Tag: marxism

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The First Mention of Marxism in “Who Shall Survive?”

This is item 01 in Marx in “Who Shall Survive?” Monograph

Introduction to the Monograph

The first time Moreno mentions Marx in Who Shall Survive?, is in the Preludes of the Sociometric Movement (1978; xiv, xv)

The advent of sociometry cannot be understood without appraising my presociometric background and the historic-ideological setting in the Western world, during and after the First World War. Marxism and psychoanalysis, the two opposites, each had spent their theoretic bolt, the one with Nikolai Lenin’s “State and Revolution” (1917), the other with Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929). The two opposites had one thing in common: they both rejected religion, they both disavowed he idea of a community which is based on spontaneous love, un-selfishness and sainthood, on positive goodness and naive cooperativeness. I took a position contradictory to both, the side of positive religion.

To summarise: Moreno makes it clear he is not creating his work in a vacuum. Freud and Marx are the ideological setting in the Western world, during and after the First World War. Moreno says “The two opposites had one thing in common: they both rejected religion”. Moreno took the side of positive religion. Continue reading “The First Mention of Marxism in “Who Shall Survive?””

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Psychological Eclecticism and Nothing

I recall being advised by my then supervisor, about 30 years ago, to look around for a psychotherapy modality that grabbed me and then to learn it thoroughly and not become prematurely eclectic. I followed that advice. Psychodrama was that modality for me and I am steeped in its traditions and have practiced it for decades and hope to do that for a few more.

However I have more than a passing familiarity with a some other fields of practice, I have a grasp of Archetypal Psychology and I am qualified in Imago Relationship Therapy. I have grappled with my multiple perspectives, and have written a paper about my tension with Imago for the AANZPA Psychodrama Journal: The Imago Affair. I’ve been thinking about this more of late.

Continue reading “Psychological Eclecticism and Nothing”

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Information Age?

This essay makes good sense to me, digitalisation will not of itself foster feminism, liberation, equality or revolution.  However there is something missing in this piece too.  What IS the impact of the information … er, revolution?  is there a shift in the relationships of production?  Is whatever it is significant at all when it comes to a Marxist conception of history.  Has anyone really examined this fully, I bet they have. 

It is important to be able to see all of history as a history of class struggle, makes sense to me.  Of course there is ajso a history of the relationships of reproduction (perhaps what the essay below is about.) And there are cultural forces, racial, religious and generational forces.  The art is to be able to see what, at any time is “primary”.  Even if the history if information from language to the Internet is not “primary” what is its nature?  The distribution of the means of information, the ability to have mass peer to peer communication… what does it all mean. 

Interesting (see previous post) where Trotsky notes that the revolution in Russia was won by the group that had dialectical materialism, not just bombs.  It is important to get all this right.

Class, the Digital, and (Immaterial) Feminism:

Immaterial feminisms have emerged as part of the digital movements of “new economy” and “network society” in order to help capital eliminate old ideological fetters of gender that stand in the way of the expansion of capitalist production and the intensification of the exploitation of labor for profit. By “immaterial feminisms” I mean the network of feminisms—from “cyberfeminism,” to feminist theories of “immaterial labor,” “(im)materiality,” and “new materiality,” to “network feminisms,” “digital feminism” and “technofeminism”—which, as a species of new economy theory, ideologically displace the relation of gender to class, labor, exploitation, and the social relations of production in capitalism by positing a constitutive change in the wage-labor/capital relation brought on by the innovations of “new technologies,” the growth of the service industries and of “knowledge work” (i.e., “immaterial labor”). This is another way of saying that the role of immaterial feminisms in history is to represent as “radical,” “innovative” and as “progress” for women toward human freedom what capital is economically compelled to do to temporarily stave off declines in profit.

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