So, this tweet basically describes only 15 people but I happen to know most of them (either as friends or as writers). So I can't help but wonder what is going on here.https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1178701629060722688 …
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First of all "they love reading balzac and trollope, read the financial press, listen to orchestral music and operas" basically describes Marx and Engels (if you leave off Trollope). So it's just a case that some Marxists continue to share the habits of the founders of Marxism.
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But it's not just a matter of Marxists inheriting Marx's taste. There's a tradition of leftists loving reactionary/conservative writers. Marx/Engels on Balzac, Lukacs on Mann, Jameson on F.M. Ford & Wyndham Lewis, Anderson on Anthony Powell, Delany on Heinlein.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Beat me to this. Even Marcuse, the most attuned of the mandarin Marxist theorists to the “new”, wrote a final short book in praise of bourgeois art as an allusion to the utopian possibilities of socialism.
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Plausible to regard Marxism as an eschatology whose paradise consists of extending to every human being the ideal life of a leisured Victorian haute-bourgeois.
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Martin Hagglund's new manifesto for atheism and socialism has this flavor too; God is dead therefore we must build a society where everyone can live like a tenured humanities professor.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @HeerJeet
There something to that, but it’s is more about the art ( literature/music/visual) representing within a class society the highest, and most capacious, forms of human achievement—but only episodically. Only socialism could transform the episodic into the quotidian.
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Replying to @yeselson @DouthatNYT
I think that's true -- but there's a also a divide in Marxist tradition between those who only value the most exalted of high culture (Adorno chief of all) and those who are open to utopian possibilities of all sorts of art high and low (Jameson).
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Replying to @HeerJeet @DouthatNYT
not find much in modern popular culture to recommend it and famously rebuked Marshall Berman for the sense of utopian possibility Berman could find in the demotic t-shirt slogans of young women in NYC.
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Hard to imagine Anderson hanging out with Philip K. Dick, as Jameson did in early 1970s.
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