On 3/8/10, Ralph Dumain
A Western Marxist, however untouched by or liberated from the
deadening influence of Soviet Marxism, can barely apprehend the weight
of the strangulating atmosphere of Soviet mental life as Mamardashvili
characterizes it.
CB; Depends on how much the Western Marxist intellectual in the US is
a Leninist, and involved in party work, radical political work. The
repression of many US Marxists in McCarthyism , but even before and
after, is not incomparable to the repression of some in the SU.
In the US, the repression is rendering through unemployment,
joblessness, careerlessness; denial of publishing, black listing.
Witness the treatment of for example, Paul Robeson, the Hollywood Ten,
dozens or hundreds of university and college professors and graduate
students.
There are significant stories of intellectual loneliness in the US.
There are lots of pseudonyms (smile)
Not that Americans have never experienced it, or continue to experience
it, but the relationship of the individual to the universe of knowledge
comprised by a diverse publishing industry--even at the worst periods of
repression--such that the problem is the relationship of the isolated or
suppressed individual to the zones of freer thought that exist. To take
an example: Richard Wright as a young black man in the South 80 years
ago was not allowed to borrow books from the public library, and had to
engage in trickery to check books out. His discovery of the possibility
of an intellectual life under conditions of extreme repression--the
American South being the first fascist state--had to do with
restrictions imposed upon his social environment, but not upon the
publishing industry and the universities in the nation at large in the
way that state censorship and monopolization of publishing and
distribution of information with one official ideology imposed upon all
of intellectual life would institute. These are my preliminary thoughts,
anyway. They do, in any case, invite comparisons among all kinds of
social environments and situations.
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