The Death Drive in Yugoslavia’s Youth Labor Camps

Jan 2

Months ago I started reading on Yugoslavia’s Youth Labor Camps. I grew up hearing many stories, full of pride and nostalgia, about these organized labor actions that built public infrastructure like roads and railways. From these anecdotes it’s always seemed like these camps played a powerful function of building a common national identity in Yugoslavia — something I was interested in exploring as I started reading on the camps. Some time later, I saw Contrapoints’ YouTube essay Twilight, in which she examines themes of love and death in the popular book and movie series. Her video led me to some very out-there readings from psychoanalysis. At some point, these readings decided to intertwine, and super cool parallels between lustful romantic love and group identity formation became evident to me.

This essay is about these parallels. In it want to unify ideas from sociology and psychoanalysis and posit a mechanism of identity formation based on two opposing drives: the ego drive and the death drive. For a shared identity among a collective to arise, the death drive for dissolution — the urge to merge — needs to overcome the ego drive for differentiation. I will argue that a special type of action, an undertaking, is particularly suitable in muting the ego drive and enflaming the death drive. These undertakings, ranging from sex to dancing to sports, as well as the Yugoslav labor camps, have a special power in building and re-affirming identity among a group. But this magic is also volatile due to the strong and conflicted ego and death drives that underpin it, so collective undertakings can be a delicate matter. Throughout the essay, I will use the Yugoslav youth labor camps as my main case study, but will continuously draw on a variety of sources, from personal examples, to Macedonian wedding rituals, to the unedited, obsessive, and erotically lustful diary entries of French writer Annie Ernaux.

This is going to be a ride so buckle up…

Youth Labor Actions in Yugoslavia

Labor Actions

Labor actions played a huge role in the reconstruction of post-war Yugoslavia. They began as organized labor actions by the communist rebels Partizani during World War II, and after the communists assumed power, presented a major tool of repairing railways, building roads, factories, dams, and other public goods. Since their inception, they relied on mass voluntary participation from the peasant population. They were organized both locally and at the federal level, and ideology was always a strong motivator for participation. By the middle of the 1950s, the Communist Party had realized the potential in these labor actions not only as a means of broad participation to nation building, in the literal sense of building infrastructure, but also as possible tools for education, socialization, and ideological indoctrination of the youth: nation-building through a common identity! As a result, they institutionalized the volunteer labor actions into month-long summer Youth Labor Camps for high school and college students.

One of the more impressive feats by the Youth Labor Camps was the trans-Yugoslav highway, stretching from Slovenia in the north, to Macedonia in the south (map shown below). Croatian sociologist Rudi Supek, excommunicated from his Marxist circles at the Sorbonne for siding with Tito over Stalin, came back to Yugoslavia where he led a prolific academic life. Between 1958 and 1961 he conducted an impressive field study of the labor camps on a stretch of the highway under active construction between the Macedonian and Serbian border (see map below). His book The Youth on the Brotherhood Highway: Psycho-sociology of the worker actions (Supek 1963) is my principal source on the labor actions in this essay.

The camps were organized into settlements, and each settlement housed several “brigades”. Each brigade numbered around 120 students (brigaders), and was composed of brigaders from the same town/area. Students volunteered to participate in their local Communist Party chapters, but the Party selected the brigaders from the typically over-subscribed lists. While brigades were not mixed with students from different regions, they were housed in settlements together, so there were ample opportunities for brigaders to interact with other ethnicities from Yugoslavia they may have never encountered before! Most of the participants were boys — around 85% — and all federal republics were proportionally represented in these camps. The camps ran throughout the summer, rotating brigades every month, so each brigade spent around 4 weeks working on the highway.

The life Supek observed in these camps was intense. A packed schedule started with early mornings and 6 hours of exhausting manual work: digging, shoveling, and carrying heavy loads. On the highway, the brigaders were coordinated by their camp commandeers and a state-owned construction enterprise with the staff and tools to complement the youth laborers. But their days did not only involve manual labor. The camps served an enormous educational role and were the site of constant socialization of the youth — the plan of the Agino Selo settlement for one brigade gives us some hints (see sketch). Each brigade had essentials, like restrooms, sleeping chambers, ambulance and a dining hall, but it also has dedicated spaces of classes, performances, and political-organizational meetings. Camps offered dozens of courses that ranged from vocational, like brickwork, cooking, and animal husbandry, and prepared brigaders for careers outside the camps, to amateur courses for cycling, photography, and even airplane and boat modelling. In 1960, when 48,500 brigaders were on the highway, Supek reports that 9,636 certificates were given for vocational courses and about 49,000 for amateur courses, suggesting high participation in the educational activities. Besides the labor and courses, students were exposed to culture: students participated in workshops on socialist political life, read special camp newspapers like “Youth on the Road“, went to theater and dance performances, and congregated around campfires at night to sing and dance. This paints a picture of an intense month for the youth, full of work, learning, and socializing.

Nation Building

The cost-efficiency of free volunteer labor was not the main concern for the Yugoslav Communists. The professional construction enterprises were often frustrated with the unprofessionalism of the youth, and asked that the Communist Party instead use paid construction workers. Some voices within the Party also thought that the camps are not a very cost-effective way to construct roads. The main goal of the camp for the Communist Party was to socialize and educate the youth. The Party saw the camps as playing a double role of nation building, not only a literal one in the sense of proving public goods, but also as a social one in creating a sense of Yugoslav patriotism as well as cross-cutting brotherly ties across youth from many parts of the federal republic, facilitating a supra-ethnic, national identity. This was enough to make up for any losses in cost-effectiveness.

