Alexey Chadayev. Poor people

Poor people
Alexey Chadayev

Publication date: March 31, 2004

The fight against poverty is the new slogan of the moment. Perhaps even more obvious than doubling GDP and the pursuit of Portugal : now, after the poignant prison confession of the “poor in spirit” Khodorkovsky, it is definitely the most important. We must understand: this is no longer just someone’s will or someone’s individual project, but a myth of general civil significance, as “glasnost” and “voucherization” once were.

Judge for yourself: on March 19, the governor of the Krasnodar Territory, Tkachev, puts on a show with the resignation of all officials of the region , and then announces the need to “raise the standard of living by one and a half times” (and, of course, double the GDP). On March 26, a report appears in Russian Journal on social liberalism - a special liberalism that does not offend the poor. On the 29th - Khodorkov’s letter in Vedomosti. And on the 26th, Sergei Gradirovsky , head of the Center for Strategic Studies of the Volga District, urgently recruited from this very district to the Gref center to fight poverty, presented his idea of ​​the topic at the journalist club.

The report on social liberalism and Khodorkovsky’s letter are quite discussed in other places, Tkachev’s “grassroots activity” is discussed a little less, but much more emotionally, but somehow Gradirovsky was not noticed at all. Meanwhile, his report contained several extremely important, key thoughts that opened the topic from a slightly different angle.

Gradirovsky, as a conscientious expert, before setting off to fight poverty, decided to first figure out what we were actually talking about. His analysis of the employment structure of the Russian population, based on regional samples, led, among other things, to a paradoxical conclusion: the so-called poverty, i.e. existence for a low salary on the border of the social minimum is extensively reproduced by the administrative structure itself, and precisely in the process of implementing “social policy”. In other words, the government is actively promoting an increase in the number of “budget” jobs with wages on the verge of the subsistence level. A classic example is such a “depressed” region as Ivanovo: despite all its “depression”, there is a fairly significant supply of vacancies worth 7-8 thousand rubles per month, but these vacancies remain unclaimed: people prefer to get two and nothing to do - and the authorities give them such an opportunity. That is, the problem of poverty in this particular example is primarily a problem of shortage of labor mobility of personnel.

Mobility deficit is generally a key concept in the report of the CSR expert. Another example, perhaps even more clearly illustrating this concept: throughout Russia there is such a widespread type of poverty as the poverty of single elderly women, demographically determined by the fact that every second representative of the stronger sex in our country simply does not live to see retirement. These single women often live on meager pensions in the individual apartments left to them, with virtually no opportunity to exchange their extra space for improved living conditions - only the most risky ones go into the network of the semi-gangster business of “care” for pensioners. In essence, this is also poverty due to a lack of mobility, in this case caused by the discomfort and insecurity of the real estate market.

People cannot change their place of residence, job, specialty, or get additional education - all this is precisely poverty, although the problems mentioned above actually have a completely indirect relation to income. However, it cannot be said that this state of affairs is perceived by people as a crisis: many are satisfied with a situation where they are provided with a guaranteed minimum in “social” jobs in exchange for basic loyalty to their superiors (a symbolic act of confirmation of which is voting for administrative candidates in elections). The share of such “working unemployment” in Russia is enormous: according to sociology, up to 65%, i.e. about two-thirds of the population.

Accordingly, this is where basic reforms ultimately come down, such as the reform of housing and communal services, education and healthcare. These reforms do not affect the rich and super-rich (3-5%) at all - this stratum has long been actively creating self-sufficiency mechanisms, separate from the state ones. The “middle class” (up to 20%) only benefits from these reforms, transferring relations with budgetary organizations to the consumer level, receiving the opportunity to demand and choose for relatively insensitive money. But the “working unemployment” of a depressed economy, plus the public sector workers themselves - teachers, doctors, officers, municipal service workers themselves - are under the threat of destroying the minimalist balance that they have developed recently.

