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Critique of phenomenology amounts to a tiny piece of the puzzle that is Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabalas thought-provoking Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx.[1] According to the spot allocated to it, phenomenology fits in with the other manifestations of classical metaphysics, bent on preserving the transcendental privilege of immutable truth. In what follows, I will argue that such placement may not do justice to phenomenology, which, in its most critical manifestations, is an ally of hermeneutic communism. This particular piece of the puzzle belongs on the other side of the intellectual and historical barricades, and, more importantly, holds the potential for mediating between the various opposed campsdescription and interpretation, realism and anti-realism, the strong and the weak, metaphysics and postmetaphysicsthat Vattimo and Zabala keep apart.

To appreciate the unique position of phenomenology, let us take one of the original terms, with which Hermeneutic Communism operates, namely, framed democracy.[2] An ingenious turn of phrase, framed democracy has a double sense. First, it means democracy enframed, restricted within a set of limiting parameters of parliamentary liberalism and militant capitalism wherein its procedures largely devoid of substance are allowed to unfold. Presented as the only legitimate political regime in existence today, it is a paradigm that claims for itself the universality of law and order, while viewing everything that falls outside its confines as chaotic, anarchic, and fraught with violence. Second, framed democracy implies the framing of those who subscribe to its logic, a situation where the oppressed are duped into believing that its system works in circuitous ways also to their advantage. It reveals a thoroughly ideological construction of the paradigm that highjacks the place of political universality. The beauty of the expression is that the two meanings are actually inseparable one from the other: the parameters of contemporary liberal democracies are set up in such as way as to frame their subjects.

Throughout their book, Vattimo and Zabala insist on the rigidity of the frame that separates not only different accounts of truth but also opposing sets of interests, histories, and classes. Clearly, they redraw these active front lines, so as to demonstrate the limitations of framed democracy that, in its most delusional moments, has pictured itself as wholly unframed, trans-historical, objective, and universally applicable. It should not be a surprise, they write, that democracy and science have become indissoluble. And it is this indissolubility that situates framed democracy outside history, where its ideal of objectivity can finally be fulfilled (HC39). Still, even in their account, the frame acts more as a membrane; it is porous, and, thanks to this porousness, it is able to draw on what lies outside it, just as it can expel what was previously captured within its confines. If, for instance, the weak are the discharge of capitalism (HC7), then there must be a way for them to be ejected outside the system of framed democracy and, whenever necessary, to be reincorporated and exploited from within this system once again. Echoing the industrial reserve army in Karl Marxs Capital,[3] these discharges provide the much-needed flexibility to the political economic system during the alternating periods of growth and contraction that depend on the periodic crises of capital.

On the epistemological plane, too, the paradigmatic frame is more of a porous membrane, creating the lines of communication between the two sides it separates. As Jacques Derrida convincingly showed in The Truth in Painting, frames, in their materiality, are not one-dimensional, inasmuch as they have a width and thickness of their own, outer and inner edges, elaborate or austere parergonal elements, and so forth.[4] Following Vattimo and Zabalas account, framed democracies thrive on the imposed descriptions of what they consider to be true and relegate flexible interpretations to the hither side of the frame. But what if, instead of scrutinizing the inside and the outsidethe staple categories of metaphysics properwe focused on the frame itself? What does it consist of? What is interjected between presumably objective descriptions and free interpretations?

I submit that this place in-between is occupied by the appearing (not the appearance) prior to its transformation into materials for either description or interpretation. Phenomenology is concerned, precisely, with the appearing in the how of its appearance, that is to say, with the modes of givenness of phenomena. It thus deals with the infrastructure common to descriptions and interpretations, which is why it could influence both John Searl and Martin Heidegger or Hans-Georg Gadamer. Phenomenology oversteps its metaphysical confines, inasmuch as it is interested in the problem of givenness, in all its finitude; its crucial question is how the world appears to an embodied, emplaced, mortal, and fallible subject. Already in the thought of Edmund Husserl, phenomenological investigations of givenness are intensely perspectival. His term for perspectivism is givenness through adumbrations, or being faced with a seemingly inexhaustible array of physical dimensions of the appearing object. Least of all does phenomenology impose a prefabricated mold of objectivity onto ontology. Far from it, phenomenological practice liberates our not yet formalized life-world from the projections of the scientific and natural attitude (common sense) that suffocate the very thing they are meant to express.

