Rev Left Radio - Women Behind the Iron Curtain: Socialism, Feminism, & Soviet Power

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WORKING WOMEN'S DAY! Kristen R. Ghodsee, American ethnographer and Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, joins Breht once again to discuss her latest book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments For Economic Independence. Kristen's website is here: https://kristenghodsee.com/ Here is Kristen's latest article about International Women's Day: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/international-womens-day-socialism.html Here is Kristen's interview on Season of the Bitch: https://soundcloud.com/seasonofthebitch/episode-57-why-women-have-better-sex-under-socialism-ft-kristen-ghodsee Here is Dr. Kristen R. Ghodsee's podcast "A.K. 47", covering the works Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Marxist Feminist who had radical ideas about the intersections of socialism and women's emancipation: http://ak47.buzzsprout.com Outro Song: "Dope Queen Blues" by Adia Victoria Find and support Adia's music here: www.adiavictoria.com --------- Get Rev Left Radio Merch here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante; explaining and analyzing essential works of revolutionary theory and applying their lessons to our current conditions): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Hammer and Camera:  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com   Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's show, we have returning guest Kristen R. Gaudsie from the University of Pennsylvania to talk about her brand new book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. She's also started a new podcast, and she's not on social media, so she doesn't get a platform to really push out her new podcast. but her podcast is called AK-47, and it's selections from the works of Marxist feminist Alexandra Collentai. We did a reading on Collentai in our book club a month or two ago, but Kristen Argosy basically reads and discusses 47 different selections

from the works of Alexandra Collentai, this preeminent Marxist feminist from the early 1900s. And so people should really go and support that podcast, listen to it. It's fascinating. It's about an incredibly important figure. And Kristen is just a wonderful person and orator and fascinating to listen to. So I really encourage people go check out her show. It'll be linked in the show notes to this episode.

But with all of that said, let's go ahead and get into this wonderful episode with a wonderful guest, Kristen R. Gatsi. My name is Kristen Gadsi. I'm a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University. of Pennsylvania, and I'm the author of eight books on gender socialism and post-socialism, most recently, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence. Yes, and people who have been longtime listeners of the show might remember Kristen from our Red Hangover episode.

I can't remember how long that was. It was probably a year and a half ago, but I remember that being one of our most well-received episodes to date, and people still bring that episode up all the time. so I really wanted to have you back and tackle this text. I'm really excited for this. Some of the questions, I just wanted to say this up front for people. I listened to Season of the Bitch, Friends of the Show. Their interview with Kristen is really amazing,

and I tried to formulate the questions for this interview that didn't ask the same exact questions that they asked. So if you wanted to have a fuller, well-rounded picture of this book and more arguments from Kristen, I would encourage people to go check that out, and I'll link to that episode of Season of the Bitch and the show notes of this episode, but yeah so Kristen thank you so much for coming back on I'm delighted yeah we're delighted to

have you always it's an honor to talk to you I guess we could just start with the most customary question which is why did you write this book and what did you hope to achieve with it yeah so this book has a kind of a strange genesis I'm sure some of your listeners will remember that I wrote a op-ed in the New York Times called why women had better sex under socialism which incidentally was a column that grew out of a chapter in Red Hangover. We even talked about that chapter, I believe, the last time I was on your show. So that column created quite a storm of controversy

and a lot of discussion internationally. I think it was translated into like 16 languages and I got all sorts of mail from everywhere you can imagine across the globe. And I also got pretty viciously trolled. by various unpleasant aspects of our society. But in the end, in the midst of all of this chaos and trolling and controversy, I was contacted by an editor at Bold Type Books,

which they thought it might be a good idea to take the op-ed and kind of expand it into a little book. And the reason I agreed to do this was because I am an academic and a scholar, one of the biggest critiques of the op-ed, aside from the fact that, you know, some people were just completely insane about the possibility that there could have been anything good about socialism in the 20th century, the biggest critique was that I had not fully substantiated the claims that I made in the argument, given that, you know, it was only about 1,200 words. That was going to be really difficult to do for a newspaper. But the editor at Bold Type basically agreed that if I

wanted to write this book, I would be able to have as many end notes and suggestions for further reading as possible. And so if you look at the final book, I think it's only about 210 pages long, and 22 of those pages are end notes and suggestions for further reading. So I have substantiated every single claim made in the book. And for me, that was really important. And so what I hoped to achieve was really to show non-academic readers, because as you know, this is a book that's not meant for my fellow academics but is really meant for a general audience to show that there's a ton of research in anthropology, in sociology, in history that's being done about the lived experience of socialism, state socialism in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, and that

the picture that we have of it in the West as this sort of unending Orwellian nightmare is really rather hysterical and stereotypical. And that life behind and the Iron Curtain was a lot more nuanced and complicated than most Americans imagine. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's some irony there that I guarantee a big bulk of your right-wing detractors and trolls and critics for any of your work. I've probably done not even a percentage of a fraction of a fraction of the research that you've actually done on this front because you've dedicated your life to study in this stuff, but that's neither here to there, I guess. Exactly. I've been doing research in Eastern Europe since 1997, and I've been studying this part of the world for the last 34 years, more or less. So when I speak about the situation in Eastern Europe, I mean, I do think I have a pretty broad understanding of the extant scholarship and the literature on the region. I think that people who, you know, hear about me or they, you know, they see an interview on Vox or they read a review in the Guardian.

or something like that, and they just get all hysterical, they haven't actually taken the time to go and look at the very careful documentation that I've done for all of the claims that I've made. And I think that partially that's just because they don't have the time or they're ignorant, and partially because they don't want to go and look. And so there's a real epistemological disconnect between the very robust field of scholarship

looking back at the lived experience of 20th century state socialism in Eastern Europe and the kind of hysterical, vitriol that you see in this country on the right. So that's for me been a real challenge. And one of my hopes with writing this book in the way that I did is to try to get people, I mean, I know I'm never going to, I'm never going to convince the trolls, but I might be able to convince some people to actually think more deeply and read more broadly about these questions than they otherwise would have. Yeah, absolutely. And before we get to more questions, it's just worth pointing out that you know the same sort of right wingers who constantly call everybody else snowflakes and

say you guys only operate on emotion we operate on facts are the ones that become most hysterical in the face of facts of this sort but let's go ahead and move on i really love how at the beginning of each chapter in this book there's a picture of a socialist and anti-fascist feminist alongside a brief biography of her they added dimension of history while also punctuating the text with underappreciated women who in their own day fought this very sort of fight, namely the fight for liberation from fascism, patriarchy, and capitalism. Was that an idea that you came up with? What do you think it adds to the overall text? And who are some of your personal favorite feminists featured in the book? Yeah. So I had hoped actually

