Kara-Murza Serguei

THE METHAPHYSICAL AND RATIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRIALISM

The first attempts in this field upset customary criteria and efficiency-assessment methods. (Footnote 20). 
In response, the best minds of industrial society (including RAND Corp.) developed a methodology of systems analysis proceeding from the notion of the resources' "pragmatic" cost, i.e. the value that every particular resource has "here and today". This marked a complete break with Keynes' concept, all the more so as the latter had paid attention to "interaction with the future" during his optimization studies. Such "interaction" ostensibly deals with future generations, which are so far unable to participate in market exchanges, elections or opinion polls. 
Therefore researchers failed to take the giant step forward, preferring to move back instead. This is a pity, because such a step was prompted by the entire development of the political economy. 
The main drawback of the basic political-economy model was consolidated, despite the fact that it came to be seen as something intolerable in the middle of the 20-th century. That drawback went as follows - the aforementioned model didn't study the interaction between the industrial economy, environment and the future. Such an attitude was backed by philosophical considerations rooted in the Scientific Revolution and Reformation. These two history-making events placed Man above the world, presenting him as a free personality called upon to cognize Nature, subordinate and exploit it. (Footnote 21). However, there existed another objective circumstance, making it possible to confine political economy within a purely mechanistic framework. In short, the world was very large, and its resources seemed unlimited; consequently, these factors could be perceived as something constant and permanent. 
Marx introduced simple and enlarged reproduction cycles into political economy, basing his findings on Carnot's thermodynamic concepts. Carnot himself had idealized his balanced steam engine, tending to disregard its furnace completely. However, the furnace constitutes the engine's inalienable part responsible for spending non-renewable resources and creating all sorts of pollutants. 
It became well-nigh impossible to exclude the "furnace" from the political-economy model in mid 20-th century. However, neo-liberalism had decided to take such a step, using powerful ideological and political pressure to compensate for the growing contradiction. The oil-related 1991 Gulf War is an outstanding example of such policies. 
As a result, the development of political economy, which serves as the industrial policy's major scientific and cultural foundation, was nipped in the bud. In actual fact, the political economy is now being unobtrusively withdrawn from university curricula and replaced by econometrics and business organization. The global reality - natural and not social - and certain criteria used to assess the efficiency of that chrematistics nucleus, which maintains a relative balance (the so-called "First World"), are now contradicting each other. This discrepancy has become quite glaring. 
Neo-liberalism's political economy staunchly ignores even these specific sources of imbalance (such as pollution) vented into the buffer zone (the atmosphere, ocean and Third World), whose negative value can still be assessed with the help of chrematistics' terminology. (Footnote 22). 
Such calculations tend to shatter the myth about a balanced market-style economy. The protracted Amazon debate sheds some light on the issue. Western public opinion is extremely concerned over the felling of tropical jungles in the Amazon River basin. Westerners are sure that Brazil is killing Planet Earth's lungs; and this is turning into some kind of obsession. Why? Well, the First World's one billion cars require oxygen generated by the Brazil jungle; oxygen, as well as oil, serve as the essential combustion component inside Promethean "furnaces". 
Consequently Western nations have posed the question of paying for that Brazil oxygen. The United States, for one, made a rather generous gesture in 1989. It suggested writing off $4 billion from Brazil's $115-billion external debt (provided that its lumberjack outfits lay down their axes). Still this is a pitifully inadequate sum. In real life, humanity derives impressive benefits from Amazon forests, which act as an ecological stabilizer and source of immense biological diversity (the gene fund reserve). In market prices, regional assets in this category are rated at approximately $50 billion per year (for a 30-year term ). This sum exceeds Brazil's external debt 12 times over. Preliminary calculations show that the aforementioned benefits total an impressive $160 billion. (sic!). 
Neo-liberalism's economists stop acting as unbiased researchers, when their opponents resort to market language. In this case, they start using all sorts of ideological and ethical terminology. 
This led to the coining of the following famous aphorism: "Why should I sacrifice my well-being for the sake of future generations? Have they sacrificed anything for my own sake?" This completes industrialism's anthropological model, when direct hereditary ties between entire generations of men-atoms are disrupted. Such ties were maintained in the past via the transfer of economic resources to one's children provided that they would hand them on to the posterity (and not in accordance with the equivalent-exchange practice). In other words, individualism had at least required the preservation of an "economic genetic link" ensuring the individual's reproduction. The present-day crisis induces radical neo-liberals to substantiate a gap in this field. Industrialism's advocates are talking about the end of history at the turn of the 20-th century; their conclusion is full of anthropological pessimism. 
The decadent social philosophy of the classic political economy's final spiral has served to predetermine the destructive nature of a modernization project aiming to overhaul the entire Russian economic system. Such a project boils down to Fromm-style necromancy. It required a profound disintegration of the vast nation's entire economy, research establishment and social sphere. 
All these tasks have already been accomplished. However, they were not justified by the initially declared goals -society's democratization and creation of certain conditions making it possible to create a liberalized and open economy. (Footnote 23). This devastation can't be attributed to the geopolitical interests pursued by the USSR's adversaries during the Cold War. The Russian reforms mark a colossal experiment that speaks volumes about the underlying motives of late industrialism, that has now confronted head on the approaching "third wave" of civilization.

