Communist Party of the Soviet Union  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

(Difference between revisions)
Jump to: navigation, search
Revision as of 07:43, 25 May 2013
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

← Previous diff		 Current revision
Jahsonic (Talk | contribs)

Line 1: Line 1:
{{Template}} {{Template}}
-The beginnings of Freudo-Marxist theorizing took place in the 1920s in Germany. After some discussions of the topic by the Soviet philosopher [[V. Yurinets]] and the Freudian analyst [[Siegfried Bernfeld]], in 1929 the basic Freudo-Marxist text ''Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis'' by [[Wilhelm Reich]] was published, both in German and in Russian in the bilingual communist theory journal ''Unter dem Banner des Marxismus.'' As the end of this line of thought can be considered [[Otto Fenichel]]'s article ''Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology'' which appeared in 1934 in Wilhelm Reich's Journal ''Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie.'' One member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around Wilhelm Reich was [[Erich Fromm]], who later brought Freudo-Marxist ideas into the exiled [[Frankfurt School]] led by [[Max Horkheimer]] and [[Theodor W. Adorno]].+The '''Communist Party of the Soviet Union''' was the only legal, ruling [[political party]] in the [[Soviet Union]] and one of the largest [[Communist Party|communist organizations]] in the world. It lost its dominance in the wake of the failure of the 1991 [[August putsch]].
- +
-For Wilhelm Reich, the principal point of contact between Marxism and psychoanalysis was the family. On the one hand, individuals' psychological development is critical during childhood – in particular as regards morality and [[sexual repression]]. On the other hand, e.g. [[Friedrich Engels]] in ''[[The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State]]'' criticised the family as the unit of cultural reproduction. Thus, among others, Reich wrote extensively about the “sociological function of the family.”+
- +
-==The Frankfurt School==+
- +
-The Frankfurt School (the "Institut für Sozialforschung") took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. [[Max Weber]] exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud. In the institute's extensive ''Studien über Authorität und Familie'' (ed. Max Horkheimer, Paris 1936) Erich Fromm was the author of the social-psychological part. Another new member of the institute was [[Herbert Marcuse]], who became famous only during the 1950s in the USA.+
- +
-=== Marcuse's ''Eros and Civilization'' (1955) ===+
- +
-''[[Eros and Civilization]]'' is one of Marcuse's best known early works. Written in 1955, it is an attempted dialectical synthesis of Marx and Freud whose title alludes to Freud's ''[[Civilization and its Discontents]]''. Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive society (which runs rather counter to Freud's conception of society as naturally and necessarily repressive), based on Marx and Freud, anticipated the values of 1960s [[counterculture|countercultural]] [[social movements]].+
- +
-In the book, Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology – history seen not as a [[class struggle]], but fight against repression of our instincts. He argues that [[capitalism]] (if never named as such) is preventing us from reaching the non-repressive society "based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations". See also [[Bernard Stiegler]], [http://www.arsindustrialis.org/Members/bstiegler/bsesp/scs/view "Spirit, Capitalism and Superego"].+
- +
-===Freud, Marx, and humanism===+
- +
-Another member of the [[Frankfurt School]] was [[Erich Fromm]], who left the group at the end of the 1930s.+
- +
-The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book ''The Sane Society'', published in 1955, which argued in favor of humanist, [[democratic socialism]]. Building primarily upon the works of [[Karl Marx]], Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of [[classic liberalism|classic liberals]]. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both [[Capitalism|Western capitalism]] and [[Communist Party of the Soviet Union|Soviet communism]], which he saw as dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that resulted in a virtually universal modern phenomenon of [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienation]].+
- +
-==Lacan and Marxism==+
-[[Jacques Lacan]] was a philosophically sophisticated French psychoanalyst, whose perspective came to predominate in French psychiatry and psychology. Lacan saw himself as loyal to and rescuing Freud's legacy. Lacan's influence has created a new cross-fertilisation of Freudian and Marxist ideas.+
- +
-===Althusser===+
- +
-[[Louis Althusser]] is widely known as a theorist of [[ideology#Louis Althusser's Ideological State Apparatuses|ideology]], and his best-known essay is ''[[Louis Althusser#Ideological state apparatuses|Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation]]''. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on [[Antonio Gramsci|Gramsci's]] theory of [[hegemony]]. Whereas hegemony is ultimately determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan's]] concepts of the [[unconscious mind|unconscious]] and [[Mirror stage|mirror-phase]] respectively, and describes the structures and systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the [[subject (philosophy)|self]]. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once for all by the ''[[epistemological break]]'', term borrowed from [[Gaston Bachelard]]: this "break" is not a chronologically-determined event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no history".+
- +
-His essay ''Contradiction and Overdetermination'' borrows the concept of [[overdetermination]] from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple [[causality]] in political situations (an idea closely related to Gramsci's concept of hegemony).+
- +
-=== Žižek ===+
-The Slovenian philosopher [[Slavoj Žižek]] has developed since the late 1990s a line of thought which uses [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan]]ian [[psychoanalysis]], [[Hegel]]ian philosophy and Marxism. Althusser is also among his references. Particularly important to note here is his ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', which deals with the original Freudo-Marxist perspective.+
- +
-==Commodity and sexual fetishism==+
- +
-Marx's theory of [[commodity fetishism]] has proven fertile material for work by other theorists since Marx, who have added to, adapted, or, as [[Marxist]] orthodoxy might see it, 'vulgarized' the original concept. Sigmund Freud's well-known but unrelated theory of [[sexual fetishism]] led to new interpretations of commodity fetishism, as types of sexually-charged relationships between a person and a manufactured object.+
-== See also ==+
-*[[Authoritarian personality]]+
-*[[Crowd psychology]]+
-*[[Repressive desublimation]]+
-*[[Wilhelm Reich]]+
-*[[Herbert Marcuse]]+
-*[[Gilles Deleuze]]+
-*[[Félix Guattari]]+
-*[[Erich Fromm]]+
-*[[Ernst Simmel]]+
-*[[Slavoj Žižek]]+
- +
-== Literature ==+
- +
-* Wilhelm Reich, ''Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis,'' in [[Lee Baxandall]] ed., Sex-Pol; Essays, 1929-1934 (New York, 1972).+
-* Otto Fenichel, ''Psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology''. In: American Imago, 1967 Winter; 24(4): 290-311+
-*Palmier, J.M. (1969) ''Wilhelm Reich: Essai sur la Naissance du Freudo-Marxisme'', Paris.+
 +==See also==
 +* [[Union of Communist Parties – Communist Party of the Soviet Union]] (alliance UCP-CPSU)
 +* [[Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union]]
 +* [[Komsomol]] (VLKSM)
 +* [[Communist Party]]
 +* [[Decommunization of Russia]]
 +* [[Handbook on history of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union 1898 – 1991]]
 +* [[Index of Soviet Union-related articles]]
{{GFDL}} {{GFDL}}

Current revision

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world. It lost its dominance in the wake of the failure of the 1991 August putsch.

[edit]

See also


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Communist Party of the Soviet Union" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union"
Personal tools
Metas