to include a lot more of the history of these individual women in the book. But the truth is that I had a pretty strict word limit. And I actually already went over it considerably because I insisted on having all these extra end notes, it was in a discussion with the editor that we decided that, okay, maybe rather than having these longer biography, biographical pieces, that we would just do these portraits with these extended captions. In some ways, I don't feel like those captions really did justice to these amazing women and one man that are included in the book. I think what it adds to the text and what's really important that it adds to the text is

precisely what you just said in your question, that there are, these underappreciated women, and they fought for a world very different from, you know, the world that eventually ended up coming to pass, but they were anti-fascists, they were against patriarchy, and they were against capitalism. Now, they weren't against men, and in fact, one of the things that distinguishes many of these socialist feminists is that they believed that they should work together with men to overthrow capitalism rather than trying to separate out and having some independent women's movement that was just going to fight for suffrage or women's allowances for women to enter the professions or married women's property

rights. Those were what they called the bourgeois feminists. These were socialist women's activists who had a very different vision about the sort of the ways in which socialism and communism and women's rights were interconnected. And this goes all the way back to Flora Tristan, who was a utopian socialist writing in the early 1800s. So my favorites in the book are, obviously, Alexandra Colentai for me is a huge inspiration. I am really interested in all of her writing around issues of sexuality and issues of trying to decommodify romantic and human relationships. I think she's been a really important thinker, and she was one of the key women who actually

took the ideas of people like Engels and August Babel and actually translated them into concrete policies in the early years of the Soviet Union in the late teens and early 20s. The other person who is the one man, I mentioned, who has his own picture and little biographical caption is August Babel, who of course was colonized inspiration. He wrote this really incredible book, really important book called Woman and Socialism. And I think that in many ways all like 150 years or more of socialist policy and socialist thinking regarding women's role within a broader socialist movement comes from Babel. And so I do think there are some other great women as well.

I talk about Anna Paulke, obviously Valentina Tereshkova makes an appearance. And then Alagadinova, who was a youngest female partisan fighting against the Nazi allied Bulgarian government during the Second World War. So there are some really incredible figures that, unfortunately, don't get the attention that they deserve, but as I said, I had a very strict word limit. So I was only able to do very small snapshots of them. And I'm hoping that people will learn about these women and August Babel and go out and find their works and biographies that have been written about them and learn more. Definitely. One of the people that, one of the feminists

that you have in the book is also Rosa Luxembourg. And I think, you know, we're working on doing an entire episode just about her and her life because it's just fascinating. And she's obviously, a martyr of our cause. But yeah, I just really loved all of that. So that is really interesting. In the author's note at the beginning of this book, you make a few important caveats before you get into the text itself. And among those caveats is you anticipating the possible critique that focusing on sex is in bad taste or otherwise unnecessary. And you cut against that critique with an argument about how sex is used in a capitalist society. Can you talk about how capitalism preys on our sexuality and the emotions around it and why you chose to focus on it, among many

other topics, of course, as a counter to that? Sure. So, yeah, one of the things that I was really worried about was this sort of line of argument of like, okay, so people are suffering under these authoritarian governments and you're really going to tell us about better sex. Like, there's so many other things that we could write about other than sexuality. And I actually wanted to turn that on its head and say, look, our capitalist world in the United States, but this is true in other advanced capitalist countries as well, is absolutely saturated with sex. Advertisers and, you know, all sorts of marketing campaigns use sexuality

and insecurities that we feel around our sexuality in order to get us to buy things that we don't need. People are incredibly sensitive to, you know, wondering whether they are attractive to the opposite sex or the same sex, depending on what your sexuality is. But there's this incredible vulnerability that people feel around sexuality. And the other thing is that sexuality, people totally accept it when it's marketing. They see it on TV. They see it on, you know, in music videos or whatever. But they're very, very, very unwilling to view their personal intimate relationships

within this larger framework of capitalism. And so I thought that I wanted to take sexuality, the discussion of sexuality, and sort of take it away from marketing. advertising and the world of music videos and online pornography and actually say, what if we talk about sexuality as a critique of capitalism? And use our intimate lives to understand how the particular structure of the system within which we live is really undermining our ability to find meaningful relationships, both in the intimate sphere, but also with our friends, with our parents, with our children. So I do think that it's really important to have this

conversation. Now, as you mentioned, that being said, the book itself has two chapters that focus on sexuality, but there are four other chapters in the book that focus on leadership, on motherhood, on work, and on citizenship. And so it's an important part of the book, and obviously it's in the title, but it's also part of a larger argument about how having wider social safety nets in society liberates women from being economically independent on men. and that that ultimately leads to more freedom and liberty for women and the ability of women to choose their partners on the basis of love and mutual affection and not on just making the choice on somebody who's going to be able to pay her rent

or put food on the table for her children. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's an important point, too, is that this book, obviously, there's two chapters on the concept of sex, but, yeah, the other ones are on work or on motherhood or on leadership and on citizenship. And then, you know, in the intro, you also make a bunch of, of interesting arguments as well. So, you know, the scope of this book is much broader than just that one topic. But, you know, that is sort of a core of this of this book. And of course,

you know, the essay was part of the reason why this book was made in the first place. So it does make sense. But, you know, given all those caveats and with the understanding that, of course, the title is meant to capture people's attention and, you know, with my tongue a little bit in my cheek here, the question poses itself. Why do women have better sex under socialism? Yeah. No, that is the best question because it's actually a pretty simple answer, which is when women have economic independence. And this is a result of having a society that supports their larger caregiving roles through job protected paid maternity leave, for instance, child care, through having, you know, free higher education,

through having universal health care, all sorts of ways in which women can be supported in their lives so that they are not basically trading sexuality in order to access basic human rights. When that happens, men essentially can't lord it over women with money. And so what we see is that in societies where women have a lot more rights, they generally tend to choose their partners on the basis of love and mutual affection. Now, very specifically, you know, this is one of the things that I, the caveats I have in the beginning is that I'm talking very specifically about heterosexual relationships here, but within heterosexual relationships, when there's a deep power imbalance, you know, at the risk of sounding

a little bit crude here, I think a lot of women are faking it, right? And they're faking it because they know that they have to sort of keep their partners happy or else they'll be replaced and that will create an incredibly economic precarious situation for them. Whereas when women are in a situation where they feel supported for their caregiving roles where there is a society around them that allows them to the supports the work that they do in the home, especially with children, but also we talk about elder care or care for the ill and the infirm. When that happens, then women aren't going to fake it. If she's in a relationship with a man who is abusing her or if the relationship is

otherwise unhealthy or unhappy, she can walk away without, you know, financial devastation and ruin. And so the sort of better sex under socialism is a little bit tongue in cheek, but it does also map on to some really interesting research that we have, both in the context of Germany, the former East and West Germany, but also post-reunification Germany, as well as in the United States, which shows that when men and women share household chores more equally, or at least there's a perception that those chores are shared equally, couples report having more sex. Now, again, it's always hard to talk about the quality of sex because most of this is going to be self-reported. But at the very least we know, based on these studies that have

been, you know, like I said, done in the United States as well as in Germany, that people have at least more sex when there's a sense of equality in the relationship. And I think on some levels, that's because, you know, women are just going to be a lot more amorously inclined with a partner who treats her well. And that means both inside and outside of the bedroom. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, you know, sex here is a stand-in for, I mean, a broader idea of just healthier relationships, where there, you know, people are in relationships, not because, as you say, of gender imbalances or because of economic precarity, but because they both actually want to be in the relationship and both come to the table with equal power.

