Today, many political scientists and philosophers often turn to the communist heritage to find tools for changing reality, the analyst of Russian news agency Vestnik Kavkaza, Yevgeniya Svatukhina said in the National Question program on Vesti FM.
National Question is a weekly program on Vesti.FM, during which various aspects of national relations in Russia and the CIS countries are discussed. Today's program was dedicated to Vladimir Lenin’s 150th birth anniversary.
The expert recalled that, as always, in the days of anniversaries, there is another reason to remember both to the legacy of the thinker and leftist ideas in general in an attempt to understand what has not lost its relevance in the piggy bank of public thought.
"First of all, let us pay attention to the actualization of socialist and communist ideas in the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and supposedly complete victory of liberalism, there was a certain ‘disappointment in leftist ideas’, but at present, after it became clear that capitalism cannot guarantee general welfare, both political scientists, philosophers and politicians are again turning to the socialist, communist heritage in search of effective tools for changing reality,” Yevgeniya Svatukhina said.
"An interesting concept, combining the legacy of leftist thinkers and today's post-capitalist constructions is proposed by philosophers and theorists of the anti-and alternative globalization movement, neo-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. They recognize the Marxist model of understanding history as the struggle between Labor and Capital and also note that under current conditions, these categories have changed significantly,” the expert of Vestnik Kavkaza drew attention.
“So, with regard to the new understanding of Labor, it is no longer localized, it is dispersed, and the results of this work are no longer concrete material benefits, but ideas, information, and even vital energy. A certain set or majority comes to replace the working class as a subject of labor. In turn, the place of Capital is occupied by the so-called Empire, that is, Capital, but brought to the Absolute - global and unlimited. The essence of the Empire lies in a corrupt, destructive beginning, which is opposed by the creative energy of the majority, ” the analyst said.
“In the process of its approval, the Empire will also liquidate the institution of the state as such, and it will be replaced by planetary networks. And, as a result, the nation-state will be a thing of the past. Now everything will be reorganized into a single linear horizon of the Empire. Thus, Negri and Hardt emphasize the difference between Empire and imperialism, as described by Lenin, when bourgeois nation-states expanded into economically underdeveloped countries and zones, " Yevgeniya Svatukhina said.
The Empire’s matrix, according to Negri and Hardt, is the United States, with its history of the formation of political structure, federalism, American democracy, and the absolutization of their own values. This, in particular, was manifested in relation to Native American civilization, when the colonialists equated the natives they behaved with as if they were non-humans. The United States did not follow the path of the colonial state but became the matrix of the Empire, now they see the world as a single space, subject to integration and transformation, taking into account their own ‘universal values.’ Philosophers note that the United States cannot help but expand its control since the idea of the ‘open borders’ and ‘universality’ of its own values is the most important feature of the entire system,” the analyst said.
“To the question of the possibility of overcoming the breakdown of the Empire, Negri and Hardt answer that it will be brought to its end by its final embodiment, the utmost intensification of all its features and qualities. At this point, the majority understands the exceptional value of the common good as opposed to the private and national.
Thus, a society that meets the criteria of a socialist society is ripening in the Empire - without exploitation, without class division and without pressure from the state,” Yevgeniya Svatukhina concluded.
