V. M.Zaznobin
Professor of Saint-Petersburg State Agrarian University,
Candidate of engineering sciences
Marxism at the new stage of globalization
Marxism has shaped the course of world history in the XXth century That is why if we are going to analyze prospects for humanity in the XXIst century and further, it is necessary to adequately assess the essence and role of Marxism in the historical past, and its trends affecting the reality For that the need arises to have adequate understanding of global historical process development.
First of all, it is better to reject the dogmatic version of world history for the majority of states. According to that, present humanity appeared in the biosphere of the Earth tens of thousands of years ago and they were the first human beings on the planet Earth; the first civilizations appeared in different areas of the planet several thousand years ago; historical events occurring after the appearance of written language and chronicles are well-known; globalization has been caused by world trade within the development of capitalism, and from the historical point ofview it presents a relatively new socially spontaneous phenomenon occurring without any management by humanity itself or from outside.
Marxism has appeared due to such an understanding of historical past and made a significant contribution to its substantiation in terms of two statements:
1) "engine of history" is the struggle of oppressed class for its political and economic
rights
2) Change of socio-economic formations under the pressure of class struggle and the development of productive forces is a natural phenomenon leading to global classless communist society where there will not be oppression and exploitation of man by man; everyone will be free as by this time social life and economic activities have been organized according to objective laws developed by science1.
However, by now archeology, paleontology, geology, ethnography and archival science have accumulated so many facts denying this dogmatic understanding of historical past that these sciences have become incompatible with it.
Looking at these facts without taking into consideration the dogmatic understanding of world history, we will see another history of humankind. Previous global civilization was highly developed and regarding some scientific and technical achievements it exceeded the present day level of life. There were at least two races: the first one was presented by "elite" exceling in the duration of life, biological potential of cultural and personal development, another one consisted of slaves serving the elite which was perceived as "gods". This civilization disappeared about 13 000 years ago following global geophysical disaster changed the face of the planet because of lithosphere's shift in relation with the Earth's axis. The majority of survivors lost their memory and became barbarians. But the minority of survived elite retaining memory and different fundamental and applied knowledge started to fulfill their mission of global civilization's restoration according to their ideas (beliefs). It was they who broke new ground in the development of ancient civilizations in different territories of the planet; they taught barbarians agriculture, different crafts and established state apparatus. Myths of different nations at different continents describe the Flood, supernatural founders of first civilizations after the global disaster who had been running the states as tsars or hierophants for many centuries.
If globalization is understood as the process directed at creating single global culture that will unify humankind in the future, globalization is as old as modern civilization exists today Besides globalization is an objective process as it expresses biological unicity of Homo sapiens who have potential for the development of culture. In this case culture is understood as all information and algorithmics non-inherited genetically. Culture is not genetically programmed owing to this fact it is variable and each person can contribute either to its development or its degradation and distortion. Everything is determined by his | her morals and mentality determined by morality. Written above concerns about not only culture being formed within globalization but also national cultures. Each of them has its own diversity due to the development of society under specific physical and geographic conditions and political environment.
The variability of culture and its different social impact results in the variability of globalization i.e. managing variability of globalization inside human society. Because of this fact we must look at the world history from the point of view of sufficiently general (meaning multipurpose) management theory (SDMT). It was made in the USSR in the work "Dead water", it was presented to officials of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in Russia and the Rector of Shanghai University in the nineties.
The management presumes determined objectives and ways and means to achieve them. Such trilateral determination can be expressed in the management conception. Analyzing the global way of history in terms of SDMT, we find out that globalization has been managed since the age of pharaohs and hierophants in Egypt (around 3500 years ago). Egypt was the first victim of globalization managed by its higher hierophants, then they didn't need Egypt as an ancient superpower and made it one of the provinces of Rome Empire, after its fall Egypt has never become as important as it was in the time of the Pharaohs.
