Political plasticity and possibilities for political change

The Bolsheviks and collectivization

“To produce a new, “improved version” of man – that is the future task of communism. And for that we first have to find out everything about man, his anatomy, his physiology and that part of his physiology which is called his psychology.”

Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), quoted in Figes (2002, p. 447)

The Bolsheviks who grabbed power after the 1917 revolution recognized that they needed to bring about major changes in behavior among the masses in order to eventually achieve their ideal classless society. Toward achieving the required behavioral changes, the Bolsheviks adopted two systems of thought: first Taylorism, the industrial design ideas of Frederick Taylor (1856–1915), an American engineer; second, behaviorism, the school of psychology that dominated Western (and particularly American) psychology from about the second to the sixth decade of the 20th century. The psychological foundations of Taylorism are in line with behaviorism, and because of space limitations only behaviorism will be discussed here (for a fuller discussion, see Campbell & Moghaddam, 2018).

The Russian Bolsheviks and the American behaviorists agreed on important propositions about human behavior. This is not surprising, given that behaviorism was in foundational ways built on the scholarship of Russian researchers, including Ivan Sechenov (1829–1905), Vladimir Bekhterev (1857–1927), and Ivan Pavlov (1849–1927). Most importantly, the Bolsheviks and the behaviorists both believed that nothing in human nature is preprogrammed. They both saw the human child as a tabula rasa (blank slate); the developing child could take many different possible shapes, depending on environmental conditions. The important challenge was to change environmental conditions in a way that produces citizens with the required characteristics according to the new revolutionary ideology, as Trotsky (1906/2010) argued, “Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology.” (p. 109).

The most important area of behavior that the Bolsheviks aimed to shape concerned collectivization: changing human motivation so that people would be motivated to work for collective rewards and collective ownership. The Bolsheviks believed that socialization in capitalist societies leads to the norm of hard work for personal profit and the drive to accumulate private property. Both the Bolsheviks and the radical behaviorists believed that human behavior is currently being shaped toward incorrect goals, and what needs to happen is reengineering of behavior toward correct goals (of course, the political end goals of reengineering were different for the Bolsheviks and the radical behaviorists). For example, Skinner (1948) set out the details of the correctly reengineered (imaginary) society in his novel Walden Two. But the Bolsheviks went further, in that the revolution had given them the power to actually put into practice their ideas about collectivization; they conducted actual mass experiments on the possible, testing the malleability of political plasticity.

The Bolsheviks implemented enormous reorganization in ownership, at the workplace, in housing, in education and the arts, in the built environment, and in just about every other major domain. Private ownership was eliminated and, through the state, everything now belonged to everyone. This meant that workers were co-owners of the farms, factories, and organizations in which they worked, and their rewards were collective rewards. Collective ownership of housing meant that the palaces and grand homes of the former aristocrats were now shared by ordinary people, and middle-class apartments were also communal, “By forcing people to share communal flats, the Bolsheviks believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, the patriarchal (“bourgeois”) family would be replaced by communist fraternity and organization…” (Figes, 2002, p. 445). Through revolutionary education and the arts, the Bolsheviks aimed to transform the consciousness of the masses, to be increasingly in line with communist ideals. All symbols, names, and cultural phenomena in the built environment were changed to help make revolutionary change possible.

What are the implications of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 for possibility studies? The Bolsheviks had near absolute control in their use of behaviorism (and Taylorism) to try to change thinking and action in line with collectivization. One interpretation, supported by social loafing research (Gabelica et al., 2022), is that because of hard-wiring individuals are best motivated to work hard when they receive individual rewards and can accumulate private profit and property. But an alternative interpretation, supported by social laboring research (Hoigaard et al., 2013), is that the Bolsheviks failed to create the necessary conditions over a long enough time period to make collectivization a success. From this perspective, successful collectivization only becomes possible when the right conditions are sustained over the long-term (possibly centuries, at least).

Next, I discuss political plasticity in the context of post-revolution Iran.

Rule by Velayat-e-Faghih

During my life in Iran in the turbulent years following the 1979 revolution, I witnessed deadly competition for power between rival Islamic and secular political groups, with no group initially achieving an absolute power monopoly. But like the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Shi’a extremists led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) were a minority who used ruthless tactics to (literally) eliminate their rivals and achieve absolute power a year after the revolution. Among their tactics were two that are often used by dictatorial forces intent on eliminating rivals. We can think of these tactics as making it possible to transform political diversity and multi-polarity into political monopoly and uni-polarity.

