Communist Utopia Research Articles

The Bethel Colony: Intersections of Culture and Built Form in a Bible Communist Utopia

This article assumes that there is a relationship between the sociocultural structures of a culture and the built form it creates and examines some intersections between the two at the Bethel Colony, a nineteenth-century Bible Communist utopian settlement. First, Bethel's history is traced. Next, five elements of its culture are examined: religious beliefs, ethnic origins, political structure, attitude toward the nuclear family, and economic organization. In the third section, the history of Bethel's built form is reconstructed. Finally, the impact of the cultural elements on the architecture and site planning of Bethel are explored. While ethnic origin and political structure can be shown to have affected the built form, this article argues that it is economic organization that had the most profound impact. Bethel's unique economic combination of the communal and the individual, expressed in ways such as the communalization of traditionally male work while traditionally female work remained individualized, is reflected in its built form at all levels from architectural detail to site planning.

PRAWO W UTOPII KOMUNISTYCZNEJ. ZARYS PROBLEMATYKI

LAW IN THE COMMUNIST UTOPIA. AN OUTLINE OF TOPIC Summary The Communist Utopia is strictly connected with the philosophical concepts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. It is based on historical and dialectical materialism, which were later developed by younger philosophers who created Communist ideology. The scientific character of Communism was stressed and they claimed that it is possible to reach Communism, which will be the highest achievement of social development of progressive mankind. According to XI thesis about Ludwig Feuerbach “the philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways, but the clue problem is to change the world”. In order to change the world law was supposed to be used, because the philosophers claimed that it is easier to create a new man and new world than to adapt the system to people. The transition to Communism, with its first phase called „real socialism”, was connected with the fight of classes, which was supposed to be sharper and sharper. In this fight the law had to be both sword and shield on the way to Communism. The law was used as a tool in this fight against „relics of capitalism” such as: counter-revolution, imperialism, non-socialist attitude towards ownership and labor, nationalistic prejudices, religion and many other relics of capitalism. The Communist ideology presumed that reaching the power would be achieved by the revolution. In political and legal practice the ideology was totalitarian. The Communist system has elaborated its own theory of state and law, according to which the law was regarded as a tool for rulers, who wanted to achieve their own goals (often Utopian). The revolutionary movement tried to preserve the changes by binding law. As a result of it the law was instrumentally treated by the regime, which itself was above the law. The Communism, which as a presumption was not Utopian, has occurred to be anti-Utopian (so called negative Utopia). According to Leszek Kołakowski, the Communism was a “total lie” from the beginning. The highest point of the Communist Utopia was a presumption that at the end of the revolution the state and law will not be necessary any more. The non-class society will reach Communist paradise on the earth.

Crimes of Democratic Kampuchea: Megacrimes and the Criminological Imagination

The story of the Cambodian hemoclysm or bloodbath, its causes and evolution, have been documented and accounted for by a sustained and critical scholarship. We draw on this literature to account for the extreme lethality of the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). First, we briefly outline the scale of the violence during DK and then describe the phases, patterns and surges of violence against different ‘classes’ of victims that occurred with the implementation of the DK’s nation building plans, and in doing so offer a sketch of the DK’s short-lived attempt to create a communist utopia. Then we situate our criminological analysis in terms of the struggle to define mega-crime and mass violence, and the limitations of current criminological theories. Next, we outline the explanatory contribution of both macro-level and micro-level criminological theories about the causes of extreme violence, and how these aid us in understanding how individuals and the DK regime were able to implement terror and repeatedly perform acts of murder. We conclude by re-examining the likely causes of this catastrophic surge in mass violence, and argue that although ample precursors of such violence are evident in Cambodia’s history, the convergence of a multitude of adverse external and internal factors combined with the particular form of radical Maoist policies imbued with indigenous over-confidence produced a perfect storm of violence.

