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on the use value of psychology in current Kiev upsurge in fascism

Martin Kraemer Liehn | 10.12.2013 09:50 | Occupy Everywhere | Gender | Globalisation | Health | World

This post is a direct news-related reaction to the discussion started at
 https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2013/12/514114.html

Two tendencies of Western EUropean and US discussions do not seem to be terribly helpful in our current fight against the fascistic upsurge in Kiev:
- seeing the East as something far apart and just catastrophic and
-assuming that desturbed minds are on their way just where corporate media choose to show them these days: with folks close to Kiev working classes

Mind, that psychology, as most beople know and practice it is still a distincltly ruling class ideology, especially its "textbook" vulgarisations. Bourgeois psychology wants to keep you normal, average consumer, average subject, average wage earner (just keep your indymedia.uk contributions NORMAL). This is completely detached from social reality, a new religion for the toiling class. Hunting for profits in the upper strata of today's European "business community" means asserting your strategy in a bonfire of highly and cynically crazy macho individuals.




Dear iodine, thank you for your helpful and constructive contribution to the text. For me, you make a row of very convincing observations in it. Just as an invective to take our collective understanding closer to the real process, I would like to propose some caution.

Everything you describe is real, it is terrible indeed, yet we, the working class of Kiev still love to live here and work with our folks for a better political outcome. Too often during the past 20 years I have been working in the Eastern European social movement (including 2 years of interventions in Cuba) I was met with a strange aloftness and distancing on the part of Western EUropean and US comrades. They somehow love to consume the catastrophy hype our misery and isolation in the East of you offers. Is it due to an analytical gluttony of REMOTE CONTROL aestetics?
All right, every campaign in the public of current Ukraine or Cuba is mainly conditioned by global Capitalist "markets", by the London stock exchange and its agents in both countries. But remote controll functions the other way as well. Every lost battle against fascism in Ukraine now will have its repercussions on the aggresivity of British upper class rule, just consider the wage-crushing power of Ukrainean, Estonian and Polish workers in English meat packing industry nowadays.
Mind, that psychology, as most beople know and practice it is still a distincltly ruling class ideology, especially its "textbook" vulgarisations. Bourgeois psychology wants to keep you normal, average consumer, average subject, average wage earner (just keep your indymedia.uk contributions NORMAL). This is completely detached from social reality, a new religion for the toiling class. Hunting for profits in the upper strata of today's European "business community" means asserting your strategy in a bonfire of highly and cynically crazy macho individuals. Do you really think we can win the fight with their ideas and instruments of asserting power and controll by keeping to bourgeois Freudian family recipees of normalised intelectual and emotional consumption?
So when the working class east of the iron curtain is indeed so distorted and psycholgigally unbalanced, dear comrade iodine, then perhaps we are just as close to a better solution as we are now to the worst case now? For further reading, I would recomment you the practical and theoretical work of Berthold Brecht 1929-1956, his letters, journals in exile, dialectical observations. When working around Hollywood in 1941ff he was especially precise in refuting cheap and too psychological theories of fascism among his German fellow refugees (including Horkheimer, Mann, even Doeblin).
Our enemies are apt to repeat their past errors. We are wise to never allow that to our fight for the minds and hearts of the working classes! No passaran!

Martin Kraemer Liehn
- e-mail: kiev (aett) riseup.net
- Homepage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Street_Scene

Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. strange,the EU is the leftwing bogeyman of the far right& fascists — swivel eyed lizard man
  2. Pay day in kiev — A