The Nuclear Predicament: Explorations in Soviet Ideology by Stephen Shenfield

Author:Stephen Shenfield [Shenfield, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nuclear Warfare, Military, Political Science, World, History, General, Russian & Former Soviet Union
ISBN: 9781000200409
Google: Qg8HEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 53371564
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-11-19T11:43:37+00:00

The impact of global problems on world politics

The growing interdependence of the world, as the philosopher Academician Ursul argues, requires

a new, global social consciousness, the reorientation of the thinking of politicians and strategists, responsible now no longer only for the fate of their own countries, but also for that of all humanity. In solving the internal problems of one or another country, including problems of security, the problems of other States can no longer be ignored.20

Many Soviet ideologists perceive that this global consciousness is indeed arising. Some, like Grigoryan, see the roots of global consciousness in a wide range of ‘unifying tendencies of world development’: modern transport, intensive economic, political and cultural interchange, and the broad diffusion of information on world events through the mass media have ‘made the globe accessible and perceptible’ to enormous numbers of people.21 But it is the ‘community of fate of all peoples, … the situation … in which various social systems can either survive or perish only together’, imposed on the human race by its global problems, which is assigned the main role in generating ‘an increasingly clear self-perception of humanity as a single, though contradictory, whole’.22 To the traditional categories of international relations such as national, State and class interests, argue Tomashevsky and Lukov, is now added the category of ‘interests of humanity’. There appears a crucial new division in world politics, that between those who do and those who do not understand the need to give priority to common human interests. Moreover, ‘the dividing line in this struggle does not usually run between classes and parties but within them’.23

Assertions of this kind, in according primacy to ideas, appear hard to reconcile with Marxian materialism. Advocates of the all-human approach, however, insist that their approach remains a fully materialist one. In analysing the determinants of historical events, Marxism has traditionally concentrated on the forces and relations of production and the class struggles associated with them. But this class approach, which implicitly takes continued human survival as a given, is no longer adequate in the age of global problems. The analyst cannot now be satisfied with the twofold Marxist distinction between the political and cultural ‘superstructure’ of society and its productive ‘base’, but must dig deeper to take proper account of the ‘sub-base’ of biological conditions of human existence:

In his time, Engels … stressed ‘the simple fact that people must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before they are in a position to occupy themselves with politics, science, art, religion, etc.’. Today, one might add to this that before eating, drinking, having shelter and clothing, people must first of all secure the preservation of the human race … The solution of all other questions - economic, social, political, ideological, etc. - depends on this.24

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