Chto Delat

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URL = http://www.chtodelat.org

Description

Alexei Penzin:

"Chto delat/What is to be done? (www.chtodelat.org) was founded in 2003 in Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art and activism. Since then, Chto delat has been publishing an English-Russian newspaper on issues central to engaged culture, with a special focus on the relationship between a re-politicization of Russian intellectual culture and its broader international context." (http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-soviets-of-the-multitude)


"Throughout all the years of activity of our collective since 2003 we have been struggling to establish a broad critical left-wing platform opposing both the liberal mainstream and the nationalist-conservative camp in the post-Soviet context and globally. This has involved a variety of practices – the production of political texts, dialogues, films, exhibitions, public discussions, learning plays, seminar-communes, summer schools, and, finally, the foundation of the School for Engaged Art, whose aim is to foster a new generation of the critical left in Russia in a more stable institutional and educational context.

In that sense, we are no longer just the Chto Delat group of 9 people but a whole network of the independent Left from several generations – artists, theorists, researchers, writers and activists. Ours is not a political party, and moreover, many of us are cultural workers, so our opposition to nexuses of power and capital such as the Kremlin are not coordinated around a regimented program. But we regularly participated in protests against the regime both individually and collectively, and were very much involved in the run-up to anti-authoritarian protests of 2011-2012 and their aftermath. And we have never supported the Putin Administration. Instead, we have diagnosed and opposed its fundamentalist tendencies all along; you can find the latest articulation of that position in our statement of withdrawal from the Manifesta 10 exhibition at Hermitage or in our new film “The Excluded” which clearly renders moot any speculation as to which side we are on. Fortunately, living in Russia does not make you an accomplice of its odious elite: fortunately, this is a great, culturally rich, and heterogeneous society, parts of which only recently demonstrated their wide rejection of Putin’s policies." (http://transversal.at/blog/Open-Letter-Who-are-the-Friends-of-Political-Critique)


Discussion

On the current crisis in Ukraine

"While we’re at it, a few basics about the current crisis and our position.

We are very much against the “campism” familiar from the times of the Cold War. We do not want to be absorbed by either liberal-center mainstreams or conservative nationalists, and we reject the pressure for choosing between new global “blocs.” We reserve the right to criticize both sides for their unacceptable militaristic expansionism, their “problems with nationalism,” their social racism; all these features are present in Russia, in Ukraine, in the EU, and in the USA, and pretty much everywhere else. We clearly see not just narrow-minded politicians, but also the competing cliques of oligarchs and corrupt officials actively fanning the flames of war. We demand peace now. We are against both the ridiculous (though dangerous) neo-imperialism of Russia, and the good old imperialism of the US and the European Union.

We clearly see how both Russian and Western mainstream media attempt to clothe the ongoing economic crisis of various peripheral and global capitalisms with the garb of geopolitical phantasmagoria or “national interests.’

We have also always insisted on the continuity between the neo-liberal policies and ideas of the 1990s and the authoritarian conservatism of the 2000s, in Russia and in other similar countries of the semi-periphery.

It is also clear for us that the current crisis in Ukraine, while directly launched and provoked by inadequate and aggressive moves of the Russian leadership, had been prepared long before by a series of imperialist, militarist, and, most importantly, short-sighted, moves by the Western political elites in the 1990s-2000s, not to mention the hegemonic position of nationalism in the current Ukraine.

Any refusal to consider all of this on the part of the European or US Left, much like any refusal from the Russian Left to recognize the right-wing nature of Russia’s current policy in Ukraine, immediately turns the situation into a “campist” and nationalist opposition instead of an ideological and historical global conflict.

It is very important at this difficult moment that we, the intellectuals of the left throughout the world, build our horizontal international solidarities: within our nation-states, as recent history has shown, we can do less and less.

Slanderous statements like Sierakowski’s actively undermine the possibility for solidarity and lock us into a thinking that revolves around two right-wing camps. To evade them, we must look beyond the level of personal slander, which after all was made to prove a point in a larger geopolitical argument. Its crux is that the European left is wavering insofar as Putin is concerned, while former neoliberal enemies have been far more steadfast and astute in their opposition to the Russian hybrid war in the south east of Ukraine." (http://transversal.at/blog/Open-Letter-Who-are-the-Friends-of-Political-Critique)