A book about the crisis of belief is a delicate thing to publish, because the reader is entitled to ask whether the author himself believes. Nihilism Today — Y. Sogomonov and P. Landesman's study of the pessimism, disenchantment and moral vertigo of the Western world, issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1977 in David Skvirsky's translation — is a work of exactly this hazardous kind. It sets out to diagnose a society in which, the authors say, the proclaimed values and the lived ones have come apart; in which official optimism is manufactured while private despair spreads underneath it; in which people go through the motions of a creed they no longer inhabit. It is a sharp book, better than its worst pages, and it was written in the capital of a state then entering the deepest phase of precisely the condition it describes. The interest of reading it now lies in watching a genuinely acute instrument being held very carefully so that it never turns around.
The date matters, and it is not in doubt. The latest event the book cites is the 25th Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1976; its closing chapter quotes Leonid Brezhnev's Report to that Congress at length, and every internal reference points to 1975 or 1976. This is a mid-decade Brezhnev text, composed in the years the Soviet Union itself now remembers as the height of zastoi, stagnation — the era of the widening gap between what was said at meetings and what was thought on the way home, of the private cynicism that later memoirists made the defining note of "developed socialism." The same year the Russian original was being finished, the Soviet leadership was drafting the new Constitution it would adopt in October 1977, the "Brezhnev Constitution" that proclaimed the arrival of a society of unprecedented moral unity. Nihilism Today is a document of that moment, and it should be read as one.
Its authors were Soviet philosophers of morals, and the book belongs to a recognisable Soviet genre: the critique of "bourgeois consciousness," produced by academics of the Institute of Philosophy and its satellites for export to Western readers and for the ideological armament of cadres at home. But it is a cut above the genre's average. Sogomonov and Landesman are not writing a denunciation with footnotes; they are attempting a real phenomenology of demoralisation, and where they attend closely to their material they see a great deal.
The strongest part of Nihilism Today is its opening account of what the authors call the "sense of contentedness" — the manufactured optimism of the post-war capitalist West. Their claim is that the ruling order, unable to deliver either meaning or security, produces a synthetic well-being to keep the population quiet: "The dilemma is—either perish or bourgeoisify the masses." This "bourgeoisification" is not, they are careful to say, the literal enrichment of everyone; it is the manufacture of a consciousness — of individuals who "would objectively remain wage workers" while their outlook becomes that of small proprietors, contented, apolitical, and lost to any project of change.
The machinery of this manufacture is the mass media, and here the book is genuinely incisive. The culture industry, the authors argue, does not persuade so much as it stupefies; "the system of mass media is called a machine of indoctrination, not of persuasion," in which "logical argumentation is conspicuously absent" and the trend is "towards irrationalism, towards rubberstamp decisions of problems, towards appealing to prejudices and base instincts." Behind this stands an "idealistic understanding of history," the maxim that "opinions rule the world" — the belief that a society's contradictions can be dissolved by managing what people feel about them. Whoever has read Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, or Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry, will recognise the terrain; the authors are drawing, without much acknowledgement, on the same Western Marxist analysis of consumer society, and they hold their own on it. Their portrait of a public trained to care more about a serial's romance or "the next boxing champion" than "the arms race, the strike struggle or political debates" has aged into something close to prophecy.
The book is at its best when it insists that the contentment is hollow. "The contented consciousness is no more than false optimism," they write; the manufactured well-being and the private despair are two faces of one thing, and "the sense of contentedness and wretchedness complement rather than exclude each other." This is a real dialectical observation, and it is the pivot of the whole book. The nihilist and the consumer, the desperate and the satisfied, are products of the same social vacuum.
Even the book's treatment of the 1960s counterculture — the section it labels "anarcho-hedonism" — has flashes of this insight. The authors are hostile, sometimes crudely so, to the sexual revolution, the drug culture and the hippie communes, which they read as psychopathological, as an "anti-labour revolution of social parasitism." But they see something that a purely dismissive account would miss: that the counterculture's cult of "collectivism" was "a perverted reaction to the dominance of bourgeois pseudo-collectivism and bureaucracy," a real revolt against a real deformation, misdirected. And they are honest enough to exempt the political folk tradition from the charge, naming "Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Elton John and John Lennon" as carriers of "a cogent political folklore with strong undertones of democracy and independence." A book that can tell the New Left's music from its narcotics is not a stupid book.