Let us take up the distinguishing features of phenomenology, which finds itself under siege in Hermeneutic Communism, one by one, paying close attention to the way that they, in fact, shore up Vattimo and Zabalas project. Having slotted this piece of the puzzle into its proper place, we will observe how a certain critical spirit of phenomenology resonates with the spectrality of communism, on the one hand, and with the weakness of hermeneutics, on the other. It is my hope that the effects of their multiple resonances would enrich hermeneutic communism, create new alliances with its supposed adversaries, and, especially, defend it against the charges of a dualist or dichotomous world-view reminiscent of classical metaphysics.

Quite rightly, the authors accuse the self-proclaimed objectivity of metaphysical and scientific descriptions of serving as support mechanisms for the worst excesses of the political status quo: A politics of descriptions does not impose power in order to dominate as a philosophy; rather, it is functional for the continued existence of a society of dominion, which pursues truth in the form of imposition (violence), conservation (realism), and triumph (history) (HC12). Although the word description is embraced by phenomenological philosophy, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the violent, realist, and triumphalist pretense of objectivity, associated with its scientific-metaphysical form. Phenomenological descriptions are the positive results of a meticulous work of reduction, which is tasked with stripping away layer after layer of unexamined presuppositions projected onto what is. In other words, they are not imposed but derived from the ever-shifting relation between the subject and the object of knowledge. Nor are they realist (Husserl has always insisted that his thought was suspended between realism and idealism), in that they are the description of givenness in its infinite manifestations, not of reality itself. And they are not triumphalist, since the work of reduction must recommence every time anew, preventing rigorous descriptions from ossifying into new metaphysical dogmas and commonsensical propositions.

We might say that the political case-in-point of phenomenological description is E.P. Thompsons 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class. A courageous history from below, it is an attempt to rescue from the oblivion of the winners history the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott.[5] In describing these characters life-worlds, Thompson sets aside the general methodological assumptions of traditional historiography and hence, like Husserl, produces descriptions that are avowedly interpretative and that educe their legitimacy from the fabric of existence, not from an alien ideality.

The role of reduction in phenomenology should not go unremarked, especially because it is allergic to the impositions of truth and to the effects of framing Vattimo and Zabala likewise resist. The goal of reduction is to unhinge the frames that surround the given in its givenness, to reject all sorts of bonuses (idealizations, immediate associations, preconceived images) surreptitiously superadded to the given, and to receive what is given within the limits of its givenness. In doing so, phenomenological reduction estranges what seemed to be intimately familiar and sheds light on the being-frame of the frame, its structuring determination of our cognition and perception as well as of the strata that accrete over and suffocate our cognitive-perceptual capacities.

The ideology critique, inherent in Vattimo and Zabalas interpretation of liberalism, is analogous to the workings of reduction. Hermeneutic communism is to the frames of the liberal state what reduction is to the frames of metaphysical and natural attitudes. Both streams of theoretical practice expose the dead and deadening character of what they reduce. The natural attitude presents the world to us in such a way that the presentation blocks from view what appears in the minutiae of its appearing. Liberal democracy occludes the viability of local alternatives to its impositions, so that the presence of this democratic frame means not only the imposition of our systems but also the exclusion of the invaded states cultural and political systems (HC57). While all framing inevitably reveals the enframed at the price of concealing something else, liberal and metaphysical violence inflicted on the given denies the most vital (existential) possibilities, relegated to the realm outside its frame.

The interplay of revealing and concealing in the movement of dis-closure will be readily recognized as the hallmark of Heideggers truth as aletheia. Vattimo and Zabala acknowledge their debt to the German philosopher when it comes to this notion of truth (HC22), as well as to his idea of being-framed, Ge-Stell (HC145). At the same time, they deem Husserls definition to truth one of the most successful... within contemporary analytic and continental philosophy (HC19). Success, of course, is the effect of the winners history and way of thinking, to which Husserlian phenomenology is said to adhere. The authors of Hermeneutic Communism contend that Husserl advances a metaphysical definition of truth, which

depends on the difference between the mere intention of the phenomenological Being and the matter itselfin other words, between the manner in which something appears and the manner in which it is itself... [T]hat is, a proposition would be true only if it refers to things in a way that permits them to be seen as they are in themselves (HC20).

