New global social revolution. "I have to say a 'terrible' thing: the world is on the verge of a new social revolution." The decline in the value of labor
The global chaos caused in the 1980s by the imperialist aggression of American fascism against all mankind testifies daily that the objective laws of a world-wide social revolution are operating on the globe, writes Doctor of Historical Sciences Juozas Ermalavičius.
At one time, the founder of the scientific worldview, K. Marx, wrote about the laws of social revolutions: have been developed so far. From the forms of development of the productive forces, these relations are transformed into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution takes place more or less quickly in the entire vast superstructure. Social revolutions ensure that the social way of life of peoples conforms to the objective requirements of the progressive development of their material productive forces.
The current world social revolution is objectively called into action by the world scientific and technological revolution of the second half of the 20th century. Compared with the agrarian and industrial revolutions that preceded it, the scientific and technological revolution turned out to be the greatest in the development of the total productive forces of mankind. It represents a qualitative transformation of the productive forces of society on the basis of the gradual transformation of science into its direct productive force. This entailed fundamental changes in the material, technical, production and technological foundation of the life of the world community of peoples, since science is the universal social productive force of all mankind.
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The world scientific and technological revolution is characterized by the direct connection of science with material production, which provides the scientific basis for production, contributing to a significant increase in its level of development. The scientific and technological revolution has opened up opportunities for creating material production of a completely new technical and technological level of development - science-intensive production. But proper realization of the newest possibilities for the scientific and technical improvement of social production turned out to be impossible under the conditions of the capitalist mode of production, limited by the fetters of private ownership of the means of production.
The emergence of science as a direct productive force of society ensured the rise of its productive forces to a qualitatively new level of development. On this basis, the socialization of production acquired a worldwide scale and global character. Correspondingly, the interrelation and interaction of all social phenomena, relations, processes, tendencies were globalized, which significantly complicated their functioning. The scientific management of their social development has become a primary necessity in the life of peoples. Satisfaction of this social need of society presupposes the purposeful use of the objective laws of its development in the practice of its life activity.
The scientific organization of material production is called upon to ensure that the nature of society's production relations corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, which is really possible and necessary in the socialist mode of production. The scientific basis of production requires a scientific substantiation of the entire organization of the life of society, which implies the observance and use of the objective laws of social development in the specific practice of social creativity. The scientific management of social processes is capable of overcoming the economic and social element, replacing it with the harmonization of the entire system of social relations, which characterizes the socialist organization of the life of society. On the whole, science provides limitless possibilities for the development of production up to sufficient satisfaction of the human needs of the entire population of the globe, which presupposes the building of a communist society.
The world scientific and technological revolution is a qualitative leap in the historical development of mankind. Turning science into a direct productive force of society, it radically renews the material basis of the life of the peoples of the globe and urgently requires a corresponding transformation of their social order of life. The scientific and technological revolution opened up opportunities and provided the prerequisites for the peoples to reach the highest stage of human civilization, free from social inequality and antagonism, based on the communist principles of collectivism and humanism. At the same time, science presents humanity with new requirements for the organization of all spheres of its life on a scientific basis. Therefore, scientific understanding and scientific substantiation of the life of society have become the primary factor in the progressive life of people.
The world scientific and technological revolution objectively determined the strategy for the further historical movement of mankind in the long term. Having received a scientific basis, the dynamics of the social progress of peoples has acquired unlimited possibilities for improving material production, social maturation, and spiritual enrichment. The primary necessary need and strategic task of the international community has become the complete mastery of science-intensive production, which ensures the comprehensive automation of production processes and the achievement of higher labor productivity. The solution of this most important task involves the further socialization and humanization of social relations, contributing to the comprehensive development of a person's personality, enriching his ability for highly productive work, stimulating creative search in social life.
Revolutionary shifts in material production objectively determine the necessary requirements for the social progress of mankind. His latest strategic goal was to fully master the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution. The scientific basis of production requires a scientific substantiation of the entire organization of the life of society, turning science into a leading factor in its social development. But not a single country on the planet has coped with the solution of these urgent strategic tasks. Because of the limitations of capitalism, the peoples of the world were unprepared to properly master the potential of the scientific and technological revolution. The social and spiritual maturity of the peoples lags behind the latest rise in scientific and technological progress. In addition, no country, taken separately, has the material power necessary for the proper mastery of expensive science-intensive technologies.
The growth of the objective possibilities and necessary needs of the historical progress of the peoples of the world due to the radical rise in the level of development of their material productive forces naturally insists on a revolutionary transformation of the entire system of people's social relations. The objective historical necessity of the coming social revolutions began to operate on the globe. In the 1970s, it caused another aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism and its development into a general world crisis of the entire old social way of life of mankind. The global crisis has become irreversible and landslide, prompting the general agony of the world capitalist system and the cessation of its existence. Therefore, the exit of peoples from the global crisis is directly related to their mastery of the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution.
The social and spiritual backwardness of society from the revolutionary leap in scientific and technological progress personifies the limitations of the private-property system of social relations. Private ownership of the means of production not only does not meet the latest needs of historical progress, but also accumulates a global crisis in the old social order of the world. As a result, an irreconcilable conflict arose between the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution and the private-property way of public life of peoples. Having found itself on the verge of an inevitable revolutionary explosion, private property can no longer serve as the basis for the formation of people's social relations. Thus, the scientific and technological revolution determined the acceleration of the disintegration of the private-property social life order of peoples. It prepared the way for socialist revolutions in all countries of the world.
The general world crisis is also marked by a significant intensification of the political reaction of imperialism, which is counting on a way out of this global turning point by the counter-revolutionary way of destroying socialism and restoring the undivided dominance of the capitalist social order on a planetary scale. But the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, the escalation of the military aggression of American fascism and its allies against many countries of Central Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa turned into the formation of global chaos, equivalent to a world revolutionary situation. Therefore, the extreme aggravation of the global crisis at the beginning of the 21st century in the international arena is followed by a gradual preponderance of social forces towards a way out of this all-encompassing catastrophic crisis. The coming wave of socialist revolutions, initially in the majority, and subsequently in the rest of the countries of the globe, must ensure that the nature of the production relations of society corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, and at the same time the transition of mankind from a privately owned civilization of social inequality and antagonism to a socialized life order of social freedom and equality.
The social consequences of the world scientific and technological revolution fully confirm the strategic forecasts of the founders of scientific communism. Revealing the essence of the capitalist mode of production, K. Marx came to the conclusion that "bourgeois production relations are the last antagonistic form of the social production process", since "the productive forces developing in the depths of bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for resolving this antagonism." On this basis, K. Marx summarized that "the prehistory of human society ends with the bourgeois social formation." F. Engels assumed the prospect of the practical implementation of this forecast as "the greatest revolution of all time." And V.I. Lenin, comprehending the impact of the Great October Socialist Revolution on the world historical process, stated that "the whole world is now moving on to such a movement that should give rise to a world socialist revolution." Finally, global chaos began to bury the capitalist socio-economic formation in the cemetery of history, freeing up space for the complete triumph of socialism. The worldwide triumph of socialism will be the greatest and last social revolution on planet earth. Only the complete triumph of socialism will ensure human life for the people.
Within the framework of the general systems theory, the "cold war" can be interpreted as a specific mechanism for managing a sufficiently long and stable international conflict situation. This phenomenon became possible in the conditions of such a global structure of international relations, where rather strict rules of the "great game" were guaranteed to function, where lines were clearly marked that could not be crossed, where confidential means of communication were laid, allowing opponents to negotiate even during the most acute phases of political and power clashes ...
"But today is not the same as yesterday..." The main stimulus of the current growing strategic uncertainty, growing ontological chaos is not so much competing geopolitical strategies, not the totality of what used to be called "social superstructure", not Putin and not Obama, not the CIA and not the FSB how much is a special phenomenon - "the sum of technologies", in the words of S. Lem.
The most important and most dangerous (for everyone without exception on our planet) is that no one, anywhere, actually controls the flow of these technologies: neither academics, nor intelligence generals, nor "responsible" state leaders.
We have entered the border zone that connects the present with the approaching future - the sixth technological order (TS), the contours of which are already beginning to shine through menacingly in some places ...
The sixth TU is mass, total, systemic, large-scale development and application of science-intensive "high technologies". The basis of the sixth TU should be biotechnologies and genetic engineering, intelligent information networks, superconductors and clean energy, nanotechnologies, membrane and quantum technologies, photonics, micromechanics, thermonuclear energy. A potential synthesis of discoveries in these areas should eventually lead to the creation of, for example, a quantum computer, artificial intelligence. That is why they talk about nano(N)-bio(B)-info(I)-cogno(C): NBIC-convergence.
Optimists argue that the eve of the "fourth industrial revolution" begins in this border zone, the main feature of which is the introduction of real "intelligent machines" that will almost completely replace a person in the field of low-skilled and even medium-skilled labor, including mental.
The use of these "robots" (some in the form of increasingly complex software) will be accompanied by a sharp increase in labor productivity in areas such as energy efficiency, transportation (for example, robotic machines), healthcare, mass production based on the introduction of 3D printing.
If the current pace of technical and economic development is maintained, the sixth TS will probably take shape more or less before 2025, and enter the phase of maturity in the 2040s.
Hypothetically, already from 2020, when the group of basic innovations of the sixth TU is fully formed, the world economy has a chance to enter the phase of "protracted recovery". Further, from the end of the 2020s - again, hypothetically - accelerated economic growth will become possible already on the basis of the new technical specifications.
However, realists (or "informed" pessimists) warn that it is risky to fall into such "technological idiocy". Remember, they say, that earlier in the transition from one to another TR, in similar border situations, there were great social revolutions, large-scale (pan-European or world) wars and large military conflicts. Now it could happen again, but with potentially much larger and more unfortunate consequences.
Moreover, the transition to a new technological order is not only and not so much a change in the economic and technological paradigm. Such a transition is both a radical transformation of social, ideological, political structures, as well as the emergence of new models of society, more or less adequate to the "sum of new technologies", and the emergence of completely new models of socio-political relationships, and the formation of a radically new type of personality (not necessarily more perfect), etc.
That is, in fact, it is all this that is a real, full-scale systemic revolution, stretched out over fifteen to twenty years. Maybe even longer. If this future revolution, where the current civilization is already being drawn into, is effectively managed, there is a chance to do without a global war. If not, then such a war cannot be avoided.
So, the "Great Depression" of 1929-1933. marked the beginning of not only the transition to a new technological order, but also a radical change from classical "Marxist" capitalism to the model of Roosevelt's "neo-capitalism", based on a sharp increase in government intervention in the economy, forced lending to millions and tens of millions of consumers, the introduction of mechanisms for mass production and mass consumption . A fundamentally new model of society arose - "mass society" with its one-dimensional type of a programmed person and a totally trained middle class, a completely new form of state ideological systems reproduced by tightly controlled media, a new structure of international relations. This frontier period included the crisis years of the 1930s, the Second World War, the birth of the Cold War, and ended in the early 1950s.
The essence of the current strategic challenge is as follows. Who exactly, what power, what coalition of countries will most effectively carry out targeted ideological, social, political transformations in order to use the mainstream, the results of the sixth TP, to become a leader and determine the program of global development, perhaps until the end of this century? The success of the transition to the sixth TS will be determined not only and not so much by the volume and scale of scientific and technological innovations introduced into the process of economic reproduction. The key, decisive moment will be the long-term effectiveness of the implementation of systemic changes in the forms of ownership, production and consumption, cardinal transformations of social structures, fundamental shifts in public consciousness and dominant political ideologies, the speed and quality of elite restructuring, etc.
