Rob Schaap
> a social panopticon-culture,
a panopticon is a model for a society (a utopia) in which one person views
everyone. The classic variant, actually put into practice by prison reformers
(I think Jeremy Bentham, the Utiliatrian, was the main promotoer) in 19th c
England, is at Strangeways Prison in Manchester. The building features a
central column; rows of prison cells are arranged in tiers and are all open to
the warders observing from the central column. They cannot see each other, or
the observer, but he sees everything.
No doubt the panopticon idea was present in the USSR but the truth was rather
different. There was a Soviet saying that 'for every well-guarded front door
there are many unguarded bakc doors' and this was very often literally true.
What over-regimentation actually creates is bureaucratic chaos and the
stifling of economic and cultural growth. Interestingly, these phenomena were
much less evident in Stalin's time than later. Work that one out. Read Stephen
Kotkin's 'Magnetic Mountain' about life in the Urals industrial zones in the
1930s (Kotkin is now a prof at, I think, Harvard, so not exactly a communist,
but the book gives an insight into how the Stalin era produced a huge uplift
in national production and industrialisation, the impetus being lost after
WW2, not least because of the massacre by Hitler of the cream of the Soviet
working class: more than 90% of young men aged 18-20 in 1941, when the
Soviet-German war began, were *dead* by its end in 1945; it was not Stalin's
purges but Hitler's legions who did the damage).
Mark>
_______________________________________________
CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
