Historicka Sociologie (Oct 2017)
Komunističtí sociotechnici
Abstract
The paper deals with social technology of the Communists period. There existed professional applied social science in Communist Poland, and Polish social scientists sometimes cooperated with the regime. Such activities should be at least partly explained as an outcome of the academic ethos which obliges the scholar to share his professional knowledge. Furthermore, it was quite natural as they aimed at improvement of life conditions in a given, liked or not, political setting. On the other hand, although the Communists project was neither as thoroughly refined as some scholars assume, nor in any strict sense Marxist, the Communists themselves proved to be capable social technologists. They attempted to turn the society into magma – groats of homogeneous yet unorganized elements. To do so, they cleverly used objective conditions (as post-war reconstruction or migration processes), as well as they developed policies which aimed at social atomization, blocking any spontaneous social organization, uniformizing organizational settings of every life sphere, continously undermining position of any socially respected figures, forcing strict egalitarianism, etc. Unfortunately, such a succesful, thorough atomization had negative influence on human creativity, slowing down development processes.
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