Orthodox socialism and “images of the future”

Modern critics of socialism sometimes resemble neurotics who have had a “childhood trauma” in their childhood, which they do not even remember (but of which they were informed by “benigners” like Solzhenitsyn) and to which they explain all their failures, which both happened and mostly did not happen (the phenomenon of so-called “lost profit”). But if there were no revolution - we would be 500 million, as Mendeleev said, but if there were no revolution - Russia would be a benign idyll as in Ivan Shmelev's “Summer of the Lord”, but if there were no revolution - Russia would get Constantinople, the straits and become a world power equal to Britain. The list of what would have happened “if there had been no revolution” is really inexhaustible....

It is a very comfortable position, a position of historical determinism (if not fatalism) to explain the present through the past. But this position has an obvious flaw: it has no room for the future. The future is strictly determined by the past: the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. Period.

The White Project, which came to power in the 1990s, had a historic opportunity to build its future. However, the ideologues and taskmasters of the new White Project were less concerned about the future. Not only did they besmirch the past, taking almost masochistic pleasure in denigrating it, but they aggressively implanted this viewpoint in the public consciousness. What about the future? There was no future in this production. While the “curators” and directors behind the scenes of revenge had a future -- a suicidal ideology of frivolous, radically selfish, and not too morally charged consumerism was imposed on us: “Live here and now”, “Take everything from life”, “Don't let yourself wither away”, “Let the whole world wait...”.

It could be said that the White Project had no blueprint, or that it was not for everyone but for a select few. The masses were offered at best a “porkopolis”, a state of sobriety on the model of Scandinavian “socialism”. The Russian people will shudder at such a drab and vulgar image of the future (as they shuddered in the late 1980s at the Khrushchev-Brezhnev “goulash-communism”, throwing it unrepentantly from the steamer of history).

After the 2008 crisis, however, it quickly became clear that the global capitalist economy does not have the resources to make all of humanity happy, if only with a meager ration of lentil stew. According to a recent far from diplomatic confession by the EU's chief diplomat, Josep Borrell: “Europe is a garden, we created this garden... Everything [here] works, it is the best combination of political freedom, economic perspective and social cohesion... The rest of the world is not really a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle. And the jungle can invade the garden”. The Bolivar cannot take two people, and as subsequent events have shown, the first candidate for expulsion from the flower garden was Russia.

A second project, Klaus Schwab's “inclusive capitalism”, paints an even more daunting future. “Electronic concentration camp”, “digital slavery”- this is by no means a complete list of the epithets with which “inclusive capitalists” have managed to be rewarded by the discerning minds of the conservative tendency.

II

We can anticipate the objection that the liberal version of the White Project described above is far from exhaustive. There is also a right-wing-conservative, monarchist, and sometimes nationalist wing (the Russian Project) that implicitly opposes the liberal flank described above (the Western Project). This is true, but, to everyone's regret, the Russian Project is largely engaged in the same thing as the Western Project: endless resentment and equally endless confusion with the Red Project. The Russian Project is not so much concerned with fighting the hegemony of the Western Project as it is with phobias over the long-dead Red Project.

So why is the Russian Project more willing to align with the Western Project than the Red Project? Partly because the Red Project is also heterogeneous and can be broken down into two components: Marxist (Comintern) and left-conservative, national-Bolshevik - also Western and Russian projects, but as parts not of the White Project, but of the Red Project. It is indicative that in opposing the Red Project, the Russian conservative right points all its arrows primarily at the Comintern project, placing the National-Bolshevik project outside its critique.

The main reason is that the White Project does not have an “image of the future”. Not having one before it as a guiding star (or at least in the Navigator's memory), it immerses itself in the past, idealizing some moments and demonizing others. Of course, the project of the Russian conservative right (which without much error can be called the Orthodox project) has an image of the future: the ideal of Holy Russia. This ideal is beautiful and lofty, and it endows its supporters, the Orthodox, with God's grace and faith in the triumph of Christ's truth on earth.

However, this ideal is too high, too detached from the mortal world, too otherworldly. The believer, unless he has devoted himself entirely to the service of God and retired to a monastery, having no way to combine the High with the Low, is condemned to lead a double life. The ideal remains an unfulfilled ideal, and daily life forces one to become, at best, “prisoners of conscience” and, at worst, to seek compromise and resign oneself to the almost universally prevalent sin of greed.

Proponents of the Orthodox project most often side with “uranopolitanism” (rejection of any social method of world organization), invoking individual salvation and relying on St. Seraphim of Sarov's famous maxim “Hold fast the spirit of peace and thousands will be saved around you”. This maxim is excellent, but how does it apply to today's spiritual and social environment? Can people be saved who not only do not want to be saved, but who become enraged at the mere mention of Orthodoxy? And are we very different from the Corinthians, whom the apostle Paul sought to admonish by saying, “Do not be deceived: bad associations corrupt good morals”?

This would be half of the problems with this illusion: one wants to be saved in one person; God help him. However, realizing the impossibility of realizing the ideal of Holy Russia as a social ideal from the position of Uranopolitanism, the supporters of the latter begin to fight against those who have a social ideal and try to realize it. And it is precisely the supporters of the Red Project who are the first to be attacked. Here we see a surprising unanimity of the Western and Orthodox projects, allowing them to unite (albeit tactically) within the framework of the White Project.