Unlike Kantian transcendental philosophy, Husserls phenomenology, however, does not postulate the existence of things-in-themselves, somehow distinct from phenomenal appearances. The methodological slogan Back to the things themselves! merely signals the aim of phenomenological reduction and description to re-experience the life-world without the impositions of the metaphysical and natural attitudes. Husserl was preoccupied, above all, not with truth claims, condensed in formal propositions, but with the truth of experience, the necessarily imperfect fit between the emptily intended (or the signified) object and the fulfillment of intentionality in intuition. This meant examining every discrete experience on its own terms, with its own specificities, modes of givenness, and ways of appearing. It required, moreover, going back both to the experiencing subject and to the experienced as it was experienced. After the reduction of what was transcendent vis--vis pure consciousness in IdeasI, no matter itself' remained;[6] rather, it was bracketed and set aside, along with everything that fell outside this newly discovered field for phenomenological operations. The idea of a disembodied, objective, God-like point of view is, actually, the first to be submitted to the knife of reduction, which recognizes in it a groundless imposition on experience.

Looking up to Descartes, Husserl resorts to the Ur-gesture of radical philosophizing, which consists in brushing away all unexamined presuppositions and truth claims and winning a new ground for thinking. Now, this ground is not won once and for all; reduction is an infinite task that must recommence as soon as experience gets buried under the sediments of concepts, theories, assumptions, and representations that grow over it. That is why Husserl is so skeptical with regard to the scientific method and rationality, which, as Vattimo and Zabala concede, he declared to be in crisis (HC13). Given his critique of the European sciences, Husserl refuses either to strengthen their stranglehold on existence or to contribute to their justification of political domination. His project of liberating the life-world from the yoke of scientific rationality is of one piece with the hermeneutic communist demand to let multiple and dispersed existences interpret themselves, revitalizing the active sense of existence as interpretation (HC87ff.). A return to the life-world opens the same horizon of emancipation as hermeneutic communism (HC93), delving beneath the death masks of facts to the facticity of existence in its infinite variations that do not fit on the Procrustean bed of the sciences.

To sum up, phenomenology offers a non-positivist version of description, compatible with interpretation; reduces or brackets extraneous impositions on experience; operates with a pre-prepositional notion of truth; and interferes with the scientific justification of political metaphysical domination. But exactly what is political phenomenology? And what can it contribute to the endeavors of hermeneutic communism?

A history of the political applications of phenomenology runs parallel to that of the political applications of hermeneutics: despite their critical, emancipatory, and anarchic potential, both have been used to promote conservative programs and worldviews. What I refer to under the title political phenomenology has to do with (1) the givenness of political phenomena, (2) the modes of appearance of political actors on the institutional and the informal stages, and (3) the re-activation of political energy, suffocated by the empty proceduralism of the established systems of domination. All three characteristics mentioned above are also crucial to hermeneutic communism, which advances a critique of how political possibilities are precluded, withheld, and decidedly not-given by the status quo (framed democracy); envisions, through the example of the South American Left, the appearance of previously excluded, marginalized, or discharged weak actors on the national, regional, and international scenes; and calls for the exercise of active interpretation, coextensive with existential dispersion, as a way to re-energize an equally dispersed, anarchic politics. Having said that, in the title of the present analysis, I qualify hermeneutic communism as a weak political phenomenology. A few words are, therefore, in order on the sense of this weakness or of this weakening.

The minimal and chronologically first meaning of weak thought denotes, according to Vattimo and Zabala, the abandonment of pretensions to absolutes that had characterized the metaphysical traditions (HC96). Proceeding along the path of the reductions, Husserlian phenomenology, too, did not spare the idols of absoluteness, including reality in itself, scientific rationality, and God. But it did insist on describing the being of pure consciousness, which remained after the operations of reduction were complete, as absolute. Henceforth, in Husserls vernacular, absolute will acquire a very specific signification of absolutely irreducible. While it may be argued that, with this notion, the old chimeras of metaphysics re-enter thinking through the backdoor, there are also traces of such irreducibility in other postmetaphysical philosophies, influenced by the founder of phenomenology. For Heidegger, absolute irreducibility will have stood for the temporality of Dasein. Emmanuel Levinas considers the alterity of the other irreducible. And, in Derridas corpus this idea assumes the shape of the un-deconstructable. In any event, the negative version of absoluteness is consistent with the tenets of weak thought that absorbs into itself the remains of the absolute (in Zabalas terms, the remains of Being[7]) and that, subsequently, produces a positive interpretation of the weakening inherent in the metaphysical tradition itself.

