Review: Dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in East and West by Susan Buck-Moors

Submitted by Anon on 30 September, 2001 - 12:41

Stalinism and capitalism in the 20th century, according to Susan Buck-Morrs, were driven by parallel “dreamworlds”. “Stalin’s First and Second Five Year Plans amounted to the largest technological transfer in Western capitalist history... [Most] design and layout [of new factories]... was American, probably one-half of the equipment installed was German. Of this, a large amount was manufactured in Germany to American design on Soviet account. In quantity, American-built equipment was probably second and British third...”

It was paid for by selling artworks previously owned by the Russian aristocracy. One Raphael painting alone, now in the National Gallery in Washington DC, covered half the cost of the contract under which Arthur McKee and Co. of Cleveland built the new industrial city at Magnitogorsk.

Most movie screenings in the USSR up to 1930 were of foreign, mainly US films, while after 1930 the USSR film industry deliberately mimicked Hollywood techniques.
While capitalist states construct their “sovereignty” and their “wild zone of power” by counterposition against an enemy in space (other nation-states), Stalinist states, so Buck-Morss claims, construct theirs by counterposition against an enemy in time (the old capitalist world). The two systems were not only intertwined, but also “co-dependent” in their difference. “‘Good’ was defined as the other of the other... entwining them in a dialectical death embrace.”

After 1991 she watched the reintegration of Russia into the capitalist world market with horror. “Again and again, the scene was of new extremes of class difference. Chic women shopped at Western department stores and exclusive boutiques, while old women and veterans begged in pedestrian tunnels. The cavernous Institute of Philosophy where we continued to meet was half-deserted, as researchers took on several jobs to survive.”

She opposes the “standard wisdom that capitalism is desirable and inevitable, the normal natural arrangement of social life”, and “the myth that multinationals have the same rights to their ‘private’ property, consisting of the earth’s natural resources and society’s collective labour, as do individual citizens to a pair of shoes or a refrigerator”.

She wants to find space for new “oppositional cultural practices”. But, to find that new space, she feels she has to back out of the world of “industrial modernity”. A half-stated undercurrent in her argument is advocacy of small-scale, low-tech development against “the capitalist heavy-industry definition of economic modernisation”, which she indicts Stalinism for “adopting”. But how would she ever have got to Moscow to do her studies without heavy industry to produce the aircraft to get her there, and the metals and other materials for those aircraft?

Politically, her reason for some confidence about rescuing “the utopian hopes that modernity engendered”, amidst what she takes to be the definitive collapse of all the 20th century’s “mass utopias” and “dreamworlds”, is the idea that the collapse of Stalinism has also “taken away the unique formula for legitimating the peculiarly American form of domination. This special kind of imperialism that insists it is no imperialism cannot continue to exist if the political enemy ceases to exist”.

But arguments about enemies in space and enemies in time were never the material base of US capitalist, or Stalinist, power. In fact, the Vietnam war was justified to the US public as holding the line for the “free world” against the menacing future of “communism”, and US military action in the Gulf and ex-Yugoslavia has been legitimated as upholding a new human-rights world order against throwbacks from the past. Russia’s invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were justified to the bureaucratic elites (the only section of society the rulers might have bothered about justifying them to) as defending the space of the “socialist bloc” against threatened Western footholds and incursions.

A ruling class with solid material bases for its power will always construct a more-or-less adequate system of ideological hegemony — social existence determines consciousness, as Marx put it. US-led capitalist power will not crumble just because particular ideological devices have become obsolete.

Despite her professed Marxism, Buck-Morss reads history upside-down — with ideologies and rhetorics as the base, and material production as mere superstructure. Oddly, but logically, and despite her earnest desire to challenge “standard wisdom”, she also downgrades the power of critical thought to change society.

“For critical intellectuals from the East, the existence of a non-socialist West sustained the dream that there could be ‘normalcy’ in social life. For their counterparts in the West, the existence of the non-capitalist East sustained the dream that the Western capitalist system was not the only possible form of modern production. Of course we each knew that our hopes were not realised in any perfect way by the other side. But there mere fact of the existence of a different system was proof enough to allow us to think the dream possible...”

In other words, the collapse of the Cold War counterposition between capitalism and Stalinism has ruined, not capitalist ideological hegemony, but those whom Buck-Morss calls the “critical intellectuals”, i.e,. the salaried, tenured, university-accredited radicals.
It ruined them because they were not critical or intellectual enough. Not critical enough: their criticism was limited to counterposing one variant of established exploitative power to another. Because they did not have Marx’s notion of ideas becoming a material force when they grip the masses, they could operate only on the margin of accomplished facts.

Not intellectual enough: although at odd points in the book she notes sharp changes around the end of the 1920s, she assumes that the post-1930 system was a legitimate flower from the bud of the 1917 workers’ revolution. She seems to have read no Trotsky, citing him only at second hand. She does not mention the Left Opposition, or later writers such as Max Shachtman, Hal Draper, Joseph Carter, and CLR James — she ignores them.

Colin Foster

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