is "soviet nostalgia" an actually viable tool for socialist agitation in former eastern bloc states, what are your thoughts on it and the organisations which rely on it?
Socialism is inherently materialist. With other movements you'll see a reverence to some mythological past which is used to try to unify people (e.g. Italy and the Roman empire, Germany and the Volk, America and the 50s) which are all idealist. Socialism is about unifying people based on class. I think we need to move on from the soviet union and not try to romanticize it to try to make it some goal society should strive for. If the goal is becoming the soviet union, then we lose sight of dialectical materialism, why the soviet union developed the way it did, and how to learn from it as social scientists.
But is reverence the same as nostalgia? Sure, often nostalgia is an unclear yearning for the past, but it can have direct intent, and sometimes that yearning is related to the possibilities of the past had and that particular aspect still has merit for agitation, no? For this, I mean the possibilities of development provided by socialism. It is a fact that the situation for modern Eastern European countries is different, and the tactics should have differences, but if you're trying to argue for moving towards a socialist system, most would consider it a "return" due to having history with it. I'm not Eastern European, so I'm mostly speculating, but trying to detach from the soviet union and move on, to many laymen is the same as detaching from socialism, no? The goal wouldn't be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.
The goal wouldn't be returning to the USSR but returning to socialism.
Yea that would be the challenge in using nostalgia of the past. That being said I think it has some use in agitation, but it's more important to follow class dynamics and unify people based on class.
I also missed that the question was specific to Eastern Europe, so idk how strongly the Soviet Union affects the culture
You still can't rid of reverence of the past. USSR revered the Paris Commune, the Paris Commune revered the Jacobins, the Jacobins revered the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95.
There is a difference between revering it and using it as an example to learn from. Lenin was objective when it came to analyzing and learning from the Paris Commune. He may have had warm feelings towards it but his argument in state and revolution was to learn from it rather than try to acheive exactly as it did.
I'm so fucking tired of the "nostalgia" narrative. Any positive mention of past governments in post-communist states is framed this way, which only serves to invalidate those ideas, reduce them to rose-tinted glasses.
Instead of bringing freedom and prosperity, the regime change brought unimaginable suffering, caused millions of excess deaths, largest peacetime life expectancy drop, a gigantic proportion of population reduced to abject poverty, a country of 300 million thrust from first to thirld world overnight with entirely predictable human cost.
Outside of post-soviet states, nobody who's people went through this kind of trauma and loss is asked "awww, are you nostalgic for the times before millions died in vain? are you nostalgic for the times before widespread child prostitution, homelessness, ethnic cleansing, fratricidal wars, hyperinflation, crippling unemployment?"
Not a single person from a post-communist state gets to bring up the immense human cost of capitalism without someone chiming in to bring the word "nostalgia" into the discussion, because people are so conditioned to frame those discussions this way it's like an itch they have to scratch. And this is no matter whether the discussion happens in a post-communist state or in the West, both sides have been equally conditioned.
And I'm just so. fucking. tired of this shit.
The disastrous and illegal transition back to capitalism is blamed as a failure of communism. Capitalism is treated as a natural state of humanity, and all suffering within it is because we just aren't doing it hard enough, or completely justified for failing The Line.
In my country nazbols are quite successful using this. Communist party is afraid to say anything publicly, i guess bcs the aggression from media and power structures would be strong
What’s your country
Why not, but then again, this is only good for a population that is decreasing with time aka pensioners.
Most East European parties are smart enough to maintain a system of pension to satisfy this portion of the electoral population (see Fico's ''socialist party'', Orban's Party, Serbian progressive party and Serbian ''socialist'' party).
If you are going to sell this to the GenX, it's not going to happen since they were the one who toppled the regime.
If you are selling this to the youth (if they didn't left already), the soviet experience is so abstract that it's useless.
Soviet nostalgia and ostalgie are both popular with people who could be nostalgic for that era, which is people who were at least young adults more than 30 years ago. This is a demographic that the European right has very much bought off. It's something to play on, but it's not something you rely on.
