We're All Socialists Now

People today are cyborgs—half human, half communist. Notwithstanding the collapse of formal communism, socialism has changed people beyond recognition. We’re all socialists now.

We’re all utilitarians; We all believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people, whenever possible. We all support progress. We all like the future. We’re all cosmopolitans. We all believe in brotherhood or sisterhood. We’re all feminists.

We want women to be doctors and lawyers. We’re all opposed to bigotry and anti-Semitism. We all support universal education, universal literacy, and free housing for everyone. We want everybody to have a job and a house. We support abortion rights; we support equality and social justice and anti-colonialism. We like hard work. We like workers. We want workers to get ahead in life.

We want the children of workers to have every opportunity, to become whatever they want to become. We love social mobility. We love the idea of a pig farmer becoming our political leader. We believe in the productive capacity of the industrial revolution. We love machines and technology and electricity and industrial power. We’re into engineers.

We want modernization at all costs. We like to plan, to map, to design, to create, and to build. We want to make things. We want to invent things. We want government to wither away once and for all. We’re against exploitation and lazy fat cats. We want solidarity, fraternity, and happiness. We want better, more meaningful art and literature and culture.

We hate fascism. We like fairness. We think people can get better and will get better. We think that men and women today are better than men and women of the past. They are stronger, smarter, and bigger. We like heroes. We believe that men and women who are born fifty years from now will be better than we are. They’ll be more rational, less emotional. We’ll look like troglodytes to our descendants.

We want our children to believe in something bigger and better than village or clan or tribe or race. We like community. We want utopia now.

Nostalgia

Nick's sad, loan post touched on an interesting theme, nostalgia for the Soviet Union. In Russia itself, a wide segment of Soviet Soviet is obviously nostalgic for the Soviet past, even or especially Stalinism. One wonders how this could be possible, but history always has winners and losers and so perhaps it's not especially surprising that some current losers would hearken back to a time when they or the people they identify with were higher up in the pecking order.

One can't completely condemn those in Stalin's hometown, or in Georgia in general, who take some pride in the largeness of Stalin's legacy, for good or evil. Then there is the nostalgia born of traumatic experience. People obviously get stuck in a time that was somehow more important than other times. World War II by itself, the Great Patriotic War, was a horrific event, but one understands that its survivors must view later life as somehow less real than the war years. Moreover, survivors must want to stay in touch with a time when many of their loved ones still lives. The tragedy itself probably invites people to stay rooted to the moment of loss.

There's a whole literature of nostalgia that explains how this process works. This literature suggests that modernity and instability and radical change--see Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air--lead to greater levels and more ac cute forms of nostalgia. Of course, the post-Soviet experience with economic shock treatments, political disintegration, gangsterism, and unbridled capitalism naturally lead to nostalgia. To use the title of one book on American nostalgia, Russians probably miss "the way things never were."

And, to be fair, there probably are a few things that are worth missing, such as relative economic equality, political stability, international power and prestige, and visions of a communist utopia that was always on the horizon. To a lesser extent, it's also interesting to reflect upon nostalgia in the West. As Nick says, CCCP gear are back in vogue. I suspect this Western nostalgia will grow and the Cold War becomes more surreal, Stalin's crimes more distant, etc.

And perhaps we do have some things to mourn in terms of international system stability and some form of perceived alternative to the existing economic or cultural system in the West.