Boris Kagarlitsky
Market, domination and the crisis of the “classical culture”

       Good morning. I am very glad to see those who are here in spite of it being Saturday and that you are here to listen to long lectures about culture, philosophy and politics. First of all I would like probably to entertain you and wake you up. The first thing I want to tell you about is some observation which I had a few days ago. I live by the “Airport” metro station and there, by the “Sokol” metro we have a big shop selling perfumery, called “Arbat-Prestige”, which is well advertised. So, I regularly pass by this shop, when taking my daughter to school, and there in the windows I always see some pretentious installations that are obviously homosexual in their nature. This has been going on year by year and then one day I pass by and suddenly see that in the window instead of homosexual objects there are red stars, “Aurora” ship and the words: “October Revolution of the Prices”. I don’t know, maybe it was just a sales period, but deep in there we saw the paintings by social realist painters and it was a rather good, representative exhibition, displaying the development of social realist art, starting from the 30s-40s until the 60s- 70s. And I repeat once again: they are originals, it’s just that they are not great pieces of art but a certain mass product of the soviet culture. And as we all know, a lot of works like that were produced during the Soviet time. So it is obvious that in the Soviet period when I was a student, when I was a member of the dissident movement this was rejected by us, but now I pass by these paintings and I feel warm inside, because they remind me of my youth or, maybe, due to some other reasons and probably this is why they are placed in that cosmetic shop. But how can we understand that evolution from the homosexuality to the Social Realism? I think that it cannot be explained exclusively by the nostalgia of the Soviet Union which became the latest fashion trend and is somehow supported by the state too. Another point is what the state is contributing to it and what the society is contributing to it. We have a more serious problem here and the problem is that the existing type of the society cannot elaborate or offer, as of now, the regional, innovative complex of cultural values which would meet the needs of the ruling class, the power, the authority, and the society through providing some minimum cultural context or the cultural consensus as an optimum. This is non-existent and therefore we need to refer to the set of values of the past in order to communicate with the society somehow and insure a system of some clear, understandable settings and values.
       Here we face a very interesting phenomenon which can be defined as the cultural limitation of the market. The point is that the market itself is probably a dominating social system on the surface but it is not a dominating cultural system or system of values or aesthetics. During the Great French Revolution it was clear that shop sellers are not aesthetic, they can not belong to this category of beauty and that “buy-and-sell” does not fit into the system of aesthetic and moral categories. So, here we can only give one category: fair trade (you shouldn’t steel from the customer), but it is not enough to build the system of artistic values.
       So, this we saw during the French Revolution and it is not by chance that Jacques-Louis David created paintings dedicated to the heroes of the antiquity, to the characters of the Rome but not dedicated to some heroic shop-keepers of the French Revolution. So, the launch of the revolutionary deed - a beautiful action - requires from that small bourgeois, big bourgeois, from the shop keeper something different than what he owed in his daily existence or his own market experience. Here we see actually something interesting. The state, which is always viewed as limiting art, as the power that is controlling and depressing it, it is the state as a commissioner of art that becomes much more efficient. After all, we know a lot of art and cultural phenomena that actually appeared due to the fact that the state commissioned them, even though sometimes the state was not so democratic and wonderful. The first thing we can recall are the Egyptian pyramids, which is the pure example of a piece commissioned by the state, it’s an example of the state propaganda or using the language of the Russian Revolution in 1917 this is a monumental propaganda and what can be more monumental then the Egyptian pyramids that outlived the pharaohs? On the other hand, even the Acropolis in Athens was commissioned by the state and Versailles and the Stalin culture in the USSR which includes not only ugly examples but also some great examples like Eisenstein. Of course, we can have some claims against Eisenstein but what hi did is the art, of course. So from the king Tang to Stalin many rulers and tyrants quite often were very effective art commissioners, because the state can be scary, dangerous and ugly but nevertheless it creates some sort of scale for activities, for events. The scale of even the threat, if you like, which it needs to promote. Aesthetic feelings and the scale of the state activities or the state danger becomes an object of art. On this background, the market processes become not interesting and quite shallow.
