Simple and Primitive

Speaking at the November Congress of the Russian Union of Rectors, President Vladimir Putin answered a question about international rankings for universities, and where Russian institutions of higher education fall in those rankings: “Yes, it is all absolutely simple and primitive,” he said. “These ratings are one of the tools for competitive struggle on the market for educational services. Who would use this tool to harm themselves and benefit us?”

What is interesting about this utterance is the peculiar understanding of the term “competitive struggle.” Normally, a competitive struggle surmises that participants perform similar work and that the one who does it better wins. Yet what is described here is not competition but the application of administrative fiat: It is within my power to manipulate ratings (with impunity) in order to benefit my (supposedly bad) institution, and so I do.

Where does this surprising understanding of competition – not as rivalry between equals, but as something obviously criminal – come from? From here:

“Under such capitalism, competition means the incredibly brutal suppression of the enterprise, energy and bold initiative of the mass of the population, of its overwhelming majority, of ninety-nine out of every hundred toilers; it also means that competition is replaced by financial fraud, nepotism, servility to the upper rungs of the social ladder.”

This is from Lenin’s “How to Organize Competition” (December 1917), in which he explains how disreputable bourgeois collusion ought to be replaced by socialist competitiveness, revealing the creative potential of the working class.*

The generation that is presently in power – those 50 and over – is the most Soviet of any generation raised after 1917. They were born after the Second World War, which severed all memory of Russia as it had once been, killing off nearly anyone who could still recall the pre-Bolshevik era. They also received the full course of ideological indoctrination, excelling as little Octobrists, Pioneers, Komsomols and Communists. They were taught Marxist-Leninist philosophy and political economy at university, and the most energetic and capable of them also had to take it up in their post-graduate studies.

Sadly, it’s not only what we agree with that influences our worldview. A brain infected with the spores of Marxist-Leninism is not necessarily inclined to leftist politics, building socialism worldwide, or even resurrecting the USSR. Casting off your faith in the power of socialist competition can be rather easy, even if it once held you in its sway. But this does eradicate the certain knowledge that bourgeois competition is financial swindling, that the bourgeois courts serve the interests of the ruling classes, that the press is bought and paid for, that money is all powerful, and that there is no crime capital would not commit for a profit of 300 percent.

Russia’s reformers of the 1990s felt certain that the economy’s transition “onto market rails” would automatically produce a democratic political system, because their minds contained that important Marxist thesis about “the basis and the superstructure,” whereby the economic system (the basis), predetermined the political system (the superstructure).

When the state media-manager explains to the public that the owner of a media holding company has every right to fire any journalist he pleases, because ownership conveys rights and the law is a formality, he fancies that he is revealing a dire but honest truth about the market. In fact, his conception of a market economy is borrowed from theses he learned en route to defending his doctoral candidacy in philosophy.

The main evil of this Marxist-Leninist infected worldview is not that it is immoral, but that it is primitive. A capitalist is not restrained from committing “any crime” for 100 or even 300 percent profit because of his personal moral scruples, but because profit does not exist in a vacuum. Profit exists in a society – a society that does not encourage criminal behavior. And most people instinctively understand that it is more profitable to cooperate with one another than to be a sociopath.

The mystical view of the universe as a “zero-sum game,” where interchangeable actors are engaged in an eternal battle over an immutable resource pie, is derived from another vulgar Marxian principle. This one is about international competition between imperialist powers (and competition, as you’ll recall, is when I whack someone over the head with a stick and get off scot-free). Thus, it does not occur to post-Soviet geopoliticians that a “resource” – any resource – is not a God-given external good, but a product of human labor. Someone also forgot to tell them that Social Darwinism and other variations of the nineteenth-century British political economy are no longer the cutting-edge of modern scientific thought.

The Soviet interpretation of Marxist philosophy painted a gloomy picture of the world, where dirt and blood oozed from every pore of nascent capital, where man exploited man, and where there was no Justice, Truth or Virtue. It was a gloomy picture, but it was redeemed by the prospect of Communism’s inevitable victory, a victory that would consign all these horrors forever to the past. And while this victory was spoken of in eschatological tones – as if of a Second Coming – the Soviet religion was nonetheless progressive: it preached the perfecting of mankind on its path from a primitive society to the triumph of communist labor. When, by the end of the 1980s, all of this rot became rather difficult to believe, post-Soviet citizens easily rejected the positive half of the theory (about the bright communist future). Problem is, the negative part (about the inherent evils of capitalism) was never questioned.

At one time there were many jokes that, in post-Soviet Russia they built capitalism as if mimicking the cartoons in Krokodil, with the fat capitalist in a stovepipe hat, his euphemistic cigar, fan of dollar bills, cocktails, can-can girls and, in the foreground, a haggard laborer lacking medical care, because they had closed the medical clinic in the mining village. But the worst part of this cartoon made real is that it is a story that cannot have a happy ending.

What sort of progress can there be in a zero-sum universe, where it is “us or them”? None whatsoever.

And yet, Russia’s ruling class clings to some very zero-sum beliefs: The internet, as Putin once famously said, arose as a CIA project and thus it continues to develop and will always be a CIA project. States will battle eternally over hydrocarbons, internal discontent will only ever be incited from without, the law is a mere formality, regulations a piece of paper, and Justice does not exist.

The teachings of Marx are omnipotent for those who choose to believe in them.

*Notably, toward the end of this work, Lenin recommended administrative measures that later became infamous: “the cleansing of the Russian land of any harmful insects, swindler-fleas, wealthy bugs and so on and so on. In one place, they should imprison a dozen wealthy people... in a fourth place, one out of every ten people guilty of parasitism should be executed on the spot...”

This article was originally printed in Vedomosti, in Russian. It was translated in collaboration with the author.