Dismantling of capitalism and the end of the Epoch of the Pyramids
CRISIS-MATRYOSHKADismantling of capitalism and the end of the Epoch of the Pyramids
Andrei Fursov - Russian historian, sociologist, publicist, organizer of science
FINANCIAL AND ECONOMIC CRISIS, which began in the US in 2007 and now covers the whole world, is often compared to the crisis of 1929-1933. The latter, in turn, was the final phase of the protracted crisis of 1873-1933. By the way, with this long crisis, the era of which the Dutch historian J. Romain called the "watershed", they often compare the crisis chrono-zone that began in 1970, and more precisely, in 1973 and continues to this day. The crisis of the "watershed" 1873-1933's. was the time of "re-transfer of social game cards" (F. Brodel), "re-transfer of cards Stories", and those who grabbed the main trump cards, were" on horseback "until a new re-take, which began in the 1970-s. Moreover, they have good chances in the new era to add new trumps to the old trumps. So to say," money to money “However, it may turn out to be“ ashes to ashes ”- this is how God will throw the bones.
The value of the crisis 1873-1933. indisputable. It was then that the main actors (players, agents) of the twentieth century were formed: financial capital, its brother-enemy revolutionary socialist movement, special services, organized crime; it was then that the main contradictions that the twentieth century had to cut were formed: British-German, American-British, German-Russian; It was then that the philosophical and scientific agenda of the twentieth century was defined, the last empires of the Old Order collapsed, which the bourgeoisie had broken since the end of the 18th century, state-monopoly capitalism (MMC) took shape, communism — systemic anti-capitalism, nationalism and national-socialism. liberation movement. And, nevertheless, it seems more correct to compare the “watershed” crisis of the end of the 20th - the beginning of the 21st century. not with "Romain", but with the crisis of 1490-1560-s, a crisis much more widespread than that of 1870-1930-s, and most importantly - systemic.
The "Romein" crisis was structural, then there was a transition from one capsystem structure to another, whereas at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries. the capsystem itself was born, its basic institutions arose: the market, the state, politics, and others. there was something that weakens, melts and dies in the conditions of the crisis of the end of the XX - beginning of the XXI century, one of the episodes of which is the financial and economic crisis that started in 2007. It turns out that the watershed crisis of the end of the XX - beginning of the XXI century. - systemic and marks the crisis and the end of capitalism as a system? I will say right away - yes, this is the end of the capsystem, and this process occurs not only spontaneously. It is also the result of conscious actions by the top of the world capitalist class, several hundred (maximum thousands - one and a half) families, the "lords of the rings" of capitalist Mordor, who dismantle capitalism in their own interests - the interests of maintaining power, privileges and wealth. But before analyzing this issue, we will look at other systemic crises - this is necessary for a better understanding of the crisis in which we live and which, like the whirlpool, is capable of carrying us to Malström History.
CHRONOLOGICAL NEAREST to us a systemic crisis - the crisis of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism, the crisis of the "long XVI century" (1453-1648), the decisive phase of which occurred in the 1490-1560 years. The main mystery of this crisis is the genesis of capitalism.
Among the various concepts of the genesis of capitalism there are two basic ones - Karl Marx and Max Weber. Weber's conception of the emergence of capitalism from the spirit of Protestantism is, above all, untenable empirically: it is based on the material of one of the German lands, which chronologically reflects a very short period of time.
In the Marx explanation, the problem is as follows. According to the general theory of Marx, the transition from one system to another — the social revolution — occurs when the productive forces of the old system outgrow its production relations, the latter break, and a new system of relations emerges that are adequate to the productive forces of overgrowth. If Marx were right, then each new social system ("formation") would start from a level of productive forces higher than the one that was characteristic of the former. In historical reality, the opposite is true. Feudalism reached the level of the productive forces of late Antiquity only in the XI-XII centuries, i.e. early feudalism in terms of the development of the productive forces was inferior to late Antiquity; capitalism reached the level of development of the productive forces of late feudalism only at the beginning of the 18th century, i.e. 300-400 years he was catching up with the past. Apparently, the origins of the crisis as well as the roots of the genesis of capitalism must be sought - by the way, completely in the Marx spirit - in another, namely in the class interests of the main, system-forming subjects / agents of the system. Studies in recent decades have shown that it is the class interest of feudal lords (seniors) in maintaining power and privileges, the struggle for this became the basis of the genesis of capitalism. Heraclitus is right - "struggle is the father of everything." How was the deal?