Suggestive of the nation building function is the perceived “meaning” of the labor actions by the youth. One of Supek’s questionnaires asks students on the highway camps what they think is the meaning of the labor camps, and what they help the students develop, offering 12 potential answers with which brigaders could agree to a smaller or higher degree. Summing across all respondents, Supek’s data gives us a clear sense of how the students see the camps. The lowest ranked answers concern the vocational training, cultural entertainment, and the desire to distinguish yourself / heroism. The middle ranked answers have to do with labor — the honor and pride associated with labor contributions, the health benefits, and the discipline and cleanliness that the camps inspire. The foremost goals are exactly the nation-building ones: the top ranked meaning of the actions according to the students is the “brotherhood among our people“, followed by “love towards our homeland“, “friendships and sense of collective life“, and “familiarizing ourselves with other parts of our nation“ (p. 25).

For Supek, the interesting question is not whether the camps indeed built a supra-ethnic Yugoslav identity — he treats the answer to this as an unequivocal yes. The interesting questions are why and how identity is formed: what are the individual, group, and institutional factors that facilitate or hinder this process? His book explores these factors, starting with a theoretical framework of action as a means of identity formation. Before I analyze some data Supek collected in the camps, I’ll take a little detour into theory that will be necessary to give Supek’s empirical findings a fresh interpretation.

Rudi Supek’s Theory of Action

Mechanical Actions vs. Undertakings

Supek claims that existing frameworks of action at the time, particularly the influential ones proposed in Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937), cannot explain the special power of the labor camps to build identity. In order to do this, he proposes a distinction between a mechanical action and an undertaking, only the latter of which can build identity among a collective. The theoretical distinction generalizes to individual actions as well, so let me illustrate the differences between mechanical actions and undertakings via two personal examples. If my reading is correct, I believe Supek would call my 3-times-a-week-1-km swims a mechanical action, but my spontaneous foraged meals an undertaking. How are they different?

First, they differ in a temporal dimension. My regular swims (mechanical action) are perpetual, they happen at regular intervals and predictable rates, with a routinized set of actions. I swim 3 times a week, 1 km every visit, 3 freestyle to 1 breast stroke, repeat that 14 times, with a break halfway. On the other hand, a foraged meal (undertaking) is spontaneous and defined around clear beginning and end. Sure, I plan a hike at a specific time, but whether I find a mushroom or a ramp or nothing at all is a matter of luck. If luck strikes, I feel the occasion calls for an elaborate meal, after which I let my creative juices flow: a ramp butter? pesto?… chicken of the woods tacos? or should I pickle it then deep fry them? Undertakings like the foraged meal, with their clear beginning and ending, generate strong anticipation and motivation, from the moment I lay my eyes on the mushroom to the moment I am eating the meal I’ve concocted.

Second, they differ in a functional dimension. This is characterized by how salient the goal or meaning of the action is during our performance. I swim for general well being and health benefits. But this long term goal is not a powerful driver in the daily decision to swim, nor is it particularly salient while I do it. I go to swim because I just have to swim 3 days a week. I do not end the swim by achieving long term health benefits, and this goal that is hard to evaluate. The removed goal prevents it from being a powerful driver that gets me out of the house. Rather it is some commitment I have made to myself, a habit a try to build — I just have to swim 3 days a week. Contrast this to the undertaking of a foraged meal, where the goal of an elaborate meal inspired by my foraged goods is a powerful driver. Moreover, the goal is achieved at the end of the undertaking, and more importantly, I can evaluate it. Does the dish live up to my vision? Its flavor? Textures? Is it as pretty as I imagined it? When I have “a vision“, the goal is achieved through obsession, not habit formation.

Third, there is an emotional dimension that these two types of action differ on. An undertaking, being short-lived and strongly goal-motivated, is characterized with a higher emotional state compared to the mechanical action. The excitement, presence and attachment to the action I have for creating a foraged meal does not come close to the same feelings for my weekly swims. I have to make myself get out of the house to swim, but I am floating in the kitchen when I’m making my ramp pesto. At the end of the cooking, when I try the meal, I will declare it a success or a failure depending on how close it came to “my vision“, and that will make me feel victorious or defeated, but if I don’t make it to the pool today, or happen to swim less than I usually do, there is always tomorrow or next week to make up for it.

Before I move onto the fourth difference, I want to introduce two caveats to this theory. First, while Supek is talking in categorical terms — mechanical action versus an undertaking — I think there is not always a discrete categorization. It might be better to think of actions as being on some spectrum between two polarities. Second, actions are not inherently more mechanical or undertakings, and people have the power to make them more or less so. For example, there is nothing inherently mechanical in a swim, and the swimming portion during my triathalon most certainly felt like an undertaking (fastest I’ve ever swam!). Conversely, cooking a regular meal for the upcoming week, when I feel uninspired but know the chore needs to be done, the action becomes more mechanical. Through narrative building, I think we have the ability to make something an undertaking as opposed to a mechanical action.

Collective Undertakings and Identity

Ok, onto the fourth dimension. This one only applies to collective actions, and this is where the real magic happens. Supek theorizes that a collective undertaking has a totalizing effect on its participants: it equates the individual and collective consciousness and has a horizontal-integrative function. In short, collective undertakings build identity! As the goal and meaning of the action is ever-present during an undertaking, when those goals and meanings are shared by members of a group, the individual and collective consciousnesses are in unison. Let me give a few examples of collective undertakings that fit Supek’s definition, and discuss how they build collective identity.

Sex is an obvious example of a collective undertaking, regardless of whether collective means two or seven to you. Sex can have a powerful function to bond humans together — beyond and independent of the reproductive function! — and the closer sex comes to an undertaking the more potent it’s power. Sex — especially when it feels spontaneous rather than mechanical, whose meaning is front of mind, which increases our emotionality — can be especially powerful in generating bonds between humans. In these moments, the physical boundaries of the individual are penetrated, participants can “feel like one“, a unity of individuals into a singular body and collective consciousness. The bond shaped during sex supports a fundamental identity in life — the couple and family.

