Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History

by Andrei Znamenski

Andrei Znamenski argues that socialism arose out of activities of secularized apocalyptic sects, the Enlightenment tradition, and dislocations produced by the Industrial Revolution. He examines how, by the 1850s, Marx and Engels made the socialist creed “scientific” by linking it to “history laws” and inventing the proletariat—the “chosen people” that were to redeem the world from oppression. Focusing on the fractions between social democracy and communism, Znamenski explores why, historically, socialism became associated with social engineering and centralized planning. He explains the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and its role in fostering the cultural left that came to privilege race and identity over class. Exploring the global retreat of the left in the 1980s–1990s and the “great neoliberalism scare,” Znamenski also analyzes the subsequent renaissance of socialism in wake of the 2007–2008 crisis.

495 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 29, 2021

About the author

Andrei Znamenski, a native of Russia, has studied history and anthropology both in Russia and the United States. Formerly a resident scholar at the Library of Congress, then a foreign visiting professor at Hokkaido University, Japan, he has taught various history courses at Russian and American universities. Among them are World Civilizations, Russian history, and the History of Religions.
Znamenskis major fields of interests are Shamanism, Western Occult and Esotericism, Russian history, and indigenous religions of Siberia and North America. Znamenski lived and traveled extensively in Alaska, Siberia, and Japan. His field and archival research among Athabaskan Indians in Alaska and native people of the Altai (Southern Siberia) resulted in the book Shamanism and Christianity (1999) and Through Orthodox Eyes (2003).
After this, Znamenski became interested in the cultural history of shamanism. Endeavoring to answer why shamanism became so popular with Western spiritual seekers since the 1960s, he wrote The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2007) and edited the three-volume anthology Shamanism: Critical Concepts (2004). Simultaneously, he continued to explore shamanism of Siberian indigenous people, traveling to the Altai and surrounding areas, which led to the publication of Shamanism in Siberia (2003). Between 2003 and 2004, he resided in Japan, where along with his Japanese colleague, Professor Koichi Inoue, Znamenski worked with itako, blind female healers and mediums from the Amori prefecture.
During the past several years, he has been researching prophetic legends of nomadic people of Inner Asia (Shambhala, Geser, Oirot, Amursana) and how these legends inspired indigenous and European spiritual seekers. The result of this research is his most recent book Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia (Quest Press, forthcoming June 2011). With all of the action and suspense of a bestselling mystery novel, it takes you on a thrilling journey into the underground occult agenda of the 1920s Soviet Secret Police. It details the zealous Bolshevik commissar Gleb Bokiis and renowned occult writer and Rosicrucian Alexander Barchenkos attempts to fulfill a mysterious Tibetan prophecy which tells of a coming fifth and last Buddha known as Lord Maitreya, a mystical Christ-like world leader. Their goal was to reach out to Tibetan Buddhist wisdom to conjure a divine era of Communism.
Red Shambhala shows how that romantic dream quickly caught the attention of die-hard revolutionaries, staunch nationalists and theosophical occultists, forging a most unlikely 20th century enterprise. Bolshevik secret police, Tibetan lamas, the famed occult couple Nicholas and Helena Roerich, and the right-wing fanatic baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg known as "Bloody White" embarked in unison on dangerous expeditions through Mongolia, Tibet and farther to the Himalayas. Supernatural urgency solidified the pursuit of their common goal: to discover the Maitreya Buddha and his mythological land known as Shambhala, a land of pure mystical bliss where inhabitants enjoyed god-like capabilities. For all of these impassioned crusaders victory meant bringing the dawn of perfect man and obtaining the keys to a benevolent all-powerful ideal society that would serve as the beacon for the humankind.

"

Reviews

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The popular neoliberalism narrative is focused on the so-called Chicago boys a group of invited free-market economists who are portrayed as the intellectual foun-
tainheads of the Pinochet regime, which is simply not true. [...] At the same time, nobody looked at the market reforms in Chile, which the dictator originally did not have on his agenda, as a factor that in fact chipped away at the authoritarian regime. The greater economic liberty and the protection of private property that was written down in the new Chilean constitution not only economically stabilized the country but also opened her up and linked to the wider world. Eventually, the greater economic freedom led to political changes. In 1990, Pinochet voluntarily
stepped down as a result of a free referendum"

pp. 309

"Having mass vanishings and sado-sexual torture but it's fine because as a dictator I personally stepped down and had free market reforms"

Do you not hear yourself? Pinochet wasn't a dictator to be a dictator; Pinochet was an ideological project of Politicide! The Goal was to Kill a Group of Political Enemies. Not for Pinochet to be a All Supreme Mega Leader. It's embarrassing that despite going deep into the cultural evolution of socialism; evolving from apocalyptic messianistic sects to 'Scientific' Socialism. yet they can't do a second of critical thinking to understand the evolution of Leon Trotsky -> James Burnham -> CIA -> Pinochet thought.

