Lecture
20 Apr 2021 · 9.00 am

Matthias Schwartz: The limits of communism. Imaginations of progress and society in Soviet science fiction of the post-Stalin period

Venue: online via Zoom

Lecture at the conference The Century of Sputnik and Chernobyl: Science and the European Left during the Twentieth Century organized by the Centre for European Research of the University of Gothenburg (CERGU)

We live in a society where traditional progressive parties and trust in scientific experts alike are in crisis. To understand the present, we need a historical perspective. Traditionally, left-wing ideals have been dependent on science in an instrumental way—as science increased the power of the state to shape society and nature—and a substantial way—as science underpinned an optimistic vision of rationality and progress. The labour movement especially embodied the ideas of High Modernism and nineteenth-century Positivism. Without science, it would have been impossible to build the society of tomorrow.

As the century progressed, left-wing forces put these ideals into practice in the radical social engineering of the Soviet Union, the gradualist transformation of social democracy and the nation-building of decolonised peoples. At the same time, two world wars, Nazism and atomic warfare revealed the darker side of technology. Consumer society and the Space Race testified the success of expanding scientific research and applying it for defence and civilian purposes. However, success bred doubts: growing awareness of technological threats to health and the environment; concern about the dehumanising effects of technological society; worry about technocracy undermining democratic scrutiny; taxpayers’ protest against “wasting” taxpayers’ money on useless scientific projects.

The 1970s were a turning point. As Western society moved away from positivism, traditional left-wing parties found it more difficult to build a cohesive and attractive political offer, but new forms of democratic engagement and political mobilisation emerged: new social movements, women’s rights activism, green parties, citizens’ advocacy groups. As science became a more complicated issue, so did its political ramifications.

The conference is organised by the Centre for European Research of the University of Gothenburg (CERGU) and sponsored by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (F19-1548). The goal of the conference is to explore the reciprocal influences between science and the European left, with the hypothesis that the historical development of one can be explained by the other. While the two topics have been explored separately, we argue that showing the connections between the two can provide new explanatory tools to history and social science. The conference brings together established scholars and early-career researchers alike from different disciplines and nations.

The conference was originally scheduled for April 2020, but it had to be postponed due to Covid-19. Despite this temporary obstacle, the event is more urgent than ever. Indeed, the global pandemic revealed how science influences politics and what role scientific expertise play in a democracy.

Following Benedetto Croce’s maxim that “All history is contemporary history”, we will have a free discussion at the end of the first day to discuss how the experience of Covid-19 changed the perception of the interaction of scientific expertise, scientific issues and democratic politics and what insights we can apply to the study of the past.

The conference will be held online via Zoom. A link will be posted on the conference website closer to the conference date.

The slavist and historian Matthias Schwartz is head of the program area World Literature at the ZfL.