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1 results

  • 34 - Communist Morality under Socialism

  • from Part V - Institutional Life
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 871-896

  • Summary

    Communist morality was created by revolutionary leaders and thinkers in the early twentieth century to serve the greater goal of building communism in the entire world and was regarded by both the communists and the Western left-wing as antithetical to the corrupt morality of capitalist societies. It is by nature a statist ethical system that always prioritizes the interests of the state and relies on state ownership of the means of production to enforce its moral principles. This essay starts with the moral interiority of socialist subjects, focussing on the transformative impact of communist morality on individuals and their motivations to accept or prescribe the newly imposed ethics by the state. Then it closely examines the official discourses of communist morality in the former Soviet Union and China and their moral practices through the social engineering project of creating the socialist ‘New Person’. The concluding section argues that the emphasis on collective identity and the centrality of institutional sociality determine the relevance of communist morality in the world today.