Ilya Lepikhov. SSSE, or Being There

SSSE, or Being There
Ilya Lepikhov

Date of publication: September 18, 2000

The historical dispute between capitalism and socialism ended in the victory of the latter. Incomplete, inconclusive, and yet... In Germany, in the USA, even in Great Britain, a bastion of tradition and common sense, regimes have been in power for several years now that can be called whatever you like: market - perhaps, tolerant - to to a certain extent, but capitalist - excuse me. “Where there was a table of food, there is a coffin” - where previously the wars of entrepreneurs and hired workers raged, now there is a boundless goodness, barely shaken by the wind of public opinion. Everyone is calm, everyone understands, everyone is fine...

This is how it seems from the outside, and perhaps this is how it really is. The storms of the 20th century calmed somewhat, and in a pacified world the conditions for the Great Class Compromise emerged. Its conditions are indecently simple: the rich offer the poor beer and entertainment in abundance and a little of everything else, the poor allow themselves to be loaned salted nuts, but at the first opportunity, let those who have ears hear, “Wow!” What from the outside looks like a monolith, a granite slab polished by time, is in fact just skillfully plastered brickwork. One can only dream of social reconciliation.

Westerners find plenty of reasons for dissatisfaction with their situation: high taxes, low wages, damaged ecology - in a word, the usual set of law-abiding citizens, a kind of existential discontent. But behind it lies a different kind of irritation, based on the crisis of official rhetoric. A society of equal opportunities, as Western democracy has proudly certified itself for at least the last forty years, has long ago degenerated into something fundamentally different, not having any support in a generally recognized ideology, but either due to habit, or due to some other unknown circumstances we continue to use the same social phraseology.

The modern order, which was started by great individuals, has long ago had nothing in common with individualism, and, perhaps, with the individual in general. Conveyor production took the place of conveyor production at some point. The current economic and political elites are not made up of great workers, as it was, say, in the 30s, but are strictly determined by inter-clan connections, which - both clans and connections - are their primary elements. There is no point in thinking about how an individual who can freely dispose of his capital and labor power can withstand competition, in fact, with the whole world and displace the traditional elites from their homes. This kind of “social immobility” in some respects looks attractive, since it makes any attempt at any reconstruction of the world achieved with such difficulty almost impossible, and at the same time one cannot help but admit that this very peace turns out to be bought at a high price: by transforming the previous relations of relatively free competition into a kind of a hybrid form between traditional capitalism and no less traditional distributive state capitalism. This process in itself is neither good nor bad. What makes it so is its public opinion - more precisely, its adaptation mechanisms to changed economic and political realities. But one can only guess about the degree of their effectiveness. It seems that those people who are called upon to monitor social processes are either waiting for something or have no idea at all about what processes are taking place in the depths of modern civilization.

Modern society is fully confident of its exceptional efficiency and stability. Perhaps this is where the painful addiction to traditional rhetoric, all sorts of “freedoms”, “rights” and “conquests” is rooted. The latter cannot be doubted. Looking back at the experience of the 20th century, it is impossible not to recognize the extreme stability, flexibility and effectiveness of the regulatory mechanisms of traditional democracies.

But perhaps what we take to be institutional achievements are advantages of a different kind? Thus, ill-wishers recall that there are, in fact, only two such “traditional” democracies: English and American. And this circumstance at one time allowed some talented writers, in particular the Nobel laureate in literature Sir Winston Churchill, to talk about the special spiritual path of the Anglo-Saxon world (feel the difference!). And direct envious people, in their rejection of the obvious, go so far as to explain the triumph of the English-speaking world by purely geographical reasons: some are overseas, others are on an island (go get them!) - but that’s why they are envious, to deny the obvious advantages of the best of the worst (read "the only possible") political systems.

The achievements of the “democratic world” rested on the agreement of society regarding the priority tasks facing it.

Moreover, in relation to the situation of the recent past, some dead 1980 (remember: “We will remember this bright day for a long, long time with you // The earth will be happy and... It’s still far, far, far before the start..." ) it was time to talk about almost achieved social peace. Then there would still be peace, not compromise. It is difficult to say who should have been thanked first: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the proletarian state, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, the father of the Soviet nuclear program, or Dmitry Fedorovich Ustinov, who gave the order to the troops of the Soviet army to cross the border at the Pyanj River. But one thing is clear: we should have thanked one of our Soviet, visible opponents of Western democracies, who welded Western civilization together with fear. Even Fear, but not only Fear.

