Valentin Katasonov about how the Swiss voted against UBI - the “unconditional basic income” guaranteed by the state...
In the vulgar consciousness, communism is perceived as a social system in which every person has the right to consume, but is not obliged to work. The possibility of Switzerland switching to a similar model of social structure has been actively discussed in this Alpine republic over the past few months. The idea of such “everyday communism”, which is floating today not only in Switzerland, but also in a number of other countries, is designated by the term “unconditional basic income” (UBI).
UBI is a state-guaranteed payment to all members of society, which provides them with a subsistence level of consumption and thus eliminates a person’s dependence on labor as a source of income. Since the 70s of the twentieth century, the introduction of this model has been experimented with in different countries (mainly at the municipal level). In Europe, such experiments have been and are being carried out in Holland, Denmark, Germany, Finland on the initiative of central authorities, municipalities, public organizations, trade unions, charitable foundations, and private entrepreneurs. The topic of UBI is increasingly discussed in the International Labor Organization (ILO).
Discussions about the possibility of introducing a UBI in Switzerland ended with a referendum, which took place on June 5. Citizens of the Confederacy were asked to support or reject the next version of UBI. Every adult resident of Switzerland (including some categories of foreigners) receives a monthly social benefit from the state in the amount of 2,500 Swiss francs (at the current exchange rate, approximately 2,260 euros or 170 thousand Russian rubles). For children, the benefit amount was determined at 625 francs (565 euros; 42.5 thousand Russian rubles). Simultaneously with the introduction of a single benefit, all social benefits and benefits that existed in the Confederation before were to be abolished.
The referendum in Switzerland was preceded by public opinion polls. If we discard the category of doubters (undecided), then the ratio of supporters and opponents of UBI in recent months was approximately 25% to 75%. In Switzerland, there has been a clear polarization of society on the issue of a single social benefit. Each side carried out active propaganda work, relying on an established system of arguments. To better understand the intricacies of the struggle around the UBI issue, let us note what 2,500 francs are for a Swiss. The average salary in the Confederation is 6,000 francs (before taxes). The maximum amount of all benefits that a Swiss citizen can theoretically receive under the current social security system is slightly lower than 2,500 francs (by about five percent).
The main arguments of the Swiss supporters of UBI who initiated the referendum boiled down to the following:
1. In the conditions of scientific and technological progress, there is a continuous increase in labor productivity. The consequence of this is the displacement of living labor by materialized labor. Simply put, robots are replacing people. There is an increase in absolute and relative levels of unemployment. So far, Switzerland looks relatively well compared to other countries in the world. Last year, the unemployment rate in the Confederation was 3.1 - 3.2%. This year it is forecast at 3.5%. For comparison: in the countries of southern Europe, according to official statistics, this figure reaches 15-20%. Youth unemployment in southern Europe has already exceeded 50%. Swiss experts predict that the time is not far off when the unemployment rate in the Confederation will cross the 10% level.
Conclusion: UBI represents the very “straw” that needs to be laid in advance before the mass replacement of people with robots begins in Switzerland. The system of guaranteed benefits, according to its supporters, relieves psychological tension in society (fear of losing a job) and prevents social explosions.
2. UBI will allow a person to unleash his creative potential. Having a minimum guaranteed income, a person can engage in activities that interest him and correspond to his talents. On the eve of the referendum, UBI supporters appealed to sociological surveys that showed that the number of people who would voluntarily choose idleness if the system was introduced did not exceed a few percent.
3. The current social security system in Switzerland is very complex and confusing. It is based on a huge number of regulations and includes dozens (according to other sources, hundreds) of various benefits and benefits. This in turn gives rise to a bloated bureaucracy at the level of the Confederation and the cantons. An increasing part of the budget money allocated for social purposes is eaten up by this bureaucratic apparatus.
And now the arguments of opponents of UBI, who won the referendum.
1. The introduction of a UBI will weaken the Swiss economy and create an unhealthy atmosphere in society. People will stop working hard and efficiently. At first, indeed, the percentage of those who want to lead an idle life and deliberately leave work may be low, but this is only at first. Those who lead an idle lifestyle can have a corrupting influence on those who are still working. Even if workers do not follow the example of those who quit their jobs, they will show dissatisfaction with the fact that some citizens work while others idle.
2. First of all, those citizens who have low-paid jobs are interested in UBI. It will be impossible to find Swiss citizens for such types of work; it will be necessary to attract immigrants from other countries. The social, cultural and political risks associated with such labor displacement are obvious.
3. The version of the UBI system put to referendum does not have sufficient economic justification. First of all, the state will not be able to meet its universal benefit obligations due to budgetary constraints.
4. In order for the state to meet its UBI obligations of 2,500 francs per adult per month (30 thousand francs per year), it is estimated that it will need 208 billion francs per year. This is three times the current total budget expenditures on social programs. To do this, it is necessary to increase taxes (by approximately 140 billion francs) both on company profits and on the personal income of citizens. The question of the price that Swiss society would have to pay for the “communist” experiment remained on the periphery of public attention. Additional business taxes will also reduce the competitiveness of the Swiss economy.
5. Some Swiss critics of the UBI view the project of a single social benefit not as a manifestation of the will of the people, but as a planned action to undermine Swiss society and deliberately undermine its economy. They compare the devastating effect on the economy of the Confederation with that which arose as a result of the abolition of the institution of bank secrecy at the beginning of this decade (the abolition occurred under pressure from Washington). There are suspicions that the referendum initiative originated not in Switzerland, but overseas, in the United States.
Late in the evening of June 5, the results of the referendum became known. None of the cantons supported the idea of UBI, that is, in all cantons the number of votes “against” was greater than the number of votes “for”. The idea of an “unconditional basic income” received the most positive responses in the cantons of Basel-Stadt (36.0%), Jura (35.8%), Geneva (34.7%) and Neuchâtel (31.2%).