Dancing is another example of a collective undertaking. Waltz and tango passionately reaffirm the bond between two romantic partners. Oro, a collective circle dance from the Balkans, pleasurably reaffirmed my own identity and connection to friends and family. At 4am, after hours of dancing at a good rave I feel like I am melting, getting lost in the crowd. And again, when Supek’s boxes are checked and dancing feels more like an undertaking rather than a mechanical action, the bonding is stronger and feelings of togetherness arise, whether as a couple, an ethnic group, or a house music loving subculture.

Competitive sports are also a collective undertaking. A lot of sports by definition satisfy the criteria of an undertaking: there is a clear beginning and end, the goal is ever-present and strongly motivating, and strong emotions flow. In a group, good teamwork certainly also satisfies Supek’s “totalizing effects“. It can fuse individual consciousness into the collective consciousness — the “team works like one“ — and this process can form strong bonds among the teammates. Playing team sports together has been found to build common identity among individuals of different religions in Iraq or castes in India. Competitive sports can even have this effect on fans and viewers who do not play but identify with the team; when a national soccer team wins, this increases identification with the nation (as opposed to the ethnicity).

I can list many other examples, from political protests to escape-room games, but I hope by now the reader is getting the intuition behind the theory. It is as collective undertakings that Supek invites us to see the Youth Labor Camps in Yugoslavia. But, what is the mechanism by which identity is built during a collective undertaking?

Let’s bring some psychoanalysis into the mix…

The Creative Destruction of the Self

The Death Drive

Psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein thinks that the “I“ needs to die for the “We“ to be born. In her 1912 essay, Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being, she motivates her psychoanalytic theory with biological facts: “During reproduction, a union of male and female cell occurs. The unity of each cell is thus destroyed, and from the product of this destruction, a new life originates.” (Spielrein, 1994, p.155). Some animals, like male spiders and praying mantises, will sacrifice their entire organism and die in service of their reproductive urge. Spielrein thinks that in humans, this trade-off between self-death and eternal life, is a matter of degree, not kind. While the whole human body is not sacrificed during sex, cells of the organism are, and this literal destruction of a part of oneself, a bodily invasion by a foreign object, is psychologically experienced as a threat to the self, and is thus accompanied with negative feelings of anxiety and disgust that need to be overcome for the reproductive drive to properly work.

This tension between something that is deeply desired, and yet invokes negative feelings, arises from two contradictory urges. The first is the Ego Drive, the urge to differentiate ourselves, to self-preservation and the maintaining of the ego. The second tendency is one to assimilate or dissolve, a Death Drive which opposes the Ego Drive:

The instinct for preservation of the species, a reproductive drive, expresses itself psychologically in the tendency to dissolve and assimilate (transformation of the I to the We)… ‘Where love reigns, the ego, the ominous despot, dies’. When one is in love, the blending of the ego in the beloved is the strongest affirmation of the self.
- Spielrein, 1994, p.174

The Death Drive — the Urge to Merge — is an inherently conflicted and dynamic drive:

The instinct of self-preservation is a simple drive that originates exclusively from a positive component; the instinct for preservation of the species, which must dissolve the old to create the new, arises from both positive and negative components. In its nature, preservation of the species is ambivalent. Therefore, the impulse of the positive components simultaneously summons forth the impulse of the negative component and opposes it. Self-preservation is a static drive because we must protect the existing individual from foreign influences; preservation of the species is a dynamic drive that strives for change, the ‘resurrection‘ of the individual in a new form. No change can take place without the destruction of the former condition.
- Spielrein, 1994, p.174

The Death Drive is not a literal wish for death. It is a reproductive drive towards eternal life — blending with a collective that perpetuates the ego to eternity. Obviously this manifests biologically in reproduction (eternal biological self), but also by production and sharing of cultural content (eternal social self). The death of the ego, the subordination of the "I“ to the "We“, is therefore a cost one must pay to attain this “eternal life”. The death before the resurrection! The tendency for self-preservation needs to be subordinated for one to dissolve into a collective, where shared identity is born and love is felt, be it in the context of a romantic partnership, or in the context of collective identities such as ethnic, religious, or national. A Creative Destruction of the Self, said my friend Varun when I manically explained this idea to him, connecting it to the famous Schumpeterian “creative destruction”.

Let me try to give a couple of examples about how the Death Drive manifests in various examples, before I bring it back to Supek’s theory of action. Stay with me, I promise this will be worth it…

Uprooting the Cherrytree

Macedonian wedding rituals offer a very visceral example of the symbolic self-death that precedes the birth of a new identity. Marriage is probably the biggest identity change for a woman in the Balkans. Macedonian culture is patrilocal, meaning that the wife leaves her parents’ home to live with her husband’s family. In Macedonia, where identity is largely defined through one’s social ties — “whose are you? (чив си?)“ is the first question people ask after “what’s your name?“ — marriage represents a dramatic break in the bride’s social networks. The bride’s tribe loses a member, and the groom’s gains one. The identity change is very literal too — the girl changes her last name, as in most other places in the world, but this name change was even more extreme in the not-so-distant past. My grandmother was often called not by her given name Stojna, but by a possessive construction of my grandfather’s name Pere — Perejca — meaning “of Pere“.