       At the same time at the very moment that the market becomes not just the dominating force in the society but is offering itself as dominating value for the society, the incredible filling of whole public space happens by elementary triteness. In early twentieth century, when this notion appeared it was called “triumph of vulgarity”, which was a swear-word. But now it characterises a situation in the culture. And this “triumph of vulgarity” is not as simple as it appears at the first look. When we don’t put it aside by saying: “we don’t like it”, we discover the following: the artistic means are used for advertising, the aesthetics achievements and images of the whole world’s culture are used to promote, lets say razor blades, video cameras, towels, shoes and so on and so forth and then after all we discover that the very notion or concept of art is being eroded. We can’t see the frontier between the world of commerce and the artistic world, the artistic world is being eroded and marginalised, even though the images of high culture penetrate everywhere throughout. Mozart’s music is used, for instance, to sell tobacco. On the other hand, if we take the critical intellectuals, we see the opposite movement which is easy to explain. This is a sort of market fetishism in the consciousness of an intellectual. Indeed, the market is becoming a certain super-object which fills in all the space of consciousness. Everything is analysed and described and explained in the market categories, which seems to correspond the state of the social process. But in reality it’s not so simple. The market is hypnotising not just the consumers, not only its participants, but it is also hypnotises the intellectuals, to a greater extent maybe, and I find this quite dangerous. The thing is that the criticism of market is becoming a common place for the leftist discussions, and not only leftist, but to the liberal discussions as well and, for quite some time already, conservative discussions– 20,30, maybe 40 years, not even mentioning Marx and pre-Marx times. But at the same time we discover that the criticism of market itself is just partially covering the limited nature and historical determination of the market relations. The discussion stops when we refer the reader or the audience to the point that this or that phenomenon is caused or finds a parallel in the system of the market relations, of marketing, promotion control, manipulation, advertisement, trade, sell-and-buy. Once we delivered this point we believe that we have fulfilled our task and that we can sleep in peace, but the market is just a cover of the economics system which in reality is based not on the market itself but that just uses the market as a tool for the final realisation of its economic process. In other words, if there were no industry there would be no goods to sell on the market. We can speak as long as we like about non-material production or industry but still it’s a production and an industry. No matter, whether the object is material or non-material, in order to be sold it should be first created, produced. The other point is that the dominating metaphysics of the market says that the object is created only because it is in demand. First appears demand and then comes the object. But we discover immediately that in reality things are different: at first, certain opportunity to create an object appears and then the demand is formed and then the demand creates the illusion that the object was created just to satisfy this demand. With the exception of things that are really necessary, but there is not many of them: food, clothes, shoes. So, therefore it’s obvious that the starting point is production. But, once again, these are just banal things for the people who are familiar with the basic Marxism. But these Marxist common places seem not to be common places any more for the intellectuals that have other common places now and therefore now we have to say something which we didn’t even have to say 20 years ago, since it was a kind of truth in itself. Now it is not so and we have to repeat it once again. Therefore the fetishism of the hypnosis of the market can be described as an opinion of a person that the soup is cooked by the pot. Of course, we know that it’s fire that cooks the soup. Another thing is that in order to cook the soup we need a pot, but the pot without a fire underneath it will not cook anything, it is just the form which keeps this soup whilst it’s being cooked. So, we see here the same situation: some people are carried away with the discussion of the form of the pot, the material of the pot or the reaction of the soup with the pot, but nobody actually asks the question: how the fire is started and what temperature is needed to cook something in this pot?
       So, just getting to the fire point, the production point. The main question appears here. The production is organised in many different ways. The production is not just the technologies, the people who are sitting and doing something, or standing, or lying, or crawling. In any case they are involved in some production process, that includes intellectual production as well. In any case this is a system of production relations (this is another banality from Marx and I must apologise for repeating it), but at the same time it is also the public distribution of labour. So, in this system of production we need this division of labour in order to maintain constant, permanent and regenerating functions. We can speak about certain identities that appear, that change their dimensions supplementary, that are fluctuating, that can appear or that can be eliminated, can change. But the division of labour is not an identity, it is an objective reality, pointing out that something is working. So, putting it simply: if there is no fact of hiring an employee this employee will not be working. If the employee is not working then the commodity is not produced. This is an objective point that we need to take account of, while we are in a capitalist system. In any case, this labour division results in two major factors of production: labour and capital.