The initiative to introduce UBI was supported by 23.1% of citizens of the Confederation, while 76.9% of citizens voted against UBI. The first comments on the results of the referendum that appeared in the Swiss media show the following. It was mainly the poor who voted for UBI. People with not only high but also middle incomes are against UBI. Many Swiss explained their position very simply: “We are not voting against UBI, but against the tax increases that will become inevitable if UBI is introduced.”
However, the Swiss referendum did not bury the very idea of a UBI. The Green Party (the only Swiss political party that advocated the introduction of a UBI) stated that it would continue to fight for a unified social benefit. It is likely that UBI supporters will change their tactics. They will seek the introduction of “communism” in individual cantons (Swiss law allows this). The focus will be on those cantons where UBI supporters have achieved the best results (Basel-Stadt, Jura, Geneva and Neuchâtel).
Swiss supporters of the UBI system are not discouraged. They are pleased that the referendum took place and the idea of UBI became known to millions of people in Europe and beyond. So to speak, it began to take over the masses. On the eve of the referendum, public opinion polls were conducted on the issue of UBI in some European countries. There the percentage of supporters of “everyday communism” is significantly higher than in Switzerland. For example, in the UK there are more supporters of UBI than opponents. In the words of Karl Marx, the “ghost of communism” began to haunt Europe. True, Marx talked about communism on the basis of the socialization of the means of production. Current European reformers offer a version of distributive communism while maintaining private ownership of the means of production.
Mikhail Smolin on the spiritual situation in Russia on the eve of the revolution
170 years ago, the fundamental ideological document of K. Marx and F. Engels, the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” was published. Lenin wrote that “this small book is worth entire volumes.”
Indeed, this “little book” ushered in the era of the greatest bloody sacrifice of Christian and non-Christian peoples to this terrible cult of communist worship of the ideals of Marxist communism.
In a certain sense, the “Manifesto …” among the communists is a kind of catechism among Christians. He sets forth the “doctrinal” formulations of those destructive political “dogmas” that these strange and cruel people have believed in for the second century.
On the website of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the “Manifesto…” is characterized as “an extremely succinct presentation of the main provisions of scientific communism” and its appearance is called “a turning point in the history of the world communist movement.”
Modern communists talk about the relevance for themselves of the ideas of the “Manifesto...”. And this should concern any person in our society, since it was the ideas of this “Manifesto...” that led in our country to the revolution, and to the bloody Civil War, and to the subsequent many years of class struggle with almost all groups of the population, and to Christian persecution, and to the state organization of multimillion-dollar abortions, and to many other things, which together are called national genocide.
So what do the communists “confess” in their “Manifesto…”?
1. For communists" Laws, morality, religion... - all this... is nothing more than bourgeois prejudices" (Hereinafter, quotes from the "Manifesto...").
Communists, as principled materialists, see in any religion, morality, legality a challenge for their political egoism striving for power.
Further in the text of the “Manifesto...” it is written that communism “abolishes the eternal truths, it abolishes religion, morality… Communist revolution there is a most decisive break with property relations inherited from the past; no wonder that in the course of its development it breaks most decisively with ideas inherited from the past".
How communism “abolishes religion and morality” is well known from many years of persecution of the Church in the USSR. Hundreds of destroyed monasteries, tens of thousands of bombed or desecrated churches, hundreds of thousands of repressed clergy, millions of tortured Christians, a godless atheistic struggle against religion and Christian morality throughout Soviet history.
For the sake of tactical considerations, modern communists may not even be against accepting believers into the party. But what sober-minded believer would join the party of principled fighters against God?
Whoever becomes a communist has long ago renounced Christ, since one cannot be both a materialist and believe in an afterlife.
Either a communist or a Christian.
Either take off the cross, or hand over the Marxist “little book” to the waste paper.
2. In the “Manifesto...” Marx and Engels argued that “the proletariat, the lowest layer of modern society, cannot rise, cannot straighten up without the entire superstructure towering above him from the layers that form official society did not fly into the air".
Communists cannot imagine the development of human societies without revolutions. For them this is a fundamental issue.
Karl Marx. Photo: www.globallookpress.com
Therefore, if you want to support the communists and entrust them with repeating the “improvement” of our society, then you must take responsibility for the oceans of blood that are shed in such Marxist experiments.
There are no ideally just societies, simply because it is impossible to find even a large number of ideally just people for them. But there are no people, which means it is impossible to create such a community.
And those who promise to build a fair society are either liars who dream of “socializing” you, or stupid utopian dreamers. Neither one nor the other should be allowed to come to power.
Improving societies without improving the people themselves is a crafty deception of those who want to seize power. Therefore, it is better to live in a more or less unjust, but not socialist society, than to die or live under the dictates of cruel, but “fair”, in the communist class understanding, commissars in dusty helmets.
3. Marx and Engels formulated in the “Manifesto…” that “communists can express their theory in one proposition: destruction of private property". In development of the thesis about the destruction of private property, the "Manifesto ..." also advocates " abolition of inheritance rights".
Moreover, both “destruction...” and “cancellation...” will be carried out using harsh administrative methods, without any consent from the repressed population.
Not only do these measures involve widespread violence, but they also economically destroy the work ethic. In practice, “destruction...” and “cancellation...” lead to the meaninglessness of any work. If all property is common and you cannot pass on any result of your labor to your children, then social apathy and contempt for work are guaranteed.
The late Soviet era completely demonstrated contempt for labor and at the stage of the collapse of the USSR, they hoped for their “liberation” only through humanitarian aid from the West.
4. In the “Manifesto...” there is the following reasoning: “Bourgeois marriage is in reality a community of wives. The communists could only be reproached for the fact that they want to introduce instead the hypocritically hidden community of wives, the official, open".
This is the place in the “Manifesto...” from which, with the further development of Marxism, civil marriages, free love, criticism of the institution of the traditional family, the idea of abandoning children, changing sexual orientation and then all other sodomitic Western “charms” grew.
