[Xmca-l] Re: Marx and Der Judenfrage

[mike cole]

It was I who inflicted *The House of Government* on David.  For those
interested, I would also
welcoming your views on the work. Here is what a blurb on the book says
gets at my interest.
I think that David choice of "autobiography" as description of the method
gets at my interest.

A simple characterization of the book stolen from William Taubman on the
book flat:
THe House of Government traces the public and personal lives of residents
of a unique, elite Moscow housing complex as they evolve from fanatic
Bolshevik revolutionaries to victims of Stalin's terror.
The book is based on diaries, letters, memoirs and interviews featuring
hundreds of rare photos and combining history biography and social theory.

Alexander Luria's apartment was just across the bridge from it, and a
member of Luria's research
group in the 50's lived there. Across the river was the Kremlin.

I have been trying to imaging the circumstances that Vygotsky encountered
in the period of his active engagement of what we call the cultural
historical project. All the Russian historians I know, older people to be
sure, think highly of this book while disputing the kinds of thing that
David and Michael can appreciate.

So if there is interest in taking the time and effort, I would be glad very
interested in your thoughts.
My own experience in the USSR was deeply affected by these very events *in
which they participated*.
It was not an easy environment when your life's work on a new science of
human development becomes
the title word in a government decree that is life threatening. I so the
contents of the book are of special
concern.

mike

mike


On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 4:47 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Wolff-Michael (I think Marx's actual name for his pamphlet was
> "Zur Judenfrage".
>
> But then why is Heydrich's infamous "Final Solution to the Jewish
> Question" called *Endlösung der Judenfrage?*
>
> (My grasp of German grammar is highly tenuous, as you can see!)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
> understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 9, 2019 at 8:37 AM Wolff-Michael Roth <
> wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Perhaps a bit  picky, but it is "die Judenfrage," for Frage (question) is
>> a feminine noun. Michael
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 3:04 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I am ploughing through an enormous tome by Yuri Slezkine, called "The
>>> House of Government". Slezkine sets out to give us a kind of historical
>>> ethnography of Soviet times in the form of an autobiography of "the
>>> Swamp"--an area of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. To his credit,
>>> he soon realizes that when you do this, you cannot have a "bricks and
>>> mortar" model of context (what Ruqaiya Hasan called 'material situational
>>> settings'); you need to understand context as the relevant settings for
>>> text. So then he decides that the context is really Marxism (already a very
>>> debatable proposition) and that the context of Marxism is really--religion.
>>>
>>> In Russia, it's an idea whose time--or at least whose sell-by date--has
>>> come: all of Soviet history is now being re-evaluated by Russians in highly
>>> religious terms. But how to repackage this idea in America? It turns out
>>> that Slezkine's model of Marxism is based on Marx's work on the "Jewish
>>> Question", probably the most vociferously decontextualized thing poor Marx
>>> ever wrote (it is invariably cited in discussions which 'prove' that Marx
>>> was anti-semitic). It also turns out that Slezkine's model of Judaism has
>>> an uncanny resemblance to the work of Amy Chua on "model minorities" like
>>> Chinese-Americans and Mormons; Slezkine thinks that Jews are
>>> a "Mercurial" people, who thrive on going to places in the economy where
>>> angels and "Apollonian" gentiles dare not tread.
>>>
>>> Slezkine is not an idiot; he's just a very repetitious, redundant, and
>>> wordy writer (caveat emptor until the paperback comes out!). But my reading
>>> of "Marx and Der Judenfrage" is very different. First of all, I took it for
>>> granted that Marx is writing as a Jew himself--as someone who would, like
>>> Mendelsohn, have been recognized as part of the "self-emancipated" Jewry
>>> (the Jews who had sought franchise by renouncing religion). Secondly, I
>>> thought that Marx is really making the same argument that Andy made. It is
>>> one of the cardinal and most overlooked  points of the Quranic revelation:
>>> in religion, and matters of philosophy quite generally, compulsion (and
>>> French style state atheism) is quite beside the point. But maybe I am an
>>> idiot. (If so, the least I can do is to try to avoid repetition,
>>> redundancy, and ...)
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Sangmyung University
>>>
>>> New Article:
>>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
>>> understanding narratives by
>>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI:
>>> 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>>
>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>
>>>

-- 
We become ourselves through others -L.S.Vygotsky
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