I’m about a quarter of the way through The Dispossessed, and I’m pretty disappointed so far. It seems like a flat character expounding on the virtues of Anarcho-syndicalism, but I just have a hard time believing it.
It honestly reminds me of Atlas Shrugged. It’s this ideal world where an idealist system works, and it’s hard to make it believable.
Maybe I’m just a hater. I guess I shouldn’t have an opinion until I finish it.
I remember how Lenin hated “futurists” and ordered them to be chased off from cultural institutions because they did produced idealist visions.
That honestly makes sense!
Yes, and on several different levels. It was something like 1921, RSFSR was just picking it up from the civil war, half of party was up in arms because NEP looked like regress to them and at the same point the famine hit hard, everything was in real danger of falling apart and Lenin was again like “MORE GRAIN” just like in 1917.
And in this political climate the previously pacified machists led by Bogdanov and Lunacharsky again tried to smuggle their ideology into the marxism using proletkult, and much of remaining dissident intelligence gathered around them.
The immediate problem with futurists then is that they either purposefully or unwittingly hit the worst possible time for their visions. Note how later, after situation stabilised the futurism stopped being unwelcomed and when USSR caught up with science to the west, even sci-fi was encouraged to the point USSR scene was very popular and developed.
I’m not super knowledgable about the history of the Russian revolution, but now I’m imagining this guy in civil war era USSR:
Wh-what happened to his face?
But yeah this guy and his bro would surely be one of the aristocratic-bourgeois parasites on the soviet science. Or more likely, just fucked off to the west with the rest of the guys.
Also about the Bogdanov in question, remember the famous photo of Lenin having a gamer moment playing chess on Capri with Gorky in the background? Alexander Bogdanov is the guy with whom he was playing.
Actually he did had some significant role here and now for the bolsheviks and was never ultimately purged despite being admonished several times and even arrested once. His mistake was his bourgeoise scholar ambition, he tried to make his own philosophical system “empiriomonism”, but it was just regurgitation of machism into marxism and russian conditions and ultimately just a bastardisation of dialectical materialism, and he was dunked out heavily by Lenin for that. Unfortunately, he was pretty good at presenting that so he had many followers and at grown into one of the most significant crisis in the party around 1909.
Was empiriomonism what Lenin was responding to with Materialsm and Empiriocriticism?
Exactly, Bogdanov was the main guy on the recieving end of that absolute burn.