Author: Paul R. Josephson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801898412
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
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.
Author: Paul R. Josephson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781421428000
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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.
Author: Carmel Finley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022644337X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
Introduction: political roles for fish populations -- The fishing empires of the Pacific: the Americans, the Japanese, and the Soviets -- Islands and war -- Manifest destiny and fishing -- Tariffs -- Industrialization -- Treaties -- Imperialism -- Enclosure -- Conclusions: updating the best available science
Author: Aaron Todd Hale-Dorrell
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190644672
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Scarcely making ends meet -- Industrial agriculture, the logic of corn -- Corn politics -- Better living through corn -- Growing corn, raising citizens -- From Kolkhoznik to wage earner -- American technology, Soviet practice -- Battles over corn
Author: Andreas Malm
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781312
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 678
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Book Description
How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.
Author: Julia Vaingurt
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166526
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 322
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Book Description
In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.
Author: Andy Bruno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714471X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
This in-depth exploration of five industries in the Kola Peninsula examines Soviet power and its interaction with the natural world.
Author: Julia Obertreis
Publisher: V&R Unipress
ISBN: 3847007866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 538
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Book Description
Beamte, Ingenieure und Wissenschaftler des Russischen Reiches und später der Sowjetunion planten die Ausweitung und Modernisierung der Bewässerungssysteme und des Baumwollanbaus in Zentralasien. Die Studie, die das heutige Usbekistan und Turkmenistan untersucht, betont die diskursiven und politischen Kontinuitäten über die Zäsur von 1917 hinweg. Einer der zentralen Topoi war die Umwandlung von ›toten‹ Steppen und Wüsten in ›blühende Oasen‹. Der high modernism erreichte seinen Höhepunkt in den Nachkriegsjahrzehnten. Seit den 1970er Jahren entwickelte sich eine Öko-Kritik an der sowjetischen Modernisierung, die in der Perestrojkazeit an Fahrt aufnahm. Letztendlich trugen die ökologischen und ökonomischen sowie sozialen Folgewirkungen der wachstumsfixierten Modernisierung zum Zusammenbruch des kommunistischen Regimes bei. Officials, engineers and scientists in the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union envisaged the expansion and modernization of irrigation systems and cotton growing in Central Asia. Focusing on the region of today's Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, this book highlights the continuities in discourse and policies beyond the historical divide of 1917. One of the central topoi was the transformation of 'dead' lands into 'blossoming oases'. High modernism policies hit their peak in the post-war decades. From the 1970s, an ecological critique evolved which gained momentum in the Perestroika period. Ultimately, the grave ecological, economic and social consequences of the growth-fixated modernization contributed to the downfall of the Communist regime.
Author: E. Maurer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230307043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Starting with the first man-made satellite 'Sputnik' in 1957 and culminating four years later with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin, space became a new utopian horizon. This book explores the profound repercussions of the Soviet space exploration program on culture and everyday life in Eastern Europe, especially in the Soviet Union itself.
Author: Nicholas Breyfogle
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822986337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
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Book Description
Through a series of essays, Eurasian Environments prompts us to rethink our understanding of tsarist and Soviet history by placing the human experience within the larger environmental context of flora, fauna, geology, and climate. This book is a broad look at the environmental history of Eurasia, specifically examining steppe environments, hydraulic engineering, soil and forestry, water pollution, fishing, and the interaction of the environment and disease vectors. Throughout, the authors place the history of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in a trans-chronological, comparative context, seamlessly linking the local and the global. The chapters are rooted in the ecological and geological specificities of place and community while unveiling the broad patterns of human-nature relationships across the planet. Eurasian Environments brings together an international group scholars working on issues of tsarist/Soviet environmental history in an effort to showcase the wave of fascinating and field-changing research currently being written.