"In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back... While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door."

Rafferty, Chloe. “Australia Must Extradite Pinochet Agent Adriana Rivas.” Red Flag AU, 30 Nov. 2024

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a relentlessly one-sided and tendentious anti-socialist polemic, as well as a terribly edited one. The book is riddled with typos, which reflects poorly on Lexington Books. More importantly, it is full of simplistic, exaggerated, and misleading claims.

-Znamenski misspells Cedric Robinson's name as "Cedrick Robinson" and falsely claims that he invented the concept of "racial capitalism" (actually it had been used previously by Martin Legassick and others). He crudely straw-mans Robinson's argument in Black Marxism by claiming Robinson says it was "race and race exploitation rather than class that had defined the development of Europe [...]." Robinson never advances such an either-or argument about race and class as explanatory factors in historical development.

-He calls the 1619 Project "Project 1619" and attributes it to a vague entity called "the cultural left" rather than actually naming any of its authors. He ignores critiques of the 1619 Project that were published in 2019-2020 (which he could have cited) in places like Jacobin, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, and the very mainstream New Republic. This is because acknowledging debates within the left would complicate his generalizations.

-He makes sweeping statements about "the left" that completely lack nuance or acknowledgement of differences within the left, as when he writes: "The left talked about this postwar period that lasted until the 1970s as the golden age of democratic socialism." It is ludicrous to suggest the "left" was a singular entity that "talked" about anything, as if liberals, social democrats, anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, and Maoists all agreed on such questions in the postwar period.

-He writes that Alain Badiou "demonstrated such despise [sic] for the "unwashed masses" by openly calling the left to exercise “cultural hegemony” in society by smashing respect for individual freedoms, including a right to open a business and own a property." I'm no fan of Badiou, but placing the phrase "unwashed masses" in quotes falsely implies that he used the phrase, but he never did. This is scholarly malpractice.

-While rightly criticizing western leftists who defended Pol Pot, he fails to acknowledge that the U.S. government provided $85 million to Pol Pot's regime and the Khmer Rouge Forces between 1980 and 1986, over half of which was provided during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. See Peter H. Maguire, Facing Death in Cambodia (Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 70. Znamenski praises Reagan as an "important conversation starter" despite his administration's backing for at least 4 dictators who have been credibly charged with perpetrating genocide (Pol Pot in Cambodia, Rios Montt in Guatemala, Suharto in Indonesia and East Timor, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq). While lambasting leftists who defend dictatorships, he fails to mention his hero Hayek's similarly execrable defense of Pinochet (whose crimes he downplays) or Mises' work for the anti-semitic Austro-fascist Engelbert Dollfuss. Here Znamenski is clearly engaging in moral and intellectual double standards. Sorry, but you can't have it both ways while claiming the moral high ground.

-Znamenski makes no attempt to be fair or even-handed when discussing socialists. The crimes of authoritarian socialist states are undeniable, and most of what Znamenski says about their human rights record is true, from the Holodomor, Great Terror, and the Gulag to the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields. However, socialist critics of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot criticized all of these things all along. As Ilya Budraitskis points out in his book Dissidents Among Dissidents, anti-socialist liberals and conservatives never had a monopoly of criticisms of authoritarian socialism, including within the USSR itself; the strongest and most principled criticisms often came from anti-authoritarian socialists. Lea Ypi, whose father was brutally persecuted under Enver Hoxha's Stalinist regime in Albania, explains in her memoir Free that he remained a socialist until the end of his life, precisely because (like George Orwell) he believed that the movement's moral ideals remained defensible despite the crimes that dictators and their accomplices carried out in its name.

