The Books of My Life: Revolutionary Dreams

 

Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) explores utopianism and experimentalism in the Soviet Union from the era of relative cultural, economic, and political openness of the Lenin era to the era of increasing cultural, economic, and political closedness of the early years of Stalinism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Along the way Stites addresses the seemingly eternal and ideologically driven question associated with many academics and public policy polemicists, namely was there a difference between Leninism and Stalinism. Stites marshals a host of cultural evidence to argue that indeed there was a difference between Leninism and Stalinism.

Stites traces Soviet utopianism and experimentalism to the utopianism, experimentalism, and iconoclasm of the mid-and late 19th century Russian intelligentsia, people, and state, a utopianism and experimentalism that was conservative, reactionary, Slavophilic, Christian, monarchist, militarist, and socialist. He explores how these various forms of utopianism and experimentalism took cultural, symbolic, ritual, aesthetic, architectural, and everyday life, forms in such missionary oriented social movements as futurism, populism, science fiction, cooperativism, collectivism (by the way, cooperatism and collectivism, as Stites notes are distinct phenomena though anti-communist and anti-Soviet polemicismts and apologists tend to elide this empirical distinction), and Taylorism-Fordism. Each of these social and cultural movements, Stites argues, tried to create new Soviet men and women, a new Soviet culture with new symbols, rituals, gestures, and living spaces, a new Soviet economy, and a new Soviet state from 1917 to the 1930s. This openness to various cultural movements ended, Stites argues, when Stalin instituted a new Soviet state, economy, and culture grounded in militarist and Taylorist-Fordist culture (functionalism) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, establishing an official "new" Soviet civil religion or public and civic cult (substantivism) in the process.

Stites's book should be essential reading for anyone interested in culture, cultural history, historical sociology, sociological history, and Soviet history. His book shows once again how important culture is in the study of humans, how meanings get institutionalised and made official by elites, and how, like the US and the nations of Western Europe, the USSR came to be dominated by a modernity in which bureaucratisation and conformity were central to social and cultural life. Revolutionary Dreams is an important and seminal work that I can't recommended more highly.

Musings on Utopianism and Social Engineering

For philosopher, social critic, and critic of Marxism Leszek Kolakowski, the utopian idea of human fraternity was disastrous as a political programme even though it and the optimism and hope associated with it was indispensable to human life. I would have to agree with Kolakowski (and Lev Tolstoy before him) on one level, so much utopianism in the modern West is potentially if not inherently dangerous to human health. This social engineering of human life utopianism goes far beyond the Marxist tradition Kolakowski was critical of, however.

Yes, Bolshevism mixed an alchemical brew of utopianism, paternalism, and Comteanism (the academic mentality?). But you can also find the same alchemical mix in the neo-liberalism of those who seem to believe that capitalism will bring us to the promised land of endless wealth and consumption.

So, social engineers who believe they know the direction of history or the science of society share visions of utopias dancing in their heads. Ironically another movement shares much with these "secular" social engineers. But that movement is not so secular.

Fundamentalisms of all varieties of religious stripes and colours share a utopianism and a paternalism with the Enlightenment movements mentioned above. Where "secular" utopians and "religious" utopians differ is in their epistemology (a postmodernist might argue that there is, semiologically, no difference at all). Secular utopians find their authority in science, social science, or the humanities. Religious utopians find it in divine revelation. Both, to me, are equally paternalistic. Both, to me, are equally utopian. And both, to me, are equally dangerous.

As for human hope, I am reminded of the relevant verses of Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" of 1932 and 1933. I have to wonder whether hope is possible in a world where globalism has strengthened the hegemonic control of oligarchs in the core nation world and where digital communications have taken misinformation, disinformation, anti-intellectualism, and demagoguery to new heights...