The upcoming transition will undoubtedly prove to be qualitatively more complex and risky than previous border periods. For there are a lot of questions that the ideologists and strategists of the sixth TR face and which even the most ingenious computer programs cannot answer yet.
For example, how to find a balance between the ever-increasing flow of scientific and technological innovations of the sixth TR and conservative, inert social and political structures, most of which are already in a state of systemic crisis?
What is the most painless, optimal way to reduce the population of the planet by two or three (at least) times, since the coming innovative and technological civilization does not need such an amount of biomass in human form? After all, the sixth TR, in principle, does not need the mass consumption of material goods for its self-reproduction and self-development, especially given the growing shortage of natural non-renewable resources.
How to radically limit the socio-economic and political influence of the swollen middle class, which was and remains the main driving force of "neo-capitalism", but which is not at all necessary for the realities of the impending sixth TR - at least on such a scale?
What should be the models of interaction between creative human capital, the main driving force of the sixth TR, and the new model of the political elite, which also does not yet exist?
And so it turns out that "our path is in darkness." In conditions of forced growth of strategic uncertainty, no one knows the optimal answers. The frontier period, which we, without realizing it, entered in 2007-2008, is not only the stage of maturation of the sixth TR, but also a time of extraordinary exacerbation of the systemic, largely antagonistic, contradictions of modern "capitalist humanity." That is, as Comrade Mao Zedong taught, this is an extremely favorable time for a real world revolution.
Global labor and capital market
In the past few decades, the strategic will of the highest Western establishment and the totality of achievements in the scientific and technological field have led to the creation of a single functioning global labor and capital market. As you know, the most profitable use of both the first and the second, regardless of the territorial location, equalizes their cost in different geo-economic zones of the planet. This is the main feature of the current global market.
The distinctive feature of such a market, further, is that the flow of technological innovation not only integrates already existing sources of labor and capital, but also creates new ones.
Modern machines, robots are replacing various types of human labor, and much more intensively than ever before. Reproducing themselves, these means of production simultaneously increase the amount of capital. It follows that the economic future is not on the side of those who provide cheap labor or own ordinary capital - they will inevitably be supplanted by automation.
Then it seems that the third group should be lucky - those who are ready to innovate and create new products, services and business models. However, this spontaneously raises a series of provocative questions. For example, how and in what way will a new market environment, adequate consumer demand for these innovations and new products be formed, in the conditions of an objective narrowing of mass demand? If, of course, the preservation of market mechanisms of supply and demand, the balance of power of various socio-economic agents is generally envisaged.
Hypothetically, in the future sixth TR, it is precisely creative, economic and technological ideas that should become a really scarce production factor - more scarce than labor and capital combined. However, who will ultimately determine the prospects of certain ideas? Especially if the traditional market mechanisms for evaluating product creativity (with all their well-known shortcomings) change significantly by the middle of the 21st century and become much more manageable by "non-market methods"?
The new face of capital
In his recently published book "Capital in the 21st Century", which became a world bestseller not by accident, T. Piketty notes that the share of capital in the economy increases when its level of return exceeds the overall level of economic growth. "Deepening of capital", i.e. cost reduction due to savings in labor, fuel, raw materials and materials will continue until robots, automated systems, computer networks and various forms of software (as modifications of capital) increasingly replace human labor.
The share of "total" capital in the national income has been growing quite steadily over the past two decades, but in the foreseeable future this trend may be threatened due to the emergence of new challenges. This is not about some unexpected jump in the value of labor, but about changes within capital itself. As the sixth TR matures, its special part, digital capital, becomes increasingly important.
As is well known, under market conditions the scarcest means of production are most valued. Accordingly, in an economic environment where capital such as software and robots can be reproduced cheaply, its marginal cost inevitably begins to fall. The more cheap capital that is added, the faster the value of existing capital decreases. Unlike, say, traditional, expensive or super-expensive factories, it is very profitable to introduce additional types of digital capital because it is cheap. Programs can be duplicated and redistributed at virtually zero additional cost.
In other words, digital capital is objectively becoming abundant, by definition it has a low marginal cost and is becoming increasingly important in almost all industries.
It inevitably follows from this that in the coming period, digital technologies and creative people (the core, the most important component of human capital in general), who will be able to generate advanced ideas and innovations using these same digital technologies, will become the most scarce and most valuable resource.
The ability to codify, digitize and replicate many important goods, services and processes is constantly expanding. Digital copies, as an exact reproduction of the original, require virtually no cost and can be instantly transferred to anywhere in the world.
Digital technologies turn ordinary labor and ordinary capital into a commodity, so those who invent, implement and develop them will receive an increasing share of the profit from ideas.
Thousands of individuals with ideas, not millions of investors and tens of millions of ordinary workers, become the scarcest resource. Dramatic and frankly terrible, in its long-term consequences, the fact, however, is that truly creative people, even in developed societies, are no more than 3-4%. Let's assume that all these few percent of "creatives" will be concentrated only in the economic sphere of the future civilization of the sixth TR. And what fate awaits the remaining 95% of non-creative human beings?
Although production is becoming increasingly capital intensive, the returns received by capital owners as a group will not necessarily continue to rise relative to the share of labor. If new means of production create cheap substitutes for more and more types of work, dramatic times are coming for tens and hundreds of millions of wage workers throughout the global world. But at the same time, as digital technologies begin to replace conventional capital, contradictions within the capitalist class itself will inevitably escalate.
The decline in the value of labor
In the past few decades, the historically established ratio in America (as well as in other OECD countries) between the shares of national income that fall on labor and material capital has changed not in favor of labor. Since the beginning of the new century, this has become even more noticeable. For example, in the United States "the share of labor averaged 64.3% by the beginning of 2011 compared to the period 1947-2000. Over the past 10 years, this share has fallen even more and reached its lowest level in the third quarter of 2010 - 57, 8%".
The same trend is spreading around the world. Significant declines in the share of labor in GDP are observed in 42 of the 59 countries studied, including China, India and Mexico. Moreover, it turns out that it is the progress of digital technologies that is becoming one of the important prerequisites for this trend: “The fall in the relative price of the means of production associated with the development of information technology and the computer era is forcing companies to move from labor to capital.”
Practically in various spheres, the most cost-effective source of "capital" is becoming "smart technologies" in the form of flexible, adaptive machines, robots, programs that ruthlessly replace labor in both developed and developing countries.
The so-called "reindustrialization" of a number of OECD countries, including the United States (when large corporations return real production to American soil from Southeast Asia), is not due to the fact that the cost of labor in the Asia-Pacific region suddenly increased to a critical level and became unprofitable for companies. Manufacturing in automated and robotic factories with minimal labor and close proximity to the large US market proves to be more profitable than using even the cheapest labor in Vietnam or the Philippines.
The tragedy of the middle class
Ample evidence proves that the tradable sectors of the industrialized economies have not created jobs on their own for nearly 20 years. This means that work can now be found almost exclusively in the vast non-tradable sector, where wages are steadily declining due to the growing competition of workers forced out of the tradable sector.
Such aspects of the sixth TR as the massive development of robotics, the active use of artificial intelligence, 3D printing, etc., are beginning to hurt not only relatively unskilled workers in developing countries, but also blue collar workers in OECD countries. "Smart machines", becoming cheaper and more sophisticated, will increasingly replace human labor, starting with relatively structured industries (i.e. in factories and factories), and where routine operations predominate.
Moreover, ad hoc macroeconomic forecasting models prove that a similar trend will prevail even in countries where labor is inexpensive. For example, in Chinese factories, where more than a million low-paid workers assemble iPhones and iPads, their labor is increasingly being replaced by diverse and numerous robots. According to official PRC statistics, the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased by 30 million, or 25%, since 1996, while the volume of industrial production has increased by 70%.
Gradually, production moves to where the final market is located. This allows you to reduce costs, reduce delivery times, reduce storage costs and, accordingly, increase profits. Accordingly, the sixth TP in the social aspect will hit the most significantly precisely on the large middle class of economically developed countries. For example, the middle class in the same United States was traditionally considered after the Second World War "the salt of the American soil" - it was the main consumer, the American political system was based on it, it was considered the main custodian of American values and moral norms.
The gradual "lowering" of the American middle class began in the late 1980s. Politically, this was most evident in the shrinking of the once powerful US trade union movement. In economic terms, most of the "middles" are steadily sliding down or have already rolled down to the level of the "poor strata". According to the Gallup Institute, in 2014, 19% of Americans could not earn a decent diet. Currently, 75% of families in the US live paycheck to paycheck without extra money (almost like in today's Russia). Already 29% of American families cannot afford to spend money on higher education for their children. The average credit debt of the average American middle-class household has quadrupled over the past 20 years. Such a family with children (even with one child) can no longer live on one salary. American women are pushed into the labor market not so much by the notorious emancipation with feminization, but by severe economic necessity.
In the United States, being middle class is defined as having your own home. The vast majority of Americans are accustomed to taking "for life" loans for the cost of the house. As a result of the crisis of 2007-08, the real estate bubble burst with its inflated prices. And the American middle class suddenly became significantly poorer - it became impossible to ask for cash loans.
Accordingly, the gap between the middle class sliding into a permanent crisis and the "upper strata" is growing. In 1990, top executives in the US earned, on average, 70 times the wages of other workers. Just 15 years later, in 2005, they were earning 300 times more. Since the late 1970s, 90% of the US population (and this is most of the middle class) has not grown in income, but the heads of corporations have quadrupled their income.
I want to emphasize once again that all this is not a manifestation of the evil will and greed of the bourgeois, but a completely objective, natural process. Today, the higher the market value of a company, the more important it is to find the best manager to lead it. To a large extent, the growth in cash income of senior executives is due to the widespread use of information technology, which expands the potential reach, scope and monitoring capabilities of the decision maker, which increases the value of a good top manager. Direct control through digital technologies makes an effective manager more valuable than before, when control functions were distributed among a large number of his subordinates, each of whom followed a certain, small area of activity.
And what is happening today in the US is the tomorrow of the entire developed West.
American experts themselves embarrassingly write that "ensuring an acceptable standard of living for the rest (meaning those tens of millions of middle-class people who do not fit into the reality of the sixth TU) and building an inclusive economy and society will be the most pressing challenges in the coming years."
For the formation of such an "inclusive economy" it is necessary to solve, first of all, two main, non-trivial long-term problems.
First, the middle class was the main consumer component of the US market system. Who can replace him in this role and how?
Secondly, this middle class was or was considered a kind of custodian of the traditions of the American "Protestant ethic". The "demoralization" of business and society in the United States is becoming more and more noticeable: the erosion of the work ethic, the growth of corruption, and the increasingly screaming socio-economic inequality. Growing total injustice is becoming one of the hallmarks of the upcoming sixth TR...
All these trends are already affecting the stability of Western society and the Western ruling class. For example, this is manifested in the growing alienation of various social groups and segments from formal government institutions in the United States. Even the most trustworthy public institution, the US Supreme Court, has a trust rating of no more than 12-13%.
Does the American middle class feel its "historical" doom? Yes, at the level of social instincts, this feeling is clearly enhanced. More than two-thirds (71%) of Americans, and this is practically the entire middle class, are convinced that the country is on the wrong track. According to CNN and Opinion Research Corporation, 63% of respondents are pessimistic that their children will live worse than their parents.
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of the revolutionary October events in Russia at the state level, they try not to remember them. According to the press secretary of the President Dmitry Peskov, "what is there to celebrate?". But the problems of social stratification have not gone away, while now everyone considers themselves oppressed classes - from lumpen to big businessmen. There is a growing demand among young people for some kind of “social justice” and revolution. Andrey Koryakovtsev, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Associate Professor of the Ural State Pedagogical University, a member of the Union of Russian Writers, Andrey Koryakovtsev, talked about what kind of ghost is haunting today's Europe, Russia and the USA, and why in the long term the revolution will become global.
Is class theory relevant now?
Class theory has now been banished from Russian academic science and Russian education. Meanwhile, the very everyday life of capitalist society reminds us of it by the growth of social and property inequality. Moreover, those in power and property themselves remind us of it, like the Kaliningrad governor, who recently approved a reduction in compensation for kindergarten, or the well-known businessman and blogger Varlamov, who openly stated that he “… spun the trade unions.” Who is pulling them by the tongue to express their class interests directly? Have they become more honest or have they lost any concept of social responsibility (if they had any)?
Is it moral progress or regression? (laughs). The problem is precisely that ideology, as the collective mind of their class, makes these gentlemen reject class theory, and their everyday personal practice confirm. And those of them who are more honest - yes, more honest! - he simply directly expresses his class interest, and, unwillingly, confirms the correctness of the theory of classes.
It turns out that the bourgeoisie and officials themselves propagate the revolution?
Strictly speaking, revolutionary conclusions do not follow from every class theory. There are different class theories. The first, it can be called distributive, was created by Aristotle. In it, the criterion for class distinction is the size of the appropriated wealth. Society from this point of view is easily divided into three classes: the rich, the poor and the middle class.
The second was formed by the French economists of the XVIII century. The difference criterion here is already different: performance. Quesnay singled out the "productive" and "sterile" classes. His follower Turgot (who is considered one of the founders of liberalism, by the way) divided the “producers” into capitalists and wage workers. By the latter, he understood those who are not the owners of the land, are engaged only in productive labor and earn money only by selling their labor power. Doesn't it remind you of Marx? Then the doctrine of classes and the class struggle was developed by the French historical school, primarily by Thierry and Guizot. It is these that Marx mentions when he dismisses the merit of creating class theory. True, he adds one more feature of the proletariat to the features of the proletariat identified by Turgot: participation in the production of surplus value, thereby distinguishing the industrial working class from the pre-capitalist proletariat working for hire (such were, for example, the servants of Figaro or Trufaldino). Thus, contrary to popular belief, Marx is not the author of class theory as such. Moreover, it originates within the framework of bourgeois science and in itself is devoid of revolutionary conclusions.
What, then, is Marx's contribution to class theory?
The fact that he turned it into a very specific theory of social revolution, because he comprehended it not only historically, but also anthropologically. Even before Marx, English economists had shown that the existence of classes is associated with specific economic conditions: with the division of labor, a regular but limited excess of labor products, inequality in distribution, inequality in property, etc. To summarize: the root cause of the existence of a class structure is that economic necessity, economic expediency, dominates a person. Following it is reason, and there is freedom. But according to Marx, the “kingdom of freedom” begins beyond the limits of economic necessity, and, therefore, class belonging characterizes the socio-economic status of the individual, but not the individual itself. Consequently, a person is capable, in principle, of going beyond class limitations, for example, in his creative or scientific activities.
This implies: first. Personal development means development outside of class, reaching into the sphere of universal meanings: for Robert Schumann to become a great musician, he had to break with the prospect of a career as a banker. Or: Thomas Eliot worked in a bank, but chose to become, in the end, a professor of literature. Second. The criterion for the victory of the working class is the elimination not only of the capitalists, but also of itself as a class. If the bourgeoisie, as bourgeoisie, enjoys its class exclusivity by conserving classness, then the objective goal of the workers is not to destroy individual classes, but the class structure as such. And this is possible not by military or political, but only by economic means: the destruction of labor as an economic necessity, the displacement of man from the sphere of material production, the creation of conditions for personal development and free activity, etc. In a word, according to Marx, the real revolutionary task is to overcome the class struggle, and not its constant escalation, as followed from Stalin's demagogy. Moreover, this overcoming does not mean chattering about class contradictions or ignoring social problems, but actually solving them.
Contrary to liberal and conservative myths, society develops from its own contradictions, and not from other people's virtues or shortcomings.
The policy of the authorities makes revolution inevitable, and if you don't want a revolution "from below", as in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, make it at least "from above", like Roosevelt or the Swedish Social Democrats. I say this not from the point of view of what is desired, but from the point of view of what exists: if the authorities, in the face of growing social problems, do not choose the path of “revolution from above”, they will inevitably receive a “revolution from below”.
Is it true that class theory is outdated and inapplicable to today's reality?
The one that was developed in classical Marxism, on the material of the liberal model of capitalism, of course, is somewhat outdated. Well, at least due to the widespread deindustrialization and the complication of the class structure. Here, for example, the numbers: more than 70% of the US workforce since the 80s has been concentrated in the service and education sectors. The industrial working class has ceased to dominate the modern economy. But this does not mean that class theory itself is outdated.
Neither Marx nor Lenin singled out technology as a feature of the working class. The industrial working class leaves - a new one comes, associated with new, information means of production. Let's call it the words of Pisarev: "the thinking proletariat." Or in the words of André Gortz: "the cognitive proletariat." One can also recall the expression of Marx: “clerical proletariat”, or “office plankton”, in the present. You can name it differently, but the essence remains.
And what is the point?
The essence is class antagonism, basically class contradiction. It has remained unchanged since the 19th century, being formulated by Marx as follows: it is a contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation.
Another question is that this contradiction manifested itself in different eras in different ways. It is clear that in Soviet society or in the conditions of the Western welfare state it was not expressed in the same way as in classical capitalism, familiar to us from Dickens, Zola or Dreiser.
But this does not mean that Soviet society and the welfare state were devoid of class contradictions. It's just that the classes were different in them, and the contradictions between them were expressed differently. The first thing that catches your eye when studying the societies that took shape in the post-war era in the West, and then in Russia after the collapse of the USSR, is that the civilian bourgeoisie is not the ruling class in them. These societies represent a paradoxical, peculiar capitalism, where the power is not in the hands of the capitalists themselves. sort of undercapitalism.
And who has the power?
At the bourgeois-bureaucratic corporation. If we talk about post-Soviet Russia, then the bourgeoisie in it never became the ruling class. Big capital became part of the nomenklatura, but the nomenklatura did not become part of the bourgeoisie as a civil class. Why would she? The bureaucracy can convert power into capital, and this process went on in Russia throughout the entire perestroika and beyond, into the 90s, but did not lead to the “normal” capitalism of the capitalists, idealized by the liberals. Nobody needed him, except for the most numerically insignificant civil bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, disinterestedly in love with capitalism.
Why the lower classes do not need him - it is clear (he robbed them and robs them), but why did the bureaucracy not need him? The fact is that the social situation of the bourgeoisie, especially the petty and middle class, is a situation of constant risk. The position of the bureaucracy is more stable than that of the bourgeoisie. Her wealth is based on what is always under her control. This is not an accidental profit, but taxes that she collects with the help of the tax, bailiffs, police ii. This is bureaucratic rent. Officially, an official, by law, does not have the right to do business, but he does not need it, he will find thousands of ways to be involved in it.
This is why the bureaucracy as a political entity is more maneuverable, more stable than the civilian bourgeoisie, and this is why the late Soviet nomenklatura, having played capitalism with civil society and carried out large-scale privatization, in the end chose to keep capitalism under its control. She included some loyal capitalists in her hierarchy, using them as a cash cow, and ostracized others who were not loyal. So calmer, more stable. And the people supported this policy, because they also wanted stability. Therefore, when modern Russian entrepreneurs call themselves "the most oppressed class", then this is true. Only I would add to this that, contrary to what Western liberals say, this situation is global.
Is the situation exactly the same in the West?
Yes. The civil bourgeoisie in the West, already at the very beginning of the era of imperialism, was pushed aside from power in the course of the merging of big capital with the bourgeois-bureaucratic corporation and placed under its control by it. This was accompanied by deep social reform, thanks to which the lower classes supported the new system. A “welfare state” is emerging everywhere, the core of which is a system of socially oriented redistribution. The socio-economic basis of this system is a solvent individual.
Let me explain. The capitalist produces goods, sells it on the market, making a profit. Why? There is a demand. Why is there a demand? Because there is purchasing power. Who is the main buyer? Working class. Thus, it would seem that everything is very simple: the rich working class is beneficial to the capitalist. Why did he not understand this earlier, in the 19th century, and it took two world wars, many civil wars and revolutions to get to him? Marx answers this question: yes, the capitalist is interested in the high purchasing power of the population, but he perceives his workers only as recipients of wages, which he wants to do as little as possible in order to increase profits and capital turnover. And so, following the logic of capitalist production, every capitalist argues. Thus, the general mind of the bourgeoisie is outside the cranium of a single capitalist.
How to resolve this contradiction? Only one way: the emergence of a social force that will dominate the individual capitalist, embodying the collective mind of the bourgeoisie. The state became such a force, which began to encourage this mass demand, making it cost-effective. Actually, this is the essence of Keynes's theory.
Before us is nothing else than institutional or distributive or even palliative socialism, which goes back to the ideas not of Marx (he criticized him), but of Saint-Simon and Proudhon. It turned out that it was impossible to build socialism as a society, but as an institution - please. This society is an embodied paradox: on the one hand, it is dominated politically by the bourgeois-bureaucratic corporation, and on the other hand, the working class dominates economically, because its demand, purchasing power and its tastes determine the development of the economy. Moreover, the working class in this sense dominates here economically just insofar as the egoism of the capitalists does not determine economic development, but is subject to the state will in the form of law. Liberals talk a lot about the rule of law, forgetting that in its truth it has an anti-bourgeois and bureaucratic character.
In this society, economic class differences are complemented by political and legal differences insofar as access to capital depends on position in the bureaucratic hierarchy and on loyalty to power. On the surface, this looks like a return to the estate structure, as neo-feudalism.
But this, of course, is not the case. Here, however, the orientation of the economy towards profit and surplus value remains, even if they appear in the converted form of a planned indicator, as in the Soviet Union or among monopoly corporations operating in the regime of maximum profit.
What is the future of this system?
From 1968 to 1973, this system is covered by a crisis, then the crises become stronger and stronger, and part of the ruling elite adopts theories neo-liberals: they say, cheaper labor force will revive the market.
In fact, in modern conditions it is a utopia. Neoliberalism is embodied more in slogans than in a practical program for a return to the free market. We see that the “welfare state” has not been destroyed as an institution, the free market has not been recreated anywhere, and power still remains in the hands of the bourgeois-bureaucratic corporation.
The case is limited reduction in distribution volumes. This inconsistency is explained neoliberal simple governments. To completely destroy "welfare state", it is necessary to destroy its social premise - a mass type of consumer, a bourgeois, consumerist working class, which is already accustomed not only to have in a variety of ways, but also to want in a variety of ways, and this can only be done through mass genocide. It is clear that in modern conditions this is not easy to do, although someone really wants to, so the neoliberal governments took a different path: they destabilized the periphery of the capitalist world and let guest workers into their countries.
Thus, a surplus labor force arose, which was necessary to reduce the cost of labor and brains. And earlier there was a transfer of national enterprises to "third countries" with cheap labor. In practice, all this led not to the growth of the economy, but to its crisis, because the Western economy has long been geared towards the production of goods for the individual consumer. It seems that the system of cheap credit could contribute to meeting the demand of the population in money, but it only inflated the financial bubble.
Two waves of the crisis have already passed, a third is expected, crises neoliberal systems can appear indefinitely. P Therefore, I am forced to say something terrible for someone: we are on the threshold of a new world social revolution. It can be said that the world has already begun to move towards it, just as it began to move towards the world bourgeois-democratic revolution in the first half of the 17th century, and in the first half of the 20th century along the path of the socialist revolution. This can be seen both in the presidential elections in the United States and in the events in Western Europe.
