[Xmca-l] Re: Marx and Der Judenfrage
Andy Blunden
andyb@marxists.org
Sat Jun 8 19:11:35 PDT 2019
Mike, I read the first 120 pages - the days of revolutionary
agitation - but I got swamped by other things. Right now I
am reading The English Patient.
In mitigation of my omission, Mike, like David I think, I
have had other personal experiences such that I am all too
familiar with the processes described in the book. 1. As a
Trotskyist, I have never harboured illusions in the Soviet
bureaucracy, 2. Also as a Trotskyist I have personally
experienced that kind of relations between people which
supplants revolutionary fanaticism when the tide of
revolution ebbs. 3. My parents were both enthusiastic
members of the CPA, my mother died a dedicated supporter of
"the Chinese people" and I know how powerful this kind of
illusion can be, and yet compatible with bottomless
humanism. Fortunately, my personal experience was only
miniature-scale, so I have survived intact.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 9/06/2019 11:54 am, mike cole wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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
> <mailto: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
> <mailto: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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