In Husserls phenomenological universe, absolute consciousness has a constituting function: it is the ground, on which experience as such and the world will be reconstructed in the aftermath of reduction. The political equivalent of this function is sovereignty, or the right to decide upon and constitute the political sphere, to give it a determinate shape. This is where we must insist on the weakening of political phenomenology (as much as of political metaphysics), in keeping with the argumentative thrust of Hermeneutic Communism. Although Vattimo and Zabala do not openly engage with the concept of sovereignty, they gesture toward its breaking-up into sovereignties (in the plural) that invalidate the assumption of a unitary and preponderant will of the sovereign. Consistent with the current theories of popular self-determination, this multiplication is possible thanks to the grounding of hermeneutic communism in existence, which cannot be gathered into a totality without losing its existential character. If the right to interpretation is coeval with the right to existence, then the active exercise of both rights by all those who have been dispossessed due to the global system of domination is tantamount to the egalitarian distribution of sovereignty that shatters its unified core. Politics without truth as much as anarchic interpretation (HC9899) are the corollaries to a politics without sovereignty, though not without sovereignties.

As the books subtitle indicates, Hermeneutic Communism is entrusted with an ambitious task of charting backwards an intellectual itinerary that leads from Heidegger to Marx, that is to say, from existence to justice. If Marx emphasized the significance of keeping our feet anchored to the earth, Vattimo and Zabala write, it is Heidegger who indicated through the thought of Being how such earth is constantly moving and changing, constantly in conflict (HC5). Husserls phenomenology combines these divergent relations to the earth, much in the same way hermeneutic communism wishes to do. Phenomenology appeals to the concreteness of the earth as the ground from which our abstractions are born and to which they are bound to return if they are to retain their meaningfulness. But it also recasts the grounds of experience through reduction, by depriving us of the conceptual ground we thought secure and by rooting thinking itself in the life-world, in existence, and, ultimately, in something self-grounded, ungrounded, and groundless, i.e., Being itself. Hence, the hypothesis of my brief intervention: the road leading from Heidegger back to Marx must traverse the philosophy of Husserl, which stands in a somewhat unexpected proximity to hermeneutic communism.

Notes

1. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2011). Cited hereafter as HC within the text.

2. Cf. part one of Vattimo and Zabala, Hermeneutic Communism.

3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), pp.781ff.

4. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). Cf., especially, the section on the parergon.

5. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p.12.

6. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, first book, trans. F. Kersten (Dodrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), esp.33, Preliminary Indication of Pure or Transcendental Consciousness as the Phenomenological Residuum, pp.6366.

7. Santiago Zabala, The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2009).

More:
Hermeneutic Communism as (Weak) Political Phenomenology - Telos Press

WASHINGTONThe power of memoryto honor, to console, to teach, and to warnwas evoked on the morning of June 9 at the award and wreath-laying ceremonies at the Victims of Communism Memorial.

The event began with the passionate violin playing of Wuilly Moiss Arteaga, a 23-year-old from the socialist state of Venezuela. Arteaga had been flown in from Caracas and promptly outfitted with a new violin. The police in Caracas, where Arteaga has regularly played in protests against the repressive Maduro regime, had smashed his previous instrument.

Perhaps the raw energy of Arteagas playing drew in part on grief for the recent death of his friend and fellow violinist Armando Caizales, who was killed in the Caracas protests.

Arteaga played on a stage facing the memorial statue, a bronze replica of the Goddess of Democracy figure assembled from papier-mch by the students on Tiananmen Square in 1989. The statue dominates a small plaza on a busy Washington street corner that is an easy walk from the Capitol.

This was a day for remembering the victims of communism, which is easier to do for one individual at a time, than for a group whose size strains our understanding.

(Kitty Wang/NTD Televsion)

The keynote speaker, Vytautas Landsbergis, said the enormity of the crimes of communism is astonishing, difficult to comprehend. Landsbergis noted the scale of the crimes can invite the remark,attributed to Josef Stalin, that while one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

On its website, The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation refers to there being more than 100 million deaths and says its memorial is the only one in the world dedicated to every single victim of communism.

Jos Gutirrez-Solana attended the first of the foundations memorial ceremonies 10 years ago and has attended every yearsince. He spent 10 years in Fidel Castros jails.

Gutirrez-Solana was a law student who had joined with Castro to oppose the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Then Castro said there would be no law and no constitution. That is not what we were fighting for, Gutirrez-Solana said, and so he began using his words to oppose the soon-to-be communist tyrant.

