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		<title>Stitched Up Part 5 | An Ideal Fashion</title>
		<description>Discuss Stitched Up Part 5 | An Ideal Fashion</description>
		<link>http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/161-stitched-up/6790-stitched-up-part-5-an-ideal-fashion</link>
		<lastBuildDate>Tue, 21 May 2013 14:10:31 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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			<title>RE: Stitched Up Part 5 | An Ideal Fashion</title>
			<link>http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/161-stitched-up/6790-stitched-up-part-5-an-ideal-fashion#comment-1854</link>
			<description><![CDATA[Really enjoying these articles! This one brought up some problems for me though. Quote from Walter Benjamin - ''The class struggle... is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude.'' When we talk about culture, fashion etc, all the ''refined and spiritual things'' in life, I think we have to recognise these two apparently contradictory factors. On the one hand art, creativity, spirituality etc (fashion included) are secondary to the brute reality of the struggle for a better world. On the other hand they cannot simply be deferred to a future post-revolutionary utopia. We have to somehow find the vital strands of all these things already existing in the struggle itself. At its simplest Walter Benjamin's treatment of art is a foil to nostalgia and utopian fantasy - it insists on the contemporary-ness of art. Beyond that it says something about the nature of culture: Culture is not something which we can simply take over; it isn't a spoil which falls to the victor. In a parallel way to the institutions that exist under capitalism (courts, parliament, universities etc) culture is something thoroughly embedded within capitalism, something in which capitalism is highly invested (as all the stitched up articles have shown). Revolution has to be a double process of overturning capitalism, its structures and and its institutions, and at the same time creating out of the process of struggle revolutionary structures that can replace or re-make what is overturned. In a parallel way culture under capitalism has to be simultaneously overturned and replaced, starting with what exists here and now. This doesn't mean that there aren't decisive moments in history, revolutionary moments straddling the pre- and the post-revolutionary situation. But I think it does mean that it's very difficult to imagine a future society or a future culture that sits convincingly between the most distant abstractions or fundamental principles, and the most immediate reforms or concrete victories. You could say that this is a gap which can only be bridged by the process of struggle itself, and this applies to creativity and all the 'refined and spiritual things' as much as the 'crude and material things'.]]></description>
			<dc:creator>alistair cartwright</dc:creator>
			<pubDate>Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:56:04 +0000</pubDate>
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