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7/12/2025, 12:56:00 AM
>>63971011
Milovan Djilas (a high-ranking communist official in Yugoslavia who turned against it) described a contradictory attitude towards scientific development in communist regimes. On the one hand, communist regimes identified with scientific progress™ as emerging from the Enlightenment. These were atheist states that believed in Darwin and Newton. The whole idea behind Marxism-Leninism is that it's a science (or supposed to be). But once it got into anything like politics, sociology, philosophy, economics, etc. it became very ideological.
You know how BioShock created a fictional underwater city based on the works of Ayn Rand? This is a nerd vidya reference but Atomic Heart is a lot like how communists imagined themselves in the 1950s:
https://youtu.be/RdsKoWUNcIk
They were also extremely pro-industrial which necessarily required the training of a technical intelligentsia. HOWEVER they didn't want the engineers to form their own social class, because that's dangerous. Also there was a total monopoly on thought, which meant every new idea was dangerous too. So this was a system that stimulated technical progress and provided a lot of resources and training for it, but also hindered every research activity where people thought freely (which is necessary for applied engineering). This sounds contradictory, because it is. It was a system based on a single philosophy, which by definition made it hostile to new discoveries as that could threaten the hegemony of the philosophy, even though it claimed to be scientific.
Milovan Djilas (a high-ranking communist official in Yugoslavia who turned against it) described a contradictory attitude towards scientific development in communist regimes. On the one hand, communist regimes identified with scientific progress™ as emerging from the Enlightenment. These were atheist states that believed in Darwin and Newton. The whole idea behind Marxism-Leninism is that it's a science (or supposed to be). But once it got into anything like politics, sociology, philosophy, economics, etc. it became very ideological.
You know how BioShock created a fictional underwater city based on the works of Ayn Rand? This is a nerd vidya reference but Atomic Heart is a lot like how communists imagined themselves in the 1950s:
https://youtu.be/RdsKoWUNcIk
They were also extremely pro-industrial which necessarily required the training of a technical intelligentsia. HOWEVER they didn't want the engineers to form their own social class, because that's dangerous. Also there was a total monopoly on thought, which meant every new idea was dangerous too. So this was a system that stimulated technical progress and provided a lot of resources and training for it, but also hindered every research activity where people thought freely (which is necessary for applied engineering). This sounds contradictory, because it is. It was a system based on a single philosophy, which by definition made it hostile to new discoveries as that could threaten the hegemony of the philosophy, even though it claimed to be scientific.
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