And I think that is, you know, underlines this whole concept of sex is really undergirded by that broader idea of healthier relationships. Yeah, absolutely. And I do think, you know, in the book, I talk about sort of heterosexual romantic relationships, but I also talk about relationships with our friends and relationships with other, like, our parents and our children, but relationships with our colleagues. You know, unfortunately, kind of late capitalism in the United States, And I think that this is exacerbated by the creation of all of these sort of social networking apps.

Late capitalism has commodified so much of our affective resources, so much of our affection, our attention, and our emotions are being kind of funneled through these for-profit applications on our phones. So that, you know, you have these apps like Bumble BFF where you're supposed to meet your best friend through an app. and you know there was this wonderful article in the December it was the cover issue of the cover article of the December Atlantic about the sex recession I don't know if you saw that but one of the things that she talked about in that article is the ways in which Tinder has sort of gamified dating that's her term gamified dating and I actually think that there's a way in which all of the sort of capitalist intrusion into our intimate lives trying to mitigate our personal relationships through these for-profit platforms is really corroding the basis of just

sort of fundamental human relationships. And that's a real problem. And that's on top of the economic precarity, right, that undermines the sort of that comes from this economic dependence. This is also about living within a capitalist system that is increasingly moving from just commodifying our labor, but also wants to commodify all of our possible free time, including the time that we spend with our friends and loved ones. Yeah, definitely. And when you mention like Tinder or some of these dating apps, it's really, it's not only like, you know, Guy Debord's idea of society of the spectacle, where our reality is

mediated by images, right? We post these curated images of ourselves to try to lure people in or be attracted to us. But it also sort of undergirds and strengthens the idea. of looks being the essential thing. You know, you don't really get a chance to meet or know anybody on any level. All you get to see, first of all, is an image of their face, and then you can choose to swipe left or swipe right to get to know them better. So I think it also has this, like, nefarious reinforcement of, of capitalistic beauty standards, which, you know, prey on our vulnerability and our insecurities, et cetera, which you talk about a lot as well.

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, it's even, you know, it's even sort of worse than that in some ways because every interaction, right, so for Tinder or for any of these, like, you know, apps like Bumble or Grindr, right, the idea is for them to increase engagement. They want you to be, to use their app as much as possible. So think about the logic of that. If you're in a happy relationship with somebody, a long-term relationship with somebody, it doesn't matter who this person is, but if you're in a relationship where you're not on Tinder, they lose. They lose your attention. They lose, their business model is based on keeping you out of a meaningful relationship with somebody. Because the minute you actually enter into a relationship, it undermines their

business model. And I think that that's something that we don't talk about very often. The fact that these apps are meant to create a world in which we are much, it's easier for us to meet each other. But in fact, what it's doing is it's eroding the quality of those relationships in order to keep us engaged on the apps. Yeah, I hadn't even thought about. about that answer that's really that's really interesting absolutely so so moving on early on in the book you talk about the soviet union being a foil for u.s capitalist hegemony and you talk about how the very existence of the soviet union actually exerted force over domestic policies in the u.s forcing them into concessions for workers and the poor out of fear of a socialist revolution occurring

in their country this influence affected not only the domestic social policy but also the space race the Olympics, international science, and many more areas of life. So I was hoping you can talk more about the Soviet Union's counter-influence on capitalist societies in the West and what's happened since that counter-influence has been gone for now over 30 years. Sure. And this is a wonderfully robust area of research in the fields of history and anthropology. And I think a lot of Americans, for instance, don't realize that when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, we immediately get the 1958 piece of legislation called the National Defense Education

Act, which is the first piece of federal legislation that actually puts money into supporting women's studies in science and math, actually integrating more women into these fields because the male American leaders at the time were afraid that the Soviets were beating us at the space race because they had doubled the brain power. You know, when we look at the Olympics, the reason that we have Title IX, which integrated women into American sports, if you look at that history, it's because the Soviets were kicking our butts in the metal count at the Olympics every year, largely because of the higher percentage they had of women athletes. So the United States had to get with the program if it wanted to increase the overall number

of medals at the Olympics, which during the Cold War was kind of a big thing. Mary Dudzziak is a historian who wrote a beautiful book called Cold War Civil Rights. And she argues in that book that the American government was much more amenable to people like Martin Luther King precisely because on the international stage, the Soviet Union was constantly pointing out American hypocrisy and white supremacy when the United States was trying to support human rights and democracy abroad but was treating African Americans like second-class citizens at home. So in all sorts of ways, having the Soviet Union as a foil, having a real, you know, kind of

a sort of bipolar world, this superpower rivalry actually proved productive for all sorts of social and economic rights. I have another colleague named Samdrin Kopp, who's at the University of Geneva, and she writes a really interesting article about workers' rights at the International Labor Organization and how Cold War superpoweral rivalry actually produced all sorts of conventions around international labor rights that would not have occurred otherwise. And so, of course, the answer to the second party of her question is when the Cold War ends and the Soviets are no longer a threat. We see an incredible erosion of all sorts of basic rights and all sorts of things that American employers and industrialists had, you know, concessions that they'd given to the

working class out of fear of the possibility of a Bolshevik-style revolution. So, you know, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a coincidence. Neoliberalism gets its start in the 80s, But it's only after 1989 when we really get this kind of wild, unchained, unregulated capitalism that has devastated our economies for the last 30 years. Yeah. And, you know, aside from all the sort of obvious and explicit, you know, ravages of neoliberalism when it's unchallenged over the entire Spain of the globe, there's also the almost the psychological impact. And in this book you referenced Mark Fisher in capitalist realism. And I think, you know, one of the most insidious aspects of, you know, liberal triumphalism and capitalist triumphalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the implementation that the slow ingratiation into our minds of this concept that there is no alternative to capitalism and that capitalism not only dominates the external globe, but also actually the internal contours of our very imaginations. Yeah, I think Mark Fisher's book is essential reading for everyone. It should be for everyone, but certainly everyone. everyone on the left, because Fisher really points out, and I think it's so important that

what he argues is that the epidemic of mental health crises that the kind of developed world is seeing these days, the high levels of depression, the incredible widespread feeling of loneliness that's reported among millennials and Generation Z is a direct result of neoliberal capitalism. And in some ways, I am very much paying homage to Mark Fisher and his work, because I think the same thing is happening in our relationships, in our human relationships. It's not just about our mental health. It's also about our relational health with each other. Of course, those two things are always going to be related. But I think that Fisher's work and this insidious idea that there is no alternative to global capitalism has really, really done a severe amount of damage to our societies, which is why, incidentally, I believe, that we're starting now to see this upturn in interest of ordinary people and especially young people around ideas of socialism.

