Abstract
Thirty years ago, ‘real socialism’ ceased to exist as a geopolitical and economic object, but the contradictions and conflicts of late capitalism remain. Global problems and threats are growing. The world is looking for a way to another world rather than the late capitalism. And the search for this other reality is both theoretical and practical. One proof of this is the World Social Forum, the transformation of which we are witnessing now, that is replacing the motto ‘Another world is possible!’ with the motto ‘We are making another world!’.
In this issue, the authors’ focus is on the theoretical search for objectively possible alternatives, and this search is based on the study of the contradictions of the current reality in its historical retrospect. And how this problem is solved within the periphery of Marxist thought in post-Soviet Russia, as it were, with a focus on the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, which has been actively developing in recent decades and is already partly present in the international arena. It is this school that is presented in this special issue of the journal.
In this short foreword, we are not going to characterize this school – this aspect is covered in an article by Olga Barashkova, a young and talented researcher and adherent of this tendency. We are going to briefly dwell on the historical preconditions and contexts of the rise and evolution of this school.
The historical roots of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism go back to the USSR, with the reference to which this text was begun, this being not a coincidence. While Marxism existed under strict bureaucratic control in the space of ‘real socialism’, our movement was developing, and during certain periods (above all in the 1920s and 1960s–1970s) it demonstrated world-class achievements. Let us call this really developing Marxism, which overcame dogmatism and bureaucratic restrictions, to be creative Marxism. It was this so-called creative Marxism that provided the breeding ground on which the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism grew.
We have inherited and are developing to the best of our ability (1) the dialectical-materialistic method, considerably advanced over the level of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the works by Evald Ilyenkov, Viсtor Vaziulin, and their colleagues; (2) political and economic achievements of two actively arguing schools of political economy, with Nikolai Tsagolov (the school accentuated the priority of planning and free harmonious development of human individuality as the basis of socialism) and Yakov Kronrod (Soviet theorist of socialism as a special mode of production, combining both plan and market) having been the leaders in this field; (3) preliminary studies in the field of social philosophy, theory of creativity, and culture by Genrikh Batishchev, Nal’ Zlobin, Vadim Mezhuev, and others. No less important for the development of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism were and still are (4) the works of foreign Marxists, which have become more accessible to us since the 1990s.
The legacy of these traditions coupled with a practical involvement in the struggle to preserve the leftist intellectual tradition in post-Soviet Russia, where Marxism and other leftist schools of thought have been almost entirely excluded from academic research and education programs, has been the basis for the emergence and development of our tendency. Its main reference points, that have gradually taken shape over the past three decades, have been the following:
Focus on the dialectical and materialistic method and its development applying thereof to the social regress processes and qualitative transformations of social systems.
Development of the theory of ‘Capital’ as applied to the realities of the 21st century; a study of the contradictions of post-Soviet oligarchic-bureaucratic capitalism of the semi-peripheral type and ways of its transformation.
The search for a theory of socialism and communism of the future, based on a critical conceptualization of both contemporary world practices and those of ‘real socialism’.
No doubt, other theoretical directions of the left spectrum have been developing in Russia in recent decades. The dogmatic, Stalinist-Suslovian ‘Marxism-Leninism’ has survived and been reproduced. Numerous tendencies using the methodology of postmodernism, theories of the social-democratic spectrum, anarchism, and so on are developing. But the reader can learn more about all this from the above-mentioned introductory article.
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This special issue is devoted to the studies made by the leading figures of our school, its middle-age and younger generations, those who study the problems of late capitalism and contemporary Russia.
It opens with the introductory article by Dr Olga Barashkova, called The Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism (PSSCM): particular characteristics, main tendencies, and its place in the system of Marxist studies in post-Soviet Russia. The article provides an overview of the main characteristics of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism and its differences from other trends of Marxism in contemporary Russia. The article contains both a substantial analysis and generalizations and a list of the main works elaborated by representatives of the school and representatives of other mainstreams of post-Soviet Marxism, published in the Russian and English languages.
The article by the author of this Foreword, Capital of the 21st Century: From the Proletariat and Bourgeoisie to the Precariat and the Oligarchic-Bureaucratic Nomenklatura?, carries on to some extent the text by Andrey Kolganov, shows special characteristics of capital in its relations with labor under the conditions of the 21st-century capitalism, as well as those transformations of the social structure, which are preconditioned by those characteristics; a hypothesis is set forth on the formation of a new proto-class – socialiat, which incorporates workers of the public sector.
In the article Culture in the Space of Late Capitalism: The Artist and the Market, Professor Lyudmila Bulavka-Buzgalina reveals the specific characteristics of the cultural interpretation of late capitalist relations by showing how the artist submits to the total market of simulacra, turning himself into a function of this market, making art and inspiration itself subject to its market conditions and turning works of art into a kind of highly liquid goods, quasi-money. Dr Gleb Maslov, a representative of the new generation of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism, in his text Soviet and Post-Soviet Marxism: Braving the Challenges of the Technological Revolution, discusses how creative Soviet and post-Soviet Marxism explored and investigated the contradictions of technological development under late capitalism.
Zhan Toshchenko, one of the leading sociologists of modern Russia, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, prepared for this issue an article called Society of Trauma as a Third Modality of Development (Debatable Problems of Russia’s Present and Future from the Standpoint of Critical Marxism). This text provides an original interpretation of the tragedy that occurred in the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the focus on the social aspects of the problem, interpreting in a particular way the general contradictions of today’s transforming world.
The topic of socio-economic analysis of the contradictions in post-Soviet Russia is continued in the article the Socio-economic Inequality and Quality of Life in Russia, written by leading scientists of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Professor Michael Voeykov and Dr Galina Anisimova. They describe the causes and consequences of the deep social gap that separates the majority of Russians with incomes below 500 euros a month from the oligarchs (Russia ranks first in the world in the number of dollar billionaires per unit of gross domestic product).
The article Education in Post-Soviet Russia: Marketization, Financialization and Bureaucratization – The Case of Universities by Dr Natalia Yakovleva reveals the processes of marketization and financialization of education. The author identifies the main characteristics of these processes, which are characteristic of the system of late capitalism in general and using the example of Russian universities she analyzes specific manifestations of the fact that the educational process (values and motives of students and teachers, the interests of leaders of educational organizations and public administration) is increasingly subject to the market conditions and the purposes of financial capital accumulation.
The issue is completed with an article by Professor Ruslan Dzarasov and Dr Viktoria Gritsenko called the Post-Soviet Capitalism in Russia and Digital Revolution. The authors show the contradictions that characterize Russian capitalism in the conditions of the ongoing technological transformations and provide a generalized interpretation of the social system that had occurred in the Russian Federation by the 2020s as inadequate in facing the challenges of modern productive forces and unable to ensure social progress.
These materials represent some aspects of the research progress made by the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism. This is a very small part of our research (more than a hundred books and many hundreds of articles have been published in recent decades by authors of this school and other researchers close to it), most of which have been published in the Russian language and, to our great regret, are little accessible to foreign readers.
The authors of the texts proposed would be grateful to readers for a feedback and critical comments. A dialogue with English-speaking readers is critical for Russian Marxists. We are profoundly grateful to David Fasenfest for his support of the initiative of implementing the project and systematic valuable comments and advice, to Gleb Maslov and Olga Barashkova, who have done a great organizational job in preparing the special issue, and to Renfrey Clarke and Yury Simonov, the translators of the texts, who made invaluable contributions to this project.
