ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts a chronologically anomalous starting point by first trying to understand Cornelius Cardew's philosophical position circa 1974. It demonstrates Cardew's position that the revolutionary struggle is not simply part of the existing culture but that it defines the world as it exists. Cardew's use of the term bourgeois in Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is in reference to what he considers to be a bourgeois society, that is, a society where the workers are in the employ of capitalists who exert ideological influence on their subjects. Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is stylistically of its time, littered with the language of class warfare, of the enemy in the form of the bourgeoisie, of the decay and imminent collapse of imperialism. Stockhausen's work is assessed according to the broadest definition of the imperialist regime the cultural superstructure of the largest scale system of human oppression and exploitation the world has ever known.
