Fabricating the new man and woman: self-alteration through revolutionary socialism

Socialist movements hope and assert that revolution generates a new world. Through it, humanity acquires a changed collective ontology, and participants alter their selves. Leftist revolutionary activism wagers all, then, on the contention that radical social change is pre-requisite for genuine self-knowledge and self-alteration. In doing so it runs against the grain of a century of psychiatric care whose dominant models of self-alteration privilege individual and psychological factors, and which downplay the sickness of the social order. How do revolutionary political projects imagine and pursue self-alteration? In this essay I analyse three very different events and portrayals of revolutionary socialism, as well as the forms of self-alteration they enable.