How did the East (2nd world/ soviet aligned) lose the culture war so bad during the cold war?? The west Pretty much dominated the 20th century with Music, movies, cars, products, fashion, etc etc
What did they do wrong? did they stifle creativity somehow? Was it because there was very little financial incentive for creators?
How do communist( or insert your brand of leftism here) countries compete with capitalist culture?
Other urls found in this thread:
thephilosophicalsalon.com
youtu.be
en.m.wikipedia.org
youtube.com
youtube.com
youtube.com
bbc.co.uk
thequietus.com
k-punk.org
twitter.com
The West was richer and more literate/embedded in mass culture than the East before it started. Also the CIA had a bigger budget:thephilosophicalsalon.com
Have you been to Russia? People there are a lot less Americanized as you think they might think they are.
That being sad, you are obviously talking about pop culture and not high culture. In terms of the latter I'd say that both Shostakovitch and Tarkovski can compete with pretty much everyone of their Western equivalents.
About pop culture, the simple answer would be consumerism. They idea that the population have to constantly spend money on stuff that stimulates them creates a massive industry of superficial stimulation. That also means, the less money people have, the shittier the culture becomes. With the neoliberal reforms since the 80s, mainstream pop culture was on constant decline, and good culture became "indie", amongst their respective subcultures (Metal, "geeks", etc.) as the mainstream cultural industries wasn't able to finetune the stimulation anymore, simply because people have less and less money in their pocket. People just buy the cheapest brand and pirate movies and music. As a result you get shit like Marvel movies. Nobody really likes Marvel movies. People constantly complain about stuff was cooler back in the day, and they are right. Watch any Hollywood movie from the 60s and then watch a Micheal Bay flick.
I don't really have an idea. They shouldn't have a consumerist/commodifying approach though. Too bad humans are shallow creatures.
As leftists, we should just point out the ideology behind modern culture all the time, like Žižek does.
They didn't. It just so happens that since capitalist culture is made to be mass-marketed it gets disseminated all over the planet. Of course everyone wears blue jeans and watches Star Wars, it's pretty much designed to be as appealing as possible to as many people as possible. This is the problem, western culture is constrained by the incentive of profit. In truth we have a very limited scope for the kind of art that is cultivated by society for this reason.
The Soviets were making next level patrician shit that was simply not possible in the west until the internet made tapping into extremely niche and scattered markets possible. Especially movies. In the USSR you could do whatever you wanted with your movies besides criticize the government.
Not different from the West. Sure, there is no "official" censorship but the structural constraints of the movie industries makes it impossible for you to make a movie critisizing the government.
Only when some shit becomes "historicized" you can talk shit about it. For example the Vietnam War. Not Bush and the Iraq War though - that's not long ago enough
but there are plenty of GWOT movies.
And which one was really critical of it besides the mild liberal notions?
Literally the most critical movie I remember was Lions for Lambs by Robert Redford. Still liberal though.
lots of movies have shown the horrors of gwot, just like every other war movie. Fury portrays US soldiers as drunks and rapists. Band of brothers shows that some US soldiers were openly racists, In lone survivor US soldiers openly talk about executing a farmer and his kid, american sniper has Chris kyle shooting kids and women etc
or this
You mean the movie in which a single Sherman takes on ten Tigerpanzer and wins? Yeah, totally not pro-American propaganda.
It's not about showing "the horrors of war". That has no statement. They never show how these wars were manufactured by the ruling class. They all state that wars are a necessary evil and bad but there is never a single doubt implemented about that the ones the US is fighting are not the bad guys.
i lived in saint petersburg for a year. and yes russians were heavily westernized. All of them watched americans shows and movies mostly game of thrones at the time, they all wore western brands, and all drove western cars.
the irony
like?
its a movie, what do you expect? the russians and chinese do the same thing. and i promise you they don't show that their wars were manufactured by the ruling class. i think what you want is called a documentary.
The fact you don't know your own countries high culture and sorround yourself with individuals whose cultural life ends with Game of Thrones doesn't have a lot going for you mate.
m8, pls. most people who listen to classical music and partake in "high culture" are fucking bourgeois. "high culture" is not for poor people. aka the working class.
They didn't win though. Soviet society was the most "cultured" in the world during that time. They went to plays, to ballets, to orchestras. They read more and the works they did read were much higher quality than the usual westerners read (the classics versus dime store novels / genre fiction). IMO their poetry was much better than what was coming out of the west during that time period but that might have more to do with the rich poetic tradition there was in Russia.
What the west was better at was commercialization of culture. Read Adorno.