What will be the result of this?
The result will be some new model of the "welfare state". What exactly is hard to say. There is no doubt that it will be devoid of the shortcomings of the previous ones, such as, for example, national isolation.
It is now impossible to determine the future in trifles, as well as the very course of a new revolutionary movement, but it is already happening. Modern numerous separatisms, including the British Brexit, is nothing but a symptom of the social revolution, its sublimative expression. The peoples must play enough of independence in order to understand later that it does not solve social problems by itself, that it is only a false form of their solution and that the peoples will solve their social problems only all together. Sooner or later, the states will have to restore the national industry, and therefore - to revive the working class. And the growth of the working class, not directly, but indirectly, through its political and economic struggle, implies an increase in the cost of labor or a return to the "welfare state".
Look at today's China: it has already gone half way, labor force becomes more expensive and he is moving production even to an EU country like Bulgaria. And with the revival of the working class, the new world social revolution will gain an understanding of its true goal, and then the revolutionary movement will decide on the means and throw off inadequate forms of parochialism and nationalism. A world "welfare state", at least in the form of a world confederation of "welfare states" that do not fight each other for resources, but rationally distribute them - this is the program of this revolution, corresponding to the state of modern productive forces. In the era of the Internet and other modern communications, this is nothing fantastic.
Yekaterinburg, Evgenia Viracheva
In modern sociology, within the framework of the question of the development of human society, it is not so much the Marxist concept of the successive change of socio-economic formations that dominates, but rather the “triadic” scheme, according to which this process is viewed as a consistent movement of individual societies and humanity as a whole from one type of civilization to another - agrarian , industrial and post-industrial. In the opinion of many contemporary sociologists, including domestic sociologists,231 historical practice has confirmed that such a scheme is more in line with the truth. So,
V. M. Lukin argues, in particular, that the reason for this correspondence was a more logical choice of starting positions: if in the dogmatized Marxist scheme rather secondary points were taken as the basis - forms of ownership, class relations, then in the civilizational scheme the most fundamental the structure of socio-historical activity is technology (and this is one of the most important components of the productive forces).
Let us note, by the way, that in the Marxist scheme, the core of the basis is by no means production relations, but the productive forces, i.e., the totality of personality-qualifying, technical and technological factors of a given mode of production. One of the starting points of the formational approach is the thesis that the productive forces are the most mobile, dynamic element of the basis (that is why they, at some historical period, come into conflict with more cumbersome and inert production relations, "outgrowing" their framework) . Although, alas, “neither Marx himself nor subsequent Marxists developed the technological aspect of social production in a sufficiently universal way, despite constant assertions about the paramount importance of this aspect”232.
Since the 1960s, starting with the work of W. Rostow "The Theory of Stages of Economic Growth", the periodization of historical development began to be carried out using the ideal-typological allocation of various societies depending on the level of economic growth and socio-cultural conditions of various countries and regions. This typology is based on the dichotomy of traditional and modern societies. Moreover, the second of the identified types today is increasingly divided into industrial and post-industrial societies. However, to be completely consistent, the traditional society, covering a huge historical period, including, in accordance with the formational approach, the slave and feudal stages, can hardly be considered as a "starting" one. Indeed, how legitimate would it be to attribute to traditional societies, for example, the tribes of African Bushmen, Australian aborigines, or inhabitants of other hard-to-reach areas, where primitive communal relations remain largely untouched? Therefore, it seems to us appropriate to put "primitive society" at the beginning of this chain. True, this concept, which came from evolutionary anthropology, is perceived and used in sociology very ambiguously1. Nevertheless, we accepted it as a starting point and below we will try to substantiate and argue this choice, showing more or less clear criteria that separate primitive societies from traditional ones.
The transition from one type of society to another takes place as a result of a global revolution of a certain type.
The general scheme of the progressive (ascending) development of human societies can be depicted graphically (Fig. 21).
Rice. 21. Scheme of the progressive development of human societies
As we have already said, a “revolution” in sociology is usually understood as a sharp change in all or most social conditions occurring over a relatively short historical period. However, in the history of mankind there have been revolutions of a different kind. They, perhaps, were not so sharp, that is, they did not take place during a short - at least comparable to the life of one generation - period of time, but could take the life of several generations, which in the historical sense is also not so a lot of. However, the impact that they had on the fate of mankind was, perhaps, much more significant and powerful than the impact of any social revolution. We are talking about radical changes in the nature of the productive forces, which could be called global revolutions. We call them “global” because, firstly, their development knows no national boundaries, proceeds in different societies located in different parts of the planet, approximately according to the same laws and with the same consequences, and, secondly, these consequences affect not only on the life of mankind itself, but also on its natural environment. The most important factor in such revolutions is a fundamental change in technology, which indicates their close connection with the productive forces.
It is difficult now to give any exact chronological date (or at least a time period) for the start of the agrarian revolution. Using the periodization of G. Morgan and F. Engels, who followed him, one could point to the middle stage of barbarism, which “... in the east begins with the domestication of domestic animals, in the west - with the cultivation of edible plants”233. Thanks to these truly historic changes in technology, man becomes the only living being on the planet who begins to some extent come out of the slavish subordination of the natural environment and ceases to depend on the vicissitudes and chances of gathering, hunting and fishing. Most importantly: "... an increase in production in all sectors - cattle breeding, agriculture, home crafts - made the human labor force capable of producing more products than was necessary to maintain it" 234. Australian archaeologist W. Child, who named such revolution "agrarian" (although there is another term for its designation - "Neolithic", indicating its beginning in the Neolithic), believed that it was thanks to her that the transition from barbarism to the first slave-owning civilizations took place. As a result, a class division of society arose and the state appeared. We will not go into too much detail about the consequences of this event for all spheres of social life, but it is undeniable that they were truly colossal.
We cannot know exactly when, but probably early enough - first in animal husbandry, and then in crop production - selection work begins. In any case, the activity of the biblical Jacob in crossing white sheep with black ones (he was promised by his father-in-law Laban a reward and a dowry in the form of a flock of sheep with only a motley color) already belongs to a very high level of this kind of knowledge in animal husbandry235 and in some ways already anticipates modern genetic engineering. There are a number of parameters of scientific knowledge (albeit at an elementary level) here: empiricism, empirical verifiability, generalizability, and others.
Let's note one more essential point. All primitive tribes and peoples that are at the stage of savagery, with regard to the organization of social life, are more similar than different from each other in terms of their life activity, regardless of which part of the world, in which lost area they live. They have almost the same social institutions, mores and customs. They use the same technologies and tools to obtain food. They have very similar ideas about the world around them, and religious rituals.
Differences begin in the period of the birth of the agrarian revolution, at the transition from the lower stage of barbarism to the middle, when the intellectual potential of man is first clearly manifested. And here, more clearly than in previous millennia, differences in the natural conditions of the habitat begin to emerge. “The Old World,” notes F. Engels, “possessed almost all domesticated animals and all types of cereals suitable for breeding, except for one; the western continent, America, of all domesticable mammals - only llama, and even then only in one part of the south, and of all cultivated cereals, only one, but the best - maize. As a result of this difference in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere develops from now on in its own special way, and the landmarks on the boundaries of the individual stages of development become different for each of the two hemispheres.
The predominance of this or that tribe or people in some specific type of agricultural labor creates a new type of division of labor and leaves a deep imprint on the nature of the direction of development of the whole culture as a whole. Pastoral tribes lead a predominantly nomadic way of life, while agricultural tribes are increasingly sedentary. 237 This creates potential opportunities for the emergence of small settlements among agricultural peoples, and then cities as centers of cultural and intellectual development.
The consolidation and development of the social progress achieved with the help of the agrarian revolution has probably taken mankind a path of several millennia. Individual discoveries, improvements and inventions (related to the technique and technology of both agricultural and industrial production) that were made along this path, different in significance and influence on the life of society, were sometimes truly brilliant, but in general this influence and the social changes can hardly be attributed to their nature as revolutionary. And yet these changes, gradually accumulating, along with social changes in other spheres of life, ultimately lead to the next global revolution.
If history has not preserved for us information about when and where the agrarian revolution began, then the time and place of the beginning of the next global revolution - industrial (or industrial) can be called with a much higher degree of accuracy - the end of the 18th century, England. F. Engels even names the year in which two inventions appeared, which became a kind of capsule, the igniter of this revolution - 1764 from the Nativity of Christ. “The first invention that brought about a decisive change in the condition of the working class was the jenny, built by the weaver James Hargreaves of Standhill near Blackburn in North Lancashire (1764). This machine was a rough prototype of the mules and was driven by hand, but instead of one spindle, as in the usual hand spinning wheel, it had sixteen or eighteen spindles driven by one worker.
In the same year, 1764, James Watt invented the steam engine, and in 1785 adapted it to drive spinning machines. “Thanks to these inventions, which were further improved, machine labor triumphed over manual labor”239. This victory simultaneously marked the start of a rapid and gigantic rise in social intelligence in human history.
Here I would like to make a small digression in order to more clearly show one of the main features of the industrial revolution, which played a decisive role in the entire further development of mankind. If you ask any representative of our generation who was the inventor of the steam engine, eight out of ten will certainly name Ivan Polzunov: all Russian history textbooks have said so. In fact, the project of a steam-atmospheric machine was announced by I. I. Polzunov in 1763 - a year earlier than Watt. However, fate played a cruel joke with him: he lived in a country that was still relatively far from the onset of the industrial revolution, and his steam engine remained, in modern terms, a laboratory, experimental model. Meanwhile, Watt's steam engine found industrial application twenty years later, and Watt, together with his companion M. Bolton, became a successful manufacturer, engaging in the serial production of steam engines. Watt, by the way, went down in history not only as a talented inventor (whose name is imprinted on every electric light bulb today as an indication of its power in “watts”), but also as one of the founders of the “early scientific management” school. In the same way, the whole world knows not V. Mozhaisky as the inventor of the aircraft, as Russian history textbooks wrote, but the Wright brothers. The inventor of the radio in the eyes of the whole world (with the exception of Russia) is not Popov, but Marconi.
The example of the invention of the incandescent electric light bulb, the patent for which was obtained in 1876 by the Russian electrical engineer P. Yablochkov, is also indicative. Few people know that this light bulb had an operating life of less than an hour. Thomas Edison undertook to refine it, as a result of which an industrial design came out of his laboratory with a resource of at least 6-7 hours and, most importantly, relatively inexpensive and technologically advanced in mass production (this information was heard in one of the TV shows “Obvious - incredible”); is it any wonder that, in the opinion of any more or less educated Western man in the street, the inventor of the electric light bulb is Edison.
These examples once again show one of the most characteristic features of the industrial revolution: for the first time in history, it closely linked the industrial introduction of technical innovations with economic efficiency and thereby opened the eyes of many enterprising people to the great importance of intellectual (and therefore, in a practical sense, useless, as it seemed before) products. . These examples reveal an important social pattern: any intellectual product - be it a technical invention, a scientific concept, a literary work, an ideological theory or a political doctrine - is a product of its era. He, as a rule, is born and receives recognition almost always on time: it is precisely by the time the demand for it is ripe that consumers will appear (and in a sufficiently large number), that is, people who are able to appreciate it and use it in their lives and practical activities. In the case of “premature birth”, fate, alas, can “bestow” oblivion on such a product (especially in those cases when it is not imprinted on material carriers). Thus, machine labor triumphed over manual labor. The technical, technological, even political, and especially economic events that followed, grew in a truly avalanche-like manner, and even the briefest, most cursory description of them takes Engels (introduction to The Condition of the Working Class in England) a dozen and a half pages. We will dwell on the various characteristic features of this process in the next chapter, noting only that among the most important of these features is the emergence of the factory system, as well as a sharp increase in the attention of entrepreneurs to the achievements of scientific and technical thought and a rather energetic introduction of these achievements into production practice. This process entailed a fairly rapid and significant expansion of the circle of people professionally involved in survey, design and technological work. Attention to the development of fundamental science has also increased, for which both the state and private entrepreneurship began to allocate a significant amount of financial resources.
