The world we leave, the world we enter, and the world between them
At the end of the Third Age
The events of one of the most important books of the twentieth century. - “The Lord of the Rings” - John Ronald Royle Tolkien takes place at the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth. This metaphor is the best suited to our current situation, is represented by its symbol. We were at the end of the Third Epoch not in one respect, but in several at once, the ends of several eras overlapped each other.
If we take the European branch of development, then Modernity (Modern), at the very end of which we live, having already moved beyond its boundary, is the third epoch after Antiquity and the Middle Ages. A Marxist can change epochs into formations: slavery, feudalism, capitalism.
If we scale down to a single capitalist system, we get three epochs: Old Order 1600 – 1789; “Substantial capitalism” of the “long” (up to 1914) of the XIX century and “functional capitalism” with a rampant function of capital in the form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism and communism, as well as related movements and structures - these Colossi of the “short” Panic (before 1991, or, more precisely, to the chronological traits of 1979 – 1991. ) century.
In the geo-economic and geopolitical plane, we also get three epochs according to three cycles of capital accumulation - Dutch, British and American - and three hegemony in world politics - Dutch (peak 1618 – 1652), British (1815 – 1871), American ( 1945 of the pre-American (1945 of 71 politics - Dutch Dutch, and again we get three epochs: Old Order 1600 - 1789, I - I are fading before our eyes, and the current, "fading" US hegemony is the US hegemony mainly as cluster of multinationals, hegemony of the USA how exclusively states ended in xnumx).
If you go from stories capitalist system to Russian history, then here we will see “three epochs, three component parts”, which, by the way, clearly correlate with accumulation cycles / hegemony of Holland, Great Britain and the USA and are essentially alternative accumulation cycles, but not capital, but authorities and Eurasian (hypercontinental) hegemony: Moscow kingdom (Moscow autocracy), Petersburg empire (Petersburg autocracy), USSR (historical communism). Soviet communism, being a systemic anti-capitalism in the world system, was a real Russian Modern, a real Russian Modernity, the end of which coincided (could it have been otherwise?) With the end of Modernity, Modernity in general. But perhaps we are exaggerating? Indeed, about the end of modernity, about postmodern have been written for several decades, but perhaps this is just empty fears, “rustle, nothing else” (Edgar Po), especially considering the frivolity and poverty of what claims to be the changer of Modernity - postmodernism .
Nevertheless, more and more people are feeling more and more acutely: in recent decades something has happened to the world; something has irrevocably changed; the familiar world has almost disappeared; social science studies not so much today's world, as - by inertia - the world of yesterday; humanitarian and social studies education to the student to a greater extent picture of the world that has already left. The world is changing faster than science in its current state is able to catch it. This gap, by the way, is growing, has three reasons. First, the world really changes with acceleration. Secondly, in the modern world there are many influential and powerful forces interested in concealing the essence and direction of the processes occurring in it and successfully camouflaging reality. Thirdly, we still, although the epoch is almost over, have little idea of its essence, only now starting to understand something - “The Owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” To understand the essence of the new era, or at least come closer to an understanding of what is coming, it is first necessary to determine what is leaving and why. In our context, this means defining the basic components of Modernity, the era of its “farewell bow,” and at the same time the “farewell bow” of capitalism that we are experiencing.
Actually, we have already left the old world, but have not yet entered a new one - today we live between worlds, in “in-between-world”, as the Anglo-Saxons would say, at the chronological divide. Such a situation provides fantastic opportunities for the observer, the historian of social systems: the past has not completely gone and the future is already visible, they can be articulated by fixing the connection of times. The situation between the epochs has another aspect: “During the period of fermentation and disintegration, the meaning of the recent past suddenly becomes clear, because there is no indifference of the future yet, but the argument of yesterday has already collapsed and the lie differs from the truth. It is necessary to sum up when the epoch, ripening in the depths of the past and having no future, is completely exhausted, and the new has not yet begun. This moment is almost always missed, and people go to the future without realizing the past ”(Nadezhda Mandelstam. Second book). Let us catch this moment and look at the future through the prism of the capsystem development trends in the modern era (1789 – 1991), because each new system emerges as a removal of the old contradictions, like continuity-through-discontinuity — new systems do not arise from simple old ones. Modern society and the capsystem are not exceptions, and much in the post-capitalist, post-modern system can be understood from the logic of the development of their predecessor. Through the prism of the trends of the development of the modern era capsystem, which converge into one point, the bifurcation point (apparently, 1975 – 2025) is the moment-eternity, the world between the past and the future, in-between-world, we will try to look into the future that comes as a nagging crisis and reflect on the nature of this crisis.
To some, the proposed analysis may seem to be what Stanislav Lem called "black-vision". On this occasion, I have a question: is it better to prepare for the worst or to exist in accordance with the “Sidonia Apollinaris Syndrome” - a Roman who lived on the eve of the destruction of Rome by the barbarians and nevertheless short-sighted in his letters to his friends a good picture of life on the eve of the death of his civilization. I think that the rule should be the Roman saying - praemonitus praemunitus (who is warned, he is armed). I will be happy to make a mistake in my predictions. At the same time, it is a clear, without illusions, the vision of the world - the courage to know - is a necessary condition for the courage to be.
Industry, substance and function, or something about the needle of “Koscheev death” of capitalism
Modern (in the strict sense) society has developed in 1789 – 1848, in the “era of revolutions” (Eric Hobsbome), and the Modern has acquired its final form in the “long fifties” (1848 – 1867), “squeezed” between the Communist Manifesto and the European revolution 1848, on the one hand, and the first volume of Capital and the Meiji Japanese restoration, on the other.
Such “components” as the industrial system of production, the nation-state, the middle and working classes grew on this foundation (not to mention the progressist ideology and geoculture as a whole, the science of society, education - these subjects are beyond our thinking, which today come and have already fallen into decay, and it is on these ruins that the future will be built - if it is.
The industrial system of productive forces (hereinafter referred to as ISPS) was formed in 1780 – 1840-s in Great Britain, and then, in the second half of the XIX century, took shape in Germany, France, Russia and the USA. In its essence, ISPS means the domination of artificially created productive forces over natural productive forces (not to be confused with a geographical factor) and, as a result, materialized labor over living - it is the latter that makes the non-economic nature of production relations (alienation of will) unnecessary and turns the latter into economic, exchange of labor for capital.
In essence, the whole epoch of modernity is the epoch of the gradual industrialization of the world system, which entailed the corresponding social and political changes and consequences.
The ISPS needed not just a numerous working class, but a working class integrated into the system. In the first half of the XIX century. the lower classes were not integrated into the system; on the contrary, polarization in society, its separation reached a dangerous stage, which Benjamin Disraeli described as a “two-nation” situation. Bottoms were referred to only as “dangerous classes” (dangerous classes, des classes dangereux) and their integration into the system became a matter of its further development.
The “domestication” of dangerous classes and their integration into the system as workers developed along several lines - the right to vote, the legalization of trade unions, and the improvement of material conditions (most often through the exploitation of colonies and semi-colonies). Undoubtedly, the right to vote and organization strengthened the position of the working class, but within the system and according to its rules. Up to the 1970s, because the scientific and technological revolution that began (NTR) created the conditions for changing the position of the working class for the worse and, moreover, created the material basis for the finalization of capitalism as a system. In order to better understand the essence, a brief excursion in the field of theory is necessary.
Every social system has its social “body”, a substance possessing certain functions, attributes. The more primitive the social system, the more society depends on nature, the more natural factors of production dominate artificial, and living labor over materialized, as is the case in “pre-capitalist” societies, the simpler and less acute these contradictions are, the more the function "recessed" in the substance, the less its autonomy.
Substance is primarily material production in the narrow sense of the word (the actual production process), the relations that arise directly inside it or directly about it, for example, during the distribution of production factors (property).
A function (or functions) are those relationships that are formed not inside the substance and not directly about it, but outside of it and indirectly. So, they can mediate the distribution of production factors, i.e. relationship about the substance, speaking their more or less active attribute. And the more complex, complex and developed a substance is, the more functions, the greater and more obvious the discrepancy with it, the more autonomous they are; functions are management (“state”), regulation of social behavior (“policy”), communication; functions have their own structures and forms of organization, as well as substances. The more complex and developed the social system, the less absolute and impassable the line between its substantial and functional aspects. This is particularly evident in the sphere of production relations (see for more information: Fursov, AI, The Bells of History. - M., 1996. - C. 21 – 62; his own: For whom the Bells of History ring: capitalism and communism in the XX v. // Russian Historical Journal. - M., 1999. - Vol. II, No. 1. - C. 377 – 403).
The contradiction between social substance and function (as well as content and form) reaches its maximum sharpness under capitalism, when economic relations become systemically important industrial ones, social violence is meaningfully separated from the sphere of industrial relations, becoming a state (i.e. state - not to be confused with patrimonies ) and forms arise that regulate (c) non-economic relations of individuals and groups (politics). In addition, under capitalism, functionally (but only functionally), the contradiction between the relations of production and exchange is removed — exploitation is carried out as the exchange of labor for materialized labor (“capital”).
The functional qualities of production relations under capitalism significantly distinguish this system from the “pre-capitalist” one. Production relations of a slave or feudal society, representing the alienation of the will of the worker, i.e. his transformation, in whole or in part, into a “speaking instrument,” into a kind of natural substance, carries a large substantial imprint. They are designed to transform the function into a substance in order to naturalize social relations regarding the appropriation of nature. Capitalism, by contrast, starts with a high level of functionalization of the relations of production. This is his beginning. The logical end of capitalism should be (and can be) only the functionalization that is striving for completeness (“dematerialization”) of the productive forces, at least their main segments. This corresponds to the functionalization as a macro-law of the development of the productive forces of capitalism.
So, there is, firstly, the fact of a mismatch of substance and function in the capsystem; secondly, the sharpest contradiction between them as the engine of this system. This contradiction grew and sharpened as capitalism developed.
In the last third of the XIX century. ISPS not only took shape as such, but thanks to this fact, as well as to no less a) the rise and growing autonomy of financial capital (the victorious phase is 1870 – 1920-s); b) the state-political rivalry on the world stage, which has sharply worsened in the context of the decline of the British hegemony; c) the rise of socialist movements (essentially, the three "angles" of one triangle) - they demanded such a degree of development and autonomy of the functional aspects of capital that went beyond the organization of material production, exceeded the capabilities of existing organizational forms of both production and politics, demanded changes in relationship between them.
It was impossible to solve these problems at that particular time or even within the framework of industrial production as a historical type. For this, a breakthrough into the post-industrial world was needed, but a whole century remained before that. In addition, the industrial system of material production is far from exhausted its technical and production capabilities - it also had a century in store. Another thing was exhausted: first of all, forms of social organization and regulation of production and, what is less, and perhaps more important, non-production processes that arose in the early industrial era and did not correspond to the situation at the end of the 19th century.
