On the communist origins of diversity, equality, and inclusion ideology

In his essay Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky—an exiled Soviet poet who settled in the United States and went on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987—wrote that he began to despise Lenin in the first grade “because of his omnipresent images which plagued almost every textbook, every class wall, postage stamps, money, and what not…”. I thought I was done—with Lenin, whose works Soviet students were forced to study judiciously in history classes, as well as with communism and its bloody legacy, having left the USSR behind. Yet here I am, 30 years later, reminded of it all by none other than my colleagues, affluent Western academics, whose narratives range from being eerie reminiscent of the Soviet propaganda of my childhood and adolescent years to its verbatim English translation. Below, I provide several examples of this. Not only is this ignorant obsession with the genocidal dictatorship and its leader painful to watch, but it will have tragic consequences for Western academia, just as it did for the Russian one.

Lenin’s mark on Russia, much like Hitler’s on Germany, is inked in the blood of untold millions of innocent victims, whose bodies ended up scattered around the vast land, often in unmarked mass graves. Even the approximate numbers of those executed, starved, or otherwise murdered, are unknown, and therefore debated, but the number of the order of 30 million is generally agreed upon (not counting the losses incurred by the USSR in the Second World War). In April 1917, approximately half a year before the coup d'état that became known as the Great October Socialist Revolution, Lenin laid out the program for bringing the country towards the revolution and beyond in his “April Theses”. One of them called for the abolition of the police and army. Shortly after the coup, not only the police, but the courts had also been abolished. They were replaced by “revolutionary conscience”, dealt out by the Revolutionary Tribunals and People’s courts; we all know how that turned out. It is most ironic that the movement rooted in the abolition of the judicial and penitentiary institutions ended up developing the most advanced and deadly penitentiary and secret police systems.

Apparently unaware of this sordid history, The Just Mathematics Collective can be seen promoting Lenin’s ideas on their webpage and in various blog entries. Not surprisingly, they list Angela Davis, a communist inspired by the German Stasi and the Soviet KGB, as their inspiration. Similar ideas are also found in the document that defines visions and values of White Coats for Black Lives, an organization that furthermore openly promotes socialism.

Shortly after the coup, in 1918, in his “Six Theses On the Immediate Tasks Of the Soviet Government”, Lenin notes that the need to pay exuberant remuneration to “bourgeois intelligentsia” in order to advance the socialist economy, science, and technology “not only implies the cessation … [but] also a step backward on the part of our socialist Soviet state power, which from the very outset proclaimed and pursued the policy of reducing high salaries to the level of the wages of the average worker” (emphasis mine).

Demonstrating, once again, either a lack of awareness, or a deliberate promotion of Lenin’s ideas, Katherine J. Mack, prominent member of American and Canadian scientific communities, theoretical cosmologist, and author of a popular science book, appears to agree: according to her Twitter post, wage differences result from “enduring inequality”. The post gathered tens of thousands of likes. 

