“I am forced to say a ‘terrible’ thing: the world is on the threshold of a new social revolution.” Global revolutions New global social revolution

For a new strategy for a new global revolution

(post too old to reply)

2007-05-31 09:10:35 UTC

For a new strategy for a new global social revolution by abolition
monetary system

Mironov
***@ybb.ne.jp

revolutions in our times.



clearly state the strategic goals of the socialist revolution as follows:

















production.

















Engels.








in the global communist movement.
For more details, read the article entitled:

Note: This article was previously sent to a number of
Communist Party
And she was also in the Forum of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation website (http://kprf.ru) on the topic “Reflection
on the development strategy of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation", in the forum anastasia.ru, citadel of Olmer.

The end of inertial thinking that has come to a major failure!!

Viktor Vashkevich

2007-05-31 16:13:20 UTC

For a new strategy for a new global social revolution by abolition
monetary system
Mironov
Increasing mutual dependence of the economies of foreign countries and
spread of information and telecommunications connections throughout the world
mashitabe accelerate the maturity of the objective conditions of the global social
revolutions in our times.

In general, this is true, but you need to start by moving from Einstein’s physics
to Hertzian physics, from the transition from fuel to fuel-free energy.

The alternative to imperialist globalization is something other than
a new global social revolution.
To move forward towards a global social revolution, it is necessary
Abolish the plutocratic regime of domination of capital, its basis -
monetary system, commodity production and classes;
To build a new society of free service both in factories and
institutions, and labor, in general in all areas of social life
people all over the world. Moreover, this is increasingly required now in
conditions of accelerating cooling and the onset of the ice age, and
at the same time, the onset of a solar explosion by 2008 according to ESA
(Europian space agency), which was published by the website izvestia.ru, due to
for accelerating the warming of the Earth due mainly to the core of evil
industrialized countries led by the United States.
To realize such a new global revolution, it is necessary to stop
inertial thinking, fundamentalism according to Marx and Lenin, dogmatism and,
in particular, the cult of former leaders of the world communist movement that determined
and led to the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union and other so-called.
socialist countries and to the ideological disarmament of the world communist movement due to the refusal
inseparable most important and basic goals of the socialist strategy
revolution: rejection of the complete abolition of the monetary system and commodity
production.
After all, F. Engels did not set the strategic goal of abolishing monetary
system, limiting it to mentioning its erroneous spontaneous disappearance
after the revolution in labor the Principles of Communism, remaining
half-heartedness and inconsistency. Marx and Engels did not deliver
this strategic goal in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
The proverb says: Don’t forget your word once given to yourself!
But Lenin limited the stated goals of socialism only to the abolition of classes with
May 1919, abandoning the strategic goal of abolishing monetary
systems in the 2nd Program of the RCP(b) adopted at the VIII Party Congress in March
1918, without leaving it even as a goal in the future. And perverting
definition of the concept of socialism, he noted that since there is
class difference, such a society cannot be called socialism.
This became an alternative solution to the principled concession
international imperialism and defeatism, although in the conditions of the time
lagging Russia, still on the basis of right opportunism, while his
setting the strategic goal of abolishing the monetary system in the 2nd
program of the RCP(b) was a contribution to overcoming the major mistake of Marx and
Engels.
And Lenin’s successors unfortunately and stupidly made this a world tradition.
communist movement right up to today, and they led to the degeneration of the party, going
along the path of rapprochement to the cap since the Khrushchev period and the advancement
counter-revolution under Gorbachev and its implementation under Yeltsin.
That is why there was no socialism in the USSR. Workers and engineers in the former
The Soviet Union now approves of such conclusions.
To successfully move forward along the path of the coming global revolution
and its implementation, first of all, it is necessary to realize an ideological renaissance
in the global communist movement.
For a new strategy of socialism that meets the requirements of the 21st century

We have so many frightening, warning and demoralizing pamphlets, books and articles about environmental disaster that, behind the noise about the inevitable apocalypse, we have stopped trying to comprehend the real situation. Meanwhile, a correct analysis of the situation largely determines whether we will continue to struggle with the consequences of the environmental crisis or will finally move on to its causes.

Of course, we must take into account that the analysis can be carried out in completely different ways and the exact opposite conclusions can be drawn. Therefore, later we will talk about the environmental imperative - the ethics and goals of the movement.

Participants in the environmental movement, for the most part, avoid systemic analysis at the global level, leaving this activity either to scientists or politicians. This “delegation” leads to the fact that the Greens are forced to rely on analysis made not only by like-minded people, but often by direct opponents of the movement. Even the Club of Rome, which is close to the greens, disagrees with them on a number of premises, to say nothing of the crazy geopoliticians who put the national idea at the forefront. Greens must engage in systems analysis on their own, drawing on their own worldview, ethics, their own experiences and methods. The call to “think globally” should not just become a popular slogan. On the other hand, you should not give the global level any special place in your ideological concept, because it is not at all an independent system that can be changed by influencing certain of its elements, it is just one of the projections of socio-economic relationships between people and their groups, between people and nature. Problems that were fundamental to people were never resolved in the struggle between states and continents; they were solved mainly in social revolutions.

At the global level, the world through the eyes of a geopolitician looks quite primitive. For convenience, it is stratified, dividing countries into blocks that have a similar internal structure, economic and military power. For some reason, this leads to the conclusion that these countries have common interests on the world stage.

The system of three worlds (when the First, capitalist, and Second, socialist, worlds fought for influence in the Third, developing world and, in the long term, for world domination) was replaced by the North-South system, where the rich North (called the “Golden Billion” in Russian geopolitical literature " - according to the number of inhabitants living in its countries) opposes the poor, but rapidly increasing population of the South, sucking natural and human resources from the latter, selling waste and harmful industries in the opposite direction. The West (North) is reliably protected by a joint security system (military, political, economic, demographic) from economically backward states, and from time to time demonstrates its power in one of them. All Eastern European countries, including the former Soviet republics, have a desire to integrate into the Western world by any means. The fact that they all applied to join NATO is not explained by fear of an unpredictable Russia, but by a desire to become part of the Western world.

All these systems of the universe no more correspond to reality than a flat Earth resting on three elephants and a turtle, since they consider countries as socio-political monoliths, attributing to their people mythical aspirations, mentalities, national characters and other nonsense.

But the accepted rough diagrams of geopolitics can still be used in the same way as flat Earth maps.

Despite all the robberies of the Third World, the West did not manage to transition to post-industrialism, as many domestic greens mistakenly believe, because the mechanical transfer of dangerous and harmful industries and their wastes beyond the territory of the First World and its focus on imported raw materials does not at all mean the onset of post-industrialism. Yes, miniaturization and energy-saving technologies have led to some reduction in raw materials and energy costs, but only in relation to a specific type of goods or services. The very quantity of goods and services, as well as their quality, is constantly increasing, negating the advances of technology, and the number of consumers is constantly growing. No promising discoveries capable of radically changing the structure of consumption of raw materials and resources have been noticed on the horizon of scientific and technological progress. It is foolish to rely on “revolutionary” thermonuclear energy - it is little safer than nuclear energy and does not solve the problem of thermal pollution of the environment. In general, in this situation, humanity has this situation, as in the famous joke: “There are two ways out - fantastic and real. The fantastic is if we can handle it ourselves, and the real is if the Martians come and save us.”

The hope that the system that dominates the world and is responsible for the destruction of the environment will be able to turn towards reducing its expansion is more likely to be a fantastic way out. Domestic environmental reformists, who claim that it is possible to change the system from the inside (no matter whether by participating in elections or working in governments), cannot even create a party with even a well-thought-out strategic program (corresponding to the global scale of the environmental catastrophe). But even in those countries (Germany, France, Austria) where green parties really have political weight, even there, has at least one fundamental change been made to the system responsible for the disastrous path of self-destruction of humanity? No, they often fail to even force their governments to abandon individual dangerous projects. What can we say about the economy or the decision-making system as a whole. Optimists who argue that the terms “ecology”, “environment”, “sustainable development” or “limits to growth” are firmly entrenched in the lexicon of Western politicians should remember that even earlier, the rights of indigenous peoples and the rights of women were also ingrained in the lexicon politicians, but how many women presidents or prime ministers have become (exceptions, oddly enough, are more typical for countries where little is said about women’s rights - Turkey, Pakistan, India).

Most of the adjustments that scientists had to make in the 20 years between the publication of the first Limits to Growth report in 1972 and the publication of the anniversary report Beyond Growth in 1991 in terms of global economic trends concerned primarily updated statistics or changes in policies and economics, not related to the awareness of the threat of environmental disaster. Conscious changes associated with such an understanding are primarily at the regional level (removal of “dirt” from Europe and the USA) and do not change anything on a global scale.

There was, of course, a reaction: “Our book was discussed in parliaments and scientific societies. One major oil company allocated funds for a series of critical publications, another established an annual prize for the best research in this area. “The Limits to Growth” caused several enthusiastic reviews, many analytical reviews and a flurry of attacks from the right, left and even from centrists. The book was perceived by many as a prediction of the imminent end of the world..." But even despite the unconditional fame and authority of the Club of Rome and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the basis of which the research on the first report was carried out, the report was largely ignored. The report of the Brundtland Commission, “Our Common Future,” commissioned by the UN, was almost completely ignored.

After all, the world system, despite all the political changes, has not changed in principle because at its core the same socio-economic relations have been preserved.

And of course, public speeches that were less significant for the technocrats were ignored.

There is no benefit in recounting here all the details of the analysis of the world economy undertaken by the scientists of the Club of Rome; this analysis is indisputable for the environmental movement and played an important role in the scientific (primarily economic) formulation of the warnings put forward earlier at the public level. All reports of the Club of Rome are worthy of the attention of participants in the environmental movement and ordinary citizens. We will focus on those points that raise doubts.

The main conclusion from the analysis of the Club of Rome experts is as follows: “The rate of human use of many important types of resources and the rate of production of many types of pollution already exceed acceptable limits. Without a significant reduction in the flow of material and energy resources, in the coming decades there will be an uncontrolled reduction in the following per capita indicators: food production nutrition, energy consumption and industrial production."