New forms of social organization were needed, which had to solve a dual problem: fix the triumph of the function of capital, without destroying the system, but on the contrary, strengthening it and suppressing the spontaneous forms and movements associated with the function. In reality, capsystems are authoritarianism (the dominance of a function over a substance — the state over civil society — in the political sphere) and totalitarianism (the same dominance, but not only in the political sphere, but also in ideology and partly in the economy). However, to solve the double problem, remaining within the framework of capitalism, did not work - one part was sometimes solved at the expense of another, the function was strengthened by and through the destruction of the substance, but this meant going beyond the framework of capitalism and the creation of communist society. In any case, almost the entire twentieth century, the function of capital in its positive and negative forms (the “Colossi of Panic”) shook the capsystem with its “material and substantial” productive forces, and these shocks, among other things, were the most powerful engine of capitalism development. Everything has changed with the NTR.
NTR - the terminator of capitalism?
What is the essence of the NTR, its main result? As a result, scientific and technological revolution is “intangible”, immaterial, information factors of production began to play a dominant role in relation to the material in the framework of material production. Of course, they did not abolish this production itself, nor ISPS, but changed the subordination of the elements, sharply increasing the value and cost of the "intangible" in relation to the "material" and building a new industrial over the industrial system - not the post-industrial, but hyper-industrial. The productive forces of capitalism themselves, more precisely, their main, defining element has lost its substantial character and has become a “pure function”, a “reflection of matter”. There was a functionalization of the productive forces, i.e. substance; the contradiction "substance - function" is the basic contradiction of capitalism, its motor, engine is essentially removed or, at least, damped, developed. But along with it, capitalism itself cannot fail to fade.
Contrary to Marx, who believed that the system dies when its basic contradictions are maximally aggravated (for him it was a contradiction between productive forces and production relations), the system dies when it fades out, its basic, system-forming contradiction is developed, when it resolves in its development , removes this contradiction and thus implements its sociogenetic program. The aggravation of systemic contradictions leads to intrasystem, i.e. structural crisis, when a new structure replaces one structure in a revolutionary-military way. The systemic crisis is caused by the damping of the basic contradiction, which, as a rule, is accompanied not so much by an explosion, as by a sob - vixerunt.
Externally, the development of capitalism as a system manifests itself in different ways. This is a decline in the global profit rate, and a crisis of the global financial system (the acquisition of a global financial system based on the communications revolution is another very important indicator of production and technological, and not just political, "non-economic" domination of function over substance) and crisis nation-states, which will be discussed below. But there is one obvious example that demonstrates the problems of the functioning of a substance - the industrial productive forces, the economy based on them. These are Kondratieff cycles (waves).
As you know, these cycles started in 1780-s. Each cycle lasts 50 – 60 years and is divided into two waves - upward (A-Kondratiev) and downward (B-Kondratiev); To put it simply, the first wave is the rise of the economy, the second is the decline. Nikolai Kondratyev himself in his famous report 1926 of the “Great conjuncture cycles” recorded three waves: 1780 – 1844 / 51. (with a fracture in 1810 – 1817); 1844 / 51 – 1896 (with a fracture in 1870 – 1875) and starting in 1890 (with a fracture in 1914 – 1920). In 1945, a new cycle began, the upward wave of which ended in 1968 / 73, after which the decline began, i.e. downward wave. Its endings were expected in the 1990s, but this did not happen; a number of extremely negative phenomena for the capsystem were avoided due to the collapse of the USSR, and then in 1990-s by pumping out funds from the Russian Federation by legal and illegal means. However, even in such conditions, the crisis continues to grow, there is a failure in the cycles. What's the matter?
Is the Kondratieff scheme wrong? I think the matter is different. The start of the Kondratieff cycles was not accidentally fixed in 1780-s with the beginning of the industrial revolution and the establishment of the ISPS. Should these cycles be preserved in a hyper-industrial economy? No, and those anomalies that we have been witnessing for twenty years speak of a “breakdown”, more precisely, the completion of these cycles as a consequence of the completion of the industrial age, Modernity and - due to the development of the central controversy of the capsystem - the near end of the last. It can be said that Modernity has tangled the basic contradiction of capitalism as a system and, perhaps, with the most obviousness this has manifested itself in what has happened in recent decades with the phenomenon of the state in general and the nation-state in particular.
Nation-state - a melting snowman?
The state (state) is primarily a sphere of social violence, separated from production relations. In "pre-capitalist" societies due to the fact that production relations are non-economic in nature (natural factors of production are alienated - the human body, the earth, and therefore his will), social violence is embedded in production relations. Therefore, no special permanent institution is needed for the realization of social violence.
The situation began to change with the disintegration of feudalism (not to mention the genesis of capitalism), when production relations became economic (the main thing was not the alienation of will, but the appropriation of labor by exchanging it for materialized labor) and by themselves ceased to guarantee social control, that is, . social coercion / violence. In this regard, there was a request for a body or institution that would perform this function. This need was repeatedly magnified by social conflicts, intensified by the pressure of the lower strata on the tops during the last quarter of the XIV century, the entire XV century. and the beginning of the XVI century.
Initially, the state and capital were the products of the disintegration of feudalism in the post-feudal, but not yet bourgeois society of the Old Order of the XVII-XVIII centuries. developed as if in parallel, although they gradually approached, co-evolved. However, gradually the connection between them became closer and stronger, and already in the form of a police-mercantilist state of the late XVII - first half of the XVIII centuries. turned out to be very close. At the same time, for quite a long time, the state in its various early forms (princely, monarchical, territorial, police-mercantilist) and the dominant groups associated with it dominated capital and its associated groups. The era of revolutions (1789 – 1848) put an end to this state of affairs, undermining the forces of the Old Order and forging a fundamentally new type of state - the nation-state, which quickly turned into a nation-state.
The nation-state should, among other things, eliminate the situation of “two nations”, successfully (for the upper ranks) integrate the lower classes into the new social system, and this country into the world system, the world division of labor. Both of the integration in question, had to preserve social peace, be carried out in the interests of capital, the bourgeoisie. This does not mean - in short-term, short-term interests. Often the state sacrificed short-term and partial interests in favor of medium and long-term and holistic. But after all, this is the function of the bourgeois state as a nation-state - to be a committee for the common affairs of the bourgeoisie, as the authors of the Communist Manifesto wrote.
The highest form of the nation-state was welfare state ("welfare state", a more accurate translation - "the state of universal social security"). The first signs of welfare state are seen in France by Napoleon III and Bismarck of Germany, however, the real flowering of the welfare state came with the end of the Second World War.
In the context of rapid economic growth, bourgeois society could afford to promote the growth of the welfare of the middle and working classes, especially since the increase in their incomes stimulated the growth of demand, which spurred production. But this is just one side of the matter - the economic one. There was a more important one - a socio-economic or even a system-historical, geohistorical reason.
The military threat on the part of National Socialism and the incomparably greater system-historical threat on the part of International Socialism, i.e. Communism, forced Western capitalism to transform in a progressive direction. Bourgeois society was forced to deviate from capitalist logic much further than economic reasons associated with the dynamics of supply and demand could require.
The global cold war has forced nuclear capitalism to change. Economic, social and political democratization of bourgeois society in 1945 – 1975 contrary to the immanent laws of capitalism, they were determined by the class struggle, and not so much by the intersystem as by the intersystem. The very fact of the existence of the world socialist system forced the burzhuins to make concessions to their middle and working classes, to shell out for welfare, to hide their fangs, like a wolf from the “Little Red Riding Hood”, to camouflage dominance as much as possible.
At the same time, the western elite was able to convince many that the democratic capitalism of 1950 – 1970's is the bourgeois norm, and not a forced departure from it, so to say the “quasi-socialist NEP” of capitalism. And it was an important psycho-historical success of the western elite, which continued to speculate on the subject of democratization and welfare state even when, from the middle of the 1970-s, it began its gradual dismantling, purposeful weakening of democratic institutions and the depoliticization of society. This coincided with the beginning of the nation-state crisis (and welfare state), which forced dismantling measures.
First, at the turn of the 1960 – 1970-s, the welfare state reached the limit of its effectiveness in the existing economic and socio-political conditions. Its economic institutions began to slip, as did the democratic party politics, which gradually turned into an administrative system mixed with brokerage and lobbyism. The trade unions became more and more integrated into the system and put pressure on it to a large extent as a special group of interests. All this coincided with the economic and socio-political crisis.
Secondly, at the turn of 1960 – 1970's, an upward wave of the Kondratieff cycle subsided and a downward wave began. At the beginning of 1970, the United States was shaken by a brutal financial crisis - the result of the Vietnam War. A turning point in the history of world finance came - the emergence for the first time of the US trade deficit with 1894, their abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement, the devaluation of the dollar, the oil crisis 1973 – 1979, inflation 1975 – 1976, production decline. Under these conditions, the gradual dismantling of the welfare state as a concrete form of the nation-state begins. But the nation-state itself, as a type, is beginning to have problems in 1970 – 1980-ies. Already in the 1980-e in the world talked about the decline, weakening, "melting", "rusting", etc. nation-states. The source of all these very real problems was globalization - a direct consequence of the scientific and technological revolution and indirectly - of the Cold War, which caused this and caused the scientific and technical revolution.
Globalization is a process of production and exchange in which, thanks to the domination of information factors over the material in the material production itself, capital turns into an electronic signal and turns out to be free from all restrictions of the local and, most importantly, the state level - spatial, material, social, institutional. “Everything that moves at a speed approaching the speed of an electronic signal,” writes sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, “is practically free of restrictions related to the territory from which he was sent, to which he was sent, or through which he passes.” Globalization is the victory of time over space and, naturally, those who control time (capital), over those who control space (state).
With the formation of global money markets, the state’s ability to control financial and economic flows has weakened dramatically. In such circumstances, the state cannot (does it want?) To ensure the welfare of citizens. Many states, including the United States, are experiencing increasing difficulties in ensuring the stability of their budgets. Chronic budget deficit and the growth of public debt significantly reduce the ability of the state to work even not to increase, but to maintain the welfare of society.
In the nation-state, which arose as a means of preventing social split into “two nations,” especially in the welfare state, the gap between the middle and rich strata was narrowing. And this was one of the achievements. In 1980-s, this tendency began to be broken, and this is largely due to the middle class, more precisely, to the problems that had arisen at the top of the capsystem with it in the 1970-s.
A short happy middle class life
Having emerged in the 19th century, the middle class of the capsystem core led a modest life for quite a while. The situation changed in the post-war period (1945 – 1975), which became for the middle class of the West “the glorious thirty years” (Jean Fourastie), the era of “fat cows” and political triumph.