I encourage you to read Lenin’s essay in its entirety: he describes in some detail how they had to make a deal with the bourgeois devil and pontificates on the “corrupting influence of high salaries”. An inquisitive reader might wonder what that deal looked like from the point of view of the members of the "bourgeois intelligentsia". For that, I recommend the biography of Ivan Pavlov Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science by Daniel Philip Todes, which provides an account of Pavlov’s life and work. The book’s extensive description of the post-revolutionary life of the formerly Russian scientists in the new Soviet realities is striking. Pavlov, a Nobel prize winner with strong connections abroad, leveraged communist government with the threat of immigration to improve the conditions of his laboratory, his family, and of scientists in general to the point that the situation in his laboratory was “… better than in hospitals and children’s shelters.” Notably, a dedicated decree “On Conditions Facilitating the Scientific Work of Academician I. P. Pavlov and His Coworkers” was passed by the Council of People's Commissars in 1921, essentially to provide Pavlov’s laboratory with firewood, dogs, food rations for the laboratory animals (dogs and horses), and the scientists themselves. Todes also describes the emergence of the rations bureaucracy that busied itself with classifying scientists and adjusting their rations accordingly. Almost immediately, the rations system became a tool of ideological control: “The threat [to a professor] of losing his academic rations can, in the time span of a single course, transform even the most inveterate counterrevolutionary into a Marxist.” Many years later, the topic of this means of ideological control reverberated in the novel The White Robes by Vladimir Dudintsev, who compared the life of biologists in the post-war USSR is described as that of Pavlov’s dogs being fed through tubes controlled by “an academician” who enforces policy by gently constricting the tubes feeding those, who attempt to dissent—and they immediately repent. Sakharov, who declined the to join the Communist Party at a time when such actions could result in dismissal from an academic post or imprisonment, marveled in his memoirs at the psychology of some Soviet academicians, whose fear of losing status and privileges afforded by compliance—such as the ability to travel abroad—prevented them from supporting human rights causes or defending their unjustly accused, persecuted colleagues (Andrey D. Sakharov Memoirs. 1990. In Russian). The eerie similarity between the DEI bureaucracy ranking scientists on their commitment to the ideology for determining hiring, promotion, funding, and publication, as well as the fear of consequences of dissent permeating academic community, is inescapable.

Is that it? “No”, as Marisa Tomei famously pronounces from the court stand in My Cousin Vinny, “there’s more”. If we look at Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism” written in 1913, we find the following statement: “Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery … To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is … foolishly naïve.” If this rhetoric sounds eerie familiar, it is because we have been inundated with messages that objectivity and impartiality, or even the very existence of “objective reality”, are myths—if not deliberate inventions of white supremacists—the goal of which is to oppress the marginalized. As an illustration, here is a post by another prominent figure in the academic social justice circles, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, the recipient of an award from the American Physical Society “… for contributions to theoretical cosmology and particle physics and for her efforts in promoting inclusivity in physics”. Another prominent example is the denial of the reality of biological sex that made it all the way into Scientific American, a formerly prestigious popular science journal, and the British Medical Journal (there was also a thoughtful response). Further reading on this topic can be found here and here.

Soviet history was, in a way, an exercise in imbuing every action of every citizen with a political and ideological meaning; where science, art and literature, education, and even family and reproduction, were supposed to serve one ideological purpose: the triumph of Marxism-Leninism and the arrival of communism. Time and again, party congresses asserted the importance of Marxist (or communist) morality, ideological upbringing, formation of a new kind of human, enhancement of communist consciousness—predicated on the notion that the life and behavior of every person were to be subordinated to communist ideas and deeds (These words are taken from The Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, XXII Communist Party Congress, 1961, which also adopted the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism). Today, we see a proliferation of slogans “Science Has Always Been Political” or “Science and politics are inseparable” in the leading scientific journals, promoted by short-sighted scientific leaders, as well as demands for institution-level ideological activism.

More generally, the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism, with its focus on loyalty to communism, intolerance of injustice and to the enemies of communism, moral purity, and collectivism, is oddly similar to the demands placed today on Western academics by the diversity, equality, inclusion and anti-racism initiatives—including the need to actively affirm one’s adherence to the ideology through various proclamations, and coercive measures taken against dissidents that are defended in peer-review literature as “consequences culture”. The problem with the political nature of diversity statements has been commented on, most notably by Abigail Thompson of the American Mathematical Society. 

