“To denote this new type of social pressure, Gramsci uses the term“ hegemony ”, which he borrowed from Russian Marxism, but filled with new content. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie is carried out with the help of a number of institutions - schools, trade unions, parties, associations, which gradually instill in the masses completely definite ideas justifying the domination of the bourgeois class and representing this domination by the "natural, unshakable order of things." Moreover, a special social group nurtured by the ruling elite - bourgeois intellectuals - acts as a conductor of such ideas, the impact of which is especially great due to the fact that it is largely composed of people from the people. So, the main means of hegemony is the ideology created by the bourgeois intelligentsia and promoted to the masses, and it can be expressed in various forms - from direct political appeals to half-hints contained in seemingly "apolitical" works of literature or in school curricula approved by ministries. Regardless of this, they are all aimed at forming a certain way of thinking that is beneficial to the hegemon. "
Antonio Gramsci - Italian philosopher, journalist and politician; founder and leader of the Italian Communist Party and theorist of Marxism.
“Representatives of the Frankfurt School, or Freudomarxists, were, perhaps, one of the first Western philosophers to seriously engage in the development of defency and the theory of totalitarianism. Already thinkers belonging to the older generation of Frankfurt - Adorno and Horkheimer put forward the thesis of the connection between scientific rationality and political totalitarianism, the development of which led them to the conclusion that fascism is a kind of dialectical fruit of the Enlightenment paradigm: the hypertrophy of rationality led to self-disclosure in this rationality of its irrational, mythological nature. On the basis of this thesis, the socio-philosophical theory of Frankfurt was built, describing the repressive mechanisms of modern society in all its varieties ( fascism, communism, neoliberalism). The younger generation of the school - Marcuse, Fromm, Habermas just studied this side of the life of modern society, and the most striking figure here was probably Marcuse - the recognized master of the minds of opposition-minded Western youth of the 60s, the ideological leader of student riots that received the name of the "revolution of three Ms" (Marx, Mao, Marcuse), the creator of the Great Refusal ideology, which had a huge impact on the Western counterculture - the movement of hippies, punks, beatniks, rockers, environmentalists, neoanarchists, etc. We can say that Marcuse brought the "critical theory of society" of the Frankfurt school to its logical conclusion, and that is precisely why he is interesting for the researcher of the repressive mechanisms of postmodern capitalism.
Herbert Marcuse is a German and American philosopher, sociologist and culturologist, a representative of the Frankfurt School.
Marcuse fully shares the position of Adorno and Horkheimer about the totalitarian nature of modern science and technology. Experimental science is already infected with the virus of fascism. In place of harmony with nature, which the people of pre-technological civilization aspired to, and which was realized in myth and religious ideological attitudes, the rationalistic paradigm of the Enlightenment offers the model "Absolute Master - Absolute Slave". According to her, man is called upon to completely conquer nature, to reduce it to a passive and dumb material that serves to satisfy our diverse needs. In this case, the most cruel methods are used: for example, one of the main tools of this science is an experiment, which is nothing more than a torture of nature (Galileo said that an experiment is a "Spanish boot" that is put on nature in order to snatch she has her secrets).
Ultimately, the self-development of this logic leads to political totalitarianism. After all, man is also a part of nature, so from the thesis: "we must completely subjugate nature" directly follows the thesis: "we must learn to manage society and man." Progress gives birth to totalitarianism, classical mechanics and the steam engine give birth to Auschwitz.
Thus, Marcuse proceeds from the definition of totalitarianism deduced by the older Frankfurt people, according to which it is characterized not only by the presence of state pressure on a person - otherwise there would be no difference between totalitarianism and classical ancient despotism, but also a special world outlook implicated in total rationality. Totalitarianism is a product of our time, accustomed to sorting everything out on the shelves, adjusting it to a common, rationalistic yardstick, making everything absolutely transparent and absolutely predictable. The ideal of a totalitarian project is a machine society where people play the role of cogs, of course, nothing of the kind could have occurred to a person of antiquity or the Middle Ages, when a completely different, organic understanding of space and society prevailed, for this a scientific revolution had to take place. So, in the foundations of totalitarianism lies the absolutization of rationality, and if irrationalistic phenomena are manifested in this society - torchlight processions, book burnings, absurd accusations of espionage, then this is a payback for the hypertrophy of rationality, the dialectical degeneration of "logos" into "mythos".
From the point of view of Marcuse, the transition of a Western-type society to totalitarianism occurred with the outbreak of World War I - it was then that the formation of mechanisms of social control based on scientific rationality began (before that, the government did not set itself the goal of subjugating the minds and will of all citizens, moreover, in a methodical uniform way , and was satisfied with the necessary, episodic political and ideological violence). However, according to Marcuse, totalitarianism can be divided into two types - military-police, open, to which he attributed the Soviet and fascist regimes, and liberal, non-terrorist, soft, which was finally formed in Europe and especially in the United States after World War II. Marcuse does not consider them mutually exclusive, they can grow together and complement each other to varying degrees - for example, Marcuse considered the confrontation between the USA and the USSR in the Cold War as a symbiosis of two totalitarian regimes, which, by creating an image of the enemy and its propaganda exploitation, only support and strengthen each other.