In the post-war period (the upward wave of the Kondratieff cycle, 1945 – 1968 / 73 years) the “public pie” increased dramatically by orders of magnitude. This “wave” not only surpassed all previous periods of expansion of the world economy (1780 – 1815, 1848 – 1873, 1896 – 1920), but the entire previous one and a half century of its development: in 1945 – 1975. the same quantity of goods and services as in the previous 150 years was produced (in terms of value). As a result, the top Westerners received such a “foundation” from which it was theoretically possible to unfasten something of the middle class and the top of the working class (in absolute terms this “something” was very, very significant). However, theoretically it does not mean practically.
A practical imperative in the economy was the desire to increase mass demand, and this required at least a little to increase the welfare of these very masses, more precisely, the middle of society. However, welfare has increased to a great extent. Why? After all, capitalism is not a philanthropic organization, and it simply will not increase wealth, especially mass strata. To this “iron heel”, the top cap was prompted by the presence in the world system, along with capitalism, of systemic anti-capitalism — the socialist camp, the USSR.
The very existence of the USSR, its rapid economic development, even among Western politicians of the second half of 1950 – 1960, created the impression that the USSR would be overtaken by the US, an egalitarian social system, and finally the ability to materially support the anti-capitalist movement around the world, including the communist, socialist and workers parties in the West itself forced the capitalists to pacify their working and middle classes, to buy off them. From the working class - not to rebel, from the middle class - to fulfill the function of a social buffer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The means of feeding and pacification became a welfare state, which through the taxation system redistributed part of the funds (in absolute terms, very significant) from the bourgeoisie to the middle class and, to a lesser extent, to the working classes. As a result, in the West by the middle of 1960-s a large and quite prosperous middle class took shape, which was not found in any other social system, either within the framework of Western civilization or outside it. The very existence of the middle class (the “socialist bourgeoisie”) of the capsystem as a sign-symbol of the mature (overriding?) Modernity was due to such factors that are characteristic only of capitalism of this era only.
Firstly, only under conditions of industrial capitalism and its core, with the characteristic urban structure of life, is it possible to create such wealth, a “public pie” of such size and volume, a part of which the top can share in principle.
Secondly, only in the conditions of the capsystem with its division into the core (center) and periphery, into the metropolis and colonies / semi-colonies, subjected to hard operation, under the conditions of the world division of labor unseen in other — local — systems of the world division of labor only at the expense of the core itself, but at the expense of the accumulation of capital from external sources; in this case, it is not just a tribute, but a systematic withdrawal of the surplus product on a global scale. Actually, the raison d'être of capitalism exists as long as there are external non-capitalist zones, which, if necessary, can be turned into a capitalist periphery, i.e. Profit zone.
Thirdly, capitalism is the only social system that can exist simultaneously with a plus sign (“positive capitalism”) and a minus sign (systemic anti-capitalism, “negative capitalism”, “real socialism”). The presence of systemic anti-capitalism, although it is outside capitalism, at some stage begins to deform, distort capitalism, causes it to develop not only according to its own, but also according to anti-capitalist logic, which - paradoxically - for some historically short time - allows to solve problems capitalism, smoothes out its contradictions.
This is the “three sources, three components” or, if you like, the three whales of the middle class phenomenon, its welfare. And the main of these "whales", so to speak, "whale kittych" - the third, because the bourgeoisie turned on the redistributive mechanism is not out of spiritual kindness. Welfare state is a clear departure from the logic of development and the nature of capitalism, which can only be to a small extent explained by the concern for creating demand and consumers of mass products. The main thing is different - in the presence of systemic anti-capitalism (historical communism) in the form of the USSR. In the course of the Cold War, the global confrontation of the USSR, in the clash of two world projects, the bourgeois in fear of a “secret move”, “according to which they click on you, respond to us the same way”, were forced to pay off the middle and working classes, to pacify them (taxes on capital, high wages, pensions, benefits, etc.), dress up in quasi-socialist clothes.
"Long 70-e", or How to break the twentieth century
The beginning of 1970-x was a turning point in many respects, to assess the significance of “long 70-x” (1968 – 1983) for the history of the twentieth century, Modernity and capitalism is yet to come, as well as writing a clear and secret history of that segment. Here I limit myself to what is directly related to our topic.
First, there was a series of serious negative changes in the economy (more on this later), and the post-war prosperity began to end.
Secondly, at the turn of the 1960 – 1970-s, the welfare state, with its huge bureaucracy, came to the limit of its administrative and political effectiveness.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the swollen middle class has become too heavy a burden for the capitalist system (even in a relatively prosperous core), and the global economic downturn, coupled with the inefficiency and cost of the welfare state, further exacerbated this situation. The size of the middle class, multiplied by its level of well-being, went beyond what could provide a capsystem without major changes in its nature and without further substantial redistribution to the detriment of the top, without further socialization of capitalism. The political aspirations of the middle class were no less, and perhaps even more dangerous for her. In this situation, the capsystem owners stopped retreating, regrouped and launched a social counter-offensive. The ideological and theoretical rationale for this counteroffensive was the extremely important and frankly cynical document “The Crisis of Democracy”, written in 1975 by the “Three Wise Men” of the “Trilaterals” by well-known sociologists and political scientists Samuel Huntington, Michel Crozier and Jзji Watanuki - commissioned by XNUM. The Trilateral Commission (“backstage” of a new type, whose task as a “good investigator” to stifle the USSR in the arms).
The report clearly stated the threats to the ruling stratum - first of all, that democracy and the welfare state, formed 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.” Experts recommended promoting the growth of non-involvement (noninvolvement) of the masses in politics, the development of a certain apathy, moderate democracy, based on the fact that it is only a way of organizing power, and not at all universal. In particular, the report said: "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."
However, the weakening of democracy in the interests of the Western elite was not an easy social and political task. Who was the backbone of Western democracy, which had to be moderated? The middle class and active upper part of the working class. The first blow was dealt to him. In 1979 in the UK and in 1981 in the USA, market fundamentalists Thatcher and Reagan come to power. The place of the “old” bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, linked by state-monopoly capitalism (MMC), is replaced by a young predatory corporatocratic faction, directly connected with the TNCs that fought for the place under the sun from 1940 – 1950-s and finally achieved success ( This was largely due to the defeat of the United States in Vietnam).
The main tasks of Thatcher and Reagan, these first politicians of such rank from corporatocracy, were the dismantling of a part of the welfare state and the attack on the middle and working classes. However, while the USSR existed, the “lords of the rings” capsystems could not fully develop such a course. From here - two consequences.
The first is the policy of sharply weakening the USSR (in 1989 – 1990, it was replaced by a course towards its dismemberment and destruction); to this end, the USSR was lured to Afghanistan, and then followed a new sharp turn of the Cold War.
The second is the desire to get what could not be immediately taken away from the middle classes of the core, from the middle class of the periphery, destroying the latter as a class. In the 1980-s, the Latin American middle class associated with the public sector was almost completely destroyed by the IMF’s structural economic reforms in Latin America; It went to the middle class of the most developed countries in Africa (for example, Nigeria). The funds from the expropriation of the peripheral middle classes were pumped to the West, and this somewhat hampered the top offensive against the western middle class. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, globalization took the place of the Cold War as a form of world governance. It completely untied the hands of the “lords of the rings” of capitalism and at the same time brought capitalism and the society of modernity to the last line, because, paradoxically, communism played a huge stabilizing role in the functioning of the capsystem.
The collapse of communism - the knock of fate on the door of capitalism
In recent years, it is customary to write about the crisis of communism and Marxism and interpret it as a triumph of capitalism. With the Manichean view of capitalism and communism as absolutely opposite mutually exclusive integrity, the way it is. Well, if the connection between capitalism and communism as systemic anti-capitalism is much thinner and smarter, and the very existence of communism is an indicator of the normal state of the capsystem? In this case, the collapse of communism is a “sign on the wall” of the capsystem, a signal of its impending demise.
Communism as a collection of ideas, there are almost two and a half millennia. However, as a special socio-economic system, communism materialized only in the capitalist era. Historical communism (“real communism”, “real socialism”) is only anti-capitalism. There have never been such systems in history as anti-steadfastness and anti-feudalism. Communism as a social system never existed as anti-feudalism or anti-steadfastness. Thus, there remains only one era in which communism existed (and could exist) historically - capitalist. And that is not all, but only its mature, industrial phase, which limits the realization of communism in time, in history, to a certain stage in the development of capitalism.
All this means that in capitalism itself as a phenomenon, as a world system of relations of production, there is something that gives it a very specific, inherent only to it alone, and therefore - mysterious and mysterious ability to act, to realize themselves in two different social forms: positive and negative. Capitalism exists as a kind of double star, a double mass - the unity of capitalist and non-capitalist, moreover, it is the condition sine qua non of its existence. At the same time, objectively the progress of capitalism is the elimination of non-capitalist, but this is the path to systemic death: the normal functioning of capitalism requires a non-capitalist segment. And the constant struggle with him - the dialectic.
At first, in the 17th – 19th centuries, this segment was the post-feudal additional capitalism of the Old Order. First, capital used it as a shell, then in the XVIII century. joined the fight with him (the Enlightenment, the French revolution 1789 – 1799), and during the world war 1914-1918. destroyed it. J. Schumpeter remarked on this: breaking in this way that which hindered his progress, capitalism also demolished the supporting structures that protected it from collapse. This is partly true, but I think that non-capitalist forms that were inadequate to the new era were objectively eliminated, and other, more adequate ones appeared in their place. It is primarily about the systemic anti-capitalism of the USSR, which became the next stage form after the Old Order (but already “anti-” and not “before”), a double mass for capitalism.
Acting as an alternative global project (from the middle of the 1950-s to an ever decreasing degree) and significantly limiting the scale of capitalism's actions in the world, historical communism at the same time decided for capitalism — mainly indirectly, but in this case it does not matter a series of tasks. These are participation in the world war on the side of the Anglo-Saxons, the role of external stimulus for intra-capitalist transformations, joint control of the world with capitalism and the stabilization of the latter through the Cold War, etc.
By supporting left parties in the First World and the national liberation movement in the Third World, the USSR did not allow the burzhuins to crush them. At the same time, subordinating these movements to their logic of opposition to capitalism — systemic, and from the second half of the 1950s to state-geopolitical increasingly, historical communism limited, “disciplined” these movements, making them more predictable and manageable. As a result, as the USSR and its dominant groups were integrated into the capsystem — integration, which ultimately led to the collapse of anti-system capitalism, the USSR built along with it peripheral “dangerous classes” into the capsystem, partly “domesticating” them in a systemic way.
True, this “domestication” on a global scale of the twentieth century. often turned to capitalism for defeats. However, firstly, these defeats, with all their significance and resonance (for example, Vietnam 1975), were usually local in nature, and secondly, even if the defeats went beyond the local scope, the capsystem's owners often quite quickly learned and used them for self-transformation according to the principle “for one broken two unbeaten give”. Thus, the victory of the USSR in the Cold War over the US state in 1975 (Vietnam, Helsinki) significantly facilitated the intracapitalist transformation and access to the first roles in the corporatocracy’s capsystem (“gibperubruazii”, “cosmocracy” - D. Duclos) - the young and predatory world bourgeoisie, closely associated with TNCs.
