Virginia L. Conn discusses the nature of blood exchange as a basis for collectivism in Alexander Bogdanov sci-fi masterpiece Red Star.
IN his pre-revolutionary novel Red Star, the author, scientist, and political leader Alexander Bogdanov presented a society predicated on the exchange of blood as a commodity, a system that not only facilitated economic equality but also created an embodied communal existence in which society as a whole was conceptualized as a supra-organism. The blood-based tektological system of Red Star asserted that full economic equality must be predicated on a biological economy of exchange with surprising implications for social reproduction. This literary depiction of a near-future society offered a revolutionary decoupling of sex from reproduction, yet still foregrounded the body and its biological value as central to the nation-building process.
IN early revolutionary literature from what would become Soviet Russia we see numerous gestures towards the breakup of the nuclear family towards a more communal form of child-rearing, a futurity that retained its focus on the production of future generations but that was unshackled from the heteropatriarchal dyad of husband-wife relations. Marx himself identifies the bourgeois family as a system of capitalist retention, asking in chapter two of the Communist Manifesto,
“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”1
However, the systemic unity of reproductive and capitalist systems for value accumulation is still intimately bound up in the conceptualization of the future as being tied to reproduction in such extrapolations. No matter to what extent the nuclear family as a unit is disbanded, the emphasis on future generations in the image of the child—even if decentralized, as in Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, What is To Be Done?2—retains an emphasis on creating a new class conceptualized as laborers, and with it the intractable promise of reproductive futurisms.3 The issue then, is not the role of the child or best practices for family structures, but on methods by which the future can be envisioned, produced, and reproduced without relying on biological roles tied to sex and/or heteropatriarchal ideas of the family itself.
Specifically, in Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908, republished in 1918) we are presented with a radical decoupling of biological reproduction and social labor that addresses this very question of reproducibility—one that the author envisioned as not only limited to science fiction, but also applicable to his own culture at his own time. Red Star follows the journey of Leonid, a Bolshevik revolutionary who is offered the chance to go to Mars and, once there, encounters a utopian socialist society explicitly posited as the immediate, achievable future of humankind on Earth (provided the revolution succeeds, of course). A technocratic and meritocratic society, the Martians have achieved their level of comfort in no small part due to a physiological bond created through blood-sharing, in which the “comradely exchange of life extend[s] beyond the ideological dimension into the physiological one.”4
In the novel, the transfusion of blood amongst those citizens of a Martian socialist society serves as a sort of social lubricant, keeping the old young and the young inoculated against diseases encountered previously by the old, but more than that, it unites them at the cellular level, a higher stage of physiological development that is fundamentally intertwined with the higher socioeconomic level of development represented by socialism. To achieve socialism necessitates the entire socialization of what were once individual identities, and vice versa—socialism required full socialization, and full socialization required socialism. To fully share oneself in total and open comradeship necessitated both political and biological change, so much so that the lower individualists still on Earth can no more achieve socialism while retaining their individual boundaries than can the barbarous forms of life mentioned to be living on Venus achieve communication with the Martians without having yet developed language of their own.
Yet while the setting was science fictional, Bogdanov was himself determined to make the socialist utopia of the Martians a reality on Earth, following the very blood-sharing principles he described in Red Star. A physician by trade, he established Russia’s first institute for blood transfusion, the Institute for Hematology and Blood Transfusion. Recognizing his own situatedness to bring about such a reality on earth, “Bogdanov claimed that Narkomzdrav5 had assigned him the task of organizing the institute because he understood both the “social-practical and scientific importance” of blood transfusions. He described his own long-standing interest in the procedure, which had led him to formulate a concept of “physiological collectivism”—the increase of the “viability” of individual organisms through regular blood exchanges among them.”6
Yet Bogdanov’s literary output precipitated his involvement in Russia’s earliest experiments in blood transfusion, which is what he is primarily remembered for today. In keeping with the “theory of near anticipation”7–an artistic tenant that would not be formally codified for another two decades after Red Star’s initial publication, but which was nonetheless predominantly adhered to even before its formalization—his description of Martian society is at once located in humanity’s present and future—it is in the present day, but the Martians represent humanity’s immediate developmental end goal. Blood transfusion as a technique was one that Bogdanov not only described, but intended to implement among his own society, specifically with the intention of bringing about the socialist utopia described in his novel.
