It may seem strange that in the beginning of XXI century the word “socialism” back into the popular political lexicon. After all, the last decade of the last century was a time of full and it seemed the final defeat. “Real socialism” of the Soviet sample is completely disgraced, capitulating to aim him right in the chest with a stick of smoked sausage.
It turned out that it is not enough to make rockets and block the river, to validate the advantages of a planned economy based on public ownership. It is necessary to provide man under socialism, access to consumer goods, the minimum is comparable to those he can get under capitalism. But if you do not, then soon there will be a gap not only in domestic but also in the technological sphere. Under the weight of this contradiction, Soviet socialism collapsed, and the Chinese went to such a deep reform that looking for Chinese billionaires, permissible to doubt: whether socialism before us today, or the capitalism under the red banner oligarchic dictatorship of the CCP, which, really, is no worse than hundreds of other oligarchies in history.
In this capitalist world with its triumphant liberalism had won, it seemed, unconditional moral victory. He managed not only to overtake but also to absorb the world of socialism. All more or less reasonable ideas of socialism were integrated in the design of the welfare state, leaving the share of “real socialism” such dubious achievements as a total socialization of ownership and doctrinaire ideological censorship. Socialism, it seems, was simply absorbed and digested by capitalism, published in this struggle to a new evolutionary stage of its development.
It took a quarter century with this victory over socialism, and the foundations of a global liberal order is shaken by more pronounced tremors. Inside of the US Democratic party serious competition for liberalism, Hillary Clinton, focused on racial and sexual minorities, amounted to “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders, referring primarily to white workers of America calling for revolution against the dictatorship “1%” — speculators on wall Street. A socialist candidate for US President… in the beginning of the XXI century… is absurd, and only. And on the other side of the Atlantic the labour party is comely bureaucrats headed by a socialist, antimilitarist and desperate leftist Jerry Corbin. One of his first decisions as head of the shadow Cabinet was the creation of the Commission on development of the new economic policy, which included well-known supporters of the fight against economic inequality — Thomas Piketty and Nobel laureate, the American Joseph Stiglitz.
Suddenly we find that the two leading countries of the capitalist world-system and socialism is not only resurrected, but also he exposed himself as a powerful political alternative to the ruling liberal mainstream. If you remember that on the other side of the same mainstream are attacking the supporters of right-wing populist ideas, like Donald Trump or marine Le Pen, and in the last lot of anti-capitalist elements, filed in the anti-globalization vein, it becomes clear that the liberal “end of history” ended too quickly. And if this wave is not yet reached us, it is only because our liberalism and our capitalism is very specific, and our political process is far from playing by the rules of the Western world. But shut out of the revolution of ideas is impossible, and there is no doubt that soon the pace of the new socialism we will hear in Russia.
Why is this socialist re-revolution of the early XXI century? That back the fundamental conditions that gave rise to the flourishing of socialism in the nineteenth century and dramatically changed in the twentieth century. The driving force that gave rise to the socialism of the last century, there was a contradiction between the ideas of civil liberty and equality, which brought the French revolution and age of Enlightenment, and absolute economic inequality, the former norm for Europe’s “Old order” and became even more prominent and unbearable with the beginning of the industrial revolution, when hundreds of thousands of ragged, half-starved proletarians were crowded in a stuffy and smelly factory suburbs of developed countries.
Liberalism faced monstrous and unsolvable contradiction: why, proclaiming the fullness of the rights and freedoms of the individual in the sphere of thought, political life, equating the rights of all the States and destroying all classes, he must remain the guardian of the gap between wealth and poverty, to preserve economic inequality? This provision, when defending equality in the less significant for most people sphere of thought, liberalism was supposed to zealously defend inequality in a much more vital area of the stomach, — it was, of course, absurd.
Excuses, invent in order to explain why one rich and the other poor, themselves pushed those who this situation seemed unfair, to certain decisions. “Private property is inviolable, you just do not dare to encroach on it, and hence do not dare to encroach on wealth”, — said the defenders of wealth. “So property is theft, and that there is no gap between wealth and poverty its need to destroy, to socialize,” said lawyers for the poor. “Freedom is not equality of results and equality of opportunity. We should be equal at the starting point, and then let each will get according to his energies and abilities,” said the defenders of wealth. “So we have to socialize the labor effort and the result is General: from each according to his ability, to each according to his work,” answered the defenders of the poor. — In addition, let’s in this case really level the playing field because equality of opportunity the one who went to a million, and one who went to Malpensa, is a deliberate lie”.