The conception of globalization promoted by the successors of ancient Egyptian hierophants has become the Bible. It isn't perceived as a man-made conception of globalization as the Bible has been the basis for several regional civilizations for several centuries (West, Russia and South America) where it is elevated to the rank of "sacred manuscripts" allegedly expressing the God's (the Creator's, the All Ruler's) will. Referring to the Bible as the driving force of globalization is to buy the world with its inhabitants and all its property by Judaic (by faith) elite as it is written in the Old Testament giving them the monopoly on international usury. Usury in terms of game theory is non-zero-sum game, where usurers always get the gain and the others will be completely dependent on the "financial climate" created by them.
However, the promotion of globalization process according to this conception resulted in dead-end situation by the beginning of the XlXth century. It was caused by the loss of global expansion by biblical culture with the appearance of Koran denying usury as a kind of Satanism, spreading Muslim culture around the world; attempts of Genghis Khan to boost an alternative project, though it didn't succeed but it blocked the spreading of biblical culture to Asia.
Marxism has appeared as a secular ideology basing on the achievements of atheistic science of that time due to losing the impact of religions on society. The mission of Marxism was to bring the previous biblical project to an end at the age of disappointments in traditional confessions, capitalism basing on the ideology of bourgeois liberalism. In the course of world social revolution basing on the Marxism's ideas there would appear international socialistic socio-economic formation, further it would become communistic one and solved all problems humankind is facing. But Marxism's project also faced crisis in the second part of the XXth century. As a result the world socialistic system was destroyed by the activists of bourgeois liberalism with the help of turncoats from socialistic countries and the majority of population supported the return to capitalism. By now global environmental social and political crisis of civilization development has reached enormous size: capitalism basing on the ideology of bourgeois liberalism brings only mass poverty, lack of culture, ecological problems; socialism proved to be inconsistent within the country itself followed by its collapse in many states. In those countries where communistic orientation has retained after the fall of world system of socialism, in our view, it was caused by the subordination of Marxism to the processes of their national culture development. It has nothing to do with its adequacy to the mission of socialistic or communistic development of society
The point is that Marxism is internally controversial it doesn't include dialectal contradictions that can be overcame and boost development. They are different contradictions. In the work "Three sources and three parts of Marxism" V.I. Lenin represents Marxism as an organic system including three components:
- The philosophy of dialectical materialism uniting materialism of natural sciences and Hegel's dialectics.
- Political economy based on the labor theories of value (LTV) determines the political superstructure and methods and forms of surplus value's distribution.
- Theory of socialism based on Utopian dreams of everyone's happiness and harmony in relations between people, society and nature; and it became the science on the society's development due to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and Marxist political economy
Contrary to Lenin's and other Marxist scholars' opinion there is only one proved statement that is inevitability of communism's building around the globe. This is an ancient dream of humankind about coming back to a golden age, paradise, building of temple on the Earth (Jesus, Moses, Muhammad preached it though historically existing Judaism, Christianity and Islam are teaching their adherents the other sense of life). The tools of political economy and philosophy that are necessary to build communism and socialism don't work in Marxism, as a consequence government sovereignty and cultural sovereignty of society based on Marxism turned out to be impossible. As a result the real power over society based on Marxist ideals is concentrated not in the hands of people, but in ones of transnational political mafia not only pursuing the politics of bribery and appointing executive staff, but first of all through bypassing consciousness of Marxists and implementing the principle "knowledge is power".
These characteristics of Marxism remain hidden from the majority of people and Marxists themselves and arose because of inconsistency between its philosophy and human psychology and metrological incompatibility of its political economy.
In ancient Greece dialectics was understood as a method or art of seeking the truth by asking leading questions. Human's conscious perception of the world has a discrete character; it means that by asking questions and finding answers you solve the problem of discrete ambiguity between "Yes" and "No" and "this" or "not this". Therefore dialectics as an art of seeking the truth is genetically programed for a human being. But some people can use it effectively, others can't do this. Dialectics can't be formalized as it is an art and each creative cognitive act is unique. However Hegel tried to make dialectics formal; owing to this he substitutes dialectics with logic elevated to the rank of dialectics. A.S. Khomyakov corresponding member of Emperor's Academy was the first who pointed out the inconsistency of Hegel's philosophy as logic ignored the intellectual power of unconscious mind in 1846 in his work "Russians' opinion on foreigners"
In reality logic of consciousness level can fulfill two functions:
- Interpret the results of creative cognitive acts produced by unconscious mind;
- Give task to unconscious mind.