Revolutionary Russian Art Practice and Redefinition of the Russian Avant-Garde: Totalitarian Avant-Garde Project

In this article, we will focus on the relation between art revolution and social revolution in Russia at the beginning of the XX century. The key issues in the article are the place and the role of avant-garde art in society and the social organisation of the upcoming totalitarian regime. Interpreting artistic strategies and methods of the Russian revolutionary practice, we hypothesise how an alliance of avant-garde artists and political revolutionaries has originated, how long it lasted and how it looked. Art and social utopias of the Russian avant-garde were different from the totalitarian Communist utopia. This paper emphasises what compromises were necessary for the survival of the alliance of avant-garde and totalitarian regimes.

Los diagramas históricos de Leonardo Padura

This article discusses two novels by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura (El hombre que amaba a los perros y La novela de mi vida ) which do not belong to the police cycle of the character Mario Conde but who share various both structural and thematic aspects that facilitate the joint examination. Both novels work with biographical and empirical material and set ambitious perspectives on the history of Cuba, starting from the degradation of the Communist utopia and of the liberal project of independence, respectively. In that sense, the two novels connect with the large narrative projects of the boom Latin American of the second half of the century XX (withAlejo Carpentier, especially), but offering a post-utopian vision in which the decline of the Communismi s even more intense that the of the nationalism.

Liberal Possibilities in a Communist Utopia: Minority Voices and Historical Consciousness in Morris's News from Nowhere

Since the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, utopian texts have often featured extended dialogues between a displaced visitor and a knowledgeable resident. Frequently didactic in tone...

Political Discourse and Artistic Fiction in Utopian Reality Representation

In Russian and Western literary studies, the peculiarity of Russian culture is often considered through the prism of Utopia. This article discusses the formation of an utopian metagenre in Russian fiction, tracing a change in emphasis from the political discourse to artistic means, and, conversely, archetypes that distinguish utopian world-modelling in different cultural epochs. Perhaps there is no better term than “Utopia” to characterize modern literature, where the avant-garde Utopias anticipate global communist Utopia that was formalized in artistic creativity through the theory of socialist realism, which in the 1950–1960s was replaced by retrospective Utopia of “the villagers” in the diversity of author’s variants and technocratic Utopias of the “youth prose”. In this paradigm the place of postmodernism as a set of techniques used for opposing Utopian intentions is determined by the role of anti-Utopia.

Doing Gender Justice as a Mission Imperative

Announcement of the kingdom of God The gospel of Luke describes John the Baptist going throughout Jordon, proclaiming a baptism of repentance: "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight'" (Luke 3: 4-5). When the people ask John, "What then should we do?" John doesn't moralize, but responds proactively: "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher, what should we do?" He said to them, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages." (Luke 3: 11-14) In other words, to prepare the path for God's kingdom is to actively do justice and destroy the consequences of the sin. What we have in the words of John the Baptist is an expression of Christological eschatology, i.e. the kingdom of God is going to be given to us as a gift, but at the same time we have been called to "make the path smooth" in our acceptance of the gift. In that sense, eschaton is God-human endeavour, the kingdom that we're awaiting from God is anticipated and expressed in history through the praxis of human beings that should iconize the new eon. In Gustavo Gutierrez's words, "The hope which overcomes death must be rooted in the heart of historical praxis; if this hope doesn't take shape in the present to lead it forward, it will be only an evasion, a futuristic illusion." (1) Christological eschatology means one important thing: it is divine-human synergy, just as Christ has divine-human nature as defined by the ecumenical council of Chalcedon. It isn't a communist utopia in which heaven on earth will be brought about by the proletariat, or a utopia of Zealots during the time of Jesus that human will is capable of bringing kingdom of God. We sometimes forget this truth and make ourselves passive in history through the expectation that God will do everything exclusively. We forget sometimes that "from the very beginning Christianity was socially minded. The whole fabric of Christian existence is social and corporate. All Christian sacraments are intrinsically 'social sacraments,' i.e., sacraments of incorporation ... To build up the church of Christ means, therefore, to build up a new society and, by implication, to re-build human society on a new basis." (2) The New Testament reveals the kingdom of God as a new mode of relationship, a new quality of life. The kingdom is proclaimed when the sick and the poor are healed, when the dead are resurrected, when the disenfranchised are accepted, when abundance of food is offered to many, when justice, love, peace, harmony, and solidarity rule (Matt. 4:23, 5:10, 25:34; Luke 9:2, 9:12-18; Rom. 14:17; 1 Cor. 6:9). Let's look at the words from the beginning of the liturgy in the Orthodox Church: "Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Through these opening words, the liturgy is supposed to open up toward the eschatological kingdom, "a progressive movement towards the fullness of the kingdom of Christ, toward His cosmic and historical triumph." (3) The kingdom of God should be manifested in all of its social implications through historical limitations. It means that the liturgy should not reflect a patriarchal mode of relationship, the degradation of women,4 * disregard of lay people/ and inaccessibility for the sick and elderly. Primacy should be given to these issues that collide with the values of God's kingdom. Genesis 3:16 argues that man should rule over woman, but this verse comes as a consequence of the sin--the fall. This verse only expresses how the male-female relationship has been lived or conducted in our communities where the ideology of men rules, and not God's given/original order. …