If Soviet totalitarianism was studied by Marcuse in his work "Soviet Marxism", fascist - in some sections of the book "Reason and Revolution", then his work "One-Dimensional Man" was devoted to the study of neoliberal totalitarianism. This book begins with a phrase in which, as in focus, its main meaning is collected: "In a developed industrial civilization, comfortable, moderate, democratic lack of freedom, evidence of technological progress, reigns." The most powerful mechanisms have been created to suppress skepticism and protest in the very embryo - television, radio, newspapers, shows, advertising, lottery. A loyal “happy Consciousness” reigns everywhere, which is satisfied with controlled comfort, lulled by false freedom and does not want to use even the critical institutions available to it. In this society, there is almost no persecution for beliefs, because there are almost no people who can think independently and have their own convictions. Everywhere the cult of unification reigns - they buy those goods that are advertised, repeat those thoughts that are recognized as "progressive", dress in those things that are declared fashionable. A whole system of artificial needs has been created, with the help of which a person is drawn into a frantic race in a circle that makes up the senseless essence of the society of postmodern capitalism. If you don’t buy a new receiver and new jeans, you will not be considered "advanced" enough. But in order to buy them, you need to make money. And they can be earned by working in a company, in a concern, in a factory and producing more and more receivers and jeans. Or in the newspaper, in a PR company, on TV and advertising these receivers and jeans. Fashion is changing, you need to keep up with everything, as a result, a person is absolutely satisfied with his life, absolutely loyal to his government and has only one desire that worries him - to consume, consume and consume again.
Such a person is characterized by Marcuse as "one-dimensional", pointing out the absence of "volume", "complexity" in his spiritual configuration. It is easy to see that this is the pseudonym of the "man of the masses" José Ortega Y Gasset, a triumphant mediocrity, a self-righteous bourgeois who is incapable of creative activity, but at the same time he is sure that the whole world exists only for him, that the light in the lamps lights up himself on its own, according to the laws of nature, there is no labor behind it, the mental dramas and insights of thousands of scientists and engineers, the sweat of millions of workers. Marcuse notes with bitterness that such a majority in modern Western society and that in this sense the proletarian is no different from the bourgeois, the average intellectual is from the vacuum cleaner seller. Both the owner of the company and the black bellboy watch the same TV programs, hum the same popular melodies, they are representatives of the same culture, called pop or mass culture, although it would be more correct to designate it as postculture. She absorbed classical literature, painting, theater, digested everything and in the end it turned out to be messy, which resembles Pop Art paintings, where the images of the Mona Lisa sit side by side with cigarette butts glued to the canvas. In this "one-dimensional culture" there is no place for Truth, Goodness, Beauty - for it, these are anachronisms, a relic of feudalism, there is only a commodity in it, which draws into its field and absorbs everything, political views from now on are a commodity, talent is a commodity, a beautiful face - commodity, genitals - commodity, kidneys - commodity, children - commodity ... The paradigm of the commodity unifies everything, monetary calculation averages everything, the difference between the law against drugs and a batch of heroin is here measured in dollars.
Marcuse calls the world of "one-dimensional people" "a society without opposition." Here, there really are no principal opponents of this system, and if someone calls themselves that, then it is easy to come to an agreement with him. Each has its own price - for one the portfolio of the minister, for the other - a prestigious literary prize. The assortment of this society is large, it is not for nothing that it is called a "consumer society", however, in full agreement with the laws of dialectics, it is also the poorest, because it can offer only goods and nothing but goods ... The freedom that this society boasts so much is generally illusory , this is the freedom to choose between Pepsi - and Coca-Cola, the Democratic and the Republican Party, in short, between goods of approximately the same quality.
And where does real freedom, real oppositionists come from in this world, because the power elite here possesses powerful mechanisms of suppression, a hidden ideology “dissolved” in cinema, advertising, shows, strong precisely because the majority of people in this society are sincerely convinced that there is no ideology in it does not mean that they live in a "free world."
Marcuse, like other Frankfurt people - for example, Fromm, strove to comprehend the essence of the psychology of this "one-dimensional man" and came to the disappointing conclusion that it should be characterized as a fascisoid type of consciousness. Its main features are narrow-mindedness, complacency, hatred of the other, dissimilar, original. Any dissimilarity is immediately included in the ideological discourse, begins to work for it, becomes a commodity, is absorbed - as, for example, homosexuality or pacifism. The USA served as an example of such a state of "hidden fascism", where an aggressive, sanctimonious majority rules for Marcuse and other Frankfurt.
In his younger years, Marcuse lived with hope in a change in the state of affairs, in a revolutionary charge of "outcasts", "lumpen", thrown to the sidelines in the consumer society, in the cleansing power of surrealist, avant-garde art, designed to dispel the propaganda spell, in the effectiveness of the Great Rejection of all bourgeois values ... But then, after the failed student revolutions of the 60s, he increasingly began to see the future in black and gradually moved away from politics and plunged headlong into academic science. However, his analysis of the society of "liberal totalitarianism" has become a classic example of modern critical social theory, with which, perhaps, not everyone agrees, but which is still impossible to simply dismiss as it raises, indeed, "painful" questions and points to real problems ”.
Today Russia again faces a choice: which path of development is preferable - liberalism or totalitarianism?
Having sipped their fill of "wild capitalism" in the 90s (which has retained many of its features even now), many Russians advocate the social orientation of the state, to a return to the times of the USSR.
Liberalism arose in Europe during the Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries as a reaction to the dominance of monarchs and the Church represented by the Pope. Protestantism emerged from Christianity, which gave significantly more individual freedoms and encouraged the initiative of an individual citizen.
Liberalism proclaimed the equality of all citizens before the law, the provision of natural rights given to each person by nature (including the right to life, to personal freedom, to property), the establishment of a free market economy, the responsibility of the government to society and transparency of state power.
Thanks to the adoption of a course towards liberalism and the transition to Protestantism, a rapid development of trade and industry began in a number of European countries: machines with a steam engine appeared, railways began to be built, and shipping developed significantly. First, the Netherlands, and then England, France, Germany, and the United States became major economic and military states.