However, if this were the case only in this way, then it would be a matter of purely developed countries. Indeed, what does a resident of Russia or the United Arab Emirates care about a lack of resources if the resources of these countries have a reliable future. Or that a resident of most countries in Asia and Africa faces an uncontrollable reduction in industrial production and energy consumption, if he enjoys the benefits of civilization only from time to time. Only the economy of the North, and after it the population and political institutions of these countries, will seriously suffer when growth goes beyond the limits. Scientists are of little concern about the danger of transforming the biosphere to a state generally unsuitable for human life (and many other species). For them, the end will come with the collapse of the traditional economy, beyond which they cannot see. Hence, they see a way out of the crisis only within the framework of the existing system. From our point of view, only by destroying the system can we achieve fundamental changes in humanity’s attitude towards nature. Pointing to economic growth as the main cause of the impending catastrophe, the Club of Rome does not consider the social roots of this cause. He almost does not consider the role of the political hierarchy - the state and the economic hierarchy - capital in the formation of the values ​​of a doomed society. Both are seen by economists as nothing more than tools that can be successfully used to change the situation. In general, taking the position of an “independent” expert group, the Club of Rome is careful in identifying the carriers of the disastrous paradigm of modern society (and therefore the main opponents of the environmental movement), attributing all troubles to human vices. Hence, “The Limits of Growth” and “Beyond Growth” surprise with the naivety of the prerequisites for overcoming the environmental crisis: “if each family decides to have no more than two children,” “if everyone decides to lead a moderate lifestyle.” No, it won't solve it. Because within the existing system a new person cannot arise. It is, of course, difficult to expect from economists suitable recipes for preventing environmental catastrophe, because modern economics is narrow-minded and for it there is nothing outside the framework of capitalism and the market (maybe only the frightening abyss of state socialism). However, the economists of the Club of Rome themselves do not claim to have an unambiguous indication of the path and only say that either a pro-ecological revolution will happen on its own, or everything will end in tears for humanity.

The need for a revolution to radically change the situation is not disputed by the experts of the Club of Rome. True, the report “Beyond Growth” emphasizes that such a revolution will not be of a political nature, like, for example, the French one, but will be on a par with the Agricultural and Industrial revolution, that is, it will have a complex and global character. Why a political revolution will not arise is not entirely clear, since it inevitably accompanied the two aforementioned global revolutions. The authors, apparently, are captive of their statist and democratic beliefs and do not see the possibility of the existence of a free and fair system other than the one in which they live.

The greatest interest is generated by the reports of the Club of Rome, which are not focused solely on the problems of the development of the world economy.

Unfortunately, the work of M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel “Humanity at the Crossroads” (Mesarovic M., Pestel E.: “Mankind at the Turning Point”, 1974), not translated into Russian, and B. Schneider’s “Barefoot” are practically inaccessible to the environmental movement Revolution" (Schneider B.: "The Barefoot Revolution", 1985), more oriented towards politics and society and some other reports. (They are hard to get in English too.)

Among the “politicized” ones, the report by A. King and B. Schneider “The First Global Revolution” was published in Russian (Progress publishing house, 1991). The politicization of this report is, of course, very conditional. The authors repeat the unchanging concept of the Club of Rome - “The global revolution is devoid of an ideological basis.” Despite this, the book pays due attention to the local, social and even personal level.

Criticizing modern society, the authors note: “As we see, the state system, with its inherent decision-making process, has proven unable to offer anything that would refute or change the trends that call into question our future and the very survival of humanity.”

The chapter “The Limits of Democracy” is not without interest. “As practice shows, democratic states have already largely lost the ability to solve new problems,” the authors write. From this, however, they do not conclude that it is necessary to change political institutions to freer ones (they, quoting Churchill, simply do not believe in such), on the contrary, the logic of globalism leads them to the idea of ​​“global governance”, where democracy, with its slowness, caution and inertia are sacrificed to achieve efficiency.

The “independent” position of the authors, which makes it attractive only to themselves, also leads them to such “pragmatic” decisions as the development of nuclear energy. The above-mentioned Brundtland report generally suggests placing the development of outer space on a broad international basis (as a factor of consolidation); as for management, special hopes are placed on the UN. It is no coincidence that Brundtland’s report is criticized even by members of the Club of Rome, who consider her approach unrealistic, since it is impossible to set conflicting goals for society: “It is doubtful that global sustainable development can be achieved through the increase in industrial economic growth rates proposed in the report developed countries."

In order to adequately assess environmental activities in the territory of the former USSR, and even more so to develop and propose some kind of strategy to the environmental movement, it is necessary to consider the uniqueness of the political, economic, social and cultural context in which “green” people have to work at the present time.

It would be very naive to believe that the main feature of the political, economic, social and cultural context of the countries of the former USSR is the legacy of “real socialism” alone. The optimistic statements of some Western ecologists that “the reforms carried out in the territory of the former Soviet Union cannot be called purely economic. They also contribute to the solution of environmental issues, because the market economy will ensure more efficient use of resources” now look like complete nonsense, since the reforms have added to The problems of socialism also included the problems of capitalism and thereby aggravated the catastrophic state of both the economy and the environment.

Of course, industrial society in its “socialist” variety left behind a not very livable environment, plundered resources, predatory nature and, most importantly, costly infrastructure, including the military-industrial complex, undeveloped technologies, imbalance of production and disharmony industrial relations. This infrastructure will have a negative impact on any processes in the countries of the former USSR and partly Eastern Europe for a long time.

Vast territories contaminated as a result of military tests, industrial accidents at chemical and nuclear facilities, devastated due to unbalanced agriculture and land reclamation, flooded by giant hydroelectric power plants are, however, not a unique Soviet phenomenon. Neither the pollution of the seas, nor the decline in public health (mainly a decrease in immunity), nor, especially, the extinction of species, are unique. All this can be seen both in the West and in the South. The former Second World can only claim exceptional levels of environmental damage.

The socialist feature is that, having destroyed the environment on its own, unlike the Third World, “socialism” did not create a high standard of living and technology, like the West. Because of this, after integration into the global economic system, the countries of the former USSR were unable to compete on equal terms with Western ones, and everything came down to the primitive sale of oil, gas, diamonds, territory (who has what) and, in parallel, to the massive impoverishment of their own peoples. But the environment has already been depleted, the remaining resources have been pledged to global financial structures (after all, somehow it will be necessary to pay for those loans, the receipt of which causes the idiotic delight of domestic officials; their delight is understandable).

It would be unfair to blame resource theft on the West alone. Domestic “business executives” of all political stripes participate in these robberies on an equal footing.

You shouldn’t get too carried away with the demonization of the Western world. Firstly, this will not give any result, since the West will still remain at the helm of the world economy and politics, and secondly, the point is not in specific Western countries (which simply occupy a dominant position), but in the very system of relations, which is the basis of the current world order. If by “West” we understand a certain culture, values, economic model, then such a “West” will lose its geographical essence, since it is present not only in Western Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, but everywhere in every country, in every city where a minority arrogates to itself the right to regulate, to suit its needs, the life of not only the entire community, but also its environment. But this “West” is already called power and capital.

In general, attempts at such alignments, when the continental, ethnic or state factor is placed at the forefront, and the socio-economic and political foundations of society are relegated to the background, alignments pompously called geopolitics, strongly smack of Nazism.

When dirty politicians try to prove to people that their troubles are not caused by those who control their lives now through imposed political and economic institutions, but by exactly the same institutions of “enemy” peoples, countries, continents or hemispheres who are just about to establish this control; when people are told that the cause of their troubles is not a system of relationships, but another race, ethnic group, or religion; when people start to believe all this, it’s already too late to talk about fascism. Because it has already arrived. For now it’s only in the brain, but it won’t matter to the country.

A very small proportion of people on Earth are involved in geopolitics.

Unfortunately, it is this insignificant part that is at the top of the hierarchical pyramid; it is precisely this that now determines the destinies of people. For some, geopolitical games are beneficial because of the opportunity to realize their ambitions, while others are directly interested financially (the ones who shout the most about being robbed by foreigners are those who themselves are not averse to plunder in a foreign country).

The work of N.N. Moiseev "The Agony of Russia. Does it have a future?" is a sort of national version of a report in the spirit of the Club of Rome. If Moiseev had not been a participant in the environmental movement, if he had not taught at the International Independent Ecological and Political Science University, if his work had not been published by the Ecopress-ZM publishing house, we would have ignored it, just as we ignored the schizophrenic geopolitical fictions of Zhirinovsky and the pseudo-intellectual works of Dugin and many articles by petty fascists, like Eddie Limonov. However, Nikita Moiseev’s word carries great weight in the environmental movement and needs commentary.

N. Moiseev’s position is based on the same national idea. It dominates the idea of ​​the ecological with all the ensuing conclusions proposed by the author at the end of the work: the development of all types of trans-Siberian transport, including the Northern Sea Route with its nuclear icebreaker fleet, the “development” of the Far North in the form of increased exploitation of its natural resources, the construction of large cities there and turning it into the northern Persian Gulf.

Moiseev does not see an alternative to a market economy and calls “not to fence yourself off from the world market with an Iron Curtain, but to find your own niche in it.” The author calls all this the GOELRO-2 plan, believing that the second industrialization will bring the country among the developed countries, “although it will pose many environmental problems.” Apparently, the existing ones are not enough for us. Please note that all this nonsense comes from an environmentalist, albeit one with a technical education. And it comes only because it is based on the national idea - “what is good for the nation and the state is good for everyone.”

Let's start by questioning the existence of a nation as such. No, of course, if you wish, you can define a community, either living on a territory limited by state borders, or speaking the same language, as a nation - this will be a purely political scientific definition.

But can this community have some natural common and exclusive aspirations so that we can talk about a national idea? Of course, propaganda from the TV screen can impose a national ideology on the majority (but still not everyone), just as international ideology was previously imposed, but this does not mean that people need it, it only means that the authorities need it. Can a peasant and a banker, a scientist and a politician, a worker and a clergyman have common aspirations just because they conventionally belong to the same nation or are citizens of the same state? No, everything that is common in the aspirations of these people is also present in all other people on the planet, and in most common aspirations not only people.

Moiseev did not escape many imposed patriotic myths of Russian history and reality.

All the same lamentations about the “loss” of Kyiv, Sevastopol, and the Baltic ports.

It was as if the Ukrainians and Balts were not part of the Soviet Empire and did not live in their own homes, but flew from Mars and occupied these cities.

And what is a national idea without false stories about the exploits of our ancestors, about the great Ermak (who did not commit genocide of the Siberian peoples, but who, according to Moses, tore away lands from the abstract steppe), about “Russian military glory.”

Following this, the myth of the exclusivity of the Russian people emerges (this is precisely the basis of any national idea). The Germans, for example, according to Moiseev, were themselves to blame for the national catastrophe at the end of the Second World War, “and it is difficult to blame our people for anything: we were brought to our knees by the stupidity, incompetence and, perhaps, the meanness of our own rulers.”