Orientalist modes of modernism in architecture : Colonial/Postcolonial/Soviet

This article aims to propose a comparative analysis of modernism in architecture, which appeared at the end of the 19th and especially during the 20th century in colonial Maghreb, postcolonial India and Soviet Central Asia. Building on the notion of double bind, we attempt to explore the contradictory role that modernism played in the modernisation of the way of life in the “ Oriental peripheries ” of old colonial empires to better understand the peculiarity of the Soviet experience. We find in it some phenomena close to colonial and postcolonial modernist practices, as well as other potentialities inherent in the Communist utopia.

Forgotten voices of Mao's great famine, 1958-1962: an oral history

In 1958, China’s revered leader Mao Zedong instituted a program designed to transform his giant nation into a Communist utopia. Called the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s grand scheme—like so many other utopian dreams of the 20th century—proved a monumental disaster, resulting in the mass destruction of China’s agriculture, industry, and trade while leaving large portions of the countryside forever scarred by man-made environmental disasters. The resulting three-year famine claimed the lives of more than 45 million people in China. In this remarkable oral history of modern China’s greatest tragedy, survivors of the cataclysm share their memories of the devastation and loss. The range of voices is wide: city dwellers and peasants, scholars and factory workers, parents who lost children and children who were orphaned in the catastrophe all speak out. Powerful and deeply moving, this unique remembrance of an unnecessary and unhindered catastrophe illuminates a dark recent history that remains officially unacknowledged to this day by the Chinese government and opens a window on a society still feeling the impact of the terrible Great Famine.

How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999

How Difficult It Is to Be God: Shining Path’s Politics of War in Peru, 1980-1999

New socialist cities: foreign architects in the USSR 1920–1940

The creation of a Communist society between 1917 and 1939 implied the concomitant establishment of a non-capitalist economy and a non-bourgeois culture and lifestyle. In terms of the rhetoric used at the time, the Communist utopia was based on confidence in the beneficial impact of science, technology, planning and management. This necessarily presupposed alternative (new) town planning concepts, a reformed building industry, a new housing typology, and new management styles. Solutions for this mission were expected to come from foreign (mostly German) engineers, architects, and town planners who were invited to the USSR to realize the Communist utopia during the first Five-Year Plan (1928–1933).

Crise, convite para a ação e um Manifesto Comunista

A atual crise do capitalismo produziu, além da desorganização das economias, redução do crescimento econômico, falências de empresas, queima de valores incomensuráveis, desemprego, redução de salários, suicídios, e também efeitos de outra natureza: uma corrida atrás de autores de pensamento crítico. O filósofo Slavoj Žižek escreveu um texto no qual faz uma crítica radical ao liberalismo clássico e contemporâneo e retoma a utopia comunista. Se a democracia eleitoral constitui o instrumento pelo qual a burguesia preserva o controle sobre a sociedade, um evento revolucionário precisa criar meios pelos quais os sujeitos da revolução possam tornar real a noção de emancipação. Após efetuar a crítica da democracia por ser a "ditadura da burguesia", retoma a noção de ditadura do proletariado em seu lugar. Entretanto, para quem viveu mais de 20 anos sob a ditadura militar brasileira, essa questão está longe de ser satisfatoriamente resolvida, dado que ditadura é ditadura, independentemente do adjetivo que a acompanha.

