Our goal is communism: why the “American dream” is bad for Russians

The leaders of the Davos Forum understood this and announced the search for a new model, some kind of “inclusive capitalism”. Some leaders of our country understood this. This is perhaps the best we understand, faced every day with the fact that prices are rising, and incomes are in no hurry to catch up and overtake them, with the fact that things are not in the best way with “confidence in the future”. With the fact that the strategic goals and, most importantly, the values ​​of our life are unclear.

What do we want? Money and more money? But where is the limit in the pursuit of wealth? Or we want the state to be strong. But then the question is: what is a state? We or the apparatus of officials who serve not so much us, citizens, as capital and themselves, loved ones? Or do we, the majority of ordinary Russians who receive 20-50 thousand a month, just want to live normally? But what is it? American dream: a house, two cars for a family and a family business? Or is it something more?

Before offering answers to these questions, I would like to emphasize that a negative convergence has taken place in our country. The essence of this process is simple: instead of the positive convergence desired by the social democrats of the past and the present, the combination of the best features of capitalism and socialism, we got the combination of the worst features of wild capitalism and the Soviet model.

From the first – the subordination of the real goals of life to money and goods. For most, this is not abundance, but an endless race with a one and a half to two rates for elusive wealth (or even just for survival). For a minority, greedy service to the golden calf: in fact, how can you live if you have a yacht 150 meters long, and your neighbor has as many as 200? And how do you do without a golden toilet or a $350 million plane? And from capitalism we got a general alienation: competitors are next to you. Add to this the attributes inevitable for the market: crime, loneliness, the commercialization of culture, education, science, life in a world where everything is for sale …

From the Soviet past, Russia, which began to build capitalism, also inherited mostly negative things: there was even more bureaucracy, there was less real protection of the rights of the majority. Blat turned into mass corruption. The list is easy to continue.

Hence the main problem: the leadership of our country and the majority of its citizens do not have a clear great strategic goal. The one for which you live and want your children to live. And she’s in demand. The world is changing. Technologies are developing. Global threats are turning from abstract horror stories into serious problems of everyday life (which is worth at least the pandemic that has not let us go for many years). Dreams of friendship with the United States of the Yeltsin era and partnership with NATO in the first years of the 21st century can today be regarded at best as a utopia, while continuous armed conflicts on all continents are a reality.

The revival in these conditions of the USSR in the form in which it was, both under Stalin and under Brezhnev, is impossible. This is a utopia! It is even greater utopia to take everything good from the USSR and lose everything bad: the systems have a single quality, and there is no “good” without “bad” in them.

What is possible?

One can and should understand why the USSR became an example of unprecedented successes and profound tragedies. Why did it arise and why did it leave the historical arena. What contradictions underlay the progress of this system and what led to its death. This is truly a historic task. Great thinkers have been struggling to solve it for many decades. Numerous charlatans from science and just talkers procrastinate her. It is speculated by political demagogues. This theme was played around like an old vinyl record. But she doesn’t leave.

I don’t claim to be the solution. Especially in this short article. But I want to emphasize something else: from the USSR it is possible and must go only into the future. It is impossible to return to the USSR. The reason is simple: socialism can survive and defeat capitalism only by actively moving into the future.

What has been said is as obvious as it is abstract. And abstract programs have an amazing property: they always remain nothing more than a propaganda slogan. Therefore, the proclamation of the task “From the USSR to the Future” is not enough. What is needed is a concretization of the goal, the definition of social forces that are interested in achieving it, a clear formulation of the system of tasks, plus the definition of means and resources for their solution.

So: purpose. I’m afraid the following will shock most readers. But for the author it is essential. The strategic goal of mankind and in particular of our country is nothing but … communism.

The older generation, in response to this statement, will remember a couple of anecdotes from the Khrushchev era (such as the slogan on the building of the artillery school “Our goal is communism”). The youth will decide that the professor is catastrophically behind the times. But I’m going to argue with both. And I’ll start with a few unexpected arguments for someone.

As you know, the material and technical basis of communism should be automated production, in which the functions of creativity fall to the lot of a person, non-mechanized labor – time. This production should be in harmony with nature and not destroy, but reproduce biogeocenoses – two. The basis of the movement towards communism is the growth of free time and the progress of human qualities in the process of creative activity and in free time – three.

Above, I have just listed the key provisions of the Marxist theory of communism. But after all, these are nothing but purely modern imperatives put forward by the majority of progressively thinking scientists and public figures. Moreover, even the leaders of the largest corporations and at least some far-sighted politicians are talking more and more about these guidelines (albeit in their own way, for PR purposes).

Let’s continue the argument. For many, communism has remained memorable for the slogan “to each according to his needs,” which seems to be an absolutely unrealizable imperative. Indeed, in a consumer society, where the pursuit of things is the dominant feature of human behavior, this is impossible. But only lazy people do not write about the crisis of this (often called “Western”) model today. Moreover, even Western experts are talking more and more about the need to move to responsible consumption, to abandon private ownership of consumer goods and develop forms of collective consumption: car sharing, co-living, coworking, etc. — the first swallows on this path.

One more argument. The key development resources today are health, education, science and culture. These are the foundations of knowledge-intensive production and reproduction of the creative worker. But what socio-economic forms are most appropriate for the development of these areas today? The answer is given by sociological surveys, according to which the majority of citizens of our country believe that education, health care and other public goods by their nature should be free and publicly available, that is, they should be produced, distributed and used on the basis of communist principles.

Finally, the most important resource for the development of modernity is information. Today, it is predominantly in private ownership, but it is here, in the space of culture (information, knowledge, co-creation), that the actual communist model of “everyone’s property for everything” can be realized. Indeed, Tolstoy’s novels, Einstein’s theory, the penicillin formula belong to each of us. These are blessings that can be distributed endlessly, there will be no less. Hence the communist imperative: “everything that can be distributed without loss must not be sold.”

So far, these are only the first sprouts of the new within capitalism, used primarily for the benefit of the same capitalism. But these are the germs of a new world – consumption as a means for a creatively active life, and not an end in itself; public appropriation of goods; rejection of unnecessary things, etc. Maybe we need to think about how to use them for the benefit of citizens, and not transnational capital.

Let’s put an ellipsis here in the argument and answer the obvious objection: all this can be fine as the future. Distant future. But today we in the Russian Federation are not up to it. We should start producing normal cars so that there are two cars per family, enough apartments to build, wages and pensions to be raised so that there is enough for an apartment and a couple of normal cars, and even a good rest. And there, you see, you can think about the future … So?

Yes, not so. The model described above is nothing less than the American Dream. And it is bad not because it is American, but because it is not a dream at all. This is nothing more than an intermediate step in the endless pursuit of material wealth in any capitalist country, even in the United States, even in Tmutarakan. This ideal of the so-called middle class of the countries of the center within the framework of the market-capitalist system is achieved (if at all) only under the condition of economic exploitation of the countries of the periphery. Do we want to turn our Motherland into the second USA, which most of humanity hates?

Meanwhile, the same and even higher quality of life can be achieved by other methods, with the help of other relationships. There are some sprouts of movement in this direction in China, and in Latin American countries with left-wing governments, and even in Scandinavia. So, maybe we should start moving in this direction, not copying, but ahead of it? And here we will be greatly helped by the critical use of the experience of the USSR, which, precisely in this – in the germs of communism (new, non-market values ​​and goals of human life; generally accessible quality education and health care; culture and science) – was ahead of the whole world.