It is worth being precise about the debt, because the authors half-acknowledge it themselves. The apparatus of the "sense of wretchedness" — the "borderline situations," the dread that "does not directly menace a person's health or his property" and yet haunts, the flight into everyday routine and preoccupation — is drawn straight from the existentialist analysis of anxiety, transposed into the language of mass sociology. And in a footnote to the chapter on stoicism the authors cite a Soviet study of "Existentialism and the Frankfurt School," which is as near as the book comes to naming the sources it is working from. This is a book that knows it is standing on Western Marxism's account of one-dimensional man and the culture industry, and on the existentialists' account of dread, even as its stated method spares it from citing either. The concealment is not dishonest so much as generic: the Soviet critique of "bourgeois consciousness" habitually absorbed the sharpest Western self-criticism and re-presented it as an external diagnosis, the patient's own symptoms read back to him as news. What the book calls the post-war West's descent from "contentedness" into "wretchedness" is, stripped of the euphemism, the disenchantment of 1968 and after — the exhaustion of the boom, the souring of the counterculture, the turn to private survival — seen with real acuity and named in a private vocabulary.
One further point of method deserves credit, though it will also be the hinge of the criticism. The authors deliberately refuse to conduct their argument as a tour of philosophers. They announce in the introduction that they will not name "the names, schools and orientations that would have had to be given in an academic analysis," because their subject is not the theory of nihilism but its diffusion into "the bourgeois mass consciousness." This is why Nihilism Today never once mentions Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Kierkegaard or Marcuse, though its whole apparatus — dread, the absurd, the "borderline situations," the "know yourself," the road to Calvary — is built from their vocabulary. As an account of how existentialist despair migrated from the seminar room into a general mood, this is a defensible and even sophisticated choice. As we shall see, it is also convenient.
The test to apply to a book like this is not whether it uses harsh words about capitalism; our own tradition used harsh words about capitalism. The test is reflexive. Nihilism Today builds a powerful analytic instrument — the manufacture of false optimism, the gap between proclaimed and lived values, the hollow contented consciousness, the citizen who performs a belief he does not hold. The question is whether that instrument is ever, even once, allowed to swing toward the society that built it.
It is not. And the book's fifth chapter, "In Face of the New Social Reality," is remarkable because the authors take the instrument all the way to the edge and then, deliberately, set it down.
The chapter turns to "existing socialism," and its candour is real up to a point. The authors concede that Soviet society still carries "the economic and moral traditions, habits, traces and birthmarks of capitalism"; that "red tape and formalism have not been weeded out"; that there persist "social boils such as irresponsibility in the fulfilment of social duty, embezzlement, drunkenness, abuse of office for mercenary aims, an anti-humane attitude to people and, lastly, crime." This is more than the genre usually admits. But every admission is immediately quarantined. These are "remnants of the past," "survivals," "birthmarks" — never products of the present order, never structural, always residues fading on their own.
Then comes the decisive passage, the one the whole book is organised to reach and to deflect. The authors report, in order to reject, the charge that
"in the socialist world the official ideology and morality are lifeless and receive only outward approval, while the actual—mainly consumer—ideology and morality have 'silent' support and that society has reconciled itself to this duality."
This is a precise, almost clinical description of Soviet dvoemyslie — the double-consciousness of the late-Brezhnev years, the split between the ritual language of the meeting and the private cynicism of the kitchen. Sogomonov and Landesman name it exactly. And then they attribute the description to "bourgeois ideologists" who "grossly exaggerate," and dismiss it as slander. The one place in the book where the analysis of value-collapse is turned toward Soviet reality is the place where the authors work hardest to slam the door.
The irony is not that they were unaware of the phenomenon. It is that they had, in the first four chapters, built the perfect tool for anatomising it — and then declared, by fiat, that the tool did not apply on their side of the line. "False optimism," "the contented consciousness," the "philistine, apologetic thinking" that "embellishes reality" and clings to "stereotype views doomed to decay": every phrase they minted to convict Western culture of manufactured contentment describes, with uncanny accuracy, the official optimism of zastoi. The book even reaches, in its closing pages, for the language of self-criticism — warning against "servile contentedness, moral dogmatism, fear of criticism, placidity, complacency, the lulling pseudo-optimistic belief in the philosophy of letting things drift." But the warning is addressed to individual failings within a healthy system, backed by a Brezhnev quotation, and never to the system's own production of exactly that complacency. The category can be applied to persons. It can never be applied to the order.
The same asymmetry runs through the book's vocabulary. "Bureaucracy" and "pseudo-collectivism" are among its favourite terms of indictment — and its index attaches them, without exception, to capitalism. Bureaucracy is what the state-monopoly order imposes; pseudo-collectivism is the false togetherness of the consumer herd. That the words might describe the ministries of Zubovsky Boulevard, or the compulsory collectivism of the Soviet workplace, is not a possibility the book entertains; the terms are the property of the enemy by definition. It is the reflexive block again, working now at the level of the dictionary.
