Bourgeois Ideology Research Articles

Diverse Attitudes of French Pacifists and Socialists Towards the ‘Yellow Peril’ in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This essay examines the various ways in which pacificists and socialists in France responded to the ‘yellow peril’ from the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) to the end of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). I identify and examine four different attitudes they developed towards the ‘yellow peril’. On the one hand, some pacificists and socialists perceived it as a reality and used it as a means of exposing the problems of expansionism but differed on their views of what Asia would become for the West: whereas pacifists like Paul d’Estournelles de Constant invoked Asia as a potential existential threat, certain socialists welcomed ‘yellow’ workers as future comrades. On the other hand, there were people who viewed the ‘yellow peril’ as a myth or some sort of ideological smokescreen. Roughly speaking, they fell into two groups: socialists who treated it as a set of false ideas created to justify Tsarist imperialism, which practically led them to embrace Japanese imperialism, and revolutionary syndicalists who, opposing capitalist exploitation and expansionism in general, dismissed it as part of bourgeois ideology. Thus, I ultimately argue that the ‘yellow peril’ was less of an imperialist ideology consisting of negative racial stereotypes about East Asians than a versatile concept that was used against as well as for racial stereotyping and expansionism.

Hegemony and crisis: An analysis of habit and ideology as mechanisms for achieving ‘consent’

This article presents an analysis of the role played by ideology and habit in ensuring the stability of the socioeconomic order by looking at key passages from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks dealing with the notion of hegemony and its various aspects. This discussion is informed by Beasley-Murray’s criticisms against the notion of hegemony and his insistence that, at times of crisis, ruling classes’ ideologies stop mattering, and we should, instead, focus on domination and habit imposition. This piece attempts to clarify key concepts such as domination, leadership and ideology, as well as presenting distinctions between different ‘forms of consent’. In response to Bealey-Murray’s critique, it will also highlight how economic and political crises effect workers’ habitual life, domination and habit imposition within production/surplus extraction, leadership style and the subsequent ‘form’ bourgeois ideologies must take to appeal to an electorate that has lost trust in political elites. It will then conclude with the opposite assertion: At time of crises, we should pay even closer attention to the ‘morbid symptoms’ displayed by bourgeois ideological trends.

The specter of authenticity: Social science after the deconstruction of Romanticism

In a long-forgotten essay, Alvin Gouldner defended the distinctive contributions of Romantic social science. Today, half a century later, very few would risk making a similar plea. Owing to its deconstruction, the discourse of Romanticism has increasingly fallen out of favor in the social sciences, meaning social scientists have progressively come to see Romanticism as less a resource for critique than a bourgeois ideology warranting critical scrutiny. Yet the truth is quite a bit more complicated. For despite its disapproval at the level of social science's explicit culture, Romanticism continues to serve, at the level of implicit culture, as a potent resource for social analysis. We start with a clarification of what we mean by Romanticism. While Romanticism may be an amorphous and multifaceted structure of thought and feeling, like Gouldner, we do not think it lacks coherence. Thus, we outline what we take to be the core dimensions of the ‘Romantic syndrome’, and then survey some of its key figures in Western social thought. Next, we move to a discussion of three select studies about the infiltration of Romanticism into the capitalist heartland—the sphere of work. We demonstrate how, consistent with our argument that Romanticism has become increasingly symbolically polluted within social science, each of these studies critiques the Romantic turn at work, while nevertheless anchoring their critiques in Romanticism, albeit in increasingly implicit fashion. We conclude by offering some reflections on why Romanticism continues to haunt contemporary social science—and why this matters.

M. Prishvin and A. Platonov: ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’

The article examines critical reviews of M. Prishvin’s novella Naked Spring [Neodetaya vesna] published in the journal Oktyabr in 1940. The scholar and literary critic L. Surovova describes an overall positive reaction to the writer’s chronicle of his trip to the Volga River: He travelled there to observe animals’ survival strategies during the seasonal flooding. The occasional negative remarks in the press invoked the harsh dispute of 1930, when the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers attacked Prishvin’s biographical novel Kashchey’s Chain [Kashcheeva tsep] and the novella Cranes’ Homeland [Zhuravlinaya rodina]. Their characters were castigated as proponents of a bourgeois ideology. The 1940 critical coverage contained, however, a rather scathing review by A. Platonov, whose strong dislike of Prishvin’s writing style was also rooted in this 1930s’ ideological dispute. Surovova suggests that this polemic arose from a clash between the two radically opposing mentalities — Prishvin’s ‘contemplative observer’ against Platonov’s ‘action-orientated’ approach — and resulted in an exchange on a critical as well as literary plane, namely, in Platonov’s novella A Great Man [Velikiy chelovek].

