The falsification of world History

All talk of the progress of capitalism is really only confirmed by the example of the 15-25% of the world's central population and its enclaves on the periphery. The 75-85% of the population is excluded from this progress, which is an immanent feature of the capitalist system as a zero-sum game: the progress of the minority is at the expense and expense of the majority. The universal (for all) progress of capitalism is therefore a myth. The progress of capitalism is progress for the minority, represented as material and spiritual progress for all or for the majority. Depending on the historical period of the world economy, this minority may be between 15 and 25 per cent.

All systems are based on hierarchies and privileges. The basic bourgeoisie has declared that its hierarchies and privileges are the best and has tried to justify them scientifically and ideologically with the notion of “progress”. Scientific veracity plays a huge, if not decisive, role in this essentially ideological justification, since according to both positive progressive ideologies, science works with objective truths, i.e. outside the realm of social interests. In reality, this is not the case. In addition to the rational knowledge of objective truth, science and scientific culture perform a social function. Science, including the science of society, is a functional element of the capitalist system, working to strengthen it, to rationalize and theoretically justify the domination of privileged groups. To some, this language and these formulations will seem Marxist, leftist. But this is not Marxism, it is reality. Don't you agree? Try challenging it. Meanwhile - to complete this story - a quote from Wallerstein.

Scientific culture “represented more than mere rationalization. It was a form of socialization of various elements that acted as frameworks for all the institutional structures necessary for capitalism. As a common and unified language of the cadres, but not of the workers, it also became a means of class cohesion for the upper stratum, limiting the prospects or degree of rebellion of cadres who might have succumbed to this temptation. Moreover, it was a flexible mechanism for the reproduction of such cadres. Scientific culture put itself at the service of a concept known today as ‘meritocracy’ and in the past as ‘la’ sagriere ouverte aux talents'. This culture created a structure within which individual mobility was possible, but in a way that did not threaten the hierarchical distribution of labour. On the contrary, meritocracy reinforced the hierarchy. Finally, meritocracy as a process (operation) and scientific culture as an ideology created a veil that prevented us from grasping the real workings of historical capitalism”.

The myth of universal progress associated with capitalism, of the progressive and revolutionary transition from feudalism to capitalism, of the development of production as a precondition for this transition, of bourgeois revolutions as its means, are precisely these veils, whether in Marxist or liberal form. (In this case, they are similar in many respects, since, unfortunately, Marx uncritically borrowed the ideas of evolutionary development and bourgeois revolution from liberalism, constructing an ideological and theoretical ‘Trojan horse’ in his theory). Let us examine this myth in more detail, especially since many of its elements are used today to justify the progressivism of the “wonderful new world” of globalization.

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First, a few words on the Marxian (and Marxist) scheme of the progressive transition from feudalism to capitalism, from one formation to another. According to Marx, this transition took place when the relations of production outgrew the old productive forces and required for their normal functioning new appropriate relations of production, a new socio-economic formation. Revolution was the means to establish this correspondence. If Marx were right, the level of development of the productive forces of early capitalism should have exceeded the corresponding level of late feudalism, and the level of development of the productive forces of early feudalism the corresponding level of late slavery. In historical reality, the case is exactly the opposite.

Early feudal society shows an obvious decline compared to late feudal society in terms of the development of productive forces and trade. The level of agriculture of the second century of modernity was only reached almost a thousand years later. The same applies to late feudalism and early capitalism. The level of agriculture of the 12th-13th centuries, as E. Leroy Ladurie, was only restored at the turn of the 17th-18th centuries. The productivity of the early manufactures was lower than that of the cottage industry. The crisis and demise of the systems should not be explained by the worsening of the contradiction that forms the system (in Marx's terms, between productive forces and production relations), but, on the contrary, by the development and attenuation of this contradiction.

As a rule, the emergence of fundamentally new forms - whether social, biological, technical or scientific-theoretical - first entails a subsidence, sometimes quite serious, from the existing ones. The first automobiles were inferior in speed to horses, the first manufactures to workshops, and the ancestors of human beings to many representatives of the animal world. However, in the design principle of the automobile, there was a potential for development that the horse did not have. This is the potential for progressive development of the system. In the beginning, however, it exists only as a design principle, not as an established substance or system. In terms of substance and system, the new form is a regression. And, as a rule, it is forced, not from a good life, a reaction to a crisis.

As A. Gurevich in 1970, the reasons for the transition to feudalism in Western Europe lay not in qualitative changes in the field of production, but in the crisis of the social system of the barbarians, caused by the collision with the Roman social system. Feudalism was one of the successful attempts to escape from social hell. ‘Is it possible to escape from hell? Sometimes yes, but never alone, never without accepting a rigid dependence on another person. It is necessary to join one or another social organization… or to create one - with its own laws, to create essentially a counter-society,' wrote F. Braudel. (This was about how in the 15th-18th centuries groups and individuals escaped from the social hell, from the bifurcation point of the crisis of late feudalism, from post-feudalism). In fact, in that branch of macro-historical development, the European, subjective one, in which there was a constant transition from one system to another (sociosystemic transgression) in the form of a great social revolution, the new society or its prototype, be it a pre-polis, an early Christian community, a brotherhood in arms or a primitive manufacture, was regressive in terms of an indicator such as the development of material productive forces. What was progressive was the recombination of the elements of the social structure and the emergence of a new historical subject, a new type of man and his organization, creating a new system. That is just how it is - from subject to system, not vice versa: there is no direct filiation of one system from another.

