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34 - Communist Morality under Socialism

from Part V - Institutional Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Yunxiang Yan
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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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.

Keywords

statist ethicsrevolutionclass strugglehatred of enemysocial engineeringthe New Personselflessnesscollectivisminstitutional sociality
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 871 - 896
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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