In general, those who, following the Black Hundreds, perceive Russian history as a series of exclusively moral actions on the part of Russia and those unfair to it, need to take a closer look at the actions of their ancestors. Russia is not Eurasia at all, it is a European country and is responsible for the same set of crimes as many European countries. These crimes include colonialism (in the case of Russia, these are the Caucasus, the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, the Far East, the Black Sea coast, Alaska), the destruction of folk traditions, the destruction of small ethnic groups, industrialism and environmental destruction. Only European countries formally liberated the colonies (transferring them to a state of economic dependence), and Russia retained them, losing only American possessions.

The same applies to the myth of the state. Moiseev believes that the state protects the interests of the majority of its population, although due to its not just hierarchical, but intentionally hierarchical structure, the state cannot but express, first of all, the interests of the elite, and only secondly - to protect everyone else (in the interests of all that same as the elite).

Moiseev’s analysis of world processes is almost no different from the analysis of the Club of Rome. Everything revolves around the same subjects of world politics (Empires and blocs), the same subjects of the world economy (states and transnational corporations). Therefore, Moiseev’s criticism in this part does not differ from our criticism of the Club of Rome.

Unlike the authors of most reports of the Club of Rome, Moiseev rightly does not believe in the possibility of changing the situation with the help of international institutions, since they represent the interests of Western countries (or the countries of the “Golden Billion”). According to the national idea, he transfers the possibility of initiative in changing the world order to the national level. And although before this he himself convincingly shows the ineffectiveness of the existence of imperial Russia (due to severe climatic conditions and territorial dispersion, which leads to excessive energy consumption), it is the Eurasian giant as a state that the author places his bets on.

However, Moiseev, like domestic geopoliticians, pays little attention to the environmental factor in global situations. All of them believe a priori that the notorious “golden billion” has prospects for unlimited development, even at the expense of other countries. But even in the countries of the Third World, resources are not infinite, and the possibility of creating sufficiently developed technologies that make it possible to rely only on renewable resources (i.e., technologies of the real thing, and not the mythical “information” post-industrialism) in a short time, still causes serious concern. doubt.

The state of modern Russia resembles schizophrenia: on the one hand, exorbitant imperial ambitions are being implanted and inflated in every possible way in society, on the other hand, practice shows the opposite - the weakness and stupidity of the state, which is unable to confirm these ambitions in any way. All this can lead to very sad consequences. Society falls into the trap of an artificially created “national humiliation,” whether an agreement with NATO or defeat in the war with Chechnya will play the role of a kind of “Russian Versailles,” but the country is on the verge of establishing a fascist regime. The path to maintaining imperial ambitions is the path to final degradation. It is time for politicians, as well as the social movement, to understand that unconfirmed national ambitions are a direct road to fascism.

The path of “Westernization” is also not acceptable for Russia.

In principle, Russia (or even the CIS) can be “pulled” into the ranks of developed countries through huge energy expenditures through restriction of freedom, through violence and overturning the ideals of both the socialist past and the patriotic present. General Lebed preaches approximately this policy of “national pragmatism.” However, he cannot give up patriotism, which neutralizes pragmatism. After all, for a “great leap” it is necessary to conduct a completely unpatriotic trade in islands and influence, the sale of geopolitical friends and the abandonment of part of the territory, etc. The “national idea” in this case should be the simple idea of ​​increasing the well-being of all segments of the population.

However, this is not the question at all. Doubts arise - is it really so good to be included in this notorious “golden billion” and share its future with it?

If the world system is overwhelmed by a complex ecological and economic catastrophe, then the “golden billion”, easily vulnerable and dependent on a high level of consumption, a very complex infrastructure and the functioning of the world economic system created by them, will have a better chance of survival (with the preservation of civilizational information), but, on the contrary, among those peoples who are more adapted to crisis situations. Perhaps it would be preferable for Russia to develop other institutions, self-sufficient, independent, capable of functioning normally in crisis conditions.

Neither Moiseev, nor geopoliticians, nor the Club of Rome, nor the Brundtland Commission almost consider the socio-political balance of power both within countries and at the international level. Relationships in the world roughly copy only one of the social systems - the police state.

Society is not monolithic, and the conflict of social groups (if one does not like the classical class theory) will force the world to change much more than the “battle of the giants.” Transnational corporations and global empires are not omnipotent. Territories not controlled by governments, corporations and, especially, global structures in different countries are constantly expanding. Local initiatives can successfully resist giants, sparking revolutions (like Vlora in Albania) or international movements (like Chiapas in Mexico). Neither national nor international police forces will be able to suppress such movements (especially if their number is constantly growing). No planetary totalitarianism will save the countries of the “golden billion” from the resistance of the majority of the planet’s population. On the contrary, it is precisely the increased pressure and control of the North over the South that will allow the latter to consolidate and, despite corrupt governments, arrange global sabotage for the world elite. And even in the developed countries themselves, there is far from complete unanimity regarding the colonial and unfair foreign policy.

Moiseev does not believe in the possibility of a global civil movement, but it has already emerged, and a congress in the rebellious Mexican state of Chiapas in 1996 brought together several thousand completely different people from all over the world and initiated a world movement against neoliberalism and the globalization of the economy for human relations. There are other signs of the emergence of a global civil society, for example, transnational strikes at Renault factories or protests by French citizens against tightening immigration laws.

Members of the Club of Rome believe that the global revolution must take place at the global level using global political and economic institutions. Hence their hope for the “revolutionization” of international organizations and governments, for the creation of a UN Security Council on the Environment, etc. However, a much more likely scenario is when the global revolution will take place at the local level, but everywhere. In this case, it will not need either governments, corporations, or international structures. The masters of the world order will never agree to change the state of affairs themselves. Therefore, you should not wait for their permission. A global revolution could end the world order as such. The globalization of the economy is already encountering widespread resistance, and when it reaches its peak after the collapse of the state socialism system, independent of the world, local resistance will inevitably merge.

This will be the first and last global revolution. A global revolution that will disperse the global level in the economy and decision-making system, leaving only decentralized information communications on it.

Whether the environmental movement will play some role in this revolution, or whether it will leave all the initiative to other social movements, will determine its nature (it may carry an environmental imperative to a greater or lesser extent). But with or without the environmental movement, the latest global revolution is inevitable.

Within the framework of the general theory of systems, the Cold War can be interpreted as a specific mechanism for managing a fairly long-term and stable international conflict situation. This phenomenon became possible in the context of such a global structure of international relations, where fairly strict rules of the “great game” were guaranteed to function, where the lines that could not be crossed were clearly marked, where confidential means of communication were laid, allowing opponents to negotiate even during the most critical phases of political and power clashes...

“But today is not the same as yesterday...” The main stimulator of the current increasing strategic uncertainty, growing ontological chaos is not so much competing geopolitical strategies, not the totality of what was previously called the “social superstructure”, not Putin and not Obama, not the CIA and not the FSB , what a special phenomenon - “the sum of technologies”, in the words of S. Lem.

The most important and most dangerous thing (for everyone without exception on our planet) is that the flow of these technologies is actually not controlled by anyone anywhere: neither academicians, nor intelligence service generals, nor “responsible” government leaders.

We have entered the border zone that connects the present with the approaching future - the sixth technological order (TS), the contours of which are already beginning to appear ominously in some places...

The sixth technical specification is mass, total, systemic, large-scale development and application of knowledge-intensive “high technologies”. The basis of the sixth technical specification should be biotechnology and genetic engineering, intelligent information networks, superconductors and clean energy, nanotechnology, membrane and quantum technologies, photonics, micromechanics, and thermonuclear energy. The potential synthesis of discoveries in these areas should ultimately lead to the creation, for example, of a quantum computer and artificial intelligence. That’s why they talk about nano(N)-bio(B)-info(I)-cogno(C): NBIC-convergence.

Optimists claim that in this border zone the threshold of the “fourth industrial revolution” begins, the main feature of which is the introduction of real “intelligent machines” that will almost completely replace humans in the field of low-skilled and even semi-skilled labor, including mental work.

The use of these “robots” (some in the form of increasingly sophisticated software) will be accompanied by dramatic increases in productivity in areas such as energy efficiency, transportation (e.g., robotic cars), healthcare, and mass production through the introduction of 3D printing.

If the current pace of technical and economic development is maintained, the sixth TU will probably more or less take shape before 2025, and will enter the maturity phase in the 2040s.

Hypothetically, as early as 2020, when the group of basic innovations of the sixth technical specification is fully formed, the world economy has a chance to enter the “prolonged recovery” phase. Further, from the end of the 2020s - again, hypothetically - accelerated economic growth will become possible on the basis of the new technical specifications.

However, realists (or "informed" pessimists) warn that it is risky to fall into such "technological idiocy." Remember, they say, that previously, during the transition from one TU to another, in similar border situations, great social revolutions, large-scale (pan-European or world) wars and major military conflicts took place. Now this could happen again, but with potentially much larger and more dire consequences.

Moreover, the transition to a new technological structure is not only and not so much a change in the economic and technological paradigm. Such a transition is a radical transformation of social, ideological, political structures, as well as the emergence of new models of society, more or less adequate to the “sum of new technologies”, and the emergence of completely new models of socio-political relationships, and the formation of a radically new type of personality (not necessarily more perfect), etc.

That is, in essence, all this is a real, full-scale systemic revolution, stretched over fifteen to twenty years. Maybe longer. If this future revolution, into which the current civilization is already being drawn, is effectively managed, there is a chance to do without a global war. If not, then such a war cannot be avoided.

Thus, the “Great Depression” of 1929-1933. marked the beginning not only of the transition to a new technological order, but also of a radical change from classical “Marxist” capitalism to the model of Rooseveltian “neo-capitalism”, based on a sharp increase in government intervention in the economy, forced lending to millions and tens of millions of consumers, the introduction of mechanisms of mass production and mass consumption . A fundamentally new model of society has emerged - “mass society” with its one-dimensional type of programmed person and a totally trained middle class, a completely new form of state ideological systems reproduced by tightly controlled media, a new structure of international relations. This border period included the crisis years of the 30s, the Second World War, the emergence of the Cold War and ended in the early 50s.

The essence of the current strategic challenge is as follows. Who exactly, what power, what coalition of countries will most effectively carry out targeted ideological, social, political transformations in order to, using the mainstream, the results of the sixth technical specification, become a leader and determine the global development program, perhaps until the end of this century? The success of the transition to the sixth technical specification will be determined not only and not so much by the volume and scale of scientific and technological innovations introduced into the process of economic reproduction. The key, decisive point will be the long-term effectiveness of implementing systemic changes in forms of ownership, production and consumption, fundamental transformations of social structures, fundamental shifts in public consciousness and dominant political ideologies, the speed and quality of elite restructuring, etc.

