degraded all of Russia; the introduction of language into the Constitution of the Russian Federation limiting free speech; laws that protect the “faithful” from offense, while codifying inequalities between those of “traditional” and “non-traditional” sexualorientation. I have to speak out about my country’s political and economic practices. The last time I was so infuriated was October 2011, when Putin announced his third term. The rage, indignation, and steely determination I was feeling then led to the creation of Pussy Riot. What will such feelings lead to this time? Time will tell.
I hope thinking through the specifics of Russia’s situation might be of some use to you.
Who knows—it might be productive to consider the practices of a country where those who decide the fates of people, ideas, creative energies, and entrepreneurial and political initiatives consult not a meticulous, considered portrait of the situation, as in Europe, but rather a post-expressionist spasm of color. By contemplating the state that holds me in this labor camp, you might just answer your own perplexing questions about the creation of a stable, ethico-political feeling that can unite winds of discontent. If we want to understand the future of global capitalism, we need to consider its past. In the Russia of today, of Putin’s third term, a vintage politics is masquerading as new—global capitalism reenacting its past before our eyes.
How exactly is this going to be useful?
Again, I insist that even the most developed capitalist formulation presupposes hierarchization, normalization, and exceptions. You quote Marx saying that “constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions … distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” Agreed, we see upheavals in all social relations, but they don’t cancel out exploitation and standardization. Instead, the outsourcing you oftencriticize comes into play. Antiquated techniques of discipline migrate to the Third World, into countries like mine, rich in raw materials. Of course, in the so-called “developed” world, disciplinary power doesn’t disappear—but there are more bases of production and they’re spread farther apart, so that the implementation of disciplinary power can be softer, more yielding in the face of resistance. Meanwhile, “developing” countries have cornered the market in discipline, which develops a horrific, archaic character. (For a striking example, consider the law “On Offenses Against the Emotions of the Faithful”—the comeuppance on such “offenses” is a three-year deprivation of actual, personal liberty, which in Russian penal practice always includes forced labor.)
And here in Russia, I’m keenly aware of the cynicism with which “developed” countries regard “developing” ones. The “developed” ones exhibit a conformist loyalty to governments that manhandle and suppress their citizens—a little rich for my taste. The US and Europe are glad to collaborate with a Russia where medieval laws have become the norm and the jails swell with prisoners of conscience. They’re glad to collaborate with China, where things are happening that would make your hair stand on end. So the question arises: what are the acceptable limits of tolerance? When does it cease to be tolerance and become instead collaborationism, conformism, even criminal complicity?
The most common justification for this kind of cynicism goes something like this: “It’s their country, let them do what they want.” But that’s just not viable, since countries like Russia and China have been enfranchised as equal partnersin the system of global capitalism (which, it turns out, is by no means anti-hierarchic and rhizomatic everywhere). Russia’s resource-based economy, and the Putin regime that draws strength from it, would be completely undermined if the political principles being forfeited by the buyers of
I hope thinking through the specifics of Russia’s situation might be of some use to you.
Who knows—it might be productive to consider the practices of a country where those who decide the fates of people, ideas, creative energies, and entrepreneurial and political initiatives consult not a meticulous, considered portrait of the situation, as in Europe, but rather a post-expressionist spasm of color. By contemplating the state that holds me in this labor camp, you might just answer your own perplexing questions about the creation of a stable, ethico-political feeling that can unite winds of discontent. If we want to understand the future of global capitalism, we need to consider its past. In the Russia of today, of Putin’s third term, a vintage politics is masquerading as new—global capitalism reenacting its past before our eyes.
How exactly is this going to be useful?
Again, I insist that even the most developed capitalist formulation presupposes hierarchization, normalization, and exceptions. You quote Marx saying that “constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions … distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” Agreed, we see upheavals in all social relations, but they don’t cancel out exploitation and standardization. Instead, the outsourcing you oftencriticize comes into play. Antiquated techniques of discipline migrate to the Third World, into countries like mine, rich in raw materials. Of course, in the so-called “developed” world, disciplinary power doesn’t disappear—but there are more bases of production and they’re spread farther apart, so that the implementation of disciplinary power can be softer, more yielding in the face of resistance. Meanwhile, “developing” countries have cornered the market in discipline, which develops a horrific, archaic character. (For a striking example, consider the law “On Offenses Against the Emotions of the Faithful”—the comeuppance on such “offenses” is a three-year deprivation of actual, personal liberty, which in Russian penal practice always includes forced labor.)
And here in Russia, I’m keenly aware of the cynicism with which “developed” countries regard “developing” ones. The “developed” ones exhibit a conformist loyalty to governments that manhandle and suppress their citizens—a little rich for my taste. The US and Europe are glad to collaborate with a Russia where medieval laws have become the norm and the jails swell with prisoners of conscience. They’re glad to collaborate with China, where things are happening that would make your hair stand on end. So the question arises: what are the acceptable limits of tolerance? When does it cease to be tolerance and become instead collaborationism, conformism, even criminal complicity?
The most common justification for this kind of cynicism goes something like this: “It’s their country, let them do what they want.” But that’s just not viable, since countries like Russia and China have been enfranchised as equal partnersin the system of global capitalism (which, it turns out, is by no means anti-hierarchic and rhizomatic everywhere). Russia’s resource-based economy, and the Putin regime that draws strength from it, would be completely undermined if the political principles being forfeited by the buyers of
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