Ideas, recipes, moral pathos of socialism of the past has emerged from a combination of the irrepressible aspirations of European humanity towards equality, noted by Alexis de Tocqueville, and experiences of the enormity of wealth inequalities in Europe at that time, the others between wealth and poverty is an insurmountable border. This boundary became the subject of a dramatic dialogue between the young Rastignac and burn the gautrain’s crook in Balzac’s “Father goriot online”. Vautrin explains still young and idealistically configured Rastignac that his chances to gain status through education, personal qualities, work, equal to zero. The only chance to gain status is to get it from someone who has it already is, through inheritance or marriage. The only way to become rich is to be rich.
A world in which developed most of the socialist ideas of Saint-simonism and proudhonism to Marxism, was not the liberal world of free competition and equality of opportunity. It was a world respected families, old money and the highest concentration of wealth. It was a world of polarization, devoid of a middle class: only 1% of people who have everything and 99%, who no almost nothing.
What did it mean in practice? This meant that conversations about some of life’s chances, given the liberal version of capitalism, were a myth. Large money was the magnet that attracted other money. A large part of national income, regardless of its growth rate, were distributed in the same proportion, which was enshrined in the structure of the national capital. That is, those who controlled most of the wealth and receive most of the revenue, virtually nothing for it without doing.
The only exception was America, where the concentration of wealth was lower, and therefore, the higher was the share of income distributed in free competition. Hence the common view of America as the Promised Land, the country life chances, attracted many migrants. A good way to amass wealth in Europe was to go to America. And then you can go back to the Old world with the money.
No industrial development, no attacks of the socialists on the government and the bourgeoisie have not changed anything in the structure of this world until the beginning of the First world war. Overall, the revolutionary character of European socialism and proposed radical with an element of utopianism solution: the total socialization of production, expropriation of the ruling classes, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, the dream of World Revolution.
This World Revolution really happened, but she only started not in 1917, but in 1914. As shown by Thomas Piketty in his brilliant work “Capital in the twenty-first century”, a World War launched a real default of old European wealth. The ravages of war and the collapse of world trade, Revolution, destruction of the civil war and the expropriation of the ruling classes in Russia, the defeat and hyperinflation in Germany and Austria, the demographic hole, and the budget deficit of great Britain and France, the beginning of the collapse of the colonial system all contributed to the catastrophic decline in the concentration of capital in Europe.
The revolutionary role of Russia, whose bourgeoisie was thrown the victim on the altar of the world’s conversion, was not so much in the socialization of ownership and the launch of the socialist experiment, as in the collapse of the world rent. Huge Russian debt, feeding millions of investor across Europe, suddenly turned up nothing, dooming civilization rentiers to collapse.
During the 1920s—1940s, the level of concentration of capital in the world capitalist system continued to decline: from the Great Depression, affecting, finally, America, and the destruction of the Second world war, and the postwar wave of nationalizations and tax exemptions for the restoration. The ratio of capital and national income has decreased from 6:1 in the old order to a 2:1, that is, the entire capital is concentrated in the form of whether houses, shares, land or foreign assets was equal to only two annual national income.
What socio-economic effect had this great default? The grip of Capital is severely weakened, its magnetic effect was so all-encompassing, and within the world capitalist system began to address the issue of economic equality without recourse to the radical prescriptions of socialism of the early twentieth century. More precisely, radical recipes came to share in the countries that lagged in its industrial development as Russia or China. And most importantly, why there is this radicalism is needed, is strong-willed for the implementation of the industrial leap. Socialism in the “socialist countries” solved primarily the problem of development of productive forces, not redistribution of wealth.
But not needing to jump in the industrial Western countries could afford now to afford the luxury of “socialism without socialism”. Social democracy, Christian socialism Swedish socialism, social-reformism have a unified model: not destroying private property as such, without resorting to the dictatorship of left-wing parties, limiting partial nationalization, to achieve economic equality through a system of high salaries and social development, shaping the welfare state. In fact, it was a huge “financial pyramid”, built in the framework of a Keynesian economic model: the state is removed as taxes a considerable part of incomes in order to distribute that money again as income, but on grounds of greater equality.
Such was the atmosphere of the “Golden years” 1945-1975, when all Western governments with slight variations held the same economic and social policies that are designed to limit the mitigation of social inequality, increasing the share of national income distributed as wages, to the detriment of the rents, dividends, etc., the expansion of social obligations of the state. This was the era of the rise of the “middle class”, those 40% of the population that follow the 10% richest. This middle class began to belong to 30-40% of national wealth (instead of 5% until the First world). Remained 50% of the poor control of the same 5% of the wealth as before, but now there is a sustainable chance to break out of poverty through education, good work, enterprise and ingenuity.
Social mobility seemed to have earned. A kind of anthem of this era — a naughty song by Chuck berry, recorded in 1964: “You never can tell”, under which so famously danced Travolta and Uma Thurman in “pulp fiction” by Quentin Tarantino, the story of a young black couple from New Orleans, which acquires house furniture catalog, good salary, refrigerator, music system and even a used clunker… there is a slow but steady accumulation of new capital, but not in the form of rent and foreign bonds, primarily in the form of capital housing, of any shares and securities.