The Troubling Persistence of Race in Pharmacogenomics

This article is concerned about what may be happening to race and medicine in the "meantime" between today's clinical realities and the promised land of pharmacogenomics where the need for using race in medicine is supposed to fade away. It argues that previous debates over the use of race in medicine are being side-stepped as race is being reconfigured from a "crude surrogate" for genetic variation into a purportedly viable placeholder for variable drug response--to be used here and now until the specific genetic underpinnings of drug response are more fully understood. Embracing the trope of "promise" in pharmacogenomics alongside the idea of using race as a useful interim proxy for genetic variation raises concerns that new diagnostic and therapeutic interventions may reflect or be mapped upon existing social categories of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in a harmful or dangerous manner. At the most basic level, the politics of the meantime in pharmacogenomics may be promoting the scientifically unjustified and socially dangerous recasting of race as a social and historical construct into a reified genetic category.

Stalinism - A Metamorphosis of Liberalism or Marx - The Last of the Liberals?

Liberalism was born as a utopia against monarchy and religion; it became the ideology of capitalism. This essay sets out that Marx's thought is above all a criticism of capitalism, and therefore it also represents the utopia corresponding to capitalism, described as a communist utopia, the main thrust of which relates to social relations within capitalism. In this way he could be consider as a liberal. It is why Stalinism is more an avatar of liberalism rather than a Marxian heritage.

Remarx

What relationships can be formed between labor and liberty when labor is no longer necessarily experienced as the social indicator of alienation from liberty in the economy? It was Marx who first painstakingly developed these issues, formulating the theory of two reigns, that of necessity and that of liberty, within the context of the communist Utopia. Nonetheless, his positioning of the problem entailed a whole series of ambiguities. In basing ourselves on André Gorz's analyses, we will demonstrate the dependence of all thought about liberation on a philosophy of liberty that assumes, or fails to assume, a certain irreducible depth of any human collective, an inevitable heteronomy of the human condition.

« Le règne de la nécessité » borne-t-il l'émancipation sociale ?

Résumé Quels rapports peuvent se nouer entre travail et liberté, dès lors que le travail n’est plus essentiellement vécu comme la marque sociale de l’aliénation de la liberté dans l’économie ? C’est Marx qui élabore pour la première fois et avec beaucoup de rigueur cette question, en formulant la théorie des deux règnes, celui de la nécessité et celui de la liberté dans le cadre de l’utopie communiste. Pour autant, sa position du problème n’est pas sans maintenir toute une série d’ambiguïtés. En nous appuyant sur les analyses contrastées de Simone Weil et d’André Gorz, nous montrons la dépendance de toute pensée de l’émancipation vis-à-vis d’une philosophie de la liberté qui assume (Gorz) ou qui n’assume pas (Weil) une certaine épaisseur irréductible de tout collectif humain, c’est-à-dire une indépassable hétéronomie de la condition humaine.

Russian myth and the Communist Utopia (novel M N in the context of creativity Zamyatin)

AbstractIn Russia after 'Perestroika' Zamiatin's We was often published in collections with Huxley and Orwell's novels, all of them banned in the Soviet period and generically related as anti-utopian. Though thus situated in the broad context of world literature, We remains unexplained in Russian literary tradition where Zamiatin's work belongs to the line of Gogol, Leskov, Remizov, i.e. those prose writers who were steeped in the Russian myth and whose verbal richness and variety of colloquial tone called forth a special critical term – skaz. How could it be that one of them wrote a novel about the future separated from Russian roots and in a language unified to the point of obliteration? In his earlier stories Zamiatin explored traditional life as he knew it from his own experience (A Provincial Tale, A Godforsaken Hole); even then he preferred not to describe but to distort reality, to make it speak up for itself. In Alatyr' Zamiatin made a decisive step towards a new manner when he challenged the Russian myth with a utopian dream of the bright and universally happy future. We came out as another experiment in mass consciousness, but this time inspired by the writer's response to the new revolutionary reality.

