Why Russia absolutely needs its own ideology
Dear Reader! This article is devoted to the study of the controversially acute issue of our Russian reality: does Russia need ideology? Least of all, the author would like to be in the role of a wise teacher teaching the plebs, while demonstrating his intellectual academic exceptionalism. The author pursues only one goal: to share his analytical research with a thoughtful and intelligent reader, so that, ultimately, in an open discussion, jointly form a collective, maximally constructive and uniting position of the actions of the patriotic forces of our country - people who are not indifferent to the fate of Russia and the fate of our children ... To the evil ignorant, the lowest request: skip this article without your comments and do not waste your expert peremptory sarcasm. Thanks!
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Recently, in the socio-political space of Russia, long and stormy discussions about the need for ideology for the state have been increasingly emerging. Recently, the President of Russia V.V. Putin, despite the constitutional prohibition of state ideology (13th article of the Constitution), nevertheless started talking about it. So, in his opinion, "the national idea of Russia is patriotism, but it should not be leavened, musty and sour." About this in an interview with the program “Moscow. Kremlin. Putin "said the Russian President. Let us also try to look for an answer to the question: does Russia need an ideology, and if so, why and why? To increase the objectivity of the answer, let us consider this question through the prism of a number of geopolitical and geostrategic circumstances.
The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century were marked by a number of significant events: the collapse of the world socialist system and the growing crisis of capitalism. The latter is closely related to the collapse of liberalism as the ideological formulation of the classical capitalist socialeconomic model of society. By the way, V.V. Putin in an interview with the Financial Times in 2019.
The liberal idea is outdated. She came into conflict with the interests of the vast majority of the population
- he said.
Financial and economic globalization, covering the whole world, has reached its political, geographical and socio-economic limits. In recent years, a tendency has become increasingly clear: the main “engine” of the capitalist system - loan interest (payment for a loan) in the formula “money-commodity-money” does not work. Loans at 0-0,25%, the introduction of a negative bank rate in Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland indicate that the system has reached the limit of its capabilities. Hence the search for other sources of financial profit, one of which may be the exchange rate: the payment for the exchange of one currency for another. But this requires the presence of a multi-currency global system and the formation of several regional self-sufficient and relatively independent financial and economic zones with their own currencies. By the way, the main representatives of the "money changers" are the Rothschilds.
It must be said that the decline of globalization and the "bloc" tendency in the development of the world were predicted long ago. The original plan for global transformations was drawn up by the Club of Rome (the authorship is attributed to the Rothschilds), and it provided for the creation of two or three "world regional blocks". The configurations of the blocks, the basic principles and the roadmap for their construction were determined using exclusively the mechanisms of financial and economic coercion of national elites and total psychological and ideological zombification of the population of the candidate countries. At the same time, Russia was assigned a place either as a raw material appendage of the Atlantic civilization, or it should be divided between the eastern and western blocs.
And today we see that in place of Globalization, which has drawn almost the whole world into a single financial and economic system, there is a fragmentation of what some time ago was brought together under the shadow of the WTO and the dollar. An opposition process is visible ahead - political and economic regionalization. It is no coincidence that D. Trump's foreign policy program contains the thesis of rejecting globalism. In this case, the question inevitably arises: why should the collapse of globalization end with regionalization, and not national “atomization”? Because the world economic science has recognized that for the progressive development of a closed economy, the volume of the domestic market must be at least 250-300 million people. It is not yet entirely clear who will end up in which conglomerate and in which company. Actually, this is what a fierce struggle is going on today between the core-forming countries. The United States, for example, expects to take control of three large regions, imposing on them its own undivided leadership - Europe, South America and the Asia-Pacific region (Asia-Pacific region). And for the latter, the geopolitical confrontation between the USA and China is taking place today. Great Britain would like to revive the British Empire under its auspices. This is precisely the main reason for leaving the EU. Europe would like to keep its zone and draw the CIS countries into it. And the example of Ukraine, in particular, is extremely illustrative here. Russia is forming, not without problems, the EurAsEC.