III

An alternative to the modernist “the future is built from the past” view is the traditionalist, but very true and very Christian, “time flows from the future to the past” view: “The main reason is not the “causal cause”, but the “goal cause”, i.e., “for what? We have stopped understanding what we are living for: we are surviving, struggling, or trying to resist. In fact, this disappearance of purposeful reason, the disappearance of a meaningful future -- this has become fatal <...> in fact, time flows from the future, time has a purpose. It is as if we have forgotten this purpose, we have forgotten the future dimension. It's just that the past predetermines our present to such an extent that our present has already become the past for the future. And then there is no future, it escapes, it recedes... In the end, it doesn't matter what was, what is -- it only matters what will be. The goal is much more important than the source; the return is much more important than the result. Let's reflect on the purpose, the meaning, let the future come into us, let's allow the future to happen, otherwise under the heap of the past we can't even look at it.

As if listening to Dugin, the ideologues of the Red Project put the future at the center, striving hard to achieve it, regardless of the cost. The Red Project has fallen on fertile ground: the Russian people, who cannot live without the future, who are willing to suffer any adversity for the sake of the future, victory and only victory is important. And for the price they will not resist. In this context we must consider all the countless sacrifices, crimes, and sufferings of the Russian people -- all were justified by a great goal: not only to survive and remain in History, but also to restore the grand but almost forgotten mission, the establishment of God's Truth on earth, the Russian Truth. In the Orthodox sense, this atoning sacrifice of the Russian people on the Cross was justified and had deep historical and symbolic significance. The people went to the Cross for the triumph of Christ's truth. And it was the victory in the Great Patriotic Victory that proved the validity of the Red Project in its Stalinist (National-Bolshevik) reincarnation.

With all our deep sympathy for the Stalinist period of Russian history, we are forced to admit its spiritual inconsistency in many respects. The “image of the future” drawn by the Bolsheviks was Marxist, modernist. It was not Holy Russia, but a hastily drawn map, in red pencil, with no other colors or shades. It was a regime of diurnal heroism, where there are no half-measures and where only and exclusively radical responses are manifested. In a paradigm shift, the radical subject assumed authority. In the 1920s, the “commissars in dusty helmets” became such-they took full responsibility for themselves, because they were the image operators of the future they dreamed of and that we read about in Stalin-era Soviet films.

The Bolsheviks were building heaven on earth, and they made no secret of it. Did Stalin believe in this chiliastic heresy? It is unlikely that we know-and Stalin fell into such “force majeure” that he had no time to reflect on the subject. Collectivization, industrialization, the Great Patriotic War, the restoration of the economy, the creation of a nuclear shield: all these tasks required a huge effort, a super-concentration of resources and power in the hands of the state. This was socialism, but of a particular kind: a mobilization socialism, authoritarian and forced.

And when, after Stalin's death, it was possible to breathe easy and turn off the emergency mobilization mode, socialism was also somewhat imperceptibly turned off, though not immediately. The ideal began to fade, “workers' welfare” became an end in itself. The ideal of late socialism was vulgar and ungrateful, which is why it was rejected without regret by the Russian people. However, the ideologues of perestroika, taking advantage of the late Soviet spiritual crisis, turned everything upside down: they demonized socialism in general while rehabilitating the bourgeoisie.

Was it possible to save Soviet socialism? This is a difficult question. As we know, the genesis of the system determines its functioning. Capitalism, born of colonial expansion, robbery and exploitation, had become in essence a form of legalized robbery and violence of one part of society against another. of some countries over others. Soviet socialism, which began as Marxist socialism, never got out of the Procrustean bed of European theory. Nor did it ever let God, the benevolent and animating breath of the Holy Spirit, enter its center....

IV

While capitalism is criticized on the basis of values, socialism is rarely criticized on them and is criticized almost exclusively on the historical aspects of its realization. Of course, one can and should criticize Marxist socialism for its atheistic and deeply materialist stance.

But if we try, in the spirit of the Red-White synthesis, to take all the best of the Red-White project and put forward Orthodox socialism as the image of Russia's future, who but the most obstinate dogmatists will have serious objections to this grandiose attempt?

The ideas of Orthodox socialism have been circulating in public thought for a long time, meeting with misunderstanding, rejection, or criticism for the flaws of the “old” socialism. So, perhaps the time has come to take more seriously the ideas of orthodox socialism, which not only draws an imaginary picture of the future, but also traces the road to get there?

Orthodox socialism was born in the community of Jerusalem, in that blessed example of early Christian community that St. John Chrysostom never tired of admiring: “See how it succeeded immediately: (speaking of Acts 2:44) not only in prayers, not only in teaching, but also in life! It was an angelic company, for they called nothing to themselves... Did you see the success of piety? They renounced their possessions and rejoiced, and great was their joy, because the possessions they gained were greater. No one rebelled, no one envied, no one quarreled, there was no pride, there was no contempt, everyone accepted instruction like a child, everyone was welcomed like an infant... There was no cold word: mine and yours; therefore, there was joy during the meal. No one thought they were eating their own; no one (thought) they were eating someone else's, although it seems to be a mystery. They did not consider what was foreign, for it was the Lord's; nor did they consider what was theirs, but what belonged to the brothers.

Is this not the truest sign that the cause of Orthodox socialism is in the Lord's hands?

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo