Episode 5: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism with Keti Chukhrov

Reimagining Soviet Georgia

On today’s episode, Sopo Japaridze and Beka Natsvlishvili have an engaging discussion with philosopher Keti Chukhrov. Keti was born in Soviet Georgia in the 1970s and since then has gone on to write articles and books touching subjects such as art criticism, philosophy, political theory and more.

Sopo, Beka and Keti discuss the premise of her recent book Practicing the Good: Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism. Keti’s book is a much needed intervention into anti-capitalist discourse. Her thorough knowledge of both Soviet philosophy and Marxists from the West allow her to grapple directly with the philosophical and political tensions between how those anti-capitalists in the West imagined communism, how their own ideals reproduced capitalism and how those same ideals or ideas functioned (or didn’t) within Soviet society. Keti’s work is not only refreshing but takes to task common understandings of the USSR from the Left.

Her book description is as follows:

“This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism’s domination is resisted—the zones of counter-capitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress—and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.

By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anti-capitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies’ views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.”