Therefore, every systemic change comprises regression (to a greater extent) and progress (to a lesser extent). Progress and regression are different aspects of transgression. Let us remember this term, which neutrally captures the fact of systemic change, its, as Hegel would say, “pure being”. It is transgression that one usually tries to pass off as progress, thus demonstrating that the transition from one social order to another is a legitimate and justified transition to a higher stage of development that benefits the majority. In reality, only a certain minority benefits from the change in the social order.

A classic example of this is the interpretation of the emergence of capitalism. We should dwell on it in more detail, because this is where many, if not all, of the secrets and mysteries of capitalism lie, including the secret of its “death of the horse”. What image of the age of the 15th-17th centuries has been drawn by Marxists and liberals since the mid-19th century?

Once upon a time, there were evil lords, lazy monks, oppressed peasants and enterprising bourgeoisie - merchants and artisans. They lived in a gloomy medieval society, with a subsistence economy and Church rule, in almost total ignorance. But fortunately for them, an advanced section of the bourgeoisie (the future bourgeoisie) rose up to fight against the existing system and the Catholic Church. First it revived antiquity, then early Christianity. In the course of the bourgeois revolutions, sometimes in alliance with the monarchy and often also in struggle with it, it overcame the feudal lords and created capitalism, a much more progressive system than feudalism.

Almost everything here is false and falsified. Feudal society was certainly not perfect. However, it was by no means a stagnant society. The studies of the last 30-40 years, dedicated to the Middle Ages, refute the interpretation of feudal society as a period of triumph of the natural sector and present a completely different picture of the time than the one to which textbooks have accustomed us. This alternative picture is reproduced in the most concise manner in Wallerstein's work.

At the beginning of the 14th century, Western Europe reached a very low level of economic development. The “Black Death” further aggravated the situation, strengthening the sociable position of the peasant and the citizen vis-à-vis the hereditary lord. The lords' attempt to reverse this trend led to the anti-feudal revolution of 1380-1382, which Marxists and liberals, who only recognize bourgeois and socialist revolutions, divided into three distinct rebellions: Wat Tyler, White Caps and Chompies. At the same time, the crisis of the Catholic Church manifested itself.

As a result, the hereditary lords were faced with the grim prospect of a society in which they would be members of a large feudal (post-feudal) agrarian middle class living under conditions of increasing political decentralization. In other words, they were in danger of losing their privileged position. And here the “zoosocial” instinct of the class worked, objectively demanding the dismantling of feudalism ‘from above’ before it was “dismantled” (swept away) “from below”.

Smoothly and imperceptibly for the participants themselves, the social battles for the rewards of late feudalism - the Cabochiens, the Burgundians and the crown in France, the “scarlet” and “white” rose in England - turned into struggles for the exit from feudalism. Already in the mid-15th century, we see two competing variant-flows of dismantling feudalism – “from below” and “from above”. Sometimes, however, they mixed for some time (a classic example is the so-called Peasants' War in Germany in the early 16th century, less obvious the religious wars in France in the second half of the 16th century). The main agent of the “top-down” variant was the “new monarchies” of the type of those of Louis XI in France and Henry VII in England.

At the end of the 15th century America was discovered, the world market began to form, a new international division of labour took shape. A military revolution takes place, which, together with the ‘new monarchical power’ at the centre and the wealth overseas, clearly changes the bargaining position in favour of the former elders. Many of them are now connected to the world market through traders and can intensify their exploitation. A by-product (initially a recessive mutation) of all these processes was the genesis of capitalism. By the mid-17th century, the great social revolution, the unprecedented social drama of 1453-1648, which even today only boils down to the genesis of capitalism, had come to an end. Its final agreements were the Thirty Years' War, the English Revolution (tragedy) and the Fronde in France (farce).

The obvious result of the revolution was the formation of the historical subject that then created the capitalist system, namely the “baroque monarchy” mythologized by 19th century historians as absolutist. Less obvious, but from the point of view of general historical strategy, the main result was that in the mid-17th century most of the same groups and even families that had held power in the mid-15th century remained in power and ‘privilege’, albeit in a renewed form. The second cycle of capitalist history (1648-1789 and 1848) consisted of the dismantling of the post-feudal but not yet capitalist Old Order by parts of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the grassroots. In the mid-19th century, the two rounds - very different in content and objectives - were presented as a single process of gradual transition from feudalism to capitalism (consequently, feudalism, which had fallen into disuse in the West in the 15th century, “lasted” until the 18th century), as “bourgeois revolutions”, which in reality never occurred anywhere as such.

