The Law of Negative Selection - By Mikhail Globachev

Essay

THE LAW OF NEGATIVE SELECTION

By Mikhail Globachev
September 2006
Source

The commune is the mother of all kinds of socialism. It still persists in Russia where it has just passed into a different convolution of the spiral

Precisely one hundred years ago, an attempt at a capitalist style agrarian reform was made in Russia. It was a failure, in fact, despite the administrative talents of its originator, Pyotr Stolypin. It failed primarily because of the stubborn reluctance of the peasantry to face the risks of independent management. They preferred to stick to the traditional communal system. By the onset of the World War I, only one seventh or less of the farmland, and not the best, had been freed for private use. Having repulsed the attempt at its historic foundations, the commune counterattacked and in the end overcame all obstacles.

However, this article is not so much about the sad fate of rural reforms in Russia, or of the general land turnover, as about the larger–scale consequences. I mean the ones that for decades used to be labelled “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and later “the Soviet way of life” and, at the time of the demise under General Secretary Chernenko, were even defined as “the socialist civilization”.

Quite soon the latter, ambitiously “fundamental” as it was, went the way of the aged leaders and of the whole Soviet regime. However, unlike the majority of European members of the former Socialist community of nations, no full-fledged transformation of the system took place either in Russia or in its immediate neighbours. To be more exact, now in the twelfth year of the new era the transformations are still just scratching the surface of the spheres of public life that are unstable and devoid of any reliable means of self-defence. The slogan-rich ideology may not be defunct yet, but it has petered out and crawled to the backyard of mass consciousness while the Soviet man in all his manifestations – he who wields the shovel and he who wields a Parker pen to endorse important decisions – is still quite “Soviet”.

One horse, one subject

The Eurasian Project of the last century outwardly seemed a victory of the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. Actually, the trends and forces in operation there were quite different. This is particularly evident nowadays when the world's “political Islam” has begun freely enriching its practices with the Bolshevist ideas and methods.
All this is because there is no Socialist civilization either as a totality or, at least, as a more or less distinct separate instance. Diverse features and signs of what we think of as socialism in our times manifested themselves from extreme antiquity in most diverse societies and human communities: from classical Greece and China and the empire of the Incas up to the multitude of sectarian religions and even to the political classes in a number of countries in contemporary Western Europe. The idea of everyone being equal is quite capable of striking root in practically any substratum, and every kind of “socialism” has some particular brand of it.

…One of the basic concepts of the Soviet-dominated thinkers of the 1960s was that the USSR’s system of government had proved to be a dictatorship of the proletariat only in name. They thought that the Stalinists had vulgarised and corrupted Lenin's legacy, that they had indeed established a dictatorship but it was a dictatorship of a principally different and bureaucratic nature. In this kind of a dictatorship the sovereignty of the people was an absolute value and, correspondingly, the proletariat was “good” by definition and had to be loved with all one's soul, whatever happened and with disregard for any horrors written on its, so to speak, collective face. This way of thinking had its roots partially, in the European Enlightenment, and was directly assimilated in our country in the 1860s by the intelligentsia of that time when they realized for the first time that they were a social force. As it happened, the spiritual values of the new class, the major being freedom of speech and religion and primarily of thought, soon got divorced from the age-old proletarian mentality. In the end run, such a mental duality could not help but lead to misanthropy. Though sometimes submerged deep in the subconscious, misanthropy was inevitable. The red thread of that distressing mood runs through the spiritual legacy of the Russian men of both the 1860s and 1960s.

To this day, when it seems there is no place for idealism, adherents of that trend still attempt to suppress their anguish with overdozes of politically proper love for the humble. One of these people who had contributed quite a lot to the Gorbachevian attempts to humanise the monster, wrote just seven years ago: “The people, courageous and patient as they are, are wax in the hands of their leaders, executors of the latter's will, and their voters and obedient victims. A noble horse under a crafty and merciless rider…”

But the rider and its horse are absolutely different. Enlightened society does not consider it proper to ascribe that kind of difference to people of most dissimilar social status. However, not forty years ago nor now has anybody been earnest enough to ask : where do they come from, these brazen parasites of noble victims?

