The politics of the people or the people of politics: from the Russian revolution to Gramsci’s Ashes

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Tora Lane.

Abstract

Taking the current discourse on populism as its point of departure, the paper examines the relation between modern democracy, totalitarianism and different ideologies of the people. It seeks to establish a metapolitical historical difference between a politics of the people and a politics of the popular by analyzing how the people were in question in the times of the Russian revolution and in particular in the literary reception of Andrey Platonov as opposed to how the post war times, which is marked rather by the way that the popular (as in popular opinion, popular culture etc) becomes the focus of the times.

I have used the title of Pasolini’s collection of poems Gramsci’s Ashes to denote a time when the “the attempts to remake life/ end up among the ruins” as he writes there, but I also turned to Pasolini essaistic thoughts on the nature of the transition between the two forms of ideologies. Thereby, I also ask if we in the discourse on the totalitarian threat in Europe today must take this shift to the different form of ideology of the popular into account.

Tora Lane is PhD in Russian Literature, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Research Leader at CBEES.