Corruption and end of history

Speaking at the I International Law Forum, President Dmitry Medvedev called the fight against corruption “universal value”. It is not known what he had exactly in mind, but, including the fight against corruption in the universal values ​​of our time, he thereby significantly increased the ontological status of corruption as such. This is not just a recognition that corruption is everywhere in the world and everywhere fighting it-corruption, in essence, turns out to be a kind of metaphysical evil, and the struggle with it is put on the highest level (somewhere not far from protecting human rights).

The current president of Russia in his election program declared a war on corruption. From that time it has already passed enough time for the strategy of this war to become quite understandable. The main blow was directed against bureaucracy, civil service and “rotten elements” of the state system. It is carried out in two directions: on the one hand, this is an increase in control over the income and activities of officials, and on the other, a reduction in the resources, functions and capabilities of the state, first of all, with regard to “intervention in the economy”.

The second direction provides for the privatization of state property and or complete exemption from state supervision and regulation of various socio-economic spheres and the provision of their market elements, or the introduction of mechanisms of public self-regulation (SRO). This direction was actually the mainstream of the so -called liberal reforms in Russia since the beginning of the 90s.

The most important role here is the strategy of servicing and commercializing state functions. The implementation of the fundamental human rights, provided by healthcare systems, education, social services, justice and law enforcement, is reduced to the “provision of services”, in fact, in the same sense of the “service” in which it is applied to dry cleaning, hairdressing, taxi or car service.

At the ideology level, discrediting and “ousting” of the state from the life of society continues to exist in the form of a set of relevant dogmas and journalistic stamps. Freedom is always better than non -freedom, the market is always better than state regulation, the individual is always higher than society, etc. - All these liberal dogmas did not disappear from the consciousness of the Russian “advanced class”, including its political wing. They continue to proclaim and iron the mass consciousness, despite the fact that the majority of the people are full of throat freedom in the form of lawlessness, that we are familiar with the remarkable market “laws”, mainly by the ongoing galloping increase in prices, and the stream of non -unconnected, counterfeit and falsified goods that flooded all the shelves and turned the trip to the store or the store General catering to the "Russian roulette".

Of course, not to listen and not read the performances of patented ideologists of vulgar liberalism is not so difficult. It is much more difficult to hide from mass art, starting with Hollywood blockbusters and ending with “modernized” Russian multi -sopes, which is “on the forehead” or sophisticatedly discredit everything state as such. Mass Media, who turned into a stamp, into the usual figure of speech, are also blowing into the same dudu, the identification of an official (that is, a civil servant) with a embezzle, a bribe taker and a “roof”. A kind of “presumption of corruption” of the official was formed, like a medieval presumption of the sinfulness of man.

God for course, to put the existing state apparatus and state policy outside of criticism. However, it is extremely difficult to get rid of the impression that often, under the guise of “fighting corruption”, the fight against the Russian state continues. So, what, in fact, should you fight against?

From a sociological point of view, corruption is an illegitimate privatization of institutional roles (positions) by their performers. In other words, corruption is when a person who plays an institutional role (official, judge, doctor, etc.) and at the same time with discretionary powers for one reason or another (that is, the ability to solve certain issues of his own discretion), uses this in personal, which are not provided or even incompatible with the role/position of goals. In the same sense, they speak of “abuse of power”, since every institution is based and represents the implementation of a particular power. It follows that corruption is a system dysfunction .

What is dysfunction? The easiest way, probably, is to understand this on a technical example. Take the internal combustion engine; Its function, that is, what it was designed for and created, is the rotation of the crankshaft. However, in the course of the physical process, which ensures the performance of the function, the engine body is heated. The heating of the case is, in this case, dysfunction; Moreover, dysfunction is quite dangerous, since it is able to cause jamming of the pistons and the stop (breakdown) of the engine. As you know, in order to get rid of this danger (compensate for dysfunction), ICE is supplied with a cooling system.

About the same in social institutions that can be considered as a kind of machine of reproduction of norms that ensure order and stability in society, dysfunctions occur. It is clear that it is almost impossible to formalize everything during decision -making, leaving nothing “at a personal discretion”. You can try to limit a personal discretion through the appropriate “cooling system”, which can act as a law, total supervision and external control (that is, the fear of inevitable punishment), or conscience and a sense of duty. Both mechanisms are not free from "technical" problems. The first requires the presence (creation) of such control institutions that themselves would not be subject to corruption. The second, that is, conscience, a sense of duty and the ethics of ministry based on it, suggest the education of a person in the appropriate environment, in which, in particular, there are general values ​​that do not have material (monetary) “equivalent”. From this point of view, the campaign announced by President Medvedev against corruption was doomed to simulate not only and not so much because it was instructed to conduct the same bureaucracy against which it is directed, but because it is contrary to the whole system of the “advanced class”, its fundamental values, and generally against the “formula of success” in today's Russia. And the president himself, by the way, recognizes this.

However, the worst of all is that corruption entails the crisis of the institute, and vice versa - the crisis of the institute often entails corruption .

What is an institutional crisis? A common understanding - “ the fall in the authority of the social institution, a decrease in its role in society and the trust in it of the population ” - recruits more consequences or symptoms of a crisis than its essence. The bottom line is that the institution becomes ineffective. Ineffectiveness can be double. For example, what the institute does on a massive scale ceases to be necessary and important (as, for example, happened to the Institute of Family/Marriage). Or, the institution spends a disproportionately large amount of certain resources - time, money, qualified specialists to the qualitative performance of its functions. We leave the first case aside, look more closely at the second, since it is in it that the most typical corruption flourishes.