Yeah, definitely. If anybody's not familiar with capitalist realism, we did do an episode here on Rev. Left on that. topic. The book, though, itself is very short. And as Kristen said, it's very much worth reading. It's, it's essential reading for folks on the left. But in your book, you argue, quote unquote, anti-communists refuse to acknowledge the important differences among the wide variety of societies that embraced socialism, end quote. I think this is really important because oftentimes the Soviet Union appears in our minds conceptually as a sort of absolute monolith. Can you talk about some of the different approaches to policy in different countries and which countries in

Eastern Europe you think were the most impressive and why? Yeah, sure. Okay. And so here, I want to point out that I also make a distinction in the book between what I called state socialism and what I call democratic socialism. So in the book, I talk about state socialism being the kind of socialism that was implemented in Eastern Europe with a very centrally planned economy. And then I think of democratic socialism as kind of the sort of Scandinavian variant of this,

but that still maintains an underlying market economy, even though there's heavy state regulation and lots of redistribution. And in the case of Norway, there's still a lot of state ownership. It's just not majority state ownership. The thing that's really interesting is that people who look at state socialism in Eastern Europe generally tend to think of the model of the Soviet Union, where you have this massive state control over the economy, and everything is done through central planning.

And for those of us who actually study Eastern Europe, what we know is that that model was actually not necessarily representative of the entire Eastern bloc. The Hungarians had something called Gulash communism, which was much more open and flexible. They had these secondary markets. The Yugoslavs weren't even part of the Warsaw Pact. They had open borders. Yugoslav citizens could travel. They had something called self-managing socialism, where there was a lot more autonomy. workers had a lot more control for instance over their enterprises everything wasn't being

decided by these sort of faceless bureaucrats in the capital there was much more devolved control uh Bulgaria was closer to the Soviet model in terms of the centralized control of the economy but it was way more liberal a lot of colleagues of mine have called it soft socialism right the the guy who was in charge for about 35 years you know didn't have the sort of heavy hand that somebody like Shoshescu in Romania had, for instance, or Arakhaniker in the GDR. So when we look across the block, there's a ton of variety with regard to different economic policies, with regard to the extent that the economy was being completely controlled and planned by the center, and with the level of authoritarian control. You know,

Yugoslavia, surprisingly to many Westerners, actually had like pornographic magazines. They had a pretty open society compared to a place like Bulgaria, for instance. And even within the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union existed from 1917 to 1991, and people want to reduce that entire history only to the Stalinist period. But of course, the 20s were much more wild and interesting and liberal than Stalin's rule. And then after Stalin dies, the Soviet Union also starts to open up and lots of different things are changing. We get to Parastroika and Glasnos in the 80s, and the Soviet Union, you know,

there's a wonderful Soviet movie about prostitutes, which is something that you never would have seen in an earlier period in the Soviet Union. If we look at a country like Czechoslovakia, for instance, obviously it was very liberal before 1968 when the Soviet tanks rolled in and squashed this idea of socialism with a human face. So when we look across the block,

And then, you know, just to put it out there, if we go outside of Eastern Europe and we look at countries, you know, like Cuba or we look at China or Vietnam or places like Nicaragua or Yemen or Ethiopia, there are a variety of different places, you know, that used bits and pieces of socialist ideology, sometimes in the wrong way, sometimes in a really weird, creative way, sometimes it was undermined. But I think that what the big problem with 20th century, 20th century state socialism in our mind is that we have, have a very narrow fixation on basically the years of Stalinism, and that's what's come to represent the entire project of socialism, including, by the way, the Democratic Socialist experiments in places like Finland or Norway or Sweden or Iceland. And it's important to realize that particularly in a place like Finland, you know, Finland had the largest communist party, it had a huge communist party that was actually running, it was part of the parliamentary process. And it was much of the Finnish social welfare state comes directly from the influence

of this large, longstanding communist party. You can also look at the legacies of, for instance, communist parties in places like India that have participated within a parliamentary system and have come in and out of power and done things that communists usually do, like nationalize certain types of production and redistribute well. So I think that it's really, really important for us to keep in mind that the idea of socialism is so variegated. And that if we go back, you mentioned Rosa Luxembourg, right? Yeah. Rosa Lexenberg wrote a lot about how do we get to socialism?

Is it revolution? Is it reform? Like, what are the pathways? And there's, you know, this has always been a big debate on the left. But I think, you know, what Rosa Luxembourg says is it doesn't matter how we get there as long. as we get there. And so it's important to always, you know, I think that people on the left have a responsibility to educate themselves about all of these different historical trajectories that have happened. And then to learn from those trajectories, to learn from that past, to see what went wrong,

to see what went right, to see what we not salvage and repurpose for the 21st century, and then to move forward, leaving all the baggage of the past behind us. Yeah, and I think that's one area where you and I, you know, fully agree. And, you know, we'll get back to this idea in a couple questions, I think, but this idea of, like, you know, don't fetishize things, but don't also reject them wholly. The point is to really take a nuance to look at our history and find what works and what doesn't. And I think our enemies want to reduce proletarian socialist history and in all of its varied forms to, they want to reduce it to, to Orwellianism. They want to reduce it to, you know, Stalin's Iron Fist. And they want to eradicate.

the nuance and the complexity of all these different attempts to build socialism in different ways. And that sort of experimentalism, that idea that building socialism, there is no guidebook, there's no exact way to implement it because conditions are always shifting and changing, but experimenting with different forms, learning from the past, looking at all these different ways of building socialism, finding what worked and what didn't, discarding the bad parts and carrying forward the good parts, I think that's essential. And I think we lose that if we either go the reactionary route and reject proletarian history or we go the you know dogmatist route and fetishize it and act like nothing bad ever happened exactly exactly and i and i do think that

that's um you know walking the middle ground it may not be as like sexy and militant as people want but it is sort of the responsible middle ground um is to learn from the past because yeah you know there there are some pretty you know nasty things that happen in the name of social and we should not just ignore them. On the other hand, we should not reduce the entire history of socialism, which, you know, let's face it, has been around, has been discussed since the early 1800s with the utopian socialist in France and the UK and then later scientific socialist in Germany. This is all pre-Bolsheviks, right?