The traditional wedding rituals dramatize this death and rebirth of the bride, and evoke the deepest positive and negative components of Speilrein talks about. In the morning of the wedding day, the groom and his party go to take the bride from her family’s house. There, they have to bribe a line of defending brothers and cousins before they reach the bride to court her. Once “purchased”, the bride leaves her house, and as she leaves the home she grew up in, she has to turn and bow to her mother three times in gratitude and respect. It is around this moment that the musicians plays a very special song for the occasion. Chereshna se od koren korneshe (черешна се од корен корнеше) compares the bride to an uprooted cherrytree. The song starts strong with the lyrics “Cherrytree is uprooting // Girl is splitting from her mother“…but more poetic. The bride in the song continues to beg forgiveness of her blood family, as she can’t be obedient to them anymore, listing all the in-laws that she now has to obey instead. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t been to a Macedonian wedding, but this song is powerful. It will have grown men cry, like watching 20 Tony Sopranos sob, cracking one by one, slowly cascading into some bittersweet ecstasy. Watching this as a kid, I knew that I’m seeing something rare, it’s now and never again! This song is controversial too — some brides’ families will explicitly forbid the musicians to play it. My mom told me she banned it on her wedding with my dad. However, one of my dad’s aunts managed to sic the musicians to play the song anyway, not sparing my mom and her family from public display of cathartic emotions. Few years later, my mom got her lick back though, as she instigated the playing of Chereshna at that auntie’s son’s wedding. And if the bride’s ban prevails and the song is not played — the perfect juicy gossip for the wedding guests: “What, they’re special? It’s tradition! We all did it at our weddings!“ My point is, not only do people understand the power of this song, but they wield it as a weapon in silly little games.

What’s the magic of this song? I think it is precisely in its ability to dramatize this process of self-death and re-birth, the subordination of the Ego Drive to the Death Drive. In it, it captures perfectly the deepest “positive components“ and “negative components“ that Spielrein is talking about in her theory. The positive feelings of happiness that one’s daughter is in a happy union and will produce offspring (urge for preservation of the species, eternal life) are contrasted with the realization that she is now, in many ways, less your daughter, as she will change her name and family allegiances (urge for static self-preservation). Let’s turn to the lyrics, starting with the very-on-the-nose opener with the uprooted cherrytree. A metaphor for the bride, the uprooted cherrytree is a double-entendre that combines images of death of the cherrytree by uprooting and the loss of identity, i.e. loss of family roots. Then the song goes, roughly, “I’ve obeyed my mother so far // Now I have to obey my mother-in-law“, a perfectly symmetrical contrast between the death of one bond of allegiance and the re-birth of another. Mommy is dead — you have a new mommy now! As Spielrein put it: “No change can take place without the destruction of the former condition.“ If she were alive she would love Macedonian weddings!

The Addictive Death Cycles of Annie Ernaux

“Do you know that sometimes I could kill you?—not because I do not love you, or am jealous of you, but, because I feel as though I could simply devour you.”
- Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

At a recent party, I spiced up the conversation pit by mentioning vore, a sexual arousal to thoughts of eating or being eaten, like one Toronto man who reported “fantasizing about being consumed and destroyed by a very large, dominating woman”, reported in one of the few studies on the subject. My friend Jeanne Sorin matched the vibe and recommended Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, a book she said contained a lot of visceral images that reminded her of vore. It is uncanny how closely Annie’s inner thoughts track Spielrein’s framework, so let me make a few connections.

Getting Lost is a collection of unedited journal entries that French writer Annie Ernaux wrote in the late 80s, when she had an affair with a Soviet diplomat in Paris. These pages reveal obsessive thoughts about this man she calls “S.”, ranging from sweet to pathetic. To be clear, Annie is perfectly reasonable about this man. She knows he is married. She knows that he is 34 — 14 years younger than her! A mysoginist “parvenu” (p. 15), a Stalin fanboy who bums cigarettes and vodka from her. As Annie puts it: “he fucks, he drinks, he talks about Stalin“ (p. 32), a “gigolo down to the last detail“ (p. 132) who “lets himself be worshiped“ (p. 79). And yet, her rationally knowing all of this does not change how she feels about him: “There is no point in telling myself that his intellect is unremarkable, his personality conformist, etc., since it’s not these things that make me attached to him, it’s that indefinable bond of the flesh, the lack of which is killing me.“

Annie wants to die. And if she doesn’t want to die, like Dostoyevsky’s protagonist, she wants to kill. Images of death and consumption appear page after page in this book. “This need for a man“, Annie writes, “is so terrible, so close to a desire for death, an annihilation of self, how long can it go on…“ (p. 20). Annie and S. kiss “as if to die from it“ (p. 13). When she doesn’t “sleep with the sensation of being inside his body“ (p. 27) or “inside his skin“ (p. 33), she “cannot detach [herself] from his body, which remained inside [her]“ (p. 17). Devourer and devouree — a vore Queen if I’ve ever seen one! Sabina Spielrein would’ve loved reading the following realization that Annie wrote down: “I can’t say that men are my perdition, it is my own desire that get’s me lost — my submission to (or quest for) something terrible which I don’t understand, born in the union with another body and no sooner gone.“ It is in these obsessive rabbit holes that Annie “get[s] lost” and “[her] self dissolves“ (p. 46). Her words track the tension between the Ego Drive and the Death Drive, when she write “Today, again, I’ll be caught between fusion and the return to self“ (p. 33). That ambivalence in the sexual act, in the urge to merge, is perfectly captured by Annie when she says that “nothing is more desirable and dangerous than losing the sense of self“ (p. 139). Desirable and dangerous. Something terrible born in the union with another. A “nameless terror" (p. 9)