After Castro seized power, Gutirrez-Solana was rounded up. He says he comes to this event each year to pay tribute to our friends and brothers who lost their lives for freedom in Cuba.

Gutirrez-Solana escaped Cuba decades ago. Chi Lihua and her daughter, Xu Xinyang, escaped China only four months ago, in February.

Chi and Xu practice the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, which the Chinese Communist Party set out to eradicate in 1999. Chis husband died in 2009 after being tortured during an 8-year prison sentence for practicing Falun Gong. Chi said she has also lost her brother, father, and mother due to the persecution in China.

(Kitty Wang/NTD Televsion)

After her fathers death, Xu was forced to quit school, and several of her classmates, who also practiced Falun Gong, were arrested. Chi and Xu came to the foundations ceremony to ask for help for Falun Gong practitioners and in particular for Xus classmates. They dont speak English, but brought with them a laminated poster in Chinese that tells about the persecution of Falun Gong. When asked to pose for a photo, they unfolded the poster and held it between them.

The foundation runs several activities meant to further its vision of a world free from the false hope of communism. Prominent among these is the awarding of the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, given to those individuals and institutions that have demonstrated a lifelong commitment to freedom and democracy and opposition to communism and all other forms of tyranny, the website says.

At this ceremony, the foundation awarded the medal to Mart Laar, Estonias first prime minister after the countrys independence from the Soviet Union. The award was accepted by Estoniasdeputy chief of mission, Marki Tihhonova-Kreek, as ill health kept Laar from making the trip to Washington.

In his acceptanceremarks, Laar wrote that Estonians know precisely what communism is. This is why our task is not to let it happen again. This demands that we all keep memory alive.

Landsbergisskeynote address struck a different tone. He began, Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, combatants. Landsbergis, the first head of state of a Lithuania freed from Soviet domination, spoke as one warrior to other warriors.

(Kitty Wang/NTD Televsion)

For him, communism is alive. It is a monster or a plague that seeks to destroy all of humanity.

While one might be pardoned on a sunny morning in Washington for feeling far from these terrible things, Landsbergis warned, The epoch of mass extermination is not yet over.

Landsbergis sees the evil of communism mutating and appearing in new forms. Murderous Islamists and what he called Russo-fascism are new faces of an old enemy.

The mixture of speculative communist teaching and fanatic delirium, Landsbergis said, goes on like an endemic illness.

Landsbergis sees a love based on thebelief in God as a way for humankind to avoid this contagion.

The climax of the mornings events was the roll call of nations. Wreaths were presented by the representatives of 22 nations, four other governmental entities, and 30 private associations (from the union representing Voice of America employees to the World Uyghur Congress).

In the solemn ceremony, one or a few individuals would carry a wreath to the space in front of the statue of the Goddess of Democracy and briefly bow their head in respect for the many victims who have been slaughtered. The wreath would then be arranged with the others in rows behind the statue.

After the memorial ceremony ended, the foundations executive director, Marion Smith, reflected on the significance of the days events for Americans. An October 2016 poll commissioned by the foundation on Americas views on communism was an eye-opener.

Among other findings, younger generationsmillennials and Generation Zwere found to be more likely to underestimate the death toll of communism, to have less appreciation for the lasting threat of communism, and to be more likely to have favorable attitudes toward socialism and communism.

Smith said the results of this poll reflected an overall failure of American education. He sized up our younger generations as having a lack of historical awareness, a frustration or inability to participate in the free enterprise system, and then a weariness at the messiness of democracy.

Smith characterized this as very fertile soil for dictatorship and totalitarianism.

To respond to this situation, the foundation has several educational initiatives: seminars for high school teachers; outreach programs on college campuses, where the foundation teaches the basic facts about communism; and symposia for college professors to discuss difficult issues involving communism, socialism, totalitarianism, and collectivism. In addition, the foundation has run a series of ads in New Yorks Times Square.

Next on the foundations agenda is to build the InternationalMuseum on Communism in Washington.

Smith said that understanding and celebrating the lives of those killed by communism is very important for us as a society in terms of justice, of who we are.

Remembering the victims of communism and seeking to defend others from it, even if our situation only allows us to do so with words, is essential to the American character, Smith said.

If we dont defend the great ideas of individual liberty and self-government around the world, then we lose the capacity to affirm those ideas at home, Smith said.