Yeah. Socialism was in the air in Europe. It had all sorts of different permutations and ideas associated with it before the Bolsheviks even came to power. And so I think that the dynamism and the fluidism. of those ideas is what's so interesting about them and that we can actually go back and revisit those writers and thinkers and say, hey, Tristan had a really interesting idea about this, or Fourier or Owen, we could use this idea about cooperatives to build this kind of movement

in this context. But by just reducing everything to the gulags and the purges, which is what some people want to do, it completely strips this incredibly rich and beautiful history from its potential of being relevant in the future. Absolutely. And I know we're kind of lingering on this question right now, but, you know, something occurred to me when you were answering these questions. And it's the concept of planning and central planning. And, you know, obviously there were missteps and there were successes with that model. A lot of people today, you know, especially people on the right or the liberal center, want to reject central planning in its entirety as an obviously failed way to do an economy.

But I wonder with climate change barreling down on us, I can't avoid this thought that some level of planning is going to be necessary into the future because this free market idea that anybody can just produce whatever they want if there's a consumer market for it, you know, produce it. And you talk about having 47 different types of shampoos on the store shelves, etc. Which is just wildly inefficient, wildly inefficient and really harmful to our ecology. And then, of course, we live in the 21st century. So we have all this new technology that we can actually use and maybe put toward more rational planning of how to produce and distribute goods and services.

I don't know. What are your kind of thoughts, I guess, on planning as it pertains to contemporary problems of climate change and contemporary tools like technology? Yeah, I mean, that's like an episode in and of itself like that. Because I think there's a lot to talk about. I mean, obviously, the key thing that I will say is that really no particular country got planning right in the 20th century. It was very cumbersome.

It was very bureaucratic. and it led to an incredible amount of inefficiencies. Now, of course, you know, places like the Soviet Union did not have the luxury of computers, right? And also, during this period of time, people weren't necessarily concerned with the environment. So when you add in this question of the environment and the need to kind of criticize sort of the overproduction of goods that capitalism encourages us to overconsume and to discard, I find it actually quite funny that this whole Marie Condo phenomenon, where people are like, you know, drastically downsizing their world and without a subsequent or concomitant critique of why we have all this stuff in the first place is really interesting. So, but I think that the planning is ultimately going to be about putting limitations on our

consumption. And I think that the discussion around planning is who gets to decide. Because the problem in Eastern Europe was that you had a bunch of random, you know, old men in Moscow or Warsaw or Sophia deciding on what scent your women's shampoo should have. Right. Right. Which is not necessarily a very good use of anybody's

time or resources and it leads to, you know, pretty awful smelling shampoo. On the other hand, right, we know that there are real economies of scale when, for instance, you know, the state is the primary utility it has a utility monopoly over electricity or heating.

There are ways in which some things naturally lend themselves to state control because they're natural monopolies anyway. So I think the key discussion of planning, and this is how it relates to climate change, is that states really do need to assert themselves over the market in order to address climate change. And that is going to limit capital's ability to create more and more. products and chase after profits and growth in a way that has been sort of fundamental to the development of capitalism for the last, you know, 200 or so years. And that's going to take a real change. And people are going to resist that because it's going to mean that somebody else

is going to have to make decisions over their consumption. So it would, I think the way I like to think about this when I talk to my students is, you know, it would be like if the government sort of said, okay, well, everybody, you know, should have a smartphone. Okay, fine. we agree that but no individual should have a smartphone can all like no individual should be able to replace their smartphone um more than once every four years right if there was a law right or something right and then people would go crazy oh man can you imagine fox news you know high school students would rebel i mean it would be really hard to make that kind of like that kind of policy however if you may if you just sort of you know had sort of state control over a

electricity production and you just switched it to renewables, right? That kind of thing, you know, prices might go up, but the people who will be screaming the most are going to be the corporations. Right. Right. Right. The fossil fuel corporations. So, so this is about where you start. I mean, it's a very, very difficult conversation. I'm not trying to say that I have all the answers here. But I think that the problem is when we talk about planning, what people generally tend to focus on is the government telling me how often I can change my smartphone rather than the larger conversation, which is don't states have a responsibility to their future citizens to protect the environment so that we still have a hospitable planet in 50 years? And it doesn't that

require a certain kind of regulation of industry, which let's face it, no industry is going to regulate itself on this matter because they're just interested in short-term profits. And what we're talking about here is a much longer time horizon. And the only sort of actors that we have right now that can deal with the longer time horizon are states. Now, my anarchist friends, my anarchist friends will completely disagree with me on that one. But I don't think that, you know, that there's an easy solution to this problem. And it seems to me that we need some kind of state regulation of industry around the environment or else we're in big trouble. Yeah. The problem, you know, And you said it, you know, this could be, you know, several episodes.

The problem with trying to do something like that in the U.S. is just that the entire bourgeois state is not a neutral entity, but is actually, you know, a functionary of the capitalist class. And so to try to get that state to put on the necessary regulations and the necessary time frame on the capital class, which it's a manifestation of is a whole problem in and of itself. But we're not going to solve all the world's problems today. So moving on.

In an hour, no. Moving on to the next question. After engaging in all the research for this book, I'm just interested. What were some of the most impressive accomplishments by and for women under socialism? And what happened to those specific accomplishments after the restoration of capitalism? So this is an interesting question. And again, I think some of them are still around. So for instance, I think Bulgaria and Romania have the highest percentage of tech workers in any of the EU countries

because they have a long tradition of women in engineering. I think Lithuania has the highest percentage of female doctors anywhere in the world. So there were these real inroads in terms of education and professional training and professional socialization that was a direct result of some of these socialist policies. And in some ways, they are still lingering, right? So in some of these countries, again, the tech sectors, engineers, they are largely feminized or at least much more feminized than in the United States. states where the tech sector is so dominated by men.

But the other things are obviously really key to the argument in the book is this idea of women's economic independence and having a state with a broad enough social safety net so that women are not penalized for their biology, so that women are not penalized for being the, you know, being the sex that actually has the child and is largely responsible, socially at least responsible for caring for the child. And then because of her care work in the home, women often get also overloaded with care work for the elderly and for the ill and infirm. And these societies are societies where at least nominally they tried to socialize some of

that work to liberate women. And after 1989 or 1991, depending on where you are in the block, a lot of those supports just disappear. And so not surprisingly, what we see across this region is a massive plummet in birth rates so that the fastest, top ten fastest shrinking countries, I believe in the world, are all in Eastern Europe. because women can no longer combine work and family, and so the decision is just not to have children. And then, of course, there's this increasing commodification of women in their bodies that also is a result of these changes.