Reassessing the Communist utopia? Eurocommunists at the mirror of „developed socialism“

Reassessing the Communist utopia? Eurocommunists at the mirror of „developed socialism“

From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Birth of the Third Hungarian Republic 1988-2001. Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, 135. East European Monographs, 722 by Ignác Romsics (review)

REVIEWS 577 English language, he deserves to be lavished with praise for persuading such a distinguished line-up of authors to contribute. Indeed, themerit of the book lies as much inwho has written the chapters as in any of the actual contents. Amongst the best contributions are those written by Poul Skytte Christoffersen who was Denmark's Ambassador to theEU from 1995 to 2003. In a series of chapters, he charts the process of accession, through all of its twistsand turns from the Copenhagen European Council in 1993when the eponymous criteria were promulgated to the summit in the same city nine years laterwhere negotiations were concluded and the ten stateswere almost home and dry (the accession treaties stillhad to be signed and ratified).He highlights how the process was affected not just by the preferences, strategies and tactics of the EU and accession states' negotiating teams, but also some of the internal differences between theMember States. Many of the challenges were common to all the accession states, but some of the thorniest issues were specific to each case, often related to sensitive sectors of their respective economies such as steel and shipyards. In the case of Lithuania, for example, Petras Austrevicius examines two of the issues which dominated the accession of his country: Kaliningrad and the Ignalia nuclear power plant. The solution to the latter enshrined in theAccession Treaty involved an acceptance of the need to decommission in return for the EU providing a generous compensation package worth 285 million in the first two years alone. Although the country chapters are full of the less than exhilarating detail associated with the acquis,most are brightened up by the occasional vignette. Telicka and Bartak, for example, remind us that even in the late 1990s laws had to be flown from Prague to Brussels and back on paper. Moreover, Streimann's chapter recounts how a solution to the thorny issue of the incompatibility of the Estonian corporate tax regime with EU rules was resolved over lunch between Prime Minister Kallas and EU Commissioner Verheugen. Vassiliou's edited volume provides valuable insights into the storyof acces sion. Although not offering any theoretical innovations, the impressive team of contributors have served up a rich set of ingredients and hence provide an abundance of raw material for future conceptualization. Scholars not just of EU enlargement, but of theEuropean Union more broadly, not only need to find space on their crowded shelves forThe Accession Story,they need to read it. Centre for Russian andEast European Studies European Research Institute, Universityof Birmingham T. Haughton Romsics, Ign?c. FromDictatorship to Democracy: The Birth of the ThirdHungarian Republic 1988-2001. Atlantic Studies on Society in Change, 135. East European Monographs, 722. Social Science Monographs and Adantic Research and Publications, Boulder, CO and Highland Lakes, NJ, 2007. 462 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Selected bibliography. Indexes. $60.00. 578 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 2010 The sudden collapse of the Communist utopia in 1989 was the thirdmajor turning point in the twentieth century when the events in the zone between Western Europe and the Russian heardand had very wide repercussions. Two nations, the Poles and theHungarians, were the pioneers in overturning the Communist dominoes, but while the march of Solidarity to victory is well-documented, very little isavailable inEnglish on thepeaceful and smooth 'system change' inHungary. The Lawful Revolution in Hungary, 1989?94, edited by B?la . Kir?ly and Andr?s Boz?ki (Boulder, CO, 1995), also in the present series,was a collection of essays by many authors, most ofwhom stood close to the then governing coalition, and the resultwas a rather one-sided picture. Ign?c Romsics, one of the leading Hungarian historians, and a prolific one, was the first to produce a comprehensive account in Hungarian: Volt egyszeregyrendszerv?lt?s (Budapest, 2003). The book reviewed is its unrevised translation. The tide is somewhat misleading about the period covered: Romsics gives a succinct and balanced account of the external and internal antecedents going back to the 1960s, but the story ends rather arbitrarily in 1991. The epilogue, which summarizes the following ten years, provides little more than an item in Wikipedia. Admittedly it is difficult for a historian towrite...