The upcoming transition will certainly prove to be qualitatively more complex and risky than previous border periods. Because there are a lot of questions that the ideologists and strategists of the sixth TU are faced with and which even the most ingenious computer programs cannot yet answer.

For example, how to find a balance between the ever-accelerating flow of scientific and technological innovations of the sixth TU and conservative, inert social and political structures, most of which are already in a state of systemic crisis?

What is the most painless, optimal way to reduce the planet's population by two or three (at least) times, since the coming innovative technological civilization does not need such an amount of biomass in human form? After all, the sixth TU, in principle, does not need mass consumption of material goods for its self-reproduction and self-development, especially taking into account the growing shortage of natural non-renewable resources.
How can we radically limit the socio-economic and political influence of the swollen middle class, which was and remains the main driving force of “neo-capitalism”, but which is not at all needed for the realities of the impending sixth TU - at least on such a scale?
What should be the models of interaction between creative human capital, the main driving force of the sixth TU, and the new model of the political elite, which also does not exist yet?

This is how it turns out that “our path is in darkness.” In conditions of accelerated growth of strategic uncertainty, no one knows the optimal answers. The border period, which we, without realizing it, entered in 2007-2008, is a stage not only of the maturation of the sixth TU, but also a time of extraordinary aggravation of the systemic, largely antagonistic, contradictions of modern “capitalist humanity.” That is, as Comrade Mao Zedong taught, this is a time extremely favorable for a real world revolution.

Global labor and capital markets

Over the past few decades, the strategic will of the highest Western establishment and the combination of achievements in the scientific and technological sphere have led to the creation of a single functioning global labor and capital market. As is known, the most profitable use of both the first and the second, regardless of territorial location, equalizes their cost in different geo-economic zones of the planet. This is the main feature of the current global market.

A distinctive feature of such a market, further, is that the flow of technological innovation not only integrates existing sources of labor and capital, but also creates new ones.

Modern machines and robots are replacing various types of human labor, and much more intensively than ever before. By reproducing themselves, these means of production simultaneously increase the volume of capital. It follows that the economic future is not on the side of those who provide cheap labor or own ordinary capital - they will inevitably be replaced by automation.

Then it seems that the third group should be lucky - those who are ready to introduce innovations and create new products, services and business models. However, a series of provocative questions spontaneously arise. For example, how and in what way will a new market environment be formed, adequate consumer demand for these innovations and new products, in conditions of an objective narrowing of mass demand? If, of course, the preservation of market mechanisms of supply and demand and the balance of power of various socio-economic agents is generally envisaged.

Hypothetically, in the future sixth technical specification, it is precisely creative, economic and technological ideas that should become a truly scarce production factor - more scarce than labor and capital combined. However, who will ultimately determine the prospects of certain ideas? Especially if traditional market mechanisms for assessing product creativity (with all their known shortcomings) by the middle of the 21st century will change significantly and become much more controlled by “non-market methods”?

The new face of capital

In his recently published book “Capital in the 21st Century,” which, not by chance, has become a bestseller all over the world, T. Piketty notes that the share of capital in the economy increases when the level of its profitability exceeds the general level of economic growth. "Deepening capital", i.e. cost reductions due to savings in labor, fuel, raw materials and supplies will continue until robots, automated systems, computer networks and various forms of software (as modifications of capital) increasingly begin to replace human labor.

The share of “total” capital in national income has been growing quite steadily over the past two decades, but in the foreseeable future this trend may be under threat due to the emergence of new challenges. We are not talking about some unexpected jump in the cost of labor, but about changes within capital itself. As the sixth technical specification matures, its special part—digital capital—becomes increasingly important.

As you know, in market conditions the scarcest means of production are valued most highly. Accordingly, in an economic environment where capital such as software and robots can be reproduced cheaply, its marginal value inevitably begins to fall. The more cheap capital is added, the faster the value of existing capital declines. Unlike, say, traditional, expensive or super-expensive factories, it is very profitable to additionally introduce many types of digital capital because it is cheap. Programs can be duplicated and distributed at virtually zero additional cost.

In other words, digital capital is objectively becoming plentiful; it, by definition, has a low marginal cost and is becoming increasingly important in almost all industries.

It inevitably follows that in the coming period, the most scarce and most valuable resource will be digital technologies and creative people (the core, the most important component of human capital in general), who will be able to generate advanced ideas and innovations using these same digital technologies.

The ability to codify, digitize and replicate a variety of important goods, services and processes is constantly expanding. Digital copies, as exact reproductions of the original, require virtually no costs and can be instantly transferred anywhere on the planet.

Digital technologies transform ordinary labor and ordinary capital into goods, so an increasing share of the profit from ideas will go to those who invent, implement and develop them.

Thousands of individuals with ideas, rather than millions of investors and tens of millions of ordinary workers, become the scarcest resource. A dramatic and downright scary fact, in terms of its long-term consequences, however, is that there are no more than 3-4% of truly creative people, even in developed societies. Let us assume that all these few percent of “creatives” will be concentrated only in the economic sphere of the future civilization of the sixth TU. And what fate awaits the remaining 95% of uncreative human beings?

Although production becomes increasingly capital-intensive, the income received by capital owners as a group will not necessarily continue to rise relative to the share of labor. If new means of production create cheap substitutes for more and more jobs, dramatic times ensue for tens or hundreds of millions of wage workers throughout the global world. But at the same time, as digital technologies begin to replace conventional capital, contradictions within the capitalist class itself will inevitably intensify.

Declining importance of labor

Over the past few decades, the historical relationship in America (as in other OECD countries) between the shares of national income that go to labor and material capital has been changing not in favor of labor. Since the beginning of the new century this has become even more noticeable. For example, in the United States, “the labor share averaged 64.3% by the beginning of 2011 compared to the period 1947–2000. Over the past 10 years, this share has fallen further and reached its lowest level in the third quarter of 2010 - 57. 8%".

The same trend is spreading throughout the world. Significant declines in labor's share of GDP were observed in 42 of the 59 countries studied, including China, India and Mexico. Moreover, it turns out that it is the progress of digital technologies that is becoming one of the important prerequisites for this trend: “The fall in the relative price of means of production associated with the development of information technology and the computer era is forcing companies to move from labor to capital.”

In almost a variety of areas, the most cost-effective source of “capital” is becoming “smart technologies” in the form of flexible, adaptive machines, robots, and programs that ruthlessly replace labor in both developed and developing countries.

The so-called “reindustrialization” of a number of OECD countries, including the United States (when large corporations return real production to American soil from Southeast Asia), is not due to the fact that labor costs in the Asia-Pacific region suddenly increased to critical levels and became unprofitable for companies. Production in automated and robotic factories with a minimum amount of labor and proximity to the capacious American market turns out to be more profitable than using even the cheapest labor in Vietnam or the Philippines.

Middle class tragedy

Extensive evidence shows that tradable sectors of industrialized economies have not created jobs on their own for nearly 20 years. This means that work can now be found almost exclusively in the huge non-tradable sector, where wages are steadily falling due to increasing competition from workers forced out of the tradable sector.

Aspects of the sixth technical standard, such as the massive development of robotics, the active use of artificial intelligence, 3D printing, etc., are beginning to hurt not only relatively unskilled workers in developing countries, but also blue-collar workers in OECD countries. "Smart machines", becoming cheaper and more sophisticated, will increasingly replace human labor, starting with relatively structured production (i.e. in plants and factories), and where routine operations predominate.

Moreover, special macroeconomic forecasting models prove that a similar trend will prevail even in those countries where labor is inexpensive. For example, in Chinese factories where more than a million low-paid workers assemble iPhones and iPads, their labor is increasingly being replaced by a variety of robots. According to official Chinese statistics, the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased by 30 million, or 25%, since 1996, while industrial production has increased by 70%.

Gradually, production moves to where the final market is located. This allows you to reduce costs, reduce delivery times, reduce costs for warehouse space and, accordingly, increase profits. Accordingly, the sixth TU in the social aspect will hit the large middle class of economically developed countries most significantly. For example, the middle class in the same United States traditionally after World War II was considered the “salt of the American soil” - it was the main consumer, the American political system rested on it, it was considered the main custodian of American values ​​and moral norms.

The gradual “lowering” of the American middle class began in the late 80s. Politically, this was most clearly manifested in the shrinking of the once powerful US trade union movement. In economic terms, the majority of the “middle classes” are steadily sliding down or have already fallen down to the level of the “poor strata”. According to Gallup, in 2014, 19% of Americans could not earn enough to eat. Currently, 75% of families in the United States live from paycheck to paycheck, without any extra money (almost like in Russia today). Already 29% of American families cannot afford to spend money on higher education for their children. The average debt burden of the average middle-class American family has quadrupled over the past 20 years. Such a family with children (even with one child) can no longer live on one salary. American women are being pushed into the labor market not so much by the notorious emancipation and feminization, but by cruel economic necessity.
In the United States, being middle class is defined by owning your own home. The vast majority of Americans are accustomed to taking out loans against the value of their home to make a living. As a result of the 2007-08 crisis, the real estate bubble with its inflated prices burst. And the American middle class became significantly poorer overnight - asking for cash loans became impossible.

Accordingly, the gap between the middle class, sliding into a permanent crisis, and the “upper strata” is growing. In 1990, earnings of top executives in the United States were on average 70 times higher than the salaries of other workers. Just 15 years later, in 2005, they were earning 300 times more. Since the end of the 70s, 90% of the US population (and this is the majority of the middle class) have had incomes that have not increased, but for the heads of corporations they have quadrupled.

I want to emphasize once again that all this is not a manifestation of the ill will and greed of the bourgeoisie, but a completely objective, natural process. Today, the higher the market value of a company, the more important it is to find the best manager to lead it. Much of the growth in the cash income of senior executives is due to the widespread use of information technology, which expands the potential reach, scope and monitoring capabilities of the decision maker, thereby increasing the value of a good top manager. Direct control through digital technologies makes the effective manager more valuable than before, when control functions were distributed among a large number of his subordinates, each of whom oversaw a specific, small area of ​​activity.

And what is happening today in the USA is the tomorrow of the entire developed West.

American experts themselves shyly write that “ensuring an acceptable standard of living for the rest (meaning those tens of millions of middle class representatives who do not fit into the reality of the sixth technical standard) and building an inclusive economy and society will become the most pressing challenges in the coming years.”