So I think I should have done this probably earlier in the episode, but it's probably worth mentioning, and you mentioned it on your episode with Season of the Bee, but the caveat you make up front about how you use the term women throughout the book. Would you like to touch on that really quick and just clear that up for anybody who might be wondering about that? Right, yeah. And so in the preface, in the author's note, I definitely try to address this issue of that I am talking primarily about cis women. And I'm, you know, I'm not trying to exclude people of other genders who identify as women. It's just that the 20th century state socialist women's question. And to a certain extent, I would argue, the way that these questions have been dealt with in northern Europe generally tend to focus on women. as cis women who are responsible for the reproduction of children or not responsible, but they are the reproducers of children. And so I actually think that a lot of the people that I write about in the book were very, very open-minded about people of different genders and people with, you know, multiple sexualities. And that it's just that because of the word limit that I had for the book,

I had to focus on this one very specific, you know, definition of women, which is cis women, in largely heterosexual relationships, which result in children. But again, and I was just at an event last week where somebody asked me about people that are not heterosexual, not, you know, sort of non-heterosexual sex. And I really believe that when you destabilize capitalism, when you destabilize capitalism, when you destabilize, the family as a household unit as an economic unit where in women's unpaid labor actually ends up increasing the profits of capitalists

like societies where women are the most economically dependent on men are in some ways the most heteronormative societies they're the most homophobic because the society needs every man to basically care for women so that woman can provide unpaid labor in the home and so when you have a broader social safety net that allows women more economic independence, there's much more celebration of the fluidity of sexuality.

And so in some ways, socialism is much more conducive to multiple sexualities than a very traditional sort of patriarchal capitalist society. And I also think it's worth mentioning that August Bebel, who's the one man that I have to conclude a picture of in the book, he was also the first, generally regarded as the first politician to speak publicly in favor of the decriminalization of homosexuality. And so there is also a long history of socialist thinking broadly outside of the narrow confines of heterosexual nuclear family relationships. But it's just that for the purposes of this book, I had to narrow in on that topic.

Absolutely. Yeah. And thank you for saying that. And I really appreciated that part of the author's note leading into the text itself. So yeah, thank you for that. But now moving on, as you mentioned many times in this book, and we were talking about it a little bit a couple questions ago, It is unhelpful to either wholly reject the Soviet experiment as a total failure, but it's also unhelpful to fetishize it. Rather, we need to take real stock of the successes and failures of Soviet policies and policies throughout the Eastern Bloc so we can build a socialism that learns from the past and carry forward its successes while transcending its failures. As a Marxist myself, I feel as if this approach is absolutely essential and we benefit nobody, least of all ourselves, if we pick and choose from history instead of honestly assessing it as a whole. So with all of that in mind, can you talk about?

about some of the failures of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc specifically regarding women and women's rights? Yeah, this is really important and I want to emphasize that these are included in the book, right? There's no cherry picking here, right? So the big critique that I have is that none of these cultures or societies really dealt with the underlying issue of patriarchy in the home. They did not really challenge traditional gender roles. They generally tended to view women as exclusively workers and mothers. But they, I mean, they, they viewed them both as workers and mothers, but they never let go of the mothers part. They were very pro-natalist. Probably the worst place anywhere in the eastern block was Romania under Shoshescu,

where women's wombs, women's bodies were essentially nationalized by the dictator. Abortion and birth control were completely illegal. When a woman got pregnant, she was registered with the police, and they watched her to make sure that she would have the baby. Yeah, no, it was really very, very aggressive pro-natalism. Women had no freedom in terms of no control over their own reproductive biology. And so obviously other countries like the GDR or Czechoslovakia or Poland were a little bit more liberal in terms of guaranteeing women's reproductive freedoms, but women did, in fact, still suffer under what has been called the double bird.

whereby men never really helped out around the home as much as socialists thought that they would and the social safety net or the socialization of domestic work and child care was never as robust as they wanted it to be and so most women were working full-time jobs and also had care responsibilities in the home as well as domestic work which left them pretty exhausted and it also meant that almost throughout the block

without exception, women never really rose up to the level of high political leadership that you would have expected given that they had all this professional training and education and experience in the workforce. They generally tended to be too exhausted and not very interested in entering into the sphere of high politics or high enterprise management. So there were some real failures and I definitely don't want anyone to come away with the impression that it was like some kind of socialist women's paradise behind the iron curtain there were still problems that were never dealt with yeah and that's important for us because you know we give ourselves the the task of carrying forward that proletarian history and trying to build you know socialism here in the belly

of the beast in the 21st century and it's it's worth noting that the radical tradition has failed in a lot of these areas and since then a lot of people from you know a lot of you know feminist, a lot of LGBTQ activists, a lot of people of color have pointed out some of these problems throughout socialist history and its Eurocentrism and its whiteness and its heteronormativity. And I think we've really, over the last several decades, especially really progressives or leftists have struggled with these ideas and infused our Marxisms or our anarchisms with a lot of these ideas. They were present in embryo form in a lot of these figures and a lot of these movements and certainly, you know, lots of countries in the Eastern Bloc, Soviet Union, were really

taking steps as much as they could to to help women and to bring you know matt would talk about you know women hold up half the sky etc so it's always been a part of our tradition but you know it does need to become more robust and every single you know person on our side needs to really think about this and take an honest assessment and figure out how we can you know not make those same mistakes again and a lot of that you know is just the the natural leadership of women and marginalized folks in our movements you know centering them and letting them take the lead and learning from them and listening to them is a big part of that, I think. Yeah, I mean, to come back to somebody I talked about earlier,

Alexandra Colentai, who was really trying to attack the bourgeois nuclear family. She wanted to explode the family and it transfer the responsibility of domestic work and child care onto society. And she had some really, really progressive ideas, you know, writing in the late 19th century, early 20th century. and the 1918 and 1926 Soviet family codes really kind of reflected a lot of Cullen Tye's thinking around these issues, but by 1936 the family code,

Stalin reverses everything. And in many respects, Colantai, like there was so much upheaval going on in the Soviet Union at that time with the World War I and then the Civil War and then the famine. And the male leaders, both Len and And Trotsky in the early period, they just turned on her. And they said that her idea of liberating women and, you know, destroying the family was too radical. Here, they were doing so many other things,

but they, they were very, you know, traditional in some ways around gender roles. And I think that this has always been a tension on the left is that people want to rush into, you know, building some kind of future that doesn't, that isn't sensitive to the ways in which people with and the movement are coming from different positionalities. And while we do need to have solidarity, we also need to be respectful of the fact that people have, you know, there are multiple kind of oppressions going on. And especially if we look historically at women's rights,

as well as other marginalized group. But women, I think, were promised a certain bill of goods. They were some of the most enthusiastic supporters of the revolution or the reform, no matter, depending on where you're looking at this. but they often kind of got sold down the river when the focus turned to building an industrialized economy or militarization or central planning, all these other problems that the socialist leaders needed to figure out before they dealt with the women's question. Definitely. And the whole idea of the Marxist idea that we're historical subjects and that we're sort of confined given our epoch of what sort of ideas were capable of fully reaching. And, you know, think about the Russian Revolution.