In the middle of the XIV century. a plague epidemic has come to Europe - the Black Death, decimated 20 million from the 60 million population, i.e. third. Peasant hands began to be missed, the transactional socio-economic position of the peasant (as well as the tenant and farm laborer) in relation to the seigneur improved. Seniors tried to change the situation, the answer in 1378-1382. there were just three uprisings ("chompy" in Florence, "white caps" in France, under the direction of Wat Tyler in England), and in fact - the popular anti-feudal revolution, which broke down Western European (in fact, no other in history) ridge.
From this point on, as the researchers believe, the most likely vector was the development of Western European society in the direction of "kulak paradise" and "burgher paradise", i.e. such a social system in which the lords turned into simply wealthy landowners or wealthy burghers, losing much of their privileges and status. Seniors faced a choice: to lose privileges in relation to the mass of the population, or to sacrifice them in relation to royal power. Yes, they did not like kings, fought with them, but the lower classes put them against the wall, and the lords went to union with the crown.
This scheme differs significantly from the liberal-Marxist, according to which the alliance and the struggle of the crown and burghers (bourgeoisie) against the seniors became the foundation on which capitalism “grew”. Of course, the alignment of social forces that the liberals and the Marxists talked about took place. But he was not the main one; the main was the way of turning feudal lords into capitalists, connecting them to the one that arose in the 16th century. world market. On extensive material, this was well demonstrated by R. Lushmen in his work The Capitalists Against Their Will.
The first result of the union of the crown and seniors was the emergence of the so-called "new monarchies" (Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England) - structures much more institutionalized than the feudal and much more repressive than the latter; the king became the "immediate" sovereign in relation to all his subjects, and not only in relation to his vassals; the duties of the new, essentially post-feudal, nobility in relation to the crown became heavier than those of the vassals of the feudal era. For the "new monarchies" there was no term, and it was invented. This made Machiavelli, "run" the term lo stato - the state. The state has become the most powerful weapons ex-feudal lords against the lower classes. Another weapon was the army of a new type.
In 1492, Columbus discovered America, and in the XVI century. silver and gold poured into western Europe. These funds were invested primarily in military affairs. The result is the military revolution of the 16th century, the emergence of a new form of military organization, which was difficult to cope with. In addition, the discovery of America, the emergence of what K. Marx called the "world market", and I. Wallerstein - the "European world-system" and what essentially represented the system of the new international - North Atlantic - division of labor, provided the upper levels with new opportunities . The ex-feudal lords and merchants involved in this system drastically improved their transactional socio-economic position in relation to the lower ranks, since they now operated on a higher level of economic space - macro-regional than the lower levels remaining at the local level dependent on the macro-regional.
As a result of all these changes, 1648% of the families that ruled the "peninsula" in 90 were in power and at different levels in Western Europe in 1453. Thus, the feudal lords dismantled feudalism in their class interests in order to preserve power, privilege and wealth in the process of this struggle created a new system. Capitalism, therefore, is a by-product of the feudal struggle for the translation of itself into the future in a new systemic "guise." Is amazing? Not at all. After all, wrote the same V.V. Krylov that the class struggle is the development of productive forces (primarily social) outside the sphere of production.
The next crisis that needs to be mentioned is the crisis of late Antiquity, the anti-slave system (4th-6th centuries AD). From the late feudal crisis this is different. I will note the main thing. First, the ancient slavery was a system of extensive (extensively-oriented), it needed expansion and the presence of peripherals. Intensively oriented feudalism did not need this. Secondly, during the crisis of late Antiquity, the top of the Western Roman Empire was destroyed, scattered or absorbed by the top of the barbarian tribes. There is no continuity between the Late Antique and early feudal tops, and between the end of Antiquity and the beginning of feudalism, the Dark Ages (6th-8th centuries AD).