To form such an “inclusive economy,” it is necessary to solve, first of all, two main, non-trivial long-term problems.

First, the middle class was the main consuming component of the US market system. Who can replace him in this role and how?

Secondly, this middle class was or was considered a kind of custodian of the traditions of the American “Protestant ethic.” The “demoralization” of business and society in the States is becoming more and more noticeable: the erosion of the work ethic, the growth of corruption, and increasingly glaring socio-economic inequality. Growing total injustice is becoming one of the calling cards of the upcoming sixth TU...

All these trends are already affecting the stability of Western society and the Western ruling class. For example, this is manifested in the growing alienation of various social groups and segments from official government institutions in the United States. Even the most trustworthy public institution, the US Supreme Court, has a trust rating of no more than 12-13%.

Does the American middle class feel its "historical" doom? Yes, at the level of social instincts this feeling is clearly intensified. More than two-thirds (71%) of Americans, which is almost the entire middle class, are convinced that the country is going down the wrong path. According to CNN and Opinion Research Corporation, 63% of respondents pessimistically believe that their children will fare worse than their parents.

In modern sociology, within the framework of the question of the development of human society, it is not so much the Marxist concept of a consistent change of socio-economic formations that dominates, but rather a “triadic” scheme, according to which this process is considered as a consistent movement of individual societies and humanity as a whole from one type of civilization to another - agricultural , industrial and post-industrial. According to many modern sociologists, including domestic ones,231 historical practice has confirmed that such a scheme is more consistent with the truth. So,

V. M. Lukin argues, in particular, that the reason for this correspondence was a more logical choice of starting positions: if in the dogmatized Marxist scheme, rather secondary aspects were taken as a basis - forms of ownership, class relations, then in the civilizational scheme the most fundamental the structure of socio-historical activity is technology (and this is one of the most important components of the productive forces).

Let us note, by the way, that in the Marxist scheme, the core of the basis is not production relations, but rather productive forces, i.e., the totality of personal qualifications, technical and technological factors of a given method of production. One of the starting points of the formational approach is the thesis that productive forces represent the most mobile, dynamic element of the basis (which is why, at some historical period, they come into conflict with more cumbersome and inert production relations, “outgrowing” their framework) . Although, alas, “neither Marx himself nor subsequent Marxists developed the technological aspect of social production in a sufficiently universal way, despite constant statements about the paramount importance of this aspect”232.

Since the 60s of the twentieth century, starting with the work of W. Rostow “The Theory of the Stages of Economic Growth,” the periodization of historical development began to be carried out using the ideal-typological identification of various societies depending on the level of economic growth and socio-cultural conditions of various countries and regions. This typology is based on the dichotomy of traditional and modern societies. Moreover, the second of the identified types today is increasingly divided into industrial and post-industrial societies. However, if we are to be completely consistent, traditional society, covering a huge historical period, including, in accordance with the formational approach, the slave-owning and feudal stages, can hardly be considered as “starting”. In fact, how legitimate would it be to classify as traditional societies, for example, the tribes of African Bushmen, Australian aborigines or inhabitants of other remote areas where primitive communal relations remain largely intact? Therefore, it seems appropriate to us to place “primitive society” at the beginning of this chain. True, this concept, which came from evolutionary anthropology, is perceived and used in sociology very ambiguously1. Nevertheless, we accepted it as the initial one and below we will try to substantiate and argue this choice, showing more or less clear criteria separating primitive societies from traditional ones.

The transition from one type of society to another occurs as a result of a global revolution of a certain type.

The general scheme of progressive (ascending) development of human societies can be depicted graphically (Fig. 21).

Rice. 21. Scheme for the progressive development of human societies

As we have already said, by “revolution” in sociology we usually understand a sharp change in all or most social conditions occurring over a relatively short historical period. However, in the history of mankind there have also been revolutions of a different kind. They, perhaps, were not so sharp, that is, they did not occur during a short period of time - at least comparable to the life of one generation - but could occupy the lives of several generations, which in a historical sense is also not so a lot of. However, the influence they had on the destinies of mankind was, perhaps, much more significant and powerful than the impact of any social revolution. We are talking about radical revolutions in the nature of the productive forces, which could be called global revolutions. We call them “global” because, firstly, their development does not know national boundaries, takes place in different societies localized in different parts of the planet, according to approximately the same laws and with the same consequences, and, secondly, these consequences affect not only on the life of humanity itself, but also on its natural environment. The most important factor in such revolutions is a radical change in technology, which indicates their close connection with the productive forces.

It is now difficult to name with any precision the chronological date (or at least the time period) of the beginning of the agrarian revolution. Using the periodization of G. Morgan and F. Engels who followed him, one could point to the middle stage of barbarism, which “... in the east begins with the domestication of domestic animals, in the west - with the cultivation of edible plants”233. Thanks to these truly historic changes in technology, man becomes the only living creature on the planet who begins to, to some extent, emerge from slavish subordination to the natural environment and ceases to depend on the vicissitudes and accidents of gathering, hunting and fishing. The most important thing: “... an increase in production in all industries - cattle breeding, agriculture, home crafts - made the human labor force capable of producing more products than was necessary to maintain it” 234. Australian archaeologist V. Child, who named this revolution “agrarian” (although there is another term for it - “Neolithic”, indicating its beginning in the Neolithic era), believed that it was thanks to it that the transition from barbarism to the first slave-owning civilizations took place. As a result, a class division of society arose and a state appeared. We will not consider in too much detail the consequences of this event for all spheres of social life, but it is undeniable that they were truly colossal.

We cannot know exactly when, but probably quite early - first in animal husbandry and then in crop production - breeding work begins. In any case, the activity of the biblical Jacob in crossing white sheep with black ones (he was promised by his father-in-law Laban a reward and dowry in the form of a flock of sheep only with a motley color) already refers to a very high level of this kind of knowledge in animal husbandry235 and in some ways already anticipates modern genetic engineering. Here there are a number of parameters of scientific knowledge (albeit at an elementary level): empiricalness, empirical verifiability, generalizability, and others.

Let us note one more significant point. All primitive tribes and peoples at the stage of savagery are more similar in terms of the structure of social life than different from each other in terms of the conditions of their life, regardless of what part of the world, in what lost area they are located. They have almost the same social institutions, morals and customs. They use the same technologies and tools to obtain food. They have very similar ideas about the world around them and religious rituals.

The differences begin during the birth of the agrarian revolution, at the transition from the lowest stage of barbarism to the middle, when the intellectual capabilities of man are clearly manifested for the first time. And here, more clearly than in previous millennia, differences in the natural conditions of the environment begin to appear. “The Old World,” notes F. Engels, “possessed almost all domesticable animals and all types of cereals suitable for breeding, except one; the western continent, America, of all the domesticable mammals - only the llama, and even then only in one part of the south, and of all the cultivated cereals, only one, but the best - maize. As a result of this difference in natural conditions, the population of each hemisphere henceforth develops in its own special way, and boundary signs at the boundaries of individual stages of development become different for each of both hemispheres” 236.

The predominant occupation of a particular tribe or people with some specific type of agricultural labor creates a new type of division of labor and leaves a deep imprint on the nature of the direction of development of the entire culture as a whole. Pastoral tribes lead a predominantly nomadic lifestyle, while agricultural tribes lead an increasingly sedentary lifestyle. 237 This creates potential opportunities for the emergence of small settlements among agricultural peoples, and then cities as centers of cultural and intellectual development.

The consolidation and development of social progress achieved through the agrarian revolution probably took humanity several millennia. Individual discoveries, improvements and inventions (related to the technology and technology of both agricultural and industrial production) that were made along this path, varying in significance and influence on the life of society, were sometimes truly brilliant, but in general this influence and the social consequences caused by it the changes can hardly be classified as revolutionary in nature. And yet, these changes, gradually accumulating, along with social changes in other spheres of life, ultimately lead to the next global revolution.

If history has not preserved for us information about when and where the agricultural revolution began, then the time and place of the beginning of the next global revolution - industrial (or industrial) can be called with a much higher degree of accuracy - the end of the 18th century, England. F. Engels even names the year in which two inventions appeared, which became a kind of primer, the igniter of this revolution - 1764 from the Nativity of Christ. “The first invention to bring about a decisive change in the condition of the working class was the jenny, built by the weaver James Hargreaves of Standhill near Blackburn in North Lancashire (1764). This machine was a rough prototype of the mule machine and was driven by hand, but instead of one spindle, as in an ordinary hand spinning wheel, it had sixteen to eighteen spindles, driven by one worker."238

In the same 1764, James Watt invented a steam engine, and in 1785 he adapted it to drive spinning machines. “Thanks to these inventions, which were further improved, machine labor triumphed over manual labor”239. This victory simultaneously marked the start of the rapid and gigantic rise of social intelligence in human history.

Here I would like to make a small digression in order to show more clearly one of the main features of the industrial revolution, which played a decisive role in the entire further development of mankind. If you ask any representative of our generation who was the inventor of the steam engine, eight out of ten will certainly name Ivan Polzunov: all Russian history textbooks said so. In fact, the project of a steam-atmospheric machine was announced by I. I. Polzunov in 1763 - a year earlier than Watt. However, fate played a cruel joke on him: he lived in a country that was still relatively far from the onset of the industrial revolution, and his steam engine remained, in modern terms, a laboratory, experimental model. Meanwhile, Watt’s steam engine found industrial application within twenty years, and Watt, together with his companion M. Bolton, became a successful manufacturer, engaging in serial production of steam engines. Watt, by the way, went down in history not only as a talented inventor (whose name is imprinted today on every electric light bulb in the form of an indication of its power in “watts”), but also as one of the founders of the school of “early scientific management.” In the same way, the whole world knows as the inventor of the aircraft not V. Mozhaisky, as domestic history textbooks wrote, but the Wright brothers. The inventor of radio in the eyes of the whole world (with the exception of Russia) is not Popov, but Marconi.

An indicative example is the invention of the incandescent light bulb, a patent for which was received in 1876 by the Russian electrical engineer P. Yablochkov. Few people know that this light bulb had a lifespan of less than an hour. Thomas Edison took up the task of finalizing it, as a result of which his laboratory produced an industrial design with a resource of at least 6-7 hours and, most importantly, relatively inexpensive and technologically advanced for mass production (this information was presented in one of the television programs “The Obvious - the Incredible”); Is it any wonder that, in the opinion of any more or less educated Western man in the street, Edison was the inventor of the electric light bulb.

