ABSTRACT
Vesa Oittinen’s chapter takes us back to Soviet debates within Marxism. In the late 1970s, Soviet philosophers and social scientists began to discuss the usefulness of the Marxist theory of socio-economic formations. To avoid socio-economic reductionism, they sought to complete (not replace) it by a theory of civilization. The concept of civilization served to stress the continuity of human culture across revolutions and ruptures. The “civilization discussion” of the late 1970s and early 1980s informed the ideas behind perestroika, such as the notion of “common human values.” This idea became one of the cornerstones of Gorbachev’s policy. Conceived initially as a supplement to the theory of socio-economic formations, the civilizational theory was eventually appropriated by the opponents of the Soviet Union—of Soviet rule as well as of Marxist ideology. Their use of civilization bore resemblance to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the “End of History,” which associated the road to civilization with the Western liberal-capitalist model, whereas the later patriotic and nationalist use of the term resembled Samuel Huntington’s approach. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Marxist debates and theorization about civilization were discarded. The concepts of civilization and culture came to replace the Marxist premise of material production forming the foundation of societies.