It is the corporatocracy that began its ascent as a result of and after the world war 1939 – 1945. and which for the first time declared itself by the overthrow of the Mosaddyk government in Iran in 1953, in 1980, it put its presidents in the White House (Reagan, Bush), and in 1991 it defeated the USSR as a system and as a state, “promising” to include In its composition, at least part of the nomenclature, and the other issue "a barrel of jam and a basket of cookies."
The triumph of globalization, the first victim of which was systemic anti-capitalism and the USSR, is the triumph of corporatocracy. Globalization has allowed corporatocracy capitalism - “turbo-capitalism” (Lutwak) to partially solve many of the problems of stabilizing the system that were previously solved with the help of systemic anti-capitalism. Or, on the contrary, to solve those tasks that were previously prevented from solving the very existence of the USSR. For example, the presence of nuclear weapons in society - systemic anti-capitalism in general also called into question the large-scale (world) war, and, as the revolutionary wars in China, Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba showed, the victory of the capital center over the weaker periphery, even in a local war. Globalization, among other things, solved this problem, and not only because it eliminated the USSR, but because, by creating a global financial capital market, it fully guaranteed the victory of the nucleus over the periphery by non-military methods — up to its economic destruction, as it happened, for example , with Argentina, and turning into a “finished country” - “the finished country”.
However, globalization created intractable long-term, pushing capitalism (precisely because it was a “turbo”) —and rather quickly — to the edge of the abyss, resolving the intractable medium-term problems of the capsystem.
As already mentioned, the normal functioning of capitalism requires non-capitalist zones. Each time another global recurring global profit occurred, the capsystem responded by expanding it and transforming the external non-capzone into a capitalist periphery with cheap labor and new sales markets (forced creation of colonies and semi-colonies) - and so on until next time. Already at the end of the XIX century. the whole world was divided, and in the twentieth century. colonial expansion was replaced by expansion in the zone of the core itself - the dynamics of capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century. (more precisely, in 1871-1945) it acquired a mainly military character. The world Anglo-Saxon-German wars for hegemony in the capsystem (the war of nations 1914-1918 and the war of the masses 1939-1945), among other things, destroyed a huge mass of material substance, capital, thus creating a blank sheet for capital development and profit growth the very core and led to the unprecedented economic growth of the world economy (especially Japan, Germany and Italy) in the "glorious thirtieth anniversary" of 1945-1975.
By the end of 1960-x there was a complete restoration of the defeated 1939-1945 in world war. Germany and Japan, and the core was almost homogenized - without the practical possibilities of new wars in it because of the presence of the new hegemon - the USA and the need to preserve the “united front” (“bloc”) in the face of the USSR; well, the wars with semi-periphery and periphery were, firstly, an expensive event, including because of the presence of the USSR capable of seriously helping the weak of this world; secondly, much of what was previously provided by military means could now be achieved by financial and economic methods (what the USSR called “neo-colonialism” and “neo-imperialism”), simply economic terrorism, the mechanics of which are superbly outlined by professional economic killer John Perkins in the book Confessions of an Economic Killer.
Globalization has conquered the core, eliminated systemic anti-capitalism and in fact suppressed the possibilities of the struggle of peripheral societies for a better position in the world system, for the best transactional positions in relation to the core, i.e. globalization triumphantly solved the problems over which the entire twentieth century. fought capitalism. However, the victory was “hidden emptiness” - having solved the intractable medium-term problems of capitalism, globalization created insoluble long-term and as a result, the position of the capital system at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. it turned out to be much worse than at the turn of the XIX-XX: the time trouble and zugzwang, along with the prospect of a new war — only social, the top against the lower and middle layers in the very core. Actually, this war has already begun. Why and how? Very simple.
As already mentioned, the normal functioning of capitalism requires the existence of non-capitalist zones for which it is fighting. At the end of the twentieth century. capitalism has “conquered” these zones — globalization has eliminated them, making the whole world capitalist. But this means that now the process of reducing global profit threatens to become permanent. The world "iron heel" was faced with a choice: either the loss of a significant part of profits, privileges and, possibly, power, or the transition from extensive to intensive, i.e. mainly to the internal sources of profit and accumulation, to the intensification of intracapitalist exploitation in the core itself and its enclaves throughout the world.
There is a lot that stands in the way of such a change of milestones. These are formal democratic institutions of the bourgeois core of the capsystem, civil society, nation-state, “universal values” and many other achievements of the lower and middle classes of the 1830 / 1840-x era - 1960 / 1970's. In fact, on the path of transformation in question, capitalism itself as a system as a whole, from which, it turns out, should be free capital, which its top and began to do with 1980's.
Contrary to popular belief, capitalism as a system cannot be reduced to a pure and unlimited triumph of capital. Capital existed before capitalism and will exist after it. Capitalism (core) is a complex system of economic, social, and political institutions that limits capital in its own long-term interests, does not allow it to embrace, devour everything at once, including itself. An aggregate capitalist is capital limited by a nation-state, civil society, and quasi-democratic political institutions. The liberation of capital (the market) from these institutions is beneficial to capital, but destructive for capitalism. Once it was in the interests of capital that the creation of a capitalist system turned out (and in the interests of the dominant groups, it turned into the bourgeoisie, or rather, into an “aggregate capitalist”, often against its will). There is nothing surprising that at some point the interests of capital will require (have already demanded) the dismantling of capitalism - only in this way can the ruling groups retain their privileges and power, transforming capital into other forms of domination, and capitalism into a different system.
The external expansion of capital (and capitalism was the system of state-political organization of external, global expansion of capital) ended: capitalism embraced the planet as a whole, and therefore in this regard is no longer needed, in the sense - not only cannot ensure profit growth, but cannot stop the process of its decline. Therefore, a large-scale attack on democratic institutions, the weakening of the public law sphere, the degeneration of politics into a combination of the administrative system and show business, the “fading away” of the nation-state while strengthening the (global) financial capital market is nothing but a spontaneous and, to an even greater degree, the directed (though perhaps still not entirely project-conscious) process of dismantling capitalism. Remove all obstacles in the way of capitalism, let it fully realize itself on a global scale, allow it to become global - and you will destroy it.
That part of the world top, including the American neocons, which eliminates everything that limits capital and the realization of the interests of the United States as a TNC cluster, destroys capitalism much faster and more efficiently than the leftist movements of the twentieth century, which, in fact, hampering the self-realization of capital, in the end, to a greater degree strengthened him, delayed his end. Globalization is the needle of “Koshcheeva death” of capitalism. However, the "finalization" of capitalism is not a spontaneous process, the dismantling of this system is a conscious process. I am ready to go even further and argue: the collapse of communism in the USSR coincided with the beginning of the dismantling of capitalism as a system of Western elite. Moreover, these are two sides of the same coin - the decline and fall of the capitalist world, the struggle between the top and the middle class for who will exclude someone from the future post-capitalist world on whose bones it will be built.
At first glance, the thesis about the dismantling of capitalism may seem paradoxical - the owners of the system, the "lords of its rings" themselves dismantle it? And why not, if this is the only way to preserve privileges and wealth in the face of a call from the middle class and other forces of the capsystem, to maintain power in the face of a decrease in the resources of the planet and an increase in its population. The history of Western civilization knows such a system transgres, which representatives of the dominant groups spontaneously carried out in order to preserve power, privileges and wealth, not to lose them in relation to the lower classes. This is a crisis of the “long 16th century” (1453-1648) (for details, see below).
Karl Marx and Max Weber were wrong in assessing this period as teleologically early bourgeois, well, and many liberals and maksisty XIX-XX centuries. conceptually falsified “early modernity” and presented it as “the era of early bourgeois revolutions” (another myth: strictly speaking, there were no bourgeois revolutions in history, and there could not be any). In contrast to the dismantling of feudalism, such capitalism is a process that is mostly not spontaneous, and it is conducted on a completely scientific basis - thousands of research centers around the world work on the current “iron heel”, being its intellectual service personnel. 1975 can be considered as the notional date for the beginning of the dismantling of capitalism (the report “The crisis of democracy”). In essence, the entire activity of the corporatocracy after 1975 was largely the realization of the ideas of the report and the developments of thought factories that followed the “iron heel”.
The collapse of the USSR eliminated the factor that prevented the full-scale attack of the "iron heel" on the middle class of the nucleus - now you no longer need to pacify anyone, you can pillage both in the international arena (Yugoslavia, Iraq) and inside the country. And the corresponding instrument appeared - corporation-state.
Hyperboloid of globalization engineers
A corporation-state (hereinafter - CG) is such a form of government, whose functioning objectives are primarily of an economic nature, i.e. are aimed at reducing costs, and therefore, require minimizing political and social costs to ensure the "territory of residence" - from minimizing social obligations characteristic of the state to getting rid of economically unnecessary, unprofitable from an economic (corporate-state) point of view population (from clipping from the "public pie" to the actual exclusion from real life).
As soon as the main for the state proclaims economic competitiveness in the global economy, the social and national components of the state can be forgotten. The state begins to behave like a corporation, in which everything is determined by economic efficiency (“the strongest survives” and “nothing personal”), due to a double logic: the development of the capsystem itself in the late Modernist era and, to an even greater extent, in opposition to the social system. The departure of the latter drew a line under the welfare state, as astute analysts predicted. However, they apparently couldn’t even think that the content of the nation-state would be dismantled and destroyed along with the form, since the nation ceases to be both a form of production organization and a form of political organization for the global struggle for hegemony. Therefore, the place of a nation-state, followed by politics and civil society (adieu, political science and sociology), is taken by the corporation-state. Moreover, this process goes faster not in the core, but in the semi-periphery and periphery of the capsystem: “a pagan suffering from the plagues of Christianity” - this is what Marx called situations of this kind.
The CG should in no case be confused with a corporate state such as fascist Italy or national socialist Germany. The latter are the essence of the classical Welfare state forms, the social states, the rigid inter-war dictatorships of the middle classes - as opposed to the post-war soft dictatorship of the middle classes. If the main task of the nation-state (and specifically welfare state) was the inclusion of the “whole” population, then the main task of the CG - the state of post-national and postsocial (in the ideal-typical tendency - asocial) is, on the contrary, the exclusion from the real statehood of all economically unprofitable , unsuitable as primary objects (producers) and secondary (consumers) exploitation. CG is a kind of political and economic "Occam's razor", which cuts off all unnecessary and unnecessary for hyperbourgeoisie / corporatetocracy from the "public pie", which privatizes the cumulative process of social production as a whole and splits it into a certain number of clan "rations".
KG is such an administrative and economic complex, which:
- while remaining formally a state apparatus, it plays an independent and decisive role in a given country as a political (imperious) corporation;
- makes the political and economic national interests of this country dependent on the economic apparatus-departmental (corporate), or at least considers the former through the prism of the latter;
- privatized in his own interests the power functions characteristic of the state as an institution (privatization of power-violence) and at the same time refuse to fulfill most of the social obligations and functions characteristic of the state (or sharply reduce them).