Contrary to the advice of geniuses

The proletarian revolution in Russia was not at all a triumph of the hired labour that had been the hope of classic Marxism, much as it had been rewritten by that time and even somewhat put to shame by the real progress of the industrial world. Instead of suffering relative and absolute destitution as predicted by the gloomy geniuses , the supposed gravedigger of the bourgeoisie was rapidly accumulating goods and acquiring a new self-confidence by joining fast expanding trade unions.

Lenin coined the phrase “the upper classes cannot, and the lower classes would not”. He understood perfectly that developments to his personal liking would not follow Marx's theorems. The lower class, those who definitely “would not”, was the most numerous social stratum with the greatest weight. They were the members of the rural communes and accounted for 80 percent of the then population of Russia. From our schooldays we remember the causes of the social explosion: the monstrous backwardness of the autocratic rule plus the imperialist war for interests alien to the people, and the eternal peasantry' thirst for fair distribution of the land. This ascertainment unfailingly turned sour any officially admitted scientific thought and made it crawl into the wilderness of pseudo-disciplines.

Nowadays, the authors of textbooks or treatises show the same ardour in depicting the unprecedented “big leap” Russia made in the first fifteen years of the 20th century as they did when denouncing the abominations of the tsarist rule in times past. However, since the new books are written mostly by the same people or by their best and most loyal students the phenomenon gets analysed within the parameters of socialism's favourite heavy industry and all that necessarily accompanies it. The production of iron and steel grew so many percent, coal and petroleum extraction by so many percent, railways grew so many times, and the proportion of city dwellers by half as much…

However, the history of the Islam-clad fanaticism, the new Evil No.1, indicates that the world is ruled not so much by commercial categories as by the so–called overvalued mass ideas. And in this sense it is controlled not so much by the intellectual elites' adherence to some general dogmas and theories as by commoners' ardent dislike of very specific things though they may not realize it in full.

The prosperity of Russia's cities and industries at the start of last century, though it did not have the social depth for it and though it was mostly ungrounded (the most sensible chronicles mention the fact), was more than a list of just so much additional tonnage of steel goods and thousands of new profitable projects. It was also the victorious steps of the bourgeois civilization that was rejecting all preceding systems.

The communes could not help feeling the threat to their traditional way of life. None of them anywhere pondered over their vague feelings or even less, put them into words. But when forced to defend themselves, they would sometimes react quite cruelly. To all appearances the closest analogue to our 1917 was, probably, Iran in 1979 where there had been a leap of its own that stirred the stagnated countryside immediately before the “conservative Islamic revolution”. Or even in Cambodia where in 1975 the kindly country folk, on the first call of previously unknown bachelors of the Sorbonne, took to machine gunning and hoeing down all who lived in the cities, knew how to read, wore eyeglasses, and the like. Much of it was similar to our experience, except, maybe, that local traditions and modernisation were not as acute.

So it turns out that it is not in every revolutionary situation that the notorious lower classes want to live in at new way. On the contrary, they want to go on living in the old way of life. And, probably, in most cases real wars of civilizations happen not quite and even not at all in the localities where they are placed by the new-fangled theory that brought overnight fame to some professor at Harvard. They occur not in the geopolitical area between Argentine and China but along the inner fissures of a society living through an upsurge of belated development.

That custom of destructive labour

So what is the commune, the mother of the Russian, Cambodian and all other socialisms that were “victorious” one way or another?