Though blood-sharing is not emphasized as being integral to the plot of Bogdanov’s Red Star, it is foundational to the story’s depiction of what merits a utopian society and, more importantly, why. Because comradeship is based in the physiological exchange of blood and not limited to merely words or deeds, individuals are united not just in their beliefs, but in their very bodies. The “comradely exchange of life” underpins the very concept of what it means here to function as a society, wherein ascension beyond individualistic capitalism can only be overcome through a communitarian process that enrolls society as a whole into one shared supra-organism.
Yet while Marxist-Leninists referred to the masses as a single, deathless organism, Bogdanov’s vision of a future in which recognized labor (as scientists, artists, engineers, etc.) was divorced from biological distinctions also recognized that, to achieve such a goal, distinctions of sex must also be eliminated. But Bogdanov goes farther than Marx, who, as previously mentioned, claimed that “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”8 Instead, Bogdanov’s vision was even more revolutionary—the dissolution not just of the family, but of sex itself. Much like the anti-natal theorist Shulamith Firestone, who wrote “Just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be […] not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally,”9 sex and labor as concepts have become divorced in Bogdanov’s utopia.
The collective physiological organism in Red Star that both represents and embodies socialism is oriented towards itself in that it eschews a recognition of the individual body as capable of producing value while also investing that same body with a recognition of being the sole arbiter of value. It is not an economy of doing, but one of being. As Sara Ahmed asks in “Towards a Queer Phenomenology,” to direct attention to one worldly object is to position oneself and form the boundaries of a situated and embodied worldview.10 In the economy of circulation evinced by Bogdanov, biology becomes the marker of value without being tied to its historical mode of biological production, both affirming and undermining its importance. In Red Star, blood and the shared experience of circulating socialist collectivity are valued as a mode of being as they are intimately and inextricably connected—to share blood is to share ideology and to both embody and engender the state. At the same time, biological roles are stripped of their associations with actual bodies, such that certain bodies are evacuated of historical modes of value while imbued with new, more diffuse ones.
What we see here is the collapse of “capitalism and socialism […] into each other,” such that “obliterating spaces of alterity or uncalculated discourse in the process, simply to describe unrealized (maybe unrealistic) economic possibilities is to rediscover a glimpse of autonomy in the process.”11 In attempting to describe a socialist utopia predicated on blood-sharing, the process of blood-sharing itself enrolls the bodies from whence it comes into an economy of circulating value. The “massive alteration of people”12 necessitated by a shift to socialism transforms the idea of Marx’s labor theory of value by valuing something that requires no explicit labor time to make. Individuals do not need to toil at the process of creating blood; their physical bodies contain all the labor value they can contribute to the world.
In this, Bogdanov’s vision of a future society composed of a biological superorganism is tied to biological essentialism insofar as, to participate in society, one’s value derives entirely from the production of bodily fluids. On the other hand, Bogdanov’s blood-sharing is established as a method of evading preexisting physical conditions for reproducing the state by separating the historical role of cissexed heterosexual female bodies to birth a future generation of workers from their equally unrecognized and unremunerated role as social reproductive laborers. Blood-sharing not only dissolves the requirement for a maternal role vis-à-vis childcare but also undermines the necessity of gender as it is propped up by historical biological labor requirements. That is, freed from the necessity of giving birth and childcare, enveloped in a society in which all are equal, biological gender traits have faded away almost entirely from Martian society. For much of the early text, Leonid cannot differentiate between male and female Martians (and thus experiences disquieting homosexual desires for Netti, before it is revealed—much to his relief—that she identifies as female).