To be honest, while Annie seems to be having this deliciously painful, obsessive-compulsive, feral union of fleshes, reading her journal gets hard at times. She starts learning Russian, re-reads Anna Karenina… knowing full well there is no future with this man! Why would this feminist writer debase herself so pathetically for some intellectually inferior nouveau riche? Allow me to psychoanalyze! Taking Spielrein’s theory seriously, I think that Annie got stuck into some addictive death cycles in her affair, driven by excessive Death Drive. That there is pleasure in fulfilling the Death Drive is undeniable. And not just the ecstasy of sex, but also the imaginary anticipation of the union that precedes it: “I wait for him with many scenarios in mind (where and how to make love, etc.), without really knowing if he will come. This chasm — between imagination, desire, and reality — is unbearable.“ (p. 63) Maybe not that unbearable, given that so many of her actions are prolonging and intensifying this anticipation. It seems that Annie knows subconsciously that this anticipation before the meeting, the will-he-won’t-he, only makes the bliss higher: “I understand Tistan and Isolde, the passion that consumes and cannot be extinguished, despite — because of — the obstacles.“ (p.40) In fact, she seems insistent on putting the obstacles there. A Russian native speaker with a wife: obstacle and obstacle. Page after page, Annie is committed to convincing herself — despite the lack of any evidence — that her Soviet lover will not come anymore. That he has abandoned her and will not show up anymore. Yet she hopes. Waits. Suffers. When he finally calls out of nowhere, she is ecstatic with joy, ready to turn all her fantasies into reality, but only after she has suffered “from absence, from desire, from waiting“ (p.133). And then, when all her fantasies are realized, when all flesh is consumed, “desire wanes“ (p. 15) and she gets to the “point of saturation and the absence of desire“ (p. 43).

Obstacle-anticipation-consumption. Put it on repeat. Annie got hooked on the Death Drive.

Ok, but why? Why would she do this? Just feeling good is not a satisfying answer. What might Speilrein say? Well, maybe this is some perversion of a the biological reproductive instinct. When Annie has a pregnancy scare (at 48 years old!) and writes in her journal: “Apparently, the chance of pregnancy is one in forty-five. Still, I think of S much less, and wonder if, obscurely, all I expect from a man is to be fertilized like a bitch and then show him my teeth“ (p. 80). These lines hint at Speilrein’s biological motivation, but biology cannot fully explain Annie’s cravings, and Annie would agree: “A terrible state of waiting, in the sense of need and emptiness. Desire that is not physical, or detectible in my body (it doesn’t make me wet, for example). I’m psychologically hollow, alienated from myself to the point of weeping.“ (p.126).

What is this psychological hollowness? I think the answer to why Annie slipped into these death cycles is not the death drive alone. Rather, I think that Annie’s Ego Drive was too weak and allowed the Death Drive to take over. One way to think about Speilrein’s theory is through this conflict and interplay between the species-preserving Death Drive versus the self-preservation Ego Drive. Dissolution fighting differentiation. If one is too weak, it can lead the other to dominate, and propel us into extremes. Probably the most common theme after these obsessions with desire and death, is the fact that Annie just cannot get herself to write. She either procrastinates, or hates what she has written. For a writer, prolonged episodes of writers’ block, inability to do what is essential to affirm your identity, has to be a blow to one’s sense of self. If the sense of self gets too low, there is nothing of worth to preserve. Then, the death drive, the urge to merge, becomes the sole captain of the ship. In short, I think Annie got into these depths of lust and death because she wasn’t writing. In her words, she found herself “in that hollow place where death, writing, and sex merge, and I see the link between them but am unable to surmount it. Spin it out in a book.“ (p. 135) It is due to this loss of her identity as a writer that Annie abandons differentiation and seeks dissolution, the Death Drive to attain another identity, to fuse with someone’s flesh, to die and be re-born anew. But a married Russian is no way towards any new identity, no path to re-birth. The only way out is back, to the writer — spin it out in a book!

But Annie doesn’t just want to go back to writing. She wants to feel it all! “To embrace all of life, as I’ve always done, is so hard, much more than protecting oneself in order to retain the power to write. (But then what is there to write that is true and fair?)“ (p. 198). There is some utility in this suffering, in the excesses of the Death Drive. Besides, going back to the self, to writing is not necessarily any better for Annie. For Annie, going back to writing is another extreme, of hyper-Ego Drive and no Death Drive. Starting to write means “being lost to the world for months“ (p.136), and for Annie this “writing is a way to make people love me, which for me means ceasing to love” (p. 143). What emerges is a picture of a woman oscillating between two extremes: the Death Drive extreme, of getting lost, dying, loving, and giving, and the Ego Drive extreme of selfish distinction, of being loved but not loving, being alone.

“Nameless terror or emptiness, what a choice!“ (p. 205)

The Death Drive & Collective Undertakings

Now I finally want to propose a framework of identity formation that unites Spielrein’s and Supek’s works. Spielrein’s mechanism involves two opposing drives: Ego Drive (differentiation) vs. Death Drive (dissolution). Now I want to make the argument that this framework of identity building, as a conflict/interplay between Death and Ego drives, goes beyond the romantic pair and sex as the main “undertaking” that builds the bond and identity we talked about so far. Supek’s “totalizing effect“ can be seen as a triumph of the Death Drive over the Ego Drive, resulting in a strong “unification of individual and collective consioussness“ (Supek 1963, p. 65). I claim the self-death is also necessary in collective rituals of identity formation: from sport, as “There is no I in team!“, to dancing the oro, when one’s body literally abandons differentiation in movement to stay on the beat, to dance in harmony and unison with the collective. The Ego Death is prevalent in community rituals, like self-flagellation rituals in religious practices; at the extreme of this Death Drive, individuals from kamikaze pilots to suicide bombers will kill themselves to show devotion, to eternally bind themselves to a community.

So it is at the youth labor camps on the highway — the “I” needs to die for the “We” to be born. Supek documents a similar creative destruction of the self that Spielrein talks about in the context of sex and romance. What dies in these camps? Supek claims that what dies is a “socially narrower” form of identity in favor or a more expansive one. What dies is “familial selfishness“ (p. 21), “small mindedness” and “local-patriotism“ (p. 306). What is born anew is class consciousness and Yugoslav brotherhood and unity. It is a process of destroying or renegotiating old identities, and increasing the circle of identification from the family and ethnicity to class and nation. Such renegotiations of identity are necessary when new states are established and a national identity needs to be formed. To be clear, while Supek is a firm believer of the Yugoslav project, and sees this process as some expanding altruism, he notes that these come with trade offs as well. The familial selfishness makes one better in “the private sphere“ and “a better father“, while the Yugoslav brotherhood makes one better in the “public sphere“ and “a better politician” or a “philosopher“ (p. 288). I think the success of this nation-building project on the Yugoslav highways can be seen as triumph of the Death Drive over the Ego Drive.

Before I make an argument that Spielrein’s theory can be useful to re-interpret Supek’s data, let me formalize some of my thinking. For identity of a collective to be formed, reaffirmed, or renegotiated, the death drive needs to win over the ego drive. We can mathematically (I’m sorry!) think of the feelings of identity to a collective (IdC) as a difference between the death and ego drives:

IdC = Death - Ego

One feels strongly connected to and identifies with a collective if the death drive is strong or if the ego drive is weak. The result of this differentiation is the extent of identification one has with a collective, or from a group-level’s perspective, how cohesive the group is. (It’s important to note that even though this simple mathematical subtraction can be useful as a framework in the rest of the essay, it does not feel sufficient to represent all the complex interplays between these two drives. The Death and Ego drive are sometimes conflictual, but they can also re-enforce each other. It might be better to think of them as some sort of Duality that needs to be continuously reconciled, never in equilibrium. Like the yin-yang, or like a Hegelian thesis and anti-thesis. What results is not a simple netting out of two independent drives, but rather a synthesis, something that contains both.) Now let’s bring Supek to the mix.

I claim that Supek’s undertakings are particularly suited for identity formation, i.e. increasing IdC. During the collective undertakings the ego drive is muted, and the death drive heightened and allows for shared identity to arise. Why would dissolution beat differentiation during collective undertakings? First, a collective undertaking has a clear beginning and an end. This temporal limitation makes it easy for the individual to sacrifice the self: a temporary death is less scary than a perpetual one. Thus, collective undertakings can lower the ego drive. Second, during undertakings the collective goal is front-of-mind and shared among the participants. As such, collective undertakings may also increase the desire to be a part of collective and achieve a common goal. Thus, an undertaking can also increase the Death Drive. Whether through increasing the Death Drive or through decreasing the Ego Drive, collective undertakings are able to facilitate group cohesion and identity formation. Mathematically speaking (again, sorry!), the ego drive and the death drive are functions of several variables, including the type of collective action that may serve as the context. So, Ego(Undertaking) < Ego(Mechanical), and Death(Undertaking)>Death(Mechanical), which would imply that identity is more easily formed under collective undertakings as opposed to mechanical collective actions: IdC(Undertaking) > IdC(Mechanical). This can perhaps explain why upper management feels the need to do “escape-the-room“ or other “team-building“ games with their employees — the mechanical action of coming and doing your work in your little cubicle will not give rise to the “We’re all family here!“ feelings your boss wants.

For the rest of this essay, I want to take this framework and present two empirical “case studies” from Supek’s impressive data collection efforts. I will take some of the results found in Supek’s book and attempt to give them a fresh re-interpretation using Spielrein’s theory of the ego vs. death drives. Throughout, I think it will be interesting to maintain an analogy of this process of collective identity formation in Yugoslavia to romantic, lustful, love.

The Summer Fling of 1958

Rudi Supek collected data on the highways for 4 years between 1958 and 1961. Each summer, he administered a panel survey to the brigades, conducted interviews, and ethnographic work. His main questionnaire aims to measure group cohesion. It consists of 17 questions that ask participants about collective life in the brigades, how much they are attracted to and identify with their brigades, how fractionalized into cliques their brigades are, and how happy they are with the decision-making processes, as well as questions about how much they are attracted to individual as opposed to a collective way of living. Given Supek’s engagement with the broader sociological literature in the book, there is every reason to believe these are state-of-the-art survey instruments for the late 1950s. Interestingly, about two thirds of the questions can be classified as being about “pulls toward“ and “pushes away“ from collective life (p. 326-328), something that directly maps onto the death drive and ego drives in the framework.

The bad news is, Supek averaged all questions into an aggregate cohesion index, so I only have an idea of the overall identification with the collective, but not how the ego vs death drives move separately. The good news is, there is lots of other data. He conducted this questionnaire once at the beginning and once at the end of the labor camps. In the case of 1958, he followed up a third time with the participants 6 months after the camp. This gives us interesting insights into how cohesion evolves over time. His data also covered 7 brigades, with about half participants surveyed in each brigade, giving us a good idea of the behavior of the brigade overall (most brigades numbered around 120, and Supek surveyed about 55-60 brigaders from each group). He covered all 6 federal republics of Yugoslavia, and high school as well as college student brigades.

In the figure to the right I plotted the cohesion index for 7 brigades from 1958, using data from Table V/2 (p. 118).

The vertical plots Supek’s Cohesion index.

The horizontal plots the wave of data collection (1=beginning of camp, 2=end of camp, 3=6 months after the camp).
Each brigade is represented in a separate color, and places of origin are noted in the legend.
High school brigades are represented in circles and full lines
College brigades are represented in diamods and dashed lines.

The general trends in the panel data of 1958 — as well as it’s outliers — tell an interesting story. First, the college brigades are characterized by a stable cohesion index across waves, starting high, falling only slightly, and (for the brigade that we have data) recovering to the original levels. Conversely, the high school brigades show a very different trend. They start with high cohesion as well, but at the end of the labor camp show a marked dip in cohesion and a tendency to pull away from collective life, only to recover again to the original cohesion 6 months after the camp (when they are not around each other!). The only exception to this high school trend is the Montenegrin brigade, which shows steady and highest levels of cohesion.

Why are the high schoolers and college students exhibiting different trends? Why are the Montenegrins such outliers? Supek has an explanation, and I think it lends itself fabulously to re-interpretation using the ego-death drives framework.