The integration experience of recent years irrefutably testifies that the success of the process of formation of regional entities depends not only on the attractiveness of economic proposals from the core-forming countries. Today, among the national elites of medium and small states, especially in the post-Soviet space, the idea of neutrality is extremely popular - an attempt to build equidistant political and economic relations with all centers of power. The policy of the so-called "multi-vector" is based on the reluctance of the national elites and small-town princelings to sacrifice almost monarchical powers, obtained by chance as a result of the collapse of the USSR. Of course, the short-sightedness and erroneousness of such aspirations is obvious. The Achilles' heel of small countries is the narrowness of the domestic market. The process of regionalization will inevitably lead to political and economic delimitation and fierce inter-bloc political and economic rivalry. This will surely put before small and even medium-sized countries the question of bloc affiliation. In the context of harmonization of intrablock financial and economic competition against the background of interblock contradictions, access for "neutral" countries to intraregional markets will be significantly hampered, and their own material and intellectual potential for innovative development will clearly not be enough.
But despite these arguments, it is extremely difficult to overcome the egoism and separatism of national elites with economic instruments alone, as the experience of the EurAsEC shows. After all, how to prove to the whole people or to an individual simple person of a particular country that he personally will receive some benefits from the creation of the Customs Union. But there will always be so-called "nationally oriented" voices that will explain that Russia in this union is robbing poor Belarusians or Kazakhs. That is exactly how the USSR was destroyed: against the background of the ideological collapse of the CPSU, the absence of a modern integration idea accepted by the whole society, the peoples were “divorced” on economic egoism. That is why the United States, as an informal initiator of the unification, put the ideas of "Atlanticism", the common security of the "golden billion", the ideology of universal human values and liberal freedoms as the basis for building the European Union.
Thus, the success of interstate integration is determined, among other things, by the attractiveness of the socio-political, moral, and ideological unifying model that is proposed by the country - the nucleus of the crystallization of the future regional conglomerate. It should be especially noted that the formation of regional unions will undoubtedly be based on the use of the principles of etatism (etatism is an ideology that determines the priority role of the state in society), the implementation of which is impossible without ideological design.
Based on the foregoing, it should be recognized that today the main geopolitical mistake of the current leadership of Russia, in our opinion, is the rejection of ideology, and the fact that all its integration projects both with the countries of the former USSR and far abroad, it tries to build exclusively only on the search for mutual economic interest, which is only partly true. The ideas of "economic determinism", which give rise to the President of Russia deep confidence that the benefits of economic cooperation will inevitably lead to close interaction and will help to rebuild the entire spectrum of interstate relations, which were valid a few decades ago, now work partially or do not work at all.
One of the reasons for the low efficiency of integration projects solely based on the search for mutual economic interest is that the class of the national industrial bourgeoisie, which is directly interested in the economic preferences of interstate cooperation, in many countries under the conditions of "bureaucratic-corporate capitalism" has lost most of its political influence and authorities. Real power today has passed to the class of bureaucracy, which includes not only high-ranking civil servants (politicians), but also top managers of transnational banking and industrial corporations (corporatocracy). The latter, under the conditions of corporate ownership (there is no pronounced physical owner), usurped economic and administrative power in their corporations and acquired unprecedented political influence. By the way, D. Trump is trying to return political significance to national capital. This thesis is clearly illustrated by the story of Nord Stream 2. Certainly beneficial in all respects to German industrialists, the new pipeline is being torpedoed by the German state bureaucracy to please the transatlantic solidarity of the "distributor" class. Therefore, it should be recognized that it is impossible to unite countries and build a stable political and economic structure only on a mercantile basis. All countries have different resources and capabilities, therefore, with economic integration, the one who is larger and stronger inevitably wins. To unite only on the basis of economic benefits is unproductive: the constituent parts of such an alliance will always look around, looking for a "thicker" proposal, and they will be right. After all, the main goal of such an economic association is to "earn more."
To justify the current government of Russia, it should be said that it itself does not have a clear ideological platform for building its own state, because one cannot seriously say that patriotism is a national idea. "Devotion and love for their homeland, readiness for any sacrifices and deeds in the name of the interests of their homeland" are also inherent in Americans, Germans and Chinese alike. And the superficial thesis: “the well-fed will not rebel, therefore, first we will feed, and then we will think about ideology” - is completely false and has long been refuted by history. The hungry and unkempt Parisian communards of revolutionary France utterly defeated the well-fed armies of Europe near Valmy, and the Russian people not only won the Civil War, but also built a most powerful state in the shortest possible time. Not to understand this is the most dangerous political myopia.