Law of economy of time. Most of the social consequences of the industrial revolution "extend" up to our time and deserve, no doubt, closer consideration. However, the introduction of the achievements of human intellect directly into the productive sphere, that is, into machine production, is of a very contradictory nature. On the one hand, machine labor quickly gains a final victory over manual labor, which greatly reduces the cost of all manufactured products. The consumer benefits from this on an unprecedented scale. It was thanks to this victory that the industrial revolution gave a powerful impetus to the development of productive forces, incommensurable with all previous history. Such a revolution is indeed like an explosion. For some one and a half centuries, machines, equipment, machine tools of incredible power and productivity appear - and, moreover, in huge quantities: the law of saving time begins to work in full force.
The revolutionary upheaval in industry is characterized by an increase in labor productivity in all spheres of social production. If at the dawn of the industrial revolution, in 1770, the productivity of technical devices exceeded the productivity of manual labor by 4 times, then in 1840 it was already 108 times1. And it's not just about the fact that the productivity of "live" labor reaches unprecedented heights. One gets the impression that time is generally compressed to previously unthinkable limits. Thus, thanks to the appearance on a mass scale of high-speed vehicles, the previously seemingly endless expanses of our planet are sharply reduced. And on a trip around the world, which took Magellan almost three years, Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg spends only eighty days - and this is no longer fantastic, but quite realistic prose of the late 19th century.
In the context of the problem of the development of social and individual intelligence that we are considering, a sharp increase in the speed of dissemination of information and an increase in its circulation are of particular importance. If before a simple letter could go for years from the sender to the addressee, now this speed was at first equal to the speed of vehicles in general, and then significantly surpassed them thanks to the emergence of new means of mass communication, such as the telegraph, radio, Internet, equaling almost the speed of light.
Strictly speaking, any law must establish the necessary, stable and recurring connection between certain phenomena in nature and society. Thus, in the formulation of any law there should always be at least indications of: 1) those phenomena between which a connection is established; 2) the nature of this connection. Without such an indication, there is probably no wording of the law itself (which, in our opinion, the wording of the "economic laws of socialism" has suffered to a large extent in recent times). The law of economy of time - or, as it is more commonly called, the law of increasing productivity (productive power) of labor - can be represented in terms of the labor theory of value: “... the greater the productive power of labor, the less labor time required to manufacture a known product, the the smaller the mass of labor crystallized in it, the lower its value. On the contrary, the lower the productive power of labor, the greater the labor time required for the manufacture of the product, the greater its value ”(our italics. - V. A., A. K) 1.
Here, as befits this law, there is an indication of a causal (causal) relationship. In order for fundamental, revolutionary changes in the growth of labor productivity to take place, no less revolutionary changes in the means of labor are required. Such changes, of course, cannot occur without the participation of the human intellect, just as they cannot but cause serious changes in its very quality. We have already seen above that the spinning wheel with the beautiful female name Jenny, with the invention of which, in fact, the industrial revolution begins, allowed one worker, even using his own muscular strength (foot drive), to produce during the same working time 16-18 times more products. The combination of muscular strength with the steam engine pushed these boundaries even wider. The steam engine was, in fact, the first inanimate source of energy to have a truly industrial use, with the exception of the power of falling water and wind, which were used before, but still on a much more limited scale. Since that time, a sharp increase in demand from capital for intellectual products begins, it acquires its own value, the share of which in the total volume of capital is steadily increasing.
Of course, the impact of the accumulation of various scientific knowledge on the development of the economy is not unambiguous and not straightforward, especially at the stage of initial capital accumulation (or, as W. Rostow calls it, the stage of preparing the conditions for economic growth). In fact, a revolution in the technical and social conditions of labor entails an inevitable decline in the cost of labor power, since “thus, the part of the working day necessary for the reproduction of this value has been reduced”240. Moreover, the introduction of the latest achievements of science and technology into the direct production process on At this stage, it leads not so much to an increase in general mental development, but to a certain extent to the stupefaction of the "average" worker, since in large-scale industry there is a "separation of the intellectual forces of the production process from physical labor and their transformation into the power of capital (our italics. - V. A .)"241. As Engels emphasizes: “Let factory workers not forget that their labor is a very low category of skilled labor; that no other work is easier to learn and, considering its quality, better paid; that no other labor can be obtained by such a short training, in such a short time, and in such abundance. The master's machines actually play a much more important role in production than the labor and art of the worker, which can be taught in 6 months and which any village laborer can learn.
True, this situation does not last very long (at least on a predominant scale), since as industrial societies develop, the effect of the law of labor change gradually begins to increase, which we will consider a little later.
However, the law of economy of time in this era begins to manifest itself not only in the avalanche-like growth in the volume of production of a wide variety of material products. Above, we mentioned how much the travel time between different geographical points has been reduced; how, thanks to a significant increase in the speed of movement and a reduction in the cost of these movements per unit of distance and time, a huge variety of diverse points of geographical space became achievable for most members of society, and how the time for transmitting information was rapidly reduced.
The increase in the rate of circulation of information, and with it the rate of increase in social intelligence, increases faster than the rate of all other processes that make up the essence of the development and evolution of society. Thus, it can be argued that the law of economy of time has the greatest influence as the industrial, that is, modern, society develops, in fact, not so much on the increase in the volume of production, the mass and range of material products (consumption and production), but on the increase the volume of production and the rate of circulation of intellectual products. This is precisely one of the most important prerequisites for the information revolution and the emergence, ultimately, of what is called the information society.
The law of the rise of needs. The industrial revolution “launched into full swing” the operation of a number of other socio-economic laws (which had manifested themselves very weakly in previous eras). Thus, the operation of the law of the rise of needs, which previously functioned very limitedly - perhaps within a very thin layer of the wealthy and cultured elite of society, acquires a mass character. This law manifests itself in the era of the industrial revolution already in the fact that many objects, things, goods, tools and pleasures that were previously available only to the rich (not to mention new ones, previously unknown to the richest people of the past), thanks to a significant reduction in price and mass production are included in the daily routine of many ordinary members of society.
The law of the rise of needs was introduced into scientific vocabulary by V. I. Lenin at the end of the last century in his essay “On the so-called question of markets”, where he wrote: “... The development of capitalism inevitably entails an increase in the level of needs of the entire population and the worker the proletariat. This increase is created in general by an increase in the exchange of products, leading to more frequent clashes between the inhabitants of the city and the countryside, of different geographical areas, etc. ... This law of the rise of needs has fully affected the history of Europe ... The same law is manifesting its effect and in Russia ... That this, undoubtedly, a progressive phenomenon should be credited precisely to Russian capitalism and nothing else - this is proved, if only by the already well-known fact ... that the peasants of industrial areas live much "cleaner" than the peasants engaged in agriculture alone and almost unaffected by capitalism” 243.
Actually, Marx and Engels pointed to such a possibility in the first chapter of their "German Ideology": "... The satisfied first need itself, the action of satisfaction and the already acquired instrument of satisfaction lead to new needs, and this generation of new needs is the first historical act" 244. Probably, the operation of the law of the rise of needs was manifested both in previous epochs and in societies of the traditional type. Convinced of the convenience of using new, unknown to their ancestors, tools and articles of personal consumption, people quickly get used to them, and any of their disappearance from their lives or a decrease in the level of their consumption is already considered as a decrease in the very standard of living. (Although until relatively recently, not only their ancestors, but they themselves, unaware of their existence, completely dispensed with such items and at the same time felt sufficiently satisfied.) Nevertheless, during the era of traditional societies, the overall level of inquiries of the vast majority population remains very low, weakly, almost imperceptibly changing over time. Many generations live in a circle of almost the same set of needs. There is reason to believe that this range of needs, say, for the “average” Russian peasant of the late 18th century, is unlikely to differ sharply from the set of needs that his ancestor had three or four hundred years ago. (By the way, this was also determined by the extremely low development of communication networks.)
The situation changes radically with the onset of industrialization. We mentioned above that the main features of an industrial society manifest themselves systematically in history. The set of socio-economic laws that we are considering is no less connected and integral system. Thus, the expansion of the scope of the law of the rise of needs is brought to life by the intensification of the law of economy of time: many types of consumer products are significantly cheaper due to mass production, and many previously unknown types of it appear on the market. It is because of the cheapening of essential commodities that the cost of labor power also becomes cheaper. At the same time, the totality of these processes leads to a situation that K. Marx calls the absolute impoverishment of the working class. Let's try to define this situation.
The relative impoverishment of the proletariat is much easier to understand: it arises from the fact that the rate of increase in the income of the working class lags behind the rate of increase in the income of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, although in an industrial society there does seem to be an increase in the income of the “average” worker, the rate of this increase lags more and more behind the rate of profits received by the bourgeois class. But how to understand the essence of absolute impoverishment? K. Marx in most cases directly connects it with a decrease in the level of wages of workers in comparison with their previous situation245. However, already
E. Bernstein, only a decade and a half after the death of Marx, emphasizes as a stable trend the universal growth of incomes of the working class in absolute terms246. In this context, the essence of the absolute impoverishment of the proletariat can only be understood in the following way: the rate of growth of its income lags behind the rate of growth of its needs - in quantitative, but especially in qualitative terms.
During the life of one generation, more and more new, previously unknown types of consumer products appear, and most importantly, they very quickly turn into essentials. A kind of symbol of this process was the activity of Henry Ford, who formulated as the mission of his business the creation of a car accessible to the average American (remember the famous phrase of Ostap Bender: "A car is not a luxury, but a means of transportation"). Of course, advertising also makes a considerable contribution to the development of this process, but still the main role belongs to the dizzying growth rates of mass production, i.e., to the strengthening of the action of the law of economy of time already known to us.
So, the operation of the law of the rise of needs leads to the fact that in almost all strata of industrial society, the requirements for the quality of life are changing at a rapid pace. And an increasing place among the ideas about this quality is occupied by education and advanced training. Against the background of the growing educational level of friends, colleagues, neighbors and their children, the “average” layman is already beginning to consider it normal for his children to receive a more complete education, improve their own educational and qualification level, familiarize their family with cultural achievements and increase interest in politics. Thus, the needs of intellectual development and self-development are increasingly subject to the influence of the general law of the rise of needs.
The law of labor change. A very special place among socio-economic laws is occupied by the law of change of labor, which could be regarded as a kind of version of the "law of the rise of intellectual needs." Marx introduces the concept of this law in the first volume of Capital: “... The nature of large-scale industry determines the change of labor, the movement of functions, the all-round mobility of the worker ... On the other hand, in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labor with its ossified specialties. We have seen how this absolute contradiction destroys all peace, stability, and security of the worker's position in life, constantly threatens, together with the means of labor, to take the means of life out of his hands and, together with his partial function, to make him superfluous too... This is the negative side. . But if the change of labor now makes its way only as an irresistible natural law and with the blind destructive power of natural law, which runs into obstacles everywhere, then, on the other hand, large-scale industry itself, by its catastrophes, makes it a matter of life and death to recognize the change of labor, and therefore, the greatest possible versatility of the workers, the universal law of social production, to the normal implementation of which relations must be adapted (our italics. - V. A., A. K) ”1.
What Marx said can be concretized in the form of the following basic provisions of the law of labor change. 1.