The Honeymoon Phase

High schoolers enter the camps with high death drives, a strong urge to belong and achieve great things! Build their nation for generations to come! However, in any group individual preferences need to be negotiated, and roles need to be divided for the goal to be achieved. This is when power and hierarchies start to arise — the most fertile terrain for the Ego drive! Supek explains the drop in cohesion as a consequence of the interpersonal problems associated with collective life and how they are solved. According to him, the institutional environment featuring strict hierarchical governance, few opportunities for group-level decision making, and competitive activities, all led to formation of smaller cliques within brigades, who fought for power and prestige, and led to fractionalization and dissatisfaction with collective life.

To draw a parallel to a romantic relationship, the high cohesion in the beginning is some sort of a “honeymoon phase“ that the group goes through. Struck by Cupid’s arrow, ignoring all the red flags. As the group is faced with challenges, the difficulties in sustaining a healthy relationship arise. Navigating the preferences of romantic partners is hard, and done incorrectly, can fracture the cohesion of the couple. Supek describes this withdrawal from collective life by the brigaders in a similar way one might be disenchanted in a relationship after its honeymoon phase.

Six months later, removed from the inter-personal problems at the camps, the ego drive goes back down and the high schoolers nostalgically reminisce and romanticize their time at the camps. Just like a summer fling with “the one that got away“. But this one didn’t! All the nostalgic feelings are channeled to a sense of love toward all comrades and a sense of a Yugoslav identity, just like in the personal stories I heard growing up, decades after these camps! Supek emphasizes that while the measures of cohesion are quantitatively equal in the first and third wave, these are associated with qualitatively different feelings of identity. The initial cohesion is a consequence of “anticipation/imagination” (Supek 1963, p. 131), the lust involved in the Death Drive toward the collective, that bittersweet thing that got Annie hooked. On the other hand, the final cohesion involves a process of “assimilation“ (Supek 1963, p. 134) of experiences and cultural content that shapes the meanings of the identity. What happens in between the first and third waves is a negotiation of who we are and what we do as a collective, the inherently dynamic and unstable, the full of opportunities, the thing that can succeed or fail in making us a community - so let’s not fuck it up!

Maturity Helps

The college students don’t exhibit this same drop we see in the high schoolers — why? According to Supek, the difference is one of age and experience. Puberty is an emotionally turbulent time for young people — one in which questions “Who am I?“ and “Where do I belong?“ are front and center. This is why teenage love can feel particularly potent, or why teens are prone to experiment with subcultures. Supek says the high schoolers “intensely live through their development of social consciousness, find themselves in a full expansion of their sociability“, and this makes them “more sensitive to the collective goals they have set as a brigade, and to the inter-personal relationships with which they want to achieve it“ (Supek 1963, p. 125). In other words, high schoolers have a stronger death drive (seek belonging), but also a more volatile ego drive (shifting sense of self). Due to more experience and higher maturity, college students, are able to surmount the pressures of collective life and interpersonal tensions without a sacrifice to cohesion of the group. Just like a more experienced lover on the dating scene knows to avoid the “honeymoon phase” trap and the disillusionment that follows after.

It’s Us Against the World

Finally, there is the puzzle of the Montenegrins… why are they an outlier? Why are they showing not only stable, but the highest cohesion of all brigades? Supek says it’s the Montenegrin “tribal mentality“ (p. 127), describing them as an ethnic group which “due to geographical and historical conditions, lives isolated, and shows at the same time larger group solidarity and a larger warrior spirit.“ (p. 128). Basically, the Montenegrins just have a larger death drive due to their culture, geography, and history. The “ethnic tribalism” has a parallel in relationships — the “us against the world“ couple. Just like the Montenegrins, the “us against the world“ couples can be strongly cohesive and hive-minded, support and solidarity abound, but they can also potentially isolate themselves with that warrior spirit.

Of course, this ethnic tribalism doesn’t simply make the Montenegrins immune to the pressures of collective live. Tensions that arise when the group is faced with challenges need to be resolved. Just like the “us against the world“ couples, they take these tensions and direct them outwards. Supek notes that a whopping 70% of all surveyed Montenegrin brigaders wrote in the open-ended question, and 60% of them complained about their commandeer, villainizing and attacking him for not winning an inter-brigade award. Supek contrasts this to the 10% of the other brigaders who did the same. Supek believes that the Montenegrins had the “need of group release of internal tension“ (p. 127) and took it all out on their commandeer! The cost of preserving the us (internal cohesion) came at the expense of the world (the commandeer).

So, maintaining cohesion is hard, be it in a collective group or a romantic relationship. Collective undertakings can be great catalyzers for shared identity to be (re)born, but the conflicting interplay between the death drive and ego drive make them turbulent and volatile, sometimes failing or underperforming its identity building magic. How do we get from lustful naivete to mature collective identity? What stabilizes cohesion and facilitates identity formation during undertakings?

It Takes Communication

Supek went back and collected data for 3 more years after 1958. However, the data in the 3 subsequent years showed stable cohesion! The image on the left below shows the cohesion index over years and waves. In every year in Supek’s data, there is a drop in cohesion between the beginning and ending of the camp, but the drop is much larger in 1958 than any of the subsequent years!

Why do we see stabilization of cohesion after 1958? Why are high schoolers more resistant to the forces that fractionalized them?

For Supek, the answer is that the camps became more democratic and less authoritarian. Between 1958 and 1961, a series of changes were introduced to the governance structure of the camps, all of which tended toward broader power sharing as well as more direct participation of actual brigaders in decision making. In the figure above, Supek contrasts the hierarchical organization of the camps in 1958 and the democratic organization in 1961. In 1958, an authoritarian structure prevailed, with the commandeer and brigader leadership being in charge of most decision making for the brigades. The only possibility for deliberation and decision making for the entire brigade body were the brigade conferences, but Supek notes that even these were not used, quoting Yugoslav Communist Party evaluation that “brigader leardership and commandeers insist on solving all or most problems themselves without consulting the brigade conferences“ (Supek 1963, p. 183). This paints a picture in which power is concentrated and group-level discussion is not utilized in decision-making.

