The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Dalam suatu bagian terkenal Marx kuat mendorong kita untuk melakukan hal yang mustahil, yaitu, untuk berpikir perkembangan ini [kapitalisme] positif dan negatif sekaligus, untuk mencapai, dengan kata lain, jenis pemikiran yang akan mampu menangkap fitur terbukti yg adalah amat buruk kapitalisme beserta dinamisme luar biasa dan membebaskan secara bersamaan dalam satu pikiran, dan tanpa menghaluskan salah satu kekuatan penghakiman baik. Kami entah bagaimana mengangkat pikiran kita ke titik di mana dimungkinkan untuk memahami bahwa kapitalisme adalah pada satu saat yang sama hal terbaik yang pernah terjadi pada umat manusia, dan yang terburuk. Selang dari ini penting dialektis keras ke dalam sikap yang lebih nyaman dari pengambilan posisi moral lazim dan semua juga manusia: masih, urgensi subjek menuntut bahwa kita membuat setidaknya beberapa upaya untuk berpikir evolusi budaya kapitalisme akhir dialektis, sebagai bencana dan kemajuan bersama-sama.

- Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 

Read more...

The German Ideology

[Konsepsi materialis tentang sejarah] menunjukkan bahwa sejarah tidak berakhir dengan cara dipecahkan menjadi 'kesadaran diri sebagai roh dari semangat', tetapi di dalamnya pada setiap tahap ada ditemukan hasil materi: sejumlah kekuatan produktif, suatu historis menciptakan hubungan individu dengan alam dan satu sama lain, yang diturunkan ke setiap generasi dari pendahulunya, massa kekuatan produktif, dana modal dan kondisi, yang, di satu sisi, memang dimodifikasi oleh generasi baru, tetapi juga di sisi lain mengatur untuk itu kondisi kehidupannya dan memberikan perkembangan yang pasti, karakter khusus. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa keadaan membuat pria seperti halnya laki-laki membuat keadaan.

- Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Read more...

Antonio Gramsci on discipline

Bourgeois discipline is the only force which keeps the bourgeois aggregation firmly together. Discipline must be met with discipline. But whereas bourgeois discipline is mechanical and authoritarian, socialist discipline is autonomous and spontaneous. If you accept socialist discipline it means you are a socialist or you want to be so more fully, joining the youth movement if you are young. And whoever is a socialist or wants to become one does not obey: he commands himself, he imposes a rule of life on his impulses, on his disorderly aspirations. It would be strange if, while one too often obeys without a murmur a discipline that one does not understand and does not feel, we were not able to act according to a course of conduct that we ourselves have helped prescribe and keep rigidly consistent. For this is what autonomous disciplines are like: the very life, the very thought of the person who observes them. The discipline imposed on citizens by the bourgeois state makes them into subjects, people who delude themselves that they exert an influence on the course of events. The discipline of the Socialist Party makes the subject into a citizen: a citizen who is now rebellious, precisely because he has become conscious of his personality and feels it is shackled and cannot freely express itself in the world.

- Antonio Gramsci on discipline

Read more...

gramsci quote

The active man in the mass has a practical activity, but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his practical activity, which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can indeed be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousness (or one contradictory): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed. But this verbal conception is not without consequences. It holds together a specific social group, it influences moral conduct and the direction of will, with varying efficacity but often powerfully enough to produce a situation in which the contradictory state of consciousness does not permit any action, any decision or any choice, and produces a condition of moral and political passivity. 

 

- Antonio Gramsci

Read more...