FOOTNOTES

1 This article is published in "Industrial Policy of Russia and The Problems of Industrialism". Moscow: "AO ICC RIA", 1994. P. 10-26. Return to text
2 The author wishes to thank Tamerlan Aizatulin, Darja Kara-Murza and Ivan Tugarinov for valuable counsel and information. Return to text
3 The creation of a time-piece needed by researchers signaled the emergence of a machine-building sector, that was used to make industrial machine-tools; this sector began to utilize precision gears for the first time. Precision screws invented some time earlier were used by researchers to focus their microscopes. Return to text
4 Solidary social structures marked by non-linear and "irrational" self-organization processes are unpredictable in many respects. The pace of Russia's liberal reforms serves as dramatic proof of this postulate. Return to text
5 This concept, borrowed from a science studying Mother Nature's objective laws, exerted a far more powerful legalizing impact than Malthusianism with its obvious ideological bias. This theory is well-substantiated, convincing and complete (albeit seemingly); therefore it becomes quite understandable why industrialism's competing and even hostile ideologies decided to borrow social Darwinism (despite the fact that it was rejected by traditional societies and traditional sub-cultures). Return to text
6 According to Darwinism's historian R. Grasa, social-Darwinism became part and parcel of Western civilization's cultural luggage, "gaining a wide audience at the turn of the twentieth century because of its claim to biologically substantiate social sciences and above all because of its role in the substantiation of economic liberalism and primitive industrial capitalism." Return to text
7 Behaviorism's myths were extremely important for the creation of an "organized man" (or man with pre-determined behavior), who represents an essential feature of today's factories. Behaviorism, which boils down to a mechanistic concept of man as an incentive-governed machine, is quite popular with industrialism's ideology. K. Lorentz attributes this success to a tendency "towards techno-morphic thinking mastered by mankind owing to achievements in obtaining insights into the non-organic world, which do not demand that we heed the systems' complex structures and qualities ... Behaviorism brings this to extreme consequences. The lust for power is another motivation; one becomes convinced that man can be manipulated by means of training: such a conviction is based on the aspiration to attain this goal. Return to text
8 As a social-democrat, Willi Brandt emphasizes that the idea of expansion and progress has come to contradict social policy. Things are even more complicated in real life. The inalienably linked institutions of this civilization (market economics, "atomized" democracy and rational science) require constant expansion into other cultures (deep inside Man as well). Traditional societies seem to collapse under the European civilization's blows during the colonial period. But now it has transpired that such a process is much more protracted and painful. The continuation of a policy aimed at grinding and dissolving backward cultures is becoming a formidable task, indeed, and is fraught with the danger of global upheavals. Return to text
9 This constitutes a revolutionary change, compared to traditional society, where universal ethical values possess a normative nature with respect to all spheres (F. von Hayeck claimed that this tendency paved the road to slavery). Return to text
10 This alone served to create a hidden contradiction inside the entire system of definitions of the Soviet industrial policy as, in principle, political economy doesn't study the economy, or precisely the type of production which existed in the USSR; nor does it claim a right to do so. Consequently the notion of "socialism's political economy" also makes no sense. Return to text
11 Illic points out that the "my body" notion was used in the West only until the 1980s; at present they prefer to talk about "my system", perceiving the body as some kind of fixed asset or machine-tool. Return to text
12 According to the Hobbes-Locke model, the non-owner threat is constant and justified; each person has a natural and legal right to wage war. Hobbes' Leviathan states explicitly that nobody can feel safe with the current level of power attained by him, without constantly controlling, be it by force or deception, all the people he can control, until he is convinced that there is no other force sufficiently powerful to harm him. This can be attributed to the fact that all people struggle for power. Return to text