Mastering an art of dialectics presupposes the dialogue between consciousness and unconscious mind and further tuning this informational algorithmic complex system. This demands such a type of psyche that can help a person to work out on his own effective creative cognitive culture of dialectics. Neither Marxism's founders nor next Marxists study this problem.
As a consequence there wasn't worked out any theory of management in Marxism but without such a theory the management has become mysterious art that only a few knows.
The same situation concerns Marxist political economy.
Firstly, the labor theories of value (LTV) can't be implemented in all cases; it can be applied to the work of diggers, but not to scientific researches. I. V. Stalin was the first who hinted at metrological incompatibility of LTV and Marxist political economy in his work "Economical Problems of Socialism in the USSR". There he proposed to reject such main notions of Marxist political economy as "necessary" and "surplus product", "necessary" and "surplus working hours" as they don't exist in economic reality
Secondly, there are other factors impacting the price formation except for production cost that can be partially proved by LTV, the key ones are potential buyers' and vendors' demands based on their moral mentality i.e. they are determined by psychological factors formed into the statistics of preferences predetermining the state of all markets.
Thirdly the process when the means of production transfer their value to the product doesn't represent objectively existing economic phenomenon, it is an accounting transaction on amortization charge regulated by juridical laws. So far as Marxist political economy contains such metrologically inconsistent fictions, it has nothing to do with the practice of bookkeeping neither in micro- nor in macro- levels of national economy. Referring to this, the system of social economic development can'tbe connected with Marxist political economy or be based on it.
These two factors - inconsistency of cognition methodology of dialectic materialism and metrological incompetence of political economy together with the absence of adequate psychology and management theory in the conditions of dogmatizing the heritage of Marxism founders and following the principle "Marxism is all-powerful as it is right"2 have become scientific methodological reasons of the fall and collapse of the USSR and world socialism system.
Nevertheless Marxism isn't useless in the history of humankind. The point is that all philosophies can be related to one of two types: methodological philosophy or dogmatic philosophy. Each philosophy works in a different way. Dogmatic ones work on the following principle: if you have a question, look for the answer at legal classists and comply your answer from their opinions. Methodological ones work according to another way: If you have a question, master the methodology of creation and cognition given by philosophy and find an answer yourself. In reality Marxism has become the first exoteric (public) methodological philosophy in Europe and Russia. Therefore some people perceived it as a dogma, others - as demagogy, third party (minority) accepted it as methodology of cognition and creation, and it can be further developed and improved. All claims on Marxism written above and our refusal of using it as a basis for future development caused by the fact that we perceived Marxism as methodological culture and worked out definite methodological culture, and it allowed us to find out and start solving those problems that can't be solved or seen by Marxism theory. These principles are developed by Conception of Public Safety (CPS) in Russia, it is an open civil initiative for everyone.
Works of CPS include:
• Stating the methodology of creation and recognition based on human psyche structure, a person can compare it with his own psyche structure; as a result effective personal cognitive and creative culture can be developed by a person himself
• Stating of sufficiently general (meaning multi-purpose) management theory that allow to 1) interpret any processes as particular management processes that are constituents parts of embracing processes of hierarchally higher management 2) together with the methodology of creation and recognition can be the language of communication and coordination of specialists working in different areas.
• Considering different aspects of life from the point of view of sufficiently general management theory: confessional and national interrelations, economy management at micro- and macro- levels to build communism and overcome global bio spherical social ecological crisis and other issues.
¹ Freedom is the recognition of necessity (F. Engels)
² V. I. Lenin. Three sources and three parts of Marxism