What it came out of is, like, centuries of feudalism, monarchical rule, highly, highly hyper-conservative, you know, patriarchal domination. And so a part of me realizes that to come directly out of that and to be perfect on these issues is sort of an impossibility. But it's also not an excuse for that either. Right. Yeah. It's not an excuse.

And it's even amazing that they tried, right? So from 1917 to 1936, they tried. You know, we have the, we have this guy. We can look at the legal codes. We can see what happened. There was an attempt. It just really didn't work for a complicated set of reasons. But I do think it's worth, it's always worth reminding people that it is part of this broader history of socialism. And again, as I pointed out earlier, this goes back. This predates the Bolshevik revolution. You know, Owen, Robert Owen, up in Scotland, is talking about, you know, raising children collectively. Very early on, earlier drafts of

the communist manifesto written by Engels talk a lot about having children at the moment that they're able to leave their mother's care put into things like kindergartens. So this is really fundamental, this idea of socializing the work of the family and socializing the kind of domestic work that women are largely responsible for, which traps them in the home and traps them in economic dependence on men. That goes way back even before the Bolsheviks. Yeah, absolutely. Now, with all of that said, let's make damn sure we don't forget the ongoing crimes of global neoliberal capitalism and imperialism. So in what ways in your estimation do women suffer the most acutely and unnecessarily under capitalism today? Yeah, okay.

So again, I could just teach a class on this subject. So I'll just try to keep this brief because this is really the crux of my book, right? All of the ways in which capitalism fundamentally undermines women's ability to be, economically independent, which women's, undermines women's liberty. Like, we talk so much in the United States about, oh, liberty and freedom, and yet we essentially create the conditions whereby, you know, again, speaking specifically about cisgendered women, you know, we have much higher rates of poverty and economic dependence in all age groups of women in this country. Obviously, this is worse for people of color, for women of color. It's often really terrible for the elderly. But

women because they are you know you had sylvia federici on the show and this is essentially her argument that capitalism in its contemporary instantiation and some would argue going back to its very origins exists in the current in its form because it exploits and you know extracts the unpaid labor of women in the home and that has been consistent throughout the history of this economic system. And so I think that any woman or person who wants to have children wants to have a family, wants to create a world to do care work in a society that is so brutal and provides so little of a social safety net is fundamentally, you know, oppressed and made unfree by that society. So that capitalism in the United States, particularly in our contemporary moment,

it does not liberate people. It actually enslaves them. It makes them dependent in all sorts of ways on employers, on partners. And we haven't really figured out a way to solve that problem. And it's a problem that's been going on for a long time. Definitely. Every woman in my life from my partner to my sister, to my mother, I mean, they're all affected by that sort of stuff in one way or another to some degree or another.

And so, you know, it's like no woman can escape it. And, of course, when we talk about trans women, the amount of violence and the amount of poverty that they have to endure every day in this patriarchal society is another layer of just depravity that we have to deal with. But it's also the case, you know, for instance, you know, if we look at a place like Greece, any place where you have had a massive austerity program sort of imposed on a society, what happens when budgets get slashed? health care, education, all sorts of social services are cut from the budget because of these austerity programs that are being imposed on these countries. Where does that labor go? It doesn't disappear. It all goes back into the home where women do it for free. So these states consider women like they're, you know, kind of just like the place where you can dump care work that needs to be done but you don't want to pay for and it's you know or anybody i would say not just

cisgendered women but anybody who's in a in a relationship of dependence or who's in the home and who's in a primary caregiving role this is really deep exploitation of course capitalism is based on exploitation but this is a form of exploitation that we don't talk about often enough i believe yeah that explicit connection between austerity and dumping all of that burden onto onto to women is something I never, you know, really thought about explicitly like that. But yeah, that's incredibly true. And God damn it, I hope people, like, really take that in and internalize that. Now, zooming in towards the end of our conversation, I have two more questions for you.

And these are more, I think, just sort of like thinking about the past and looking at the present, you know, kind of zooming more into Eastern Europe in today's world. So in the former Soviet Union, the former Soviet bloc countries like Hungary and Poland and Ukraine and even East Germany, we are seeing the rise of far right and fashion. movements and governments so with all of your understanding of that area why do you think this is happening with such consistency in the former soviet bloc and how is it related to capitalism because after all if communism did one thing really well it was always fighting fascism yet under capitalism it seems to blossom unimpeded yeah so this is a long again i keep saying this but it's a complicated answer um that i may actually end up writing a book on so but the the long and short of it is the rise in inequality. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development did a really interesting

report in 2016-2017. It's called the transition report. And they basically argue in that that the rapid rise in inequality and the concentration of wealth, wealth that used to be collectively owned, but which is now concentrated in a very small sliver of the top of populations in this region has contributed to obviously a lot of economic anxiety, but a lot of distrust towards democracy and free markets. A lot more distrust than anybody thought possible in places that, you know, only 30 years ago were welcoming these systems with open arms, were in fact, you know, very much hoping that they would become democracies in free markets. And so I do think that a lot of it has to do with the inequality relative to the previous time, and then a way

in which you have to articulate a new sense of communality with people. They don't like this inequality. They're trying to assert a sense in which we all have to look after each other in society. And because there's a kind of allergy to the left, obviously, especially in place places like Poland and Ukraine, where the left or the socialist past is associated with Soviet imperialism, there is a turn towards the right, towards fascism, because that is a narrative that does allow these countries to talk about, like, the health of the nation and caring for each other. And we see this most clearly in Poland and in Hungary, where both the Law and Justice Party and Victor Orban in Hungary, are instituting all sorts of social policies that might actually look kind of leftist, except for that they're taking on these very nationalist characters, characteristics.

And so I think that part of the story has to do with growing inequality relative to the previous period, and part of the story has to do with the fact that if you want a narrative that is going to accept the importance of a kind of collectivity and the left narrative is foreclosed to you, people generally tend to drift towards a more right-wing narrative. And we're seeing that not only in Eastern Europe, by the way, we're seeing that and lots of other advanced democracies as well. Yeah, there was a really interesting Vice documentary that I watched for like three hours of their day, and, you know, Vice sucks. And this documentary was hosted by somebody who was sympathetic to Ukraine, I think. But it really showed the tensions in Crimea during the Russian takeover of Crimea recently in the Ukraine. And it's really fascinating for leftists to kind of see the residual left over anti-communism and pro-communism and that sort of debate.