Until a certain point, the shortage of labor and geographic mobility played a huge positive role - if not for it, we would have been left without an army and police, without educational and healthcare infrastructures, without all those institutions that are needed by everyone together and no one individually. But people continued to live and work where they had always lived and worked, regardless of whether they were paid for it or not. However, now the sign has obviously been reversed: the government is not even trying to compete for personnel on the open labor market, but instead “keeps” people in place with social and administrative mechanisms, creating something like an improved version of serfdom.

From the point of view of the modernization of Russia, an absolutely disastrous situation arises: the country is deprived of both administrative and market levers for managing labor reserves, it becomes absolutely impossible to collect personnel potential in the main areas - be it geographic or industry areas; the entire system begins to work to preserve the existing state of affairs, and this conservation becomes the key to its stable existence. Actually, this is precisely the logic of existence “on the pipe”: the largest companies (and not citizen taxpayers) form the tax base of the budget, which is then spread in a thin layer over the majority hooked on a social hook - and the main question of public life becomes what is the most correct and It's fairer to share among everyone. Thus, managed “poverty” automatically gives rise to the dominance of the theme of “natural rent” and “revision of the results of privatization” - regardless of whether the authorities want it or not.

There is another very important aspect of poverty - regional. The ABC of social stratification: poverty is a relative concept, it is always compared with something. In any village of reindeer herders in the Far North there is a person who has more reindeer than the rest, and walks around in an expensive hat and new pins - according to local concepts, he is almost an oligarch, although from the point of view of a Muscovite his wealth and property are not much different from that what other station homeless people who live on alms have. A reasonable conclusion from this would be the transfer of this problem itself and the powers to solve it down to the level of regional authorities and local self-government - to the very microsociety in the hierarchy of which “poverty” itself is measured. However, the expanded reproduction of loyal poverty is the favorite habit of regional leaders, their natural and proven technology of power. And therefore, federal reformers are forced to leave this topic at the highest level of government, “combing” Russia, which is increasingly different within itself, under one standard.

Gradirovsky’s basic idea was to show from the angle of “poverty” many of those very real problems that the authorities otherwise simply would not have seen. Well, most likely, he will succeed - the result of which, with a significant degree of probability, will be that his ideas will probably not find a place in the management structures. The problem here is precisely that the “fight against poverty” is taking on more and more the character of campaignism, and campaignism of a very specific nature. It is increasingly understood - including this is exactly what it sounds like in Khodorkovsky's letter - as the so-called. social responsibility of business, and in essence - a veiled progressive tax on the super-rich, an off-budget mechanism for the redistribution of money from business to support “working unemployment” through the wise leadership, organized into the “party of the presidential majority.” Accordingly, the “request” today is formulated completely differently: we need to think not about how to give people the opportunity to earn money and overcome the “mobility deficit,” but about how and under what sauce to take money from repentant Magdalenes from the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs or somewhere else and direct it to “targeted support for those in need”, having initially determined the categories of such. Gradirovsky, with his innovations, flies quite far past the social order.

All this, as usual, stems from a pathological misunderstanding in our society of the functions of power - including by the power itself. A wild, inside-out situation, when everyone is systematically minding their own business, becomes the norm: business, instead of making money, fights poverty, the government, instead of collecting taxes and developing infrastructure, produces forced parasites, and people, when trying to independently To decide their fate, they are always faced with a choice between abnormally high risks and a ridiculous, but guaranteed minimum “for no reason.”

In relation to “poverty”, there are examples that are simply egregious: let’s say, the total annual income of the slot machine market in Russia is already up to $5 billion, and this figure is growing rapidly - as this next-generation scam spreads into the provinces and captures more and more wide social strata. Doctors talk about gambling addiction as a serious mental illness, similar to drug addiction, the number of suicides and murders due to unpaid debts is growing, families of gamblers go without food for weeks - and the authorities, instead of strictly limiting the spread of gambling establishments, are optimizing their taxation.

And pathetically fights poverty; and the unfortunate cat from the famous joke licks mustard from under her tail - as she should, voluntarily and with a song. This is her destiny - she knows whose lard she ate, so God grant her every health. But the most offensive thing is that there is absolutely no one to come out and say: well, we don’t need your fight against poverty, let us somehow cope with our poverty ourselves without you.