The Bolsheviks realized that most normal people would not willingly surrender to their utopia of equality through expropriation (“kill the rich” in the modern parlance) and had to resort to terror. The dictatorship of the proletariat turned into state terror that lasted some 70 years. To support and sustain the terror while tending their gentle flock of creative elites—scientists, artists, writers, poets, etc.—the Bolsheviks created and maintained until the end of the USSR one of the most pervasive systems of ideological control in human history. Everything was censored: what could be said, read, or published. For example, the copies of the journal Science, sent to the USSR by AAAS, had large portions of text blacked out before reaching their readers. It boggles my mind that in the West today, academics who have never experienced censorship, are calling for and engaging in purging of articles and sacking of editors on ideological grounds, moral policing of publications by diversity and inclusion committees (see also), renaming of laws and discoveries, and ostracism of inconvenient colleagues. These issues have been discussed in several recent publications, blogs, and on Twitter. The insatiable drive for the moral purification of academia based on the social justice principles yet again parallels the “grass-roots” nature of censorship, denunciation, and persecution in the USSR: children denounced parents; students denounced teachers; relatives, neighbors, and colleagues denounced each other—out or righteousness, out of fear, for a few pieces of sugar, a few extra rubbles, a better flat, or a higher office. The core principles of Soviet censorship—to prevent people from being exposed to ideas and to exact condemnation of those ideas by those people—is back in vogue.

In the spirit of Lenin’s “The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism”, from their early days, the Bolsheviks promoted the notion that imperialist, bourgeois science was not “the real thing”. “The real thing” was the up-and-coming “science for the people, science by the people” that was based on the Marxist- materialist principles. The arrival of this new science, which was eagerly awaited, was predicated on the development of new and different ways of teaching, learning, and “doing” science, brought to the laboratory and the lecture hall by the new, working-class scientists and educators. A perfect example of such a working class “scientist” and “educator” was “the people’s academic” Lysenko, whose meteoric rise owed much to his peasant roots. In the same spirit, we are witnessing calls for “decolonization” of scientific curricula based on the notion that different audiences require different content and teaching approaches in order to succeed (Nazis similarly claimed that science could be divided into Jewish and Aryan), as well as a redefinition of excellence in order to meet diversity goals. Continuing the parallels with the Soviet Union, we are also seeing an emergence of some sort of pathological reverence for “firstgens”. The practice of preferential admissions of children of the workers continued in the USSR all the way into late 80s, but could be circumvented by bribes, party connections, or additional exams.

I want to conclude this sad exposition of communist roots of the campus diversity, equality, and inclusion ideology with one more tragic story. The father of Joseph Brodsky, the poet who made the appearance in the very beginning of this essay, was a career Naval officer. In 1950, he, and many others like him, was thrown out of the Soviet armed forces as a part of the campaign to purify the Soviet officer core from the Jews. (Jewish officers were similarly expelled from the German armed forces as per the NurembergRace Laws of 1935.) This is just one example of how, for the better part of its existence, the Soviet state was antisemitic. The members of the Jewish Antifascist Committee, who investigated Nazi atrocities against the Jews in Eastern Europe, were executed. Under the guise of fighting against cosmopolitism, Zionism, or “the 5^th column”, Soviet Jewry was persecuted in various ways: arrests, media campaigns, restrictions on the admission to the institutions of higher education. All of this was accompanied by state-wide anti-Israel propaganda: indeed, my first childhood memory of Israel was a news program showing a tank and talking about the atrocities of the Israeli military. Today, we are witnessing a re-emergence of Soviet antisemitic propaganda in the West. Given its communist roots, it is no accident that diversity and inclusion machinery on university campuses is very much involved in the Soviet-style replay of antisemitism in the West. 

The parallels between communism and National Socialism are outside the scope of this essay, but it would be woefully incomplete without mentioning what I consider to be the most unhinged post attempting to defend diversity, equality, and inclusion practices. It was made by another prominent academic, Professor Calthleen Crudden (Queen’s University, Canada). I show it side-by-side with a screenshot of a Letter to the Editor of Nature by Johannes Stark, the German Nobel prize laureate and Hitler supporter, because of the striking similarities between the two. In both cases, a minority is accused of “unjustifiable” influence. In both cases, the arguments led to the implementation of social engineering measures for rectifying the injustice of “overrepresentation”.