Nowhere is the block more visible than on alienation, the concept that carries more weight in this book than any other. The authors state flatly that "socialism destroys the economic roots of labour alienation," that under it "the individual is no longer compelled to materialise, to dehumanise his relations" with others. And yet, a few pages on, describing the persistence of money and wage differentials in Soviet society, they concede that these "do not allow closing all roads to egoistic concentration on one's own advancement, to self-alienation, to a market attitude to oneself." Self-alienation, a market attitude to oneself: the very conditions the book has just declared abolished at the root. The contradiction is not hidden — it sits within a single chapter — but it is never confronted, because to confront it would be to ask whether socialist alienation has its own roots, structural and present, rather than being a "birthmark" fading from the skin of the past. The authors reach the edge of their own best idea and decline to cross it.
That is the finding, and it is worth stating plainly: the book's diagnosis is not wrong about the West so much as it is unfalsifiable in one direction. Everything that hollows out belief is capitalism doing it to its victims; nothing that hollows out belief could be socialism doing it to its own. The concluding vision — that "elements of the sense of contentedness and the sense of wretchedness, of false optimism and disastrous nihilism, which are historically transient, will recede into the past" as communism advances — is offered as science. It reads, in 1977, as the very "false optimism" the book spent four chapters exposing.
The tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism had been making exactly this observation, about exactly this society, for forty years by the time Nihilism Today appeared, and it made it with the book's own weapons.
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is, among other things, a study of manufactured optimism and official cynicism in a workers' state. Writing of the very phenomenon Sogomonov and Landesman treat as a bourgeois fantasy, Trotsky described the moral trajectory of the Soviet bureaucracy without euphemism: "Parallel with the political degeneration of the party, there occurred a moral decay of the uncontrolled apparatus." When he came to the 1936 Constitution — the direct ancestor of the 1977 document being drafted as our book went to press — he found in its solemn proclamations "the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued," and concluded that "whatever concerns freedom and democracy is saturated through and through with the spirit of usurpation and cynicism." This is the gap between proclaimed and lived values applied without exemption — the same tool Nihilism Today forbids itself to use at home, turned on the Soviet Constitution four decades before Sogomonov and Landesman praised its successor. A reader who wants to know what an honest version of the book's fifth chapter would have looked like should read the tenth chapter of The Revolution Betrayed, "In the Mirror of the New Constitution."
The deeper answer is to the book's real subject, which is morality itself — the question of what happens to values in a society of decline. Trotsky addressed it directly in Their Morals and Ours (1938), and his argument cuts beneath Sogomonov and Landesman's on precisely the point where they are strongest and least self-aware. Every ruling order, Trotsky wrote, secretes an official morality to hold itself together: "Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality." And the function of that cement is exactly what the Progress authors describe the Western media performing — except that Trotsky refuses to make it a capitalist monopoly. "The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality." A book issued by the ideological export house of the Soviet state, teaching millions of readers which values are healthy and which are decadent, is itself an instance of official morality doing its office. That it cannot see this is not an oversight; it is the condition of its employment.
Trotsky had a name, too, for the tone of the book's smoother passages — the reassurance that history is on track, that the contradictions are residual, that the confident reader need not trouble himself. Against the complacency that dresses itself as realism, he wrote that "there is nothing more flat, stale, self-satisfied and cynical than the moral rules of common sense." It is a sentence Nihilism Today could usefully have quoted against itself.
None of this is to say the anti-Stalinist tradition dismissed the Western malaise the book describes. The Fourth International's own theorists took the alienation of consumer society seriously as a Marxist problem, not a propaganda target; the difference is that they were willing to ask whether a bureaucratically commanded economy produced its own alienation, its own hollow rituals, its own double-think — and to answer yes. The category, for them, could turn around. That willingness is the whole distance between an analysis and an alibi.
A reader should not close this book having learned that it is worthless, because it is not. Its account of the manufacture of consent in advanced capitalism — the media as an engine of stupefaction, the consumer trained into political apathy, the official cheerfulness laid over a real despair — is serious Marxist cultural criticism, and much of it holds up. Its refusal to reduce the 1960s revolt to mere delinquency, its ear for the difference between a protest song and a marketing gimmick, its recognition that the counterculture's confusions were reactions to genuine deformations of bourgeois life: these are the marks of authors who were looking, not merely labelling. Where Nihilism Today describes a civilisation losing its capacity to believe its own promises, it is often exactly right.
The trouble is only that it was published in a society doing the same thing, by writers who had built the perfect apparatus for saying so and were required to prove it inapplicable. The book's title asks after nihilism "today." Its most honest chapter, had it been permitted to write it, would have found the subject a good deal closer to Zubovsky Boulevard than to the boulevards of the West. Read it, then, as a mirror its authors could not look into — a diagnosis of the crisis of belief, composed in good faith and considerable talent, in the years when the faith it defended was quietly emptying out around them.