       Yesterday, Chantal Mouffe spoke of the antagonism, saying that the political process presupposes conflicts, and these conflicts find no reconciliation. She emphasised the importance of dividing into “us” and “them”. So, politics or any social activity presupposes a clear division into “us” and “them”. If there is no division like that than there is no directed or targeted social action. So who are “them” and who are “us”? We see today not only unstable identities that can turn out to be antagonistic or not antagonistic, but we deal, I repeat, with sustainable relations, roles; without them the existence of the capitalist society is technically impossible. This is what defines the principal antagonism and the interest of the ruling class, or the ruling social groups consists in moving away as far as possible from understanding of this antagonism, to spread it, to break it into a thousand of small problems which hide the forest behind the trees. At this background we recall Lenin’s thesis of two cultures within one national culture. When I was a student that made us laugh, we could not understand: what are two cultures within one national culture? Where would Rubens, Malevich or the novel of the nineteenth century (Dickens, for example) be included (as we know, Marx admired Dickens)? If we understand this thesis dogmatically it can indeed result in some absurd, indeed idiotic conclusions. And Lenin faced them when he didn’t like at all the practices of proletarian culture. He started to oppose these practices and fight against them. These practices of proletarian culture were based on his own thesis of two cultures within one national culture. Here we have a bourgeois culture, we dispose of it and we create a proletarian culture. The first one who was shocked by such interpretation was Lenin himself, who starts saying: “You didn’t understand, I actually meant something completely different”. And in general, he really doesn’t like the aesthetics of the proletarian culture. The other question is whether it’s good or bad, since the aesthetics of proletarian culture had a lot of interesting things in it and it was an organic part of avant-garde, which was an organic part of the whole cultural process of early twentieth century. Therefore the concept of proletarian culture was actually disproving itself, because on the level of creative process this division of two cultures didn’t work. On the other hand Lenin’s thesis is not as absurd as it might seem in the 60s and 70s when we were confronted mainly by dogmatic and literal understanding of that point of view. Lenin did not just say something about two cultures, he said about two cultures within one culture. Maybe he was not very accurate in what he said, but be as it may it was one integral, holistic culture with a struggle going on in order to impose certain kind of agenda and to instrumentalise that culture in accordance with the class political interests. The cultural field is uniform but the political players, the class players in that field are fighting each other in order to impose their own system of values as a system of values that would control the entire process.
       But what kind of field is that after all? The field with which the theoreticians of the late nineteenth – early twentieth century dealt was classical culture. I would like to start from the outset, say that this is a Eurocentric approach. Whether it’s bad or good, it’s a kind of stable set of cultural notions that was evident in Europe for approximately 250 years starting with the Italian Renaissance and ending with the Enlightenment. I am talking about the Great French Revolution, the main system of values and the parameters of culture were set and it continued to develop by itself, using these given parameters. Here we see a very curious phenomenon. The consolidation of this classical culture coincides exactly with the consolidation of capitalism. Moreover, somehow we come to the conclusion that the current disintegration of the classical culture is also representing not an independent event, but a reflection of a much more in-depth process that is disintegration of the capitalist system itself. A question arises: how do we deal with antiquity, with the classical works. The classical culture appeals to classic antiquity. In one way or another, it presupposes the referral to Greeks, or Romans and so on, that are in the basis of everything. Then another conclusion comes. The antiquity to which we refer the spectator or the reader, or the listener is not the real antiquity but something invented. That is to say Europe or the early capitalist age did not rediscover antiquity but invented it anew. Not in the way it is portrayed in the Fomenko works who tries to prove that ancient Rome did not exist at all and the pyramids were built out of concrete in the sixteenth century. The antiquity that became the event of culture and public consciousness of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was reconstructed in some way and it referred to antiquity the in the same way as Renée Kérouaille’s work and the comparison of immaculately white antique statues to the barbarically painted statues. It is clear that in one way or another, the crisis of this system of values that is