If we proceed from the economy, it is a repressive community of dying out subjects who are half-masters and half-slaves. In pre-revolutionary Russia, the property rights and obligations used to be assigned to every commune member by the so called mir, that is, by an assembly. Plots of land would change hands and rotate more or less regularly, with no plot ever the full property of the family that held it. The government had got stuck in the archaics of, first, the serfdom law and then of communal land use, and for four decades clung to them blindly and foolishly just like the modern leaders of the allegedly civilizing Federation cling, for instance, to Stalin's residence registration and conscription army. They use the same arguments – that these are highly beneficial and very convenient for the dear people, while, in fact, they thus breed, like in the past centuries, dangerous human destructiveness on every level. Our elected leaders just have nowhere else to draw other ideas from.

Meanwhile let us have a look at the economic heights these methods lead to. It had been long understood that “at a higher turn” of the dialectic spiral they would inevitably generate nothing but the specifically collective farm system of labour conscription. Basically, to this day the countryside is mired in that system: in an overwhelming majority of the new so-called stockholding societies an individual plot is tied to all the other plots, just like it used to be in the times of “the sovereign's men on God's land”.

There is no more need of long-winded explanations why a hired hand cannot till “nobody's” land properly, let alone love it. This had, by the way, consequences way down the road like, say, common misuses in spoken Russian language. More and more often professional editors, not to mention writers and speakers, confuse the use of the adjectives “qualitative” and “non-qualitative” thinking they are synonyms of “good” and “poor”. Actually, in the ideal literary norm the former adjective denotes a characteristic related exclusively to qualities while the latter is related not to quality but to quantity.

As the commune understands the words, qualitative – good or bad – is applicable only to the soil, with God alone responsible for its properties with the given land use system. So it follows that the importance of know-how unavoidably tends towards zero. If one has sowed well into good soil and in good weather, the crop should be good. But if the person did not sweat a lot at the job he's bound to starve. In one of Nekrasov's poems, a farmer named Yakim said about himself not without pride that he “worked to death and drank until half-dead”. But the fruit of such labour outside the “deadly”, that is destructive experiences is discarded by the speaker as obviously non-significant. One is left to guess that the man must have reaped 100 percent of the grain-crop and drunk exactly half of it. Or take his neighbour a poultry-grower, a lady with more economic sense (because in Nekrasov's time her product was not estranged by the mir as much as the land) and, besides, she did not “drink until half-dead”. She, too, described her business rather incomprehensibly: “Sometimes I could raise up to a thousand birds”.

It is these habits that made their educated heirs an age later think that the strongest army is the one that has more tanks and soldiers. And the “great” generals who won a really great and terrible war not thanks to their skills but sheer numbers, to heaping their soldiers' bodies on the enemy. And the world's most advanced economy that produced the greatest amounts not of goods and merchandise but of lists of goods in the widest range (the farmer's eternal dream of a self-sustaining farm that kept everything to itself).

The learned offspring were left to wonder bitterly: why is there ever more cement and shoes but still no better life?

Timelessness

Right at the next to the last turn of the commune spiral, I was queuing for the “food's delivered” and made an observation which I think is remarkable. In many settlements in this country, especially small and medium sized ones, many items were called, without irony, simply “meat”, “cheese”, “salami”… However, eggs were somewhat luckier: practically everywhere they were on sale in two varieties: at 0.9 and 1.05 roubles per ten eggs.

With the wage/price scales of that epoch an extra 15 kopeck coin in one's pocket could hardly have been of much value to anyone but a collective farm pensioner. But the latter, as a rule, had at least one hen of their own. As for the citizens quite affluent by Soviet socialist standards, they would persist in manifesting their willingness and capacity to queue for hours to get Grade 1 salami while Top Grade was freely available.

For those who live by the commune psychology, time is not money nor does it have any value at all. Time does not exist outside natural cycles: winters and summers in the North. Rains and droughts can be late or early in coming but will never “forget” to come. Leisure time almost always is not a product of some particular skill but of the same natural conditions, that is, it is a kind of forced downtime. It's nice to have a chance to fill the downtime with traditional festivities or seasonal work. An alternative is drinking until half-dead and neighbours' fights without meaning or mercy like the one described in the autobiographical novel of the former party author Mikhail Alexeyev. It seems the poor guy did not realize what a demystifying document he was writing when he attempted to describe his childhood.