These examples once again show one of the most characteristic features of the industrial revolution: for the first time in history, it closely linked the industrial implementation of technical innovations with economic efficiency and thereby opened the eyes of many enterprising people to the enormous importance of intellectual (and therefore, in a practical sense, useless, as it seemed before) products . From these examples, an important social pattern emerges: any intellectual product - be it a technical invention, a scientific concept, a literary work, an ideological theory or a political doctrine - is a product of its era. As a rule, it comes into being and receives recognition almost always on time: precisely by the time the demand for it ripens, consumers will appear (and in fairly large numbers), that is, people who are able to appreciate it and use it in their lives and practical activities. In the case of “premature birth,” fate, alas, can “bless” such a product with oblivion (especially in cases where it is not captured on material media). So, machine labor triumphed over manual labor. The technical, technological, even political and especially economic events that followed grew like an avalanche, and even the briefest, cursory description of them takes up fifteen pages from Engels (introduction to the work “The Condition of the Working Class in England”). We will dwell on various characteristic features of this process in the next chapter, noting only that the most important of these features include the emergence of the factory system, as well as a sharp increase in the attention of entrepreneurs to the achievements of scientific and technical thought and the fairly energetic introduction of these achievements into production practice. This process entailed a fairly rapid and significant expansion of the circle of people professionally engaged in survey, design and technological work. Attention to the development of fundamental science has also increased, for which both the state and private enterprise began to allocate a significant amount of financial resources.

Law of saving time. Most of the social consequences of the industrial revolution “extend” right up to our time and undoubtedly deserve closer consideration. However, the introduction of the achievements of human intelligence directly into the productive sphere, that is, into machine production, is very controversial. On the one hand, machine labor quickly gains a final victory over manual labor, which greatly reduces the cost of all manufactured products. The consumer benefits from this on a scale never seen before. It was thanks to this victory that the industrial revolution gave a powerful impetus to the development of productive forces, incommensurate with all previous history. Such a revolution really is like an explosion. Over the course of just a century and a half, machines, equipment, and machine tools of incredible power and productivity appear - and in huge quantities at that: the law of saving time begins to work in full force.

The revolutionary revolution in industry is characterized by an increase in labor productivity in all spheres of social production. If at the dawn of the industrial revolution, in 1770, the productivity of technical devices exceeded the productivity of manual labor by 4 times, then in 1840 it was already 108 times1. And it’s not just about the fact that the productivity of “living” labor is reaching unprecedented heights. One gets the impression that time is being compressed to previously unimaginable limits. Thus, thanks to the emergence of high-speed means of transportation on a massive scale, the previously seemingly endless expanses of our planet are sharply shrinking. And on the journey around the world, which took Magellan almost three years, Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg spends only eighty days - and this is no longer fantastic, but quite realistic prose of the late 19th century.

In the context of the problem we are considering of the development of social and individual intelligence, the sharp increase in the speed of dissemination of information and the intensification of its circulation are of particular importance. If previously a simple letter could travel for years from the sender to the addressee, now this speed first became equal to the speed of vehicles in general, and then significantly surpassed them thanks to the advent of new means of mass communication, such as the telegraph, radio, and the Internet, almost equaling the speed of light.

Strictly speaking, any law must establish a necessary, stable and repeatable connection between certain phenomena in nature and society. Thus, the formulation of any law must always contain at least indications of: 1) those phenomena between which a connection is established; 2) on the nature of this connection. Without such an indication, there is probably no wording of the law itself (which, in our opinion, has been the problem with the formulation of the “economic laws of socialism” to a large extent in recent times). The law of saving time - or, as it is more often called, the law of increasing productivity (productive force) of labor - can be presented in terms of the labor theory of value: “... the greater the productive force of labor, the less labor time required to manufacture a known product, the more The smaller the mass of labor crystallized in it, the lower its value. On the contrary, the lower the productive power of labor, the greater the working time required to manufacture a product, the greater its cost” (our italics - V. A., A. K)1.

Here, as befits a real law, there is an indication of a causal relationship. In order for radical, revolutionary changes to occur in the growth of labor productivity, no less revolutionary changes are required in the means of labor. Such changes, of course, cannot occur without the participation of human intelligence, just as they cannot but cause serious changes in its very quality. We have already seen above that the spinning wheel with the beautiful female name Jenny, with the invention of which, in fact, the industrial revolution began, allowed one worker, even using his own muscular power (foot drive), to produce 16-18 times during the same working time more products. The combination of muscular power with a steam engine pushed these boundaries even wider. The steam engine was, in fact, the first inanimate source of energy to receive truly industrial use, except for the energy of falling water and wind, which had been used before, but still on a much more limited scale. From this time on, a sharp increase in demand from capital for intellectual products begins; it acquires its own value, the share of which in the total volume of capital is steadily increasing.

Of course, the impact of the accumulation of various scientific knowledge on the development of the economy is not unambiguous and not straightforward, especially at the stage of initial accumulation of capital (or, as W. Rostow calls it, the stage of preparing the conditions for economic growth). In fact, a revolution in the technical and social conditions of labor entails an inevitable reduction in the cost of labor, since “thus the part of the working day necessary for the reproduction of this value has been reduced” 240. Moreover, the introduction of the latest achievements of science and technology into the direct productive process This stage leads not so much to an increase in general mental development, but to a certain extent to the dullness of the “average” worker, since in large-scale industry there is a “separation of the intellectual forces of the production process from physical labor and their transformation into the power of capital (our italics - V. A .)"241. As Engels emphasizes: “Let factory workers not forget that their labor represents a very low category of skilled labor; that no other work is easier to master and, taking into account its quality, is not paid better; that no other labor can be obtained by so short an instruction, in so short a time, and in such abundance. The owner’s machines actually play a much more important role in production than the labor and art of the worker, which can be taught in 6 months and which every village farmhand can learn” 242.

True, this situation does not last very long (at least on a prevailing scale), since as industrial societies develop, the effect of the law of labor change gradually begins to increase, which we will consider below.

However, the law of saving time in this era begins to manifest itself not only in the avalanche-like growth in the volume of production of a wide variety of material products. We mentioned above how much the travel time between different geographical locations has been reduced; how, thanks to a significant increase in the speed of movement and a reduction in the cost of these movements per unit of distance and time, a huge variety of diverse points in geographic space became accessible to most members of society and how the time for transmitting information rapidly decreased.

The increase in the speed of information circulation, and with it the speed of growth of social intelligence, increases faster than the speed of all other processes that constitute the essence of the development and evolution of society. Thus, it can be argued that the greatest influence of the law of saving time as industrial, that is, modern, society develops, in fact, has not so much on the increase in the volume of production, mass and range of material products (consumption and production), but on the increase volume of production and speed of circulation of intellectual products. This is precisely what constitutes one of the most important prerequisites for the information revolution and the eventual emergence of what is called the information society.

The law of increasing needs. The Industrial Revolution “launched at full speed” the operation of a number of other socio-economic laws (which had been very weakly manifested in previous eras). Thus, the effect of the law of increasing needs, which previously functioned very limitedly - perhaps within a very thin layer of the wealthy and cultural elite of society, is becoming widespread. This law manifests itself in the era of the industrial revolution in the fact that many objects, things, goods, tools and pleasures that were previously available only to the rich (not to mention new ones, previously unknown to the richest people of the past), thanks to a significant reduction in price and mass production are part of the everyday life of many ordinary members of society.

The law of increasing needs was introduced into scientific vocabulary by V.I. Lenin at the end of the last century in his essay “On the so-called question of markets,” where he wrote: “... The development of capitalism inevitably entails an increase in the level of needs of the entire population and workers proletariat. This increase is generally created by an increase in the exchange of products, leading to more frequent clashes between residents of the city and the countryside, of different geographical areas, etc. ... This law of increased needs has been reflected with full force in the history of Europe... This same law manifests its effect and in Russia... That this undoubtedly progressive phenomenon should be credited specifically to Russian capitalism and nothing else - this is proven at least by the well-known fact... that peasants in industrial areas live much “cleaner” than peasants engaged in farming alone and almost untouched by capitalism" 243.

Actually, this possibility was already pointed out by Marx and Engels in the first chapter of their “German Ideology”: “... The satisfied first need itself, the action of satisfaction and the already acquired instrument of satisfaction lead to new needs, and this generation of new needs is the first historical act.” 244. Probably, the effect of the law of increasing needs was manifested both in previous eras and in traditional societies. Convinced of the convenience of using new tools and personal items unknown to their ancestors, people quickly get used to them, and any disappearance of them from their lives or a decrease in the level of their consumption is already considered as a decrease in the standard of living itself. (Although until relatively recently, not only their ancestors, but also they themselves, unaware of their existence, completely managed without such items and at the same time felt sufficiently satisfied.) Nevertheless, throughout the era of traditional societies, the general level of demands of the overwhelming majority population remains very low, changing slightly, almost imperceptibly over time. Many generations live with almost the same set of needs. There is reason to believe that this range of needs of, say, the “average” Russian peasant of the late 18th century was unlikely to differ sharply from the set of needs that his ancestor had three or four hundred years ago. (By the way, this was also determined by the extremely low development of communication networks.)

The situation changes radically with the beginning of industrialization. We mentioned above that the main features of industrial society appear systematically in history. The set of socio-economic laws we are considering is a no less connected and integral system. Thus, the expansion of the scope of the law of increasing needs is brought to life by the intensification of the law of saving time: due to mass production, many types of consumer products become significantly cheaper, and many previously unknown types appear on the market. It is precisely as a result of the cheaper prices of essential goods that the cost of labor also becomes cheaper. At the same time, the totality of these processes leads to a situation that K. Marx calls the absolute impoverishment of the working class. Let's try to define this situation.

The relative impoverishment of the proletariat is much easier to understand: it arises due to the fact that the rate of increase in the income of the working class lags behind the rate of increase in the income of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, although in an industrial society there does seem to be an increase in the income of the “average” worker, the rate of this growth is increasingly lagging behind the rate of profits received by the bourgeois class. But how can we understand the essence of absolute impoverishment? K. Marx in most cases directly connects it with a decrease in the level of workers’ wages in comparison with their previous position245. However, already

E. Bernstein, just a decade and a half after Marx’s death, emphasizes the widespread increase in income of the working class in absolute terms as a stable trend246. In this context, the essence of the absolute impoverishment of the proletariat can only be understood in the following way: the rate of growth of its income lags behind the rate of growth of its needs - in quantitative, but especially in qualitative terms.