In Russia, totalitarianism triumphed in the 16th-17th centuries, one of the carriers of which was Ivan the Terrible. Under him, Russia significantly expanded its territory, serfdom was finally established in the state.
Totalitarianism is a form of relationship between society and power, in which political power takes full control of society, forming a single whole with it, completely controlling all aspects of human life.
Any form of opposition is brutally and mercilessly suppressed and suppressed by the state.
Members of society are completely dependent on the ruler, do not have sufficient independence to make a decision, entrusting it to the ruler and thereby relinquishing responsibility. Since the ruler takes it upon himself to provide the members of society with vital resources, this is to some extent beneficial for ordinary members of society.
Hitler directly told his soldiers: "I take full responsibility!"
That is, do not doubt anything, do not think about anything: kill, hang, burn, destroy - you are not responsible for anything!
A very comfortable position for a subordinate!
According to an unwritten agreement between the government and the people, an individual citizen transfers to the government most of his rights, including the right to life, personal freedom, property (and there was also the right of the first night).
At the same time, the authorities are not accountable to the people.
The ideology of a totalitarian society is aimed at justifying the subordination of a person's personal interests to the ruler, declares the unity of society and emphasizes the ruler's tireless concern for the people entrusted to him.
The illusion of complete approval by the people of the actions of the authorities is artificially created and in every possible way heated up. This could be observed during the reign of all Russian autocrats, Stalin, Brezhnev.
Thus, the totalitarian system is inherent in undeveloped societies, in which its members act as some limited, mentally and physically disabled children, and their loving but strict father tightly controls the people, keeps them in check and in a black body and sometimes something of the highest bestows from his bounty. For this paternal concern, the subjects tirelessly admire the wise, caring ruler and tirelessly sing hosanna to him.
So, Nicholas II bestowed the State Duma on the people. But if in tsarist times representatives of the working class were present in the Duma, today only proteges of the oligarchs who live at the expense of the exploitation of the people sit in the State Duma. The main occupation of the Duma members is to invent laws that infringe upon the rights of citizens, and to carry out their own affairs.
In a liberal society, every citizen has the right to independently make decisions and bears full responsibility for them. The government is under the control of civil society in the form of the opposition, independent courts and parliament.
Countries with liberal economies are developing successfully, they have created quite acceptable conditions for the life of ordinary citizens. Anyone has the opportunity to sue a government official or the richest corporation and win the process.
At the same time, totalitarian countries are not susceptible to progress, the economy in these states is backward. A characteristic feature of a totalitarian state is the low standard of living of the population, which is often confirmed by the rationing system. Typical representatives of such countries today are North Korea and Argentina.
Until recently, China was a totalitarian state; the authorities urged to share food for two by three. Today, China is a country with a liberal economy, the largest in the world, and a constantly growing standard of living of the population.
If we consider the table of states by living standards for 2015, then liberal states occupy the leading position in them. The first three places are occupied by Norway, Switzerland and Denmark.
China is in 52nd place, and Russia is in 58th place, significantly behind Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, and even Argentina.
Apparently, Russia is destined to remain a totalitarian state until the end of centuries, since the bulk of the population is still in historical childhood and dreams of having a wise, caring ruler over them, day and night taking care of the people's welfare. Pretty naive reasoning.
As our ancestors said, addressing the Varangians: "Our land is abundant and great, but there is no order in it; come to reign and rule over us."
Nothing has changed in the people's consciousness for a thousand years.
State table of living standards, 2015
http://gotoroad.ru/best/indexlife
Reviews
"and dreams of having a wise, caring ruler over him, day and night taking care of the people's welfare."
Of course, it is much more worthy to dream that the ruler was a fool, a bastard and only cares about his wallet))
Sorry, maybe you didn't mean that, but I prefer to read literally what is written.
As for totalitarianism, if it were in modern Russia, you would not write your articles, but I would not read them. And there would be exactly one party in the country. But for some reason the people do not understand their good and everything is swearing, swearing ... They forgot that if they began to scold the government under Stalin or even Brezhnev, it would all end quickly and unfavorably for the scolder.
Sincerely,
And one more thing: you write that you like the existing order. What can you like when people in Putin's team shamelessly make money, rob the country worth billions of rubles and go unpunished when the government is not accountable to the people?
The authorities face a choice: either continue to chew at the expense of the state or improve the situation of the people. The power chooses the first, as a result, the people become beggars, and even the working person remains poor, and then the retirement age has to be raised.
I have an article "Putin is a mountain for reforms", in which I wrote what the Russians expect from the President. And they will not wait. Hence the protest rallies.
Yesterday's speech by the president was criticized by the media: he only lacquered the predatory, anti-popular essence of the reform. Protest rallies will not subside, they will continue. The meaning of the rallies: stop stealing, give something to the people!
Nabiulina fled to America with the money. According to the media, Putin and Medvedev are also involved in this. THEM - believe ?????
Political, economic and socio-cultural changes taking place in the modern world involve virtually all countries, without exception, in a comprehensive transformation of the existing world order. An important means of realizing this goal in the interests of global management community becomes the approval in the mass consciousness of pseudoscientific concepts, created in order to protect the liberal social order (as supposedly democratic and horizontally controlled), the existing world division of labor and the geopolitical balance of power. And if self-identification of the West, since the 1950s, has been carried out within the framework of successive doctrines post-industrialism(including such modern modifications as the "knowledge society" and "network society"), promising a free and secure future for mankind through the development of technologies, the concept of "totalitarianism" persistently continues to be used to characterize alternative, all the more resisting Western hegemony, regimes, countries, civilizations "(In the meaning of state arbitrariness, violation of human rights, etc.).