The first tactic involves the creation of “crisis incidents,” which are used as a pretext to end civil liberties, brand rivals as “the enemy” and eliminate them. Classic examples of this are Adolf Hitler’s use of a fire on Feb 27, 1933, at the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament in Berlin. A left-wing activist was blamed for starting this fire, and Hitler used this as a pretext to accuse the communists of plotting to take over Germany. This “threat” served as a basis for martial law and the Nazi dictatorship that followed. Earlier, Benito Mussolini’s fascist followers helped to create chaos in Rome in 1922, then marched on Rome and took control of the government in order to “end the crisis.” More recently, Vladimir Putin took advantage of apartment bombings in Moscow in 1999 (a “crisis” that, it is rumored, he created), in order to wage war on “Chechen terrorists,” position himself as the “savior of Russia,” and spring to power from an underdog position (he had been a mid-level KGB employee in Dresden 10 years earlier). Using the same tactic, Khomeini’s followers created a crisis through their 444-day hostage-taking at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, starting Nov 4, 1979. The hostage-taking crisis enabled Khomeini to eliminate his opponents, achieve complete power monopoly, and establish a religious dictatorship.

The second tactic used by would-be and actual dictators to monopolize power is to engage in war. Again, Hitler provides the classic illustration of this tactic, with his aggressions that started the Second World War. In the pressure cooker context of war, the elimination of opposition to the Nazi rule was easier. In a similar manner, Khomeini used the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war, which gave him further opportunities to brand his political opposition as “traitors,” imprison or kill them, and tighten his grip on power.

One of the ways in which Khomeini strengthened his own position was by incorporating in the new “revolutionary” Iranian constitution the principle of absolute obedience to a Supreme Clerical Leader, velayat-e-faghih. This individual has absolute power and is the ultimate decider on everything in Iran. For example, a majority of Iranians could vote for a person or bill, but if the Supreme Clerical Leader deems it “Un-Islamic,” then he has the power to overturn the decision of the majority. For example, in the 2008 elections the majority of voters did not vote for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but, nevertheless, he was selected to be president by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Clerical Leader.

Absolute rule by a Supreme Clerical Leader, velayat-e-faghih, raises questions about the possible viability of dictatorship. Can closed political systems led by authoritarian strongmen work better than Western-style democracy? What are the possibilities for efficient functioning of dictatorships? These questions are important and timely, because of the challenge the idea of democracy faces both from major dictatorships such as China and Russia, and from authoritarian strongmen in the context of relatively more open societies, such as Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Narendra Modi in India.

Both experimental evidence and case studies demonstrate that when a society or organization is headed by a person with absolute power, then corruption grows (see Moghaddam, 2016, pp. 104–107). When people are not able to criticize leadership and must show unquestioning obedience to authority, then corruption will spread to different corners of society. In their defense, the radical Shi’a Muslims who govern Iran will claim that religious faith and the purity of the Supreme Leader will increase political plasticity and prevent Iranian society from suffering from corruption. However, objective evidence does not support this claim. For example, out of 180 nations, Iran ranks 150 (with a score of 25 out of 100) on the Corruption Perceptions Index, the most widely used global corruption ranking in the world (transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/irn).

High political plasticity: Women in education

I now turn to briefly discuss a positive example of high political plasticity, the role of women in higher education. Until fairly recently, women were excluded from higher education, on the grounds of so-called “scientific” evidence (see Moghaddam, 2023). Women were also excluded from joining scientific societies, even though the bogus “scientific views” that excluded them are contradicted by factual evidence. For example, in 1911 Marie Curie (1867–1934) won her second Nobel Prize, but in the same year her application to join the French Academie des Sciences was rejected. But the situation of women in higher education changed dramatically after World War Two, and in the 21st century the majority of students in universities in many parts of the world are women. My own university department reflects this change: most faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduate students in my department are now female, whereas when I first joined Georgetown University (in 1990) they were male.

How should we explain this remarkable change? If women are born with lower intelligence, as supporters of the “intelligence is inherited” view claim, then how could such dramatic biological changes come about so quickly to enable women to make such rapid advances in higher education? Obviously, they could not. A far better explanation is reached when we focus on the role of the environment, and the new opportunities given to women. For example, consider the case of Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal (the “Nobel Prize of mathematics”) in 2017. Dr. Mirzakhani was born in Iran and eventually left to become a professor at Stanford University. Like other talented Iranian women, she was treated as a second-class citizen in Iran, just as women in Western societies were treated as second-class citizens until fairly recently. But once Dr. Mirzakhani was able to move from Iran to the United States, she was free to compete and show her intellectual talent—just as women in Western societies excelled in higher education after reforms allowed them the opportunity to compete with men on a more level playing field. The case of Maryam Mirzakhani, and that of women in higher education, demonstrates that political plasticity and the possibility of change is high in some domains.

Concluding comment

In summary, common to the situation in both post-revolution Russia and Iran is attempts to change society through leadership with absolute power, who cannot be criticized. But in both societies, the push to reach new “ideal” possibilities in behavior became thwarted by corruption that inevitably arises from this style of dictatorial leadership. These patterns reflect limitation in political plasticity, and in possibilities for changes in political behavior: absolute power brings absolute corruption. But the example of women in higher education is illustrative of possibilities for positive change that is relatively rapid, reflecting higher political plasticity. More research is need on such positive examples, so that they inspire and guide our future planning.