The commune member's attitude to money was curious as well. He keeps a mortal grip on every penny that lands in his pocket, but the most elementary relationships between demand and profit rate are utterly beyond him. Should he get something to sell he would never lower the price. On the contrary, for him a steep price is the apex of success in commerce. Yelena Ustyuzhanina defined it brilliantly in a recent copy of the NT: “The ability to divide is not tantamount to the ability to count”.

In addition, the commune member does not at all understand the nature of work if it does not involve exhausting physical labour. He even tends to suspect his compatriots of sponging off him if they have happened to toil some place other than next to him. Consequently, he sees the job of a manager or even a white-collar employee as nothing but a meal ticket: on getting such a job, the commune member turns happily into a true sponger.

Unless this is understood, all liberal modernisations turn into absurd and expensive fakes. Just recall not only the legion of “new Russians” along with the “red directors” and other “big managers” whose fortunes were built on the inflation and torpedoed by the default that was brought on by the mores of the sower and guardian. The depth of the abnormal tradition can be excellently seen in a satire by the pre-revolution author Averchenko: a merchant who kept on inflating the price of his wares in order to buy a big mansion was shocked at men's baseness when he discovered that while he had trebled his prices to save up the money the cost of his dream had gone up five times

From “solid life” to “solid death”

Here is one more example of laughter through tears connected with the status of relations between the post-Soviet state and its economy. It is a very old joke and, as often is the case with petty mockery, digs deep into a very serious layer of life.

“Ivan, what would you do if you became a tsar?”

“Me? I would pinch a hundred roubles and decree not to catch me”!

Such is the logic of the commune members who got a chance to pretend they are masters of the universe. The standard pattern of thought of their subordinates was very aptly reflected in the Soviet-time humour: “What is happiness? To steal a carton of vodka, sell it at half price and drink away the proceeds”.

Author Gleb Uspensky, an expert on the old village life style called it “real living”. In that life, he wrote, all must act as one, and nobody stand out. A person was to think and behave like everybody else. He could not even speak of anything important in his own words but only using words which were as universally impersonal and fit for every occasion as was the land plot allotted to him. Even the status of breadwinner as such was accorded to him by the commune. One had simply no chance to get ahead in any other way: the person who could have, so to speak, “a hundred roubles” legally was one who “cannot be caught” because he has special rights granted by a higher authority, by God or by some outside force. A commune member had to plan all his actions and his whole life not by what he could do and knew how to do but proceeding from what he would, or would not be permitted to do.

That is all there was to the “deep-lying core of values based on unselfishness” that nowadays so please the authors who are batty over populist and patriotic ideas. The poignant hatred for the miroyeds (“blood-suckers”) and this very name were not born in the time of the Poor Peasants' Committees: in most cases a commune member could not become anything but a miroyed if he got rich by going around the status standards. Now the same model has been in evidence in all the relations between Russia's authorities and businesses of any size. No wonder, then, that status rent (making money off one’s status) has become the basis of life in the state built by God inspired peasantry led by professional parasitic revolutionaries. The endless redistribution of personal power in place of normal production corresponds in minute detail to the redistribution of land plots in a commune. That is why, following the linguistic logic of the commune, its member does not earn his income, he “receives” it.

Here is one more lexical self-exposure. Some time ago a rather well-known lady publicist desirous of protecting the simple folks from the “glutted cynics, Gaidars, and Chubaises” as she described them, mentioned her “countryside friends who… go to work every day for eight years without getting a living kopeck”. What can be more unnatural than a farmer demanding money for doing some regular but undefined exercise?