The late anti-crisis, unlike the late feudal crisis, is an example of unsuccessful actions by the top and the collapse of the system together with this top. It is also indicative that the crisis of feudalism, which turned into dismantling, did not destroy Western civilization - capitalism became (albeit with nuances) the next stage of its development, while the crisis of the antique-slave society became the collapse of ancient civilization, i.e. also civilizational, in contrast to the late feudal crisis (the crisis of the "long XVI century" was intra-civilization).
The third crisis that will be discussed (and the third type of crisis) is Upper Paleolithic (25 thousand - 10 thousand years BC). This is perhaps the worst - resource-demographic (socio-biosphere) - crisis. It lasted for 15 for thousands of years, drew a line from the Paleolithic to several hundreds of thousands of years and covered almost the entire planet, more precisely, its inhabited part. Its result was the reduction of the world's population by 80%, the decline and degradation of society and culture. The way out of the Upper Paleolithic crisis was the so-called "Neolithic revolution" - the emergence of agriculture, cattle breeding, cities, classes, etc., in a word - Civilization.
So, we have three different crises: the system formational; systemic formation-civilizational (in the narrow, concrete sense of the term "civilization") and system socio-biosphere, which replaced one type of the “Game of the Society with Nature” (S. Lem) - Paleolithic, on the other - Civilization.
Well, now, having become acquainted with the three systemic crises, let's see what is happening in the modern world, more precisely, what has happened since the 1970s. In essence, the world that emerged in 1870-1930 and disappears into the "glorious thirtieth anniversary" (J. Fourastie) 1945-1975 disappears before our eyes.
WEAK AND COMING the decline of the nation-state; the position of the middle and working layers of even the nucleus of the capsystem deteriorates, not to mention its lowlands and its periphery; civil society is shrinking - and, whenever possible, influence power at the national and even more so at the global level and in fact: many Western societies are transformed from societies of citizens into societies of communities and minorities, i.e. become post-Western; politics is increasingly turning into a combination of administrative system and show business; market is replaced by a monopoly; Rational knowledge is falling into decay, whether it is the progressive ideologies of Marxism and liberalism as elements of the geoculture of the Enlightenment, or science — books with the symbolic names End of Progress, Commemoration of the Enlightenment appear; the science of society (de-theorization, the bastardry) and education are rapidly degrading; The Bologna system undermines the university as a phenomenon of the era of modernity; there is a decline in Christian morality and ethics - in fact, we already live in a post-Christian society; The number of garbage / slum people, the “new outcast”, is growing in the world, with clusters of anger ripening among them.
Why is this happening? In part, the processes in question are spontaneous, in part - design, i.e. represent the result of conscious action. Whose?
In 1975, the report “The Crisis of Democracy” was published, commissioned by the Trilateral Commission S. Huntington, M. Crozier and Dz. Watanuki. The report clearly states the threats to the position of the ruling stratum - first of all, that democracy and the welfare state, which took shape in the post-war period, are beginning to work against it. The crisis of democracy meant not a crisis of democracy in general, but a development of democracy that is unprofitable for the top.
The report argued that the development of democracy in the West leads to a decrease in the power of governments, that various groups, using democracy, began to fight for such rights and privileges that they had never previously claimed, and these "excesses of democracy" are a challenge to the existing system of government. The threat to democratic rule in the United States is not external in nature, the authors wrote, its source is “the internal dynamics of democracy itself in a highly educated, mobile society characterized by a high degree of (political. - AF) participation.” Conclusion: it is necessary to promote the growth of non-involvement of the masses in politics, the development of a certain apathy, to moderate democracy, based on the fact that it is only a way of organizing power, and not at all universal: "In many cases, the need for expert knowledge, superiority in position and rank (seniority), experience and special abilities may outweigh the claims of democracy as a way of constituting power. "
The weakening of democracy and the middle stratum implied a weakening of the basic institutions of capitalist society, in essence, their dismantling. We are talking about the nation-state, politics, civil society, rational knowledge. In other words, we are talking about capitalism. It should be noted here that, contrary to the view of many, capitalism is not just a triumph of capital, capital existed before capitalism and will exist after it.
