From degradation to development. Why Stalin is better than Chubais.
The attempt to eliminate the Russian Academy of Sciences, which is considered the “brain of the nation”, makes us think about a more general and crucial issue for the nation itself. Is our management system able to overcome the tendency to the degradation of all forms of socio-economic structure?Reform itch
This trend arose immediately after the collapse of the USSR and since then has consistently increased, despite attempts by the country's political leadership to direct it towards modernization and innovative development. The liquidation of the Russian Academy of Sciences is just another stage in this process, which has already led to the destruction of the majority of the complex socio-economic systems created in the USSR. So almost destroyed engineering-engineering NGOs, which produced almost the entire range of high-tech products - from machines to aircraft. Destroyed the world's most efficient Unified Energy System. Unique education and health care systems have been killed, and the world's largest agricultural and forestry organization systems have collapsed. The nuclear industry and the rocket and space complex, which are still under state control, are next in line.
The destruction of old highly organized systems was not compensated by the formation of new ones. The market for Russian high-tech goods occupy imported counterparts. The place of domestic design institutes was seized by foreign engineering companies. Soviet education standards are replaced by a “Bologna” surrogate. Following the elimination of industrial applied science, we are also preparing to destroy the fundamental science. But it was she who gave the last hope for the revival of lost positions.
The social and economic system of Russia in the post-Soviet period has been repeatedly tried to reform. The result was always the same - the drop in the effectiveness of the corresponding subsystems. At the same time, the same reformers sometimes fancifully mixed liberal, bureaucratic, and anarchist methods. Only a mechanistic approach was common, ignoring the complexity of socio-economic systems, their organic nature, and the importance of the human factor.
The most primitive on the ideological basis and at the same time the most destructive were the so-called libertarian reforms, aimed at the elimination of state regulation and control. Thus, voucher privatization, which is destructively comparable to a military invasion, led to the degradation of industry, destroying production links that made it possible to create complex products. Under the same ideological sauce, the privatization of the Unified Energy System was held. The result is a multiple increase in tariffs. Russia dropped to the last place in the world in terms of connecting to the power grid. Privatization of forest and agricultural land caused continuous forest fires and the abandonment of agricultural land.
Health care reform shifted medicine from serving the population to the commercial interests of private insurance companies. The education reform has replaced the training of children "coaching" on the exam. “Modernization” of the state administration system, instead of increasing its efficiency, turns into its decline, the increase in the number of civil servants and the cost of their maintenance.
Back to the amoebas?
A common feature of such a variety of failed reforms is reductionism — the reduction of complex forms of organization to simpler ones. The libertarians reformers believe that self-organization will achieve a market equilibrium with a maximum economic effect that will be higher than as a result of the activities of complex highly organized structures. This is equivalent to what is considered animal world more efficient than civilization. It seems to the bureaucratic reformers that the formalization of management procedures will ensure an increase in their efficiency. In both approaches there is no development, and also the main subject of socio-economic relations is people.
Ignoring the human factor is a generic disease of our reformers, who usually blame the failure of reform for the inadequacy of the “human material.” Suffice it to recall Chubais "did not fit into the market" in relation to the millions of able-bodied and qualified people who were thrown on the social bottom. But it is people who determine the effectiveness of systems. Stalin's “cadres decide everything” amusingly contrasts with the cannibalistic approach of modern reformers. The communist tyrant was obviously more concerned with managing people than modern reformers. But it is their incompetence and corruption that explains the failure of most post-Soviet reforms.
Real socio-economic development is strikingly different from the speculative views of both libertarian and bureaucratic approaches. It goes from simple forms to more and more complex. In them, personal motives, private and collective interests, rules of work of organizations, norms of state regulation and participation are intricately intertwined. And the theory of market equilibrium, borrowed from classical mechanics, reflects the reverse evolution in the direction of increasing chaos according to the known principles of thermodynamics. The achievement of equilibrium by the system corresponds to the state of maximum entropy, in which development stops.
Forward to progress
Success is being achieved by countries skillfully combining the management of scientific and technological development with macroeconomic, industrial, educational and other components of state policy. All of them must comply with the common goal of improving the competitiveness of the national economy. Such a targeted systemic policy gives an economic miracle - the explosive growth of production and the influence of countries that have succeeded in its competent conduct.