Another very serious geostrategic factor should force the current leadership of Russia to think about ideology. Undoubtedly, the cosmopolitan state-corporate bureaucracy, having won unprecedented political influence in recent years, is persistently leading the world to the abolition of nation states and the creation of a global corporate zone for humanity. The instrument for this is the fascization of the world distribution system - "global hegemony" with the "king of the mountain" - a group of countries that will distribute global resources. In this case, Russia can survive only in the regime of a besieged fortress. This can be resisted only by forming a stable nationally oriented and ideologized political and economic structure within the country.
Thus, it should be recognized that state building, and even more so the building of multinational conglomerates, is impossible without a developed ideology. And therefore, Russia needs a detailed ideological platform, its own distinctive national idea based on long-term strategic development goals, taking into account the distinctive features of the mentality of the Russian (state-forming) people.
In addition, today no one doubts that the system of public administration of the Russian Federation is inadequate and does not fulfill its main purpose: the organization of the country's progressive development. It requires urgent and deep reform. There is also no doubt that radical reform should be carried out on a fundamentally new political and ideological basis, since the concept of the public administration system is largely determined by the state ideology. As you know, ideology is not only a theoretical formulation of ideas about the laws of development of society, but also a system of values and norms that set guidelines for social development and state building of the management system.
The quintessence, so to speak, the core of ideology is the national idea. It should be noted right away that this is not necessarily an idea that describes national priorities and views on the structure of life and the principles of building a state of a particular people. A national idea can be put forward by some, most often a state-forming people, but due to its attractiveness, it can become ideas of consolidation for other peoples and national state formations. The national idea is always the goal of a dynamic process extended in time and necessarily projected territorially. This is a movement towards something or somewhere, but more often than not, it is the construction of something somewhere. Any national idea is always formed and subsequently implemented on the basis and within the framework of one or another global geopolitical and geostrategic concept.
Undoubtedly, the need for state ideology should be recognized by society and, above all, by political movements and parties, which are called upon to "move" social progress, develop and improve the political structure of society. And here we have to agree with the unflattering opinion of V.V. Putin about political parties and political movements of our country. Speaking about the possibility of introducing a parliamentary republic in Russia, he rightly noted that our parties do not have a well-developed intelligible ideology as a system as a political basis for their social activities: the principles of organizing society, strategic and tactical goals of its development. Numerous parties and social movements are mainly focused on the proclamation of social demands.
Let's summarize all of the above: Russia needs an expanded ideology, its own distinctive national idea based on long-term strategic development goals, taking into account the distinctive features of the mentality of the Russian (state-forming) people for the following reasons:
1. The crisis of the capitalist socio-economic model of society predetermined the end of the era of globalism, which is being replaced by global fragmentation - the creation of regional supranational alliances-blocs.
2. The need to form the largest possible "bloc" internal consumer market is the essence of the world geopolitical confrontation without an ideological component in this struggle cannot be won.
3. Inter-bloc rivalry will force small and medium-sized countries to choose bloc affiliation, since access for “neutral” countries to intra-regional markets will be significantly hampered.
4. The construction of integration associations is impossible only on an economic basis, due to the inequality of economic and resource opportunities of the participants. The success of the formation of regional formations also depends on the attractiveness of the proposed ideological integration model as the basis for overcoming the separatism of the elites of the uniting countries.
5. The core of a unifying ideology can be the national idea of a state-forming people, provided it is attractive to other peoples and national state formations as the basis for interethnic consolidation.
6. The national idea describes national priorities and views on the structure of life and the principles of building a state. The national idea is always the goal of a dynamic process of development, extended in time and necessarily projected territorially.
7. Russia currently does not have a clear ideological platform for building both its own state and a supranational integration association. State building, and even more so the building of multinational conglomerates, is impossible without a developed ideology.
8. Aggravation of geopolitical confrontation is forcing Russia to form a stable nationally oriented and ideologized political and economic structure inside the country.
To be continued ...
- Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Professor A.S. Medvedev
- https://pxhere.com/
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