The Intellectual and His People by Jacques Ranciere

Author:Jacques Ranciere
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

4

Joan of Arc in the Gulag

This is a book that intends to be disturbing, and has the reputation of being so.1 Glucksmann is the first writer formed in the school of Western Marxism who has systematized Solzhenitsyn’s provocative arguments: no more (Marxist) intellectualizing on the backs of the tortured; this time there’s no escape from focusing on the Gulag, and we say ‘Gulag’ and not just ‘Stalinism’. An end to all delicate measuring that balances the building of the ‘economic base of socialism’ and the Stalingrad victory against the excesses of the Moscow trials. An end to the long list of ‘theoretical’ explanations: the cult of personality, the backwardness of the muzhiks, the survivals of Tsarism, the confusion between different kinds of contradiction, the deformations of the workers’ state, deviations whether humanist, economist or other – in short, everything that argues from the stupidity of the masses and the distraction of those in power. It is time for the heirs of Marx to consider the Gulag in its full materiality: its geography, its statistics, its rules, its symbols, its discourses, the ways in which it was accepted and the ways in which it was resisted. No more quibbling and prettifying. Never mind if it confuses the Renault workers – though there is good reason to believe that they were ahead of us in abandoning any hope from that direction. The self-evident fact has to be stated: Soviet Russia forged the most radical fascism we have known, not only by the extent of its concentration camps, but above all because it alone was able to ensure the collaboration of its victims with the executioner’s order, while winning abroad the respect of the powerful and the hope of the oppressed. An unprecedented acquiescence to the concentration camp system that had Marxism as its point of honour. An internal solidarity: Bukharin’s coded discourse explaining to his assassins that it was right to declare him guilty even though he was innocent. And an external one: our Marxism, as diffused in our universities, practised in our groupuscules and sold in our bookstores, consists of several theories that are summed up in a single one: it is right to put people in camps. Glucksmann’s book does not stop short at this proposition, which may confuse Renault workers but gladdens the departments of state. In the unprecedented terror of the Gulag it seeks to show the same music that is scarcely audible in the everyday life of our democratic disciplines. The Gulag is woven on the same loom as the masters’ discourses here, along with the enclosure of the mad and the marginal, and the enforced silence of the plebs. The summit not of Oriental despotism, but rather of Western barbarism. If Marxism imposed this on Russia, it was because it accomplished there the task of capitalist accumulation and the formation of a modern state. The struggle of those challenging the Soviet system is not that of our learned defenders of the West, it is that of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.