Sociology of Communism
2021
Communism as an ideology
Csaba Szaló
Kundera The Joke
A sense of history as myth.
Falling back beyond history
into myth.
Seeing to shape the future or
to recapture the past.
A nostalgia for human
solidarity, some common past
which is an amalgam of truth
and legend.
Ideology and the Political
The distinction between
friends and enemies.
Enemy-constructs.
Collective identity.
Communism as a movement
Csaba Szaló
From utopia to revolution
The passive acceptance of
decisions made by legitimate
experts.
The ruling class does not
only rule but also leads.
From a true-false dichotomy
to the distinction between
domination and
emancipation.
Class-consciousness
Georg Lukács: To destroy the
fiction of the immortality of
capitalism.
The process of modern
rationalisation: people do not
go beyond correct calculation
of possible outcomes of their
action.
Revolutionary praxis
Who will be able to recognise
the totality of society and
break through the reification-
structure?
Communism vs. Fascism
The party of a new type.
The militant rhetoric of
struggle.
The methods of mass-
mobilisation.
Communism as a social reality
Csaba Szaló
Political mobilisation
Youth: the capacity for
enthusiasm
An imaginary
Volksgemeinschaft
Totalitarianism
Everything is possible and
permitted.
To transform human nature
itself.
Human beings as dispensable
resources.
Authority and its legitimacy
The historical narrative of
emancipation
Institutional performativity
“Suddenly I saw it all clearly. People willingly
deceive themselves with a double false faith. They
believe in eternal memory (of men, deeds,
things) ... and in rectification (of deeds, errors,
sins, injustice). Both are shams. The truth lies at
the opposite end of the scale: everything will be
forgotten, and nothing will be rectified. All
rectification will be taken over by oblivion. No one
will rectify wrongs; all wrongs will be forgotten.”
“We managed to forget what was going on around
us and create a magic circle of music; it was like
being walled off from the drunks in a glass cabin
at the bottom of the sea ... I felt happy inside of
the songs ... where sorrow wasn’t playful, laughter
wasn’t mocking, love wasn’t laughable ... where
love is still love, pain, pain and values free from
devastation.”
“I was equally aware that my home was not of
this world ... that everything we sang and played
was only a memory, a monument, a recreation in
images of something that no longer was, and I felt
the firm ground of my homeland sinking under my
feet, felt myself falling ... into the depths where love
is love and pain, pain, and I said to myself that
my only real home was this descent, this searching
eager fall, and I gave myself up to it, savoring the
sensuous vertigo.”