The CG is a de-socialized (ideally, down to asociality) and denationalized (privatized) market-repressive state, which, with further evolution in a few decades, will inevitably have to completely reset state characteristics, with the result that it will cease to be a state and become rigidly hierarchical patrimonial clan-based. The internal principle of the organization of the CG - the clan. It is the clan, and not the physical individual, as in the nation-state, that is the basic social unit of the CG: individuals “do not walk here.”
In the CG, state control remains minimal control over borders and territory and repressive power, which sharply increases due to the need to pursue a policy of denationalization and de-socialization, which can cause protest and mass unrest. As one of the leaders of Mexican peasants in Chiapas remarked, “in the cabaret of globalization, the state begins to engage in striptease, and at the end of the presentation there remains only what is absolutely necessary, repressive power. New masters of the world have no need to directly rule the world. On their behalf, the administrative task is on the shoulders of national governments. ” At the same time, the latter, of course, essentially cease to be both national and governments, turning into external administrative bodies of corporations.
Of course, this case is characteristic of weak states of the South. The stronger states of the same South turn themselves into corporation states (corporations-states): if the country is small, then we are talking about one corporation, if more, then several. For example, in Colombia it is a “state” - two drug cartels (Kaliysky and Medellinsky) and partly FARC. The processes of forming the CG are going everywhere - in the USA, Russia, India, Indonesia, China, Brazil and others. In these large countries, because of their size, population, powerful and highly developed culture, historical traditions and claims for status if not great, then regional power The process of "corporatization" of the state will be especially acute, controversial, conflicting and fraught with serious social upheavals. Corporatization of the state takes place in the North. So, the United States is not only and not so much a state as Globamerica is a matrix of American TNCs, with which in one way or another all of the emerging CGs are connected.
In addition to the main route of the formation of the CG (through the state) there are also side-counter processes: bottom-up and, so to speak, from the side. On the example of Lev Leviev’s corporation, Sergey Goryainov showed this in the work “Diamonds of Allah”. If for former corporations politics was a means, then for corporations of a new type, seeking to turn into a quasi-state, it and power in general is the goal. “The Levaev Corporation,” says Goryainov, “fits perfectly into the globalist model.” It can even be considered a kind of standard, one of the first structures implemented, on which the new world order will hold. ”
In the CG, terrorist organizations, criminal syndicates, in some places - special services that have escaped from the central control, are striving to evolve. As a result, if the international (Westphalian) organization of states (and in the XIX – XX centuries - nation-states) is in legal space, in the zone of law, then the international network of the CG is located in the legal-illegal sphere, in the “wrong zone” (Eduard Balladur , French Prime Minister in 1993 – 1995). The CG network is the world wide web with a large number of large, medium and small power-economic spiders, which have two faces at the same time - legal and extralegal (criminal).
In this regard, the CG is much more adequate to globalization and its world than the nation-state. The modern global economy, at least in its main areas (trade in arms, oil, precious metals, drug trafficking, prostitution and porn business), is, essentially, a global criminal economy, the normal functioning of which is built on the violation of state and international laws - i.e. of what the nation-state stands on. Therefore, the CG is, in fact, a corporate-criminal (criminal-corporative) state. Up to the point that in certain areas of the world criminal characteristics begin to dominate. “Bandit State” is the name of the state in several African countries by Michael Schatzberg in his remarkable work Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire. The corporatization and criminalization of the nation-state are two sides of the same coin, two mutually reinforcing and mutually co-sponsoring processes.
Criminal means and structures, “criminal revolutions” (like the Soviet-Russian 1988 – 1998) are very strong and effective means of state corporatization (not to mention the initial accumulation of capital) where there are not enough legal economic means and mechanisms for this simply no. It is only necessary to "slightly" help. Among other things, to crush law enforcement agencies in the form of a chain of reorganizations, turning them ... correctly, into a force (criminal-force) structure. However, power is no longer a legal structure, but a personification of “power business”.
The CG is not only "on the other side of good and evil," but also "on the other side of the law and crime." This is a fundamentally new (post-bourgeois and post-civilization at the same time?) Phenomenon not only from the point of view of statehood, but also from the point of view of economics, law and morality. In the CG, a specific social, anthropological type, a certain human material is selected.
In the modern world there are many examples (non-legalization) of the state as one of the means of turning it into CG and the etatization of crime. Thus, the West created a terrorist-mafia-state Albanian in Kosovo, which entered the fight, on the one hand, with the well-fed nations-states of the European Union, on the other - with the largest old mafias of Europe (in 2007 the largest mafias of Italy - Cosa Nostra, Ndrangeta and Comorra - began negotiations on the creation of a single cartel to combat the Albanian mafia, which is not really a mafia, but a criminal form of the CG, for which the nation-states and the old mafia are relics to be dealt with). This criminal-corporate state also penetrates overseas - since 2001, a mafia network of ethnic Albanians has been developing in New York with the symbolic name “Corporation”.
Criminal structures, special services and the “armies of the new world disorder” (Vladimir Ovchinsky) created by the latter emerge a complex of common interests, which is antagonistic to those of the nation-state and other institutes of the modern era - political, economic, general social (civil society), cultural.
All this does not mean that the nation-state has already disappeared, the process of forming the CG is far from complete. The conflicts of the new epoch will continue for some time in the old form and under the old standards, and only when the latter decay, and the new agents finally stand on their feet, will the brave new world of the corporation states and the task of getting rid of the state in general. It is in this direction, the opposite of that in which power structures developed in Western Europe from the “long XVI century” (1453-1648), the state is now developing, which has passed its peak - the form and phase of the nation-state.
Once B. Moore noticed that revolutions, contrary to Marx, more often arise not from the triumphant cry of the ascending classes, but from the death roar of those layers over which the waves of progress are about to join. The old middle and working classes, turning into locales, are one of the reservoirs of resistance. There are others.
In any case, the CG with its denationalization and de-socialization cannot but generate something like social-nationalism as its social antithesis. In this antithesis, the distinctions between the “left” and the “right” characteristic of the modern era (1789-1991) are erased; he is able to unite in the framework of "reactionary progressism" all those who are not smiling to become raw materials for the CG and their world with Globamerica as a matrix. World of the XXI century It is built as a hierarchy of corporations of a new type, different in origin, but identical in essence.
What is happening today looks very much like the final centuries of the Roman Empire and the first Dark Ages of Europe (V – VIII centuries), on the one hand, and the finale of the Middle Ages (1300 - 1440-e) and the second Dark Ages of Europe (1450 – 1640-e ), i.e. in an era without a state. In essence, the CG is the will of the state and death and a means of transition from state to post-state, stateless forms of power, to a world without a state, to a world in which there are quite a few “gray zones” ruled by shady, secret structures.
Shadow that has ceased to know its place
The CG corresponds not only to globalization, but also to the one that has developed in the 19th – 20th centuries. (a qualitative leap - 1871 – 1933's) to the process of shadowing real power in the capsystem, the formation of what was not quite successfully called the “world backstage”. The nation-state is not very well mated with the "backstage", CG - this is what the latter needs. But, I repeat, this is the result — and the final — of the development of the power system of capitalism in the epoch of modernity.
The history of capitalism and Modernity is inseparable from secret societies, and this is dictated by the specificity of the political economy of capitalism. There are several aspects and reasons.
First, capitalism as an economic system is of a global, supranational character, and the formal political organization of the capsystem is of a national-state character. Since commodity flows constantly violate state borders, the bourgeoisie is in dire need of supranational political (or political-economic) organizations, especially as it has developed since the end of the 18th century. financial capital. There were no ready-made and natural organizations of this level. Therefore, it used what it was - Masonic, Jewish community organizations, etc. In this regard, the "backstage" in the XIX century. it is filled with other content than before and begins to develop in accordance with the laws and logic of capitalism and, in turn, casts its shadow on the whole organization of the power of capitalism in its core. B. Disraeli already wrote that “the world is ruled by occult forces and their secret societies”.
Secondly, as the political legalization of anti-systemic movements, as the society quasi-democratization, as the policy in bourgeois society became more and more public, the role of secret politics, secret power increases; real politics, real power are becoming more and more secret, shadow. And the more part of the population electoral rights and the possibility of formal participation in political life, the more open political life turned into a theater, a show, a farce, the more real power acquired conspiratorial character, turned into a conspiratorial structure (hereinafter referred to as K-structure). At the same time, a similar process was developing in the economy, where financial capital increasingly went into the shadows, which in the 1870 – 1930s took leading positions not only in the economy, but also in determining policy. The unions of financiers and politicians during this period began not only to create their own secret structures, but to give them a quasi-institutional nature. Example - K-structure, created by Cecil Rhodes, William Stade and Reginald Brett, Alfred Milner's group, and others. Secret power, shadow politics, conspiracy - reverse, “dark” side of democracy, publicity, legalization of anti-systemic movements, in short - “dark side” Moderna.
Thirdly, this power and the tendency to its development were further strengthened by the fact that socio-economic processes became more and more complex, proceeded with ever increasing speed, and the era of 1870 – 1940-ies - the era of the struggle for hegemony, wars and revolutions - made ever more stringent requirements for speed and accuracy of decisions. Incredibly strengthened the secret nature of power, power-shadow Cold War.
By their very nature, K-structures were ideal agents and tools of the Cold War. They became the incubator for the formation of a historically new bourgeoisie faction - the corporatocracy - which gained strength in the 1950 – 1970-s, and at the turn of the 1970 – 1980-s put its representatives in Whitehall and the White House. The power of the corporatocracy, which launched an offensive against the USSR from the 1980-ies, the middle and working classes and began to dismantle the quasi-democratic sociopolitical institutions of capitalism (nation-state, parties, civil society), is already mainly secret power, the power of secret organizations . Globalization, which grew out of the Cold War and took its place as a new form of organization of world governance, seems to have finally shifted the balance in favor of the K-structures.
KG is, of course, more K-structure than legal structure. The criminalization of the world economy, and after it - a number of segments of social life, characteristic of the era of globalization, is the reason and at the same time the impetus for the further development of K-structures, shadow power, the Conspiracy. At the end of modernity, corporatocracy, in its dismantling of capitalism, has a double qualitative advantage over the social strata that are objectively opposed to it: unlike them, it operates on a global level, and they act on a national level; it acts in the shadow, and they are in the light.
Thus, globalization as a triumph of a corporatocracy is at the same time a triumph of shadow forms of power over explicit, legal ones, and in fact the presence of the latter distinguished capitalism from other systems. Today it is already in the past. Of course, there is a certain façade, a stage on which presidents and prime ministers are wriggled, but, as A. Galich sang, “this is red, all to the public”. At its end, Modern and capitalism came to such forms of organization of power, against which they fought in their beginning. Only today these secret structures are not comparable with the late feudal structures either in power or scope or in conspiracy. And, obviously, the future, at least the “near future” will become the field of the game of K-structures at various levels.