The most positive memories of the Soviet era have affected people associated with the same process, only taking place in the entourage of the red banners and slogans “Glory to the CPSU”. The level of income of the Soviet workers was disproportionately lower, and thus lower was the quantity and quality of consumer goods, which gave them a market (no one for a long time did not understand that the market in the West this era is only a distribution mechanism for income not quite market way). But the Soviet system in an infinitely greater extent helped the recovery and concentration of… capital. It even was called: “capital construction”. Absolutely free the majority of citizens of the USSR got their hands on the estate, is equivalent to many years of individual income and still have an impressive market value. Drums were created cute and a little bourgeois world of heroes riasanovsky comedies.
The socialist system, like West, was a road of restoration of capitalism. While socialism as an idea has become during the twentieth century, less and less relevant, because it was eliminated the fundamental reason for the growth of socialist sentiment — inequality. Semi-socialist policies of the Western countries had created the perfect showcase for capitalism: a low level of inequality, opportunities, intensive social mobility, a high degree of social security, but the availability of a variety of benefits via well-developed and flexible market. It seemed a brilliant alternative to the socialist experiment: to socialize not property, not production and profits, distributing them at the same time so that everyone could freely decide how to spend, on a wide spectrum of possibilities.
A perfect world of equality and freedom, it seemed, was built. In this world there was a place and dissemination of the equality of races and genders: the 1960s became the era of successful strategies for all forms of equality. It seemed that there is no problem that capitalism could be solved through internal evolution. While socialism gradually got mired in internal contradictions, where total control of the state made it impossible for freedom and emasculated the brightness and variety of life.
However, the economic processes of the “Golden years” led to a meeting with the gravedigger of Soviet socialism and Western social capitalism. And the undertaker was inside. It was natural accumulation of capital by saving part of income in the West or through direct capital gifts state like in the USSR. Property of capital is that it “magnetizes” and attracts the income. For the owner of capital is not trudoolenivka, and rent-seeking behavior. He wants to interest and rents, wants to transfer their capital by inheritance, wants to pay less tax and with contempt for “rogue”, who have nothing of their own and whose claims on the part of his income seem to be “capitalist” is outrageous.
Since the late 1970-ies in the world, the uprising of new capitalists that have gained a variety of forms, from Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganomics in America, until demolished the Soviet system and socialist economy perestroika wave of privatization. It was a large-scale performance for the return to capital the right to extract revenues and to spend them on, not sharing with society. All this gave rise to similar phenomena: privatization, reduction of taxes, the failure on the part of social obligations, the destruction of the Keynesian scheme of income redistribution. And as the pendulum swing to socialism in the early twentieth century, the pendulum to pure capitalism at the end of the same century appeared in Russia the most pronounced and socially destructive. Wild wolf oligarchic capitalism, reigned here, freed themselves from the burden of social responsibility almost completely. It was the despotism of money, limited only by the noose in the hands of the strong, whether raiders-bandits or raiders-officials.
But we are mistaken if we decide that the essence of what was happening in these decades of the processes varied widely in Russia, or Europe, or the United States. Everywhere it was a time of large predatory States, speculation and fraud, social polarization and increased inequality. Accustomed to the slogan of the society of equal opportunities, the Americans and Western Europeans began to discover that once again the time has come of Rastignac, when the only way to become rich is to be one. This changed the concept of wealth is not reasonable comfortable prosperity, and yelling luxury.
Joseph Stiglitz in his book “the Price of inequality” characterizes the behavior of the modern business world of America as “rent-seeking”. No one is committed to the improvement of real economic indicators, no one wants to make. All strive to take a position that will allow you to clip coupons as an annuity, unjustified bonuses, “Golden parachutes”, all kinds of sloviplast become the norm for us corporations. Is it really that much different from the “cleaners Gazprom”?
And at the other end — the increase of poverty inflamed: according to Stiglitz, the life expectancy for white men without a College education is declining in the United States with a speed equal to the speed of reduction in life expectancy in Russia in the 1990s About the “end of the middle class” did not say the last 15 years, only lazy. Piketty forecasts show that if the structure of inequality will recover at the same pace that now, by 2050 Europe will return on this indicator is almost in the XIX century: in the hands of 10% of the rich will focus 80% of capital and 60% of all revenues.
The society created by the global anti-capitalist revolution of the early twentieth century is passing into history, and with it the belief in market self-regulation of capitalism, the evolution of which, supposedly, allowed to resolve a social issue.
It turned out that self-regulation was not, on the contrary, the increase of economic equality was associated with the crash that killed the old capital, making it possible to create a unique social-capitalist system, and the increasing concentration of capital, the apparently natural self-regulating capitalism, reproduces the schemes of inequality.