Capitalism is a complex institutional system that limits capital in its long-term interests and ensures (primarily with the help of the state) its expansion in space. The latter is vital for capitalism because of its extensive orientation. Capitalism cannot be any other way; it solves many of its contradictions, bringing them beyond its own limits and increasing its space.
As soon as the global rate of profit declines, capitalism snatches, pulls out a piece from the non-capitalist zone and turns it into a capitalist periphery - a source of cheap labor and a sales market. And so on until the next serious drop in profits; hence colonialism, colonial expansion, which did not occur all the time, but in spurts. Let us emphasize: for normal functioning, capitalism requires a non-capitalist zone, which it turns into the capitalist periphery and without which it cannot exist either - just like an antique-slave-owning system without its periphery. Among other things, the exploitation of the periphery helps to maintain social peace in the center ("core"), to maintain a certain standard of living for most of its population. But capital constraints in the core are, as already mentioned, the nation-state, politics, civil society and a number of other forms and institutions. And, as we know, it is these institutions and related social groups that have been destroyed / dismantled since the middle of the 1970s. Dismantling these institutions means essentially dismantling capitalism as a system that is being undertaken by a supranational (world) elite in order to preserve its power (world control), privileges, wealth from the 1970s, which accelerated in the 1990s and, apparently, accelerate more in 2010-e years. What are the reasons for this process?
FIRST OF THE REASONS is frankly class character. At the turn of 1960-1970-ies, the top of the bourgeoisie in the core of the capsystem in the face of growing economic well-being and political influence of the middle and working classes, left-wing parties, increasing the size of the nation-state in the form of a welfare state Feudal lords appeared in the XV century. The move was made the same - dismantling the system. Only if the feudal lords did not understand what they were doing, but acted in obedience to social instinct, then the burzhuins, in which thousands of "think tanks" work, started dismantling consciously, although it is possible that at first they thought about dismantling the elements, and not systems in general. However, the system perspective soon became apparent.
This emerged with globalization, especially after the collapse of the main bastion of "system capitalism" - the USSR. Globalization (of capital) —the “daughter” of the NTR and the “granddaughter” of the Cold War — became a complete victory for capital, which turns into an electronic signal and overcomes almost all limitations (spatial, social, political); the real cannot control the virtual — different levels (and vice versa — perhaps). The whole world has become capitalist-neoliberal, including the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China. Capital (ism) is everywhere! Victory! However, as N. Korzhavin wrote on another occasion, "But their misfortune was a victory - / Emptiness opened behind it." The non-capitalist zone has disappeared and now capital (izm) can no longer solve its problems, bringing them outside - there is no place. A war type 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. also impossible.
Where should poor capitalism go? Where to look for sources for further accumulation? Only within yourself. But the whole point is that capitalism is an extensive, not an intensively oriented system, it is institutionally “sharpened” to be extensive, and its reorientation, “reloading the Matrix,” requires dismantling the backbone elements, i.e. the system itself and the creation in its place is different, which will be typologically, equivalently, niche-like feudalism, more precisely, it will be a return to the principles of its organization in a new, higher turn of the development spiral - with the amendment that it will not be Western , not Christian and not local society. Exhaustion of earthly space with globalization has become another, besides the class, reason for the dismantling of capitalism.