The interests of the progressive development of social production require that the nature of the labor force (educational, skilled, psychological, etc.) be constantly brought into line with the current and rapidly changing organizational and technological level of production. 2.
This, in turn, necessitates the constant readiness of the participants in the production process to bring their knowledge, skills and abilities into the same correspondence both quantitatively and qualitatively (up to changing their specialty or even profession) - what Marx calls all-round mobility. 3.
This law is objective, that is, it operates outside and independently of the will of people, of what they want or do not want, realize or do not realize - with the blind and even "destructive" power of natural law. Cancel, destroy or slow down its action is not given to anyone, it can and should only be taken into account, adapted to it. The power of this law will be truly destructive until its mechanisms are revealed, and their action is directed in the direction of production relations that is beneficial for the subject. 4.
The law of the change of labor comes into full force at the stage of the emergence of large-scale industry (it is “the nature of large-scale industry that determines the change of labor”) and, as the industrial and then the scientific and technological revolution develops, it asserts itself more and more powerfully. To the greatest extent, the manifestation and nature of the action of this law depend mainly on the level of productive forces, since it reflects precisely the nature and pace of their development. 5.
The action of this law, like no other, stimulates the development of the intellect - and above all the individual. This development, in the words of Marx, “as a matter of life and death”, which poses such a task: “... replace a partial worker, a simple carrier of a known partial social function, with a comprehensively developed individual, for whom various social functions are successive ways of life (italics ours. - V. A., A. K) "1.
Note that the process of changing labor was carried out before the industrial revolution. But is there any reason to assert that he was subject to the operation of the law of change of labor - at least in the context in which it was formulated by Marx? Let's say, before the invasion of capitalist relations into agricultural production, the peasant had to be, involuntarily, an agronomist, a livestock breeder, and a carpenter. However, this circle of occupations was quite clearly defined, and the peasants did not go beyond it from generation to generation. Consequently, the significance of the change of labor, determined by the law we are talking about, does not refer to any change in the types of activity by the same individual.
Thus, as a result of the industrial revolution, human society passes into a qualitatively different state, called industrial civilization. The speed of social changes is increasing to an enormous extent: their quality and volume are sharply increasing, and the time during which they occur is reduced to one and a half to two centuries.
However, objectivity requires addressing the negative consequences of the industrial revolution. Whether we like it or not, one of the basic tenets of dialectics is that everything comes with a price. Along with the indisputable benefits that the industrial revolution brought to mankind, there appeared (and also in colossal volumes) the instruments of death, whose "productivity" also fell under the general effect of the law of economy of time. Yes, in fact, the benefits themselves turned out to be not so indisputable: by stimulating the production of more and more volumes of products and goods, developing in the consumer the habit of goods and the desire to acquire more and more of them, the era of the industrial revolution brought humanity to the threshold of planetary catastrophes. scale. Even if we ignore the very real danger of self-destruction in a thermonuclear fire, it becomes impossible to turn a blind eye to how the insatiable moloch of the industry requires an increasing amount of resources - raw materials and energy - to feed itself. And man, armed with weapons of enormous power, makes strenuous efforts to feed this Moloch, risking undermining the very foundation of his own existence - nature. In other words, it is the results of the industrial revolution that make us take a fresh look at the essence of socio-historical evolution,
which we discussed in the first paragraph of this chapter.
At the same time, the growing shortage of all types of raw materials, energy (and even - in a certain sense - human resources), apparently, served as one of the main factors that determined the emergence and development of the third of the revolutions we are considering - the information revolution247. Already its first fruits are felt as a true blessing. That part of humanity that lives in the countries that fell into the sphere of influence of this revolution seems to have forever got rid of the fear of the specter of starvation that has loomed on the historical horizon for so long (remember the ominous seer Malthus!). The population of these countries is provided in abundance with essential products (as well as the second and third). But the main thing, perhaps, is not even that. Science, which used to be more of a useless luxury than a real necessity, has turned into a truly productive force of society and therefore began to recruit more and more people into its ranks. The share of the population professionally engaged in science is growing. And this, in turn, requires appropriate information support. However, the scientific and technological revolution of the second half of the twentieth century expands the material possibilities for such provision. If the industrial revolution, first of all, “lengthened the arms” of a person, increased his muscular power many times over, then the scientific and technological revolution significantly expanded the possibilities of human intelligence, creating machines, devices and devices that practically unlimitedly increased the memory capacity and accelerated elementary processing processes by millions of times. information.
This created the preconditions for the information revolution to collapse on the world. Having completed the massive renewal of fixed assets by the beginning of the 1980s (focused mainly on the goals of energy and resource saving), the economies of the most developed countries shifted their main focus to automation and computerization of all production processes, including management. The basis of this process is electronic information and the development of automatic production on its basis. If you try to formulate the essence of one of the most important aspects of this revolution, then it seems to be that it is precisely this that turns information (almost any!) into a good available for mass consumption - just as the industrial and scientific and technological available material goods. The possession and use of knowledge cease to be the privilege of the elite.
The germ from which the information revolution matured more than five hundred years later was Johannes Guttenberg's printing press. Until that time, the exchange of information was very weak, and information and knowledge leaked to a person, as they say, in scattered drops. Knowledge, skills and abilities were transmitted mainly orally and "at a glance" - from father to son, from teacher to student, from generation to generation. Reading, that is, the process of obtaining information through a material intermediary, the carrier of this information, fixed in a sign system, was the lot of a relatively small part of humanity. Objectively, in addition to other reasons (such as, for example, the high cost of material - up to the appearance of relatively cheap paper), the widespread literacy was hindered by the too low labor productivity of book copyists. Needless to say, manuscripts and incunabula are rarities not only today, but were such in the very era of their production. It was the printing press that helped connect the information drops into a stream - at first weak, thin, but over the centuries turned into a full-flowing river.
The information revolution is aimed at resolving this global contradiction: on the one hand, the scientific and technological revolution, due to the fact that the law of labor change has intensified, has sharply increased the demand for knowledge; on the other hand, a huge mass of the population, even in developed countries, is simply not able to master the required volume of a colossal mass of information (obtained, we note, by others), while at the same time more and more urgently needing it.
Based on the foregoing, some general conclusions can be drawn regarding the place and significance that global revolutions had in the history of human society. Undoubtedly, all of them had an international universal character and inevitably spread around the globe. E. A. Arab-Ogly notes that “each of these revolutionary upheavals in the development of the productive forces of society was the prologue of a new era in world history and was accompanied by profound irreversible changes in the economic activity of society. Each revolution gave rise to new branches of social production (first agriculture, then industry, and now the sphere of scientific and information activities), which eventually turned into dominant ones, and society began to devote a lot of effort and attention to them.
The social consequences common to all global revolutions could be summarized in the following main points. ?
Each global revolution led to a sharp, multiple increase in the productivity of human labor in a relatively short time compared to the previous period of socio-historical development. ?
All global revolutions were accompanied by a huge growth in the material, material wealth of society. ?
In the course of global revolutions, the division of labor was significantly deepened, and many qualitatively new types of professional activity arose. As a result of this, there was a mass movement of the population from traditional to new branches of material and spiritual production. ?
In the course of technological revolutions, many activities that were previously considered fruitless and idle turned into the most productive and meaningful. ?
As a result of global revolutions, profound changes took place in the way of life of people. ?
Each of the global revolutions ultimately led to the emergence of a new type of civilization.
In most sociological concepts, social evolution is seen as an upward movement - as a transition from simple to complex. Evolution is also opposed to the opposite process of decomposition (disintegration). As society develops, according to G. Spencer, the complex of social activities that were previously carried out by one social institution is redistributed among other newly emerged or previously existing institutions. Differentiation is the increasing specialization of different parts of society, thereby creating more and more heterogeneity within society. G. Spencer gives a universal and most general definition of evolution: “Evolution is an integration
ration of matter, which is accompanied by the binding of motion, during which the substance passes from a state of indefinite, incoherent heterogeneity to a state of definite coherent heterogeneity, and the motion preserved by the substance undergoes a similar transformation. 2.
The most important manifestation of the strengthening of heterogeneity is the differentiation of the parts of a single whole and the functions they perform within this framework. Spencer introduced the concept of social differentiation into sociology, applying it to describe the process of the emergence of specialized institutions and the division of labor, which is universal for the entire social evolution. 3.
Among the supporters of social evolutionism, there have been discussions about which of the factors have a stronger influence on the process of evolution: internal or external. Supporters of internal factors, or endogenous evolution, believed that the development of society is explained mainly by the influence on it of causes of internal origin. Adherents of external factors, or exogenous evolution, on the contrary, argued that the basis of social development is the processes of borrowing useful customs and traditions, the spread of cultural values from one social center to another. 4.
Modern sociology, until recently, was dominated mainly by Marxist concepts of social revolution. According to their point of view, revolution in the methodological sense is the result of the resolution of fundamental contradictions in the basis - between production relations and the productive forces that outgrow them. Central to the Marxist theory of social revolution is the question
about the struggle of the main antagonistic classes. 5.
In sociology, a number of the most famous and influential non-Marxist sociological concepts of social revolution are distinguished. The elite circulation theory (V. Pareto) argues that the main task of the revolution is to “cleanse” the horizontal and vertical channels of mobility, since without a periodic change in the power elite and a qualitative change in its composition, the normal functioning of society is impossible. The theory of modernization as a factor of revolution focuses on the gap between the growing level of political education and awareness of fairly wide sections of society, on the one hand, and the real levels of economic transformation lagging behind them, as well as the development of political institutions and their democratization, on the other.
6. In accordance with a number of modern sociological theories, three global revolutions can be pointed out, the core of which is a fundamental change in technology, which indicates their close connection with the productive forces. The agrarian revolution leads to a transition from a primitive society to a traditional one. The industrial revolution transforms an agrarian society into an industrial one. In the course of it, the effect of three socio-economic laws is sharply intensified: the law of saving time, the law of increasing needs, the law of changing labor. The information revolution taking place at the present stage of social development will transform the industrial society into a post-industrial one.
Control questions 1.
How does G. Spencer's definition of evolution sound? 2.
What are the main provisions of social Darwinism? 3.
What are the main differences between the endogenous and exogenous approaches to describing the process of social evolution? 4.
What is acculturation? 5.
In the course of the social revolution, what is the task of the advanced - for the given socio-economic formation - class? 6.
What is the essence of the institutionalization of the conflict? 7.
What is the main idea of the elite circulation theory? 8.
What is the main factor in all global revolutions and what are the general consequences of such revolutions? 9.
What two inventions can be considered as the "trigger" of the industrial revolution? 10.
List three socio-economic laws that begin to function "in full force" during the industrial revolution.
Vernadsky V. I. Reflections of a naturalist. Book. 2. - M., 1977. 2.
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Darwin Ch. Origin of man and sexual selection. - M.-L., 1959. 4.
Kozlova MS Ecological meaning of human evolution // Chelovek. - 1998. No. 4. 5.
Lenin V.I. On the slogan of the "United States of Europe" // Lenin V.I. Poln. coll. op. T. 26. 6.
Marx, Toward a Critique of Political Economy. Preface // Marx K, Engels F. Sobr. cit., 2nd ed. T. 13. 7.
Rose G. Progress without social revolution? - M., 1985. 8.
Soares K Society in the process of change // Sociological research, - 1991. No. 12. 9.
Contemporary Western Sociology: A Dictionary. - M., 1990. 10.
Spencer G. Basic principles. - St. Petersburg, 1897. 11.
Sorokin P. A. Sociology of the revolution // Sorokin P. A. Man. Civilization. Society. - M., 1992. 12.