Central planning methods alone do not guarantee success. The secret of an economic miracle is in its skillful combination with the motivation of citizens creating and mastering advanced technologies. Already the first successful models of capitalist development in medieval Venice and Genoa showed effective examples of public-private partnership. The economic miracle of Holland that followed was based on a tough alliance of business and government in the East Indies campaign. Later this experience was successfully reproduced in England and Russia.
To date, this process has reached the scale of transnational corporations.
The path to salvation - partnership
The first necessary condition for Russia's return to the path of independent development should be the rejection of obsessive libertarian mythology. It serves the interests of foreign structures seeking to appropriate Russian national wealth, exploit its resources and establish control over Russian spaces. Under the influence of this ideology, Russia is gradually voluntarily becoming a colony, exploited by American, European and Chinese capital.
The second condition is the streamlining of state policy itself. Decisions should not be made based on dogma, personal or group interests, as well as on the recommendations of foreign agents or on a spontaneous reaction to changes in the situation. State policy should be a system of measures aimed at long-term socio-economic development. State property should be an important tool for achieving development goals, which implies the subordination to these goals of the entire state property management system. Including state corporations, whose management should be responsible for the timely achievement of targets.
All sectoral management subsystems must be aligned with government policies. For example, the goal of the health system should be to increase life expectancy and reduce the incidence of citizens, rather than enforcing the budgets of compulsory health insurance funds in the interests of private companies. The goal of the secondary education system should be the preparation of creatively active, competent and socially responsible youth, and not the passing of the USE. The goal of the reform of science should be the increase in innovation activity, the restoration of applied branch and plant science, and not the bureaucratization of its fundamental sector. Science itself should be managed by the scientific community in the interests of obtaining new knowledge, rather than mastering the budget.
The third condition is the coordination of private and public interests. It is necessary to actively involve private business and public organizations in the processes of state policy planning, with subsequent overall responsibility for its implementation. The state in this process should play the role of moderator, not replacing it with bureaucratic procedures. The process of public-private partnership should become transparent and focused on achieving jointly set development goals. Instead of corruption, his responsibility should be mutual responsibility. At the same time, the idealization of both the state and business should be avoided. This partnership between the state and the private sector must be subordinated to the interests of society. And for this it is necessary to form a network of broad public control over this process. Citizens should have the right to initiate the removal from office of any negligent official.
The fourth and key condition is the creation of conditions for the creative self-realization of citizens in socially useful activities. This will require a significant restructuring of both the education system and the methodology for managing organizations. To solve the first task, the state should rely on the pedagogical community, which still carries the many achievements of the national school. The rights of teachers to assess the knowledge of students and applicants should be restored. For the exam, you can save the functions of testing a set of knowledge, the minimum necessary for admission to higher education. The solution of the second task involves the formation of a new management culture, focused on the activation of the human factor.
Take what you want
Modern national economic systems are classified as open. For all the post-Soviet years, Russia has given its economic energy to the external environment, acting as a financial, energy, technological and human donor.
With this approach, the turnover of Russian property through privatization, offshore withdrawal and sale to a foreign investor was considered by reformers as quite natural and almost the only possible one. Therefore, all economic policy issues they reduce to improving the notorious investment climate, which means ensuring complete freedom and guarantees of permissiveness to foreign capital.
Actually Russian, focused on the interests of the country's development, remain mainly state-owned corporations of the high-tech sector, social organizations and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their privatization, manically imposed by the reformers, will destroy the last roots of the country's independent development. The trajectory of its further evolution will be subordinated to the interests of external structures: transnational corporations, the American oligarchy, the European market, the Chinese state, etc.
Modern national economic systems are classified as open. For all the post-Soviet years, Russia has given its economic energy to the external environment, acting as a financial, energy, technological and human donor.
With this approach, the turnover of Russian property through privatization, offshore withdrawal and sale to a foreign investor was considered by reformers as quite natural and almost the only possible one. Therefore, all economic policy issues they reduce to improving the notorious investment climate, which means ensuring complete freedom and guarantees of permissiveness to foreign capital.
Actually Russian, focused on the interests of the country's development, remain mainly state-owned corporations of the high-tech sector, social organizations and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their privatization, manically imposed by the reformers, will destroy the last roots of the country's independent development. The trajectory of its further evolution will be subordinated to the interests of external structures: transnational corporations, the American oligarchy, the European market, the Chinese state, etc.
