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I was so excited to finally visit New Lanark, the home of Robert Owen’s utopian socialist experiments in the early 19th century. This place could be seen as the birthplace of every social movement to improve the working conditions of industrial workers in the last 200 years.
Since it was early April, the place was very empty and we spent a few hours wandering around the exhibits and really reading everything. It was the perfect day trip from Glasgow.
“Second World, Second Sex,” delivered October 20, 2021 and chaired by the brilliant Juliane Fürst
I spent an absolutely wonderful day with the folks at Medicine for the People in Antwerp and with the activists and party leaders of the Belgian Workers Party at the invitation of Peter Mertens. It was a fantastic day and I learned a lot!
Dr. Sofie Blancke, Maartje De Vries, and Kristen Ghodsee at Medicine for the People
COMAC activists: Apolline Dupuis (middle)
Peter Mertens and Kristen Ghodsee
Nadine and Kristen
My summer research student, Abby Laform, has been researching cool socialist, communist, and revolutionary women and posting about them TikTok, trying to bring some of these life stories to a Zoomer audience. You can check it out here.
These are the French proofs of my article forthcoming in the July edition of Le Monde Diplomatique in both French and English. I am so excited that it will be featured as the middle two-page spread in both editions.
This debate which I did little while ago dropped today on the NPR website. For the record, the conversation that Vivek, Bryan, and I had was about an hour and forty-five minutes, which was then edited down to about 45 minutes. I did have more to say about the role of neoliberal economics in Eastern Europe, but it got cut.
A history of Bulgarian radicals - what’s not to like!
My comments on the book: Imagining Utopia: The Lost World of Socialists at Europe’s Margins
In her chapter on Angelina Boneva, Todorova introduces us to the idea of the “extraordinary” ordinary person,” someone whose life is not representative of some statistical average or of a particular subgroup of some clan of acknowledged historical significance, but a fully autonomous individual whose life and work deserves to be remembered on its own terms, as a legacy of one particular mind in one particular moment in time. As an ethnographer, this question of significance forever haunts my discipline, especially in an era of big data where everyone is keen to understand some imagined concept of public opinion or popular preferences in order to manipulate, deceive, subvert, or most likely, market to it. When the citizens of every continent are microblogging the daily minutia of their lives on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, those harvesting this content see its value only in its aggregation and monetization. But the discipline of cultural anthropology demands that we take individuals and small communities as representatives of something deeper, always looking for clues to the universality of human experience despite the many differences that divide us.
In her chapter on Todor Tsekov, Todorova tells us that his handwritten “memoir-diary” of over 1100 pages only constituted the first 4 volumes of a ten-volume set. Todorova reflects, “excluding novelists and a few politicians, I have never encountered such graphomania in anyone” (205). Her mention of the word “graphomania” reminded me of one of my favorite pages of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting when he meets a graphomanaical taxi driver. Kundera writes:
Graphomania is not a desire to writer letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or ones close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers)… For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
The many rich lives that Todorova rescues from oblivion in her book, extraordinary ordinary people like Angelina Boneva, Todor and Katia Tsekov, Koika Tineva and Nikola Sakarov, as well as the many glimpses of socialist women and wives, allow us to find the universality in the specificity of these lives: their overwhelming desire to build a better world. Their imagining of utopia.
“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labeled Utopian, explained Emma Goldman in 1911.” The German sociologist Karl Mannheim also argued that utopia was a necessary antidote to ideology, which he defined as the unseen but omnipresent social, cultural, and philosophical structure of ideas that uphold a particular “order of things” protecting those who hold political and economic power. “Inasmuch as man is a creature living primarily in history and society,” Mannheim wrote in 1929, “the ‘existence’ that surrounds him is never ‘existence as such,’ but is always a concrete historical form of social existence… The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized.” In other words, those who benefit from the status quo have a strong motive for labeling as “utopian” any ideas which threaten it. But even beyond that, those steeped in the ideology of their current existence quite literally cannot imagine an alternative to it. And most people just follow along.
But Todorova’s beautiful book shows us that there have always been dreamers, like these lost socialists on Europe’s margins, refusing to accept the status quo. Fighting for women’s rights, for improvements in the lives of peasants and workers, for worlds free from exploitation and misery, and for more democratic forms of political participation. Their dreams may have had different contours, and we know that there are always conflicts among people with different visions of the ideal future, but we also know from history that it is these dreamers that move our societies forward. Behind the great men and women (but usually men) who are written about in history books, there are billions of “extraordinary ordinary” men and women who have devoted their lives for causes bigger than themselves alone, and these causes gave purpose and meaning to their lives, helped order and structure their days, and allowed them to feel that they might not disappear “unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe.”
In his 1863 novel What Is to Be Done?, Chernyshevsky outlined a utopian vision of the future where workers would finally enjoy the fruits of their own labor in his protagonist Vera Pavlovna's third dream sequence. "Tell everyone that the future will be radiant and beautiful," Chernyshevsky writes, "Love it, strive toward it, work for it, bring it nearer, transfer into the present as much as you can from it."
It is not easy to imagine a better future, a utopia out there floating on the horizon, when the crushing burdens of quotidian existence often limit our ability to dream. Tired and apathetic, most of us cling carelessly to the status quo, convinced by our societies that any attempt to change this will inevitably devolve into dystopia. By salvaging these moving lost life stories from Europe’s margins, Todorova has shown us the value and importance of social dreaming in an era when utopianism is still derided as useless at best and politically dangerous at worst. I think Todorova’s book shows us that the uncanny ability to believe in an unknown (but somehow better future)–to see the world not as it is but as it should be–is what makes these individuals extraordinary in their ordinary-ness, and for me this is ultimately a book of “individual close-ups” of hope, of the tenacity of the human spirit to think beyond suffocating ideological boxes of the present.
To end with the full quote from Oscar Wilde with which Todorova begins her book: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
Today, I also received 8 copies of the Slovak translation of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence, seen here with my autographed photo of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. I didn’t realize that this cover had a hole in it and inside was an image of a stamp in honor of Tereshkova.
On sale March 3rd, just in time for Women’s History Month and IWD!
Дали при социализма жените са имали по-добър секс? Да, убедена е американската етнографка Кристен Годсий. В своята книга, излязла през 2019 в Германия, тя обяснява защо. Годсий задава и други въпроси.
So I actually didn’t know this was going to happen, but it seems that Capitan Swing, my Spanish publisher, arranged to have an excerpt of the Spanish book published under my name in Spain’s second largest newspaper. It’s pretty weird to see my name on something that I had no idea about, but I suppose this is standard book promotion stuff. At least I like the photo they chose to accompany the excerpt.
Thanks so much to Mónica Zas for her great interview questions.
Coming in November from Captain Swing Libros in Spain: Por qué las mujeres disfrutan más del sexo bajo el socialismo. Y otros argumentos a favor de la independencia económica'
I had no idea the Russians had translated my interview with Sophia Benoit for their national version of GQ Magazine. A friend just sent me the link.
So happy that Vintage paperbacks did such a wonderful job with the paperback version of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence.
We pulled it off! After a year of logistics and organizing, we had over 35 women from around the world in Ann Arbor for a meeting on Global Socialist Feminism.
Discussing her book: Finding Women in the State
Here is the cover of the German version of my book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. I am sad that they didn’t include the subtitle, but it does make the cover look much cleaner and less cluttered. It’s out on October 27, 2019!
