Revolutionary Humanism Research Articles

The Enemy with Human Face? Rehumanization of the Images of Americans in the Soviet Thaw Cinema

Introduction. The article focuses on the changes that happened in the portrayal of U.S. characters in Soviet Thaw cinema. The contribution of the article in the field of cultural Cold War is threefold: for the first time, it studies the American characters’ images through the prism of the concept of rehumanization; establishes common and particular traits of deconstruction of the image of the enemy in Soviet and American cinema; and introduces new materials into scientific circulation. The materials consist of the movies on which Soviet cinematography worked in the early 1960s; reviews in film magazines; and archival data of discussions on movies and their scenarios that took place in film studios. Analysis. Specifics of the dehumanization of ‘enemy number one’ in Soviet cinema. The Soviet anti-Americanism was based on the idea of ‘two Americas’: dehumanization has been subjected only to class and politically alien Americans. Deconstructing the image of the enemy in Thaw cinema. Humanizing U.S. characters was achieved with the help of endowing them with kindness, empathy, creativity, emotionality, moral behavior, ability for love, friendship, and comradeship, emphasizing the similarity of the basic values of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and demonstrating the possibility of peaceful coexistence through cases of mutual aid, cooperation, and the occurrence of friendly and romantic relations. The humanness of U.S. characters becomes less dependent on political factors. The cinema expressed the idea that man by nature was good, and this original human goodness was noticeable most of all in children, including American ones. The limits of rehumanization. The conservative part of the Soviet elite accused ‘abstract humanism’ of forgetting the class principle and juxtaposed it to ‘revolutionary humanism’. Criticism of ‘abstract humanism’ in ideology was accompanied by a tightening of demands for representing America that representatives of the Soviet controlling bodies made. Results. In the 1960s, Soviet cinema (just like U.S. cinema) had the tendency of deconstructing the image of ‘enemy number one’, which took the form of rehumanization. The rehumanization had its limitations.

Che Guevara and the case for revolutionary feminism in global politics

ABSTRACT Despite his renown, feminists have had little to say about the ideals or legacy of Che Guevara. In global politics, feminism is more commonly associated with pacifist movements, and his advocacy of armed insurgency to initiate revolution is an unpopular sentiment amongst feminists. Despite this discomfort, this article will make a contemporary case for revolutionary feminism for global politics by examining synergies between Che’s philosophy of revolutionary humanism and revolutionary feminist thought. For both, revolutionary politics is fundamentally about power and ‘the determination to wrest power from the ruling group and to end their domination’ (Jeffreys, 1977). Having fallen out of fashion in theorizing global politics (Duriesmith & Meger, 2020), radical and revolutionary feminisms can offer alternative praxis for tackling the persistence of patriarchy and women’s subordination globally. This article argues that an exploration of synergies between revolutionary feminism and Guevara's revolutionary humanism may provide a roadmap towards a more integrated revolutionary model for emancipation.

Albatros – a Publishing House for the Romanian Communist Youth, 1970-1989

This paper examines the profile of the Albatros Publishing House in Bucharest (specialising in youth literature) and the activity of its director, writer Mircea Sântimbreanu. He held this position for almost two decades and recounted his experience in a volume of memoirs. I tried to explore these memoirs mainly in parallel with accounts from archival documents and secondary literature. The Albatros Publishing House was a micro-universe for assessing the impact of successive ideological offensives by the Romanian Communist Party on book production and on the youth in general (mainly the July 1971 Theses and the other party directives of the 1970s, as well as the Mangalia Theses of 1983). By the 1980s, the regime’s propaganda had acquired ultra-nationalistic nuances. This paper will also exemplify such developments by discussing the scandal generated by the 1983 publication of Saturnalii by Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a volume of poems with strong antisemitic tenor. Using mainly diaries, journals, secondary literature and archival documents, this article also analyses the strategies deployed by the communist regime in order to coerce the young generation – through the agency of publishing houses – to assume the new literary-political ideology of revolutionary humanism (the Socialist Realism of the Ceaușescu era).