It must be said that communism and other “scientific socialism” are, first of all, desire for totalitarian socialization, to the withdrawal from individual use of all property and their transfer into the hands of the party of revolutionaries, who are implementing their project of “making happy” this or that society.
It all starts with nationalization, that is, the socialization of the means of production. Further, through the establishment of its own party dictatorship, it comes to the socialization of all material values in general. And somewhere in the future, in socialist societies, the socialization of children and desired wives always looms.
5. The Communist "Manifesto..." postulates that: " workers have no fatherland".
During the war between Russia and Germany, Lenin wrote in his work “Socialism and War” (July-August 1915) that: “The war, undoubtedly, gave rise to the most dramatic crisis and aggravated the misfortunes of the masses incredibly... Our duty is to help realize these sentiments, deepen and formalize them. This task is correctly expressed only by slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war, and any consistently class struggle during the war, any seriously pursued tactics of mass action inevitably leads to this."
Communist love for the Motherland is always limited by their ideology. If they are not in power in Russia, then their Motherland is a “dark kingdom” or a “gang of corrupt officials.”
Communists can “love” (a Christian, anti-communist word, which is why it is put in quotation marks) only the Soviet Fatherland. They treat pre-revolutionary, thousand-year-old Russia and the post-Soviet Russian Federation as fierce “Vlasovites”, with undisguised hatred and readiness to start a Civil War.
6. The "Manifesto..." says that in order to achieve your goals " Communists everywhere are seeking unification and agreement between the democratic parties of all countries".
This is a point that our modern communists still have to master.
Indeed, any revolution has always been started by the liberal democrats. It was they who rocked society, ridiculed traditions, and brought doubts into beliefs. They were the beginnings of that revolutionary movement, the end of which were all kinds of socialists, anarchists, and communists.
The liberal democrats undermined, the socialist democrats disposed of the revolutionized society.
The ideologists of Marxism knew their destructive craft well. And the union of communists and democrats is absolutely inevitable, for a real united, liberal-socialist rebellion either against Putin, or against any other national Russian government.
7. The founders of the communist movement, in their “Manifesto…” were proudly frank and stated that: “their goals can only be achieved through the violent overthrow of the entire existing social order. Let the ruling classes shudder before the Communist Revolution.”
Do we need to wait for a “communist revolution” today? And will they achieve their goals “by violently overthrowing the existing social order?
This depends on Russian society, on its resistance to its secondary Sovietization, and on the communists themselves, to what extent they will comply with their revolutionary “pseudo-traditions.”
Russian society, which experienced genocide from communist ideology and Bolshevik practice, should not be poisoned again by the Marxist dope. It's time to develop a healthy, conservative antidote to the relapse of Soviet diseases. And having overcome the protracted quarter-century transition period, move towards the Russian future.
A ghost is haunting Europe - the specter of communism. All the forces of old Europe united in the sacred persecution of this ghost: the pope and the tsar, Metternich and Guizot, the French radicals and the German police.
Where is the opposition party that its opponents in power would not denounce as communist? Where is the opposition party that would not, in turn, throw the stigmatizing accusation of communism at both the more advanced representatives of the opposition and its reactionary opponents?
Two conclusions follow from this fact.
Communism is already recognized as a force by all European forces.
It’s time for communists to openly state their views, their goals, their aspirations in front of the whole world and counter the manifesto of the party itself with fairy tales about the ghost of communism.
To this end, communists of various nationalities gathered in London and compiled the following "Manifesto", which is published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish.
The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggle.
Free and slave, patrician and plebeian, landowner and serf, master and apprentice, in short, oppressor and oppressed were in eternal antagonism to each other, waged a continuous, sometimes hidden, sometimes open struggle, always ending in a revolutionary reorganization of the entire social edifice or the common death of those fighting classes.
In previous historical epochs we find almost everywhere a complete division of society into different classes, a whole ladder of different social positions. In Ancient Rome we meet patricians, horsemen, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages - feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, apprentices, serfs, and besides, in almost each of these classes there were also special gradations.
Modern bourgeois society, which emerged from the depths of the lost feudal society, did not destroy class contradictions. It only put new classes, new conditions of oppression and new forms of struggle in the place of the old ones.
Our era, the era of the bourgeoisie, is distinguished, however, in that it has simplified class contradictions: society is increasingly split into two large hostile camps, into two large classes facing each other - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages came the free population of the first cities; From this class of townspeople the first elements of the bourgeoisie developed.
The discovery of America and the sea route around Africa created a new field of activity for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, exchange with the colonies, the increase in the number of means of exchange and goods in general gave a hitherto unheard of impetus to trade, navigation, industry and thereby caused the rapid development of a revolutionary element in a disintegrating feudal society.
The old feudal or guild organization of industry could no longer satisfy the demand that was growing with the new markets. Manufactory took its place. The guild masters were supplanted by the industrial middle class; The division of labor between the various corporations disappeared, giving way to the division of labor within the individual workshop.
But the markets kept growing, demand kept increasing. Even the manufacture could no longer satisfy him. Then steam and the machine revolutionized industry. The place of manufacture was taken by modern large-scale industry, the place of the industrial middle class was taken by millionaire industrialists, leaders of entire industrial armies, and modern bourgeois.
Large industry created a world market prepared by the discovery of America. The world market caused a colossal development of trade, navigation and land communications. This in turn had an impact on the expansion of industry, and to the same extent that industry, trade, shipping, and railways grew, the bourgeoisie developed, it increased its capital and pushed into the background all the classes inherited from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, that the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long process of development, a series of revolutions in the mode of production and exchange.
Each of these stages of development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by corresponding political success. An oppressed class under the rule of feudal lords, an armed and self-governing association in a commune, here an independent urban republic, there a third, tax-paying estate of the monarchy, then, during the period of manufacture, a counterweight to the nobility in a class or absolute monarchy and the main basis of large monarchies in general, finally , since the establishment of large-scale industry and the world market, it has won for itself an exclusive political dominance in the modern representative state. Modern state power is only a committee managing the general affairs of the entire bourgeois class.