-When it comes to the rest of the world, Znamenski is loathe to acknowledge anything positive that socialists ever did, including socialist contributions to trade unionism, women's suffrage, anti-fascist resistance, civil rights, anti-colonial, and anti-apartheid movements, or the real accomplishments of social democratic and democratic socialist parties and leaders. As a corrective to this biased view, I highly recommend books like Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (2003), Gary Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (2021), Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism (2023), and Molly Crabapple, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (2026). No honest reader of these books can deny that socialists have made major contributions to humanitarian causes (not to mention science, art, music, and literature). One of them was Martin Luther King, Jr., who opposed authoritarian socialism but admired social democracy, and who said: "There must be better distribution of wealth and maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism." This is what King was fighting for when he was assassinated in Memphis two years later, ironically in the very city where Znamenski teaches.

-Conversely, Znamenski is loathe to acknowledge anything negative that capitalists ever did, as if their actions played no role in the growth of the socialist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as if socialist critiques of capitalism and imperialism had zero merit whatsoever. Znamenski rightly condemns human rights abuses committed in the name of socialism and the ideas of Karl Marx in the USSR, the PRC, North Korea, and Cambodia. However, he turns a blind eye to human rights abuses committed in the name of liberalism, capitalism, and the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Chicago School economists in the USA, Europe, and their colonies and/or authoritarian client states in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The only right-wing dictatorship whose crimes Znamenski is willing to acknowledge is Nazi Germany, because he can blame them on socialism (after all, it is in the word "Nationalsozialistische"). However, he fails to acknowledge that Hitler had the backing of major German and other western capitalists throughout the Holocaust and World War II. See David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires (2022), Jacques R. Pauwels, Big Business and Hitler (2013), Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (2001), and Tom Bower, Nazi Gold (1997). Moreover, Hitler hated Marxism because Marx was Jewish, and the Nazis liquidated socialists, communists, and social democrats alike within Germany and Axis-occupied territories.

-There is a mountain of historical evidence that the crimes of capitalist states equal or surpass those of socialist states in violent brutality and repression (see the sources cited here: https://brucebartlett.substack.com/p/...). Znamenski might respond that statesmen, not corporate executives or bankers, were responsible for the horrors listed above. But what about the private capitalists who profited from chattel slavery (Franklin and Armfield, Barclays Bank, New York Life Insurance), colonial genocides (Van Diemen's Land Company, Elder Dempster, the Abir Congo Company, Woermann-Linie, the Peruvian Amazon Company), and the Holocaust (I.G. Farben, IBM, Ford, General Motors, Du Pont, Standard Oil, UBS, Credit Suisse, Swiss Bank Corporation), and who continue to profit from arms manufacturing and war (Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon), toxic pollution (Dow Chemical, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil), and deforestation (Cargill, JBS, Colgate-Palmolive)? How should we morally evaluate their actions? While unchecked state power can lead to great evil, so can the unchecked profit motive.

-Znamenski wants us to believe that the worst crimes of socialists discredit socialism as a whole. But if this is the case, why don't the worst crimes of capitalists discredit capitalism as a whole? Why does this logic of guilt by association only apply to socialists, but not to capitalists? He tries to get around this problem by rejecting the concept of capitalism itself. In addition to putting him at odds with most of the economics profession, this is a convenient excuse for moral double standards. Acknowledging nuance in the historical record would require him to admit that not all socialisms are alike, just as not all capitalisms are alike; there are democratic and authoritarian, top-down and decentralized versions of both. While Znamenski's analogy between socialism and religion isn't a bad one, it applies just as well to capitalism and the verities of the free market. And just as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not reducible to the worst crimes committed in their name, neither are socialism and capitalism.

-When he gets to the last 40 years, rather than acknowledging any downsides to the economic policies associated with Reagan, Thatcher, or the IMF, Znamenski trivializes decades of writing about their negative effects as a "neoliberalism scare" (as if neoliberalism's critics had no legitimate objections, which is preposterous on its face). While rightly criticizing the alarmist excesses of some environmentalists, Znamenski irrationally dismisses the overwhelming scientific consensus that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, because the solutions that logically follow (government regulations to cut those emissions) conflict with his own secular creed of laissez-faire capitalism.

-In the book's final paragraph, Znamenski accuses Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of costing New York City 25,000 jobs because she opposed a tax incentive deal for Amazon (which he misspells as "amazon"), while providing no evidence for this inflated statistic. The sloppy writing and lack of scholarly rigor in this final paragraph are characteristic of the book as a whole.

-Finally, if you think that being from the former USSR gives Znamenski special authority, you need to consult a broader range of post-Soviet Russian opinion. You don't have to agree with Marxists like Boris Kagarlitsky to object to many of Znamenski's arguments. Most Russians don't agree with the right-wing Austrian school ideology that he embraces, and many offer a more balanced view of this topic.