13 A prominent European philosopher of the 17-th century pointed out that gold and silver were the cleanest substances of our blood, serving as the marrow of our strength and the most essential instruments of human activity and our existence. Return to text
14 This analogy of realist scientists anticipated non-mechanistic concepts of the late 20-th century (including specific ideas on non-homeostasis processes, fluctuations and instability). Return to text
15 We are not discussing the specific trends of economic thought, which developed outside the postulates of industrialism in our work. This concerns, first and foremost, the school of Russian agrarian economist, A. Chayanov, who had, in essence, laid the foundations for the so-called non-chrematistics political economy by proceeding from different postulates conforming to the peasantry's political economy. Chayanov himself compared the move with Lobachevsky's feat. (Lobachevsky is credited with creating the non-Euclidean geometry). Return to text
16 Incidentally, technology gave birth to evolutionary ideas (instead of biology). This is reflected in the history of steam engines. Experts studied various inventions and modifications in 70 models of Newcomen's steam engine, thereby managing to increase its efficiency more than 100%. Return to text
17 Yegor Gaidar borrowed that conclusion to offer some kind of theoretical substantiation for his stabilization program on Russian territory. However, Gaidar's IMF advisers were well aware that Phillips' curves couldn't be applied in real life, and that inflation had increased on a par with unemployment throughout the crisis-stricken 1980s. Such a phenomenon is called stagflation. All these developments were not applied to Russia's economy, simply because this country should first build capitalism. Return to text
18 This also serves to mobilize modern society's latent racism. A small race of people, that succeeds in doing away with some instincts and cultural taboos, would constitute the so-called "golden billion". That "billion" will enjoy every right to subordinate all "Untermenschen". The instinctive murder ban (on fellow humans) will also be automatically eliminated, because those belonging to other species will no longer be seen as humans. This is one of the simplest anti-crisis options. Return to text
19 The principal discrepancy between the value of a ton of oil for mankind and its market value (calculated in accordance with the particular amount of money needed to bribe or intimidate Arab sheikhs) constitutes a vivid example of commodity fetishism that conceals similar discrepancies. Return to text
20 The industrial world's spendthrift economy has turned out to be inadmissibly energy-intensive. This sometimes served to distort the original meaning of economic activities. In the beginning, agriculture aimed to convert solar energy into food (with the help of green leaves). At the same time, America's famed industrial farming establishment ("soil-based factory"), which is being offered as some kind of exemplary entity to the entire world, spends ten calories of fossil fuel on every food calorie. In other words, the supreme industrial civilization has bred an interesting agricultural method converting mineral fuel, or non- renewable resources (instead of solar energy), into foodstuffs. Return to text
21 The specifics of industrialism's "freedom formula" are, first of all, connected with that mechanistic picture of the Universe and determinism, which creates the illusion that Man can predict accurately the consequences of his actions. This removes the metaphysical component from the responsibility issue, substituting it with the rational-calculation task. A pre-determined and quantitatively described system is devoid of any sanctity. As one philosopher noted, all things that can have a price can't be holy. Determinism still remains the main pillar of Westerner mentality, despite impressive scientific progress at the end of the 20-th century ("God doesn't play dice"). Return to text
22 In principle, market mechanisms reject any exchange of values between present and future generations, which are unable to hit the market and therefore don't possess any buyer properties whatsoever. Consequently, they can't guarantee any equivalent exchange. Therefore, any such act tends to immediately upset the homeostasis principle, which is seen as political economy's main dogma. Return to text
23 Here we are talking about the perestroika project, whose main provisions are contained in the articles and speeches of reformist leaders (from Mikhail Gorbachev to Gavriil Popov). Return to text

c 1994, S.G.Kara-Murza