You know, here in the U.S., it's kind of stripped of its historical context, I think, a lot of times. But, like, you know, in the Ukraine, the people that wanted to be taken over by Russia, a lot of them were still really in this USSR mode. And, you know, they defend like a Lennon statue. They would do their rallies in a Lennon statue in Crimea, and Ukrainian fascists would come and confront them. and there'd be fistfights in the streets, etc. You know, the Ukrainian, you know, far right, basically, the nationalists and people who still have nostalgia for the Soviet Union. So, I don't know, I just thought it opened up a really interesting, like,

worldview for me to see that sort of, that sort of tension still living on in a lot of these places today. I don't know really what to make of it, but I just think it's interesting. People should check it out. But last question, and this is sort of looking back, and I wonder this a lot, and I've seen different things online, you know, saying polls show this, or poll show that, but how do people living in Eastern Europe today feel about their Soviet past, giving 30 years of capitalism to compare it to? Is there any polling that you think is legit

regarding the nostalgia or lack thereof about socialism given hindsight? Yeah, actually, I just wrote a big paper looking at 30 years worth of public opinion polling in Eastern Europe on this question. And I can tell you that unequivocally there is a lot of nostalgia for the past and that it's growing rather than shrinking. When it was first noticed, it was always thought that it was among the older generation and that it would eventually die out as the older generation died out. But what we're seeing is that, in fact, young people who were born after 1989 or 91 are actually nostalgic for the past, which is kind of weird.

It's sort of like displaced nostalgia for a past they didn't live through. What we also see, and this data comes from, I mentioned the EBRD, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This is the institution in Europe that was largely responsible, at least partially, for the transition in a lot of these countries. And it did a series of transition reports looking at progress that was made. There are three big data sets that you can look at. And the most recent one shows really worrying trends throughout the region. People's confidence in democracy and free markets is declining, and the levels of social trust in these societies has just gone into the toilet.

So there's actually a lot of social pain. Poverty has increased. When we look at some of the economic data and we combine it with demographic data and we look at poverty rates, we can see that there's a ton of continued suffering from the transition period. I'm actually working on a project with this with a colleague of mine at Penn, who's a political scientist. And we are both actually, I was, to be honest, even me, surprised at how much worse the data actually shows it is than what you hear in the press or what you see, you know, if you're just sort of Googling around on the internet. The data is actually pretty depressing.

And I think that there is a lot of frustration with 30 years of capitalism, but two colleagues of mine in Romania wrote a wonderful paper called zombie socialism. And in this paper, they argue that many of these East European elites, some of them oligarchs, use the specter of the socialist authoritarian past as a way to justify the unequal distribution of income in this part of the world right now. And so there's a way in which, like, if you want to tax, you know, banks or you want to build roads or you want to support, you know, pre-K education, you must be a socialist and you killed my grandfather.

That's sort of their general line. And I do think that this zombie socialism is very strong in places like Ukraine. Again, I think that the Baltics and Ukraine and Poland are places where socialism is very much associated with a kind of Soviet imperialism. so it's a particularly touchy subject. But even outside of those places down in the Balkans in Bulgaria and Romania in Hungary, a lot of nostalgia for the past is looked down upon in these countries. So it's generally seen as somehow being, you know, backward and not modern.

But on the other hand, there's this massive out-migration. There are these plummeting birth rates. There are increased poverty rates. so that even if you are a total anti-socialist, for instance, in Hungary, you have to admit that the last 30 years of economic development haven't been the greatest as far as the long-term survival of the Hungarian nation is concerned, which is why Victor Orban just passed some law that any woman who has four or more children, I believe it is, will not have to pay income tax for the rest of her life, or something like that. the Polish government is paying women to have babies. So there is this tension between the widespread nostalgia, which is there, and there's very good data on it, and what to make of that nostalgia, because politically it's sort of dead in the water in a lot of these countries, because people do not want to go back, obviously, to any

sort of authoritarianism, sort of left authoritarianism. They might be willing to embrace kind of right authoritarianism, and so that's the kind of situation that we see developing in Eastern Europe today. Yeah, you know, I mean, as Lenin said, you know, fascism is capitalism and decay, and as global capitalism continues to not be able to solve any of our problems, and as the center of capitalist politics continues to reveal itself to be a farce, people will be looking for alternatives, and the two main alternatives on offer is, do we move right or do we move left? And depending on your historical context, what country you live in, the history of that country,

you know, people may go one way or the other, but it's our jobs as radicals to clarify our history so that people don't have this one-dimensional, absurd, propagandistic, far-right view of what socialism in the left is and what it can offer so that we might be able to bring more people over to our end. And I think you, Kristen, are doing really important work on this front. So thank you so much for coming on. It's always an honor to talk to you. If you have any books in the future, any essays, you always have a home here at Rev. Left Radio. Before I let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Yeah, so I'm pretty easy to find if you just type.

in Kristen Godsey. I have a website www.christingodsey.com. I also actually just have a brand new academic book out called Second World Second Sex, which is about women's global solidarity during the UN Decade for Women, which was 1975 to 1985.

It is a very academic history, but people who are interested in sort of the history of global socialist feminism might be interested in the book, but otherwise you can find most of my work on my website. I try to post links to everything that I write these days. And I'm not on social media, unfortunately. But I'm,

but I am, you know, my work is out there. And I hope people will be inspired by this book in particular to reach out not only to my other more scholarly books, but also to the books of my colleagues, both in the United States and in Eastern Europe, who are doing such interesting research about this period of time today. And the other thing is I just, I'm, you know, I'm very much a newbie, but I did just start a podcast which I am calling AK-47, which is 47 works of 47 selections from the works of Alexander Colentai. So it will be 47 episodes and I'm going to go in and I'm reading selections of her essays and I'm going to talk about their meaning and why I think they're relevant to the contemporary moment. So they're short, they're like 15 minutes

long and I'm hoping that younger, especially younger listeners who may not know who Alexander Colentai is or don't really, you know, want to dive into reading a bunch of, you know, texts from the late 18th century or early 20th century, they can listen to the podcast and at least get a overall sense of who Alexander Colentai was and why she's so important to our thinking about socialist feminism today. Kristen, thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure and I can't wait to talk to you in the future about more stuff that you do.

When my landlords knock, knock, knocking on my door Mr. Bill collect to call me, but I don't answer no more I keep a pistol in my pocket, got a dagger hidden in my vass, yes. I've been dancing with the devil only trying to do my best, yeah. It's acclimation. of my ruination. We are lost in vain. We are lost in vain.

We are lost in vain. And clapping, tick, ticking time away. Well, I'm out doing things that I should. things that I shouldn't, but I do anyway. I'm looking for a quick fix, baby, I ain't trying to stay. So we can love them on my mama, and then we throw each other away. Yeah, it's a crumination of the ruination. in vain

Realized in vain In vain I want to break free from my body, shy it can lose my skin, yes, I hate a thought I am, my god, and I am convinced, I want to break free from my body, shy can lose my skin, yes, I hate a thought I am my god, and I take another sneer. We are lost. Even they realized In vain Realized