See the original post:
Remembering the Victims of CommunismFor Them, and For Us - The Epoch Times

Dear DJ:

You write of the east. I am from the east, born in 1957. My parents and their friends were beatniks. As an avid hipster watcher I enjoy reading your recent field guide series. Especially useful for identifying a casual! However, I notice that, while todays hipsters remind me so much of the beatniks I grew up around, one amazing difference stands out. Long ago, once beatniks had removed themselves to more rural locales, they couldnt remain beatniks. They naturally and steadily evolved into craftsmen, hippies, farmers, or squares. Beat-ness was helpless against the forces of nature. How does the hipster do it? To endure in all environs? What is his secret? How does he adapt and thrive, yet retain his hipness in whatever territory he finds himself?

David A.

Even though I cant be 100 percent sure of what you mean by a casual, I absolutely hope that I am not one, and I accept your comment as the shining compliment I know it is.

bows graciously

Okay. Having expelled the last vestiges of residual smugness that linger after a hard day of eating grass-fed burgers and arranging my substantial collection of 1980s Japanese dub singles that even Ive never heard of before, I believe your inquiry merits a substantive answer.

Giving credit where credit is due, the 1950s Beatnik was absolutely the hipster of his day. He even hated being called a Beatnik. Roaming free and unfettered throughout the concrete jungles of the mid-Twentieth Century, the Wild Beatnik hungered for the freshest innovations of a youthful and rebellious culture: non-rhyming poetry, color field paintings, modern jazz, occasional homosexuality, inklings of communism, and primitive strains of marijuana. But Beat culture lived in the cities, and died somewhere along the county line, because it was an academic, top-down revolution. Fed up with a hundred years of industrialization and nothing to show for it but two world wars and growing discontent in Asia, the Beats were going to change the world with their ideas, man! Unless you control the means of production, ideas dont get a lot of traction without a lot of like-minded people to share them with.

By contrast, the modern hipster, fed up with 150 years of industrialization, two world wars, and growing discontent in Asia (plus bonus Middle Eastern instability) is just fucking, like, over it, man. Stick him in a cabin in the woods somewhere and nothing changes except its actually slightly easier to roll your eyes at the worlds absurdity when youre not actively participating in it. Even so, the modern hipster cannot endure indefinite separation from the hipster community, which is why, like the astronaut terraforming Mars from within the antiseptic confines of his biosphere, the hipster slowly remakes the world around him in his image. Unlike the generations of cool kids who came before him, the hipster is a colonist, not an exile. Perhaps its evolution, or perhaps Im a filthy liar and an apologist, but I suspect the hipster owes his social tenacity to this very facet of his nature.

Time will tell, but unlike the Beatniks (remember beatniks?), Hippies (remember legit hippies?), Greasers, Punks, Mods, Riot Grrls, and Juggalos (remember all of them?); something about the hipster suggests that he will always be with us, rather than fading to a cultural ghost.

Read more from the original source:
Inklings of communism, and primitive strains of marijuana - San Diego Reader

Thrissur: The Indian Communist parties must focus on building their movement on the basis of Indian social context and traditions, said C K Saji Narayanan, national president of the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) at a press meet held here on Thursday. He questioned the views expressed by Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat during their talks at EMS Smriti, organized in memory of E M S Namboodiripad, in Thrissur recently. "The argument that the October Revolution changed the world has been proved wrong. Perestroika and glasnost (restructuring and openness) brought about by Mikhail Gorbachev before the 90s proved that there was wide-spread poverty in the USSR. In Poland, people had to go on strike for food. The fall of the Berlin Wall bared the poverty that prevailed in East Germany," he said. In which Communist country did democracy and secularism prevail, he asked. The Indian communist party made several grave mistakes, especially in 1942 and 1962. The party must correct itself and focus on Indianness. In Russia, Lenin gave shape to Russian Communism as Mao gave shape to Chinese Communism and Ho Chi Minh to Vietnamese Communism. In India alone, communist parties failed to create Indian Communism, he said. Talking at the press conference, B Gopalakrishnan, BJP state secretary said the Communist parties were haunted by 'inferiority complex' about their ideologies. The Communist leaders were selling a pipe dream by promising to bring about Socialism in India, he said. tnn

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Communist parties must focus on Indianness: BMS - Times of India

We begin with circle time, then move on to Leninist doctrine.

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Thinkstock.

Before I became a parent, this countrys lack of affordable, government-supported child care was something I thought about sympathetically every once in a while, in between long yoga classes and leisurely novel-reading. I always diagnosed this hole in our social services as a feminist issuethere arent publicly funded day cares because conservatives dont want women to work.