The bourgeoisie played an extremely revolutionary role in history.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has achieved dominance, has destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. She mercilessly broke the motley feudal shackles that tied man to his “natural overlords,” and left no other connection between people except bare interest, a heartless “purity.” In the icy water of selfish calculation, she drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, knightly enthusiasm, and bourgeois sentimentality. It transformed a person's personal dignity into exchange value and replaced the countless granted and acquired freedoms with one unscrupulous freedom of trade. In a word, it replaced exploitation covered by religious and political illusions with open, shameless, direct, callous exploitation.
The bourgeoisie deprived of the sacred aura all kinds of activities that until then were considered honorable and looked upon with reverent awe. She turned a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a poet, a man of science into her paid employees.
The bourgeoisie tore away their touching-sentimental veil from family relationships and reduced them to purely monetary relations.
The bourgeoisie showed that the brute display of force in the Middle Ages, so admired by the reactionaries, found its natural complement in laziness and immobility. It showed for the first time what human activity could achieve. She created miracles of art, but of a completely different kind than the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; She made completely different campaigns than the migration of peoples and the Crusades.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly causing revolutions in the instruments of production, without, therefore, revolutionizing the relations of production, and therefore the entire totality of social relations. On the contrary, the first condition for the existence of all former industrial classes was the preservation of the old mode of production unchanged. Continuous revolutions in production, continuous upheaval of all social relations, eternal uncertainty and movement distinguish the bourgeois era from all others. All frozen, rusty relationships, along with their accompanying, time-honored ideas and views, are destroyed, all that arise again turn out to be outdated before they have time to ossify. Everything classy and stagnant disappears, everything sacred is desecrated, and people finally come to the need to look with sober eyes at their situation in life and their mutual relationships.
The Manifesto of the Communist Party is the greatest program document of scientific communism. “This small book is worth entire volumes: the entire organized and fighting proletariat of the civilized world lives and moves in its spirit to this day” (Lenin). Written by K. Marx and F. Engels as the program of the Communist League, the Manifesto of the Communist Party was first published in London in February 1848 as a separate edition of 23 pages. In March–July 1848, the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was published in the democratic organ of German emigrants “Deutsche Londoner Zeitung” (“German London Newspaper”). The German text was also reprinted in London in 1848 in the form of a separate 30-page pamphlet, in which some typos from the first edition were corrected and punctuation was improved. This text was subsequently used by Marx and Engels as the basis for subsequent authorized publications. In 1848, translations of the Manifesto were also made into a number of European languages (French, Polish, Italian, Danish, Flemish and Swedish). The names of the authors of the Manifesto were not mentioned in the 1848 editions; they were first mentioned in print in 1850 with the publication of the first English translation in the Chartist organ Red Republican, in a preface written by the editor of that magazine, J. Gurney.
In 1872, a new German edition of the Manifesto was published with minor amendments by the author and with a preface by Marx and Engels. This publication, like subsequent German editions in 1883 and 1890, was published under the title “Communist Manifesto.”
The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in 1869 in Geneva, translated by Bakunin, who distorted the contents of the Manifesto in a number of places. The shortcomings of the first edition were eliminated in the edition published in Geneva in 1882, translated by Plekhanov. Plekhanov's translation marked the beginning of the widespread dissemination of the ideas of the Manifesto in Russia. Attaching great importance to the propaganda of Marxism in Russia, Marx and Engels wrote a special preface to this publication.
After Marx's death, a number of editions of the Manifesto were published, reviewed by Engels: in 1883, a German edition with a preface by Engels; in 1888, an English edition translated by S. Moore, edited by Engels and provided with a preface and notes; in 1890, a German edition with a new preface by Engels. Engels also wrote several notes for the latest edition. In 1885, the newspaper Socialiste (Socialist) published a French translation of the Manifesto, made by Marx's daughter Laura Lafargue and reviewed by Engels. Engels wrote the preface to the Polish edition of the Manifesto in 1892 and to the Italian edition in 1893. – 419.
From time to time we began to hold conferences dedicated to the life and work of philosophers who worked in the 60s, close in spirit to our wave of democratization and perestroika. The past cannot be overcome in silence. But at the same time, one cannot denigrate it, because if new promises are not fulfilled, then it may return. The past is a glorious and at the same time dangerous thing. Just in case, it should be handled carefully so as not to stain it and not to become infected with viruses that our pampered body will no longer be able to grow. Perhaps we should learn how to deal delicately and politely with the departed from our ancestors, who revered and respected the dead and communicated with them on certain set days. In fact, we, as historians of the past and clinicians of the present, as unique mediums evoking the “spirit of ancestors,” must follow certain rules for communicating with them. We must not forget about them, so as not to cut off the roots that give strength. But we should not persistently call on them or constantly think about them, so that they do not interfere with our creative work. There remains a certain paradoxical movement, which is regulated not so much by logic as by ethics. Oddly enough, the most difficult thing to be polite about is the recent past.
"A ghost haunts Europe, the specter of communism"
These words at the beginning of the Manifesto are fascinating and alarming. If something seems, you need to be especially careful. Marx's attention is drawn to the ghosts of bourgeois society. This is an illusory world placed on its head. The reality of bourgeois society is an abode of ghosts, illusory forms of consciousness. Therefore, criticism of economic theories leads Marx to the conclusion that its principles correspond to existing social relations, which, being inauthentic and inhuman, distort the science that describes them. This does not correspond to the generally accepted criteria of science, according to which a theory is verified by facts. Marx criticizes the “facts” themselves and exposes them as ghosts. Strictly speaking, his teaching is not scientific, if we use this word in the common positivist sense of the word. The problem arises from the evaluative understanding of non-science, which is considered bad. Marxism was understood by some as a science, by others as an ideology. Science is built on facts, not values. Many social science methodologists do not see much difference between them, considering values to be independent of individual consciousness. Both must be recognized.