It's somewhat ironic that it was the soviets who embraced the type of culture that old world europe was more known for than the west.
t.Jazz-loving capitalist
That's why we need another Proletkult. High culture isn't inherently bourgeois.
I feel like everybody starts using the Nazi flag these days to gaslight Holla Forums
soviets wanted to portray themselves as "high class" ironically enough. which is why they invested so much into these kinds of programs.that didn't stop russians from listening to the beatles or Elvis.
its like being asked to choose between playing tetris or zelda.
It's the cost of access to said "high" culture. In the West it's always been too cost prohibitive to be able to partake in such culture since the norm for those behind such productions is to have limited, small scale performances to lower the supply that leads to higher profits. I mean look at Hamilton. It could be being done across the nation in stadiums to allow as many as people as possible to partake in the event. Instead it's held solely in Broadway in a small theater with a limited amount of performances.
The USSR sought to lower the cost of access as much as possible (though of course access became more about who you knew) which led to a greater amount of people being able to experience some high quality performances.
There is also of course the fact that children in the USSR were introduced to said culture at a young age since it wasn't cost prohibitive to do so. This versus the West where pretty much no school system introduces children to such culture really at all (I went to an upper middle class school district that did for elementary/middle school which is rare).
jazz is bourgeois. i only listen to memphis blues. soon, that too will be bourgeois and i will be forced to listen to African drum music. or anime nightcore.
The west invested vast sums of money into production of culture as well. CIA funding modern art, the great scam that is hollywood left alone (and often told what kind of movies to make).
I think one of the things that is little talked about is the human price that is paid for the music we enjoyed in the west during the cold war. How many people dedicated their most important years pursuing a career in music to have it fail versus the tiny number that found success (and usually had most of the proceeds stolen from them by record execs). People were willing to make such a risk because they had few alternatives. This versus the USSR where a college education and a job were always an option and only those with a deep passion were those who pursued a career in the arts where they sought to excel at it.
meanwhile, Story of a Real Man or Anna the Proletarian was the stuff byrocracy didn't object to at all and it all manages to be even more retarded than massculture the west had to offer
sure, sure, that is, if whatever you did didnt smell of degene-whoops i mean western imperialism
You realize anonymous imageboards are a product of western culture. Something such as this would of never existed in the Soviet Union.
Really makes you think
I see, very interesting .How would one pursue a career in the arts in the USSR? Would you be chosen by a government agency, after showing promise in school the same way soviet athletic programs did?
Obviously this would stifle creativity, leaving little room room for development or originality. Someone like Jimi Hendrix may have not ever picked up a guitar in the USSR, and playing the way he did may have landed him in the Gulag.
...
And they use IPHONES and drink COFFEE as well!!!
Really makes u think
...
GRAMSCI
Muh Cultural Marxism
Lack of creative freedom.
Fact that Soviet union had a list of banned books should speak for itself.
Besides that USA has a more diverse cultural history. Something like black culture is a specific result of the diaspora of Africans. Russia on the other hand is quite homogenic. Sure you have a lot of ethnic groups but they weren't connected to the urban mainstream culture.
Your compromison is hardly fair.
The Internet comes form government labs.
They had a much smaller material base and a smaller market. Culture is a networked good, so it becomes stronger as more people are in its market. The people with the most money were walled of from them.
Not limited to Soviet Union. Back in the fifties even the sucdems still sponsored cultural associations to "uplift" the people. Only recently have those been turned towards producing shitty punk graffiti art and whatnot.
Pic related, an example of an art temple built by the sucdems in Belgium of the Belle Epoque.
why are you a fucking jew
You fucking faggot. The West banned more books than the USSR. And fun fact, USSR only banned propaganda shit like Gulag Archipelago, while the West banned stuff like American Psycho.
en.m.wikipedia.org
In America Alice Cooper and W.A.S.P. were often banned from certain venues.
They were banned do to pressure/influence of the religious right, not the state, moron.
I dont think capitalism is good tankie, but look at the scoreboard.
no Jimi Hendrix, no Nirvana, no Metallica, no Johnny cash, etc. USSR only supported composers, chess players, musicians, ballet dancers, etc. cause muh high class
japan and korea are western.
western with eastern characteristics
The left should hold higher standards than the capitalists. Imitating them won`t do us any good.
(OP)
yea, soviet institutionalized censorship was a pure cancer
it caused a huge amount of frustration for the people and a massive damage to the soviet image
and it also had this tendency to portray everything like sunshine and rainbows
disgusting
fuckers censored the ending in brothers Strugatsky's The Ugly Swan to some shit tier happy ending when in the original manuscript the ending was purposefully left up in the air
they also didn't publish The Doomed City which is a God tier novel
easing of censorship was one of the reasons why Gorby was popular
some of the best soviet movies were created at the time of Perestroika
that is why we need some decentralized anonymous global wireless crypto mesh network and crowd funding infrastructure in socialism
Or don't have such a centralized media network. Really the USSR television network was far too centralized and it made no sense to have Moscow not only program CT USSR but censor for the regional channels. Then you had the policy of jamming western channels instead of rebutting them in the national press.