Fast forward a few years in 1961, the picture has dramatically changed. The governance changes in the camps mirrored broader societal shifts in Yugoslavia, as the country moved toward its idealized system of socialist self-governance, based on principles of local control like worker-owned factories. Two more bodies — in addition to the brigade conferences — are now institutionalized with the intention of bottom up participation and governance. The Brigade Councils and the Settlement Council serve as forums in which brigaders met and discusses problems and solutions. Many specialized governing committees were also formed, responsible for organizing and managing daily life on the camps, from work on the highway to classes and performances. Supek notes that by 1961 more than 50% of all the brigaders were involved in these committees! (Supek 1963, p. 190).

Supek believes the new forums of discussion and deliberation and the increased participation in decision-making is what allowed for cohesion to remain stable. Interviews with the commandeers from the brigades paints a very interesting picture of the results from these governance changes. The commandeer from Agino Selo says that in the new self-governance system “all participants are included“ and that the brigaders “better resolve the issues“ (p. 243); the commandeer from Kumanovo said that the advantage of the new changes is that brigaders “appropriately discuss problems“ and “jointly solve“ them (p. 243); the Preshevo one notes that the brigaders can now “fight for their rights and manifest a battle of ideas“ (p. 246); the Vrbovo commandeer noted that the active brigade conferences have led for brigaders to “avoid discussing problems at other places“, that they approach their issues with larger sincerity, and “critically look at their own mistakes and problems“ (p. 246); the Ranutovo commandeer noted that “it often happened that [a brigader’s] ego was hurt, since, as it stands, someone else besides them also matters in the brigade“.

Why did this atmosphere of open discussion lead to stable cohesion? Remember, in 1958 Supek observed large fractionalization within the brigades, separating into smaller cliques that vie for power and control. The institutional environment Supek describes in can explain why this happened. If few brigaders and the commandeer wield power and make decisions for the 120-something people, most are excluded from collective decision making that affects them. This exclusion can both decrease the death drive, as the collective in which one is powerless becomes less attractive, and an increase in the ego drive, as the self is not “reflected” in the collective the self-death feels more threatening and dangerous. The institutional changes that Supek describes as democratization, increased open and public discussion and participation in decision making. Brigaders were empowered to seek conflict resolution with broad participation at the public forum, which prevented fractionalization and power-games. This inclusive atmosphere not only made more people feel included, but also muted the ego drive of those that under different circumstances may seek to control and dominate, maintaining a more egalitarian collective. To be part of a healthy and mature collective, one has to put their ego in check, like the Ranutovo commandeer observed, and also critically reflect on their own mistakes, like the Vrbovo commandeer said.

If we take the analogy to romantic relationships to its final conclusion, perhaps we can draw a lesson from the Yugoslav youth camps. Reading the interview quotes from commandeers, one would think they are quotes from couples therapists! Just like the sense of common identity has to mature during the camps, from the youthful lust to belong in a group, to a more experienced sense of a group belonging, in which one knows how to manage and negotiate others’ preferences, and respect to everyone’s personhood, so a romantic relationship needs to mature. From the honeymoon phase, when all red flags are ignored, through a difficult period of openly facing and solving problems, openly communicating about preferences, needs and emotions, with respect and equal participation by the partners. Authoritarian control without open discussion breeds frustration and eventually harms cohesion, be it in a romantic relationship or a group of high schoolers.

Conclusion

Where does this all leave us? I leave this journey of ideas — from Croatian sociologists, to German psychoanalysts, to French feminists and Macedonian wedding rituals — with a couple of take-aways.

First, being in community is hard. It involves a continuous interplay between our strong and conflicting Ego and Death drives, a constant iteration and reflection between the two, like a Hegelian dialectic, or a yin-yang. Few months ago, I wrote on my blog about my own struggles with abandoning my selfishness and opening myself up more to community — about these conflicting desires for community, belonging and service as opposed to desires for distinction, status, and achievement, to sparkle the most in the room. Scared to win, scared to lose. While I didn’t have the language then, I think this struggle of mine can be explained by the framework I proposed here: as my ego drive overpowering my death drive. But my death drive cannot be repressed — it manifests itself in staged compulsive behaviors. In the blog, I talked about my obsessive rabbit holes listening to albums whose vulnerable lyrics make me live-out my death drive, without really harming my ego. After all, I identify more with the ego-drive villains in the songs than with the death-drive protagonists. Listening to the song, like in Supek’s short-lived undertaking, allows me to let go, to be vulnerable and dissolve, even if vicariously through the protagonist. I think I am still too scared to let go in real life, to dissolve and die in the way Spielrein suggests. Compulsive, short-lived, contrived, and highly pleasurable undertakings allow me to exercise my death drive and temporarily scratch that itch, but I am beginning to realize that this cannot be the best way to manifest my Death Drive.

The second takeaway is that identity is not given and fixed, like some menu that individuals choose from, or are assigned at birth. Identity is born, re-affirmed, negotiated, and evolves through collective action. The struggle between the death drive and ego drive perpetually create the volatile environments in which identity is continuously reborn and its contents renegotiated. Every social interaction is a chance for a collective undertaking, a chance to strengthen the bond between people and enrich the content of their collective conscioussness. Supek says that the identity and its meaning

“demand continuous renewal, the drives to which lie deep in the human being, but that need to be awaken anew as a discovery and ecstasy, integral in the birth and development of the human collective consciousness“ (p. 302)

Basically, Rudi Supek says: the death drive is deep within us all and carries a strong need to be manifested into a community, and that undertakings like the youth labor actions are a great way to achieve this. What’s the worst that can happen if we heed Supek’s advice? If the prescription is more collective public goods, more sports, more dancing, more sex… more ecstasy and more discovery… can we really go wrong?

Pepi Pandiloski