What do you think?
Rate this book
Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History
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
67 people want to read
About the author
Andrei Znamenski
2 books20 followersAndrei 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.
"
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.
"
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 28, 2025
"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-pp. 309
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"
"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
December 14, 2025
This book is a relentlessly one-sided and tendentious anti-socialist polemic, as well as a terribly edited one. There are typos on virtually every page, and the book is loaded with 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. Unsurprisingly, 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 sweeping generalizations.
-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." While I'm no fan of Badiou, 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 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 multiple genocidal dictators, including Pol Pot in Cambodia, Rios Montt in Guatemala, 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 blatantly engaging in moral and intellectual double standards.
-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."
-Znamenski makes no attempt to be fair or even-handed. He is loathe to acknowledge anything positive that socialists and communists ever did, from anti-fascist resistance in World War II to the labor, women's suffrage, civil rights, anti-colonial, and anti-apartheid movements. He is also loathe to acknowledge anything negative that capitalists ever did, from the corporations that profited from the slave trade, colonial looting, deforestation and toxic pollution to anti-communist genocides in countries like Indonesia and Guatemala. 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 criticism of their negative effects as a "neoliberalism scare" (as if objections to flat working-class wages, austerity policies, and rising inequality were just a matter of fear). 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.
The crimes of authoritarian socialist states are undeniable, and most of what Znamenski says about their human rights record is true, from the Holodomor and the Gulag to the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields. But while Znamenski uses these crimes to indict socialism in general, he fails to follow the same logic with the vast and equally appalling crimes of capitalist states like Britain, France, and the USA and capitalist corporations like the East India Company, the Royal African Company, Standard Oil, IBM, I.G. Farben, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, and Philip Morris. If the crimes of socialist states require us to indict socialism in general, why don't the crimes of capitalist states and corporations similarly require us to indict capitalism in general? Znamenski tries to get around this problem by rejecting the concept of capitalism itself, but this is just an evasion.
Acknowledging nuance in the historical record would require Znamenski 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. MLK, Olof Palme, Nelson Mandela, and Clement Atlee were socialists too. Would Znamenski deny that they contributed more to human well-being than capitalists like Jay Gould, Günther Quandt, and Dick Cheney? In his zeal to demonize socialism, Znamenski has to deny the many accomplishments of socialists, and ignore or explain away the many crimes and abuses of capitalists. For a corrective to this one-sided view, I recommend books like the following:
1) David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
2) David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire
3) Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History
4) Ned and Constance Sublette, The Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
5) Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
6) Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
7) David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties
8) Jacques R. Pauwels, Big Business and Hitler
9) Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America
10) Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
11) Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
12) Jack Doyle, Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical & the Toxic Century
13) Gerald Posner, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America
14) Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine
15) Jean Ziegler, Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry.
Nothing excuses the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, but if you read these fifteen books, you can't pretend that the historical contest between capitalism and socialism is a story of good vs. evil.
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.
-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. Unsurprisingly, 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 sweeping generalizations.
-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." While I'm no fan of Badiou, 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 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 multiple genocidal dictators, including Pol Pot in Cambodia, Rios Montt in Guatemala, 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 blatantly engaging in moral and intellectual double standards.
-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."
-Znamenski makes no attempt to be fair or even-handed. He is loathe to acknowledge anything positive that socialists and communists ever did, from anti-fascist resistance in World War II to the labor, women's suffrage, civil rights, anti-colonial, and anti-apartheid movements. He is also loathe to acknowledge anything negative that capitalists ever did, from the corporations that profited from the slave trade, colonial looting, deforestation and toxic pollution to anti-communist genocides in countries like Indonesia and Guatemala. 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 criticism of their negative effects as a "neoliberalism scare" (as if objections to flat working-class wages, austerity policies, and rising inequality were just a matter of fear). 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.
The crimes of authoritarian socialist states are undeniable, and most of what Znamenski says about their human rights record is true, from the Holodomor and the Gulag to the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and the Killing Fields. But while Znamenski uses these crimes to indict socialism in general, he fails to follow the same logic with the vast and equally appalling crimes of capitalist states like Britain, France, and the USA and capitalist corporations like the East India Company, the Royal African Company, Standard Oil, IBM, I.G. Farben, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, and Philip Morris. If the crimes of socialist states require us to indict socialism in general, why don't the crimes of capitalist states and corporations similarly require us to indict capitalism in general? Znamenski tries to get around this problem by rejecting the concept of capitalism itself, but this is just an evasion.
Acknowledging nuance in the historical record would require Znamenski 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. MLK, Olof Palme, Nelson Mandela, and Clement Atlee were socialists too. Would Znamenski deny that they contributed more to human well-being than capitalists like Jay Gould, Günther Quandt, and Dick Cheney? In his zeal to demonize socialism, Znamenski has to deny the many accomplishments of socialists, and ignore or explain away the many crimes and abuses of capitalists. For a corrective to this one-sided view, I recommend books like the following:
1) David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World
2) David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire
3) Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History
4) Ned and Constance Sublette, The Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry
5) Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
6) Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
7) David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany's Wealthiest Dynasties
8) Jacques R. Pauwels, Big Business and Hitler
9) Stephen G. Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America
10) Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
11) Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
12) Jack Doyle, Trespass Against Us: Dow Chemical & the Toxic Century
13) Gerald Posner, Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America
14) Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine
15) Jean Ziegler, Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry.
Nothing excuses the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, but if you read these fifteen books, you can't pretend that the historical contest between capitalism and socialism is a story of good vs. evil.
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.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews