Vladimir Videman. Who won on December 7?

Who won on December 7?
The postmodernists won

Vladimir Wiedemann

Publication date: March 13, 2004

The phenomenon of "United Russia"

did not cause a sensation during the Duma elections United Russia , despite almost 38% of the votes received. “Well, what can we take from them,” some people argue about United Russia, “the party in power, an administrative resource!” “What a nightmare, because they don’t even have an ideology!” - others make big eyes, keeping in mind: “What cynicism!” In general, controlled democracy and nothing more!

“A new political era is coming,” said Vladislav Surkov , deputy head of the Russian Presidential Administration, immediately after the elections . The official did not give a detailed definition of this era, however, in accordance with a number of indicators, it can be assumed that we are talking about the era of political postmodernity . So, maybe United Russia is really the party of victorious postmodernism?

Modern society

From a historical point of view, the period of modernity as the New Time, the “new world” replaced the stagnant feudal formation along with the Enlightenment, secular society, the political emancipation of the third estate and the industrial revolution. The ideological climate of the era of modernism was determined by rationalism .

The “article of faith” of modernism is scientific : as a result of scientific and technological progress, humanity will supposedly be able to identify the levers of the most effective , universal and at the same time scientific regulation of all aspects of social life in the interests of general social progress.

English political economy, as an intellectual product of the world's first industrial revolution, seemed to reveal the scientific laws of the economic life of society and, thus, stimulated temptations to use its know-how for scientific regulation of the process of social production.

During the same period, the emergence of three ideological directions of industrial society took place - conservatism , socialism and liberalism , reflecting the process of political consolidation of the three main social classes involved in the creation of GDP: landowners, wage workers (proletarians) and capitalists. The material existence of each of them is closely linked to the “class monopoly” on one of the three classical factors of production and is formed through land, labor and money rent.

The beginnings of postmodernity

At the same time, the removal of the East-West confrontation and the actual de-ideologization of totalitarian societies, which coincided with the information revolution and the spread of post-industrial technologies, are perceived by some analysts as phenomena marking the beginning of a new socio-historical era - the postmodern period . In postmodernism, faith in scientific, technical and social progress, characteristic of modernity, gives way to skepticism and agnosticism, intuition takes the place of reason, and game takes the place of logical calculation.

In essence, the “creed” of postmodernism can be considered individualism , which has gone beyond the framework of modernism, which proclaimed humanism and was oriented towards the emancipation of the third estate . In the conditions of information and economic globalization, the legally and politically liberated personality of modernity discovers radically new possibilities for self-expression and material positioning. The man of the new era is a global player.

The erosion of classes and the new corporatism

Consistent liberalization of the economy leads to the erosion of the traditional social classes of industrial society, since, as George Soros noted, not only production products, but also the production factors themselves begin to take part in market turnover: “International trade in goods and services is not sufficient to create a world economy; factors of production become interchangeable. Land and other natural resources do not move, people with their problems move, therefore it is the mobility of capital and information, as well as entrepreneurship, that are responsible for economic integration" ( J. Soros. The Crisis of World Capitalism ).

The emergence of a global community and the internationalization of business are leading to the emergence of a new cosmopolitan reality, where the rules of the game are increasingly written not by parliaments, but by boards of directors. In the information society, the new corporate loyalty of the individual begins to gradually dominate over the political. The very psychology of political action is changing. In modern politics, the main players are corporations of all kinds. Even parties participate in political struggle not as movements and class forces, but as hardware corporations.

Post-industrial reformatting

This state of affairs forces the most realistically thinking politicians to take an increasingly closer look at postmodern trends that determine the process of global reformatting of economic reality and social relations. The national political class determines public consensus less and less in an information society permeated with transnational connections and interests.

Global capitalism, while destroying the factor monopoly of the productive classes, simultaneously undermines the ideology of the classical national state, which is, in essence, an arbitrator in the conflict of economic interests of these classes. At the same time, it is probably in vain to expect the formation in the future of some kind of global cosmopolitan ideology as the last dot over the “i” in the history of human unity. The individualization of the modern producer, emancipated from class and national (in the political sense of the word) consciousness, will not allow him, either ideologically, or, especially, “ideologically,” to long-term identify with any collectivist projects.

Attempts to create new global ideological projects are typical relapses of the modernist mentality, which ultimately strives to unify everything and everyone in Hegelian fashion and bring them to a common denominator. In the information community, any ideology actually turns into a personal point of view. And the vital social interests of the population, instead of ideological political parties, are protected by non-governmental organizations, including international ones. This is an effective civil society. Here the political class is not concerned with ideological debates, but competes as part of organized teams in the field of efficiency in managing the state machine, the route of which, however, is calculated by specialists from the expert community.

