Kurginyan

[Arlekino]

hello Russian comrades
would you tell me what is your views about Kurginian? I do like his appearance on Krasnoe TV,but I do believe his too asking radicalise from ordinary people too much? or I am in wrong.
Please would you open my mind whom living in Russia thanks a lot of,

[Robespierre Richard]

I still don't understand what he wants, to be honest. From what I can tell it's weird pseudo-Stalinism that wants the process and aesthetics of Stalin's epoch but doesn't want the cause it was after. In that sense they see the USSR as an empire and want a return to that empire, in a somewhat Confucian manner in that they see capitalism as incompatible with Russians as a nation and Russia as a nation.

On the other hand, they really like the writings of Marx and the tradition of Marxism that they say was abused and ignored by the USSR's ideologists. They also like psychoanalysis and Frankfurt School. Their total ideology seems to be, according to them, a synthesis of Marx and Weber.

They have a really good explanation of the present Russian state as gangster capitalism, as unlike other societies, the Russian bourgeoisie as a class never established itself as a law-abiding productive class vis-a-vis the openly coercive and opulent feudal aristocracy. Instead, the Russian property-owning class was formed from:

- 'gray' illegal businessmen who had, through either bribes or threats, taken raw materials from factories and then used them to make products, and/or made products and sold them through those factories.
- 'gray-black' speculators who got their hands on large amounts of saleable items and sold them at large markups, creating no value.
- 'black' capital pools - actual pools of money controlled by the prison mafia as well as other smaller mafias (usually of speculators or gray businessmen like the fur mafia) in the USSR.

As these were the only ways to have starting capitals. As a result, the current state is controlled by criminals.

Also, they see modernism as the expression of bourgeois ideology to justify its legitimacy. Overall their theory of the modern bourgeoisie is also very good. In a way, the present death of modernism is concurrent with the dying of capitalism.

Over time their whole manifesto seems to actually get better, becoming a justification of political anti-modernism as opposed to Western post- (and counter-)modernism which dismisses modernism of developing countries as authoritarian (as modernism gives every nation a 'right' to progress) and how it is now turning into support of pre-modernism, Islamism in particular as even American conservatives who used to believe in the 'clash of civilizations' theory ended that with their projects of bringing democracy to the middle east, and now the US tries to support and even ally with such groups as Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban respectively.

In the end he goes back to Russia and how the it has been neither 'east' or 'west' culturally, but an alternative to the west as Byzantium has been to Rome and how his personal motivation with his movement is to have the USSR come back to the world as an alternative to the West and the entire modernist ideology.

http://eot.su/manifest

Very interesting, I'd say, but probably not to the tastes of our comrades here on RevLeft who would rather stay in their Eurocentric worldview regarding revolution.

On the other hand, I am not personally interested in ideology, so I did not try to make a personal synthesis of his views and mine, but some of the rhetoric - regarding criminal capitalism or modernism for example - has definitely been useful to think about though it will not really impact any of my views on what is to be done, concretely.

Also, I'm aware that this may read a little weird because I stated my prejudices about him first and then read through the manifesto and pointed out what I noticed about it.

[Arlekino]

Majority of Russian Stalinist society see him as another Lenin.
The video his asking for people come to the streets and protest seems good, but the problem his appearance is desperation and I would say some will see mix feelings about him.
http://krasnoe.tv/node/12747

[Ismail]

Thread moved to Politics and renamed at the request of Robespierre Richard.

[Robespierre Richard]

Majority of Russian Stalinist society see him as another Lenin.
The video his asking for people come to the streets and protest seems good, but the problem his appearance is desperation and I would say some will see mix feelings about him.
http://krasnoe.tv/node/12747

Yeah, he is very ineffectual as a sole public speaker (despite being good at debates), and would be better relegated be behind the curtain (having theater director as one of his past professions), being a very famed political scientist and political strategist in Russia itself. I guess he is using the image he developed through the political-historical debate show he does, but that only serves a narrow circle.

His show does seem to be well-done (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSy4KiWW_Lw) though. However, in this case he is doing political debate, not political action itself, which has to be nothing but passion.

[Dire Helix]

Here`s a good Marxist analysis of Kurginyan and his phenomenon(in Russian):

Part 1: http://n-petrovich.livejournal.com/32771.html
Part 2: http://n-petrovich.livejournal.com/33525.html

[Robespierre Richard]

Here`s a good Marxist analysis of Kurginyan and his phenomenon(in Russian):

Part 1: http://n-petrovich.livejournal.com/32771.html
Part 2: http://n-petrovich.livejournal.com/33525.html

По стилю все это похоже на писания одного известного исторического деятеля. Он тоже в свое время «потерял страну», которая проиграла в войне и от которой оторвали ряд территорий. Правда, закончил этот исторический деятель плохо, застрелиться пришлось. А потому труп облили бензином, да сожгли во дворе Рейхсканцелярии.
[Comparison of Kurginyan's rhetoric to that of Hitler's]

Aaaaand... Godwin's Law!

To be honest, it's kind of weird because he critiqued what was in the PDF version about 6 pages of the 30+ page text, in what would be at least 20 PDF pages. It's also really not a Marxist analysis, unless you mean it in the sense that the guy writing calls himself a Marxist and it's an analysis. However, it's really annoying to read his moralist ravings without at all addressing things that Kurginyan talks about later in his text. For example,

К моменту «краха СССР», хоть власть все еще формально находилась в руках советского рабочего класса через его партию (КПСС), но эта КПСС по уши погрязла в оппортунизме и перестала быть научным авангардом рабочего класса. Кроме того, фактически сформировался класс советской буржуазии – партийная бюрократия сросшаяся с руководителями советских предприятий, а с 1988 года – советские бизнесмены. Именно они в 1991 году и совершили контрреволюционный переворот, в результате которого власть перешла к классу буржуазии, который уничтожил общественную собственность на средства производства (созданные рабочим классом) и сосредоточил их в руках немногих частных лиц. Рабочий класс превратился в класс наемных рабов, вынужденных работать на капиталиста, который присваивает результаты их труда.
Таким образом, не абстрактные кургиняновские «силы», а конкретный класс капиталистов; не «лишил Родины», а присвоил созданные и принадлежавшие рабочему классу средства производства.
[Talking about USSR's collapse in terms of the CPSU's revisionism and opportunism, as well as emerging capitalist classes later in its history.]

While Kurginyan talks about exactly these things in his own text, as well as external reasons for USSR's collapse.

Besides that, I found the forced BSE-style Marxist tone really annoying, especially in contrast to the later volumes of the Collected Works of Stalin that have come out in recent years. Personally, I have stopped using that sort of language myself, not seeing it as useful to talk in terms of definitive laws and stages in a field (Social Science/Political Science/History/Economics) that is mainly concerned with gathering and analyzing data seems a little odd. Plus it has not been at all useful in studying the more "rigid" sciences such as geography and anthropology. In sociology, history, political science, and economics (which is itself more of a religion so your mileage may vary) it is still much more acceptable. On the other hand, accounting is probably as a study the most ardent supporter of Marx's Capital, though that has nothing to do with Marxist analysis really.

[sanpal]

Who is interested, could to listen the talk Tim Kirby (american media-person in Russia, radio "Mayak") with S. Kurginyan http://oper.ru/news/read.php?t=1051609871