New Realism, New Barbarism. By Boris Kagarlitsky, Pluto Press, 1999.
Socialism has never existed, anywhere. However, Boris believes that socialism did exist in Eastern Europe but has now been replaced by capitalism, so we now have global capitalism. He is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Comparative Political Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Boris is no government stooge, however. He was a political prisoner under Brezhnev and is currently an adviser to the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.
Following the collapse of the state capitalist dictatorships in Eastern Europe in 1989 and after, neo-liberal (Thatcherite) “New Realism” became global. The current global system, according to Boris, is a “New Barbarism” wherein the relatively few wealthy countries of the centre exploit the poorer countries of the periphery. Eastern Europe has now become part of the periphery, with debt dependency and declining living standards for many. In Russia the old nomenklatura (ruling class) has become the new capitalist class by converting its political power into money and property. However, the process of change has not been identical throughout Eastern Europe, ranging from civil war in Romania to a change of power witnessed by a largely passive population in Hungary. But the end result was more or less the same: an acceptance (even by the reformed Communist Parties) of market capitalism.
The technological revolution of the late twentieth century is developing according to the same logic as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so Boris argues. The Internet in particular has important social consequences. The Internet is intrinsically socialist in that its success depends on the free flow of information and data within a non-hierarchical network. But its full development is fettered within global capitalist relations of production. The Internet can only really flourish when free and equal access is established.
Boris claims that unless a socialist alternative “challenges the system of global capital and its local political representatives, it has no chance to change anything.” But his “socialist” alternative turns out to be the failed and discredited policies of “nationalisation and redistribution.” This conclusion is just as mistaken as his belief that globalisation is a new phenomenon. Globalisation is just another word for capitalism.
Lew Higgins
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