characteristic for the antique classical culture cannot take place without a reason. So we are using the hypothesis of the link between the crisis of the system and the crisis of the classical culture. How to ensure the understanding of this link that leads to this result? Here again we see an interesting weakness, helplessness, sometimes the ostrich policy on the part of the intellectuals. What is curious is that the left-wing intellectuals, liberal critical intellectuals are the ones who feel very uncertain in these questions. The right, conservatives are quite open, they talk about capitalism, market, using categories of the main basic values of that system, while left-wing politicians start to evade, to replace political and economic categories by some vague ideas. They are not talking about the development of the capitalist system, they are talking about “project modern”. This is not the same, but their “project modern” coincides with the development of capitalism and it uses the same kind of notions, ideas that are part of the Enlightenment and even the late Renaissance. This is the project of European Enlightenment. Then why do you invent a new term? If for 200 years we have been talking about Enlightenment as a conceptual project that is obviously linked with the development of capitalism. Why would you suddenly replace Enlightenment, with its dialectics described by Horkheimer and Adorno, with the ‘project modern’ – in order to disrupt the link which is evident when we discuss it. Why then such a passion for new terminology? By Orwell this new terminology is being created in order to establish the system of ideas that is convenient for the ruling regime and which excludes the use of other notions. The new terminology of today has the same task. The sense of new terminology, unlike Orwell’s new terminology is not only to replace a notion but also to wash it out, to disintegrate it. To make it on the one hand beautiful and on the other hand – vague. The more they correspond to these tasks, the more they are useful for the intellectuals. Thus notions loose the analytical sense but they create wonderful idea, wonderful possibilities, because these washed-out notions are much more convenient then the specific ones. They are much more poly-functional. If we say it’s a “spade” – it’s a spade. If we are talking about the long continuum that presupposes some kind of earth-work, you can read many meanings into it, although we are just speaking about the spade. There are wonderful notions of that kind such as ‘pluralities’, ‘pluralities’ in the plural –I love this – and ‘identities’, also in the plural. From the point of view of the Russian language, it’s a catastrophe, disaster. It’s not only a disaster from the point of view of the Russian language, in every language there are problems like that, except for the French. Even in English, there is a fluctuation of the linguistic structure, but the work has been done in English to make it suitable and this work has been done in Russian. In 20 or 30 years of this endeavour, the text of classical sociology will be completely incomprehensible for the student. That is, the understanding of the text is no longer a condition of its acceptance. It is not the task of the author. The more intellectual games you play around the incomprehension and around not being able to understand the text – the better.
       What does this work reflect? (the work of replacing notions). It’s quite conscious but at the same time very unplanned. I can answer very briefly – it’s the crisis of intellectuals. But this only brings us to the next question: why crisis? What is the nature of that crisis? If they coped with their work in the last 100 years, why did they stop to be able to cope with it? What happened to them? In my view, it is linked to the progressive integration of their critical activity in the system. The opposing intellectual activity is also integrated in the system like the intellectual activity which is supports the system. In one sense the critical and the oppositional intellectual activities are more needed then apologetic ones, because the last ones, although important for the stability of the system, do not add anything to it, while the criticism does bring some additional intellectual factors into the system. Here we are faced with a curious phenomenon: the crisis brings about a complete misunderstanding of the role of intellectuals by intellectuals: why are they there? To such a large extent that it is possible even to loose the positive function of intellectuals for the system, that is to say the crisis of integrated opposition is a continuation of the system crisis, but it is developing even faster then the system crisis. It overtakes it. Maybe because they are advanced intellectuals and they do things faster. Speaking in political terms, we understand what the integration of the opposition is all about, just looking at the TV screen. But at the intellectual level we have, by and large, the same thing. When we speak about the restrictiveness of the market and of capitalism (it’s not the same thing, mind you) we are dealing with the fact that this system probably needs some outward, out-of-system stabilisers, that would be based on a different system of values