The crisis of the biblical project
Due to the social nature of capitalism and its global scale, the crisis of this system becomes a kind of trigger, a cascading phenomenon that triggers a crisis mechanism that goes far beyond the capitalist, but generally beyond the socio-systemic framework. Capitalism sharpened as much as possible all the dormant contradictions of this civilization before its appearance - both internal and with other civilizations. And although the "Clash of Civilizations" by S. Huntington is a typical "conceptual virus" whose main task is to divert attention from real contradictions, the crisis of capitalism has a powerful civilizational aspect, and threefold: the crisis of European civilization; the crisis of non-European civilizations caused by the impact on them of capitalism, primarily its structures of everyday life and mass culture; earthly crisis - due to the global nature of capitalism - civilization as a whole.
In the crisis of European civilization, in addition to the decline of high culture and changes in the European human material itself in the twentieth century, we must first note the crisis of Christianity. The latter is almost dead. Protestantism, replacing God with the Book, almost turned into neo-Judaism, and it has no immunity to either Judaism or liberalism. The systemic crisis of capitalism coincided with the crisis of secular versions of the biblical project and with the exhaustion of this project as a whole.
The combination of the crises of capitalism and European civilization (and in it Christianity) finds its quintessential expression in the crisis (or end) of the “biblical project”. Any social system is a system of hierarchy and control, i.e. solving a simple problem: how to keep a small person in check and how to control this task to control the behavior of the tops and their relations with the bottoms. For almost two millennia, Christianity as a form of social and ecclesiastical organization, using the protest and emancipatory project of Jesus Christ and at the same time muffling it (ideologically - with the help of the Old Testament, organizationally - with the help of the church) and transforming it into biblical and religious foundations first in the Mediterranean, and then in Europe (with Russia in Eurasia) and America; another Abrahamic religion, closely related to Christianity, Islam, on the one hand, fulfilled the function of a biblical project for more backward areas of the region, and on the other, it was a continuation of the previous one, the ancient Egyptian project, which successfully operated for thousands of years and whose peak was the Roman Empire.
The biblical project began to falter quite early - starting with the splitting of Rome (Catholicism) from Orthodoxy for political purposes and the struggle between the pope and the emperor; Well, the partial nationalization and the partial Judaization of Christianity in the mutation of Protestantism meant the beginning of a deep crisis. In the past two centuries, the role of implementing the biblical project in general had to take on the secular ideologies of the progressive type - liberalism and communism, and communism turned out to be the same systemic restriction of Marx's project as the biblical - Christian with all the ensuing consequences. The systemic crisis of capitalism coincided with the crisis of secular versions of the biblical project and with the exhaustion of this project as a whole. What worked in late antiquity (that is, up to the “empire” of Charlemagne), in the Middle Ages, even worse - in the times of the Old Order, ceased to work in the New Age. On the agenda is the creation of a new control and organizing project, only with its help - all other things being equal - will it be possible to set up a “twisted century” and overcome the crisis. The double question is who proposes such a project - top or bottom, and who uses it to their advantage.
Attempts of such a design are already visible - less conscious and more religious at the lower levels, more conscious and more secular at the top. Radical Islam in the Muslim world and Pentecostalism in Latin America, acquiring the features of if not separate religion from Christianity, then something similar - this is another “utopia” if we use the term of Karl Mannheim. From the top, this is a project of American neocons (“global fascism”), designed to deepen and preserve forever the socio-economic polarization of the late capitalist society (“20: 80”) and transfer this essentially casteized form to the post-capitalist world.
It is quite symbolic that many neocons are former leftists, and some are simply Trotskyists, who have gone through the “right” school of Leo Strauss and have read Plato. It must be remembered that of the three projects generated by the subject branch of the historical (antiquity - feudalism - capitalism) process, two were protest-emancipatory - Christ and Marx, and one, the very first, Plato - is conservative, and in some ways even restorative and reactionary. However, both emancipatory projects were fairly quickly appropriated by certain social forces and organizations and began to be used for completely different purposes than those planned by their “general designers”; nevertheless, the emancipatory potential in them has been preserved, and this contradiction has become central to both the biblical and communist projects.
Plato's caste-aristocratic project was a response to the crisis and decline of the polis system, the collapse (and partly deliberate dismantling) of polis democracy. Plato's reaction is to stop and freeze social changes with the help of strict conservation of the social structure and its hierarchization. The project of Plato as a whole did not materialize, the ancient world emerged from the crisis on the basis of the Roman (a modification of the ancient Egyptian - an attempt failed) and Christ (turned into a biblical - a classical neutralizing transformation of the protest-emancipatory project into a hierarchical control, an attempt failed); However, some elements of the Platonic project were removed in a removed form both in the biblical and in the communist.
Much of the Platonic project today is clearly the court of the late capitalist “iron heel”, which organizes a global re-sorting-culling of mankind during the crisis / dismantling of bourgeois democracy, as well as politics and statehood, and this has been the case for the last decades of corporatocracy and its supranational structures and clubs. It was corporatocracy that brought the “biblical project” to a logical end by globalizing it (the tragic end of the project is the American adventure in Iraq, in the Middle East, the project finishes where it started) and turned the American republic into “neoimperia” (Chalmers Johnson).
However, by bringing capitalism to the finish line, globalization turns out to be a pyrrhic victory of corporatocracy — apparently, the last, “hyper-bourgeois”, stadial-historical faction of the bourgeoisie. Corporatocracy "sharpened" by external expansion, under the global extensive; globalization was at the same time its social “sharpening”, instrument and goal. Now the goal has been achieved and the question is: does a corporatocracy suit as a layer for transferring socio-economic arrows from the outer to the inner loop, from exploitation — economic destruction of the South to “intra-northern” exploitation, where, by the way, it is opposed by all the same people from the South, only in contrast to the white social atomized population, organized into communities and clans and able to respond to the pressure of power and, in turn, put pressure on it, and on the white population. Or will it in any way slow down this process? The answer to this question, or at least hints of it, we will receive, watching first of all the struggle for power in the American elite. And, of course, it is necessary to take into account the effect on this process of what C. Johnson called “blowback” —that is, the world’s response to half a century of pressure on it from the United States (cf. the situation of the Roman Empire after Trajan).
So what do we see? Due to the functionalization / “dematerialization” (or “deification”) of the most important elements of the productive forces, the basic metaphysical contradiction of capitalism, between substance and function, which determines the physical, is their matrix, fades away. Along with him, capitalism that has engulfed the whole world and embraced by the excitement of self-devouring is dying out - he would have to sing (according to Vladimir Vysotsky) "horses are a little slower," but he rushes like the Gogol troika, only in it is not Russia, but capitalism is a change of fate.
The industrial system has approached its production limit (I’m not even talking about the demographic and environmental aspects; moreover, in this article I don’t touch on the problem of resources); it is not industrial, but the hyperindustrial system sets the tone, but, paradoxically, since the capsystem has become global, hyperindustrial production has no markets. Structures and mass strata come into decay, and those connected with the industrial production system are the nation-state, the middle class, and the working class. For them, and therefore for the system as a whole, the end of progress has come. And this means the crisis of the progressive ideologies of liberalism and Marxism, the crisis of ideology, the crisis of the geoculture of the Enlightenment, science and especially education — it collapses partly spontaneously, partly consciously; The Bologna system puts an end to the university as a modern phenomenon. Over the past half century (the Cold War, globalization), real power has shifted from the public-legal sphere to the backroom, illegal, secret. The corporatocracy and the corporation-state actively use conspiracy structures in the dismantling of capitalism, cutting off an increasing part of the population from the “public pie”. All this draws a line under the era of Modernity and under capitalism. However, does this trait promise a bright future for the masters of the modern world? Far from it. Starting the dismantling of capitalism, they opened the Fount of the Abyss, woke such a famously, such forces that could sweep them away. How? Before answering this question, it makes sense to look into the past - at the macrosocial crises of the past, more precisely, at the historical types of systemic crises, of which there were not so many (types) - three, and it looks like all of them are our near future, so to speak, our everything.
Three crises
The first type of crisis is the crisis of late feudalism, the crisis of the “long XVI century” (1453 – 1648). In the middle of the XIV century. a plague epidemic swept across Europe, killing 20 from its 60 million population. As a result, the "bargain" position of the peasant in relation to the feudal lord sharply increased - there was a shortage of hands. For 30 – 40 years, the lords attempted to force the former state of affairs back by force, again leading the “mean blacks” to submission. The answer was not long in coming. In the 1378 – 1382 years, the revolts of the “white caps” in France roll, the Wat Tyler in England and the compies in Florence. In fact, it was a popular anti-feudal revolution that broke the back of feudalism and its ruling strata. Under the pressure of peasants and burghers, the seniors found themselves in a situation where the threat of loss of status, privileges, and a part of wealth and transformation at the very top of a peasant or burgher paradise loomed ahead. The alternative is to cede part of the privileges to the traditional opponent, i.e. central authority, to the king. It was a lesser evil, and it was chosen.
As a result, in the XV century. centralized structures of a very repressive type start to appear - “new monarchies” (Louis XI in France, Henry VII in England, which begin not only to limit the know, but also to crush the lower classes. A state emerges (more precisely lo stato - this term “launched” by Machiavelli ), which turned out to be a dual-purpose social weapon: the royal power against the nobility and the royal power and the nobility - against the lower classes. With the emergence of the state coincided the discovery of America and, as a result, the design of the new international division of labor which the upper strata won, and the military revolution.All this dramatically changed the social situation - the uprising began on the bottoms.In the course of this offensive, which was based on the formation of a new international division of labor (the North Atlantic world-system) and the military revolution, the ex-seniors became partly post-feudal nobility of a non-bourgeois type, partly into the proto-bourgeoisie — the system-forming elements of a special system in the history of Europe — the Old Order, which is neither feudal nor bourgeois, and therefore turned out to be launched in the liberal and Marxist theories (or rather, mythologies) stories.
The way of forming this order was religious wars, under which the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648) and the Westphalian World (1648) led the way. Studies show that 80 – 90% of families that controlled Europe in 1453, retained their power in 1648. Thus, during the crisis of the “long 16th century”, the late feudal elite carried out a successful systemic transgression, translating, transferring themselves to the future and preserving privileges and wealth through the creation of a new system. Naturally, this was not a conscious project, social instincts worked, but they worked in the right direction. Late feudal elite did not allow the lower classes to demolish themselves and brought down a new system on them. In the latter, it took the place of the "capitalist" (in the sense - connected with the world market) nobility, and later - in the first half of the XIX century. - partly transformed into the bourgeoisie, partly gave way to her, merging with her.