In fact, as noted V. Kamenev“There is a big ideological lie hidden behind the totalitarian accusations. If we take this point of view, then the modern West has already surpassed both Hitler and Stalin in the totalitarianism of its propaganda, at least Snowden's exposure of the US intelligence services' electronic surveillance, the revelations of American "economic killers", the practice of secret CIA prisons and legalized ( !) torture of prisoners. " Humanity is witnessing the triumph of aggressive ultra-liberalism, which requires total world domination at any cost, and the transformation of such- totalitarian - liberalism in liberal totalitarianism . No wonder that the phrase “liberal totalitarianism” and synonymous terms (“neototalitarianism”, “informational totalitarianism”, “soft-totalitarianism”, “light-totalitarianism”, etc.) are increasingly becoming stable definitions when characterizing processes and phenomena in the modern world.
In these conditions, the task of a clear conceptual formulation of the concept of "liberal totalitarianism" and the definition of its features, which is possible on the basis of a comparative analytical review and understanding of scientific and philosophical works devoted to this topic, becomes extremely important. Here it is worth pointing out as deserving attention and rather high assessments of several works by contemporary Russian authors who have recently made attempts of this kind. So, R.R. Vakhitov provides an overview of criticism of the manipulative and repressive mechanisms of Western society by a number of Western European left intellectuals of the middle and second half of the XX century. V.A. Tuzova considers views on the problem of liberal totalitarianism as totalitarianism information some contemporary Eastern European and Russian authors. Work K.P. Stozhko and A.V. Chernov as a whole is a review of the bibliography of a critical analysis of the economic model of the new totalitarianism. However, in their conclusions, these authors did not come to a conceptual synthesis, to the allocation of an ordered list of signs of liberal totalitarianism, which becomes the main aim of this article.
Recall that the concept of "totalitarianism" was first introduced into political science discourse by Italian anti-fascist liberals J. Amendola and P. Gobetti in the early 20s. XX century for criticism of the established regime of B. Mussolini. In reply J. Gentile made an attempt to eliminate negativity, an interpretation of totalitarianism, relevant to the ideological demands of Italian fascism. In the next decade, rhetoric was adopted in the leading countries of the "free" world, trying to use any common features of fascism and Soviet socialism to unite them under one banner and thereby moral and ideological discrediting of the latter (it was, in particular, willingly used L. Trotsky, W. Churchill, G. Truman). The next stage is the desire to bring these statements under a solid theoretical foundation, which they tried to do a little earlier - F. von Hayek(fascism and Nazism are not a reaction to socialist tendencies, but their inevitable continuation and development) and K. Popper(opposition of "open" and "closed" society), a little later - H. Arendt(the quintessence of totalitarian rule is terror, as well as ideology that imposes super-meaning, fulfilling the laws of Nature or History), K. Friedrich and Z. Brzezinski (scroll defining signs of a totalitarian society). By the end of the 1950s - mid-1960s, after the publication of works H. Linz, R. Arona and others, the "canonical" concept of totalitarianism already contained a dozen features, and versatility some of them (such as the denial of traditional morality and the complete subordination of the choice of means to the set goals, adherence to expansionism, the all-encompassing control of the ruling party over the armed forces and the proliferation of weapons among the population) cause some doubt or bewilderment.
We emphasize once again that practically all theorists of totalitarianism and their followers assert the undoubted (for them) identity communism and Nazism as anti-democratic regimes existing in opposition to the “free” society of liberalism, “which does not know the unifying goal, ... enjoys the process of life, not the result. Therefore, later attempts to create an empirical theory of totalitarianism, built on the basis of real, verifiable facts, did not have much success, more and more diverged from reality as the political regime of socialist countries was liberalized and, moreover, did not reflect the fundamental differences property, social justice, orientation towards nationalism or internationalism, etc.). Due to its quite definite political orientation, such a concept of totalitarianism turned out to be too simplified, even somewhat primitive, continuing to exist exclusively as an ideological weapon.
True, it is for this reason that under the conditions of the capitulation of the socialist system in the late 1980s - early 1990s. In the post-Soviet information space, the classical concept of totalitarianism was at one time widely used in order to discredit the very principles of social justice and altruism.
Ideas are typical examples. K.S. Hajiyeva, which, separating totalitarianism from absolutism, authoritarianism, despotism as a phenomenon that belongs exclusively to the XX century, produced its simple typology on right(fascism and national socialism) and left(communism). The goal of totalitarianism, in his opinion, is not only the forced transformation of all types of social relations and institutions, destruction of social stratification(italics of the author of the article), the destruction of tradition, but also in the purposeful change of human existence itself, "complete alteration, transformation of a person in accordance with ideological attitudes", the constitution of a new type of person, atomization and fragmentation of society. Terror is viewed by Hajiyev as an essential characteristic of totalitarianism, and is used not only for destruction and intimidation, but also as an everyday tool for controlling the masses.
In the main with K.S. Gadzhiev agree A.G. Tauberger, claiming, however, to search for objective laws, interpreting totalitarianism as "a method of mobilizing the masses, a specific mobilization response to a sharply crisis situation", which inevitably follows from the tasks of "catch-up modernization". In his opinion, "the main essential feature of totalitarianism is the desire to create a" new man "with a change in his inner nature so that he equates the interests of society (state) with his personal interests" the authorities of the media are secondary elements of totalitarianism.