Over the course of one generation, more and more new, previously unknown types of consumer products appear, and most importantly, they very quickly turn into essential items. A kind of symbol of this process was the activity of Henry Ford, who formulated as the mission of his business the creation of a car accessible to the average American (remember the famous phrase of Ostap Bender: “A car is not a luxury, but a means of transportation”). Of course, advertising also makes a significant contribution to the development of this process, but still the main role belongs to the dizzying growth rate of mass production, i.e., the strengthening of the already known law of saving time.

So, the action of the law of increasing needs leads to the fact that in almost all layers of industrial society the requirements for the quality of life are changing at a rapid pace. And education and advanced training occupy an increasingly important place among ideas about this quality. Against the backdrop of the growing educational level of friends, colleagues, neighbors and their children, the “average” man in the street is already beginning to consider it the norm for his children to receive a more complete education, increase their own educational and qualification level, introduce their family to cultural achievements and increase interest in politics. Thus, the needs of intellectual development and self-development increasingly fall under the influence of the general law of increased needs.

The law of labor change. A very special place among socio-economic laws is occupied by the law of labor change, which could be considered as a kind of version of the “law of the rise of intellectual needs.” Marx introduces the concept of this law in the first volume of Capital: “...The nature of large-scale industry determines the change of labor, the movement of functions, the all-round mobility of the worker... On the other hand, in its capitalist form it reproduces the old division of labor with its ossified specialties. We have seen how this absolute contradiction destroys all peace, stability and security in the worker’s position in life, constantly threatens, along with the means of labor, to take the means of subsistence out of his hands and, together with his partial function, to make him himself superfluous... This is the negative side . But if the change of labor now makes its way only as an irresistible natural law and with the blind destructive force of the natural law, which everywhere encounters obstacles, then, on the other hand, large-scale industry itself, with its catastrophes, makes the recognition of a change of labor a matter of life and death, and therefore, the possible greater versatility of workers, by the universal law of social production, to the normal implementation of which relations must be adapted (our italics - V.A., A.K)"1.

What Marx said can be concretized in the form of the following basic provisions of the law of labor change. 1.

The interests of the progressive development of social production require constant bringing the nature of the labor force (educational, qualification, psychological, etc.) into line with the current and rapidly changing organizational and technological level of production. 2.

This, in turn, necessitates the constant readiness of participants in the productive process to bring their knowledge, skills and abilities into the same conformity, both quantitatively and qualitatively (up to a change of specialty or even profession) - something that Marx calls it all-round mobility. 3.

This law is objective, that is, it acts outside and independently of the will of people, what they want or don’t want, are aware of or not aware of - with the blind and even “destructive” power of natural law. No one can cancel, destroy or slow down its effect; it can and should only be taken into account and adapted to it. The power of this law will be truly destructive until its mechanisms are revealed, and their action is directed in a direction beneficial to the subject of production relations. 4.

The law of labor change comes into full force at the stage of the emergence of large-scale industry (it is “the nature of large-scale industry that determines the change of labor”) and, as the industrial and then scientific and technological revolutions develop, it asserts itself more and more powerfully. To the greatest extent, the manifestation and nature of the action of this law depend mainly on the level of productive forces, since it reflects precisely the nature and pace of their development. 5.

The action of this law, like no other, stimulates the development of intelligence - and above all, individual intelligence. This development, in the words of Marx, is “as a matter of life and death,” which poses this kind of task: “... the partial worker, the simple bearer of a certain partial social function, is replaced by a fully developed individual, for whom various social functions are successive ways of life (our italics - V.A., A.K)"1.

Let us note that the process of labor change was carried out before the industrial revolution. But is there any reason to assert that he was subject to the law of change of labor - at least in the context in which it was formulated by Marx? Let's say, before the invasion of capitalist relations into agricultural production, the peasant had to be alternately an agronomist, a livestock breeder, and a carpenter. However, this circle of occupations was quite clearly defined, and the peasants did not go beyond it from generation to generation. Consequently, the meaning of a change in labor, determined by the law we are talking about, does not apply to any change in types of activity by the same individual.

Thus, human society as a result of the industrial revolution is moving into a qualitatively different state called industrial civilization. The speed of social changes is increasing to a colossal degree: their quality and volume are increasing sharply, and the time during which they occur is being reduced to one and a half to two centuries.

However, objectivity requires addressing the negative consequences of the industrial revolution. Whether we like it or not, one of the basic principles of dialectics says that you have to pay for everything. Along with the undeniable benefits that the industrial revolution brought to humanity, instruments of death were born (and also in colossal quantities), whose “productivity” also fell under the general effect of the law of saving time. Yes, in essence, the benefits themselves turned out to be not so indisputable: by stimulating the production of larger and larger volumes of products and goods, developing in the consumer a habit of benefits and a desire to acquire more and more of them, the era of the industrial revolution brought humanity to the threshold of planetary catastrophes scale. Even if we ignore the very real danger of self-destruction in a thermonuclear fire, it becomes impossible to turn a blind eye to how the insatiable moloch of industry requires more and more resources - raw materials and energy - for its sustenance. And man, armed with tools of enormous power, makes strenuous efforts to feed this moloch, risking undermining the very basis of his own existence - nature. In other words, it is the results of the industrial revolution that force us to take a new look at the essence of socio-historical evolution,

which is what we talked about in the first paragraph of this chapter.

At the same time, the increasing shortage of all types of raw materials, energy (and even, in a certain sense, human resources) apparently served as one of the main factors that determined the emergence and development of the third of the revolutions we are considering - the information revolution247. Already its first fruits are felt as a genuine blessing. That part of humanity that lives in the countries that fell within the sphere of influence of this revolution seems to have forever gotten rid of the fear of the specter of starvation, which loomed on the historical horizon for so long (remember the ominous seer Malthus!). The population of these countries is abundantly provided with essential products (as well as the second and third). But the main thing, perhaps, is not even this. Science, which previously was more of a useless luxury than a real necessity, has turned into a truly productive force of society and therefore began to recruit more and more people into its ranks. The share of the population professionally engaged in science is growing. And this, in turn, requires appropriate information support. However, the scientific and technological revolution of the second half of the twentieth century expands the material possibilities for such provision. If the industrial revolution, first of all, “lengthened the arms” of man and increased his muscular power many times over, then the scientific and technological revolution significantly expanded the capabilities of human intelligence, creating machines, devices and devices that almost unlimitedly increased memory capacity and accelerated elementary processing processes millions of times. information.

This created the preconditions for the information revolution to hit the world. Having completed the massive renewal of fixed assets by the beginning of the 1980s (focused mainly on energy and resource conservation), the economies of the most developed countries shifted their main emphasis to automation and computerization of all production processes, including management. The basis of this process is electronic information and the development of automatic production based on it. If we try to formulate the essence of one of the most important aspects of this revolution, then it apparently consists in the fact that it is precisely this that transforms information (almost any!) into a benefit available for mass consumption - just as the industrial and scientific and technological revolutions do on a massive scale accessible material goods. Possession and use of knowledge ceases to be the privilege of the elite.

The embryo from which the information revolution matured five hundred years later was Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Until this time, the exchange of information was very weak, and information and knowledge leaked to a person, as they say, in scattered drops. Knowledge, skills and abilities were transmitted mainly orally and “closely” - from father to son, from teacher to student, from generation to generation. Reading, i.e. the process of obtaining information through a material intermediary, a carrier of this information recorded in a sign system, was the lot of a relatively small part of humanity. Objectively, in addition to other reasons (such as, for example, the high cost of material - up to the advent of relatively cheap paper), the widespread spread of literacy was hampered by the too low labor productivity of book copyists. Needless to say, manuscripts and incunabula are rarities not only today, but were also such in the very era of their production. It was the printing press that helped unite information drops into a trickle - at first weak, thin, but over the centuries it turned into a deep river.

The information revolution is aimed at resolving this global contradiction: on the one hand, the scientific and technological revolution, due to the fact that the effect of the law of labor change has intensified, has sharply increased the demand for knowledge; on the other hand, a huge mass of the population, even in developed countries, is simply unable to master the colossal mass of information (obtained, we note, by others) to the required extent, while simultaneously needing it more and more urgently.

Based on what has been said, we can draw some general conclusions regarding the place and significance that global revolutions had in the history of human society. Undoubtedly, they all had an international, universal character and inevitably spread across the globe. E. A. Arab-Ogly notes that “each of these revolutionary upheavals in the development of the productive forces of society was the prologue to a new era in world history and was accompanied by profound irreversible changes in the economic activity of society. Each revolution gave birth to new sectors of social production (first agriculture, then industry, and now the sphere of scientific and information activities), which over time became dominant, and society began to devote a lot of effort and attention to them” 248.

The social consequences common to all global revolutions could be reduced to the following main points. ?

Each global revolution led to a sharp, multiple increase in the productivity of human labor in a relatively short period of time - compared to the previous period of socio-historical development. ?

All global revolutions were accompanied by a huge increase in the material wealth of society. ?

During global revolutions, the division of labor deepened significantly, and many qualitatively new types of professional activities emerged. As a result of this, there was a massive movement of the population from traditional to new sectors of material and spiritual production. ?

During technological revolutions, many types of activities that were previously considered fruitless and idle turned into the most productive and meaningful ones. ?

As a result of global revolutions, profound changes occurred in people's lifestyles. ?

Each of the global revolutions ultimately led to the emergence of a new type of civilization.

In most sociological concepts, social evolution is viewed as an upward movement - as a transition from simple to complex. Evolution is also contrasted with the opposite process of decomposition (disintegration). As society develops, as G. Spencer believed, the complex of social activities previously performed by one social institution is redistributed among other newly emerged or previously existing institutions. Differentiation represents the increasing specialization of different parts of society, thereby creating increasing heterogeneity within society. G. Spencer gives a universal and most general definition of evolution: “Evolution is an integral

“ration of a substance, which is accompanied by the binding of motion, during which the substance passes from a state of indefinite, incoherent heterogeneity to a state of definite coherent heterogeneity, and the motion preserved by the substance undergoes a similar transformation.” 2.

The most important manifestation of increased heterogeneity is the differentiation of parts of a single whole and the functions they perform within this framework. Spencer introduced the concept of social differentiation into sociology, using it to describe the process of the emergence of specialized institutions and division of labor, universal for all social evolution. 3.

Among supporters of social evolutionism, there have been discussions about which factors have a stronger influence on the process of evolution: internal or external. Proponents of internal factors, or endogenous evolution, believed that the development of society is explained mainly by the influence of causes of internal origin on it. Adherents of external factors, or exogenous evolution, on the contrary, argued that the basis of social development is the process of borrowing useful customs and traditions, the spread of cultural values ​​from one social center to another. 4.