The second type of crisis is late antique. If the lords (feudal lords) managed to retain power by creating a new system and becoming the aristocracy of the North Atlantic world-system and "capitalists against their will" (Lachman), then the late anti-dominant groups were swept away (with their system and civilization) by the double blow of Arnold Toynbee would call the union "the inner and outer proletariat." If the seniors, roughly speaking, put the external environment into their service, then the external environment swept away the rotten late Antique top: the ancient periphery flooded the ancient center. Here there is a combination of internal (decline in economic efficiency, disintegration of social ties, degradation of the ruling elite, decline of its cultural hegemony, barbarization of society, demographic crisis) and external - the Great Migration of Nations - crises.
The barbarians destroyed the internally already barbarized world. At the same time, the mass of barbarians was actually “fed up” by the Romans at the borders - surprisingly favorable conditions were created for them in terms of demography! Germanic tribes settled in the border with the permission of Rome (so he avoided wars with them), received the status of "federates" (allies) - and enjoyed the fruits of imperial culture, moving on to more productive agriculture. And multiplied rapidly. For several centuries of such a policy, the barbarians intensified and attacked Rome, destroying a highly developed culture and plunging Europe at that time into the darkness of ignorance and fragmentation. Late anti-crisis is a crisis without a future, or a crisis with a strongly delayed future: the level of development of ancient society of the 1st – 2nd centuries. AD Europe reached in the XI – XIII centuries, and for a number of indicators - only in the XVI – XVII centuries.
The third type of crisis - the worst, the longest - is the Upper Paleolithic crisis. It began about 25 thousand years ago and ended in 10 – 8 thousand years BC. the so-called "Neolithic revolution", i.e. lasted about 15 for thousands of years, 150 centuries is not the first five "dark centuries" of Europe (V – IX centuries) or three centuries of the second "dark centuries" (mid-XIV - middle of the XVII centuries). The crisis of the Upper Paleolithic was a crisis of the appropriating economy — first and foremost a highly specialized hunt for a large beast, which provided a high level of excess product and, consequently, significant demographic growth. At some point, the population and resources came into conflict and the crisis began - economic, demographic, ecological, social, i.e. total systemic crisis, which was aggravated by the deterioration of natural and climatic conditions. The result is a decrease in the population of 75 – 85%, social degradation, primitivization of art, 150 of centuries of the most severe struggle of people for survival - with nature and other people. The transition to a producing economy — agriculture and cattle breeding — did not come from a good life, it was an adaptation to the conditions of the crisis. As a result of this adaptation, a world has emerged in which we still live and which, apparently, ends its existence before our eyes. I will clarify my point.
XXI century - "crisis matryoshka", or the decline of the West in the "hole of history"
If you try to correlate the systemic crisis in which capitalism creeps in with the crises of the past, you get a disappointing picture: the global crisis carries the characteristics of all three crises mentioned above in “one package”, it is a “matryoshka crisis”, or, if you like, “ domino crisis ”, where one type of crisis automatically pulls the other along,“ including ”the whole chain.
As we remember, the Late Feudal crisis is the dismantling of the existing system in the interests of the dominant groups. If we agree that since the middle of the 1970s, capitalism has been dismantled in the interest of its dominant groups, then we get an analogy with the crisis of the “long XVI century”. With the only difference that the current global “uprising of elites”, unlike the “North Atlantic” in the 16th century, takes place on a scientific basis, it is implemented on the basis of the development of numerous “thought factories”, etc. The essence is the same. With one essential difference: the crisis of the XVI century. was an internal European crisis, in which the periphery is barbaric, i.e. the periphery, which is at a lower level, practically did not participate in any way, did not threaten the society, and it was precisely this lack of an external threat that largely determined success. (In fact, this periphery was not - the West itself was at that time a periphery.)
The current situation is different. The global system is divided into the core (North, "neo-empire") and the periphery (South, non-barbarial zone). Like almost two thousand years ago, this happened in the Roman Empire, when Rome stimulated the demographic growth of the barbarians who settled along the perimeter of its borders, the West in the 20th century. provoked a world, population explosion, or rather, a population explosion on the periphery. And most of this huge socio-biomass that has grown today is not simply cut off from the “public pie”, but generally pushed out of social life. I mean the so-called "slum people", the number of which reached a billion people.
Slum "cities" are becoming the main conurbations in many countries of the South. These are zones of poverty and self-replicating social decay. As sociologist Michael Davis noted, “the brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization after 1978 is similar to the catastrophic process that first created the“ third world ”during the late Victorian capitalism (1870 – 1900 years)”, but today the situation is much worse and more hopeless: the era of peasant wars and national- behind the liberation movements, ahead are much more terrible conflicts of a socially disorganized population, slum people, with a socially disorganized one.
According to forecasts, between 2030 and 2040 for years, the number of Slumland will reach 2 billion (with a population of the planet - 8 billion). According to experts, neither ecologically, nor socio-economically, nor psychologically such numbers, such concentration, such deprivation and rejection can the world endure the slums, and its inhabitants will spill out into the outside world, rushing to where it is clean and light. And this will be worse than the Great Migration of the Nations of the 5th – 7th centuries. The slums will begin to storm at first the more prosperous countries of the South itself, and then, sweeping away the “buffer states” —Europe, North America, and, apparently, Russia. Here they will go beaten in the twentieth century. by migrants from the South. Moreover, people from the South to the North - and according to the forecast, in 2020 – 2030. they will constitute 30 – 40% of the population of the largest cities of the North, i.e. his “underclass” is the objective allies of the new waves of migrants from Slumland. Before us is the link of the “internal proletariat” and the “external proletariat”, directed against the socially organized population of the North.
There is another very important aspect. The bulk of the population of the South (including the world of slums), on the one hand, and the “southern” segment of the North, on the other hand, are young people. In a recent book, Sons and World Domination: The Role of Terrorism in the Rise and Fall of Nations, Gunnar Gainson writes that demographic failure occurs when there are less than 80 boys in the population of 100 men of 40 – 44 age. This is the situation in Western Europe (for example, in Germany - 50 on 100, i.e. demographic failure). In the South, the situation is diametrically opposite: in the Gaza Strip (Palestine) this is 464 on 100, in Afghanistan - 403 on 100, in Somalia - 364 on 100, in Iraq - 354 on 100. It is clear that the South is the demographic future of the world: from 1900 to 2000, the population of the Islamic world grew from 150 million to 1 200 million - 800% growth; China - from 400 million to 1 200 million - 300% growth; India - from 250 million to 1 000 million - 400% growth. And, I repeat, a large part of this biomass is youth. And in the North, the majority of people from the South are young. But it is well known that as soon as the number of young people in society reaches 25 – 30%, an explosion of violence occurs. John Goldstone showed it well in his study of the Reformation and the Peasant War in Germany of the XVI century, but here also include the French revolution 1789 – 1799, almost all the revolutions of the twentieth century. The migration of the “southerners” to the North is primarily the migration of young people.
Thus, at the very core of the capsystem, we have, on the one hand, a full, white, atomized Christian (formally, since the current West is already not only post-Western, but also post-Christian society, which “tolerance” and “political correctness” do not allow to protect their culture and their values both from their “minorities” and from alien external forces) the population is mainly elderly and middle-aged, on the other - hungry, feeling deprived and rejected, color, community-based or clan-organized, slit all the Muslim, young, with an obvious taste for violence and crime population.
The outcome of the confrontation is generally clear, even without an invasion of slums. About the prospects of white Europeans, the writer Sergey Helemendik says: “They have already ended their existence in history, they are no longer there. While they are sitting in their banks and looking at crispy pieces of paper, Albanians, slowed down by centuries of cave incest from the centuries-old cave incest, happy at the opportunity to dilute their excessively thick blood, seized their streets. At the same time, it must be remembered that migrants from the South are often organized not only in a clan way, but also criminal ones, which further aggravates the situation, reinforcing the tendency for non-avarvarization and neoarchaization.
Thus, it is already clear that the attempt of the Western elites to conduct a transgression like the “long XVI century” will not succeed - the crisis of the late feudal type smoothly but irreversibly flows into the crisis of the late Antique type and almost simultaneously with the “uprising of the elite” in the core of the capsystem and its peripheral enclaves begins the uprising of the lower classes, threatening to grow into either a global social revolution (if they find allies in socially higher groups), or a global revolt. This is a serious problem that the global “backstage” will have to solve, and it is already clear that neither the reduction of the population of the South and the poor in general is “evolutionary” (family planning programs) or “revolutionary” (from forced sterilization to things like AIDS), nor Attempts to resolve the issue with the help of controlled chaos, by inciting the Muslims to Russia, China or - less likely - India, will not give any result.
Moreover, the late-type crisis pulls behind itself another one - like the Upper Paleolithic type. Capitalism, in contrast to feudalism and slavery, is not local, but a world (now global) system, and the systemic crisis of such a society can only be global and total, encompassing ecology, demography, etc. and turning the social systemic crisis into a crisis, as it was at the end of the Upper Paleolithic, of the relationship between Society and Nature, into a crisis of the biosphere and the genus Homo sapiens. Capitalism in its current state is incompatible with the normal functioning of the biosphere. And although many environmental horror stories paid for by interested TNCs and have no relation to reality, the situation is very serious.
"Nesting Crisis" can not be avoided - we are already in it. But we must try to reduce it and the “dark ages” that follow it, and go through both periods with minimal losses for the human race, society and culture, since the crisis in question involves a number of serious losses that are incomparable with the losses which threatened late feudal and late anti-crisis crises. The closest analogy is the Upper Paleolithic crisis, but the current situation is much more dangerous: a huge population; stocks of terrible deadly weapons that are objectively available to small groups and even loners; accumulated social hatred, tied with a tight knot with racial, national, confessional - “this is now breaking!”
Three explosions, three problems of the XXI century
The first explosion is associated with the size of the population: the destructive possibilities of humanity are growing along with the creative ones, said Stanislav Lem, and sometimes overtake them. The Upper Paleolithic crisis destroyed 75 – 85% of the population. The present - objectively - should relieve the current demographic pressure on the planet’s resources, on the biosphere, this can be up to 90% of the population (7 billion from 8 billion). But even if the rate of global “cleansing”, “re-sorting” and “culling” of humanity will be lower, the results of the reduction in the number of those weapons of mass destruction that may impose such an imprint on the population will cause such a blow to the gene pool that will cause it psychophysical degeneration, i.e. degeneration of man as a species.
The second explosion is a global, globalized criminalization. Social crises, especially systemic ones, are always accompanied by breaking social rules — criminalization is growing. At a minimum, this means that the old society is beginning to die - its control mechanisms do not work, as a maximum - a new society is beginning to emerge, and in a criminal, asocial form. A significant part of the world's population will be able - and will - “break out of the social hell” (Fernand Braudel) of the transgression, having gathered together in packs. So, blurring the boundaries of a normal life, the association of a post-crisis society is another potential explosion of the 21st century.
