Alexander Zinoviev Quotes

La grande rupture - sociologie d'un monde bouleversé, Alexandre Zinoviev (trad. Slobodan Despot), éd. Éditions l'Âge d'Homme

translated from French according to Zoubovitch, Olga. « La démocratie totalitaire dans la pensée d’Alexandre Zinoviev. » Cahiers d'histoire, volume 33, numéro 1-2-spécial, 2015, p. 83–98. URL : https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/histoire/2015-v33-n1-2-sp%C3%A9cial-histoire03364/1042876ar/ d'après :

In reality, the occidentist state system is not reduced to democracy. It is not even its main element. It is in the public eye, it makes a lot of noise and serves as a showcase. But it is only the façade of real power

...the political class of Western society reminded me in a striking way of what I had had the opportunity to observe for several years, as in the laboratory, in Soviet Russia. It's a bit as if Soviet society had divulged secrets that remain hidden in Western society and that are not spoken out loud. p. 161

The political class belongs to the sphere of community which, I repeat, reached its maximum stage of development in communist society where it became dominant. In Western society, she probably cannot reach this level, but she tends to try. p. 161

Poverty, which is seen as a kind of horrible and incurable disease, is not the fruit of the machinations of dark forces operating in the depths of Western society. It is the inevitable consequence of the objective laws of Westernism. p.117

L'Occidentisme - essai sur le triomphe d'une idéologie, Alexandre Zinoviev (trad. Galia Ackerman et Pierre Lorrain), éd. Plon, 1995 (ISBN 978-2259-183-178)

Intending to improve the economic situation, the Gorbachevites put the economy itself into a state of crisis. p. 108

The best study of these capitalist crises remains, from my point of view, the work of K. Marx, which it is fashionable today to judge to be erroneous. In fact, it's exactly the opposite. p. 106

The crisis of the communist economy has nothing in common with the economic crises of capitalist societies. At the basis of the capitalist crisis is anarchic production.[…] At the basis of the crisis of the communist economy are the very principles of its organization. […] This crisis is relative, in the sense that it is only perceived in comparison with the standard of living and technology of Western countries. The real crisis comes from the fact that we have moved away from communist methods applied in economics, to try to overcome difficulties and stagnation by capitalist methods. p. 107

It follows that, to make a communist country, it is not enough to take power, collectivize the economy or impose a state ideology. We need deeper transformations, namely: organizing the masses differently, in accordance with community laws to which all aspects of life must be subject. (…) p. 14-16

Communism, in a word, is the organization of millions of people into a whole, according to community laws. This naturally implies the establishment of many things that did not exist in the previous non-communist society, or in society of another type. The pre-existing community elements, the beginnings of communism, are transformed in the newly created conditions, sometimes so radically that they no longer seem to have any connection with their former manifestations. Hence the erroneous impression that communist-type relations are absolutely new. p. 14-16

It follows from what has just been said that communism is neither the product, nor the continuation, nor the outcome of capitalism. They have different origins. It is no coincidence that communism burst onto the scene of history, not in the highly developed West but in a Russia that was backward from a capitalist point of view and highly developed in terms of community phenomena. : centralized and powerful state apparatus, important class of civil servants, masses accustomed to submitting to power, peasant community. By liquidating the weakened classes of landowners and the not yet solid classes of capitalists, the October revolutions were to sweep away the terrain of community relations. It is also not by chance that communism has attracted countries with weak capitalist development. p. 14-16

Whatever the case, the community phenomena themselves are general, universal. They are determined by the simple fact that a fairly large number of individuals find themselves forced to live, over generations, forming a whole, a community. (…) These community phenomena are in turn governed by certain objective laws. p. 14-16

The roots of communism existed and exist, in one form or another, in the most diverse societies. They also existed in pre-revolutionary Russia. They exist today in Western countries. Without them, no large-scale or even slightly developed society is conceivable. They represent social phenomena that I would describe as “community phenomena”. These only become dominant and can generate a specific type of communist society - or "real socialism" - under very specific conditions. (…) p. 14-16