, . . . explains in concrete terms what the other has said,... distorts him, but that is precisely why the masses will understand him: because he will grasp a small piece of the new and combine it with age-old popular beliefs. Beside them stand two figures with the severe countenances not of thinkers but of politicians. One is ready to fight for the truth and will have no mercy on the enemy, unless the enemy comes over to his side. ... He wants power too, he is capable of leading the crowd, but he understands what the cause is about, this is the fighter-thinker. And next to him is the fanatical, bestial countenance of the fourth apostle. He is a petty politician. ... He pursues this idea in a harsh, mercilessly narrow spirit and is already a completely base mouthpiece of the crowd and its means. But he is easiest to understand, and de facto most powerful. But one can hardly recognize the thoughts of the first apostle in the outward form of the fourth, and thus, in particular, even that which has influenced humanity most strongly and powerfully may come to pass. 1 Albrecht Duerer. The Four Apostles.1526 Fragment. Apostle Markus The profound philosopher, the pupil-intermediary, the fighter-thinker, the crude mouthpiece of the crowd—Duerers contemporaries found in the painting a personification of the four temperaments. Vernadsky saw in it the truth about the power, fascination, and loathsomeness of popular religious movements. We readily recognize the four chiseled profiles that not long ago still adorned our cities on revolutionary holidays. The contemporary postmodernist artist, recreating the famous painting, might portray another two apostles. Alongside the bestial countenance of the petty politician, we would see the dull, self-satisfied physiognomy of the aging ruler who enjoys the carnal pleasures of life. For him the ideas that had inspired his predecessors have lost their original meaning, and have been reduced to a collection of dead dogmas. He would be regarded with disdain by the reformer brimming with faith who has revived and cleansed of distortions the truth that was once revealed to the world in the teaching of the philosopher but was corrupted by the church. And again before our minds eye would arise familiar historical figures, reminding us of the debauched Roman popes of the Middle Ages and the leaders of the Reformation and at the same time of our own leaders, some of whom undermined the authority of the teaching while others tried to reconstruct and save it. It is hard to accept the similarity of these two phased sequences as a mere coincidence. It is more likely that we are dealing with a historical regularity—an invariant core of events visible through innumerable particulars that never repeat themselves exactly. The encounter of two great minds, that of the artist and that of the scientist, revealed regularities in the development of ideology, applicable equally to the Christian religion and to Marxism. Albrecht Duerer. The Four Apostles.1526 Fragment. Apostle Paulus That this is really so is convincingly demonstrated in L.S. Vasilevs and D.E. Furmans comparative historical study Christianity and Confucianism. 2 Here the European Reformation of the sixteenth century is considered as one of many reformations or regular stages in the functioning of religions founded by specific historical personalities (founder religions). The arguments by which the authors demonstrate the inevitability of the religious reformations alone are in fact more generally applicable, allowing us to establish reformation as a historical phenomenon inherent in all founder ideologies. as a turn to the authentic works of the doctrines founder in a new historical situation. In particular, Khrushchevs reforms, which are justified ideologically by reference to Lenins works, were a timid attempt at such a nonreligious reformation. The choice has now been made and the reformation of Leninism is no longer possible. The stream of facts discrediting Lenin rules out any support from his authority, but it is precisely such support from the traditional reverence for a founder that really makes reformation a less painful and, correspondingly, a more effective method of transforming public consciousness than the creation of a basically new ideology. 3 Is the reformation of Marxism possible? Such attempts have been made more than once. A typical example was Erich Fromms reformation of Marxs doctrine of man.4 At one time the well-known discussion concerning the Asiatic mode of production assumed the character of a reformation of historical materialism. Some participants in this discussion tried to overcome the contradiction between the official doctrine and the results of concrete investigations by relying, not without success, on Marxs texts, especially, on his historical essay Precapitalist Economic Formations, 5 which was published in Moscow in 1940 and thus remained unknown to the first generation of Russian Marxists. Unfortunately, the reformation of historical materialism was not accomplished. It could not be achieved earlier because of the fierce resistance of orthodox ideologists and then when perestroika began, public interest in the problem significantly declined. The reason for this was not only the failure of the great experiment on Russia by those who considered themselves to be followers of Marx, but also the exposure of discreditable facts about Marx and Engels (although in this respect they were no different from many other famous people revered by humanity). Nevertheless, as recent events have shown, the dream of a society of social equality has not only not been expunged from mass consciousness but, on the contrary, against the background of the social distress of the transition period is finding new supporters. These moods are stimulated not only by material factors but also by the sudden and forced (not earned) renunciation of the familiar cliches of Soviet propaganda and of its pseudomyths, which fed on the vestiges of ancient mythological thinking. Everyday thinking is unable to grasp that the self-destruction of the communist empire and the subsequent difficult transition period are, first of all, manifestations of sociological regularities, a historical tragedy rather than consequences of the mistakes and crimes of the politicians of the period of liberal-democratic reforms. Alas, for those who have not risen to the level of theoretical thinking and are unable, following Marx, to distinguish essence from existence, everything is explained by simply counterposing the sorry present to a past embellished by psychological aberration. Alas, it is precisely the masses, unaware of the deep meaning of what is happening, who become without expecting it the most important subjects of historical action at times of revolutionary upheaval. Under these conditions, the reformation of historical materialism—the separation of its nonutopian component, which is compatible with contemporary knowledge and the retention of the customary authority of both the founder of the doctrine and his terminology and affirmation, in particular, of the Marxist assumptions about the lawful course of history and the possibility of building a more perfect society—would provide an effective mechanism for legitimizing the new social system, a mechanism created by history itself, which is psychologically comfortable insofar as it affirms the new without on the surface breaking with the old. The reformation of historical materialism is at the same time a possible way of rehabilitating the humanistic aspects of theoretical thought, the authority of which has been badly undermined as a result of the failure of the theoretically unsubstantiated socialist experiment, which had been presented as the crowning achievement of theory. Two Marxisms An attractive feature of Marxs views is their systematic character. According to his hypothesis, society is a self-developing system—a social (as distinct from a geological) formation. The mode of production is the system-forming factor of a social formation,6 and material relations of production are its economic structure on which ideological forms of social life are based. Hence the social formation is called an economic formation. This is the starting hypothesis and to this day it is accepted by all followers of historical materialism. But at the next stage there already appear divergences between orthodox and reform-minded Marxists. The two groups define the mode of production in different ways. For orthodox Marxists, relations of production are relations of cooperation (in the primitive commune and under socialism) or relations of domination and servitude (domination of the exploited by the exploiters). In the latter case, the basis of the relations of production is the dominating classes ownership of the means of production. According to the neo-Marxist F. Tekei, mode of production can be defined in the following way.7 It is the subsystem that determines the properties of the large system, that is, of the social formation, and consists of three elements: individuals, collectives (co
Posted on: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 13:29:13 +0000
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