The Resistance to Receptivity: Or, Spontaneity from Fanon to Kant

The Resistance to Receptivity:Or, Spontaneity from Fanon to Kant M. Ty (bio) There is spontaneity and there is spontaneity. —Lenin, "What Is to Be Done?" (1902) I Fanon narrates decolonization in terms of an uncompromising appropriation of violence. Violence, as he describes it, is a "cleansing force," whose exercise therapeutically relieves the colonized subject of a systematically enforced state of psychic inferiority and potentially restores a sense of integration to those whose abjection from the category of the human has been normalized by colonial rule (Fanon 2004, 51). For those dispossessed of humanity, taking up violence as an "absolute praxis" becomes an avenue for what might be termed a partially reparative subjectivation (Fanon 2004, 44). Or, in Fanon's words, decolonization names the necessarily violent process whereby the "'thing' colonized becomes a man" (Fanon 2004, 2). Full restitution is of course no guarantee. And, as evidenced by the case studies that close Les Damnés de La Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), there is no promise that the way out and through to humanization will not leave in its wake irreparable damage (Fanon 2004, 181). In Fanon's account, such a deployment of force not only reverses the medusan hold of colonization so as to create new, disalienated subjects but transforms violence itself—from an affliction to a mode of self-making, from a life-destroying instrument of racial subjugation to a medium through which liberation is enacted. Through violence, a Manichean world—divided between the white kingdom of ethics and the zoological realm of the "native"—is destroyed and reorganized [End Page 1] along a historical trajectory of national sovereignty. As colonial rule enforces a context of total domination, it does not give rise to disparate viewpoints so much as it produces irreconcilable "species" (Fanon 2004, 5). Thus, the "totalizing" violence of the colonized is not, he emphasizes, wholly of its own making but rather breaks out in response to the primary, petrifying violence of the colonist through which it seeks to break (Fanon 2004, 50). Dereliction is driven and so drives itself to de-creative expenditure. In Les Damnés de La Terre's foundational chapter "On Violence," Fanon is resolute in rearticulating the colonial situation in terms of a deliberately simplified agonism: a "murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists" (Fanon 2004, 3). On the basis of this image of a bifurcated world, a horizon of aspiration is articulated through a logic of reversal and substitution. The work of violence is not complete until the colonized, risking his life, takes the place of his oppressor. Resistance is thus imagined restrictively in terms of the equation between the new humanization of negated colonized life and the negation of the European colonist as human. Les Damnés thus inaugurates its readers into the emphatically pronounced frame of a rigged Hegelianism—that is, an embodied conflict between two hostile parties, Master and Colonized, who, unlike the actors in the Phenomenology, were never presumed to be capable of reciprocal recognition and, consequently, confront each other through the risk of death that is asymmetrically valued. But Fanon's conception of violence, as this reading will show, does not remain as monolithic as the rhetoric of the opening scenario suggests. Though at times it may seem to spell a prolonged deadlock, this schema of lethal antagonism—the "single combat" between two different species—subsequently gives way to another conceptual frame whose provenance is less readily situated within the phenomenological tradition (Fanon 2004, 42). If, in the opening section, agency is narratively distributed between two archetypal figures held in homicidal tension, in the following chapter, Fanon's focus shifts to an interpretive rubric that, as the title indicates, pivots on the "Grandeur and Weakness of Spontaneity" (Grandeur et faiblesse de la spontanéité; Fanon 1991, 105; Fanon 2004, 105). This essay attends to how Fanon's theorization of violence shifts as Les Damnés de La Terre unfolds toward the formation of national [End Page 2] consciousness.1 In readings that foreground the psychodynamics of sociogenic racial inferiority, its lived impossibility, and its potential dissolution through the advent of revolutionary humanism, Fanon's reflections on spontaneous resistance are often overshadowed by...

Las contradicciones del capitalismo: breves apuntes sobre la salud en Puerto Rico desde los planteamientos de David Harvey

The illustrated author David Harvey explains in his book “Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism”, arguments evidenced as problems of capitalism during economic and social crises. The fundamental thesis that this great work reveals is the crisis of capitalism as a social system through time and the analysis of its economic engine, the capital. He exposes the concept of contradiction dialectically to refer to the capital, defining it as two opposing forces present at the same time in a given event. In this article, we reflect on the ideas of the Marxist geographer and social theorist, applied to the social context of Puerto Rico. We will point out some discussions around health, considering the state of colonial political situation with the United States. Some final thoughts will be shared with the idea to building a revolutionary humanism that places hope in social movements for the rescue of human rights, such as health, and develops actions aimed to transform the current human predation.