The basis of public consent in non-communist countries was the consciousness of the superiority of the civilizational choice. I would like to especially emphasize: it was civilizational competition that laid the foundation for the all-class rejection of the Eastern Bloc. The military power of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact as a whole transferred the usual “savages” and “barbarians” to a different register. Unevenness, quantitative and qualitative non-identity of economic systems for some time passed for equal originality. Thatcher's maxim, which identified the Soviet Union with the heavily armed Upper Volta (now, if my memory serves me correctly, Burkina Faso), was precisely aimed at destroying this idea. Any competition in Western conditions - it’s time to remember Huizinga, who described this curious phenomenon back in 1932 - turned into a kind of near-sporting competition, where good guys were pitted against bad guys. Fear turned into participation, participation into experience, experience into unity into a single team of fans for our own, North Atlantic, oh, with such a four-pointed star on the fuselage. Under these conditions, you had to be a complete Italian to vote for the left. The prerequisites for the establishment of social peace were clearly right-wing in nature. Any just expression of social democratic anger could be countered by the parallel of Soviet propaganda with the background of the street riots in Prague in 1968, and any social democrat, be it Schmidt or Smith, automatically found himself in a losing position. The public is not used to going into detail.

Today there can be no talk of any “rightism”. Political forces in the eyes of society look equally hostile, and if so, then preference, as a rule, is given to the one that is able to rely on the largest possible strata of the population. Here the advantage of socialists of all stripes is more than obvious. Moreover, the property boom that took place in the 50s and 60s and practically created a new conservative electorate has either already exhausted or is about to exhaust its potential.

Conservative forces are faced with a choice: change tactics or adapt their own ideology to the challenges of the time. In the first case - much more effective, but much less probable - one should decisively and consistently implement a number of measures and, in particular, be prepared for property redistribution. The emergence of a new, stronger competitively and at the same time legal owner will mark the beginning of a redistribution of the market for finance, goods, services and will ultimately contribute to the emergence of a fundamentally new right-wing voter.

But all the dangers of such a path are obvious. The readiness of any right-wing government to remove itself from the economic sphere is extremely unlikely. In addition to the confrontation with the traditional elites, who have absolutely nothing stopping them from crushing any administration, much more weighty considerations of state security come into play. For such risky economic experiments, will, power and infrastructure alone are not enough - either an almost completely closed internal market is needed, in which the threat of replacing national goods with imports in structure-forming industries would not be great, or, conversely, such an open and unstable economic system that any import substitution would occur quite painlessly for its subjects.

The other way involves much lower costs. It consists of preserving the existing order of things and promoting right-wing values ​​in the hope of a gradual wiser society. The path is evolutionary, therefore acceptable, but looks attractive only on paper (see the printable version, print and make sure). In this case, conservative forces risk turning into conservative, if not even conservative, and achieving a goal that is not at all the one they set for themselves.

The mass media impact on society, apparently, can only be of a monotonous, so to speak, semiconductor nature. People can be fooled, they can be stupefied, they can be frightened, but it is almost impossible to make them think. Despite the fact that traditional means are almost exhausted. Thus, xenophobia is considered a recognized recipe for consolidating the electorate, but the peculiarities of modern civilization significantly limit the resource for searching for a new “enemy image.” He can no longer be a foreigner or a foreigner - recent experience shows that it is necessary to construct a “foreign” enemy. The successful experience of demonizing Milosevic and the not entirely successful, in our opinion, of Saddam Hussein clearly demonstrate this.

And here a turn is emerging that is extremely unpleasant for all non-socialist forces. The search for an ideological opponent in modern conditions is, first of all, a condemnation of the power and methods of traditional politics in general. Most of the conflicts of the last decade were generated precisely by “right” costs: a stake on national values, circumstances of a religious or property nature, etc. In this regard, politicians who preach leftist values ​​are a decisive winner.

The first and understandable desire of their political opponents cannot but be to clarify their position. In this case, they will adapt their ideology to the changed social situation. But the further the conversation with society, the more it can only be conducted in a language that this very society understands, and therefore using a fair amount of socialist phraseology. The most conservative speakers will be capable of is calling for the preservation of the status quo achieved with such difficulty, that is, consciously preserving the intermediate state of the political-social system, a state in no way capable of satisfying the right-wing self-consciousness. As a result, without even noticing it, conservative ideology, which over the past two centuries was primarily an ideology of development, will turn out to be only and exclusively an ideology of conservation, repeating the sad fate of legitimism.

So, having come full circle, socialism will win. It will certainly win if its leaders do not show their very obscene dogmatism or some kind of defiant professional incompetence ahead of time. This will begin a new era: total lies and equally general uncertainty. This will end not the most barren period in European history in all respects, which once opened with the English revolution of the 17th century. Thus, the Union of Socialist Countries of Europe, abbreviated SSCE, or SSCE and SA - the countries of Europe and North America - as you like, will finally triumph. It will, of course, be more difficult for Americans to abandon common sense in the name of socialist chimeras, but historical experience shows that for a disunited society - such as the US society, and even coupled with a state at the zenith of external power, which, without a doubt, should be considered the administration United States - nothing is impossible.

It appears that right-wing ideology in its unchanged form should either completely disappear from political life, or...

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In this place there should have been reflections on the special role of the renewed Russia as a new stronghold of world conservatism. A society that has suffered from extreme leftist hobbies cannot help but develop a strong immunity against them, which in turn...

Let's wait. A deficit-free budget, state calm, an effective law enforcement system - let's wait for recovery.

We hope that it will not drag on for long.