Sorokin P. A. Sociocultural dynamics and evolutionism // In the book: American Sociological Thought. - M., 1994. 13.
Tylor E. B. Primitive culture. - M., 1989. 14.
Turovsky M. B., Turovskaya S. V. The concept of V. I. Vernadsky and the prospects for evolutionary theory // Questions of Philosophy. - 1993. No. 6. 15.
Fadeeva T. M. Social revolution and traditions // Sociological research. - 1991. No. 12. 16.
Engels F. Preface to the work The position of the working class in England // Marx K, Engels F. Sobr. cit., 2nd ed. T. 2.
presented at the session. I will go further in posing the question - "The world is waiting for a revolution?". And if it really expects peace, then how does the Russian revolution and the world revolution compare? Now the theme of the world in the public discourse is missing. But the absence of a topic does not mean the absence of a corresponding challenge.
The problem of historical revolutions has recently undergone a historiographic revision. At the level of the historical and cultural standard, the basic document for school history education, the October and February revolutions were united by the concept of a single Russian revolution. Their ideological differences were not taken into account. And now the revolutions of the past are fitting in with the type of modern “color revolutions”. The idea of the similarity of color and social revolutions is being introduced.
Against the backdrop of a series of "color revolutions", which in reality are not revolutions, but a variant of a new type of war, the actual revolutions are reduced in public discussion to the technologies of the struggle for power. They are perceived as something unconditionally negative. Maidan and Tahrir are mixed with the Great French and Great October revolutions. The question of technology replaces the question of the nature of revolutions. And the main emphasis in this substitution is who pays the money. The thesis is put forward that any revolution de-sovereignizes, and therefore cannot be considered acceptable.
Therefore, the principal task is to distinguish between color revolutions and social revolutions.(Fig. 1).
Rice. 1. A mixture of "color revolutions" and social revolutions
The key to "color revolutions" is that they are not revolutions at all.
"Color revolutions" are a type of interstate wars. Wars, as you know, are fought not only in the classical format of confrontation between armies, but also in non-classical ones, including actions inside the enemy camp. At the present stage, the emphasis in wars is increasingly shifting to non-force factors of warfare - the substitution of values, the manipulation of the consciousness of the masses, the suppression of the will and the defeat of the enemy's identity. The result of the use of such tactics is a coup d'état, the seizure of power in a hostile state by the hands of its own citizens. This is the color revolution - the defeat of the sovereignty of the enemy state without the use of armed forces and direct invasion of foreign territory.
"Color revolutions" differ from social revolutions in that the driving force in them is not the broad masses of the people, but the elitist groups of society. These are groups embedded in globalization processes and acting as carriers of the ideology of Western globalization. Color revolutions also differ from national liberation revolutions in that they are aimed not at national liberation, but at the de-sovereignization of nation-states. As a result of their implementation, a model of external control was established or strengthened. Behind all the colored revolutions, without exception, there was invariably American political direction. This “made in America” formula is the main essential characteristic of color revolutions. Social revolutions have a fundamentally different nature. They are a historically indispensable condition for development.
Development is not growth. If growth involves a certain monotonous process, then development implies a change of paradigms. Development requires a change in the qualitative characteristics of the system. And it is the revolution that acts as the instrument for the implementation of these qualitative changes, the change of paradigms. In this sense, we can talk, for example, about the Christian revolution, through which the transition from the ancient model of life to the medieval one took place. Today the world is in a state of systemic crisis. And the theme of revolution, as a way out of the impasse that has arisen, is again on the current agenda. (Fig. 2).
You can treat revolutions differently, accept them, or not accept them. But within the framework of the mega-temporal historical process, they are an objective necessity. Systems become obsolete and are historically replaced by other systems. The Christian Revolution brought about a historical paradigm shift from pagan antiquity to that of Christianity. Social revolutions can differ in terms of technology. Both violent and non-violent tactics can be used in their implementation. But the main thing is the essence of the social revolution - the change in the model of social structure carried out through it.
Rice. 2. Revolutions as a development factor
There is a fundamental challenge that must be answered in connection with the consideration of the themes of the world revolution. Today's situation is fundamentally different from the one that took place a hundred years ago, when the October Revolution took place. It differs in that a unified world power system has developed. The governing institutions of this system have unlimited financial resources. What kind of revolution, in this case, can we talk about today if the global and total power of the world beneficiary has been established?
What can the global beneficiary do if in any of the countries there really is a prospect of social transformation that threatens its interests.
Firstly, to organize financial suppression, in view of the unlimitedness due to the issuing mechanism of the FRS of monetary resources. It can disconnect the revolutionary subject from the channels of cash receipts, the possibilities for which are provided by the unity and controllability of the global financial system.
Secondly, to carry out forceful suppression, having dominance in military force and technology.
Third, organize information suppression, disavow revolutionary subjects, which allows hegemony in media resources.
Fourth, to use tools of personal control to influence the revolutionary cadres. Today, a unified total system has been created, in which any of the personalities is, one way or another, on the hook of the governing forces.
Fifth, the destruction of the revolutionary party is still at the stage of partogenesis. No one under modern total control will allow a truly revolutionary party to be institutionalized.
At sixth, to use interception tactics in case a truly revolutionary scenario gets a certain sweep. There is a revolutionary wave, but then the resources of global governance are turned on, and the scenario changes. Instead of the scenario of the social revolution, for example, the scenario of the color revolution is realized. (Fig. 3).
Rice. 3. Possibilities of blocking the revolution by the world power system
At one time, Karl Marx declared that it was the proletariat that was the revolutionary class to the end, because it had nothing to lose but its chains. And today the question of revolution is also the question of where to find a subject who has nothing to lose but his chains.
I will refer to the studies of the Soviet historian of the revolutionary movement M.L. Lurie. He used the prosopographic method, studied the biographies of the revolutionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who had retired from revolutionary activity. It was necessary to find out the reasons for this departure. It was expected that the main factor would be political repression by tsarism. But the analysis carried out revealed a completely different factorial hierarchy. The first place was taken by marriage, the second - promotion, and only the third - political repression. Today the question is the same - where to find a revolutionary subject, minimally dependent on social and economic circumstances, the conjuncture of life? (Fig. 4).
Rice. 4. Motives for the withdrawal of revolutionaries from revolutionary activities in the Russian Empire (according to the research of M.L. Lurie)
There is a global system in which any country of the modern world is built.
Suppose (such scenarios are historically known) that a national liberation, anti-colonial revolution is taking place in any of the countries. But this country is built into the outside world, with which it is connected technologically, economically, financially, culturally. These links become the dominant factor over time. Instead of the former colonialism, a de facto system of neo-colonialism is being built. The revolution is reborn. The old colonial system is being restored anew under new signs. There are plenty of such examples of the rebirth of national liberation revolutions. We know another example from the experience of the history of the USSR. A social anti-bourgeois revolution is taking place. Initially, being in a hostile environment, the Soviet Union created its own alternative system, which was sufficiently isolated from the outside bourgeois world. Gradually, the isolation is removed and the USSR is integrated into the system of world relations. Further ideas of convergence are accepted. The institutions and norms that were previously considered bourgeois are penetrating the life of Soviet society.
The country is being reborn, the revolutionary spirit is fading away. The bourgeois rebirth, so feared by the first generations of revolutionaries, is becoming a reality. The USSR ceases to exist. The most important factor in the defeat of the Soviet project is integration into the system of the global world. (Fig. 5).
Rice. 5. The rebirth of the revolution is programmed
In the discourse of Marxist theory, much attention was paid to the question of the possibilities of building socialism in one country. It is believed that I. V. Stalin introduced the provision on the construction of socialism in one country in contradiction with classical Marxism. In fact, he talked about building socialism in the USSR with a certain reservation regarding the threats emanating from the outside capitalist world.
Here is the full statement of I.V. Stalin on the essence of this problem, given a year before the start of the World War:
“It turns out that this question contains two different problems: a) the problem of the internal relations of our country, that is, the problem of overcoming our own bourgeoisie and building complete socialism, and b) the problem of our country’s external relations, that is, the problem of fully securing our country from the dangers of military intervention. and restoration. The first problem has already been solved by us, since our bourgeoisie has already been liquidated and socialism has already been built in the main. We call this the victory of socialism, or, more precisely, the victory of socialist construction in one country.
We could say that this victory is final if our country were on an island and if there were not many other, capitalist countries around it. But since we do not live on an island, but "in a system of states", a considerable part of which is hostile to the country of socialism, creating the danger of intervention and restoration, we say openly and honestly that the victory of socialism in our country is not yet final. But it follows from this that the second problem has not yet been resolved and will have to be resolved. Moreover, the second problem cannot be solved in the same manner in which the first problem was solved, that is, through our country's own efforts alone.
The second problem can only be solved by combining the serious efforts of the international proletariat with the even more serious efforts of our entire Soviet people. It is necessary to strengthen and strengthen the international proletarian ties of the working class of the USSR with the working class of the bourgeois countries; it is necessary to organize the political assistance of the working class of the bourgeois countries to the working class of our country in the event of a military attack on our country, as well as to organize all kinds of assistance from the working class of our country to the working class of the bourgeois countries; it is necessary to strengthen and strengthen in every way our Red Army, Red Navy, Red Aviation, Osoaviakhim. It is necessary to keep our entire people in a state of mobilization readiness in the face of the danger of a military attack, so that no accident and no tricks of our external enemies could take us by surprise ... ".
The concept of "world revolution" was not used. But how else could one understand the thesis of combining the efforts of the international proletariat with the efforts of the Soviet people? In the future, the warnings of the founders of the Soviet project about the threats of integration with the bourgeois world were forgotten. This cost not only the failure of the revolutionary project, but also the death of the state.
Once upon a time, historically, revolutions could be carried out on the scale of the nation-state. Relations with the outside world at that time did not yet play a decisive role, and this was possible. Further, expanding connections lead to the formation of geo-economic world-systems, and, accordingly, the scale of revolutions expands. At present, it is becoming more and more problematic to create separate islands or zones of systemic transformation. A unified world system has been created, and, accordingly, the question is about a revolution on a global scale. (Fig. 6).
Rice. 6. Revolutions in systems inversion
There is a financial, economic, technological, informational, scientific, educational and cultural integration of the countries of the world into a single global system. A revolution, if integrated into an anti-revolutionary system, is doomed to rebirth. Therefore, we can talk about either a world systemic transformation, or the creation of an alternative world-system, a rupture of the umbilical cord connecting the revolutionary country with the outside world. For this, there must be a movement that transforms the world, a new International, an International of future humanity. (Fig. 7).
Rice. 7. The problem of being integrated into the world system
Each of the major revolutions was not limited to internal addressing. Following the revolutionary transformation inside the country, the export of the revolution immediately began. And this is no coincidence. Embedding in the world system was a threat to the revolution, and therefore the task was actualized - to transform the outside world. The Christian revolutionary transformation led to the global spread of Christianity. The Islamic transformation was also a revolution, associated with the expansion of Islam, the global caliphate building. The Great French Revolution developed into revolutionary wars, the distant echo of which was the campaigns of Napoleon. The October Revolution led to the rapid worldwide spread of communist ideas. Under the leadership of the Comintern, communist parties arose in the shortest possible time in most countries of the world. Fascist brown inversion correlated with the project of building the World Millennium Reich. Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed the export of the Islamic revolution. (Fig. 8).
Rice. 8. National revolutions are turning into a world revolution
But are there conditions for the implementation of world revolutionary transformation? If we analyze the works of the classics of revolutionary theory, it will be found that the entire set of favorable conditions for world revolution identified by them is present today.
What are these conditions?
Firstly, social polarization. And in relation to today, the maximum of social polarization is recorded both in intercountry and intracountry distribution.