I mean, I catch myself falling for Soviet nostalgia crap that ends up in the West a lot, despite having been born long after the dissolution, but like, the Western left as a whole has a Soviet obsession and Eastern Bloc nostalgia problem. Lot of Western communists who didn't live through the Cold War but miss it anyway, along with those who did live through it and miss when just being a communist was in and of itself revolutionary and dangerous and Doing Something. People who love Soviet aesthetics and still want Red Dawn to actually happen, instead of having to lead a local revolution and take local culture and material conditions into account.
So, this might not work that well in the actual former Warsaw Pact... but it sure as hell works in countries that were on the other side of the Cold War.
Especially on the ostalgie train I think you can look at it in real time not working the fuck out precisely because "look at what we've lost" is much more fascist than communist at it's core. Like for everyone in germany who posts or talks about how the GDR was fairly progressive on queer rights for it's time or whatever you get about 10 times the amount of people who want to build the wall back up but this time it shoots brown people.
Yep
Nostalgia is inherently reactionary. Nowhere to go but forward. Makes for nice art sometimes though...
Two guys who definitely got on super well and agreed on stuff
Tsar Nicholas and Stalin....two very big very beautiful men. They didn't do the same things but they sure got them done.
That is... Very strange. But also not that surprising. Lot of Russian "past power and glory" nostalgia relies on the Orthodox church and tsarism just as much as it relies on Stalin era USSR or post Great Patriotic War Soviet nationalism.
I'm far from an expert but having been traveling through eastern Europe lately i would say absolutely not. The attitude I've seen is mostly that the soviets did some good things but overwhelmingly had a negative impact on the countries culture and history. And the most recent living memories are obviously of the end of that era when corruption was much more common than communist ideals even though things were still done in the name of the party.
The issue you have with soviet nostalgia in eastern europe is that it appeals to the 40+ who are culturally backwards on social issues. In order to keep their 40+ audiences the communists lean into some of that, in part because a good chunk of their groups are filled with older people with that nostalgia.
The problem with this is that the young are significantly less culturally and socially backwards. Many younger people end up being attracted to pro-europe groups and liberal social/cultural policy because of this.
You can not appeal to both audiences simultaneously. Either you appeal to the old with their socially backwards views and nostalgia, or you appeal to the young with their socially progressive views and lose the old. The problem is that the old won't just go on to stop existing, they will organise among themselves as communists and continue to cause an association between socially backwards views and communism. This in turn will continue to make attracting younger people hard.
we should focus our agitprop and work towards the youth of our countries instead of a group of people who ultimately will go "extinct" soon.
I personally think the old probably need to go extinct first before the pendulum will swing hard towards attracting the young. Their very existence is a barrier because you can't stop them continuing to do the work they do that currently keeps communists in that space of only appealing to older people in these countries.
The majority of the youth in Europe is also socially backwards ,just cause a lot of them aren’t homophobic doesn’t mean they aren’t fascists
A lot of them want to mass deport or starvation up murder migrants
Just cause they fly pride flags doesn’t make them socially backwards comrade ,yes the old generation also is but the point stands
For all their flaws, they achieved something that was truly progressive in a society that not too long before was backward and full of violence. It was a mark of progress for humanity. We can and should accept all that and still admit its flaws and mistakes.
Do not let anyone erase that achievement. Do not let anyone convince you that the Soviet Union was a defective system that no longer has any relevance to our society today. Do not let anyone rewrite history. You’ll find yourself fighting an even worse uphill battle if you concede on these grounds.
The swing from Czarist Russia to the Soviet Union must have been the biggest cultural whiplash ever felt. They achieved something truly envious.
Like, waking up to an All vegan USA with forced trans ops
Agreed, but is that necessarily the same as nostalgia? Uphold the USSR resolutely and absolutely, but it may not be the most effective political strategy to say "let's go back!".
Agree, nostalgia is a tool of reaction. It will backfire if that’s how you recruit support.