L'espressione di Marx 'Vorstellungsweise'

“Bukharin then turned to an issue which had been at the centre of his disagreement with Lenin in October 1920 when the Politburo had debated the status of the Proletkul’t. Whereas Lenin tended to view certain disciplines as ‘value free’ and had argued that in respect of these disciplines the ‘assimilation of bourgeois culture’ should take precedence over the ‘invention of a new proletarian culture’, Bukharin, like Bogdanov, denied the neutrality of the sciences, natural or social, and was wary of a strategy of ‘total assimilation’. Considering that the methods of all the sciences were inextricably bound up with the research strategies which they adopted or were prescribed, Bukharin wished to abolish the hegemony of the bourgeoisie in all branches of knowledge. In an attempt to resolve this disagreement, Bukharin suggested that the category ‘culture’ be divided into two sub-categories: material culture or the economic base, comprising techniques, the means of production in all their interrelationships and the everyday habits and customs of people (tekhnika ob”edinennoy zhizni, byt); and spiritual culture the means of representation or cognition (sposob predstavleniya) – in Marx’s expression, the ‘Vorstellungsweise’: the ideological expression of a particular system of production relations. This latter aspect of culture should be recognized as being as important as the former.” [Anthony Kemp-Welch, The Ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, 1992]