Ruha Benjamin notes that the trend of “society defining people primarily through their ‘doing,’ rather than their ‘being’”13 is typically associated with individuals who are perceived to have lost something valuable and is not so dramatized in those born with impairments or “invisible” afflictions. Though Leonid is initially appalled by the flattening and diminishment of sexual dimorphism that blood transfusion and shared labor has effected within the Martian population, he comes to see it, eventually, not as a loss of possibility for action, but as a true blossoming of the possibilities of revolutionary comradeship. His fear switches from the perception of loss to one of possibility—no longer are the Martians marked by a loss of female and male gender and labor roles, but, rather, a sense of optimism and possibility for an expansion of sex-blind human rights. What would eventually become Soviet Russia’s “New Man”—with all the masculine vigor implied—is sublimated in Red Star into a Firestonian dismissal of sex- and class-based differences altogether—that is, a prerequisite for utopia.
The reproductive labor of Red Star, then, is a non-natalist reproduction that locates the state in the body, but the body itself is much more porous than if reproductive responsibility simply shifted to a different (or many different) groups. Instead, the very concept of what it means to reproduce is reified as a literal exchange of social values passed through the blood and connecting society as a whole.
Society for Bogdanov—both his future Martian society, which he depicted as the teleological end point of Bolshevik revolution on Earth, and the real world, in which he attempted to bring praxis to his biological ideology of comradely exchange—was only viable through a radical reconceptualization of economy, individual, and form. Ultimately, following his belief in the viability of his dream for a blood-sharing future, Bogdanov exchanged more than a liter of blood with a young man with tuberculosis, and though the student recovered, both developed adverse reactions that led to Bogdanov’s death two weeks later. His “death was highly publicized in the press as the last heroic act of an unselfish physician and revolutionary,”14 a model for other individuals to follow. Taking the leap in real life that he espoused in his fiction, Bogdanov attempted to merge physiology and politics together and create the utopian shared social body on Earth that he envisioned as humanity’s only chance at a utopian socialist future—and while it failed at the personal level, his political predictions and medical advances would be widely used and implemented for decades following his death to shape the course of the coming future.
- Marx, Karl and Frederic Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 2018.
- In What is to Be Done? the main character, Vera Pavlona, flees an arranged marriage and, in pursuit of economic independence, advocates for socialist communalism. Told in a series of chapters, the most famous—“Vera Pavlona’s Fourth Dream”—is also the most radical, and depicts an agrarian socialist utopia in which all of society is communal and all individualist structures—including nuclear families—have been dissolved. Everyone works as they are able, and all children are raised communally with the expectation that they, too, will participate insofar as their limited strength will allow. See Chernyshevsky, Nikolai. Что делать? (What Is to Be Done? Tales of New People: a Novel). Moscow: Raduga Publishers, 1983. Print.
- See Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Print.
- Bogdanov, Aleksandr, Loren R. Graham, Charles Rougle, and Richard Stites. Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2007. Print. Pg. 86
- The People’s Commissariat of Public Health
- Krementsov, Nikolai. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print. Pg. 1
- Major, Patrick, “Future Perfect? Communist Science Fiction in the Cold War” in Across the Blocs: Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History, eds. Patrick Major and Rana Mitter. London: Frank Cass, 2004. Print. Pg. 76
- Marx, Karl and Frederic Engels. The Communist Manifesto, chapter two. New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 2018.
- Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. London ; New York Verso, 2015. Print. Pg, II
- Ahmed, Sara. “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 12 no. 4, 2006, pp. 543-574.
- Davies, William. Economic Science Fictions. London : Goldsmiths Press, 2019. Print. Pg. 21-22
- Marx, Karl, Friedrich Engels, and Karl-Maria Guth. Die Deutsche Ideologie. Berlin Contumax Hofenberg, 2016. Internet resource. Pg. 70
- Benjamin, Ruha. People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press, 2013, pg. 64
- Krementsov, Nikolai. A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Print. Pg. 100