A clear example in this regard is the United States - a country of victorious liberalism and victorious (albeit at great expense) postmodernism. Here we see a well-functioning two-party system of de-ideologized (because everyone here is liberal) managers, while demagogic rhetoric becomes a means of profiling the politician’s personal image . Image making is generally a characteristic feature of postmodern politics.

Raw materials and processors

In Russia, Zhirinovites and Limonovites are often called political postmodernists for their ideological eclecticism and focus on media performance. However, in our opinion, political strategists from United Russia are much more serious postmodernists. The only thing they lack to be in full condition is a worthy opponent, in a fight with whom they could seriously improve their technocratic professionalism.

By its “class” nature, United Russia strongly resembles the American Republicans - the party of the conservative clan of energy workers and the military-industrial complex. The economic ideology of United Russia is formulated by ultra-liberal presidential adviser Andrei Illarionov , who sees nothing wrong with the fact that GDP growth in Russia will occur at the expense of the raw materials sector: “If there is national and global demand for the products of the raw materials sector, what’s terrible about that?”

In the United States, manufacturing companies are the main sponsors of the country's second largest party, the Democrats, opposing the Republicans. In Russia, raw materials producers operating through United Russia are structurally opposed by the same processors, who have not yet formed their own consolidated political resource.

The economic ideology of processors is most systematically formulated by Sergei Glazyev, and the head of Putin’s election headquarters, Vladimir Litvinenko, is already planning to create a politicized association of processing companies in the form of the Union of Industrialists of Russia based on the joint efforts of mining producers, forest producers, and small and medium-sized businesses.

It is interesting that the small American parties operating in the political life of the country in addition to the republican-democratic tandem in Russia structurally and in image correspond with their “doubles” with amazing accuracy: Ralph Nader’s American Greens - the intellectual-ecological “Yabloko”; ultra-liberals of the Libertarian Party - SPS; populist-isolationists of the Reformed Party of Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan are the complete overseas equivalent of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's LDPR. It’s another matter that all American “third” parties taken together have virtually no chance of getting into Congress in the foreseeable future and act more like structures that nuance the battle of two titans. In Russia, in principle, with the creation of a consolidated political project of processors, the “third parties” will also very quickly come to naught, and this process seems to have already begun.

Left sector

By and large, the unification of the ideologically fragmented left flank into an analogue of the American Democratic Party could - as we have already said - just form a worthy rival to United Russia. But for this, the “left” needs to give up its claim to a monopoly in the field of social policy in favor of civil society, and actively create a sponsorship infrastructure in exchange for declarative recognition of the sacred right of private property and the state’s obligation to protect this property.

Now the left political resource in Russia is actually lying on the street. At the same time, its promotion in a new, postmodern format could activate the country’s overall political system and introduce into it an element of competitiveness in democratic governance technologies.

However, many uncritically believe that the united Russian left must somehow have the appearance of European social democracy.

European political culture is still strongly tied to modernity, with local political parties still maintaining formal loyalty to the class ideology of industrial society: conservatism (Christian parties), socialism (socialist and workers' parties) and liberalism (liberal parties).

In America, as in Russia, due to historical reasons (revolution and radical elimination of the class system), society is much more egalitarian in its mentality. Moreover, the American “left” is not just a non-Marxist left, but not even a socialist one. These are more left-wing liberal trade unions, lower middle class. In this sense, they are close to British Laborism. The American left is not confrontational (like the European ideological class war), but socially constructive. In principle, the left social sector in the United States votes for the most part for the Democratic Party - quite liberal and even, one might say, oligarchic (if we take into account some of its quite wealthy sponsors, for example Soros).

It is curious that one of the leaders of Rodina, Dmitry Rogozin, in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta, has already voiced the idea of ​​a possible “Laborist” format for his political project (as social, but emphatically non-Marxist): “... there is Rodina with great claims to create a great Labor Party with a national spirit."

Russia, of course, is still far from the degree of information and post-industriality that America has achieved (where GDP is already more than 60% formed due to the fourth factor). However, the prerequisites for the formation of a post-industrial economy here fully exist, and with them the prospects for a more effective system of political management.

Thus, large corporate sponsors should, roughly speaking, “buy” left-wing politics, de-ideologizing it strategically and forming a mechanism for interaction between sponsors and the social clientele at the level of specific accounting for the mutual interests of partners.

Indeed, from a purely economic point of view, ideology is nothing more than a kind of loan agreement between a specific member of society and the management structures of society, when a member of society provides management structures with a loan in the form of deductions from his labor (taxes) and agreement to follow established laws, and managers the structures, in turn, undertake to repay this loan after some time either to the member of the society or to his heirs.

Already today, the Russian political elite speaks virtually a single language of numbers. Only ideological simulacra differ . Well, let a hundred flowers bloom! A simulated difference should not interfere with a serious matter; the tail cannot wag the dog. However, in the era of postmodernism this is also possible. Like another simulation.