This picture of models of social structure is reasonably criticized on the basis of comparison with empirical reality. And here it turns out that O. Huxley deduced his "brave new world" from the capitalist liberal democracy of his day, and the closed society described by K. Popper (as well as, say, J. Orwell's dystopia) is just a cast of the dark sides the very same Western civilization. Liberalism today is an ideology that requires any state to serve not its people, but global monopolies. The United States, as a world geopolitical entity, has declared its systemic "moral" monopoly on truth, in which there is absolutely no hint of the possibility of the existence of other systems, ideologies and projects. The strategy of action proposed by the idea of globalization is a priori considered absolute and superior to any alternative. From now on, topics such as the market or the pursuit of private interests appear as an expression of not even the best, but the only possible lifestyle. The market acquires a sacred character (despite the fact that in practice it has long turned into a fiction), the hierarchy of consumerism is likened to a divine hierarchy.
In a situation where more and more new signs of totalitarianism are clearly revealed in the social life of precisely the leading states of the Western world (according to M.G. Delyagina, "... modern liberalism is fascism today, fascism is not industrial, but informational era"), its "non-classical" versions acquire actual sound.
As noted by R.R. Vakhitov, the phenomenon of this “soft, liberal totalitarianism” has been deeply studied in the works of the “new left”, who sought to push the boundaries of classical Marxism by synthesizing its humanistic content with other philosophical trends of modern times - psychoanalysis, structuralism, existentialism and revealed the very mechanism of action of capitalist ideology.
At the origins of this trend in understanding the phenomenon of totalitarianism is A. Gramsci, borrowing the term "hegemony" from Russian Marxism, but filling it with new content. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie is carried out with the help of a number of institutions - schools, trade unions, parties, associations, which gradually inspire the masses with completely definite ideas that represent its rule as a "natural, unshakable order of things." Moreover, a special social group nurtured by the ruling elite - bourgeois intellectuals - acts as a conductor of such ideas, the impact of which is especially great due to the fact that it is largely composed of people from the people. The main means of hegemony is the ideology created by such intellectuals and carried out by them to the masses, which is expressed in a variety of forms - from direct political appeals to half-hints contained in seemingly "apolitical" works of literature or in school curricula. Regardless of this, they are all aimed at forming a certain - beneficial to the hegemon - a way of thinking.
A huge role in expanding the view on the subject of totalitarianism belongs to Frankfurt School.
Already representatives of her "older" generation - T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer - put forward the thesis about the connection between scientific rationality and political totalitarianism, the development of which led them to the conclusion that fascism is a kind of dialectical fruit of the Enlightenment paradigm: hypertrophy rational led to self-disclosure in this rationality of its irrational, mythological nature. Based on this thesis G. Marcuse- a representative of the "younger" generation of Frankfurt - believed that from the thesis: "we must completely subjugate nature" directly follows the thesis: "we must learn to manage society and man", in other words, technology cannot be neutral, and classical mechanics and a steam engine Auschwitz is born. The ideal of a totalitarian project is a machine society where people act as cogs. Nothing of the kind could have occurred to a person of antiquity or the Middle Ages, when the organic understanding of the cosmos and society prevailed. The process of society's transition to totalitarianism accelerated during the First World War - it was then that the formation of mechanisms of social control based on scientific rationality began (before that, the government did not set itself the goal of methodically subjugating the minds and will of all citizens and was satisfied with the necessary, episodic political and ideological violence ).
The meaning of the liberal variety of totalitarianism is focused by G. Marcuse in the following statement: "In a developed industrial civilization, a comfortable, moderate, democratic lack of freedom reigns, evidence of technological progress." The most powerful information and technical mechanisms have been created to suppress skepticism and protest in their very embryos (television, shows, advertising, lottery, etc.). The world of “one-dimensional people” is “a society without opposition”, since under the dominance of a loyal “happy Consciousness” satisfied with controlled comfort, lulled with false freedom and unwilling to use even the critical institutions available to it, there are almost no people who can think independently. Everywhere the cult of unification reigns - they buy those goods that are advertised, repeat those thoughts that are recognized as "progressive". The assortment of this society is large, but at the same time it is the poorest, since it cannot offer a person anything but goods. The freedom that this society is so proud of is illusory; it is the freedom to choose between goods of approximately the same quality. At the same time, the ruling elite has the most powerful mechanisms of suppression, hidden ideology, strong precisely because the majority of people in this society are sincerely convinced that there is no ideology in it, that they live in a "free world."
The doctrine is also directly related to the formation of the theory of liberal totalitarianism. G. Deborah about modern capitalism as the "Society of the Spectacle". The play is the apogee of the capitalist alienation discovered by K. Mark (where a person loses not material goods, as in economic exploitation, but himself, his creative essence, becoming a passive, obedient object of manipulation, a thing, a commodity) - everything has turned - political debates in parliament, terrorist acts, sale of discounted goods. A specially edited and thought-out performance with its own constant plots (plane crashes, terrorist attacks, sexual adventures of "stars", etc.) imperiously invades life, deforms it, filling it with its meanings, i.e. ideology and begins to pass itself off as life itself. As a result, it becomes impossible to discern where the Performance ends and reality begins, for the performance becomes so total that even those who create it begin to believe in it.
Later, in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, G. Debord prophetically advanced the idea that the collapse of the USSR and the monopoly of the market would lead to the triumph of a new type of performance - integrated, which will combine the dictates of consumption and a strong repressive apparatus.
I. Wallerstein already after the capitulation of the socialist system, he not only substantiated the absence of opposition between totalitarian ideologies, on the one hand, and liberalism, on the other, but also questioned the traditional presentation of the post-war history of the 20th century. as stories of the bipolar world. The confrontation between socialism and liberalism, according to Wallerstein, was part of a consensual political game in the interests of global world politics and a global liberal project, the elements of which they were: "There was only one true ideology - liberalism, which found its manifestations in three main guises." The collapse of socialism ultimately results in a deep crisis of liberalism, which is rapidly losing its legitimacy.