But a few weeks ago, as I negotiated a change in my baby daughters day care setup and inwardly raged against our countrys sorry support for child care, I suddenly remembered reading historian Nancy Cohens 2013 piece in The New Republic about the role of red-baiting in the failure to pass universal child care in the early 1970s. Do we really lack good, publicly funded preschools not only because some people think women should stay at home, but also because some people are afraid of Communism? Maybe! At the very least, the government-run day care services the Soviet Union provided have shadowed our efforts to get a version of the same in the United States.

The first Americans to think and talk about Soviet day care were leftist feminists in the 1920s, who praised it as an exciting innovation. The Bolsheviks believed that capitalism had created a new contradiction, felt most painfully by women, between the demands of work and the needs of family, historian Wendy Z. Goldman writes. Capitalism would never be able to provide a systematic solution to the double burden women shouldered. Services such as day care and communal kitchens and laundries were the Bolsheviks way of putting into practice Marx and Engels ideas about eliminating the oppressive structures of the bourgeois family. S. Ia. Volfson, a Soviet sociologist, wrote in 1929 that the traditional family will be sent to a museum of antiquities so that it can rest next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe, by the horsedrawn carriage, the steam engine, and the wired telephone. Historian Julia Mickenberg writes in American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream that many American suffragists and New Women were drawn to the Soviet Union because it embodied a promise of the good life and explicitly included womens emancipation in that promise. (Disclosure: Mickenberg was one of my dissertation advisors.)

When American feminists visited the new nation in the 1920s, they wrote about what they saw in glowing terms. The Soviets set up day nurseries at a time when Americans would have known them only as charities operated to house poor children while their mothers worked. In a 1928 book, American visitor Jessica Smith described the day nurseries in glowing terms: Wide sunny rooms, rows of cribs with gay coverlets, play rooms with slides and chutes and steps to exercise tiny limbs, great colored blocks, pictures on the walls. Mothers could drop by to nurse their infants, and a sanitary kitchen with a trained dietician made the proper food for every age.

This beautiful dream of quality universal day careif it ever truly existedwent sour quickly. As Mickenberg writes, material shortages and deep-seated sexism within Russian society limited womens gains. By the middle of the 1930s, Goldman argues, the process of forced collectivization created fresh streams of homeless, starving children, and rapid industrialization subjected the family to new and terrible strains. Trying to get things back on track, leaders began to encourage Soviet women to return to the home, and female workers lost much of the ground they had gained in entering male-dominated fields. Workplace discrimination continued despite government regulations, and cuts in funding for day care followed.

During the same time period in the U.S., the Depression and then World War II forced a reimagining of mothers role in the economy. As more middle-class moms went to work, the idea that day care was a welfare service for desperately poor single mothers began to transform, historian Elizabeth Rose writes. The understanding had been that day care was simply custodial: a way to keep poor kids from cutting themselves with knives or falling out of windows while their mothers toiled at factories. Now, however, people started to think of day care as potentially educational or enriching. In this social climate, the Works Progress Administration created 1500 preschools, mainly as an employment scheme for teachers. These schools served 50,000 children between 1933 and 1943. It was the first time the government put money into early childhood care, with hopes that the successful pilot would lead to more permanent and extensive services. WPA nursery school leaders expected their program to lead to public preschools for all young children, historian Molly Quest Arboleda writes. During World War II, the Lanham Act funded child care centers (including some of the former WPA schools) that served as many as 1.5 million kids.

In the immediate postwar period, many women wanted to see the Lanham Act centers stay open. One activist fighting to keep public centers open in Philadelphia at the end of the war wrote to the Childrens Bureau: Weve won the bloodiest war in history, now lets win permanent Day Care for our children.

It was not to be. Molly Quest Arboleda found that many women involved in the WPA nursery schools, either as teachers or supporters, faced accusations of Communist sympathies. Susan B. Anthony II (the more famous Susans grandniece) came under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee for her work with the Congress of American Women, which had named the conversion of wartime day care centers into permanent social fixtures as one of its three main goals. Governor Thomas Dewey of New York called protestors asking him to keep child care centers open Communists. Elizabeth Rose found that many of those who wrote in to a Philadelphia Bulletin forum on publicly funded child care used anti-Communist language. One wrote, America is built on the bedrock of family ties and we refuse to imitate the Soviet Union, where 6,000,000 children are in such centers while the mothers are in forced labor camps.

