24.04.2025, Moscow.
After the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union built a consumer society, and this iss what the USSR agreed with the West about, philosopher and political scientist Sergey Kurginyan wrote in his article “War and Peace”, published in The Essence of Time newspaper on April 1.
Kurginyan recalled that already, philosopher and sociologist Erich Fromm had justly noted this fact in his book To Have or to Be, published in 1976.
“Fromm, who was both a Marxist and a person who was hoping that with the USSR humanity would pave the way not to ‘having’, but to ‘being’, acknowledged a certain alarming agreement between the USSR and the West on the matter that ‘having’ is more important than ‘being’,” Kurginyan noted.
At the same time, according to Fromm, the question of “to have or to be” was “central” for Karl Marx in the debate regarding the emergence of new Man. He relied on this when discussing the transition “from economic categories to psychological and anthropological ones.”
“Western social democrats and their bitter opponents, communists within and without the Soviet Union, transformed socialism into a purely economic concept,” writes Fromm.
According to Fromm, the central goal of Soviet “goulash communism” is “maximum consumption and maximum use of technology.” According to Nikita Khrushchev’s ideal, everyone in the USSR should be provided the level of consumption that capitalism offered only to a minority.
“Fromm rightly asserts that the Soviet pseudo-orthodox Marxists, who glorified Marxism, removed from it precisely that which should have formed the basis of a genuine Soviet society, that would allow opposing the Soviet ‘be’ to the Western ‘have’,” writes Kurginyan.
However, the leader of Essence of Time movement noted that the USSR’s transition to a consumer society or “goulash communism” cannot be reduced to Khrushchev – by and large, it began with the transition to “peaceful life” immediately after the Victory in 1945.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
