On Asimov’s Foundation: a Stalinist Hypothesis Isaac Asimov’s (1920-1992) trilogy Foundation published in the early 1950s (1951-53) and, then, expanded as a heptalogy in the 1980s and early 1990s (1982-1993), was a foundational work in the science fiction of the time. In the series, a hard-science approach, whereby interplanetary travel met atomic energy, was combined with unprecedented historical and spatial sophistication, whereby the impending collapse of a galactic empire was scientifically dissected with narrative precision. This combination took place a time the nuclear and spatial race between the USA and Soviet Union raised similar fears of decadence and collapse among the two cold-war rivals. The first Soviet atomic bomb was tested in 1949 and the Sputnik 1 satellite was launched in 1957, few years before and after the publication of Foundation respectively. It was also the time when Stalin, as leader of the Soviet Union (Chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1946-1953), consolidated his power after engaging in murderous ideological purges in the 1930s and massive population exterminations during World War II, which showed the internal corruption of Soviet-style communism (Hungary’s invasion in 1956 being the other defining historical event of the continuity of Stalinism after his death). During the same period and in the name of democracy, the US embarked in a more traditional but bloodier imperial campaign that spanned throughout Latin America and East Asia. Asimov is known for being a traditional liberal who opposed the Vietnam War, was anti-Zionist, and also collaborated in the translation and publication of Soviet science fiction in the US. He even developed an early ecological doctrine about the decadence of human civilization, based on his Malthusian believes about unregulated population growth. Somewhere between cold-war anxieties and Malthusian ecological fears, Asimov found the idea of civilizational collapse worth exploring in what was to become his most famous trilogy, Foundation. The idea of civilizational (and imperial) decadence was present in the West, at least since Edward Gibbon’s influential The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789) and, especially, after World War I with the publication of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918-1922). Yet, the idea of communism, in Asimov’s own singular version of “neuronal communism” (all beings connected mentally in a single democratic community), shows that the Foundation series struck a rather complex compromise among all the civilizational anxieties of the 1950s, which were further expanded in the 1980s, at the dawn of the computer revolution, in the last four installments of series. At the end of the last chronological sequel, Foundation and Earth (1986; later he wrote two prequels), humankind and its galactic expansion are about to embark in a neuronal communist voyage that will solve its contradictions and tendencies to self-destruction. Yet, at the core of this "neuronal communism," Asimov places a human-technological hybrid subject in order to marry rational-technological enlightenment and communism. Moreover, this marriage follows a historical logic that, as I will argue below, has its closest correlate in Soviet Stalinism and, ironically enough, is also the true heir to the European Enlightenment. Stalinist communism, rather than Western liberal capitalism, emerges as the culmination and teleology of the Enlightenment in my reading of Asimov’s series Foundation. The cult of personality was perhaps one of the most defining characteristics of Stalinist communism. In Asimov’s Foundation, Hari Seldon becomes the founder of a science, psychohistory, which predicts the end of Empire; yet, in order to dampen imperial fall, he resorts to a solution that makes impossible to deploy his science to continue predicting history. Seldon, this foundational Marx of sorts, whose “historical materialism” is invoked several times throughout the novel, becomes the personality that cannot be questioned and must be followed with religious blindness. Yet, and unlike in Marx’s account of capitalism's demise, in Asimov’s novels, a galactic-level capitalist system, the Empire, has already fallen, and thus, just like in the Soviet Union, the historical duty of Seldon's project to start a new community of scholars and scientists, Foundation, is to expand its small social experiment to the entire galaxy, by resorting to the galactic “historical materialism” of psychohistory, and thus arrive to some sort of democratic communism. Moreover, and unlike in Marxism/Soviet communism, Foundation’s experiment of “communism” is carried out by resorting to science and technology, i.e., to reason, without the trappings or violent revolutions—only calculated and defensive violence in moments of provoked crises—. In this respect, Foundation follows the older Kantian credo and doctrine that defines the Enlightenment: reason will set you free. Yet, there is another feature of Stalinism that organizes Asimov’s Foundation series, which also helps us rethink the hidden connection between Stalinism and the Enlightenment: conspiratorial history and politics. Asimov stated several times that he liked detective novels: their investigative structure