Modern sociology, until recently, was dominated mainly by Marxist concepts of social revolution. According to their point of view, a revolution in a methodological sense is the result of the resolution of fundamental contradictions in the basis - between production relations and productive forces that outgrow their framework. Central to the Marxist theory of social revolution is the question

about the struggle of the main antagonistic classes. 5.

In sociology, there are a number of the most famous and influential non-Marxist sociological concepts of social revolution. The theory of circulation of elites (V. Pareto) argues that the main task of the revolution is to “clear” the horizontal and vertical channels of mobility, since without a periodic change of the power elite and a qualitative change in its composition, the normal functioning of society is impossible. The theory of modernization as a factor of revolution focuses on the gap between the growing level of political education and awareness of fairly wide sections of society, on the one hand, and the real levels of economic transformation that lag behind them, as well as the development of political institutions and their democratization, on the other.

6. In accordance with a number of modern sociological theories, one can point to three global revolutions, the core of which is a radical change in technology, which indicates their close connection with the productive forces. The agricultural revolution leads to a transition from a primitive society to a traditional one. The industrial revolution transforms an agrarian society into an industrial one. In the course of it, the effect of three socio-economic laws sharply increases: the law of saving time, the law of increasing needs, and the law of labor change. The information revolution taking place at the present stage of social development is transforming industrial society into post-industrial society.

Test questions 1.

What is the definition of evolution given by G. Spencer? 2.

What are the main tenets of Social Darwinism? 3.

What are the main differences between endogenous and exogenous approaches to describing the process of social evolution? 4.

What is acculturation? 5.

During the social revolution, what is the task of the advanced class for a given socio-economic formation? 6.

What is the essence of institutionalization of conflict? 7.

What is the main idea of ​​the elite circulation theory? 8.

What acts as the main factor in all global revolutions and what are the general consequences of such revolutions? 9.

What two inventions can be considered as the "trigger mechanism" of the industrial revolution? 10.

List three socio-economic laws that begin to function “in full force” during the industrial revolution.

Vernadsky V.I. Reflections of a naturalist. Book 2. - M., 1977. 2.

Gumilyov L. R. Ethnogenesis and biosphere of the earth. - M., 1993. 3.

Darwin Ch. The origin of man and sexual selection. - M.-L., 1959. 4.

Kozlova M. S. Ecological meaning of human evolution // Man. - 1998. No. 4. 5.

Lenin V.I. About the slogan of the “United States of Europe” // Lenin V.I. Complete. collection op. T. 26. 6.

Marx K To criticism of political economy. Preface // Marx K, Engels F. Collected. op., 2nd ed. T. 13. 7.

Rose G. Progress without social revolution? - M., 1985. 8.

Soares K Society in the process of change // Sociological Research, - 1991. No. 12. 9.

Modern Western sociology: Dictionary. - M., 1990. 10.

Spencer G. Basic principles. - St. Petersburg, 1897. 11.

Sorokin P. A. Sociology of revolution // Sorokin P. A. Man. Civilization. Society. - M., 1992. 12.

Sorokin P. A. Sociocultural dynamics and evolutionism // In the book: American sociological thought. - M., 1994. 13.

Tylor E. B. Primitive culture. - M., 1989. 14.

Turovsky M. B., Turovskaya S. V. The concept of V. I. Vernadsky and the prospects of evolutionary theory // Questions of Philosophy. - 1993. No. 6. 15.

Fadeeva T. M. Social revolution and traditions // Sociological studies. - 1991. No. 12. 16.

Engels F. Preface to the work The situation of the working class in England // Marx K, Engels F. Sobr. op., 2nd ed. T. 2.

The global chaos caused in the 1980s by the imperialist aggression of American fascism against all humanity daily demonstrates that the objective laws of a social revolution on a global scale are in effect on the globe, writes Doctor of Historical Sciences Juozas Ermalavičius.

At one time, the founder of the scientific worldview K. Marx wrote about the laws of social revolutions: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with existing production relations, or - which is only the legal expression of the latter - with property relations, within which they are still developing. From forms of development of productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution occurs more or less quickly in the entire enormous superstructure.” Social revolutions ensure that the social way of life of peoples corresponds to the objective requirements of the progressive development of their material productive forces.

The current worldwide social revolution is objectively brought into action by the global scientific and technological revolution of the second half of the 20th century. Compared to the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it, the scientific and technological revolution turned out to be the greatest in the development of the total productive forces of mankind. It represents a qualitative transformation of the productive forces of society based on the gradual transformation of science into its direct productive force. This entailed fundamental changes in the material, technical, production and technological foundation of life of the world community of peoples, since science is the universal social productive force of all humanity.

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The world scientific and technological revolution is characterized by the direct connection of science with material production, which provides a scientific basis for production, contributing to a significant increase in its level of development. The scientific and technological revolution has opened up opportunities for the creation of material production at a completely new technical and technological level of development - knowledge-intensive production. But the proper implementation of the latest opportunities for scientific and technical improvement of social production turned out to be impossible under the conditions of the capitalist mode of production, limited by the shackles of private ownership of the means of production.

The emergence of science as a direct productive force of society ensured the rise of its productive forces to a qualitatively new level of development. On this basis, the socialization of production acquired a worldwide scale and global character. Accordingly, the interconnection and interaction of all social phenomena, relations, processes, and trends have become globalized, which has significantly complicated their functioning. The scientific management of their social development has become the primary necessary need of the life of peoples. Satisfying this social need of society presupposes the purposeful use of objective laws of its development in the practice of its life activity.

The scientific organization of material production is designed to ensure that the nature of society's production relations corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, which is really possible and necessary in the socialist mode of production. The scientific basis of production requires a scientific substantiation of the entire organization of social life, which presupposes compliance with and use of objective laws of social development in the specific practice of social creativity. Scientific management of social processes is capable of overcoming economic and social disaster, replacing it with the harmonization of the entire cumulative system of social relations, which characterizes the socialist organization of social life. In general, science provides unlimited opportunities for the development of production until the human needs of the entire population of the globe are sufficiently satisfied, which presupposes the construction of a communist society.

The world scientific and technological revolution represents a qualitative leap in the historical development of mankind. By transforming science into the direct productive force of society, it radically renews the material basis of life of the peoples of the globe and urgently requires a corresponding transformation of their social life structure. The scientific and technological revolution opened up opportunities and provided the prerequisites for peoples to achieve the highest level of human civilization, free from social inequality and antagonism, based on the communist principles of collectivism and humanism. At the same time, science makes new demands on humanity for organizing all spheres of its life on a scientific basis. Therefore, scientific understanding and scientific justification of the life of society have become the primary factor in the progressive life of people.

The world scientific and technological revolution objectively determined the strategy for the further historical movement of mankind in the long term. Having received a scientific basis, the dynamics of social progress of peoples acquired unlimited opportunities for improving material production, social maturation, and spiritual enrichment. The primary necessary need and strategic task of the international community has become the complete mastery of knowledge-intensive production, ensuring comprehensive automation of production processes and achieving the highest labor productivity. The solution to this most important task involves further socialization and humanization of social relations, promoting the comprehensive development of a person’s personality, enriching his abilities for highly productive work, stimulating creative search in social life.

Revolutionary changes in material production objectively determine the necessary needs for the social progress of mankind. His newest strategic goal was to fully master the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution. The scientific basis of production requires a scientific justification for the entire organization of social life, turning science into a leading factor in its social development. But not a single country on the planet has managed to solve these urgent strategic problems. Due to the limitations of capitalism, the peoples of the world were unprepared to properly master the potential of the scientific and technological revolution. The social and spiritual maturity of peoples lags behind the latest surge in scientific and technological progress. In addition, not a single country, taken separately, has the material power necessary to properly master expensive high-tech technologies.

The increase in the objective possibilities and necessary needs of the historical progress of the peoples of the world due to the radical rise in the level of development of their material productive forces naturally insists on a revolutionary transformation of the entire total system of social relations of people. The objective historical necessity of the coming social revolutions began to operate on the globe. In the 1970s, it caused another aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism and its development into a general world crisis of the entire old social way of life of mankind. The global crisis has become irreversible and avalanche, prompting the general agony of the world capitalist system and the cessation of its existence. Therefore, the emergence of peoples from the global crisis is directly related to their mastery of the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution.

The social and spiritual lag of society from the revolutionary leap of scientific and technological progress personifies the limitations of the private property system of social relations. Private ownership of the means of production not only does not meet the latest needs of historical progress, but also accumulates a global crisis of the old social order of the world. As a result, an irreconcilable conflict emerged between the productive achievements of the world scientific and technological revolution and the privately owned way of social life of peoples. Finding itself on the verge of an inevitable revolutionary explosion, private property can no longer serve as the basis for the formation of social relations between people. Thus, the scientific and technological revolution determined the acceleration of the collapse of the privately owned social life structure of peoples. It prepared socialist revolutions in all countries of the globe.

The general world crisis is also distinguished by a significant intensification of the political reaction of imperialism, which expects a way out of this global turning point by a counter-revolutionary way of destroying socialism and restoring the undivided dominance of the capitalist social system on a planetary scale. But the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991, the escalation of military aggression by American fascism and its allies against many countries of Central Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa resulted in the formation of global chaos, equivalent to a worldwide revolutionary situation. Therefore, the extreme aggravation of the global crisis at the beginning of the 21st century in the international arena is followed by a gradual preponderance of social forces towards a way out of this all-encompassing catastrophic crisis. The coming wave of socialist revolutions, initially in the majority, and subsequently in the rest of the countries of the globe, must ensure that the nature of production relations of society corresponds to the level of development of its productive forces, and at the same time the transition of humanity from a private-owner civilization of social inequality and antagonism to a socialized life structure of social freedom and equality.

The social consequences of the world scientific and technological revolution fully confirm the strategic forecasts of the founders of scientific communism. Revealing the essence of the capitalist mode of production, K. Marx came to the conclusion that “bourgeois production relations are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production,” since “the productive forces developing in the depths of bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for resolving this antagonism.” On this basis, K. Marx summarized that “the prehistory of human society ends with the bourgeois social formation.” F. Engels envisioned the prospect of the practical implementation of this forecast as “the greatest revolution of all time.” And V.I. Lenin, comprehending the impact of the Great October Socialist Revolution on the world historical process, stated that “the whole world is now moving towards a movement that should give rise to a worldwide socialist revolution.” Finally, global chaos began to bury the capitalist socio-economic formation in the cemetery of history, freeing up space for the complete triumph of socialism. The worldwide triumph of socialism will be the greatest and last social revolution on planet Earth. Only the complete triumph of socialism will ensure human life for people.