Idols of the Fragment: Barthes and Critique

Abstract: Critics often valorize fragmentary writing as a device for subverting systems and liberating thought. Roland Barthes is an acknowledged aficionado of this style; this essay argues that he is equally one of its astute skeptics. While his early writings announce the need to dismantle bourgeois ideology in scattered strokes, his later works scrutinize the value of the piecemeal writing even as they ramify its aesthetic possibilities. Barthes's ambivalence replays an episode from the eighteenth century, when the Jena Romantics abruptly renounced the fragment on the grounds that its utopian promise easily devolved into parochial uses. Twenty-first century publishers continue to advertise fragmentary books as avant-garde provocations, but we should view this gesture as a conceit with a long history.

“A Stratagem for Self-Oblivion”: Rosselli, Real Talk, and the Abolition of the “I”

This essay analyzes the poetry of Amelia Rosselli alongside accounts of urban displacement, deinstitutionalization, and political militancy. I show that Rosselli comes to see poetry as allowing for a suspension of the self that is also a way of taking distance from the demands addressed to it, including the demands that it defend itself, assert itself, pursue its interests, and reproduce the same. Poetry becomes a means of resisting ideology and its “lure of identity,” a practice on its way to what Rosselli, translating and altering a phrase from Charles Olson, calls “the abolition of the I.” Before turning to this process as it plays out in Rosselli’s poetry, I ask what gets in the way of the self’s suspension, what thwarts self-abolition, making it appear unthinkable and impossible. I take bourgeois ideology to be one answer to this question, and I argue that ideology sustains the “reparative” and “postcritical” tendencies traceable to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Analyzing a key scene in Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” that stages a refusal to read, I study the implications of this refusal and consider counterfactual alternatives.

Class Struggle: Money, Power, Oppression, and Resistance

The paper contributes to the lifelong dialogs about the capital-labor conflict between the upper-class (bourgeoisie) and the working-class (proletariat). It unpacks the ideological underpinnings driving the insatiable quest of the capitalist class for profit, power, interminable exploitation of the working class across ages. The paper underscores the knack of the upper-classes to exert limitless authority over the working classes given their control of the means of production in ways that include dictating the working conditions, wages, hours of work, and engaging the apparatuses of the state – laws, judiciary, police, and army – as detailed by Althusser, to enforce their compliance with capitalist ideals (80). It ascribes the continued failure of the working-class to successfully resist and overthrow the brutal capitalist machinery to encumbering False Consciousness; described as a mental trap that propels the class to accept and naively participate in their own economic oppression. The predilection of the members towards individualized forms of resistance as against forming formidable alliances across interest groups to pursue collective action is equally found culpable. Alongside forming alliances, the author suggests outright rejection of bourgeois ideologies which permeate the major spheres of the society and their replacement with the workers’ own ideological alternatives as imperative. Consistent with Marx’s submission, workers’ ownership of the means of production to produce their own necessities rather than continually selling their labor for a living wage is considered expedient in their struggle to disable the capitalist machinery system (571). This is coupled with textual analysis of media and popular culture, for example, newspapers, television, advertising, games, and films, by the audience; mostly comprising the working class, to unearth and disavow the entrenched capitalist ethos. The paper examines two films that exemplify how the capitalist class systematically exploits their subjects with feeble resistance.

От философии культуры – к философии истории

Yu.M. Lotman’s creative path from philologist to philosopher was difficult and risky. The scientist resolutely moved away from the mossy traditions of Soviet vulgar sociological literary criticism and began to master modern methods of text analysis developed by structuralism and semiotics. Since structuralism and semi­otics were banned in Soviet science as products of bourgeois ideology, Lotman and his colleagues at the Tartu-Moscow School called the subject of their re­search “secondary modeling systems”, to which they referred not only literary texts, but also texts of art, texts of behavior, city, history, etc. Thus, a culturologi­cal turn took place in the methodology of Lotman and his associates, which was expressed in the fact that the philosophy of culture became the theoretical basis of structural analysis, and the philosophy of history became the historical and cultural approach. With his works in the field of humanities, Lotman showed that the key to understanding and predicting history is culture, and for building a phi­losophy of history is the philosophy of culture. Lotman actually acted as a pro­found theorist and philosopher of culture on a par with such domestic thinkers as A.F. Losev, M.M. Bakhtin, or foreign ones like O. Spengler, A. Toynbee, K. Levi-Strauss, R. Barth or U. Eco.