A direct link between liberalism and totalitarianism establishes T. Sunich... He notes that by placing people exclusively in economic dependence on each other and destroying the more traditional ties of kinship and patriotism, modern liberalism will inevitably lead to the creation of a society where in difficult times everyone will seek to outbid, outwit and bypass others, thus clearing the field for "terror of all against all" and paving the way for the emergence of new totalitarian systems.
Z. Vidoevich already states the onset of liberal totalitarianism in the modern world, due to the lack of a new philosophy of life in the Western world, since “the satiety of things and the exhaustion of the civilizational paradigm as an endless accumulation of objects and power make the Western project essentially unrealistic in a historical perspective, since it cannot offer anything - something essentially new. " Totalitarianism is not a stochastic social phenomenon, but is "a constantly present tendency in Western civilization and an inevitable consequence of the degeneration of liberal democracy." The sources of liberal (or postmodern, in the terminology of Z. Vidoevich himself) totalitarianism are rooted in the political economy of modern capitalism, based on the global role of multinational companies striving to act as de facto planetary power, planetary violence and cutting edge technologies. The latter provide unlimited possibilities for manipulating the mass consciousness (and subconsciousness); at the same time, there is a constant methodological improvement of manipulations. At the same time, atomized individuals find themselves in the world of consumerism and "replication and association in a network of pseudo-reality, or, in postmodern language," simulacrum ". In other words, modern totalitarianism has the property of "ideological self-distortion of its own essence."
The systemic crisis experienced by post-Soviet Russia, the apparent discrepancy between the explanatory concepts of liberal-globalism and the existing reality contributed to the awareness of the presence of a dominant ideology and aggressive strategy of the West, at least by a part of the scientific-philosophical community of post-Soviet Russia.
A powerful impetus was the proliferation of later works A.A. Zinovieva, in which very clearly and frankly explained the mechanisms of functioning, expansion and stability of Western civilization in modern and modern times. The thinker constantly emphasized that the political stability of Western societies over the past centuries is ensured not by the election of representative power and a multi-party system, but by the system of institutions "Superstates"... The superstate forms an overgrown apparatus of police, courts, prisons, and most importantly - special services, secret societies, elite clubs, transnational corporations, which in fact are not controlled by society in any way, in some cases are not at all legalized in law, but completely control the visible power, possessing unlimited financial resources, ideological cohesion, discipline, the widest choice of means and forms of repressive suppression and elimination of opponents of the global world order.
Among domestic researchers of theory and practice totalitarian economy can be called S.N. Baburin, V.M. Mezhueva, A.S. Panarina, L.M. Martsev etc. Modern totalitarianism, according to representatives economic discrimination theory, may well get along with the market economy, mimic in the conditions of "representative democracy", acquire the form of ochlocracy and bureaucracy. It is worth making a judgment R.L. Livshitsa that the market dictatorship has all the signs of totalitarianism and uses the most modern technologies: juvenile justice, special propaganda, manipulation of consciousness. The characteristic features of a market dictatorship are as follows: market relations cover all spheres of human life, incl. private, turning the person himself into a commodity; market institutions "work" under the strict control of the state, creating only the appearance of freedom of economic activity; market principles operate only during a favorable market environment, but fully or partially cease to operate in a crisis (when severe restrictions on the part of the state become permissible). At the same time, in the conditions of a discriminatory economy (separation from the production of material goods and knowledge in favor of the economy of services), all spiritual values are artificially devalued, which also receive a lower public status. Instead of spiritual benefits, they are relegated to the level of simple services: services for education, research, health care, etc.
V.P. Pugachev in the concept of information and financial totalitarianism formulated by him, he distinguishes two combined groups of methods of influencing human behavior: 1) information based on the possibilities of total control over a person with the help of modern satellite, computer, PR-technologies; 2) economic used by the state-controlled financial and political oligarchy. More opportunities, according to the political scientist, undoubtedly belong to information methods as more effective, in comparison with which the primitiveness of the methods of classical totalitarian regimes based on direct external violence becomes obvious. Moreover, modern methods of social control are often borrowed from other sciences, for example, the cybernetic trigger method of management, which involves the management of the social system “... through control only over its key points, which in relation to modern society are primarily financial resources, electronic media, the most influential elites and organized groups ”. The author also refers to the most important characteristics of information and financial totalitarianism as the destruction of traditional axiological attitudes, the formation of a mass type of personality, manipulation of consciousness and behavior.
The existential concept of the nature of totalitarianism V.Yu. Darensky is built on the basis of the following definition: "Totalitarianism is a type of socio-economic, political and cultural structure of society, in which the power holders try to unify people's lives as much as possible in accordance with a certain ideological and ideological doctrine by maximizing influence on the formation of personality." The researcher does not attribute repression to the necessary attributes of totalitarianism, since its essence lies in the self-destruction of a person, the erection of the state into a pseudo-absolute, and supposing oneself to be able to control the foundations of human life. Repressions of totalitarianism are due to people's resistance to self-destruction, but in the absence of resistance, they are unnecessary. Therefore, modern totalitarianism is “the totalitarianism of a consumer society and total manipulation of consciousness” under the guise of the ideology of liberalism.