The third explosion is connected with this. During periods of acute social crises, the social is muffled and the role of what is called the biological component in human behavior increases dramatically. In fact, strictly speaking, we should talk not so much about the biologization of social processes (although outwardly it often looks like this), as about the coming to the forefront of pre-human forms of sociality (“non-social animals do not exist” - “Espinas rule”), zoosociality. Crisis epochs are epochs of heightened zoosociality, when in a person, in a society, like a pre-human past shoots.
In different epochs in man, the social and biological, zoosocial (pre-human sociality) and the sociality of the human are in different ways. In crisis and revolutionary epoch, predatory, antisocial individuals jump out of the nooks and ends of a man-made creature like a troll from a snuffbox. “The social revolution is arranged not by the“ social lower classes ”, but by the biological scum of humanity,” wrote Ivan Solonevich. Of course, the revolution is a more complicated process than the release of zoosociality, but on the whole, Solonevich recorded a very important feature that can be seen in all revolutions - from the French (this was remarkably shown by Ippolit Ten) to the Russians, the communist 1917 of the year and the anti-communist 1991 of the year.
Of course, the release of “biology”, of zoosociality during crisis epochs, occurs according to social laws; another thing is that these laws are implemented in different ways during normal and crisis epochs and they are implemented by individuals with different ratios of anthroposocial and zoosocial (“biological”). The time of crises is the time mainly of reptile people, homozavrov. This is not a metaphor, but a fixation of reality related to the historical structure of the human brain. In the middle of 1990, I wrote about it in “The Bells of History” (M., 1996. - p. 352 – 353; see Sagan K. Dragons of Eden. - M., 1986), so here I will repeat in brief .
According to Paul MacLean, morphologically the oldest part of the brain is the P-complex (reptile brain), inherited from the reptiles — the first creatures whose information in the brain exceeds that in the genes. The next evolutionary system, accumulating on the reptile brain and enclosing it according to the matryoshka principle, is the limbic brain, it is an achievement of mammals. And finally, the neocortex is a new bark that is a human, “too human” contribution. There is a division of labor between the three brain structures. The neocortex is responsible for specifically human (volitional, purposeful) efforts, including the use of signs, anticipation of events, empathy and a number of other functions. The limbic system, in the depths of which the pituitary gland is located, generates vivid emotions associated with the joy of discovering the new (creativity), with the aesthetic perception of the world, with altruistic behavior, taste perception, creativity. Finally, the reptile brain plays an important role in aggressive, ritual and territorial behavior, in establishing a group hierarchy, including through sexual behavior (control over females, controlling access to them) and control over territory. There are no feedbacks, most often there is the passionless implementation of any behavior dictated either by one of the hemispheres or by genes and instincts.
Of course, there are no such people for whom only one of the three brains would act - everyone works, but with different power, and therefore the ratio of the brains, their hierarchy-subordination is different for different people. People with the dominance of the P-complex - homozavry.
One of the main tasks of the social system is to ensure the “neocortex” behavior of human beings and control that social relations, especially production, do not break through the social behavior of the reptilian type in its pure, directly-natural form (indirectly, it is embodied in many social institutions and practices ). In normal times, society as a whole copes with this task. However, in the epoch of crises and revolutions, when the “century has been sprained”, and the norms and institutions are breaking down, a reptilian-type breakthrough occurs, its massive exit to the historical scene - greetings from Paleozoic.
Predators of various sizes, a scum in the strict sense of the word - this is the shock force of any revolution, any crisis. In post-crisis times, a significant part of homozavr is shot, they are replaced by smaller predators - thieves (direct examples are the Directory in France, the post-Stalinist thieving nomenclature in the USSR), social life becomes less dangerous and more systemic and limits reptilian behavior.
The global crisis in which the capsystem creeps in will cause a global outburst of homozosaurs with their biology and zoosociality at all levels - from top to bottom - and will dramatically increase their role and, therefore, the role of biosociality in social processes. Many features of this process are already visible in the changed exterior of movie heroes (greetings from the Stone Age), advertising of demonstratively asocial behavior on TV, aggressive forms of homosexuality and feminism.
So, the global crisis may well put on the agenda the question of the genus Homo. Since the crisis will proceed under the conditions of the struggle of a growing population for diminishing resources (including food and water), in its conditions the question of population reduction will arise - the question is, if not biosocial, then socio-biological. Homo had already passed this during the Upper Paleolithic crisis and “passed through” (with huge losses) in 15 – 20 thousand years. Then, however, the crisis was of a total-local, not global nature; there was no single planetary humanity; Earth was not stuffed with nuclear power plants, enterprises with hazardous production, nuclear, biological, chemical and other weapons. However, as the example of Hutu and Tutsi shows, the regional genocide can be quite organized with the help of ordinary weapons, having armed AKM 12 – 14-year-old children.
The ending of the global crisis of capitalism (especially in the conditions of geological activity forecasted by the geologists for the second half of the 21st century, the likelihood of a change in the slope of the earth's axis, the onset of the new ice age, now no longer small, etc.) may turn out to be a struggle of Homo and the biosphere , and inside Homo itself - Homo sapiens and Homo robustus - according to the principle of "who is whom." In order to get through the crisis, we need a fundamentally new philosophy of relations with nature, we need to rethink, and not just rethink (unthink, not rethink) not only the Enlightenment geoculture, but also Christianity with medieval theology and ancient philosophy, starting from its fathers - founders in other intellectual ways - taking into account all or almost all intellectual and political mistakes made in the subject stream of historical development over the past 25 centuries. New philosophy should be alternative European, but European, and not borrowing from Buddhism, Hinduism or Confucianism: “eternal rest is for the gray pyramids,” we need the Promethean-Faustian spirit of burning — we stand and cannot do otherwise.
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 also the entire post-Zeolithic civilization. And if humanity succeeds, even if having reduced in number to 0,5 – 1,0 billion, to survive it, then the new society is likely to be different from Civilization (Pyramid World - in the sense that the Egyptian pyramids are the main symbol of the entire post-Neolithic era) how it differed from the Paleolithic. Some of the contours of the post-critical world are already visible, but this is beyond the scope of this article.
The crisis in which the late capitalist world crawled in (for us, like pagans suffering from the plagues of Christianity, this late capitalist crisis began with the collapse of Soviet anti-capitalism) is objective. The real task is to go through it with minimal losses and as quickly as possible, not allowing it to stretch for thousands of years, but to shorten it to a half to two centuries. I remember the Azimov Academy (Foundation), where, according to the mathematician Seldon, the collapse of the galactic empire because of its objective nature could not be avoided, but the crisis “dark ages” could be reduced from thirty thousand to one. Of course, fantasy is fantasy, and reality is reality, but in our life they are closely intertwined - and the farther, the more.
New ethics and new knowledge - the shield and the sword against the "civilization" changed
What can be opposed to the crisis, to which ethics has changed and moneylenders with their vulgar materialism and elevated to the rank of the highest value successful gesheft? First, the new ethics - Kshatri-Brahmin, the ethics of soldiers and priests. In all other societies, except Western European, the traditional aristocracy knew how to infer social rot, extinguished its growth. In Europe in the XVII – XVIII centuries. the aristocracy treated by Protestantism, and then by the Enlightenment itself, became infected with “new values” and could not resist, at first, ingratiating, and then more and more brazenly, “lending percent civilization”.
New ethics require certain conditions. A sufficient condition is the power will of a fundamentally new world elite, “sharpened” precisely under the collective passage of the crisis. Someone will say: the emergence of such an elite is fantastic. And the appearance of the Stalinist elite as the only means of the sovereign survival of Russia and the Russians in the world of the 20th century. - this is not fiction?
However, in addition to a sufficient condition - will - there is a necessary - reason, knowledge. We need fundamentally new content and a new organized knowledge of the modern world as a whole and as a combination of elements (including Russia). We need knowledge about the upper and lower levels of the modern world, about the criminal global economy, about the forms of manipulation of the historical process and much more. The modern Western science of society, the triad "economics - sociology - political science", reflecting the realities of the outgoing world and not able to not only explain, but even adequately describe the crucial world - is just as impotent as the Soviet ismatmat, and possibly worse. Not to mention the fact that there is no neutral knowledge, that the current science of society (as media, cinema, etc.) reflects the interests of corporatocracy and their “sixes” all over the world and in all spheres - from power to science.
Getting out of the crisis involves the creation of new knowledge, fundamentally new disciplines (or epistemological programs), with new methodologies and new research subjects. We are to in a short time (time does not wait) to develop an adequate theory of capitalism as a special case of the theory of social systems, methodologically built on the denial of, first of all, the heritage of the bourgeois XIX century. - the triad "economics - sociology - political science"; This is the path of criticism of political economy, which Marx moved to work on Capital, and which he never went to the end, and the Marxists, with very few exceptions that do not make the weather, turned away from it altogether.
Based on this theory, we have to rethink much in the question of the relationship between subject and system, “project-conscious” and “natural” in history, above all - in its crucial epochs when the project and decisions of a small group “weigh” no less than mass rush We will have to revise the entire geoculture of the Enlightenment and many Christian ideas, especially all that relates to biology, the “natural nature” of man in its various dimensions. And for this you will need to seriously delve into ancient philosophy. Of course, this is easier said than done, but there is no other way out. It is the creation of new knowledge, in the center of which is the Great Breakthrough of the 21st century, the formation of “ominous intellectual superiority” (Karl Polanyi) over the enemy, and there is a front line in the struggle to get out of the crisis for the maximum number of people in the shortest possible time, for a more egalitarian and a just world, rather than a capitalist or any new edition of neo-mastery in the form of a globash-fascist caste system, consecrated by neo-Judaism (a synthesis, or simply a mixture of Protestantism, Judaism and Masonic ideas) or occultism.
And, of course, for the preservation of the Russian world and Russianness in the post-critical world, since it seems that Russia is preparing the role of the main theater of military operations (economic, social and information warfare). Is it necessary to once again drag chestnuts out of the fire for someone else's uncle? It is necessary to be very clearly aware of your interests in a crucial era and fight for them as for your historical truth, guided by the principle “Do not believe. Do not be afraid. Do not ask". In this case, there is hope that we will overcome the crisis in which the World of the Pyramids is immersed, pass - and help others, those who deserve. And then it will happen as the largest figure in our history said: “Our cause is just. The enemy will be defeated. Victory will be ours".
Fursov Andrei Ilich (born 1951), Cand. ist sciences. Director of the Institute of Russian Studies, Moscow University for the Humanities. He has written about 200 scientific publications, including 9 monographs, including: “Kratocracy (the social nature of Soviet-type societies)”, “The Great Mystery of the West”, “Capitalism in the antinomy of East-West”, “The Bells of History”, “Big Charlie” , or about Marx and Marxism "," The Break of Communism "," Saeculum vicesimum: In memoriam (In memory of the twentieth century) "," Russian power, Russia and Eurasia ", etc.
- Andrei Fursov
- http://postmodernity.vv.si/mir-kotoryj-my-pokidaem-mir-v-kotoryj-my-vstupaem-i-mir-mezhdu-nimi/
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