How does corruption lead to an institutional crisis? The answer is quite obvious. Being dysfunction, corruption is fed by the same resources that go to the performance of functions; Growing up like a cancer tumor, it consumes more and more resources on itself and less less leaves for useful activities. Dysfunction "devours" a function. State expenses are growing, but the return from them is almost zero.

Now let's see from the back. What happens when the “user” of the institute is faced with the fact that the solution of his issue can take away from him, or from his institutional counterparty, a lot of time and effort? .. Often he experiences an insurmountable temptation to “get around” these difficulties in one way or another. Including, and at the expense of a bribe. It is not so important whether these difficulties are objective or created artificially, with the aim of extortion, although, of course, the scale and social danger of corruption depend on this significantly. It is important that corruption arises here as an attempt to compensate for the ineffectiveness of the institute in private, and often this is the only way. Before us is a vicious circle ending with an institutional disaster.

Is it possible to defeat corruption by displacing the state, as Neoliberal reformers offer? Namely, to go along the way of serving the state system of power, that is, substitutions activities to ensure state interests and fundamental rights of people “providing services” in order to logically inevitably come to the commercialization of these services. In short, the matter is reduced to the replacement of state-owning institutions with "market". Which at first glance may even seem reasonable. That is, if the corruption is illegal privatization of government posts and functions, and this is inevitable, then why wouldn’t “not relax and have fun”, that is, to immediately and openly rent a private trader for rent?

On the one hand, because - as our prime minister was insightfully remarked, the population does not have enough money. And, not even an hour, the people are rebelled against the attempts of the state apparatus to remove two skins from it: one in the form of taxes, and the second - in the form of a fee for activities that are constantly cited to us as an example, is funded from the state budget.

On the other hand, even if the people are not so unceremonious, but to arrange it economically and legally more civilized, that is, to use the format of institutions of the capitalist economy - a joint -stock company, an investment fund, etc. - Then here we will not leave the institutional crisis (with all the ensuing).

In fact, even in such an exemplary capitalist country as the United States, market institutions are today in a brutal institutional crisis. The corresponding diagnosis and analysis can be read, for example, in the book “Battle for the Soul of Capitalism” by financier John K. Bogla. He writes that the classical “capitalism of the owners” has turned into “capitalism of managers”, intermediaries who dispose of someone else's (joint -stock) property by proxy, and depriving owners of most of their original rights. These “intermediaries” behave as temporary workers, they are not interested in strategic development and long -term investments, preferring short -term speculations, postscribes and risky operations, for which practically no responsibility for capital (like real owners) in order to assign themselves a disproportionately large share of profit. Of course, Bogl did not make any great discovery. About this more than once, although not so detailed, wrote. Not to mention the fact that in the course of the current global financial and economic crisis from the myth of the superiority (efficiency) of managers over officials, there is little left.

It is also unlikely to be saved in the field of non -profit and non -governmental institutions, since today almost all institutions - from family to UN - are in crisis. This fact suggests that the reason is not in individual institutions, but in the most institutional being, on the grounds on which institutionality is based and where the institutions are “growing”.

In such a situation, there are two strategies. The first is to limit ourselves to gentle therapy of the most important institutions (including income control and sanctions), concentrating the main forces and means on the development and use of non -institutional mechanisms and forms, for example, networks and fronts of various kinds. The second is to try to understand the deep causes of what is happening and try to restore the normal functioning of the institutions (of course, here no one cancel control and so on for the time being).

The first path, which ends, for example, with the final transition to a total network society, seems relatively easier. However, the risk lies in the fact that non-constitutional forms can be ineffective-and for the same reasons as the institutions-and, in addition, unstable and unable to ensure the stability of society.

The second approach begins with attempts to understand the indigenous causes of the institutional crisis. The closest answer, which almost everyone finds, including Russian President Medvedev and American financier Bogla, is a general decline in morality/morality. Medvedev speaks of the significance of the “moral moment” and that any economic system can be successful only if it is mental. Bogl trusts that American society will be able to get rid of “excessive greed, egoism and materialism” and will return to the ideals of capitalism, “based on honesty, decency and trust”.

However, how to restore morality/morality after its loss? Is it possible at all ? Does a kind of analogue of the law of evolutionary irreversibility of Louis Dollo work here? That is, for the type of society, which once grown such a “organ” as morality/morality, but then lost it, replacing it with immoralism and tolerance, the restoration of this body in its former form (“repressive”, from the point of view of liberalism) may be impossible in principle. This means that the liberal -type society must die (along with the overwhelming number of its individuals), and on its remains, perhaps, a different type of society, which, among other things, will not put the interests of the individual above public (or even communal). Surely it will be a society that is more primitive in many respects, but having morality/morality as a regulator of social and personal life.

It turns out that in any case, the whole world in the future awaits a sociocultural catastrophe, another “end of history”, like the death of the Roman Empire. Or the next answer, in fact, is not yet final? Maybe there is some opportunity to abandon the existing, natural-historical mechanism of institutionalization, making it controlled and “genetically modifying” to such an extent that traditional morality/morality will not be so necessary? ..