A.G. Dugin, defining modern Western society as a "third totalitarianism", writes the following: "Liberalism is totalitarian in a special way. Instead of direct physical reprisals against dissidents, he resorts to the tactics of "soft strangulation", a gradual shift to the outskirts of society of dissidents and opponents, to economic blackmail, and so on. ... the dominant ideology of the West (liberalism) actively fights against alternative political and ideological projects, but uses more subtle, softer, more refined methods to achieve its goals than the previously known forms of totalitarianism. Liberal totalitarianism is not brutal, but veiled, illusory, invisible. However, this makes him no less cruel. " Dugin notes that the very fact of promoting the individual as the highest value and measure of things is a projection of society, that is, a form of totalitarian influence, ideological induction. The individual is a social concept, the person himself learns that he is – a private person only from a society, and from one where liberal ideology dominates. Therefore, liberalism is a totalitarian ideology that insists, with the help of classical methods of totalitarian propaganda, that the individual is the supreme authority. Liberal society, opposing itself to the mass societies of socialism and fascism, in turn, remains mass and standardized. The more a person strives to be not ordinary in the context of liberal paradigms, the more like others he becomes.
At the same time, A.G. Dugin (like Z. Vidoevich) was able to sense the complex connection between the ideology of liberal totalitarianism and postmodern discourse. Let the postmodern philosophers criticize the claims of Western civilization for democracy, equality and tolerance, prove that all this – overlooked forms of control and repressive suppression of the Other. In essence, postmodernity opens up as a new course of the strategy of modernity, which has realized the ineffectiveness of fighting tradition through its direct rejection, as its result. Hence the notion of "the end of history" and similar concepts of optimistic liberals who identified postmodernity with the final victory of their ideals.
A.V. Shchipkov, within the framework of criticism of the classical theory of two totalitarianisms as opponents of liberal democracy, and assertions about the existence of only one totalitarian regime – liberal (the components of which are fascism and communism), destroying traditional Christian society, turns to the analysis of the moral and ethical foundations of liberalism and fascism. Claiming their complete identity, he directly reveals at least two common imperative: 1) total competition, that is, natural selection transferred from the animal world to human society; 2) a split world, divided into "higher" and "lower" (not having human rights), easily excluding entire peoples, races, cultures from the concept of human, reasonable, civilized (at different times it could be Irish, Negroes, Asians, Slavs in general, Russians, etc.), the ongoing construction of identity according to the “we – they” principle.
Comprehension of the totalitarian evolution of liberalism, which has now turned into an aggressive dogmatism that does not recognize any alternatives, leads to the conclusion that it has never been established as an ideology, but has turned into a broad way to "liberate" the individual from collective identity: first from religious and estate-corporate, then from state, national-ethnic, family, now - from gender, and in the short term - from genetic. In this - spiritual and physical - dehumanizing of each individual and is the ultimate goal of the strategy of the collective superstate. The explanation of the motives for the radical transformation of liberalism is possible within the framework of the theory of anti-morality.
The spread and evolution of anti-moral attitudes as a whole was carried out within the framework of double doctrine (some postulates – for the "laymen", others – for "dedicated" and "chosen"), through speculation in the concepts of "humanism", "freedom", "reason", "democracy", "progress", etc. Along with focusing only on the negative sides and manifestations of tradition, its interpretation exclusively as a prejudice, and novelty as progress and truth, the main inversion was the replacement of the concepts of “good” and “freedom” in the hierarchy of values, followed by a break in their connection (which is quite correlates with the basic commandment of Satanism: "Nothing can be prohibited and everything is allowed"). The superstate as a collective subject-carrier of anti-morality makes a hierarchical selection of employees according to the degree of adherence to anti-values and introduces "initiates" into the spheres of legal politics and management, mass media, etc.
What antimorality as meta-ideology passes off as rationality is only external logic, its form. According to the remark K. Castoriadis, “In the syllogisms of the modern world, the premises borrow their content from the imaginary. And the predominance of syllogism as such, the obsession with "rationality" separated from everything else, form the imaginary of the second order. The pseudo rationality of the modern world is one of the historical forms of the imaginary. It is arbitrary in its ultimate goals, since the latter are not based on reasonable grounds. " It is not for nothing that throughout the last century in literature and art the topic of mental disorder has been eagerly exploited, insanity is being elevated to a cult, since the sick consciousness perceives and creates a picture of not the true world, but a parallel reality. In this situation, it is correct to speak of a totalitarian schizophrenic logic.
The creation of the imaginary is achieved through pseudoscience ... Anti-moral today systematically resorts to a pseudo-reality constructed by pseudoscience in order to smooth out, mask cynicism and nihilism in some cases, and in others to present them as something natural, objective, the only possible one.
So, techno-utopian projects within the so-called. NBICS-convergence is called upon, first of all, to empirically substantiate the “naturalness” of antimoral and antihuman doctrines of trans- and posthumanism; the concept of gender construction is directly related to the value nihilism of postmodernism; the libertarian approach in legal theory and monetarism in economic theory serve the ideology of social Darwinism and anarcho-capitalism.
Thus, “mirroring” the signs of totalitarianism, which during the years of the Cold War, trying to identify Nazi Germany and the USSR, singled out the classics of the totalitarian school, taking into account the “antidemo- who directly proves the pseudo- and antidemocratic nature of the entire socio-political system of the "free world": L. Feld, J. Chiesa, A. D. Bogaturov, V.L. Avagyan, V.V. Sorokin S.G. Kara-Murza), the following characteristic signs the upcoming liberal totalitarianism:
Literature
- VAllerstine I. After liberalism. Moscow: Editornaya URSS, 2003.256 p.
- Vakhitov R.R. Liberal totalitarianism: repressive mechanisms of modern Western society and their critical analysis in foreign philosophy of the twentieth century. URL: http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_20.htm (date of access: 21.07.2017).
- Vidoevich Z. Liberal totalitarianism // Sociological research. 2007. No. 12. S. 39-49.