around crime mysteries helped him organize his science-fiction novels. It is the case of Foundation, as most installments end up with a “whodunit” type of revelation. Yet, if Foundation's knowledge is organized as a canonical discourse (psychohistory), which cannot be challenged but revered (as in the case of the Stalinist take on historical materialism), the subject responsible for this knowledge is articulated by Asimov as a hidden actor who generates and organizes a paranoiac politics of knowledge. Although, at first, it appears that there is a single Foundation in a single remote planet called Terminus, later on a second Foundation emerges among the ruins of the galactic capital, Trantor. Furthermore, the most unsuspected character, a plain looking folksy farmer, turns out to be the mastermind of the second Foundation: Preem Palver. He helps the second Foundation defeat the Mule, a mutant who is able to influence anybody’s mind and desires so that he ends up controlling the entire galaxy for few years. The two Foundations’ fear towards the Mule embodies the same paranoia Soviet Stalinism had towards capitalism, i.e., that its communist citizens secretly desired capitalist consumerism and, thus, an outside subject, such as capitalism/the-Mule, organized and controlled their true desires. In the Foundation series, not only is there a second hidden Foundation behind the first one, but also the latter eventually discovers that there is a “third Foundation of sorts” hidden behind it: the planet Gaia, from where the Mule originally hailed. Gaia represents a neuronal communism where all beings are mentally connected and, thus, they act communally so that the well-being of the entire planet-community prevails over most of their actions. Moreover, at the end of the series, the reader finds out that the entire Foundation project initiated by Seldon as well as the community of planet Gaia were controlled from the beginning by a robot-computer hidden inside the Moon: R. Daneel Olivaw. The fact that Olivaw controlled the actions of Gaia and the second Foundation, which in turn, controlled those of the first Foundation, shows that, rather than the indivualistic detective novels Asimov claimed as inspiration, we are dealing here with complex geopolitical groups and entities that, in a hidden conspiratorial way, determine the future of humankind at a galactic level. Even though it could be argued that the robot-computer Olivaw is an individual, the novel presents it as the culmination of a communal technological effort. This effort is even more communal and complex as R. Daneel Olivaw is about to die and the human protagonists decide to transfer its neuronal structure to a child rescued in Solaris who is sexually and psychologically self-sufficient and has even greater computational powers than Olivaw. In short, this is a complex communal robot-human hybrid in charge of expanding communism across the galaxy. And indeed, this also was the “foundation” for the political purges Stalinism carried in the Soviet Union: the fear that groups outside Stalinist control, always defending false or corrupt interpretations of historical materialism, could determine the future of the Soviet Union and, thus, of communism worldwide (or galaxy-wide, as it is the case of the computer-child hybrid). Asimov’s genius lies on the fact that, in the last chronological installment of the series, Foundation and Earth (1986), he solved the problem between Stalinist paranoia towards political conspiratorial groups/subjects and the promise of an inclusive planetary (galactic) communism. On the one hand, Asimov resorted to unquestioned faith in reason, science and technology, which hailed from the Enlightenment but only survived as such in the Soviet Union to represent the ultimate technological-rational subject, the robot-human hybrid, as the legitimate subject of the largest conspiracy ever perpetrated in human history. After all, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, the West shifted its believe in reason to consumerism and, thus, to the consumption of individual technological commodities (from cars to electric kitchens) where conspiracies only pointed to the Soviet Union and aliens. On the other hand, Asimov revealed a robot-computer-human hybrid, which was entrusted with technologically expanding “neuronal communism” to the entire galaxy. This communist project was called Galaxia (Gaia + galaxy) by the protagonists of the series. In this way, Asimov presented the ultimately subject of political conspiracy and paranoia as the only capable of disseminating efficiently and rationally neuronal communism throughout the galaxy. In short, and unlike Stalin, Asimov managed to combine, in his series Foundation, the possibility of paranoiac political conspiracy with the scientific-technological neuronal expansion of communism across planets. In Asimov, the continuity from Enlightenment to Stalinism is rescued and solved through techno-neuronal communism. Western liberal capitalism, ironically, is excluded from Foundation’s galactic utopia. The reason remains to be determined in another post.
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AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
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