Reification of Bourgeois Ideology in Bhattarai’s Muglan

This paper aims to explore how innocent Nepali youths reify the elitist bourgeois ideology of the Nepalese society that forces them to go to Muglan, a term, denoting foreign country for Nepali people, and confront unexpected blows there in Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s novel, Muglan. Reification signifies the ideology and perception of people residing in a capitalist society. The study of the impact of reification demonstrates the reality of a society. Bhattarai is critical to the way Sutar Kanchha, the protagonist of the novel, obsessed with the dominant capitalist ideology, goes to Bhutan to earn. But he gets robbed there and he is forced to do tough physical labor like an animal. To survey terrific effects of the dominant capitalist ideology of the Nepalese society over the life of the poor Nepali people, the research paper applies neo-Marxist insights, with special focus on Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci. The chief finding is that Bhattarai is critical to persisting capitalist ideology of the Nepalese society that forces innocent Nepali youths to leave their country just for survival. But, in turn, they get robbed and are compelled to work like slaves in the cruel Muglan. It is expected that researchers intending to explore on Nepali literature from the neo-Marxist perspective will find the paper a useful reference.

V. I. Lenin’s Struggle against Anarchism

ABSTRACT In the historical struggle between Marxism and anarchism, Lenin played an important role. In “Anarchism and Socialism,” written in 1901, Lenin denounced anarchism as a petty bourgeois ideology. Lenin defended this view over the next twenty years, as he fought for Bolshevik hegemony in Russia. This article argues that Lenin’s struggle against anarchism was significant for several reasons. First, it clarified the fundamental differences between anarchism and Marxism. Second, Lenin contributed to the victory of Marxism over anarchism, initially, in revolutionary Russia, and after that, within the Soviet era communist movement. Third, Lenin’s struggle offers original insights. For one thing, Lenin delineated the revolutionary limitations of anarchism. He identified the circumstances in which anarchism can empower or weaken the working class. Lenin also established the organisation, struggle, and leading role of the vanguard working class party as an independent distinction between Marxism and anarchism, a distinction that needs resurrecting today.

Lichtbilder der Ideologie: Von Marx zu Fontane

Abstract The article investigates the role metaphors of optical media and projection have played within the conceptual and literary history of ideology. Starting with the figure of the camera obscura in Marx, Fontane, and other contemporaries, it is shown that the ambiguous concept of Lichtbild (slide, photography) gains significance in social thought and literature as a metaphor for false perception. Subsequently, the analysis of Theodor Fontane’s novel Effi Briest (1895) shows how optical media are turned into figures of narration that generate a critical perspective on bourgeois ideology and its affect structure.

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Arab Psyche, Indian Dream, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Silencing as a way to de-communise contemporary domestic social science

The idea is to consider the phenomenon of silencing as a way of decommunisation of modern Russian social science. The term «silencing» is absent in the methodological literature, so as a working definition is proposed to use the interpretation, which is given in the lexicographical dictionary S. I. Ozhegov, – as the implementation of aspirations, allowing by deliberate silence to hide, not to let know about something. The task is twofold: firstly, to present silence as a way to decommunicate the philosophical and methodological basis of modern domestic social science; second, to consider the use of this action on its subject-practical level. In the first case, it is proposed to demonstrate the fact that the silencing of the philosophy of Marxism as a methodology for studying social processes has had detrimental consequences, especially given the fact that this philosophy has been replaced by positivism (in the forms of postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstructivism, etc.) which has 65 Знать, чтобы предвидеть... To Know so that to Foresee... long since become obsolete. Under the predominance of such «advanced» methodology, modern Russian social science and its branches have found themselves in a fundamental crisis. In fact, the attitude to cognition of deep cause-and-effect relations, correlation of essence and phenomena, necessity and contingency, possibility and reality and other is no longer obligatory. Methodological approaches that aspire to a non-subjective (objectivist) representation of reality have become dangerously popular. Secondly, by design, is to show that silencing has become a way of de-communising the subject-practical sides and levels of social science. In this connection, we should condemn the extremely poor use of information riches allowing to talk about the activity of the Communist Party of Belarus during the Great Patriotic War in various spheres of social life (in the educational process, in educational and propaganda work, in the training of scientific-pedagogical personnel). The exceptional importance of objective and full coverage of Communist Party history (the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and its part) for educating young people in the spirit of patriotism, for exposing the rewriting of history by Western proponents of de-communisation, for solving the urgent problems of preventing the reduction of Communist ideology, its withdrawal from it and thus strengthening the bourgeois (liberal, in the current terminology) ideology, should be emphasised.