Another important substitution was the derivation of the new European republican-democratic tradition from antiquity - Greece and Rome - while the Middle Ages were declared the era of the rule of monarchy and hierarchy. In reality, as studies by H. Daalder, B. Downing and others show, it is the medieval West, primarily its cities, that essentially demonstrates a level of democracy, republicanism and constitutionalism unknown in Antiquity. What is the point?

It is very simple. Ancient polis were primarily oligarchic structures, and oligarchy itself was often hidden behind democracy and monarchy. It is no coincidence that, according to scholars such as R. Springborg, the western medieval city was by no means the heir to the ancient polis. (In its classical version, it arose following the communal revolution of the 11th-12th centuries, which was the response of a section of society to the senatorial revolution of the 9th-10th centuries). The Muslim city is typologically much closer to the latter. The medieval city, whose air made man free, was often more democratic than the polis. The proclamation of the latter (and of Antiquity) as a model of democracy made it possible to justify the need to fight against the alternative form of organization of medieval society that actually existed - the non-polis - as cozy and undemocratic.

For the emerging post-feudal oligarchies of the 16th-17th centuries, the ancient oligarchic system was closer to the medieval one. In this respect, the myth of ‘antiquity’ created by the Renaissance, firstly, was not so much cultural as socio-political in character and, secondly, it played the same function in the social struggle of the 15th-17th centuries that the myth of progress began to play from the end of the 18th century. These two myths are interrelated and act as successive stages in the struggle to create a new, non-equal privileged society and to cut out from the social cake significant segments of the population of late medieval society, to whom the “moral economy” of feudalism guaranteed certain rights, including the right to survival. Capitalism replaced the moral economy with the political economy and drew a straight (and false) line back to antiquity (just as the ideologues of the late Soviet era drew a line from perestroika to the “thaw”, bypassing Brezhnevism, from which perestroika was born, and to the NEP). Incidentally, both the Petrine reforms and the NEP and perestroika objectively played the same role for the respective ruling groups in Russia and the USSR as capitalism did in 16th-18th century Western Europe: preserving the privileges of as much of the upper class as possible, cutting the middle part of society out of the social cake, and redistributing part of the ‘democratic wealth’ by turning it into “oligarchic wealth”. Of course, all this took place under the slogans of progress, which was meant to conceal the regression of the situation of the broad strata and present it as a cost of progress rather than its consequence and source at the same time. The same function in the modern West is performed by neo-liberal globalization.

To sum up. Progress is a private form of change, development. The essence of this form is a qualitative change accompanied by an increase in the information-energy potential of the agent of progress and, consequently, an increase in competitiveness, the conquest of new areas and differentiation. Progress always takes place at the expense and detriment of someone both inside and outside the system and is conditioned by the need to survive in an acute crisis situation. In this sense, one should not speak of progress, but of the unity of progress and regression, or more precisely, of transgression.

If we move from abstract reasoning to historical-concrete development, the need to use the concept of “transgression” instead of “progress” is even more evident. The transition from the old to the new system, especially in the last half millennium (in Western history: feudalism - capitalism; in Russian history: Moscow autocracy - St Petersburg autocracy, St Petersburg autocracy - communism, communism - post-communism), is mainly carried out as an operation to preserve the privileges of the dominant groups, which implies a sharp deterioration in the situation of the bulk of the population, increasing their exploitation and strengthening social control. Sometimes this attempt fails. A revolution occurs and a new dominant group comes to power, which immediately grants itself even greater privileges and acts as a more severe exploiter and social controller than the previous masters. At the same time, not only the old masters but also the workers are cut out of the old social cake. All this is interpreted as progress.

The specificity of the current phase of development - late global capitalism - is that ideology and the notion of progress can no longer play the role of ideological guarantor of the preservation and increase of privileges. The selective and exclusionary nature of the progress of globalization is evident: the ‘ears’ of the regression of the majority are increasingly popping out from under the ‘progress’ of the minority. It is not surprising that the dismantling of capitalism begins with democratic institutions (see the report written in 1975 under the leadership of C. Huntington and commissioned by the Trilateral Commission on the Rights of Peoples). Huntington commissioned by the Trilateral Commission), the geo-culture of the Enlightenment (freedom without equality), universalist-progressivist ideologies (the triumph of ‘right-wing radicalism’), European Christian democratic values (multiculturalism, attacks on the Christian Church, and so on) - everything that limits capital and in this limiting negative unity-symbiosis with it constitutes capitalism as a special historical system. In such a situation, reactionary progressivism can become a powerful weapon of the grassroots and middle classes, on which the waves of history seem ready to close in, against the current upper classes. And the most radical leftist strategy could be a conservative opposition to “right-wing radicalism” and neo-conservatism.

The epoch is coming to an end and in the situation where “the” time is out of phase, the most incredible ideological and political combinations and constructions are possible. This is the historical view. There is a new transgression in sight and one must carefully watch the game of power “thieves” around the world, because “he who is forewarned is forearmed”.

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo