Leesgroep Gramsci: de filosoof van de praxis

[guerin]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Proletariër

ik post gewoon een foto van een robot (ééntje om argonlassen mee te leggen trouwens, maar dat totaal niet terzake.)

ook wel een beetje omdat ik niet vind dat die iets weg heeft van een mens

@desi: ik denk dat je het werk in een fabriek wel een beetje onderschat, er lopen heel wat stiellui in een fabriek. velen beseffen dit echter niet van zichzelf.

btw, robots werken niet vanzelf. er kruipt heel wat arbeid in om die te maken, programmeren, onderhouden en zelfs gewoon om hun repititieve werk te laten doen.

Zo is dat programmeren en onderhouden van die robots geen repetitieve gedoe volgens jou?

[Desiderius]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Proletariër

@desi: ik denk dat je het werk in een fabriek wel een beetje onderschat, er lopen heel wat stiellui in een fabriek. velen beseffen dit echter niet van zichzelf.

Ik onderschat dat zeer zeker niet; m'n grootvader was in ver vervlogen tijden dokwerker toen het stukgoed nog niet in containers toekwam in A'pen. Je zou kunnen zeggen dat dit werk was voor 'dommekrachten', maar ik ben héél snel van gedacht veranderd toen ik veel later dokwerkers ging fotograferen in Afrika en het verre Oosten (m'n geliefde reportage-subject trouwens). Die gasten weten van aanpakken en er komt heel wat inzicht bij kijken om de vracht veilig, snel en efficiënt te lossen.

Ik had het eerder over mensen die bvb. dag-in-dag-uit componentjes op printplaten duwen. Dat lijkt me zo repetitief en deprimerend... En misschien ook wel sommige computer-operatoren (technisch gezien zijn dat bedienden) die botweg lijsten invoeren in databanken. (en heel vaak moeten pauzeren omdat hun brein anders tilt begint te slaan) D�*�*r zie ik echt de romantiek niet van. Met de beste wil van de wereld niet...

[Proletariër]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door guerin

Zo is dat programmeren en onderhouden van die robots geen repetitieve gedoe volgens jou?

als je er niks van kent, zwijg je echt beter

[Samsa]

hoe komt het eigenlijk dat de website van IMAVO al een jaar of zo niet meer werkt?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Samsa

hoe komt het eigenlijk dat de website van IMAVO al een jaar of zo niet meer werkt?

Probeer eens http://www.democratisch-links.be/imavo/

[guerin]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Proletariër

als je er niks van kent, zwijg je echt beter

je mag ook afstappen van je protelarier imago

[Jonas Elossov]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Dr. Strangelove

Probeer eens http://www.democratisch-links.be/imavo/

Awel, die site is toch al maanden, misschien zelfs jaren oud - daar is niet recents te vinden - zo dood als een pier vind ik.

[Praetorian]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Jonas Elossov

Awel, die site is toch al maanden, misschien zelfs jaren oud - daar is niet recents te vinden - zo dood als een pier vind ik.

Dat komt omdat er al een nieuwe site bestaat ...

[solidarnosc]

Linkje? Waarvoor dank.

[Jonas Elossov]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Praetorian

Dat komt omdat er al een nieuwe site bestaat ...

Wat dan?

imavo.be bestaat niet eens meer als web-pagina...

[Praetorian]

Steeds nog uitgenodigd. Up!

[Dr. Strangelove]

@ Praetorian, Jaani en iedereen die geïnteresseerd is.
Vooruitlopend op de volgende Gramsci-bijeenkomst, heb ik dit stukje gevonden, over ideologie.

"The Concept of “Ideology”

“Ideology” was an aspect of “sensationalism,” i.e. eighteenth-century French materialism. Its original meaning was that of “science of ideas,” and since analysis was the only method recognised and applied by science it means “analysis of ideas,” that is, “investigation of the origin of ideas.” Ideas had to be broken down into their original “elements,” and these could be nothing other than “sensations.” Ideas derived from sensations. [...]]
How the concept of Ideology passed from meaning “science of ideas” and “analysis of the origin of ideas” to meaning a specific “system of ideas” needs to be examined historically. In purely logical terms the process is easy to grasp and understand.

It could be asserted that Freud is the last of the Ideologues, and that De Man is also an “ideologue.” This makes the “enthusiasm” of Croce and the Croccans for De Man even more curiousor would if there wasn’t a “practical” justification for their enthusiasms One should examine the way in which the author of the Popular Manual [Bukharin][74] has remained trapped in Ideology; whereas the philosophy of praxis represents a distinct advance and historically is precisely in opposition to Ideology. Indeed the meaning which the term “ideology” has assumed in Marxist philosophy implicitly contains a negative value judgment and excludes the possibility that for its founders the origin of ideas should be sought for in sensations, and therefore, in the last analysis, in physiology. “Ideology” itself must be analysed historically, in the terms of the philosophy of praxis, as a superstructure.
It seems to me that there is a potential clement of error in assessing the value of ideologies, due to the fact (by no means casual) that the name ideology is given both to the necessary superstructure of a particular structure and to the arbitrary elucubrations of particular individuals. The bad sense of the word has become widespread, with the effect that the theoretical analysis of the concept of ideology has been modified and denatured. The process leading up to this error can be easily reconstructed:
1. ideology is identified as distinct from the structure, and it is asserted that it is not ideology that changes the structures but vice versa;
2. it is asserted that a given political solution is “ideological” – i.e. that it is not sufficient to change the structure, although it thinks that it can do so; it is asserted that it is useless, stupid, etc.;
3. one then passes to the assertion that every ideology is “pure” appearance, useless, stupid, etc.
One must therefore distinguish between historically organic ideologies, those, that is, which are necessary to a given structure, and ideologies that are arbitrary, rationalistic, or “willed.” To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity which is “psychological”; they “organise” human masses, and create the terrain on which men move, acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc. To the extent that they are arbitrary they only create individual “movements,” polemics and so on (though even these are not completely useless, since they function like an error which by contrasting with truth, demonstrates it).
It is worth recalling the frequent affirmation made by Marx on the “solidity of popular beliefs” as a necessary element of a specific situation. What he says more or less is “when this way of conceiving things has the force of popular beliefs,” etc. Another proposition of Marx is that a popular conviction often has the same energy as a material force or something of the kind, which is extremely significant. The analysis of these propositions tends, I think, to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which precisely material forces are the content and ideologies are the form, though this distinction between form and content has purely didactic value, since the material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and the ideologies would be individual fancies without the material forces."

Wat denken jullie hierover?

[Proletariër]

dat ik daar geen woord van versta.

[Dr. Strangelove]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Proletariër

dat ik daar geen woord van versta.

Er zijn jammer genoeg nog geen Nederlandse teksten van Gramsci op het web verkrijgbaar.
Misschien heeft iemand anders een vertaling van dit stukje?

[Dr. Strangelove]

Nog een interessant artikel, over de huidige toepasbaarheid van de Gramsciaanse concepten.

Hegemony and Subalternity. Reading Antonio Gramsci Marco Scotini Edward W. Said once stated that "what one feels is lacking in Foucault is something resembling Gramsci's analysis of hegemony, of historical blocs and given relationships as a whole, constructed in accordance with the perspective of a politically active individual for whom the description of fascinating power mechanisms never becomes a substitute for the effort made to transform power relationships in society." [E. W. Said: The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge (Mass) 1983].
If a reading of Gramsci in the light of current challenges is possible today, it is one that is able to relocate the general theory of the working class struggle to within a philosophical discussion of sovereignty and the paradigm of power in itself - the logic behind its construction and legitimisation, its sphere of influence and operation, and its complexity - and therefore in contrast with every reductionist theory of power as a mechanism of the dominant class according to the classical Marxist tradition. However, such a reading does not have to renounce the right to present itself an operational discourse, a theory to be used both for and in practice, one that does not limit itself to analysing and interpreting power, but works to change or negate it by means of political action.
In this sense, hegemony is one of the principal and most productive categories of Gramsci's inheritance today, not only because of the central position it has assumed within the current phase of capitalist development, but also because of the new types of strategy and composition recent global resistance movements have displayed and continue to display. Thus, on the one hand the category of hegemony becomes an interpretative tool in the social field of postfordism, its determining trait being the reabsorption of the differences between pure intellectual activity, political action and work. On the other hand, the intermittent, network structure of the movements that began in Seattle - the irreducibility of their components to the membership of any specific social class, the role assumed by new means of communication within them and the way they claim autonomous spaces for action - necessarily invokes the concept of hegemony in the Gramscian sense. But above all it is the current identification of political struggle and cultural output that cannot do without Gramsci's theoretical arsenal, which, in contrast to the traditions of Marxism, locates politics as a superstructural dimension in such a way that it has its own full and specific autonomy. How then should ‘hegemony' be defined? What examples of power does it refer to? For which social classes is the term synonymous with supremacy? What are the paradigms required in order to discuss hegemony?
It is Gramsci who takes the concept of hegemony to an extreme degree of theoretically mature expression, and he extends it as much to the ruling class as to those who are ruled, without limiting it to any specific membership class. Gramsci's point of departure, however, is Lenin's definition of ‘proletarian hegemony' as a plan for the ideological and political direction of Bolshevism, and the same term is used by Bucharin, Zinovev, Stalin etc. in many documents from the Second International. However, the systematic use of the concept and the central position it assumes in Prison Notebooks is anticipated in Notes on the Southern Question (1926). Although Lenin is still the direct reference here, the historical-political function of intellectuals and culture assumes considerable prominence within the hegemonic, bourgeois system and the class struggle. From this point on, Gramsci's theory of hegemony has considerable autonomy compared with Lenin's strategic conception, and for Gramsci, the problem of the cultural affirmation of the workers' movement acquires a greater importance than for any other Marxist thinker. However, the intention is not to give more importance to the superstructure than to the structural, and even less to over-estimate superstructural elements. What is intended, rather, is to reduce them to the level of structure. That is to say that all those elements pertaining to the sphere of civil society - such as ideologies - acquire an "objective and operational" reality, and assume functions that orthodox Marxist thinking attributes to the economic structure. If it is true that the economic basis is the determining factor, the great material conflictonly become politically relevant for Gramsci when they enter "the realm of ideologies". [Prison Notebooks, p.1249].
In this sense the new area of conflict opens on cultural and ideological ground, which is where hegemony, as a form of power, is constructed. This is the source of the general theory of the relationship between the organic intellectual and social classes throughout the Prison Notebooks. In fact, "every social groups, - Gramsci writes - coming into existence on the original terrain of an essential function in the world of economic production, creates together with itself, organically, one more strata of intellectuals which give homogeneity and awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also on the social and political fields".
But what form of power does hegemony exercise? What relationship does it define between the leaders and the led? Gramsci identifies two main forms of power where hegemony differs from dominance, which correspond to two different spheres: civil society, and political society with the State as its synthesis. If civil society is constructed from spontaneous rather than coercive affiliations, political society is formed from institutions whose function is connected to forms of dominance within society. Hegemony would be situated within civil society, which would establish itself as an area for constructing a political subjectivity that depended on consensus rather than coercion. Thus hegemony would operate as a de facto power whose popularity and persuasive capacity would depend on the strength of the ideas it represented. In this sense, for Gramsci, a society can only be profoundly changed if all the conditions are already in place for its takeover.
Therefore - through a redefinition of the revolutionary process - the proletariat has to become the hegemonic class before it becomes the ruling class, which is a logical consequence of hegemony. Gramsci's concept is rooted in the analysis of ‘the historical bloc' as the relationship between economic forces and ideology, in which the reciprocal influence of structure and superstructure is manifested. There can be no dominance without consensus, and consensus can only be gained from ideological and cultural struggle. Gramsci's radical change of direction, even compared with Lenin, is exactly that of gaining consensus before the actual conquest of power. It is not by chance - as has been said - that for Gramsci, a social class "does not take State power, it becomes State". [E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 1985]. "A social group can, and indeed has to be the directive one before seizing governmental power (indeed this is one of the primary conditions for the takeover of power). Afterwards, when exercising power, even if it holds it tightly in its fist, it becomes dominant, but it also has to continue to be directive (dirigente)." [Prison Notebooks, p. 2010-2011]. With regard to this objective, intellectuals, as the organisers of hegemony, must commit themselves to a long-term task that is firmly bound to prevailing historical conditions. Gramsci calls this "the war of position", in that it is "the unprecedented concentration of hegemony" in contrast with "the war of movement", the frontal attack of the Trotskyist matrix.
In the continual transformation of the composition and interrelationship between rulers and the ruled, another Gramscian category exhibits its extraordinary vitality today: the concept of subalternity. Such a category is, however, not solely the conceptual counterpoint to either hegemony or the ruling class. In fact, this category, inherited today from the Subaltern Studies project, is characterised by its focus on the territorial, spatial, and geographic basis of social life. If Gramsci originally coined the term ‘subaltern' as a substitute for ‘proletariat', the concept has since come to assume the wider Gramscian meaning of a revolutionary construct that transcends the urban working class - the sole subject of orthodox Marxism. To a greater degree than either Marx or Engels, Gramsci emphasizes the importance of cultural and spatial coordinates in the correlation between the tendency towards world unification and the political plan. To some extent we are dealing with the introduction of geo-social parameters within a general reflection on the subject of power. Space and territory burst forth from texts on the Gramscian analysis of the Southern question, the ‘agrarian bloc', and the division of the world into North and South. Here too, one cannot fail to see a certain relationship between the subsequent Foucaultian discussion on geography, and ideologies and strategies concerning space, as well as with projects for the deconstruction of existential theories of culture. Despite great differences, and not only those linked to historical circumstances, that separate Gramsci as a representative of fordism (to which we owe the formulation, if not the introduction of the term itself) from the current situation, what characterizes the postfordist multitude is the direct link between structure and superstructure, between material development, social conflict and culture. In this sense, the Gramscian toolbox appears to be not only still useful but absolutely necessary in these times of the power of the Empire.

Marco Scotini (born 1964) is a curator and critic of contemporary art. He lives in Milan.
http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?o...274&Itemid=125

Dus, de reductionistisch-materialistische benadering, die enkel de onderbouw analyseert en elke vorm van "ideologie" verwerpt, wordt door Gramsci vervangen door een meer genuanceerde visie. De cultureel hegemonie is het resultaat van een "historisch blok", met een wederzijdse beïnvloeding van de onderbouw (materiële omstandigheden en economie) en de bovenbouw (cultuur, idologie).

Als we de "loopgravenoorlog" willen winnen, en zo de culturele hegemonie doorbreken, dan moeten we ook strijden met "superstructuur-middelen".

Je kan eeuwig zitten wachten op de "objectieve pre-revolutionaire omstandigheden", of je kan elke dag gebruiken om weerstand te bieden aan de heersende ideologische opvattingen. Dat is de betekenis van Gramsci voor mij.

[Jonas Elossov]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Proletariër

dat ik daar geen woord van versta.

Wat mij betreft; ik doe de moeite niet eens...

[lombas]

Even uppen. Ik heb "Modern Prince and Other Writings" van Gramsci in een wenslijstje (lees: wachtlijst tot centjes) gezet, zijn er interessante werken van hem voor de rest uitgegeven? Die gevangenisschrijfsels? Enige goede uitgave? Sorry, ik kan die zeven pagina's hier niet gaan doornemen.

[travis]

Zijn gevangenisgeschriften zijn een must-read. Ik heb ze van marxists.org.
Maar je kan ze in boekvorm ook int Engels bestellen op http://www.antiqbook.com/books/index.phtml?Language=nl

Tweedehands, maar zeer goedkoop.

[lombas]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door travis

Zijn gevangenisgeschriften zijn een must-read. Ik heb ze van marxists.org.

Ha! Wat ik vermoedde!

Maar je kan ze in boekvorm ook int Engels bestellen op http://www.antiqbook.com/books/index.phtml?Language=nl

Tweedehands, maar zeer goedkoop.

Ken jij die shop? Ik bedoel, ik vind niet meteen iets terug over shipping rates.

[Praetorian]

Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door lombas

Ha! Wat ik vermoedde!



Ken jij die shop? Ik bedoel, ik vind niet meteen iets terug over shipping rates.

Dat is geen shop, gewoon een "doorsluissite". Zo heb je er 101, amazon nog de bekendste. Dan ben je gewoon beter af boeken te bestellen via de lokale handelaar.