The Soviet Unions child care system was indeed expanding and becoming more systematized. In 1956, wanting more women to enter the workforce, Nikita Khrushchevs regime started an early childhood education program that became an extensive network of kindergartens and nurseries. These day cares did (as American critics charged) de-emphasize parental involvement in childrens education, instead leaning on the theories of psychologists and pedagogues who were considered more up-to-date than parents. Psychologist Alison Clarke-Stewart writes that childrens activities in Soviet day cares were the most highly developed and uniform in the world, and that nothing was left to chance in the curriculumeverything was planned and specified, even the temperature. Children were taught industriousness, aesthetics, charactergroup awareness, problem solving, and creativity. Soviet day cares put a strong emphasis on cooperation and sharing, and as soon as they could talk, children weregiven training in evaluating and criticizing each others behaviors from the point of view of the group.

These readily available, sophisticated, but highly standardized day cares made an impression on Western visitors wary of Communist centralization and indoctrination. One such impression may have led to the downfall of a possible American equivalent to the Soviet day care system. The Comprehensive Child Development Act, which got through Congress in 1971 before being vetoed by Richard Nixon, would have created nationally funded child care centers providing early childhood services and after-school care, as well as nutrition, counseling, and even medical and dental care. The centers would charge parents on a sliding scale. But Pat Buchanan, as special assistant to the President, convinced Nixon to veto the plan.

Brigid Schulte interviewed Buchanan about this decision for her book Overwhelmed, and he told her hed visited the Soviet Union when the CCDA was being debated: We went to see the Young Pioneers, where these little kids four, five, and six years old were being instructed in Leninist doctrine, reciting it the way I used to recite Catechism when I was in the first grade, he said. Either this experience truly, deeply affected Buchanan, or perhaps he wantedas the bills sponsor Walter Mondale later wroteto use the issue to rally cultural conservatives and create a little maneuvering room to make the China trip. (If Nixon threw conservatives a bone in the matter of day care, he could more easily sell them his plan to normalize relations with Communist China.)

Whatever his motivation, Buchanan successfully influenced Nixon to inject anti-communist language into his veto. Our response to the challenge of child care must be a measured, evolutionary, painstakingly considered one, consciously designed to cement the family in its rightful position as the keystone of our civilization, Nixon wrote. For the Federal Government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.

When Mondale and his co-sponsor, Representative John Brademas, tried again in 1975, grassroots fundamentalists torpedoed the revised legislation. As Nancy L. Cohen writes, an anonymous flyer circulated widely in churches in the South and West, claiming that the legislation would give children fantastical rights to sue their parents and organize labor unions. Sally Steenland, director of the faith and progressive policy initiative at the Center for American Progress, said of the conversation over day care at the time: I remember seeing books with these really alarming pictures of state-funded nurseries in the Soviet UnionSwaddled infants tightly wrapped in rows of beds side by side, massive rows, and it was impersonal and supposed to be terrifying. And it was like: this is daycare. According to Cohen, Buchanans redwashing of day care was a political hijacking so fabulously successful it wiped away virtually any trace of its own handiwork.

When my friends and I bemoan our own child care conundrums, anti-communism is not the first thing we blame. But on the right, writers and pundits still invoke it to condemn the very concept of government-funded day care. Michele Bachmann, speaking on the floor of Congress in 2009, characterized President Obamas vision for child rearing as send that little baby off to a government day care center from the day that baby is born. A cheerily designed website called Daycares Dont Care features a history of day care that sports a clip-art hammer and sickle. It quotes a woman who spent most of her childhood in Communist Polands daycares: The assembly line time table, with everyone having to perform together on cueThe grubby, institutional food. The absence of real contact with adults, which meant that fights and squabbles were usually settled on the survival of the fittest principle. In the Federalist, political scientist Paul Kengor explicates the Marxist idea of the abolition of the family, describing the Soviet push to put kids in day care and the Supreme Courts support for same-sex marriage as equally radical measures. On the website of Concerned Women for America, a blog post asserts, True feminist ideology is steeped in Marxist thought. The government must redistribute wealth, control businesses to make them hire us, and even take on the responsibility of raising our children via government daycare for us to be equal.

Does it help to know that some of the mindset keeping us from having government-funded day care is anti-communism, in addition to simple anti-feminism? Im not sure. But Im still making phone calls to figure out how to cover my daughters care on Fridays! That part I'm sure about.

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Your Child Care Conundrum Is an Anti-Communist Plot - Slate Magazine (blog)