Art steering
The modern theory of organization management has gained a lot of knowledge and experience in this area, including the school of human relations, the concept of organic institution-building, the position of the "knowledge economy". However, the implementation of these theoretical achievements requires considerable effort on the part of managers and owners of organizations. This is impossible in modern conditions, when the business is focused on short-term profit maximization due to the merciless operation of production and the unavailability of a long-term loan.
Therefore, the fifth condition for the transition to the trajectory of successful development is a fundamental change in both the microeconomic environment and macroeconomic policy.
Macroeconomic policies should be sufficiently selective to meet the challenges of development. Simplification of macroeconomic regulation does not always entail an increase in efficiency. The control system must match the complexity of the control object. This means that it is necessary to regulate prices in monopolized activities, tax incentives to stimulate innovative activity, low-interest long-term loans to finance investments. At the same time, incentives for destructive forms of entrepreneurial behavior, including “devouring” fixed capital and its export abroad, environmental pollution, overpricing and tax evasion, should be eliminated.
The fulfillment of these five conditions is necessary, but not enough for the transition to successful economic development. The system of government should be organic. The growing complexity of the modern economy makes it necessary to focus on the "cultivation" of economic organizations that are competitive in the world market. Of particular importance is the restoration of applied scientific, technical and project activities. For this, it is vital for the state to fully stimulate corporate R & D, to create a wide network of innovative companies. The latter will have to be grown mainly by cloning research departments of the RAS, the most powerful of the remaining scientific organizations in the country.
It is required to recreate on the advanced technological basis of the expanded production of goods of final demand. Technologically speaking, this is still possible. An important role in this process can be played by state support for the import of technology along with a shock stimulation of advanced domestic developments. At the same time, it is necessary to ensure the return from all offshore companies under the Russian jurisdiction of all enterprises conducting a significant economic activity in Russia. At the same time, a sovereign monetary system must finally be created that can provide long-term affordable credit from domestic sources.
The proposed changes in government policy may seem too radical and even unrealizable. We have become accustomed to live in a strange mind. In fact, this requires only high qualifications and a responsible approach, as well as knowledge of the general laws of development theory. These are not such overwhelming demands for people at the helm of a country that claims to be a superpower.
Brains for sale
During the preparation of market reforms, the author of these lines, together with Academician Lvov, proposed a gradual plan for denationalizing the economy by creating market mechanisms without losing the complexity of organizing production activities. We proposed expanding the independence of existing NGOs, research institutes, factories, and institutions with immersion in a competitive environment based on corporatization and market pricing. At the same time, they would preserve systemic integrity and the ability for expanded reproduction. Administrative planning should have been replaced by strategic ones with a wide autonomy of economic entities.
Unfortunately, this path that China followed, having found its economic miracle, was rejected as too complicated. Foreign consultants poorly educated leadership of post-Soviet Russia imposed a primitive libertarian approach. The “shock therapy” implemented with Bolshevik directness resulted in the fragmentation of research and production associations, and their component parts that lost their viability were plunged into a chaos of galloping inflation and lawlessness. As a result, the economy quickly degraded to primitive types of activities in the extraction and production of commodities and trade in finished imported products. The state ceded control over the economy of organized crime, and semi-literate "top managers" took the place of highly qualified engineers.
The loss of the ability to produce complex products of final demand unfolded huge volumes of raw materials, materials, capital and highly skilled labor for export, which were absorbed by the West, providing it with two decades of sustainable growth on a modern technological basis. Only five years ago, they were faced with a crisis that began at the end of the 80s, but was delayed and mitigated by the enormous resource supply of their economies from the collapsing national-economic complex of post-socialist countries.
In fact, the Russian economy has become a nutrient medium for the development of foreign structures, which quickly adapt it to their needs. Not only to raw materials, energy and sales. Over the past decade, the reproduction of “human capital” has been rebuilt to meet the needs of foreign structures - the transition of Russian education to the Bologna standards, the creation of the grotesque Skolkovo are designed to facilitate the digestion of Russian intellectual resources. In the same direction, the reform of the RAS was conceived, which would entail the release of the remaining scientific potential for foreign utilization.
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