After visiting Russia in 1921, the journalist Lincoln Steffens
famously declared, "I have seen the future, and it works." Steffens
referred to the social experiment of technological utopianism he
found in the Soviet Union, where subway cars and farm tractors
would carry the worker and peasant--figuratively and
literally--into the twentieth century. Believing that socialism and
technology together created a brave new world, Boleslaw Bierut of
Poland and Kim Il Sung of North Korea--and other leaders--joined
Russia's Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky in embracing big
technology with a verve and conviction that rivaled the western
world's.
Paul R. Josephson here explores these utopian visions of
technology--and their unanticipated human and environmental costs.
He examines the role of technology in communist plans and policies
and the interplay between ideology and technological development.
He shows that while technology was a symbol of regime legitimacy
and an engine of progress, the changes it spurred were not
unequivocally positive. Instead of achieving a worker's paradise,
socialist technologies exposed the proletariat to dangerous
machinery and deadly pollution; rather than freeing women from
exploitation in family and labor, they paradoxically created for
them the dual--and exhausting--burdens of mother and worker. The
future did not work.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the end of
communism's self-proclaimed glorious quest to "reach and surpass"
the West. Josephson's intriguing study of how technology both
helped and hindered this effort asks new and important questions
about the crucial issues inextricably linked with the development
and diffusion of technology in any sociopolitical system.
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