So, dismantling capitalism by its top a la dismantling feudalism in 1453-1648. But did the lords of his rings and their intellectual servants think everything over? I have a bad news for dismantlers of high-altitude: with capitalism it will not work the way it did with feudalism - feudalism had no periphery, the presence of which significantly changes the essence of the crisis, the process of dismantling, and the vector of their development. By incorporating into the world market a huge mass of the population, the entire planet, capitalism demographically raised its Afro-Asian and Latin American periphery in a way that the population of these regions themselves would never grow. And now this capitalist periphery, which is essentially not needed by the nucleus as it was in the “good old capitalist times,” will simply not untie it. It puts pressure on the core, the South penetrates to the North, creates its own enclaves and undermines it; that A.J. Toynbee Jr. called it the “union of the internal and external proletariat,” contributes to the periphery of the nucleus, its capture by the periphery with a direct and obvious threat, if not a shift, then a significant modification of the elites, at least a significant part of them. Thus, an attempt to dismantle capitalism a la feudalism turns into a crisis not of a late feudal, but of a late antique type, or more precisely, combines the traits and qualities of both. But that's not all. There is another bad news.
Capitalism is a global, planetary system based on the exploitation of not only man, but also nature. By incorporating the biosphere as a whole into its production and economic processes, capitalism brought it into a state of global environmental, and humanity into a state of resource crisis. Typologically, this was not the case since the Upper Paleolithic crisis. At the same time, of course, the current scale is incompatible with the Upper Paleolithic. Thus, the dismantling of capitalism develops against the background of the global biosphere-resource crisis, and to its late feudal and late-antique crisis qualities a much heavier Upper Paleolithic is added in its content and consequences. We get a crisis matryoshka, a domino crisis, where one crisis entails another, more ambitious and destructive.
The features of the three crises discussed above are not limited to the current crisis — the dismantling of capitalism. His crisis automatically means a few more crises. First, it is the crisis of Western civilization in the form in which it was formed over the past thousand years. Secondly, it is the crisis of Christianity in its most diverse aspects: private (crisis of the Protestant attitude to work against the background of rapidly growing tendencies to hedonism, consumption, more or less doing nothing both at the top and bottom), general (crisis of the Christian personality type) project. The latter should be mentioned separately, since the crisis of capitalism at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. This and crisis bible project.
For two millennia, the top (first Mediterranean, then European, and in the XIX-XX centuries - the world), using and adapting to their needs the protest-emancipatory project of Jesus Christ and at the same time muffling it (ideologically - with the help of the Old Testament, organizational - with the help of the Christian church), turned it into a biblical project. The biblical project as a means to keep in check the "little man" mainly from the inside (internalization of control) replaced the ancient Egyptian project, the last personifying of which was the Roman Empire, with its emphasis on external control. Despite the fact that the biblical project gave a lot of failures (separation of Catholicism from Orthodoxy - orthodoxy for political purposes; the emergence of Protestantism as the beginning of the Judaization of Christianity; the emergence of the pantheistic and atheistic Enlightenment and its “process” - liberalism and especially Marxism as not just secular, but de-Christianized version of the biblical project), for almost two thousand years in general, even worse, but he coped with the tasks for which he was created. Since the last third of the twentieth century. bible project is not working. The "dismantlers" of capitalism will have to create not only a new system, but also a new project. The "neocon" global fascism - these leftists who have passed the "right school" of Leo Strauss and who have read Plato, is unlikely to pass.
Thirdly, the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of civilization, i.e. of earthly civilization in the form in which it exists the last 10-12 thousand years (13653 of the year according to Indian chronology; 13542 of the year - according to ancient Egyptian and Assyrian; 10498-10499 of the chronology of the Olmec and Maya). I call the epoch of the earth civilization the Epoch (or Time) of the Pyramids and the Sphinx: the archaeological data of the last decades show that the age of the pyramids and especially the Sphinx is older than expected, these buildings are 8-10 thousands of years BC. and apparently built by representatives of the civilization that preceded the Egyptian.
The world of the Pyramids is coming to an end with capitalism. The scientific and technological revolution (NTR), due to which informational (material) factors begin to dominate the material ("material") - this is not the second industrial revolution, but something more serious, comparable in scale to the Neolithic.
The world is living out the last relatively calm decades before the matryoshka crisis, which had no analogues, and which, it seems, will sweep away not only capitalism with its supporters and opponents, but the entire post-Neolithic civilization. And if humanity succeeds, even if having reduced in number to 0,5-1,0 billion, to survive it, then the new society will most likely differ from Civilization (the Pyramid World - in the sense that the Egyptian pyramids are the main symbol of the whole post-Eolian era) no less than it differed from the Paleolithic.