Such a principle cannot be followed without humiliating oneself and, more importantly, without continuously slighting one's neighbours. Not so much those who are of a lower status (not the beggarly ones whom the commune pities and regards with a sentimentality that all too often is accompanied by a streak of sadism) but those who are “like the others”. In “just plain living,” equality gets granted only through humiliation. The responsiveness Russians are known for, though is also found in many Africans and Asians, is an aggressive kindness (this definition was coined by a genius). That is, if for some reason you do not like something that you ought to like, your comrades will be sure to teach you to like it. Not from innate malice but exclusively for your own good. Should you not wish to like it they will find a way to make you.

Having started reducing all rich and clever guys to a common nominator (but not all, mind you, particularly not the Soviet officials) the victorious commune of the proletarians ends by destroying …itself.

The suicidal instinct

We are now coming to the most fateful of the issues, one that cannot be resolved using the traditional concepts of the people of the 60s: if the Great Terror with enforced starvation was launched not by extraterrestrials and degenerates but those of the people's flesh and blood – how could that have happened at all?

But it could happen, even very simply. Igor Shafarevich, an astute critic of socialism before he switched to denouncing the world Jewry, wrote for Samizdat about “the socially conditioned suicidal instinct” of huge human masses. Of course, there was the influence of Stalin's particular passion for the art of ancient despotism. All titans who were lovers of power were, in the end run, absolutely indifferent to what would happen to what they had undertaken while in power. The heart of the matter was not who of the subjects, how many of them, where and how cursed or idolised the ruler (this point was crucial for the generation of the '60s). More important is the fact that, to this day, he is one of the leaders whom people continue to remember as the personification of authority that cannot be shrugged off and forgotten just like that, no matter whether he was hated or adored. I emphasize again, just unlike all the others.

Shafarevich's research in the mid-1970s more or less coincided with the revolutionary conclusions drawn by a group of American scientists who had observed tribes of hunters, gatherers and primitive farmers still found in some places. Their aim was to once again look into why mankind had switched from hunting to agriculture.

Up to that time the “correct” answer had been to free itself of the misery and hardships of the riskiest kind of labour and of the uncertainties of life, and to ensure the availability of reliable resources and thus free more time for spiritual development.

It was all wrong. Hunters and gatherers lived where nature and custom were not as yet violated by outside interference, they were exhausted by their labours much less than farmers, they had a lot more leisure time, provided themselves reliably with foodstuffs and worked at self-perfection at least as well.

Free hunters' way of life deprived them of only one thing: of the chance to start a demographic boom on their compact piece of land. But let us suppose that an agrarian revolution took place. After it everything is bound to turn upside down sooner or later, in the opinion of the thinkers who worship man's “social side” or are seduced by the myth of “stable development in harmony with nature” (nature has never encountered as merciless and efficient a destroyer as the simple unpretentious farmer). Everybody knows how population explosions in colonies of lemmings ultimately end. Less known is another fact: before they drown themselves during a regular great migration, these peace-loving fully vegetarian mice start fighting each other fiercely, tearing each other to bits. In other words, when there is total stress the selection principle no longer applies and becomes unnatural for the species.

“Conditioned reflexes” can prevail in the human race, too. Like it was in Russia in the early 20th century when the potential of social mobility of commune members got far behind the population growth (30 percent in seventeen years!) while the country's vast unpopulated expanses went to waste. Or like it was in Rwanda at the end of the century, or somewhat later in Nigeria.

Humans are not animals, of course. With the latter, after a “thinning out”, life quickly reverts to normal, at least until the next overpopulation. In human communities, the laws of selection in reverse seem to be implanted in a mystical gene pool.

But why did it have to be in the Russian-Soviet empire that the mutiny of inertness against all that was foreign and alien had to culminate in an all-consuming victory and become a full-scale anthropological crisis threatening the very existence of whole peoples?

We can say for now that in the end run all prospering cities are probably alike. Every unfortunate commune forges, or, rather sows and reaps misfortune in its own way.