In fact, the difference between facts and values is that facts “do their job” even if we do not recognize them. On the contrary, values are reality if they are fulfilled not only in consciousness, but also in activity. Of course, their separation to some extent turns out to be artificial, and therefore science cannot be considered free from value judgments. This dream of M. Weber to free himself from values was critically perceived by Habermas, who, in the famous work “Technology and Science as Ideology,” revealed in these objective forms, based exclusively on natural parameters and technical capabilities, a whole layer of implicit preconditions of a value-ideological nature. Therefore, even positive science also turns out to be the abode of ghosts.
The Manifesto characterizes communism as a ghost. But whose? Maybe this is the ghost of the innocently murdered Christ, who dreamed of equality and justice. Like the shadow of Hamlet's father, he cried out for vengeance. Christ was betrayed a second time at the dawn of bourgeois society, when the market destroyed the temple. The yellow metal burned the hearts of people with a thirst for profit, forcing them not only to trade, but also to rob and exploit the labor of others. But this has always been the case. Anyone who has studied the history of the Middle Ages knows that the division of property and the injustice that reigned in society there was no less, and perhaps much greater, than in bourgeois society. A. Smith rightly argued that it is the market that ensures equal rights and freedom for people. If they produce goods, sell some and buy others, this means that they do not kill or take away. But the paradox is that in a society where living conditions were significantly less comfortable and more cruel, nevertheless, there was much greater unity than even now.
Communism was a specter haunting the intellectual fields of Europe. He became a ghost who haunted subtle, conscientious people. Utopian socialists undoubtedly considered themselves responsible to Christian values that were rejected by the market. Dostoevsky and Weber, each in his own way, carried out an act of repentance and reconciliation. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor convinces Christ to return back to his kingdom and not interfere with governing the earth like a human being. Weber, on the contrary, believes that Christian values were not betrayed, but became the basis of civilized capitalism. The question of the ghosts of Marx was recently raised by J. Derrida, who, as is known, was keen on Marxism in his youth and, apparently, in his mature years realized the traces of its influence. Communism has become a ghost for us - former Marxists who, unable to recognize the new market ideology, nevertheless no longer believe in the feasibility of Marxism.
Our ancestors are staggering like restless ghosts. Descendants do not give them their due, forget or denigrate them, and therefore, having already become dead, they bother us and not only in nightmares. Today we are building capitalism, but its builders themselves constantly doubt it. In a hysterical fit of suspicion and hatred, they are capable of destroying each other. The present not only did not become clearer, but, on the contrary, became even more illusory. The idol of the market is also a ghost, and more and more people are realizing this more and more clearly. Sometimes I want to ask with them: is it really impossible to just live and learn from life itself? However, life is a complicated thing and it usually teaches too late. The truths of life mature when they are no longer needed. That's why you always have to listen to ghosts. Ghosts come from the past, they are messengers of the dead who have not calmed down. These ghosts live among us and disturb us with their appearance. But should we trust them unconditionally? One inevitably has to remember the ancient rules of communicating with the dead. The ancients felt the danger of death and at the same time wanted to use the “spirit of ancestors” for the benefit of the living. Likewise, we should not forget our past if we do not want it to reach us in the form of ghosts.
It seems to us that the generation of the sixties did not know how to finally deal with Stalinism. In fact, they did not allow the past to be denigrated and did not consider Marxism to be a false teaching in principle; they tried to humanize it rather than discard it, as happened in the 90s. We can criticize the founders of “diamatism” and “historical mathematics,” but the networks of concepts they developed still hold us in their cells. So it was with the sixties. We must find a responsible and at the same time respectful and distant way of relating to our predecessors. To do this, we must, first of all, determine their degree of influence on ourselves. If someone, even reading only foreign literature and only in the original language, thinks that he is absolutely free from the philosophical discourse of the 30s, 50s, 69s, then he is greatly mistaken. The past lives and acts in modern times not as a philosophical discourse, but as a form of life. This is “historical necessity”, which is given as fate. Philosophers should not embellish his face through peculiar cosmetic operations, although washing away the clothes of the past is one of the duties of historians.
Marxism and its society
Question: “What should we do today?” is not purely Russian. Any honest intellectual always thinks and talks about this, although our time is not conducive to raising questions about the meaning and purpose of existence. It even discourages these kinds of questions, although in a different way than before. If earlier the main strangler of freedom was the state power, interested in self-preservation, today the conformist system of order exists before or in addition to power. It is determined by the continuous process of circulation of goods, knowledge, sexuality, in which a person functions without experiencing the sharply protesting pressure of forces alien to him. In other words, previously a person experienced attractions, had natural needs and faced strong obstacles to their implementation in the form of a simple lack or prohibition. Today, especially in developed countries, order has penetrated to the level of the needs themselves, while they are not suppressed, but stimulated. But the paradox is that since there are no prohibitions, a person no longer experiences desires. There is no conflict between “I want” and “I can” and thus the obvious, directly experienced experience of a collision with an alien force disappears. From a modern point of view, the society in which Marx lived was rude and even cruel, but simple and honest. It is characterized by exploitation, colonization, poverty, revolution, war and, finally, alienation. But the whole point is that in a modern welfare society, people feel that not everything is in order, but they do not have the pathos characteristic of the early critics of capitalism. After all, how can intellectuals criticize modern society if everyone is well-fed and happy? The brutal dramas of early history gave way to psychodramas. Everyone is well-fed, but neurotic. Therefore, for Freud, unlike Marx, the authority of order was not being, but consciousness, exploiting the energy of libido. Lacan noted the transformation of the authority figure, which Freud represented as the Father, into a symbolic form: The Other is language. Hence, instead of the class struggle, a subtle variety of “criticism of ideology”—cognitive psychoanalysis—comes to the forefront. But this form of protest is no longer given to us. Sexual liberation, in the implementation of which the current older generation has invested a lot of effort, has led to an unexpected result - the disappearance of sexual desire. Sexuality, having overstepped its artificially and forcibly contained boundaries of the marital bedroom, poured into the streets, onto the stage, and into the screens in a wide stream. Everything became sexual, and this completely drained the libido, bringing one step closer to the ideal of Eastern nirvana, which in fact represents a radical threat to the active West. The teachings of Freud, like Marx, also obeyed the fateful formula: “they wanted the best, but it turned out as always.” First, the working class “dissolved,” and then the “men” and “women” themselves who fought for emancipation.