Restless Flying, A Black Study of Revolutionary Humanism

This is an expository essay of “restless flying,” the terms of which are gleaned from engagement with two poetic lines. One is from Aimé Césaire’s 1956 poem, “Le verbe marronner.” The other is from the tenth-century Abbasid poet al-Mutanabbī’s qaṣīda, لااحترا مه سيل ءاش يئاقب (“Baqā’ī šā’ laisa hum irtiḥālan,” “My Constant Wish Is They Not Be Departing”), apropos the literary and political work of twentieth-century Tunisian thinker Mahmud al-Mas‘adī. Both the flight and its exposition belong to what J. Kameron Carter and Sara Jane Cervenak call “the Black Outdoors,” invoking in part Michel Foucault’s notion of “the thought of the outside,” whereby the domineering speaking subject of knowledge disappears in the infinite boundedness of language. Restless flying, it is argued, is elemental of what I term poiēsis in black, referencing a set of practices-of-living articulating conceptions of humanity that are appositive to the anthropology of “Man” concomitant with capitalist modernity.

Miraculous Mathematics: André Bazin's Film Theory

Andre Bazin's film theory is filled with scientific metaphors based on his secular education between 1933 and 1938 in La Rochelle at the Ecole Normale d'Instituteurs. There, he excelled in a wide range of subjects such as biology, physics, chemistry, and, of course, mathematics. Inasmuch as Bazin's handling of art and religion deeply shaped his film theory, in this essay I shall limit myself to his use of algebra, arithmetic, calculus, and analytic geometry to acknowledge his debt to Henri Bergson's philosophy, discuss his views on Henri-Georges Clouzot's policier Les Diaboliques (1955), and explain his admiration for Vittorio De Sica's early neorealist films such as The Bicycle Thief (1948), Miracle in Milan (1951), and Umberto D. (1952). My own discovery is that Bazin's mathematical references from calculus and analytic geometry throw light on the radical nature of Bazin's neorealism as a revolutionary humanism.1 Its openness toward fantasy, ambiguity, and contingency is worth examining in detail. Due to Bazin's penchant for paradoxes, my rereading of De Sica's early neorealism will show that miracles and mathematics interrogate each other in the context of a daily life open to childlike wonder, self-questioning, and social consciousness.From Biology to MathematicsThe scientific discipline of biology studies everything that is alive and enables new life. Biology also looks at human beings with the same detached attitude usually reserved for the study of animals or plants. By so doing, it aligns itself with the indifferent look of the camera's nonhuman eye or lens, which can only see the world from the outside and equalizes everything it intercepts. Due to his passion for biology-the science of life-Bazin had little use for the static tendencies of ancient mathematics based on Euclidean geometry in a timeless space. Bazin upheld a Bergsonian preference for the temporality of modern mathematics through calculus, a method of computation that was originally developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson wrote:We believe that if biology could ever get as close to its object as mathematics does to its own, it would become, to the physics and chemistry of organized bodies, what the mathematics of the moderns have proved to be in relation to ancient geometry. The wholly superficial displacement of masses and molecules studied in physics and chemistry would become, in relation to that inner vital movement (which is transformation and not translation) what the position of the moving object is to the movement of that object in space.2Here Bergson compares biology's contingencies to calculus's handling of motion because of his interest in the creative evolution of dynamic and organic wholes over static and interchangeable parts. Bazin extends Bergson's analogy between biology and calculus to his conception of cinema as a spatiotemporal modeling system based on automatism and randomness. The philosopher's turn-of-the-century work had the most influence on Bazin even though it preceded the popularization of quantum physics in the 1920s and 1930s, of which the film theorist was deeply aware. In his introduction to Bergson and Modern Thought (1987), Andrew C. Papanicolaou points out that Bergson'smatter should be viewed as comprised of modifications, perturbations, changes of tension or of energy, and nothing else. In such a world . . . energies are pulsational (quantized), entries cease to be simply located (and gain wave characteristics) and indetermination becomes a fundamental feature of micro-events. (Bergson in fact urged physical scientists to look for measurable indetermination in physical nature.) It is thus, as physicist Louis de Broglie pointed out, no exaggeration to hold that in Bergson we find Heisenberg before Heisenberg, Bohr before Bohr.3Papanicolaou's history of science, with the French Catholic physicist Louis de Broglie between Bergson and the Danish School of Heisenberg and Bohr, fits with how Bazin included randomness and indeterminacy in his definition of modernity. …