Kino, DDT, Aquarium and all the other Soviet rock bands shit on that theory.
Most of the famous singers from Brazil (and i gonna take a wide guess that the rest of south america) were communist/communist sympathizer
that had to do with South America being a dictactor wet dream made USA
here are a few songs of that time
youtube.com
Nah we won the culture war.
...
If Russia converted to the English language it would be a different story.
They would have dominated the art world and we'd all be speaking Russian now.
Does the east even gives a fuck about "spreading culture" like the west (more like just the US) do?
Looking at the USSR I get the impression that they were all about just preserving local cultures and that's it. No need to dominate the international music or whatever.
Oh, really?
Then why does that shit always make billions in profits just in cinema tickets alone?
I don't like that shit either but saying that nobody likes it when it makes billions is silly.
And nothing of value would be lost.
Soviet rock bands couldn't even get on the radio until after the collapse of the USSR.they couldnt even get their music published because Melodiya thought they were degenerates. A Lot of them made songs about how shit the USSR was, which is why they were censored and got in trouble with KGB.
Yegor Letov was put in a fucking mental hospital for 3 months by the KGB for his music.
fuck you faggot.
Which was actually a good thing because they were considered an actual threat to something. It was once said among Soviet dissidents that only the KGB takes literature seriously.
From my point of view by the time the USSR had rock bands the revisionists were already in control and it had degenerated into a capitalist country, although one that was a very unique type.
When was the last time that rock was considered a threat to anything in the West post-1980s. Minor Christian hysteria over Marilyn Manson and black metal during the 90s represents the death-gasp of a time when rock was considered a threat to anything.
When was the last time any anti-capitalist band had their music played regular radio, much less rock radio? Don't even start by referencing the soc dem Obama-supporting group Rage Against the Machine.
Anti-capitalist punk only worked bc mainstream radio wouldn't play them and when they finally did start getting picked up it was the death of punk. No surprise that commercial radio chose the non-political tracks and the less political bands as representative.
Even groups like the Dead Kennedys were the exception that proved the rule. What's the track most likely to be played by them? "Holiday in Cambodia" which criticizes yuppies and left-wing hipsters and outright stated they should take a "holiday in cambodia" and get acquainted with the real world. Hell any honest firm-minded capitalist businessman could appreciate that message of "quit complaining" even if Jello didn't want it to be taken that way. Kinda odd how none of their stuff criticizing Reagan or mainstream capitalist society gets much airplay.
Yes, in the West, you can make an anti-capitalis album but it's typically completely censored by omission in mainstream vectors of transmission which have only concentrated their power in spite, or rather because of the internet. You can say anything you want because it won't change anything, any drip of class consciousness you put out there is diluted in the sea of right-wing media.
And hell, let's not forget the extent to which much of rock and rap had outwardly veiled right-wing/apolitical messages. They were often as much the problem as they were the answer to any question they posed.
At least the East bloc bands had the potential to change something. Though it seems many have changed their minds about open capitalism/bourgeois democracy having experienced it.
bbc.co.uk
Fascinating thing on the rise of consumerism and the pursuit of difference (with the result that any new "revolutionary" counter-culture is commodified near instantly to re-enforce the extant order.)
This is one thing I miss about paternalism in societies like postwar Britain before the Americanised free-marketeers got into it. I think this quote covers it pretty well:
Now public service is dead. Even this token to enjoyable life in a hierarchical society was too much for capital to bare. Bow before the market. Work, Sleep, Cons–UP NEXT IT'S THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF!
Considering movies, it's simple.
Media boycott. Soviet Sherlock Holmes and Soviet Aladin were one of the best fucking movies I have ever watched.
But it is still happening though. What ever good stuff Germany or France produces (like Taxi Taxi) will not get dubbed in English. It will get remade.
Even video games. The translation of Gothic is fucking horrible and they didn't even bother translating Night of the Raven, clearly they are not used to this kinda stuff. To the idea, that good entertainment can come from non US countries too.
Thank god for the internet.
Any society or state will try to censor works of art and entertainment that goes against its ideology. How many people here would suppport a book that criticises socialism in a hypothetical socialist society? Very few people.
Source for this?
Anna the Proletarian is the favorite novel of every tankie.