Fourthly, we should talk about the crisis of the white race, the very existence of which the expansion of capitalism, which caused the demographic explosion in the South and the massive migration of its inhabitants to the North, threatened - the number of whites in the modern world is rapidly decreasing.
Fifth, the crisis of Homo sapiens can be put on the agenda. One thing is the crisis of the 25 biosphere thousands of years ago, and quite another today, on a planet stuffed with nuclear power plants, bacteriological and other weapons, with a population of 6,6 billion people (by 2030 there will be 8 billion). A planetary catastrophe can either mow the population altogether or leave such an imprint on it that further "development" will be possible only in one form - degradation.
SO, the dismantling of capitalism opened an unprecedented box of unprecedented Pandora with unprecedented consequences. But we did not say anything about the gain in the XXI century. (peak - XXII century) of geovolcanic activity, or about the inevitable change in the direction of the earth's axis (occurs every 12-15 thousand years, the last occurred 12-13 thousand years ago), nor about the fact that "long summer" ends a warm ten thousandth segment in each hundredth millennium - 90 thousand years falls on the ice age.
Of course, from all of this you can dismiss as if forcing fears, from "curiosity" (St. Lemme). However, it is better to live according to the principle “who is warned is armed” than to become a victim of “Sidonia Apollinaris syndrome”, i.e. point blank not to see the threat already hanging overhead.
What are the options for post-crisis development - of course, if we manage to get out of the crisis in a minimally catastrophic way? Theoretically, there are several options - from a high-tech civilization of the type that Ivan Efremov described in the Andromeda Nebula, to futroarchic empires of the type that Lucas portrayed in Star Wars: in other words, from Dara Vether to Darth Vader. In reality, the new system is likely to be futuroarchic - the world of supernova technology will coexist with the world of neoarchaic or even non-Barbarian structures.
As in the XIV-XVI centuries, there will be a mosaic of various forms of social, powerful and economic structure on the planet. It will be a world of contrasts: next to the ultra-modern enclaves of the “region-economies” (E. Omae) there will be demodernized, archaic and even asocial zones. The capitalist era, especially its modern phase, will seem like a fantastic time, which is quickly mythologized. The pace of development of the post-capitalist, post-civilization world will be noticeably lower than the capsystem, and perhaps even the Epoch of the Pyramids as a whole. Most likely, Civilization was a brief exponent between two asymptotes - the Paleolithic, and the fact that it replaces the Civilization. Is it sad Yes. But sadly from the point of view of the Enlightenment, the biblical project and Christianity, with which we must say goodbye - vixerunt. The future is not a linear continuation of the era of capitalism and even the Epoch of the Pyramids, it is something else, more complex and simpler at the same time.
The development of a new system, as well as most social systems, it will exist 600, at most 1000 years, will flow in less favorable natural conditions, and therefore it is quite possible if further growth of barbarization and archaization in different parts of the planet is not inevitable. In any case, one of the most important tasks of the people of this unkind future will be the preservation of knowledge and preparation for natural disasters, first of all - for the new ice age. However, this unkind future of the XXIII-XXX (?) Centuries will still have to be fought in the XXI-XXII centuries and today.
What can oppose dismantling today? Not so much, but not so little - the will and mind. The will to oppose them to the social-Darwinian progress is the ethics of the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, i.e. ethics changed with their philosophy of gesheft it is necessary to oppose the ethics of warriors and priests (priests). Reason is a new rational knowledge of the world. New ethics and new knowledge - that's the shield and the sword against civilization changed. Does this guarantee a win? Not. Victory is gained in the fight. But it guarantees the will to win and dignity as a state of mind and soul. And the hope that we will overcome the crisis in which capitalism and Western civilization are immersed, that we will remain on a ship gliding through the waves of the Ocean of Time, into which the Age of Pyramids sinks.
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