The suspicion arises that the proletariat is no longer a class, that the forms of oppression in society are much more diverse than the capitalist exploitation described by Marx. Moreover, the mysterious “trickster” of Marx’s formulas, strictly speaking, turns out to be not only the proletarian, but any person living on wages. Marx did not approach the assessment of bourgeois society in a philistine way, with suspicion of universal deception. It is unlikely that society would put up with deception for long. In the end, those who are deceived and exploited find a way to freedom. The colonies have achieved independence, the proletarians have risen from their knees and are fighting for their rights. One way or another, the possibility of increasing capital through deception and violence is constantly decreasing. It is obvious that if the bourgeoisie lives by deception and exploitation of others, then sooner or later it will be overthrown. Marx insisted on the inevitability of revolution not only because of the Christian understanding of justice. Objectively, he evaluates bourgeois society in general as “honest” and “fair”, based on equivalent exchange, pursuing all kinds of deception and dishonesty in business. The essence of the market is not the possibility of deceiving the buyer, but, on the contrary, the possibility of a fair exchange. Due to the “savagery” of our current market, we do not even understand A. Smith, who considered the market a democratic institution. Marx could not adhere to the Christian-moralistic opposition between the temple and the market, the understanding of capitalist society as a kind of satanic regime like the one described in V. Solovyov’s “Three Conversations”. Still, our so-called “Slavophile” position in relation to European bourgeois society turns out to be biased, infected with the ideals of Orthodoxy and, in general, the religious denial of worldly wealth, and especially that acquired through trade. It must be said that in the West, too, the moralistic approach to assessing bourgeois society has not yet been completely eliminated. If morality claims to be absolute, then how can one evaluate morality itself and distinguish bad morality from good? The market removes the opposition between good and evil and itself wants to become a universal measure of all values, which are reduced to commodity value.
But where does “non-labor” come from in bourgeois society? According to Marx, its source is a specific commodity, which is labor power. It is purchased at “consumer” cost, and in the process of labor produces goods that are sold at a different price. The problem of labor power is not its unfair use. In the end, no one will ever receive as much as he earned with his own labor, because the very assessment of work and its results turns out to be fundamentally relative. Even such worthy and almost sacred work as working the land and producing essential products has environmental consequences and can therefore be regarded as unnecessary. The dual assessment of labor becomes even more pronounced when it comes to military production or the production of luxury goods or other unnecessary things. It is clear that this work is more harmful than useful. No less problems arise with the economic assessment of intellectual and creative work. But in any case, Marx’s main argument against bourgeois society is not the deception and exploitation of the worker, but general alienation, from which, Marx believed, only the proletarian revolution can save us, for by freeing himself, the worker will liberate the whole society. After all, it is he who, through his labor, by going to work and then shopping, reproduces and maintains the existing order of alienation. Man has been turned not only into labor power, but into a commodity, and this is the source and consequence of alienation.
It can be concluded that Marx and other classical philosophers, supporters of determinism, materialism and the theory of reflection had serious objective reasons to adhere to a realistic attitude, which is now considered naive. In phenomenology, being disappears and cognizable “objects” turn out to be the meanings of consciousness. In linguistic philosophy, scientific statements about facts are declared a type of myth, since observation is loaded with theory. But modern philosophers are not natural idealists either. Modernity is characterized by a lack of reality. Symbols and signs have enslaved things so much that they have become simulacra. Our images are like icons, behind which there is nothing, and they themselves are objects of worship. This makes us more cautious about not only idealism, but also materialism. Simply restoring it is clearly not enough to deal with the illusions and ghosts that have enslaved us. An example would be the fate of Marxist liberation theory in the West.
One Dimensional Man
In his famous book, Marcuse, whose ideas, as comparative analysis shows, are being developed by many modern intellectuals, characterized modernity as an amazing unity of opposing groups, classes, generations, and sexes, who have been waging war to the death for centuries. Power has always oppressed and deceived, and people knew this much better than intellectuals. Therefore, criticism of ideology, which has become the work of the professional intelligentsia, is not so effective. It is no coincidence that Marx declared the end of criticism and the need for practical changes in those conditions that generate and reproduce illusory forms of consciousness.
The apparent social situation of the 19th century, the explosive element of which was the polarization of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, changed radically in the 20th century, when they began to come closer together to the point of talking about the “dissolution” of the working class. Of course, today there are many people who are dissatisfied with what they have and envy wealthier citizens. However, since the times of the medieval state, which united people through compassion and forgiveness, there has never been a common interest for which different classes could overcome hostility. What is the reason for the fading of class battles, which marked the 19th and early 20th centuries? Undoubtedly, the improvement in lifestyle has reached such a level that the difference between rich and poor has been significantly reduced. Democracy brought the masses and power closer together, and politics ceased to interest the population. But the main achievement of the 20th century was that people began to value their well-being so much that they were willing to pay any price for it, even to the point of giving up freedom. Under these conditions, criticism of ideology lost support from below and fell into oblivion. If earlier it was prohibited from above, and, on the contrary, supported by the oppressed, today it is assimilated by the authorities and does not evoke support from those who are deceived. People stopped feeling the pressure of power also because it changed its form. Foucault called modern power “biopower,” defining it as a concern for life. Indeed, today order is maintained not so much by threats and punishments (used to intimidate that part of the population to which the “ethics of discourse” does not reach and therefore there is a need to help the truth with a whip), but by advice and recommendations on a varied, healthy and long life. Who can throw a stone at the institution of advisers and experts concerned with the welfare and health of people?