and coordinates of different mechanics of reproduction. Coming to absolute terms with the market system, this system of estrangement, the system of privatisation brings to the disintegration of any society, including the capitalist and the bourgeois ones. If we believe that the buy-and-sell is the only moral value, it will destroy any morality. I want to draw your attention to the thesis of Max Weber of “Protestant ethics”. We’d say that “Protestant ethics” is raising the value of bourgeois activity. This is a well-known thesis, but Max Weber has a different thesis that the religious Protestant ethics is a check for the bourgeois and it is opposing the thirst for profit. It creates the framework where this profit-oriented activity would act and be successful. This is very important, because it explains the role of the critical intellectuals under capitalism, the role of art, of creative endeavour and also the various traditions and the so-called remnants of the past. For example, the nobility of Great Britain and the monarchy. Why all these feudal remnants are not removed but are being supported? Because they create certain stability and insure its acceptability. Even for those, who suffer from that system. Also for the people who are at the top of that system. Here the oppositional intellectuals and critical thinkers and artists are also participants in the process and they accept part of the role which for Weber in early capitalism used to play Protestantism as a religion. The more secular becomes a society, the more pragmatic and orientated to the specifics of today, the more the stabilising role of religion and the religious set of values passes over to the cultural set of values including such things as aesthetic parameters of life. So aesthetic parameters of life replace the religious ones. Both are based on emotional recognition. Both of them cannot be completely rationalised. Both of them presuppose certain values that are quite evident to us but we are not always able to express them in words. In this respect, philosophy, including critical thinking and critical philosophy becomes an important element for the development of this stabilising factor. Here we face a paradox: on the one hand we criticise and fight this system, on the other hand we stabilise it. This contradiction and this dialectics is dialectics of the existence of intellectuals and the capitalism. In different periods different sides of this contradiction prevailed. Sometimes the system role is prevailing, the other times the destructive role is prevailing. These roles are not strictly divided, there is no watershed between them, no wall that would divide them and would be impossible to penetrate. These barriers are quite conditional and some of the ideas that used to be very destructive at some stage would be quite acceptable at the different stage. We know that also from the history of art. You remember how the works by impressionists were shocking bourgeoisie. Now it’s all in the museums and costs a lot of money. This is the moving frontier, the border between the challenge and acceptable criticism. It’s not at all rigid. But the problem is that the integrated intelligentsia and the integrated way of thinking within the framework of the system is starting to loose this function of criticism. To be more exact, the integration of intellectuals is so far advanced that the critical function is if not so much lost, but already meaningless for the critics themselves. On the one hand they know that they are being paid to criticise the system. The system pays them money to be criticised by them. On the other hand, they are so integrated into the system that they don’t even understand how they can criticise it: why and in what way. So the criticism of the system is replaced by the simulation of the criticism, or by some intellectual game which is self-sufficient and, in principle, does correspond to the formal criteria of the same system, the very same system. So, they are trying to deceive or to cheat the system. And in this case the victim of this simulation is both critical thinking in the old Marxist notions of proletariat and bourgeoisie, which is getting something different for its money than it wanted. In my view, all this in the final analysis is part of the general process of disintegration which in the long run has only one result – the barbarisation of society. Neo-Nazi movement is not at all a random symptom because it’s closely related to the very same process. In other words, when Rosa Luxemburg talked of a choice between socialism or barbarianism she meant socialism would by all means win, whereas barbarianism would be just like a scarecrow as a way to dramatise one’s position. Well, unfortunately, at present time, barbarianism is dominating, it is the most invasive and triumphing trend of social development. Barbarisation, disintegration, decay, and so on. Indeed, if we go back to Rosa Luxemburg’s paradigm, barbarianism is winning for the time being. Does it mean that it’s the barbarians that have the future in their hands? I don’t think so, although for the time being the evidence is such. But may be we still have a chance. This means socialism in the end! Thank you.

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