First drafts of an industrial strategy

The young author of Rabkor, Ivan Shchegolev, wrote an article about the defense industry that provokes interesting thoughts. The fact that this sector remains one of the hotbeds of industrial growth and remains competitive in the world market is, of course, well known. But what are the prospects and tasks for its further development? How can (and can) it become a driving force for other industries?

There has been talk for a long time that it is time to get off the oil needle, but no “breakthroughs” have been observed. It is not true that there are no achievements or successes, but there is precisely no breakthrough. This means that even against the background of individual successes, general negative trends continue to develop. In ruling circles they are confident that it is enough to direct money somewhere, everything else will happen by itself. The result is very modest achievements, accompanied by high-profile corruption scandals. In turn, liberal critics of the authorities, without analyzing anything on the merits, explain that the culprit for everything is swindlers and thieves sitting in high offices. All you have to do is replace them, and everything will go as it should.

In fact, the situation is the opposite of what is usually imagined. It’s not because nothing works out because they steal a lot, but because they steal a lot because nothing works out. It's a matter of technique. The more specific, clear, obvious and meaningfully simpler the task, the more control and power specific technicians (and not general project managers) have, the less space, and most importantly interest, for theft. The easiest way to cut up and steal funds is when you are instructed to “go there, we don’t know where, to find something, we don’t know what.” Actually, nothing else but the absorption of funds in this case seems possible.

This is why many innovative projects of the 2000s were initially doomed not only to failure, but also to an insane waste of funds. The degradation of science, despite all the talk, continued, because the matter here also does not come down to money. Theoretical science lives in interaction with applied science, which interacts with production, and production needs science when they need to solve specific problems with their joint efforts.

After the collapse of the 1990s, the illusions of the “information society” and the “innovative economy”, and the ambitious but manila plans of the 2000s, the time has come to seriously think about the prospects for reindustrialization. But not at the level of an abstract slogan, but at the level of a specific program based on the actually preserved potential, on the one hand, responding to the specific needs of society, on the other. Simply put, if we limit ourselves to loading Uralvagonzavod with orders for the production of more tanks, this will not give us even a semblance of an industrial breakthrough.

General conversations about training personnel for industry are equally unpromising. On the one hand, there are not enough personnel. And there is such a shortage that in many cases qualified workers are already being lured with all sorts of benefits . But on the other hand, on a state scale it remains unclear who needs to be trained and in what quantity. Benefits for certain categories of workers at certain enterprises are combined with titanic efforts by the business community aimed at preventing the “price of labor” from rising. This is precisely what Mikhail Prokhorov’s proposals and the projects of RSPP experts in the field of labor legislation reform boil down to. Although these attempts are doomed to failure precisely because one of the key issues of modernization is the increase or, rather, restoration of the cost of labor (to reproduce their ability to work, a skilled worker needs not only more money, he needs better living conditions, including social and cultural conditions , educational). At the tactical level, it would be cheaper for the state to support the efforts of enterprises to train and retrain their own personnel instead of creating a wide network of vocational schools, where they will again train unknown people for unknown reasons. At the strategic level, we must set a course for the transition from an economy of cheap labor to an economy of expensive labor, which involves serious investments in infrastructure and living conditions of people. This issue is now sometimes even more pressing than the problem of wages. But work to restore social infrastructure in itself turns into a source of economic growth and a mechanism for creating jobs. Moreover, jobs that are socially useful. Scientific personnel (including, by the way, social science professionals) must be involved in solving these problems, specifically tied to the development needs of the respective regions.

As for the defense industry, it is not enough to simply record its growth points and prospects. In order to take advantage of them, you need a strategy. In the defense complex, as Shchegolev reasonably showed, it is necessary to develop, first of all, dual-use technologies, through which technological innovations go into mass production. This is how mobile communications, personal computers, and the Internet arose. Our industry can receive government support even within the WTO if growth is based on the defense industry. But this will work if the defense industry, for its part, relies on new tasks, on the reconstruction of enterprises, on dual-use products that meet modern standards. First of all, funds and investments should be allocated for this. And, by the way, under this strategy it is already possible to deploy a system of mass training of personnel, not only workers, but also scientists and engineers.

At the same time, there is the possibility of “tightly linking” technological efforts in four directions:

— creation of modern energy;

— reconstruction and modernization of transport infrastructure (including environmentally friendly types of vehicles, for example, airships);

— aerospace industry;

— dual-use defense production.

There are a lot of interesting problems here for science, including, for example, the creation of new types of road surfaces that are resistant not only to bad weather and low temperatures, but also to corruption (if the road has a ten-year guarantee, then there is no opportunity for theft under the guise of endless repairs remains).

Moreover, it is absolutely necessary to create a SINGLE TECHNOLOGICAL SPACE in these four and other related areas without any information and legal barriers between enterprises and firms. This last task can only be solved by socialist measures, within the framework of the public sector. In other words, socialization here is a technological and strategic necessity. Fortunately, a significant part of enterprises in the relevant sectors are already connected with the state. But the nature of this connection and its legal basis must be radically changed. Privatization of current state corporations would be a disaster for the country, but maintaining them in their current form (in fact, in the form of private companies with state participation in assets) is futile. We need a new form of a modern state, or rather public (public) enterprise with an appropriate legal framework, including control of technical personnel over many decisions, mutual technological and financial transparency, exchange of personnel and information, etc. By the way, there are also a few words about this at Shchegolev's.

Out of the crisis and discussions about it, the contours of a new strategy are beginning to emerge little by little. And I am very pleased that this is the product of the collective work that we are doing within the framework of IGSO.