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Soviet ‘Zeitgeist’: Critique of the Post-Industrial Society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
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The Soviet discovery of the approach of postindustrial society is not an incidental one. Since converging trends are observed in both capitalist and communist economic systems, the inclusion of macroplanning and more significant activity of the public sector could not be left unnoticed by the Soviet authors. For if convergence is viewed as a “capitalist policy” toward integration, postindustrialism stresses behaviorism with an accent on the consumer demand whose outlook became subject to extended modernization and technical acceptance of societal transformation. Soviet observers claim that in the capitalist environment, objective economic principles are replaced by purely biological determinants, because technocracy and consumerism are the very functional representatives of oncoming social values. Parenthetically then, planning and welfare-state designs are modes to “socialize” capitalism, since the two systems, as western economists claim, possess common values in terms of dynamic growth with no particular doctrine of implementation. Therefore, capitalism not only enforced hybridization of two ideologies, it became a virtual variant of socialism, converging around an industrial nucleus with increased participation of the public sector. Thus, capitalist convergence and revisionism in certain socialist countries are inbred, because by recognizing certain Marxian truisms but by ignoring class struggle, western societies approximate reinterpretation of Marx in the eastern bloc. The latter is a direct contradiction of the Soviet aim of establishing a classless, community-oriented society.
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References
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