/View.info/ The modern world is quite strictly structured. At the top are those that French philosopher and economist Jacques Attali calls neo-nomads. These are rich people who change their place of residence, move from Europe to America, from Hong Kong to Singapore. At the bottom are the poor people who migrate from Africa to Europe. They are mobile and have nothing.
Sandwiched between the rich neo-nomads and the poor are the middle class and the working class. These people live stationary, they are the object of exploitation, payment of taxes. In Europe, they support Africans, Arabs and Kurds with their deductions in the budget. When the German youth leaves for New Zealand or Canada, she says in plain text: we don’t want to feed the newcomers. It is clear that the world economy will deal with the crisis precisely at the expense of the middle part of humanity, those from whom it can be taken and taken away.
Capitalism is experiencing a systemic crisis. There is no means of solving the problems before him – they are unsolvable within the framework of this system. Capitalism is an extensively oriented system, it resolves its contradictions by taking them outside its own framework. Every time the world norm has to be lowered, a “piece” is torn off from the non-capitalist areas and becomes a capitalist periphery – an area for the sale of goods, raw materials and cheap labor. The rate of profit begins to rise and so on until the next crisis. But in 1991, with the destruction of the USSR and the social camp, that is, the zone of systemic anti-capitalism, there are no non-capitalist zones left – capitalism is everywhere. Now I have nowhere to transfer my problems – he has exhausted the planet.
In the West, the middle class has been completely broken by the neoliberal counter-revolution, and as the crisis progresses, it will shrink and its situation will worsen. Another is that social “fat” has accumulated – largely due to the looting of the Third World, which today we call “the South”. Therefore, the western middle layer also has a certain reserve of time, but historically it is not large. In any case, it will die before capitalism.
As for Russia, we do not have the middle class, or rather the middle class as a significant social group. There is one in the USSR, but the Yeltsin government destroys it.
If in 1989 in Eastern Europe, including the European part of the USSR, 14 million people lived below the poverty line, then in 1996 they were already 168 million. In the UN report on poverty issued at the very beginning of the 21st century, this is called the most large-scale and terrible pogrom of the middle class in the twentieth century. This is larger than what was created by the “structural reforms” carried out in the 1980s at the behest of the IMF in Latin America. In fact, it is a global expropriation of the assets of the middle class, which is an integral part of the neoliberal counter-revolution after 1980, which started in the West with Thatcherism and Reaganomics and reached us in the form of Yeltsinism.
We have no prospects not only for development, but also for the emergence of any significant middle class. The social scheme of the Russian Federation works against this. The so-called creative class, the main part of which is the “office plankton”, has nothing to do with creativity, nor with the real middle class.
I think the revolution of the middle layer is hardly possible. Moreover, for the last 30 years in the West, especially in Western Europe, a layer has been formed with which the authorities – both the Brussels supranational Eurobureaucrats and the national state bureaucracies – can direct the “average”. We mean the lower strata, the new “dangerous classes” represented by the migrants from the South and the East. Rather, something else is possible: support from the middle layers of right-wing, authoritarian, nationalist regimes.
The rise of China was initially associated with the interest of the collective West in the struggle against the USSR. For 10 years (1969–1979), the PRC demonstrated its willingness to play on the side of the West against the USSR, becoming a workshop for the US. The interest was mutual. In the 1970s, the United States was in crisis. By the way, I am convinced: during this decade, the USSR missed the chance to “throw away” the USA, the well-guarded and stupid Soviet elite, lulled by the pro-Western advisers of the leaders, ate the oil money and the future of the country… China was interested in the inflow of capital. This became one of the foundations of the “Chinese miracle” of the 1990s and 2000s.
But the United States did not calculate: China “rushed” forward much stronger, and America gained a competitor. The dollar also got a competitor, especially since there are people at the top of the world who would like to “let it go” and switch to, for example, a “basket of currencies” with the gold yuan leading. After all, in America, even for a significant part of the Anglo-American elite, it did not work out.
I call the program to dismantle capitalism “the three Ds”: deindustrialization, depopulation, and derationalization (of behavior and consciousness). In fact, the dismantling of capitalism and the neoliberal counter-revolution (1980-2010) as its first phase (the next phase should logically be the abolition of the market as an institution and its replacement by monopoly) mean an attempt to stop history and then return to the pre-capitalist past: a world of industrial-hyper-industrial enclaves surrounded by caste-slave-feudal zones. Capitalism is a balance between monopoly and market. Eliminating the market with the help of monopoly turns capital into power, which in the post-capitalist world, taking into account the role of information factors, is power over information flows and the psychosphere.
What the post-capitalist world will really be depends on the course and results of the struggle in the crisis of the 21st century. One of the main weapons in the fight for the future, for a way out of the crisis, is knowledge about the world. The problem, however, is that today the structures that provide knowledge about the world – the research institutions and the analytical departments of the intelligence services – are increasingly inadequate. Modern social science increasingly resembles scholasticism in the late Middle Ages. Scientists have been replaced by experts – those who know more and more about less and less.
The West has succeeded in imposing its vision of reality, its “grid” of social sciences on the entire world. In Japan, for example, only those Japanese who are published in Anglo-Saxon journals are cited. There are, of course, some flamboyant attempts to change this state of affairs. For example, the 1978 book Orientalism by Edward Said, who can be considered the “scientific Khomeini”. Unfortunately, this work is little known among Russian Orientalists.
Said writes that modern Orientalism is not a science at all, but a “power of knowledge.” The West “orientalizes” the East, depriving the latter of the qualities it possessed. Since the time of Alexander the Great, the East has been interpreted as backward. The East is a society in which there is no private property, free cities, and a free type of personality. That is, the East is defined as a negative cast of the West.
Thus, the latter with the help of his science (imposed on others from his picture of the world) does approximately the same as with the help of economics. That is, in economics, the core of the capitalist system (the West) alienates the product from the “Non-West” (the periphery of the capital system), and with the help of science, space and time are alienated from the same periphery. Thus we have before us a subtle instrument of global hegemony.
The existing classical triad of social sciences really works only in “the study of only one social system – the capitalist one, and in particular its North Atlantic bourgeois core”. Therefore, modern social sciences are not suitable for the purposes of Russian rise and development. Alas, indigenous social sciences are heavily dependent on the West. So far, we haven’t found our own Saeed, breaking harmful stereotypes. Most local researchers slavishly use foreign theories.
Reading the memoirs of Gorbachev’s Perestroika by all sorts of Chernyaevs, Shakhnazarovs and others, I see: from the simplicity of their souls they excitedly write that even in the 60s they were disappointed with Marxism-Leninism and how they incorporate ideas from sociology and political science into their reports to the Secretaries-General. Of course they are partly lying, but only partly. Look what is happening: advisers to the leaders of the USSR in the 1960s are embedding in our knowledge the ideas of our main enemy! There is no such thing as neutral knowledge. If you start looking at the world through someone else’s eyes, you start acting in someone else’s interest. As Tacitus said, he who lowers his eyes first loses the battle. That was exactly the situation.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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