The relation of Marx’s humanist political economy to ideas of “divinity” and humanity found in Plato and Aristotle

In this paper I will argue that Marx’s political economy is “humanist” in a sense that sublates ontological and anthropological concepts found in Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of “divinity” and its relation to the human being. The tension in the relationship between humanity and divinity in the thought of Aristotle and Plato will be explored. Plato identifies the human being with the potential for “divinity,” i.e., with the potential to achieve knowledge of “divine beauty.” Aristotle, in contrast, while associating human beings with “divinity,” denies that the ultimate “good” for humanity is the same as that for “God.” Marx sublates the idea of an objective and knowable “good” which is the same for “gods” as for “man” from Plato, and from Aristotle he sublates the idea of this “good” as “the actual exercise of complete virtue,” including the ideas of “justice” and true “friendship” as essential aspects of this idea (while rejecting Aristotle’s exclusion of women and others from human “nature”). This sublation is found in his conception of truly “good” activity as fully “free” end-in-itself activity actualizing universal ethical, aesthetic and intellectual values. With Marx, therefore, we have a completed humanism, and it is an essential element of his revolutionary political economy. Marx’s revolutionary humanism was influenced by the intellectual climate of his day and his exposure to debates about theology and religion was essential for the development of his critique of political economy and revolutionary social theory.

Review: Unfinished Spaces by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, directors/producers

Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, directors/producers Unfinished Spaces Ajna Films, New York, 2011, DVD, 86 min., $19.99, http://www.shoppbs.org Early in the film Unfinished Spaces (Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray), we see the famous photograph by Korda of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, young, long-haired, bearded, in their military fatigues, playing an ironic round of golf on the erstwhile-restricted course of the Country Club (it needed no more name than that) in 1961. Prior to the revolution, the Country Club was off limits to the vast majority of Cubans—although as the son of a wealthy landowner, it would not have been so for Fidel had he chosen to fulfill his expected role in society—and the near-exclusive domain of the legions of North American tourists whose expenditures on the island accounted for a significant portion of the GNP. Apparently it was on those links that Fidel had an epiphany and vowed to convert the golf course, a symbol of capitalist exploitation and exclusion, into a symbol of revolutionary humanism and freedom of expression: he wanted to build the best art schools, not just in Latin America, but in the entire world. Thus opens the fascinating journey of Unfinished Spaces as it reconstructs the dazzling moment of revolutionary, utopian vision and shows the political agendas that initially endorsed and later foreclosed on the dream. The enthusiasm with which the revolutionary leadership and ordinary citizens sought to remake Cuba found magnificent expression in this ambitious architectural project of a world-class complex of art schools, with separate schools for fine arts, drama, music, modern dance, and ballet. The film juxtaposes gorgeous if elegiac photography of the five schools in their present state—some nearly complete and some skeletal—with archival film footage, photographs, and interviews. While the contemporary photography captures the beauty and …

We are all monsters now!

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Marxist accounts of capitalism and capitalists as “vampiric” and “cannibalistic” can challenge the exploitation underlying “monstrosity” of the diverse “liberal organization”.Design/methodology/approach– To bear out this argument, it will critically turn to Marx's original description of capitalism as “vampire” like. It will do so by examining a range of theoretical and existing empirical research related themes of contemporary diversity.Findings– The paper argues that in order to avoid becoming capitalist monsters it is imperative to adopt an explicitly anti-capitalist Marxist perspective centring on themes of a “monstrous” capitalism. Capitalist organizations, not only “suck the blood of workers” but turns them into exploiting vampires, feeding on others for own profit and promotion. Yet it also expands on such readings by emphasizing the liberating possibilities that a more contemporary view of “monsters” stressing radical diversity and difference can make to this Marxist critique.Originality/value– To this end, it illuminates how a perspective uniting these ideals, termed here as a “revolutionary monstrous humanism”, can effectively challenge the dehumanization of managerial control and market ideologies while also fighting for the right of individuals to express their heterogeneous and always evolving unique cultural identities.