Marcuse calls the modern form of power instrumental: technological progress creates forms of life (and power) that seem to reconcile the forces opposing the system, but in fact sweep away or refute all protest in the name of the historical prospect of freedom from drudgery and domination. Modern society has the ability to restrain qualitative social changes, as a result of which significantly new institutions, a new direction of the productive process and new forms of human existence could be established. Since the Marxist program of eliminating the conditions of false consciousness has failed for reasons of achieving effective forms of social consent based on increasing well-being in both the capitalist and communist worlds, the thought of changing the critical project arises. But, first of all, it is necessary to justify its necessity, and most importantly, the social basis. Why destroy such a “good society”, where citizens are promised in words and gradually realize in practice the age-old dream of an earthly paradise? Dostoevsky in his famous “Legend...” and V. Solovyov in “Three Conversations...” described the onset of the kingdom of Antichrist, which is similar to the critical reconstruction of post-industrial society carried out by such famous philosophers as Jaspers, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Adorno, Marcuse , Fromm et al. Of course, the moral impulse of an intellectual is concern for people. Marcuse is concerned about the dangerous trends that determine the development of post-industrial society: unemployment, weapons production, man-made overload of nature, non-observance of human rights, oppression of women, children, and the elderly. But he is especially concerned about the fact that society has learned not only to show off, but also to turn its shortcomings into advantages.
But can this protest of intellectuals against mechanization, marketization, massification, lack of spirituality, consumerism and conformism be able to awaken people who are concerned about improving the comfort of their own lives? Marcuse himself did not really believe in the validity of his critical theory. All the more pessimistic is Foucault, who considers the protest of intellectuals inconsistent, since it is they who produce power, moreover, they themselves are entwined with it on all sides and do not know how to fight it. But one can pose the question even more radically: is it fair to call for the destruction of a society that was able to provide a high standard of living for its fellow citizens?
It would be wrong to consider the protest of the intelligentsia completely empty. In fact, the kingdom of the Antichrist is not so safe. Marcuse believes that the standard of living of people in a post-industrial society has long exceeded the minimum paradise line and the authorities could begin to educate and emancipate. However, she has become automated and thinks exclusively about her own self-preservation. This point was well revealed in the works of J. Habermas, who pointed out that today strategic orientations for the development of society are taken based on technical capabilities, and not on the vital interests of people. Marcuse also pointed out the integration of multidirectional institutions: the category “society” expressed an acute conflict in the social and political spheres - the antagonism of society and the state. Likewise, the concepts of “individual” and “class”, “family” denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated into established conditions. But the increasing integration of industrial society, depriving these concepts of critical meaning, tends to transform them into operational terms of description or deception.
Marcuse noted that the technology of modern power has become so perfect that it uses even the negative for its support. It neutralizes not only intellectual criticism, but also its own miscalculations, limited attitudes, human and natural disasters caused by the unprecedented acceleration of the system. Lyuli is moving faster and faster, although there is no goal. The goal was the movement itself, reminiscent of the movement of a corpse.
What Marcuse expressed in the 60s has become even more obvious today. However, the critical theory of society did not gain more supporters. Not only ordinary people, but also intellectuals have accepted their fate and are trying to achieve liberation within the framework of private life. The state and the market can no longer be corrected. These are machines that cannot be broken, because the losses will be too great. At the end of the reforms, nostalgia for the past awoke in Russia.
So, everyone knows the truth about modern consumer society. The authorities should not even spend large amounts of material resources on camouflage, because people tolerate it because they see no other way out. The price of such compromise remains high. But now we pay not with slavery, poverty, lack of rights, lack of education and lack of culture, and not even with psychodramas, which turn into melodramas with the help of psychoanalysts, but with the loss of the energy of life, a feeling of hopelessness. We do not have a guilt complex and we have nothing to repent of, but we have a hopeless sense of fate, which we accept because we have lost faith in any recipe for emancipation.
Perspectives on critical social theory
The rescue program announced by the Frankfurt people, even if it had been implemented, would not have brought positive results. Everyone began to care about human rights, saving nature, and even cultivating a love for high art (at what time did tens of thousands of people gather in stadiums to listen to opera arias?).
The main danger is the softening of the physical, natural substance of the culture, separation from the roots, loss of not only the soil, but also the body. A person living in a sterile environment (society has become a giant dispensary) has lost the ability to resist viruses. People who were capable of experiencing a sense of responsibility for what was happening began to disappear. The souls of people trembling with sweet horror in front of TV screens, but not really experiencing any hardships, have lost their sense of compassion and solidarity. The market economy gives rise to a mobile individual who explores the whole world in search of profitable deals. It sets goods, money and ideas in motion. But today it looks like the engine is starting to peddle: the ignition is turned off and communication with the transmission is interrupted, but the fuel burns as a result of overheating of the cylinder walls. So the market begins to work for itself and literally evaluate everything by the speed of circulation. It is no longer regulated even by the law of value, and today few people understand the reasons for the jumps in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, because no one knows how much a dollar “really” is worth. Goods are sold on the principle of “more expensive than expensive,” and money, having lost its connection with material support, becomes a purely speculative sign, symbolic capital. I recall A. Tolstoy’s description of the process of speculation during the First World War: a merchant takes out a bag of sugar and resells it to another, then to a third, etc. So, there is only one bag of sugar, and it does not increase (especially since the invoice is resold), but the money grows like a snowball. The modern financial system functions in an equally strange way. The 1987 crisis on Wall Street, and finally, the events of 1997 and 1998 on the stock exchanges of Asia, Russia and South America - all these are financial crises that are not generated by some destructive processes in the real economy. In this they differ sharply from the crisis of 1929, which was caused by miscalculations in industry. If earlier money depreciated following the decline in material wealth, now, on the contrary, goods depreciate as a result of financial fraud. This means that today money functions as signs that are no longer provided by real value and are not regulated by labor and wealth. No one knows how much a dollar “really” costs. The idea of gold or other natural security for money today seems too archaic. However, separation from the laws of value leads to the fact that the economy turns into pure speculation - the production and circulation of symbolic products.