Secondly, contradictions between monopolies. And a new stage of the global struggle for the redistribution of markets between TNCs is unfolding.
Third, war. And the military escalation in the modern world is also evident.
Fourth, financial and economic crisis. And the global financial and economic system has not fully emerged from the crisis that began in 2008, the contradictions have not been resolved, and experts predict new crisis waves.
The whole package of revolutionary conditions thus exists. (Fig. 9).
Rice. 9. Conditions for world revolution
Some illustrations are in order. According to the National Budget Office of the United States of America: 1% of Americans control 37.1% of the national wealth; 20% - 87.7%. The remaining 80% of the American population accounts for only 12.3%. the total national wealth of the United States. Today American society, the world as a whole, is at the historical apogee of social differentiation. (Fig. 10).
Rice. 10. The distribution of total wealth in American society
The possibilities of synchronized revolutionary actions in the world are illustrated by the "occupy Wall Street" actions. It would seem impossible. so that mass demonstrations of young people with communist slogans and portraits of Marx are organized in the United States of America! In 2011, this became a reality. In a short time, the action covered 85 countries of the world. There has never been anything like it on this scale. In this respect, the 2011 action can be seen as a rehearsal for a more politically serious action.
Attention is drawn to the support of the action by a number of representatives of the world establishment. It was supported by figures holding different positions and holding completely different views: billionaire George Soros, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Ayatollah Khamenei, Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales, Nobel Prize winner in economics Paul Krugman, philosopher and publicist Noam Chomsky , church leader Peter Tarkson, writer Salman Rushdie, actor Alec Baldwin. All of them, despite the fundamental ideological differences, express a certain conflict in relation to the existing world order. There is, obviously, this conflict at the level of clan contradictions of the club of the world's beneficiaries. The situation of multiple conflicts is optimal from the perspective of the global revolution. (Fig. 11).
Rice. 11. Who supported Occupy Wall Street?
A prominent role in the coming revolutionary events, apparently, will be assigned to immigrants. Today it is customary to talk about them more as an actor in the conflict of identities than a revolutionary force. Indeed, if we think on the scale of the nation-state, it would seem that immigrants are not such a force. But in relation to the context of the world revolution, their special role becomes obvious.
Marx, as already mentioned above, is credited with discovering the special revolutionary role of the proletariat. The discovery of the revolutionary role of immigrants belongs to Herbert Marcuse. Today, migrants make up an army of 244 million people. It is predicted that in the medium term their number will reach 350 million. They, like the proletariat in Marx's assessment, represent for the most part the social bottom. They have nothing to lose, they are antagonistic towards the beneficiary. The migrants, apparently, will still say their historical word. (Fig. 12).
Rice. 12. A new revolutionary role for migrants
How stable is the existing system of the world order in relation to revolutionary challenges? Contradictions are found in its foundation, which sooner or later, having reached a crisis point, should lead to an explosion.
Economic sphere: the transfer of real production to the countries of Asia and Latin America, the de-industrialization of the center of the world-system.
Financial area: insecurity of the issued dollar supply, dependence on the purchase of dollars in the outside world.
Social sphere: inequality, aggravated disparities in living standards.
Demographic area: reproductive extinction and the immigration substitution taking place against its background, the conflict of autochthons and allochthons.
Axiological sphere: hedonism, individualism, erosion of the value of labor, propaganda of vice.
Civilizational sphere: the actual hierarchy of civilizations and peoples.
Religious area: the contradiction of militant secularism and neo-religiousness to the value foundations of traditional religions.
Political and legal sphere: the actual substitution of the basic categories for Western civilization "democracy", "freedom of speech", "equality", "human rights".
Ethnic sphere: the dead end of the policy of multiculturalism, the growth of xenophobia, neo-racism and neo-Nazism.
Cratological sphere: de-sovereignization of Western states themselves in favor of a transnational oligarchy.
There are many contradictions. There are plenty of points of vulnerability. The question is about the targeted impact on these points of vulnerability. (Fig. 13).
Rice. 13. In what ways is the Western world-system vulnerable?
And what about Russia?
Russia is waiting for a revolution. The question is what will this revolution be like. So far, the logic of the “color” revolution is being built. The "color revolution" in Russia is programmed by the logic of that historical trend within which its development has been carried out over the past three decades. There was an alternative Soviet project to the Western world. Attempts to eliminate it by military means were unsuccessful. New technologies are being developed to combat the Russian (then Soviet) statehood, focused on the substitution of public values and the defeat of the collective consciousness. Such tactics of struggle led to success. At some stage, the idea of convergence, integration into the Western world-system is accepted. "Perestroika" was the frontier, setting the Western trend of the country's development. The late Soviet elite adopts the ideology of Westernism. In 1991, the first “color revolution” took place, which resulted in the adoption of the course of Russia's incorporation into the Western-centric world-system. As this incorporation progressed, the Russian state was deprived of its sovereign potentials.
Then, when the process becomes irreversible, Russia is given to understand that its existence as an independent and integral geopolitical entity has come to an end. The result of this development should be the final disintegration of the country. "Color Revolution" No. 2 should put an end to this through an appropriate political operation. (Fig. 14).
Rice. 14. Color Revolution Programmed by Westernist Choice
In classical social revolutions, the revolutionary part of the people attacks the regime, fights against the authorities. A counter-elite arises, which leads the masses to the revolutionary struggle. As a result of the revolution, there is not only a change in the model of life arrangement, but also a change in elites.
"Color revolutions" are carried out differently. The main internal subject of their implementation is the power elite itself. (Fig. 15).
During "color revolutions" the elite is not overthrown. She remains the same. As a result of the transformation that has taken place, only the personalities in the first chairs can change. In view of the fact that the elite itself initiates “color revolutions,” building protective barriers around power turns out to be meaningless. On the contrary, as a counteraction to the desovereignization project being implemented by the compradors, barriers are needed to protect the elites from the possibility of implementing anti-national revolutionary scenarios.
Rice. 15. Power is the main internal subject of "color revolutions"
Misidentification of the actors of the "color revolution" and the technological arsenal of revolutionary forces can cost the state dearly. N.N. Yakovlev's book "The CIA Against the USSR" was repeatedly republished in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were identified as the main internal enemy of the Soviet power. The names of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Orlov, Ginzburg were called. In reality, dissidents did not play any significant role in the process of the collapse of the USSR. The main actors were representatives of the party elite. The main enemy, therefore, was not detected in time, and the dissidents turned out to be only a distracting target. (Fig. 16).
Rice. 16. Misidentification of the main internal enemy - dissidents
In most cases, as a result of “color revolutions”, figures came to power who had previously been part of the political establishment. A number of "new" leaders who came on the revolutionary wave are represented by a cohort of former high-ranking officials and persons of the "inner circle": B.N. Yeltsin - former first secretary of the CPSU MGK, member of the Central Committee (Russia), V.A. P.A. Poroshenko - former Minister of Economic Development and Trade, former Minister of Foreign Affairs (both Ukraine), M.N. Saakashvili - former Minister of Justice (Georgia), K.S. Bakiyev - former Prime Minister (Kyrgyzstan), M .F.Ghimpu - former Chairman of the Parliament (Moldova), Mustafa Muhammad Abd al-Jalil - former Chairman of the State Committee of Justice (Libya), Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, former Vice President (Yemen), Fuad Mebaza - former Chairman of the Parliament of Representatives (Tunisia) and others. Based on this number of potential leaders of the “color revolution” in Russia, one should look not among the protesters, but in the bureaucratic chairs of the highest power.
If the "color revolution" is programmed by the system, then it is possible to resist it only in a systemic way. But the change of the system itself is a revolution. This means that we can talk about two different revolutionary perspectives. One is desovereignization, which ultimately leads to the geopolitical disintegration of the country. The second is re-sovereignization, correlated with the ideology of national liberation. For the highest power, the historical choice is that it will either saddle the national liberation revolution, lead it, or be swept away by means of a “color revolution”. “Humanity,” the great mathematician and logician Alfred Whitehead once said, “has only two ways - either development or degradation. Conservatism in its purest form is contrary to the essence of the laws of the universe. Conservation of the existing system of Russian life order is futile due to its unviability. Some time will pass, and it will inevitably be replaced. The fundamental question today is no longer whether it is capable of being preserved, but the essence of the replacement. There are three scenarios for such a replacement. The first is the "orange revolution", a variant of the new liberalization. The second is the "brown revolution", a variant of building a nationalist state. Both of these scenario versions of the "color revolution" can only become an accelerator of geopolitical doom. There remains a third version of the revolution - national liberation.
With this option, Russia returns to the civilization-identical tracks of development, leaves the external world-systems and restores its own Russia-centric world-system. (Fig. 17).
Rice. 17. Three versions of the revolution in Russia
What is the structuring of the revolutionary and power forces in the perspective of the revolution scenario? Below is their organizational and social structure. It is presented what forces will be co-opted to implement the "color revolution" scenario, what forces the authorities will mobilize, and who can stand under the banner of a national liberation revolution. (Fig. 18, 19, 20).
Rice. 18. The forces of the "color revolution" in Russia
Rice. 19. Powerful forces of opposition to the threat of revolution
Rice. 20. Forces of the National Liberation Revolution in Russia
It is important to fix the channels of control from different sides with available forces in the forthcoming revolutionary struggle. The forces of the "color revolution" are co-opted through money and the State Department and the ideology of Western-centric values. The authorities mobilize supporters through administrative coercion and, again, money. With such a model of co-optation, it objectively loses to the forces of the “color revolution”. The West has disproportionately more financial resources than the Russian authorities. Moreover, the resources at the disposal of the authorities in the conditions of external economic pressure will inevitably be reduced. With a shortage of finances, ideology could play a unifying role in relation to the pro-government forces. But she does not have power, unlike the opposite side.
Thus, only the administrative resource remains. But here lies the main danger. Pro-government structures connected with the regime exclusively in material terms can betray at a decisive moment. Moreover, such a betrayal in the current situation is programmed.
The national liberation revolution has more chances to resist the "color revolution" than the authorities. Her forces are structured fundamentally differently. This structuring is based neither on money nor on administrative coercion, but on adherence to an articulated revolutionary ideology. This lowers, in comparison with power, the dependence of the revolutionary forces on material financial circumstances. It will not be possible to defeat the social, national liberation revolution only by cutting off funding channels. It turns out, in this respect, less vulnerable than the forces of power, or the forces of the "color revolution". A social revolution is much more difficult to organize than a "color revolution" and even more so than a pro-government movement. But if it is already in a dynamic sweep, then it is fundamentally more difficult to stop it. An idea that has captured the masses overcomes any obstacles and beats everything else. The “color revolution” objectively defeats the inertial power. But the social, national liberation revolution is capable of defeating both the authorities and the “color revolution”.
The statement of such a correlation of forces determines the model of the union of the supreme power and the forces of the national liberation revolution. If a revolution cannot be resisted, it must be led. However, this presupposes the transfer of supreme power to revolutionary positions.
We must not even talk about revolution, but about the development of revolutions. (Fig. 21).
Rice. 21. Anthropological revolution
National liberation revolutions raise the question of the coming to power of national forces, instead of the colonial administration and compradors. This is certainly an important task, but insufficient. The revolutionary state included in the system of colonial relations will be re-colonized. In the social revolution, the raising of the question of changing the system of the life order of society. But this is not enough either. A system transformed on moral principles with a person who does not correspond to its level will inevitably be reborn, the revolutionary spirit will be defeated by conformism and consumerism. And hence the main question about the revolution, which is not indicated in the traditional classifications - the anthropological revolution, the transformation of man. It is this revolution that will ultimately lead the world and the country to higher, moral principles of life.