Cosmismo ruso

“Immortality for all!”, “Our task is the resurrection of the dead!”, “Communist society must also be interplanetary!” Here we have some slogans that synthesize the action program that brought together at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century a heterogeneous movement made up of radical anarchists, revolutionary activists, poets related to the occult, philosophers, utopian novelists, scientists and pioneers of the astronautics. It was a circle of Russian authors for whom all evils such as inequality, injustice and suffering, were rooted in a greater problem: death, an unnecessary luxury that could be avoided through the technological improvement of nature. According to cosmist principles, human beings should leave behind their differences and organize their efforts behind this common goal, which would be followed by a no less ambitious one: interplanetarity. Once the temporal limits of life are exceeded, we would be ready to break our space ties and spread the revolution throughout the universe.

These texts, condemned to oblivion for years and which we can access for the first time in Spanish with direct translation from Russian, surprise both for the audacity of their proposals and for the unexpected resonances they have in the present. A large part of the cosmism projects are reflected in the agenda of the Silicon Valley titans – who finance programs to reverse cellular aging or implement cryogenics – and in currents of thought as current as posthumanism or cyberfeminism, for which they also the body is a plastic device that we can modify in order to exceed its limits. Even the fear of the first cosmist, Fyodorov, “that millionaires could infect other planets with their extractive exploitation” seems to materialize in the privatization of the space race operated by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In this scenario, recovering the tradition of Russian cosmism can help us today to recreate that much-needed confluence between techno-scientific development and emancipatory policies.