The world has turned into an iconic, virtual reality. This manifests itself even in such a serious matter as war. The current generation has lived a life without war, but the fear of a military threat was a very real reality. And before, people were afraid of war, since not a single generation could get by without being affected by it in one way or another. This fear referred to completely real events - death, destruction, hunger, captivity. The war was on the ground. Today they talk about the atomic threat. So many weapons have been accumulated, including nuclear warheads, that it is possible to destroy the entire population on the planet several times over. And yet the third world war is a virtual reality, it does not exist, and it may not come. But the paradox is that the fear of war is perhaps more significant than the war itself. Two points are interesting here. On the one hand, the concept of “star wars” is being developed and thus the war is transferred from the territories of the Earth to star space. On the other hand, there is a growing escalation of fear, which is an important form of preserving the regime of power and order. Without it, the work of the military industry would have no internal justification. These seemingly contradictory trends, because moving wars into outer space reduces the intensity of fear, are nevertheless complementary. War remains an unshakable justification for the existence of the state and at the same time turns out to be a virtual reality. Cinema replaces real war. It only seems that we live in the world. In fact, every day great battles unfold on TV screens, cities are destroyed, and human blood is shed. This has led to the fact that real wars, such as those against Iraq and Yugoslavia, are perceived in the West as cinematic events. The staging of some events that disturb public opinion is carried out primarily by the means of mass communication. The military themselves no longer meet in “close combat”, and see targets exclusively on the screen. Today reality is becoming iconic, and between a person and reality there is a computer. Freedom in the West is defined as democracy and the Internet in every home. Evil in its direct form, which gives rise to Manichaean sentiments, becomes invisible. But he doesn't disappear. The war has moved, as promised, onto monitor screens, and real death, destruction, and suffering of civilians are perceived as a movie. Hence the special cruelty of our wars. Against the background of all this, the contradictions of classical society look cruel, but so to speak “honest”. Real and obvious suffering stimulated the search for forms of overcoming it. And in a sense, obvious injustice is even better than camouflaged and painless injustice. Today, people can no longer rely on direct experience of cruelty, oppression, suffering, and alienation. The young do not understand or hear the warnings of the older generation until they themselves experience this. In Russia the situation is aggravated by the fact that the forms of evil in it are, so to speak, multi-layered. On the one hand, diseases and poverty that seemed to have been overcome long ago have returned. On the other hand, due to inevitable modernization, new invisible viruses have emerged in society, with which representatives of the older generation are not familiar. Today no one can foresee the consequences of “telematic”, “sexual”, etc. revolutions.
The Russian intelligentsia, after abandoning Marxism, began to rely mainly on moralizing discourse. But, it seems, a sense of justice can be trusted no more than a “class instinct.” Since, thanks to the intervention of the mass media, the obvious is being deformed in our country, it is necessary to revive critical social theory, which was the most important component of non-dogmatic Marxism. In this regard, turning to the works of Marxists of the 60s seems quite natural.
A ghost haunts Europe, the specter of communism
The first phrase from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party", written in 1848 by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). The Russian edition was first published in 1869 in Geneva; several illegal editions were published in Russia in the 80s. XIX century
The phrase usually serves for all kinds of paraphrases, replacing the word “communism” with something else appropriate to the case, and is used to describe a situation when a potential threat can be fulfilled, a certain probable phenomenon can become a reality, etc.
- - an allusion to the “Communist Manifesto”: ஐ “The savior of the masses, I realized, can only be a tooth-breaking terrorist who will rein in the vile freedoms, captured by millions of greasy paws,...
Lem's World - Dictionary and Guide
- - When Jesus came to the disciples on the water, they took Him for P...
Brockhaus Biblical Encyclopedia
- - ghost, dream...
Concise Church Slavonic Dictionary
- - This word was borrowed from the Old Church Slavonic language, where it was formed by the prefix zrak – “view”, formed in turn from the verb zr’ti – “to see”...
Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language by Krylov
- - Borrowing. from Art.-Sl. language Pref. derivative from zrak “view”, suf. education from the same basis as ripen)) “look, see”...
Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language
- - eyeless; bloodless; silent; restless; incorporeal; wandering; pale-faced; fearful; air-numb; fleeting; rebellious; unearthly; dumb; deceptive; vague; dying; cold; fragile...
Dictionary of epithets
- - GHOST, husband. 1. An image of someone or something that appears in the imagination, a vision, something that is imagined. Night ghosts. P. of the past. Ghosts of the old castle. 2. transfer Fiction, mirage, something apparent...
Ozhegov's Explanatory Dictionary
- - ghost m. 1. What is seen is imagined; a vision, a figment of the imagination. Ott. trans. decomposition Someone or something that only resembles someone or something. 2. Unclear, vague outlines, contours...
Explanatory Dictionary by Efremova
- - ghost noun, m., used. compare often Morphology: what? ghost, why? ghost, what? ghost of what? a ghost, about what? about the ghost...
Dmitriev's Explanatory Dictionary
- - etc"...
Russian spelling dictionary
- - @font-face (font-family: "ChurchArial"; src: url;) span (font-size:17px;font-weight:normal !important; font-family: "ChurchArial",Arial,Serif;) ghost...
Dictionary of Church Slavonic language
- - Ghost in the castle. Jarg. Arm. Joking. Unit duty officer. Maksimov, 145. The ghost of communism. Publ. Iron. Frightening ideas about communism...
- - Zharg. Arm. Joking. Unit duty officer. Maksimov, 145...
Large dictionary of Russian sayings
- - Publ. Iron. Frightening ideas about communism. /i> Part of a quote from the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by K. Marx and F. Engels. Mokienko 2003, 85...
Large dictionary of Russian sayings
- - ...
Word forms
- - noun, number of synonyms: 7 Verkhnomezensk zashiversk Kadykchan Neftegorsk Pripyat halmer-yu hasima...
Synonym dictionary
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