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One day I will write about the American imaginary of socialism, because it is something else. And it permeates my life as the daughter of a red diaper NYC Jewish culture whose family even emigrated BACK to Russia in the 1930s to become full Communists.
And then growing up with Communist Party members as close friends. And finally going to Eastern Europe with my imaginary and interviewing people and hitting a record scratch moment.
What fascinates me at the moment is the aesthetics of imaginary socialism in America. Both nostalgic and speculative. And who finds that aesthetic inspiring, who finds it threatening, and who finds it infantile. It's possible it is all these things at once.
The *best critiques of capitalism, I've found, come from people who came to it from socialism. They know precisely what's wrong with our system.
But they also have a low tolerance for people with Che shirts, hammer and sickle in their bios, and so on.
I mean, to a certain age group who wound up on the wrong side of whatever soviet satellite regime, a hammer and sickle is the symbol of what killed their family members. But people toss it around here like it's nothing. And that will never again not bother me.
You can't abstract those symbols to what it meant to people. Just like you can't exactly recuperate the swastika. It's foolish to try. So while we're talking language to bring people in to supporting social programs and ending state brutality, bear that in mind.
Anyway, my book about Slovakia's transition from Soviet satellite to EU member is below if you want to learn more. But I need to write the other side of the story: What we Americans continue to think socialism is. https://upittpress.org/books/9780822960010/
But if you are interested in how these countries are reckoning with their own history, might I recommend the Czech serial "The Sleepers" on HBO and the Slovak movie "The Teacher" (2017).
And this is a great new book on post-Soviet Hungary: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501750182/remains-of-socialism/
But notice the biggest feature of Communist Party rule was that people didn't talk. You could take the bus from one end of town to the other. Nobody talked. Nobody smiled. (they did both in their own houses.) There is an affect that distinctly belonged to the times. Chilling.
On the aesthetics of socialism, Ione of my Slovak interlocutors showed me a statue of a worker and said. “Because that was the best thing you could be: a worker.” He had been sent to tech school to be an electrician. After revolution he became what he wanted: a history prof.
And every time in this political cycle in America I hear “worker” celebrated over any other form of being, the image I have is if my friend and that statue.
I also think about my other friend who wasn’t allowed to go to med school bc his aunt had defected. Also sent to tech school. His father (physicist) lost his job at the main uni and was given low level position in tech university, but not allowed to give exams.
Obviously these are the nightmares that the right wing here wants to invoke when the scream “socialism!” to scare people off from funding public schools and health care—which are routine features of capitalist and mixed economies everywhere but here.
And every time the right wing here caricatures socialism, the left springs up to reframe it in an image of everything that we here lack, (public services) and everything good, and I imagine my former Slovak interlocutors and their experience, captured in none of it.
The elevation of "productivity" as the ultimate value to which a human life can aspire is absolutely the same in socialism and capitalism, and people could spend a little more time meditating on how messed up that is.