Abstraction in the Marxian Oeuvre: Tendencies, Laws and Dialectics

ABSTRACT ion has taken very different terminologies revolving around the relation between reality and thought. In this framework, the debate on the issue of crisis is fueled by different, often one-sided and ideologically contradictive, uses of abstraction. In this work, we attempt to show that without an adequate grasp of the role of abstraction, and without sufficient flexibility in making the needed abstractions, most interpreters of Marx — Marxists and non-Marxists alike — have constructed versions of his theories that suffer in their very form from the same rigidity, inappropriate focus, and one-sidedness that Marx saw in bourgeois ideology. In this framework, we argue that Marx's abstraction is not ‘other things equal', i.e. ceteris paribus, but ‘nothing equal'. In the same vein, we argue that the capitalist process is a ‘non-equilibrium' process. Instead of ‘laws', we argue that tendencies and contradictions may be found in the Marxian oeuvre. Furthermore, we argue that the isolation of the third Volume of Marx's capital from the rest of the Marxian oeuvre facilitates the interpretation of Marx's method in terms of ‘mechanical materialism’.

The impact of ideology on the institutionalization of correspondence accounting education in Soviet Russia (1929–1939)

The article discusses the case of the All-Russian State Distance Learning Institute of Finance and Economics (VZFEI), a Russian educational organization, where the methodology of correspondence accounting education was developed in the 1930s. Later, this methodology was actively used by many universities in the USSR that had a strong influence on the competence model of Soviet accountants. Mobilization of state resources made it possible in a short time to train a large number of financial specialists necessary for the implementation of ambitious plans for the country’s industrialization.The VZFEI was not only a successful educational organization but also a pioneer in the process of institutionalization of correspondence accounting education in the USSR. The new institutional form of accounting education was created during the struggle of the new Soviet ideology with the old bourgeois ideology. Based on Louis Althusser's sociology of education and Hardy's framework of power, the authors explain the role of correspondence accounting education as an ideological apparatus of the Soviet state from 1929 to 1939.

Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder

Reviewed by: Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German ed. by Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder Pamela S. Saur Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaert, and Olivier Couder, eds., Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German. Legenda: Germanic Literatures 21. London: Modern Research Association, 2020. 234 pp. Confrontational Readings: Literary Neo-Avant-Gardes in Dutch and German is the twenty-first volume of a series of scholarly books, "Germanic Literatures." Chaired by Ritchie Robertson at the University of Oxford, the Editorial Committee of the series currently includes professors from Oxford, London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Toronto. The mission of the series reads as follows: "Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland." This volume focuses largely on developments from 1950 to 1970 but discusses other years in tracing writers' entire careers. According to the authors of one of the chapters, Thomas Eder and Sven Vitse, the term "neo-avant-garde" distinguishes the era from the classical (Paris from 1860 onwards) and the historical (1900–1920) (130). In this comparative—or "confrontational"—book each chapter pairs a Dutch-language neo-avant-garde writer with a German-language representative of the genre. Segments for each author discussed are devoted to Background, Poetology, Reception, and Literary Practice, with a Conclusion on both. Chapters that pair a Dutch writer (named here first) with one from Germany discuss and compare Mark Insingel and Helmut Heißenbüttel; Armando (the pseudonym of Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd) and Alexander Kluge; and Patrick Conrad and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. Austrian writers, whose chapters are given a closer look below, are Gerhard Rühm, paired with Paul de Vree; Friederike Mayröcker, whose Dutch counterpart is Lucienne Stassaert; and Oswald Wiener, paired with Jacq Firmin Vogelaar. The book contains several illustrations, some of which are concrete poems with visual elements such as words and letters arranged as meaningful designs. The introduction presents bibliographies, previews of each of the book's chapters, and insightful statements on aspects of the "neo-avant-garde" and its many aspects and forms. Defining characteristics mentioned include "scepticism toward language, political authority, bourgeois ideology, and toward the authority of traditional literary genres" (1) and exploitation of "the visual and material nature of poetry" (3). Neo-avant-garde and other experimental literature [End Page 134] of the 1960s also reflected emancipatory and anti-establishment social movements of the time. The chapter devoted to Belgian Paul de Vree and Gerhard Rühm demonstrates that neo-avant-garde literature is connected to and can fruitfully be merged with other artistic genres (de Vree was a painter, Rühm a musician and composer). Both of these multimedia writers created "concrete" or "visual" poetry, but neither "ever limited themselves to a mechanical application of those programmatic principles" (13). De Vree's experimental poetry incorporated quotations, words in regional dialects, references to technology and youth culture, and visual material such as photographs, newspaper clippings, and advertisements. Rühm made many associations between language and music, creating acoustic poetry (for listening), non-conceptual phonetic poetry, and "tone poems" with specified qualities such as pitch, volume, duration of sounds, speed, and tone color (harsh, soft, falsetto, etc.) (41). The chapter "Hybrid Hydra-Heads" contains the book's only discussions of female writers, Austrian Friederike Mayröcker and Dutch writer Lucienne Stassaert. Both created experimental work marked by ambiguity and volatility, although their viewpoints diverged. Mayröcker, who rejected trends and group membership, did not embrace Staessart's explicit left ist viewpoint or her bohemian and anti-establishment sentiments. Mayröcker created "hybrid prose poems," highly original theatrical sketches and operatic pieces that reveal the "unnatural, hierarchical and gendered conditions" (109) of opera training and production. She is also known for "didactic" pieces offering largely aesthetic commentary in formats of "text books, conversation lexicons, instructional manuals, etc." (111). According to the chapter's conclusion: "both authors deliberately wanted to break with conventions of narrative writing and promoted a poetics that could not be...