New socialism is the natural response of the society, the fundamental values which aspires to equality, the emergence of new inequalities. Will it differ from classical socialism? Will, and quite strongly.
The destruction of private property, the socialization of the means of production turned out to be a rather dubious way to socialism. In practice, they have led only to the formation of a new class — the bureaucracy, the decline of individual initiative, of logistical mistakes and errors in planning, leading to a shortage and sometimes famine. And thus failed to prevent the restoration of capitalism in its most wild forms. In addition, small private property continued to develop and in terms of formal complete abolition of private property.
Utopia of universal socialization confronts the fact that, as material and intellectual progress of man requires more and not less space for individual life and self-realization. The ideal of a harmonious person is your house, not the barracks. Collectivism inevitably leads to the dictatorship of mediocrity, and that is the cause of his adopted society on the gap in scientific and technological development.
In these circumstances, the new socialism involves the socialization of income and the prohibitive limit of concentration of capital. The world of the future of socialism is a world where the most severe offshore and destroyed every rich man is forced to pay high taxes on income and on property, and inheritance laws impede the transfer of sverhsoznanie. Thereby resets the magnetic effect of large capital, and most of the income is distributed in society as wages, which depend on free labor, and are consumed in the free market. From the tool, by definition of income, the market becomes a tool for cost optimization.
But here a new socialism lurks a series of classic challenges identified in the mid-twentieth century Joseph Schumpeter. Inability to obtain sverhbogatyh, limiting opportunities for dishonest and imperfect competition, monopoly and speculation will lead to extinction of that entrepreneurial spirit on which to build a capitalist economy. Fewer will be those who want to start new business, to stay ahead of the rest and from that to obtain good profits. And diplomas “inventor and innovator”, as it is easy to understand, are a very poor substitute for extra income.
The only cure for the crisis of entrepreneurship in the framework of neosocialists system could be a radical change of business philosophy: not to seek big money, and proud of the individual person of his Affairs, interestingness and social relevance of his project. But this is only possible in small and medium business, and large business requires such investments (including pokopaysya) and those risks that are “owner-driver” can take over only in the hope of profits. The alternative is the state, a planned innovation policy, “a communism of ideas”, the degree of long-term effectiveness of which is questionable.
Society that provides relative equality of incomes, will be doomed to low economic growth. However, such a stabilization of economic growth, especially in the core of the capitalist system, it is assumed by economists that neosocialists direction, first of all, Piketty.
One more question, which certainly puts the phenomenon of neosocialism is its relationship with globalization. In the world of neoliberal globalization is the way of the construction of the world market, which costs the rich and developed countries are passed on to poor and undeveloped by the formation of suppressing the development of “common markets”. In these markets for the poor always remain only secondary areas of production chains, and the right to ideas and the final product remain the developed countries. It is on this principle are constructed the TRANS-Pacific and Transatlantic partnership is a modern attempt to establish a trading eternal US hegemony.
The alternative to this economic globalism is economic nationalism, becoming more pronounced with decreasing economic growth and increasing inequality. Countries with their own production potential and resources of the internal market, will try to dissociate itself from the world — ranging from import and ending with the migrants to keep their level of development in spite of and at the expense of others.
It is this nationalist alternative is regarded as the most serious threat to neosocialists project, and his supporters spend a lot of effort to criticism of the nationalist and protectionist concepts to protect smetanskij dogmas of the theory of “comparative advantage” that encourages to the international division of labour and formation of common markets.
However, the persistence of global markets, combined with neosocialists policy would have implied “equation of state” throughout the world. Rich countries would have, as rich people, spend a significant portion of his wealth to improve the lives of the poor to the level of “average house”. According to modern calculations, GDP per capita, that’s life on the level of Turkey or Mexico. Although it is actually much less since a significant part of the income and product in rich countries is created only because it is the rich countries, and lead them in a more modest way of life, a part of the product to simply not be created.
Whether really so “lower” the standard of living of the rich countries, and so raise the level of the poor, to little to smooth out global inequalities? It is permissible to doubt, especially given the fact that the purpose for a large part of mankind is the standard of living of developed countries, not the “average house”. People all over the world stimulates the dream of “Lexus” rather than “Zaporozhets”.
And here we are again confronted with the fundamental contradiction of the socialist dream. She ensouled the global historical trend towards the equality of people and establishing social justice. But the validity of this averaging is inevitably, the destruction of the arrogant extremes of wealth and poverty flashy. However, how this value of justice is compatible with the imperatives of development, which always is focused on some extreme values? To press forward, it takes the desire to be the best. Which is impossible without a certain “set points”, including at the expense of others.
How to combine the values of justice and equality with the values of development — a task that the new socialism has not yet been resolved.