St. Brecht and the Theatrical Stock Exchange

This is an abridged version of an article by the same title published in Review1, launched in 1965 as Monthly Review's literary supplement. Eleanor Hakim was the managing editor of Studies on the Left in its first few years. At the time she wrote this article she was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her essay dealt with Brecht's theory of the subversive role of the artist in confronting what he conceived as the "cultural apparatus"and how this affected his theory of epic theater. Hakim was particularly concerned with demonstrating that Brecht's critical outlook was confirmed by the way that, after his death, the U.S. cultural apparatus ("the theatrical stock exchange" of her title) was manipulating and de-radicalizing his drama. In this context, she drew out the significance of Brecht's revolutionary humanism.… —Eds.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Fanonian practices in South Africa: from Steve Biko to Abahlali baseMjondolo

Written by a leading Fanon scholar, and with an acute philosophical intelligence, Fanonian Practices in South Africa is a sophisticated attempt to examine post-apartheid South Africa through the emancipatory lens of Frantz Fanon's revolutionary humanism. South Africa has been widely heralded as an African success story in the wake of the 1994 democratic elections. But in recent years the world's media have too often carried stark images of South African police attacking protesters or scenes of xenophobic violence. Has post-apartheid South Africa been unable to chart a course away from the all too familiar script of a post-colonial crisis, rooted in the narrow nationalism and neocolonialism that Fanon so vividly described? This is not another meditation on Fanon's continued relevance. Instead, it is an inquiry into how Fanon, the revolutionary, might think and act in the face of contemporary social crises. Taking Fanon's passion for freedom and liberation seriously, and Biko's analysis of the dangers of liberalism, Fanonian Practices looks into the politics of the shack-dweller movements currently gathering momentum in South Africa as important spaces in which to think and construct a truly human post-apartheid future.

From Popular Justice to (Revolutionary) Humanism: Ideological Shifts in Femi Osofisan

Every writer grows in ideological perspectives, whatever his vision is. This growth is usually a result of, or response to, societal becoming. The paper discusses some major plays of Femi Osofisan, the leading figure of the second generation dramatists in Nigeria, as part of the dramatic responses to the shifting environment of the Nigerian state within the postcolony. The paper is of the view that the insistence of the dramatist on the social function of art and the artist in society is responsible for his own ideological mutation from what the paper terms popular justice to revolutionary humanism. This is also a result of the dramatist‟s own artistic maturation over time as it is common to every writer. Again, for art to remain relevant and ideologically verdant, it must continue to respond to the inconsistencies in society. It is on this note that the paper concludes that in any epoch, authorial ideology shifts consistently with the mutation of the general ideology whether at the acquiescing or conflicting levels of social experience.

Global Fascism Revolutionary Humanism and the Ethics of Food Sovereignty

Social movements struggles against neo-liberalism are always both global and local. Resources to fight this ‘global fascism’ on the ground can be found in a mix of the anti-colonial humanist writing of Frantz Fanon, and in the ethical thinking of Alain Badiou. Rajeev Patel argues that both thinkers ask activist to undertake a critical self-reflective engagement as part of the broader political struggle struggle. He looks at how a framework for this kind of global and local reconstruction has been applied in the fight for Food Sovereignty declared by the international peasant organization Via Campesina.

‘That the tool never possess the man’:¹ taking Fanon’s humanism seriously

The key argument in this article is that there are three good reasons to take Fanon's humanism seriously. The first is that he took it seriously; the second is that he wrote to wrest humanism from the distortions of racism and colonialism; and the third is that Fanon's humanism is a current in the movement that Michael Hart and Antonio Negri call revolutionary humanism, which they distinguish from reactionary humanism. The second and more subterranean argument is that Fanon's humanism can incite and hone a revitalisation of our thinking and practice of politics in contemporary South Africa.

Che's Revolutionary Humanism

Global neoliberalism parades victoriously through our era, monopolizing its discourse and ideology. To confront the inherent perversity of the capitalist system's universal domination we need, more than ever, alternative modes of thinking and acting that are universal, global, planetary. We need ideas and models that, in a thoroughly radical fashion, confront the worship of the market and of money which has become the dominant credo of the moment. As is the case with very few other leftist leaders of the twentieth century, the legacy of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara—universal spirit, internationalist and consistent revolutionary—continues to mount such a challenge.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy

Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy

Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy

Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy

Masses and the Elite in Modern Italy - Edmund E. Jacobitti: Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Pp. 164. $18.00.)

Masses and the Elite in Modern Italy - Edmund E. Jacobitti: Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Pp. 164. $18.00.)

Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy, by Edmund E. Jacobitti

<i>Revolutionary Humanism and Historicism in Modern Italy</i>, by Edmund E. Jacobitti