- Gadzhiev K.S. Totalitarianism as a phenomenon of the XX century // Problems of Philosophy. 1993. No. 2. S. 3-25.
- Golovatenko A.Yu. Totalitarianism of the XX century. Moscow: Shkola-press, 1992.96 p.
- Gramsci A. The theory of hegemony. URL: http://politiko.ua/blogpost67770 (date of access: 25.07.2017).
- Darensky V.Yu. Totalitarianism as an existential phenomenon // Humanitarian vector. 2014. No. 3 (39). Pp. 122-129.
- Debord G.
Afterword to the commemoration
For all my almost animal disgust for the Russian liberals, I sometimes feel a little sorry for them.
Not only that all this huge political machine of the state, created with their active participation, acting not according to the principle of the rule of law, but proceeding from political expediency, suddenly began to work against them, so also the democracy they cherished turned against its supporters.
It happens in life that for some time you forget about your principles, even to some extent give up on them - sometimes for the sake of reaching agreement and peace, and at times, on the contrary, to rally forces in the fight against a common enemy. But there comes a moment when it becomes unbearable to act like that, and the knot that binds the incompatible breaks. And after that you feel not the bitterness of loss, but liberation from the fetters that previously bound you.
The assessment of the events of October 1993 is such a litmus test, checking who is a friend, who is an enemy, and who is like that.
The 20th anniversary of the shooting down of Russian democracy passed on pro-Kremlin TV channels extremely calmly (and joyfully). If earlier, especially in the 90s blessed by the liberals, any TV program about those events was filled with poisonous anger towards the unfinished red-brown scoops, and the latter, even if they were invited to the studio, it was only as a decoration, then 20 years later the picture changed. First!
I try not to watch the zombie box, so I can't pretend to have a comprehensive assessment of all the materials released on the air, but what I was able to see was in the nature of an attempt to consider what happened in October 1993 calmly and as objectively as possible.
The documentary film "White House, Black Smoke" by Vladimir Chernyshev, shown on October 3 on NTV, is indicative in this regard. For the first time, probably, on the air of the federal channel it was openly said that not a single one who died in those days was killed from weapons in the White House, that the special forces soldiers who died in Ostankino could not have been killed by shots from the street, that a breakthrough the police cordon on October 3, 1993 looked like a planned provocation that Yeltsin in his televised address immediately after the shooting of parliament lied from start to finish ...
And all this after 20 years of aggressive lies about the red-brown rebellion and the attempt at communist revenge.
Apparently, the new growth of journalists is tired of being content with liberal stereotypes imposed 20 years ago, which in fact turned out to be completely false. And it is quite natural for the sake of objectivity to turn to the primary sources - the direct participants in the defense of the House of Soviets: deputies or ordinary defenders - it does not matter.
After all, no matter how we spit today at the word "democracy", the country has lived for at least 22 years in the regime of proclaiming the priority of democratic values. And freedom of speech as well. And freedom is one for all. And for the liberals, and for the reddish-brown. Who is right, let the viewer, the reader, the listener judge. And flashed on TV screens Baburin and Alksnis, Konstantinov and Shurygin. Not to mention Rutskoy and Khasbulatov, without whose participation not a single plot on this topic could do. And this is just the territory of occupation - TV broadcast. And what can we say about the Internet - the territory of freedom.
Surprisingly, this very principle of the universality of freedom has always been hated by Russian liberals, both then and now. Protect us from the damned Constitution (Akhedzhakova, 1993), they missed Hitler with their democracy (Satarov, 1996), no freedom for the enemies of freedom (Sobchak, 2013).
Disgusting, although at the same time it was fun to read and listen to all these cries of liberals on their media territory. A little more, and they will begin to call for an end to this whole seeming red-brown renaissance of the fiercely hated Putin, whose pardon after the overthrow they are already considering on certain conditions (Piontkovsky).
But Putin said nothing. And he did the right thing. Sometimes it is better to be silent than to speak. For example, at a commemoration. Although if we consider that the limits of freedom of speech in our country are determined by the will of one person who is responsible for everything, then it can be assumed that in the environment of this person, and maybe in his head, the thought has matured that it is necessary to disown Yeltsin's crimes. But at the same time, continue the policy started under his predecessor. After all, privatization, which became a stumbling block between the Supreme Soviet and Yeltsin and ultimately led to the shedding of blood in October 1993, is developing today according to the Yeltsin-Chubais scenario, and attempts to revise it are unacceptable, as the national leader has publicly said more than once. It seems that the sheep (the Russian population) are safe, and the wolves (the ruling bureaucratic-oligarchic clan) are full. But the wolves want more and more, and the sheep also want to live well and calmly, without looking back at the wolf's teeth. Throwing between these two subjects can lead Putin straight to another Ipatyev house. Because the communist fascism of Barkashov-Makashov-Anpilov was (and remains) just a liberal bogey (after all, neither one nor the other, nor the third were in power, and even with a hypothetical victory of the Supreme Soviet would not be at the helm), but the methods aggressive liberalism is well known - crush the reptile that prevents us from living freely.
Once again I am convinced that the Russian liberals do not need true democracy. That they are able to impose their totalitarian ideology not in a competitive political struggle, but only relying on the state apparatus of violence, to which they appeal even today, being in opposition to this state, as it were.
It would be nice for today's sincere supporters of the charming and unsullied Alexei Navalny to take a closer look at his figure. Are the well-known pork snouts, soiled in burning and blood, crawling out from behind his back? Will they not present us with such "democracy", in comparison with which the current power of crooks and thieves will seem to us only a mild form of domestic violence?