Critique of Capitalist Ideology in Bhattarai’s Muglan

This article explores Govinda Raj Bhattarai’s worries about the innocent youths to be the Muglanis forced by the dominant capitalistideology of the society in his novel Muglan. In the novel, he presents the critical situation of the youths who are compelled to leave their motherland just for survival but they get sold like cattle and are enslaved and forced to do hard physical labour in the cruel foreign land. The article applies neo-Marxist insights to study devastating results of elitist bourgeois ideology of the society over the life of poor innocent people in the novel. It mainly borrows ideas from Luis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” along with the ideas by Terry Eagleton and Antonio Gramsci. The article shows Bhattarai’s critique of elitist bourgeois ideology of the society that he does through his choice of the protagonist, Sutar, who along with other youths leaves his home and goes to muglan but gets robbed, sold and forced to work as road builder in the foreign land of Bhutan. By showing the hopelessness of better life for the youths in their native land, Nepal and their pathetic condition in the foreign land, Bhattarai critiques the elitist ideology of Nepalese society.

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

The Future of Progressive Politics in a Post-Fordist World

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF COSMPOLITANISM IN THE CONTEXT OF WESTERN VIEW

This article describes that cosmopolitanism reflects the nature of capital, striving towards where the best conditions are created for it and it is possible to obtain the greatest benefit. In the history of industrially developed countries, a complex interaction of cosmopolitanism with the idea of a nation-state is traced. The elements of cosmopolitanism were also present in communist ideology. It is in the context of cosmopolitanism that his basic thesis of building a classless and stateless society on a global scale can be interpreted. In the USSR, where during the first decade of Soviet power the expectation of a world revolution was replaced by the predominance of political principles in politics, the concept of cosmopolitanism acquired a persistently negative meaning and was perceived as a bourgeois ideology. After World War II, the state periodically campaigned to combat "rootless cosmopolitanism" and adultery in the face of Western scientific and cultural achievements. Furthermore, we can point out that a different interpretation of cosmopolitanism has led to frictions of various kinds. In essence, it should have been one of the most important factors in solving world problems. In this research work, special attention is paid to the notion of cosmopolitanism in the context of the current situation in the world. An important problem is the place of the human being in the world as a matter of philosophy or the place of the human being in the system of state politics as a matter of political science.

KOMI POETRY 1920-1930s.: SEMANTICS AND POETICS

The article presents the results of a study of the Komi lyrics of the 1920s - 1930s, in particular the lyrics of V. Savin. The literature of this period solved the following tasks: the establishment and strengthening of the new social system, the education of the working people in the spirit of the socialist ideals of internationalism, the struggle against bourgeois ideology and old morality. The lyrics of the Komi poets were consonant with this process. Their work is the work of poets of the time of the formation of socialist realism, when the "new", Soviet Komi poetry began with publicistic messages. The subject of analysis was V. Savin's poetic journalism. It was revealed that a necessary structural element for reproducing the civil, patriotic pathos of works is their rhythmic and intonational structure and lexical composition. It has been established that in poetic journalism, the main images are the lyrical hero and the subject of consciousness "we", united by one emotional tone. The problems actualized in the work fit into the complex of studies of modern Finno-Ugric literary criticism.